The Last Christian on Earth

by Os Guinness

  Table-turning is the forte of the third fool. This is the person who appears a fool but is actually the fool maker, the one who in being ridiculous reveals. The third fool is the jester; building up expectations in one direction, he shatters them with his punch line, reversing the original meaning and revealing an entirely different one. Masquerading perhaps as the comic butt, he turns the tables on the tyranny of names and labels and strikes a blow for freedom and for truth. From the apostle Paul (again) to Nicholas of Cusa to Erasmus to G. K. Chesterton and the Old Fool himself, this strain of brilliant Christian fooling has never quite died out, yet it has never been as common as the first fool nor as understood and honored as the second.

  “Who then is wise enough for this moment in history?” my source said, gripping my arm. “The one who has always been wise enough to play the fool. For when the wise are foolish, the wealthy poor and the godly worldly, it takes a special folly to subvert such foolishness, a special wit to teach true wisdom.” The Christian faith is an “upside down gospel,” but only because the world has put things upside down and only a grand reversal can put them back to rights. When the significance of this great secret of history dawned on him, he said it was as if he was caught off guard and catapulted toward the one conclusion he was resisting: All along it had been he who had played the fool while the fool maker had been “the Adversary.”

  It had been one thing to realize, he continued, that the last laugh and the ultimate truth belonged together. The inner story of his journey and his search was evidence for that. Chinese box after Chinese box, Russian doll after Russian doll, had all been opened and had been discarded as he searched for the one that was solid and would not open, the kernel beneath the husks, the pearl of supreme price.

  But suddenly my source came face to face with truth itself, and it was calling into question every lie and half-truth short of itself—and doing so, not just abstractly and in general, but concretely, specifically and in person.

  It was this that cornered him and forced him to the turn-around. He who had been skilled at turning others had been turned himself. That night in Radcliffe Square he talked about the prophetic fool-making of the Adversary as the divine subversive. He talked about conversion as the supreme turn-around. He talked about the Incarnation as history’s greatest double-entendre. And then he was gone, but clearly changed forever.

  Fool’s-Eye View

  Precisely how this helps us face the challenge of the Operation Gravedigger papers, he did not have time to elaborate. So I have struggled with what to say and to say quickly as the urgency required. Wholesale problems are rarely amenable to wholesale solutions, and seeking to offer mass medicines for a mass malaise is usually a form of illusion mongering. The real answer to the papers will be in lives lived out, not books.

  But having noted this caution, what can we say in the face of the papers? One thing is perfectly clear. Their main thrust is quite obvious and can be appreciated without my help, his understanding of fools or any other intermediary. It is frequently said that in time of war it is as foolish to believe everything that comes from the other side as it is not to believe anything. The same applies here. Those on the other side are also victims of their own premises and propaganda. In any case, no one can claim to have modernity by the scruff of the neck.

  “If the shoe fits, wear it” must therefore be as applicable to the fight of faith in the modern world as anywhere else. The evidence of which the other side speaks is there for any one of us to observe and verify. We are each as free (and responsible) to draw our own conclusions as they have theirs. We must therefore begin by asking: What are they saying? Is it true? What of it?

  Undoubtedly there is one central question that cannot be escaped by any of us who confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. Is the Church in the Western world culturally captive, more shortsighted and worldlier than she realizes? Are we ourselves? If so, what will be the outcome, and what is to be done?

  What is historically certain is that cultural conformity is never the end of the story for the Church, any more than it was for the nation of Israel. To both, God has said: When you want to become like other nations, “you are thinking of something that can never be.”4 Worldliness, or cultural conformity, is only a stop on the line. That line either doubles back through grace to renewal and reformation, or it continues straight on down to judgment and destruction.

  The renewal and reformation of the Western Church, or judgment and destruction? In our advanced modern setting, this choice constitutes an awesome challenge, and the outcome will depend partly on each of us. For the fact is that our real enemy today is not secularism, not humanism, not Marxism, and not postmodernism. It is not Islam, or any of the great religious rivals to the Christian gospel. It is not even modernization. It is ourselves. We who are Western Christians are simply a special case of a universal human condition to which Pascal pointed earlier. “Jesus Christ comes to tell men that they have no enemies but themselves.”5 Or as it has been put more recently: “We have met the enemy and it is us.”6

  Fortunately, we do not know the outcome of our story and whether the Church in the West will be revived, and take its place alongside the vibrant churches of Asia, Africa and South America. But for myself, having pondered these papers, I agree with my source that bleak pessimism must not be the end. Just as he said, as soon as we turn from the present to the future and from the central problem to its possible remedies, the fool’s-eye view shows the way through.

  Facing the Facts

  First, the fool’s-eye view helps us to face the situation. It enables us to assess the facts realistically and yet to see that the apparently pessimistic picture must not be taken entirely at face value. To be sure, the European believer is likely to be unduly discouraged about the state of the faith, and the American believer to be overly enthusiastic, simply because of their different spiritual surroundings. In the same way, many of us who have been suddenly forced to expand our horizons and take a broad view of the Western Church in the modern world may feel overwhelmed. The picture appears to close in like an unbroken panorama of pessimism.

  But without minimizing the gravity of our situation, the fool’s-eye view provides a double corrective, because on at least two accounts the pessimism may be rooted more in impressions than facts. To begin with, part of the discouragement may be rooted in the feelings that inevitably follow a switch from the bits-and-pieces thinking (to which many of us are accustomed) to a more comprehensive view of the whole. Like an inactive, middle-aged man who is suddenly forced to run, the bits-and-pieces thinkers are compelled to exert themselves at a level they are not used to, and they feel pain in muscles of which they were not previously aware. But like the runner’s, this pain passes with exercise, leaving us ready to “think globally but act locally,” a basic requirement of contemporary discipleship.

  Another part of the discouragement may be rooted in the discomfort of being forced to see things from the other side’s point of view. Inside-out, back-to-front thinking can be dizzying at first. But it can also train us in the mental and spiritual agility that eventually allows us to join the subversive table-turning of the fool maker and refuse to bow to the tyranny and finality of the here and now.

  I have to be honest. The condition of the Western Church is very troubling, not least because so many refuse to face it. Things are truly in bad shape. But the fool maker’s sense of discrepancy between the real and the apparent is crucial here. The current facts are not all the facts.

  Some of the bleakness of the papers is simply because theirs is a perspective on the Church “under the sun.” Ancient Ecclesiastes and modern ecclesiastics come around to the same conclusion: Leave out God and the high demands of his ways, and we soon find we have exchanged the “holy of holies” for “vanity of vanities.” That so much of what we are doing today can be explained so adequately by categories “under the sun” is a measure of our worldliness. “Under the sun” the Church amounts to little. Under the Son she can
aspire to and achieve much.

  In addition, for all the comprehensiveness of their sorry catalog of worldliness and failure, what is striking in the papers is the arrogance behind all they overlook. Yet it is not surprising that in a world of the big, the powerful and the well known, most of the staggering victories and the true Christian heroes are unnoticed and unsung. These Christians are the hidden resistance fighters of our generation, the ones whose quiet faith, solid character, simple lives, and prevailing prayers have a worth more substantial than fame, a greatness surpassing any conferred by stardom. Topsy-turvily, they remain unsung, but they are the true “just ones.” Known only to God, they are those without whom no church, no community, no country can long endure.

  Thus the challenge of the present facts is neither harder nor easier for us than it was for the earliest believers who had to say Yes to Christ and No to Caesar. What matters finally is faith, the stance from which the discrepancy is seen, from which the facts are best assessed and from which action most effectively proceeds. God, after all, is sovereign over the wider picture and not just over our own small part.

  Playing the Rebound

  Second, the fool’s-eye view helps us to assess the rivals to the Christian faith and to answer them. There is every reason to believe that the major alternatives to the gospel are in worse condition than the Church. In the case of secularism, for example, the plainest fact about the secular world is its disillusionment with secularism. Heralded so recently as progressive and irreversible, secularism (the philosophy) has failed conspicuously to consolidate the advantages offered to it by secularization (the process). There are more atheistic and nonreligious people in the world than ever before, as the papers attest, but there is a ferment of new spiritual movements which grows straight from the heart of the problems with secularism.

  People in the secular world have too much to live with, too little to live for. Once growth and prosperity cease to be their reason for existence, they ask questions about the purpose and meaning of their lives: Whence? Whither? Why? To such questions secularism has no answer, or—more accurately—the answers it has given have not satisfied in practice. Secularism in its sophisticated humanist form is too erudite at times, too banal at others; it flourishes only in intellectual centers. In its repressive Marxist form, it creaks.

  In the long term, there is no lasting substitute for religion. Sometimes for better, usually for worse, religion is the only substitute for religion. As playwright Peter Shaffer put the problem, “Without worship you shrink; it’s as brutal as that.”7

  It is possible that our generation is standing on the threshold of a spiritual rebound of historic proportions in the West. The modern West has come of age and rejected the outgrown tutelage of faith. But its prodigal descent has been swift. In the same vein as the papers, we could list our own ironies. Modern cities make people closer yet stranger at once; modern weapons bring their users to the point of impotence and destruction simultaneously; modern media promise facts but deliver fantasies; modern education introduces mass schooling but fosters sub-literacy; modern technologies of communication encourage people to speak more and say less and to hear more and listen less; modern lifestyles offer do-it-yourself freedom but slavishly follow fads; modern styles of relationships make people hungry for intimacy and authenticity but more fearful than ever of phoniness, manipulation and power games. And so on.

  If this is so, we may be poised on the brink of the reductio ad absurdum of modern secularism. But then the question is this: How will people be turned, like the source of these papers, not only from secularism but from the post-Christian religious alternatives as well? How do we speak to an age made spiritually deaf by its skepticism and morally colorblind by its relativism? The prosaic sermon and the labored apology have proved ineffective, as stolid and single-visioned as the flat-earth literalism of the secularized mind itself. One contribution must surely come from a wide rediscovery of the prophetic fool-making of the divine subversive, but only once the tables have been turned on us.

  The West Is Not the World

  Third, the fool’s-eye view reminds us that our talk of the modern Church needs balancing, for the modern Church is not all the Church. Indeed, it is the smaller as well as the spiritually poorer part. Beyond it stirs the youthful energy and expanding vision of the Church in the global South, and all around the less-developed world. Less modernized, the Church around the world is less worldly. Less sophisticated, it is less secular. Lagging behind in modernization, it is already beginning to lead in its ministry, mission, dedication, sacrifice and joy. As such, it can be a transfusion of life to the withered churches in Europe and the shallow, worldly-wise faith in America.

  After centuries limited largely to Europe, the Christian faith has become the first truly global religion, the Bible the most translated and translatable book in the world, and the Church the largest and most diverse community on earth.

  These facts contain their own illusions. Expressed unguardedly, they create the false impression that the only Christians who truly flourish are the less educated or the most persecuted, those who are not exposed to the tempting power and prosperity of the modern world.

  How our brothers and sisters from the Global South will fare when the blandishments of modernity come their way is another question, and one they will face in their own time. But for the moment, the greater illusion is that of the indispensability of the Church in the modern world. The Western Church is not the whole Church. It is only the older Church, a Church that providentially handed on its torch just as it was taken captive by the world it had helped to create. But what if that torch were handed back to the old Church by the new, burning more brightly than when it was given? The challenge of modernity would still have to be faced, but with all the lessons of our experience and all the life of theirs.

  No Fear for the Faith

  Fourth, the fool’s-eye view sees that the faith will endure, because of the faith itself. Even if the modern world proved to be the greatest challenge the Church has faced, or if the alternatives to the gospel were powerful and menacing rather than weak, or if the Church in the rest of the world were nonexistent or as weak as we are, the faith would still endure. Its currency is truth; its source an unconquerable kingdom.

  The Christian Church may be in poor shape in the modern world, but this is not the first time, nor will it be the last. As always, when the Church is compromised by its cultural alliances, it suffers along with the culture to which it conforms. It may thus suffer doubly, once as the price of its compromise, and once as the price of its identification with a culture under judgment by God. This double judgment could be the fate of the Western Church.

  Yet the kingdom of God can never be totally absorbed into any cultural system. There will always be part of it that does not fit, which cannot be squeezed into any social or cultural mold. Christian truth is finally irreducible and intractable, and it is here, in the inescapable tension of its being “in” but not “of” the world, that the possibility of some future judgment or liberation lies.

  Marxism, by contrast, lacks such resilience because it lacks such transcendence. As social scientist David Martin points out, “It is a paradox that a system which claimed that the beginning of all criticism was the criticism of religion should have ended up with a form of religion which was the end of criticism.”8 Pravda in Russian means “truth,” but truth in the Soviet Union was mastered by Pravda.

  What is the secret of the Christian faith’s capacity to survive repeated periods of cultural captivity? On the one hand, it has in God’s Word an authority that stands higher than history, a judgment that is ultimately irreducible to any generation and culture. On the other hand, it has in its notion of sin and repentance a doctrine of its own failure, which can be the wellspring of its ongoing self-criticism and renewal.

  Like an eternal jack-in-the-box, Christian truth will always spring back. No power on earth can finally keep it down, not even the power of Babylonian conf
usion and captivity. “At least five times,” noted G. K. Chesterton, “the Faith has to all appearances gone to the dogs. In each of these five cases, it was the dog that died.”9

  To write these things is not to whistle in the dark. Nor is it to dredge up arguments to bolster the defenses of a sagging optimism. Rather, since the Gravedigger thesis turns on the monumental irony with which the papers began, it is apt to finish with another: There is no one like the other side for overplaying their hand.

  Out of corruption came Reformation. This was the story of their sixteenth-century overbalance. But what of an earlier day still, a day when they planned another grave and held another body captive?

  That day witnessed the greatest irony of all. It was, as John Donne said, “the day death died.”10 Because, as Augustine had said before him, the cross of the Lord was “the devil’s mousetrap.”11

  In spite of all the forces arrayed against the Christian Church, whether seen or unseen, grave-digging has been a somewhat less than certain business for the Evil One ever since the resurrection. Therefore, in the words of the most constant refrain in all the Scriptures, “Have faith in God. Have no fear.” God is greater than all, and he may be trusted in all situations.

  APPENDIX

  An Evangelical Manifesto

  A Declaration of Evangelical Identity and Public Commitment

  MAY 7, 2008, WASHINGTON, DC

  The following declaration, “An Evangelical Manifesto,” was published on May 7, 2008, as a call to Evangelical renewal and reformation—very much in line with the analysis of this book. It is included here as a spur to reflection, study, and prayer for Evangelicals concerned for the state of the Church.