Dining With The Devil Summary

In 1993, Os Guinness wrote a wonderful little book entitled Dining with the Devil. The subtitle was The Megachurch Movement Flirts with Modernity. Guinness pointed out how the megachurch movement was borrowing tools, insights, and strategies from the modern management, business, and marketing world to “reach” people. It was a sort of Babylonian captivity. What these churches often thought were the result of prayer, evangelism, or biblical preaching, were, perhaps, simply the result of good marketing, management, and business principles applied to growing one’s membership (clientele). Further, he likened this borrowing, this captivity, to dining with the prince of darkness himself. Yikes. The book, of course, was written with fundamentalist/evangelical

Someone needs to write a new book, entitled Dining with the Devil: Part Two. And the subtitle might be Fundamentalists/Evangelicals Flirt with Political Power.

Modernity’s teleology is simple: power. Knowledge, material resources, collection, categorization, mapping, colonization, and planning, are, at the end of the day, about power. The power to control, the power to impose one’s vision upon the world. The means to this end, for the modern, is the state, the political. We might say the politician is high priest, while the scientist is their wizard, working their dark magic, literally splitting atoms and moving the earth.

The counter-story to the one modernity tells is the Judeo-Christian story, which is one not of power nor imposition, but of vulnerability and the surrender of any supposed power. We live out the paradox that only crucifixions ever portend the possibility of power. Even then, “power” is nothing like what modernity believes it to be. Resurrection power is never about control or mastery. In Revelation 5, the Lion who has “conquered” is the Lamb who is as if “slain.” His “standing” isn’t about the power of a lion, but the surrender of a

Because he is a Republican, because he is supposedly “pro-life,” many evangelicals will give him a pass (As this Christian satire site sums up the mentality here), just as they did Trump. The mindset in play is power over principle. It’s about winning folks; it’s about “power” (just as who we believe is about power as well---why don’t we believe the women?---which, with more satire, is spoken to here). Thus, the ends justify the means. My goodness, but how quaint, how modern. Also, how short sighted. Christians aren’t supposed to act or think short term. Empires, of which America is only the most recent, will come and go. Christians have eternity in mind; we take the long view. Except when we don’t, like now.

Of course, the only one who can give the sort of power modernity believes in is a rather imposing figure, but always on the lookout for those seeking his dinner company. He knows who to invite. And, when the dinner invitation came, many fundamentalist/evangelicals decided to accept. They packed their longest spoons and headed off. The dinner was held on a mountain, and the story goes like this:

Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. “All this I will give you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me.

Jesus said to him, “Away from me, Satan! For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.’”