Jesus Rediscovered

Jesus RediscoveredBy Malcolm Muggeridge Doubleday, $5.95 In Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis tells us in some detail about his conversion, and, since he was a complicated person, the process of his conversion was far from simple. Yet at a pivotal moment he had to answer a simple, if overwhelming, question: Was Jesus actually God? He returned to the gospel narrative and one thing struck him forcefully: that the claims made by Jesus would ordinarily be evidence of madness, but that the person who made them here in fact radiated sanity. From this contradiction Lewis deduced that the claims were true. Malcolm Muggeridge’s conversion—the subject of this book—is less philosophical than that of Lewis, but equally indebted to a confrontation with the reality represented in the New Testament narratives.

“Each generation of Christians,” he writes, “inevitably seeks to fashion its own Christ from the austere figures carved in wood of the early Middle Ages, through the ebullient Renaissance Christs, through the weird efforts of our own time, sometimes clerically sponsored, to devise a Hipster Savior. Yet behind all this there is a real man— born, growing up, reaching maturity like other men; turning his mind, as I have tried to turn mine, to what life means rather than to what it provides. . . . I, too, have my notion of what he was like—this man in whose flesh God deigned to live and die.” And Muggeridge does indeed have an idea of what Christ was like, for he presents it memorably and on the whole convincingly in the opening chapter.

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Jeffrey Hart

Jeffrey Hart is a contributor to National Review.

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Jesus RediscoveredBy Malcolm Muggeridge Doubleday, $5.95 In Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis tells us in some detail about his conversion, and, since he was a complicated person, the process of his conversion was far from simple. Yet at a pivotal moment he had to answer a simple, if overwhelming, question: Was Jesus actually God? He returned to the gospel narrative and one thing struck him forcefully: that the claims made by Jesus would ordinarily be evidence of madness, but that the person who made them here in fact radiated sanity. From this contradiction Lewis deduced that the claims were true. Malcolm Muggeridge’s conversion—the subject of this book—is less philosophical than that of Lewis, but equally indebted to a confrontation with the reality represented in the New Testament narratives.

“Each generation of Christians,” he writes, “inevitably seeks to fashion its own Christ from the austere figures carved in wood of the early Middle Ages, through the ebullient Renaissance Christs, through the weird efforts of our own time, sometimes clerically sponsored, to devise a Hipster Savior. Yet behind all this there is a real man— born, growing up, reaching maturity like other men; turning his mind, as I have tried to turn mine, to what life means rather than to what it provides. . . . I, too, have my notion of what he was like—this man in whose flesh God deigned to live and die.” And Muggeridge does indeed have an idea of what Christ was like, for he presents it memorably and on the whole convincingly in the opening chapter.