WHAT TURNS A SKEPTIC TO CHRIST?

Many of us have followed with interest the pilgrimage of Malcolm Muggeridge, the British journalist and social critic, who turned from skepticism to Christianity, even from a critic of the faith to one of its staunchest defenders. As an apologist for the Bible, he sees the contradictions therein as an indication of its integrity. The contradictions could easily have been edited out, he insists, claiming that he could do it himself, and the fact that they were not means that they are for real. “If the Gospels are a fake,” he writes in his Jesus: The Man Who Lives, “then the hands that did the faking were quite exceptionally inexpert and careless.”

Those who knew the crusty old pessimist back when he was editor of Punch were amazed that he became a Christian, so they asked him why. The answer is given in a new book about him, Malcolm Muggerridge: A Life, by Ian Hunter. The answer may in essence be the only answer that can be given. It was the answer that Peter gave when Jesus asked if the apostles themselves would turn back and walk with him no more. To whom shall we go? asked the fisherman. It was his answer, not a question. And I am persuaded it is the only answer fallen man has.

Muggeridge tells how he saw himself as a stranger in this world. He had his idols to be sure, all centered in material things, but they toppled before him one by one. He found no hope in the political systems, for even though he rejected the despotism he found in Communism when he served as a correspondent in Moscow, he found no security in the institutions of the West. The more he learned about his world the more pessimistic he became. It was therefore the pessimism that he saw in Christianity that began to turn his life around. He was especially impressed with Jesus’ promise: “In the world you will have troubles, but be of good cheer, for I have overcome the world.”

Muggeridge says quite pointedly that he accepted Christ because he had no other alternative. He has been very critical of TV, insisting that it fabricates an unreal world, merchandising in tinsel and confetti. Still TV mirrors the world as it is, deceived and deceiving. All that the world pursues, Muggeridge came to see, whether power, sensual pleasure, money, learning, celebrity, or even happiness are preposterously unrewarding. He sees in this God’s mercy, for as man comes to see how superficial all these things are - and God in His mercy has made them unrewarding - he has but one thing to turn to and that is Jesus Christ.

In another manner of speaking it was disgust with what he saw as rector at Edinburgh University that fanned his enthusiasm for the Christian faith. The students protested for the right to use LSD, present nude scenes on stage, and ready access to birth control pills. When they turned on him for not taking their side, he challenged them to turn their creative powers toward great art and ideas rather than to a slobbering debauchery that called only for dope and bed. He resigned in protest. The deity of Jesus Christ and his resurrection from the dead thus became the anchor of Muggeridge’s life.

Is this not actually the predicament of all mankind, and is Muggeridge’s answer not the answer for us all? It is all a problem of colossal greed. The world by its very nature is carnal and greedy, whether for power, pleasure, or prestige. It is apparent even in the church, for we are often greedy for our own way, greedy for our preferences, greedy for attention and recognition. But it is all so vain, and in the end, as Muggeridge discovered, preposterously unrewarding. Suppose we do win the argument, gain the point, have our way, put up our man, or put somebody down? Or even gain riches and fame? So what? Such a life can be terribly empty. It is no way to live. The simple life, directed by the golden rule, is the victorious life.

Muggeridge now professes Jesus Christ as Lord, but he has joined no church. With its “crazed clergy, empty churches, and total doctrinal confusion”, the church is like the society around it, dead. The Christianity that one sees in the church is drained of its transcendental meaning, he says. He is content to serve as a prophet to the church, calling it to repentance from without. So Christendom, the power structure of the church, is over, he says in his The End of Christendom. But Christ is not over.

He takes hope in Christianity’s power to renew itself, and he sees this the world over. He is especially encouraged by the surge of the Christian faith in Russia. His bottom line is therefore, “Finding in everything only deception and nothingness, the soul is constrained to have recourse to God himself and to rest content with him.”

In Muggeridge we have an example of the churchless type of Christian renewal, which may ultimately prove to be the church itself, rising out of our decadence and calling us to be the real Body of Christ. Muggeridge at least shows us that men can and will find their way to Christ, with or without the church, and that Christ is the only answer. It may be that the church itself, believing too much in its own doctrines and structures, has yet to learn that lesson.—the Editor