Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: IVP
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
- ECPA 2017 Christian Book Award Finalist The church in the West is at a critical moment. While the gospel is exploding throughout the global south, Western civilization faces militant assaults from aggressive secularism and radical Islam. Will the church resist the seductive shaping power of advanced modernity?More than ever, Christians must resist the negative cultural forces of our day with fortitude and winsomeness. What is needed is followers of Christ who are willing to face reality without flinching and respond with a faithfulness that is unwavering. Os Guinness describes these Christians as "impossible people," those who have "hearts that can melt with compassion, but with faces like flint and backbones of steel who are unmanipulable, unbribable, undeterrable and unclubbable, without ever losing the gentleness, the mercy, the grace and the compassion of our Lord."Few accounts of the challenge of today are more realistic, and few calls to Christian courage are more timely, resolute—and hopeful. Guinness argues that we must engage secularism and atheism in new ways, confronting competing ideas with discernment and fresh articulation of the faith. Christians are called to be impossible people, full of courage and mercy in challenging times.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 364
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
IMPOSSIBLE PEOPLE
CHRISTIAN COURAGE AND THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SOULOF CIVILIZATION
OS GUINNESS
DOM
And to Dick and Mary Ohman,
—true friends, without whom.
Contents
Introduction: Found Faithful
1 New World, Old Challenge
2 The Greatest Challenge Ever
3 The War of Spirits
4 Exploring the Heart of Darkness
5 Life with No Amen
6 Yesterday, Today, Forever
7 Give Us the Tools
Afterword: A Time to Stand
Notes
Name Index
Subject Index
Scripture Index
Praise for Impossible People
About the Author
More Titles from InterVarsity Press
Copyright
The Lord said, “Behold, they are one people, and they all have the same language. And this is what they began to do, and now nothing which they purpose to do will be impossible for them. Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of the whole earth; and they stopped building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of the whole earth.
Genesis 11:6-9
If the foundations are destroyed, What can the righteous do?
Psalm 11:3
I am the LORD, that is My name; I will not give My glory to another.
Isaiah 42:8
Because your heart is lifted up And you have said, “I am a god, I sit in the seat of gods In the heart of the seas”; Yet you are a man and not God, Although you make your heart like the heart of God.
Ezekiel 28:2
I heard a mighty voice crying from the elements of the world: “We cannot move and complete our accustomed rounds as we should do according to the precepts of our Creator. For humankind, because of its corruptions, spins us about like the sails of a windmill. And so now we stink from pestilence and from hunger after justice.” As often as the elements of the world are violated by ill-treatment, God will cleanse them by the sufferings and hardships of humankind. . . . All of creation God gives to humankind to use. But if this privilege is misused, God’s justice permits creation to punish humanity.
Hildegard of Bingen,Meditations with Hildegard of Bingen
I have placed you at the very center of the world, so that from that vantage point you may with greater ease glance around you on all the world contains. We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine.
Pico della Mirandola,Oration on the Dignity of Man
Man must . . . venerate the state as a secular deity.
George Hegel,The Philosophy of Right
To be a nation . . . is the religion of our time. Leave all the little religions and perform the great duty to the single highest, and unite yourself in it to one belief high above the pope or Luther. That is the ultimate religion.
Ernst Arndt,Geist der Zeit
The beginning, middle and end of religion is MAN.
Ludwig Feuerbach,The Essence of Christianity
Man is free only if he owes his existence to himself. . . . Philosophy makes no secret of it. Prometheus’ admission “I hate all gods” is its own admission, its own motto against all gods, heavenly and earthly, who do not acknowledge the consciousness of man as the supreme divinity.
Karl Marx,doctoral thesis
In some isolated corner of the universe, poured out shimmeringly into unaccountable solar systems, there was once a star upon which clever animals invented knowledge. It was the most arrogant and hypocritical minute of “world history”: but it was only a minute. After nature drew a few breaths, the star grew stiff with cold, and the clever animals had to die.
Friedrich Nietzsche,“Truth and Lie in a Morally Disengaged Sense”
Should I eat and drink, only in order to hunger and thirst again, and eat and drink, merely until the open grave under my feet swallows me up as a meal for the earth? Should I create more beings like myself, so that they can eat and drink and die, and so they can leave behind beings of their own, so that they do the same as I have already done? What is the point of this continual, self-contained and ever-returning circle, this repetitive game that always starts again in the same way, in which everything is, in order to fade away, and fades away in order to return again as it was—this monster continually devouring itself in order to reproduce itself, and reproduce itself in order to devour itself?
Johann Gottlieb Fichte,The Vocation of Man
The West has lost Christ, and that is why it is dying; that is the only reason.
Fyodor Dostoevsky,Notebooks
Where there is no God, there is no man either.
Nicholas Berdyaev,ANew Middle Ages?
Once acclimatized to space-living, it is unlikely that man will stop until he has roamed over and colonized most of the sidereal universe, or that even this will be the end. Man will not ultimately be content to be parasitic on the stars, but will invade them and organize them for his own purposes. . . . The stars cannot be allowed to continue in their old way, but will be turned into efficient heat engines. . . . By intelligent organization, the life of the universe could probably be prolonged to many millions of millions of times what it would be without organization.
J. D. Bernal,The World, the Flesh and the Devil
Some day we will realize that the prime duty, the inescapable citizen of the right type is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world; and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type. The great problem of civilization is to secure a relative increase of the valuable as compared with the less valuable or noxious elements in the population. . . . I wish very much that the wrong people could be prevented entirely from breeding, and when the evil nature of these people is sufficiently flagrant, this should be done. . . . The emphasis should be on getting desirable people to breed.
Theodore Roosevelt,“Twisted Eugenics”
It is a curious but neglected fact that the very types which in all kindness should be obliterated from the human stock, have been permitted to reproduce themselves and to perpetuate their group, succored by the policy of indiscriminate charity of warm hearts uncontrolled by cool heads. . . . There is only one reply to a request for a higher birthrate among the intelligent and that is to ask the government to first take the burden of the insane and feebleminded from your back. . . . Sterilization is the solution.
Margaret Sanger,“Need for Birth Control in America”
It is only by believing in God that we can criticize the Government. Once abolish God, and the Government becomes God. The truth is that irreligion is the opium of the people. Wherever the people do not believe in something beyond the world, they will worship the world. But, above all, they worship the strongest thing in the world.
G. K. Chesterton,Christendom in Dublin
Nature is cruel, therefore we too are entitled to be cruel. When I send the flower of German youth into the steel hail of the next war without feeling the slightest regret over the precious German blood that is being spilled, should I not also have the right to eliminate millions of an inferior race that multiplies like vermin?
Adolf Hitler,in Joachim Fest,Hitler, 1974
There still remains only God to protect Man against Man. Either we will serve him in spirit and in truth or we shall enslave ourselves ceaselessly, more and more, to the monstrous idol we have made with our own hands to our own image and likeness.
Étienne Gilson,“The Terrors of the Year Two Thousand”
One who is himself a god needs no religion; he is divine in himself. He must not bow his head. . . . The more man lives in his artificial man-made reality amongst man’s structures and machinery, the more strongly he receives the impression that he is the creator of his own existence.
Emil Brunner,Christianity and Civilization
Man has always been his own most vexing problem. How shall he think of himself?
Reinhold Niebuhr,The Nature and Destiny of Man
When great causes are on the move in the world . . . we learn that we are spirits and not animals, and that something is going on in space and time, which, whether like it or not, spells “duty.”
Winston Churchill,The Unrelenting Struggle
Judgment in history falls heaviest on those who come to think themselves gods, who fly in the face of Providence and history, who put their trust in man-made systems and worship the work of their own hands, and who say that the strength of their own right arm gave them the victory.
Herbert Butterfield,Christianity and History
Man’s power over nature is really the power of some men over others with nature as their instrument.
C. S. Lewis,The Abolition of Man
Philosophy will be unable to effect any immediate change in the current state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all purely human refection and endeavor. Only a god can save us.
Martin Heidegger,Der Spiegel interview, 1966
The systems are . . . punishing of any species unwise enough to quarrel with its ecology. Call the systemic forces “God” if you will.
Gregory Bateson,Steps to an Ecology of Mind
Man, from having been one of the many creatures of the planet, has now cast over it his uncontrasted empire. . . . This global human empire possesses the wherewithal to outshine all past civilizations, or it may just as easily end tragically like a colossal Wagnerian Valhalla.
Aurelio Peccei, founder of the Club of Rome,The Human Quality
To be men, we must be in control. That is the first and the last ethical word.
Joseph Fletcher,New England Journal of Medicine, 1971
We are the children of chaos, and the deep structure of change is decay. At root, there is only corruption, and the unstemmable tide of chaos. Gone is purpose; all that is left is direction. This is the bleakness we have to accept as we peer deeply and dispassionately into the heart of the universe.
Peter Atkins,The Second Law
Is there anything more terrifying than the destruction of the world? Yeah, the knowledge that it doesn’t matter one way or the other—that it’s all random, radiating aimlessly out of nothing and eventually vanishing forever.
Woody Allen,September, 1987
The odds of Homo sapiens surviving the twenty-first century are “no better than fifty-fifty.”
Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, Our Final Century
The 21st century is an extraordinary time—a century of extremes. We could create much grander civilizations, or we could trigger a new Dark Ages. . . . We’re becoming like the sorcerer’s apprentice, having started something that we can barely control. In the legend of the sorcerer’s apprentice, the apprentice knows the magic is dangerous, but he plays with it anyway when the master is away. He can’t resist it. In that story there was a sorcerer and only one apprentice. Now we are all apprentices.
James Martin,The Meaning of the 21st Century
At the instant the Omega Point is reached, life [Homo sapiens] will have gained control of all matter and forces, not only in a single universe, but in all universes whose existence is logically possible; life will have spread into all spatial regions which could possibly exist.
John Barrow and Frank Tipler,The Anthropic Cosmological Principle
Seventy thousand years ago, Homo sapiens was still an insignificant animal minding its own business in a corner of Africa. In the following millennia it transformed itself into the master of the entire planet and the terror of the ecosystem. Today it stands on the verge of becoming a god, poised to acquire not only eternal youth, but also the divine abilities of creation and destruction. . . .
We are more powerful than ever before, but have very little idea what to do with all that power. Worse still, humans seem to be more irresponsible than ever before. Self-made gods with only the laws of physics to keep us company, we are accountable to no one. We are consequently wreaking havoc on our fellow animals and on the surrounding ecosystem, seeking little more than our own comfort and amusement, yet never finding satisfaction.
Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?
Yuval Noah Harari,Sapiens
Long ago, in youth, I was brash enough to think myself able to pronounce on “The Meaning of History.” I now know that history’s meaning is a matter to be discovered, not declared. . . . Each generation will be judged by whether the greatest, most consequential issues of the human condition have been faced, and that decisions to meet these challenges must be taken by statesmen before it is possible to know what the outcome might be.
Henry Kissinger,World Order
Once, after having spoken about some of these ideas someone came up to me and said, “I appreciated your words. But don’t you think you are fighting a losing battle?” It was a good question. . . . What I replied, though, was this: “Yes, the Jewish fight is a losing battle. It always was. Moses lost. Joshua lost. Jeremiah lost. We have striven for ideals just beyond our reach, hoped for a gracious society just beyond the possible, believed in a messianic age just over the furthest horizon, wrestled with the angel and emerged limping. And in the meanwhile those who won have disappeared, and we are still here, still young, still full of vigor, still fighting the losing battle, never accepting defeat, refusing to resign ourselves to cynicism, or to give up hope of peace with those who, today as in the past, seek our destruction. That kind of losing battle is worth fighting, more so than any easy victory, any premature consolation.”
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks,Future Tense
Introduction
Found Faithful
How on earth, it is often asked, could German Christians have caved in so weakly to the allure and coercions of National Socialism in the 1930s? The answer is plain: All too easily, if you understand the temper of the times in which they lived. Just so, many Western Christians are caving in weakly before the challenges of our own times, whether through the general seductions and distortions of advanced modernity, the tempting thinking behind the sexual revolution or a failure to understand the significance of the hour and appreciate the implacable hostility of some of the forces against us—and so blunting our witness and betraying the lordship and authority of Jesus. And all this at a time when momentous events across the world are running at a floodtide.
The present stage of history and the character of the advanced modern world have combined to throw down a gauntlet before the church in the West that is as decisive as Rome’s demand that Christians offer incense to Caesar as lord. As we shall see, the challenge to the Western church is subtle but unprecedented in its scale, and it must be answered with a courageous no to everything that contradicts the call of our Lord—whatever the cost and whatever the outcome. Is Jesus Lord, or are the forces of advanced modernity lord? The church that cannot say no to all that contradicts its Lord is a church that is well down the road to cultural defeat and captivity. But the courage to say no has to be followed by an equally clear, courageous and constructive yes—to the Lord himself, to his gospel and his vision of life, humanity and the future, so that Christians can be seen to live differently and to live better in the world of today.
Christians in the West are living in a grand clarifying moment. The gap between Christians and the wider culture is widening, and many formerly nominal Christians are becoming “religious nones.” In many ways we are in the Thursday evening of Holy Week. The cock has not yet crowed, but the angry crowd who would like to see the end of our Lord in the Western world has already seen and heard enough of our early betrayals to believe that it can count on more, and harry us toward ignominious surrender. So this is no time for cowards, for fence sitters or for those who wish to hedge their bets until they hear the judge’s verdict on the contest.
We face a solemn hour for humanity at large and a momentous showdown for the Western church. At stake is the attempted completion of the centuries-long assault on the Jewish and Christian faiths and their replacement by progressive secularism as the defining faith of the West and the ideology said to be the best suited to the conditions of advanced modernity. The gathering crisis is therefore about nothing less than a struggle for the soul of the West and the place of faith—any faith—in the life of advanced modern societies. The crisis can be expressed in terms of the interplay of four sets of challenges.
First, the primacy of the Jewish and Christian faiths as the defining faiths of the West has been weakened and almost overcome by two forces: the assault of progressive secularism and the weakening caused by the shaping power of the world of advanced modernity.
Second, within the West itself the near victory of progressive secularism has opened up a further struggle between two post-Christian forces: on one side, nihilism, degeneration and barbarism, which would spell the decline and fall of the West as it falls apart from within; and on the other, the hubris and soaring self-confidence of progressive secularism or evolutionary humanism, which would overreach in trying to lead the West in an entirely new direction and attempting to open up a stunning new world for humanity at large.
Third, the overthrow of the Jewish and Christian faiths as the soul of the West has opened the door at the global level to two powerful post-Christian alternatives vying for dominance in the world at large: aggressive secularism and radical Islam.
Fourth, the overall situation raises a double challenge for all the Christian churches across the Western world: Can Christians so witness to their Lord and live out their faith that Christian faith can prevail over the shaping power of the advanced modern world and its institutions? And can Christians, who in some Western countries are still a substantial majority, overcome the militant assaults and ways of life of progressive secularism so as to remain in a position themselves to contribute decisively to the human future?
The major focus of this book is on the challenges of the advanced modern world to the church in the advanced modern world, but they cannot be understood in isolation. Put all these challenges together and take a general’s eye view, and the stakes become very clear. For if the anti-Christian forces prevail, they represent nothing less than a return to the philosophy, the ethics and the lifestyles of the pagan world that Christians overcame originally. In other words, today’s challenge rivals that of the fateful clash of the early church with the Caesars in the first three centuries and the menace of the sultans of Ottoman Islam in the sixteenth.
The details of this grand strategic challenge will unfold as the argument proceeds, but let me summarize a key part of it in advance: the challenge of advanced modernity is much more than a matter of ideas. To be sure, Christians in the West are certainly facing powerful opposition created by the convergence of several streams of ideas that have created a raging flood that threatens to overwhelm the Christian faith in its deluge. This flood is the result of four infamous S factors that have built up over several centuries: Secularism, reinforced by secularization, has been empowered by separationism, and the outcome is a new and formidable form of statism. (A fifth S might be added, the Sixties, as there is no question that in both Europe and America the 1960s had a watershed cultural significance.) Each of these terms and trends are different, and we will need to define and distinguish them and understand the connections between them as we go forward. More importantly, they all need to be resisted with courage and overcome by faith. But if the forces of advanced modernity have weakened the church, these other forces are now threatening to complete the overthrow of the Jewish and Christian faiths as the working faith of the West.
The challenge described here amounts to a grand showdown for the Western church as a whole. This book is therefore addressed primarily to Christians throughout the Western world, for they are in the thick of the crisis. But it is also urgent that Christians and others outside the West appreciate the strategic global importance of the crisis of the West and the Western church and their vital part in responding to it. For one thing, the same challenge is coming to the rest of the world, for everyone will soon face similar problems as their own countries and regions modernize. And Western Christians need the help of their sisters and brothers from around the world, and their contributions to the West may well prove critical. Sometimes far less numerous in their own countries and usually far less wealthy than Western Christians, Christians in other parts of the world are often better off because they are further behind in terms of modernity. They have not yet become as deeply contaminated by modernity as many Western Christians have been. Like the apostle Peter, they may have less in terms of “silver and gold,” but what they have is the faithfulness, the courage, the boldness and the supernatural power that the Western church so often lacks and so badly needs.
In many ways the book is also a quiet tribute to our friends in the Jewish community. As many Jewish leaders have recognized, Jews are facing their own severe crisis today because of defections from Judaism under the conditions of advanced modernity, and this time not primarily because of anti-Semitism or persecution. In the words of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, “When it was hard to be a Jew, people stayed Jewish. When it was easy to be a Jew, people stopped being Jewish. Globally, this is the major Jewish problem of our time.”1
But while the Jewish crisis is evident, it is also true that we are living in what may be called the Jewish hour. First, more than half the world’s inhabitants are followers of one of the three faiths that trace their origins to Abraham. Second, it is time to appreciate the incalculable debt the Western world has long owed to Jewish beliefs and ideas—above all for the gifts of human dignity, freedom and the importance of covenant for political systems that prize freedom. And third, it is time for Christians to appreciate how the secret of the miraculous survival of the Jews in history offers very practical lessons in how Christians are to remain faithful in a post-Christian age. The simple fact is that many of the first things of Judaism are the same first things that many Christians are in danger of forgetting. But they are the very things we must hold fast to if we are to remain faithful to our Lord and demonstrate our own capacity to endure.
All that said, the main focus of this book will be on the American church for several reasons, principally because the United States still represents the world’s lead society and therefore experiences the challenges of the advanced modern world in a clearer and sharper way. Importantly too, Christians in America are still a substantial majority, so if they were retored to live as they were called to live, they would have the best chance of living and speaking with integrity—and even helping to prevent the secularist takeover and pointing the world toward a better way.
Yet that compliment is no cause for American complacency, because there are also reasons why the triumph of progressive secularism (or the triumphant return of paganism) could produce more immediate devastation in America than in the rest of the West.
Needless to say, Christians throughout the West often appear to be on the back foot. They have been told repeatedly that their prospects are hopeless. In a thousand withering dismissals we have heard that we are fighting a losing battle and the game is already over. Christians are “yesterday’s faith,” our day is done, our disagreements with others are a matter of bigotry, and we are reactionaries and on “the wrong side of history.” The future is with the faith free, we are told, as if there were such people. The Christianization of Rome and the West was a “false turn” in the long and winding road of history, they say, so the West must return to where it went wrong. The emperor Julian (the “Apostate”) may have failed to return Rome to its pagan greatness, but progressive secularists will succeed where Julian failed, though their goal is not to go back, except in their secularist philosophy, but to go forward—forward to the New Frontier or the Promised Land of a new, new world of super-technology, automation, robots, artificial intelligence, guided evolution, Singularity, Omega Point and Omega Man.
We reject such claims simply and completely. On one side, we passionately treasure science, but we equally reject the utopian power fantasies of the scientist-kings who are out to play the role of would-be gods and promote their own much-heralded humanist futures. In the years ahead we humans may explore unimaginable reaches of outer space, but we will still carry with us the crooked timber of our humanity. On the other, we reject the slur that we who are followers of Jesus are either reactionaries or has-beens. As salt and light in today’s extraordinary world, our contribution is indispensable. We are not simply guardians of some of the best of the past, but pioneers whose task is to stand against the world for the future of the world—and for the very future of humanity. No less than that is the high calling at stake in many of our present challenges. For serious though our time is, the present challenges are both significant in themselves and harbingers of even weightier ordeals that lie ahead on the horizon. Our responses today are therefore a trial run for the even graver tests that lie ahead, and as the Lord admonished the prophet Jeremiah when he was fainthearted, “If you have run with footmen and they have tired you out, / Then how can you compete with horses?” (Jer 12:5). Overall, then, a simple question confronts us: If the Christian faith is no longer our own defining and working faith, how do we expect it to remain the defining and working faith of our societies and our civilization?
The Audience of One
As followers of Jesus we are called to live before one audience, the audience of One. From Abraham on, the life of faith has always been “all at the sound of a voice.” There is only one voice that matters for us—the voice of God, and not the voice of the people or the voice of the times. And certainly not the warm embrace of popularity, the soft whisper of our own desires for comfort, the careful eye to our own reputations, the siren lure of being on the “right side of history,” or the mean faces of the bullying activists and the social media mob. Equally, there is only one judgment that matters, and one word of approval that counts in the end: “Well done, good and faithful servant.”
My parents tried to teach me that lesson in loyalty when I was a small boy, though there was a long gap between their teaching and my learning it for myself, and there will always be a gap between our knowing what is right and following it faithfully. I grew up in a China that had been ravaged by two centuries of European and American adventuring, and then by World War II and a brutal civil war. We lived in Nanjing, which was then the nation’s capital, but there were few good schools to go to, so at the age of five I found myself setting off by plane to a boarding school in Shanghai.
Obviously, the conditions behind the decision to send me out at that age were extreme, and I was not the only one launched on that path so young. But it was the first time in my life that I had been away from my parents and on my own. So, to give me a constant reminder of the North Star of the faith at the center of our family life, my father had searched for two small, smooth, flat stones and painted on them his life motto and that of my mother. For many years those two little stones were tangible memos in the pockets of my gray flannel shorts that were the uniform of most English schoolboys in those days. In my right-hand pocket was my father’s motto, “Found Faithful,” and in my left-hand pocket was my mother’s, “Please Him.”
Many years have passed since then, and both of those little painted stones were lost in the chaos of escaping from China when Mao Zedong and the People’s Army eventually overran Nanjing, returned the capital to Beijing and began their iron and bloody rule of the entire country. But I have never forgotten the lesson of the little stones. Followers of Jesus are called to be “found faithful” and to “please him,” always, everywhere and in spite of everyone and everything.
That same faithfulness braced our Christian brothers and sisters in China as they took the full brunt of one of the most vicious, cruel and systematic persecutions in all history. And as I write now, we are witnessing almost daily the same astonishing courage of Christians in many countries of the world, but especially in the Islamic Middle East that was once the cradle of the church. Day after day Christians are standing as martyrs, facing false charges, assaults, mutilation, rape, religious cleansing, murder, bomb blasts, beheadings and even crucifixions, all because they will not renounce the name of Jesus.
And what of us in the West? Are we showing that we too are prepared to follow Jesus and his authority at any cost? When an imperceptible bow would have saved Daniel’s three friends, they defied King Nebuchadnezzar’s idolatry at the threat of being burned alive. When simply closing a window and drawing his curtains could have saved Daniel himself, he chose to risk the lions rather than mute his allegiance to God. When a mere whiff of incense would have saved their lives, early Christians refused to acknowledge Caesar as lord rather than Jesus and were made human torches or the evening meal for wild animals. When it seemed quixotic to take on the emperor, the empress and all the empire, Athanasius took his stand for truth contra mundum (against the world) and was exiled five times for his faithfulness. When he was told he was arrogant or out of his mind to follow his conscience and defy the consensus of tradition, Martin Luther stood firm in the face of the fiery stake that had cremated Jan Hus before him. When his closest friends urged him to save himself for the important work of his future scholarship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer chose to reenter Hitler’s lair and ignore the looming specter of the gallows.
What then of us? Are we living in the light of the great cloud of witnesses and martyrs who have gone before us? Or in the comfortable conditions of the advanced modern world, where the seductions of modernity are more of a threat to our faithfulness than persecution? In the golden era of the Roman Empire, Pliny the Younger advised Emperor Trajan that Christians should be executed solely for their tenacity and intransigence. “Whatever the nature of their admission, I am convinced that their stubbornness and unshakable obstinacy ought not to go unpunished.”2 The similar charge in the death of many martyrs was routine: “Since they remained unbending, obstinate, I have condemned them.”3
Would we be convicted today for being stubborn, tenacious, unbending and obstinate? It is surely undeniable that only rarely in Christian history has the lordship of Jesus in the West been treated as more pliable or has Christian revisionism been more brazen, Christian interpretations of the Bible more self-serving, Christian preaching more soft, Christian behavior more lax, Christian compromise more common, Christian defections from the faith more casual, and Christian rationales for such slippage more spurious and shameless.
Let me say it again: How on earth could German Christians have caved in so weakly to the allure and coercions of National Socialism in the 1930s? The answer is plain: All too easily, if you understand the temper of the times in which they lived. Just so, many Western Christians are caving in weakly before the challenges of our own times, such as the general seductions and distortions of modernity, the particular temptations of the sexual revolution or a failure to appreciate the implacable hostility of the forces against us—and so blunting our witness and denying the lordship of Jesus and the authority of the Scriptures. It is time, and past time, to turn this situation around and take a stand worthy of our Lord—before the cock crows and we are left with the bitter regret that our brothers and sisters around the world stood firm and paid with their lives, but our generation in the West betrayed our Lord in such a pitiful way.
Unclubbable
Why “impossible people”? The term impossible man was used to describe the eleventh-century Benedictine reformer Peter Damian (c. 1007–1073). Dante placed Damian in the highest circle of paradise as a saint and the predecessor of Francis of Assisi. A thousand years ago, as in our own time, there was little regard for truth or for the integrity and purity of the Christian faith. Nor was there much sense of the gravity of sin, so the church was easygoing, corruption was rife and the moral and theological rot was as pervasive among the clergy and the leaders of the church as among ordinary people. (As in the times of the Hebrew prophets, so among Evangelicals today, it is too often the pastors, the shepherds, who are leading the people astray—though celebrity shepherds is surely a contradiction in terms.) Above all, Damian called for reform against the most prominent evils. In particular, he attacked the widespread practice of simony, the selling of church positions for money, and the equally widespread acceptance of homosexuality, pedophilia and pederasty, especially among the clergy.
In recognition of his reforming fervor, Damian was later canonized by the Catholic Church as St. Peter Damian. Criticized in his time for being fanatical and purely negative, he was in fact passionate about the church’s “welfare of souls” and about faithfulness to Jesus and the truth of the gospel. Yet it was these positive passions that made him severe and unsparing in his denunciation of all forms of corruption and immorality, and in attacking them he could not be swayed by either obstacles or opposition. His commitment to Jesus alone was so fierce that he won the reputation for being unmanipulable, unbribable, undeterrable and, in George Orwell’s later term of approval, unclubbable (“clubbable” being the ultimate in coercion through comfortable conformity).
Unquestionably, the term impossible man was ambiguous. It could be taken either as a compliment or an insult. Doubtless, many of Peter Damian’s generation admired him for his stand, just as many hated him for his fervor, and many were frustrated and made uncomfortable by what they saw as his intransigence. In other words, the same term could express either admiration or exasperation, as it will again today. But all that was irrelevant to Peter Damian. He spoke, wrote and acted solely with an eye to the audience of One. He could not be deterred by other voices. He was faithful to Jesus alone and above all. His faith had a backbone of steel. He was the impossible man.
It would be tempting to underscore that we especially need Christian leaders like that. The story is told that a Roman praetorian prefect was so offended by St. Basil’s outspoken statements that he declared that he had never been addressed like that in his life. “No doubt,” St. Basil replied, “you have never met a bishop.” (Clearly he was speaking in a day when bishops were not yet political appointees and to be a bishop was not what it became: a position with the promise of power and personal advancement. The church will never be free so long as we continue to have that kind of bishop appointed for reasons other than churchly). But the challenge today goes far wider than leaders. All who would be faithful followers of Jesus in our advanced modern world are facing similar challenges and seductions, and we too must become impossible people—Christians with hearts that can melt with compassion, but with faces like flint and backbones of steel who are unmanipulable, unbribable, undeterrable and unclubbable, without ever losing the gentleness, the mercy, the grace and the compassion of our Lord. Whether we are Evangelicals, Catholics, Orthodox or Pentecostals, we must have a rock solid allegiance to Jesus alone, above all and despite everyone and everything. “Jesus is Lord” is our allegiance, our confession, our authority and our standard and rule of life. Whoever and whatever contradicts him summons us again to count the cost and to take our stand. Christians today need to be broad-shouldered—made so by carrying the weight of the cross as we were commanded.
Impossible People is a companion to my earlier book Renaissance, which came first for a reason. In that book I explored the reasons for our response of assured faith in the gospel—which must be forever unshakeable—and it concluded with hope. I deliberately reversed the normal order of “challenge and response” and put the response before the challenge. Such is the character and record of the gospel of Jesus that we may trust it absolutely however dark the times and however bleak the challenge. Doom, gloom, alarmism and fear are never the way for the people of God. We are to have “no fear.” Impossible People addresses the challenges we face and subjective side that is our response to these challenges—the gospel carries its own inherent transforming power, but we need to trust it, obey it and live it—against all the odds and at any cost. We need to respond to the gospel with courage and conviction, in order to live faithfully according to the call of Jesus and the good news of his kingdom in today’s world.
We need never have qualms about the objective side of the challenge. The gospel of Jesus may be trusted to be the transforming power that it is. It is, after all, the very power of God for the saving of humanity, and the record of its impact in history is glorious and undeniable. Our allegiance to it is the concern today. We have to rise to the challenge that the gospel raises to all who say that they believe it—we must demonstrate our confidence in the gospel by a courage that is prepared to break with all that contradicts with what God says. In short, by faith we must be prepared to wager our comfort, our livelihood, our honor and our very lives on God and his Word against all other claims and authorities. We must therefore live as we have been called to live: to take up our crosses and to count the cost of living lives that are true to the gospel and to the lordship of Jesus, regardless of the cost and the consequences in our day—and so be worthy of the great cloud of witnesses behind us in history and around us in the world today.
One of the greatest Christian leaders of the last century was John R. W. Stott, rector of All Souls Langham Place in London and a peerless preacher, Bible teacher, evangelist, author, global leader and friend to many. I knew him over many decades, but I will never forget my last visit to his bedside three weeks before he died. After an unforgettable hour and more of sharing many memories over many years, I asked him how he would like me to pray for him. Lying weakly on his back and barely able to speak, he answered in a hoarse whisper, “Pray that I will be faithful to Jesus until my last breath.”
Would that such a prayer be the passion of our generation too. The Jewish sages point out that when Moses pleaded with God to forgive the people for their rebellion over the golden calf, he cited the very reason God had given for deciding to abandon them. (“It is a stiff-necked people.”) Did Moses not see the illogic of what he was asking? But that of course was the very point of his request. The same stubbornness that was the Jews’ worst vice at Sinai would one day be their noblest virtue when tempted to abandon their faith in God. Only such a stiff-necked stubbornness would enable the Jews to resist the threat of death and the seduction of conversion to another faith.
The church of Jesus can never be the church without both faith and faithfulness, and both of them in a form that is strong to the point of being stubborn. The supreme challenge of the hour for the church of Jesus in the advanced modern world is to so live and speak as witnesses to our Lord that, as in the motto of the US Marines, we are “Semper Fi”—always Found Faithful. Rarely in two thousand years of Christian history has that calling been so tested as it is in our time. Come threats of death or seductive temptations to an easy life, our task is to stand faithful to our Lord in every moment of our lives and faithful to our last breath.
A Prayer
O Lord our God, you are the one true God, beside whom there is no other. In you alone lies our trust, our salvation and our hope. We do not trust ourselves, we cannot save ourselves, and our hope is not in ourselves. To stake our existence in the vastness of the cosmos anywhere other than in you is folly, and to seek for strength and wisdom apart from you in the hazardous journey of life is madness. Be to us, small and sinful though we are, all that you can be, so that, brought to life by your grace, strengthened by your power and warmed by your love, we may trust you with our whole hearts as your faithfulness and covenant loyalty so richly deserve. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.
