Foreword
FOREWORD
I see E. Stanley Jones almost every day. In the sanctuary of the Church of the Resurrection, he sits next to a river, gazing up at the risen Christ, part of the Resurrection Window. When people ask me who this man is, I respond, “He is one of the most remarkable Methodists I’ve ever known.”
I was in seminary when I first came to know of E. Stanley Jones. Dick Schaefer, with whom I worked, gave me a copy of Jones’s A Song of Ascents. I had just joined The United Methodist Church a few years before, and Schaefer said, “You must get to know this man.” Jones published the book when he was eighty-four years old, calling it his “spiritual autobiography.” As I read of his amazing journey, he became, and remains, among my heroes of the faith.
I think many who have claimed Jones as a theological hero might be surprised by some of the things that he penned in his books. He was evangelical, to be sure, but of a different sort from many who use that name today. He was described to me while I was in seminary as a “liberal evangelical.” He became for me a pattern of what a United Methodist looked like, a pattern that still shapes my life and ministry to this day.
Preparing to write this foreword led me back to Jones’s other books in my library. I reached for The Christ of the Indian Road, first published in 1925 (my copy is a sixth edition, published in 1927, when Abingdon Press was still located in New York). The book sold more than a million copies and inspired people around the world. Jones offered a thoughtful critique of Western Christianity, and of many Christian missionaries and evangelists who had come to India only to repel rather than draw the Indian people to Christ.
When it came to his ministry among the Hindus of India, Jones demonstrated humility and love. He pointed out places where he believed Hinduism and Christianity shared common ground. He preached Christ with words and concepts Hindus were familiar with. He did not believe Indian Christianity would look like Western Christianity, nor should it. He wrote that the most important spiritual ideas in Hinduism might be reinterpreted in the light of Christ, and would form a deep Christian spirituality that would, in turn, have something to teach Western Christians. What a remarkable insight born of a humble spirit!
I reach for another of Jones’s books, my copy of his 1931 book, The Christ on the Mount. It is a powerful exposition of the Sermon on the Mount, which speaks just as clearly to twenty-first–century readers as it did to those for whom it was first written. It is clear that his passion for inviting others to consider the claims of Christ was no mere invitation to “ask him into your heart,” or to have a personal relationship with him—as important as these are—but to actually follow Jesus and to put into practice the ethics he taught.
There’s another Jones book I grasp. Inside its front cover is a note that it is a wartime book, and thus printed on thinner paper. It is The Christ of the American Road, published in 1944. I’m reminded that Jones served as a go-between with President Roosevelt and a Japanese delegation just before the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. It is a fascinating little book, written in the midst of World War II, with prescient reflections on world events. He anticipated a world with two superpowers when the war was over, atheist Russia and the United States, a nation whose population largely claimed to be Christian. In the book, he called Americans to live up to the faith they professed. Speaking of what would become the postwar economy, he warned that America would need to choose between “a dog-eat-dog economy, or a brother-help-brother economy.” In his chapter on “The Seven Hesitations of Democracy,” he wrote a scathing critique of America’s treatment of “Negroes.” Jones penned these words ten years before the young Martin Luther King Jr., broke onto the scene to lead the Civil Rights Movement.
Among my favorite of Jones’s books was his last, The Divine Yes, which I have quoted and preached about in several sermons. When he was eighty-seven, Jones had a stroke that left him partially paralyzed. He chose this as the opportunity to write one more book, a final testimony to his faith in the face of adversity. In it he writes,
I cannot afford to be anything but grateful that he thought enough of me to give me this period at the end of my life to be a proof that what I’ve spoken about all my life—the unshakable Kingdom and the unchanging Person—is true because I’m showing it to be true by his Grace.
Before he died, he traveled back to his beloved India one last time, and there died among the people he loved. Reading that book, I thought to myself what I thought when I read my first E. Stanley Jones book thirty-three years ago: I want to be like this man.
— Adam Hamilton
Senior Pastor
The United Methodist Church
of the Resurrection, Leawood, Kansas