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Robert Elliot Speer
Quote on Attitude from Speer
This is the precept by which I have
lived: Prepare for the worst; expect the best; and take what comes. R E Speer
Robert Elliot Speer
Robert E. Speer was born in 1867 in
Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, a small town nestled in the Allegheny Mountains. His
father, who raised the family alone after the death of Martha Speer in 1876, was
a successful attorney, sometime member of Congress, and devout Presbyterian of
Scots-Irish descent. He passed on his religious tradition, in part, by requiring
his children to memorize the Shorter and Larger Westminster Catechisms.
At age 16 Robert was sent east to Phillips
Academy for a college preparatory education. He matriculated at the College of
New Jersey (Princeton) in 1885. In college, Speer was profoundly influenced by
Dwight L. Moody, the preeminent evangelist of the day, and committed himself to
foreign missions. He matriculated at Princeton Seminary in 1890 but accepted a
position with the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in 1891
and never completed his theological degree.
Speer’s theology, nurtured in the crucible of
the interdenominational Student Volunteer Movement and the budding international
missionary movement, was broadly Christocentric. A passionate "apostle of
Christian unity" he disparaged theological disputes between denominations
and advocated the equality before God of men and women and of all races.
Moreover, Speer insisted that Christ, as the revealer of the unity and equality
of all people, bore the solution to inter-national struggle. The Christian faith
offered the only basis of a "just and secure international order."
Speer served on the Special Commission of 1925
and, as moderator of the 1927 General Assembly, presided over the adoption of
the commission’s report that declared the fundamentals non-binding on the
church. In this, his vision of a broad evangelical Christianity won the day over
militant doctrinal precisionism, ensuring, Speer believed, the proclamation of
the Gospel for the salvation of the world.
In 1933 controversy reared its head again when
Machen charged the Board of Foreign Missions, which Speer directed, with
tolerating modernists. When the General Assembly vindicated the orthodoxy of the
Board, Machen formed an Independent Board of Presbyterian Foreign Missions to
promote "truly Biblical Mission work." Speer, of course, welcomed the
General Assembly’s support but he lamented the division in the church, for the
world family, which could only be one in Christ, could never be united by a
divided church.
In 1934 the General Assembly declared the
Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions unconstitutional and ordered
Presbyterian clergy and laity to sever their connections with it. Machen
insisted that the mandate of the General Assembly was unconstitutional and
insisted he had no intention of resigning. Indeed, by this time Machen was
hoping desperately for a schism so a "true Presbyterian church" might
continue. In 1936 the General Assembly suspended Machen from the ministry and
Machen led in the formation of a new church, now the Orthodox Presbyterian
Church, essentially bringing the conflict to a close.
The Speer Library, at
Princeton University, opened in 1957 (and named in honor of the renowned
missionary statesman Robert E. Speer), has space for 400,000 volumes and 200
readers. (I assume it houses his papers and collection archives)
Robert E. Speer, The Finality of
Christ (Westwood, N. J.: Fleming H. Revel! Co., 1934), 315.
A Pioneer Surgeon in China Robert E. Speer
John F. Piper, "Robert E. Speer: his call and the missionary impulse,
1890-1900" in American Presbyterians, v.65 (1987): 95-108.
Nice
Web page here about the development of the student
volunteer
movement which Speer (and Buchman) joined
Speer Library in
Princeton
http://www.deepsight.org/articles/oldham.htm
history of student awakenings
http://www.dayofdiscovery.org/article-SVM.htm
Chapter 28 GOD IN CHRIST THE ONLY
REVELATION
OF THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD
Chapter from RA Torrey Book
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Parthenon/6528/fundcont.htm
By Robert E. Speer, Secretary of
The
Board of Foreign Missions of the
Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., New York City
Births and Rebirthds
from Faith at Work Webs-Sam Shoemaker
Donald B the article "History of the Big Book"
The Four Absolutes: Absolute Purity, Absolute
Unselfishness, Absolute Honesty, Absolute Love. The Four Absolutes were first
printed in a book called "The Principles Of Jesus" in 1902, which was
written by Robert Speer. These can be found on page 35 of that book. Speer was
deeply involved in the Northfield Student Movement, foreign missionary work, and
Princeton University. Another pertinent book is titled "The Will of God and
A Man’s Life Work," by Henry B. Wright in 1916. Wright was one of Oxford
Group founder Frank Buchman’s college professors, and was chairman of religion
at Yale University, also involved in the Northfield Student Movement. This
volume has many ideas regarding the absolutes, beginning on page 166, as well as
making a decision to turn your will and life over to the care of God. Bill
thought this attack by Jack Smith and his sermon was "...just about
enough." The alcoholics needed to believe in something greater than
themselves. Bill believed that adhering to the principles, believing in each
other, and the strength of the group could get them sober!
The following is a short review of the New Biography of Robert
Speer
Biography
of Robert P Speer by John Piper
Piper, John F. Jr. Robert E.
Speer:
Prophet of the American Church (Geneva Press, 2000).
Robert E. Speer, ecumenist, missionary spokesman, loyal Presbyterian, and
devoted family man, was one of the most remarkable personalities in the
history of American Christianity. Although his name is not well known today, in
the early twentieth century he was viewed as the outstanding missionary
statesman of his era and one of our leading American churchmen.
In this comprehensive and accessible biography,
Piper tells of Speer's work with the Student Volunteer Movement, his
high-profile role as secretary of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions,
his service as moderator during the fundamentalist-modernist controversy in his
church, and his tireless work in the often controversial fields of missions and
ecumenical relations. In his later years Speer turned his attention to issues of
ministry in wartime, the problems of racism, and the role of women in the
church.
This
biography is the first serious effort to tell Speer's story. It not only lifts
up his life and ministry but goes beyond that to tell the story of Protestantism
in America in the firt half of the twentieth century. Though Speer's
contributions do not complete this story, they do enhance it. With his
involvement in Presbyterianism, foreign missions, ecumenism, the church's
response to war and racism, and his advocacy for leadership roles for women in
the church, Robert Speer established himself as a prophet of the American
church.
Prophet
of the American Church
Historian John Piper became acquainted with
Robert E. Speer in the 1960s when Piper was writing a book about the American
churches during World War II. Now forty years later Piper has written the first
comprehensive biography of the churchman he considers “one of the most
remarkable personalities in the history of Christianity in America.”
The book, Robert E. Speer: Prophet of the
American Church, was published in October by Geneva Press, and Princeton
Seminary is thrilled that the man it honors in the name of its library will be
more widely recognized for his myriad contributions to the church.
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John Piper
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Piper, who teaches history at
Lycoming College in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, waxes eloquent about the man
whose prophetic leadership in the church has been largely understated. “Speer
became the outstanding missionary statesman of his era and one of the foremost
American church leaders,” he writes. “In a dramatic conversion experience
during his college years [at Princeton University], he heard God call him to be
a foreign missionary. He understood himself to be a minister from that moment
and never wavered from his call. At virtually every turn in his life he was in a
position of leadership, chosen by others to be one of a small handful of
spokespersons or called to the front as the leader.”
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Robert E. Speer
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Speer was a student at Princeton
Seminary for one year, but left in 1891 to become assistant secretary of the
Presbyterian Church’s Board of Foreign Missions. He went on to become the
board’s secretary and to take missionary trips and attend missionary
conferences throughout the world—in Mexico, South America, India, Persia,
China, Japan, and Korea. He participated in the founding meeting of the Federal
Council of Churches and later served as chair of its Commission on Foreign
Missions.
Piper also highlights Speer’s important role in
the history of the Seminary. He was elected to its board of directors in 1914
and to its reorganized board in 1929, and in 1937 became the board’s chair.
“One of Speer’s favorite people was John
Mackay,” Piper recollects. “Mackay heard him lecture in Edinburgh, Scotland,
and later said he was the greatest man he ever knew. One of the things that
Speer felt best about was chairing the committee that called Mackay to
Princeton’s presidency. When Robert Speer died, Mrs. Speer wrapped up his robe
and sent it to John Mackay, it was like he had been passed the mantle.”
As its title reveals, Piper’s book lifts up Speer’s prophetic role as an
ecumenist and churchman. “Robert E. Speer was frequently described by
colleagues as a prophet of God,” he writes. “A prophet can be a person who
sees the future. Many believe he did that, in his vision of the role of women in
the church, his conviction of the need for churches to confront and help resolve
racism, and his belief in the centrality of the ecumenical movement in the life
of the church. A prophet can also be one who has a gift of spiritual insight.
[Speer’s] gift was insight into the life and ministry of Jesus Christ.”
Ordained as an elder but never a minister, Speer
was nonetheless chosen as one of the leading preachers in America by The
Christian Century in 1924. He was also elected as moderator of the Presbyterian
Church, his denomination’s highest office.
His biographer finds a likely explanation for
Speer’s relative anonymity since his death (in 1947) in Speer’s conception
of himself and his attitude toward his ministry. “He was very modest and often
withdrawn in the face of public recognition or honors. He accepted academic
honorary degrees but did not use them or any titles in his personal address. He
began a family history in the 1930s but refused to write an autobiography.”
So, according to Piper, what appears to have been
legitimate modesty has led to histories of the American church that have omitted
mention of Speer, to their own disadvantage.
He hopes that his book will offer redress.
Robert E. Speer: Prophet of the American Church
is available from Princeton Seminary’s Theological Book Agency at a cost of
$29.71.
PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY
Robert E. Speer Library
Mercer Street and Library Place
Princeton NJ 08542
(609) 921-8092
James Armstrong, Librarian
AGNEW BAPTIST COLLECTION n.d. 1 item
pamphlets: A Chinaman in Search of Baptism, by [?] Angier,
n.d.
SPEER MANUSCRIPTS COLLECTION 1892-1943 34 folders, 12 V
minutes records reports correspondence: 13 folders and 1
volume of reports and correspondence on topics including China missions,
1899-1908 China visits, 1896-97, 1926 cooperation and union in China, 1905-33
correspondence about China, 1892-1923 liquor and opium addiction, 1903 and the
Sino-Japanese War, 1939-40.
manuscripts: "Report on China and Japan of the Deputation
Sent by the Board of Foreign Missions of the Missions of the Presbyterian Church
in the U.S.A. to Visit These Fields," by Robert Elliott Speer, 1927.
memorabilia: Ca. 16 folders and 4 scrapbooks of miscellaneous
items relating to China in general, 1892-1943 cooperation and union in China,
1898-1911 liquor and opium addiction, 1903-6 Sino-Japanese war, 1932-42 and
visits to China, 1896-97, 1915, 1921, 1926-27.
audio-visual: 5 photo albums and 2 folders of loose photos of
China (and other East Asian countries), 1896-97 and n.d.
aids: In-house shelf list.
CROSSED FINGERS HOW THE LIBERALS CAPTURED THE
PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH TABLE OF CONTENTS
there is a lot about
speer on several chapters
especially chapter ten
I really do not understand what
the historical point of the books is about
but the book contains lots of historical info about Robert Speer
Crossed Fingers
Table of
Contents
Crossed Fingers is the first book to identify and discuss in
detail the five points of liberalism and the rival theological positions. It is
also the first published book that "follows the money" by tracing the sources of
the funding of theological liberalism in twentieth-century America. One man,
more than any other, was the primary source: John D. Rockefeller, Jr.
Crossed Fingers serves as a handbook for the diagnosis and
defeat of the same liberal forces that have captured American Christianity. How
did they do it? With a vision, with a plan, and with other people's money.
Crossed Fingers shows how they achieved victory in what had been the
most theologically conservative large Protestant denomination on earth. It also
shows what the conservative Presbyterians could have done, and still have not
done, to immunize the Church.
Reflections on the Roots of
Presbyterian Conflict:
A Background Paper for the Atlanta
Conference, Spring 1999
Bradley J. Longfield
University of Dubuque Theological
Seminary
Robert E. Speer
Robert E. Speer was born in 1867 in
Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, a small town nestled in the Allegheny Mountains. His
father, who raised the family alone after the death of Martha Speer in 1876, was
a successful attorney, sometime member of Congress, and devout Presbyterian of
Scots-Irish descent. He passed on his religious tradition, in part, by requiring
his children to memorize the Shorter and Larger Westminster Catechisms.
At age 16 Robert was sent east to Phillips
Academy for a college preparatory education. He matriculated at the College of
New Jersey (Princeton) in 1885. In college, Speer was profoundly influenced by
Dwight L. Moody, the preeminent evangelist of the day, and committed himself to
foreign missions. He matriculated at Princeton Seminary in 1890 but accepted a
position with the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in 1891
and never completed his theological degree.
Speer’s theology, nurtured in the crucible of the
interdenominational Student Volunteer Movement and the budding international
missionary movement, was broadly Christocentric. A passionate "apostle of
Christian unity" he disparaged theological disputes between denominations and
advocated the equality before God of men and women and of all races. Moreover,
Speer insisted that Christ, as the revealer of the unity and equality of all
people, bore the solution to inter-national struggle. The Christian faith
offered the only basis of a "just and secure international order."
Speer served on the Special Commission of 1925
and, as moderator of the 1927 General Assembly, presided over the adoption of
the commission’s report that declared the fundamentals non-binding on the
church. In this, his vision of a broad evangelical Christianity won the day over
militant doctrinal precisionism, ensuring, Speer believed, the proclamation of
the Gospel for the salvation of the world.
In 1933 controversy reared its head again when
Machen charged the Board of Foreign Missions, which Speer directed, with
tolerating modernists. When the General Assembly vindicated the orthodoxy of the
Board, Machen formed an Independent Board of Presbyterian Foreign Missions to
promote "truly Biblical Mission work." Speer, of course, welcomed the General
Assembly’s support but he lamented the division in the church, for the world
family, which could only be one in Christ, could never be united by a divided
church.
In 1934 the General Assembly declared the
Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions unconstitutional and ordered
Presbyterian clergy and laity to sever their connections with it. Machen
insisted that the mandate of the General Assembly was unconstitutional and
insisted he had no intention of resigning. Indeed, by this time Machen was
hoping desperately for a schism so a "true Presbyterian church" might continue.
In 1936 the General Assembly suspended Machen from the ministry and Machen led
in the formation of a new church, now the Orthodox Presbyterian Church,
essentially bringing the conflict to a close.
Christ died for us, so that we can live for Him...
The Christ Who Lives in Men
by Robert E Speer
"I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ
liveth in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of
the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me." - Gal. 2:20.
Robert E. Speer: Sometimes it is given to a
man to say it all in just a few words. I read not long since a list of such
great sayings in each one of which the man had really gathered up the whole of
his life, and through which he has been long remembered. There was Lincoln's
word in his Cooper Institute speech, "Let us have faith to believe that right
makes might, and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we
understand it." There was the famous saying attributed to Mr. [Grover]
Cleveland, "Public office is a public trust"; and a long list of such great and
characterizing words as these.
It is one of these words, greater far than any that were on that list, that I
speak here. It is the word which one would pick out of all the sayings of Paul
as most completely gathering up the fullness of the man's life and bringing home
to us the very heart of his conviction and of his message. It is the one word in
which more perfectly than in anything else that he ever wrote or, as far as we
know, ever said, Paul gathers up the meaning of his new and his real life.
And what a life it was! The names of the great statesmen and merchants and
scholars of his time have almost all of them been forgotten. The few that we
remember best we remember chiefly because they had some contact with the life of
Paul and with the great enterprise which had been begun and to which he had
consecrated his career. This was his supreme interest, how to live the deepest
and most powerful life that he could; how not merely to endure his life, how not
merely to accept it, but how to live it at its maximum of meaning and of content
and of influence and of power. And to everyone of us in some grave and earnest
hour of our lives, the question has come which Paul answers for himself and for
every other man, as to what life is, where it springs from, where it is to be
wrought out, what the inner secret of it is to be, how we, coming these long
generations after, can perhaps be laid hold of by just such principles and
powers as laid hold of him, and be enabled to do in our own time, please God,
the same necessary work that he did in his.
I
What we have here first of all is his explanation of where his life came
from, the spring and the source of it. "I am crucified with Christ." His life
began in death, in death and life with Christ. I suppose all living must begin
in some such place as that. "The vine from every living limb," wrote Garibaldi's
friend, Ugo Bassi -
The vine from every living limb bleeds wine.
Is it the poorer for that spirit shed?
The drunken and the wanton drink thereof.
Are they the richer for that gift's excess?
Measure thy life by loss instead of gain,
Not by the wine drunk, but the wine poured forth;
For life's strength standeth in love's sacrifice,
And whoso suffers most hath most to give.
Christianity began there. It had to die before it ever lived. It came out of
the black shadows, out of a grave where Christ's faith was laid away with his
body. Christianity came forth out of death into life and power. "Thou fool,"
writes Paul in another of his letters, "that which thou sowest is not quickened,
except it die" (I Cor. 15:36). And what is he doing but catching up our Lord's
own great word, "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth
alone" (John 12:24)?
The life of man has to begin in shadow, the life of power and strength in
Christ's death. And we do not need to flinch from the deepest and the most
mystical interpretation of all that is contained in that idea of Paul's.
Elsewhere he unfolds it.
"What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound?
God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein? Know
ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized
into his death? Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death; that
like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so
we also should walk in newness of life. For if we have been planted together
in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness - of his
resurrection; knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the
body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin. For
he that is dead is freed from sin. Now if we be dead with Christ, we believe
that we shall also live with him: knowing that Christ being raised from the
dead dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him. For in that he died,
he died unto sin once: but in that he liveth, he liveth unto God. Likewise
reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God
through Jesus Christ our Lord." (Rom. 6:1-11)
And this is not to be thought of as a curiosity of exceptional religious
experience, as a category of antiquated ideas in which a man who belonged to a
different race and a different time cast a religious experience which is to be
depersonalized and to be made simply moral for us. This is the real fact about a
life of fullness and power and reality to the end of time. It begins in death
with Christ to sin, that it may live with him unto righteousness.
And yet this does not mean that one is not prepared to cast the meaning of
Paul's words also in real social and ethical terms for our own life now. Being
crucified with Christ and taking up out of that death a new life with him must
mean for us, if we put it in those terms, that we accept his attitude toward
life and fix duty as the highest of all our moral values; that we take up
his spirit of mind with regard to our enemies and make forgiveness a
fundamental principle of our own hearts; that we hold fast to his faith in
the sure triumph of innocence even over wrong and fear; that we cherish his
undying hope of the possibility of a better world even against the background of
murder and of crime.
When Paul says that he died with Christ and came out through that deep
experience to the living of a new and powerful life, he meant things like these
as realities in his daily relationships with men. The cross was the mark of the
beginning of that new and real life.
There is a story of a company of men who had been gathered in the earliest
days of our participation in the [First World] war. The whole group could not be
sent over to the other side at once, and every man was eager to go; at last they
decided that they would put a lot of papers in a hat, one for every man, and
they would put crosses on as many papers as there were men who might be sent,
and every man who drew a paper with a cross on it was to be allowed to go. When
it was all over one lad who belonged to the group wrote home to his father,
"Father, if I ever prayed in my life, I prayed today that I might draw a cross."
He wanted the life that bore that symbol and mark and all that it opened up in
the possibility of service and of sacrifice.
Do we want to find our way into a life that can do in our time what Paul's
life did in his, that can leave its deathless scar on the soul of humanity as
Paul's life left his, his healing scar? Well, here is the beginning and the
foundation of it all for us as for him: "I am crucified with Christ:
nevertheless I live" (Gal. 2:20).
II
Paul goes on next to tell us where this life of his was to be lived, the area
and sphere in which the great battle was to be waged and the great work was to
be done. Not in any quiet islands of the blest elsewhere than here, not in some
far-distant heavenly age with another environment from that in which men
actually live in our real world. "I am crucified with Christ nevertheless I
live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me ... the life which I now live in the
flesh."
We have been asking ourselves these last few years over and over again
whether, after all, Christianity is a practical thing; I mean, the original idea
of Christianity, or whether it has not to be vacated in some way, some of its
old ideals toned down, some of its old demands reduced, some of its old ideals
bedimmed. Can Christianity be lived, we ask, here and now in this meat of our
body, in the midst of all this maelstrom of evil that whirls us around by day
and by night? Can Christianity be lived?
That is exactly Paul's ideal about his life. "The life which I now live in
the flesh." It is the glory of the human body and it is the glory of
Christianity that Christianity can be lived inside a man's flesh, that there
are no passions here that are right that cannot be purified and consecrated, and
that anything that cannot be so transformed does not belong in the man. Paul
lived his life, this great life of his, full and complete, deficient in nothing,
not truncated, not constricted, but abounding, Paul lived this life in the
flesh.
It was to make the divine life possible in the flesh that Christ himself
was incarnate, to demonstrate to men the possibility that the godlike character
might be realized in bone and blood and sinew and gristle and flesh, and that
today it is possible for men to live this life, the high, complete, full life in
their flesh. And of course this means more than the mere flesh and blood,
meat and bone interpretation of it.
It means the whole range of our human relationships; that inside the family,
in all our actual living relationships from which we cannot escape, Christ must
be supreme, and the life of Christ be lived; that Christ is to be our life in
the flesh of all human experience and all human need and all human activity. And
not in these narrower ranges only; but across the width of all the life of man.
Professor Lang, of the University of Alabama, tells of an experience that he
counted one of the most singular in his life, which happened when he was a
graduate student in the University of Edinburgh some years ago. He had gone to
McEwen Hall to hear Mr. Balfour [Prime Minister of Britain] deliver an address
on the moral values which unite the nations. It was a wonderful address. As
Professor Lang looked across at the audience to see the effect of it on those
who listened, he saw opposite him in the gallery a Japanese student leaning over
the gallery and drinking in every word. And when Mr. Balfour had ended naming
the moral values which he conceived bound the nations together, or were at last
to accomplish the unity of man, there was an instant of appreciative silence
over all that great hall, and in that moment of silence the Japanese student
stood up and leaning over the balcony said, "But, Mr. Balfour, what about
Jesus Christ?" He had spoken of the moral values that unite the nations and
left out the only value that can unite them; the only undying, valid bond, the
only power by which at last the whole life of the world is to be made harmonious
and complete.
"The life which I now live," says Paul - and he is embodying in himself the
whole collective Christian experience; for this that he went through was only
the thing that all Christian men and women to the end of time were to go through
- "the life which we ... live in the flesh we live by the faith of the Son of
God." We live it not elsewhere, not far away, not in some other stage of social
progress to which some day we may come. We may live it in the flesh, the only
flesh we know, the life that is here, that is today.
III
But men ask themselves, "How can we live this life, accepting Paul's
account of where it comes from and of where it is to be experienced? We know
enough from our own lives, of the difficulty of realizing any such great
achievements as these on the battle ground of our experience. Can it be?" Men
say that for them it cannot be. They know it cannot, for they have tried, and
again and again have been beaten down on this very field. Well, Paul goes on to
tell us the secret and the power of this absolutely unlimited and invincible
life: "I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ
liveth in me."
One great weakness of our Christian life today in our colleges and outside of
our colleges is that we have thinned it out; we have crowded out the miracle and
the mystery and the supernatural of it. We have made it just a veneer, a moral
purpose or an admiration; and we have lost those great dynamic energies by which
alone the thing can ever really be. "I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I
live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me."
I do not mean to say that the thing can be explained. Life cannot be
explained. It runs far deeper than our understanding of it. But there are
some things about it that Paul intimates here which make the mystery after all
not so dark and impenetrable. How was it that Christ could do this in him? For
one thing, by the obvious and experienced principle of our multiple
personalities. Paul does not balk at it at all. We think that ideas like the
subliminal self are modern discoveries. But Paul knew long ago of these layers
of a man that make up the man, of the conflict between these different levels of
his life and the secret that one possessed of coming down through the upper
levels to deep buried potentialities.
How many I's and me's are there here? "I am crucified with Christ";
what "I" is that? "Nevertheless I live"; is that the same "I" that was
crucified? "Yet not I"; what "I" is that? "But Christ liveth in me"; what "me"
is that? "And the life which I now live"; is that the old "I" before the
crucifixion or the new "I" after rising again, the "I" in his own energies and
ambitions, or the "I" permeated with the indwelling Christ? "The life which I
now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me" -
what "me" is that? "and gave himself for me."
Paul knows perfectly well what we know, that every man of us is half a dozen
men, this man and that man and the other. And the wonder of Christ's insight
into personality has always been that he does not confuse, as we do even in our
self-judgment, these multiple men, but can make his way among them until he
finds the last and the least soiled of them all, the man in whom there is most
of the undeveloped power, the man who has lost least of that great birthright of
kinship with him in whose image we were first of all made; and Christ uncovers
that and washes it in his own blood and breathes confidence into it and strips
away all the shackles of the sins that so easily beset it, and sets that inner
best man free.
And not by the principle of the multiple personality only does Christ work,
but by the principle of the real and the ever repeated resurrection as well. We
remember what Donald Hankey said, in those last hours which he had with his men
just before the great hour [of attack in the First World War] came, as he walked
up and down the trenches while they waited and spoke to them one by one and in
little groups: "Boys, we are going over the top tomorrow. Remember if you are
wounded, it's blighty [back to England]; if you are killed, it's the
resurrection." Through Christ it was a legitimate inspiration to work with in
that black hour. But the resurrection is not a principle that comes in the last
and ultimate moment alone; the resurrection is a principle of life every hour of
every day. It is the power available in men that knows no moral limits
whatsoever, the power that God put forth when he raised Jesus Christ from the
dead, the power by which in conquering death our Lord showed that there was not
anything that he could not conquer.
There is that evil habit that comes when the light has gone out and you lie
alone. You know its face well; and you have always said when you saw it come,
"Here comes my enemy that is too strong for me." Yes, but not for the power of
the resurrection, the power that is adequate to deal with any foe, the power
that is strong enough to nerve a man for any sacrifice, the power that is mighty
enough to lift any load and break the very bars of death.
There is many a man to whom life is just a half thing. The vast deeps have
not been cut open for him. Sin seems to be a venial affair. The great moral
realities have never burst on him as they burst that day in one blinding vision
upon Paul on the highway.
Well, the power of the resurrection is adequate in the life of every one of
us today to lift us out of all this half-living, out of all these partial
visions, out of all these toned-down fellowships, out of all these abstentions
from the sufficient power of God. The power of the resurrection is adequate to
lift us out of all this and to tear these lives of ours open for the coming in
of the energies that are in Christ.
IV
There is one more thing that Paul tells us here: not alone about the spring
and the power of this great life, not alone about the area and the sphere in
which it can be lived, not alone the secret and the power of it, but he is
laying bare here also the method and the process of it.
"And the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of
God, who loved me, and gave himself for me."
We may take this legitimately in two different senses, I suppose. "I live
it," says Paul, "by the faith of the Son of God"; by the same kind of faith that
he had, by the principle of life and relationship with the unseen that
controlled him; "I live my new life by that faith." It would mean a new
world if we would begin to live our lives that way, by Jesus Christ's faith in
God as his Almighty Father, in goodness at the heart of everything, at the back
of the tragedies of life, at the back of the moral disciplines both of the
individual and of the nation, by Jesus Christ's faith in God as the heart of
love at the very center of all the life and experience of man, by his faith in
humanity.
One can name men and women all over our land to whom that faith is an utterly
strange thing today. They do not believe in humanity as Christ believed in it,
although they have far more reason for believing in it than he did. "He came
unto his own, and his own received him not" (John 1:11). He took on human flesh,
and human flesh crucified him. The very mankind that he came to save
demonstrated that it was not worth his saving, and he still believed in it. If
we had Christ's faith in mankind today we would not balk at the little things
that are proposed for the making of a new world - if we had his faith in
possibility.
"All things are possible" (Mark 9:23), said he in a day of moral penury, of
national insularity, when the whole world was dead in lust and evil. Even in
that day all things were possible to them that believed. What ought not to be
possible in a day like this to men who believe that there is nothing that ought
to be that cannot be, "by the faith of the Son of God" (Gal. 2:20)!
Or there is the other meaning. We find it in Moffatt's translation of this
passage. "The life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God who
loved me and gave himself up for me," by vital personal relationship with
Christ, by the loving trust that sees in him grace beyond all my deserving,
a patience that my sin and moral indifference might well have outworn but have
not.
I thought His love would weaken
As more and more He knew me.
But it burneth like a beacon,
And its light and heat go through me;
And I ever hear Him say,
As He comes along His way, -
"Wand'ring soul, O do come near Me;
My sheep should never fear Me;
I am the Shepherd true,
I am the Shepherd true."
His was a love strong enough to wear down our love of the things that he
hates, and to make us willing to bring our lives in complete surrender to him,
that his fulfilling and enriching hands may make us complete and like himself.
I know well how imperfectly this draws out what Paul was trying to get into
words. But I know that even this imperfect way of putting it cannot hide the
truth that is here, and that this is a truth that we are needing today, in order
that we may experience again just what the gospel of Jesus Christ is.
Christ is not simply a beautiful figure for us to admire across
nineteen hundred years. The gospel is not a mere wholesome moral teaching, part
of which we accept, the rest of which we reject because it is now too hard to
live by. The gospel is a great deal more than that. The gospel is the living God
confronting men's lives today in the record of what Jesus Christ was and did and
in the reality of all of this, still as a permanent and ever-continuing work
inside the souls of men, and calling us in our lives to leave what is only
partial or out on the skirts of spiritual reality, and to come in to share
Christ's death, and then to go out to live his life.
I remember coming down on a railroad train many years ago from Eaglesmere
with a crowd of railroad men who had been there for a summer Bible conference.
We rode in some open freight cars on the old primitive railroad which was all
there was then, and which has not been much improved since. As we sat on the
boards laid across the open cars, the men were telling about their experiences.
There was one man, who had drunk the cup down to the very lees of it, and they
had been bitter. And then the Voice had called him, and he had risen up to a new
career. He was an old, gnarled veteran of the [American] civil war. He was
telling us about his experience and he said: "It at last all came down to this
with me. I sat down one day in the midst of my sin, with the Savior near, making
his offer, and I closed with it, and I rose up in his strength and power. He
died my death for me that I might live his life for him."
He died for us to all our sin of imagination and of desire and of deed; and
he rose for us that we might live with him today the new life of cleanness and
of joy and of power and of Victory. Yes, and what is equally wonderful, we died
in his death with him that he might live his life and our life in us. This is
the gospel of reality. This is the reality of the gospel.
Sermon preached by Robert E. Speer, Princeton[?], 1925
A Missionary Call
by Robert E. Speer
What constitutes a missionary call? It is a good sign that men ask this
question. First, because it suggests that they think of the missionary
enterprise as singularly related to the will of God. Second, because it
indicates that they believe their lives are owned by a Person who has a right to
direct them and whose call they must await.
But when we have said these two things, I think we have said everything that
can be said in favor of the question because, far too often, it is asked for
thoroughly un-Christian reasons.
For instance, Christians will pursue a profession here in the United States
having demanded far less positive assurance that this is God's will than it is
for them to go out into the mission field. But by what right do they make such
distinctions? Christianity contends that the whole of life and all services are
to be consecrated; no man should dare to do anything but the will of God. And
before he adopts a course of action, a man should know nothing less nor more
than that it is God's will for him to pursue it.
If men are going to draw lines of division between different kinds of
service, what preposterous reasoning leads them to think that it requires less
divine sanction for a man to spend his life easily among Christians than it
requires for him to go out as a missionary to the heathen? If men are to have
special calls for anything, they ought to have special calls to go about their
own business, to have a nice time all their lives, to choose the soft places, to
make money, and to gratify their own ambitions.
How can any honest Christian say he must have a special call not to do that
sort of thing? How can he say that, unless he gets some specific call of God to
preach the Gospel to the heathen, he has a perfect right to spend his life
lining his pockets with money? Is it not absurd to suggest that a special call
is necessary to become a missionary, but no call is required to gratify his own
will or personal ambitions?
There is a general obligation resting upon Christians to see that the Gospel
of Jesus Christ is preached to the world. You and I need no special call to
apply that general call of God to our lives. We do need a special call to exempt
us from its application to our lives. In other words, every one of us stands
under a presumptive obligation to give his life to the world unless we have some
special exemption.
This whole business of asking for special calls to missionary work does
violence to the Bible. There is the command, "Go ye into all the world and
preach the gospel to every creature." We say, "That means other people." There
is the promise, "Come unto Me all ye that labor and are heavy laden and I will
give you rest." We say, "That means me." We must have a special divine
indication that we fall under the command; we do not ask any special divine
indication that we fall under the blessing. By what right do we draw this line
of distinction between the obligations of Christianity and its privileges? By
what right to we accept the privileges as applying to every Christian and
relegate its obligations to the conscience of the few?
It does violence to the ordinary canons of common sense and honest judgment.
We do not think of ordering other areas of our lives on this basis. I think
ex-president Patton of Princeton was representing the situation accurately when
he used the following illustration. He said, "Imagine I was employed by the
owner of a vineyard to gather grapes in his vineyard. The general instructions
were that as many grapes as possible should be gathered. I went down to the gate
of the vineyard and found the area around the walls well plucked and the ground
covered with pickers. Yet away off in the distance no pickers at all are in
sight and the vines are loaded to the ground. Would I need a special visit and
order from the owner of the vineyard to instruct me as to my duty?"
If I were standing by the bank of a stream, and some little children were
drowning, I would not need any officer of the law to come along and serve on me
some legal paper commanding me under such and such a penalty to rescue those
children. I should despise myself if I should stand there with the possibility
of saving those little lives, waiting until, by some legal proceeding, I was
personally designated to rescue them!
Why do we apply, in a matter of infinitely more consequence, principles that
we would loathe and abhor if anybody should suggest that we should apply them in
the practical affairs of our daily life? Listen for a moment to the wail of the
hungry world. Feel for one hour its sufferings. Sympathize for one moment with
its woes. And then regard it just as you would regard human want in your
neighbor, or the want that you meet as you pass down the street, or anywhere in
life.
There is something wonderfully misleading, full of hallucination and delusion
in this business of missionary calls. With many of us it is not a missionary
call at all that we are looking for; it is a shove. There are a great many of us
who would never hear a call if it came. Somebody must come and coerce us before
we will go into missionary work.
Every one of us rests under a sort of general obligation to give life and
time and possession to the evangelization of the souls everywhere that have
never heard of Jesus Christ. And we are bound to go, unless we can offer some
sure ground of exemption which we could with a clear conscience present to Jesus
Christ and be sure of His approval upon it. "Well," you ask, "do you mean, then,
that I should take my life in my own hands?" No! That is precisely what I am
protesting against! That is exactly what we have done. We have taken our lives
in our own hands and proposed to go our own way unless God compels us to go some
other way. What I ask is that, until God reveals to us some special, individual
path on either side, we should give our lives over into Jesus' hands to go in
that path which He has clearly marked out before His church.
I want to say one last thing.
I think love will hear calls where the loveless heart will not know that they
are sounding. If there were a hundred little children crying, a mother would be
able to pick out the voices of her own - especially if they were voices of pain
and suffering.
There is a mighty keenness in the ears of love, and I wonder, after all,
whether that may not explain a great deal that one is perplexed over in this
matter of a special missionary call. Is it possible that, in many cases, it is
just a matter of a callused heart, a reluctant will, or a sealed mind?
God so loved the world that He gave. It was need in the world plus love in
God that constituted a call for Jesus. Do we need more than what sufficed for
Him? If they were our own, would we hesitate and hold back?
Let us lay aside all double-dealing, all moral subterfuge, all those
shuffling evasions by which the Devil is attempting to persuade us to escape
from our duty, and let us get up like men and look at it and do it.
Students are old enough to decide to do their duty. They are old enough to
decide to go to college. They are old enough to decide for law and medicine and
other professions. They are old enough, too, to decide this question. God forbid
that we should try to hide from solemn consideration of our vital duty behind
any kind of pretext.
More links
Robert Speer Henry B Wright Horace Bushnell
Henry B. Wright's
Biography Page and
page regarding his book Student Personal
Evangelism
Life of
Henry B. Wright by George Stewart
Henry B. Wright's
The Will of God and a Man's Lifework condensed
Robert Speer Author of
Principles of Jesus
Horace Busnell Links
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