Mentors from Church History
Bulletin Roundtable
Bulletin Roundtable Question
In this Bulletin Roundtable, our contributors respond to the question: “Who in church history has been a role model or inspiration for your life?”
Paul Copan
When I was in college, I was first exposed to the writings of John R. W. Stott. During this time I read Christ the Controversialist, Men Made New, Christian Counter-Culture, God’s New Society, Only One Way, What Christ Thinks of the Church, Basic Christianity,and Understanding the Bible. As time went on, I eagerly read his commentaries on the Johannine epistles, Acts, Romans, 1 & 2 Thessalonians, 1 & 2 Timothy, and Revelation. I devoured other volumes such as his reflections on the life of the mind (Your Mind Matters), on pastoral ministry (Between Two Worlds), on mission (Christian Mission and the Modern World), on Christian social engagement (a two-volume work entitled Involvement), on the atonement (The Cross of Christ), on the Spirit’s work (Baptism and Fullness), and more. I would listen to cassette recordings of Stott’s sermons and expository teaching.
Stott was a highly respected British theologian, Anglican rector, Christian statesman, and chaplain. It was said of Stott that if anyone could have served as a Pope for evangelicals, it was he. Stott certainly exerted a great influence in my own life.
In a time when certain troubling forms of liberation theology were being entertained by some evangelicals and social activism was eclipsing evangelism, Stott remained gospel-focused. He acknowledged that while evangelizing our neighbor doesn’t exhaust our obligation to him, the gospel should retain primacy. He asked: “is anything so destructive of human dignity as alienation from God through ignorance or rejection of the gospel? And how can we seriously maintain that political and economic liberation is just as important as eternal salvation?”[1] And in his coauthored book with liberal theologian David Edwards (Evangelical Essentials), he pinpointed the key areas of in the evangelical-liberal divide—namely, salvation and scriptural authority.
I always appreciated Stott’s clear biblical exposition, his clear definition of terms in his writings, his life of Christian integrity, and the thoughtfulness of his firm evangelical convictions. I admired the sheer breadth of his interests and involvements—theology, biblical studies, pastoral ministry, world mission (particularly his leadership in the Lausanne Movement), and evangelistic outreach (especially to university students). And though he had studied at Cambridge University and had been chaplain to the Queen of England, he was no elitist. Early in his ministry he ran summer camps for inner-city children. He lived simply and modestly, and he was generous with his resources (he donated the proceeds of his book royalties to the ministry of the Langham Partnership). I myself had the honor of meeting Stott on several occasions, and when I had written a couple of letters to him, he graciously replied.
I also came to adopt John Stott’s love of birds. He was a birder—or a “twitcher,” as the Brits like to say—who took his binoculars and camera with him wherever he traveled. He wrote a marvelous little book The Birds Our Teachers—a book containing pictures of birds photographed by Stott himself. These photos are accompanied by his own theological reflections on birds mentioned in Scripture texts. This book also weaves in Stott’s own study of birds and their habits, and the result is a delightful, insightful devotional study in “ornitheology.”
John Stott left a strong imprint on my life. He was directed by “the twin authorities of the Bible and the person of Jesus Christ,” and these guiding lights in his life were clearly observed by those even remotely acquainted with him and his work. Stott’s voluminous writings, his ministry, his integrity, his fidelity to the gospel, and his warmth and humility have left their stamp and made a profound impact on a generation of evangelical Christians, including me.
*You can read more about John Stott’s life and legacy here.
Notes
[1] John R. W. Stott, Christian Mission in the Modern World (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1975), 35.
Paul M. Gould
Which leader in church history has had the most influence on me? I’m tempted to give that award to Augustine. He’s certainly at the top of my list. The problem is that I’ve only read and digested his Confessions with any sort of regularity. I return to it often. It is deeply devotional and formative for me. But I’m going to select someone from more recent church history, since I’ve read almost all of his work, and he too has played a huge role in my development intellectually and spiritually. His name: Clive Staples Lewis.
Why Lewis? He has helped shape my thinking and emotions, my imagination and longings more than anyone else from church history. Consider his autobiography, Surprised by Joy. In his own words, we learn that Lewis was enchanted by beauty at a very young age (an encounter with his brother’s toy garden when he was six years old). That encounter with beauty stirred his longing, ultimately for God. The experience of beauty set him on a journey for an object that would satisfy this intense and pleasurable longing. As a teenager, Lewis read George McDonald’s fairy story Phantastes, and that too shaped and guided him along his journey to Christ. As he put it, reading Phantastes re-baptized his imagination, helping him to understand for the first time, as a young man, the meaning of the word “holiness.” This experience left Lewis of two minds: his imagination longed for deep beauty but his mind told him (largely because of the influence of his atheistic tutor), that there was no deep beauty to be had in the universe.
Lewis’s journey to Christ has taught me to ask two basic questions: (1) Of all the competing stories, is there a story true to the way the world is? (2) Of all the competing stories, is there a story true to the way the world ought to be? For Lewis, the answer is yes! He discovered, years later, that Christianity is “true myth”—satisfying both head and heart, imagination and reason. I’ve tried to incorporate this idea that Christianity is a perfect blend of reason and romance in my parenting, teaching, evangelism, apologetics, discipleship, spiritual formation, and leisure activities. Christianity alone is true to the way the world is and true to the way the world ought to be. It is true myth. As a bonus, check out my attempt to capture the beauty of this true myth in this spoken word poem.
Second Bonus: A few years ago, I was able to teach on Lewis in Oxford (I was with a group of seminary students from the United States). My time in Oxford was a pilgrimage. I ate often at the Eagle and Child, imagining Lewis, Tolkien, and Charles Williams sharing their latest essays as they ate and laughed and drank and smoked. I journeyed to Lewis’s home and walk his land. I went to his church and sat in his pew. I did all things Lewis. It made me appreciate the man even more. It helped me see how he was shaped by his time, his surroundings, and his friends and family. It inspired me, as he still does, to joyfully enter into God’s story in search of drama, love, joy, delight, satisfaction, purpose, meaning, and more.
David Baggett
What historical Christian figures have had the most impact on me? Though a difficult question—probably harder than I can handle, in all honesty—it’s a joy to think about several of those whose influence was formative. After much reflection I think I would have to go with Mike Austin.
Just kidding.
Now, Paul Gould chose C. S. Lewis, a major proponent and promulgator of the moral argument. So as my eyes fill with tears and heart with bitterness for not taking Lewis first, I will choose another luminary from the history of the moral argument, namely, the Scottish philosopher William Sorley (1855-1935).
Whether integrating or reconciling life and work, finite and infinite goods, the temporal and transcendent, the moral law and evil, philosophy and poetry, or morality and metaphysics, Sorley’s mind was expansive and integrative and his heart was open and capacious. His prescient insights have endured the test of time, demonstrate what a long and intimate acquaintance with the world of ideas can generate, and his enduring example serves as an inspiration and corrective to much of what passes for apologetics today.
I’m especially struck by (1) the seriousness with which he undertook understanding the tie between morality and God; (2) his assiduous resistance of the temptation to confuse moral and nonmoral goods, refusing to domesticate the categories of morality and, in the process, vitiating their evidential power; (3) his conviction that morality is the key to metaphysics; (4) his integration of poetry and philosophy, head and heart; and (5) while enduring unspeakable loss, boldly reconciling the moral law with the problem of evil, insisting on neither trivializing this world’s travails nor allowing them the final word.
To say just a word about the last two points: Regarding (4), as a philosopher Sorley had a refined aesthetic and imaginative taste. His reading wasn’t myopic or provincial; it didn’t include only philosophy but also a wide range of great literature, and he possessed prodigious literary ability himself, a trait he passed down to his son Charles. Sorley and his wife, Janetta, would have four children, two sons and two daughters. Their highly gifted and eldest son, Charles Hamilton Sorley, was a noted World War I poet. William once compared his own achievements with those of his son’s: “He will be remembered when I am a dead and forgotten scholar—there is in his poetry the truth I sought, and beauty such as I have never found.”[1]
Sorley knew that human beings are not mere logic choppers, which likely contributed to his draw to an argument that appeals to both the intellectual and affective—the full range, in fact, of our relational, aesthetic, and imaginative faculties. Nor was he alone in this regard; the fertile history of moral apologetics is filled with profound thinkers who could see that our efforts to apprehend reality in all of its fullness requires a broad approach to knowledge and keen, intentional attentiveness to the expansive array of evidence at our disposal—moral and relational, aesthetic and discursive. John Henry Newman, Clement Webb, William James, and others saw that this requires openness to an interdisciplinary approach. A. E. Taylor echoed this insight:
Plato was so much more than the author of a philosophical theory; he was one of the world’s supreme dramatists, with the great dramatist’s insight into a vast range of human character and experience, an insight only possible to a nature itself quickly and richly responsive to a world of suggestion which narrower natures of the specialist type miss. By moralists I do not mean primarily men who have devoted themselves to the elaboration of ethical systems, the Aristotles, or even the Kants, but men who have lived richly and deeply and thought as well as lived, the Platos, Augustines, Dostoevskys, and their fellows.[2]
Sorley, like Taylor, like John Henry Newman, like Clement Webb, could see that the head and heart must come together, that philosophy and literature must converge, that an inquiry into truth requires the full panoply of our resources.
And regarding the problem of evil, when Sorley said we must be attentive to the moral evidence, he wasn’t blind to the suffering of the world. He saw it clearly as a sign something was awry and in desperate need of fixing. There was nothing Pollyannaish about his approach. He wrote his Gifford lectures in the throes of World War I, sending early chapters to his son Charles, who was in the middle of the fight. Sorley acutely recognized that ignoring the sufferings and evils in the world wasn’t an option. He couldn’t merely speak of the evidential power of the moral law; he had to acknowledge and somehow come to terms with the broken and dysfunctional elements in the world, the sense in which the world clearly isn’t yet what it ought to be.
Then something happened that brought the problem of evil home in the most personal way possible. The ghastly news arrived that Charles had been killed in the Battle of Loos. There was already inextricable connection between Sorley’s work and life, but now it became a dramatic, dynamic collision of heartrending loss and his life’s work. His grief over, and abiding faith despite, his son’s untimely and tragic death resonates on every page of Moral Values. The problem of evil was no mere academic discussion for Sorley; it couldn’t have been a more gripping existential reality. The moral law is real, he was convinced, but equally undeniable is evil. The moral evidence vividly contains both intractable realities.
Sorley came to see that this very recognition makes sense of a dispute between Kant and David Hume. Kant’s formulation of the moral argument suggests that the moral law (the inexorable fact of duty) requires us to assume the being of God as what he calls a practical postulate necessitated by moral reason. But of course the facts of morality have also been used to argue against God traditionally construed, especially in the form of the problem of evil, a point Hume pushed vociferously. How could reflection on good and evil lead Kant and Hume in such opposite directions? Sorley realized they were approaching the question from different points of view. Hume directed his attention to the struggle of mankind, what men suffered, the cruelty of the world, and havoc of life. Kant, though, wasn’t looking at outward performance but on the inward law of goodness and the power it reveals in the mind that is conscious of it.
On the evidential role of evil and the difference between Kant and Hume, Sorley agreed with Kant, and used the very fact of evil as the foundation for a theistic argument. He argued that both the moral order and the order of nature belong to the essence of reality, and if it is synthesis and rapprochement we seek, they can be harmoniously united in one universe only when nature is understood not merely in its present appearance but as working out the purpose of making moral beings. The problem of evil, Sorley thought, is often cast in a way that overlooks the creation of beings who will achieve goodness only freely, requiring experience of all sorts of circumstances that it may develop into secure harmony with the moral order.
Sorley’s argument wasn’t a straightforward inference from morality to God, but a bit more circuitous, with a wider range. Little surprising that Sorley’s moral argument, forged in the crucible of unspeakable personal loss, insisted on neither trivializing this world’s travails nor allowing them the final word.
Notes
[1] Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Charles Hamilton Sorley: A Biography (London: Cecil Woolf, 1985), 12.
[2] A. E. Taylor, Faith of a Moralist (New York: Macmillan and Co., 1930), 16.
Christopher Reese
One well-known Christian scholar I’ve drawn inspiration from, who passed away this year, is James Innell (J. I.) Packer. He was a theologian, churchman, and professor, and one of the most influential evangelicals of recent times. I feel a kinship with Packer not because I’ve delved deeply into his body of work, but because we both encountered a particular teaching on Christian spirituality that we embraced, but eventually found to be misguided and disappointing. When I learned in seminary that his experience had been similar to mine, and that he had convincingly critiqued these ideas, I was greatly encouraged.
The teaching goes under various names and descriptions, including “the deeper life,” “the higher life,” “the victorious Christian life,” and “Keswick theology.” Different authors and speakers in the movement have different emphases, but in a nutshell the idea is that if a believer absolutely and continually surrenders his or her life to God, the Holy Spirit will empower the believer to live an essentially sinless life and the believer will experience a continual state of rest in which they do not have to exert effort to live a godly life, but just allow the Spirit to live it through them.[1]
What’s missing from this approach is the biblical teaching on sanctification that indicates that sanctification is a process (not a one-time event or sudden transfer to a higher spiritual plane [e.g., Phil. 2:12]), and that it takes considerable effort on the part of the believer (this doesn’t refer, of course, to salvation, but to sanctification)(e.g., 1 Cor. 9:24-27; Heb. 12:1). Packer described these teachings as “Pelagian; for, in effect, it makes the Christian the employer, and the Holy Spirit the employee, in the work of sanctification.”[2]
It also has the effect of inducing guilt and feelings of failure when a believer doesn’t actually experience sinless perfection. Packer adds, “it offers a greater measure of deliverance from sin than Scripture anywhere promises or the apostles themselves ever attained. This cannot but lead either to self-deception, in the case of those who profess to have entered into this blessing, or to disillusionment and despair, in the case of those who seek it but fail to find it.”[3]
I appreciated Packer pointing these things out and describing his own experience of trying to follow this approach early in his Christian life. I felt the same way and wondered why my lived experience wasn’t matching up with what I was reading in various books. Packer encouraged me by affirming the fact that living the Christian life is difficult and only comes with time and effort—and, of course, the work of the Holy Spirit (Gal. 5:16; Phil. 2:13).
Notes
[1] For a full discussion of the teachings and a critique, see Andrew Naselli, No Quick Fix: Where Higher Life Theology Came From, What It Is, and Why It's Harmful (Lexham Press, 2017). A more detailed and academic treatment can be found in Naselli’s earlier volume, Let Go and Let God? A Survey and Analysis of Keswick Theology (Lexham Press, 2010). There are also a number of positive aspects of Keswick theology, which Naselli describes, but these tend to be overshadowed, in my view, by its misunderstanding of the nature of sanctification.
[2] Naselli, Let Go and Let God?, 280, quoting Packer’s article “Keswick and the Reformed Doctrine of Sanctification,” Evangelical Quarterly 27, no. 3 (July 1955): 166. Italics in original.
[3] Packer, “Keswick and the Reformed Doctrine of Sanctification,”166, quoted in Naselli, Let Go and Let God?, 294.
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