by Os Guinness
Beware Third Ways
You asked me which was the most significant of the three major areas of damage (damage to the Church’s institutions, ideas or involvement in the world). I would have to say the last one. Nothing else calls into question the integrity of Christian truth like the grand polarization, and nothing more weakens the Church’s capacity to respond to the modern challenge. And the added advantage for us is that it is the area where Christians are least aware of the damage being done.
In the grand polarization, each extreme is acutely aware of the danger of the other, as I have said. Conservatives feed off fears of the slippery slope that leads to revisionism, just as liberals grow more dogmatically liberal to avoid the horrors of conservatism. But seldom do they consider the problem as a whole; and it is unimaginable that they should mobilize to work for a solution that overcomes the polarization altogether.
As always, the one thing we must guard against is recklessness. The worst thing that could happen is this: The increasingly apparent weakness and captivity of the Church might jolt Christians into seeing the force of the extremes, and then spur a movement to recover a coherent and balanced, ruthlessly biblical “third way.” If you like, a resistance movement content to be neither émigrés nor collaborators. The time for such a movement is ripe, for if the ’60s began to illustrate the absurdities of extreme liberalism, then the late ’70s onward has done the same for extreme conservatism. The cry “A plague on both your houses!” would be a fitting tribute to our work, but it could also spell trouble for us. Nostalgia for a golden age is harmless; the desire for a golden mean is not.
Fortunately, the polarization is so powerful that no counter-movement is likely to get underway, and the odds against building such a third way are impossibly long. For one thing, the whole notion smells of the dreaded word “compromise,” as if each side had to admit it was not fully right in the first place and the other side is perhaps right after all. That would be inadmissible to them. More importantly, the forces within the grand polarization are so strong that no movement could hope to hold the middle ground for long.
Having said that, we can expect to see recurring attempts to solve the problem, most probably from a combination of chastened Evangelicals and chastened Catholics, though perhaps with the support of certain more moderate liberals too. We are ready for this. The Council has made no formal decision yet, but in my judgment we would be wise to adopt the following approach.
On the one hand, we should do everything possible to prevent the chastened conservatives from escaping the constrictions of modernity. Since the 1960s, the general movement of conservatives has been out of the closet and into the culture, sometimes even out of the backwoods and into the limelight. This should be heady enough for them, without any radical talk of a third way. (“It is charming to totter into vogue,” as Horace Walpole put it.) Their new cultural involvement should blind them to the constrictions of modernity: secularization, pluralization and privatization. Unless they break these chains, conservative Christians will never amount to more than a harmless, if commercially interesting, folk religion.
On the other hand, if chastened conservatives do succeed in escaping the constrictions, we should do everything possible to push them to refuel the liberal cycle. If they were harmless when they were inside the cultural closet, we can make them harmless again by pushing them toward the opposite extreme and launching them on the liberal merry-go-round. That is not as difficult as it sounds. Emerging from the stuffy darkness of their ghettoes, conservatives are now basking in the light of cultural attention. Once a generation or two behind the times, they are making up for lost time with zest and abandon. Nothing is further from their minds now than their old, instinctive fear of worldliness. So who better than these erstwhile conservatives to refuel the cycle of the old liberals?
The Last Christian in the Modern World
When you arrive in California, you will begin receiving detailed instructions from the Council on how Los Angeles is to proceed in this final stage of the Operation. But before meeting the Director on Saturday, make sure that your grasp of Operation Gravedigger is both comprehensive and meticulous.
In closing, let me describe to you an aspect of the Director’s plan that has always fascinated me: the cultivation of the last Christian in the modern world.
This is not literal, of course. Nothing could be further from our plans than a pogrom. As I have stressed, even so important a tactic as secularization is not directed at faith’s disappearing, but it’s distortion. You may remember the secret revolutionary cell in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed. The aim of this group was systematically to destroy society and the fabric that held it together, with the object of throwing everyone into a state of hopeless confusion and despair mixed with an intense yearning for self-preservation and some guiding ideal. Then it could suddenly seize power.
The final stages of our operation will be remarkably similar. We are working slowly and steadily to demoralize the Church and discredit it in the eyes of the watching world. In particular, to see that what is left of the Church becomes shallow, trivial, vulgar, bizarre and consistently hypocritical in a myriad of ways, but always so that its confusion and compromise are matched by at least one thing—its complacency.
You can see how far we have advanced toward this end. At the beginning of the last century, more than 150 years after the launch of the Operation, the odds still seemed stacked heavily against us. The rich and powerful nations were still Christian, while the non-Christian ones were poor and seemingly backward, their religions dormant and their cultures moribund. The Christian faith still seemed synonymous with civilization, and zealous evangelizing and high-minded civilizing went hand in hand.
No one in 1900 had heard of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and Mao Tse-Tung, let alone dreamed of an Islamic resurgence, an East Asian economic miracle or the rise of “multiple modernities” and the decline of the West. That the coming century would be so turbulent and be marked by such horror and violence, and that so many of the worst crimes should have come from “Christian nations,” would have been unthinkable.
Today, by contrast, the odds are stacked against the Church. In terms of the burden of her past, she will soon, like the builders of Babel, be buried under the rubble of her own towering achievements; while in terms of the seductions of today, she is about to be drowned, Narcissus-like, in the deceptions created by her own undisciplined brilliance, wealth and enterprise.
The great survivor of the centuries, the proud tamer of empires, nations, faiths and ideologies, is being savaged by modernity. Soon all that will remain is a little philosophy, a little morality, a little architecture and a little experience.
The Director now regards the American Christian Church as the decisive arena for the closing stage of the Operation, which he views as a movement with three phases leading toward the denouement.
First, comes the push phase, well underway at the moment. American Christians have been forced to face the extent, not of their captivity, but of their impotence. Now, in a desperate push for power, many of them are attempting to seize such power levers as political action, legislation, education and the mass media. But, since the drive for power is born of social impotence rather than spiritual authority, the final result will be compromise and disillusionment. Christians in this first phase are falling for the delusion of power without authority.
As this phase peaks, it leads naturally to the second. This is the pull phase, when Christians will be jerked back and reminded of their need, not for power, but for principles and purity, even at the expense of powerlessness. The gears will be suddenly thrown into reverse, and the drive for power will be switched to a call for “disentanglement from the powers.” Power without authority, power born of the shame of impotence, will be renounced for the sake of authority without power, powerlessness born of the shame of impurity. But—and here the calculations have been precise—since this will happen when traditional theologies of cultural transformation
(such as the Reformed) have become a minority taste, leadership in this phase will pass to theologies stressing prophetic detachment, not constructive involvement.
By the end of the second phase, the effect will be vicious. Uncritical pietism and uncritical politicization will be succeeded by hypercritical separatism. Being essentially worldly, the former is rapidly fueling reactions to itself that will put new life into flagging secular ideologies; being essentially otherworldly, the latter will tend to withdraw from society and create a vacuum that these ideologies will speedily fill. And the last state of the house of American culture will be worse than the first.
Then comes the third phase, press, the Director’s own signature to the finale. Individual Christians of integrity will view these hapless alternatives and be incited to frustration, anger or grief. There will then be a fleeting moment when they feel so isolated in their inner judgments that they wonder if they are the last Christian left—“I, only I, am the only one not to have bowed the knee.” This movement from insight to isolation does not last long, but when the moment passes and the emotion drains away, it leaves a residue of part self-pity, part discouragement, and part shame that unnerves the best of them.
This is how we pick off the caring, one by one. Ashamed by their secret arrogance, they sink back disheartened to the general level, their spirits sagging and their vision dimmed. Ashamed to be different, they assent to be demoralized. They thus produce the state they fear. The “last Christian” comes one person closer each time.
All this, of course, is the minority dilemma (the dilemma of the concerned) and the American version at that. The way we deal with the complacent majority is far easier: We simply keep them asleep. As I said in the first memo, the only thing that matches my satisfaction at the Church’s deepening captivity is my amazement at Christian credulity. I sometimes wonder if they think they are immortal, or that they can summon revival through the click of a computer button.
The day will come when millions and millions of Westerners will still be Christians, but what they believe and how they live will be unrecognizable by the standards of the one whose name they claim to bear. Let the Adversary then return to the earth, as he promised. What he finds will not be a faith to his liking.
Do they consider themselves exempt from the normal rules of human experience and spiritual life? They believe their faith can give birth to renewal. Do they not also believe that it can die? They remind me of a tale of Nasreddin Hodja, the celebrated Turkish holy man. He once borrowed a large cauldron from his neighbor. When some time had passed, he placed a small metal coffee can in it and took it back to its owner.
“What is that?” said the latter, pointing to the small can.
“Oh,” said the Hodja, “Your cauldron gave birth to that while it was in my possession.”
The neighbor was delighted and took both the cauldron and the coffee can. Some days later, the Hodja again asked his neighbor to lend him his cauldron, which he did. This time a few weeks passed, and when the neighbor felt he could not do without his cauldron any longer, he went to the Hodja and asked him to return it.
“I cannot,” replied the Hodja. “Your cauldron has died.”
“Died?” cried the neighbor. “How can a cauldron die?”
“Where is the difficulty?” said the Hodja. “You were glad to believe it could give birth. Why will you not believe it can die?”
When the time comes, even the Adversary will put it no more clearly than that. Until then, Operation Gravedigger proceeds. Let them dig on, not knowing it is their own grave that they dig.
AFTERWORD
On Remembering the Third Fool and the Devil’s Mousetrap
To be honest, no part of my involvement in the publication of these papers puts me in a greater quandary than writing this afterword. Who on earth can rouse the Church from such a grand “Babylonian captivity” but the Lord himself? Yet my source was adamant. The papers by themselves could lead to a bleak and pessimistic conclusion, which would be the exact opposite of what he intended. Nor would they give more than the slenderest clue as to why he himself was defecting to the Christian side.
On the other hand, my source was emphatic that nothing could serve the papers worse than a fairy-tale ending. Pious romanticism, a simple reiteration of truisms or a facile claim to a silver bullet answer would gloss over the stark problems and convince no one. Smart secular people, he said, do not like books that preach at the end. And those orthodox believers who do not like having their brains stretched could use the afterword to take refuge from the burden of the papers.
My dilemma, then, has been to do justice to my source’s urging, and at the same time to make sense of what was no more than a lightning explanation of the thinking behind his disillusionment and defection. A quarter of an hour was all too brief for him to give me more than the ends of some threads of thought that I have since unraveled on my own. If and when his own full account of the defection is published, you may judge whether my grasp of his points has been developed in the right direction.
The Turner Turned
It appears that for some time, even before his nomination as Director of the L.A. Bureau, my source had been disillusioned with the direction of their strategy. It was becoming, as he put it, a “Vietnam war of the spirit,” a war they could not win but would not dare abandon. His sense of uneasiness only increased as each post-Christian alternative proved more dreary and insubstantial than the Christian position it had been designed to replace. Curiously, these doubts were magnified even further as the Operation Gravedigger memoranda started to flow across his desk, especially as he turned from the chess playing of counter-apologetics to the realities of cultural subversion.
The switch itself had been easy enough, and the prospect of California was not uninviting. What unsettled him was something else. The Deputy Director had been half right in his barb about the ivory tower. But the ivory tower for my source was not the academic world. It was his confidence in the viability of secularism.
He found himself caught uncomfortably between the opposing stratagems of an elitist secularism and an exotic spirituality; the one unpopular with most people, the other unpalatable to him. His mind was plagued by an old saying that kept returning to him like an unthinkable thought, that while nothing is worse than bad religion, nothing is more necessary than true religion. Were even his best agents merely “cheerless atheists, religious fanatics turned inside out”?1
All this cast a different light on Operation Gravedigger itself. The entire strategy pivoted on a monumental irony, yet as he had once written to the Deputy Director, irony was not a monopoly of either side. Only the side with the ultimate truth could be sure of having the last laugh.
In the end it was laughter that triggered the breakthrough in his thinking. The moment came when he was interviewing the Old Fool (as they refer to the distinguished writer) for the last time. The latter, sharing what he described as his “operational orders” as a Christian convert late in life, had added a maxim of his own: “Love laughter, which sounds loudly as heaven’s gates swing open, and dies away as they shut.”2
Nietzsche had raised the right question, my source said (“Who is wise enough for this moment in history?”), but Nietzsche had no answer to his own question. As he talked and laughed with the Old Fool, he suddenly saw an alternative to the impossible ideal of the Superman and the all-too-possible madman. The way out was through the fool. A note of exhilaration entered his voice that night in Radcliffe Square. “The fool!” he exclaimed. “The answer is the fool. We’d been dealing all along with the third fool.”
Talk of a third fool was Greek to me, and my source barely enlarged on it, apart from stating the kernel of what it meant to him and telling me where to follow it up. If I have developed it correctly, the gist of his point was this. The first fool is the fool proper, the person who by heaven’s standards is called a fool and deserves to be. This is the fool who litters history with the vast carelessness of his intellectual
and moral stupidity, the sort of fool who appears frequently in the pages of the Old Testament and who fills the passenger list of Sebastian Brant’s great satire of medieval folly, The Ship of Fools. This, he said, is the sort of fool the Christian should never be, but the Christian worldling becomes.
The second fool is the fool bearer, the person who is ridiculed but resilient, a comic who is the butt of the slaps but is none the worse for the slapping. In Christian terms, the second fool is the one who is called a fool by the world, but who neither deserves it nor is destroyed by it.
What is important, since it links the second fool to the third, is the secret of this resilience. The quicksilver spirit of the second fool springs from the Christian vision of the discrepancy between the apparent and the real, between the way things are and the way things will be. Knowing this discrepancy, the fool bearer is always able to bounce back, and his laughter is neither bitter nor escapist but an expression of faith. It is the kind of laughter that absorbs pain and adversity and, seeing beyond them, in situations of despair becomes a sign of hope.
The second fool is the “fool for Christ.” From the apostle Paul to Francis of Assisi and Sister Clare, to Thomas à Kempis, to the “holy fools” of Ireland and Russia, down to the countless despised and persecuted believers of the last century, the great tradition of “fools for Christ” has never lacked an heir and will play its part here too. As Reinhold Schneider wrote from his experience as a courageous poet in the Christian resistance movement in Germany in the 1930s, “Anyone who goes against the spirit of the age in the name of the Lord must expect that spirit to take its revenge.”3 Wherever the gospel has been in contention they have stood like lightning rods in the storm. But seizing the initiative and turning the tables were never meant to be their brief.