Are you comfortable or are you ready to give up everything to make Jesus more real to people that desperately need him? Pioneer missionary Griffith John wrote A Voice in the Darkness over 100 years ago, but the challenge he wrote about laying down our lives for the kingdom of God is both timely and powerful.

“He saved others; Himself He cannot save.” Matthew 27:42

What did these men mean to express by this taunt? Did they mean to express a disbelief in the reality of our Lord’s miracles? “He professed to save others; but we have found Him out at last.”

“We know now that it was all sham, all pretension. He cannot save Himself! How could He save others?” Or is there here an admission of the fact that our Lord did save others, and a faint hope expressed that He might come down from the cross and prove Himself to be the very Christ? Did they imagine that, by taunting Him in this way, He might be induced to give this proof of His Messiahship? “He has certainly saved others. Why does He not save Himself? Let Him do so now, and all our doubts will be removed. We will crown Him king, and follow Him wheresoever He may lead.” Whatever their thoughts may have been, we know that our Lord did not gratify their vain curiosity.

In this taunt there is a great truth expressed. It is true that He saved others; it is true also that He could not save Himself. But there is another truth, and this other truth was hidden from their eyes. Why could He not save Himself? The reason was not obvious to them but it is perfectly clear to us. He could not save Himself because He would save others. To deliver others He must surrender Himself; to save others He must sacrifice Himself.

It must be one or the other. He could not do both—save others and save Himself also. And what is true of the Master is true of the disciple. We, the disciples of Jesus Christ, can be saviours to men only in so far as we are willing and ready to sacrifice ourselves on their behalf. Let us then spend a little time in devout meditation on this great truth.

“Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?” That is God’s voice to us, and it rests with ourselves as to whether we will respond to the Divine voice or not. But the moment we do respond and say, “Here am I, send me,” that very moment our life must become a life of service and self-sacrifice. Let me give you two or three examples as illustrations of this great truth.

There is Moses in the Old Testament. When the time had come to deliver Israel from the bondage of Egypt, God’s voice came to Moses, saying, “Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?”

It was optional with Moses to go or stay. But the moment he resolved to obey the Divine voice, that very moment his life became a life of service and sacrifice. Having said yes, it was not optional with him as to whether his life should be a life of self-indulgence or self-abnegation. His magnificent position in Egypt had to be renounced; his brilliant prospects of future aggrandisement had to be abandoned; his dire conflict with Pharaoh, and his forty years of suffering with and for his people in that terrible wilderness, followed as a matter of course. He lived for his people, sacrificed everything for his people, and was prepared to die for them at any moment. We know the result. Israel was saved, and God’s purposes were fulfilled. Moses saved others, himself he could not save.

There is Paul in the New Testament. When the time had come to make known to the Gentiles God’s redemptive purposes, a fit agent was needed, and God’s voice came to Paul, saying, “Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?” It rested with Paul to decide as to whether he would or would not respond to the Divine voice; but having responded, it did not rest with him as to whether his life should or should not be a life of service and sacrifice. The moment he said, “Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do?” that moment his life became a life of self-renunciation and suffering. The hunger, the thirst, the fastings, the toil, the stripes, the imprisonments, the anxieties for the churches, and finally his martyrdom followed as a matter of course.

We know the result. The Gospel was preached to the Gentiles, many churches were established in the Roman Empire, and multitudes of men were saved. Paul saved others, himself he could not save.

This excerpt is a chapter from Griffith John, A Voice in the Darkness: Lessons from 60 Years in Ancient China (Underground Publishing, 2023).

David Livingstone saved others; himself he could not save.

And there is Jesus Himself. The time had come for the full manifestation of God’s redemptive purpose. The time had come “to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness.” The voice of God is heard, saying, “Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?” It rested entirely with the Eternal Son of God as to whether He would respond to that voice. There was no power in the universe to compel Him to leave heaven and come down to this earth to suffer and die. But the moment He did respond, the life of sorrow and suffering, Gethsemane, and the
cross, became inevitable. The life of the world depended upon that great sacrifice. Of Jesus it may be said emphatically, He saved others; Himself He could not save.

Let us now look at this great truth as an all-pervading, all-embracing law.

As a law it pervades the whole of Nature. In Nature, receiving there always means giving here; life there means death here. The animal kingdom lives on the vegetable, and the vegetable lives on the mineral. The mineral must die to itself in order to build up the vegetable, and the vegetable must die to itself in order to build up the animal. The development of vegetable life depends upon the concurrence of certain agents, such as heat, air, moisture, light, and soil. All these must die to themselves if the tree or the plant is to live and grow.

In Nature there must be giving wherever there is receiving; this must be sacrificed if that is to be realised. It is the law of natural instinct. No sooner is the child born than natural instinct steps in, and imposes this law of self-sacrifice on the mother. From this moment, her life becomes a life of holy ministration, wherein, for the sake of the child, she cannot save herself. It is the law of family, social, and political life.

Would you be a father or a son worthy of the name? Would you be a mother or a daughter worthy of the name? Would you be a husband or a wife worthy of the name? Would you be a brother or a sister worthy of the name? Would you be a neighbour worthy of the name? Would you be a statesman worthy of the name? If you would, you must come under this law as the law of your life. It is the law of philanthropy.

A true philanthropist, a lover of mankind, is a man who cannot save himself, because he will save others. Such was Paul, such was Howard, such was Livingstone, and such have been many more whose names I might mention. It is the law of the Divine life.

Let us not fall into the delusion of supposing that, because God is omnipotent, the forth-putting of His power costs Him nothing. This is a very common supposition, but nothing can be more erroneous. Even of God Almighty it is absolutely true that He cannot save Himself. He is ever saving others; Himself He cannot save.

It is the law of the Christian life. Service, rising up to self-sacrifice for the good of men, is the ideal Christian life. Every true Christian is a priest, not merely because he stands before God alone, without the intervention of a human mediator to intercede for him, not merely because he offers to God the sacrifice of thanksgiving and praise in daily adoration, but because his life is a life of priestly ministration for others, and that in sacrifices wherein, for the sake of others, he cannot save himself. He presents himself daily to God, on behalf of humanity, in sacrifices which save men from sin and misery. Such is the priesthood of the New Testament and such is the ideal Christian life.

Can you imagine a higher life than this? Can you imagine anything more God-like? It is the Christ-life. It is the noblest life possible to man.

It is emphatically the missionary’s true life. It was the life of Henry Martyn. “Now,” said Henry Martyn, as he set out for India, “let my life burn out for God.” And it did burn out for God. There you have the true missionary.

It was the life of William Johnson, of West Africa. “Had I ten thousand lives,” said William Johnson, “I would willingly offer them up for the sake of one poor African.” There you have the true missionary.

It was the life of Dober. “I determined,” said Dober, the Moravian, “if only one brother would go with me to the West Indies, I would give myself to be a slave, and would tell the slaves as much of the Saviour as I know myself.” There you have the true missionary.

It was the life of Francis Xavier. “Care not for me,” said Xavier; “think of me as dead to bodily comforts. My food, my rest, and my life are to rescue from the granary of Satan the souls for whom God has sent me hither from the ends of the earth. They will destroy me by poison, you say. It is an honour to which a sinner such as I am may not aspire. But this I dare to say, that whatsoever form of torture or death awaits me, I am ready to suffer it ten thousand times for a single soul.” There you have the true missionary.

This, then, is the missionary’s true life. A self-seeking, self-centred, self-indulgent missionary is a pitiable object to behold. He may call himself a missionary, the directors of his society may put him down as one of their missionaries, and speak of him as our able missionary, our highly valued missionary, our well-known missionary, and so on and so on, but in God’s sight he is a contemptible hireling.

Every missionary ought to be a self-sacrificing man, and every missionary worthy of the name is a self-sacrificing man. Still, the true missionary will not look upon himself as a self-sacrificing man, neither will he speak of his work, and the trials in connection with it, as if he looked upon God as his debtor. His sense of indebtedness to his God and Saviour will make it impossible for him to do that. “Can that be called a sacrifice,” asked Dr. Livingstone, “ which is simply paid back as a small part of a great debt owing to God which we can never repay? Say, rather it is a privilege.”

Then the missionary finds that his best work is very poor and imperfect, and that, try as he will, he can never come up to his own ideal. “My doings! my doings!” said John Elliot, the apostle of the Indians, “they have been poor and lean doings. Oh, child of the dust, lie low; it is Christ that hath triumphed.”

Such is the Christian’s true life. Such emphatically is the missionary’s true life. But how far is this life from being fully realised by Christians generally? How far from being fully realised by ministers at home and missionaries abroad? How far from being fully realised by any one of us? Some of us may have lofty ideals as to what we should be in this respect; but is there one among us who has realised his ideal?

Some will sacrifice much in one direction, but not in another. They will sacrifice in the line of their liking. But can that be called a sacrifice which a man does in the line of his liking? Ask them to step out of that line, and you will find that the idea of the Cross has never entered into their conception of the Christian life. For instance, some will talk much and talk eloquently, but are slow to do. They are born preachers, and their Christian life begins and ends in telling others what to do.

We must be prepared to sacrifice in all directions. The element of self-pleasing must be cast out, and the will of God must become to us the one law of our being. What some seek in the Christian life is the salvation of their own souls. This is a worthy aim.

PR

This excerpt is a chapter from Griffith John, A Voice in the Darkness: Lessons from 60 Years in Ancient China (Underground Publishing, 2023). Used with permission.

For more about Underground Publishing, read the PneumaReview.com interview with Bethany Hope about rediscovering the writings of missionaries and Christian pioneers.

Despite the fact that we, as mere fading mortals, go out of our way to not think about death, great works of art and literature tend to inexplicably draw us into the obscure world of mortality. The End of the Christian Life is one of the latest books to wrestle with this topic—a topic that is increasingly inconsistent with mainstream cultural mores. J. Todd Billings provides a freshness and unobscured clarity to a difficult conversation that can be attributed both to his erudite scholarship and present experience with terminal cancer. Billings increases the veracity of his book by engaging with numerous authoritative voices—from early Church Fathers to contemporary scholars. Based strictly on the title, this book concerns a critical phase in the life of a Christian, but believers and non-believers alike, who want to know how to “truly live,” will benefit greatly from the gems found at the surface and buried beneath.

Following the informative introduction, chapter one presents the reader to the pit of Sheol where those who are imprisoned within it feel abandoned, helpless, and cut off from God. Contrary to the belief of some, “no mortal lives for long without visiting Sheol for a time,” Billings muses (p. 30). Often Sheol is experienced in the death of someone close to us, frustrating our attempt for complete control over life. Our consistent denial of the recurring experience of Sheol engenders a false sense of control. Maybe we should stop fighting, “open our eyes and breathe deeply in the Pit itself,” Billings suggests (p. 45).

Billings ponders the views of his friend Walter and that of Irenaeus, a second-century bishop, both of whom approached death as part of a divine pedagogy, in the second chapter, “Two Views of Mortality.” Contrasting views, as seen through the theology of St. Augustine and the author’s experience of the memorial service for his friend Melissa, are then presented as a counterbalance. Although death may testify to God’s love for us, it is both irrational and a consequence of sin (p. 66). The reality of these opposing views is that both death and dying are, simultaneously, gifts of the “arc of human life,” and “an enigma and a wound” that point us to the redemptive death of Christ (pp. 57, 68).

Chapter five addresses two extant views of flourishing—the so-called prosperity gospel, and God’s counterview. With cancer patients as his focus, Billings talks about the religious hope that keeps them enheartened and living. He finds that deeply religious patients choose extreme measures of treatment, their risky choices revealing their view of flourishing. How Christians are formed theologically leads to important questions such as, where does our hope lie, how does God act in this world, and does God want us to prosper? Billings looks at the theology of healing as espoused by Joseph Prince and then turns to the teachings of St. Paul to examine the difference between how humans and God define prosperity. He completes this chapter by redirecting the discussion towards the Pauline emphasis of a life hidden with Christ.

Timing is everything, so it goes without saying that this book could not have been released at a better time. The global COVID-19 pandemic and its hourly coverage by an impassioned media has served to remind us of our frailty by resurrecting a once-dormant fear of mortality. Dying and death is the obvious theme of the book, but this is ameliorated by many other themes such as the human desire for control over death, and the idolatrous trust in modern medicine. I was encouraged by how the author treats these universal human perceptions with informed grace. All Christians and non-Christians will recognize themselves—their thoughts and attitudes—within the pages of this book and not feel condemned. Also, I found the discussion questions placed at the end of each chapter helpful for assimilating what was read. My only frustration was found in a minor misstep that fails to include Christians from outside of the Reformed faith tradition. Some readers may be uncomfortable with Billings’ implicit theology of God’s sovereignty, water baptism, and irresistible grace; however, any noticeable doctrinal differences do not detract from the book’s overall message. Altogether, J. Todd Billings offers to his audience a gripping message of resurrection hope in Christ, thereby lifting everyone with faith in God, up and out of the deep, dark, and ensnaring pit of Sheol.

Reviewed by Joseph R. Fiorentino

This book review previously appeared in Didaskalia: The Journal of Providence Theological Seminary, Volume 30 2021-2022, CS ISSN #0847-1266. Used with permission.

Publisher’s page: http://bakerpublishinggroup.com/books/the-end-of-the-christian-life/392000

In our urban-dominated landscape, hunting, particularly sport hunting, has increasingly been viewed as a remnant of a barbaric era that is no longer needed and should be abolished. Clearly there is a cultural divide between hunters and anti-hunters. Hill and White sought to deepen their understanding of this intellectual and ideological divide and investigated how Christians have understood and understand their faith in regards to sport hunting. As Hill clearly says, “… this collection of essays was to provide a window into the different perspectives held historically by Christians in relation to sport hunting and to hear new voices on the debate. … The secondary goal was to encourage its readers to thoughtfully consider the various perspectives, many times not set in clear apposition, and the merits (and weaknesses) of each” (p.411). In brief, the book clearly accomplishes its goals.

Before delving into the text, readers should know that I was a contributor to this volume. My article, “Dominion Over Animals: Taking the Scriptural Witness and Worldview Seriously” (pp.33-348) summarizes my dissertation published in Dominion over Wildlife? An Environmental Theology of Human-Wildlife Relations, Wipf and Stock, 2009. My engagement with the specific contributions made by my fellow contributors to this volume occurred only after the book was published.

The editors did a superb job providing readers with an overall perspective on the topic. Their writing not only helped prepare readers to grasp the major themes and controversies, but their summaries of the articles enhanced reader pre-understanding and thus apprehension of the material. Heuristically, the book (both sections 1 and 2) stand as a model for educational best practice. I would note, however, that Hill’s contention that Christianity was a syncretistic religion (p.23) reflects a modernistic comparative religions bias and not the testimony handed down by Christ’s apostles.

The articles are organized into two major sections. Section One takes a descriptive approach to the debate over recreational hunting. Articles focus on historical attitudes and perspectives held by Christians over the centuries, starting with the biblical text and culminating with interviews of contemporary Christian hunters. The articles show how Christians argued both for and against sport hunting. Articles often described prevalent views by the way “Nimrod” of Genesis was portrayed in the literature. Interestingly, when hunting was in vogue, Nimrod was portrayed as a neutral or valuable character. When hunting was not in vogue, Nimrod became a term of derision and symbol of moral turpitude.

The second article entitled, “A Dying Legacy?: A Century of Hunting in the Stories of Texas Families”, Hill provides a sort of meta-analysis of the interviews contained in the following chapter. He keenly identifies key themes, concepts and sociological factors that impact one’s adoption (or lack) of hunting. If one wishes to have a quick, but not simplistic, look at the cultural-historical issues embedded in the hunting experience, this article is must reading. Though it focuses on the American, albeit Texas, experience, I suspect that the categories and insights will be useful elsewhere in the United States if not the world. The third article is actually a collection of interviews. These interviews are valuable for providing a more granular look at the motivations behind the desire to hunt as told by various hunters who claim a Christian heritage.

Section Two contains articles addressing the ethical or prescriptive views on hunting. Authors from both sides of the debate use a variety of rationales to support their position for or against the morality of hunting. Unsurprisingly, the majority of the emphasis focused on the justification (or lack thereof) for the killing of animals for “fun”.

Two articles that attempted to use Christian theology to condemn hunting (Killing and the Kingdom: A Case against Sport Hunting” by Shawn Graves and “Muscular Christianity and Sport Hunting: Missing the Target?” by John B. White were quite disappointing. Both ostensibly tried to use Christian teaching to condemn hunting but neither dealt with the concrete realities and teaching of the Biblical text. Their arguments reminded me of Supreme Court justices that attempt to argue that capital punishment violates the U.S. Constitution’s cruel and unusual punishments clause even though the authors of the Constitution clearly supported the death penalty. Any rational reading of the constitution clearly reveals that the authors were only referring to cruel execution methods such as Drawing and Quartering, etc., not to a condemnation of execution in general. Grave’s approach tended to avoid Scripture entirely choosing instead to rely on the vague notion of not causing harm. White’s article, on the other hand, argued that God’s intention was for humans to not kill animals. It never occurred to these scholars to even consider the ontological status of animals. If they did, the anti-hunting authors would perhaps understand that harm to an animal is categorically different (morally speaking) than harm to a person. (I suspect they would both grant that fact but apparently, they did not consider the full impact of that view). If God grants humans permission to kill His property, who are we to say that somehow violates God’s will? Neither of them considered how Christ was quite comfortable killing animals, sometimes for no apparent reason other than to demonstrate he could (e.g., miracle of the fishes). Dismissing this by saying that Jesus was God (though true) does not resolve the problem because Jesus was also the perfect human who provided an example of a sinless life before God.

Regrettably, Christian anti-hunters continue to commit two key mistakes that I have repeatedly pointed out over the years. First, they have either an inability or unwillingness to read literature that disagrees with their perspective. Not every scholarly article is found in top tier (often liberal) journals. Second, they are unwilling to consider the whole testimony of Scripture. Instead, Christian anti-hunters find a generic passage, such as “reconciling all things” and then use that generic principle to truck in every idea that fits their narrative even when specific passages counter those ideas. By rejecting or perhaps ignoring the principle of the general rule is constrained by the specific, they allow themselves to fly off into fanciful arguments without sufficient grounding in the Word of God.

Overall, this book provides an important contribution to the topic of sport hunting that is scholarly, yet accessible to college-level readers.

Reviewed by Stephen M. Vantassel

Publisher’s page: https://www.mupress.org/God-Nimrod-and-the-World-Exploring-Christian-Perspectives-on-Sport-Hunting-P952.aspx

Christian historian Woodrow Walton continues his investigation into the origins of the modern movements that inspired Christians to go and share the mission and message of Jesus throughout the world.

George Müller

When studying how living out the gospel changed the social fabric of the early nineteenth century England, Europe, and North America, several figures must be considered. How their charitable work thrust the gospel into the societies of both England and the young United States of America should not be forgotten or underestimated.

The first of these was George Ferdinand Muller [also spelled Müller or Mueller], who was born in Kroppenstedt, Kingdom of Prussia (now Saxony-Anhalt Germany) and later moved to England. In 1829, Muller offered to work with Jews in England through the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews. He gained his fame as a man who cared for 10,024 orphans during his life time and provided educational opportunities for them. He not only preached the gospel but also established 117 schools which offered Christian education to more than 120,000 children. In England, he associated himself with the Pilgrim Brethren Church. He and his wife, Mary Groves, had four children, two of which were stillborn.

The New Orphan Houses in the Ashley Down district of Bristol, England.
Image: The George Müller Charitable Trust/Wikimedia Commons

Muller, after early bouts of illness, and the death of his wife, in 1871 married again. His second wife was Susannah Grace Sanger. Together, beginning in 1871, they began a 17–year period of missionary travel that took them to the United States of America, Canada, Germany, India, Australia, Palestine, the Straits of Malacca, and New Zealand. When in the U.S.A., he was welcomed by the President of the United States of America. He died at the age of 93 on March 1898 and has been honored throughout the world ever since as the director of the Ashley Down orphanage in Bristol, England and the care of 10,024 orphans over the years, and as man who never asked for support for his work but when support was given by churches and individuals, he kept account of it and wrote “Thank You” letters to every donor. His example defies any estimate.

This article is part of The Gospel in History series by Woodrow Walton.
Image: The Books of Kells by way of Wikimedia Commons.

Simultaneous to the years of Muller’s life was the ministry of Frances Willard, the founder of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which challenged the liquor industry in the countryside and urban areas of both the frontier and growing cities. Willard was not only a stalwart defender of women’s rights but also one of the earliest of Christians to see the mission of God within the socio-cultural context and thus living out the ministry of Jesus as spelled out in the tenth chapter of the gospel of Luke. At the same time the Society of Friends and many of the Mennonites and Moravians were binding the wounds of soldiers and were given exemption from military service and recognized as peace churches, an exemption which exists into the present.

Frances Elizabeth Caroline Willard (1839 –1898).
Image: Gamaliel Bradford (1919) Houghton Mifflin Company/Wikimedia Commons

Simultaneously in this era the Congregationalists, Baptists, Dutch Reformed, and Methodist churches established schools for Native Americans. After a childhood of abuse and impoverishment, William Apess [originally spelled Apes] served as a soldier in the United States army during the War of 1812, became a Christian and entered into the ministry of the Methodist Church. He rose to fame as a preacher and as a lecturer giving protest of the plight of Native Americans in New England and beyond. His autobiography, A Son of the Forest, published in 1829, was the first published by a Native American writer. In 2014, Philip F. Gura, with the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, wrote a biography of William Apess. This writer owns a copy of Gura’s The Life of William Apess, Pequot. During the years of both his ministry and his series of lectures, he gained support from churches outside of the Methodists and public recognition. Slowly but surely, co-operation among churches of Arminian and Reformed backgrounds brought them together in different areas of Christian ministry and mission outreach.

The Pietists had great impact within the colonies from the time of the Great Awakening and into the Second Great Awakening. In time, their influence was to lead to the formation of the Free Methodist Church, the Evangelical Free Church, and others who broke from synodical and presbyterian polities common among the Lutherans and Reformed Churches. It is against this background that Alexander Campbell during the Second Great Awakening welcomed any one of any Christian persuasion to participate in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. We are all “disciples of Christ,” he proclaimed. Barton Warren Stone, the “New Light Presbyterian” felt much the same but simply used the term “Christian” no matter a person be Baptist, Presbyterian, Catholic, Lutheran, Moravian, Quaker, or Mennonite. The Anglican Church in America dropped the term “Anglican” from it vocabulary and re-named itself “Episcopal.” The Methodists in America under the leadership of Francis Asbury and others shortened their identity from “Methodist Episcopal” to simply “Methodist.”

In 1826, the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance was formed. However, there were many precursors of such public charity, many from the earlier years of the Christian faith. Basil of Caesarea initiated the first hospital for the sick and feeble. In the Middle Ages, the Beguines, a laywoman’s ministry initiated in the pre-Reformation era, reached out to the neglected, the homeless, the lame, and the poor, and wrote devotional and theological works which made for conflict with some of the “professional” clergy. But of great significance to the Reformation era and the years of the global expansion of the gospel was the initiation of Sunday Schools by Hannah Ball in High Wycombe of England in the late 18^th century but carried further by Robert Raikes in 1780.

Robert Raikes the Younger (1736 –1811) promoted the Sunday school movement, raising awareness of a need for public education before state-run schools existed.
Image: Wikimedia Commons

The start of the Sunday Schools began with a school for boys in the slums. Raikes had been involved with boys incarcerated at the count Poor Law which was part of the jails at the time. Raikes believed that vice would be better dealt with school as a preventive and held on Sundays as the boys were frequently enlisted to work in factories the other six days. The best available teachers were among the laity of the churches. The basic textbook was the Bible. The originally intended curriculum began with learning to read the Bible and then progressed to the catechism of the Anglican church. The first Sunday School class started in July of 1780 in the home of a Mrs. Meredith with boys and then extended to girls. By 1782 several other Sunday Schools opened around Gloucester, England.

On November 3, 1783, Raikes published an account of the Sunday Schools in the newspaper he started. Later news of the spread of the Sunday Schools appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine and by 1784, a further account of the spread of the Sunday Schools appeared in a letter to the Arminian Magazine.

Children laboring in a cotton spinning factory in 1835.
Image: illustration from The History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain (1835), by way of Wikimedia Commons.

Little by little, Jesus’ great commission was being realized as a missionary mandate that was greater than proclamation and fulfilled the whole missionary made enunciated by Jesus and recorded in Matthew 25:35-40; 28:18-19; Luke 10:2-9; 18-20; and Acts 1:8, and universalized in Mark 16-18. The missionary mandate included healing the sick, discipleship, and entering the domain of the “serpent” to release the imprisoned, the afflicted, the haunted, the down-trodden,” and penetrate the darkness of the world with the light of a greater kingdom not of this world but of the one who is King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

PR

Christian historian Woodrow Walton continues his investigation into the origins of the modern movements that inspired Christians to go and share the mission and message of Jesus throughout the world. In Part 3, he invites us to learn more about the Quakers and other marginalized groups whose convictions had them following God on paths often disdained by other Christians.

In the 17^th and 18^th centuries, events were unfolding in England, Europe and North America that would change how the gospel message was being proclaimed. Although little was being done in the strict evangelical sense of proclaiming the message (kerygma), much was done in the area of the living out of the Christian message and in the complexion or appearance of the total church in Europe and especially in North America.

During this time, Southern Europe, especially along the Mediterranean coastline, remained dominantly Roman Catholic, from Portugal all the way to the Balkans and no further. The Balkans were strongly Orthodox within a growing Islamic presence. Slavic Europe, outside of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was also Orthodox. Austria-Hungary and the Czech and Slovak areas remained Catholic but were quickly experiencing the effects of the Protestant Reformation and the Anabaptist Radical Reformation. The Hussite Brethren, better known as the Moravians, were leaving for western Europe and then continuing to go overseas. However, similar Brethren bodies, such as the Mennonites, the Amish, and the Hutterian Brethren, remained. These had a significant impact on the Christian complexion of Eastern Europe outside of Russia.

To see the unfolding of the worldwide Christian mission, let us look at England and Germany in particular. First, there are two Englishmen worthy of attention, George Fox and William Penn.

George Fox was born on July 1624 in Drayton-in-the-Clay, Leicester, England, and is credited with being the founder of the Society of Friends, now known as the Quakers. By the time that he turned 19 years of age, he was conscious of an “inner voice” which evangelicals and Pentecostals would identify as the leading of the Holy Spirit. Fox became an assiduous student of the Bible. He was the first person on record to argue for the equality of women with men in the propagation of the gospel. In 1647, Fox began preaching publicly. He preached in fields and markets. He attracted gatherings of people who flocked to listen to his messages. At times, they gathered in houses after the services. Originally, the new believers referred to themselves as “Children of the Light” or “Friends of the Truth” and later still “Friends,” a term which continued to be in use along with “Quaker.” Fox became a public figure, but not of his own making. Officials were suspicious of him because of the stands he took on military service, the place of women in home and in public, and how the incarcerated and children should be treated.

George Fox refusing to take the oath at Houlker Hall, 1663. From a painting by John Pettie (1839-1893).
Image: Wikimedia Commons

At the same time, he gained approval from people in prominent positions: James Naylor, a prominent preacher in London, became one of Fox’s first converts to the Quaker position. By the end of the 1650s, the Society of Friends became more organized. The British Commonwealth under Cromwell in the 1650s was also the Friends’ most creative period. Even though the restoration of the monarchy was threatening for the Friends, now characterized as Quakers, it became the era when believers migrated to North America and settled in Puritan New England. The revolt in 1661 by the Fifth Monarchists led to the suppression of the Quakers and the repression of other dissenters, instigating an exodus. It was in the aftermath of the Fifth Monarchist coup that Fox and eleven other leaders among the Friends issued a statement which became known as “the peace testimony” from which stems their stand against military conscription.

A woman preaches during a Quaker Meeting in London (circa 1723), engraving by Bernard Picard (1673-1733).
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Their stand against military conscription and for equality of rights between men and women in both civil matters and the ministry of the church. This did not sit well with many in either England or Puritan New England. When some of the New England Quakers came to London to plead their case, Fox met with them. After his release from prison in 1666 for refusing to swear the oath of allegiance to the existing political regime in England, Fox set about normalizing a system of monthly and quarterly meetings throughout Great Britain, extending to Ireland’s Quaker population, a system which has persisted to this day. In 1669, Fox married a widow with eight children, Margaret, at a Quaker meeting in Bristol. They shared together in the administration the Society of Friends. In 1671, George and Margaret Fox embarked on a voyage to the West Indies and North America where they visited groups of Quakers who had earlier left England for Barbados, Jamaica, Maryland, and North Carolina. After the travels abroad, the Foxes returned to England. It was there that George and Margaret met with William Penn and Robert Barclay, men of wealth and position who became allied with the Friends.

In 1683, Penn, who had been granted land in North America, turned 1,000 acres of land in the colony of Pennsylvania to Fox and the Quakers. Although Fox was never able to visit for himself the Quaker colony in Pennsylvania, he was overjoyed with what was granted. Penn, himself a Quaker, furthered the ministry within Pennsylvania. The Act of Toleration of 1689 put an end to the uniformity law under which the Friends and other dissenting Christians had been discriminated against and persecuted. It was a great day for Fox and the expanding Quaker movement, both within what would later become the United States of America, and in the Netherlands, Poland, Denmark and Germany. Fox died in January 13, 1691, soon after preaching at the Gracechurch Meeting House in London. He left a journal and letters and other writings which were subsequently published after his death. His name is immortalized at the prestigious George Fox University with campuses in Portland, Salem, Newberg, and Redmond, Oregon.

Of equal importance was the Quaker emphasis on the leading of God’s Holy Spirit in a person’s life and, thereby, an increase of Christian witness. The spiritual health of the witness is as important as the sermon that is preached. Walt Whitman, who was raised by parents inspired by Quaker principles, wrote of George Fox: “George Fox stands for something too—a thought—the thought that wakes in silent hours—perhaps the deepest, most eternal thought latent in the human soul. This is the thought of God, merged in the thoughts of moral right and the immortality of identity” (Prose Works, Philadelphia, David McKay, 1892). Modern Christians have taken seriously the writings of Elton Trueblood, who for years taught at Earlham University in Indiana, on how Christians are yoke-fellows in Christ’s work of outreach and ministry. This writer has met Dr. Trueblood in person at a meeting in Fort Worth, Texas, around 1956, at the Texas Christian University.

This article is part of The Gospel in History series by Woodrow Walton.
Image: The Books of Kells by way of Wikimedia Commons.

The work of Richard Foster, who inspired the Renovaré moment and the Renovaré Spiritual Formation Study Bible, is another example of Quaker influence. The Renovaré Study Bible is an inter-denominational venture that seeks to plumb the spiritual depths of the Scriptures using quotations of Christians from the past with the intent of deepening the devotional life of the believer and consequently improve the quality of Christian witness.

A side effect of Penn’s donation of land to the Quakers was to encourage the settlement of the same area by other dissident Christian groups, particularly those with pacifist leanings such as the Mennonites of the Netherlands and the Amish of Switzerland. The designated land was composed of what is now known as Lancaster County, which historians consider the birthplace of American agriculture. The new Mennonite and Amish immigrants were principally farmers and agriculturists. Their children would later migrate into the American Midwest, during James Monroe’s presidency in the early 1820s, taking their agricultural skills with them. These migrations saw the development of farmlands in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa. Cedar Rapids, Iowa, proudly displays a billboard advertising Quaker Oats as you enter the city. These families also displayed a quality of Christian life that enabled them to relate to the Native Americans of that section of our country. One of the earliest of these was the family of Daniel Boone. His earliest portrait identified him, by way of personal adornment and headwear, as a Quaker, a portrait that dispels the myth built around him by the Motion Picture industry and modern television frontier drama. Boone and his family of six children were able to balance the scales between the way of life of Native Americans and that of the immigrant settlers coming from the East.

What this did was to give a larger scope to the mission of the church beyond the preaching and purely evangelical to include the presentation of the Christian life lived out beyond that of preaching. The role of the church is not only that of the kerygma (proclamation) and the didactic (teaching) but the presentation of a kind of communal life which reaches outward beyond itself to reconcile, heal, extend mercy, befriend, encourage, and inspire.

What would become the United States of America was not merely a haven for different Christian groups from England and Europe. For many colonial American Christian leaders, it was also a model of what was envisioned by Peter the apostle when he spoke at the festival of the Pentecost a short time after Jesus’ ascension and by John, years later, when, banished to the island of Patmos, he envisioned those who were redeemed “out of every tribe and tongue and people and nation” (Revelation 5:9-10). It is important to note that within that vision, the redeemed were not identified by their church polity, interpretive stance, racial or ethnic origin, but having come from every tribe, tongue, people and nation whether Slavic, Germanic, Scandinavian, African, Asian, or whatever. It would take another century for some incoming church groups to set aside prejudices and begin to co-operate in both evangelism and outreach and in some cases merge.

Adoniram Judson in 1846.
Image: Wikimedia Commons

In the young USA, only sixteen years old, a meeting occurred near the newly formed Williams College that sparked America’s initial entry into the Christian world mission. This event is referred to in American history as the Haystack Meeting in August of 1806. Several students of Williams College at Williamstown, Massachusetts, gathered for prayer in the shadow of a haystack close to the school. Among the students were Samuel Mills, James Richards, Adoniram Judson, Robert Robbins, Harvey Loomis, and Bryan Green. The news of Carey, his wife, and family departing from England to spread the gospel in India and translating the Scripture into the language spoken near Calcutta reached America and spread to Williams College. The news lit a fire in the hearts of the six young men. Of the six of them, Adoniram Judson decided to meet William Carey in India.

The Haystack Prayer Meeting of 1806 has been considered the beginning of America’s entry into the Christian world mission. It was, however, in 1810, that the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions was formed by Baptist churches who set aside their extreme congregationalism to in order to have a General Convention the purpose of which was to enable and support Baptist missionaries around the world. It was under this Board that Adoniram Judson and his wife were able to make contact with William Carey in Calcutta and then go on to southeast Asia.

The evangelistic outburst in mid-America, often referred to as the Second Great Awakening, was not an altogether novel idea. It was a sudden earnestness in Christian devotion and discipleship. It made headway from the leadership of Timothy Dwight, president of Yale University, grandson of Jonathan Edwards. As it spread into the trans-Appalachian west, two of the leading figures were Thomas and Alexander Campbell in Pennsylvania, Barton Warren Stone, a New Light Presbyterian, in Kentucky, and Peter Cartwright, a Methodist Circuit Rider who once took evangelism into a dance hall. He later served in the United States Congress as a representative from Illinois.

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Christian historian Woodrow Walton continues his investigation into the origins of the modern movements that inspired Christians to go and share the mission and message of Jesus throughout the world.

The Making of the Christian Global Mission

Part 2: Missions to the First Americans

Before proceeding to dealing with the spread and growth of the Christian gospel into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there is also the need to look at the contribution of a lone figure of Norman-French heritage who as a Jesuit missionary opened the pathway for mission and evangelism in North America. In his travels in Canada, he not only spread the gospel among a particular native American people, the Hurons, but also lived among them for several years and penned the lyrics of the first Christmas carol written and composed in North America. This song was later translated from the Huron language by Jesse Edgar Middleton in The United Methodist Hymnal, No. 244 “Twas in the moon of wintertime.”

Huron moccasins (circa 1880 CE) on display at the Bata Shoe Museum, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Image: Wikimedia Commons

I want to introduce the figure of Jean de Brébeuf, whose biography Saint among the Hurons: The Life of Jean de Brébeuf  was first written in 1949 by Francis X. Talbot and published by Harper & Brothers and most recently republished in 2018 by Ignatius Press. Brébeuf was a Norman from the north of France, the descendant of Scandinavians who invaded northern France in the early 1500s. He was born in what is now know as Condé-sur-Vire, March 25, 1593, in the diocese of Bayeux in eastern Normandy. In 1617, at the age of 24, after finishing his schooling and settling family affairs, he applied for entry into the Society of Jesus and thereby became a part of the missionary-minded Jesuits, an independent minded order not initiated by the Church but by Ignatius Loyola and which had gained later recognition as a missionary arm of the church. Even after gaining such authorization, the Jesuits were allowed to function as an independent mission arm of the Roman Catholic Church under its own umbrella, the Society of Jesus. This same independence also affected the relationship of the Jesuits with the different countries in which they operated. In some cases, they were regarded with suspicion from the political realm of the countries in which they served as missionaries of the Gospel. Mexico was one such country as were Brazil and Argentina in South America.

It was in 1625 that Jean de Brébeuf learned that the Jesuits were opening a mission in New France (Canada). This was five years after the founding of the Plymouth Plantation in New England. The year before, in October of 1624, Brébeuf met two Récollet [a Franciscan order] missionaries just returned from the New World.

This article is part of The Gospel in History series by Woodrow Walton.
Image: The Books of Kells by way of Wikimedia Commons.

In March of 1625, with full royal assent, the Viceroy of Quebec issued a decree authorizing the establishment of a residence in Quebec and other parts of New France for the Jesuits and to associate its members with the Récollets in the conversion of the “savages.” On April 24, 1625, after several delays resulting from opposition by the Montmorency Company in both Paris and Rouen to the proposal, the authorization came through, and Brébeuf and the other missionaries crossed over into the open waters of the Atlantic for New France (Canada). They entered into Canada by navigating around Cap Gaspé and through the Gulf of St. Lawrence and to Quebec. From 1625 to 1649, the year of his death at the hand of the Iroquois, de Brébeuf labored among the Huron who lived along the borderlands of the Great Lakes all the way from southern Canada to Michigan’s shoreline to Sault Ste. Marie.

The point of this short excursus is that the Jesuits did not engage in general evangelism among Native Americans but focused their attention on specific people groups, both in Canada and Brazil. The 1986 motion picture The Mission portrayed the Jesuit work and also their conflict with the political regime of the Portuguese which governed Brazil at the time of the Jesuit mission work. The independence of the Jesuits in their missionary evangelism also brought them into an adversarial relationship to the Spanish viceroys which governed out of Mexico City.

John Eliot

Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God, also known as The Algonquian Bible.
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Concurrent with Brébeuf in North America was John Eliot in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the first Puritan missionary to Native Americans who concentrated on the Algonquian language of the local Massachusetts. Helping him learn the language was a young Native American named Cockenoe. The youth had been captured in the Pequot War of 1637 and was a servant of an Englishman named Richard Collicot. Eliot later wrote in his diary that Cockenoe “was the first that I made use of to teach me words, and to be my interpreter.” Cockenoe could not write English but he could speak it as well as he could speak Algonquian. He was able, thereby, to help Eliot translate the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer and other portions of the Bible and prayers. His first attempts at sharing the gospel with the Native American in 1646 were meager, if not failures, but eventually met with success. He also became able to produce printed publications for the Indians in their own language. In 1663, Eliot completed a translation of the whole Bible into the Massachusetts language, Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God. The printer who did the printing issued 1000 copies on the first printing press in the American colonies.

Three years later, in 1666, Eliot published The Indian Grammar Begun.

Through the succeeding years, fourteen towns of “praying Indians” grew up in Massachusetts Bay Colony, the best documented of which being the one at Natick, Massachusetts. Other missionaries also established praying Indian towns, one of whom, Samson Occom, was himself half Mohegan.

Eliot and his wife, Hanna, had six children, five sons and one daughter. Two sons, John Eliot, Jr., and Joseph Eliot, both became pastors of churches themselves. Joseph Eliot, a pastor in Guilford, Connecticut, and his wife, were parents of Jared Eliot, who also became a minister of the gospel was also a noted agricultural writer.

David Brainerd is another significant figure, not only in mission among Native Americans but also upon the future development of the missionary enterprise world–wide. Brainerd was born April 20, 1718, in Haddam, Connecticut, the son of a Connecticut legislator, and his wife Dorothy. Although he died young at the early age of 29 from tuberculosis on October 10, 1747, his ministry intersected with that of George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, Gilbert Tennent, James Davenport, and Jonathan Dickinson.

From David Brainerd, the apostle to the North American Indians, published in 1891.
Image: Wikimedia Commons

In 1742, at the age of 24, he was licensed by a group of Presbyterians known as the “New Lights” which included such figures as Barton Warren Stone, Jonathan Dickinson, and the initiators of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge, the first-known organized missionary society.

Brainerd’s ministry in New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, and Long Island became an inspiration for William Carey, Brainerd’s cousin, James Brainerd Taylor (1801-1829), and the 20^th century’s Jim Elliot who ministered among the Aucas (Huaorani) in Ecuador, South America. Brainerd was the forerunner of the evangelical missionary enterprise[1] which emerged with William Carey in England and the Haystack Prayer Meeting of 1810 in Massachusetts.

Thomas Bray, the founder of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign parts and also the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, supported the ministry of Whitefield both in England and the English colonies which were to become known as the United States of America. Because the focus was upon North America and the British isles, the site of the activities was not global but British North America. A world, or global focused evangelical witness, first became reality with the initiation of the Particular Baptist Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Among the Heathen in 1792 in Kettering, England, where 12 ministers signed an agreement to support the missionary work of William Carey and John Thomas in Bengal, India. Carey and Thomas were first sent out in 1793. To this day, William Carey is considered to be the initiator of the Christian world mission with schools and organizations and a book publishing house named after him in both the United States and Canada. This first missionary society is still in operation to this date. In A.D. 2000, its name was changed to the Baptist World Mission and presently supports over 350 workers in 40 countries.

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Notes

[1] The reason to not consider George Whitefield and John Wesley as the forerunners of the evangelical missionary enterprise is that both Whitefield and John Wesley were more revivalists than missionaries. Their preaching missions were to revive Christian faith in believers and reinvigorate a Christian witness that would lead others to faith in Christ.

Christian historian Woodrow Walton investigates the origins of the modern movements that inspired Christians to go and share the mission and message of Jesus throughout the world.

The Making of the Christian Global Mission

Part 1: Jan Hus and the Moravians

It may seem odd to associate the making of the Christian global mission to the trans-oceanic voyages of the maritime ventures of the merchant ships of Spain, Portugal, The Netherlands, England, and the Baltic countries of Europe in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. Yet it is not without reason when one considers what was happening in the world at that time. A trans-oceanic trade network was opened between East and West, North and South. The ports of entry receptive to the merchant marine also became the harbors who welcomed the newcomers who were tradesmen, many of whom were Christians.

1587 woodcut of Jan Hus by Christoph Murer.
Image: Wikimedia Commons

It would be easy to think of Western European Christians going overseas to the Americas or to the East Asian landmass without considering what was happening to Christians in central and eastern Europe, places where Christianity was more Orthodox than Catholic or Protestant. We seldom consider the reverberations of the Protestant Reformation upon those areas. We focus primarily upon Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Menno Simons, and William Tyndale who reshaped the Christian landscape of western Europe and the British Isles. We forget that it was a Christian priest in Moravia, now known as the Czech Republic, known as Jan Hus (also spelled John Huss), who lit the fire of the Reformation. Before the Lutherans, there were the makings of the Moravian Christians who in later years had a significant impact upon John Wesley. Another seldom considered contribution to the Christian world mission came out of Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church. Among the Orthodox Churches, the Russian Orthodox were probably the most mission oriented, spreading Christianity across the Asian steppes and beyond the Ural Mountains. This became more so in the late 1600s as a result of Patriarch Nikon’s move to modernize the Liturgy of Worship which caused the first major split.

Those who split referred to themselves as the “Old Believers,” and it was they who spearheaded a mission clear across the top of Asia to Siberia and to the coast of the Bering Sea. That is a story in and of itself, and it becomes part of a larger story played out through the 18^th and 19^th centuries when Slavic Christians started spreading out beyond their initial homelands.

Jan Hus at the Council of Constance, by Karl Friedrich Lessing (1842).
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Reverse image of the German or Austrian 16th century Jan Hus Centenary Medal.
Image: Wikimedia Commons

]]> https://pneumareview.com/the-making-of-the-christian-global-mission-part-1-jan-hus-and-the-moravians/feed/ 0 https://pneumareview.com/the-global-christian-mission-the-maritime-global-expansion/ https://pneumareview.com/the-global-christian-mission-the-maritime-global-expansion/#comments Fri, 10 Jan 2020 22:58:58 +0000 http://pneumareview.com/?p=15946

Christian historian Woodrow Walton takes another look at the causes and effects of global navigation by ships sailing from Europe and how the mission and message of Jesus was carried throughout the world.

The Maritime Global Expansion: End of the Fifteenth Century to the Present

A few year prior to the fall of Constantinople in 1452 to the military prowess of the Ottoman Turks, a Norwegian long boat arrived back in Norway after a lengthy voyage across the north Atlantic from the Davis Strait separating the southwestern shoreline of Greenland from northeastern Canada. It was the first known crossing of the North Atlantic. The long boat carried marketable goods for Norway and its neighbors as Denmark and Sweden and other countries facing both the North Sea and is neighboring Baltic Sea.

Denmark, the Faero islands (circled), and Greenland are highlighted in red.
Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Unlike the expansive Atlantic Ocean, the North Sea is squeezed between Great Britain and Denmark and the Baltic flowing between the shorelines of Sweden, Poland, Prussia the Slavic lands and northeastward along the shorelines of Finland.

In a way, it was not an extraordinary feat of seamanship because the voyage to Greenland involved landfalls at the Shetland and Faero Islands and Iceland, making the distance between that Scandinavian settlement and Greenland feasible. By the late 1400s, there were settlements on those islands, and an occasional influx of Christians. Nonetheless, the voyage was an important one as far as negotiating an extremely wide expanse of ocean.

Before 1452, Europeans confined their sea voyages to the Mediterranean squeezed between the shorelines of southern Europe and North Africa, the Arabian Sea between the horn of Africa and the shorelines of Iran and northeastern India. There were also smaller bodies of water that were navigated such as the Adriatic and the Aegean, both inlet extensions of the Mediterranean. The Adriatic separates the eastern shorelines of the Italian peninsula, from the western shorelines of Illyria and Greece. The Aegean Sea flows between the eastern shorelines of Greece and Macedonia from the shorelines of what we know now as Turkey. The tiny and narrow Sea of Marmara is actually not a sea as it is squeezed in by Macedonia and northwestern Turkey and becomes the Bosporus, a strait that almost trickles into the Black Sea. Where the Marmara flows into the Black Sea is the City of Byzantium, later re-named Constantinople, and after 1453, became known as Istanbul.

As Western Europeans sailed the seas to trade and settle around the world, how did they carry the mission and message of Jesus with them?

This article is part of The Gospel in History series by Woodrow Walton.
Image: The Books of Kells by way of Wikimedia Commons.

The first long voyages of the Portuguese merchant mariners touched seashores around the world. In their wake came Portuguese Catholic priests to the mission fields of Angola on the western seaboard of Africa, the seashores of Mozambique in southeast Africa, the waters of the Arabian Sea, the southwest coast of India, and on the other side of the world, the Atlantic shoreline of Brazil.

The first long voyages of Spanish galleons left in their wake waters that washed the Philippines in the Pacific Ocean, the western seaboards of Mexico, Central and South America on one side of the world. On the other side, their ships penetrated the Caribbean all the way to the shorelines of eastern Mexico, Texas, and most of northern South America. These became the mission field of Spanish priests when they began arriving. They would soon be matched by French priests debarking from French vessels finding harbor in Mobile Bay and the southeast seaboard of North America.

The Netherlands and the English extended themselves to counter the feats of the Portuguese, the Spanish, and the French. The English had a distinct advantage over the Portuguese and Spanish and to an extent, the Netherlands. This was, in part, because of what happened in the eastern Mediterranean, of all places. In 1517, the Ottoman Turks seized Palestine. The Ottomans allowed other European nations a part of the Palestinian trade. England, under Queen Elizabeth, lobbied for influence at the Ottoman court in Istanbul for the right to bid against Venice and the Venetian merchants. The English were early allies of the Ottoman Turks, as they regarded them as a bulwark against a growing Catholic Hapsburg Empire in Central Europe.

A fluyt.
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Queen Elizabeth had a big part in establishing a joint-stock company. She named it the Levant Company and enabled it to underwrite business in the Ottoman-controlled eastern Mediterranean. The Levant introduced a new, fast-moving cargo ship: the Dutch fluyt. Without going into the details of the exchanges between the English and the eastern Mediterranean merchants, trade included such items as worsted wool and a high-tech fabric called kersey in exchange for raisins, wine, camel hair, and chemicals. What made this side-venture so important that there were among these new fast moving ships, twenty-five which were called The Mayflower. It was one of these Dutch-English cargo ships, docked at Leiden, The Netherlands, probably in transit, which gave shipment and transport to a group of Separatist Christians bound for the shores of North America and which made eventual land-fall at Plymouth. This ship was at the end of its grape-running life, from the shores of what is now Israel. The great European grape rush from the Bethlehem landscape to England and thereabout had a large part in the Christian mission by bringing a unique Christian group of individuals we now called the Pilgrim fathers into the American landscape.

As usual, the writing of Matthew Schmitz, senior editor of First Things, is clear and cogent—and courageous. He fearlessly tackles daunting topics such as, in this case, immigration. It is a genuine pleasure to follow his almost seamless integration of personal testimony, social environment, rational investigation, and theological articulation. I particularly appreciate Schmitz’s compatible juxtaposition of Protestant ethical and social theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s realism and Catholic natural theologian Thomas Aquinas’s political theory. Well done!

I will confess up front that I am in a position of a high level of agreement with what I take to be Schmitz’s primary assertions. Liberal idealism is an impractical and unworkable assumption about the world in which we live. It arises out of an over-realized eschatology rooted in an inaccurate assumption that utopia has already been achieved if people will just act like it. Further, liberal Christianity’s idealism has an anemic hamartiology. It simply does not realize the depth and extent of human sinfulness.

I am in something of a shock over the intensity of Schmitz’s insistence that outright contempt is behind liberal attitudes toward American citizens in general. Indeed, religious elitists do often ascribe ignorance and inferiority to their opponents (John 7:49). But I wondered if Schmitz overstated his case here. I fear not. I know liberal Christians of whom contempt for others would not be an accurate description. Yet I must admit in my own dealings with liberal Christianity I have often encountered an arrogance and animosity toward conservative Christians that is nothing short of contemptuous.

Nevertheless, although my journey and that of Matthew Schmitz have much in common, they have different starting points—and that affects their direction. Schmitz initially assumed the need for open borders and viewed with contempt those who thought otherwise. His life experiences and development eventually changed his direction toward a more closed border mindset. I had the opposite experience. I initially assumed the dire need for strictly enforced closed borders. My familial background is Pentecostal Christian. Pentecostals are very conservative, both religiously and politically. Furthermore, my first jobs included construction work, working in a truck stop, and factory labor. Immigrants were frequent rivals for scarce resources. My brother-in-law lost his job as a sheetrock hanger because he could not compete with the low wages undocumented immigrants were constrained to endure. Secure borders were a matter of economic survival for us … even before 9/11 and another whole set of security concerns.