I found the Methodist theologian Thomas Oden helpful in understanding the shallowness of much modern theology and finding a deep compatibility between Wesleyan theology and the fathers of the Church.  One of the first books I reviewed for my “Reedings” was his After Modernity . . . What?  Agenda for Theology (Grand Rapids:  Academie Books, c. 1990).  Having discovered that both he and his “postcritical” students hungered for “the available power of the Christian heritage rather than trendy ideas of minor modern heretics” (p. 16), he called readers to recover their authentic Christian roots in the Ancient Church, for “it is from the martyrs, saints, and prophets of Christian history, more than from recent riskless interpreters, that we learn of the value of classical Christianity” (p. 13).

     In part one of the book, “The Courtship of Modernity,” Oden urged readers to reject many of our era’s most seductive proposals.  To do so means discounting “modernity,” which he described as “a narcissistic hedonism that assumes that moral value is reducible to now feelings and sensory experience” (p. 31).  Indeed:  “Narcissism is a key mark of modernity.  Myself becomes the central project of moral interest; self-enjoyment and self-development become the central goals” (p. 79).  Oden knew whereof he spoke!  In some deeply personal, confessional, passages he reflected on all the “movements” he had earlier joined and championed, only to find them short-lived and inconsequential.  Older and wiser, he found a profoundly satisfying rootage in classical orthodoxy, mainly located in the first five centuries of Church history.

     A major step on this journey was discovering biblical hermeneutics!  By learning to listen to the text itself, becoming obedient to it (not the latest scholar’s interpretation of it), he found what ‘was the most improbable and difficult and revolutionary thing that has ever happened to me’ (p. 80).  He discovered his real role as a theologian:  listening, along with the ancients, to the Bible.  Most modern thinkers cultivate novelty to celebrate their brilliance.  Rather than seeking to clarify and declare the ancient texts they covet acclaim.  During the last two centuries, “critical” scholars, have pretended to objectively deal with biblical materials, whereas they usually asserted, in religious terms, their peculiar generation’s prejudices, generally imposing a “naturalistic reductionism upon the New Testament texts” (p. 101).  Rejecting fashionable moderns and their cavalier treatment of ancient texts, Oden prefered Origen’s abiding confidence that the Holy Scriptures are not mere human productions, but rather written by humans under the “inspiration of the Holy Spirit,” scriptures subsequently “transmitted and entrusted to us by the Will of God.” 

     Having cut a wide swathe through modernity’s most treasured artifacts, Oden advocated ‘The Liberation of Orthodoxy.”  Long concerned with pastoral theology and praxis, he thought churchmen needed to stand strong against heresy.  If the church survives, transmitting its traditions from generation to generation, its teachers must conserve the treasury of the past.  So heresies must be forever highlighted and resisted.  In Oden’s view, heresy basically means “self-choice”—exalting one’s personal interpretation over that of the believing community.  Unlike heretical movements, orthodoxy conserves by continually asking “What in fact did the apostles teach?” (p. 162).   At the heart of orthodoxy one finds not static dogmas but the living Lord Jesus Christ.  At the heart of orthodox communities one finds believers loving the resurrected Christ.  This, above all else, the church must sustain. 

     Oden closed his treatise with a somber chapter entitled “the winter temperament.” To him the cultural landscape looked like a bombed out city.  All the fond aspirations of earlier times had failed and laid about like litter on an abandoned playground.  The hope that sustains him was what St Augustine discovered amidst the collapse of the Roman Empire:  the City of God!   And insofar as Oden finds firm foundations in the same faith which shored up Augustine, he reminded us that however unsettled our times may be there is something to rest upon.  For Oden, T.S. Eliot’s words (quoted by J.I. Packer in his foreword) suffice:  “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring/  Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”

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In A Change of Heart:  A Personal and Theological Memoir (Downers Grove, IL:  Inter/Varsity Press, c. 2014) Thomas Oden set forth a fascinating and illuminating reflection on his life and scholarly career.  Reading his story provides not only insight into Oden—it illuminates much about recent American history as well as amplifies timeless truths regarding the Christian Faith.  In brief, he confessed:  “My life story has had two phases: going away from home as far as I could go, not knowing what I might find in an odyssey of preparation, and then at last inhabiting anew my own original home of classic Christian wisdom.  The uniting theme of the two parts of my life can only be providence” (p. 140).  

Born in 1931 and reared in Altus, Oklahoma, Oden absorbed and still celebrates many aspects of the high plains frontier culture that nourished him.  Joining the Cub Scouts as a boy, Oden embraced their Motto:  “Do your best,” and “memorized the Scout law, which says ‘A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent.’  These ideals have never been erased from my consciousness” (p. 20).  Devout members of the Altus Methodist church, his parents not only attended services but began each day with devotional readings from the “Upper Room” and said grace before meals.  As a zealous youngster, he “became maximally involved in the youth activities of the Epworth League for Methodist young people, where I received ever-expanding doses of social justice aspirations” (p. 31).  

Entering the University of Oklahoma in 1949, Oden qualified for a unique “Letters” program that enabled students to choose their course of studies in literature, history, and philosophy.  He read many of the “greats”—Shakespeare, Plato, et al.—but found himself most drawn to the Marxism and was “a Marxist utopian dreamer for a decade before I learned the vulnerabilities of Marxist theories” (p. 42).  He also decided, while at OU, to enter the Methodist ministry and became active in denominational activities, including summer camps more devoted to social justice than personal redemption.  “I went into the ministry to use the church to elicit political change according to a soft Marxist vision of wealth distribution and proletarian empowerment” (p. 50).   Still more:  “I found Saul Alinsky’s teaching of socialist pragmatism and political opportunism extremely useful as I made plans to co-opt religious structures as instruments for the fundamental transformation of society” (p. 53).  

He then entered Southern Methodist University’s Perkins School of Theology and served as youth minister for a nearby Congregational church.  He read voraciously and plunged energetically into ecumenical endeavors (especially promoting the World Council of Churches).  Determined to pursue a PhD, he went to Yale University, where he worked with H. Richard Niebuhr and some of the most distinguished luminaries in the Protestant world.  He also embraced, without much thought, the “demythologizing” approach to Scripture personified by Rudolph Bultmann.  Finishing his PhD course work, he returned to SMU and earned for himself a reputation as a “situation ethicist,” fully committed to a “what’s happening now” existential agenda.  Joining  the faculty at Phillips Graduate Seminary in Enid, Oklahoma he churned out books championing every thing from Rogerian psychology (with its emphasis on “unconditional love”) to existential ethics to socialist economics to radical feminism.  Traditional Christian doctrines, such as the Incarnation and Resurrection, he either ignored or “professed” with inner reservations evacuating them of substance.  But during a year spent studying in Europe, he read Wolfart Pannenberg and discovered significant flaws in both Bultmann and Karl Barth.  He also became disillusioned with Freudian psychoanalysis (long a mainstay in his understanding of and prescriptions for pastoral psychology). 

Back in America, sitting on a Houston bench during an Earth Day march in 1969, he fully felt “a revulsion against the self-preoccupation, narcissism and anarchy” that had characterized his adult years.  Sitting on that bench, he picked up his copy of the Book of Common Prayer.  “I read out loud:  ‘Almighty Father, who has given thine only Son to die for our sins, and to rise again for our justification; Grant us so to put away the leaven of malice and wickedness, that we may always serve thee in pureness of living and through the merits of the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.’  My eyes filled with tears as I asked myself what had I been missing in all my frenzied subculture of experimental living” (p. 126).  

His “change of heart” synchronized with his 1970 move to Drew Theological Seminary in New Jersey, where, as a tenured professor of theology, he began to learn theology!  One of his colleagues, Will Herberg, a “brilliant, diminutive, forceful, bearded Russian Jew” both accelerated Oden’s growing disillusionment with Marxism and prodded him to seriously study authentic Christian thought.  Herberg told him that he “was densely ignorant of Christianity.”  Indeed:  “Holding one finger up, looking straight at me with fury in his eyes, he said, ‘You will remain theologically uneducated until you study carefully Athanasius, Augustine and Aquinas.’  In his usual gruff voice and brusque speech, he told me I had not yet met the great minds of my own religious tradition” (p. 136).  Suitably chastised—and admirably open to Herberg’s wisdom—Oden turned his life around by turning to the classic sources of the Christian tradition.  “Soon I reveled in the very premises I had set aside and rationalized away:  the preexistent Logos, the triune mystery, the radical depth of sin passing through the generations, the risen Lord and the grace of baptism” (p. 138).  

Thenceforth he devoted himself to following the rule of St Ireaneus of Lyons:  invent no new doctrines!  He realized that by endeavoring to do so during the first half of his life (promoting “vast plans for social change”) he had inadvertently but tragically “harmed many innocents, especially the unborn.  The sexually permissive lifestyle, which I had not joined but failed to critique, led to a generation of fatherless children.  The political policies I had promoted were intended to increase justice by political means but ended by diminishing personal responsibility and freedom” (p. 145).  Guilt-ridden, especially for teaching a situational “social ethics to young pastors” and providing them “a rationale for their blessing convenience abortions” while ignoring the intrinsic evil of the act, he turned to God for solace.  What God said in response was simply:  “no excuse.  I had been wrong, wrong, wrong” (p. 157).  

Oden’s “change of heart” quickly led to a change in his publications.  He worked to bring theological studies back to the classic, “consensual” position of the Church’s first five centuries.  Despite his best efforts, Oden had little influence in Methodist circles or even in his own institution, which continued its leftward drift during the ‘80s.  He became “a lonely voice” for the orthodox Christian tradition “amid a chorus of indignant advocates” (p. 184) of whatever was newest and most “cutting edge” in academia.  Especially belligerent at Drew were the radical feminists who vindictively targeted him (despite his lengthy record of supporting women’s rights) for opprobrium.   As feminists gained control of the seminary, they promoted a radical agenda composed of “gender language, abortion rights, reproductive rights and sexual ethics” (p. 186). 

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In his final days as a professor at Drew Theological Seminary, Thomas Oden published Requiem:  A Lament in Three Movements (Nashville:  Abingdon Press, c. 1995) to register his “affectionate anguish” over  both seminary education and the state of mainline Protestant denominations in the United States.  Having discovered and sought to make available the great resources of the classic Christian tradition, he styled himself a “young fogey” so committed to the truth of the past that he was considered “old-fashioned” by the legions of “modernists” now controlling mainline institutions.  “As a former sixties radical,” he confessed, “I am now out of the closet as an orthodox evangelical (yes, you read me right—orthodox evangelical)” (p. 15).  Explaining “the feast I left” Oden recounted an incident in his seminary’s chapel devoted to worshipping the goddess “Sophia.”  The woman presiding at the service described Sophia as “a strong, proud, creative goddess within the biblical tradition,” a “divine saving figure” immanent “in all things, waiting to be discovered.”  At that moment Oden “felt just a little (for the first time in my life) like the apologists of the second century must have felt when confronted with the challenge of attesting the Lordship of Christ amid a pagan pantheon of Greco-Roman deities” (p. 29).  Though this kind of service is, Oden insists, quite limited to radical hyperfeminist circles, it does in fact represent powerful currents within contemporary Christianity. 

The fact that a goddess, Sophia, could be worshipped in a Methodist seminary points to the tarnished state of theological education in America.  To Oden, the culprit in the story is Secularization, an “interloper” who has stolen the doctrinal, liturgical and devotional riches of the church.  Mainline seminaries have aided and abetted this secularizing process, wedding themselves to a “modernity” (what Oden calls “mod rot”) that is already passing away.  They have provided a safe place for trendy, tenured radicals who worked closely with ecclesiastical bureaucracies to promote “change” in the church.  Self-consciously “liberated” and socially engaged, they generally considered themselves “doctrinally imaginative, liturgically experimental, disciplinarily nonjudgmental, politically correct, multiculturally tolerant, morally broad-minded, ethically situationist, and, above all, sexually lenient, permissive, uninhibited” (p. 34).  Consequently:  “It seems worth noting that the liberated seminary at its zenith has finally achieved a condition that has never before prevailed in Christian history:  Heresy simply does not exist” (p. 46). 

In addition to the seminaries, Secularization afflicts the ecumenical organizations which once promised to unite Christians and make more effective their witness.  In his younger years, Oden invested much time and energy in ecumenical endeavors, but in time he became disillusioned with them.  In particular, they were dominated by elite planners, bureaucrats determined to save the world through political processes!  As “political idealists,” they “care far less about the classical Christianity of the grassroots church than about their ideals and programs and blueprints for reforming the denominational networks” (p. 92).    Quite apart from organizations such as the WCC, a real ecumenical movement (orchestrated by the Holy Spirit rather than bureaucrats) has brought conservative Evangelicals, Roman Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox together, affirming their belief in ancient creeds and uniting to oppose the “culture of death” most evident in abortion-on-demand.

Such believers illustrate the emergence and worth of what Oden terms “Postmodern Paleo-orthodox Spirituality.”  It is a spirituality deeply rooted in the Ancient Christianity best expounded by Athanasius, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and Wesley.  “Christian orthodoxy in its ancient (paleo) ecumenical sense is summarily defined sacramentally by the baptismal formula (in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), liturgically the by the Eucharistic event, and doctrinally by the baptismal confession with its precisely remembered rule of faith as recalled in the Apostles’, Nicene, and Athanasian creeds, and their subsequent consensual interpretations” (p. 130).  Despite having been shunted aside by liberals and modernists during the past 200 years, it retains an abiding strength clearly evident for 20 centuries.   Modernity, Oden believes, is collapsing, though dinosaurs proclaiming its wonders still stalk the halls of academic and culturally powerful institutions.  But Paleo-orthodoxy will survive and prosper simply because it is eternally true and will provide its adherents with eternal life, now and forever.  Routinely declared dead and gone, this classic Christianity revives and flourishes again and again, for:  “Life lived in Christ does not waste time resenting the inexorable fact that each culture like each person dies.  Sanctifying grace offers beleaguered cultural pilgrims the power and means of trusting fundamentally in the One who proffers this ever-changing, forever-dying historical process” (p. 130).  

Young Evangelicals in particular seem committed to exploring and expounding this ancient tradition.  Thus Oden, having begun his life within a family still rooted in orthodoxy, has returned to the basic tenets of its creeds.  With T.S. Eliot he has clearly discovered the timeless truth that “In my beginning is my end.”  Consequently:  “There is only the fight to recover what has been lost /  And found and lost again and again:  and now, under conditions / That seem unproptitious” (“East Coker,” in Four Quartets).  

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Anyone looking for a comprehensive discussion of doctrine with a resolutely “back-to-the-Fathers” brand of thinking will benefit from reading Thomas Oden’s trilogy: The Living God:  Systematic Theology: Volume One (San Francisco:  Harper & Row, Publishers, c. 1987); The Word of Life:  Systematic Theology:  Volume Two (San Francisco:  Harper & Row, c. 1989); and Life in the Spirit:  Systematic Theology:  Volume Three (San Francisco:  HarperSanFrancisco, c. 1992).  Oden sought to formulate an ecumenical, consensual theology—“an ordered view of the faith of the Christian community” (I,ix), mutually acceptable to Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant believers.  Amidst a world culturally collapsing it’s time to rediscover the common roots of the various traditions which will equip Christ’s Church to move rightly into the uncertainties of tomorrow.  That requires us to find guides who are not so much up-to-date as they are dateless, less avante-guarde than guarding the gates, less attuned to the times than in touch with the past.  Oden insists that the core doctrines of Christianity were effectively defined during the first 500 years of Church history and are best discerned in the biblical and classical documents preserved from antiquity.  We need nothing new!  What we need is a renewal of what’s true!  

    In The Word of Life he reflected:  “By the middle of the 1970’s the idea had gradually begun to dawn upon me with increasing force that it is not my task to crate a theology.  Newman taught me that the deposit of truth is already sufficiently given, fully and adequately.  What I needed to do was to listen.  But I could not listen because I found my modern presuppositions constantly tyrannizing my listening” (II, p. 219).  But in time he learned to listen, largely by discarding contemporary theology, which proved bankrupt.  The ones he learned to hear were the biblical writers and Early Church Fathers.  His resolve to hear them provides both the strength and weakness of Oden’s work:  the vast collection of quotations and citations provides us a wealth of valuable information, but it also makes for ponderous reading too much of the time.  That the title of each volume of his systematic theology includes the word “life” indicates the theme which binds together the entire study.  God the Father gives life as Creator, for “God is uncreated, necessary, one, infinite, immense, eternal being, the life of all that lives” (I, p. 52).  God the Son came to save us not simply “through assent to doctrine but through union with the living Christ” (II, p. 434).  Indeed:  “The ancient ecumenical testimony is that Jesus now lives so as to engender life in us.  His living presence is the real energy and force and dynamic and power of historic Christianity and present Christian life” (II, p. 435).  God the Spirit, as defined at Constantinople in 381 A.D., is “the Lord and giver of life” and gives it to all that lives.  “Merely to be alive is to be endowed with life by the Spirit of God” (III, p. 36).  In the judgment of Cyril of Jerusalem, something radically new transpired at Pentecost as the believers ‘were baptized completely” in the Holy Spirit—a fresh draught of God’s Presence which instilled a “‘sober drunkenness, deadly to sin and life-giving to the heart’” (III, p. 67).

Oden sought not to be “original” or “creative” but to faithfully distill and explain the essential traditions of the Church makes these volumes most valuable.  And he did so effectively.

During the past few decades some eminent atheists have openly modified their views.  Anthony Flew, after promoting atheism in some of England’s finest universities, announced There Is A God, admitting he was now a deist.  Thomas Nagel, one of America’s most esteemed philosophers, still holds to his atheist faith but acknowledges the naturalistic evolution he espoused cannot adequately explain human consciousness or the intricate design of the cosmos.  Both men note the influence of scholars making the case for “intelligent design” in forcing them to reevaluate their views.  Both are questioning their atheistic assumption that the material world is all there is.  Perhaps, as St. Paul thought, “the invisible things” of God are “clearly seen” in the world He made.  During the past three decades this position has been advanced by a corps of scholars insisting there is an “intelligent design” evident throughout creation.  Notable in advancing this position was Philip E. Johnson, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley.  A Harvard Law graduate who had clerked for Chief Justice Earl Warren, his analysis of Darwinism led him to think it was essentially a philosophical theory lacking credible evidence and logic.  So he published Darwin on Trial (Downer’s Grove:  InterVarsity Press, c. 1991).  His treatise elicited considerable discussion, and Johnson used his formidable rhetorical skills to debate a variety of atheistic evolutionists.  Soon thereafter he published Reason in the Balance:  The Case Against Naturalism in Science, Law & Education (Downer’s Grove:  InterVarsity Press, c. 1995), asking:  “Is God the true Creator of everything that exists, or is God a product of the human imagination, real only in the minds of those who believe”  (p. 7).  At stake is the question of Ultimate Truth, the Being of God, and of our ability to know Him and the realities He created—beings—which exist independently of ourselves.  

   Johnson thought we need “a qualified opposition party that is willing and able to challenge the established religious philosophy itself, the metaphysical naturalism that is so successfully promoted in the name of science” (p. 96).  He enlisted in this party and served very much as a paratrooper—a battle-scarred commando working behind enemy lines, preparing the way for a coming corps of dissidents, willing to assail the bunkers and dismantle the reigning orthodoxies of naturalistic evolution.  He declared that the presuppositions of naturalistic science make sense only if there’s no God.  But if God really IS, as Johnson holds, the metaphysical assumptions undergirding monistic materialism (i.e. Darwinism) cannot stand.  If God really IS and created all that is, “the living world is the product of an intelligent and purposeful Creator rather than merely a combination of chance events and impersonal natural laws” (p. 74).  Conversely, those who eliminate God from the cosmos allow only random events in an iron-clad impersonal universe—“chance and necessity.”  This position Johnson calls the “blind watchmaker thesis,” using the title of biologist Richard Dawkins’ work whose subtitle declares that “the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design.”  Though admitting that much in our marvelous world seems to be as well-designed as a great  cathedral—that a single cell has more data “than all the volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica put together”—Dawkins adamantly insisted such “design” is purely an illusion and everything can be explained by “natural selection.”

     To call into question such reductionistic declarations, Johnson argued the evidence (i.e. fossils and genetics) suggests design.  Perhaps the marvels of nature Dawkins admits appear to be designed are in fact, designed!  Christian scholars especially, Johnson says, need the courage to live in truth, “to assert that God is real and that the evidence reflects the truth that nature was created by God” (p. 202).  He found it thoroughly mystifying that “Christian” scholars, whether scientists or theologians, seemingly feared to challenge Darwinian pieties when they should be among their most vigorous and articulate critics.

     In fact:  “Christianity makes sense only if its factual premises are true and if it is providing meaningful answers to questions that people ought to be asking.  The essential factual premise is that God created us for a purpose, and our destiny is a glorious one in eternity” (p. 204). 

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In 2004, the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, a scholarly journal housed at the Smithsonian Institution, published a peer-reviewed article by Stephen Meyer. advocating intelligent design.  Angry scientists, alarmed at the article’s deviation from the party line, demanded the journal’s editor be censured for allowing such heresy to gain traction.  In due course, he was demoted and assigned to another position within the institution.  In time his career was ruined and he was ostracized from the inner ring of biologists.   Such is the opposition that meets any scholar who dares study biology with anything less than a philosophical commitment to monistic materialism—a stance nicely illustrated in Francis Crick’s admonition that biologists, while marveling at the mystery of DNA, must “‘constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved’” (p. 12).  .  

Nevertheless, the article’s author, Stephen Meyer, persevered in his studies and amplified his case for intelligent design in Signature in the Cell:  DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (New York:  HarperCollins Publishers, c. 2009).  Meyer received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in the philosophy of science and this book, he said, “attempts to make a comprehensive, interdisciplinary argument for a new view of the origin of life.  It makes ‘one long argument’ for the theory of intelligent design” (p. 8).  Consequently it was, said Steve Fuller “at once a philosophical history of how information has come to be central to cutting-edge research in biology today and one man’s intellectual journey to the conclusion that intelligent design and provides the explanation for that fact.”  Meyer primarily focused on the reality of non-material information within the biological world.  Just as you can load “information” into a computer without adding any weight to its material components, so too information (evident in the DNA) has been programmed into all that lives.  Consequently, evolutionary biologists, though deeply committed to reductionistic materialism, cannot avoid using teleological language that refers to intentionality and purpose when describing what they behold.  Overtly denying design, they cannot find words that fail to imply it!  

As a young scientist, Meyer himself became enamored with the mystery of life while attending a conference that addressed “three big scientific questions—the origin of the universe, the origin of life, and the nature of human consciousness” (p. 24).   One of the speakers was “Charles Thaxton, the chemist who with his coauthors had proposed the controversial idea about an intelligence playing a role in the origin of biological information” (p. 28).  Intellectually challenged, Meyer decided to pursue his interests in one of the world’s elite research universities (Cambridge) and discern the degree to which information, not mindless matter-in-motion, best explains life’s mysterious origins.  Something rational must supply the rationality, the information so evident in all that lives.  Most great scientists in the history of science—giants such as Kepler and Newton—saw divine design everywhere in the world they studied.  They did so because they inferred the makings of history from its results—employing what Charles Sanders Peirce would label “abduction.”  For example, none of us has seen Abraham Lincoln, but we cannot, as historians, explain the Civil War without affirming his existence and activities.  So too cosmologists now embrace the Big Bang as the best explanation of the origin of the universe, remarkably unlike the “steady state” theories that long dominated the field.  

Everywhere it seems evident that intelligent agents—and only intelligent agents—are responsible for specified information.  To explain (using abductive reason) all the information in living organisms, it simply makes sense to posit the possibility of an Intelligent Agent as its source.  Mathematical calculations render the possibility of chance (random material events) creating life nearly preposterous.  We’re faced with the fact, as G.K. Chesterton said a century ago, that:  “Evolution as explanation, as an ultimate philosophy of the cause of living things, is still faced with the problem of producing rabbits out of an empty hat; a process commonly involving some hint of Design.”  After carefully explaining (and rejecting) various naturalistic hypotheses, Meyer declares that since “evidence for the causal adequacy of intelligence is all around us both inside and outside the lab” (p. 340) it makes sense to attribute the vera causa of life to intelligent design.   “Experience shows that large amounts of specified complexity or information (especially codes and languages) invariably originate from an intelligent source—from a mind or a personal agent” (p. 343).  

Meyer meticulously considered a multitude of issues in 500 pages, adding another 50 pages of endnotes and 30 pages of bibliographical references to scholarly literature.   “In Signature in the Cell,” says Scott Turner, a SUNY professor of environmental and forest biology, “Stephen C. Meyer gives us a fascinating exploration of the case for intelligent design theory, woven skillfully around a compelling account of Meyer’s own journey.” 

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During the past two decades the dramatic increase of Americans self-identifying as “Nones” (having no religious faith) has concerned thoughtful Christians.  Particularly among the young, it seems, many are disinterested and even hostile to the Christian tradition.  Asked by pollsters to explain their stance, they often say “science” (especially the chemical evolution of life and the biological evolution of species) had disproved it.  Concerned by this development, Stephen Meyer wrote Return of the God Hypothesis:  Three Scientific Discoveries that Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe (New York:  HarperOne, Kindle Edition, c. 2021) to show why their position is certainly questionable and probably untenable.  Meyer currently works with the Discovery Institute in Seattle, WA.  In his earlier scholarly works he “argued that certain features of living systems—in particular, the digitally encoded information present in DNA and the complex circuitry and information-processing systems at work in living cells—are best explained by the activity of an actual designing intelligence.  Just as the inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone point to the activity of an ancient scribe and the software in a computer program points to a programmer, I’ve argued that the digital code discovered within the DNA molecule suggests the activity of a designing mind in the origin of life,” though  he refrained from making philosophical claims concerning the existence of God.  

In his recent treatise, however, he makes such claims, challenging entrenched scientific dogmas that shape the worldview of millions of people.  He begins by acknowledging that today’s scientific worldview is deeply materialistic, asserting that “matter, energy, and/or the laws of physics are the entities from which everything else came and that those entities have existed from eternity past as the uncreated foundation of all that exists.  Matter, energy, and physical laws are, therefore, viewed by materialists as self-existent.”  Without any mental qualities, these entities have randomly assembled themselves into all that exists.  So there cannot be immaterial realities such as God or the human soul.  Varieties of materialism have been propounded for thousands of years by ancient Greeks such as Democritus as well as makers of modernity such as Thomas Hobbes, Charles Darwin, and Francis Crick.  The materialistic position was succinctly summed up by astronomer Carl Sagan:  “The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.”  On the contrary, Meyer seeks to demonstrate that:  “The properties of the universe and of life—specifically as they pertain to understanding their origins—are just ‘what we should expect’ if a transcendent and purposive intelligence has acted in the history of life and the cosmos.  Such an intelligence coincides with what human beings have called God, and so I call this story of reversal the return of the God hypothesis” (p. 19).  This “hypothesis” was basic to the development of modern science, as is evident in the works of Copernicus, Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton.  In short:  Meyer’s views are thoroughly in accord with the West’s greatest scientists.

In the 19th century, however, the “theistic science” of Newton et al. was edged aside by the “scientific materialism” now dominating the West.  Yet, amazingly, as the 21st century begins, some of the guiding assumptions of materialism seem to be crumbling.  By definition, materialism assumes the eternality of the material world—in one mode or another matter has existed and simply circulated from one thing to another, and no Creator is needed to explain it.  However, sophisticated discoveries by astronomers such as Edwin Hubble led to an avalanche of evidence regarding an expanding universe which pointed to an initial, explosive moment of creation, popularly known as the “big bang.”  (This is the first of Meyer’s three scientific discoveries justifying the return of the God hypothesis.)  One of Hubble’s gifted associates, Alan Sandage, an agnostic for much of his life, found the evidence so persuasive that he ultimately changed his mind.  Speaking at a meeting in 1985, “he not only described the astronomical evidence for the beginning of the universe; he shocked many of his colleagues by announcing a recent religious conversion and then explaining how the scientific evidence of a ‘creation event’ had contributed to a profound change in his worldview.  I recall his looking intently at the audience and gravely stating, ‘Here is evidence for what can only be described as a supernatural event. There is no way that this could have been predicted within the realm of physics as we know it.’  As he spoke, he paused between the words ‘super’ and ‘natural,’ saying them separately for emphasis. He went on to explain that ‘science, until recently, has concerned itself not with primary causes, but secondary causes.  What has happened in the last fifty years is a remarkable event within astronomy and astrophysics.  By looking up at the sky, some astronomers have come to the belief that there is evidence for a ‘creation event’” (p. 172).  What Sandage and contemporary cosmologists recognize as a point of “singularity” indicates the physical universe came into being from nothing physical!  It was, as Christian theologians have always declared:  “creatio ex nihilo—‘creation out of nothing’ (nothing physical, that is)” (p. 186). 

The second scientific discovery Meyer discusses is often called the “Goldilocks Universe.”  From every angle of investigation, the universe seems amazingly fine-tuned.  Four fundamental forces underlie all that is:  gravity; electromagnetism; the strong nuclear force; the weak nuclear force.  The slightest difference in any one of these forces would have made the formation of the universe impossible.  Essential chemicals, most especially carbon, need to be precisely what they are in order for anything to be.  Physicist Fred “Hoyle was stunned by these and other ‘cosmic coincidences’ that physicists began to discover after the 1950s.  Whereas before he affirmed atheism and denied any evidence of design, he began to see fine tuning as obvious evidence of intelligent design.  As he put it in 1981, ‘A common-sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.  The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question’” (p. 218). 

The third scientific discovery Meyer explores is the “origin of life and the DNA enigma.”  Monistic materialists, such as Richard Dawkins, tenaciously upheld the dogma that biology is “‘the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose’” (p. 257).”  But the more we know of living things the more it seems they have been meticulously designed by an all-knowing Mind.  The notion that “chance and necessity” would bring living creatures into being appears less and less possible.  Thus “Nobel laureate Christian de Duve, a leading origin-of-life biochemist until his death in 2013, categorically rejected the chance hypothesis precisely because he judged the necessary fortuitous convergence of events implausible in the extreme.  As he put it, ‘A single, freak, highly improbable event can conceivably happen.  Many highly improbable events—drawing a winning lottery number or the distribution of playing cards in a hand of bridge—happen all the time.  But a string of improbable events—drawing the same lottery number twice or the same bridge hand twice in a row—does not happen naturally’” (p. 273).  Nor, says Meyer, could life on earth have happened naturally!  Furthermore,  since the discovery of DNA every materialistic explanation of the information indwelling and shaping biological cells has failed.  

Beyond calling into question the materialistic position on the origin-of-life, Meyer argues Intelligent Design properly explains it.  The creative action of a conscious and intelligent agent clearly represents a known and adequate cause (one ‘now in operation’) for the origin of specified information.  Uniform and repeated experience affirms that intelligent agents can produce large amounts of functional or specified information, whether in software programs, ancient inscriptions, or Shakespearean sonnets. The specified information in the cell also points to intelligent design not just as an adequate explanation, but as the best explanation. Why?  Experience shows that large amounts of specified information invariably originate from an intelligent source.  This is particularly apparent when the information is expressed in a digital or alphabetic form.  A computer user who traces the information on a screen back to its source invariably comes to a mind, that of a software engineer.  Similarly, the information in a book or newspaper article ultimately derives from a writer—from a mental, rather than a strictly material, cause” (p. 288).  

In his final chapters, Meyer shows how the these scientific discoveries justify believing the “God hypothesis.”  An Intelligent Being could bring into being all that is, design it meticulously, and create living creatures on planet earth.  The rational process of abduction—inference to the best explanation—makes such belief highly reasonable and persuasive.  Reflecting on his research at Cambridge University, especially devoted to one of its most illustrations professors, Sir Isaac Newton, he thought about “how thinking about science and God had changed since the publication of Newton’s great Principia in 1687, almost exactly three centuries earlier.  In the epilogue to a later edition of that book called ‘The General Scholium’ and in other scientific works, notably the Opticks, Newton articulated a profoundly theological perspective.  Not only did he extol the order and uniformity of nature as a reflection of God’s character and superintending care of creation; he argued for the existence of God based on the design evident in nature—in short, for a God hypothesis” (p. 593).  Newton “also understood that the most fundamental laws of nature either merely describe the observed regularities in nature or they manifest the ‘constant Spirit action’ of a ‘Divine Sustainer’ of the world.  He did not think the laws of physics alone explained the origin of the solar system or, still less, the origin of the universe” (p. 596).  Consequently:  “For Newton, nature not only provided evidential support for belief in God, but his God hypothesis functioned as a hugely productive science starter.  There is no reason to think that updating that hypothesis will threaten scientific advance today. On the contrary, there is good reason to expect that it will inspire deeper interest in discovering more about the intricacy, order, and design of the universe, just as it did for Newton himself” (p. 622).

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Just recently I’ve become acquainted with the works of an Oxford mathematician, John Lennox.  He has had a remarkable life, helping spread the Gospel throughout the world.  Through many lectures, podcasts and books he has attracted many followers, and he openly identifies with the Intelligent Design corps of scholars, as is evident in Cosmic Chemistry:  Do God and Science Mis? and his autobiography, My Life.  Christians concerned with rightly reading both Scripture and Creation will find in Lennox a first rate thinker with an engaging approach to our world. 

In graduate school, 60 years ago, I encountered the work of Jacques Maritain, delighted to find a first-rate Christian philosopher, and over the years read many of his books.  To understand him it helps to peruse a two volume memoir by his wife, Raissa, entitled We Have Been Friends Together and Adventures in Grace; both appear in a single volume (Garden City:  Image Books, 1961).  Raissa, a Russian Jewess, brought to her union with Jacques a poetic and deeply contemplative mind which he routinely credited for expanding and enriching his philosophical endeavors.  Though reared without much religious instruction, as a teenager she sensed a deep spiritual hunger.  Above all, she remembers, “I had to make sure of the essential thing:  the possession of the truth about God, about myself, and about the world.  It was, I knew, the necessary foundation for my life” (p. 34).  Raissa’s parents emigrated to Paris; there she finished her schooling, though her teachers, espousing a “rationalistic skepticism and pseudo-scientific positivism” (p. 119) which restricted itself to empirical data—failed to open for her the doors to truth.  Then she met Jacques Maritain, who shared with her similar longings for intellectual nourishment unavailable in the schools.

     They fortunately encountered, in Paris at the turn of the century, free spirits such as Henri Bergson (a world-acclaimed philosopher), Charles Peguy (a noted poet), and Leon Bloy (a radically-committed Catholic writer).  Such thinkers helped point them to the realm of truth and the riches of Christianity which neither young person had hitherto encountered.  Ultimately they “were brought face to face with the question of God, both in all its power and in all its urgency” (p. 99).  Their spiritual quest led them to embrace the Christian Faith.  Both were baptized and thenceforth sought to bring all of life into the love and service of Christ and His Church.  For Jacques, sensing a call “to philosophize truly” (p. 143), this meant, initially, a renunciation of professional ambition, for he feared (with good reason) that he could not freely teach as a professing Christian in the state-controlled universities of France.  

     So he began his career as an independent philosopher!  In that process Jacques and Raissa discovered St Thomas Aquinas and found in him the intellectual foundations they needed.  In Raissa’s experience, the “first reading of the Summa Theologica was as if I had been given a very pure gift.”  Therein she encountered truly sanctified intelligence.  “So great a light kept flowing into both my heart and mind that I was carried away as if by a joy of Paradise.  To pray, to understand, was for me one and the same thing; the one made me thirst for the other, and that thirst in me I felt to be constantly, and yet never, quenched” (p. 183).

     In one of his early lectures (1913) Jacques declared:  “There is but one region where the soul and the intellect live in the peace of God and grow in grace and truth; it is in the light of Thomism” (p. 341).  Given that confidence, Maritain devoted the rest of his life to spearheading a revival, a contemporary restatement, of the thought of St Thomas.  In time he wrote some 50 books and held prestigious positions, including appointments to the University of Chicago and Princeton University.  Though Raissa’s memoirs tell us far more about their friends than about themselves, they’re beautifully written and help us understand the formative years wherein the Maritains flourished and undertook to make relevant the timeless wisdom of St Thomas Aquinas.

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Helping launch Mid-America Nazarene College, in 1968, I thought seriously about Christian education and found Jacques Maritain’s Education at the Crossroads (New Haven:  Yale University Press, c. 1943) most helpful.  If we have a realistic understanding of human nature and society, if we recognize the need for moral guidance, he said, we can effectively design healthy educational systems.   What is man?  What is the nature of human nature?   To answer this question is the most important of educational inquiries. To him, “moral re-education is really a matter of public emergency,” for without it schoolrooms become unruly and chaotic.   This means we must set forth coherent “aims of education” which give order and direction to our endeavors.  “Education is an art,” he said, “and an especially difficult one” (p. 2).  It is an “ethical art” which seeks to free persons to attain the end for which they are created.  As practitioners of the art of teaching, teachers are more like farmers or doctors than sculptors, for there must be an attentiveness to the nature of the person, an ars cooperativa naturae—art cooperating with nature.  

    To both teachers and students, Aquinas said:  “‘never leave behind him any difficulty unsolved.’”   “He also warned teachers . . . ‘never to dig a ditch that you fail to fill up.’  He knew that to raise clever doubts, to prefer searching to finding, and perpetually to pose problems without ever solving them are the great enemies of education” (p. 50).  Above all, education should encourage the development of moral reasoning, virtuous living, qualities of mind and character which, we early discover, cannot be mechanically inscribed in the young.  Facts can, at least momentarily, be poured in.  Data can be inscribed in computers, and young people often acquire lots of facts.  But they know little about the soul, the life of the spirit, the moral dimension to life, the life of freedom.  Moral persons, of course, are necessarily free persons who make moral decisions and become persons of character.   

     What we mainly aspire to, as persons, is freedom.  Most deeply, we long for an inner spiritual freedom, the freedom which St Paul described as freedom of the Spirit.  Our social world, our vocational world, have worth, but they lack the eternal dimensions our hearts crave.  “Thus the prime goal of education is the conquest of internal and spiritual freedom to be achieved by the individual person, or, in others words, his liberation through knowledge and wisdom, good will, and love” (p. 11). Ultimately such things are gifts from God, gifts of grace.  The true liberation we all need is freedom from self-centeredness, egoism, sin.  Thus there is, in a profound sense, an essentially religious component to genuine education.  Ultimately, he said, ‘our chief duty consists, according to the profound saying of the Greek poet, Pindar, in becoming who we are, nothing is more important for each of us, or more difficult, than to become a man.  Thus the chief task of education is above all to shape man, or to guide the evolving dynamism through which man forms himself as a man” (p. 1).  Indeed, “education is not animal training.  The education of man is a human awakening” (p. 9).

  If, in fact, the Greek, Jewish, and Christian understanding is correct, we best understand “man as an animal endowed with reason, whose supreme dignity is in the intellect; and man as a free individual in personal relation with God, whose supreme righteousness consists in voluntarily obeying the law of God; and man as a sinful and wounded creature called to divine life and to the freedom of grace, whose supreme perfection consists of love” (p. 7).  And this definition of human nature leads to distinctively different educational strategies.

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Teaching Ethics I benefited from Jacques Maritain’s Moral Philosophy:  An historical and critical survey of the great systems (New York:  Charles Scribner’s Sons, c. 1964).  He said his work was an “historical and critical examination of a certain number of great systems which are, in my opinion, the most significant ones with respect to the development and the adventures of moral philosophy, and those which it is most important to consider for a work of prise de conscience and intellectual renewal to which our age seems called, at least in the eyes of a few who still care for wisdom” (p. ix).  He first examined the great Ancient, Medieval, and Enlightenment ethicists whose conversation so illuminates the study of moral philosophy.  He found much to admire— while always pointing out glaring flaws—in the positions taken by Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and Epicureans.  They raised the right questions, explored the available options, and took seriously their calling to reason toward truth.  But they failed to discover how to achieve what all ethicists urge us to achieve:  transcending a purely physical, human existence and becoming what we really ought to be!

     Into that ancient world came Christianity, with a different (and, to Maritain, far better) philosophy.  Medieval Christians understood wisdom to be something far more than a purely human attainment.  “Medieval Christianity was dominated by the law of descending motion of supreme wisdom to which we called attention in speaking of the Old Testament, and knew its name–it is the law of the Incarnation.  Thomas Aquinas formulated it in a text of limitless significance:  ‘In the mystery of the Incarnation,’ he says, ‘the descent of the divine plenitude into human nature is of greater import than the ascent of human nature, taken as pre-existent, toward Divinity’” (p. 74; quoting Sum. theol., III, 34, 1, ad 1).  Beyond Plato’s hunger for the transcendent Good, beyond Aristotle’s desire for Happiness, Christianity “has its supreme archetype in a subsistent Good which is a loving Personality—three Persons in a single nature, one of whom has been incarnated, [so that] moral reflection now understands definitively and explicitly that the Good is something other than Happiness, and that the first demand and the first condition of moral rectitude is to love the Good more than Happiness” (p. 77).  Medieval Scholastics such as St Thomas lived in a theocentric world.  Only as things are rightly related to God do they move smoothly.  Only as men and women find their final End in God do they live with meaning and purpose.  So only an ethic which acknowledges God as the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, truly suits human beings.  Both ancient and modern thinkers routinely betray a longing for some transcendent source of values, some truly final end, but the humanistic limitations imposed on their systems keeps them locked within an inadequate vision of Reality.

     From the Medieval World, Maritain jumps to Immanuel Kant, the last of the great ethicists who operated within a largely intact Christian worldview, though he does in fact take some crucial steps away from it.  With his concern for disinterestedness and duty, Kant embraced some of the traditional Christian concern for unselfish love and responsibility.  Yet, importantly, he effectively denied God any role in the process.  His ethic “makes out of God an appendix to morality, not its foundation” (p. 102).  Finding within one’s own mind a “categorical imperative” able to reason what one ought or ought not do, Kantian ethics encourages the love of moral law but not of God, the love of treating others rightly but not the love of others.  With Kant, Maritain believes, we step over a threshold and thenceforth must deal with what he calls “the great illusions.”  These include Hegel’s Idealism, Marx’s Dialectical Materialism, and Auguste Comte’s Positivism.  These highly influential thinkers are “exponents of modern anthropocentrism whose work has seriously disorganized moral knowledge, not only among philosophers but also in broad sectors of the common conscience” (p. 353).  More recent philosophers, such as Sartre and Dewey, offer little more, in Maritain’s opinion, though he grants them the courtesy of serious consideration.

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     One of Jacques Maritain’s most significant philosophical treatises is entitled Distinguish to Unite, or The Degrees of Knowledge (New York:  Charles Scribner’s Sons, c. 1959).  “We hope to show in this book,” Maritain said, ‘that Thomistic realism, in preserving, according to a truly critical method, the value of the knowledge of things, opens the way to an exploration of the world of reflection in its very inwardness and to the establishment of its metaphysical topology, so to speak; thus, ‘philosophy of being’ is at once, and par excellence, ‘philosophy of mind’” (p. ix).  The first section of the book deals with “the degrees of rational knowledge:  philosophy and experimental science.”  Here Maritain celebrates our mind’s ability to truly know, through sense experience, objective reality.  On its own, science cannot discern the essence of an existing, particular thing.  Here philosophy—metaphysics—is needed, and Maritain asserts that the Thomistic tradition offers the key to unlock the riches of metaphysical knowledge which philosophers too often eschew.  St Thomas taught the intellect has a natural ability to know, through an immediate intuition (adaequatio rei et intellectus—a bond between intellect and thing—the being of a being and thenceforth to know, by definition, its essence.  

     Maritain espoused a “critical realism” which begins with this simple assertion:  “I am aware of knowing–I am aware of knowing at least one thing, that what is, is; not: “I think” (p. 76).  In knowing that what is, is, one grasps the fundamental reality of metaphysics and begins to think truly.  Failing to begin rightly, we are afflicted by bad philosophies which, Maritain believes, must be ousted by a good philosophy.  Unfortunately, “good philosophy is more difficult than bad” (p. 196).  Just as the intuitive certainty of the “law of non-contradiction” gives one the basis for logical thinking, so too the intuitive certainty of the “law of being” (p. 215) affords one the basis for metaphysical thinking.  Thus metaphysical thinking allows one to know transintelligible” realities, immaterial realities such as person, spirit, freedom, love, and God.  

    Having discussed the importance of scientific and metaphysical knowledge—different types of rational knowing—Maritain turned, in the second half of the book, to “the degrees of suprarational knowledge.”  Here he treats the very special knowledge which comes through faith and love, the sanctifying grace which enables us to “share in the Divine Nature” (II Peter 1:4), through mystical experience, where one suffers rather than siezes “divine things” (p. 253).  While Aristotle and St Thomas serve as a good guides to rational knowledge, St John of the Cross opens to us the ultimate realms of spiritual reality.  

    In sum, Maritain holds:  “For St. John of the Cross, as for St. Thomas Aquinas and the whole Christian tradition, the final end of human life is transformation in God, ‘to become God by participation’ which is fully achieved in heaven by the beatific vision and beatific love, and fulfilled here below, in faith, by love.  Such love comes through self-surrender, which St John says is a giving to God of everything one has.  This death-to-self is absolutely necessary in order to be spiritually united with God.  Here we find best illustrated the principle of St Thomas:  grace perfects nature but does not destroy it.  

    I know of no more thoughtful discussion of mystical knowledge—the contemplative wisdom given only by God—than that Maritain provides in this volume.  That a first-rate philosopher finds in St John of the Cross the route to ultimate Truth and Wisdom, leads us to both pray and give thanks for the illumination which awaits those who heed him.  

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     Thomists like Maritain insist there are good, rational reasons for believing God exists.  That view is most clearly stated in Approaches to God (New York:  Collier Books, 1962).   I think this was the first book of Maritain’s I encountered as a graduate student  pursuing my own interests quite apart from class work.  Maritain first argues for “the primordial way,” the “natural or prephilosophic knowledge of God.”  We just know, deep in our being, that there’s a God who sustains our being.  This immediate awareness serves as the foundation for St Thomas Aquinas’ famous “five ways” to “prove” God exists.  If, like Aristotle and most common sense philosophers, you accept as self-evident the reality of causation, these five cosmological arguments (motion; efficient causation; contingency; degrees of perfection; government) enable you to persuasively demonstrate the necessity of “a cause which is pure Act or Being, itself subsistent in its own right” (p. 33), which indwells the various phenomena we encounter.  

    As Maritain explains and defends these “proofs,” he up-dates and effectively demonstrates their perennial validity as metaphysical arguments.  Then he adds a “sixth” possibility, one he found more and more attractive as he pondered it:  an intuition regarding “the natural spirituality of intelligence” (p. 70).  With my mind I easily transcend the limits of time and space; in my mind I am almost as infinite as the universe.  As an intellectual being, I am dramatically distinct from the material world I apprehend—if not, I could only, like a computer, process the flow of data which happens to enter my neurological system.  Thus I know, while I think, that I am a spiritual being.  But I also know that I have not always existed.  So I must, as a spiritual being, be rooted “in a Being of transcendent personality” in Whom my personality has definition and reality.   Having discussed some of the “approaches to God” of the speculative intellect, Maritain then turns to some of the ways of the practical intellect.  Whenever we see beauty, we encounter “a transcendental, a perfection in things which transcends things and attests their kinship with the infinite, because it makes them fit, to give joy to the spirit” (p. 79).  There is a certain eternality in great music and poetry which suggests its tie to some Ultimate Reality.  

     Our moral experience also, on a practical level, points us to God.  For unless we are free, as moral beings, to choose what’s good, there’s no real morality.  Yet as we reflect on the reality of personal freedom we find ourselves rooted in a transcendent realm which grants and guarantees it.  “God is thus naturally known, without any conscious judgment, in and by the impulse of the will striving toward the Separate Good, whose existence is implicitly involved in the practical value acknowledged to the moral good” (p. 88).  Finally, Maritain argued, in accord with Aristotle’s dictum, that natural appetites have realizable ends.  The fact that we’re thirsty proves, rather persuasively, that real liquids exist to slake that thirst.  Similarly, since mankind has forever hungered and thirsted for God, there must be a Reality to which that appetite is directed.  

    Though it demands careful attention, Approaches to God is not overly difficult to read.  It was written for the general reader and enables anyone who desires to master its basic arguments.  

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     Maritain’s final book, written in his 85th year, was The Peasant of the Garonne:  An Old Layman Questions Himself about the Present Time (New York:  Holt, Rinehart and Winston, c. 1968).  Here he “calls a spade a spade” and voices his dismay at developments within the Post-Vatican II Church. 

In one of my chapel talks I said that of all persons alive on planet earth I’d most like to meet Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great Russian writer, who was for me a powerful witness, revealing important truths regarding Communism, the importance of writers, and the durability of “permanent things.  During the 1970s I read most of his novels as well as The Gulag Archipelago, a massive (three volume) documentation of Bolshevik brutality.  Thanks to him, I discarded some of the American academy’s gilded portraits of the USSR and was better prepared to discern the Marxist themes so deftly infusing many analyses of American history.  I was also prompted to re-examine America’s role in the world vis-à-vis both Communism and  Islam.  He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1970, and his Nobel Lecture (New York:  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, c. 1972) focused on artists.  Some—infatuated with their avante garde role—engaged in rebellion and self-assertion.  Others, such as Solzhenitsyn, considered art a sacred vocation that “acknowledges a higher power” and “joyfully works as a common apprentice under God’s heaven” (p. 4).  

Great art, truthful art, weathers the winds of time and gives wings to our souls.  Indeed, Plato’s “old trinity of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty” (p. 7) retains its ancient grandeur, and nothing rivals the importance of investing one’s life in illuminating and defending transcendent realities—the “permanent things.”  Speaking personally, Solzhenitsyn noted that he survived the Gulag while thousands perished.  So he had a sacred mission:  to record, to explain, to imbed their story in literature.  Millions died because too few believed in “fixed universal human concepts called good and justice” while the oppressors disdained them as “fluid, changing, and that therefor one must always do what will benefit one’s party” (p. 220).  Sadly enough, might-makes-right philosophies forever enlist devotees; hijackers and terrorists succeed.  But despite the fact that there is much “slavery to half-cocked progressive ideas” (p. 24), one must courageously seek to refute them.      

This means refuting the “spirit of Munich” that spread cancerously throughout the West, becoming “dominant in the twentieth century.  The intimidated civilized world has found nothing to oppose the onslaught of a sudden resurgent fang-baring barbarism, except concessions and smiles.  The spirit of Munich is a disease of the will of prosperous people; it is the daily state of those who have given themselves over to a craving for prosperity in every way, to material well-being as the chief goal of life on earth” (p. 24).  He referred, of course, to the agreement Neville Chamberlain made with Adolf Hitler in 1938.  The next year Germany invaded Poland.  Even then, many Europeans sought to remain “neutral,” paralyzed by their pacifism.  This, Churchill said, was “lamentable; and it will become much worse.  . . . .  Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last.  All of them hope that the storm will pass before their turn comes to be devoured.  But I fear—I fear greatly—the storm will not pass.  It will rage and it will roar, ever more loudly, ever more widely.”  

The ghastly carnage of WWII might have been avoided had Churchill’s warnings been heeded.  But neither the League of Nations nor Europe’s politicians had the courage to resist.  So it’s up to writers such as himself, Solzhenitsyn said, to speak the truth to the world.  Tyranny thrives by lies, so truth-tellers must expose and ultimately defeat the tyrants.  Writers “can VANQUISH LIES!  In the struggle against lies, art has always won and always will” (p. 33).  And so, he memorably declared:  “ONE WORD OF TRUTH OUTWEIGHS THE WORLD” (P. 34). 

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Solzhenitsyn came to the world’s attention during the “Khruschev thaw” in the 1950s with his publication One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (a fictional depiction of his experience in Stalin’s prison camps) He was briefly a celebrity in his native land who was welcomed by its state-controlled literary establishment.   Before long, however, he encountered mounting governmental opposition.  So he began recording his struggles in a work entitled The Oak and the Calf:  Sketches of Literary Life in the Soviet Union (New York:  Harper Colophon Books, c. 1975).  He began by confessing:   “For the writer intent on truth, life never was, never is (and never will be!) easy” (p. 1).  Knowing this, Solzhenitsyn “entered into the inheritance of every modern Russian writer intent on the truth:  I must write simply to ensure that it was not all forgotten, that posterity might someday come to know of it” (p. 2).  He believed “the Soviet regime could certainly have been breached only by literature.”  No military coup or political movement could begin to challenge Stalin’s brutal dictatorship.  “Only the solitary writer would be able” to effectively oppose it, simply because “one word of truth outweighs the world.”  After writing The Gulag Archipelago (first published only in the West) he was expelled from Russia in 1974.  As he departed, he left behind a short, memorable message to his people:  “Live Not by Lies!”  

In exile Solzhenitsyn found refuge in the mountains of Vermont,  Initially lionized by the American intelligentsia, he was invited to deliver Harvard’s 1978 commencement address, published as A World Split Apart (New York:  Harper & Row, c. 1978).  He began his speech abrasively, noting that though Harvard’s motto is Veritas graduates would find that “truth seldom is sweet; it is almost invariably bitter” (p. 1).  And his words proved “bitter” to many!  He said, “A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today,” something “particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites” (pp. 9-11).  This decline—“at times attaining what could be termed a lack of manhood”— portended a cataclysmic cultural collapse.   Then he upbraided the media.  This march of evil, he thought, gained considerable impetus from the press.  In the USSR the press was rigorously censored and obviously untrustworthy, whereas in the West it  was “free” but irresponsible and similarly untrustworthy!  Bewildered by their behavior, he thought “their fly-by-night trade” consisted mainly in trying “to outdo one another in snooping, conjecturing, and snatching at whatever they can.”  Angrily he declared:  “You are worse than the KGB!”  Throughout his years in the U.S. he disliked its media.  Rather than working hard to discover the truth, they slipped into the slothful role of circulating rumors, opinions, and “fashionable” ideas.  “Hastiness and superficiality—these are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century and more than anywhere else this is manifested in the press” (p. 27).    Consequently, “we may see terrorists heroized, or secret matters pertaining to the nation’s defense publicly revealed,” all under the “slogan ‘Everyone is entitled to know everything’” (p. 25).  Equally disturbing were American economists who lionized socialism—the very ideology that had destroyed his homeland.  This, Solzhenitsyn warned, “is a false and dangerous current” (p. 33).  In the East, “communism has suffered a complete ideological defeat; it is zero and less than zero.  And yet Western intellectuals still look at it with considerable interest and empathy, and this is precisely what makes it so immensely difficult for the West to withstand the East” (p. 55).  But capitalism in itself provides no panacea.  Both East and West, he said, need “spiritual” rather than “economic” development, and the spirit has been “trampled by the party mob in the East, by the commercial one in the West” (p. 57).   

American politicians who appeased Communism elicited Solzhenitsyn’s scorn.  In fact, looking at the nation’s withdrawal from Vietnam, he said:  “the most cruel mistake occurred with the failure to understand the Vietnam War.  Some people sincerely wanted all wars to stop just as soon as possible; others believed that the way should be left open for national, or Communist, self-determination in Vietnam (or in Cambodia, as we see today with particular clarity).  But in fact, members of the U.S. antiwar movement became accomplices in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in the genocide and the suffering today imposed on thirty million people there.  Do these convinced pacifists now hear the moans coming from there?  Do they understand their responsibility today?  Or do they prefer not to hear?”  To Solzhenitsyn:  “Your short-sighted politician who signed the hasty Vietnam capitulation seemingly gave America a carefree breathing pause; however a hundredfold Vietnams now looms over you” (p. 41).  He envisioned a future “fight of cosmic proportions,” a battle between the forces of either Goodness or Evil.  Those who are morally neutral, those who exalt in their moral relativism, are the true enemies of mankind.  

Cowardice explained the retreat in Southeast Asia.  Democracies, Solzhenitsyn feared, lack the necessary soul-strength for sustained combat.  Wealthy democracies seem especially flaccid.  “To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being.  Nothing is left, in this case, but concessions, attempts to gain time, and betrayal” (p. 45).  More deeply, the “humanism” that has increasingly dominated the West since the Renaissance explains its weakness.  When one believes ultimately only in himself, when human reason becomes the final arbiter, when human sinfulness is denied, the strength that comes only from God will dissipate.   Secular humanism he thought, is almost identical with the humanism of Karl Marx, who said:  “communism is naturalized humanism” (p. 53).  

Consequently, Solzhenitsyn said, “If the world has not approached its end, it has reached a major watershed in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.  It will demand from us a spiritual blaze; we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life, where our physical nature will not be cursed, as in the Middle Ages, but even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon, as in the Modern Era” (pp. 60-61).  This speech ended Solzhenitsyn’s speaking career in the United States.  The nation’s elite newspapers thenceforth ignored him.  Prestigious universities closed their doors.  He became something of a persona non grata and spent the last 15 years of his life in America living as a recluse, working on manuscripts devoted to Russia’s history.  

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In the years immediately prior to Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard speech, he spoke to several American and British audiences.  His speeches were published in Warning to the West (New York:  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, c. 1976).  He particularly assailed Bertrand Russell, who coined the slogan “Better Red than dead.”  To Russell and his fifth-column ilk, Solzhenitsyn replied:  “Better to be dead than a scoundrel.  In this horrible expression of Bertrand Russell’s there is an absence of all moral criteria” (p. 119).  Delivering an address over BBC in 1976, Solzhenitsyn noted that “until I came to the West myself and spent two years looking around, I could never have imagined the extreme degree to which the West actually desired to blind itself to the world situation, the extreme degree to which the West has already become a world without a will, a world gradually petrifying in the face of the danger confronting it, a world oppressed above all by the need to defend its freedom” (p. 126).  “There is a German proverb,” he continued, “which runs Mut verloren—alles verloren:  When courage is lost, all is lost.  There is another Latin one, according to which loss of reason is the true harbinger of destruction.  But what happens to a society in which both these losses—the loss of courage and the loss of reason—intersect?  This is the picture which I found the West presents today” (pp. 126-127).  

The First World War, culminating this process, virtually destroyed Europe, and in its wake the evils of socialism inundated Russia, annihilating 100 million or more of its people.   Europeans, eschewing moral criteria to follow narrowly pragmatic policies, stood by silently.  England’s prime minister, “Lloyd George actually said:  ‘Forget about Russia.  It is our job to ensure the welfare of our own society” (p. 131).  So Russia’s erstwhile “allies,” ignoring her wartime sacrifices, did nothing to stop the Bolsheviks’ tyranny and terror.  Even as millions were executed or sent into the Gulag Archipelago and six million peasants died in the Ukraine in the 1930s, Westerners ignored it.  Sadly:  “Not a single Western newspaper printed photographs or reports of the famine; indeed, your great wit George Bernard Shaw even denied its existence.  ‘Famine in Russia?’ he said.  ‘I’ve never dined so well or so sumptuously as when I crossed the Soviet border.’” (p. 133).  Similarly, during WWII the Allies benefited from Russia’s assistance, but following the war Stalin continued to oppress his people.  “Twice we helped save the freedom of Western Europe,” he said.  “And twice you repaid us by abandoning us to our slavery” (p. 136).  Frankly, he believed that Westerners preferred peace and security, pleasure and comfort, to demanding justice for Russia’s oppressed.  So they ignored the mass deportations of “whole nations to Siberia” and the occupation of the Baltic states.  Having stopped Hitler, they seared their consciences and remained untroubled with Stalin.  Indeed, rather than seriously evaluating and learning from Russia’s disaster, Western intellectuals seemed willing to replicate it!  “And what we see is always the same as it was then:  adults deferring to the opinion of their children; the younger generation carried away by shallow, worthless ideas; professors scared of being unfashionable; journalists refusing to take responsibility for the words they squander so easily; universal sympathy for revolutionary extremists; people with serious objections unable or unwilling to voice them; the majority passively obsessed by a feeling of doom; feeble governments; societies whose defensive reactions have become paralyzed; spiritual confusion leading to political upheaval” (p. 130).  

Solzhenitsyn was particularly incensed by the “misty phantom of socialism” so prevalent in places like England.  “Socialism has created the illusion of quenching people’s thirst for justice:  Socialism has lulled their conscience into thinking that a steamroller which is about to flatten them is a blessing in disguise, a salvation.  And socialism, more than anything else, has caused public hypocrisy to thrive,” enabling Europeans to ignore Soviet atrocities (p. 141).  There’s actually no logic to socialism, for “it is an emotional impulse, a kind of worldly religion,” embraced and followed with blind faith (p. 142).  As an ideology, it is spread and embraced by immature, sophistic believers.  The British had drifted toward socialism under the post-WWII Labor leaders.   Consequently, “Great Britain, the kernel of the Western world, has experienced this sapping of its strength and will to an even greater degree, perhaps, than any other country.  For some twenty years Britain’s voice has not been heard in our planet; its character has gone, its freshness has faded” (p. 144).  The land of Churchill had vanished!  “Contemporary society in Britain is living on self-deception and illusions, both in the world of politics and in the world of ideas” (p. 144).  What was true about Great Britain, he insisted, was equally true about much of the West.  

As one would anticipate, Solzhenitsyn’s BBC career ended abruptly!  Neither British nor American politicians, labor leaders, professors or journalists wanted to be rebuked for their failures!  In the 1970s, neither the United Nations nor the European Union, neither Richard Nixon nor George McGovern, neither Gerald Ford nor Jimmy Carter had the courage to oppose Communism in Southeast Asia.  Nor do numbers of their successors today seem ready to deal with the violence and injustices in the Middle East.   Let us, however, never say that no one warned us about appeasement’s desserts!

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Solzhenitsyn’s The Red Wheel novels include:  August 1914, which focuses on the pivotal first month of Russia’s engagement in WWI, showing why and how the Tsarist state failed to rightly respond to the conflict; November 1916, which deals with the disintegrating home front (and is the most explicitly Christian of the novels); and March 1917, which shows the government beginning to dissolve amidst the collapse of traditional authorities.  In the judgment of David Walsh:  “There is no doubt that The Red Wheel is one of the masterpieces of world literature, made all the more precious by its relevance to the tragic era through which contemporary history has passed.  Moreover, the impulse of revolutionary and apocalyptic violence associated with the age of ideology has still not ebbed.  We remain confronted by the fragility of historical existence, in which it is possible for whole societies to choose death rather than life.”

In toto, The Red Wheel constitutes what Solzhenitsyn considered “the chief artistic design of my life.”  He believed the Russian revolutions in 1917 were the crucial events of the 20th century—the cauldron of destruction still defacing the globe.  Writing the novels, Solzhenitsyn said, “there is always only one right path:  to tackle the main job.  That job will lead you to the right path of its own accord.  Tackling the job meant seeking out, for myself and for the reader, how, through our past, we can conceive of our future” (#5054).  Russian history merits our attention since it provides an important lesson regarding the fatal consequences of embracing any utopian, socialist vision for society.  Especially enlightening are passages such as one finds in November 1916, surveying the leftist movement that would finally prevail in the Bolsheviks’ triumph.  Largely responsible for that triumph was a “hapless Russian liberalism, prostrating itself, dropping its spectacles, raising its head again, throwing up its hands, urging moderation, and generally making itself a laughingstock” (p. 59).  Though feigning impartiality, Russian liberals unfailingly aligned themselves with leftist ideologies.  “Educated Russian society, which had long ago ceased to forgive the regime for anything, joyfully applauded left-wing terrorists and demanded an amnesty for all of them without exception.” (p. 59).  They fulminated against the Tsar and his government while refraining from any critique of “the revolutionary young” who had gained control of the universities and “knocked their lecturers down and prohibited academic activity.”  Students—then and now—unleash what seems to be an effluence of adolescence—“the normal sympathy of the young for the left” (p. 495).    

In a passage I’ve pondered many times—for it speaks to us today—Solzhenitsyn said:  “Just as the Coriolis effect is constant over the whole of this earth’s surface, and the flow of rivers is deflected in such as way that it is always the right bank that is eroded and crumbles, while the floodwater goes leftward, so do all the forms of democratic liberalism on earth strike always to the right and caress the left.  Their sympathies are always with the left, their feet are capable of shuffling only leftward, their heads bob busily as they listen to leftist arguments—but they feel disgraced if they take a set to or listen to a word from the right” (p. 59).  Indeed, as Lenin as other revolutionaries realized:  “The wind always blows from the far left!  No Socialist in the world could afford to ignore that fact” (p. 485).   In a 1979 interview Solzhenitsyn lamented the 1917 failures of liberals and moderate socialists in the Duma and the Provisional Government.  They lacked the courage needed to oppose the hard left—a pattern of “weakening and self-capitulation” that would be “repeated on a world-wide scale since those days.” 

It became evident with the publication of August 1914,that Solzhenitsyn was a conservative—both a Russian patriot and an Orthodox Christian—who treasured much about the “old Russia,” despite its deeply-flawed Tsarist authoritarianism.  In particular he defended Pyotr Stolypin, the Russian prime minister from 1906-1911, who had sought to bring into being a “solid class of peasant proprietors,” convinced that they could support and preserve a constitutional monarchy of some sort.  Unfortunately, Stolypin was assassinated in Kiev in 1911; he was probably the last hope for a “conservative liberal” regime that might have avoided the revolutionary chaos that subsequently ruined the nation.  In taking this position he lost support in liberal circles in both Russia and the West.  America’s Secretary of State, Henry “Kissinger for a long time prevented the Voice of America from broadcasting me, and the BBC and Radio Free Europe were also beginning to avoid me as an ‘authoritarian figure” (#4165). 

Returning to Russia in 1994 and dying in 2008, Solzhenitsyn failed to much influence developments in has native land.  And he is today largely ignored by most Westerners.  But to those with ears to hear, he remains a lasting witness to what ought ultimately concern us.  Just remember:  “ONE WORD OF TRUTH OUTWEIGHS THE WORLD” (P. 34).  Consequently:  “LIVE NOT BY LIES!” 

   Though we can never reach a consensus determining who was the “world’s smartest man,” a significant number of scholars would vote for St. Thomas Aquinas.  The “Angelic Doctor’s” genius lay not in his originality or creativity—both attributes he would have disdained—but in his unique ability to synthesize and persuasively explain the perennial truths of philosophy and theology, to effectively conjoin faith and reason.  Commending him to the Church as her finest theologian, Pope Leo XIII said:  “Because he had the utmost reverence for the Doctors of antiquity, he seems to have inherited in a way the intellect of all.”  Still more, wrote Jacques Maritain:  “St. Thomas cast his net upon the universe and carried off all things transformed into the life of the mind, towards the beatific vision.”  While in graduate school I encountered thinkers such as Maritain, and I embraced Aquinas’ “moderate realism” with its common sense Christian approach to philosophy.  I’ve read both his Summa Contra Gentiles and Summa Theoligica, and, as Flannery O’Connor wrote:  “I couldn’t make any judgment on the Summa, except to say this:  I read it every night before I go to bed.”  Aquinas’ love for God elicited her love for him.  Without question Aquinas is one of the handful of theologians who’ve shaped theological developments in the Christian Church.  Yet anyone who’s tried to read his Summa Theologica will testify to some difficulty in plowing through it.  Mainly this stems, I suspect, from its imposing length—several thousand pages in some editions!  

If you like sober, down-to-earth folks like Aristotle, you’ll find Thomas congenial.  He’s also congenial to those of us committed to historical Orthodoxy. Though not everyone would share the decision of the Council of Trent, placing St. Thomas’s Summa second only to the Bible as a source of theological authority, all Christians can find wellsprings of Orthodox doctrine pooled in the aquifers of Aquinas.  That Richard Hooker, drank deeply of Aquinas helps us better grasp the thought of later Anglicans such as John Wesley and C.S. Lewis.  Still more, the level of Aquinas’ thinking is far more elevated and intellectually demanding than most of us can handle  Though his thought is, in the final analysis, almost always crystal-clear, it takes patient reading and re-reading to probe the depths of reality he explores.  He’s one of the most coherent, understandable theologians, but he’s not interested in stylistic devices to entertain us!  Fortunately, Peter Kreeft, provided us a great service with his edited and annotated A Summa of the Summa:  The Essential Philosophical Passages of St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica Edited and Explained for Beginners.  He selected those excerpts which best introduce the reader to the substance of St. Thomas.  To Kreeft:  “St. Thomas Aquinas is certainly one of the greatest philosophers who ever lived (to my mind he is the greatest),” giving “at least eight reasons:  truth, common sense, practicality, clarity, profundity, orthodoxy, medievalism, and modernity” (p. 11).

     Aquinas had no interest in “language games,” for the “study of philosophy,” he insisted, “is not the study of what men have opined, but of what is the truth.”  Rigorously—resolutely—he sought to see and clarify what is true, and he found truth to be down-to-earth and accessible.  He dismissed professional skeptics (whose verbal puzzles defy resolution) as misguided folks out-of-touch with an eminently touchable reality.  Ultimately, says Kreeft, “St. Thomas is important for us today precisely because of our lack.  Timeless truth is always timely, of course, but some aspects of truth are especially needed at some times, and it seems that our times badly need seven Thomistic syntheses:  (1) of faith and reason, (2) of the Biblical and the classical, the Judeo-Christian and the Greco-Roman heritages, (3) of the ideals of clarity and profundity, (4) of common sense and technical sophistication, (5) of theory and practice, (6) of an understanding, intuitive vision and a demanding, accurate logic, and (7) of the one and the many,m a cosmic unity or ‘big picture’ and carefully sorted out distinctions” (pp. 13-14).

     Encouraging the beginner to read one brief section a day, Kreeft provides helpful footnotes and a glossary of terms which enable one to develop some understanding of “Thomism.”  Though I’ve read lots of studies of Aquinas, I think Kreeft’s most helpful while digesting him. 

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That Thomas Aquinas is a truly ecumenical thinker is evident in Thomas Aquinas:  An Evangelical Appraisal, by Norman L. Geisler, a prolific scholar who was widely respected by conservative evangelicals.  Geisler’s work on St. Thomas interests me because it shows how truly catholic he was, finding followers within the American “evangelicalism” Geisler and R.C. Sproul represented.   Sproul, incidentally, says of Geisler’s work:  “This is ‘must reading’ for every thinking Christian.  I am thrilled by this careful analysis of St. Thomas.”  Geisler dismissed those evangelicals such as Francis Schaeffer who disparaged Aquinas, finding them largely ill-informed.  But there was a hardy handful of evangelicals—”a strong but too often silent minority [e.g. John H. Gerstner and  R.C. Sproul] among us—who are directly dependent upon Aquinas for our basic theology, philosophy, and/or apologetics” (p. 14).  In this they imitate C.S. Lewis, finding Aquinas a fertile field for healthy theological vineyards. 

     Geisler argues there are eight contributions Aquinas can make today.  “First, Aquinas’s view of nature and interpretation of Scripture is helpful in the current debate on inerrancy and hermeneutics” (p. 21).  A Fundamentalist Aquinas was not, but he had a lofty appreciation for Scripture’s divine inspiration.  “Second, Aquinas can help us build a solid theistic basis for doing historical apologetics” (p. 21).  “Third, Aquinas, can provide a philosophical answer to the growing influence of the finite god of process theology” (p. 21).  “Fourth, Thomistic analogy seems to be the only adequate answer to the problem of religious language” (p. 22).  We must refer to God either univocally, equivocally, or analogically, and the final option is the only one suitable for Christian theology.   “Fifth, the value of Aquinas in overcoming the separation of the God of reason and revelation” (p. 22) cannot be ignored.  “Sixth, Aquinas makes a major contribution in the area of epistemology,” (p. 22), for his sophisticated distinctions between the active and passive intellects, his balanced emphasis on both empirical learning and rational thinking, provide a viable modern theory of knowledge.  “Seventh, Aquinas’s answer to the relation of faith and reason is a surprising synthesis of the best elements of rationalism and existentialism” (p. 22), for both faith and reason must be properly blended in a viable theology.  “Finally, Aquinas addresses reconciliation of human freedom and divine sovereignty . . . the nature of divine and human law . . . and the problem of evil” (p. 22).  

     After a brief discussion of Aquinas’ life and an overview of his thought, Geisler considers such subjects as “The Bible,” “Faith and Reason,” “God’s Nature,” “Evil,” and “Law and Morality.”  In my opinion, we who consider John Wesley and James Arminius our theological mentors should take note of Geisler’s appreciation for Aquinas, since in many ways he’s one of our finest forebears!  If we’re neither Calvinistic nor Pelagian when discussing the freedom of the will, we’ll find useful Thomas’ defensible middle ground.  If we believe grace perfects nature, as we suggest when we preach holiness, we side with Thomas, not Luther or Calvin.  When we rely upon the Bible as the fully-inspired Word of God, we discover it’s Thomas, not Barth or Bultmann, who guides us.  So if someone like Geisler, operating out of a thoroughly Reformed perspective, finds Aquinas worthwhile, how much more should we Wesleyans! 

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     It’s always delightful to discover an erudite scholar engaging his world with wit and wisdom.  Edward Feser teaches philosophy at Pasadena City College.  That a scholar of his caliber teaches at a community college reminds me of a remark Alexander Solzhenitsyn made when he addressed a gathering at Harvard University.  While cognizant of Harvard’s elite standing, he noted that much of the best thinking in the nation took place in non-distinguished, out-of-the-way places where individuals were not subservient to the reigning dogmas of fashion and ideology.  I’d guess he’d be delighted to find a man such as Feser working in an undergraduate college in Pasadena!  For many years he was “a convinced atheist and naturalist.”  But slowly, by carefully reading philosophers such as Gottlob Frege, he became persuaded that “there exists, in addition to the material world and the ‘world’ within the human mind, a ‘third realm’ of abstract entities, in particular of meanings and of mathematical objects like numbers.”  He then discovered, through Elizabeth Anscombe and Alasdair MacIntyre, the perennial relevance of Aristotle.  Finally, notable philosophers of religion, such as Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig whetted his appetite for St. Thomas Aquinas.   “All of this led me eventually to a serious reconsideration of the Aristotelian tradition in philosophy in general, and of Aquinas’s adaptation of it in particular, and the end result was that I became convinced that the basic metaphysical assumptions with modern secular philosophers rather unreflectively take for granted, and which alone can make atheism seem at all plausible, were radically mistaken.” 

Coupled with an appreciation for the ancient Greeks, Feser urges us to learn from Medieval thinkers such as Aquinas, the “greatest philosopher of the Middle Ages, and among the greatest philosophers, period.”   His intellectual debt to Thomas is evident in his Aquinas:  A Beginner’s Guide,  When one turns to Aquinas after reading “new atheists” such as Richard Dawkins (who failed to grasp even elementary differences between science and metaphysics), the luminous superiority of the Angelic Doctor becomes instantly apparent.  Dawkins, for example, cannot think of creation except within a linear time frame, but when Aquinas endeavored to develop arguments demonstrating God’s existence, he aimed “to show that given that there are in fact some causes of various sorts, the nature of cause and effect entails that God is necessary as an uncaused cause of the universe even if we assume that the universe has always existed and thus had no beginning.  The argument is not that the world wouldn’t have got started if God hadn’t knocked down the first domino at some point in the distant past; it is that it wouldn’t exist here and now, or undergo change or exhibit final causes here and now unless God were here and now, and at every moment, sustaining it in being, change, and goal-directedness” (The Last Superstition, p. 86).  

Aquinas held this because he grasped the difference between “accidentally ordered” and “essentially ordered” events.  The former occur as a series within time, as illustrated in the biblical lists of sons begotten by their fathers; the latter must be traced not backward but “‘downward’ in the present moment [as when a batter swings the bat, moving his hands and the bat simultaneously, the arm and shoulder and hands causing the bat to move] since they are series in which each member depends simultaneously on other members which simultaneously depend on turn on yet others, and so on” (Last Superstition, p. 93).  When we grasp this distinction, and understand that God is “Pure Act,” we can see why it is that He must, necessarily, exist.  Inasmuch as everything has an “essence”—what it is—it attains being by being actualized, deriving its existence from another, more basic Reality:  Being Itself.  “As Peter Geach puts it, for Aquinas the claim that God made the world ‘is more like “the minstrel made music” than “the blacksmith made a shoe”’; that is to say, creation is an ongoing activity rather than a once-and-for-all event.  While the shoe might continue to exist even if the blacksmith dies, the music necessarily stops when the minstrel stops playing, and the world would necessarily go out of existence if God stopped creating it” (Aquinas, p. 88).  

The natural world appears mysteriously ordered.  As Aquinas noted, “things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result.”  Trees grow upward, seeking the light; arrows follow a predictable trajectory; acorns drop to the earth, ready to become lofty oaks.  In view of such manifest facts:  “It follows,” Feser says, “that the system of ends or final causes that make up the physical universe can only exist at all if there is a Supreme Intelligence or intellect outside the universe which directs things towards their ends.  Moreover, this intellect must exist here and now, and not merely at some beginning point in the past, because causes are here and now, and at any point at which they exist at all, directed towards certain ends” (Aquinas, p. 117).  Far from being a probable hypothesis, an intelligently ordered cosmos demonstrates, as Aquinas argued, the reality of an Intelligent Agent.  

Emphatically, Feser asserts:  “the classical theistic arguments, and certainly the arguments of such major philosophical theologians as Anselm, Aquinas, and Leibniz, are not properly interpreted as ‘God of the gaps’ arguments at all.  They are not ‘hypotheses’ or attempts to ‘postulate’ a quasi-scientific explanation for particular phenomena that science has not yet accounted for, but which it could in principle account for someday.  They are rather attempts conclusively to demonstrate the existence of a Necessary Being or First Cause of the world on the basis of premises (concerning the metaphysics of causation, say, or the contingency of the material world, or the concept of a greatest possible being) about which empirical science has nothing to tell us.  The question of whether they succeed or fail as proofs is thus independent of the current state of our scientific knowledge” (Philosophy Mind, pp. 236-237).  

So for Feser it’s back to Aristotle and Aquinas!  

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To make  accessible important aspects of Aquinas’ work, Kevin Vost wrote The One Minute Aquinas:  The Doctor’s Quick Answers to Fundamental Questions.  Designed to address “the questions that matter most,” he explores some of Aquinas’ positions (primarily found in his Summa Theologica), treating the nature of human nature, God, and Christ.  We naturally desire happiness.  Exactly how to fully attain and enjoy it, however, perennially puzzles and eludes us!  Many (indeed most) of the things we pursue—wealth, pleasure, status—wrongly promise to make us happy, and even the best and brightest of mortals generally die a bit discontent.  To Aquinas this makes sense because we most deeply long for a joy impossible to attain on earth.  At best we can only partially discover (through God’s grace and a virtuous life) what we will fully attain only in heaven (the beautific vision).  We are special creatures, preeminently spiritual beings, created to share God’s eternal life, so we must rightly respond to His initiatives and commands.  

To do so requires that we comply with our divine design to live as free moral agents, to act responsibly, to do the things conducive to true happiness.  “As the intellect seeks to know the true, the will seeks to obtain the good.”  Thus we must be free, for as Thomas said, “‘Man has free will:  otherwise counsels, exhortations, commands, prohibitions, rewards and punishments would be in vain.’”  We choose to do right or wrong, to resist or surrender to sinful temptations, to demand instant gratifications or consider long-term goods—and in making such decisions we develop the habits that shape our character.  Good habits come through sustained repetition.  “Good habits direct us toward good acts, and another word for a good habit is a virtue.   Thus we need to practice the cardinal virtues (prudence; fortitude; temperance; justice—all nicely discussed by Voss in short sections) in order to live well.  Helping us do so is the Law.  To Aquinas, “‘The light of natural reason, whereby we discern what is good and what is evil, which is the function of the natural law, is nothing else than the rational creature’s participation of the eternal law’” (#1229).  This law is given specificity in Scripture and informs human laws insofar as they are truly good.  

Yet we need more than the Law to guide us to eternal goodness.  Only the Grace of God grants the infused virtues (faith, hope, and love) that finally satisfy our hunger for happiness, enabling us to participate in the very life of God Himself.  Responding by faith to His invitation, we find the forgiveness of sins and are born again.  By faith we acknowledge the truth fully revealed to us in Christ and learn of Him as the Holy Spirit works within us, giving us understanding and strength to trust and follow God.  Hope grants us the assurance that our future good, our eternal happiness, has been provided by Christ’s atoning sacrifice on the Cross and Resurrection from the grave.  The best of the infused virtues, of course, is charity—“the friendship of man for God” that “resides not in our passions, but in the will, and the will desires, seeks, and loves the good.  Love in the sense of charity seeks the highest good—the attainment of union with God.”   Amazingly, God has entered into our world and encourages us to establish a lasting friendship with Him.  Just as loving our neighbors means doing good for them, as well as wishing them well, so too loving God means doing what pleases him, not simply feeling certain things about Him.  

To please God we must first know Who He Is!  To this subject Aquinas devoted himself wholeheartedly.  As a six-year old child he asked “Who is God?” and for the next 42 years he constantly sought to answer his question.  By nature we have a vague awareness of a Supreme Being of some sort, though this innate awareness easily slides into denial or forgetfulness.  We can, however, by careful thinking come to certainty regarding His existence.  Thus Aquinas set forth, at the beginning of the Summa, five famous ways to “prove” or “argue for” God’s existence.  Beyond this simple fact, we need Him to reveal Himself (primarily in Scripture) regarding his attributes, though we can reason cogently when deciding various things regarding the Great I Am who is Three-in-One.  Until quite recently, natural scientists and philosophers took the universe to be eternal.  By taking the Bible as his foundation, however, Aquinas said it was created.  Matter began to be as God spoke it into being.  Citing Dionysius, who said all things were divinely caused, Thomas said:  “God’s ability to create belongs to his being or essence, which is common to the three Persons of the Trinity.  God causes things by his intellect and will, as when a craftsman works through an idea or ‘word’ in his mind to craft something that he loves.  So too did God the Father make creatures through the Word, who is his Son, and through his Love, which is the Holy Spirit.  The Trinity, then, created creation” (#3054).  He created simply because He is Good and sought to share His goodness with His creatures.  So, as Augustine said, “the trace of the Trinity appears in creatures” and guides the studious mind toward the Creator.  

The Second Person of the Trinity, Christ Jesus, most fully revealed God to us, and Aquinas labored to fully grasp His nature and work.  With the memorable simplicity characteristic of him, he said of our Lord:  “Being born, He became our friend.  At supper, He became our food.  Dying, He was our ransom’s price.  And, reigning, is our eternal good” (#3432).    “God became incarnate as the most fitting way to restore our corrupted sinful human nature so that many good things would follow, including the building up of our faith, since we could hear God Himself speak; our hope, since Christ’s presence shows us God’s love for us; our charity, so that we would desire to love God in return for his presence among us; and our well-doing, since God himself served as our example; and indeed, ‘the full participation of the Divinity, which is the bliss of man and end of human life; and this is bestowed on us by Christ’s humanity; for Augustine says . . . God was made man that man might be made God’” (#3467).  

Summing up his commendation of Aquinas, Vost cites the 14^th century Pope John XXII, who  declared, in Doctoris Angelici:  “He enlightened the Church more than all the other Doctors together; a man can derive more profit from his books in one year than from a lifetime spent pondering the philosophy of others” (#4321).  Anyone desiring to do so will find in Kevin Vost a most helpful tutor.

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No 20th century thinker impacted me more than C.S. Lewis.  In this I’m not alone!  In a recent interview with Dean Nelson at Point Loma Nazarene University, NewYork Times columnist David Brooks said he received some 500 books when folks realized he was interested in Christianity.  Probably 300 of them, he said, were Mere Christianity, by Lewis!  When I was in high school one of my aunts, Edith Lantz, suggested I read Lewis, and subsequently he became a vital part of my life.  I frequently assigned Mere Christianity to classes I taught and I occasionally offered a reading seminar on Lewis.  Then I published two books on aspects of his thought—C.S. Lewis and the Bright Shadow of Holiness and C.S. Lewis Explores Vice and Virtue.  In the former I noted that when Christianity Today listed the “Movers and Shapers of Modern Evangelicalism” it said Lewis was the author whose “books indisputably affected American evangelicals during this period more than  . . . .  any of the other authors mentioned.”  In a column entitled “The Oxford Prophet,” Charles Colson called Lewis is “a true prophet for our postmodern age.”  He deserved that label, Colson said, because he was so deeply immersed in history that he could incisively critique “the narrow confines of the world-view of his own age.”  He thought and wrote from within what he called “the great body of Christian thought down the ages.”  Lewis never claimed to be more than a “lay theologian.” but he sought to clearly explain traditional Christian beliefs, and his thoroughly grounded faith informed virtually all he wrote.  His was a thoroughly converted mind! 

Lewis stood within the Natural Law tradition, as was clearly evident in the first section of Mere Christianity, entitled “On Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe” (originally a brief book consisting of 15 minute lectures he gave on BBC in 1941),  The fact that we make moral judgments points to the fact that God exists and requires righteous living.  So it’s revealing that C. S. Lewis, lecturing at the University of London, labeled himself a “middle-aged moralist,” testifying to the fact that his writings show a sustained concern for righteousness.  He thought he was called to remind us of “the primeval moral platitudes” we so routinely ignore.  He always wanted to uphold the philosophia perennis—the perennial philosophy shaped by Greek philosophers (Plato and Aristotle),  medieval theologians (Augustine and Thomas Aquinas), and Anglicans (Richard Hooker and Samuel Johnson).  These men blended moral realism, natural law, divine law, and the ethics of virtue into the central ethical tradition of Western civilization.  As his discerning contemporary Malcolm Muggeridge said, Lewis embodied integrity—a goodness “in his innermost being.  His teaching and his writing were his opus dei.”

Lewis feared that Western civilization was collapsing, so he sought to do battle for truth and justice, preserving the culture forged in Europe’s centuries-long struggle with barbarism.  In 1954 he moved from Oxford to Cambridge University, which had created a Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature for him.  Giving his inaugural Lecture (De Descriptione Temporum) he spoke from within what he called the “Old Western order” that significantly differed from modernity.  He was, in fact, something of a “live dinosaur” or ancient Athenian who could bear witness to distant eras.  In fact, he said, “ Ladies and gentlemen, I stand before you somewhat as that Athenian might stand.  I read as a native texts that you must read as foreigners.”  But he could prove to be a useful “specimen,” providing insight into what the “old Western men” believed.  Thus, he said, “use your specimens while you can. There are not going to be many more dinosaurs.”  That Old Western order clearly distinguished good from evil.  The modern world contained millions of people who were not more evil than folks in the past, but they increasingly refused to differentiate right from wrong, granting everyone the “right” to do what they please.  It just feels right to do so.  In the past, thinking, not feeling, set moral standards.  The “new morality” that would burst on the scene in the 1960s was a self-satisfying, feel-good morality.  To Lewis: “Out of this apparently innocent idea comes the disease that will certainly end our species (and, in my view, damn our souls) if it is not crushed; the fatal superstition that men can create values, that a community can choose its ‘ideology’ as men choose their clothes.”

Not long after delivering the BBC talks that became Mere Christianity Lewis was invited (in 1943) to give a lecture series at the University of Durham that would be titled, when published, The Abolition of Man.  It was praised by noted theologians, including Joseph Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI who noted its “keen accuracy”) and Hans Urs von Balthasar, who found its “taut brilliance” admirable.  It would be ranked among the 10 most influential non-fiction books of the 20th century by the National Review.  Having repeatedly re-read it, I consider it one of his most profound works, probably his best purely philosophical treatise, explaining much about the contemporary world. In his first lecture, “Men Without Chests,” Lewis analyzed a textbook widely used in England’s elementary schools.  It cited a well-known passage in Coleridge wherein two tourists responded differently to a waterfall; one called it “sublime” and the other found it  “pretty.”  The textbook’s authors declared:  “When the man said This is sublime, he appeared to be making a remark about the waterfall . . .   Actually . . .  he was not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings.”  Truth, to the extent there is truth, is purely subjective, found within the mind rather than the external world.  Then the authors added: “This confusion is continually present in language as we use it.  We appear to be saying something very important about something: and actually we are only saying something about our own feelings.”  But Lewis insisted:  “Until quite modern times all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it—believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence or our contempt.  The reason why Coleridge agreed with the tourist who called the cataract sublime and disagreed with the one who called it pretty was of course that he believed inanimate nature to be such that certain responses could be more ‘just’ or ‘ordinate’ or ‘appropriate’ to it than others.  And he believed (correctly) that the tourists thought the same.  The man who called the cataract sublime was not intending simply to describe his own emotions about it: he was also claiming that the object was one which merited those emotions.”  

Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas all agreed:  a rightly educated person learns to see what’s good or true or beautiful in what we perceive.   In the moral life, Lewis said, there is what the Chinese call the Tao.  “It is Nature, it is the Way, the Road.  It is the Way in which the universe goes on, the Way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly, into space and time.  It is also the Way which every man should tread in imitation of that cosmic and supercosmic progression, conforming all activities to that great exemplar.  ‘In ritual’, say the Analects, ‘it is harmony with Nature that is prized.’  The ancient Jews likewise praise the Law as being ‘true’.  This conception in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike, I shall henceforth refer to for brevity simply as ‘the Tao.’”  These great ethical traditions share a commitment to “objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.”  They have been variously called the Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes. They were set forth by some “wise men of old” whose main concern was “to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue.”   It’s the Tao, and it’s “not one among a series of possible systems of value.  It is the sole source of all value judgements.  If it is rejected, all value is rejected.  If any value is retained, it is retained.  The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgement of value in the history of the world.”  The architects of these traditions believed in the propagation of received wisdom, whereas the modern educators—the “innovators” in Lewis’s view—engaged in propaganda that produces “Men without Chests.”  Sadly, Lewis concluded:  “In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function.  We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise.  We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.  We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

Embracing this modern philosophy of education would, in the long run, destroy society.  Without objective values widely acknowledged and followed there would be the cascading chaos of everyone doing whatever feels good.  And indeed, within 30 years young folks—the ‘60s generation—spoke for the counterculture by declaring “if it feels good do it!”  It’s not what’s good that I want—it’s what I want that’s good!  Such persons would be promoting, Lewis predicted in his third lecture, “The Abolition of Man.”  Without adhering to the Tao, people would differ in their views of what is truly “good,” and inevitably those with power would tell others what to do.  In our increasingly technological world (a world Lewis disliked in many ways) the machines empower their developers.  As we impose our wills on Nature, and “if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized,” the result will be “the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men.”  Tragically:  “Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man.  The battle will then be won.”

Writing these lectures Lewis could not have foreseen the success of today’s transgender advocates.  Men not only claim to be women but are supported by powerful cultural institutions in so doing!  They have repudiated the very notion of human nature!  But Lewis asserted:  “Either we are rational spirit obliged for ever to obey the absolute values of the Tao, or else we are mere nature to be kneaded and cut into new shapes for the pleasures of masters who must, by hypothesis, have no motive but their own `natural’ impulses.  Only the Tao provides a common human law of action which can over-arch rulers and ruled alike.  A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.”  And though dictators and totalitarian regimes illustrate this quite clearly Lewis warned that:   “many a mild-eyed scientist in pince-nez, many a popular dramatist, many an amateur philosopher in our midst, means in the long run just the same as the Nazi rulers of Germany.  Traditional values are to be `debunked’ and mankind to be cut out into some fresh shape at the will (which must, by hypothesis, be an arbitrary will) of some few lucky people in one lucky generation which has learned how to do it.” 

Only a recovery of the Tao, only a restoration of traditional values, can save us from tyranny and destruction.  As of now the folks Lewis feared are in control of our world, creating the chaos portrayed in his dystopian novel, That Hideous Strength.  

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In The Problem of Pain C.S. Lewis set forth persuasive philosophical answers to human suffering.  But when his wife Joy died he had to deal with it in a deeply personal way.  He recorded his struggles in some notebooks that were later published as A Grief Observed (San Francisco:  HarperSanFrancisco, c. 1961, 1996).  His words helped me deal with my own grief; I have re-read the book many times and recommended it to others, for it more accurately describes what I’ve felt than anything I’ve read or can say.  In his “Introduction” to the book, Lewis’s step-son, Douglas Gresham, notes:  “This book is a man emotionally naked in his own Gethsemane.  It tells of the agony and the emptiness of a grief such as few of us have to bear, for the greater the love the greater the grief, and the stronger the faith the more savagely will Satan storm the fortress” (p. xxvi).  Pious rhetoric fails in such moments, and Jesus’ words on the Cross—“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me”—sound more truthful than “God is good, all the time”!  

 “Meanwhile, where is God?” Lewis wondered.  “This is one of the most disquieting symptoms” (p. 5).   If he’d hoped God would emotionally embrace and comfort him, such was not the case.  “Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly.  Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively.  But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand” (p. 25). “What chokes every prayer and every hope is the memory of all the prayers H. [referring to Joy] and I offered and all the false hopes we had” (p. 30).  “Kind people have said to me, ‘She is with God.’  In one sense that is most certain.  She is, like God, incomprehensible and unimaginable” (p. 24).  Perhaps, Lewis thought, “If H. ‘is not,’ then she never was.  I mistook clouds of atoms for a person” (p. 28).  But he could never confuse mind with molecular motion, agreeing with a great neuroscientist, John Eccles, who said:  “We are spiritual beings with souls in a spiritual world, as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world” (p. 29). 

An unexpected consequence of his suffering, Lewis noted, is “the laziness of grief” (p. 5).   Indeed:  “Reality, looked at steadily, is unbearable” (p. 28).  “And grief still feels like fear.  Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense.  Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen.  It gives life a permanently provisional feeling.  It doesn’t seem worth starting anything.  I can’t settle down.  I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much.  Up till now I always had too little time.  Now there is nothing but time.  Almost pure time, empty successiveness” (p. 33).  “The agonies, the mad midnight moments, must, in the course of nature, die away, but what will follow?” he wonders.  “Just this apathy, this dead flatness?  . . . .  Does grief finally subside into boredom tinged by faint nausea?” (p. 36).  It’s enervating.  There’s a strange ennui, a disinterest in doing anything beyond necessary daily tasks.   

Lewis often wondered at the mysterious one-flesh nature of Christian marriage.  Male and female are, by nature, somewhat at odds.  “Marriage heals this.  Jointly the two become fully human.  ‘In the image of God created he them.’  Thus, by a paradox, this carnival of sexuality leads us out beyond our sexes.  And then one or other dies” (p. 49).    There is a literal truth to this conjugal union that one realizes when the bond is broken and part of you departs.  So:  “There’s a limit to the ‘one flesh.’  You can’t really share someone else’s weakness, or fear or pain” (p. 13).  Only Joy had to suffer the interminable treatments.  Only she knew the inescapable depression of unanswered prayers and failed procedures.  “I had my miseries,” he said, “not hers; she had hers, not mine.  The end of hers would be the coming-of-age of mine.  We were setting out on different roads” (p. 13).  Different roads:  hers to Glory; his through Gethsemane.  

“If, as I can’t help suspecting,” Lewis says, “the dead also feel the pains of separation (and this may be one of their purgatorial sufferings), then for both lovers, and for all pairs of lovers without exception, bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love.  It follows marriage as normally as marriage follows courtship or as autumn follows summer.  It is not a truncation of the process but one of its phases; not the interruption of the dance, but the next figure.  We are ‘taken out of ourselves’ by the loved one while she is here.  Then comes the tragic figure of the dance in which we must learn to be still taken out of ourselves through the bodily presence is withdrawn, to love the very Her and not fall back to loving our past, or our memory, or our sorrow, or our relief from sorrow, or our own love” (p. 50).  How helpful this is!  To imagine that separation is but another step in the dance of love—a process divesting one of self-absorption while focusing (primarily through grief) upon the lover—is worth pondering.  Lewis also wondered about the sanctifying aspects Joy’s suffering, when “month by month and week by week you broke her body on the wheel while she wore it” (p. 42).  “The more we believe that God hurts only to heal, the less we can believe that there is any use in begging for tenderness” (43).  He then compared God to a loving surgeon who insists on operating, at considerable pain to the patient, in order to ultimately heal.  Nothing is more helpful (if hard to accept) than this:  God wills our good—our holiness—and certain processes, sickness and death included, contribute to this good. 

Implicit in the well-intended but usually unwelcome “how are you doing?” inquiries is the assumption that you must soon “get over” the loss of your loved one.  As Lewis notes, “the words are ambiguous.  To say a patient is getting over it after an operation for appendicitis is one thing; after he’s had his leg cut off is quite another.  After that operation either the wounded stump heals or the man dies.  If it heals, the fierce, continuous pain will stop.  Presently he’ll get his strength back and be able to stump about on his wooden leg.  He has ‘got over it.’  But he will probably have recurrent pains in the stump all his life, and perhaps pretty bad ones; and he will always be a one-legged man.  There will be hardly any moment when he forgets it” (p. 52).  Lewis then notes the various things one continues to do while constantly sensing the loss of the limb.  “All sorts of pleasures and activities that he once took for granted will have to be simply written off.  Duties too.  At present I am learning to get about on a wooden leg.  But I shall never be a biped again” (p. 53).  What powerful analogies Lewis employs!  Many of us describe the loss of a spouse as an amputation.  But only Lewis has the skill to flesh out the comparison so as to enable one to see this.  “I shall never be biped again.”  How lamentably true.  

In time, Lewis sensed how rightly remembering his wife pointed him to God.  He had no “good” pictures of Joy, but at times he thought of her as a sword, because of her sharp mind.  At other times he compared her to a lush, nurturing garden.  “Thus up from the garden to the Gardener, from the sword to the Smith.  To the life-giving Life and the Beauty that makes beautiful” (p. 63).   Ultimately:  “All reality is iconoclastic.  The earthly beloved, even in this life, incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her.  And you want her to; you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her unexpectedness.  That is, in her foursquare and independent reality.  And this, not any image or memory, is what we are to love still, after she is dead” (p. 66).  Lewis interrogated himself, wondering if he loved Joy more than God or craved to see her more than Him hereafter.  He knew he must prefer God above all in order to attain his final end.  So he asked:  “Lord, are these your real terms?  Can I meet H. again only if I learn to love you so much that I don’t care whether I meet her or not?  Consider, Lord, how it looks to us” (p. 68).  He then noted that “Just as if, on earth, I could have cured her cancer by never seeing her again, I’d have arranged to never see her again.  I’d have had to.  Any decent person would” (p. 69).  That’s because, if the Gospel is true, Joy was alive and well, as never before, and he must rest content with the knowledge that her being is ever sustained by the “One in whom we live and move and have our being.”  

Describing one of his sudden awakenings to his late wife’s persisting presence, Lewis said:  “It’s the quality of last night’s experience—not what it proves but what it was—that makes it worth putting down.  It was incredibly unemotional.  Just the impression of her mind momentarily facing my own, not ‘soul’ as we tend to think of soul.  . . . .  Not at all like a rapturous reunion of lovers.  . . . .  Not that there was any ‘message’—just intelligence and attention.  No sense of joy or sorrow.  No love even in our ordinary sense.  No un-love.  I had never in any mood imagined the dead as being so—well, so business-like.  Yet there was an extreme and cheerful intimacy.  An intimacy that had not passed through the senses at all” (p. 73).  “Wherever it came from, “Lewis continued, “it has made a sort of spring cleaning in my mind.  The dead could be like this; sheer intellects” (p. 74).  He found he didn’t need emotional comfort.  “The intimacy was complete—sharply bracing and restorative too—without it” (p. 74).  Rather than being the nebulous, ethereal spirits portrayed in New Age materials, the departed are:  “Above all, solid.  Utterly reliable.  Firm.  There is no nonsense about the dead” (p. 75).  Indeed!  How good it is to imagine our departed loved ones as the substantial figures portrayed in Lewis’s incomparable The Great Divorce. 

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In the final pages of The Everlasting Man, G.K. Chesterton noted that Christianity is quite unique inasmuch as it has died several times and then, mysteriously, risen again.  “Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died.  Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a god who knew the way out of the grave.  But the first extraordinary fact which marks this history is this:  that Europe has been turned upside down over and over again; and that at the end of each of these revolutions the same religion has again been found on top.  The Faith is always converting the age, not as an old religion but as a new religion.”   At least “three or four times” in Church history “the whole soul seemed to have gone out of Christianity; and almost every man in his heart expected its end.”  Whether studying the Arians or the French skeptics, the Albigensians or the Darwinists, “the Faith has to all appearance gone to the dogs.”  But every time it was the dogs who died!  

“This is the final fact,” Chesterton wrote, “and it is the most extraordinary of all.  The faith has not only often died but it has often died of old age.  It has not only been often killed but it has often died a natural death; in the sense of coming to a natural and necessary end.”  Sometimes the death came violently, under intense persecutions.  “But it has a more strange and even a more weird tenacity; it has survived not only war but peace.  It has not only died often but degenerated often and decayed often; it has survived its own weakness and even its own surrender. “  It has survived because it is the bride of the Risen Lord Jesus, Who promised:  “‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.’”  The ancient and medieval worlds have passed away.  Modernity may well be dying now and carrying Christendom with it.  But, Chesterton said, let not your heart be troubled!  The future may be surprisingly Christian—just not in the way we might imagine it.

Without forgetting Chesterton’s insights, we can now take seriously the plight of today’s Western Christian Church without losing hope in the ultimate triumph of her Redeemer.  While reading the latest sociological study by Christian Smith—Why Religion Went Obsolete:  The Demise of Traditional Faith in America (New York:  Oxford University Press, c. 2025; Kindle Edition)—it’s important to remember such studies are snapshots of a current situation, not conclusive laments for a lost supernatural reality.  The data prove, Smith says, that “Americans have lost faith in traditional religion” (p. 1).  “Until the 1990s, traditional American religion appeared in many ways to be alive and well.”  Europe might have lost the Faith, but it thrived in America.  “No longer.  The tide has turned.  Crucially, these religious losses are concentrated among younger generations, which means that—barring unlikely religious revivals among youth—the losses will not just continue but accelerate as less-religious younger Americans replace older more-religious ones and fewer and fewer American children are raised by religious parents” (p. 1).  These trends are especially evident in mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic churches.

The rapid loss of religious faith is the result of a cluster of “sociocultural developments” that have made traditional religion irrelevant and obsolete, says Smith, a professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame, who excels in cranking out and analyzing the kinds of studies prescribed by his profession.  His data document what many of us have observed on a personal level—churches declining or closing, schools collapsing, anti-Christian polemicists and movements gaining traction.  The failure of the churches to appeal to young people is also quite evident.   Gen X (born 1965–1980) proved to be “the transitional hinge of cultural and religious change, breaking with the old order and signaling new directions.”  Millennials accelerated the process, and “Gen Z (born 1997–2012) is now carrying forward and working out the details of the new normal” (p. 12).  No matter how you measure it, younger people find religion less essential than their grandparents.  They may think religion is good if it encourages morality or psychological health or community service, but they don’t think it reveals any kind of Transcendent Truth.  Indeed, they seem uninterested in their souls’ condition or destination. 

Young people are, in fact, shaped by their culture.  Much that they think is scarcely reflective, much less logical.  The culture of relativism (famously identified by Pope Benedict XVI) now dominates their world.  It’s the zeitgeist within which they function—a worldview fed by a variety of cultural developments that seem to have little immediate bearing on religion.   Identifying these developments makes Smith’s work most valuable.  They include, first, “higher education for the masses.”  The more highly educated you are the less you will find religion necessary.  Statistically, college students turn away from their parents’ faith. Secondly, women entering the work force tended to take religion less seriously.  Thirdly, there was a serious erosion of traditional marriage and family.  Until the ‘70s “cohabitation was practically nonexistent,” but now it’s “not uncommon and largely accepted by the cultural mainstream” (p. 78).  Fourth, younger folks rarely join fraternal and civic organizations.  They’re less likely to join a church or civic club or a bowling league.  Fifth, they are embedded in a mass consumption culture, continually shopping and buying things.  Sixth, they’re poster children for “expressive individualism,” forever seeking “personal authenticity.”  To think of yielding one’s life to another person—or to an Ultimate Person—violates their desire for autonomy.  Seventh, they clearly have embraced much of postmodernism, including its epistemological skepticism and ethical relativism.  Eighth, they identify as “emerging adults” rather than fully formed grown-ups.  The data show significant numbers of them still living with their parents rather than setting up independent households.  

Smith thinks the year 1991—the end of the Cold War—marked  the beginning of religion’s collapse.  “The victory over godless communism that America and the West had achieved ‘by the grace of God’ would, ironically, result in an America with much less interest in God.  The end of the Cold War was a jolt that helped to trigger the cultural avalanche that plowed over religion in the next two decades” (p. 129).  A “new world order” emerged, establishing a “neoliberal capitalism” that required young folks to totally give themselves to careers.  This frequently meant going where the jobs were and leaving their childhood communities.  Working only for themselves, constantly competing to succeed, they were caught up in a very irreligious economic system.  Simultaneously they were immersed and in danger of drowning in the digital revolution.  Smith’s analysis of the impact of this revolution is perceptive and alarming, for it underlies many of the problems churches must confront.  The internet and cell phones transformed the culture in manifold ways, demanding large amounts of time and creating a virtual world that easily replaced the real one.  Contact with actual persons declined, as did attending religious services.  As one young person said:  “‘The reason for religion’s decline is pretty basic:  technology.  Our focus is just gone’” (p. 145).  

No sooner had the Cold War ended than a new war—a war on terror—erupted.  On September 11, 2001, militant Muslims destroyed the World Trade Towers in New York City and the world changed.  Unexpectedly, religion also changed, since Americans’ evaluations of religion shifted from seeing it as generally good to fearing it as a vehicle of violence.  Then an influential corps of “new atheists” persuaded their followers that all religions, Christianity as well as Islam, are by nature violent.   During the same decade a “third sexual revolution” challenged the traditional religions, normalizing non-marital activities.  Young women especially celebrated their freedom to be promiscuous, enjoying “friends with benefits” and “booty calls.”  Homosexual activities also gained significant social approval.  In 2001 a majority of Americans disapproved same-sex relationships, but by 2008 the tides had turned and a majority approved them.  By 2022 some 71% of the people found them “morally acceptable.”  By 2016, when the Supreme Court approved same sex marriage, a majority of Americans agreed.  Millennials especially support the LGBTQ+ agenda.  They also believe in and fear global warming.  Many suffer “climate grief” or “environmental nihilism.  Some have abandoned hope for the future, even despairing at bringing children into the world.  “An astounding 33% of Millennials believe that ‘Humanity is doomed,’ while 28% report that they feel a huge amount or a lot of ‘sadness, fear, anxiety, or anger over the climate crisis’” (p. 211).   

Amidst these developments during the initial decades of the 21st century, young Americans showed less and less respect for traditional religion.  Though  religion may have helped their parents be morally upright, they think it’s quite easy to be “good without God.”   Harvard University’s humanist chaplain, Greg Epstein, laid out this claim in a pivotal book entitled Good Without God:  What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe.  Though the standards for goodness were quite low, “The insistence that people can be moral without religion was one of the most pervasive in our interviews.  A small sample:  ‘I found comfort going to church and learning things, but it’s not spiritually supportive of me anymore’” (p. 221).  A young woman felt “annoyed by the Ten Commandments“ inasmuch as she finds equally valid prescriptions in her own heart.  She, along with many of her generation, prefer to think of themselves as “spiritual” rather than religious and often join  the growing crowd of “nones” identifying as having no religion.  

Compounding the growing disaffiliation from traditional religions are an assortment of self-destructions littering the ecclesiastical scene.  “Beginning in the late 1980s, scores of public scandals rocked religious communities as religious leaders were exposed for having committed various sexual, financial, and other wrongdoings.  For more than two decades, scandals touched almost every religious tradition in the United States, demoralizing the faithful and disgracing leaders” (p. 229).  Horrendous sexual misbehavior (largely involving priests and young men) rocked the Roman Catholic Church.  Protestants and Jews suffered similar revelations.   Famous leaders were exposed, including Jean Vanier, the Catholic founder of L’Arche, who engaged in multiple sexual trysts, and John Howard Yoder, an influential Anabaptist theologian, who “sexually harassed, abused, and assaulted” some 100 women.  As Smith comments:  “The contrast between Yoder’s compelling call for Christian nonviolence and his practice of sexual abuse was stunning” (p. 240).  These seemingly endless scandals certainly played a major role in disillusioning anyone seriously considering religious claims, many of whom headed for church exits.

Winding up his presentation, Smith lists 34 items explaining the growing obsolescence of religion.  Many of them can be reduced to the Millennials’ widespread expressive individualism—everyone is unique, everyone must be celebrated, everyone’s values must be respected.  Self-awareness and self-development are highly prized.  You must constantly develop your self and resist any effort of others or (especially) institutions such as churches to shove you into a mold.  Only you know and can appropriate the truths that are right for you.  Live for the day.   YOLO—“you only live once.”  If religion helps you in your development embrace it.  But don’t dare suggest it’s valuable for others—and, above all, don’t be judgmental.  Summing up (with myself adding bold face to the main points):  “In heart and soul, as a matter of deep culture, the Millennial zeitgeist was (and seems to remain):  Immanent:  Focused on the here and now, not the transcendent or otherworldly; Individualistic:  Envisioning society as a collection of atomistic, choice-making selves;  Anti-institutional:  Avoiding structured social groups and institutions;  Presentist:  Captive to the contemporary, unmoored from history and tradition;  Relativist:  Viewing knowledge, truth, and ethics as opinions dependent on perspectives;  Distrustful:  Suspicious of most people’s and organization’s motives and agendas; Subjectivist:  Assuming interior feelings and experience to be the best guides for living; Anti-authority:  Hostile to structured social roles of influence and power;  Fluid: Expecting change, instability, revision, mobility; Multicultural:  Comfortable with sociocultural diversity, dubious of homogenous groups; Minimalist:  Preferring to strip away unnecessary systems, particularities, creeds;  Transgressive:  Breaking down received boundaries, norms, categories, decorum; Pornographic:  Inundated by images of nudity, sex, and violence of all sorts in most media; Jaded:  Bored by hype and defeated by disappointment, scandals, and dim futures; Consumerist:  Conceiving the good life as continually acquiring new experiences and products; Entertained:  Soaking up relentless stimulation, amusement, performance, spectacle; Re-enchanted:  Open to believing “weird” stuff that enlightened modernity had suppressed” (p. 336).  Dealing with this zeitgeist, Smith acknowledges that churches find themselves in “no-win situations.  When religion seriously accommodated pluralism, it became milquetoast.  When it proclaimed a distinctive message, it was narrow-minded” (p. 367).  

Reading Smith’s treatise, I was impressed with his wide-ranging scholarship and commitment to making clear the state of religion in America.  Yet it seems to me it is as much a commentary on our culture as our religion.  We need to recognize, as Alistair MacIntyre insisted in After Virtue, that we are witnessing the triumph of barbarism.  Thus there is an alarming decline in the quality or education—as pointed out by in Every One Must Have a Prize, by Melanie Phillips.  There is a similar decline of standards in music and art.  Smith certainly acknowledges that the obsolescence of religion has taken place in a withering culture, but much apart from the church has also become obsolete.  Classical languages, meaningful grammar, literary masterpieces, and logic share that demise.  

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That religion may, in fact, not be obsolete is evident in Charles A. Murray’s recent Taking Religion Seriously (New York:  Encounter Books, c. 2025; Kindle Edition).  Murray is a controversial political scientist well-known for such treatises as Losing Ground and The Bell Curve.  He made headlines when he was Invited to speak in Middlebury College in 2017.  Students protested and prevented him from delivering his speech.  He then made a video of the address and tried to leave the campus, only to be physically attacked by protesters.  Though he was not injured, a professor accompanying him was seriously injured, suffering a concussion.  A committed libertarian, Murray was, for much of his life, a religious skeptic.  Then his wife, overwhelmed by the beauty of bearing a child, developed an interest in a world rooted in something bigger than herself.  “Her epiphany was that she loved [her daughter] Anna ‘far more than evolution required’” (p. 7).  That led her to link up with The Society of Friends (Quakers) and cultivate a more spiritual life.  Her interests prodded Murray to become more open-minded to religious claims, and this brief book charts his journey during the past two decades.

Though he attended a Presbyterian church as a child, Murray abandoned any religious life while earning degrees from Harvard and MIT.  Without serious thought he simply embraced what he calls “Western modernity” with its deeply irreligious assumptions.  He now knows that these assumptions were unreflective and deeply flawed.  “I had not investigated the factual validity any of those propositions.  They were part of the received wisdom of most Western intellectuals throughout the twentieth century.  I accepted them without thinking” (p. 22).  He assumed science had rendered belief in God irrational, that earth is a tiny speck in a vast universe, and man is simply a sophisticated animal.  No enlightened thinker believed in the soul and there was certainly no life beyond the grave.  “The great religious traditions are human inventions,” Murray believed, “natural products of the fear of death.  That includes Christianity, which can call on no solid evidence for its implausible claims” (p. 21).  But late in life —in the 1990s—he started to question these assumptions, beginning with the eerie conjunction of mathematics and Reality demonstrated by thinkers such as Newton, Boyle, and Einstein.  “The relationship of mathematics to reality has generated shelves of books of which I was entirely ignorant (and remain nearly so).  But even at my elementary level, it just seemed extremely odd that so many basic phenomena were so mathematically simple. It was almost as if someone had planned it that way” (p. 23).  If so, who is that someone?  He also began to appreciate the importance of human consciousness, the possibility that we have souls.  Strict materialists cannot explain the way we think.  Though great advances have been made in understanding the brain, there is something more than matter-in-motion when we think.  Perhaps, he came to see, there is a non-material realm to our awareness of our world.  

Then a friend of his, Charles Krauthammer, asked him, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”  Though this is a truly ancient philosophical question, Murray had never seriously pondered it!  He’d never read Plato and Augustine, Aristotle and Aquinas!  “When I had thought about the existence of the universe at all, I had taken it as a given.”  Case closed!  But perhaps not!  The more he actually thought about it the more he took “the issue seriously.  Why is there anything?  Surely things do not exist without having been created.  What created all this?  If you haven’t thought about it recently, this is a good time to stop and try to come up with your own answer” (p. 24).  Perhaps there is, as Aristotle said, an “unmoved Mover.”  Next, coming to terms with the scientific evidence for a moment of singularity, he began studying current materials regarding the “big bang.”  Literally, in a milli-second, everything came into being.  “Sometime in the early 2000s,” says Murray, “I did have a road-to-Damascus moment, but it was empirical rather than spiritual.  I decided that the entity that I might as well call God had deliberately designed the universe to permit the existence of life.  It was a case of reading a relatively small number of pages of text and saying to myself, “I can’t believe I’m thinking this, but it’s the only plausible explanation” (p. 29).  He had to rethink everything.  While pondering the evidence presented in a book titled Just Six Numbers, he concluded he “had no choice” but to acknowledge “that a God created a universe that would enable life to exist” (p. 44).  

Intellectually persuaded that God exists, Murray began to consider Christianity.  He’d already been impressed by great Christian thinkers and artists while writing Human Accomplishment, published in 2003.  Fortuitously, two years later an Evangelical friend suggested he read C.S. Lewis’s classic Mere Christianity, which helped him move from acknowledging a transcendent Moral Law to accepting its Author.  Strengthening his case, in The Abolition of Man, “Lewis discusses how the Moral Law raises an issue that cuts across religions and philosophic systems:  the doctrine of objective value, “the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are” (p. 148).  That we can’t construct our own morality seemed manifestly true. Trying to do so had collapsed our culture.   “I was born in 1943,” he says, “and have witnessed 180-degree flips in the secular received wisdom on child-rearing, marriage, divorce, euthanasia, abortion, acceptable public behavior, responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions, and virtually everything about human sexuality.  Many of these changes do not appear to have been for the better.  Doesn’t the evanescence of moral principles in the present age suggest a special need to seek moral bedrock?” (p. 151).  There is, of course, a lengthy list of thoughtful folks who have been intellectually challenged and moved by the works of Lewis.  Murray is simply one of the latest, and notably prominent, thinkers to acknowledge him.

Subsequently, Murray began to consider the truthfulness of the Gospels, which he’d earlier considered fictional.  It became clear to him that the “lives of Jesus” constructed by biblical critics revealed much about themselves but not much about Jesus.  The more he studied the primary texts in the New Testament the more he came to believe in their accuracy.  He devoured a great historical work, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses:  The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony, by Richard Bauckham, and came to share his high regard for the authenticity and trustworthiness of the New Testament.  Miracles, especially Christ’s Resurrection, became credible.  This didn’t make him a believer, but it did establish a solid foundation for belief.  

He’s still a seeker, but he’s come to believe that much that religion holds may very well be true. 

In graduate school one of my five fields of study was ancient and medieval history.  That equipped me to teach church history, and I maintain a genuine interest in the subject.  Plutarch’s Parallel Lives is one of the classic ancient texts, and of the best recent works I’ve read explores the parallel lives of two monumental men in Fatal Discord:  Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind (New York:  HarperCollins, c. 2018; Kindle Edition), by Michael Massing.  Desiderius Erasmus (the Christian humanist and biblical scholar) and Martin Luther (the Protestant reformer) were contemporaries, and Massing tells their stories with journalistic skill, putting the two men’s stories in chronological, alternating chapters.  Doing so enables him to provide illumination on their tumultuous era and insight into ours, for:  “These two schools remain with us today.  The conflict between Erasmus and Luther marks a key passage in Western thinking—the point at which these two fundamental and often colliding traditions took hold.  The struggle between them continues to shape Western society.  On one side are Erasmus-like humanists: seekers of concord, promoters of pluralism, believers in the Bible as a fallible document open to multiple interpretations, and advocates of the view that man is a fully autonomous moral agent.  On the other are Lutheran-style evangelicals who seek a direct relationship with God, embrace faith in Christ as the only path to salvation, accept the Bible as the Word of God, and consider the Almighty the prime mover of events” (p. xiii). 

Erasmus was a Dutchman born out of wedlock in 1467 in Rotterdam.  He attended a renowned Latin school in Devanter where both Geert Groote and Thomas a Kempis had studied.  The latter’s Imitation of Christ prescribed the Devotio Moderna, an important “reform movement” calling for a vibrant relationship with God through pious practices.  But what most impacted Erasmus at Deventer was the classical literature of Rome (Terrence, Horace, Virgil) so central to the humanistic Renaissance.  He would find in Petrarch an example of “critical textual editing” that he would apply to biblical studies.  Luther was born in Eisleben, Germany, in 1483, the son of a miner who became prosperous enough to provide his son with a solid education, initially designed to enable him to become a lawyer.  At the University of Erfurt Luther encountered the philosophical works of William of Ockham, absorbing his nominalism and rejecting the scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas, who was deeply influenced by Aristotle.  Accordingly, Luther despised Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, calling it “‘the worst of all books’ and charging that it ‘flatly opposes divine grace and all Christian virtues.’  Luther’s great revolt would spring in part from his fierce reaction to this work” (p. 82). 

After earning his doctorate in theology Erasmus became an itinerant scholar, publishing a number of works that made him a celebrated figure in Europe.  He was especially interested in “exploring the fathers” of the Early Church such as Jerome and translating their works.   In 1500 A.D. he published his first book, Collected Adages—an assortment of quotations (with commentary) from Plato, Cicero, Horace, Virgil, and others.  He also began to study Greek, determined to read the New Testament in its original language, and would in time publish his enormously influential Greek New Testament text, with extensive annotations, many of which questioned traditional doctrines.  “Erasmus’s text would become the foundation for all Western scholarship on the Greek New Testament for the next three centuries” (p. 255).  Though conventionally religious, Erasmus was above all a Christian Humanist, impressed with man’s innate abilities and convinced that he could work out his own salvation in communion with God.  

At the same time Luther (in 1505) abruptly decided to pursue the religious life in an Augustinian monastery after surviving a traumatic moment in a thunderstorm.  The monastic life failed to resolve his spiritual disquiet, but he was encouraged to become a priest and ultimately earned a doctorate in theology.  Deeply troubled by his understanding of the justice of God—justitia Dei—he never felt righteous enough to please Him.  Teaching at a new university in Wittenberg, Luther began studying and lecturing on the Bible.  He was especially drawn to the Psalms, and while reading Psalm 85 he awakened to the fact that “it was not because Christ did righteous deeds that he was righteous; rather, it was because he was righteous that he did righteous deeds.  The same was true of man.  A person cannot be righteous simply because he behaves in an upright fashion.  He must first become righteous; virtuous deeds will then follow.  Luther was here turning Aristotle on his head.  In the Nicomachean Ethics, the Greek philosopher had proposed that man becomes good by doing good deeds; it is through his moral conduct that he shows he is a moral person.  For Luther, one must first become a righteous person; righteous deeds will then follow.  In these rough notes on the Psalms, one can see the foundations of Western Christianity beginning to shift” (p. 190).  Soon thereafter, studying Romans, he found that the Gospel shows that “the righteousness of God is revealed, as it is written, ‘He who through faith is righteous shall live.’”  Luther felt born again!  Righteousness comes from God as a gift of faith. We are justified by faith alone!

Massing ably retells Luther’s role in birthing the Protestant Reformation.  And he rightly sets forth the inevitable conflict between the common sense reforms proposed by Erasmus and the radical theological views of Luther, including the positions that:  “‘Free will collapses, good works collapse, the righteousness of the Law collapses. . . .  Only faith and the invoking of God’s completely pure mercy remain.’  This ran directly counter to Erasmus’s belief in human agency and the ability of men and women to use their reason and willpower to show modesty, forbearance, and other Christlike traits” (p. 346).  He believed the 10 Commandments applied to Christians, whereas Luther considered them part of the Law no longer required.  Erasmus would famously declare:  “Christ I recognize, Luther I know not.”  Though they never met and were never colleagues, Erasmus and Luther had for years supported each other’s endeavors, working to reform the Church.  But as Luther’s views turned more radical the two men parted ways.  At the Diet of Worms in 1521, Luther laid down the gauntlet in his famous declaration:  “Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason—for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves—I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted, and my conscience is captive to the Word of God.  I cannot and I will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. May God help me! Amen.”  Luther then severed ties with Rome, becoming the “pope of Wittenberg,” while Erasmus remained a loyal son of the Church.  

The two men most sharply disagreed about free will.  Luther believed that “never for a single moment” are things “under our control.”  Thus, it follows, “all things occur by absolute necessity.”  Erasmus, after extensive study in both Church Fathers and philosophy, published The Freedom of the Will: A Diatribe or Discourse, insisting on its reality, defending the traditional Catholic view.  The God whom Erasmus conjures up “is caring, wise, reasonable, and, above all, just” (p. 604).  The treatise elicited favorable reactions throughout Europe, but Luther would respond angrily.  He “felt that his entire gospel was at stake” and penned The Bondage of the Will, “one of his last important theological tracts.”  A “central tenet of Luther’s theology—that the sinner is justified by faith and grace alone, without the works of the law” was at stake.  He insisted “that humans are incapable of finding salvation through their own acts.  If an individual could choose to perform deeds that merited God’s favor, Luther’s whole system would collapse” (p. 671).  God alone does everything “‘by his immutable, eternal, and infallible will.  Here is a thunderbolt by which free will is completely prostrated and shattered’” (p. 672).   Ultimately, says Massing;  “The deities described in Erasmus’s and Luther’s dueling tracts could hardly be more dissimilar.  Erasmus’s God is an even-tempered rationalist who sagely judges men and women by how they behave in the world.  Luther’s God is an inscrutable being who acts according to his own unfathomable logic, apart from human understanding and expectation.  Erasmus’s God requires the existence of free will to ensure that his rule is just; Luther’s God has to reject free will to make sure his power is unbounded.  Whereas Erasmus wanted to protect the freedom of man to choose, Luther wanted to safeguard the freedom of God to act” (p. 675).

Thenceforth the Renaissance and Reformation took different trajectories.  Erasmus had stood for a moderate, reasonable religion, holding that:  “Believers are justified by faith, but works of charity are necessary as well.  Confession can be beneficial, as long as one does not dwell excessively on one’s sins and resolves to do better.  On fast days, those who eat should not insult those who abstain, and those who abstain should not condemn those who eat.  More generally, Erasmus urged Christians to ‘do nothing by violent or disorderly means, nor inflict on anyone anything for which, if done to us, we should call on heaven and earth and sea; nor force on anyone a new form of religion which he finds abhorrent’” (p. 753).  But his approach was rejected in northern Europe.  “As the great schism opened up in Christendom, a sort of religious lunacy had set in, with apostles and zealots of every stripe declaring theirs to be the only true creed and ready to slash and flay anybody who followed a different one” (p. 737).  Catholic and Protestant princes went to war.  The Christian world quickly fractured into increasing numbers of combative factions.  When Erasmus died, Luther said:  “‘He lived and died as Epicurus, without minister and consolation.”  In fact:  “He went to hell.”  In his declining days, before dying in 1546, Luther also lashed out at Zwinglians, Calvinists, and Jews.  It would lead to the “fatal discord” Erasmus feared.  

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G.K. Chesterton famously said:  “Original sin is the only doctrine that’s been empirically validated by 2,000 years of human history.”  Unlike other animals, there’s something deeply flawed in human beings.  We’re not quite what we’re designed to be.  That truth was evident to Edmund Burke two centuries ago.  Writing to Adam Smith, the noted ethicist/economist, he said:  “A theory like yours founded on the Nature of man, which is always the same, will last, when those that are founded upon his opinions, which are always changing, will and must be forgotten.”  But to recognize that there is something wrong with us is not, necessarily, to say everything about us is utterly awful.  That elementary fact generally eludes James Boyce, whose Born Bad: Original Sin and the Making of the Western World (Berkeley, CA:  Counterpart, c. 2015) endeavors to show original sin is a uniquely Western doctrine, crafted by St. Augustine in the fifth century A.D.  Boyce insists that neither Jews nor Eastern Orthodox Christians believed man is born bad, holding that he is basically good but makes poor choices considered sinful.  This position would be disputed by many Christian theologians and historians, but Boyce’s description of the doctrine’s development is generally accurate and certainly readable.   

The story begins with St Augustine (354-430 A.D.), the “father of original sin,” who in his Confessions said he found within himself  an “insurmountable depravity that must be accepted before grace, the unearned gift of God’s forgiveness, could be received.  Augustine’s point was that the desire to sin could not be banished by human effort” (p. 17).  He also found this truth confirmed by the story of Adam’s Fall as recorded in the book of Genesis.  (Whereas Augustine believed biblical account is fully historical, Boyce dismisses it as sheer myth.)  Most of Augustine’s pessimistic appraisal of man came as he struggled with the Donatists and Pelagians during last two decades of his life, when “he came to believe that human beings were so corrupted that they could not even choose to embrace the mercy of God: those who appeared to have chosen to be saved had, in reality, already been predestined by God for salvation” (p. 19).

In subsequent centuries Augustine’s position was never fully endorsed by Church scholars and councils, though belief in original sin remained firm.  Numerous dissidents,  such as Peter Abelard and Julian of Norwich, denied it, but the greatest Scholastic, Thomas Aquinas, was deeply Augustinian, though he defined original sin as a deprivation of goodness rather than an inherent depravity.  “The stain of sin does not impose a nature on the soul, but only the privation of grace,” he said.  We’re born with infirmities, much like blindness, and suffer a perpetual bent toward evil.  Then came Martin Luther and the Protestant reformers, who pushed the doctrine beyond Augustine.  In what he believed was “the unchangeable truth of God,” Luther denied the freedom of the will, insisting we continually sin in word, thought, and deed.  Soon thereafter John Calvin “presented himself as a modern-day” Augustine,  “seeking to defeat ‘the Pelagians of the present age’” (p. 75).  Along with Luther, he believed “that to lay claim to even a residual goodness within human beings proffered the false hope that people could do something to save themselves, and that this was the well-trodden road to hell” (p. 76).  Calvin’s stance informs the 1647 Westminster Confession of Faith:   “Mankind is wholly defiled in all parts and faculties of soul and body … utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, and wholly inclined to all evil.”  Rejecting some of the Reformers’ dismal views regarding human nature, John Wesley, regarded by Boyce as the “founder” of Evangelicalism, “parted from Luther and Calvin in one highly significant respect:  he rejected the teaching that the impact of the Fall was so profound that human beings were incapable of making real choices—first to be saved, and second to be sanctified” (p. 116).  Sharing James Arminius’ critique of Calvinism, Wesley believed in a kind of synergism whereby God and man work together in the salvation process.  Centuries later, as evident in Billy Graham, this kind of Evangelicalism became dominant in America.  

In modern times, belief in original sin shifted.  But it didn’t disappear!  Boyce constructs a compelling case to show how it morphed into non-Christian views.  Though probably an atheist, Thomas Hobbes’ belief “in the innate evil of human beings rivaled that of Martin Luther” (p. 106).  Other eminent philosophers such as John Locke tended to blame the environment for man’s deviant decisions.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau thought we are born good but get corrupted by society.  Charles Darwin attributed evil to unavoidable evolutionary processes.  “Original sin had always seen human beings as innately self-centred creatures whose nature was to pursue their own interests at the expense of others’.   Charles Darwin provided a language in which this old religious idea could be renewed and given social scientific credence” (p. 151).  (A contemporary Darwinist, Richard Dawkins even claimed there ice a “selfish gene” imbedded in our biology!)  Sigmund Freud certainly found a depraved dimension to human nature!  Indeed, his “ideas in some ways resemble those of Thomas Hobbes, but Freud’s focus on the divided self—in which even the most worthy action or good deed is corrupted by innate drives which are beyond the power of the will to fully control— s closer in theory and sentiment to Augustine.  The fundamental similarity of the two men is accentuated by the importance each placed on sex” (p. 156).  

Born Bad provides us an informative journey of intellectual history documenting the persistence of the doctrine of original sin.  And though he would like to dismiss it as an erroneous view rooted in the “myth” of biblical teaching, he nevertheless demonstrate its enduring truth.  

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Nadya Williams earned a PhD from Princeton University and worked as a professor for 15 years, teaching history and classics before leaving academia to homeschool her kids.  To treasure marriage and children is, sad to say, countercultural in today’s America!  Yet:  “Compelling data exists, in fact, that it is married women with children who are the best off economically of all categories of women in modern American society.  Study after study shows that while single unwed mothers are not flourishing economically, people in happy marriages are financially better off, happier, and healthier” (p. 4).  More importantly, there is a deeply philosophical question we must ask:  “What is a human life worth?  Are some lives more economically beneficial to society than others?  And are there not ways of estimating the worth of a life that are not economically driven at all?  As a historian of the ancient world and the early church, I am reminded of the way the earliest Christians challenged the longstanding values of the pagan world around them to display a love of all humanity that was utterly radical—and costly.  The early Christians’ pro-life stance included, at the economic level, a radically different and selfless use of money for the benefit of others.  That we do not do so in our society today is a powerful reminder that the values of our society at large, including those of many confessing Christians within it, are values of the post-Christian culture all around rather than the church.  Without God and without the understanding of the imago Dei within each human being, what is a human life worth?  The pre-Christian Mediterranean world gives us a terrifying answer:  it depends. Those same values were also the values of the pre-Christian culture.  We are living in a crisis of devaluing all human life, and especially the lives of children” (p. 6).  

Williams has recently published Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic:  Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity (Downers Grove IL:  IVP, c. 2024; Kindle Ed).  She seeks to address three questions.   “First, in what ways does this devaluing of motherhood and children in our own society manifest itself?  Just how deep does this problem go?  Second—and this is where my historical expertise will particularly come into play—how might the history of the extraordinary and unconditional valuing of human life in the early church help us to get back on track?” (p. 13).  Early Christians may very well give guidance to contemporary believers seeking to challenge the “culture of death” surrounding us.  We must learn to revere persons as persons, not as cogs in an economic machine.  “Third, where do we go from here?” (p. 14).  For guidance she explores the works of three thinkers (St Perpetua, St Augustine and Wendell Berry) who push “us to see the preciousness of all humanity in ways that acknowledge the challenges of this present life while insisting on the eternal truth about the priceless value of every human life” (p. 14).

Evidence for the devaluing of human beings is everywhere evident.  Consider the growing number of young folks who have no interest in having children, resulting in a growing “birth dearth” throughout the industrialized world.  The worldview of Margaret Sanger has become the norm—sexual pleasure, birth control, population control, eugenics.  The “difficult truth” we must address “is that contemporary US society utterly devalues children, motherhood, and the dignity of human life more generally.  This devaluing is an invisible cancer within our society that has pervaded every system of the body politic, including even the church” (p. 24).  But we find much the same in the ancient world.  Women and children, slaves and strangers, the sick and deformed were not necessarily valued.  Wars, such as Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul, were often genocidal, killing the men and enslaving the women.   Indeed:  “we are looking at a world that saw no problem with the casually devastating cruelty of the strong toward the weak” (p. 89). 

Into this world came Christ and His Gospel!  Literally everyone—even “useless people”—had value.  Women and children, widows and orphans found comfort in the Church.  Jesus and the Church fathers promoted the physical and spiritual well-being of all peoples.  As Williams explores ancient texts, including the writings of one of the earliest Christian martyrs, St Perpetua, and the greatest ancient theologian, Augustine, she finds how Christians both challenged pagan thought and provided a better way for mankind.  She also finds in Wendell Berry (an “American Augustine”) a better way for our contemporaries,  many of whom are rootless, needing to discover a way to flourish as human beings.  Berry lived on a family farm in and defended deeply “traditional forms of flourishing, pushing back against the modern treadmill life as the only option, calling instead for ‘Nature as Measure,  . . .  Roots and rootedness, Berry’s writings repeatedly affirm, are key to human flourishing” (p. 197). 

Scholarly excellence, mixed with motherly empathy, make Williams’ treatise a fine conjunction of historical inquiry and contemporary wisdom.

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Rendering verdicts in good judicial systems requires evidence rightly presented and accepted by juries and judges.  So too historians ponder primary and secondary sources seeking to discern what actually happened long ago, looking for evidence enabling them to determine what’s true.  A similar thought process takes place when we think about the existence and nature of God, for there is, as Josh McDowell declared long ago, Evidence that Demands a Verdict.  Much such evidence is now available in God:  The Science, the Evidence (Palomar editions, c. 2025; Kindel; originally published in French as Dieu, La science, Les preuves, c. 2021) by Michel-Yves Bollore and Oliver Bonnassies.  That this 600 page non-fiction book has sold 400,000 copies in Europe is truly amazing!  It is, they say, “the culmination of nearly four years of research conducted in collaboration with a team of around twenty high-level international specialists and scientists.  Its objective is unique:  to shed light for you on the question of the existence or non-existence of a creator God, one of the most important questions of our lives which is being posed today in completely new terms” (p. 19).

For three centuries (1650-1950)—an era generally called modernity—scientific work gradually eclipsed theology as the highest and most certain form of knowledge.  Hand-in-hand with the scientific revolution came a revival of philosophical materialism, the dogma that matter-in-motion is all there is.  Claiming to be utterly scientific, materialistic ideologies such as Marxism, Freudianism, and Scientism enjoyed their day.  But then, a century ago, small cracks began to appear in the materialist edifice.  “During the first half of the twentieth century, belief in a simple, mechanical, and deterministic world was shattered by a more precise confirmation of the principles of quantum mechanics and its postulates of indeterminacy” (p. 28).  Drawing upon the best of current thought, the authors want “to gather into one volume the most up-to-date rational arguments for the possible existence of a creator God” (p. 31).

The authors begin by clarifying what they mean by scientific evidence, differentiating “absolute” from “relative” proofs.  Absolute truths exist in mathematics and logic, but only relative proofs can be discovered through scientific work, which must deal with “evidence of varying degrees of strength, the accumulation of which can nevertheless lead us to a conviction beyond all reasonable doubt” (p. 40).  As the history of science reveals, our understanding of the physical world continually expands and undergoes endless revisions.  What we find most persuasive generally “arises from the presence of multiple, independent, and converging pieces of evidence” (p. 49).  So when we look for scientific evidence demonstrating the reality of God we should acknowledge that we must rest content with relative or probable proofs.  

One of the most highly probable scientific maxims is the second law of thermodynamics.  Einstein declared it “the first law of all science.”  Notable 19th century thinkers demonstrated its importance, fleshing out the ramifications of its central tenet—entropy—detailing what Sir Arthur Eddington called the cosmological “arrow of time.”  Time is a linear, not a cyclical phenomenon, and ultimately the universe will collapse in a heat death.  “The Universe is like a fire crackling away in a fireplace.  Subject to the laws of thermodynamics, both are destined to burn themselves out over time.”  The logs gradually become embers, which die in due time.  Watching the fire we can rightly conclude that “since the fire is being consumed at a measurable rate, it cannot have been burning forever.  If it had always existed, then it would also have burned down and gone out an infinitely particular point in the past” (p. 64).  This fact gives substance to an ancient philosophical position, known as the Kalam cosmological argument, which holds:  1) Whatever begins to exist has a cause; 2) The Universe had a beginning; 3) Therefore the Universe has a cause.

Working out the implications of entropy (the central component of the second law of thermodynamics), physicists a century ago began to consider what came to be called the “big bang” origin of the universe.  As Einstein’s theories of relativity became accepted, the notion that the the material world was eternal and fixed began to dissolve.  In 1922 a young Russian, Alexander Friedmann, proposed the possibility of an expanding universe.  Five years later a Catholic priest, Georges Lemaître, pushed Einstein’s insights to their logical conclusions.  “Lemaitre summarized his conclusion thus:  ‘We can reason that space began with the primeval atom and that the beginning of space marked the beginning of time’” (p. 91).  His views were soon verified by Edwin Hubble, an astronomer looking into deepest space through his new telescope on Mount Wilson in California and observing an ever-expanding cosmos.   

Shocked at such findings, Fred Hoyle, an English astrophysicist, tried to dismiss the notion, coining the phrase “big bang” to ridicule it.  But in 1964, almost accidentally, two men detected Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR), something that could only have resulted from an instantaneous beginning of the universe.  Ex nihilo—out of nothing!  Within 20 years confirmations of the “big bang” led to the development of what’s called the “Standard Model” embraced by most all physicists.  It is “supported by such a large number of probative observations that the vast majority of cosmologists now accept its central claims” (p. 107).  George Smoot, recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize, said that what scientists now see is “‘like seeing God’” (p. 97).  And he was right, for the “big bang” makes it “clear that the Universe proceeds from a cause that is neither temporal, spatial, nor material.  In other words, it proceeds from a transcendent, non-natural cause at the origin of all that exists and, as we shall see, at the origin of the extreme fine-tuning of the Universe’s initial parameters and the laws of physics and biology, which are indispensable for the existence and evolution of atoms, stars, and complex life” (p. 100).  Indeed, Arno A. Penzias, 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics, said the evidence shows “‘that not only is there a creation of matter but also the creation of space and time.’”  What we now know, he said,  is “‘exactly what I would have predicted, had I had nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole’” (p. 109).

The Standard Model gained currency despite several decades of furious opposition.  Indeed, some of its proponents were persecuted by the academic establishment!  Philosophical materialists realized it challenged their most important assumption, that there’s nothing but matter that has always existed.  “To save their ideology, they had to silence at all costs the scientists researching and publishing these theories.  Herein lies the great interest of the history of these persecutions.  The materialists would not have unleashed such extreme violence upon scientists who theorized the expansion of the Universe and the Big Bang had they not been convinced that these theories made a strong case for the existence of God” (p. 128).  In Russia, Alexander Friedmann declared:  “Gentlemen, we have demonstrated that the Universe has not existed forever.  It had a beginning, several billion years ago, in a far-off age when it was no bigger than a speck of dust!” (p. 137). Though his students applauded his work, the Bolsheviks did not!  They realized it refuted their doctrinaire materialism and tried to silence him.  Friedmann remained defiant though soon thereafter he died under suspicious conditions.  But during the 1930s Joseph Stalin sought to silence his disciples, calling them “Lemaître’s henchmen.”  The Secretary General of the Communist Party of Leningrad “summed up the Soviet stance toward the Big Bang in a few vitriolic words, calling Lemaître and his crew ‘imposter scientists who seek to bring back to life the fairy tale according to which the world came out from nothing!’  His objective was to savagely hunt down Lemaître’s ‘reactionary scientists.’  Anyone who spoke or wrote about expansion was systematically eliminated” (p. 240).  A number of other scientists suffered under Stalin’s great “purges” in the ‘30s and were imprisoned or executed.  Similarly, in Germany physicists believing in the expansion of the cosmos were persecuted, with many of them (especially if they were Jews) fleeing to the United States.  But even here they often suffered opposition—evident in subtle discrimination and forfeited career opportunities.  But ultimately the evidence proved overwhelming, and the Standard Model prevailed.  Even its most influential critic, Fred Hoyle, ultimately accepted it and ended his life espousing a kind of deism.

Having devoted many pages to the importance of the Big Bang, Bollore and Bonnassies focus on implications of our “finely tuned” cosmos that “will blow you away” (p. 182).  “The Universe now looks like a big ‘setup,’ an incredibly precise piece of machinery whose every part shows stunning fine-tunings of design—complex cogs that mesh together miraculously, creating the conditions necessary for the existence and functioning of the whole” (p. 182).  There are a dozen or so of these complex cogs, including:  the force of gravity; the electromagnetic force; the strong and weak atomic forces; the speed of light; the mass of protons and electrons.  These all involve extraordinary numbers which could only have come about by chance or “from the complex calculations of a highly intelligent creator God.”  Everything we know about the cosmos leads to the conclusion that these numbers inform everything that exists.  “For some of these numbers, a very slight variation by even a distant decimal point would have yielded an unrecognizable Universe, and we would not be here to talk about it.  This is the essence of the ‘fine tuning’ principle” (p. 185).  The possibility that all this “just happened” is simply beyond belief!  Indeed, one cosmologist says that this fine tuning can be compared to archer hitting a one “‘square centimetre target 15 billion light years away’ “ (p. 197).  In the face of all the evidence, materialists believing everything came to be through blind chance dramatically illustrate a blind faith.  Indeed, reasonable people should surely conclude there’s a God Who designed its all!  The Universe came to be in an instant, and its intricate laws shaped a world that sustains everything that is. 

Turning from physics to biology we encounter similar evidences for God.  “Modern biology has shed light on the incredible complexity of even the smallest living cell, which in fact bears a resemblance to an ultra-sophisticated factory.  We now know that the transition to life was an extremely unlikely and complex event that took place over a relatively short span of time.  Consequently, the thesis that life emerged by pure chance in a Universe that was not specifically designed to be hospitable to it is no longer tenable.  A biological fine-tuning is added to the cosmological” (p. 229).  The authors believe there is an “invisible hand” orchestrating the organic world.  There’s a great chasm separating the inorganic and organic worlds, and that chasm seems to be getting wider every day.  So far, “no definite intermediate steps have been identified between the most complex inert matter and the least complicated life forms currently known” (p. 239).  Tiny cells—and their even tinier components such as DNA—are incredibly complex entities made up of thousands of parts.  That a single cell could arise by chance is virtually impossible.  To Chandra Wickramasinghe, professor of applied mathematics and astronomy at University College Cardiff and former collaborator with Fred Hoyle:  “‘The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate matter is 1 to a number with 40,000 noughts after it …   It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution.  There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence’” (p. 257).  

Having looked at evidence in physics and biology, the authors provide fascinating chapters dealing with significant scientists.  One chapter simply collects quotations from 100 eminent thinkers, many of them Nobel Prize winners.  For example, Alfred Kastler, winner of the 1966 Nobel Prize in Physics and the inventor of the laser, said: “The idea that the world, the material universe, created itself, seems to me patently absurd.  I do not conceive of the world without a creator, which is to say without a god.  For a physicist, a single atom is so complicated, so pregnant with intelligence, that the materialist universe simply makes no sense.”  Again, said he: “There is no chance of explaining the emergence of life and its evolution by the interaction of chance forces. Other forces are at work” (p. 265).  

Another chapter cites studies indicating what today’s scientists believe.  A paper detailing a century of Nobel Prizes “showed that 90% of Nobel prize winners identified with some religion and that two-thirds of them have been Christians” (p. 297).  Only 10% identified themselves as atheists.   Additional chapters examine the religious views of two of the 20th century greatest thinkers—Albert Einstein and Kurt Godel.  To Einstein:  “‘everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that some spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe, one that is vastly superior to that of man. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is surely quite different from the religiosity of someone more naïve’” (p. 310).  Though everyone’s heard of Einstein, only a select few know anything about Godel.  But his mathematical “peers considered him a singular genius.  The ‘Gödelian revolution’ is considered one of the greatest transformations in the history of mathematics and logic” (p. 322).  He was deeply theistic, noting that his religion was rather “similar to church religion”—indeed the Christian faith.  Toward the end of his life he set forth an ontological argument designed to demonstrate the existence of God, reviving the insights of St Anselm and others.  

The strongest part of God, the Science, the Evidence, is the material devoted to contemporary science.  But Bollore and Bonnassies insist there are many significant kinds of inquiries, each needing an appropriate way of thinking.  So in the second half of the book they delve into realms of apologetics—evidences “outside the sciences.”  This includes a thoughtful appraisal of the Bible.  It is truly remarkable that a small nation in a semi-arid land, lacking great cities or universities, could incubate a book “which contained a goldmine of knowledge about humanity and the cosmos.”  It had little in common with the writings of their pagan neighbors.  It refused to deify nature and insisted on high moral standards.  Amazingly:  “Most of the Bible’s claims about the nature and origin of the cosmos would remain unverifiable and inaccessible to human reason throughout antiquity and for many centuries thereafter.  But over the last century or so, modern science has proved them true” (p. 339).  The Bible is so true about so many things that it’s clearly much more than a purely-human collection of writings.  The authors assess and repudiate several of the reputed “errors” of the Bible and show that “each one turns out to contain surprising cosmological and anthropological truths.”  Critics frequently fail to show any mastery of the material.  “It’s been said that to err is human.  If we can’t find a single error in the Bible’s thousands of pages, that may suggest that its inspiration lies elsewhere, beyond the human realm” (p. 380).

Turning to the central figure in the Christian tradition—Jesus—we find solid reasons to believe Him to be the Son of God.  Ancient historians, both Jewish (Josephus) and pagan (Tacitus), provide historical evidence concerning Him, and multiple, credible Christian writings force us to choose what to make of Him.  After evaluating various views—that He was simply wise teacher or Jewish prophet or charlatan or madman—the authors conclude He was what the Christian Church has always claimed:  God Incarnate.  Given that fact, Old Testament prophecies make sense.  The incredible claims He made for Himself (e.g. forgiving sins) make sense.  The behavior of his disciples following His resurrection make sense.  The evidence that demands a verdict leads to belief in Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.

There is also strong philosophical evidence demonstrating the existence of God.  As C.S. Lewis showed, in Mere Christianity, there is a universal moral sense pointing to the Author of an everlasting ethical code.  Following Lewis leads us to an “exciting  approach:  an exercise in listening to the interior voice of our conscience, whose echo also can be perceived, though in a manner totally different to the echo of the Big Bang. St. Augustine once gave this worthy piece of advice:  ‘Do not go outside yourself, but enter into yourself, for truth dwells in the interior self’” (p. 487).  Why is it that something inside us says “no” or “don’t” when we envision doing some kinds of things?  If there’s nothing wrong with stealing an unattended car why do we feel guilty when doing it?  Yet many moderns say you’re free to do whatever you please.  Thus Jean-Paul Sartre pondered a passage in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov that said:  “If God did not exist, everything would be permitted.”  To Sartre, that meant:  “Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself.”  He stands alone, radically free to forge his own morality, for if there’s no God we find no “values or commands” to guide us apart from our personal inclinations.  Sartre’s purely subjective morality was endorsed by an eminent materialist philosopher, Richard Taylor:  “‘In a world without God, no purpose can be right and wrong, only our culturally and personally relative, subjective judgment.  This means that it is impossible to condemn war, persecution or crime as evil.  Nor can anyone admire brotherhood, equality and love.  Because in the universe without God, good and evil do not exist—there is only the bare valueless fact of existence, and there is no one to say that you are right and I am wrong’” (p. 490).  Anyone upset by the genocidal regimes in Germany, Russia, China, and Cambodia understand their actions by understanding their godless philosophies.  

Countering the philosophies of men such as Sartre and Taylor, Bollore and Bonnassies urge us to mine the riches of the Western philosophical tradition, beginning with Plato, “the first philosopher” to sense that there is a non-material world pointing to a “world soul” responsible for all that is.  Plato thought logic and mathematics enable us to discern that there is a “great organizer” who shaped the universe.  His student, Aristotle, “constructed a much more complex argument, arriving at God through the idea of motion.”  To him:  “Everything moving is moved by something else, which is moved by something else.”  There “cannot be an infinite series of movers.  The series must stop somewhere.  Otherwise, there would be no movement at all” (p. 496).  In fine:  There must be a Prime Mover.  Christian thinkers such as Augustine and Aquinas incorporated Greek philosophy into a comprehensive worldview that still proves persuasive for serious thinkers, as was evident in the resurgence of theistic philosophy following WWII.  

Highly accomplished philosophers have showed the shallowness of much that had transpired in modern times.  A variety of modern “objections to the existence of God had been carefully sifted, weighed, and ultimately found unconvincing.” Metaphysics once again began a serious discipline.  “Never before have so many and such good books been written about proofs for God’s existence than in our time” (p. 502).  An impressive of brilliant thinkers—including Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, William Craig, Robert Koons, and Edward Feser—demonstrate how effectively philosophers can argue for God’s existence.  Many of them show that “the correspondence between the free speculation of mathematicians and the physical reality of the world remains inexplicable apart from a coincidence bordering on the miraculous.  This seeming impasse actually points toward its solution:  mathematical formulae preceded the formation of the world; or, in other words, the world was conceived by an intelligent being” (p. 505).  

A French mathematician, René Thom, noted that these abstract formulae should persuade us that “‘Plato’s theory—that the universe is being informed by eternal static ideas—is a very natural and philosophically simple explanation’” (p. 505).  

The remarkable book concludes that:  “Materialism has always been just a belief, but today it increasingly appears as an irrational belief” (p. 535).  Evidence disproving it has been accumulating, and the authors believe:   “Our book is unique in offering a comprehensive panorama—including cosmology, philosophy, ethics, and historical enigmas. This richness of perspectives is possible only because evidence for God’s existence appears in every field of human study” (p. 536).  “As Paul of Tarsus writes in Acts 17:26-27, ‘God made them [men], so that they would search for Him, and if possible, grope for Him and find Him, who in fact is not far from each one of us.’  These words encourage us to persevere in our search. We hope this book will help in that endeavour” (p. 538).  And, indeed, it does!

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Following the Islamic terrorists’ attacks on 9/11/2001, President George W. Bush naively referred to Islam as “the religion of peace.”  Nonsense!  As the great Harvard historian Samuel Huntington said many years ago, Islam has always had “bloody borders.”  The great French philosopher Jacques Ellul also rejected  the “current of favorable predispositions to Islam” notably evident in the many euphemistic discussions of jihad,” saying Jihad is basic to Islam— a sacred duty for the faithful, the “normal path to expansion” via wars of conquest.  Devout Muslims are determined to conquer and control as much of the globe as possible.  Writing presciently, in 1991, Ellul declared:  “Hostage-taking, terrorism, the destruction of Lebanese Christianity, the weakening of the Eastern Churches (not to mention the wish to destroy Israel) . . . all this recalls precisely the resurgence of the traditional policy of Islam.”  History records this, for immediately following the prophet Mohammed’s death in 632 A.D. Muslim warriors launched a century of world-wide conquests remarkable both for their rapidity and brutality.  Though Spanish Christians notched a memorable victory at Covadonga in 722, their nation would be controlled for centuries by Muslims.  Only in France, in 732 (at the Battle of Tours), did Charles Martel’s Christian soldiers successfully defeat the Arabs and save most of Europe from Islam.  But in 1453 Muslims finally conquered Constantinople, burying the last remnants of the once powerful Byzantine Empire and adding the Balkans to their hegemony.  Less than a century later, in 1529 (as Luther was orchestrating his Reformation in Wittenberg), Muslim armies threatened Vienna, only to be repelled by Emperor Charles V.  In short:  for 1400 years Islam has waged Jihad and taken control of great regions once controlled by Christians.

The recent Hamas slaughter of innocent Israelis on October 7, 2023, is yet another instance in this centuries-long Jihad.  On that day some 6,000 Muslims charged out of Gaza and killed 1200 Jews.  Equally appalling, almost immediately there were mass  demonstrations in the West supporting not the Israelis but Hamas!  Protestors carried signs that read “From the River to the Sea,” “Resistance Is Justified,” “Resistance Is Not Terrorism,” “Fight White Supremacy,” “Long Live the Intifada,” and “By Any Means Necessary.”  They celebrated the terrorists and chanted their victory cry:  “Allahu Akbar!”  Jewish synagogues and schools were firebombed and shot at.  Still more:  “Throughout this period, from the moment news of the massacre in Israel emerged, one thing in particular is worth noticing:  there was not a single major protest against Hamas in any Western city.  Not one.  The people who carried out the massacre and started a war did not find themselves the object of criticism on the streets of one Western city” (p. xi).  

To understand what happened (and why it matters), reading Douglas Murray’s On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization (New York: HarperCollins, c. 2025; Kindle Edition) proves enlightening.  Murray is an English journalist living in America, the author of some fine works, including The War on the West.  As soon as he heard about the Hamas invasion he flew to Israel to investigate.  Having  covered wars on three continents, he’d “seen my share of horrors.  But there was something unusual about this atrocity.”  What appalled him “was that the terrorists of October 7 did what they did with such relish.  Not just the endless shouting of their war cries.  Or the visible glee you could see in their faces and hear in their voices.  It was the fact that all of this gave them such intense joy.  And that they were proud of their actions” (p. xiii).  Murray provides historical details as well as eye-witness accounts to explain the significance of 10/7/23.  The role of Ayatollah Khomeini, who established the radical Islamist regime in Iran in 1979, must be understood, for Hamas today is largely funded and supplied by the Iranians who, at Friday prayers, cry out “Death to America,” calling America “the Great Satan” and Israel “the Little Satan” who need to be destroyed.  But Hamas has also received generous subsidies from the United States!  “Since 2009 alone, two years after Hamas took full control of Gaza, the US government sent over $400 million there, mainly through the United States Agency for International Development” (p. 123).  Much of this money ended up in the pockets of Hamas’s leaders, making several of them billionaires!  “While claiming that their people were living in a poverty-stricken concentration camp, these leaders lived in luxury hotels and penthouses in Qatar” (p. 124).  

When Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, it became a totally Muslim region.  Shortly thereafter Hamas won an election and took control and ramped up rocket attacks on Israel.  Jewish settlers near Gaza, generally living in kibbutzim, built bomb shelters for safety but tried to live peacefully with Palestinians in Gaza.  But on October 7 everything changed.  Hoards of armed Hamas terrorists swarmed through the region, killing and raping, stealing and destroying everything in sight.  “Most terrorist groups do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.  Or they regard all the citizens of a country they oppose to be one and the same.  The professed logic of Hamas is that since Israel has military conscription for most young Israelis—both men and women—any military-aged Israeli is a legitimate target, whether they are in uniform or not, that the elderly could have served in the army, and that any young Israeli—even a baby—could grow up to be in the military.  By this logic absolutely every Israeli is a legitimate target and there is no such thing as innocent and guilty, combatant and noncombatant” (p. 73).

Though Murray is personally quite secular, while writing this book he “kept finding the same lines coming back to me.  First was the line from Deuteronomy when God says:  ‘I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that thou and thy seed may live.’  I thought also of the Psalmist who says, ‘I shall not die, but live.’  I thought of these lines continuously, even in the moments when things could not have been darker” (p. 157).

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In 2020 Douglas Murray republished an e-book, Islamaphilia:  A Very Metropolitan Malady (Kindle Edition).  Islamaphilia can “be defined as the expression of disproportionate adoration of Islam.”  He thinks it  strange that many people can be quite critical—even insulting—of other religions but give a “pass” to Islam.  So he wrote this short book to illustrate the phenomenon by citing prominent persons mouthing it.  Turning first to politicians, Murray cites a prominent French politician, Jacques Chirac, who deftly re-wrote history by celebrating a “Europe whose roots are as much Muslim as Christian.”  Then there was President Barack Obama addressing the United Nations, praising Islam and warning:  “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam” (p. 14).  John Brennon, Obama’s head of the CIA, said he “came to see Islam not how it is often misrepresented, but for what it is—how it is practiced every day, by well over a billion Muslims worldwide, a faith of peace and tolerance and great diversity” (p. 15).  Entertainers also endeavor to speak favorably of Islam.  It’s difficult to find “one mainstream film, movie, TV series or documentary that has run anything at all that is critical of Islam” (p. 28).  Cartoons are tightly censored.  Comics muzzle themselves.  “There is never an opportunity missed to portray the Crusaders as dirty, dark ages villains, and no opportunity avoided to show the Muslims as golden age golden boys” (p. 31).  Academics and journalists rarely write anything negative about Islam.  Fearless atheists such as Richard Dawkins become silent when asked to assess it.  One might expect the Christian churches to defend their faith, but they “long ago made their peace with Islam. Today many appear to have fallen in love with it” (p. 55).  The one prominent Christian leader who mildly criticized Islam was Pope Benedict XVI.  In a lecture in Regensberg, Germany, he cited a Byzantine Emperor who said something negative about Mohammed.  Though he differed with the emperor and tried to engage Muslims in dialogue, Benedict was subjected to torrents of rage throughout the Islamic world.  They rioted, attacked and killed Christians in Africa and the Middle East.  But not to worry, the future Pope Francis I (then the Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires) criticised Benedict and urged other Catholics to join him in defying the head of the Church.

Summing up his presentation, Murray thinks Islamopiles refuse to criticize Islam because they have a “desire to be nice” while “knowing of very little” about it.  They also live in fear of terrorists’ attacks.  Summing up:  “Islam is quite new to the West in such large numbers.  In the last fifty years, millions of Muslims have come here.  Most of them add a lot and want to give a lot.  Some have views which are hard or impossible to compromise with and bring utterly unacceptable baggage.  For all their talk, most people with any influence or position look at these people with terror.  The politicians have no idea what they’re going to think of them.  Artists and writers have been caught off-guard.  Having poked at empty hornets’ nests for so many years they have forgotten the courage required to do the necessary poking at full ones. And then in general—in wider society as well—you have the terrible problem that as each year goes by more and more people appear to know less and less. Such people are easy prey to people who tell them lies about history, lies about the present and lies that simply sound nice” (p. 58).  It’s time to learn some hard truths about Islam and deal with it both wisely and firmly.  

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Melanie Phillips is an English journalist who moved from the radical left to the traditional right in the culture wars dividing her nation.  More than a decade ago she wrote The World Turned Upside Down, warning of immanent threats to our civilization.  As a journalist she strives to be tell truth to power, to follow the evidence and think logically.  She came to believe “that power has now hijacked truth and made it subservient to its own ends.  The result is a world turned upside down.”  This results from two centuries of intellectual developments which can “be summed up as man first dethroning God in favor of reason, then dethroning reason in favor of man, and finally dethroning man himself.  This was done by replacing objective knowledge with ideology, which grew out of the belief that man was all-powerful and could reshape the world in whatever image he chose.” 

Prodded by the “Hamas-led program” on 10/7/23, Phillips sought to understand it in the broadest possible context.  So she wrote The Builder’s Stone:  How Jews and Christians Built the West—and Why Only They Can Save It (New York:  Post Hill Press, c. 2025; Kindle Edition).  Phillips warns:  “The West is poised at a momentous and fateful juncture.  I have written for many years about the onslaught being mounted against Western society by its enemies, both within and without.  I have never felt such a strong sense of living at a key turning point in the history of civilisation itself—until now.  In part, this is personal.  I am a British Jew and I live for most of the time in Israel. I was there on October 7, 2023, that terrible day when Israelis endured the worst single attack on Jews since the Holocaust.  I was there during the war that followed.  It’s been impossible not to feel that we are living through a seismic episode in Jewish history” (p. 6).   

Beyond describing what happened, Phillips wants to explain it, to unveil “the forces that have driven the supposed apex of reason, conscience and progress that is Western society off the intellectual, moral and cultural rails into unreason, demoralisation and a pre-modern atavism.  This is at root a spiritual problem, a crisis over meaning and purpose.  That takes us headfirst into the issue of religious belief” (p. 8).  Religion is, indeed, the “key issue behind the West’s civilizational travails.  A spiritual vacuum underpins the denigration of the nation, the abandonment of the family, the destruction of education; it has shaped contempt for the past and despair about the future; it has replaced emotional health by a profound loneliness.  All these things are connected” (p. 9).  The Hamas terrorists were not simply killing innocent Jews—they were trying to dismantle the civilization shaped by Jewish and Christian theology.  The throngs of people in London and America supporting Hamas were in fact in fact turbo-charging “the West’s decades-long process of cultural suicide” (p. 12).  

During the past century many Westerners have abandoned their civilization’s sinews, creating “a vacuum into which the Islamists have marched” (p. 26).  Islam is now the fastest-growing religion in Europe, and some areas in France are completely controlled by Muslim immigrants.  Islamists have successfully forged a “red-green alliance” with left-wingers so as to subvert and destroy Western Christian Culture.  Thus:  “White liberals are Islamic supremacists’ useful idiots” (p. 32).  They portray Palestinians as victims and Israelis as oppressors.  “The terrible truth is that the West no longer understands what civilization actually is.  Specifically, it no longer understands that civilization is Western, that the West gave birth to it.  Instead, our best and brightest have told us for decades that the West was born in the original sins of imperialism and colonialism, racism and white privilege.  It’s not worth fighting or dying for.  Indeed, John Lennon’s “‘nothing to fight or die for’  is the mantra of the modern deracinated liberal” (p. 35).

Western civilization has, unfortunately, been unravelling for some time.  It seems incapable of defending itself or recovering its vitality.  This is most manifest in the decline of patriotism, the collapse of the family and the decline of religious observance.  Ours is the world proposed in John Lennon’s song “Imagine,” celebrating the “brotherhood of man” with “no countries…and no religion too.”   The dedication to “human rights,” Phillips says, “is nothing less than a secular, quasi-religious movement.  It provides what purports to be the defining creed of the modern world in a promise to perfect humanity” (p. 151).  But Western Civilization was built in accord with the Jewish and Christian commitment to duties, not rights!  The elevation of rights over duties is quite apparent in Britain and America, most especially in their churches.  Wherever liberalism (or progressivism) prevails religious life atrophies.  “The liberal churches, Phillips says,  “seem to believe that moral laws militate against compassion, driving away people who want the freedom to live and love as they want.  But a lax approach that goes with the flow and eventually changes the church out of all recognition undermines the point of having a church at all” (p. 331).

After exploring the myriad problems besetting us Phillips suggests some ways to revive Western Civilization and build a better world.  Just as the medieval Spaniards launched a reconquista to take back their homeland from the Muslims we need to take up arms and recover our culture.  What we need is a fresh corps of leaders, for those now in power “have trampled over the concerns of ordinary people, denouncing them as ‘deplorables,’ ‘racists,”’and transmitters of ‘phobic’ forms of mental disorder—otherwise known as dissenting opinions” (p. 308).  But all this can change!  “It is possible to insist upon educators actually educating rather than indulging in social engineering or propaganda.  It is possible to empower parents, to incentivize marriage and having children.  It is possible to junk the destructive attachment to universalist institutions such as ‘human rights’ law and revive instead the primacy of the common law in Britain and the primacy of legislation passed by national parliaments.  It is possible to restore the value of the nation by policing its borders and safeguarding its historic identity.  It is possible to choose cultural survival rather than to slide off the edge of the cliff” (p. 309).

All this is only possible, however, if the Judeo-Christian moral code can be reestablished.  Young crusaders like Charlie Kirk could, in fact, lead us back to the eternal truths of Scripture.  “People are palpably crying out for meaning in their lives.  The apparently inexorable march of destructive cultural forces isn’t inexorable at all.  The problem is that they have never been properly understood and properly opposed.  The time has come for a counterrevolution on all fronts to save civilization.  There needs to be a rescue program of action:  civilization’s resistance movement,” a reconquesta akin to that undertaken by the Spaniards century ago.  We need intellectual crusaders like Thomas Aquinas, who wrote Summa Contra Gentiles to counter Islam.   And the Jewish people must play an essential role in that counterrevolutionary resistance” (p. 311).  That they may do so leads Phillips to conclude:  “For up against the unconscionable evil that was unleashed upon them on that terrible October day, the Jews are teaching their most important lesson of all, the one upon which all their other lessons depend, the one that lies at the very core of their astonishing resilience and survival in the face of overwhelming odds.  It couldn’t be more simple, more obvious, and more ignored.  It’s the most fundamental requirement for the West, and yet it’s the one that the West has yet fully to understand.  It consists of just two words.  Choose life” (p. 338).  

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In 2006, following a terrorist attack in London’s underground railway (the Tube), Melanie Phillips published Londonistan: Britain’s Terror State from Within (London:  Gibson Square; Kindle Edition).   Recently writing a forward to the reissuing of that treatise, she notes “it is alarming beyond measure to record that Britain is even now sleepwalking into Islamisation.”  The two-edged sword of Islam and cultural chaos is destroying her nation.  “The London bombings revealed a terrible truth about Britain, something even more alarming and dangerous to long-term stability than the fact that foreign terrorists had been able to carry out the 9/11 attacks on U.S. soil in 2001.  They finally lifted the veil on Britain’s dirty secret in the war on terrorism—that for more than a decade, London had been the epicentre of Islamic militancy in Europe.  Under the noses of successive British governments, Britain’s capital had turned into ‘Londonistan’—a mocking play on the names of such state sponsors of terrorism as Afghanistan—and become the major European centre for the promotion, recruitment and financing of Islamic terror and extremism.”  

This has come to pass because:  “Britain has become a largely post-Christian society, where traditional morality has been systematically undermined and replaced by an ‘anything goes’ culture in which autonomous decisions about codes of behaviour have become unchallengeable rights.  With everyone’s lifestyle now said to be of equal value, the very idea of moral norms is frowned upon as a vehicle for discrimination and prejudice.  Judaism and Christianity, the creeds that formed the bedrock of Western civilisation, have been pushed aside and their place filled by a plethora of paranormal activities and cults.  . . . . The outcome has been the creation of a debauched and disorderly culture of instant gratification, with disintegrating families, feral children and violence, squalor and vulgarity on the streets.” 

At the heart of all this is an ideology of autonomous individualism, a feminism that despises men and marriage, schools celebrating “child-centered” pedagogy, and an anti-racism that is actually racist.  Whereas in America some of the churches have held fast to the Western Christian tradition, “the Church of England has been in the forefront of the retreat from the Judeo-Christian heritage.  At every stage it has sought to appease the forces of secularism, accommodating itself to family breakdown, seeking to be nonjudgmental and embracing multiculturalism.  The result has been a shift in Britain’s centre of moral and political gravity as the Judeo-Christian foundations of British society have come under sustained assault.”  Consequently:  Britain “has effectively allowed itself to be taken hostage by militant gays, feminists or ‘antiracists’ who used weapons such as public vilification, moral blackmail and threats to people’s livelihoods to force the majority to give in to their demands.” 

Following WWII and the collapse of the British Empire several million Muslims entered England, many of them enjoying the generous welfare system of their host nation—free education, medical care, unemployment benefits.  They enjoyed the status of “victims” and manipulated the notion of “human rights” to magnify their political power.  They now control significant sections of London.  Linking hands with English socialists they are committed to destroying what’s made Britain British, making multiculturalism “the orthodoxy of the day, along with nonjudgmentalism and lifestyle choice.  The only taboo now was the expression of normative majority values such as monogamy, heterosexuality, Christianity or Britishness.”  Unless this process is reversed, Phillips warns, Britain will soon no longer be British.