Dead Christians Society

No sooner has Sheldon’s Rev. Henry Maxwell challenged his congregation to live by the question “What would Jesus do,” he is faced with answering their inevitable question, “How can I tell what Jesus would do if he were in my situation?” Here’s the point in the novel when Maxwell must answer that question. He is meeting with the group of his congregants who have taken the pledge to do as Jesus would do. Together, they are sorting through the questions and challenges that the pledge has brought to them”

“I’m a little in doubt as to the source of our knowledge concerning what Jesus would do,” said Rachel Winslow. “Who is to decide for me just what he would do in my case? It is a different age. There are many perplexing questions in our civilization that are not mentioned in the teachings of Jesus. How am I to tell?

There is no way that I know of,” replied the pastor, “except as we study Jesus through the medium of the Holy Spirit. . . . You remember what Christ said, “When the Spirit of Truth is come, he shall guide you into all the truth.” . . .

There is no other test that I know of. We shall all have to decide what Jesus would do after going to that source of knowledge.

What one church member thinks Jesus would do, another refuses to accept as his possible course of action. Will it be possible to reach the same conclusions in all cases?” asked President Marsh.

Mr. Maxwell was silent some time. Then he answered, “No, I don’t know that we can expect that.” . . . “But we need to remember this great fact. After we have asked the Spirit to tell us what Jesus would do and have received an answer to it, we are to act regardless of the results to ourselves. Is that understood?

It was understood, and the group forged on in ways that changed all of their lives, and their town, too.

Childhood years

Years as Sailor and Slaver

Years as a tide surveyor

Years at Olney

Years at St Mary Wolnoth, London

Comenius was a true world Christian. As the selected events listed indicate, he was widely traveled, but not always by his choice. He lived many lives in his 78 years—Bishop, Educator, Refugee, Peacemaker, Author, Futurist.

His life intersected the lives of many notable Europeans. Pioneers in science, art, philosophy, literature, and politics were contemporary with him. It was a time of cultural and intellectual ferment, and Comenius lived and worked in the thick of it.

A primary document is any document written by the historical figures themselves. It is distinct from a secondary document (though sometimes the line blurs), which is written, almost always in the third person, by another person about a historical figure.

So, if we’re just reading the words of the historical figures themselves, then that’s pretty straightforward, right? The writers are just giving eyewitness, first-hand accounts of what they have experienced. And we just read them, and then we know what “really happened” in history, right?

Of course, it’s not that simple. If we are really going to learn from primary documents, we must bring to them a prepared mind. Inattentive, unprepared reading will result in skewed, caricatured–or, frankly, dead wrong–ideas about what “really happened,” or even about what the writer was trying to tell us (the two are not always the same thing!)

But don’t despair: with some basic direction to show you which tools you’ll need to bring to the job, any non-historian can begin mining primary sources for the real gold and gems they contain. And that’s when the real fun of learning history begins.

First, you will feel much closer to the life of the past when you read such sources. There is no substitute for hearing those voices from the past resurrected in vivid power as you read.

Second, many students find the historical detective work you need to do when reading a primary source stimulating–even addictive!

To get you started, here are two useful “tip sheets” on how to work with primary documents:

Using Historical Sources (North Park)

How to Read a Primary Source (Bowdoin)

Enjoy!

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Because Comenius spent his whole life as a member, then bishop, and always protective father of a small Moravian Protestant denomination called the Unity of the Brethren, we need to say a few words about this group up front.

The Reformation started by the pre-Protestant reformer John Hus (1369–1415) in Bohemia did not die when he was burned at the stake. A number of small communities spun off from the Hussites, each rebelling against Rome in its own ways. The first “Brethren” moved to a remote village in 1457 to live together as the early church did and follow the law of Christ.

From the start, the Unity of the Brethren, as they became known, believed in the equality of all believers and opposed ecclesiastical hierarchy. They also, like the later Mennonites and Quakers, condemned the use of force in matters of faith and the participation of Christians in political power struggles, especially in war.

These ideas, as you can imagine, did not sit well with the authorities. The Unity was outlawed and persecuted by secular and religious powers alike. But its numbers grew, new communities were formed, and its influence went far beyond its ranks.
***

In 1722, still facing persecution, a few Moravian pilgrims went across the border from Bohemia and Moravia to the estate of Count Zinzendorf in Silesia, Germany. There they found refuge and encouragement from that Lutheran nobleman. They called their settlement Herrnhut. These new Brethren adopted much of Zinzendorf’s Lutheran pietism, but the legacy of the old Unity remained alive among them.

On August 13, 1727, there was a revival in Herrnhut, a spiritual explosion of sorts, out of which came a round-the-clock prayer meeting that lasted 100 years, and a missions explosion to go with it. The preparation for that August 13th renewal came from the count’s reading of a copy of Comenius’ Ratio Disciplinae—a Latin history of the Brethren’s church and the essential “discipline” of their faith. This book helped Zinzendorf understand the depth of the Brethren’s faith and the reason why the refugees were saying, “God has brought us here so that He might restore our Church.”

A part of the discipline that Bishop Comenius bequeathed to the Moravian Church was his hope and prayer that all the world should come to know the saving Word of God. Comenius had worked towards this all his life through his commitment to education. The Moravians now took that global vision and transmuted it into the first Protestant missions push. The Herrnhut community—a small, seemingly insignificant minority in a land not their own—now sent missionaries to the Americas and eventually throughout the world.

This, by the way, was a century before William Carey, the supposed “Father of Modern Missions,” began his great work.
***

The battle front between Roman Catholicism and the Reformation passed through Central Europe, where Comenius lived. The Protestant churches in Bohemia and Moravia were violently liquidated in 1620. Under the Hapsburg dynasty, Roman Catholicism became the only legal religion in those lands. Protestant nobles were forced into exile and the common people were corralled back into the Roman Church.

A historian of the Moravian church replays the horrific scenes Comenius witnessed, in these words: “He saw the weapons for stabbing, for chopping, for cutting, for pricking, for hacking, for tearing and for burning. He saw the savage hacking of limbs, the spurting of blood, and the flash of fire.”

“Almighty God,” wrote Comenius in one of his books, “what is happening? Must the whole world perish?”

In 1620, the town of Comenius’s ministry, Fulneck, was occupied by Spanish troops supporting the Imperial forces. His house was pillaged and gutted; his books and his manuscripts were burned. He was forced to flee to a town called Brandeis, leaving behind his pregnant wife and young son. He was never to return to Fulneck again.

He was a persecuted Christian on the run. He had lost his post as teacher and minister. Much worse, he had lost his wife and one of his children to plague. And now, for the sake of his suffering Brethren, he wrote his beautiful allegory, The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart.
***

The Labyrinth is a brilliant, imaginative Christian allegory a few decades earlier than John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and in something of the same vein.

In his Labyrinth, the truth-seeking pilgrim is led around for much of the book with a number of impairments that keep him from seeing clearly. Comenius explains that the pilgrim’s guides are “insatiability of Mind, which pries into everything, and Custom, which lends a color of truth to all the frauds of the world.” He has also been fitted with a bridle and a pair of blurry spectacles fixed to his nose: “The bridle is Vanity, and the glasses are constructed from the rims of Habit and the lens of Assumption.”

. . . the pilgrim quickly finds that the world is full of deception and deceit. Everyone is wearing masks. So the pilgrim, seeking answers, visits a number of professions whose primary concern is the discovery of truth. These include historians, astronomers, astrologers, metaphysicians, rhetoricians, and dialecticians. Though he is initially attracted to these various occupations, he consistently uncovers the fraud and deception of each profession that he is investigating.

 “According to Comenius, God has provided humanity with three tools to learn wisdom: the five senses to discover the secrets of the natural world; reason and intelligence to increase their knowledge; and faith, for it is only with this spiritual gift that God’s children may hear his voice through Scripture, meditation, or prayer. These three bases of Comenius’s later educational reforms are central components of the Labyrinth.

“By his senses and natural reason, the pilgrim begins to detect the fraud and hypocrisy of the world. His guides attempt to allure him with earthly riches and pleasures. Each time he is tempted, however, he is able to discover the moral flaw of the class he is examining. Although his sight is blurred by the spectacles Delusion has given him, the pilgrim can make these observations by surreptitiously peering under them. But human reason and sensory perception have their limits. With them, the pilgrim is only able to discover the deception and chaos of the world. The harmony and unity underlying this confusion can only be discerned through revelation.
***

When the pilgrim meets Christ, he is given a new pair of spectacles. The Word of God and the Holy Spirit replace the lens of Assumption and rim of Habit. With these new aids, the pilgrim is able to reenter the world’s labyrinth, confident in his ability to negotiate its tortuous passages successfully.”

In the closing sections of his book, we can see that he then regarded the Brethren as almost ideal Christians. Among them he found no priests in gaudy attire, no flaunting wealth, no grinding poverty; and passing their time in peace and quietness, they cherished Christ in their hearts. “All,” he says, “were in simple attire, and their ways were gentle and kind. I approached one of their preachers, wishing to speak to him. When, as is our custom, I wished to address him according to his rank, he permitted it not, calling such things worldly fooling.” To them ceremonies were matters of little importance. “Thy religion,” said the Master to the Pilgrim–i.e., to the Brethren’s Church–”shall be to serve me in quiet, and not to bind thyself to any ceremonies, for I do not bind thee by them.”
***

He had two objects. He wanted to revive the Church of the Brethren, and he wanted to uplift the whole human race; and for each of these purposes he used the same method: education.

If the Brethren, said Comenius, were to flourish again, they must pay more attention to the training of the young than ever they had done in days gone by. He issued detailed instructions to his Brethren. They must begin, he said, by teaching the children the pure word of God in their homes. They must bring their children up in habits of piety. They must maintain the ancient discipline of the Brethren. They must live in peace with other Christians, and avoid theological bickerings. They must publish good books in the Bohemian language. They must build new schools wherever possible, and try to obtain the help of godly nobles.

This is the key to the whole of Comenius’s career. It is the fashion now with many scholars to divide his life into two distinct parts. On the one hand, they say, he was a Bishop of the Brethren’s Church; on the other hand he was an educational reformer. The distinction is false and artificial. He never distinguished between these two works. He drew no line between the secular and the sacred. He loved the Brethren’s Church to the end of his days; he regarded her teaching as ideal; he laboured and longed for her revival; and he believed with all his soul that God would surely enable him to revive that Church by means of education and uplift the world by means of that regenerated Church.
***
His greatest educational work was undoubtedly his Great Didactic, or the Art of Teaching All Things to All Men. It was a thorough and comprehensive treatise on the science, method, scope, and purpose of universal education. It is far too rich to do justice to in a summary, though I can give you a taste of it in these few quotations from John Amos Comenius, The Great Didactic, 1649; tr. M.W. Keatinge, 1896:

Education for Everyone

Not the children of the rich or of the powerful only, but of all alike, boys and girls, both noble and ignoble, rich and poor, in all cities and towns, villages and hamlets, should be sent to school. Education is indeed necessary for all, and this is evident if we consider the different degrees of ability. No one doubts that those who are stupid need instruction, that they may shake off their natural dullness. But in reality those who are clever need it far more, since an active mind, if not occupied with useful things, will busy itself with what is useless, curious, and pernicious.

Learning is Natural

Who is there that does not always desire to see, hear, or handle something new? To whom is it not a pleasure to go to some new place daily, to converse with someone, to narrate something, or have some fresh experience? In a word, the eyes, the ears, the sense of touch, the mind itself, are, in their search for food, ever carried beyond themselves. The proper education of the young does not consist in stuffing their heads with a mass of words, sentences, and ideas dragged together out of various authors, but in opening up their understanding to the world, so that a living stream may flow from their own minds, just as leaves, flowers, and fruit spring from the bud on a tree.

Play

Much can be learned in play that will afterwards be of use when the circumstances demand it. A tree must also transpire, and needs to be copiously refreshed by wind, rain, and frost; otherwise it easily falls into bad condition, and becomes barren. In the same way the human body needs movement, excitement, and exercise; in daily life these must be supplied, artificially or naturally.

Lifelong Learning

If, in each hour, a man could learn a single fragment of some branch of knowledge, a single rule of some mechanical art, a single pleasing story or proverb (the acquisition of which would require no effort), what a vast stock of learning he might lay by. Seneca is therefore right when he says: “Life is long, if we know how to use it.” It is consequently of importance that we understand the art of making the very best use of our lives. Aristotle compared the mind of man to a blank tablet on which nothing was written, but on which all things could be engraved. There is, however, this difference, that on the tablet the writing is limited by space, while in the case of the mind, you may continually go on writing and engraving without finding any boundary, because, as has already been shown, the mind is without limit.
***
Summing up, while the Thirty Years’ War was raging, and warriors were turning Europe into a desert, this scholar, banished from his native land, was devising sublime and broad-minded schemes for the elevation of the whole human race.

This is one of the things that makes Comenius great. He didn’t play any part in the disgraceful religious quarrels of the age. A Jesuit scholar once pointed out that “Comenius wrote many works, but none that were directed against the Catholic Church.” As he looked around upon the learned world he saw the great monster Confusion still unslain, and intended to found a Grand Universal College, which would consist of all the learned in Europe, would devote its attention to the pursuit of knowledge in every conceivable branch, and would arrange that knowledge in beautiful order.

He was so sure that his system was right that he compared it to a great clock or mill, which had only to be set going to bring about the desired result. If his scheme could only be carried out, he believed it would put an to wars and religious disputes. He believed it would unify all men of all nations at the feet of God!

To review all the innovations by which Comenius almost single-handedly created modern education is nearly impossible. When we read about these reforms, they just seem common-sense to us, since they have shaped education today. But they were revolutionary for his time.

Sensitive to the developmental needs of children of various ages, he divided elementary schools by grades. Believing that children must be wooed rather than coerced into learning, he invented the illustrated textbook and made experience and discovery part of the classroom environment. He taught that corporal punishment, if used at all, should be connected only with moral and not intellectual faults. He insisted girls were fully as capable of learning at the highest levels as boys. And he preached that schools should teach all realms of knowledge, including those of morals and piety.

Comenius’s reforms were both praised and implemented all across Europe, with over half of European schools eventually using his textbooks. These books made him an overnight celebrity, so that Cardinal Richelieu sought his services for France and the Massachusetts Puritans (it seems) offered him the presidency of Harvard.

Amanda Berry Smith (1837 - 1915): Working from below—and conquering fear—to challenge the comfortable. This “washerwoman evangelist” spent her life ministering effectively across the Big Three cultural barriers: race, class, and gender. In the Victorian moment of complacent prosperity, she broke like a sanctified thunderstorm on the vibrant but genteel holiness camp meetings of the white middle class. Her autobiography is one of the most fascinating first-person accounts you’ll ever read from a Victorian-era Christian. It describes a woman who often spoke up in strange settings even when she felt unwelcome and intimidated, and knew she would be reviled and misunderstood.

Here are a few highlights from the Cornerstone course–John Newton session. They are pretty raw, but I thought folks might like to see and interact with them:
***
Yes, he was a sea captain—a backslider from his mother’s evangelical faith—who worked in the slave trade and had many adventures and near-death experiences. And yes, it was a storm at sea that first turned him back to God in prayer, (although his ship didn’t capsize).

But Newton didn’t get hauled out of the water, dry himself off, and write the famous hymn. No, “Amazing Grace” belonged to a second, and Newton believed, far more exciting and important, phase of his life. The part where he became the Anglican curate of an impoverished English midlands town, then the rector of one of London’s most prestigious parishes. And became the most influential person to shape evangelicalism in its crucial “teen years” after the heyday of John Wesley.

To Newton, those years as a lonely soul wrestling with God through dangerous situations in exotic locales did not hold a candle, for excitement and eternal significance, to his long career as a pastor.

. . . the hundreds of warm Christian friendships he built over the years, and the work he did to bring Christians together across boundaries of class, denomination, and theology. These were the touchstone of his years as pastor—and what he would really want us to remember him for.

Newton was the ultimate Christian boundary-crosser and bridge-builder. He was a Calvinist who accepted Arminians, a state-church pastor who encouraged independent churches, friend of prominent personalities who was comfortable in the company of the working poor.

In an America more pluralistic than ever on its Christian scene—not to mention the many non-Christian religions—John Newton is a man worth knowing.
***
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound,
that saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind but now I see.

Though some today wonder if the word “wretch” is hyperbole or a bit of dramatic license, John Newton clearly did not think so. In fact often, throughout his life, he referred to himself as “the old African blasphemer.”
***
It was during this period of peak influence in his London parish that Newton founded the Eclectic Society, a group of like-minded “Gospel” clergy, to discuss the issues of the day. It was, he said, “the society that bears no name, and espouses no party.” It included in its membership Anglicans, nonconformists, and even a Moravian or two.

The agenda of each monthly meeting was driven by a single question, submitted by one of the members at the end of the previous meeting. The members would take turns answering, and Newton kept minutes in a small journal.

The questions spanned theological issues, cultural trends, and the practical trials and dilemmas of church and family life—from “How should we reconcile Paul and James on justification?” to “What are the particular dangers of youth in the present day?”

Newton insisted the group maintain a high tone of gracious humility. In responding to theological error and dealing with ecclesiastical foes, kindness always took precedence over sternness and persuasion over polemics.

“If we stretch our authority, we lose it,” Newton observed.

In both its charitable tone and its parachurch format, the Eclectic Society became the model for other parachurch societies (including William Wilberforce’s influential Clapham Sect) and agencies (including the great British missionary societies, two of which were birthed out of the Eclectic Society).

***

How Did Newton Build Bridges?

By ministering to the needy, engendering hope in hopeless places.

By building broad personal friendships, fostered by considerable personal correspondence.

By holding fast to his theological convictions, but not allowing them to prevent cooperation.

By working within the government-sanctioned religious system where possible, around it only when necessary.

By giving lay people power and responsibility, encouraging their freedom of thought (unfortunately, at the expense of his pastoral authority).

By gathering people with divergent views and encouraging civil conversation.