The Lord Knoweth His Own
The Eclipse of Mere Christianity & the Vision of the Elect
I do not think it good to hold such a conference at such a time without paying tribute to our friend William J. Abraham, who died unexpectedly last week. Billy was an Irish Methodist theologian and philosopher who taught for most of his career at Perkins Theological Seminary in Dallas. He is best remembered, I believe, with his own words, from an online lecture he gave last year [9/18/20]. He said:
If we’re to renew the Christian tradition and reform the nation we’re going to need to have the deep resources of the widely Christian tradition, and in my book that means we’re going to have to revisit the deep faith of the church that was developed in the first seven great councils of the church in terms of the great creeds . . . the doctrine of the Trinity, deep version of the incarnation, and the doctrine of atonement. All of that material is going to have to be available to [a corrected Methodism] because we’re not going to be apologetic about it. The new Methodist Church will have the deep doctrinal resources to be able to face the culture....
We need conciliar decisions about this. It’s not enough to say, ‘Oh yes, we need the great classical faith of the church,’ what C.S. Lewis called ‘mere Christianity,’ and that we need robust practices of the church. We’ve got to have corporate commitment on that—and that’s what we’re going to have. We’re going to have a church that is going to say, ‘This is where we stand; this is what we believe; this is what we’re going to do; this is what our mission is, and we’re going to go after it.’
In the course of this lecture Dr. Abraham, who had committed his life to the internal reform of United Methodism, made clear his belief that efforts in that respect had failed, and Methodism had to be born again in the image and likeness of the ancient faith. We mourn the passing of our friend, but he leaves our hearts strangely warmed, as one might expect from such a pillar of light.
Touchstone & Mere Christianity
The first section of this presentation is titled “Touchstone & Mere Christianity,” and I will begin it with a bit of navel-gazing. I often struggle with the morbid indulgence of Puddleglumish speculation on what sort of death the Touchstone project will die, for all earthly institutions but one, like their founders, are mortal, and upon returning to them years after their foundings, one invariably discovers that they have, if they are journals, disappeared, or lost their original reason for being, or have become something the founders would renounce.
Touchstone has always seemed to me a highly vulnerable enterprise on several fronts, its most likely cause of death being one of two: The first would be a falling-out among its senior editors. The sort of person we seek for this defining task must be a bit peculiar. He must possess a level of conviction that moves him to swim strongly against the tide of cultural and church apostasy, but is, on the other hand, willing to work fraternally with people his church officially considers schismatics—an unpromising situation the logical result of which we have thus far been spared.
The other likely cause of death—perhaps not institutional, but spiritual, which is worse—is successful penetration by the Spirit of the Age we have always made it our business to oppose. There are fiscal incentives which could deliver this coup quickly, for there is nothing that kills lean and hungry conviction quicker than waking up comfortably rich—not, of course, that I am discouraging anyone from being generous with us, for we do need money to carry on—er, I mean, as evidence of God’s favor. Or, there is, most likely of all, falling to what I have observed is the surprising power of weariness with being the odd man out—a compromising force which a former chief editor of Christianity Today recently noted that Evangelicalism has not been able to withstand. (I believe this certainly to be true of the ideological leadership of the movement, now morbidly compromised by egalitarianism.) This is not just connected to our Niceness deficiency, but to our lack of membership in and support from any of the better clubs. Carrying on like this for an indefinite term is spiritually tiring, and along with this weariness comes temptation to embrace the forces of institutional entropy and die to one’s first love.
We are aware that witness to the precariousness of our existence is found even in our subtitle, “A Journal of Mere Christianity.” The concept carries with it an implicit but unavoidably divisive church-question. I found it convenient to ignore this until some years ago I wrote an article—not for Touchstone—the subject of which I don’t remember, but which must have contained an apology of some sort for the concept of mere Christianity. When the piece was published, I found a lengthy rebuke had been appended to it by the Catholic editor, himself a convert from Protestantism. He said, in sum, that mere Christianity is a purely Protestant notion, to be rejected by Catholics on the ground that the Roman Church had the only valid claim to the title, which did not and could not exist outside the boundaries of its communion. To this he attached many infallible proofs, lest his readership, mostly ex-Protestants, I believe, be tempted back to the cucumbers, leeks, and garlics of Wittenberg, Geneva, or Canterbury.
I was, of course, affronted by the editorial ambush, but let it go and just did not write for this magazine again, not because I was interested in tempting Catholic converts to leave their own frying pan and return to the Protestant fire, but because I thought his argument logically valid and therefore not to be opposed on merely logical grounds, which I would have liked the opportunity to explain. As in all such apologies, the ground on which the editor rested was not, I believe, the compulsion of Reason itself but principally an irreducible faith in the truth of a certain interpretation of the Creed, an axiom that precedes all such arguments, these being products of a prior will to believe them.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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more on Christianity from the online archives
31.1—January/February 2018
on Taking the Measure of the Deserving & the Undeserving Poor by Martin Bordelon
more from the online archives
18.10—December 2005
on an Apostle’s Encounter with the Son’s Children by Anthony Esolen
20.7—September 2007
Paul Didn’t Build Bridges to Popular Culture by Russell D. Moore
20.6—July/August 2007
The Beowulf Poet Was a Shrewd Christian Apologist by Douglas Wilson
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