The Last Christian on Earth Read online

  the last christian on earth

  © 2010 Os Guinness

  Illustration on page 22 by Nick Butterworth

  Published by Baker Books

  a division of Baker Publishing Group

  P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

  www.bakerbooks.com

  Baker Books edition published 2014

  ISBN 978-1-4412-2389-0

  Previously published by Regal Books

  Formerly published as The Gravedigger File: Papers on the Subversion of the Modern Church (InterVarsity Press, 1983).

  Ebook edition originally created 2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  All Scripture quotations are taken from the following:

  NASB—Scripture taken from the New American Standard Bible, © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

  NEB—From The New English Bible. © The Delegates of Oxford University Press and The Syndics of the Cambridge University Press 1961, 1970, 1989. Reprinted by permission.

  NIV—Scripture taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.

  DOM

  and to CJ and his generation, who are the ones to make the critical difference on these issues

  Contents

  AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW EDITION

  PREFACE: How These Papers Came Into My Hands

  MEMORANDUM 1: Operation Gravedigger

  MEMORANDUM 2: The Sandman Effect

  MEMORANDUM 3: The Cheshire-Cat Factor

  MEMORANDUM 4: The Private-Zoo Factor

  MEMORANDUM 5: The Smorgasbord Factor

  MEMORANDUM 6: Creating Counterfeit Religion

  MEMORANDUM 7: Damage to Enemy Institutions

  MEMORANDUM 8: Damage to Enemy Ideas

  MEMORANDUM 9: Fossils and Fanatics

  MEMORANDUM 10: Trendies and Traitors

  MEMORANDUM 11: The Last Christian in the Modern World

  AFTERWORD: On Remembering the Third Fool and the Devil’s Mousetrap

  APPENDIX: An Evangelical Manifesto

  REFERENCES

  Author’s Introduction to the New Edition

  Some years ago, I had the privilege of addressing a forum of Chinese CEOs in the business school of one of China’s leading universities. As we were walking back to the conference after a magnificent dinner, the dean asked me the most searching question of the day.

  “What am I missing?” he said. “We in China are fascinated by the Christian roots of the Western past, in order to see what we can learn for China’s future. But you in the West are cutting yourself off from your roots. What am I missing?”

  The dean’s question highlights one of the most urgent questions facing Western Christians in the advanced modern global era. We are living in the global era. The global era is a product of the West, just as the West is largely a product of the Christian faith. And the Christian faith is the world’s first truly global faith. But what is wrong with the Church in the West if the Church is exploding in the global South and around the world but is increasingly faithless and failing in the West?

  I was born in China, and the area where I grew up has witnessed the most explosive growth of the Christian Church in 2,000 years. I am an Anglican Evangelical, and a member of a church that is decadent or withering in many parts of the West but exploding in Africa and Asia. And not only that, but the courageous and faithful sisters and brothers in Africa and Asia who were led to faith by missionaries from the West are in their turn riding to the rescue of the Western Church that has fallen captive to the most heretical and apostate forms of faith in 2,000 years of Christian history.

  The Episcopal Church in the U.S. is an extreme case, but what has gone wrong elsewhere in the West? How are we to make sense of the spiritually barren situation in Western Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand? Or of the fact that in the United States, where Evangelicals, the people of the good news, are still strong numerically, they have become one of the shallowest, noisiest and most corrupt parts of the Christian Church, bringing down an unprecedented avalanche of disdain on their heads—almost none of which has anything to do with Jesus?

  For five decades now I have been a follower of Jesus and an Evangelical, one who has always sought to define myself, my faith and my life according to the good news Jesus announced and demonstrated. Not once has God ever let me down, and the central and overwhelming response of my life is joy, gratitude and trust for the greatness and goodness of God. But, a constant lesser theme on my journey has been sorrow over the weakness and follies of the Church in the West, both in Europe, where I have spent many years, and in America, where I live now.

  The core challenge to the Western Church can be expressed in three words: “integrity,” “credibility” and “civility,” though the greatest of these is integrity. In relation to Jesus Christ our Lord, we must regain the integrity of our faith; in relation to educated outsiders, we must regain the credibility of our faith; and in relation to people of other faiths, we must regain the civility of our faith. This is the sum of our challenge to be utterly faithful to our Lord while at the same time utterly and properly engaged in life in this astonishing modern world.

  The Search for the Deepest Answer

  There are Christian books by the hundreds that tell us we have problems in the Church and that appeal to the disillusioned and stir the angry. But there are few that say why. What has caused the problems, or what Martin Luther would have called the new “Babylonian captivity,” of the Western Church? There are many answers to this question and many of them are obviously inadequate or wrong. We simply cannot trace all of the problems back to theological liberalism or secular humanism or godless education or sexual permissiveness or coarse television or corrupt politicians or outmoded pastors, or whoever and whatever is purported to be the villain of the day. There has to be a deeper, more comprehensive and more damaging reason than any of these answers.

  I believe there is such an answer. What Luther called “Babylonian Captivity” is a falling for the spirit, style and system of the age, which is also a worldliness and an unfaithfulness that both saps the strength of the Church and brings it under the judgment of God. How have we done that? Ironically, we in the Western Christian Church have been undermined by the very modern world that the Christian faith was so instrumental in helping to create.

  This notion has mostly been studied in the social sciences, which is why Evangelicals have mostly missed it until recently. The notion might be called the “gravedigger thesis,” and it can be put simply: The Christian faith contributed decisively to the rise of the modern world, but it has been undermined decisively by the modern world it helped to create. The Christian faith has become its own gravedigger.

  When I began to understand the significance of this analysis many decades ago, it threw such light on the weaknesses and follies of the Church today that I wanted to share it with fellow Christians. But much of the analysis was buried in academic books and papers that were impenetrable to ordinary readers. Hence The Gravedigger File, the first edition of this book that I wrote in 1983. It was a grand summary and simplification of much that has been written in the social sciences on the state of modern religion, but w
ith a crucial difference: I translated it all into a form that looks at the issues from the perspective of faith and discipleship, rather than sociology.

  I am not a subscriber to apocalyptic alarmism or to conspiracy theories. On the contrary, I adhere strongly to the most repeated assertion of the entire Bible: “Have faith in God. Have no fear.” But I used the literary device of writing memoranda from one spy to another spy on how to undermine the Church for a simple reason. I did so deliberately, in order to challenge us as Christians to wrench ourselves out of our shortsightedness, so that we can see things from an outside point of view. Worldliness is always a spiritual myopia. It falls for the spirit and system of the age and fails to correct itself through the correcting lenses of the perspective of the global (the Church in other continents), the historical (the Church in other centuries), and above all, the eternal (the Word of God across all places and times).

  Over the years, many readers have asked whether my model was C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, and wondered who is “the old Fool” mentioned in the story. I owe a great deal to the famous Oxford don, including his decisive nudge toward my coming to faith in the first place. But my inspiration here was not Lewis but John le Carré and his brilliant depictions of the grey world of intelligence. As for the “old Fool,” he is Malcolm Muggeridge, who was alive and well when I first wrote the book, and a dear friend. His utterly hilarious, but deadly serious, brand of fool making has long been an inspiration to my lifelong passion for Christian persuasion. He is now in heaven, but he read the book when it first came out and his kind commendation has always meant the world to me.

  Timelier than Ever

  Twenty-five years later, some may like to evoke associations with other and newer types of secret agents, but they are always only devices. The central challenge, however, remains. Since The Gravedigger File was first published in 1983, the world has changed considerably—including such dramatic events as the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of the computer age, the re-emergence of China and India, the rise of Islamic terrorism, and the worldwide revitalization and politicization of religion. But the central point of the gravedigger thesis remains the same and it raises an inescapable question for followers of Jesus in the Western world today: Can we regain the full integrity of faith in Christ while fully and properly engaged in the advanced modern world?

  This new and re-titled edition should be read with that question in mind from the start. Sadly, the central argument is not only unchanged but more urgent than ever, which underscores the challenge. Only a few more recent illustrations have been added to underscore what has happened since the book first came out and where we are today. To be sure, many Christians are now more aware of the contributions of the social sciences than when I first wrote, though this has its snags too.

  First, much of the new awareness stops at an obsession with statistics, which itself is often a form of reductionism and even of worldliness. It misses the deeper understanding that comes only from wise theory and deeper analysis.

  Second, too much of the awareness is uncritical, so that Evangelicals have swung from an earlier ignorance of the social sciences to an acceptance that is sometimes equally uncritical. I have heard sermons in American churches with more taken from pollsters than from the Bible. The old three-step Christian approach of “discern, assess, and engage” is still the better way.

  And third, many have become so adept in using the important tools of the social sciences that they never go back to seeing things from a biblical point of view. This point is true too of many of the academic disciplines, so that the laudable increase in distinguished Christian scholarship is offset by the decrease in faithful Christian thinking.

  The title of this new edition of the book, The Last Christian on Earth, plays off the gravedigger thesis as well as the words of our Lord in the Gospel of Luke: “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?”1 Growing up in China, where I was witness to the beginnings of the terrible persecution that Mao Tse-Tung unleashed against the Church, I once thought Jesus was referring to the results of a time of dreadful persecution. I now think it is more likely that Jesus was warning of a time when there could be millions of people who ostensibly name his name but are unrecognizable as the followers he called to follow his way. Parts of the Western Church are already in that condition now.

  For American Evangelicals, the new edition is particularly timely because of watershed changes in Evangelicalism after the Republican debacle in the 2008 election and the role of the Christian right in its defeat. For many decades in the twentieth century, the Evangelical faith in America was deeply privatized—“privately engaging but publicly irrelevant,” as one critic put it. Then, after the wake-up year of 1973 (Watergate, Roe v. Wade and the OPEC crisis), the pendulum swung strongly to the other side.

  Since then, the Evangelical faith has been deeply politicized through its identification with the religious right. Both extremes have been unfaithful to God as well as a failure in practice. The second era is now coming to an end, and the question is: which stance should Evangelicals take in public life now? It would be as bad to be politicized from the left as from the right, but which is the better way? That is a burning question, and it is raised here along with many other vital issues.

  Memorandum 4 speaks directly to these issues, just as it did when The Gravedigger File first came out. Perhaps the needed current debate will be wiser and more biblical than the heedless mid-seventies rush to political engagement at any cost. But the issues are set out here for thoughtful believers to engage.

  Unquestionably, this issue and many of the issues raised in this book are controversial, and the times we live in make them urgent. But the book is back to speak for itself. As Jesus said so many times, “Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear.”

  There are many Christians so caught up in the way things have always been or so caught up in the excitement of their new “rush to relevance” that they have no time to stop and think. But for those who sorrow over the state of the Western Church, this book is a passionate and open plea for reformation and revival. It is written and now re-issued to help with the wrestling with the world, which is the preparation for the fervent prayer, which is the prelude to the costly discipleship, which will be the springboard for a faithful and effective prevailing over the greatest challenge the Church of Christ has ever faced: modernity. May it be so—and may it be soon.

  Os Guinness

  Washington, DC

  January 2009

  PREFACE

  How These Papers Came Into My Hands

  My wife and I have known the source of these papers for five or six years, first in the setting of his graduate philosophy seminars, then in the wider context of university life and, more recently, as an occasional dinner guest in our own home. To all appearances, he was a typical university don, genial, witty and (when occasion served) penetrating in his insights and criticism. Not once in all these years has he ever given us a clue that this was a mask for an altogether different self.

  We had sometimes talked quite deeply, though always agreeing to differ over the question of our respective convictions. Trained, as I realize now, to withstand forms of interrogation somewhat stronger than philosophy seminars, he must have listened to us and nonchalantly parried the questions we raised like an adult playing chess with children.

  The break came when we were dining together at his college, after an invitation that was uncharacteristically late and insistent. I noticed that he seemed distracted, almost agitated. He chose to sit at the end of the table, well out of the central conversation. Once the main course had been served and the conversation level was rising around the dining hall, he dropped his voice, a sudden edge entering it.

  “Look,” he said, “I need your help. Listen to me carefully, but show no sign of any special attention. It’s possible that I’m being watched. I suggested meeting here in public because it was less conspicuous than coming to your home.”


  “I believe I can trust you,” he continued. “I’ve come to see where your North Star lies. And there’s one other person I know I can trust … Old Fool indeed!”

  The last three words were said more to himself than to me. They trailed off into the unlit world of his own thoughts. In response to my questioning look, he spoke the name of a distinguished writer whom he knew I had recently interviewed.

  “I will soon need to get something to him urgently, without fail. I gather you’ve met him. Are you willing to do it?” If so, he continued, he would contact me again in the course of the next week. He was waiting for the arrival of news that would allow him to act.

  His call to my cell phone came earlier than I expected. At home the next evening, he phoned me as I let myself in. He wanted me to meet him that night. “Radcliffe Square. Catte Street entrance, 11:00 P.M.,” he said, and rang off without further explanation.

  The deep bell of the University Church was tolling over the almost deserted square as he loomed out of the misty November night under the winter-flowering cherry tree. He shook hands with me strongly, and as he did so he pressed something small and metallic into my palm. Then, seizing my arm, he piloted me brusquely across the square and on toward Broad Street.

  We walked together for less than 15 minutes before he slipped into the darkness as silently as he had arrived. What he had given me was a memory stick, and in it a series of top-secret memos directed to him, which he instructed me to take the next morning to the writer he had mentioned. Together we should review them and get them published without delay. He was emphatic about the urgency. He would be missed as soon as he failed to turn up for a flight at Heathrow, so 12 hours were all that were left him. The writer would not be expecting the memos, but would know what to do. He had been a journalist in his time, and had also worked in intelligence, so he would appreciate immediately what he was dealing with.