Christ and Crisis

By Charles Malik

Charles Malik’s Christ and Crisis is an invaluable guide for Christians who seek to engage our world and come to terms with the challenges unique to the era they find themselves in. Each life, each unique historical situation presents its own crisis or set of crises. Today, we read of financial crises, the environmental crisis, the crisis of radical Islam, cultural crises, political crises, crises of identity, and many more. What Malik would tell us is that these are all spiritual crises, first and foremost. Thus, in this uniquely accessible and ecumenically sensitive book, Malik puts all of these concerns before the most profound crisis of all: the state of our own hearts before the cross of Jesus Christ, offering readers a helpful way of truly understanding the crises of our world today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Acton Institute
• Release date: Dec 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9781942503286

Book preview

Foreword

Habib C. Malik

It is not easy to write about one’s own father, in particular if that father happens to be Charles Malik and his only son the writer. I remember the period in the early 1960s when we lived in Bethesda just outside Washington, DC, and my father would periodically retire to his study for long hours of work, as I was given to understand; I was seven at the time. He was immersed, I later found out, in writing two books: Christ and Crisis and Man in the Struggle for Peace. When he finally would emerge from his study toward evening, I recall, he would prepare himself a drink and sit in the living room to listen to Beethoven’s second violin concerto (as played by David Oistrach) or to his seventh symphony (especially his favorite fourth movement, conducted by Toscanini) or to his fifth piano concerto (The Emperor). For some reason it was always Beethoven.

From my earliest years, I awakened in a household where my imposing father and the black leather-covered King James Bible were inseparable. It was constantly in his hands, on his night table, or tucked away inside his briefcase. Another smaller black book also accompanied him at all times: his personal diary for which he had special gold-edged high-quality paper with six perforations and his monogram printed elegantly at the top left corner of each page supplied regularly by Tiffany’s in New York—one of his very few extravagances. Throughout his married life both the Bible and the diary competed fiercely for his attention away from my mother and I, and both predated his marriage as daily companions. Somehow he still managed to be there for us at all times, and despite his very busy preoccupations in the arenas of international diplomacy or Lebanese politics or academia I never felt an unbridgeable distance or any sense of sustained abandonment. On the contrary, being an only child I was the object of much parental doting as I also basked in the reassuring warmth of my father’s wonderful relationship with my mother. His daunting presence around the house has left a profound impression on me. I recall, for instance, his sense of humor and the accompanying loud laugh that was his trademark, his disciplined concentration and hard work immune to distractions, and the endless evening discussions over drinks with close invited friends that proceeded into the wee hours on issues of politics, philosophy, religion, literature, Lebanon, and existential threats to the Christian community. Gossip was foreign to such sessions. Most vividly etched in my mind, however, are those recurring moments, either at home or in church or during travel, when he would bow his head in silent prayer. His moistening eyes and the broken expression his face always assumed on such occasions told me he was truly in the presence of the Lord.

The greatest bequest that he and my mother gave me has been my faith in Jesus Christ—the Lord’s supreme gift granted to me through them. It is the same faith that his grandmother passed on to him, as confirmed in the dedication at the front of Christ and Crisis. This abiding family faith represents a modest instance of the power of cumulative global witness to the same timeless truth that Jesus Christ is Lord. The centrality of Christ in my father’s life was probably the most arresting feature that defined him as a person. In his foreword to Christ and Crisis he affirms that there is a crisis in the world, and in each one of us whether or not we know it, caused by Jesus Christ, and that strangely the solution to this crisis is none other than Jesus Christ himself. Pondering this assertion as I matured has driven home to me the uniquely momentous consequences reverberating all through history of God’s decision to be incarnated as a human person. How could it be otherwise? Such an unrepeatable event that pierces all of creation cannot but shake it to the core and occupy center-stage in human history while precipitating a crisis of the first order as it obliges that history to revolve around it in a myriad of different direct and indirect ways. The blunt words in Matthew 10:34–36 and Luke 12:49–53, for instance, where Jesus declares that because of him family members will rise up against one another and betray each other became ominously vivid to me. Each human being is thus called upon at some point, and in some manner, to take a position with respect to Jesus of Nazareth. The starkness and the urgency of this incredible call are what come through most vividly in the pages of Christ and Crisis: Jesus is certainly not just one among many as a particular trial of the Christian believer delineates (chapter 5, part 5). Thankfully, and by the grace of the Lord, our small family has remained intact and securely on the side of the Incarnated One.

Christ and Crisis retains its compelling relevance after all these decades. The writing of course is not gender-neutral, but anyone with the right spirit knows there is no deliberate sexism here. With some mental updates performed by today’s reader, the focus on the menace of atheistic communism when the book was composed—a focus for which the author has been completely vindicated—can be supplemented by today’s threats from, say, the ideology of the so-called Islamic State behind those gruesome televised beheadings or by the ravages perpetrated globally by hyper-capitalism on people and the environment. Today’s version of what the author terms the general dissolution in chapter 4 might include as one of its sad features a creeping technological tyranny that has condemned an entire generation through those incessant chats on smartphones to the pointless waste of time entailed in the obsessive documentation of the intricate trivialities of otherwise bright young people’s daily lives. Both the deadly evils of the moment and the more subtle evils of distraction are current indicators of the persistent crisis calling for radical remedies that can only come through Christ.

The early 1960s, when the book was written, coincided with the Second Vatican Council of the Catholic Church. Among the legacies of that historic council has been the launching of an overdue ecumenical outreach within the Christian fold that has shattered age-old barriers and brought Catholics closer to both Eastern Orthodox and to mainline Protestant churches. Remarkably, Christ and Crisis expresses precisely such a spirit of openness before it was in vogue. This is because Charles Malik in his own personal faith embodied and radiated a genuine vibrant ecumenism: from the start he was Orthodox to the bone, having served every Sunday for twelve years as an altar boy at the village church while imbibing the splendid Byzantine liturgy. He later grew to immerse himself in, and come to love, the rich Catholic theological tradition, in particular St. Thomas and the medieval scholastics. In addition, he steeped himself on a daily basis in scripture, thereby endearing himself to Protestant communities wherever he went. Viewed with hindsight, the ecumenical yearning of the book’s last chapter was ahead of its time. It merely reflected the advanced visionary ecumenism of the author himself. It is no wonder that throughout the 1960s he was called on repeatedly by Patriarch Athenagoras I of the Eastern Orthodox Church to represent that church at international ecumenical gatherings and also to accompany the Patriarch personally on his three historic meetings with Pope Paul VI in 1964 in Jerusalem and in 1967 in both Istanbul and Rome. I was there at the Istanbul encounter as a boy of thirteen, and I remember the small, crowded, and stuffy church in Istanbul where Pope and Patriarch met and prayed together with my father’s distinctive head literally propped between them in the immediate background.

When he sat to write this book, my father had put his political career behind him and was at last fulfilling the desire he always found occasion to express verbally or in letters to close friends and associates even during the thick of his political involvements and hectic diplomatic obligations—a return to what he liked to call the life of the mind and the spirit. His detour into politics in the mid-1940s, occasioned by a sense of duty to serve his newly independent country of Lebanon, took up the next fifteen years of his life and deflected him from his teaching career, his academic colleagues, his beloved students, his philosophical quests, and the kind of calm intellectual life around the American University of Beirut that he and my mother had braced themselves for when they got married in 1941. By the acclaim of many, his performance on the world stage of international diplomacy and human rights was nothing less than stellar; however, he was the one, as his diary attests page after agonizing page, who suffered the deprivation and the emptiness that such a public existence entailed. How he longed to be back at the university thoroughly devoted to philosophy and to his students, and how he constantly threw himself at the feet of Christ for succor and consolation during the years of his political involvement. Writing Christ and Crisis after exiting politics was a cathartic meditation that, he trusted, would usher in a new fulfilling phase, one that would repatriate him to the life of philosophical and spiritual pursuits. He made the best of the situation by stressing at every turn the importance of public engagement and practical responsibilities as an antidote to the limitations of the purely ivory-tower life of a professor. The outbreak of war in Lebanon in the mid-1970s rudely interrupted his brief stopover back in academia and the life of contemplation plunging him once more into the thick of politics, this time trying literally to save his burning and collapsing country. Herein resides a paramount tragedy in this man’s life that only his unshakeable faith in Christ managed to see him through.

With time his many unpublished writings and out-of-print works in both English and Arabic on Christian spiritual themes will be made available to the public, hopefully also in translations. The present book, however, will always stand out as a particularly poignant personal testimony written with much anticipation at a point of transition in the author’s life. In one of its dimensions Christ and Crisis reveals the statesman capping an illustrious political and diplomatic career with the unabashed affirmation of his faith in Christ, a faith that not only survived the ordeals of politics but that was also deepened and purified by them. He speaks about freedom followed by faith, trust, and patience—what he calls the principles of the spirit. Through this spirit the believer will uncover the crisis and overcome it in Christ. This constitutes a continuous struggle that this author experienced and about which he has written in these pages.

In Christ and Crisis, we come face to face with the eternal hope granted to humanity through Jesus Christ. We also are made amply aware of the remaining hard work ahead in order to fulfill the Lord’s supplication in the prayer he instructed us to recite daily: Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven. This is our consolation in a world that remains so un-Christian even two millennia after the Devil was decisively defeated on the Cross. We have been entrusted with spreading the Good News to a largely unreceptive and ungrateful world. We have gone about this appointed task vigorously at times and dispiritedly at others. The fact that we along