I have frequently mentioned and praised Iain Murray's Evangelicalism Divided, his often astute
chronicle and analysis of 20th century Evangelicalism and the roots
of its decay.
Nevertheless I know from Murray's other works that he remains
an advocate of the 'Christian' West and in particular Christian Britain. While
his vision and means of accomplishing and maintaining this reality differs on
certain levels from the Evangelical project, they are in effect related and
perhaps more closely than Murray would be willing to grant.
The Dominionist and Transformationalist ideologies of
Evangelicalism are part of the same Sacralist spectrum. Murray sees his
Sacralism as being at odds with Evangelicalism in that the latter produces
worldliness and compromise. Evangelicalism clearly falls into this trap but the
older 'revivalist' Sacralism advocated by Murray and others affiliated with the
Banner of Truth is but the other side of the same coin.
He is to be commended in that he doesn't believe in
compromising truth to attain a certain political or social status and yet I
cannot agree that he or the vision he advocates is free from all compromise. He
would (admirably) rely on the Spirit as opposed to a cultural and political
programme that seeks to infiltrate and capture spheres of culture and yet, the
project itself is flawed in its premise. I believe grave and evil, even perilous
compromises are inherent in all such projects that fall within the orb of 'Christendom'
so called. Murray believes the British Empire was godly and Christian and yet
the Evangelical project to recapture and re-Christianise the West is flawed
because it makes concessions and compromises truth in order to gain traction.
Just because outward symbols and rituals appeal to God, or
that lip service to truth is retained and utilised, does not mean that the
deeds themselves nor their ideological foundations are Christian. The
compromises made by British Christianity in order to build the Empire and its
society are just as profound and destructive, though because it was (supposedly)
conducted with good and honest intention, he can't seem to see it... to see
that it too was a compromise and ultimately a lie. History has borne this out
and the Scriptures (when it comes to the morality and supposed Christianity of
the British Empire) are not on Murray's side.
Murray is hardly alone in reflecting on the development of
liberal theology in Germany and in drawing a connection between its ideals and
fruits with the dangerous turn that Germany took in the 1930's. Depending on
one's understanding of WWI, some will mark this course from the time of
Bismarck and Unification while others will make a distinction between the Bismarck
era (along with WWI) and what happened after, under the Third Reich. They would
view the latter as a fruit of the Versailles Treaty and while the nationalism
of the First War was problematic enough, the Versailles Treaty, the worldwide
economic collapse and a reaction to certain policies during the war (such as
the British blockade) are what created the radicalism of Hitler. There's
something to all these arguments as such questions are inevitably complex.
Murray quotes RL Dabney favourably and indeed Dabney is a
well known 19th century voice sounding the warning about
developments within the German Church and culture.
Regardless of how one marks the history and distinctions the
comparisons have been made. I don't think Murray means to suggest there's a
direct connection between Tübingen and Auschwitz but rather the idea is that
liberal theology undermined German Christianity and made it more susceptible to
the influence of one such as Hitler.
While I deplore liberal theology and condemn it I think this
connection is shaky and can be challenged at several points. I continue to
argue the groundwork was laid centuries earlier in the framework and heritage
of Magisterial Protestantism. Some disingenuously and erroneously blame the
cultural slip on the Lutheran concept of Two Kingdoms but this only
demonstrates that they both misunderstand the nature of Lutheran Two Kingdoms
doctrine as well as what the Nazis were and how they were received and
perceived by Christians living under Weimar.
In brief we will only reiterate a point that's been made
elsewhere. Lutheran doctrine retained a form of Constantinian impulse and
retained the notion of Christianity being reckoned in cultural and political
terms. This led to both a type of nominal 'cultural' Christianity as well as a
confusion of Church with culture and politics.... the very thing advocated by
Murray and certainly by RL Dabney in his day.
Murray may believe that refusing to compromise with the world
will keep this confusion from taking place but the very project of something
like 'Christian England' is already a compromise. Dabney's celebration of
Confederate and Old Southern Christianity is also an example of willful
blindness. Murray and Dabney both stand in line with theologies that buttressed
and supported the system and thus were (and are) completely blind to the evils
that result.
Indeed while the crimes of the Nazis were atrocious, how
blind is Murray to the atrocities and crimes committed by the British! Britain
is often referenced as one of the 'democracies' fighting the 'tyranny' of
Germany and yet to the people of the British Empire, the peoples of Africa,
India and parts of Asia... not to mention Ireland and the American colonies,
Britain was the murderous tyrant and a monstrous one at that.
Like the Nazis, the British Empire has the blood of millions
on its hands and while the Nazi regime was brief and incredibly fierce the
British project extended for centuries. Would the Nazi regime be less offensive
if it spread out its killings over a century as opposed to a decade? What if
instead of launching a massive war it instead fought dozens of smaller
conflicts? Would that change the perception?
The British stole resources, lands, started wars and
destroyed lives and whole societies. Their policies were racist, immoral and
treacherous. Much more could be said about British society at home and the
cruelty of 18th and 19th century social, economic and
industrial policy.
But Murray can't see that. He like JC Ryle thinks that the
Britain which entered the 20th century was somehow Christian. There
are aspects of it that are perhaps more desirable and appealing when compared
to the Britain of today and yet it certainly is nothing to be wished for. The
Nonconformists at the time certainly viewed it as something less than Christian
in its structure and practice and so they laboured to change it. And in their
misguided zeal they did, and subsequently created a monster which has now
turned inward and is in the process of devouring itself.
The story of the fall of the British Empire is indeed a
fascinating one and complicated to say the least. The early 20th
century reforms played a part but that's but a small fraction of the larger
story which is one of capitalism, militarism, concentrated wealth,
overextension, hypocrisy and the fact that though Britain stood on the winning
side of the Second World War, she ended up (in the overall reckoning) being a
loser and became a subject to her Atlantic offspring and its ascendant empire.
Murray himself is (apparently) proud of his service in the
Cameronians during the 1950's Malay War, a sort of miniaturised pre-Vietnam. In
reality it was akin to the contemporary French conflicts in Indochina in which
the European powers (which had lost these territories to the Japanese)
attempted to re-assert their imperial rule after the conclusion of the war and
to re-structure these countries. Their efforts at reconquest were rejected and
under the aegis of peasant-nationalist 'communism' the people rose up and
fought their exploitative and brutal European masters. The Malay War though
paltry compared to the larger conflict in Indochina still contained all the
same ugliness and war crimes. The fact that Murray would be proud of this
service is something that baffles me. It's a mark of shame and represents what
can only be called a glaring blind spot in conscience.
People seem to forget that the British Empire was by many
estimations, the largest in history. You don't build something like that
without trampling on a lot of people and Britain did by the millions, by the
tens of millions. Truly she was a beast rising from an ocean of blood. Empires
are projects built on the premise of theft and the threat of violence toward
those who do not acquiesce. It is patently an anti-Christian ethos and yet since the days of Constantine and
Theodosius, it is a virus that has infected Christian thought. Murray
criticises a crass and unprincipled manifestation of this in 20th
century Evangelicalism but fails to see that he too is deeply affected by the
same Sacralist cancer. The British Empire was not a portrait of the
Ecclesiastical Bride of Christ but rather the Beast-Whore of Revelation, a form
of covenant apostasy wed to the Beast-state. Its fall is something for
Christians to celebrate.
It's always easy to feel better about yourself by drawing
comparisons with Hitler, Stalin and Mao the great mass killers of modern times.
And yet while the British regime may have put on a more benevolent facade it
was in the end every bit as brutal with a death toll extending into the
millions and tens of millions. These are people who died directly at its hand
or as a result of its policies and schemes. As a consequence the many leaders
and heroes of the 'Christian' British Empire are exposed for what they really
are... thieves and butchers, the sort of people who do not inherit the Kingdom
of God.
Another figure associated with the Banner of Truth, one
Maurice Roberts continues to make the same arguments. For years I've heard him
say things like, Britain lost her empire
because she forgot God.
The truth is that Britain forgot God when she built her
empire. She and the Christians who supported the project spat on Christ's
Kingdom and showed their contempt for it when they perverted its principles and
imperatives and redefined its concepts as it blasphemously dared to label its
ventures as Christian.
The very concept of a Christian nation or empire is itself an
example of petitio principii on a
massive scale. The concept itself is bogus and without warrant and would
require some kind of redefinition of terms like Church, Christianity, Gospel
and Kingdom. Once this question begging is recognised their arguments not only
fail, they evaporate.
Roberts recently said that 'once great nations like Britain'
have been 'reduced... to spiritual deserts'. Really? By what standard does he
judge that Britain was great? I'm afraid at this point he has completely
abandoned Biblical thinking and is letting patriotism and sentimentality govern
his thought. The Victorian and Edwardian grandeur along with the moral fibre of
the British Empire were ultimately exposed for what they were, a cheap veneer
and one that quickly wasted away. So much of British Christianity was built on
sand and the fires of the 20th century left it looking like the
London Docklands during the Blitz.
I'm sorry to report that while these Banner of Truth authors
have produced many fine works they have in the end not learned the lessons of
history and have not had the courage to re-examine the fundamental questions
demanded by the Scriptures. Perhaps the answers are for them (like many
American Evangelicals) unthinkable.
We
needn't hate Britain. That is by no means what I propose in this piece.
America's crimes are as bad if not worse. All empires are evil and the United
States has orchestrated and implemented more than one holocaust in its history.
It too has been responsible for millions of deaths. The Americans have achieved
a rather unique thing in the annals of history. They have built an empire but have
managed to obscure and deny its existence. This is even as they reign over what
is perhaps the largest empire in history. The fact that the American Imperium
is structured a bit differently has perhaps contributed to this but it's no
less a travesty, no less an evil.
My point here was to point out that for all of Murray's
acumen and wisdom he and other Banner of Truth figures like Roberts are
woefully blind on this point and so one wonders if in the end anyone will
really grasp the point he tried to make in Evangelicalism Divided? I'm sorry to
say that almost nineteen years later, I don't think many have. Perhaps because
Murray himself hasn't really worked out the implications of his argument, the
weight and import of its assessment continues to fall somewhat flat. On one
level his arguments and condemnations of Evangelicalism are powerful and quite
sound and yet they also apply to the generations of Magisterial Protestantism
that antedate the 20th century... a point Murray is seemingly
unwilling to entertain.
For it is Magisterial Protestantism itself that is the
cancer. In all its zeal to reform the abomination of Roman Catholicism it
failed to eradicate the Constantinian roots of compromise and thus the noxious
weed took form once more. Murray can see the rotten fruit as manifested in the
post-war period but he can't see that it's but an offshoot of the same garden
planted back in the 16th century. No longer able to flourish in
fertile Western soil it today grows out of cracks in the pavement and so its
form is different, but it's the same old plant and just as ugly. Its worldly
and corrupt roots are exposed and maybe that is what some have found shocking.
In previous generations those same roots were buried in rich soil and were lost
to sight. Only a few were brave enough to dig down and expose them and call
them out for what they were.