R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 271

The Briefing 08-23-16

Obama administration's transgender bathroom guidelines blocked by federal judge — for nowWall Street Journal (Erik Eckholm and Alan Blinder) — Federal Transgender Bathroom Access Guidelines Blocked by Judge

The power of consumers: After dim sales report, Target announces new bathroom initiativeWall Street Journal (Khadeeja Safdar) — Target Adds Private Bathrooms to Quell Transgender DebateWall Street Journal (Khadeeja Safdar and Lisa Beilfuss) — Target Dims Outlook as Sales Struggle

Bigger lotteries mean bigger losers: When the government preys on the people New York Times (Jeff Sommer) — The Billion-Dollar Jackpot: Engineered to Drain Your Wallet

Russian anarchist convention illustrates the best argument against anarchy—implementationWall Street Journal (Alan Cullison) — At the Anarchists’ Convention, There’s Not Much Structure

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What Became of the Christian Intellectuals? There is More to the Story

Where have the Christian intellectuals gone? There can be no question that the public square is increasingly devoid of any serious Christian thought and depopulated of Christian thinkers. Alan Jacobs perceives that a full generation ago, “American intellectuals as a group lost the ability to hear the music of religious thought and practice.” Surely, he added, “that happened at least in part because we Christian intellectuals ceased to play it for them.”

His recent essay, “The Watchmen: What Became of the Christian Intellectuals?,” is more elegy than jeremiad, mournful of a day when consequential Christian intellectuals were taken seriously by the larger secular culture, serving as mediators between the worlds of belief and unbelief and making a difference in both worlds.

“Half a century ago,” Jacobs tells his readers, “such figures existed in America: serious Christian intellectuals who occupied a prominent place on the national stage. They are gone now. It would be worth our time to inquire why they disappeared, where they went, and whether–should such a thing be thought desirable–they might return.”

We are safe in assuming that Alan Jacobs thinks such a thing is indeed desirable. That is the very point of his essay, and he does not write without hope. Indeed, he is in a real sense the refutation of his own thesis. Jacobs, Distinguished Professor of the Humanities in the Honors Program of Baylor University, is himself a model of Christian scholarship and intellectual engagement. His several books are erudite, elegantly written, and each is a serious contribution to the world of scholarship. This is a man to be taken seriously and a generation of young Christian scholars takes him seriously indeed, and for good reason–he is a model of who they want to be. He is respected among established scholars as well. If his thesis is to be countered, he is an excellent counter example.

Jacobs’s essay appears in the September 2016 issue of Harper’s Magazine, one of the more influential publications remaining in what is left of America’s once-rich culture of literary magazines. That is not an accident, and it raises the question of intended audience. Does Professor Jacobs intend first to make secular liberals realize what they have lost, or does he want Christian scholars to realize what they have left undone? Perhaps both, but the fact that the essay appears in Harper’s rather than a religious journal like First Things or Books & Culture is certainly a clue.

There can be no doubt that the intellectual culture of the West has been increasingly hostile to theism in general, and Christianity in particular, since at least the nineteenth century. That hostility has only accelerated in the last half-century in the United States. But the real opposition has been directed, not to religion in a generic and harmless representation, but to orthodox Christian belief.

Interestingly, Jacobs points to two preeminent examples of the Christian intellectuals taken seriously by the secular culture and its intellectuals a half-century ago: Reinhold Niebuhr and C. S. Lewis. No surprises there.

Niebuhr and Lewis, Jacobs writes, “were famous men–appearing on the cover of TIME in 1947 and 1948, respectively.” They did appear, of course, but less than twenty years later that same magazine would infamously ask “Is God Dead?,” implying that the Age of Secularity had arrived.

Jacobs explains that serious Christian intellectuals have, since the 1970s at the very least, suffered from a “Where Is Our Reinhold Niebuhr?” problem.

I deeply appreciate Professor Jacobs’s essay and I share his concern in general terms, but I see the situation somewhat differently. His critique of the current intellectual situation is accurate, and almost self-evidently so. His comments on the preoccupations of evangelical scholars and the vagueness of authors like Marilynne Robinson are apt. Evangelical scholars have generally addressed themselves to each other for the past few decades. But this is not so much a choice as a realization that the secular academy is either openly hostile or tone-deaf to “comprehensive worldviews,” in the language of the late philosopher John Rawls. Meanwhile, the rare religious voices and literary figures who are cited and sometimes even feted within the intellectual salons are those who pose no threat of an awkward doctrine, much less any threat to the sexual revolution and its hegemony.

There have been a few exceptions to this complete marginalization, but very few. Among Catholic intellectuals, Richard John Neuhaus did enjoy some influence in secular circles, but that had largely dissipated by the end of his life. Today, there are few intellectuals who can match Professor Robert P. George of Princeton University in terms of both communication ability and scholarship. His courageous (and brilliant) defense of marriage, however, is enough to earn him the lasting hatred of the academic class. The last Catholic intellectual truly celebrated by the secular academy in the sense Jacobs intends was John Courtney Murray, S.J., who died even before Reinhold Niebuhr (and who was celebrated for opening Roman Catholicism to both democracy and modernity).

My larger concern with Professor Jacobs’s thoughtful article, however, has to do with the Protestant examples he cites. We might call this our “Where Are Our Reinhold Niebuhr and C. S. Lewis Problem.”

At this point, Professor Jacobs and I are perhaps driven by different concerns. Jacobs is clear about his own orthodox Christian convictions, but his celebration of Reinhold Niebuhr as an example of a lost type of Christian intellectual raises the serious question of just how Christian a Christian intellectual must be.

By any measure, Reinhold Niebuhr was a serious intellectual. His influence was, if only for his own generation, staggering in terms of relevance and power. I still read Niebuhr regularly, having devoted a great deal of study to him during my doctoral studies. Through him, I came to read American history in deeper shades of irony and all of human history in more profound depths of meaning. Several of my professors back in that day had been personally taught and deeply influenced by Niebuhr. It was in the course of my own reading of Niebuhr that I discovered the unorthodox nature of his own theology. He did indeed believe in a transcendent God, but he wavered in belief in a personal deity. He recovered an Augustinian tradition and drew from deep orthodox wellsprings in his understanding of the power of sin. At the same time, he also redefined the biblical doctrine, locating humanity’s ultimate problem in society, not in the individual sinner. He openly dismissed biblical passages that did not fit his scheme.

He embraced his own program of what Rudolf Bultmann called “demythologization.” In his own words, “If we take the disciplines of the various sciences seriously, as we do, we must depart at one important point from the biblical picture of life and history.” Actually, he departed from quite a few points.

In the modern age, those who are intellectually aware “do not believe in the virgin birth, and we have difficulty with the physical resurrection of Christ.” Further: “We do not believe, in other words, that revelatory events validate themselves by a divine break-through in the natural order.” A “divine break-though in the natural order,” we must note, is the heart of the Christian truth claim.

His worldview was clear: “The accumulated evidence of the natural sciences convinces us that the realm of natural causation is more closed, and less subject to divine intervention, than the biblical world view assumes.”

That is not to depart from biblical Christianity “at one important point.” That is to abandon the heart of biblical Christianity.

Niebuhr’s strategy, historian George Marsden explains, was to “reserve a place in modern culture for what he regarded as the essence of the Christian faith, a place that would be safe from the onslaughts of scientific naturalism. This “essence of the Christian faith” was Christianity stripped of its essential supernatural elements.

As Marsden noted in his fine work, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment, “The grand irony of that strategy was that, while Niebuhr himself used it effectively as a way to preserve a public role for the Christian heritage, its subjective qualities made the faith wholly optional and dispensable.”

Or, as the late John Patrick Diggins noted in Why Niebuhr Now?: “Whether a supreme being exists was of less importance to Reinhold Niebuhr than the message Christianity holds out to humankind.”

Where is our Reinhold Niebuhr? We had better be careful what we ask for.

Furthermore, Niebuhr was already too Christian for the intellectual elites when Harvard University President James B. Conant sought to bring Niebuhr to the Harvard faculty in 1943 by means of a special professorship answerable only to Conant himself. Even at that time, Niebuhr was unwelcome in the Harvard philosophy department in 1943. Conant knew better than to try to locate Niebuhr in that department. In the end, Niebuhr declined Conant’s offer.

That point takes us to the subject of the other TIME magazine cover story, C. S. Lewis. Professor Jacobs has written a fine work on Lewis, The Narnian: the Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis, and there can be no question that Lewis was one of the great minds and hearts of the twentieth century. But the intellectual influence of C. S. Lewis was always far more located within the Christian world than in the academic world. Even now affection for C. S. Lewis is overwhelmingly to be found among Christians, and evangelical Christians in particular.

Professor Jacobs’s references to the cover stories in TIME magazine are noteworthy. TIME was dismissed by the elites as hopelessly “middlebrow,” but even they would have coveted a place on TIME’s cover. Niebuhr and Lewis were indeed both featured on TIME’s iconic cover, indicating that both were seen by TIME as significant and newsworthy in the late 1940s. Jacobs understands their appearance in this context within the context of the Cold War.

But there are even deeper ironies here. The TIME features on both Lewis (September 8, 1947) and Niebuhr (March 8, 1948) were written by Whittaker Chambers, then a TIME editor and later a central figure in the Alger Hiss spy scandal. Chambers was himself a former Communist and Soviet spy, before turning against Communism and testifying against Alger Hiss. We might say that, as a former Communist spy, Whittaker Chambers knew one when he saw one.

He also knew a story when he saw one, and in the midst of the Cold War, both Whittaker Chambers and TIME founder and publisher Henry Luce believed that a recovery of theism was a necessary defense against Communism. The cover stories on Lewis and Niebuhr were part of their effort to draw attention to the continuing relevance of Christianity in the battle against Communism.

We must note that both articles lend themselves to our argument. C. S. Lewis is identified as “one of a growing band of heretics among modern intellectuals: an intellectual who believes in God.”

Consider this passage from the article:

“Outside his own Christian circle, Lewis is not particularly popular with his Oxford colleagues. Some resent his large student following. Others criticize his ‘cheap’ performances on the BBC and sneer at him as a ‘popularizer….” But their most serious charge is that Lewis’ theological pamphleteering is a kind of academic heresy.”

C. S. Lewis may have been on the cover of TIME magazine, but he was denied a chair at Oxford University he had coveted. Instead, he took the chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Magdalene College, Cambridge, just nine years before he died.

In the cover story on Niebuhr, we read the acknowledgement that “Reinhold Niebuhr’s new orthodoxy is the oldtime religion put through the intellectual wringer. It is a re-examination of orthodoxy for an age dominated by such trends as rationalism, liberalism, Marxism, fascism, idealism, and the idea of progress.”

The “oldtime religion put through the intellectual wringer” was a wink and nod to the fact that what is left is not classical Christianity at all, but something far less.

Alan Jacobs’s essay in Harper’s is brilliant and reflective. He raises truly important questions and offers keen insights into our current intellectual moment and the Christian intellectual responsibility. With him, I pray for a recovery of Christian intellectual influence. But there is no evidence that the secular gatekeepers are even willing to hear a minimalist or revisionist Christian argument, much less an argument based in orthodox Christianity that is not accommodated to the current Zeitgeist.

I join in Professor Jacobs’s lament over the failure of Christian intellectuals, for surely there is failure to be found. But we must be careful lest a quest for Christian intellectual influence meets its end in an intellect that is neither Christian nor influential.

The Christian intellectual influence we should seek is the influence of an intellect saturated in Christian truth, keenly applied to the questions of our times. Whether the secular world will listen to us, much less thank us for the effort, is another question altogether.

 

Alan Jacobs, “The Watchmen: What Became of the Christian Intellectuals?,” Harper’s Magazine, September 2016.

http://harpers.org/archive/2016/09/th...

John Patrick Diggins, Why Niebuhr Now? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

George M. Marsden, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief (New York: Basic Books, 2014).

David A. Hollinger, After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). See especially “Epilogue: Reinhold Niebuhr and Protestant Liberalism.”

 

 

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The Briefing 08-22-16

Turkish wedding suicide bomber who killed 50 was just a child, between 12 and 14 yrs oldWashington Post (Erin Cunningham) — Bomb at wedding party in Turkey kills at least 50

The good, the bad, and the weird: What can we learn about humanity from the 2016 Olympics?Washington Post (Joshua Partlow and Dom Phillips) — ‘Let’s dance’: Olympics ends in relief for BraziliansPeople (Maria Mercedes Lara) — I Was 'Immature': Ryan Lochte Tears Up and Explains He Was 'Still Intoxicated' When He Over-Exaggerated Rio 'Robbery'Washington Post (Adam Kilgore) — Mongolian wrestling coaches strip to protest controversial bronze-medal match defeat

The "queerest" Olympics ever? The unsettled conscience and uncertain future of LGBT sportHuffington Post (JamesMichael Nichols) — Rio Summer Games Go Down As The Queerest Olympics Ever

The gender revolution arrives at the clothing store—but it's still organized male-femaleFinancial Times (Horatia Harrod) — Boy meets girl: the rise of ungendered clothing

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Exodus 11:1-12:23

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The Briefing 08-19-16

A photograph from Syria and stories from the States: How should Christians respond to child suffering?Los Angeles Times (Nabih Bulos and Laura King) — Haunting image of boy in an Aleppo ambulance captures plight of children caught in Syrian warWashington Post (Travis M. Andrews) — Parents arrested after 7-year-old, who hadn’t eaten for days, tried selling teddy bear for food, police sayNew York Times (Nicholas Kristof) — Do You Care More About a Dog Than a Refugee?

Over-scheduling and postponed responsibility: What worldview animates American childhoods?Financial Times (Isabel Berwick) — Are parents trying too hard with their children?

The inequality behind educational inequality? Growing up with mom and dad in the home.New York Times (Susan Dynarski) — Why American Schools Are Even More Unequal Than We Thought

Going home to no home: California wildfires, Louisiana flooding, and gaining perspective

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The Briefing 08-18-16

"I'm confused"—when it comes to transgender athletes, the confusion points to a collision with realityNPR (Diana Nyad) — Transgender Athletes Raise Questions For Future Olympic GamesWashington Post (Steven Petrow) — Do transgender athletes have an unfair advantage at the Olympics?

And now there are none: What a recent Marine Corps report tells us about reality of male and femaleAssociated Press (Lolita C. Baldor) — Marines turn to high school girls' sports teams for recruitsCNN (Ryan Browne) — Female Marine drops out of infantry course

Peak death: When demographics point to a deadly shift in worldviewThe Economist — Peak DeathFinancial Times (Claire Jones and Stefan Wagstyl) — Young Germans will have to work till 69, Bundesbank warns

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The Briefing 08-17-16

When gay pride becomes big business: The commercialization of LGBT activismFinancial Times (India Ross) — The business of gay pride

Were the hippies right? How looking at the 1960's helps explain our world todayFinancial Times (Aspden) — Were the hippies right?

The moral behind the medical stat: 1 in 5 babies born in Indiana are addicted to drugsFox 59 (Jill Glavan) — Study suggests one in five babies born in Indiana addicted to drugs

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The Briefing 08-16-16

Is more information always better? Parenting in the age of prenatal screening and the designer babyTime (Emily Oster) — Pandora's Baby

The microscopic matters: House passes measure protecting frozen embryos of veteransNew York Times (Jennifer Steinhauer) — House Measure Protecting Embryos Threatens Veterans’ Fertility Treatments

"Having a baby" doesn't mean what it used to: Four lesbians sue New Jersey over fertility treatmentNew York Times (Megan Jula) — 4 Lesbians Sue Over New Jersey Rules on Fertility Treatment

The difference between "burkinis" and bikinis—other than the amount of fabric—is one of worldviewNew York Times (Roger Cohen) — Olympians in Hijab and BikiniNew York Times (Aurelein Breeden and Lilia Blaise) — Cannes, Citing Security Risks, Bans Full-Body ‘Burkinis’ From Its Beaches

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The Briefing 08-15-16

Transgender deity in the Old Testament? Nonsense from a rabbi in The New York TimesNew York Times (Mark Sameth) — Is God Transgender?

Terror Management Theory? Why even atheists worry about what happens after deathReligion News Service (Simon Davis) — Why do so many ‘nones’ believe in life after death?Free Inquiry (Simon Davis) — Atheism Is Scary Because It Reminds People of Death

Secular Americans choose cremation: What does worldview have to do with burial choice?Free Inquiry (Simon Davis) — How the Nonreligious Are Reshaping American Burial

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“God Made Me for China” — Eric Liddell Beyond Olympic Glory

Olympic glory abounds in Rio as the 31st modern Olympiad is well underway. This time, the event is living up to its hype, especially for Americans, who are likely drawn to the pomp and ceremony as much as the athletic competition.

 

The medal ceremonies represent both climax and catharsis, with athletes awarded the coveted gold, silver, and bronze medals placed around their necks.

 

It was not always so.

 

When Eric Liddell, “the Flying Scot,” won the 400 meter race and the gold medal at the 1924 games in Paris, there was no awards ceremony. Back then, the medals were engraved after the games and mailed in a simple package to the victors. But, even without the medal ceremony, there was glory. Liddell instantly became a hero to the entire United Kingdom and was recognized as one of the greatest athletes of his age.

 

Americans of my generation remember Eric Liddell largely because of Chariots of Fire, the 1981 British film written by Colin Welland, produced by David Puttnam, and directed by Hugh Hudson. The film was a surprising success in both Britain and the United States, winning four Academy Awards including Best Picture. The musical score for the film by Vangelis won another of the Oscars, and its theme is still instantly recognizable to those who have seen the movie.

 

To its credit, Chariots of Fire recognized Eric Liddell’s Christian faith and testimony. His story is inseparable from the drama of his refusal to compete on Sunday, believing it to be a breaking of God’s commandment. Though this determination was well-known before the 1924 Olympics, it became internationally famous when heats for Liddell’s best race, 100 meters, were scheduled for Sunday.

 

The dramatic plot of Chariots of Fire presented a personal competition between Liddell and Harold Abrahams, another top runner who had experienced the agonies of anti-Semitism as a student at Cambridge. When Liddell withdrew from the 100 meter event, Abrahams won, bringing Britain glory. Liddell had become a figure of ridicule, with everyone from athletic officials to British leaders unable to persuade him to sacrifice his moral convictions for the Olympic glory he was promised.

 

Liddell was left to run the 400 meter race, an event for which he was not favored and to which he knew he brought liabilities in terms of his racing form. But run he did, and he ran right into the history books, winning the gold medal with a personal story that shocked the world, even in the 1920s. His intensity of Christian conviction was already out of style and often ridiculed, but Eric Liddell became one of the most famous men in the British Empire and the larger world of athletics.

 

Those who have seen Chariots of Fire well remember how it ends, with the magnificent and sentimental music of Sir Hubert Parry’s anthem “Jerusalem” and William Blake’s famous words: “Bring me my Bow of burning gold; Bring me my Arrows of desire: Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold! Bring me my Chariot of fire!”

 

Then the screen fills with these words in text: “Eric Liddell, missionary, died in occupied China at the end of World War II. All of Scotland mourned.”

 

The end.

 

But in those few words was the real story of Eric Liddell. Yes, he was one of the most famous athletes of modern times and the Olympic glory of Scotland. He was also a Christian who refused to compete on Sunday and refused to compromise. Unquestionably, Eric Liddell was made to run. And yet, more than anything else, Eric Liddell believed that “God made me for China.”

 

Many Christians are proud to quote Liddell’s most famous lines from Chariots of Fire: “God made me fast. And when I run, I feel his pleasure.” God did make Eric Liddell fast, and he ran for God’s glory, but those words were not actually from Liddell. They were written by Colin Welland and put in the voice of Liddell, as played by actor Ian Charleson.

 

What Liddell did say, and more than once, was that God made him for China. This is what the viewers of the movie never learned. Liddell was born in Tientsin, China to missionary parents in 1902. James and Mary Liddell were in China under the commission of the London Missionary Society. As Duncan Hamilton, author of a very fine new biography of Liddell explains, as a young boy Eric Liddell simply considered himself to be Chinese.

 

Later, Eric and his brother would be sent to boarding school near London and would know their parents only through correspondence and brief visits. But China was always on Liddell’s heart. As a student at the University of Edinburgh, Liddell became very well known as both a runner and a preacher. He was especially powerful as a preacher to young men. Liddell spoke passionately but conversationally, explaining that the best preaching to young men took the form of a simple talk, in Duncan Hamilton’s words, “as if chatting over a picket fence.” But Liddell’s clear biblical and evangelical message came through, and powerfully.

 

He preached before, during, and after his Olympic glory. He returned to graduate from the University and Edinburgh shortly after the 1924 Paris games and made preparation to go to China as a missionary, also under the direction of the London Missionary Society.

 

He taught school, preached, and eventually found a wife, Florence. With her he had three daughters, though he was never to see the third. After decades of internal warfare and turmoil, China was thrown into the horrors of Japanese occupation during World War II.

 

Those horrors are still unknown to many Americans, but much of China was submitted to massive rape and murder by the occupying Imperial Japanese forces. Liddell eventually sent Florence, then pregnant with their third child, and their two daughters to Canada for safety. It was just in time.

 

Along with members of the China Inland Mission and many others, Christians and non-Christians alike, Eric Liddell was forced into a foretaste of hell itself in the Weihsien Internment Camp. He would die their shortly before the end of the war. In the concentration camp, Liddell became legendary and his witness for Christ astounded even many of his fellow Christians.

 

As Hamilton writes: “Liddell can sound too virtuous and too honorable to be true, as if those who knew him were either misrepresenting or consciously mythologizing. Not so. The evidence is too overwhelming to be dismissed as easily as that. Amid the myriad moral dilemmas in Weihsien, Liddell’s forbearance was remarkable.” He became the moral and spiritual leader of the horrifying reality with that camp.

 

Chariots of Fire was released when I was a seminary student. Like so many other young Christians, I saw the movie and was greatly moved by it. But, even then, I wondered if Liddell could really have been what so many others claimed of him.

 

Not long thereafter, a professor assigned me to read Shantung Compound by theologian Langdon Gilkey of the University of Chicago Divinity School. Gilkey was in many ways the opposite to Liddell. Gilkey was a theological liberal whose father, famously liberal, had been the first dean of the chapel at the University of Chicago. Langdon Gilkey had gone to China to teach English after graduating from Harvard. He found himself interred with Eric Liddell.

 

In Shantung Compound, Gilkey analyzed what happens when men and women are put under extraordinary pressure. He argued that the worst moral dilemmas in Weihsien came not from their Japanese captors, but from the prisoners themselves. His point was that, for many if not most of the captured, the experience brought out the worst in them, rather than the best. He changed the names of those inside the camp when he told their stories.

 

There were a few moral exceptions. Gilkey wrote of one exceptional individual, a missionary he named “Eric Ridley.” Gilkey wrote: “It is rare indeed when a person has the good fortune to meet a saint, but he came as close to it as anyone I have ever known.” Gilkey described how Liddell had largely single-handedly resolved the crisis of a breakout of teenage sexual activity in the camp. In the midst of a moral breakdown, with no societal structures to restrain behavior, few even seemed to want to help.

 

Gilkey made this observation: “There was a quality seemingly unique to the missionary group, namely, naturally and without pretense to respond to a need which everyone else recognized only to turn aside. Much of this went unnoticed, but our camp could scarcely have survived as well as it did without it. If there were any evidences of the grace of God observable on the surface of our camp existence, they were to be found here.”

 

Gilkey had renamed individuals as he wrote about them, but he described “Eric Ridley” as having won the 400 meter race at the Olympics for England before going to China as a missionary. Eric Ridley was Eric Liddell, and Langdon Gilkey was writing of a man he has observed so closely as a living saint. I realized that Langdon Gilkey had told the most important part of Eric Liddell’s story long before Chariots of Fire.

 

Gilkey closed his words about Erid Liddell with these: “Shortly before the camp ended, he was stricken with a brain tumor and died the same day. The entire camp, especially its youth, was stunned for days, so great was the vacuum that Eric’s death had left.”

 

Liddell indeed died of a brain tumor, suddenly and unexpectedly. The cause of his death only became clear after an autopsy. Eric Liddell died in the nation where he had been born. Indeed, he has sometimes been listed as China’s first Olympic medalist. He never saw his third daughter.

 

“God made me for China.” Eric Liddell lived his life in answer to that calling and commission. As Duncan Hamilton explains, Liddell “considered athletics as an addendum to his life rather than his sole reason for living it.”

 

Eric Liddell ran for God’s glory, but he was made for China. He desperately wanted the nation he loved to hear the Gospel of Jesus Christ and believe. David J. Michell, director for Canada Overseas Missionary Fellowship, would introduce Liddell’s collected devotional writings, The Disciplines of the Christian Life, by stating simply that “Eric Liddell’s desire was to know God more deeply, and as a missionary, to make him known more fully.”

 

As Olympic glory shines from Rio, Christians must remember that Olympic glory will eventually fade. There will be medalists for all to celebrate in Rio. But, will there be another Eric Liddell? At the very least, his story needs to be told again. The most important part of his story came long after his gold medal arrived by mail.

 

 

Duncan Hamilton’s new biography is For the Glory: Eric Liddell’s Journey from Olympic Champion to Modern Martyr (New York: Penguin Press, 2016).

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