Signals of Transcendence – 3/1/2024
belatedly Why am I here? What is life all about? What’s the point of it all, anyway? Many ask these questions. Many dismiss them quickly, repeatedly. Some begin a quest to find THE answers, but end up in the wrong place. Some find TRUTH and it changes everything.
Os Guinness has written an intriguing book, Signals of Transcendence (2023), each chapter a case study of some notable figure who, at a key point in his or her life, cried out, “There must be something more.” Guinness credits his mentor, Peter Berger, for coining the term ‘signals of transcendence’ to describe the experiences that provoke the soul to yearn for more than can be seen.
Is life merely “a tale told by an idiot,” as Shakespeare says in Macbeth, or is it just a “trash bag of random coincidences torn open in a wind,” as Joseph Heller wrote? Guinness asks, “Will it be chance, necessity, determinism, karma, or our stars?” Or is there something . . . someone . . . ultimate, God as revealed in the Bible, who draws all to him, as in John 12:32 and John 6:44, 55?
I can think of three especially poignant ‘signal’ experiences in my life. The first I’ve written on elsewhere on this site, regarding the crisis of pointlessness I had as a teenage atheist that led to my conversion. Guinness advises us that “signals only signal.” They don’t come with the full story. It’s up to us to take the steps that lead to answers. In my case I had no idea where to look, since I had rejected all religion when I rejected my Roman Catholic heritage, and since it was the evolutionary worldview, that suffused all of my formal education, that had provoked the ‘life-has-no-purpose’ crisis in the first place.
If we are just ‘naked apes,’ or selfish genes, or as Plato put it, “featherless bipeds,” there would be no hope, no point. (Diogenes responded to Plato by plucking a chicken, throwing it into the assembly, and declaring, “Here is your Platonic man.”)
God was gracious to me. With perfect timing he crossed my path with a Christian family, offering me the chance to respond when I heard some truths I’d never considered before. It took several months for me to work through this new landscape, but when I realized that Jesus is exactly who He claims to be in Scripture, I believed. Life changed completely, forever.
Guinness’ first chapter describes the signal event in the life of Malcolm Muggeridge, the prolific and famous writer and journalist. In WW2 Muggeridge was an intelligence officer monitoring German shipping in Mozambique, what seemed to him to be an utterly pointless role in a life altogether too pointless thus far. He was drunk, alone, depressed, and decided to commit suicide. He swam out into the ocean, planning to go too far to possibly return. But he glanced back at one point, saw the lights along the coast and thought of his wife, Kitty, back in England.
“They were the lights of the world; they were the lights of my home, my habitat, where I belonged. I must reach them. There followed an overwhelming joy such as I had never experienced before; an ecstasy.” He swam back. He had hope again. Was he converted? No, not at all. But he began a quest for meaning.
Guinness reports that Muggeridge eventually became a Christian, which is the consensus view. His ‘Christianity’ however, was at first Anglican, then later Roman Catholic. Muggeridge brought Mother Theresa to the attention of the world in his TV documentary, Something Beautiful for God. In short, Malcolm properly started the quest, but landed in the wrong destination in the end. It is significant, I believe, that Guinness provides no details of an actual born again conversion experience or testimony on the part of Muggeridge.
I love Os Guinness, but he has a serious lack of discernment about what is wheat and what is tare within Christendom. Not that it’s easy! And there is no way to validate any specific case of true vs. false conversion while we reside under this blue sky. But in this case there are definite clues that, while Malcolm Muggeridge became a theist, and even embraced Christendom, he never understood the Gospel. If he had, he would not have fallen into the grasp of Rome.
W. H. Auden was one of the 20th century’s foremost poets, according to Guinness and many others. WW2 was underway, but the U.S. had not yet entered the war. He visited a local cinema in Manhattan in a largely German-speaking community. The film was a documentary of the Nazi conquest of Poland; it was graphic and violent. Auden, an Englishman, was horrified to hear the audience cry out in support of the Germans – “Kill the Poles! Kill them!”
Auden’s convictions until this point had included a belief in the natural goodness of mankind, and that the solutions to the world’s problems could be found in politics, education, and psychology. The cinema experience convinced him he was wrong. The Nazis’ actions were absolute evil and must be judged and condemned. Auden had been in sync with the late 19th century book by Herbert Spencer, Social Statics, which asserted “evil perpetually tends to disappear. . . . Progress, therefore, is not an accident but a necessity. Evil and immorality must surely disappear; man must surely become perfect.”
Spencer was simply expressing the optimism of the 18th century Enlightenment but, as Guinness states, “after the Great War it was ludicrous and after World War II and the Nazi death camps, it was unthinkable.”
Auden’s elite education had assured him that there were no absolutes in his universe. Judging anything absolutely was done only by “the great unwashed.” God was dead (Nietzsche) and truth was dead and all that was left was relativism (your truth / my truth) and emotivism (what I feel is good is good, etc.). How could anyone judge the Nazis if there were no absolute standards? Yet they must be judged!
Berger wrote, “Deeds that cry out to heaven also cry out for hell.” Many proclaimed that “hanging is not enough” for Eichmann. The soul demands damnation in the full biblical sense. Only God can deliver that.
Winston Churchill once growled that a powerful argument for God “was the existence of Lenin and Trotsky, for whom a hell was needed.”
Auden entered the theatre an atheist and left it a seeker after an unconditional absolute. Eventually, he began attending church and became a Christian. Once again, Guinness reports no clarity – no testimony from Auden and no distinctive change of life in accord with New Testament principles. Wikipedia mentions that Auden was an Anglican and that he had a serious homosexual relationship in the 1940s. So, was W. H. Auden a ‘born again’ type of Christian? Guinness offers nothing. Did Auden have a ‘signal’ experience that changed his perspective? I don’t doubt Guinness on this. But that’s a long way from repentance and saving faith.
G. K. Chesterton, author of 80 books, 200 short stories, hundreds of poems, and thousands of essays, is a favorite of Guinness. Chesterton’s ‘signal’ arose from wrestling with the dichotomies of beauty and brokenness, optimism and pessimism. In his book Orthodoxy he writes that Christianity was accused of being too optimistic about the universe, and of being too pessimistic about the world. He realized that this made sense, however, in the Bible’s account of creation and the Fall.
What Guinness (and Chesterton) should have realized is that prophecy’s end, the 2nd Coming, and the New Heaven / New Earth as restoration of the creation, completes the arc and is the foundation for the ultimate hope of every believer, whether healthy and prosperous, or tortured and dying in a dungeon for his faith.
But Chesterton landed on potentially fruitful ground, realizing that the Christian worldview allowed him to be both optimistic and pessimistic simultaneously. It explained “why I could feel homesick at home.”
Chesterton finished his autobiography just weeks before he died, ending with a chapter entitled “The God with the Golden Key,” describing his faith as “the overwhelming conviction that there is one key which can unlock all doors.”
He famously argued, “The worst moment for an atheist is when he is genuinely thankful, but has nobody to thank.” And, “If my children wake up on Christmas morning and have somebody to thank for putting candy in their stocking, have I no one to thank for putting two feet into mine?”
Chesterton’s most famous fictional character was Father Brown, the small town priest who solved crimes the police always seemed to get wrong. The moral themes in the story were right in Chesterton’s wheelhouse because, yes, G. K. was a staunch Roman Catholic. He was even considered for RCC sainthood. Accordingly, I can find no clear testimony from Chesterton to indicate he knew he was lost in his sins, humbled himself, repented, and was born again. If he had been truly born again, understanding the Gospel and his own accountability and responsibility, surely he would not have dwelt contentedly within Roman Catholicism, with its sacramental grace, priestly intercessions, and works-based uncertainties regarding eternal life.
C. S. Lewis decided that he was an atheist at the age of 14. For me, it was at 13. His parents were religious, but nominal, members of the Church of Ireland. My family was Roman Catholic – my mother and her relatives were fairly serious RCs, while my dad turned out to be an agnostic. Lewis’ atheism was triggered by his mother’s death when he was nine, his father’s coldness, and his own horrific experiences in the trenches of WW1. He was also rebellious, despising authority, and loved the autonomy of atheism. For me it was both the moral autonomy and the constant drumbeat of evolution that I experienced in my public Junior High, the Chicago Museum of Natural History, the subscription to Scientific American my parents were so generous to provide me, and a host of books on my dad’s shelves that supported an evolutionary worldview.
In Lewis’ autobiography, Surprised by Joy, he admitted to “an inconsolable longing” for something beyond human experience. He longed for Joy – with a capital “J” – as distinguished from both pleasure and happiness, which depend on transitory experiences . . . a beautiful landscape, the smell of perfume, etc. Yet Joy could be triggered by beauty, music, poetry, and human love.
On a summer day he had a memory of his brother, Warnie, with a toy garden, the memory overwhelming him with a sensation of blissful joy. But then it was gone; the world was ordinary again. Eventually, he realized that these ‘whiffs’ of something transcendental, these ‘signals’ pointed to something beyond all human objects. The ‘whiff’ simply was triggered by something terrestrial. He knew that it was foolish to make idols out of objects or experiences associated with them. So he began his search.
A fellow don at Oxford – a skeptic – remarked that the evidence for the historicity of the Gospels was “surprisingly good.” This shook up Lewis: “If he, the cynic of cynics, the toughest of the toughs, were not ‘safe,’ where could I turn? Was there then no escape?” Lewis began to study the Gospel accounts and became convinced of their truth.
He described his crisis point as feeling “the steady, unrelenting approach of Him who I desired so earnestly not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1930 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”
Now, I’ve written about C. S. Lewis before, and presented evidence that he never understood the Gospel at a personal level, that he knew he was a sinner under just condemnation, needing forgiveness, and expressing a sincere repentance and faith in the Lord Jesus. Consider the testimony above. As far as I know, he never recanted that miserable profession, never explained that he was ‘kidding,’ that he was in fact extraordinarily grateful that he found forgiveness and embraced a desire to follow Jesus. In his book God in the Dock, a collection of writings, he recounts many events where circumstances cried out for him to challenge or plead with lost sinners to repent and believe the Gospel, but failed to do so without any hint of conscience. In his most famous book, Mere Christianity, he shows zero discernment regarding the heresies that abound within Christendom. Doctrine seems to matter not at all, even the vital doctrines tied to the salvation of souls.
Indeed, Lewis turned from atheism to become a strong advocate for theism, and even Christendom. But a born again Christian? I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t expect to see him in Heaven. And I am fully aware that I am in a tiny minority on this.
In discussing his grandfather, Whitfield Guinness, Os argues that human love is a poignant signal that God provides to help sinners find Him. He quotes a line from a Michael Martin Murphy song: “If love never lasts forever, tell me what’s forever for?”
Love is a loud signal “because it is a rare moment when we are simultaneously most ourselves and least ourselves.” “Love reaches out, love risks, love offers, love affirms, love gives.” (See also 1 Corinthians chapter 13.) Love fuses two people into one, culminating in marriage, at least what marriage should be.
Yet human love crashes against mortality. The cherry blossom is gorgeous in full bloom, but then it dies so soon. The grip of love on the human soul cries out for eternity. Shouldn’t love last forever? Only God’s love satifies this yearning, because God is love, God is the author of love, God is the source of love and offers His love for eternity . . . purchased by His blood on a cruel cross. We must come via the cross.
Whatever the signal, whether love or joy or beauty or an epiphany of understanding, Os Guinness challenges the reader to pay attention. “Be ready, then, for the call that will come to you in your life. Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear.” What Guinness fails to make clear, throughout his book, is the destination, the Gospel, what everyone must understand about salvation, and what to do about it. How do you write a book like this and leave that out?
He’s right in his concluding remarks that “the perspiration that follows the signal is as important to the search as the inspiration.” He’s right in describing the materialist / secularist worldview as “poor, narrow, and constricting.” He’s right in that for anyone and everyone, “the time is ripe for a great escape, a grand spiritual awakening.” He agrees with Tolstoy that someone needs to “tear asunder the enchanted circle in which people are now shackled.”
Well, that’s the job of the evangelist, the Christian – any Christian who cares about souls. Based on many other writings and interviews, I’m confident that Os Guinness is a born again Christian. If this were the only book of his I had available, though, I would really wonder. Is this a sign of the times, a delusion of Satan that beclouds the minds of God’s people so they don’t make clear the pressing need for the salvation of souls all around them? I don’t know, but it is distressing.
The theme of Signals of Transcendence is vital. The execution of the theme within this book is lacking. But it is still worth reading. It will provoke the Christian who cares about souls to be sensitive to the signals – the drawing of the Holy Spirit – in the lives of lost sinners all around us. And even if you aren’t aware of the signals touching those around you, just take a shot anyway. Hand out some tracts this week. Start a conversation with someone who lingers and explain the Gospel. Make it personal. Don’t let someone go to Hell without a clear warning. Love them enough to give them a chance!
- drdave@truthreallymatters.com