Jesus Christ – The Lloyd C Douglas Page

by Ronald R Johnson (www.ronaldrjohnson.com)

So far, Douglas had only published books about the ministry, aimed at other ministers. In 1926 he reached out to a wider audience, and he told them about the teachings of Jesus. It was called These Sayings of Mine.

I have read this book several times over the past 25 years, and although there is a lot of good material in it, I sense now, as I did the first time I read it, that this effort fell short of what Douglas was trying to do. He was trying to present Jesus as the answer to the pressing moral and psychological problems of his age, and yet he did little more than make that claim – in many ways, and from a number of angles. He let us know that he thought Christ was the answer, but he didn’t connect the dots for us. He didn’t tell us precisely how Jesus can help us in contemporary times.

The raw materials were there. You can spot them throughout the book. But he had not yet figured out how to put them together into a coherent message.

He wrote that Christ was the Light of the World and that there was no one else in history who spoke like Jesus did or who related to people the way he did. He wrote that, in order to follow Jesus, we need to do the things he taught. He said that our creeds barely touch on Christ’s teachings; and at any rate, reciting creeds about Jesus does not get us any closer to following him, just as electricians would never get anywhere by declaring their belief in Volta or Faraday; they can only generate electricity by doing what Volta or Faraday said.

As to Christ’s teachings themselves, Douglas said that they were directed to different classes of people, depending on their gifts and abilities. He said that Jesus taught us to “launch out into the deep” and “make large demands on life,” recognizing that we have heavy responsibilities. He said that we should be able to sense Christ’s nearness when we’re at our place of employment, but also in our leisure time. This presence would establish a kingdom within us here and now – a domain that would banish fear and motivate us to live by the Golden Rule.

But it was all so vague! He talked around and around the subject but never quite helped his readers to connect. He was trying to convey something that he, himself, hadn’t quite come to terms with, even though he had experienced it in his own life.

When I say that the raw materials were there, I can point out no better example than his comments on the early verses of Matthew 6, in which Christ talks about doing our alms in secret. As I told you in an earlier post, Douglas himself had practiced that for years – so successfully, in fact, that it took me a lot of detective work in order to uncover just one of his secret projects. (See the PDF mentioned at the bottom of this page for more details.) And it had clearly made a difference in his life. But he still hadn’t put the pieces together; he still didn’t understand how to help others experience what he had experienced.

In These Sayings of Mine, he writes:

There is a peculiar psychology involved here which baffles explanation. Do your good deed and keep it a secret. You will achieve a great deal of satisfaction. Tell somebody you did it, and you divide your joy in half. Tell a dozen, and the joy is all gone. Whoever wishes to elucidate this mystery is welcome to the materials. One simply knows that it is true.
These Sayings of Mine, p. 224

Again, after a guy named Jones does a good deed…

All day Jones goes about in a sort of golden mist. Never had he done anything in his life that gave him this particular kind of spiritual satisfaction. In the evening his closest friend and neighbor drops in for a call…. So Jones tells the story; and even while he is telling it, he feels the ecstatic joy of the thing gradually oozing out! Why? Who knows? But it is true. One can depend upon whatever Jesus said about these practical considerations. He was an astute and infallible psychologist.
Ibid., p. 225

We know that Douglas himself wasn’t satisfied with what he wrote here because he ended up writing an entire book about it – a book that remained a bestseller for years and is still in print, almost 100 years later. That book was Douglas’s breakthrough, not because it made him famous but because it helped him put his great idea into words. But I’m getting ahead of the story.

For now, in 1926, Douglas published a book that promised or hinted at what was coming. And it seems to me that there was a particular reason why he wasn’t able to piece it all together yet: because he was still approaching the problem as a minister. He needed more practice thinking about the everyday lives of regular people. And he got it… in some unexpected ways. I’ll tell you about that in the next few posts.

For a free PDF copy of the booklet, The Secret Investment of Lloyd C. Douglas, fill out the form below:

by Ronald R Johnson (www.ronaldrjohnson.com)

Lloyd Douglas believed that Christian faith ought to be centered on Christ himself. (Note: in the passage I’m about to quote, he uses the word “hypothecated.” He may have meant “predicated,” or perhaps he was thinking about some form of the words “hypothesis” or “hypothetical.” Or maybe he knew exactly what he was doing but the word isn’t used like that anymore; if so, I haven’t found a dictionary that supports his use of that word.) At any rate, as he told his Akron congregation:

You will remember that I have attempted to preach the gospel of a Jesus who presents an ideal portrait of perfect living. I have not hypothecated his divinity on any biological miracle which—instead of distinguishing him—would merely assign him to a place alongside the populous list of saviors whose origins were thought to have been had through miraculous generation. I have not requested you to believe—as actual, veridical facts—the traditional nativity stories. I have preached that he offered himself as our example. And, to be an example for us humans, he would—one thinks—have to live under much the same conditions which surround us.

You have been given full liberty to believe as much or as little as you liked about the magical and mystical element in his recorded career.

If you wanted to believe that he turned water into wine—actually—and thought better of him as a worker of such magic, that was your right, and I hoped you found him greater and more lovable, in your esteem, for having done this strange thing. If you wanted to believe that this was just a poet’s way of singing that Jesus’ personality was so altogether lovely and healing and comforting and comradely, that when he came to their table it was as if the water in their cups had turned to wine—if you wanted to believe that, I saw no reason why you shouldn’t.

If you wanted to believe that he quieted the winds and waves on Galilee, I wanted you to do so—and find your Christ a peace-inspiring power thereby. If you preferred to believe that the magic words he spoke were addressed rather to the troubled hearts of these fishermen, so potently that they became, under his command, greater than their fears, I wanted you to think that!

But I did insist that the Galilean gospel—the Inasmuch declaration [Mt 25:40, 45], the Golden Rule [Mt 7:12], the whole Sermon on the Mount [Mt 5-7]—deserved your full attention and attempted practice.
Lloyd C Douglas, “Five Years of Akron,” in The Living Faith (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin/Riverside Press, 1955)

This was the most important part of Douglas’s theology: his insistence on knowing and following the things Christ taught. On his view, Christians weren’t just people who believed in the biblical accounts of Christ’s miracles. Professing that Jesus was a miracle worker did not imply that anyone would go on to become Christ-like. If one had to choose between the stories about Jesus and the things Jesus taught, then Douglas was on the side of Jesus’ teachings. (It’s debatable whether such a choice has to be made, but Douglas clearly thought so. He said that the miracles distracted us from the really important thing about Jesus: that his words lead to life.)

In fact, Douglas believed that the entire history of Christianity, and especially of the splintering of denominations, was rooted in creeds and formulas that tried to explain who Jesus was. The focus was entirely on talking about Jesus, not on knowing and doing the things he taught.

Douglas saw it as his mission to turn the tide. He wanted to educate his Akron congregation in what he called “Spiritual Culture”: a way of life based on the teachings of Jesus. He believed that this was how people could find God and have, as a permanent possession, the presence and peace and power of God available in every moment of their lives.

He also believed that this way of life was consistent with the modern (and especially scientific) frame of mind. I’ll tell you about that in the next post.

For a free PDF copy of the booklet, The Secret Investment of Lloyd C Douglas, fill out the form below:

Category: Jesus Christ

These Sayings of Mine

Lloyd Douglas’s Views on Christ