The Quest for God

The Quest for God
By Paul Johnson
Weidenfeld & Nicholson
216 pages £14.99
ISBN 0 297 81764 7

Paul Johnson is one of my favourite writers. He is a leading historian and frequent newspaper columnist. Modern Times, his history of the 20th century, is a stimulating, fascinating, brilliant and profound analysis of our century, showing us exactly where we are and how we got here. If you have never read it, stop right here, go straight to your nearest bookstore, buy, read and ponder.
He is also a deeply committed Roman Catholic. Thus when The Quest for God - A Personal Pilgrimage dropped through my letterbox from EN I fell upon it with enthusiasm. Initially I thought that my expectations might be met, that we might have here a worthy successor to C.S. Lewis' classic Mere Christianity, a well-written and incisive argument for basic Christian beliefs by one who has plenty of 'street cred' in the academic and secular world. Those expectations were to be cruelly dashed.
The Quest for God is a mixture of the brilliant (chapters 1-3), the muddled (chapters 4-9) and the awful (chapters 10-16). The first chapters are an outstanding apologetic. He points out with great clarity that: 'The existence or non-existence of God is the most important question we humans are ever called to answer ... If God does not exist ... we have no duties or obligations except to ourselves, and we need weigh no other considerations except our own interests and pleasures. ... In a Godless world, there is no obvious basis for altruism of any kind, moral anarchy takes over and the rule of the self prevails.' Too true.
In his second chapter 'The God Who would not die', he surveys the recent intellectual history of the west, showing how Hegel and Marx were wrong, how belief survived all the assaults of Darwin, Freud, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, and how science and religion ceased to be enemies and in some modest way became friends.
Chapter three 'Is there an alternative to God', is a brief but penetrating critique of some of the pretenders. He concludes that 'these totalitarian alternatives to God...have now been demonstrated to be incorrigibly destructive and evil. Belief in them lingers on only in that home of lost causes, the university campus.' Great stuff. Read these 33 pages twice; then give them to your favourite sceptic.
From there it is all downhill. Chapters 4 to 9 are highly eccentric and speculative essays on the being and gender of God, the problem of evil, environmental politics as the new paganism (some good stuff here), and the uniqueness of humankind (and what might happen when we are invaded and evangelised by invaders from outer space with their more highly developed religions). I suspect that Johnson's parish priest might be just as dismayed by some of his musings as will the average EN reader.

Saddening

The last chapters, 10-16, saddened me enormously. If you are beginning to think that Luther and the other reformers were a bit hasty in their judgments on the Roman Catholic church and that perhaps we are all singing from the same song sheet after all, read these chapters.
Johnson is an orthodox Catholic who has grown up in the Catholic church and loves it greatly. He expounds, in a very personal way, Catholic teaching on the church, salvation, death, judgment, heaven, hell and purgatory. Despite a number of references to Jesus Christ, who he plainly adores as the God-man, there is no real understanding of the cross, or of grace, or of the gospel. Man is 'an imperfect, frail-willed, flawed creature... who, nonetheless, with the help of God's grace and mercy, and by virtue of the supreme sacrifice of his only son, manages to struggle successfully against his sinful nature and contrives in the end - just - to make himself worthy of joining God in Paradise.'
The Catholic way is the best, but by no means the only way for 'good men and women' to do that. The direct route to heaven is only for the very greatest saints (of whom Johnson knows none); conversely only the Hitlers and Stalins deserve hell (and we cannot be sure that even they are there). Virtually all of us will wind up in purgatory. Johnson himself hopes that he will have some premonition of his own death so that he will have opportunity to repent, confess, and receive absolution.
Johnson concludes his book with a selection of prayers for various occasions. The last one, the prayer for forgiveness, struck me because of its poignancy and its lack of gospel assurance: 'Please God, you see that I am now sorrowful and full of remorse. Accept my humble act of contrition. Assist me to make wise and tactful restitution. Give me strength to guard against any repetition of the offence. And, by forgiving me this sin, encourage me to serve you more positively and earnestly in future.' The book left me with a feeling of great sadness that a man as learned and earnest as Paul Johnson has been given only the 'do' of religion rather than the 'done' of the gospel.

Saddening

Barry Seagren

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