by Os Guinness
Progress in human thinking is always “resistance thinking.” It is always made in the teeth of the most troublesome issues. Resistance itself is the best avenue to fresh discovery. Through tenacity to creativity, as it were. Christian apologists once followed their own version of this. Face up to those elements in the faith that are obscure or difficult, they said, and you will break through to new understanding. Today’s liberals have reversed this. Quick to alter faith as soon as it puzzles or repels anyone, they become susceptible to the special silliness and subservience to fashion of the easily swayed thinker.
Far from being pioneers of change, liberal revisionists are remarkably peer-conscious. Scrambling to keep up with the cultural and philosophical Joneses, they are fearful above all of being caught in postures that to modern people might look absurd. Just let the modern world look askance at a liberal and, like a chronically nervous strip-poker player, he takes off another layer of clothes without even looking at his cards.
3. Transience
A third problem we can expose is the transience of liberal revisionism. By working frantically for an up-to-the-minute relevance to one age or group, the liberal automatically risks being irrelevant to another, and therefore gives the impression of transience and impermanence.10
Relevance in itself is not the problem. As they have correctly deduced, relevance is a legitimate and necessary prerequisite for any communication. To be relevant to a person, any truth must be related to where he or she is. No one would dispute that.
The relevance-seeking of the liberal, however, becomes a problem for two reasons. On the one hand, it has lost touch with its own original Christian assumptions, and on the other hand it has been assimilated wholesale by certain modern assumptions. Relevance of this kind is no more use to them than working hard to catch someone’s attention and forgetting what you wanted to say. More to the point, it is like being so overpowered by other people’s conversation that you express their idea in your words and add nothing to what they think already.
This basic problem of relevance-cum-subservience has been given an added twist in the modern world, where relevance has become not only hollow but fragile and short-lived. A wider range of choices, a deeper uncertainty of events, a more pressing need for new styles—all this makes for an accelerating turnover of issues, concerns and fads. Nothing tires like a trend or ages faster than a fashion. Today’s bold headline is tomorrow’s yellowing newsprint.
Thus the relevance-hungry liberals achieve relevance, but their victory is Pyrrhic. It is precisely as they win that they lose. As they become relevant to one group or movement, they become irrelevant to another and find themselves rudely dismissed. Far from being in the avant-garde, Christian liberals trot smartly behind the times. Far from being genuinely new or radical, they catch up and announce their discoveries breathlessly, only to see the vanguard disappearing down the road on the trail of a different pursuit.
“He who marries the spirit of an age,” said Dean Inge, “soon finds himself a widower.” Trendier than thou has eclipsed holier than thou, and our gain is evident. The pursuit of relevance in the liberal mode is a cast-iron guarantee that, by definition, the Church will always lag behind the world and run at the rear of the pack. The world changes its agenda constantly, and the Church goes around in circles.
There was a time when follies like these were found almost exclusively in Protestant liberal circles. Now, I am delighted to report, we have many Evangelicals chasing hard to catch up, though 200 years in the rear. Lusting after “relevance,” passionate about “innovation,” addicted to constant “re-engineering,” assessing everything according to its “seeker sensitivity,” “audience appeal,” and “measurable outcomes,” such Evangelicals are the “new liberals” and our prospects are bright.
4. Destructiveness
The fourth problem of liberal revisionism is the decisive one, and for our purposes the jackpot. Revisionism finally becomes destructive for the Church because, in their own words, it is in “another gospel” and no longer the Adversary’s “good news.”
First, revisionism is destructive because it loses the distinctive content of the Christian faith. The Christian faith has had many expressions over the centuries, with numerous new spiritual movements, theological developments, social adaptations and institutional experiments. Regrettably, many of these new expressions have been stubborn in sticking to Christian rules and remaining within bounds, so we have been unable to exploit them. But the worldliness we achieved in the past was hard-won compared with the easy success made possible by revisionism today.
Today’s liberal revisionism collaborates with naïve eagerness. It is appeasement-minded and surrender-prone at heart. Take the state of the Episcopal Church in the United States. Prior to this generation, the most extreme worldliness we ever induced in history was the faith of the Renaissance popes, such as Alexander VI. Incest, murder, bribery, corruption—these great “princes of the Church” became almost entirely secular princes, with no Christian remainder, and the Vatican descended to an orgy of worldliness and decadence. Yet amazingly, these same popes never denied a single article of the Apostles’ Creed, whereas our brave new revisionist Episcopal bishops deny almost every article in turn, or say them with their fingers crossed, and they still stay on proudly as “progressive Christian leaders.”
These shining progressives, such as Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong, say the Apostles’ Creed with most of the major articles turned upside down and inside out. Absolutely nothing in traditional belief or practice is sacrosanct. There are no higher or central truths by which the Church will stand or fall. Heresy is orthodoxy; skepticism is faith; no paganism is too wild and no ethical practice too abnormal to be turned away from their inclusive embrace. Everything is negotiable, the kernel as well as the husk, the baby as well as the bath water. Indeed, you might wonder whether any conceivable crisis of faith is still possible for American liberal revisionists. Like someone intent on hara-kiri, nothing short of suicide is enough. Not surprisingly their churches are declining by the week, and wonderful to say, several of the other Protestant denominations are hot on their heels.
Second, liberal revisionism is destructive because it creates a gap between ordinary believers and the intellectual and bureaucratic elite in the churches. This is no accident. To adapt George Orwell, we might say that it is a strange fact, but unquestionably true, that almost any extreme liberal would feel more ashamed of affirming the Apostles’ Creed than of refusing to support the liberal cause du jour. The result is that, just as the pitfall of “oscillation” propels a conservative toward the liberal extreme, so the extremes of revisionism leave ordinary believers so confused and angry that they harden into the concrete attitudes of extreme conservatism. Three cheers for all Christian extremes! A toast to the revisionists who beget the fundamentalists, and to the fundamentalists who beget the revisionists!
After all, what are ordinary believers to make of these agile theological gymnasts, or their much-heralded “new theologies,” situational morals and “prophetically radical” (read “liberal-Left”) political stances? Aren’t these suspiciously like the beliefs and practices Christians were once taught to identify as sin and unbelief? Not surprisingly, there starts to be grumbling in the camp. Why send missionaries overseas if unbelief is alive and well in the pulpit at home? Why put money in the collection plate if it goes to self-professed enemies of the Church? Why go to church at all?
So the faithful vote with their feet, and as the dismay and defections mount, a strange fact becomes apparent. While in most institutions the leadership is more committed to the goals of the institution than the rank and file, the opposite is true of the liberal Protestant Church. Its members are more loyal than its leaders. The liberal revisionist elite have got themselves into a position where it is impossible for ordinary believers either to understand them or to take them seriously. With leaders like that, small wonder that as convictions fly out of the window, congregations fl
ow out of the door. Happily for us, liberal churches decline with almost mathematical certainty.
Third, liberal revisionism is destructive because it is inherently weak in attracting outsiders. Yet another superb irony. The very raison d’être of liberalism began with Friedrich Schleiermacher’s concern for the “cultured despisers” of the gospel. Highly laudable on the face of it, but what has this concern achieved after 200 years? Where are the cultured despisers who have been culturally disarmed? The intellectual prodigals brought back from the far country of doubt and despair?
Confront liberals with such questions and their discomfiture is plain. Things seem to have changed a little since those early days. The item is no longer on the agenda. The cultured despisers most on their minds now are themselves. Few doubters are more doubting than the revisionist believer. Our brave Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church now says that personal salvation is a “heresy.”
And what does the record show? It is embarrassingly clear that of those intellectuals and artists who have been converted in the last two centuries, the great majority have been attracted to traditional and more conservative churches. Take T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, C. S. Lewis, Dorothy Sayers or the Old Fool himself. Why they took the road to faith will always remain a mystery and a rebuke to us, but no one can deny that they had undeniably keen minds and a strong intestinal fortitude. They took their faith neat and could not stomach the tepid and diluted offerings of liberalism.
Who knows? Perhaps liberal revisionism faces one further crisis of faith after all—its unquestioned belief in the dogma that “modern man and woman” find traditional belief incredible.
To make matters worse for the revisionists, there is also clear evidence that when intellectuals reject their liberal Christian faith, they do so for a reason basic to its revisionism: When the most radical liberal revisions are complete, the result is little different from what the outsider believed anyway. “At that point,” as one former atheist put it succinctly, “the creed becomes a way of saying what the infidel next door believes too.”11 Thus, since extreme liberal revisionism always ends in intellectual surrender, its carefully worded, fashionable statements have an oddly familiar ring. The secular thinker can always respond with Oscar Wilde’s quip to a trendy cleric of his day: “I not only follow you, I precede you.”
From the perspective of the outsider, the revisionist enterprise is a waste of time. The very extremity of the revisionism only confirms the skeptic’s criticism of the faith. As one of the enemy agents sympathizes, “Why should one buy psychotherapy or radical liberalism in a ‘Christian’ package, when the same commodities are available under purely secular and for that very reason even more modernistic labels?”12
After seeing the report of a recent Christian commission on morality, an atheist wrote, “It is now announcing to the secular world, as though by way of a discovery, what the secular world has been announcing to it for a rather long time.”13 Agnostic intellectuals may respect the liberal stand of extreme revisionist, but rarely do they take their Christian faith seriously. One secular thinker even goes so far as to call them “kissing Judases” (following Kierkegaard). “To be sure,” he adds, “it is not literally with a kiss that Christ is betrayed in the present age: today one betrays with an interpretation.”14
Fourth, revisionism is destructive because it actually undercuts itself. This is the best effect of all. Just as absolute conservatism is a contradiction in terms, so absolute liberal revisionism defeats itself. When taken undiluted, it kills. No one could find a surer method for spiritual suicide.
You do not need to look further than the startled responses that extreme revisionism has drawn from inside the Church and outside. “Symptoms of the very disease for which they profess to be the cure,” comments one non-Christian of such extreme liberals.15 A “self-destructive outburst” is the surprised and amused reaction of other non-Christians.16 And from within the Church? The comments of one intelligence expert are enough. Extreme liberal revisionism, he says, becomes a reductio ad absurdum, a “theological self-disembowelment,” a “self-liquidation … undertaken with an enthusiasm which verges on the bizarre.”17 To any outsider, the practical results might well appear “a bizarre manifestation of intellectual derangement or institutional suicide.”18
Evidence to substantiate this is easy to find. As the last generation shows beyond doubt, conservative churches are growing while revisionist churches are in serious decline. Once again, the Episcopal Church is a clear example, but take a lesser-known case, the collapse of the Student Christian Movement on many British campuses after the 1960s. There, if ever, was a clear case of organizational suicide, for the S.C.M. fell victim to its own pathological open-mindedness. As research showed, the open-minded trend was trumpeted as a beacon of “tolerant,” “inclusive,” “all-embracing” liberal virtues. No group could have been more open, more humble, more eager to engage in dialogue with anyone and everyone, and more zealous to build bridges to all and sundry. And bridges were built—to Marxism, pacifism, psychoanalysis, alternative communities, group therapy.
But then what happened? The conversations in the dialogue and the traffic on the bridges became one-way. S.C.M. members flowed across to become bona fide activists or to join bona fide communes. Their original S.C.M. groups did not survive, and there was no distinctive Christian reason why they should. Their minds had become so open that they were vacant. Diluted beliefs led to defections and betrayals.
Beyond Treason
Kissing Judases, defectors, collaborators, fellow travelers, fifth columnists, quislings, turncoats, traitors—these are little throwaway words, but like small fuses they run off to powerful incendiary passions that are capable of blowing apart people and nations and faiths. Our interest, of course, is not in concentrating our effort more on the conservative or the liberal side, except as a short-term tactic to divide them further. Our real objective is to push the liberals toward revisionism, and then eventually the whole Church to a state beyond treachery, to a point at which treason itself loses its meaning.
Treason, like heresy, is an achievement that marks an important milestone in manipulation. Significant individuals or groups in a victimized nation come to re-evaluate their country’s traditional foreign-policy interests so that the policies come to be aligned with those of the aggressor. Whether they do so out of conviction or are merely rationalizing (or even bought) is neither here nor there. Subversion is well under way, and that is what matters.
The final destination, however, is a state beyond treason. When the individuals or groups in question are so committed to accepting outside influence and help that they reject the criteria by which loyalty and treachery have traditionally been defined, then treason itself loses meaning. And when treason loses meaning, no nation can effectively resist an outside aggressor for long.
The symmetry with heresy is perfect. Do you see where we are with the extreme revisionist wing of the American Church—again represented with such touching naivete by the Episcopal Church? Their initial loss of authority (with the spirit of the age now in the driver’s seat) leads to a fateful loss of continuity (with the rest of the Church across the centuries and the continents), which becomes a serious loss of credibility (with unbelievers who already believe what the revisionist believes), which leads at the end to a total loss of identity (as faith is no longer recognizably Christian). At that point, with no loyalty to define treachery and no orthodoxy to define heresy, full-blown liberal revisionists are reaching a state beyond treason that presages the capitulation of the Church itself.
Such liberal revisionists have crossed cognitive and ethical boundaries so often that they have forgotten where they are, and whose side they are on. Such diehard liberals are really “fundamentalist revision-ists” who have become like the agents-turned-double-agents of the espionage world—the gray no-men of the twilight no-man’s land. They are the stateless ones of the modern intellectual world, the wandering Jews of the realm of the spiri
t, nomads in a desert of abandoned faith. Winning a single Judas was one thing; being able to rely on a whole counter-elite of Judases is quite another.
MEMORANDUM 11
The Last Christian in the Modern World
FROM: DEPUTY DIRECTOR, CENTRAL SECURITY COUNCIL
TO: DIRECTOR DESIGNATE, LOS ANGELES BUREAU
CLASSIFICATION: ULTRA SECRET
This is the last of my memoranda briefing you on Operation Gravedigger. It is not so much a separate memo as a short tailpiece to the others. I am also enclosing your ticket for Saturday’s flight to Washington, D.C., via BA 189. As you can see, check-in is only 45 minutes before the 11:45 departure, unless you wish to indulge in the perks of the first class lounge.
As things stand now, I am planning to be with the Director when he interviews you on your arrival in D.C. I trust I have adequately impressed on you the need to be concise and convincing. He regards philosophical digressions as a waste of time and a sign of uncertainty. Both are cardinal sins in his book and could become an irremediable blot in yours.
You did not know this, but before being assigned to Los Angeles you were slated to succeed the retiring Bureau chief in Moscow. The suggestion that you should go to Los Angeles instead was mine. I have watched your progress closely and have an interest in your success. If you have kept up with the activity of the Moscow Bureau, you will know that they have contributed very little after the fall of the Soviet Union. So I have saved your career from a cul-de-sac, and I expect you to clear the shadow hanging over you, to get yourself out of the imbroglio this weekend and to produce results in L.A.