[Originally posted on Sunday 8-15-10]
In the last few years I
have begun to reread books that were important to me when I was new in the
ministry. Some have held up very well, like Paul Tillich’s books of sermons.
Some have been very disappointing, like Wm. Stringfellow’s “Free in Obedience.”
[The title is still good, though.]
One in particular has been
very humbling, Reuel Howe’s Man’s Need
and God’s Action. As I reread it, I find that every good idea I’ve had
along the way, that I thought was mine, actually comes from that book. The
language is a bit formal and stilted, typical of its time. [The copyright is
1953. I read it in seminary in the early 1960s.] The insights, however, are, if
anything, even more accurate today.
I had the good fortune,
some time in the late 1980s or early 1990s, to be in a continuing education
seminar with Reuel at Garrett-Evangelical Seminary. He was retired then, but
just as insightful, and quite delightful in person.
In that seminar, he told
the story of how, when he was a teenager, his father decided to take the family
into the forests of Washington state to homestead. They went deep into the
forest with their tents and supplies. Before they had really gotten started, a
fire wiped out everything they had. Reuel and his father walked back out to get
more supplies, leaving his mother and younger siblings behind. When they
returned, they saw that his mother had found a rusted old tin can, picked wild
flowers, and placed the bouquet on an old stump. The little children were
playing “ring” around it. “She took a tragic incident and recycled it to make
something beautiful,” he said. “I learned what was perhaps the only lesson I
would ever need on that day.”
All this is leading up to
his reflection on atonement in his book. It is the perfect word for what Christ
is all about, at-one-ment, to make us at one with God, with the world and our
neighbors, and with our own true self.
I, and all the people who
heard me say almost daily for over 60 years, “Christ came to make us whole,
with God, with self, and with the world,” owe a great debt to Reuel Howe.
JRMcF
There was no English word
for this Biblical idea of making whole, so one of the early English Bible
translators created “atonement,” to get across the idea of being restored to
wholeness. (I think I learned this from “In
the Beginning: The Making of the King James Bible,” by Alister McGrath.)
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