13 Administration, Publishing and Serving: 1970–72
Administration, Publishing and Serving: 1970–72
Love and Truth in the Afterlife
In the early 1970s, a debate arose in the Anglican Church in Australia1 over ‘Prayers for the Dead’ after a petition for the dead appeared in the trial liturgy, Australia (1969). As is often the case, a seemingly small matter had large consequences.
The words at the centre of the debate were ‘and in faith and trust we leave in your keeping N’. The problem was that the words were part of an intercessory prayer that was ambiguous at best, and some evangelicals campaigned strongly for its deletion. The chair of the Liturgical Commission of the General Synod, Bishop Arthur, had argued that the words were appropriate and were not disputed at the Liturgical Commission. A Liturgical Commission member and an evangelical, Donald Robinson,2 believed that any seeking of benefit for the dead was unbiblical. However, he accepted that the words in question were not seeking some benefit for the dead, citing the 1662 liturgy petition, ‘with [the faithful departed] we may be partakers of thy heavenly kingdom’, as equally unobjectionable. Other evangelicals were more strongly opposed than Robinson.
In light of the debate over Australia (1969), Leon was invited to join a group of four representatives of the Melbourne diocese to write a report on the matter.3 The matter was already beginning to affect local parishes. Soon after Leon joined the group he learned of parishioners leaving a parish in Melbourne. He had seen a copy of a letter of withdrawal from one of these parishioners and had been written to directly by another regarding the dispute.
Leon wrote to solicitor Harold McCracken, seeking his opinion on the English Judge Gage’s view that prayers for the dead were legal within the Anglican liturgical structure. Others he knew had already written to a lawyer who was sympathetic to the concept of prayers for the dead. On McCracken’s advice, he wrote about the same matter to an acquaintance, J.N.D. Anderson, who was in England at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies. With so many angles to consider, McCracken believed a detailed knowledge of English law might be needed.
Subsequently, the Melbourne diocesan group issued a report to assist the Liturgical Commission. It was close to Robinson’s view: prayers could be accepted if they did not seek a benefit for the departed, but rather remembered the life of the person or commended the person into God’s care, thankful for the work of Christ. The report made four points:
1. There was no biblical warrant for prayers for the dead.
2. The practice was legal according to the Church of England formularies.
3. Some prayers for the dead were sound: affirming God as the source of hope for the departed. They were acceptable if they:
(a) used Jesus Christ’s name but did not question his redemptive work;
(b) were of a thanksgiving nature for Jesus Christ’s work.
4. Anything else is unsound.
The group agreed that including prayers for the dead in Australia (1969) was not objectionable and it was theologically sound.
Ten years later, when Leon was on the Anglican Doctrine Commission, he summarized the grave disquiet of some over prayers for the dead:
1. The New Testament teaches that the faithful departed are in God’s presence (Luke 23:43; Phil. 1:23) and that after death is judgement (Heb. 9:27).
2. There are no New Testament examples of prayers for the dead.
3. Nothing should be done to remove the urgency of committing to Christ in this life.
Leon did not agree with prayers for the dead as there was a lack of New Testament evidence and, in fact, the New Testament stated that on death the Christian is in God’s presence. This truth bookended Leon’s belief in the greater truth that people need to receive eternal life now.
Humble Service
Leon’s mother died on 11 September 1970 after some years of ill health. He and Mildred flew to Sydney for the Mowll Village chapel service and cremation the next week. He was so busy he fulfilled six commitments over the weekend and on the Monday before flying back to Melbourne on Tuesday morning. It seems that he seldom had the opportunity to follow a normal grief process.
Despite his busyness, Leon continued to conduct occasional services and carry out speaking engagements with good humour. On one Sunday morning, a student had accidentally filled the font with hot water in preparation for an infant baptism during the chapel service. As Leon watched the steam rising from the font, he remarked: ‘Are we going to boil or baptize the kid?’4
Of paramount importance to Leon and Mildred, however, was an attitude of humble service. One night, when speaking at the Baptist church in Murrumbeena, Leon preached on the contrast between what the power of faith allows disciples to achieve and the persistent humble attitude we should have throughout our life. No matter how much success God brings, the Christian should say, ‘We are unworthy servants, we have only done our duty.’5
A former theological student’s wife recalled seeing Leon at his front door, stooped in front of a man who was clearly living it rough. Leon was holding out a plate of cakes that Mildred had baked, patiently watching the man eat cake after cake. The same student family received the unsolicited gift of a television from Leon and Mildred while the wife was ill and her husband was quarantined.6
These incidents of practical service by Leon and Mildred continued over the years. They also had people staying in their house and, while the reasons varied, the hospitality was consistent. It was the generosity that had first seen them host the Bockelberg girls.
While in Manila, Leon’s talk on Acts 6 included the incident of the selection of Christians to wait on tables. He related to the delegates a story of a missionary leader who was tied up in many of the chores of an office boy. He pondered whether the man should complain because, after all, are we not all called to lowly service? He pointed out that the man might do the tasks of an office boy, but why not get an office boy to do them? Few delegates might have guessed the parallels between this story and Leon’s dilemma at Ridley.
Some months after Manila, Leon offered his resignation to the Ridley Council, citing the heavy administrative load. He did not think the council would accept; he hoped his action would show once and for all his need of relief from administration.7 In response, Ridley’s Council put some plans in motion that culminated in the arrival of the Rt Revd Alfred Stanway the following year.
While Leon rightly complained that he needed administrative relief, his gifts and role as Ridley principal placed him in a quandary. As an evangelical leader, he was needed to help plan major conferences. For example, the 1971 National Evangelical Anglican Conference required Leon’s attendance at several high-intensity meetings. And who else could write articles for major technical journals, or who within Australia could write for popular yet rigorous magazines like Christianity Today? As an eminent New Testament scholar, Leon was also involved in bodies like the Doctrine Commission. From time to time, meetings for this commission lasted four to five days. Simply put, there were meetings and opportunities that Leon could not delegate. Furthermore, he had just passed his middle fifties and there were signs that his constitution could not continue at the break-neck level he had so far maintained. Together, these factors contributed to his increased feeling of being swamped by administration.
And, of course, Leon continued to accept speaking engagements, including giving a major paper at the August National Evangelical Anglican Conference meetings and speaking several times on the Gospel of John in anticipation of his commentary being published to a waiting, thirsty audience. He also wrote on ‘The Gospel, Critical Methods and Findings’ for the Lion Handbook to the Bible8 and ‘Atonement’ for the Zondervan Dictionary of the Christian Church.9
Love and Truth in a Gospel
It was the highlight of Leon’s year when The Gospel According to John in the NICNT series was finally published in September 1971. It ran to 936 pages. Leon had given over ten solid years to it. Many echoed Michael Green in marvelling that he ‘should have succeeded in writing so much … in the years when his time has been engaged in reviving the lustre of Ridley College, Melbourne’.10
Williams assessed The Gospel According to John:
a classic example of Leon’s work. The text is clear, lucid, capable of being read and understood by the lay-person no less than the scholar and of giving benefit to both. Those who are in the know are well aware of the depth of scholarship in the text, but it does not obtrude. The scholarship is demonstrated more explicitly in the footnotes and the occasional excurses.11
There have, naturally, been subsequent criticisms of Leon’s use of the Greek and issues around verbal aspect developments, but he was reluctant to engage in those matters at the time or in the subsequent revision and the commentary remains a classic. The book was a sensation when published and sold out quickly. Ironically, it was hard to get in Australia and there were reports of queues at some Christian bookshops to buy a copy. A second printing was issued in 1973. Immediate sales reached 10,601 copies. By the mid-1990s the first edition had sold 103,684 copies. Following the publication of a second edition, the total exceeded 125,000.12
Leon liked the comparison of John’s Gospel to a pool in which a child could wade or an elephant could swim.13 His commentary allowed various levels of interaction: as people read it, they were nourished at their intellectual level, but just as importantly to Leon they were nourished spiritually. Students commented on how surprised they were at the devotional value of such a technical commentary, and the footnotes were considered to be of significant scholarly value. A Melbourne woman, a fine Christian social worker of her time, made ‘Dr Morris’s commentary on John’s Gospel, her devotional reading for a sustained period of time’.14 Some rewards were even greater. The wife of a Canadian minister wrote to Leon telling him that her reading of his commentary on John had led to her giving her life to Christ.
Other books, articles and lectures flowed from the John enterprise: The Dead Sea Scrolls and St. John’s Gospel, The New Testament and the Jewish Lectionaries, Studies in the Fourth Gospel and later, Jesus Is the Christ: Studies in the Theology of John.15
Questions of Leadership
In late 1971, Bishop Alfred Stanway arrived at Ridley to relieve Leon’s administrative burden. He was no office boy but a leader of considerable weight. Stanway had organized the Anglican Church in Tanzania, was a gifted teacher and an executive-level administrator. Leon wrote buoyantly to Inchley: ‘Alfred Stanway has settled in now and he is making a big difference to the College. He has a wonderful enthusiasm and is a tireless worker. He has lifted a lot of the burden of administration from me’.16 With Stanway’s input, Ridley made significant progress in the development of its infrastructure.
Despite Leon’s early enthusiasm, he found letting go of administration more difficult than he had anticipated. The situation he found himself in seemed to be linked to his reluctance to share responsibility. There is no record of this issue surfacing when Leon was first at Ridley serving under Baker and then under Babbage, and it did not appear to come into play when he was warden at Tyndale. However, while Leon was principal and as Ridley grew, it was clear that there was a problem.
The Ridley staff loved Leon; they were in awe of his ability. He had appointed them all and was appreciative of them. However, staff colleagues reported difficulties in his dealing with some issues and people, and he did not always welcome the initiative of others on the Ridley team. Comments were made that while he encouraged people, he was not an effusive employer. According to one account, he was unwilling to negotiate good wages for a staff member, expecting him to work for an unrealistic salary. With regards to Ridley’s students, small things hinted at a bigger problem. For example, when theological students requested more input into the college by way of a regular meeting with the faculty, Leon would not agree to the request despite his open-door policy to encourage individuals to come and see him personally.17
Most telling was Leon’s working relationship with Stanway. There is no doubt Leon was delighted with Stanway at first. He was active, strategic, forward-looking, spiritually energetic, administratively astute, thoroughly evangelical and believed that God was sovereign over life. But, as Williams observed:
As the years rolled on … Leon … would say he couldn’t do his writing. The Council gave him Alf Stanway to do the administering of the College but when it came to the crunch Leon could not let go. We had some awful, really awful staff meetings, where the rest of us – John Wilson, myself and Charles Sherlock, would just sit there as Alf and Leon went hammer and tongs at each other over who would do what. Leon could not let go and in the end Alf gave up and went and started his own College in America!18
It has to be also acknowledged that no principal of Ridley since the 1940s has found the job easy, given its inbuilt tensions and responsibilities. College principals worldwide echo this reality. Add to that the task of running a theological college with a large cohort of residential university students. There were reports that when Leon was away, the college administration went into a holding pattern as he had such a tight hold on this area. It is also true that Stanway was used to running his own ship in a non-consultative style, so Ridley effectively had two captains.
But whatever way we see the situation, there was something in Leon that made sharing administration and handling some staff relationships difficult despite the goodwill he offered and was offered. Those on his staff keenly felt this flaw in his leadership style. One can speculate about what had shaped this style. Perhaps it was the view of leadership he had observed from as far back as running a small iron foundry in Lithgow around 1930? Or perhaps it was the style he met in various institutions as he travelled the USA in the early 1960s? Or perhaps Stanway was just too strong a leader and, like the same poles of a magnet, they were incapable of being together?
It seems more likely that Leon absorbed a style observed as a young Christian and then as a priest, and adopted it. While R.B. Robinson and Cecil Short could well have been consultative leaders, the expectation from parishioners for the rector of a parish was that he was clearly and unmistakably in charge as a kind of benevolent superman. Leon would have observed this reality and certainly absorbed this expectation before he was twenty-five and still forming himself. Coupled with his essentially shy nature, he simply could not adapt when he was faced with the situation of leading a growing number of staff after he had turned fifty. By that stage of life, changing to a more collegial model was near to impossible for him. In Williams’ view, as the colleague closest to Leon, ‘Leon was probably a product of his time in some ways.’19
Love and Truth in Jesus and Authority
In September 1971, Leon gave the keynote address at the SU Saturday Training Conference in Melbourne. It was the training event for the 1971–2 beach missions, ‘Theos’ coffee shops, and farm and lake camps run annually by SU across Victoria. Some four hundred participants gathered, the cream of Melbourne’s young Christians, keen to pass on the faith to children and youth.
He gave what many believe to be his finest talk to volunteers in the form of a presentation on the ‘The Authority of the Scriptures’, of truth at ground level. He showed why Jesus’ teaching was important for the formation of lives, and went on to show how Jesus accepted the authority of the Old Testament, as did the apostles. He continued by demonstrating that the New Testament was of divine origin, and ended by illustrating how the entire biblical witness was important and authoritative.
The talk was, in fact, a popular treatment of Leon’s total view of the doctrine of revelation and inspiration, distilled for young leaders and stripped of technical argument – a view that would help them minister with godly confidence and help seekers of truth. Again he took a complex subject and, without demeaning it, explained it simply and logically to young Christians who had minimal grounding in biblical understanding. In doing so, he gave them an unashamed explanation of the wonder and position of Jesus Christ. A number of emerging leaders who were there continue to use Leon’s framework to this day to train their ministry leaders.20
The same year, Mildred was made a life governor of the Bible Society in fitting recognition of her own extensive ministry.