During the thirty years he was a pastor before becoming a bestselling novelist, Lloyd Douglas said some controversial things from the pulpit. Here is something he said about the prophet Daniel in the Old Testament. This is from a sermon entitled “Human Engineering,” which Douglas preached at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor on November 2, 1919. (It can be found in Sermons [4], Box 3, Lloyd C. Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. © University of Michigan.)
“Doubtless there were many in those days [of the remote past] who ran about shrieking woes and generating them as they ran,” Douglas says; “and others foolishly whispering ‘Peace, peace,’ when there was no peace, as they and everybody else well knew. We do not hear much about them, the panic-driven, the fear-lashed, self-deceived — history has forgotten that they lived.
“But it holds in fond remembrance the outstanding deeds of a few men and women, of each perilous hour in human annals, who walked serenely, confidently, fearlessly in the midst of grave distresses and disasters.”
And here’s the controversial part: “I do not know that Daniel needs to be found alive in the morning with the lions. They who collected the fragments of his story and wrought a mosaic of it, centuries after, thought it better so, for they were temperamentally opposed to the idea of having a hero eaten in the last chapter.”
A little later he continues this thought: “I do not know whether Daniel spent a night unhurt among the lions or not. Maybe so! Stranger things have happened right before our own eyes. Maybe not! Probably not! But history gives us a Daniel nevertheless, who was quite capable of saying to King Darius that, rather than move his wheel one point nor’-nor’-east of the course he had laid, he would go to the lions — come what may!”
Why would a preacher of the gospel consider it possible — even “probable” — that Daniel was eaten by the lions? Because he’s encouraging his congregation to do what’s right even if they must face dire consequences; and Douglas thought that biblical miracles like Daniel’s made modern believers unwilling to face such consequences. Douglas thought that, sometimes, it was more important to take a heroic stand and lose than to expect God to deliver us from all harm.
“Of course,” he said, “there is a glamor of myth enhaloing these… figures whose names have been cut indelibly on the monuments to heroism” even though, “in their own generations,” they were “very much as we ourselves are. Doubtless the epic poems which pay them homage are subject to heavy discount; and the legends which recite their adventures are more ornamental than serviceable; but down underneath the rhetorical palms and laurels, there was once a vital fact, a dynamic force that motivated a life so effectively the world was unable to forget.”
This was the thing Douglas wanted his congregation to find: this motivation that would see them through hard times. It could be found, he thought, in the teachings of Jesus. But in order for his people to get to it, Douglas felt it was necessary to acknowledge that the age-old reliance on miraculous deliverance would not help them in their hour of need.
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