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The invading gospel
Book by Clemo, Jack R
128 pages, Paperback
First published February 21, 1972
About the author
Jack Clemo
22 books2 followersReginald John Clemo (Jack Clemo) was a poet and writer, strongly associated both with his native Cornwall and his Christian belief. His work is visionary and inspired by the Cornish landscape.
He had no formal schooling after age 13, became deaf around age 20, and blind in 1955, about 19 years later. His early work was published in the local press; he first received recognition in connection with the Festival of Britain.
The massive china clay mines and works around which he grew up feature strongly in his work.
He had no formal schooling after age 13, became deaf around age 20, and blind in 1955, about 19 years later. His early work was published in the local press; he first received recognition in connection with the Festival of Britain.
The massive china clay mines and works around which he grew up feature strongly in his work.
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June 25, 2018"The ultimate purpose of an invasion is the establishment of peace following the triumph of the invader. No Christian testimony would be complete without the note of serenity." (4) // meaning as opposed to continued indecision or inner turmoil
"My closing symbol of peace [the peace of God] in a dark and chaotic cosmos may therefore, very aptly be, the barbecue which some of our members organised on stony Chesil Beach one summer night. The sun had set, the joyous gospel choruses drifted softly along the shore, while the glow from a brazier lit up the quiet incoming tide. We had all submitted to an invasion, we were all relaxed, and neither the scene nor our mood could be called religious." (7) // brackets added
"My alienation from the Gospel was entirely emotional; it was not at all due to the broadening of my intellectual range. I read sceptical literature, but Renan, Wells and Shaw did not lead me to raise a question-mark against the authenticity of Christian foundations. I did not doubt Christianity - I merely disliked it; or rather, I disliked its facade, while being conscious that behind the facade there was some tremendous secret which I could not get at but which was the only thing that could satisfy me." (14)
"From the Christian standpoint, every attempt to find absolute truth without submission to authority is an elaborate dodge, a laborious feat of self-protection. ... No faculty of mind or emotion can apprehend truth except on the basis of forgiveness for its natural alienation from truth." (18)
"The keynote of this book is surrender, for that is the foundation of all Christian belief." (19)
"The Gospel of salvation by grace, offering to raise us as fallen creatures into the power of beliefs for which we have no tastes and to which we have no right, is offensive to us all whether our natural bias is toward mysticism or materialism. Marx hurls at it his social philosophy, Emily Bronte her 'celestial shine.' Darwin resists it with an evolutionary theory, Emerson with a transcendental vision. Shelley screens himself from it in the mythology of ancient Greece, and Bertrand Russell seeks refuge in the duller mythology of modern science. Every temperament reveals its depravity by inventing its own alternatives, its own retaliation, its own dodge." (19)
"Total depravity does not mean total criminality or total nastiness; it does not mean that all the people one sees n the street are feeling murderous or lustful. It means that all human beings have a strong natural objection to being justified by the righteousness of God in Christ instead of by the 'good points' of nature in themselves. Total depravity means total resistance to grace and consequent inability to meet God's demand for perfection. Since God is perfect He demands that a creature made in His own image should reflect His perfection on a finite scale. When man is not being perfect he is transgressing God's law; and since the Fall he has been transgressing it all the time, in his virtue as well as in his vice, in his religion as well as in his irreligion. His highest achievements 'come short of the glory of God.' No one suggests that they come short of the glory of man, but in the light of absolute divine holiness the glory of man is seen to be defective and corrupted. It cannot enter the Kingdom of God, and must be overwhelmed either by His grace or His judgement." (20)
"The Christian answer to human depravity is the Gospel which blocks every avenue of man's religious search proclaiming that in Christ man has already been found, justified and received into sonship by God. The continuation of man's desire to think or feel his own way into spiritual light is thus a resistance to God's assertion that it is He and not man who is the successful seeker." (21)
"The merciless divine strategy is seen to be an essential part of the fun of salvation. God has made the way into the Kingdom seem terribly hard [impossible perfection] so that man may realize how completely his sin has separated him from his Maker." (22) // brackets added
"Remembering every moment Who,
Besides creating thee unto
These ends, and these for thee, was said
To undergo death in thy stead
In flesh like thine." (25)
"Browning's experience [see quoted stanza above] was not exceptional: it was for me only the first instance of what I later found to be the norm among surrendered personalities. Coventry Patmore, the most uxorious of Christian poets, whispered to his wife as he lay dying, 'I love you, my dear, but the Lord is my light.' The most emotional of the great American evangelists of our time, Oral Roberts, struck the same note when he declared from the heart of a radiant marriage, 'I love Jesus more than I love my wife. She knows it and she is not jealous.' It is such men as these, not thwarted celibates, who unlock for us the paradox of the apparently monstrous Christian demand that we should 'hate' earthly comforts and relationships for Christ's sake. 'Where dwells enjoyment, there is He'; and though the fact that He is there as an invader is a shock, it is an oppression only as long as the enjoyment is regarded as an end in itself."(25)
"But the standards of modern culture are perverse. They exalt the baffled seeker above the man who has surrendered to the truth and is exultantly proclaiming what it has done for him. Abercrombie went on to cite Matthew Arnold as the poet who shows us what religious poetry ought to be like. This apparently means that only poets who reject Christianity should write about religion. Those who accept the Gospel are too exhilarated by it to strike the correct 'religious' note of jaded reverence and dignified despair." (27)
"...the Christian Gospel is at its deepest level anti-religious. ... By stressing God's search for man it forbids us to be solemn about man's search for God. It undermines our veneration for the founders of the world's religions - Mohammed, Buddha, Confucius, and the rest of the Eastern mystics and moralists who have set masses of humanity on a weary pilgrimage towards an elusive or oppressive Wisdom." (28)
"I was no longer trying to find anything agreeable to me in the Man whom orthodoxy was said to have hidden. I was too acutely aware of the God whom the cultural religionists had hidden - 'this near God with His upsetting ways,' as T.F. Powys called Him. I saw that one of the chief weaknesses of the modern Church was its embarrassment about the 'upsetting' character of the Incarnation. To many ministers, Christ was apparently not so much the incarnate love of God (which can be very dangerous to the world) as the incarnate 'niceness' of God (which is, of course, merely nice and not dangerous even to the religious world)." (28)
"Perhaps the most piquant and disturbing influence on the final stage of my surrender was Norman Grubb's biography of C. J. Studd, the wayward cricketer-missionary, who had died only six years before. The book showed me what was involved in full consecration, a life completely overswept by the forces of the eternal world. Studd's practical philosophy was based on the belief that 'God wants not nibblers of the possible but grabbers of the impossible.' The Christian must renounce the tricks of self-help and self-reliance, he must lose his life for Christ's sake, and then, in the new dimension of grace, he must claim his inheritance as a child of God." (29)
"The fact that I had found my Damascus Road outside organized religion was in itself a barrier to fellowship. ... The mystical concept of the Christian as 'priest and lover' had a more dominant place in my thought than it could have in the average church member. The aftermath of my battle with hedonism had taken me beyond their spiritual and imaginative range." (38)
"God save me from the thoughts men think
In the mind alone;
He who sings a lasting song
Thinks in a marrow bone." (40) // W. B. Yeats
"A man may be very sincere in advocating 'Christian' principles, yet remain totally unsurrendered in his own spiritual life. Christ did not suggest that anyone needs to be 'born again' in order to have a passion for social righteousness. He insisted that men must be 'born again' before they can enter into covenant relationship with the Holy Spirit of whom it is said, 'He will show you things to come.'" (45)
"I saw that Christian predestination is inseparable from the faithfulness of God. Where there is divine covenant ratified by creaturely obedience, its fulfillment is predestinated. Where there is no faith there is no divine predestination, but only the natural sequence of cause and effect which derives from the Fall and is contrary to God's will, though overruled by His infinite wisdom." (46)
"Apart from a few rhymed diary entries I had written no verse since my conversion two years before, but the oblique glamorous light of medieval romanticism produced at last a flicker of creative power and I found myself writing lines unlike any I had penned hitherto:
Mid all the world's strange sorrows
I know a strange relief:
That God has kissed Our Lady
And Their Son has kissed our grief
...
The inconsistency of my Catholic verse was verbal rather than spiritual, for the medieval spirit, purged of its excesses of superstition and sensuality, is akin to that of Protestant revivalism..." (49)
"In the Church we are concerned with truth. . . And truth is not to be trifled with. If it divides the spirits, then they are divided. To oppose this commandment for the sake of a general idea of 'peace' and 'unity' would be a greater disaster for all concerned than such division. Karl Barth" (51)
"On all topics in which mere human viewpoints are involved - politics, literature, art, philosophy and 'religion' - the real Christian is the most tolerant of men. He cannot take human viewpoints seriously enough to quarrel about them or wish to impose his own on other people." (51) // how i felt in college, especially when people wanted to split doctrinal hairs about when the rapture would occur or how baptism should be done or how predestination worked
"Power-lust, fear and racial tension can be dissolved only as masses of people surrender to God's decision, the 'scandal and offence' of justification by faith." (55)
"It is not enough that the Church should go out to the world with general religious truth; the Church must go out to the world with the truth which is exclusive to Christianity - the unchanging viewpoint of God." (56)
"Christ's preliminary remarks were offered as His complete message, His incidental gestures were presented as the main drama of the Incarnation." (57) // what is happening now on social media with the references to how Christians should realize that they've already been following a "brown socialist/social reformer" for years now.
"There is no historical evidence that Christ's friendship transformed anyone: if it had, the Crucifixion would have been impossible." (58)
"In one of his [Peter] Epistles he referred to Jesus not as a social reformer or an indulgent Friend, but as a Bishop, an ecclesiastical authority. The invasion as getting under way, becoming more intricate. It was a strange irony that the 'progressives' wished to advance the Church by putting Christian teaching back to its most rudimentary stage, the stage in which it was not sufficiently developed to be the basis of a Church at all." (59)
"The pagan piety induced by sense impressions has led hardened sceptics to make fools of themselves, but it has never converted them. Voltaire was once so moved by the grandeur of a sunrise over the Alps that he fell to his knees and cried, 'O Thou great Being!' But that brought him no nearer to Christianity than if he had derided the splash of color int he sky. Christianity knows nothing of a 'great Being' in the Deistic sense. It knows only a righteous Father, an atoning Son, and a convicting Spirit. Nowhere in nature is there clear evidence of any of these three Persons: the Trinity can be known only through the Church which He created as His sole instrument of revelation. Christians who claim to find the true God in nature are reading into nature ideas they have derived from the Bible: they are seeing the fallen earth as if it were already lit up by its ultimate redemption in Christ." (69)
"Christ himself was obviously not at peace with nature, any more than He was at peace with human nature. He often acted in open defiance of the 'majesty' of creation. When the storm arose on Gennesaret He did not bid the disciples to humble themselves devoutly before the 'great Being' who was trying to drown them. He lashed back at the elements from His bridgehead in the divine Kingdom: 'Be still!' To Him the storm was the work of an evil Life Force, a demonic convulsion that needed cure. All natural catastrophes are symptoms of nature's sickness - fevers, vomits, shiverings: they are not growing pains through which God is slowly evolving a perfect world, but mere reminders that we live in an enemy-occupied zone and that in so far as we are subjects to its laws we share its tragedy." (71)
"All divorces, separations and infidelities reveal that the natural strength of the basic attachment has been drained and the parties have nothing left to fall back on, no creed which can interpret or solve their problem." (76)
"A life lived wholly within the orbit of grace would show an unbroken rhythm of prayer and answer, promise and fulfillment, grafting and fruit-bearing." (102)
"When a liberating force enters occupied territory it does not give the enslaved people the strength to bear the oppressor's yoke; it breaks that yoke, brings the people under new laws and establishes their lives on a different footing. So it is with Christian faith..." (104)
"In the drama of the Redemption, God revealed his own character, the pattern He would have us follow. The pattern was either that of a Greek tragedy or that of a fairy-tale, and which it was depends on whether the cry of anguish was the last that was heard of Christ in this world or whether the cry was followed by a whimsical invitation to a breakfast on the beach. God must love tragedy more than comedy if He let His own flesh moulder into the soil of Palestine, but if He 'took it again' as the first trophy in an attack on cosmic gloom, He has set the pace for an eternal comedy." (110)
"My closing symbol of peace [the peace of God] in a dark and chaotic cosmos may therefore, very aptly be, the barbecue which some of our members organised on stony Chesil Beach one summer night. The sun had set, the joyous gospel choruses drifted softly along the shore, while the glow from a brazier lit up the quiet incoming tide. We had all submitted to an invasion, we were all relaxed, and neither the scene nor our mood could be called religious." (7) // brackets added
"My alienation from the Gospel was entirely emotional; it was not at all due to the broadening of my intellectual range. I read sceptical literature, but Renan, Wells and Shaw did not lead me to raise a question-mark against the authenticity of Christian foundations. I did not doubt Christianity - I merely disliked it; or rather, I disliked its facade, while being conscious that behind the facade there was some tremendous secret which I could not get at but which was the only thing that could satisfy me." (14)
"From the Christian standpoint, every attempt to find absolute truth without submission to authority is an elaborate dodge, a laborious feat of self-protection. ... No faculty of mind or emotion can apprehend truth except on the basis of forgiveness for its natural alienation from truth." (18)
"The keynote of this book is surrender, for that is the foundation of all Christian belief." (19)
"The Gospel of salvation by grace, offering to raise us as fallen creatures into the power of beliefs for which we have no tastes and to which we have no right, is offensive to us all whether our natural bias is toward mysticism or materialism. Marx hurls at it his social philosophy, Emily Bronte her 'celestial shine.' Darwin resists it with an evolutionary theory, Emerson with a transcendental vision. Shelley screens himself from it in the mythology of ancient Greece, and Bertrand Russell seeks refuge in the duller mythology of modern science. Every temperament reveals its depravity by inventing its own alternatives, its own retaliation, its own dodge." (19)
"Total depravity does not mean total criminality or total nastiness; it does not mean that all the people one sees n the street are feeling murderous or lustful. It means that all human beings have a strong natural objection to being justified by the righteousness of God in Christ instead of by the 'good points' of nature in themselves. Total depravity means total resistance to grace and consequent inability to meet God's demand for perfection. Since God is perfect He demands that a creature made in His own image should reflect His perfection on a finite scale. When man is not being perfect he is transgressing God's law; and since the Fall he has been transgressing it all the time, in his virtue as well as in his vice, in his religion as well as in his irreligion. His highest achievements 'come short of the glory of God.' No one suggests that they come short of the glory of man, but in the light of absolute divine holiness the glory of man is seen to be defective and corrupted. It cannot enter the Kingdom of God, and must be overwhelmed either by His grace or His judgement." (20)
"The Christian answer to human depravity is the Gospel which blocks every avenue of man's religious search proclaiming that in Christ man has already been found, justified and received into sonship by God. The continuation of man's desire to think or feel his own way into spiritual light is thus a resistance to God's assertion that it is He and not man who is the successful seeker." (21)
"The merciless divine strategy is seen to be an essential part of the fun of salvation. God has made the way into the Kingdom seem terribly hard [impossible perfection] so that man may realize how completely his sin has separated him from his Maker." (22) // brackets added
"Remembering every moment Who,
Besides creating thee unto
These ends, and these for thee, was said
To undergo death in thy stead
In flesh like thine." (25)
"Browning's experience [see quoted stanza above] was not exceptional: it was for me only the first instance of what I later found to be the norm among surrendered personalities. Coventry Patmore, the most uxorious of Christian poets, whispered to his wife as he lay dying, 'I love you, my dear, but the Lord is my light.' The most emotional of the great American evangelists of our time, Oral Roberts, struck the same note when he declared from the heart of a radiant marriage, 'I love Jesus more than I love my wife. She knows it and she is not jealous.' It is such men as these, not thwarted celibates, who unlock for us the paradox of the apparently monstrous Christian demand that we should 'hate' earthly comforts and relationships for Christ's sake. 'Where dwells enjoyment, there is He'; and though the fact that He is there as an invader is a shock, it is an oppression only as long as the enjoyment is regarded as an end in itself."(25)
"But the standards of modern culture are perverse. They exalt the baffled seeker above the man who has surrendered to the truth and is exultantly proclaiming what it has done for him. Abercrombie went on to cite Matthew Arnold as the poet who shows us what religious poetry ought to be like. This apparently means that only poets who reject Christianity should write about religion. Those who accept the Gospel are too exhilarated by it to strike the correct 'religious' note of jaded reverence and dignified despair." (27)
"...the Christian Gospel is at its deepest level anti-religious. ... By stressing God's search for man it forbids us to be solemn about man's search for God. It undermines our veneration for the founders of the world's religions - Mohammed, Buddha, Confucius, and the rest of the Eastern mystics and moralists who have set masses of humanity on a weary pilgrimage towards an elusive or oppressive Wisdom." (28)
"I was no longer trying to find anything agreeable to me in the Man whom orthodoxy was said to have hidden. I was too acutely aware of the God whom the cultural religionists had hidden - 'this near God with His upsetting ways,' as T.F. Powys called Him. I saw that one of the chief weaknesses of the modern Church was its embarrassment about the 'upsetting' character of the Incarnation. To many ministers, Christ was apparently not so much the incarnate love of God (which can be very dangerous to the world) as the incarnate 'niceness' of God (which is, of course, merely nice and not dangerous even to the religious world)." (28)
"Perhaps the most piquant and disturbing influence on the final stage of my surrender was Norman Grubb's biography of C. J. Studd, the wayward cricketer-missionary, who had died only six years before. The book showed me what was involved in full consecration, a life completely overswept by the forces of the eternal world. Studd's practical philosophy was based on the belief that 'God wants not nibblers of the possible but grabbers of the impossible.' The Christian must renounce the tricks of self-help and self-reliance, he must lose his life for Christ's sake, and then, in the new dimension of grace, he must claim his inheritance as a child of God." (29)
"The fact that I had found my Damascus Road outside organized religion was in itself a barrier to fellowship. ... The mystical concept of the Christian as 'priest and lover' had a more dominant place in my thought than it could have in the average church member. The aftermath of my battle with hedonism had taken me beyond their spiritual and imaginative range." (38)
"God save me from the thoughts men think
In the mind alone;
He who sings a lasting song
Thinks in a marrow bone." (40) // W. B. Yeats
"A man may be very sincere in advocating 'Christian' principles, yet remain totally unsurrendered in his own spiritual life. Christ did not suggest that anyone needs to be 'born again' in order to have a passion for social righteousness. He insisted that men must be 'born again' before they can enter into covenant relationship with the Holy Spirit of whom it is said, 'He will show you things to come.'" (45)
"I saw that Christian predestination is inseparable from the faithfulness of God. Where there is divine covenant ratified by creaturely obedience, its fulfillment is predestinated. Where there is no faith there is no divine predestination, but only the natural sequence of cause and effect which derives from the Fall and is contrary to God's will, though overruled by His infinite wisdom." (46)
"Apart from a few rhymed diary entries I had written no verse since my conversion two years before, but the oblique glamorous light of medieval romanticism produced at last a flicker of creative power and I found myself writing lines unlike any I had penned hitherto:
Mid all the world's strange sorrows
I know a strange relief:
That God has kissed Our Lady
And Their Son has kissed our grief
...
The inconsistency of my Catholic verse was verbal rather than spiritual, for the medieval spirit, purged of its excesses of superstition and sensuality, is akin to that of Protestant revivalism..." (49)
"In the Church we are concerned with truth. . . And truth is not to be trifled with. If it divides the spirits, then they are divided. To oppose this commandment for the sake of a general idea of 'peace' and 'unity' would be a greater disaster for all concerned than such division. Karl Barth" (51)
"On all topics in which mere human viewpoints are involved - politics, literature, art, philosophy and 'religion' - the real Christian is the most tolerant of men. He cannot take human viewpoints seriously enough to quarrel about them or wish to impose his own on other people." (51) // how i felt in college, especially when people wanted to split doctrinal hairs about when the rapture would occur or how baptism should be done or how predestination worked
"Power-lust, fear and racial tension can be dissolved only as masses of people surrender to God's decision, the 'scandal and offence' of justification by faith." (55)
"It is not enough that the Church should go out to the world with general religious truth; the Church must go out to the world with the truth which is exclusive to Christianity - the unchanging viewpoint of God." (56)
"Christ's preliminary remarks were offered as His complete message, His incidental gestures were presented as the main drama of the Incarnation." (57) // what is happening now on social media with the references to how Christians should realize that they've already been following a "brown socialist/social reformer" for years now.
"There is no historical evidence that Christ's friendship transformed anyone: if it had, the Crucifixion would have been impossible." (58)
"In one of his [Peter] Epistles he referred to Jesus not as a social reformer or an indulgent Friend, but as a Bishop, an ecclesiastical authority. The invasion as getting under way, becoming more intricate. It was a strange irony that the 'progressives' wished to advance the Church by putting Christian teaching back to its most rudimentary stage, the stage in which it was not sufficiently developed to be the basis of a Church at all." (59)
"The pagan piety induced by sense impressions has led hardened sceptics to make fools of themselves, but it has never converted them. Voltaire was once so moved by the grandeur of a sunrise over the Alps that he fell to his knees and cried, 'O Thou great Being!' But that brought him no nearer to Christianity than if he had derided the splash of color int he sky. Christianity knows nothing of a 'great Being' in the Deistic sense. It knows only a righteous Father, an atoning Son, and a convicting Spirit. Nowhere in nature is there clear evidence of any of these three Persons: the Trinity can be known only through the Church which He created as His sole instrument of revelation. Christians who claim to find the true God in nature are reading into nature ideas they have derived from the Bible: they are seeing the fallen earth as if it were already lit up by its ultimate redemption in Christ." (69)
"Christ himself was obviously not at peace with nature, any more than He was at peace with human nature. He often acted in open defiance of the 'majesty' of creation. When the storm arose on Gennesaret He did not bid the disciples to humble themselves devoutly before the 'great Being' who was trying to drown them. He lashed back at the elements from His bridgehead in the divine Kingdom: 'Be still!' To Him the storm was the work of an evil Life Force, a demonic convulsion that needed cure. All natural catastrophes are symptoms of nature's sickness - fevers, vomits, shiverings: they are not growing pains through which God is slowly evolving a perfect world, but mere reminders that we live in an enemy-occupied zone and that in so far as we are subjects to its laws we share its tragedy." (71)
"All divorces, separations and infidelities reveal that the natural strength of the basic attachment has been drained and the parties have nothing left to fall back on, no creed which can interpret or solve their problem." (76)
"A life lived wholly within the orbit of grace would show an unbroken rhythm of prayer and answer, promise and fulfillment, grafting and fruit-bearing." (102)
"When a liberating force enters occupied territory it does not give the enslaved people the strength to bear the oppressor's yoke; it breaks that yoke, brings the people under new laws and establishes their lives on a different footing. So it is with Christian faith..." (104)
"In the drama of the Redemption, God revealed his own character, the pattern He would have us follow. The pattern was either that of a Greek tragedy or that of a fairy-tale, and which it was depends on whether the cry of anguish was the last that was heard of Christ in this world or whether the cry was followed by a whimsical invitation to a breakfast on the beach. God must love tragedy more than comedy if He let His own flesh moulder into the soil of Palestine, but if He 'took it again' as the first trophy in an attack on cosmic gloom, He has set the pace for an eternal comedy." (110)
March 9, 2020
Theologically the writer probably inhabited a different planet to most british christians today: all the more reason to read it. It s a faith of fire, blood and stone. No sentimentality, compromise or smoothness here. Perhaps that's why, even though i don't share his faith and find it disturbing in places, this is so refreshing.
A lot of contemporary spiritual reading is like melted ice cream. Saccharine, sickly, and insubstantial. this book is the opposite from a man who has been given a heavy cross to bear, and bore it.
A lot of contemporary spiritual reading is like melted ice cream. Saccharine, sickly, and insubstantial. this book is the opposite from a man who has been given a heavy cross to bear, and bore it.
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