Discussion on the Review of “The End of Christendom”

Craigg's Corner - November

Craigg McRae serves as our representative to a monthly apologetics forum where strategies and information is discussed in order to engage our culture with the Gospel. Each month he's sharing a summary with us about what was discussed.

 On November 6, 2016 we had a review of the book “The End of Christendom” by Malcom Muggeridge. Dick DiTullio led us through this very short, yet insightful book which addressed the fact that all things man-made eventually are destroyed, go away or morph into something different. The title of the book is not to alarm or anger any Christians yet to explore the state of Christendom.

Christendom is man-made. It was expanded into creation by Constantine in the fourth century and has been used to expand Christian knowledge, to control people over the years and to mislead many as to the true teachings of our Savior, Christ Jesus. Christianity is God-made and will never die because the truth will always permeate any attempts at its destruction. Christendom or the Church is being destroyed by three main causes.

Liberalism has done more to destroy our relationship with God and the historic ways we have used to convene with Him. We do not need barbaric hordes coming upon us to reach this conclusion. We create new mediums which continually steal our time, reduce our inter-social experiences, and reduce complex aspects of our relationship to our creator to 10-15 video clips. TV, social networks, texting, snapchat, etc. have all turned our attention more to ourselves than to where we should be concentrating our time, our Lord and the activities He would have us do.

The abandonment of Christian morals is the second cause of Christendom’s demise. With numerous mediums we have moved into a moral vacuum, especially in the area of eroticism. We have retreated from freedom. We walk away from the creator who knows us so intimately that He counts the hairs on our head and given ourselves away to other pursuits that imprison us in guilt, loss of time and desires other than those that please our master.

Lastly, we ruin ourselves with the quest for security and plenty. We have striven to secure ourselves to the point that we have created weapons that can now destroy us. We indulge ourselves to the point that we become imbeciles and extremely complacent. We eat more than we should or need. We fail to do research on our own but rather rely on others to provide us what they determine to be the truth and we lose sight of why God gave us the blessings we have in the first place.

Malcolm Muggeridge was a strong Christian who wrote on the demise of religion. His attitude toward this life is one we can relate to if we can get past the emotion. He stated “that in this world I am a stranger. I don’t belong here. I am staying here for a bit and it’s a very nice place, an interesting place, but I don’t belong here.” He questioned much and faith was one of the areas of intrigue. He started out a devout atheist and as he studied the Word, he grew into a Christ follower. Christendom is of the world and Christianity is not of this world. We, as Christians, strive to end up out of this world in a place with the one that spoke us into existence.