1910 ~ The Centennials ~ 2010
William Holman Hunt – Louis Klopsh – The Fundamentals – F. F. Bruce
This is the opening talk by Dr. Ralph Blair given at the 20120Preaching Festival. The 201o weekend focused on a group of centennial, historical Christians whose journeys and testimonies are an encouragement and inspiration to all. Sermons from the weekend are available here.
Introductory Lecture
William Holman Hunt April 2, 1827 – September 7, 1910
In 1854, 27-year-old William Holman Hunt unveiled his first rendering of what eventually would be three versions of his painting, “The Light of the World”. It was an instant classic – enthusiastically received by both the art world and the general public. The painting depicted the text of Revelation 3:20 where Jesus says: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and I will sup with him and he with me.”
But the light of the world, as Hunt pointed out, is scripture, too. The light is both the written and the enfleshed Word. Describing this artwork, he wrote: “The closed door was the obstinately shut mind, the weeds the cumber of daily neglect, the accumulated hindrances of sloth; the orchard the garden of delectable fruit for the dainty feast of the soul. The music of the still small voice was the summons to the sluggard to awaken and become a zealous labourer under the Divine Master; the bat flitting about only in darkness was a natural symbol of ignorance; the kingly and priestly dress of Christ, the sign of His reign over the body and the soul, to them who could give their allegiance to Him and acknowledge God’s overrule. In making it a night scene, lit mainly by the lantern carried by Christ, I had followed metaphorical explanation in the Psalms, ‘Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light upon my path,’ with also the accordant allusions by St. Paul to the sleeping soul, ‘The night is far spent, the day is at hand.’ ”
To his friend, poet John Lucas Tupper, Hunt noted that, while it was the custom of English artists to present spiritual figures “as if in vapour”, he had “reason for making the figure more solid [for] the fact that it is the Christ that is alive forever more. He was to be firmly and substantially there waiting for the stirring of the sleeping soul.”
Tupper’s poem, “The Light of the World”, was inspired by Hunt’s work, as was Sir Arthur Sullivan’s oratorio of the same name, premiered at the Birmingham Festival in 1873. Gounod called it a masterpiece. Among the hymn writers inspired by Hunt’s “Light of the World” were Horatius Bonar, P. P. Bliss, Ina Duley Ogdon and William Chatterton Dix, who specifically indicated in a subtitle of his hymn, “Behold, I Stand at the Door and Knock!”: “Suggested by Holman Hunt’s ‘Light of the World’”.
The first version of “The Light of the World” is in a small side room of the High Victorian pile that is Keble College, Oxford. Although an architectural historian has dubbed it “the ugliest building in the world”, its architect refused to alter his Gothic Revival design to allow for the “The Light of the World” to be hung as its wealthy donor desired. When I was there, I found a little sign at the entrance to this small, dark room. It read: “To illuminate the Light of the World, please press button.”
The second version of the painting hangs in the Manchester Art Gallery where, in the gift shop, you can purchase “Light of the World” prints on silk and greeting cards
The last and largest version is prominently displayed within the main sanctuary of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. Hunt’s remains are buried in the Cathedral. Before the painting was placed in St. Paul’s, it toured around the world and was viewed by millions of devotees across Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa from 1905 to 1907.
A 19th-century art critic pronounced the painting, “the finest picture ever painted by an Englishman. It is really a painted text, a sermon on canvas.” (George Dawson) Said Hunt: “I painted [“The Light of the World’] with what I thought, unworthy though I was, to be a Divine command, and not simply as a good subject.”
Though the seriously Christian subject matter of most of Hunt’s work fell out of favor in the 20th-century modern art world, Yale University Press, in 2007, published a heralded and comprehensive 2-volume Catalogue Raisonne of his work.
William Holman Hunt was born on April 2, 1827. It was intended that his middle name be Hobman – after a well-to-do relative. But young William disliked that name and was delighted to learn that it had been misspelled “Holman” in church records. So, thereafter, he went by, “Holman”.
In childhood, he attended a chapel sponsored by Lady Huntingdon – “my temple”, as he recalled it. His evangelical faith never wavered, for, as was noted by a friend, “he knew his Bible au fond” – at its foundation.
His father, a warehouse manager, encouraged Holman’s early talent in art, but as a hobby, not a career. However, with the boy’s continuing resistance to “real” work, his father finally acceded to the advice of that well-to-do Hobman that, at 17, Holman be allowed to study art at the Royal Academy.
It was at the Royal Academy that Holman began his close and lifelong friendship with another pupil, John Everett Millais. Millais was the talented and pampered son of wealthy parents who, enthusiastically, encouraged both their son and his best friend, Holman, to pursue serious careers as painters.
In 1848, at 21, Holman initiated a closely-knit group of his painter friends – beginning with Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Christina’s dashing and impulsive brother) – to restore what they defined as the basic principles and practices of early Italian Renaissance painting. They were known as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood – “PRB” for short.
The “Pre-Raphaelites” emphasized authenticity, vivid colors and realistic, historically accurate detail, disdained the mannered conventionalism of the Royal Society of Sir Joshua Reynolds – or, as they called him “Sir Sloshua”, a slam at this master’s thick coats of obliterating brown varnish.
At 24, Hunt was so discouraged over the fact that his paintings were not selling that he considered settling for work as a farmer. But the very next year, with his complex multi-layered painting, “A Hireling Shepherd”, things began to turn around. Though some of the press found this painting to be vulgar, it was praised for its “embod[ying] a genuine thought, in glowing and intense colours, [its] victorious rendering of nature in every detail, solid and manly execution, unflinchingly carried out, with the representation of sunlight effect, which [is] an entirely new thing in art.” (F. G. Stephens)
Hunt explained that the painting illustrated the biblical warning about the shepherd “who is neglecting his real duty of guarding the sheep.” He wrote: “Instead of using his voice in truthfully performing his duty, he is using his ‘minikin mouth’ in some idle way. He was a type thus of other muddle headed pastors who, instead of performing their services to their flock – which is in constant peril – discuss vain questions of no value to any human soul. My fool has found a death’s head moth, and this fills his little mind with forebodings of evil and he takes it to an equally sage counselor for her opinion. She scorns his anxiety from ignorance rather than profundity, but only the more distracts his faithfulness; while she feeds her lamb with sour apples his sheep have burst bounds and got into the corn. It is not merely that the wheat will be spoilt, but in eating it the sheep are doomed to destruction from becoming what farmers call ‘blown’.”
It was just two years later that Hunt unveiled “The Light of the World”. Shortly thereafter, assured of a noteworthy place as an artist, he traveled to Palestine for more vivid accuracy – a hallmark of Pre-Raphaelite philosophy. However, upon his arrival, he learned to his dismay that the rabbis had issued an edict against Jews posing as artists’ models. Hoping that this ruling would be revoked – as, indeed, it was – he settled for painting a scene without people. The fruit of this alternative was another famous painting, “The Scapegoat”, a depiction of the goat of sacrifice in Leviticus 16: “And Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over him all the iniquities of the children of Israel, and all their transgressions in all their sins, putting them upon the head of the goat and shall send him away by the hand of a fit man into the wilderness. And the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited; and he shall let go the goat in the wilderness.”
Hunt wrote that, for accuracy, he’d consulted Talmudic scholars and gone out onto the salt flats around the Dead Sea to do this painting. While there, he saw a rainbow that inspired his inclusion of a rainbow in his first version – a promise of redemption through Christ, our Scapegoat. But he removed the rainbow in a later version, judging that the symbol of promise produced too mixed a metaphor in a depiction of the horrors of the Savior’s ordeal.
For protection in the desert, while working on “The Scapegoat”, Hunt kept a gun in his lap. It was also at this time that he grew his “sage-like” beard. This was also for protection – in this case, from what he called the “overly amorous Arabs”.
Eventually, the ruling against Jewish models was lifted and Hunt went to work on one of his most elaborate paintings, “The Finding of our Saviour in the Temple”, based in Luke 2:46-51. Again, it took years to complete – due, at first, to the previous ruling of the rabbis and also to the lack of artists’ supplies in out-of-the-way Palestine.
“The Shadow of Death” was his next painting. Here, Hunt depicts Jesus, the hardworking carpenter, stretching out his arms while their shadow on the wall foreshadows his crucifixion.
After some time back in England, Hunt again returned to Jerusalem where he painted “The Triumph of the Innocents”. This very elaborate painting took ten years to complete. It pictures the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt, attended en route by a procession of the Holy Innocents bathed in glimmering heavenly light.
On the advice of Charles Dickens, he’d been bypassing the usual business arrangements of the art establishment so successfully that his painting, “The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple” fetched over $3 million dollars in today’s money and a dealer’s winning bid at the auction for his “The Shadow of Death” was $12 million in today’s money. And, of course, he had a steady income from the sale of thousands of colorful prints of his works. But in spite of his financial success, he always said that his ambition as a painter was “to serve as high priest and expounder of the excellence of the works of the Creator”.
In the last year of his life, the 83-year-old Hunt was almost blind and he was physically quite frail. But his mind and spirits were good – for which his devoted wife, Edith, gave thanks.
Edith was a member of the famous Waugh family – of whom the most famous was Brideshead Revisited author Evelyn Waugh, born in 1903. Holman was 48 when he’d married Edith, almost a decade after her sister, Fanny, Holman’s first wife, died. She’d died shortly after the birth of their son, only a year into their marriage. He and Edith had to go to Switzerland to wed since English law prohibited marrying one’s deceased wife’s sister. The Hunts and others campaigned against this law and it was overturned in 1907. Today’s marriage equality struggles aren’t the first struggles for marriage equality.
1910 marked the deaths of other artists: French Post-Impressionist Henri Rousseau, French Pointillist Henri Edmond Cross, American landscape painter Winslow Homer, Hudson River School’s Worthington Whittredge. It was also the year of the deaths of England’s King Edward VII; the Scots Baptist preacher Alexander Maclaren, evangelical Anglican Bible scholar A. R. Fausset, American Baptist missionary to South India John Everett Clough and evangelist Henry Grattan Guinness of the famous family of brewers, Red Cross founder Jean Henri Dunant; writers Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain and O. Henry; pioneering psychologist William James. Some notable women who died in 1910 were Florence Nightingale, Julia Ward Howe, Clara Swain and Elizabeth Blackwell. And the death-denying Mary Baker Eddy died in 1910. It was also the year that the plumber, Tom Crapper, died. He’d perfected the flush toilet valve. And, no, it was long before Tom Crapper that the Latin word for chaff was crappa.
Holman Hunt also passed away in 1910. His friend, Canadian clergyman Charles Trick Currelly, was at his bedside when he died on September 7th. Currelly recorded this account of the removal of the body from the Hunts’ London home at 18 Melbury Road, near Kensington Palace: “As the coffin left the house, all the blinds in the neighborhood were drawn as a mark of respect. There were many wreaths, but only one on the coffin, a huge cross of arum lilies from the family. The king sent a message of sympathy. Archdeacon Wilberforce read the service, and the choir of St. Mary Abbots in Kensington led the singing of ‘O God, Our Help in Ages Past’ and ‘Fight the Good Fight.’ ”
The next day the state funeral was held in St. Paul’s Cathedral and Hunt’s ashes were interred in the crypt, not far from his largest painting of “The “Light of the World”. But the painter was already meeting that very Light, face to face.
In the poetic words of Hunt’s contemporary, that great Scottish preacher, Alexander Maclaren, who, as I’ve just indicated, also went Home to be with the Lord a hundred years ago this year: “In Heaven, after ‘ages of ages’ of growing glory, we shall have to say, as each new wave of the shoreless, sunlit sea bears us onward, ‘It doth not yet appear what we shall be.’”
Louis Klopsh March 7, 1852 – March 28, 1910
Louis Klopsch was born in 1852 near Berlin. The next year, his mother died. The following year, about the time Hunt was unveiling “The Light of the World”, Louis’ father – a poor physician on the outs with the political establishment – sailed to America and a new life for him and his young son in New York City.
Louis left school to work as an office boy, and it wasn’t long before he was an enterprising entrepreneur in the bustling business world of 19th-century New York City.
One day, forty-five years after coming to the city, Klopsch was working in his office when he had an idea for an innovation with which you’re all familiar but about which you’ve probably never given a thought as to just who it was who came up with the idea – if, indeed, you ever thought of someone’s “coming up with the idea”. His innovation is familiar today, while most people have long forgotten his other good work – his distribution of aid that, in today’s dollars, would amount to between sixty-million and three-hundred-million dollars, his book publishing and his editing of The Christian Herald, then the world’s largest circulation religious periodical.
What was his famous innovation? It was black and white and red all over. Though the usual answer to that old riddle is a newspaper – and Klopsch, indeed, published a paper – a newspaper wasn’t his innovation.
On June 19, 1899, as he was preparing his next editorial for The Christian Herald, his eyes fell on the text of Luke 22:20: “In the same way, after the supper, he took the cup, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you.’”
Klopsch was struck afresh by the impact of these familiar words – “My blood … poured out for you.” It seemed to him that, in these few words of Jesus, was summed up the whole significance of the Savior: “My blood … poured out for you.”
Right then and there, Klopsch conceived of a New Testament in which all the words of Jesus would be printed in blood-red ink. After consulting biblical scholars to make sure of the boundaries between Jesus’ words and those of the Gospel writers, he published the very first edition of a red-letter New Testament. That was in 1900. The first run of 60,000 New Testaments soon sold out and many more printings followed within the year. Klopsch received the gratitude of thousands of enthusiastic Bible readers – the common folk and the great. King Oscar II of Sweden sent thanks. President Teddy Roosevelt invited him to be his guest for dinner at The White House.
Klopsch was used to addressing large assemblies worldwide but he was especially fond of talking with small gatherings of children at his Tarrytown home and preaching to the homeless at the Bowery Mission. For many summers he led America’s largest Sunday school here at the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting. Of all these activities, he’d often remark: “If I do my share, I never trouble about the rest. That’s God’s affair, not mine.”
Klopsch supported relief efforts for famine, war and natural disaster-stricken sufferers in Africa, Armenia, China, Finland, France, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico and Palestine as well as needy Native Americans and New York’s homeless, widows and orphans. In the interest of the wisest use of relief funds, Klopsch always insisted that local administrators be in charge of distribution.
For this day, October 8, in his 1906 book of readings, Daily Light on the Daily Path, Klopsch chose Matthew 5:10: “Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
Today, from offices at 132 Madison, his Christian Herald Association still supports the oppressed and needy, here on the Bowery and around the world. As we do in all our EC worship services, the Sunday collection will be given away to others. This time, we’ll be sending the money to New York’s world-famous Bowery Mission with which Klopsch was so long associated.
In February, 1910, Klopsch needed a major intestinal operation and was taken to the old German Hospital (now Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan). He was in good spirits an hour before the operation. But the post-operative time did not go well and a few days later, on March 7, 1910, he died.
The remains of many famous New Yorkers are buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Tarrytown-on-the-Hudson: Washington Irving, Carl Schurz, Francis Church (of “Yes, Virginia, …” fame), Andrew Carnegie, Walter Chrysler, Elizabeth Arden, Brook Astor and even Leona Helmsley.
But such is the passage of time and the shifting of priorities and values that, a man whose passing received the recognition of presidents and kings is usually no longer noted among the icons at Sleepy Hollow. Nonetheless, the dust of Louis Klopsch lies in the dirt of that cemetery, and though he’s absent from the body, he’s at rest in the peace of our Lord, awaiting Resurrection. In words of Alexander Maclaren: “Death is not a house, it is only a vestibule. The grave has a door on its inner side.”
The Fundamentals 1910 – 1915
It can be said without fear of contradiction that our assembly this weekend is the only openly gay gathering that’s commemorating the 100th anniversary of The Fundamentals, the essays that launched the Christian “Fundamentalist” movement in America. Of course, it’s true, too, that we’re the only group of gays honoring the 100th anniversaries of Hunt, Klopsch and Bruce. Yet our remembrance of The Fundamentals might seem the most bizarre. And that’s due to two facts: (1) We’re more than merely gay, and (2) The Fundamentals was something more than the stereotype in the minds of the history-challenged.
Before looking into The Fundamentals, let’s look at our contemporary circumstances to see the continuing circumstances of theological conflict between the embracing and opposing of orthodoxy. We’ll do this for some historical perspective.
Theological infiltrators, deniers of the supernatural and pet-peeve partisans, still try to replace God’s grace with their self-righteous libertinism or self-righteous legalism, narrow-minded secularism or narrow-minded sectarianism. The Left reduces the “principalities and powers” to mere social systems and superstition while the Right reduces them to socialism and the “demons of homosexuality”. They’re all pushing their substitutes for faith in and faithfulness to Christ Jesus.
So, we’re looking back to the early years of the last century from our experience here in the early years of this century. The more things “change” the more they stay the same. That old truth doesn’t apply only to “ex-gays”. Just as prophets were repeatedly called to call Israel back to God from her whoring after false gods, the church repeatedly has had to be called back from her own whoring after false gods.
This past January, in an interview with atheist apologist Christopher Hitchens, a Unitarian minister told him that she takes “the Jesus story as story” (whatever that means). She said she believes that Jesus’ “life is exemplary” but she doesn’t believe “Jesus died for our sins”. She said that Jesus’ resurrection is a “metaphor”. So, she asked Hitchens why he doesn’t take her liberal Christianity seriously, as a viable alternative to what she called the “fundamentalism” he seems to think is Christianity.
For all his disdain of Christian orthodoxy, Hitchens nonetheless responded with more intellectual integrity than she and her liberal religionists evidence. He pointed to Paul’s saying that if Jesus hadn’t actually been raised from the dead, there’s nothing at all to Christian faith: “I would say,” he said, “that if you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.” She blithely replied: “I disagree … I consider myself a Christian” – as though her self-serving self-appraisal constituted a relevant rebuttal to his accurate assertion of fact.
Mark Roberts, who’s taught at Fuller and San Francisco Seminaries, was reared in an evangelical home. He then went to Harvard for his undergraduate work in philosophy and his Ph.D. in New Testament studies. He says he respected the biblical scholars in his graduate program, but also, that he was quick “to see how often their interpretations were saturated by unquestioned philosophical presuppositions. If, for example, a passage from the Gospels included a prophecy of Jesus concerning his death, it was assumed without argument that this had been added later by the church because prophecy didn’t fit within the naturalistic worldview of my profs.” This skepticism was just as poor a substitute for scholarship as was the Unitarian minister’s rebuttal to Hitchens. But it’s exactly what I, also, saw taken for granted by some otherwise brilliant scholars when I was in the Graduate School of Religion at the University of Southern California.
Roberts found that his Harvard professors never assigned readings in evangelical biblical scholarship. This, too, was my experience at USC.
When Roberts was on winter break in California, he needed to use a theological library so he dropped by Fuller Seminary. He discovered that this evangelical graduate school did assign readings in both evangelical and liberal works – both the books he’d been assigned at Harvard and books to which he’d never been exposed. He writes: “Whereas I was getting one party line, Fuller students were challenged to think more broadly and, dare I admit it, more critically. This put an arrogant Harvard student in his place, let me tell you. It also helped me see how much my own education was lopsided.” His experience at Fuller resembled mine at two other evangelical seminaries (Dallas and Westminster) over against a liberal but closed-minded graduate school faculty at USC.
This is what’s been true for a very long time and it’s one of the reasons for the establishment of evangelical colleges and graduate schools during the 20th century.
Roberts’ and my experience, as well as Hitchens’ interview with the Unitarian minister, illustrate tensions that go back to the early centuries of the church and were played out again at the beginning of the 20th century in the controversy between traditional Christian orthodoxy and an emerging liberal theology in an American Protestantism rooted in assumptions of 18th and 19th century European skepticism.
Appropriately, we begin our centennial celebration of the 1910 publication of the first of the 12-volume set of pamphlets, The Fundamentals, on this evening, the anniversary of the beginning of another Christian affirmation of orthodoxy, the Council of Chalcedon. That was in AD 451 across the narrow strait at Constantinople. Christian thinkers assembled there, not to invent doctrine (as some today mischaracterize it) but to affirm received doctrine. Their focus then was on the two natures of Christ – human and divine. In 1910, in the spirit of those 5th century brethren, Christian thinkers began a 5-year publishing project that, again, was not for inventing orthodoxy but for affirming received orthodoxy.
The bent of fallen human nature is such that we’re easily tempted to fall away from biblical truth and fall for seemingly more user-friendly and self-serving notions. So, time and again, God raises up an Augustine, a Luther, a Calvin, a Wesley, a Machen, a Barth – some poor sinner/scholar-saved-by-grace – and calls that person to call us back to “contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to us”, as Jude put it. (Jude 1:3) Jude goes on to explain that, indeed, “as Scripture warned would happen, some have infiltrated Christian ranks, trying to replace God’s grace. And that means doing away with Christ Jesus, our one and only Master.” (Jude 1:4ff)
Well, one hundred years ago, God raised up faithful scholars, teachers, pastors – soon to be called “Fundamentalists” – to push back against those who were twisting the historic Gospel into something alien and aligned with the passing spirit of the times.
In his book, The Night is Far Spent, my friend, writer and scholar Tom Howard – now a Roman Catholic but from a family of evangelical leaders including his sister, Elisabeth Elliott – remembers his grandfather, The Sunday School Times editor Philip E. Howard, and what Tom calls “the particular sanctity one associates with the orthodox past of Philadelphia Presbyterianism: gentlemanly, civilized, gracious, urbane, sober and merry” – a description that well fits Tom, too. He writes: “My grandfather knew intimately all the early Fundamentalists, in the days when there was no stigma other than orthodoxy attached to that word.”
With the passing of the 19th century, this country was reaching the end of a little over half a century that a church historian calls “The Last Years of ‘Protestant America’”. (Mark Noll) He calls the 65 years before that, “Evangelical America”. So, it was actually during the last years of these “Last Years of ‘Protestant America’” that The Fundamentals was launched.
The Fundamentals was a project conceived by a Christian layman and generous philanthropist by the name of Lyman Stewart, along with the assistance of his brother Milton. They’d struck oil in Pennsylvania and then they went on out to California and struck oil there. They founded the Union Oil Company of California (later known as Unocal 76). Today, Union Oil is a Chevron company.
Lyman Stewart had heard of the inroads of ecclesiastical skepticism and, as a devout Christian committed to the Gospel, he wanted to do something about that. When he met A. C. Dixon of Chicago’s Moody Church, he told Dixon of his idea to print and distribute essays on Christian “fundamentals”. Dixon saw the plan as “of the Lord” and the project was launched.
Stewart asked his friend and Presbyterian pastor, John Balcom Shaw, to come on board and Shaw became Dixon’s associate. Shaw had founded West Park Presbyterian Church in Manhattan and built it into a large congregation through his dynamic preaching. He’d gone on to do the same for other congregations. Years later, after being appointed the new president of Elmira [women’s] College, Shaw was accused, anonymously, of homosexuality. He denied it, but his good reputation was never regained.
The Stewart brothers contributed what, in today’s money, would amount to over $7 million dollars to the project. Sixty-four American, British and European scholars wrote 90 essays for the series of twelve, 125-page paper bound volumes. They were to be sent, as issued over a 5-year period, to every pastor, evangelist, missionary, theological seminary professor, seminary student, Sunday-school superintendent, and YMCA and YWCA secretary in the English-speaking world with the publishers pledge that: “No expense attaches itself to those who receive” the booklets. Some three million copies were published and distributed between 1910 and 1915. At mid-century, they would be reprinted in four hardbound volumes.
In the front of each volume of The Fundamentals, the Stewart brothers were identified, simply and anonymously, as “Two Christian Laymen”. Besides funding this project, they also gave the money to start The Union Rescue Mission for the homeless in Los Angeles and The Bible Institute of Los Angeles – now Biola University and Talbot Theological Seminary.
The authors of The Fundamentals taught at Johns Hopkins and at The University of Stuttgart, the colleges of Oberlin, Knox, Moody Bible Institute and Glasgow’s United Free Church College. One was the chancellor of New York University. They were bishops of Durham and Liverpool, knighted British dignitaries, a Middle East archaeologist, a New York City lawyer, a rather eccentric woman who wrote on spiritual warfare and the medical school professor who made innovations in gynecology and invented surgical instruments still in use today, such as the “Kelly clamp”. They were pastors at New York’s Marble Collegiate Church, London’s Westminster Chapel, Metropolitan Tabernacle and St. Paul’s Cathedral and other congregations of many denominations – from Olympia and Salt Lake City in the west to Chicago, Toronto, Montreal, Boston, Cambridge, Philadelphia and even that notorious little buckle on the Bible Belt: Darien, Connecticut.
The Fundamentals essays were presentations of historic Christian orthodoxy together with a few of the day’s more idiosyncratic issues. Topics included the inspiration of the Bible and biblical criticism, Christ’s virgin birth, his person, teachings, death and bodily resurrection, evangelism and missions, evolution, faith and science, God and grace, the Holy Spirit, justification, money, Mormonism, Christian Science, prayer, prophesy, sin and Sunday observance. There were testimonies of prominent contemporary laymen and quotations of witness under the odd title: “Brainy Men Not Known as Active Christians”, e.g., Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Daniel Webster, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Stuart Mill, Rousseau, Goethe, Napoleon and Shakespeare.
The first essay in the first volume is on biblical criticism, written by a professor at what’s now part of the University of Toronto. He defines his topic as “the study of the history and contents, and origins and purposes, of the various books of the Bible”, and explains the legitimate role of literary criticism, for which the orthodox had no objection.
In an essay on “Science and Christian Faith”, James Orr of Glasgow acknowledges that, “grievous mistakes have often been made, and unhappy misunderstandings have arisen, on one side and the other, in the course of the progress of science.” He says this is “an unhappy illustration of how the best of men can at times err in matters which they imperfectly understand, or where their prejudices and traditional ideas are affected.” But, he avers, “It proves nothing against the value of the discoveries themselves, or the deeper insight into the ways of God.” He notes that, “few are disquieted in reading their Bibles because it is made certain that the world is immensely older than the 6,000 years which the older chronology gave it.” Others, including editor R. A. Torrey of the Moody Bible Institute, scoffed at the notion of 24-hour days of creation, calling that view “hopeless ignorance”. Southern Baptist theologian E. Y. Mullins explained: “As a purely scientific theory [evolution] refers only to the facts of nature. … When a man turns his doctrine of evolution into materialism, monism, or theism, it thereby ceases to be science and becomes philosophy.”
Obviously, these views are far from today’s stereotypes of Fundamentalism and far from what some militant descendents try to push as required positions in today’s Fundamentalism.
In the end, The Fundamentals project was perhaps less influential than the Stewarts and the original authors had hoped, but liberal excess was countered in a respectable way.
F. F. Bruce October 12, 1910 – September 11, 1990
F. F. Bruce was the John Rylands Professor of Biblical Criticism and Exegesis at the University of Manchester from 1959 until he retired in 1978. He supervised more Ph.D. biblical studies students than any other teacher in British history. And he was known to so with the greatest personal care. The fact that he, himself never officially earned a Ph.D. was totally beside the point for even a mere list of his scholarly works runs to almost 60 pages in small print. He wrote more than forty books and nearly 2,000 articles and scholarly reviews.
A current New Testament lecturer at Manchester has written: “F. F. Bruce was, it seems to me, set up in the 1940s as something of a historian knight-in-shining armour, called in to do battle with the skeptical dragons. … He assumed that relatively dispassionate historical study would provide a reasonable defence, in the scholarly arena, of traditional Christian readings of key aspects of the Bible. He was proved substantially right. His work, and that of those who followed him, made a very important contribution to the change in temper of, in particular, New Testament scholarship between the beginning and end of Bruce’s career. Today, a far higher proportion of scholarship is conducive to traditional Christian beliefs than was the case in the middle of the twentieth century. The most obvious expression of this is the large number of evangelical scholars who are part of the mainstream of international biblical scholarship. Evangelical voices are a regular element of scholarly discourse.”
In 1989, a year before he died, Bruce was interviewed by biblical scholar Ward Gasque of Vancouver’s Regent College and by cultural historian Laurel Gasque. Bruce’s responses make this interview one of the most succinct sources on Bruce’s gentle and candidly well-informed good sense on a number of topics so I’m going to quote from it here at some length.
The Gasques remind him that he’d said he didn’t like being labeled a “conservative evangelical”. They quote back to him his having said he preferred to be known as an “unhyphenated evangelical.” He replies: “Conservatism is not of the essence of my position. If many of my critical conclusions, for example, are described as being conservative, they are so not because they are conservative, nor because I am conservative, but because I believe them to be the conclusions to which the evidence points. If they are conservative, then none the worse for that.”
“And what do you mean by ‘evangelical’?”, they ask. He answers: “An evangelical is someone who believes in the God who justifies the ungodly [Romans 4:5]. To believe in Him, and nothing more nor less, is to be evangelical. … Anything that begins to allow for an element of merit or human achievement in the work of salvation is, to that extent, non-evangelical.”
The Gasques ask this eminent Pauline scholar about “Paul and freedom”. He notes, with typical modesty: “Anything I say about him would do him less than justice.” He then explains: “I believe his main legacy is his law-free gospel, his affirmation that the grace of God, which he declares, is available on equal terms and manifested in an equal degree among human beings of every kind.”
Referencing Galatians 3:28, Bruce observes that Paul is saying that, “distinctions of [culture, race and sex] are simply irrelevant where the gospel is concerned, and where Christian witness, life and fellowship are concerned.”
The Gasques bring up his masterful work on Paul, published in the UK as Paul: The Apostle of the Free Spirit but, in the US, as Paul: Apostle of the Heart Set Free. Bruce responds: “The first [title] was my own choice. I had in mind the words of Psalm 51 [:12] where the psalmist prays, ‘Uphold me with thy free spirit!’ When my American publisher undertook to market it … ‘Free spirit’ was said to be … a class of hippy. I thought at the time that Paul may have been regarded as a sort of hippy in his day! … Many people, including Christians, are afraid of liberty. They are afraid of having too much liberty themselves; and they’re certainly afraid of letting other people, especially younger people, have too much liberty. … Among all the followers of Christ, I suppose there has never been a more emancipated soul than the soul of Paul. … The liberation that is at the very heart of the Pauline gospel can’t be restricted in any way. It must have its social implications and applications.”
The Gasques press him for clarity on the “implications and applications” – for example, on the role of women. Bruce states Paul’s position precisely: “Paul’s teaching is that so far as religious status and function are concerned, there is no difference between men and women.” None. He explains: “Anything in Paul’s writings that might seem to run contrary to this must be viewed in the light of the main thrust of his teaching and should be looked at with quite critical scrutiny.”
They bring up “proof texts” that “traditionalists” bring up against such a sweeping affirmation of Paul’s view of Christian liberty. He replies: “The strand that I am choosing is the strand that contains the foundation principles of Paul’s teaching in the light of which those other passages must be understood.” Bruce pulls no punches in summing up this and related matter: “In general, where there are divided opinions about the interpretation of a Pauline passage, that interpretation which runs along the line of liberty is much more likely to be true to Paul’s intention than one which smacks of bondage or legalism.”
Bruce’s approach here has obvious “implications and applications” for controversies today on homosexuality and the church. The Gasques did not ask about homosexuality, but today’s “divided opinions” over “proof texts” alleged to condemn same-sex couples do replicate the din of divided opinions over “proof texts” alleged to rule out women’s leadership in home and church. So, might it not be true also on gender in marriage, that, “that interpretation which runs along the line of liberty is much more likely to be true to Paul’s intention than one which smacks of bondage or legalism”?
Bruce responds to their asking about “some of the greatest problems facing Christians today?” His reply in 1989 is still on-target in 2010. He says: “The problem is what it has always been … conformity to the world, to the current climate of opinion … what the New Testament calls worldliness. Getting one’s mind into the mind-set of the age, and thinking in those terms instead of in distinctively Christian terms.”
He laments that, “Christian presuppositions, even in a diluted sense, are becoming less and less the presuppositions of our contemporaries.” And nowadays, on both Left and Right and in their religious or spiritual affinities, Christian presuppositions are becoming even less the presuppositions of our contemporaries – whether inside or outside church cultures.
The debuts of Vaughn Williams’ Sea Symphony and Stravinsky’s “Firebird” trumpeted, as it were, his 1910 birth. That same year, G. K. Chesterton introduced “Father Brown”, his rumpled but sharp Catholic priest-detective.
Bruce’s contemporaries, also born in 1910, included Mother Teresa, Kathryn Kuhlman, Donald Coggan, Peter DeVries, Jean Genet, A. J. Ayer, E. G. Marshall, Vincent Minnelli and Kitty Carlisle.
At 4 years old, Bruce started school and says, “I’ve been there ever since” – going on at 18 to the University of Aberdeen and then to Cambridge and then to a lifetime of university teaching. Thankful that he’d been brought up in a home full of book, he recalls, “devouring” The Last Days of Pompeii by Bulwer Lytton. But after another 50 years, he picked it up at a place where he was staying and found it “unreadable”. That’s not surprising, for that author is remembered for the epitome of purple prose in his oft-quoted opening line: “It was a dark and stormy night.”
As a child, Bruce loved reading his uncle’s copy of Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible. Years later, he’d help to write the 2nd Edition of Hastings.
In his student days he was active in the Inter-Varsity Fellowship and the less evangelical Student Christian Movement (which, in later years, become theologically very liberal). He recalls: “To be a member of the IVF Group and the SCM group simultaneously, as I was, could have meant that one was rather suspect in the eyes of both groups.” The position of bridge-builder became a typical position for Bruce for the rest of his life. His theological tastes in university days were, he says, “as eclectic … as they are today.”
Until his 1931 entrance exam at Cambridge, Bruce had never been to England – he’d never been south of Edinburgh. Among his teachers there at Cambridge, Bruce fondly remembered his Latin professor, homoerotic poet A. E. Houseman, as not only especially “patient and considerate” but the one with whom “none could compare in academic excellence”.
He observes with satisfaction: “I have never been in the position of believing what I do simply because I have never been exposed to any other form of belief!” And, the fact that he was never ordained gave this lifelong Brethren layman the freedom to do his scholarly work honestly, without the distraction of ecclesiastical busybodies breathing down his neck.
In his memoir, In Retrospect, Bruce writes: “At the back of the desk at which I am typing this, within arm’s reach, stands a row of books which I regularly consult. They include a Hebrew Bible, three editions of the Greek New Testament, a one-volume edition of the Septuagint, several editions of the English Bible (RV, ASV, RSV, NEB), a small Hebrew dictionary, C. F. Hudson’s Critical Greek and English Concordance of the New Testament (a useful Bagster reference work, long since out of print), the Book of Common Prayer, a five-year diary and a book containing people’s addresses and telephone numbers. Probably I regard these as particularly basic since I can consult them without leaving my chair.” Among these, his “basic” books, the only specific title he itemized is this concordance by Hudson. Well, this book, Bruce’s very own copy, for which he didn’t have to leave his chair to hold in his hands – you’ll be able to hold in your hands tonight. It bears his owner’s signature.
In 1970, a who’s who of world-class Bible scholars presented Bruce with a festschrift to honor him on his 60th birthday. Contributors include scholars at the universities of Aberdeen, Auckland, Basel, Cambridge, Glasgow, Liverpool, London and Princeton as well as seminary professors at Calvin, McCormick, New Brunswick and Fuller. The book’s Tabula Gratulatoria runs to nearly 400 names. None of these names is obscure.
In an introductory Appreciation, a longtime colleague writes: “One is impressed by the complete intellectual integrity of FFB. He faces the challenges of life and work, comes to terms with them and proceeds quietly and steadfastly towards his goal. This goal is not mere ambition, but the fulfillment of his work, because he regards his career as God’s call for his life, and gives himself to his work accordingly. Coupled with integrity is the quality of a genuine humility: a feature of his life of which he is unaware, but which hits those who know him – hard enough at times to challenge them to a like spirit.” And, his friend adds, “His mind has the sometimes rare quality of Christian sanity.” (H. C. D. Howley)
Bruce was often asked if belief in Christ’s resurrection is satisfied by the view that he merely lived on in the lives of his followers. Here’s his emphatic answer, reflecting both his scholarship and his faith: “No. … Our subjective experience of the power of the risen Christ is the result of the objective fact of His rising from the dead on the third day. It was to the objective fact, not to the subjective experience which follows from it, that Paul referred when he said: ‘If Christ hath not been raised, then is our preaching vain, your faith is also vain.” (I Cor 15:14)
At the end of his autobiographical retrospect, Bruce included a chapter entitled, “In conclusion – for the time being”. He wrote: “To commit one’s way in advance to God, especially (but not only) when a momentous choice has to be made, is to have the assurance that one’s way will be ordered or overruled by him for good. … In this I realize how much cause I have to be thankful. … It came home rather forcibly some years ago that every professional ambition that I could reasonably have cherished had been attained.” He went on to add: “Happily, the Christian has ambitions of a higher order; there is always something left to live for. Like Paul, he does not count himself to have ‘arrived’; he continues to press on toward the goal.”
Ten years later, on September 11, 1990, Frederick Fyvie Bruce passed on toward that goal: the nearer presence of his beloved Savior and Lord.