Those who ‘rest in unvisited tombs’

In a recent statement regarding some of the cultural turmoil in North America, historian Owen Strachan, the Provost and Research Professor of Theology at Grace Bible Theological Seminary in Conway, Arkansas, made an observation about church history that I found quite surprising. He noted that ‘epic stands for truth … are usually taken alone, so high is their cost’.

I found it quite surprising because my own study of church history has given me a fundamentally different perspective. It is a perspective that I have learned inductively from church history (be it the Apostolic era with the Pauline circle, or the Cappadocian Fathers, or the Celtic Church, or the Reformers, or the Puritan brotherhood, or the Evangelical revivals of the 18th century), and it is namely this: God never does a great work in the history of the church except through a band of brothers and sisters.

This is true of all of the eras of church history just mentioned. The idea of one lone figure standing for truth against the minions of evil and the failure of like-minded men to stand with him is the product more of a reading of church history shaped by a ‘High Noon’ culture than the actual facts.

No small people

Professor Strachan’s statement is also redolent of the ‘great man’ theory of history, which was once put this way by the Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle: ‘The history of the world is but the biography of great men’. A better reading of church history, though, affirms that there are no small people within its pages.

In the late 1980s, I was asked to write a history of my local church, Stanley Avenue Baptist Church, Hamilton, Ontario, which had a rich history. During the 1920s, this church was deeply involved in the battle against liberal theology at McMaster University, then in Toronto. Usually, when this story is told, the Toronto pastor, T.T. Shields, is seen as the great defender of the Faith.

But while I was writing the story of my church I came across a note from 10 March 1926. A young woman named Lottie Inrig stood at a business meeting and proposed to the church that they cut off funding to McMaster ‘until such time as there is no uncertainty as to the orthodoxy of the teaching of McMaster University’. The motion was carried.

When I first came to the church in 1974, Lottie was an elderly woman in her eighties, and sat quietly week by week in a pew a few rows behind where I sat. I had paid her little attention. When I read that note, I realized what an enormous debt I owed to Lottie Inrig, for by that action she helped to preserve the orthodox witness of Stanley Avenue Baptist Church and so ensured a gospel witness for the hundreds like myself who came to Christ in that church.

Indeed, without hundreds of Lottie Inrigs, T.T. Shields would have had no voice. To assert otherwise is to make church history a narrative of ‘celebrities’, when the reality is better expressed in these concluding lines of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (albeit she would have meant them quite differently):

‘That things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs’.