The Final Race

by Eric T. Eichinger

  The London Missionary Society’s governing board surprised Eric with the news of their recommendation. They would grant him only a one-year furlough. His time in Britain would be of the essence. Eric mulled over and prayed a great deal about his decision. He truly loved teaching and, in particular, Christian education. He revered the environment Dr. Hart had created at the college.

  The lingering financial depression seemed to be spreading around the world, with no sign of slowing. Accordingly, school officials held serious recurring conversations about the vitality of the college, especially after the closing of the school in Chi Nan. The survival of Tientsin Anglo-Chinese College continued to be held in question as the Chinese government pushed stricter standards on the Christian college.

  Would there even be a school for him to teach at when he returned?

  Eric read the proverbial leaves in his teacup and went with what positioned him best for his future as well as the future of his potential family. He enrolled in the Scottish Congregational College for two terms, which he needed to complete for ordination. Having his teaching degree, six years of experience, and a formal seminary divinity degree and ordination into the pastoral ministry would set him up for a wide variety of professional opportunities.

  Eric loved his work but had no reservations admitting the fun that came from looking forward to the year ahead. His final term came and went, and Eric was satisfied with all he had accomplished. He had done all anyone could have or would have expected of him—he had extended his stay an extra year, two times over, which providentially brought him to the end of a sixth academic year. He would be entering his seventh year in the mission field—divinely appropriate for a Sabbath’s rest.

  For Eric Liddell, however, “rest” would be a relative term.

  [42] Eric Liddell to Effie Hardie, January 31, 1930, Eric Liddell Centre, accessed September 21, 2017, http://ericliddell.org/about-us/ericliddell/personal-correspondence-of-eric-liddell/.

  [43] Eric Liddell to Effie Hardie, February 19, 1929, Eric Liddell Centre, accessed November 15, 2017, http://www.ericliddell.org/about-us/eric-liddell/personal-correspondence-of-eric-liddell/.

  [44] David McCasland, Eric Liddell: Pure Gold: A New Biography of the Olympic Champion Who Inspired Chariots of Fire (Grand Rapids, MI: Discovery House, 2001), 155.

  [45] Ibid., 157–58.

  CHAPTER 13

  A GAZE INTO THE LOOKING GLASS

  If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

  1 John 1:8-9

  Late August 1931

  For the first time in six years, Eric stepped out of the train at Waverley Station in Edinburgh, Scotland, his heart and mind flurried by emotion. Two weeks earlier, he’d left Canada’s shores after having spent blissful time with Florence—a time he wished would slow to a crawl, a time both he and Florence had enjoyed, in spite of knowing it would end.

  They’d talked of everything, just as they’d always done. School and work. China and its political unrest. Family and friends.

  Their upcoming nuptials.

  “Are you counting the days?” Eric had asked Florence, and she’d assured him with the number.

  “Easier to think in terms of weeks or even months,” she had said. “Days makes it almost unbearable.”

  “Eric!” Jenny’s voice penetrated his thoughts.

  He turned, saw his family standing to the left of the crowd, and waved.

  The familiarity of it all sent a shock wave through him, met by the unfamiliar parting the last time he’d stood on this very platform. Then, he’d been given a hero’s farewell. Now, only blood relatives stood to welcome him.

  After their customary hugs and kisses and Mary dabbing at her tears with a dainty handkerchief, eighteen-year-old Ernest hurried toward baggage to retrieve Eric’s luggage. Jenny looped her arm with her brother’s as they walked behind their parents and said, “I’ve got news.”

  Eric smiled down at her. “What’s that?”

  “I’m getting married.”

  Eric halted, Jenny with him. “No! And who is this chap?”

  “His name is Dr. Charles Somerville,” she rattled on. “He’s a tad older than me . . .”

  “Define ‘a tad.’”

  Jenny wrinkled her nose as she lowered her voice to admit, “Twenty-six years.”

  “Good heavens!” The words burst from Eric as they began to walk again. “I suppose Flo and I are in the clear, then. You’ve seen my romantic wager and have raised the bid significantly.”

  Jenny squeezed her brother’s arm. “I’m crazy mad about him, Eric.”

  “When is the wedding?”

  “April. Rob and Ria are coming. And, of course, you’ll be there.”

  * * *

  THE LONDON MISSIONARY SOCIETY had salivated at the opportunity of penning Eric in on their deputation schedule. Traveling on behalf of the LMS and raising funds for the further advancement of the mission was understood. But Eric was not the conventional speaker in rotation. As an Olympic gold medalist and national hero, the LMS saw him more as their poster boy, the kind which appears only once in a generation. He discovered almost immediately that his speaking schedule was monstrous, matching the ravenous financial need during the Great Depression.

  And this was merely the timetable the LMS had planned. An outpouring of other requests rained upon Eric to the awkward point that a separate committee of the Congregational Church had to be put together to discern and deal with all the lecture requests. And, of course, D. P. Thomson’s plans had to be considered.

  On Saturday, September 4, 1931, Thomson recorded in his journal that he had spent time with Eric that day and found him fit and happy—the same old Eric, “obviously glad to see me.”[46]

  A few days later, Eric stayed at Thomson’s home where they discussed plans for meetings for the short period they had together. Eric expressed to Thomson that he felt the pressure of the schedule that had been set for him.

  “It must be realized,” Thomson wrote in his book Scotland’s Greatest Athlete, “that, apart from the pressure of public engagements and the obvious need for time with his own family, and for the necessary rest and recreation after those strenuous years overseas, Eric had undertaken quite a demanding course of study.”[47]

  By the last day of September there was no hiding the fact that Scotland’s favorite son had returned—older, wiser, and darkened by China’s sun, his receding hairline more pronounced by age. And on that day, St. George’s West Church in Edinburgh found itself packed with interested representatives from the sporting and religious communities gathered for a public welcome.

  Eric rose to speak. He deflected the praise to the best of his efforts. “I accept your welcome,” he said,

  not in my own name, but in the name of a great many others. I accept your welcome in the names of those countless men, whose names are almost unknown, who went into places of danger and difficulty and hazarded their lives for the sake of Jesus Christ, and who came back after they had done those things and were never welcomed. In the name of these men and others I accept it. I think we should always remember the men who have made the task we go to far easier than otherwise it would have been.

  In China, the evangelists are going out among the people. They are going into their homes. They are sleeping in places just the same as the Chinese themselves. They are trying to understand the problems those people have to face, and the greatest challenge there is to every Christian person asks for no great courage, but asks for patience and sympathy that we will be able to sit beside those whose opinions are different from our own, and try to enter into their problems and face them from their point of view.

  Tonight I want to leave a message with you all. We are all missionaries. We carry our religion with us, or we allow our religion to carry us. Wherever we go, we either bring people nearer to Christ, or we repel them from Christ.
[48]

  Eric knew through observing others and by firsthand knowledge that some people reacted adversely to the presentation of the gospel while others readily embraced it. He had evaluated this in his own public speaking, private conversations, and the mission field. He had carefully observed numerous others proclaim and share the gospel, netting various responses. He was eager to determine through Scripture why this was and to discover the best approach to cultivate and invest his energies.

  Eric loved Jesus because Jesus loved Eric—and the world. Eric found it inconceivable that anyone could reject that beautiful truth if they truly understood just how much Christ loved them and to what lengths he went to save them. The interplay of law and gospel, and more specifically how Eric might convey that distinction to his audiences, was again at stake. The handling of it seemed to carry heavier consequences than he had first perceived.

  After an exhausting September, October brought autumn leaves and the final lap for Eric’s formal academic studies. He reenrolled with the Scottish Congregational College and was greeted by the familiar and proud faces of D. Russell Scott, a professor and the chair of biblical languages and criticism, and Thomas Hywell Hughes, the principal and sitting professor of systematic theology.

  Eric enjoyed what these father confessors brought to the table, as well as their enthusiasm and personalities, but languages were never quite in Eric’s bag of tricks. He struggled with Chinese even while being immersed in it. Learning biblical Greek and Hebrew proved to be a formidable assignment. Though Eric valued the languages determining what a scriptural text says in its original form, he gravitated toward Hughes’s systematic approach, preferring to dissect what the texts mean.

  The interconnected network of doctrine making up the theological field of systematics is often likened to catechism on steroids. Eric appreciated always being able to reference certain Scriptures in conjunction with Christian thinking and began to develop early ideas for a book he hoped to one day write. His new theories challenged his experience in the mission field.

  The Congregationalists had historically been known as staunchly nonconformist to Calvinistic thinking, which had dominated the Scottish landscape for centuries. Hughes rejected the concept of limited atonement, the concept that only a limited number of souls would be allowed to pass through heaven’s gates. He instead taught and advocated an unlimited atonement. This different starting point for evangelism resonated with Eric for the mission field.

  Eric also found it more liberating to proclaim to everyone that Christ had died, risen, and delivered them from their sin, as opposed to only the elect. He wanted to confidently articulate the gospel to, imaginably, the worst person in the world, saying that “Christ has forgiven you all your sins via the Cross.” Eric knew that for salvation to take root, hearing the truth of the gospel was only the half of it. He also had to help people in any way he could to recognize and confess faith in Christ. All this served Eric and reconfirmed his zeal for mission work.

  E. Stanley Jones became another theological influencer for Eric during his seminary days. Jones was an American Methodist missionary who had dedicated a great deal of his life to serving in India. He had contextualized himself into India’s way of life as fully as he could and had become a friend of Mahatma Gandhi. Jones’s writings had received much critical acclaim and sold in high volumes. His book The Christ of the Indian Road quickly became required reading for many Western-thinking seminaries.

  Eric appreciated the full-immersion missionary experience on which Jones expounded, especially contextualization involving an attempt to present the gospel in a socially relevant way, considering indigenous cultures, customs, and traditions. Not only did Eric soak up Jones’s ideas as good theory and practice, but he also was eager to test and apply them in the Chinese context when he returned.

  Eric felt validated, stretched, and convicted, and he voraciously consumed all that Jones taught. He understood better why the Chinese resented the imperial presence of the West. Yet Eric believed God had called him to China, and therein lay the satisfying task of going about his work for the Lord within a challenge he could more clearly identify.

  But as much as Eric studied theory and evaluated various methods of sharing the gospel, he knew not every part of native cultures should be embraced. Some issues were a matter of right and wrong, and he was never afraid to address them—even for his British brethren.

  Amid his myriad speaking engagements, Eric declared that gambling and intemperance were “two of the greatest problems the church was facing; both vices were sapping the energy of their young people.”[49]

  He tied this point to an anecdote of addiction concerning a former great Scottish athlete who ended his days begging outside the same stadiums where he used to be cheered. Eric’s popularity took a slight hit, but the glancing blow was well worth it. He never felt he judged anyone, but he was not afraid of being self-defined, particularly when looked up to by so many of Britain’s youth.

  By February, Eric’s speaking schedule, academic demands, pressures of moral example, navigation of reporters, and disarming of the occasional dissenting debater in his audience had left him exhausted. And it didn’t help matters that he had to wait another six months until his monthlong visit with Florence, with a looming eighteen months beyond that until their marriage. Their letters traversed back and forth across the ocean, and their emotions ebbed and flowed with them.

  Maybe it was forging through the fog of academics one last time. Maybe it was suspended romance, which caused emotional heartache. Maybe it was feeling as though he was past his athletic prime, or maybe it was the miserable winter weather. Or perhaps it was the constant scrutiny of the public eye provoking him to project his best image. Eric had always tried his best to be perfect in every way and occasionally reinforced his striving by quoting from Matthew 5:48: “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” Whatever combination of reasons, frustrations invariably set in, and Eric wondered why life had to be so compounding and difficult.

  Eric had fallen short. He could not deny that the perfect law of God mirrored back to him his own imperfections. Slight as they may have appeared to the human eye, he knew the reality.

  He retreated to his parents’ home in Drymen during one of these spells of gloom. His family’s presence was typically a source of solace, even as he had not always had the convenience of their physical support through much of his life. His trip proved fruitful in a surprising way. James and Mary Liddell happened to be hosting an Oxford Group speaker at their home during his stay, whose talk Eric attended.

  The burden of the law, which was weighing him down as he failed to achieve perfection, dropped from Eric’s shoulders as he listened to the speaker’s message. The gospel is not something people do, he realized, but something they receive. Hearing more about the grace of Christ relieving the burden of the law stirred a new kind of peace in his heart and a sense of renewal. Christians serve God indirectly as they serve their neighbors directly. Understanding that Christ was disguised in his service to others, Eric was relieved of the pressure of striving for and failing at perfection; personal holiness was not the only way to serve Christ.

  Much to Eric’s delight, the Oxford Group, which Eric had become interested in seven years previous via fellow athlete Loudon Hamilton, had grown. The small gospel group had expanded internationally all the way to South Africa and had resonated with numerous key leaders in the United Kingdom. Two of those leaders were Stuart and Bina Sanderson, who ran a business in Galashiels.

  Eric recalled how his “heart had burned within him” years before during his initial talks with Hamilton. Hamilton had been greatly influenced by the Oxford Group, and he had told Eric something that would be instrumental in his own life in the years to come. Living in such a way that God can say hello to us at any time of the day or night, Hamilton told Eric, begins by spending quiet time with God each morning. This early-morning quiet time with God is something that Eric
practiced and treasured and passed on to his own students at TACC.

  Eager to fan the flame from his earlier meeting with Hamilton, Eric decided to seek out the Sandersons in Galashiels, but with Jenny’s impending wedding and Eric’s rigorous schedule, he had to suspend his inquisitiveness . . . if only for another two months.

  Jenny Liddell and Dr. Charles Somerville married on April 20, 1932. Somerville, a widower, came with three children in tow, which was a lot for Jenny to take on. But her new husband was no stranger to the missionary community, and their love for each other was undeniable. Eric could look on only in admiration as he dared think ahead to his own special day to come. Only a few more months and he would see Florence again. Focusing on a strong finish to his academic year, graduation, and ordination remained.

  May provided a brief open window for Eric to trek to Galashiels and meet the Sandersons. Stuart and Bina were a unique couple. Married in 1914, they had become acquainted with Rev. Frank Buchman a decade later. Buchman’s message had a major influence on them in how they practiced their faith, made decisions, and lived their life together.

  Loudon Hamilton described them as “true pioneers” of the Oxford Group, and Stuart’s own minister said, “If only every minister in Galashiels had an Elder like Stuart Sanderson, it would make a mighty difference to the churches in this town.”[50]

  Stuart and Bina were fiercely capitalistic business-minded Christians who ran a tweed mill. They were comfortable swimming upstream against popular culture and conventional wisdom. During difficult financial times, and even though it meant great personal financial loss, they chose to sell their large house and car. They simply valued their talented staff more. They moved into a cottage and humbly kept about their business.