358 - Jesus Rediscovered

Jesus Rediscovered
By Malcolm Muggeridge
217 pp. New York, Doubleday. $5.95.

It is tempting to envision Malcolm Muggeridge as a radical. He is sure that Western civilization is on a collision course with destruction. He is down on the ecclesiastical Establishment and doctrinal orthodoxy ("I can't recite these creeds") and sees Christianity as a religion for the slaves. It is easy to think of him tramping down the center of an ecclesiastical convention with a placard attacking the pharoahs of the Interchurch Center or exorcising the demons of the National Presbyterian Church.

But alas, it is not to be. Malcolm is not a radical, but a traditionalist who finds that culture has outdistanced sanity, and this applies to reformers as well-more so to the more radical. His radicalism extends only to the point of cluttering up late night talk shows on the B.B.C. with denunciations of the powers that be and eschewing most efforts to change things.

Jesus Rediscovered is a collection of more or less autobiographical writings that describes this point of view in characteristically lucid terms. The thesis is simply stated: Things are getting worse and worse, and the only hope rests in "an alternative that was first propounded two thousands years ago near the Sea of Galilee, was fulfilled on the hill called Golgotha and in the events that followed, and, despite all the villainies and ups and downs of history, has been the glory of two thousand years of Christendom" (p. ix).

There is a certain arrogance in the title, of course, and one wonders whether, having rediscovered Jesus, Muggeridge plans to sign him to a long-term exclusive contract. But no, the author allows that Jesus is there for everyone.

The book ranges from the dull (a series of sermons that should not be inflicted on any college congregation and a short-story-length life of Jesus) to the preposterous ("Machiavelli, whose attitude to power is so infinitely preferable to, say, a Woodrow Wilson's, a Gilbert Murray's or an Eleanor Roosevelt's, and has done so much less harm").

Yet there are socially redeeming moments as he takes on the Christian-Marxist dialogue ("lunacy"), the Uppsala assembly of the World Council of Churches ("a non-event") and heart transplants ("It is highly significant that the ice should have been broken for such experimentation in South Africa"). His description of the decline of liberalism in both Protestantism and Roman Catholicism is at times brilliant. He is also fond of quoting George Herbert, the seventeenth century metaphysical poet, and anyone who does this, to my mind, cannot be all bad.

Muggeridge is right in his assertion that there is "an extraordinary

359 - Jesus Rediscovered

spiritual hunger that prevails today among all classes and conditions of people, from the most illiterate to the most educated" (p. xiii), and while his own brand of piety may not speak for many, his reflections nevertheless have the value of showing how one present-day thinker satisfied this hunger. This comes through best in the highly personal chapter, "A Dialogue with Roy Trevivian." Maybe the best thing to do is rip out these pages when the owner of the book store is not looking.

Edward B. Fiske
The New York Times
New York, New York