This week I replaced one of my favorite books from the 1960s through an online bookstore. It was written by J.B. Phillips during an era when the media were writing about the “God is dead” movement.
Phillips’ book is written against a generation’s scholarship that attempted to erode the truth, efficacy and transformation capacity of the Christian faith. He notes the secular press’ use of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s term “religionless Christianity,” taken out of context, of course, and the influence of German Rudolf Bultmann’s “demythologizing” of the Bible.
When both of these terms filtered down to the ordinary person, the result was an erosion of trust in the Bible as the Word of God.
Phillips also wrote within the context of biblical “higher criticism.” Beginning in Germany during the 1850s, every biblical scholar tried to outreach his predecessors in dissecting the Bible—determining author and date and essential message by the language or style, or similarity with beliefs in other world civilizations.
In my own last seminary chapel sermon, I felt obligated to warn that with higher criticism we can be like a capricious surgeon who would open our abdomen, analyze and extract each organ, and walk away without putting us back together and suturing us up!
As Phillips wrote, scholars can “protect themselves from the rather frightening vitality of the New Testament by carefully dismembering it. It is obviously right that we should have scholars—we owe much to them—but it is horribly possible so to dissect your subject that you remove its life! By the time each source and component has been tagged and labeled, this vibrant and compelling body of writing is no more than a cadaver on the theological operating table.”
To the ordinary person, Phillips wrote, “myth” means “concocted stories with the same quality of truth as Aesop’s Fables or Santa Claus.” Yet he concludes that, “The New Testament has a proper ring of Truth for anyone who has not lost his ear for truth.”
In his 1960s context, this Anglican priest was already seeing the harvest from a generation of benign neglect—those people who were reared in homes where parents were determined not to “stuff Christianity” down their children’s throats.
Phillips sadly observed that if mentioned at all, Jesus was “a misty hero figure of long ago who died a tragic death,” or a teacher whose Sermon on the Mount should be synchronized with all other religions.
These milquetoast views of Jesus in no way reflect the Son of God described in the New Testament, whose first disciples “turned the world upside down.” Both Dean Inge of Canterbury and G. K. Chesterton are credited with saying that conclusion of history is not that Christianity has been tried and found unconvincing, but has been neither examined nor tried.
Not a literalist
Realizing in his own time that he would be accused of obscurantism, Phillips had to point out that he was not a fundamentalist or a biblical “literalist.” He correctly pointed out: “[The] New Testament is not magical, nor is it faultless; human beings wrote it. But it is in quite a special sense inspired. By something which I would not hesitate to describe as a miracle, there is a concentration upon that area of inner truth which is fundamental and ageless.”
Phillips had an insight so often lacking—there is a dimension of truth that is “outer” and that can be discovered and articulated by anyone of average mind. However, there is also a dimension of truth that is “inner.”
“Inner truth” is what Hebrews calls “faith”—the “assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” It is by this inner truth that we love family and friends, develop or lose self-esteem, and frame our own life “evidences of truth.” It is this inner truth, Phillips wisely teaches us, that enables us to recognize “the Word of God as the Word of God and not a mere human document or opinion.”
As an Anglican, Phillips does not use the term “prevenient grace,” which is so dear to us Wesleyans, but he explains it well: “The moment we accept the Christian belief that we are sons of God, why should not sons recognize, however faintly, the true tone of his Father’s voice?” (How thankful we are for the recovery of inclusive language that Phillips’ generation did not see as necessary!)
“The Father’s voice” is not always comforting. I was reminded of this as I read Castaway Kid, the autobiography of my new pastor’s husband, who was left at an orphanage at age 3 and lived there until he finished high school. He experienced all the abandonment, fear, loneliness and anger one might expect.
Though the orphanage was related to a church and closed every day with readings from the Bible, Rob Mitchell could not weave together a belief in a loving God with his experience of parental abandonment. He grew up angry, with a deep-seated emptiness surrounding the word “home.”
When he met a girl who kept quoting Jesus, he found a Bible and began to read it. He read of Jesus: “this guy got hungry, thirsty and tired and even got his feet dirty.” Reading on, he found that like himself, Jesus was “let down by those he trusted.”
‘Better pay attention’
Then he read that Jesus said “he was the only one who knew God and he had come to make God known to all other humans!”
“The Man said He is God. If this is true, I’d better pay attention,” Rob thought.
When he was a junior in high school, he made a decision on his own: “In a little bedroom too small to turn my bed around in, I got down on my knees. ‘Jesus,’ I prayed, ‘if You are real, come into my nightmare. Forgive me of my sins and change me.’ If You really change me, I am Yours forever. If You don’t, you are a fraud and a joke.’”
Soon after, the dorm bully picked a fight. With his fist balled up to land a punch and his knee positioned for a kick in the groin, Rob remembered the words of Jesus, “Turn the other cheek.” He spun around and walked away, picked up his Bible and looked for a verse that instructed him to “go out and slay a thousand people and let blood run in the fields!” Instead his eyes fell on a proverb, “A soft answer turns away wrath.”
His confirmation of “inner truth” and biblical authority had just begun.
As a freshman in college, he recalled arguing with God: “Why, God, couldn’t you give me a little place to live—four rooms, a little yard, and a dog, a mom and a dad? Why God? Why this life? What did I do to deserve it?... I’ll never be able to go home, will I?”
Then a thought “floated unexpectedly into my mind. Its entry was soft as a feather. I almost missed it: “Call me ‘Father,’ Rob. Call Me ‘Home.’”
Rob ended up marrying a United Methodist minister’s daughter who became a minister herself, and they have two grown children. He is a stockbroker; they have a lovely home, which they are now using sparingly as they live in a parsonage apartment. His autobiography has sold over 50,000 copies.
John Wesley was mentored by Moravians. Most of us have had mentors. Even Rob had a godly grandmother and some Christian counselors who tried to reach him. Finally he found the Bible’s “inner truth” in the solitude of a bus.
If United Methodism is to reach this generation, we must go beyond our four cozy walls and practice the radical hospitality that Methodist lay preachers extended at English factory gates and American circuit riders used with immigrants in frontier cabins.
We must, give every “Rob” a home in our congregation! We must connect, communicate and care.
Dr. Haynes is a retired clergy member of the Western North Carolina Conference. e-mail: dhaynes11@triad.rr.com.
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Dr. Haynes is a retired clergy member of the Western North Carolina Conference. e-mail: 
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