The Spiritual Vision of Frank Buchman

4. Theological Questions

4 Theological Questions As Buchman’s approach to personal work indicated, he was eager to avoid approaching people with preconceived ideas. F. B. Meyer once said that Christianity was “not a creed, but a life.”1 Buchman’s view was similar. He saw his work in terms of “the propagation of life, rather than the propagation of a plan.”2 Method was necessary but also dangerous. “I believe wholeheartedly in method, but there is a great danger in method,” he said at Kuling, noting that a great many Christian workers were being “fooled by method.”3 “I have no method. With each person it is different. It is not really a method, it is a principle of life,” he said a few years later.4 This emphasis on life was an important feature of Buchman’s thinking and one that was connected to his understanding of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit was essentially the source of the kind of life he was trying to promote. He once expressed something like this in a letter to Douglas Mackenzie at Hartford: “I conceive my first mission to be a programme of life under the sustained guidance of the Holy Spirit.”5 Buchman was not primarily a theologian, and he stressed that he was not in any way proposing some new revelation about divine truth.6 His core teachings were not complicated, and he wanted them to be simple enough to be comprehensible to everyone. He even once wrote of the “sin of not putting a message so that it is understandable by everyone.”7 At the same time, he did have theological assumptions. At one level, these were quite traditional or conservative , as illustrated by his attitude to scripture. His approach to the Bible was essentially precritical in the sense that he generally used it in a literal way to support his evangelistic work. In his courses at Hartford, in which the Bible was often quoted, he often emphasized its role in helping people learn how to deal with individuals. But he did not—according to a critic of his time at Penn State—read what modern scholars were saying about it.8 Biblical authority was important to him. “Whenever I depart from Christ or Paul I am wrong,” he said 84 The Spiritual Vision of Frank Buchman in the early 1920s, and he responded to a student who claimed that Plato was superior to the Bible by declaring that he found his norm in the Bible rather than Plato’s The Republic.9 Throughout his life Buchman was drawn to passages in the Bible that referred to God communicating with and leading his people. Unsurprisingly, he was particularly drawn to the Acts of the Apostles. He often recommended the Whitsun story in the second chapter of Acts, for example. Indeed, Acts was arguably the OG’s most important reference point.10 He also drew inspiration from the Jewish prophets. For example, at meetings in Caux in 1947 he cited verses from Isaiah, Amos, and Habakkuk that referred to listening to God in some way and read Ezekiel 2:1–5, a passage that touched on God communicating with people. The prophets were “very modern for today,” he said.11 It is possible to read his own quiet times, with their references to social and political as well as personal issues, as an attempt to be prophetic himself. Moreover, by linking the OG and MRA to the Jewish prophets, he was clearly placing his work in a prophetic tradition. MRA was “recapturing, revitalizing [and] reliving ” the message of the prophets, he said in 1939.12 In terms of his underlying doctrinal outlook, Buchman was in fact quite orthodox. The Anglican modernist H. D. A. Major praised the OG for avoiding “blood theology,” and it is true that the movement’s emphasis on experience gave space to churchmen like B. H. Streeter, who questioned substitutionary or sacrificial interpretations of the atonement.13 In reality, though, as his descriptions of his experience in Keswick in 1908 indicated, Buchman’s understanding of the cross was traditional in the sense that he believed in a literal sense that Christ had died on the cross for the sins of humanity. Furthermore, he stressed the importance of salvation through the blood of Christ throughout his life. For example, in 1943 he insisted that MRA took the reality of sin, and Christ as the cure for it, seriously. “You must have that emphasis on morals plus the saving...