CREEDE HINSHAW: Authors offer different, radical pathways to faith

I don’t know how many church people engage in consistent, daily, disciplined devotional reading anymore. My own practice over the years has provided me with such richness.

I had a jarring experience earlier this week when I began reading selections from two very different devotional books. I had purchased – for the grand sum of 40 cents – a musty, yellowed copy of Philip Berrigan’s “Prison Journals of a Priest Revolutionary” (1967). Berrigan, a World War II veteran whose equally radical brother and fellow priest Daniel died earlier this year, was imprisoned during the Vietnam War for defacing draft records with his own blood. He did so out of his single-minded loyalty to Jesus. He may have been the first priest in this country tried, convicted and imprisoned for a political crime. This book addresses Berrigan’s thoughts on what it means to follow Jesus.

At the same time, I am reading a daily selection this year from Oswald Chambers’ classic devotional book “My Utmost for His Highest” (1935). Chambers, a Scots evangelical Christian who died in Egypt in 1917 while a YMCA chaplain to the British army, left these thoughts, compiled by his widow, about being a radical follower of Christ.

The sincerity and devotion of these two men run in rather opposite directions. Chambers seeks radical, complete inner conversion to Jesus Christ, obedience to the call of the Holy Spirit and sanctification, often to the exclusion of the world’s passing circumstances. Berrigan, equally radical, understands that faith requires one to painfully address the power structure of an evil world and a complicit church that preaches a false gospel.

Chambers, who lived in the shadow of WWI, was familiar with depressing, gruesome headlines and lived through the most sadistic of times. Yet his approach is to double down on the need to find and receive the Holy Ghost in order to win the life of Christ and thereby transform the world from the inside out. Chambers is the kind of Christian who, thanks to the inner life of the spirit, would remain utterly, irrepressibly confident, affirming with the Apostle Paul that those who are in Christ can never be crushed.

Berrigan, through the same eyes of faith, recognizes that the church has often sold out to the world, climbed into bed with the principalities and powers and preached a false gospel, turning a blind eye to warfare, racism, poverty, etc. He would say that conversion requires one to directly and ruthlessly confront both personal and corporate sin regardless of the cost to the disciple.

“Utmost” remains a highly popular devotional book, the Berrigan brothers, representing the prophetic tradition of Judaism and Christianity, not so much.

My copy of “Utmost,” like its owner, is dog-eared and well worn. I first read it 42 years ago. But Berrigan beckons, too. Both men address the human condition and the need for salvation from very different perspectives. Reading them simultaneously is a pretty good way to begin my summer mornings.

Email columnist Creede Hinshaw, a retired Methodist minister, at [email protected].