Category Archives: Church History
Lexington Theological Seminary Sells Campus to UK
Lexington Theological Seminary Sells Campus to UK
University of Kentucky to buy campus of Lexington Theological Seminary
Published: May 13, 2013
Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2013/05/13/2639159/university-of-kentucky-purchasing.html#storylink=cpy
By Linda B. Blackford — lblackford@herald-leader.com
The University of Kentucky will buy the Lexington Theological Seminary’s 7-acre campus on South Limestone for $13.5 million, officials announced late Monday.
The UK Board of Trustees is expected to approve the deal at its meeting Tuesday, adding room for expansion on the west side of Limestone. The seminary has moved almost all of its instruction online since 2011 and plans to relocate to a smaller campus in Lexington.
“When high-quality space adjacent to your campus becomes available, the responsible thing is to explore the possibilities,” UK President Eli Capilouto said. “The Lexington Theological Seminary space represents great potential for the university as we grapple with how to grow and manage within our existing footprint.”
In the immediate future, UK plans to use seminary buildings as “swing space” for the Gatton School of Business as it starts a major renovation and expansion across the street.
The 63-year-old seminary property includes 131,000 square feet of built space, including four classroom buildings, 44 apartments, 16 townhouses, a maintenance building and a parking lot. For the past 20 years, about 75 percent of the seminary’s housing has been rented to UK students, said seminary President Charisse Gillett. UK officials said they would honor any current leases made with Lexington Theological Seminary for the next academic year, then fold those spaces into UK Housing.
Gillett said the seminary’s move — which she hopes will be to a downtown location — is part of the school’s new identity.
“Change for every academic institution is inevitable, and change has been our mantra,” she said Monday. “This is another step in our transformation and revitalization.”
Eric Monday, UK’s vice president of finance and administration, said the sale would be a cash deal, paid for with $13.5 million in excess funds created by increased enrollment last fall. Going forward, recurring money from increased enrollment will be used to soften budget cuts across campus, Monday said.
Bob Wiseman, UK’s vice president for facilities, said the seminary’s buildings probably would become a temporary home for various programs during the next five to 10 years as UK embarks on construction and renovation projects throughout campus.
Wiseman said the seminary’s academic buildings and housing spaces were in good physical shape. “With the amount of building we are doing, we have a great need for swing space,” he said. “This is very helpful for short-term.”
In addition, the 284-space parking lot will help ease UK’s chronic parking woes, he said. Wiseman said the new property would be folded into UK’s ongoing master planning process, but there are no immediate plans to designate a permanent use for the land. Although the property is across the street from UK’s law school, which is looking to expand, “you couldn’t easily reconfigure the space for a law school,” he said.
Lexington Theological Seminary was founded in 1865 as part of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). Gillett said the seminary once was on the campus of Transylvania University, then moved closer to UK when it became a residential seminary.
The 2008 economic downturn hit the seminary’s finances and enrollment hard, pushing the school to put much of its instruction online by 2011. Today, enrollment has climbed to about 110 students, 55 of whom are full-time. Most still seek a master’s degree in divinity, Gillett said, but a growing number of students are seeking certificates in pastoral ministry.
Half the coursework is online and half is done in congregations. Students also come to campus twice a year for two weeks of intensive residential instruction.
The seminary’s 23 full-time employees were notified about the sale Monday.
Gillett said the $13.5 million from the sale of the property would help establish a new location for the seminary and give the school more financial stability.
Linda Blackford: (859) 231-1359. Twitter: @lbblackford.
New Testament Documents – Authorship and Dates
New Testament Documents – Authorship and Dates
Expository Files 20.5 – May 2013
New Testament Documents – Date & Authorship — By Steve Wolfgang
“In my opinion, every book of the New Testament was written by a baptized Jew between the forties and the eighties of the first century (very probably sometime between about A.D. 50 and 75).” – William F. Albright, Johns Hopkins University (1963, p.4)
Almost a half-century ago, when I first began to think seriously about various controversies over the dating and authorship of New Testament documents, one of the first things I encountered was this then-newly-minted comment by one of the world’s leading archaeologists, William F. Albright. While that comment was made a few years before his death in an interview in the evangelical magazine, Christianity Today, it was by no means a spur-of-the moment interjection common in interviews. Albright had previously written, in light of archaeological discoveries (his area of scholarly expertise), that “[t]hanks to the Qumran discoveries [the Dead Sea Scrolls], the New Testament proves to be in fact what it was formerly believed to be: the teaching of Christ and his immediate followers between circa 25 and circa 80 A.D” (Albright, 1957, p. 23).
What I have learned since encountering Albright’s comment has only caused me to see more clearly why this accomplished archaeologist said what he did. Interestingly, Albright’s assessment is not unique among unlikely sources of such assessments. Possibly the most unlikely source is the staunch atheist and eugenics advocate H.G. Wells (unfortunately much more widely known and read than Albright), who also acknowledged that the four gospels “were certainly in existence a few decades after [Christ’s] death” (498). Unless one reads documents through the lens of a apriori assumptions, the evidence supports the conclusions that the historical accounts, letters, biography, and other genres found in the New Testament were written by eyewitnesses and other persons living in that historical period with access to written sources and persons knowledgeable about the events
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described. The New Testament is not the stuff of mythology or fiction, as the early and wide accessibility of the documents attest.
Background: Various Theories and Proposals
Obviously, the dates and time frames for the authorship of the various documents are significant issues in an apologetic argument for Christianity. Confidence in the historical accuracy of these documents depends partly on whether they were written by eyewitnesses and contemporaries to the events described, as many New Testament texts claim. Some critical scholars have attempted to strengthen their contentions by separating the actual events from the writings by as much time as possible. For this reason radical scholars (for example, the “Jesus Seminar”) argue for late first century or even second century dates for the original manuscripts. Invoking these dates barely opens the door to argue that the New Testament documents, especially the Gospels, are “mythological” and that the writers created the events contained in them, rather than simply reporting them. As Oxford historian A.N. Sherwin White has demonstrated, using documents from antiquity even less well-attested and with much wider composition-to-earliest-copy spans than the New Testament documents, “even two generations are too short a span to allow the mythical tendency to prevail over the hard historic core of the oral tradition” (Sherwin-White, 190).
In the 19th century, Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860), founder of the “Tubingen School” of theology, maintained that the majority of the New Testament documents were pseudonymous works and gave little weight to the evidence of numerous citations provided by the early Christian writers (commonly known as “church fathers”). Proposing that the New Testament documents were written within a frame of perhaps120 years, his suggested dates ranged from ca. 50–60AD for Paul’s genuine letters (i.e., Romans, 1–2 Corinthians, Galatians) to about 170AD for the Gospel and letters of John. Baur’s proposal was remained influential for later attempts to date and identify authorship of the New Testament documents (Harris, 237, 248–62; Ellis, Appendix VI).
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More recent dating proposals have reflected the impact, among both “liberal” and “conservative” scholars, of various lines of evidence which indicate earlier dates for the New Testament documents. For example, the notorious “death-of-God” proponent John A.T. Robinson (1976) contended that all 27 documents were composed prior to 70AD. He proposed a compositional span of approximately 20 years: from about 47–48AD (Galatians) to late 68–70AD (Revelation; Redating, 352). He mainly based his argument on the fact that the New Testament documents do not reference the fall of Jerusalem (70AD; Redating, 13–30).
More recently, influential Roman Catholic scholar Raymond E. Brown (1997) proposed a date range for the New Testament documents that spanned approximately 80 years: from 50–51AD for 1 Thessalonians, to 130AD for 2 Peter – although favoring a first-century date for almost all documents other than 2 Peter and 2 John (Introduction, 396, 457, 762).
Evangelical scholar E. Earle Ellis (1995), reflecting views accepted and espoused by many “conservative” Biblical writers, has proposed that the New Testament documents were the result of four streams of apostolic sources: Peter, James, John, and Paul. He dated all the New Testament documents within the first century: 49AD (for Galatians) to 85–95AD (Gospel of John), with the majority of the documents dated to the 50s and 60s (Making, 319), considering 70AD key for setting the upper limit dating for a majority of the New Testament documents.
Outer Limits – Manuscript Evidence and Quotations in early Christian Writers
The speculative efforts various negative critical scholars to “late-date” various New Testament documents are confronted by some “stubborn facts.” For example, every New Testament book is quoted by the “Apostolic Fathers” (as the early Christian writers down to 150AD are commonly known). Almost every book of the New Testament is explicitly cited as Scripture by these early writers. By around 300, nearly every verse in the New Testament was cited in one or more of over 36,000 citations found in the writings of the Church Fathers (Geisler and Nix 108, 155). The distribution of those writings are important evidence because of their early date, the wide geographic distribution of where these authors lived, where their recipients lived, and the large number of New Testament references
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they contain. Evidence from these early Christian writers is explored in greater detail in other articles in this series, providing external evidence that from the beginning, churches and Christians recognized the authority of the apostolic writings which were soon disseminated and widely known.
Given the amount and early dates of these extensive quotations of the New Testament documents, it is impossible to argue seriously for the sort of “late-dating” and alleged pseudonymous composition of the documents composing the corpus of the New Testament. This stream of evidence is, of course, in addition to the various manuscript copies in Greek (to say nothing of early translations) of the New Testament documents.
Among these are the John Rylands papyri (p52), the earliest undisputed manuscript of a New Testament book, dated from 117 to 138AD. This fragment of John’s Gospel survives from within a generation of composition. Furthermore, inasmuch as the book was composed in Asia Minor while this fragment was found in Egypt, some circulation time is demanded, which surely places the composition of John within the first century. Entire books (Bodmer Papyri) are available from about 200AD. The Chester Beatty Papyri, from 150 years after the New Testament was finished (ca. 250), include all the Gospels and most of the New Testament. It is beyond dispute that no other book from the ancient world has as small a time span between composition and earliest manuscript copies, as does the New Testament.
Indeed, as has often been noted by many who have spent their lives pondering ancient evidence pertaining to the Scripture, “No work from Graeco-Roman antiquity is so well attested by manuscript tradition as the New Testament. There are many more manuscripts of the New Testament than there are of any classical author, and the oldest extensive remains of it date only about two centuries after their original composition” (Albright 1971, 238). Those who would question the integrity of the New Testament texts, by the same token destroy confidence in the integrity of any ancient document which has been handed down through the copying process.
Specific Instances and Particulars
While it is not possible in this short article to include a detailed explication of the date and authorship of every New Testament book, some samples will have to
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suffice for the present. As these articles are expanded and collected for publication in book form, more details may be added to what originally appears here.
Luke and Acts. The Gospel of Luke was written by the same author as the Acts of the Apostles, who refers to Luke as the “former account” of “all that Jesus began to do and teach” (Acts 1:1). The style, vocabulary and recipient (Theophilus) of the two books betray a common author. Roman historian Colin Hemer has provided powerful evidence that Acts was written between 60AD and 62AD. This evidence includes these observations: There is no mention in Acts of the crucial event of the fall of Jerusalem in 70, or of the outbreak of the Jewish War in 66, and no hint of serious deterioration of relations between Romans and Jews before that time, nor of the deterioration of Christian relations with Rome during the Neronian persecution of the late 60s. There is no mention of the death of James at the hands of the Sanhedrin in ca. 62, as recorded by Josephus in Antiquities of the Jews (20.9.1.200). Controversies described in Acts presume that the Temple was still standing; and the relative prominence and authority of the Sadducees in Acts reflects a pre-70 date, before the collapse of their political cooperation with Rome. Likewise, the prominence of “God-fearers” in the synagogues may point to a pre-70 date, after which there were few Gentile inquirers and converts to Judaism. Additionally, the confident “tone” of Acts seems unlikely during the Neronian persecution of Christians and the Jewish War with Rome during the late 60s.
If Acts was written in 62 or before, and the gospel according to Luke was written before Acts (possibly 60AD or even before), then Luke was written only about thirty years after the death of Jesus. This is obviously contemporary to the generation who witnessed the events of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection – which precisely what Luke claims in the prologue to his Gospel:
Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eye-witnesses and servants of the word. Therefore, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, it seemed good also to me to write an orderly account for you, most excellent
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Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught. [Luke 1:1–4]
While so far considering only Luke of the four gospels (due to Luke’s authorship of Acts as well), it is commonly accepted as factual by the preponderance of those who have examined the evidence in detail – whether “conservative” or “liberal” scholars – that other gospels, particularly Mark, were committed to writing even earlier. In all such deliberations, it is good to remember that, for believers, there is in reality one gospel, recalled and recorded by four different evangelists (“according to Matthew” etc.) as each was empowered by the Spirit to remember and reveal what God wishes for us to know, expressed as the Spirit moved them to do so.
First Corinthians. It is widely accepted by many “critical” and “conservative” scholars alike that 1 Corinthians was written by 55 or 56 – less than a quarter century after the crucifixion. Further, Paul speaks of most of a collection of 500 eyewitnesses to the resurrection who were still alive when he wrote (15:6) – including the apostles and James the brother of Jesus. Internal evidence is strong for this early date: the book repeatedly claims to be written by Paul (1:1, 12–17; 3:4, 6, 22; 16:21); there are significant parallels with the book of Acts; the contents harmonize with what has been learned about Corinth during that era.
There also is external evidence: Clement of Rome refers to it in his own Epistle to the Corinthians (chap. 47), as does The Epistle of Barnabas (allusion, chapter 4) and the Shepherd of Hermas (chapter 4). Furthermore, there are nearly 600 quotations of 1 Corinthians in Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, and Tertullian alone. It is one of the best attested books of any kind from the ancient world.
2 Corinthians and Galatians, along with 1 Corinthians, are well attested and early. All three reveal a historical interest in the events of Jesus’ life and give facts that agree with the Gospels. Paul speaks of Jesus’ virgin birth (Gal. 4:4), sinless life (2 Cor. 5:21), death on the cross (1 Cor. 15:3; Gal. 3:13); resurrection on the third day (1 Cor. 15:4), and post-resurrection appearances (1 Cor. 15:5–8). He mentions the hundreds of eyewitnesses who could verify the resurrection (1 Cor. 15:6), grounding the truth of Christianity on the historicity of the resurrection (1 Cor. 15:12–19). Paul also gives historical details about Jesus’
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contemporaries, the apostles (1 Cor. 15:5–8), including his private encounters with Peter and the apostles (Gal. 1:18–2:14). Persons, places, and events relating to Christ’s birth are described as historical. Luke goes to great pains to note that Jesus was born during the days of Caesar Augustus (Luke 2:1) and was baptized in the fifteenth year of Tiberius. Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea and Herod was tetrarch of Galilee. Annas and Caiaphas were high priests (Luke 3:1–2).
New Testament authors write with a clear sense of historical perspective (see Gal 4:4; Heb 1:1–2). They wrote against the historical backdrop of a Mediterranean world immersed in Greco-Roman culture and ruled by Rome and Roman officials known from non-Biblical sources (though those sources are significantly less-well attested than the New Testament documents. While the authors of the New Testament documents do include important figures, places, and events, they do not demonstrate an interest in precise chronological detail. As a result, many of their references to historical realities were more of an incidental nature. And, as is common in historical writing, they use various sources, make various choices about what evidence to incorporate or omit, and arrange their evidence to tell the story they wish to record. That is what historians do, after all.
Antilegomena: Disputed Documents
The basic principle of whether a document was recognized as legitimately belonging to the New Covenant scriptures was its apostolic “pedigree” – was it of apostolic (or prophetic) origin, and thus revelation from God? Because of some questions about the authorship or apostolic origin of seven documents (Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2-3 John, Jude, and Revelation) were sometimes challenged by various early Christians. Sometime referred to as antilegomena (“spoken against”), the very challenges these documents faced demonstrate ever more strongly that the ultimately test for whether these documents were recognized as divine revelation was: are they apostolic? Since Hebrews and 2-3 John are without authorial attribution, it is quite understandable that some might at first question their apostolic origin. Given the early martyrdom of James, the brother of John, understandable questions arose regarding the authorship of the epistle of James. The Apocalypse (Revelation) came under question later due to its wide usage by numerous heretics.
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Even 2 Peter, the most contested of the New Testament epistles, provides a benchmark of sorts for the standards necessary for a document to be recognized as the word of God. 2 Peter was questioned due to stylistic and vocabulary differences (it has the largest number of hapax legomena or unique words of any New Testament document) as well as parallels with the epistle of Jude. But as E.M.B Green points out, arguing on the basis of Westcott’s work, 2 Peter “has incomparably better support for its inclusion than the best attested of the rejected books” (p.5). Kostenberger and Kruger (73, 153-155) challenge modern examples of early and later documents unfairly grouped together, as though both are of equally legitimacy, by modern authors with their own agendas.
Kruger (645), among other conservative scholars, challenges the common notion that 2 Peter is non-apostolic, contending that “the case for its pseudonymity is simply too incomplete and insufficient to warrant the dogmatic conclusions issued by much of modern scholarship. Although 2 Peter has various difficulties that are still being explored, we have no reason to doubt the epistle’s own claims in regard to authorship.” A good discussion of many of these disputations is in Harrison (416-428).
Conclusion
Jesus Christ himself is obviously the center and circumference of the New Testament documents which record his life and works. The gospels present themselves to readers as calm and rational expositors of historical facts. Nearly all we know about Jesus comes from these source materials, written by those who had personal knowledge of the events they describe or their sources who had such firsthand, eyewitness knowledge. They record the claims of Jesus, but also indicate that he intended for this knowledge to be disseminated not by himself, but rather by men he selected and approved to carry his message to the world (John 16:13-14, 20:21-23; Matthew 10:20, 16:19, 18:18; Luke 22:30. That these appointed messengers did so effectively is attested by the widespread documentation, within a generation or two of the events themselves, of that proclamation, written down for succeeding generations to read and receive with confidence in their accuracy and veracity.
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Sources:
Albright, William F., From the Stone Age to Christianity (2nd ed; New York: Anchor Books, 1957).
__________. The Archaeology of Palestine. Reprint; Gloucester MA: Peter Smith, 1971.
__________. “Toward a More Conservative View.” Christianity Today, January 18, 1963, p.4.
Brown, Raymond E. An Introduction to the New Testament. New York: Doubleday, 1997.
Bruce, F.F., J.I Packer, Philip Comfort, and Carl F.H. Henry, eds. The Origin of the Bible. Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House, 2003.
Carson, D.A., and Douglas Moo. An Introduction to the New Testament. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2005.
Ellis, E Earle. The Making of the New Testament Documents. Leiden: Brill, 1999.
Geisler, Norman L., and William E. Nix, From God To Us Revised and Expanded: How We Got Our Bible. 2nd ed.; Chicago: Moody Press, 2012.
Green, E.M.B. 2 Peter Reconsidered. London: Tyndale, 1961.
Harris, Horton. The Tübingen School: A Historical and Theological Investigation of the School of F.C. Baur. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.
Harrison, Everett F., Introduction to the New Testament. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1971.
Hemer, Colin J. The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History. Ed. Conrad H. Gempf. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1990.
Kostenberger, Andreas J., and Michael J. Kruger. The Heresy of Orthodoxy. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2010.
Kruger, Michael J. “The Authenticity of 2 Peter,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 42.4 (1999), 645-671.
Longenecker, Richard N. “On the Form, Function, and Authority of the New Testament Letters.” In D.A. Carson and John D. Woodbridge, Scripture and Truth. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1983, 101-114.
Robinson, John A.T. Redating the New Testament. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976.
Sherwin-White, Adrian Nicholas. Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963.
Wells, H.G. The Outline of History (Garden City, NY: Garden City Publishing, 1921).
The Burnt House destroyed in A.D. 70
From Ferrell Jenkins’ Travel Blog
Our tour group visited several places in and near Jerusalem today. We began Jaffa Gate and the Tower of David (actually built by Herod the Great). We moved on through the Jewish Quarter to the Wohl Archaeological Museum. For general information about the Jewish Quarter see the informative web site dedicated to the area, here. Information about the Museum, where you may see the ruins of six houses built on the slope between the Upper City of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, is available here. These houses indicate that some of the wealthiest residents of Jerusalem lived in them – perhaps the priestly class. These houses were destroyed in the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. Photos are not allowed in the Museum.
Then we went to the Burnt House – a house belonging to the Katros Family, a priestly family that made incense for the temple…
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George Beverly Shea
Billy Graham’s other voice
By Bob Greene, CNN Contributor
updated 1:28 PM EDT, Sun April 21, 2013
George Beverly Shea sings “How Great Thou Art” to 54,000 people at a Billy Graham crusade in 2003.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- George Beverly Shea, gospel singer at Billy Graham crusades, died recently at 104
- Bob Greene: Regardless of their faith, people knew greatness when they heard Shea
- Graham was electric on stage, Greene says. Shea was soothing and comforting
- Greene: With clear enunciation, dignified presence, he showed respect for his audience
Editor’s note: CNN Contributor Bob Greene is a best-selling author whose 25 books include “Late Edition: A Love Story”; “Duty: A Father, His Son, and the Man Who Won the War”; and “Once Upon a Town: The Miracle of the North Platte Canteen.”
(CNN) — Devoted fans.
Faithful listeners.
Seldom have those words sounded quite so apt.
Bob Greene
They describe the people who enjoyed the singing of George Beverly Shea, who died last week at the age of 104. The name may not be instantly recognizable to some Americans, but that was no fault of his. He accomplished something very few vocalists can claim: During his career, he sang in front of an estimated 200 million people in live performance.
How could this be?
He was the lead vocalist at Billy Graham’s crusades and revival meetings for more than 50 years. If you went to see Billy Graham preach, you heard George Beverly Shea sing.
And, oh, what a voice he had.
It didn’t matter what your own religious beliefs were. If you were interested in the craft — the art — of vocal performance, and you were in the presence of Bev Shea (that’s how he was known to his friends), then you recognized greatness.
He was not fancy as he sang, he indulged in no gimmicks, at times he seemed as calm before a microphone as a man waiting patiently for a bus. But that was deceptive. His deep and immaculately modulated baritone, his resolute attention to precise phrasing and pronunciation, his implicit and unmistakable regard for his audience — this was a professional artist of the highest order.
He was a major and incandescent star to them — they had been listening to him for years.
The fact that he sang gospel music might, in theory, have worked against him, might have limited the number of his potential listeners; for many of the years of his career, the nation was obsessed with rock ‘n’ roll and other forms of popular, here-one-week, gone-the-next records. But he had a certain advantage:
A singer’s audience is often influenced by the person who presents him or her. In the Beatles’ early days, they had CBS television’s Ed Sullivan to do that. It made a big difference.
George Beverly Shea, for half a century, had Billy Graham to present him. At all those crusades, in all those stadiums and arenas, they were a matched pair. Graham wouldn’t have had it any other way.
They perfectly complemented each other’s strengths. Graham, at his peak, was utterly electric on a stage — his presence was crackling and palpable, there was no structure in the world too big for him. In the charisma and magnetism department, he needed no help.
But Shea was steady and soothing and reassuring. He was placid waters to Graham’s blazing lightning. And for all those years, he was a considerable part of the draw.
He never tried to be stylish or trendy; he didn’t shift his approach as the decades went by. He just sang like a dream.
Bob Greene
Bob Greene
Hear and see Bev Shea sing at 1961 Billy Graham crusade
In 1971, when I was getting started as a reporter, the Billy Graham Crusade was scheduled to come to Chicago’s cavernous McCormick Place for a week-and-a-half of summer services. I asked his advance team if I could spend days and nights with them, observing how they did what they did: how they made the arrangements and logistical decisions to get all those people to pack the huge hall every evening. They were welcoming and open about having me hang around.
Those were the years when the most successful and highly publicized musical acts were groups such as Three Dog Night and Creedence Clearwater and Alice Cooper.
So I was struck to find how constant, in my conversations with the people who were coming to the crusade meetings, their unprompted references to Shea were. He was a major and incandescent star to them — they had been listening to him for years, and they couldn’t wait to see him perform in person.
There was a phrase back then that was used in politics: the Silent Majority. In those times of turmoil and earsplitting acrimony in public life, the term referred to those Americans who didn’t raise much commotion, but whose fidelity to tradition was unwavering.
I thought then, and I think now, that the concept also applied to the enduring popularity of Shea. He never tried to be stylish or trendy; he didn’t shift his approach as the decades went by. He just sang like a dream — and, with his clear, careful enunciation and his dignified comportment on stage, he showed unwavering respect for the people in the seats.
To watch and listen to Shea sing “How Great Thou Art,” the gospel number most closely associated with him, was to be in the presence of an absolute master. (And if you’ve ever heard Elvis Presley’s haunting rendition of the same song, then you just know that Elvis had to be a George Beverly Shea fan, too.)
He did fine for himself: more than 70 albums, a Grammy Award, a separate Lifetime Achievement Award from the Grammy organization. In the days when what is now called terrestrial radio — that is, free radio, broadcast by local stations — ruled, you couldn’t help hearing his voice as you twisted the dial through the stations in your town. He was a permanent cast member of Billy Graham’s “Hour of Decision,” which was syndicated to local stations all over the country, and the power of that voice would stop your hand, at least momentarily, from seeking something farther down the dial.
On Sunday his funeral will be held in Montreat, North Carolina, his home for many years; on Monday he will be buried in a private ceremony on the grounds of the Billy Graham Library in Charlotte, North Carolina.
I remember asking a member of the audience at that long-ago crusade in Chicago what it was that made Shea’s music so important to her.
“When he sings,” she said, “he just brings me comfort.”
Which, in an often frenzied world, is not a bad sum-up of a long, serene and melodic life.
Edith Schaeffer
Excerpted by Ken Green from Frank Schaeffer’s blog on Patheos:
My mother Edith Schaeffer died today. She . . . completed a dramatic life with a final flourish: she died on Easter Saturday, to join her risen Lord . . . I trust my mother’s hope-filled view of death because of the way Mom lived her life . . . Mom was a wonderful paradox: an evangelical conservative fundamentalist who treated people as if she was an all-forgiving progressive liberal of the most tolerant variety.
Mom’s daily life was a rebuke and contradiction to people who see everything as black and white. Liberals and secularists alike who make smug disparaging declarations about “all those evangelicals” would see their fondest prejudices founder upon the reality of my mother’s compassion, cultural literacy and loving energy.
. . . Here’s what my mother showed me how to do by example: forgive, ask for forgiveness, cook, paint, build, garden, draw, read, keep house well, travel, love Italy, love God, love New York City, love Shakespeare, love Dickens, love Steinbeck, love Jesus, love silence, love people more than things, love community and put career and money last in my hierarchy of values and — above all, to love beauty. I still follow my mother’s example as best I can and I have passed and am passing her life gift to my children and grandchildren not just in words but in meals cooked, gardens kept, houses built, promises kept, sacrifices made, and beauty pointed to.
. . . Mom treated everyone she ever met well, spent more time talking to “nobodies” than to the rich and famous who flocked to her after her books were published and became bestsellers. Put it this way: through my experience of being a father (of 3) and grandfather (of 4) I’ve finally been able to test Mom’s life wisdom and spiritual outlook and found out that she was right: Love, Continuity, Beauty, Forgiveness, Art, Life and loving a loving all-forgiving God really are the only things that matter.
. . . Memories: Mother never making a sarcastic remark about her children or anyone else and the life-long self-confidence that gave me . . . Mother deep in conversation with cab drivers and giving her books away (and money, personal phone numbers and her home address) to hotel maids and other total strangers she decided she could help . . . Mother’s horror at the “harshness” as she put it, of so many evangelical religious people and the way they treated “the lost” and her saying that “no wonder no one wants to be a Christian if that’s how we treat people!”
Maybe everything has changed for me theologically but some things haven’t changed. I’m still thinking of Mom’s eternal life in her terms because she showed me the way to that hope through her humane consistency and won. Her example defeated my cynicism . . . I’ll miss her voice. I learned to trust that voice because of the life witness that backed it up. I know I’ll hear her voice again. You won Mom. I believe.
(Frank Schaeffer, excerpted from “Goodbye, Mom . . . RIP” in his internet column “Why I Still Talk to Jesus–In Spite of Everything,” distributed by Patheos network.)
Footnote 8 – S. H. Bingman
Footnote 8 – S. H. Bingman, “From the Field,” Christian Standard XXIV: 50 (December 14, 1889), p. 830 (12).
“December 3 – Closed a very unsatisfactory meeting with the church at Union Center. . . . Rain almost daily, deep mud and dark nights; divided brethren, poor preaching, good singing and plenty of babies. We would have had a houseful every session, if enough people had come to fill up, and there would have been a larger number of additions, if we could have persuaded the people to obey the Lord. That the meeting was no worse, we ‘thank God and take courage,’ and intend to try again.”‘
As we approach the spring season of “gospel meetings” (aka “revivals” in many religious fellowships) I offer this intriguing quotation in the spirit of the season, hoping that readers will enjoy it as much as I did. I don’t know who S.H. Bingman was, but one day I would like to shake his hand! He gets my vote for “honest meeting report” of the century!
However, lest we take either ourselves or our counterparts from last century too lightly, let me hasten to add that we do not share the pessimism expressed by some regarding the demise of “gospel meetings” or the alleged lack of resultant good. To be sure, the results may occasionally be “less than sensational” (as one report we saw described it). However, there are positive results from such meetings which are not found in written reports or expressed in tangible statistics.
I count it a privilege to have expended some of my efforts in meetings among small churches, in the U.S. and overseas – several of which were without a “full-time preacher.” There is certainly nothing at all wrong with an established congregation, with an evangelist already present, inviting another preacher to come for a special teaching effort (Acts 11:20-24 seems to be an example of this). However, there is a great need for work to be done in edifying smaller congregations which are not receiving regular and systematic teaching. The good resulting from such efforts, while not subject to quantification in statistical reports, is nonetheless well worth the effort.
Of course, we “thank God and take courage” that not all meetings are like the one described above. Some of them result in visible, indeed, vivid responses: baptisms, emotional restorations, congregations with large and attentive audiences. We emphatically reject any suggestion that “meetings do no good.”
A final thought is suggested by the anonymity of the correspondent. As I said, I had never before heard of S.H. Bingman, though I have an active interest in “Restoration History.” Yet, even though we may never have known them, there are literally thousands of persevering souls like this man, working diligently in their section of the Lord’s vineyard, undaunted by less than sensational results, unrelenting in their labors despite discouraging circumstances or apparently insurmountable obstacles. Their kind is legion even today: unknown by face to most churches, unrecorded by brotherhood reports, shunning prominence, choosing rather to work in the obscurity of difficult fields. Truly, from their example we “thank God and take courage.”
— Adapted from Truth Magazine XXXII: 4 (February 18, 1988), p. 107
Footnote 2 — Finke and Stark
Footnote 2 Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), pp. 18, 84, 150, 169, 238; cf. pp. 249-55.
“as denominations have modernized their doctrines and embraced temporal values, they have gone into decline . . . the message becomes more worldly, and is held with less certainty as religion becomes the focus of scholarly critique and attention . . . [the decline starts when they] begin to lift restrictions on behavior and to soften doctrines that had served to set the sect apart from its social environment . . . as the general affluence and social standing of a group rises, otherworldliness — as expressed through tension with the environment — becomes perceived as increasingly costly . . . religious organizations are stronger to the degree that they impose significant costs in terms of sacrifice and even stigma upon their members.”2
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