John Martin's Notebook

On shoulders of giants: John V Taylor

JVT reflects here on the Church as a healing community and how the Jesus story forms so much of its inspiration. (December 1964)

Throughout the centuries [the] Church has learnt to recognize Jesus in the guise of a fellow human, more than not identifying him by his wounds.; His sacred body has always been with us for our discernment of the poor, the wretched and the outcast. Jesus is the leper whom the saint kissed, and the child the monk carried over the stream, and the sick man who the widow nursed back to health. This still remains one of the mainsprings of Christian Mission.

A deeply moving instance of this way of thinking is quited by Cecil Day Lewis in his introduction to the collected poems of Wilfred Owen. In the summer of 1918, after a year and a half on the Western Front, Owen was training troops in England and preparing himself to return to the trenches, four months before he was killed.

"For fourteen hours yesterday I was at work," he wrote to a friend, "teaching Christ to lift his cross by numbers, and how to adjust his crown; and not to imagine his thirst till after the last halt. I attended his Supper to see that there were no complaints; and inspected his feet that they should be worthy of the nails. I see to it that he is dumb, and stands to attention before his accusers. With a piece of silver I buy him every day, and with maps I make him familiar with the topography of Golgotha."

 From Change of Address (Hodders, 1968)

On shoulders of giants: Max Warren

 

I'm back after a break with a series celebrating some of the great hearts and minds of the missionary movement. 

The 12th Century scholar Bernard of Chartres once said we are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants: we have insight because we are carried high and raised up by giant-sized minds of people who came ahead of us.

Here's such an insight from Canon Max Warren from his autobiography Crowded Canvass.

The theme here is Listening

My earliest memory is of dancing fire-light, and my mother reading to me. I am looking into the flames in this. I must have been three or four years old. It can be cold on winter evenings in the plains of North India, so we had a fire. Fire-light is one of the oldest ministers of magic. Looking into a far is a spell for the imagination. And listening introduced me to the magic of words. Long before I could read I was learning to listen, perhaps the most valuable lesson I have ever learnt.

Telling a truer story 1

 

Illustration: Depiction of the mass execution of rebels in British India by cannon.

There are special challenges for journalists writing about the missionary movement. The point is well illustrated by a comment made to me by Dr David Barrett, one of the most fascinating people I've met on my travels. Barrett, founder of the World Christian Encyclopedia, once told me: "Too much of the literature of the missionary movement is self-congratulatory."

It's far easier to discern the speck in the eye of people from the past than in your own. On that I need to salute the integrity of a long line of CMS archivists and librarians who have seen to it that the legacy of CMS writing and publications is preserved for posterity, with all it's 'specks'. So thanks to Margaret Acton, our CMS librarian, for help here. I'll come back to this theme from time to time.

One of the treasures of the Max Warren Collection in the CMS library is a bound volume of liturgies, speeches and sermons from events held all over Britain and India, rejoicing at the defeat of the Indian Mutiny.The first sermon in the collection is by the Bishop of Calcutta, Daniel Wilson.

Here's a great example of how easily religion can be co-opted to serve the national interest. With 20-20 hindsight we might wonder how noone questioned the right of the British to be in India or the images of the World Faiths represented on the sub continent that are perpetuated. 

Top of the table for political incorrectness, and plain bad theology, has to be a sermon by the Rev R.B. Boswell BA, a former chaplain to the Bengali establishment. His sermon title says it all: 'Hope for India in England's God'.

Of course we know better these days, don't we?