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Lurking in the shadows of the headlines we examine in our "Behind the News" newsletter is a common and spiritually deadly virus—something we might call "photonegative syndrome." It is best described in the words of author and professor David Wells:

"Worldliness is what any particular culture does to make sin look normal and righteousness look strange."

Black is white; white is black.

Reading a little book by the British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge over the past few days, I have been reminded that at certain points of history, gifted "sinner-saints" have emerged to expose with stunning clarity the details of this syndrome of worldliness. Often adult converts, almost always people who have wrestled mightily in their own lives with their day's socially dominant forms of sin—I call them "wrestling prophets."

In a comfortable Western church that sometimes seems all but obscured by "cultural camouflage," making hardly a ripple in the comfortable world it inhabits, we need to hear these prophetic voices again.

Muggeridge himself was a wrestling prophet, all too familiar with the perversions of the world. Through the first part of his long life, this chain-smoking satirical journalist was famed more for his alcoholic binges and philanderings than for anything approaching sanctity.

But in the sixties, Muggeridge met Mother Teresa of Calcutta and wrote the book that made hers a household name—Something Beautiful for God. The encounter and the writing of the book worked a change in the hardbitten libertine. As the Daily Catholic later reported it, "The more he researched the more he realized she was for real and something greater was motivating her to sacrifice her all for others. The more time he spent with her, the more he realized the truth he had been searching for."

Some time between 1966 and 1969, Muggeridge, disquieted with the emptiness of his lifestyle and answering the yearning of his heart, became a Christian. Even then, his struggle was by no means over, and in 1982 he took the further step of converting to Roman Catholicism. He was 79 years old.

John H. Armstrong has referred to Muggeridge as "a convert from Socialism, Communism, worldliness, cynicism and personal despair." No less acid after his conversion than before, Muggeridge's pen could most often be found mercilessly lampooning the lies and moral cul-de-sacs of modern society. He became a powerful Christian apologist as well as a social critic and continued to serve his Lord with his exceptional writing gifts until his death in 1990.

It should not surprise us that this modern "wrestling prophet" formed his own personal fan club for a small group of kindred spirits from the annals of Christian history. These are the bishop and theologian Augustine of Hippo (354-430), the mathematician/philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), the romantic poet and artist William Blake (1757-1827), the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855, the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), and the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910). Most of these struggled mightily with lust, desire for fame, moral failing, and despair. All of them turned devastatingly honest tongues and pens not only on themselves but on the perverted beliefs and social systems of their times.

In a 1974 video series produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and an accompanying book, both titled A Third Testament, Muggeridge presents his tribute to these men. (I have not seen the video series but am trying to track them down—I will report back if I find out that they are still in print and available.) In a 1983 edition of the book, Muggeridge added a seventh wrestling prophet, Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881). This edition was republished in 2002 by the Plough Publishing House of the Bruderhof Foundation, and now, in 2004, again by the Catholic publisher Orbis Books.

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March (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48