While at the First Congregational Church of Akron, Ohio, from 1921 to 1926, Lloyd Douglas shared the following thoughts about immortality:
I have told you that we can add length to our earthly days through altruistic service; that whatever may be the nature of our future life, we know enough about this life to be assured that men do not quickly die and leave no trace who, in the quest of the Christian ideal, have contributed something of their hope and faith and work to the generation in which they had lived.
I have taught you that belief in a life beyond this world is consistent with orderly thought on the present values and duties of our earthly day; that it is inconceivable God would so endow us with this eternal hope and disappoint us in the end with death.
Lloyd C Douglas, “Five Years of Akron,” in The Living Faith (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin/Riverside Press, 1955), pp. 91-92.
He did encourage his flock to hold the standard view of immortality (that they would live on in some spiritual form in the world beyond), but he also wanted them to live in such a way that they would be long remembered in this world. He wanted them to sow seeds in this world that would sprout and blossom long after they were gone. And it was this aspect of “immortality” that seemed to appeal to him more than the other.
(On a side note, I reached out to his daughters, Betty and Virginia, while they were still alive, back in the mid-1980s, and told them how much I appreciated their biography of their father. Virginia wrote me a wonderful note in reply, and she was especially thrilled at the realization that her father was still “so alive” in my thoughts. “What an immortality!” she exclaimed. And since I’m still writing about him on a daily basis decades later (in the 2020’s), and you’re reading it – and some of you have reached out to me to let me know that he’s still alive in your thoughts – I guess he knew what he was talking about.)
But as provocative as this view of immortality is, he still had more work to do on the concept. He didn’t know it, but he was one step away from the idea that would make him a household name: the concept of investing in other people’s lives and thereby empowering both parties. The interpersonal nature of Christian faith would soon become central to his thinking, and when it did, it would give deeper meaning to his views on immortality. But he wasn’t there yet. As I’ve said before, Douglas did his best thinking at the typewriter. He had a bit more writing to do before this idea would become fully conscious.
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Lloyd Douglas was an unusual minister. He told his congregation in Akron:
I have never asked your faith to attend to any business that your intellect could handle more easily.
Lloyd C Douglas, “Five Years of Akron,” in The Living Faith (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin/Riverside Press, 1955)
This was an extremely important point for him. He believed that his progenitors had fought very hard to liberate the human mind from the powers that would shackle it: from political constraints, certainly, but especially from ignorance. And because of this belief, he preached that people should develop their intelligence. “You can bear it in mind,” he said,
…that I have never asked you to think exactly as I think about these matters of religious belief, but only to think. WHAT you thought was not of so great importance, in my opinion, as that you should have access to all the facts that I had access to; and after that, I was entirely willing that you should come to your own conclusions without too much gratuitous assistance from my quarter.
He did, however, urge his congregation to give serious consideration to the things being taught in the (fairly new) state universities, and especially in the natural sciences:
I have taught you that religion and science must be at one—if God is God.
Although many ministers were distrustful of modern science, Douglas was a huge fan of both its history and its latest findings. And although there was much confusion in religious circles about “Darwinism,” Douglas understood that evolution was a fact and that biologists were engaged in research to help explain the known facts. The fossil record showed vast differences in the types of flora and fauna in previous epochs, as well as changes in the structures of animals that still exist, such as horses. Darwin had proposed a theory to explain these facts (natural selection through scarcity of resources), but so had Lamarck (structural changes through use and disuse), and more recently so had Hugo De Vries (change by mutation). By the 1920s, biologists weren’t fighting over whether living things evolved; they were busy trying to explain how and why it happened.
Douglas warned his congregation…
…that the elemental principles of the new biology either must fit in with the elemental principles of Christian faith—or we lose the coming generation from the ranks of the church.
At first that may sound like he was over-accommodating to secular culture, but he believed what I quoted earlier: that “religion and science must be at one – if God is God.” He trusted scientists. He viewed them as honest seekers of the truth. And therefore he believed that any facts they uncovered, as well as any theories that could account for those facts, must be in harmony with what God was doing – and had done – in this world. Any religion that posed as either a judge or an adversary of the scientific enterprise was doomed to obsolescence, because it would fail to attract anyone interested in the truth. It wasn’t that Douglas was worried about the church going out of business; he was concerned that the church would fail to perform its mission: to provide support to truth-seekers in all walks of life.
Douglas not only accepted the “new biology” but actually found it inspiring. I’ll talk more about that in the next post.
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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.
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The Christian Faith that Lloyd Douglas taught his Akron congregation (1921-1926) was not the kind of thing you’d have found in most of the other churches in town. Here’s an example, from “Five Years of Akron,” in The Living Faith (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin/Riverside Press, 1955):
I have attempted to present an idea of Deity which portrays Him as a conscious kinetic energy, speaking to the world through all the media of His creation; not a parochial Jehovah, or Zeus, or Apollo, especially concerned with the welfare of any particular class of people at any particular time in history – but a Universal Father of all mankind.
And, because I have so believed, I have made no effort to disguise my opinion that every alleged quotation of God’s voice, reported in holy books (ours or any other’s) which reveals Him as a parochial God, or engaged in any thought or action not consonant with the thoughts and acts of a cosmic and universal God – is no more to be believed or credited, because written several thousand years ago by some pious shepherd, than if it were to have been written yesterday afternoon on some preacher’s typewriter.
This, of course, meant that he was not committed to the infallibility of Holy Writ:
I have taught that the Bible is a library of impressions which certain men have had concerning Deity and their relation to Him. I have not believed these men to have been invariably inspired or supernally endowed with wisdom from on high.
You might assume, then, that he didn’t value the Bible, but he actually did. He took it very seriously. And because he did, he assumed that we could experience God and learn from God today, in our own way:
I have taught that Livingstone knew more about God than Jeremiah; that Pasteur had discovered more divine secrets than Joshua; that Faraday had been at closer grips with the Creator than Solomon; that Phillips Brooks knew as much about the real spirit of Christ as did Paul of Tarsus. I have tried to get religion into the present time. I have wanted you to hear and see God at work in contemporaneous life.
Notice how he appeals to the history of science. From 1920 onwards, Douglas routinely held up scientists as examples of how to seek the truth. Here he mentions David Livingstone (the Scottish physician, Congregationalist, and Christian missionary), Louis Pasteur (the French chemist and microbiologist who gave us the process of pasteurization, along with a lot of other things), and Michael Faraday (the English scientist who discovered the basic principles of electricity). While some may chafe at the invidious comparison he makes between these historical figures and certain biblical characters, what he’s saying is literally true: Livingstone had the whole Bible available to him, as well as two thousand years of church history, and therefore should have known more about God than Jeremiah did; we all should. Pasteur certainly “discovered more divine secrets than Joshua,” whose strength wasn’t in probing the Divine Mind, after all. Faraday was “at closer grips with the Creator than Solomon,” who, at any rate, wasn’t among the Bible’s greatest exemplars.
But we are especially challenged by Douglas’s last comparison: Phillips Brooks was an Episcopalian Bishop, best known as the Rector of Trinity Church in Boston. Those who knew him said he was a great man. But in what sense did he know “as much about the real spirit of Christ as did Paul of Tarsus”? It all comes down to this: “I have tried to get religion into the present time. I have wanted you to hear and see God in contemporaneous life.” That’s the point: not to place biblical characters far above us and, by so doing, disqualify ourselves from participation in the life they exemplified; but to present the gospel as a going concern here and now.
Which leads us to the question, “What did Douglas teach about Christ?” I’ll share that with you in the next post.
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I’ve been telling you that it was during his pastorate in Akron, Ohio, that Lloyd Douglas began to develop his distinctive theology, and last time I promised to summarize the message he preached during those years. Perhaps the best way to begin is to share some of the prayers he offered from that same pulpit; for, as I explained in an earlier post, Douglas believed that the church’s primary mission was to offer people a chance to worship. He felt that a lot of the racket of the street had found its way into the typical Sunday morning service, and he did what he could to “make worship worshipful” (his words).
So! Instead of following a laundry-list approach, outlining his beliefs as bullet-points, I think it would be best to begin with the things he said to God, in worship. Douglas thought that praying off-the-cuff in a church service was one of the worst things a minister could do, because it gave his parishioners the misimpression that the preacher was on a first-name basis with God. Instead, Douglas wrote out his prayers carefully and read them from the pulpit. After his death, his daughters retyped some of these prayers and collected them in a small bound manuscript volume, in preparation for publication of some of his sermons.
The first time I read them, I was surprised. Douglas’s main concern was to bring the gospel up-to-date so that people could live their faith vibrantly in the twentieth century; and yet his prayers were extremely conventional, using Elizabethan language (Thee’s and Thou’s). Over time, however, I realized that this was consistent with his theology. For him, God was (and is) the “sacred presence… Our Father…
Lord of the vast spaces and the unceasing years; Lord of the stars and seas, mountains and forests; Lord of all powers and energies; Lord of the nations; and Lord of our lives who are Thy children.
Make us conscious of Thyself at this hour. Give us understanding that Thy Spirit is in this place, and recreate our desire to live according to Thy will…
Prayers of Lloyd C Douglas, n.d., p. 4. In Douglas Papers, Box 3, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.
I do notice, however, a slight but significant change in his prayers over the years, so I’ll come back to them from time to time in this blog, showing you how his developing theology revealed itself in the things he said to the Divine.
Here are some of the prayers he offered during his years in Akron (1921-1926). One parenthetical note: in both his sermons and his prayers, Douglas used commas and hyphens as breath marks. Since these things were written for use in the pulpit, he punctuated them in a way that would indicate where to pause, although this often meant that he did not follow standard rules of punctuation. Although this habit makes reading his works tedious at times, it also gives us an indication of how his sermons and prayers sounded to the people in the congregation, which is valuable information for later generations like us. I usually remove the distracting punctuation when I share a quotation with you in these blog posts, but today I’ll leave it in, so that you can hear these prayers as he actually uttered them:
Tell us – Our Father – WHY we live.
For a little while we breathe, we love, we strive, we fall – our little orbits change. We seem the helpless children of an inexorable Fate – blindly driven, and very tired – homeless strangers, eager to find a better way for our weary feet.
And then Thou comest with Thy Fatherly assurance that we are Thy children. And, into the sad, bitter chalice of our years, we find love poured – with all its smiles and tears – and, quaffing this, we are content.
So lead us on – triumphant in this faith – until our rest be won.
Prayers of Lloyd C Douglas, p. 7: Akron, Ohio, October 16, 1921.
Some of the words rhyme (years/tears; on/won), and if you follow the breath marks, there’s a kind of poetic cadence. That’s characteristic of Lloyd Douglas the Preacher. He wrote poetry and often included these creations at the conclusion of his sermons. His aesthetic faculties were finely tuned. Nor is this just a stylistic remark that I’m making, for it tells us something important about his theology. He believed that God should be approached with awe and that our prayers should be expressive – and even beautiful.
He offered this prayer over a New Year’s Day communion service:
We invoke Thy divine blessing upon this sacred feast, spread before us, symbolic of the Love and Courage and Faithfulness of Him whose name is graven upon our hearts.
Do Thou bless these symbols of His deathless affection for our souls [long hyphen]
And give them power to renew within us an abiding consciousness of Thy presence, and to restore unto us THE JOY OF THY SALVATION.
And in this newfound strength may we go forth, into the privileges and responsibilities of THE NEW YEAR – prepared for whatever may betide us – whether of joy or of pain.
May we thus meet all the experiences of life, with smiling faces and exultant hearts – walking confidently and fearlessly as Thy children.
Prayers of Lloyd C Douglas, p. 8: Akron, Ohio, January 1, 1922.
Through these prayers, we begin to see glimpses of some of Douglas’s most heartfelt beliefs. We see reverence for a God who is bigger than we can imagine; a passionate devotion to Christ; the importance of connecting with Them here and now; and what follows naturally from forming and maintaining such a connection (strength, joy, peace, confidence).
The following prayer was offered at an Easter service, if I’m not mistaken:
Liberate our souls, today, Our Father, by the power of that LOVE that dwells in the heart of Christ.
Unloose our chains, by the Influence of that TRUTH that makes men free.
Banish our fears of DEATH by the LIGHT that streams from the door of HIS BORROWED TOMB.
And cause us to walk, unafraid, the road that leads to liberty and life, following the nail-pierced footprints of him who knows the way – along the plain paths of daily duty, and through the shadowed valleys, and up the steeps of pain – confident that we shall AT LENGTH reach the hillcrest, and FACE THE DAWN.
Prayers of Lloyd C Douglas, p. 9: Akron, Ohio, April 16, 1922.
In the next blog post, I’ll dive more deeply into his beliefs, but these prayers give us a good jumping-off point. He believed in a God of majesty, yet also believed that God was available to every one of us, to guide and empower us “along the plain paths of daily duty, and through the shadowed valleys, and up the steeps of pain.” This last prayer is perhaps the best, most concise summary of what he thought Christian life was all about (at least as of 1926):
Attune our hearts to the symphony of Thy heavenly grace, that we may evermore understand Thy will for us, in our daily lives, and realize increasingly the peace Thou wouldst have us bear in our souls.
Prayers of Lloyd C Douglas, p. 10: Akron, Ohio, October 10, 1926.
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This is the publicity photo that Douglas used during his years in Akron. See Burton Funeral Scrapbook, Box 5, Lloyd C Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.
I mentioned last time that Lloyd Douglas made headlines frequently while he was pastor of the First Congregational Church of Akron, mostly for controversial statements he made during his Sunday evening Q-and-A sessions at the church. Some of those remarks (such as his lack of support for the Soldier’s Bonus or his disgust with the KKK) prompted long and angry discussions in the Letters to the Editors (besides earning Douglas a lot of angry mail himself).
Here’s another one: speaking at a luncheon club, he told the astonished listeners that Akron was “a hick town.” Culturally and religiously, it was behind the times, he claimed. These words were reported in the papers, and another round of angry letters began.
But it was just this kind of thing that the journalists respected about Douglas: he spoke his mind fearlessly, especially on religious matters. Here’s a sample of the kinds of things he said on Sunday morning from the pulpit:
I have not encouraged you to worry over all the implications involved in the ancient doctrine of the atonement. I couldn’t see how as great a God as God would inevitably have to be, to create and operate the universe, would get himself entangled in a situation demanding that His son be killed in order that His own integrity might be conserved. I felt that a God so short-sighted as to get Himself into a fix like that would be hardly stable enough to see us through to the end of the trip.
I have told you that this conventional view of the atonement – in which the death of Christ became necessary to justify the parole of Adam – was unwarranted because there was no adequate basis for the Adam story. My grandfather believed in that Adam story. He also believed that the horse-chestnut which he carried in his pocket would keep off rheumatism. He was a good man, too. But he included in his creed a lot of things I cannot possibly believe…
Lloyd C Douglas, “Five Years of Akron,” p. 90. In The Living Faith (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin/Riverside Press, 1955).
Even now, 100 years later, a pastor must be careful about saying such things out loud, even if he believes them privately. But Douglas didn’t come to Akron to play it safe; he came to bring them a gospel fit for the twentieth century. Over the next several posts, I’ll tell you what his message consisted of. For it was in Akron that Douglas began to articulate the ideas for which he is now remembered.
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When Lloyd Douglas began his ministry at the First Congregational Church of Akron in the fall of 1921, he viewed it as a chance to share all that he had learned during his time at the University of Illinois and the University of Michigan. As he explained later, “I came to you from an experience of about ten years, spent upon the campuses of two great universities, where I daily faced the new problem of a readjustment in religious thought, to make it consonant with the more recent disclosures of the philosophical and scientific world” (Lloyd C Douglas, “Five Years of Akron,” in The Living Faith (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin/Riverside Press, 1955), p. 80.)
During those years, he had been in university towns, but now he was in a city – “Rubber City,” they called it, due to the predominance of the big tire companies like Goodyear and Firestone – and he was putting his ideas into practice out in the world.
If this was ever used as an advertisement in the local paper or as a pamphlet, I’ve been unable to find a clipping of it. But this photograph is pasted into the last page of Douglas’s 1920-1923 scrapbook. The First Congregational Church of Akron is in the upper right corner of the picture. From Box 5, Lloyd C Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.
The first thing he focused on was worship. Not preaching, but worship.
In his inaugural sermon at the First Congregational Church of Akron on September 18, 1921, Douglas said, “The church is failing in America because it has failed to carry out its true mission…. The church may do philanthropic and social work, but its first duty is to be a house of worship, and when it fails in this it cannot expect the veneration to which it should be entitled” (“SCORES CHURCH/New Akron Pastor Flays Modern Worship,” Akron Press, n.d., 1920-1923 Scrapbook, Box 5, Lloyd C Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan).
Over the past several years, Douglas had already established an order of worship that the people in Ann Arbor said was “probably unsurpassed elsewhere.” (This was from a resolution the congregation’s leaders drew up in 1921, accepting his resignation and thanking him for his ministry. Quoted on p. 63 of Calvin O. Davis, A History of the Congregational Church in Ann Arbor, 1847-1947, which was reprinted in A History of the First Congregational Church in Ann Arbor, 1847-1976 (Ann Arbor: First Congregational Church, n. d. [1976?]).
His services were heavily dependent on music. It was a source of great irritation to him that people would talk over the organ prelude. As he told his new congregation, “During the organ prelude in a church recently I learned the recipe for plum jelly, that a certain oil stock was a good buy, that there was to be a bargain sale at a local department store, and that the road to another city was in bad shape on account of the concrete cracking” (from “SCORES CHURCH” cited above).
He thought the church auditorium should be a true sanctuary where people would leave their worldly cares at the door and come into the presence of The Great Mystery. “The LORD is in His Holy Temple,” begins the Order of Worship from his first Sunday in Akron; “let all the earth keep silence before Him.” In Ann Arbor, Douglas had enforced that: ushers were to close the doors as soon as the organ prelude began and not open them again until later in the service. He was so adamant about this that it ruffled a few of his parishioners’ feathers, but he was striving to make the church a place where people could actually come with the expectation of meeting God.
The prelude should begin softly, Douglas felt, to counteract the rat-a-tat-tat of machinery that had assaulted worshipers’ ears for the past six days. It should calm the soul and prepare it for communion with the divine. Then, through subtle use of dynamics and ascending chords, it should end triumphantly in the exact key of the opening hymn and launch into that hymn immediately, so that worshipers would rise and sing without being prompted. Douglas hated how the typical Protestant minister could spoil the whole thing by announcing, “Beloved, shall we not rise and sing Hymn 321? That’s 321, and you’ll find it in the hymnal on the pew in front of you. Hymn 321.”
As Douglas said to an audience of fellow ministers and lay-workers:
Many a sensitive man would greatly prefer to take a book of essays with him to a shady bend in the river on Sunday morning than attend our church; whereas his whole soul cries out for a much closer contact with the divine than he can achieve by his communion with nature. But – it is a great deal better for that man’s spiritual welfare that he should go out Sunday morning and watch the river than to go to some church where the music is so ugly it positively frightens [him] and the preacher talks to the Great Unseen as if he were chaffing with his next-door neighbor over the back fence.
Lloyd C Douglas, “Making Worship Worshipful,” Christian Century, September 9, 1920, pp. 14-17.
What Douglas was trying to achieve can best be understood through his description of the exact opposite:
There wasn’t a single feature of that ‘service of worship’ calculated to quicken a man’s respiration, or grip his throat, or stir his pulse! What little of solemn ritual there was in it possessed no current, no rapids, no eddies, no sudden unexpected plunges over huge ledges into unfathomably deep pools, no sharp turns revealing startlingly beautiful vistas ahead – no! – but just ambled lazily along on a level like the sleepy Yanktse Kiang, for five hundred miles without a ripple. It reached no dramatic climaxes; pointed to no definite goal; never poured its flood into the deep sea. It spread out over the sands, and disappeared.
Lloyd C Douglas, Wanted: A Congregation (Chicago: Christian Century Press, 1920), p. 195.
At the movies, Douglas said – and he was talking about silent movies, remember, for this was 1921 – at the movies “there were certain tense moments when people stopped breathing and sat transfixed,” but at church…
…where the issue involved was the attempted establishment of actual, vital relationship with the Absolute – the invocation of His Presence at whose word light had dispelled the darkness, by whose divine fiat the worlds had appeared in space, by whose supernal genius His creatures had been endowed with a consciousness of their own immortality – this solemn and mysterious function was performed drowsily, calmly, with an air of tedium, boredom, and distaste.
Ibid., pp. 194-195.
Lloyd Douglas was the new minister in Rubber City. His first order of business was to stir people’s pulses… and invite them out into the deep sea.
To be continued…
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