Dead Christians Society

As a young teenager, I was browsing a book that was the transcript of an interview between the poet Archibald MacLeish and the scholar Mark Van Doren. Most of it was over my head, but I loved the dialogue format, in which you got to hear the personalities of both of these interesting men coming through loud and clear in their words. But what really arrested me was an off-hand comment by one of these men that when they were growing up, the characters in the Old Testament were made as real to him as any member of his family. Around the dinner table, they would talk about Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph and the rest as vividly as if they were still with them at that day. And I thought, in reading this, “What a wonderful way to grow up! And what a source of strength and inspiration!”

Many years later, after an upbringing as a kid of two liberal Protestant parents, in a series of churches including a United Church of Canada assembly that I hated—and after my college years, in which I had no use for God at all, while my parents were being renewed in their own faith through the charismatic movement—at the age of 22, after being pursued for years by the “hound of heaven,” I was brought to repentance and turned my life consciously over the One who is always Lord, whether we like it or not. And I began going to one of those modern, contemporary-looking charismatic churches whose sanctuaries look like a giant auditorium that someone decorated to look like a sterile suburban living room, complete with sea-foam green carpeting and rubber plants.

I loved that church. It was so spiritually alive. Yet through the years, I became more and more aware that we were “missing something.” Our little full gospel church—we had gotten the “full gospel” that everyone else in the non-charismatic Christian world had somehow missed—felt shallow, no deeper than the words of our pastors and a few approved TV evangelists. There was no sense at all of the whole mystical, historical massiveness of a church that had been around for 2000 years. No sense of standing on the shoulders of giants like John Wesley, Martin Luther, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Ignatius of Antioch.

I didn’t have a clue who any of those people were. I just knew that I felt like I was part of a movement that was powerful, but in some senses a mile wide and an inch deep.

***

Heb. 13:7–8: ⁷Remember your leaders, who spoke the word of God to you. Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith. ⁸Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.

Heb. 6:12: ¹²We do not want you to become lazy, but to imitate those who through faith and patience inherit what has been promised.

1 Cor. 4:14–16: ¹⁴I am not writing this to shame you, but to warn you, as my dear children. ¹⁵Even though you have ten thousand guardians in Christ, you do not have many fathers, for in Christ Jesus I became your father through the gospel. ¹⁶Therefore I urge you to imitate me.

1 Thes. 1:6–7: ⁶You became imitators of us and of the Lord; in spite of severe suffering, you welcomed the message with the joy given by the Holy Spirit. ⁷And so you became a model to all the believers in Macedonia and Achaia.

I am willing to bet that we can all think of particular people whose testimony has changed us as Christians. Surveys show that by far the most usual influence that brought people to the point of conversion to Christianity is not evangelistic crusades, preachers, or books, but the extended witness of friends or family. And that much is supported by the verses we’ve just read. Paul is telling us that we need to watch and imitate other Christians around us—especially our leaders.

This said, the question arises: should those models include people from past generations? I have called this course an initiation into the “Dead Christians Society.” We are asking if and how a knowledge about long-dead Christians can help us be better disciples. Can they be models of discipleship for us?

***

Here I think it is appropriate to start with the story of how one famous Christian was deeply and personally influenced by a Christian leader who had come before him. Most of you have heard the name of Augustine of Hippo—the late 4^th to early 5^th-century theologian and Bishop who so deeply influenced Western theology and spirituality. Some of you have probably read his famous autobiography, the Confessions.

You may remember that Augustine, a born rhetorician who rose quickly in his field, led an unruly and intellectually prideful youth (unlike any teenagers we may know, of course), only avoiding complete self-destruction, he said in hindsight, by the prayers of his faithful Christian mother. For several years he followed the heretical teachings of the Manichaeans, but then he came under the deep influence of a bishop named Ambrose, who made the faith seem intellectually respectable to Augustine. Ambrose and a number of other Christian friends also pressed him directly his own sinful lifestyle—especially his problem with lust (before he was out of his teens he had had a child out of wedlock with a concubine).

As important as these contemporaries and friends of Augustine were to him, one of the most important witnesses in his life was not someone who lived in his own time, but a great and prominent Christian who had died two years after Augustine was born—the original “Desert Father,” St. Antony of Egypt.

Let’s hear the story of this influence as told by Robert Payne, an accomplished modern scholar and novelist (excerpted from an article in Christian History issue 67 on Augustine, p. 16):

As Augustine tells the story, the day began ordinarily enough. He was staying in the villa with [his dear friend] Alypius and his mother. There came a visitor, an officer of the imperial household called Pontitian, an African and a Christian, who had arrived from Treves.

They sat down to talk, and suddenly Pontitian observed a book lying on the table, a table that had been marked out for a game of dominoes. Pontitian opened the book idly and was surprised to discover that it contained the epistles of Paul. Delighted, he spoke of his own conversion, of Antony and the anchorites of Egypt, then of the monasteries of Italy, and particularly of the monastery outside the walls of Milan where Ambrose sometimes officiated.

Pontitian praised the ascetic life and told the story of two of his friends who, upon reading The Life of St. Antony, determined to join a monastery. Some days later, the women to whom they were betrothed had also become Christians and were dedicated to virginity.

Augustine was more moved than he had ever been in his life—especially by the thought of young brides committing to chastity. It seemed to him at last that he was being compelled to confront himself, seeing himself foul, crooked, and defiled with the habit of lechery, and now there must be an end to it.

When Pontitian was gone, Augustine turned to Alypius. “What is the matter with us?” he exclaimed. “Yes, what is it? Didn’t you hear? Simple men take heaven by violence, but we, heartless and learned, see how we wallow in flesh and blood! Are we ashamed to follow because others have gone before, and not ashamed not even to follow?”

His mind was on fire. Alypius could hardly recognize him, so changed was his expression, and when Augustine threw himself out of the house, Alypius followed him closely, perhaps afraid he would harm himself.

Then we have the famous “garden experience.” Again, here is Payne’s telling of it:

Resting in the garden, Augustine found himself confronted again with the problem of the will. The old temptations returned, more cunning than ever, until he could bear the presence of Alypius no longer and flung himself weeping out of the garden, finding solitude under a remote fig tree. There he babbled like a child; “How long, how long? Tomorrow and tomorrow? Why not now? Why should there not be an end to my uncleanness now?”

Almost he expected to hear God summoning him out of the clouds, but the voice he heard came from an unknown child, chanting: “Tolle, lege” (“Take up and read”). For Augustine the words came like an angelic visitation.

No longer weeping, he rose to his feet and ran to the place where Alypius was sitting with the epistles of Paul beside him. Augustine opened the book, and his eyes fell on the verse from the Epistle to the Romans where Paul demands that the servant of Christ should renounce all voluptuous pleasures: “Let us live honorably, as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires” (13:13-14).

He put his finger in the page, calm at last, and with Alypius beside him, he went into the house to tell the story to Monica. She was overjoyed, radiant with exultation, for the dream of her son converted had at last come true.

I have noticed that Protestants tend to remember, if anything, the part of the story where Augustine picks up the Bible and reads those words. But what really set Augustine’s heart on fire, what drove him out to that garden in the first place, frantic with shame and grief, desperate to find peace in God, was hearing the story of a man who had given up all his worldly goods to pursue Christ in the trackless waste of the desert, and who had grown so much in holiness and spiritual power that people traveled from hundreds of miles away just to exchange a few words with him. Just hearing about such a man as Antony, and about Antony’s influence on other people, pierced Augustine to the heart.

Of course, Augustine went on, after his conversion, to be influenced by other Christians, living and dead. And he himself went on to inspire the monastic order that over a thousand years later would train up another very influential Christian—without whom there would be no Protestants—Martin Luther.

In short, the influence of Christian leaders from long ago is everywhere in our church.

***

Now I am aware that as Protestants, it can take us a while to warm to the idea of treasuring such “saints of the church” as gifts, and imitating them as models.

We might have some reservations, for example, about the attitudes towards “saints” held by people in the time of Francis of Assisi. After Francis died, the head of his order feared people would so desire to be close to this saint and revere him that they would steal his body. So he buried Francis’s coffin beneath the main altar in the Basilica of Saint Francis—under a slab of granite, gravel, ten welded bands of iron, a 190–pound grill, and finally a 200–pound rock. (The plan, by the way, worked: the coffin wasn’t discovered until the 19^th century.)

Protestants have tended to see such unabashed reverence and imitation of other Christians as somehow weak and dangerous—even idolatrous, in that it seems like putting another mediator between ourselves and God, when we already have Christ. (As an aside, we might ask: Do we instead overemphasize our own pet approaches to the Bible in that mediating role—the breaking of the Bible down into “principles” and “formulas,” “three steps to perfect discipleship,” or “the seven texts that prove we should do such-and-such”?) In any case, I do think we are right to be careful in loving and imitating prominent witnesses past and present: the danger still persists of raising people to a level approaching that of “incarnations” of God—we see this in the history of the veneration of Mary.

However excessive we may feel the devotion to great Christian leaders has been in the past, however, maybe we can also feel that we are missing something of the reverence those people had for a life well-lived in Christ, and of their gratefulness for the very great gift of God that leaders who have lived exemplary, challenging lives have represented in the church.

Can we admit that there also seems to be a wisdom in this practice of paying close attention to the notable Christian witnesses who have gone before us?

As a Pentecostal preacher friend of mine used to say, we sometimes just need to see “Jesus with skin on.” We need to see the gospel lived out, by flawed human beings who triumph in grace, and become in some respects worthy of imitation, as the verses we read at the beginning of the class suggested.

Maybe this is part of what that many American Christians’ deep awareness of our need for Christian community means: that if we are to survive and thrive as Christians, we must lean on our brothers and sisters. Maybe we need to enlarge that community to include some of our spiritual mothers and fathers who have gone on before.

If it has been Roman Catholics who have courted the kind of idolatry of Christian witnesses that we have mentioned, it is also Roman Catholics who have been able to draw strength from a vibrant, living appropriation of the witness of prominent witnesses in the history of the church. To many Catholics, Augustine, Aquinas, Francis, Ignatius Loyola—all of these are in a real sense still alive! As a leading Franciscan scholar, who is also a Franciscan friar, has said: “I read about Christian values in the gospels, but in Francis I see someone living them out. That example both supports and inspires me. I want my life to be like his: totally centered on Christ.”

This seems a healthy way to approach church history—we are always totally centered on Christ, but we focus also on his witnesses, so that we can live that centering. That’s why the image I want us to keep in mind for this church is one of walking with Jesus, but finding out if it would help us to walk, in some ways, in the steps of these leaders.

***

Finally, a couple of pointers on how to get the most out of our encounters with these people

[NOTE: these are borrowed from an adult Sunday School class I taught at Blacknall Memorial Presbyterian Church in Durham, North Carolinaa few years back. So the historical figures mentioned here are not the same as the ones we meet in this blog. But the principles are the same.]

Finding the points of contact

Let’s keep an eye out as we listen, read, and discuss, for ways in which these figures can speak to us and change us today. Taking Francis for example—though he lived over 750 years ago, he demonstrated some qualities that can challenge and change us if we let them.

First, he was wholehearted; his commitment to God was utter and complete. Second, he took great joy in obedience; his whole character was marked by optimism and enthusiasm. Third, he was gentle and undemanding, preferring to operate by example rather than coercion. He did not even seek to prescribe a single way of discipleship to everyone. He forbade his friars from condemning those who did not live in voluntary poverty, recognizing that many were called to a different life. Instead, he had his friars live as an example—a prophetic witness to the world. He wanted people to see their dedication and say “These friars give themselves completely to God; they manage to live on so little! Maybe I don’t need so many things in order to survive!”

Seeing them warts and all

It is appropriate, though, to remember that these “heroes of the faith” were human, just like us, and by no means perfect. If they had been, they would have been better than any of the rascals God holds up as models in the Old Testament—including the people listed in Hebrews 11. A moment’s thought about David or Jacob is all we need to knock the shine off of those “saints.”

Just like those folks, the people we’ll be getting to know were sinful people who had been chosen by God, and who once in a while acted according to a strong drive to obey God and to live for him. Take Augustine for example. He was a brilliant theologian, a bishop who reined in schismatics and refined the teachings of the church, and an extraordinary autobiographer who set the pattern for all future Western autobiographies. But he was also a human being who struggled with common, run-of-the-mill weaknesses, including lust, vanity, a hot temper, and bouts with despair, and also harbored some terrible attitudes towards both sexuality and women, some of which got passed on to us in the Western church along with his more helpful legacies. Even Francis continued to repent, after his conversion, of pride and hypocrisy (although some of this may have been the guilt of a very tender conscience), and he was a dead loss as an administrator, eventually resigning as minister general of his own order.

Getting beyond their strangeness

Benefiting from these historic witnesses often requires that we “get beyond” strange aspects of their lives and modes of discipleship. For example, most of us would no doubt find Ignatius Loyola’s strong “Catholicism” strange—with his focus on what we can do, downplaying at some points what God does. Yet he was a man of his country, the extremely loyal and Catholic Spain. And although he does tend to emphasize the human side of salvation, this results in an extremely practical focus in his Spiritual Exercises, and a very down-to-earth awareness of human psychology that can be very helpful for those of us feeling “unconnected” or alienated from theology that seems not to be on our human level, not addressing our issues. Also, Ignatius approaches Scripture in a vividly imaginative way that comes from the extremely visual, physical piety that Francis, too, had practiced—a piety of visions and levitations and miracles. If we can get beyond the strangeness of this, we may find it opens new doors for us in our reading and devotion.

Finally, some of us may find benefiting from these witnesses difficult for another reason—because they may seem too familiar. Here a good example might be Martin Luther. We might think that we have a pretty good handle on Luther—he was the swashbuckling rebel who staked out the truth against the massive error and massive power of the evil Catholic church, and proclaimed “Here I Stand” against the very threat of persecution unto death.

But let’s not forget those aspects of who Luther was that make him a little “strange” to most Protestants today:

•           he was a life-long Catholic, in his formative period an Augustinian monk, operating out of what was by his time a thousand-year-old tradition, and drawing some of his key insights from Augustine himself—the original teacher of grace;

•           he did not wish to create a new church, but to reform the existing one;

•           his attitudes towards political authority were very different from our own, as evidenced in his harsh letter denouncing the Peasant Rebellion in the most violent terms;

•           he was very “mystical” in his piety, and not at all systematic (that was left for Melanchthon); and

•           he thus inspired and passed on resources for a richly emotional approach to discipleship and the Christian life to the German “pietists”—who in turn became in a real, genetic sense forebears of warm-hearted Methodists, holiness folk, Pentecostals, and charismatics.

Until this century, little was known about the English mystic Margery Kempe (1373 – 1433) except that she had an association with the sublime cloistered mystic Julian of Norwich. This all changed in 1934 with the discovery of The Book of Margery Kempe in a library where it had lain hidden for four hundred years. Finding Margery Kempe’s own story was important not just because it shed light on her life, but also because it turned out to be the first known autobiography in the English language.

If anyone had expected to find Margery to be anything like her cloistered counterpart, Julian of Norwich, they were in for a surprise. Far from being a typical holy woman, she was married and the mother of fourteen children. Moreover, she had been a woman of substance, even running a large brewery for a time. After turning to God, she traveled thousands of miles on pilgrimage to all parts of the known world.

This woman, who we know only through her autobiographical book, was no spectacular mystic, in the mold of many other, better-known medieval women. Her “homely devotion,” as she called it, rarely reached the mystical peaks of Julian. And her teachings have generally not been considered nearly as deep or sublime as those of Julian and other mystics.

Why did I pick her to talk about today? Because she is a down-to-earth, struggling “regular person” who has some obvious flaws, but who nonetheless has amazing experiences with God. She writes with a rare honesty and an endearing “everyday-ness” about even the most exalted experiences. And she reminds us of the humanity of Jesus and the wonderful ways he is ready to meet us in our daily lives. Throughout her Book, she refers to herself as “this creature.” She writes honestly. We can read her without the pressure of feeling we don’t “measure up” to yet another “saintly mystic” with their strenuous teachings about the devotional life. She does have wonderful experiences in prayer, receives prophetic words, and gives council to important people, but always with an acute sense of her own flaws and need for god’s grace. How refreshing!

***

Now I’d like to look at a few aspects of Margery’s life and her Book that it seems to me might have important things to say to us today, more than 500 years after her death.

Margery knows God is real, and she expects God to work in her life and the lives of others

When she is at her extremity—first in her post-partum depression and spiritual crisis—she turns to God and finds that he saves her. Throughout her life, she turns to him in every circumstance—often when her Christian brothers and sisters have abandoned her or, worse, turned on her—and she finds that he answers her and carries her through.

‘Distancing” of late-medieval piety

And in that lively sense of God’s caring presence, Margery is a wonderful lens through which to see medieval piety—in particular, the intense desire for religious experience of later medieval life. “In the 1200s, the church, more than ever before, began successfully reaching people through preaching, art and drama, books and pamphlets, and annual confession and Communion, among other things. In response, there was a widespread hunger for religious experience—a hunger, ironically, that the church, which created it, could not satisfy. People found parish life humdrum and spiritually undemanding. In unprecedented numbers, devout lay people began seeking a more intense religious life while staying married and working in their secular vocations.”

In parish life, the Eucharist—always the focus of public worship—was becoming ever more “distanced” in a number of ways. The bishop or priest who formerly had faced the people across the altar-table now turned his back on them. The altar-table receded further and further from view until it finally became lodged against the east wall of the church. All the congregation could glimpse through the rood-screen that separated the altar area from the main area of the sanctuary was the moment when the priest raised the consecrated host above his head. Seeing this moment came to be the high point of the mass, and people were known to shout “Heave it higher, sir priest!” if they could not see and adore their savior in the communion elements.

Late-medieval rise in lay piety

In the midst of this late medieval “distancing” trend, devout laypeople tended more and more to make faith and its practice the highest priority in their lives. They did this through an increasingly self-conscious, explicit faith, and through activities like frequent prayer, ascetic routines, frequent attendance at Mass, dedication to acts of Christian charity, and scrupulous self-examination of their consciences.

Especially, laypeople tried to identify emotionally with Christ’s passion, in order to deepen their devotion to and love for Christ, thus becoming a better follower of him. The theologian Abelard helped push this development of “affective” or emotional piety forward with his theory that Christ’s death had been an act primarily intended to make people sorrowful and turn their hearts to Christ. And Bernard of Clairvaux also contributed, with his theology of love and his use of the Song of Songs to represent our relationship to Christ.

 “The late-medieval ‘age of faith,’ as it’s been called, was ignited by a rediscovery of the Gospels (on which we’ll say more in a few minutes); an identification with Jesus, Mary, the apostles, and saints; and especially a desire to see, touch, and emotionally experience the truths of the Christian faith.”

***

More particularly, Margery can’t get over how incredible the Incarnation is, how human Jesus was, and how much he suffered for us

Evangelicals need to hear Margery on this: evangelical Protestantism tends to hurry over the Incarnation—seeing it as a necessary step to get Jesus to the cross, where he can die as a substitutionary atonement for our sins. In general, we miss out on the rich historical theological resources on Creation and Incarnation, and we focus instead on Sin and Salvation. Margery certainly dwells on the Passion—that can be a “bridge” over which we walk to meet her. But it is the fact that God has really become human and really has been tempted and has suffered in all the ways we have that captivates her.

***

She models a life of prayer not in some cloister but in the struggles of everyday life

One of Margery Kempe’s chief contributions was as a teacher of “homely” asceticism—not highfalutin’, unreachable mysticism. “Asceticism” here does not mean 40-day fasts and self-flagellation. It simply means, as opposed to mysticism, “trying to connect with God in the midst of our everyday struggles.” Mysticism, on the other hand, means something like, “scaling, in cloistered solitude a long ‘ascending ladder’ of specific techniques to union with Christ.”

More specifically, the three classical mystical steps are purgation, illumination, and union. These are assumed to come in that order: first you purge yourself of bad stuff through a kind of “spiritual athleticism”—hair shirts, fasting, and all that; then God begins to show you and teach you things. And finally, only after the first two steps, you begin to enter a closer union with God in Christ.

Well, this sequence is quite correctly worrisome to modern evangelical Protestants. Believing as we do in salvation by grace, we assume we have real union with God from our conversion onward; we don’t have to “earn” it through a long effortful climb.

But Margery didn’t experience the Christian life in that sequential sort of way. It was a blissful encounter with Christ that saved her, after all, from her period of insanity after the birth of her first child. And then, after that, her Christian life was a series of cycles, with purgation, illumination, and union all jumbled together, sometimes layered, sometimes in this order and sometimes in that. Hers was no single, straight climb up a mystical ladder. I personally am much more comfortable with that process—it looks a lot like my life, in fact! Very messy!

Prayer

Margery certainly did, however, model a life of prayer. Her spirituality is centered on prayer. She prayed a lot—and we see her praying many different kinds of prayer, with many kinds of results. Sometimes prayer brings her to a point of resolution about something. Sometimes it results in her hearing a definite command from God. Sometimes she gets a prophetic sense of something that will happen in the future.

***

A favorite expression that Margery uses for some—but not all—of her times of intimate prayer was “dalliance.” In the English of her day, this word meant warm, affectionate conversation between two people—often two lovers. It is a homely, down-to-earth term, indicating the rich freedom, the perfect understanding, which expresses the joy of true friendship with Christ, and in Christ. She also uses the term “dalliance” sometimes when she is describing joyous times of fellowship with other Christians. And this brings us to another point where Margery can teach us:

Margery was not a self-absorbed, inward-turned mystic; she was oriented towards Christian community in many ways

Margery was not a self-absorbed, inward-turned mystic; she was oriented towards Christian community in many ways.

Take for example her most subjective practice, perhaps—the “crying episodes” linked to her meditations on the passion. These were themselves not as subjective as they look. Thornton says they usually went through 3 phases. The first phase is objective, focused on the person of Christ and on his Passion. The second is intimate and devotional: she pours out her feelings of love to Christ and senses his love in return. But almost invariably she would go on to a third phase, in which her feelings of devotion would overflow into compassion for other people, often including specific intercession for them.

***

Though in some senses mystical, Margery’s was an active piety, not just contemplative

Just as Margery was saved from navel-gazing, hyper-subjective mysticism by her communal orientation, she was moved out of the prayer closet and into the world by a desire to be a doer of God’s word. In other words, she not only meditated on Christ and enjoyed intimate prayer times with him, she sought to imitate him in the midst of life.

Her time was the early heyday of the Franciscan and Dominican orders. The friars of these orders “tried to imitate literally the life of Jesus and his apostles,” especially being moved by “Luke 9:3-6, the passage where Jesus sends out the Twelve to proclaim the kingdom of God, taking ‘nothing for the journey—no staff, no bag, no bread, no money, no extra tunic.’” And as the “Gospel revival” spread through society, some lay people, including Margery, believed they too were called to observe the hard sayings of Christ and imitate his walk as best they could. . . .

Margery generally lived out an intense concern for others, serving people by practical works and intercession. She never held back from unpleasant duties, however lowly. But this was not out of strict obedience to some medieval code of behavior or religious legalism. In fact, she did not even serve others for Christ’s sake or after his example. Rather, she saw herself as serving Christ directly in them. She served the lepers because they were in Christ, partaking of his Passion; she served an insane woman because that too was a subtle participation in the Passion.

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She is brutally honest

Here’s another thing I love about Margery: In spite of her sometimes exalted experiences in prayer, she is brutally honest about her flaws and failures. In writing about these, she seems immune to embarrassment, and is perhaps without the kind of self-consciousness which would have led her to re-write her experiences in a way that blurred over the awkward corners and sharp edges of her own personality.

As I’ve mentioned, one example of this honesty is that when prayer brings her to a prophetic sense on some matter, she often has to battle with honest, healthy doubt. She is afraid of misinterpreting what she thinks she has heard from God, because of her own sin or the deception of the devil. “As a prophet,” one of her modern admirers says, “she is extraordinarily free from arrogance.”

In fact, even though she is sometimes brash and self-centered, she is also winningly self-critical. At one point she records about herself (as always, in the third person): “She was enormously envious of her neighbors if they were dressed as well as she was. Her whole desire was to be respected by people. She would not learn her lesson from a single chastening experience, nor be content with the worldly goods that God had sent her—as her husband was—but always craved more and more. And then, out of pure covetousness, and in order to maintain her pride, she took up brewing. . . .”

While evangelicals of their day focused on saving souls, the social-gospel folk pointed to the systemic evils of American society—especially those that resulted from uncontrolled, greedy big-businessmen and industrial tycoons.

These fat cats—many of them churchgoers—ground men, women, and children into the dirt with long working hours and awful conditions. They depersonalized their workers as part of their soulless industrial machines. They marginalized them in slum tenements owned by other greedy capitalists. And as a result, many of God’s human beings were tempted into lives twisted by drunkenness, and prostitution, and crime.

As solutions to the capitalist abuses, the social-gospel leaders posed a kind of public Jesus-ethic. They preached Christian political action targeted at changing legislation. They challenged comfortable, middle-class Christians to apply the golden rule to the downtrodden and marginalized workers of their cities and towns. And they founded inner-city ministries, especially the so-called urban “settlement houses” and “institutional churches.” These were ministries and churches equipped with soup kitchens, training programs, babysitting programs, and similar ministries to the working poor—not just to meet their immediate needs, but to help them on the way to a fulfilled humanity.

Broadly put, while the evangelicals tended to see the church as called to be a “herald” of the gospel to the wider world, these social-gospel liberals saw the church as a “servant” to the wider world.

Of course, we can recognize that these two aspects of “being the church” should not be mutually exclusive. But we might be willing to admit that evangelicals have tended to be stronger “heralds” than “servants.” So let’s see if we can learn something from a leading social-gospel figure.

Now although there were more theologically sophisticated and heavy-hitting members of the social gospel movement—people like Walter Rauschenbusch, nobody did more for the movement than Charles M. Sheldon.

Sheldon was born February 26, 1857 in Wellsville, New York, and died February 24, 1946 in Topeka, Kansas. He spent his working life as both a minister and a novelist, and I’d like to enter his life story by setting a scene Sheldon describes in one of his own stories.

It is Sunday morning in the comfortable upper-middle-class “First Church” in the fictional town of Raymond—somewhere in the Midwest. The congregation and their minister, the Reverend Henry Maxwell, are half-way through a minimally inspiring but generally enjoyable service.

Suddenly, something very unusual happens:

A broken-down, ragged man, a tramp, walks unsteadily into the church—he is not drunk, but he is tired and sick. He makes his way up the center aisle, and begins, in a strangely abstracted way, a monologue. He’s not speaking angrily, but with a kind of desperation mixed with resolve. Listen:

“What I feel puzzled about is, what is meant by following Jesus. What do you mean when you sing ‘I’ll go with Him, with Him, all the way?’ Do you mean that you are suffering and denying yourselves and trying to save lost, suffering humanity just as I understand Jesus did? What do you mean by it? I see the ragged edge of things a good deal. I understand there are more than five hundred men in this city in my case. Most of them have families. My wife died four months ago. I’m glad she is out of trouble. My little girl is staying with a printer’s family until I find a job. Somehow I get puzzled when I see so many Christians living in luxury and singing ‘Jesus, I my cross have taken, all to leave and follow Thee,’ and remember how my wife died in a tenement in New York City, gasping for air and asking God to take the little girl too. Of course I don’t expect you people can prevent every one from dying of starvation, lack of proper nourishment and tenement air, but what does following Jesus mean? I understand that Christian people own a good many of the tenements. A member of a church was the owner of the one where my wife died, and I have wondered if following Jesus all the way was true in his case. I heard some people singing at a church prayer meeting the other night,

“‘All for Jesus, all for Jesus, All my being’s ransomed powers, All my thoughts, and all my doings, All my days, and all my hours.’”

“And I kept wondering as I sat on the steps outside just what they meant by it. It seems to me there’s an awful lot of trouble in the world that somehow wouldn’t exist if all the people who sing such songs went and lived them out. I suppose I don’t understand. But what would Jesus do?”

The Reverend Henry Maxwell stood transfixed at his pulpit.

“What would Jesus do?” The question echoed insistently in his ears. It continued to echo as the tramp collapsed at the front of the church. It echoed as he dismissed the service hastily. And as he brought the man home to his own house. And as the tramp lingered and finally died—in good Victorian-novel fashion.

And then, the tramp’s question continued to echo in the Reverend Maxwell’s ears and in his heart, all the following week. “What would Jesus do.”

Finally, the next Sunday, Maxwell made up his mind. He knew what he was going to do. He knew that many in his congregation would not understand it, and that he would gain enemies and lose members by doing it.

But seven days after the appearance in their midst of the tramp, the congregation of First Church, Raymond, watched their minister mount to his pulpit. The more discerning among them noticed something different about him—a new kind of earnestness—something, even, like a new spiritual power.

At the end of his sermon that morning, Henry Maxwell came to his point. He issued a challenge to his comfortable congregation. He challenged them to ask themselves that same question, “What would Jesus do?” Each time they entered a serious situation or faced a momentous decision, they were to ask themselves—and to pray and seek discernment, looking for the Spirit’s answer. How would Jesus’ example apply to them, in their own unique situations? “What would Jesus do?”

And when they thought they discerned the answer to this question, for them, at that juncture, they were to act accordingly, regardless of potential cost, embarrassment, or loss of social status.

Maxwell instructed those who were willing, to come to him after the service, and to bind themselves by a solemn declaration that they intended—for at least a trial period—to live by this four-word question, “What would Jesus do?”

And many of the members of First Church responded—many more than Maxwell had dared hope.

That, in summary, is the beginning of one of the most-read religious stories of all time, Charles M. Sheldon’s In His Steps. The novel goes on to detail the revolution that ensues in First Church—and the town of Raymond—and eventually other churches and towns all over the country, when people begin living by this question of What would Jesus do.

When Sheldon first told the story in October, 1896, it was from his pulpit, to his own congregation, week by week. Then he had it published serially. Then, in the following year, he got it published as a book. And for the next 60 years, In His Steps sold more copies than any other book in the United States after the Bible: more than 8 million.

***

. . . following in his father’s footsteps, Sheldon entered the pastorate in a small congregation in Waterbury, Connecticut.

From the first, the young minister attended to not just the souls but the daily needs of his congregation and their town. His people must have suspected that this was not your garden-variety pastor when Sheldon launched into his new ministry by “boarding around,” as he called it. That is, he lived week by week with 45 different families of his small mountainous parish’s 175-member church.

But that was only the beginning. There was nothing, it seemed, that Sheldon wasn’t prepared to do, to meet the practical as well as the spiritual needs in his community.

***

Many of his parishioners appreciated these activities, but some of the more tradition-bound weren’t so sure. His “eccentricities” made them uncomfortable, and they began to block his efforts in various ways. Eventually, in 1889, two years after coming to the town, Sheldon felt hemmed in enough by this conservative element in the church that he resigned as Waterbury’s minister.

He immediately moved west to accept the founding pastorate of the Central Congregational Church in Topeka, Kansas.

***

The following year, 1890, during his second winter in Topeka, Sheldon came face to face with the issue that would most define the “social gospel” movement: unemployment and labor unrest.

On the growing industrial landscape of America, thousands of men were losing their jobs—much like the broken-down hobo character of In His Steps. Though some Christians blamed the unemployed, calling them lazy and immoral, Sheldon saw the evil of a capitalist system that cared nothing for individuals.

The young, idealistic minister began to “research” the situation of the unemployed in his characteristically direct, personal way. He put on old clothes and tramped for a futile week in search of work.

***

Following the pattern of “boarding around” that he had established at Waterbury, he spent at least one week each with each of eight different Topeka groups: streetcar operators, college students, blacks, railroad workers, lawyers, physicians, businessmen, and newspaper men.

The most radical of these experiments, and the one with the strongest impact on his ministry in Topeka, was his time in the black community at Tennesseetown, right up the street from the church. . . .

Following the pattern of “boarding around” that he had established at Waterbury, he spent at least one week each with each of eight different Topeka groups: streetcar operators, college students, blacks, railroad workers, lawyers, physicians, businessmen, and newspaper men.

The most radical of these experiments, and the one with the strongest impact on his ministry in Topeka, was his time in the black community at Tennesseetown, right up the street from the church. The families of Tennesseetown had come from the south as part of the “exoduster” migration—some 40,000 freed slaves had passed through Topeka alone, and about 3,000 had made their home there, accounting for nearly 1/3 of Topeka’s population in 1880.

[By the way, I like to muse on the deep influence of this one little town, Topeka, on the Christian landscape of the U.S.A. You see, this was the same town where a radical white holiness minister named Charles Parham held an intensive Bible school in the years 1900 and 1901—during Sheldon’s era in Topeka. At that Bible school, he pioneered the teaching that the act of “speaking in tongues” was the sign of a new baptism of the Holy Spirit—like the baptism experienced by the apostles at Pentecost. And at that Bible school, a black holiness preacher named William J. Seymour—I wonder if he knew folks in Tennesseetown?—sat outside the door of Charles Parham’s Bible class, and picked up the Pentecostal teaching. Then, Seymour brought that teaching all the way to Los Angeles, where, in April of 1906, he was the focal figure of the so-called “Azusa Street revival”—which launched the worldwide Pentecostal movement. That movement, of course, now numbers in the tens of millions, not including tens of millions more denominational and independent charismatics. So both the most famous “social gospel” book of the late 19^th century and the most dynamic Christian movement of the 20^th century came out of this same Kansas town.]

Their houses were dilapidated, their poverty abject. The wary black community of Tennesseetown took in this idealistic white minister. Sheldon stayed several weeks here—a first week trying to understand the roots of the town’s poverty and to help find them work; a second visiting their schools; and a third traveling with a black man to gauge the level of prejudice in the surrounding communities.

Although local newspapers insisted that it was “incompetence” that kept the people of Tennesseetown in poverty, Sheldon said publicly that the cycle of poverty was rooted in racism. This was a few years removed from emancipation, with white repression against blacks rising into outright disenfranchisement and segregation. Sheldon was the first local white to point the finger back at the white establishment for the problems of these black residents of Topeka.

And he didn’t content himself with rhetoric. After a survey of some 800 residents revealed the need for basic social services, Sheldon moved into action . . . catalyzing a kindergarten, a PTA, a library, an integrated Sunday School, crafts programs for children, and other initiatives.

True to Sheldon’s slogan that “every church should be working on one local problem, at least,” and that “what we need is doing! doing! doing!” individual members of Central Church provided free medical care, small interest-free loans, legal services, food distribution, help finding employment, home visits and child care. Other white churches soon joined these efforts, many of which included a significant self-help component. Thus was born an “early, practical demonstration of social reform through ecumenical effort.”

The results seemed to bear out the wisdom of Sheldon’s approach. Tennesseetown crime rates fell; prosperity increased.

***

Sheldon did certainly consider himself a part of his day’s liberal “social gospel” movement. He visited and endorsed the movement’s settlement houses and institutional churches that I mentioned. Indeed, his novels became the social gospel movement’s best advertisement.

But it’s not enough to simply package Charles Sheldon in a box marked “liberal.” In many ways, Sheldon also looked like what we would call an “evangelical” . . .

For Charles Sheldon, social theorizing and political process were not enough: the transforming power of the gospel must reach ordinary, common people—sinners (and he does not hesitate to use that term in his novels). And he believed those common people could be changed only by the willing, sacrificial work of faithful Christians.

So was he a liberal? Or an evangelical? What we can say for sure is that throughout his life, Sheldon simply refused to become drawn into theological controversy. He saw such disputes as a waste of time when so many Christians were failing to live like their Master.