Marc Baer - Mere believers : how eight faithful lives changed the course of history

How Eight Faithful Lives Changed the Course of History

Marc Baer

To some cherished believers, my children Brett, Carter, Jaimeand their families.

A s the introduction will make clear, although everything else Ive written during my career as an academic had in mind an audience of scholars, Mere Believers is intended for a general readership. Scholars who happen on it may go to my personal website for details on the research.

Given the manner in which I brought the book to completion I have a number of organizations and individuals to thank. Chapters , , and began life as talks at the 2003 InterVarsity Christian Fellowship Great Lakes East staff conference. Thanks to two grants from the Hope College CrossRoads Project (funded by the Lilly Endowment), I was able to work with and learn from Hope College students Brianne Carpenter on the Dorothy Sayers chapter and Andreas Van Denend on G. K. Chesterton. The Huntingdon and Equiano chapters were written during sabbaticals, for which Im grateful to Hope. Ian Bussan performed admirably as a footnote detective, while Sarah Baar helped with formatting the final manuscript. My agent John Topliff encouraged me during the final years of the project, and Rodney Clapp at Wipf and Stock helped me think through a number of matters.

Ann Loades read the Sayers chapter and provided helpful comments. Bob Shuster and Keith Call at the Wheaton College Archives helped the research on the Chambers go smoothly. A great many individuals whose names I cant recall read or heard versions of most of the chapters, and their comments have helped me enormously: this includes audiences at Cedar Campus InterVarsity faculty conferences in and 2010 ; the 2009 Baylor Symposium on Faith and Culture; the 2011 and 2013 versions of my Hope College senior seminar, Exploring Faith and Calling; and the adult Sunday school class at Pillar Church in Holland, Michigan. And, as with all my books, my wife Patricia took time away from her professional responsibilities to read and comment on each chapter. The bookand my lifeare better because of her.

The Bible says that when you become a Christian your mind is renewed,

and so that with that renewing of your mind

comes a new view of the world in which you live.

Lszl Tks

W illiam Wilberforce defined Christian as a pilgrim travelling on business through a strange country. The pages that follow examine eight such pilgrims from Britains past, the society Ive been studying for the last forty-five years, asking this question: Did their Christianity change their country? Led to travel on business, as Wilberforce phrased it, did reorienting their hearts and minds result in any measureable consequences for their culture? Was the world better or worse because of them? Philosophers, atheists, and my fifteen-year-old nephew are raising these very questions today, and so Ive invited some believers from the past to brief usor rather, for us to interview them.

My interest in the questions arose out of my own story. Like my subjects I became a believer as an adult. My parents were Unitarians, my father growing up in and then forsaking a tiny denomination of German and Swiss Protestants and my mother as an unbelieving Jewish Ukrainian immigrant who dabbled in Theosophy. They met in graduate school, which meant that acquisition of knowledge was highly valued in my clan. Having been raised in California, my family moved to Iowa when I was in high school. With such a background of course I was going to ask questions! Having rejected the worldview of my parents, determining somewhere between California and Iowa that at best one religion might be true but reasonably not all them could possibly be true, by the time I entered college I was a committed non-believer who nevertheless had a nagging doubt about his doubts. The best I could do was to sense what was false. Years later I would hear G. K. Chesterton say that Truth can understand error; but error cannot understand Truth.

In this season of searching I let my doubts carry me into a philosophy minor to complement my history major. Studying the worlds religions and their textsthe Koran and the Bhagavad-Gita , the Tao Te Ching and The Teachings of the Compassionate Buddha , as well as Christianity and the Bibleconfirmed my jejune feeling that in fact none of them was true. It was not until halfway through graduate school that I had the desireor perhaps it was courageto ponder the more profound question: did any of the texts reveal what I knew to be true about myself? That no rhyme accompanied my reason, the ideas about humanity next to the knowledge about the one human I knew all too well, led me to read the Bible for the first time asking that question. Following over a year of reflection I became a believerby which I understood what the biblical writer Paul had: if you confess with your mouth, Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved (Romans :, ESV).

Traveling without as I was changing within, I took on beliefs at odds with who I had been, because to be a follower of Jesus is to believe what he believed. That human beings were created in the image of God caused me to change how I thought about peopleespecially the most vulnerable; realizing that I hadnt earned anything caused me to change what I thought about my possessions; and realizing that loving God with my mind sometimes meant having to confront the spirit of the age but also sometimes meant having to go to war with my own precious worldview. Since as an academic I think for a living, pretty much every day I need to remind myself that Jesus didnt say, Decide for me. Rather, he said Come to me. And the big one, from before I became a believer to now forty-two years later: the church drives me nuts. But as a historian its clear that God uses the church in his project to redeem humankind. While God needs me like you need a toothache, its his plan, and heres the test: take the church out of history and ask, as honestly as you can what the world would be like. Are there good things like art, hospitals, literature, science, universities and education for the poor? So I had better love the church even if I dont always like it, and loving includes knowing about who created those good thingsand why.