The Scandal of Grace: Learning from John Ruskin

John Ruskin, the highly influential British writer, art critic, and social thinker in the last half of the 19^th century, died 120 years ago today (on January 20, 1900) at the age of 81. His most important literary work highlighted what has been called “the scandal of grace.”

Bumping into Ruskin

When I read the Summer 2019 issue of Plough Quarterly, I was impressed with the article titled “Comrade Ruskin: How a Victorian visionary can save communism from Marx” by Eugene McCarraher, a professor at Villanova University.

(McCarraher’s 800-page book The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity was published last November, and he makes numerous references to Ruskin.)

And then late last year I was reading Gandhi’s An Autobiography: Or, The Story of My Experiments with Truth (originally published in 1925~29). I was surprised when I read of his reading Ruskin’s Unto This Last, calling it a book that “was impossible to lay aside, once I had begun it.”

After he read Ruskin’s book, Gandhi decided to change his own life according to Ruskin’s teaching. Among other things, he established “a farm where everybody would get the same salary, without distinction of function, race, or nationality.”

Indeed, Ruskin's influence reached across the world. Tolstoy described him as “one of the most remarkable men not only of England and of our generation, but of all countries and times" and quoted extensively from him.

Also, as the Plough article states, “Echoes of Ruskin’s thought reappeared in the 1960s and 1970s” in the work of economists such as E.F. Schumacher.

Learning from Ruskin

Ruskin considered Unto This Last (1862) his most important work. The title of that brief book, which can be read here on Wikisource, comes from Matthew 20:14, toward the end of Jesus’ parable about the laborers in the vineyard.

Jesus’ parable is called “the scandal of grace” by Warner D’Souza, a Catholic priest in India who in 2017 posted (here) an article on Rembrandt’s 1637 painting titled “Labourers in the Vineyard.”  

One contemporary scholar endeavoring to help people learn more about and from Ruskin is Jim Spates, an emeritus professor at a small liberal arts college in New York. He maintains a blog titled Why Ruskin? which is “dedicated to making known Ruskin’s continuing importance to the troubled world in which we live.”

Spates’s 169^th posting, “Unto this Last: The Power of a Parable” was made this month on January 7. It is partly a retelling in contemporary language of Jesus’ parable recorded in Matthew 20. (Unfortunately, Spates used penny as the paraphrase for denarius, which in Jesus’ day was the wage for a day’s work by an ordinary laborer.)

Implementing Ruskin’s Teachings?

While recommended more perhaps by Gandhi (and Jesus!) than by Ruskin, there are some contemporary economists and politicians who are proposing a “universal basic income.” (Here is the link to an explanatory article about that from June 2019).

This sort of economic structure was proposed by MLK, Jr., who is being celebrated by a federal holiday today. In his 1967 book Where Do We Go from Here? King wrote,

I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective—the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.

While the idea of a universal basic, or guaranteed, income may seem offensive to some, it is not only in keeping with the writing of John Ruskin and the example of Gandhi but also consistent with Jesus’ parable about “the scandal of grace.”

In closing, let me share these words from Ruskin’s Unto This Last:

There is no Wealth but Life. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings.

A Remarkable Man, a Remarkable Church: Howard Thurman and Fellowship Church

Howard Thurman was a remarkable man and 75 years ago he founded a remarkable church. This article is about him, the church he founded, and a remarkable co-pastor of that church today.  

The Remarkable Howard Thurman

Howard Washington Thurman was born in Florida 120 years ago this month, on November 18, 1899 (although some sources say he was born in 1900) and died in 1981. Ordained as a Baptist minister in 1925, he has been characterized as “a spiritual genius who mentored MLK, Jr., and carried Gandhi’s teaching to America.”

Thurman was a part of a Student Christian Movement-sponsored four-person “Pilgrimage of Friendship” to South Asia in 1935-36. That experience, including personal conversations with Gandhi, influenced Thurman greatly—and later reverberated throughout the civil rights movement in the U.S.

In 1953, Thurman became the Dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University (BU), the first African American to hold such a position at a majority-white university. At that time, MLK, Jr., was a graduate student at BU.

According to BU’s alumni magazine (see here), “King not only attended sermons [at Marsh Chapel] but also turned to Thurman as his mentor and spiritual advisor. Among the lessons that inspired him most were Thurman’s accounts of a visit to Mohandas Gandhi in India years earlier.”

So much more needs to be said about Thurman, but for additional information I highly recommend the superlative February 2019 PBS documentary “Backs to the Wall: The Howard Thurman Story.”

So much more needs to be said about Thurman, but for additional information I highly recommend the superlative February 2019 PBS documentary “Backs to the Wall: The Howard Thurman Story.”

The Remarkable “Fellowship Church”

In the fall of 1943, Alfred G. Fisk, a Presbyterian clergyman, had the vision of starting a church that would welcome people of all races and creeds. Thurman, who had served as Dean of the Howard University Chapel since 1932, was asked to recommend a young black minister who might be interested in helping start such a church.

Thurman decided to volunteer himself and requested a year’s leave of absence from Howard beginning July 1, 1944. Thus, Thurman was the main one responsible for starting a new church in San Francisco with a remarkable name: The Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples. For short, it is often just called Fellowship Church.

On October 8 of that year, Fellowship Church held its first public meeting—and last month it celebrated its 75^th Jubilee Anniversary.

Fellowship Church was unmistakably based on the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. Along with that basic affirmation, though, the second of the three-paragraph “commitment” agreed to by Fellowship Church members says,

I desire to share in the spiritual growth and ethical awareness of men and women of varied national, cultural, racial, and credal heritage united in a religious fellowship.

In 1959, Thurman wrote a book titled Footprints of a Dream: The Story of The Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples (reissued 2009). I finished reading it last week, and it was a fascinating read.

The Remarkable Current Co-pastor of Fellowship Church

Since 1994, Dr. Dorsey O. Blake has been co-pastor of Fellowship Church. (Currently, the other co-pastor is a white woman.) This past June, I had the opportunity of hearing/meeting Dr. Blake, for he was the speaker at the local Juneteenth banquet.   

Dr. Blake was born in 1946, and before he was a year old his father became pastor of First Baptist Church here in Liberty, a predominantly African American church from its beginning until the present. His first six years in school were at the segregated Garrison School in Liberty, established for Black students in 1877.

Fellowship Church in San Francisco, literally seeking to be a place of fellowship for all peoples, continues to thrive under the leadership of a remarkable man whose early life was spent as a Baptist PK (preacher’s kid) in the small town of Liberty, Missouri.

More about Newbigin

The posting on Feb. 1 was “In Praise of Lesslie Newbigin,” but there is much more I would like to share about this British missionary who spent nearly forty years in India. At this time I will just share two or three quotes about Newbigin’s ideas on secularization and social change in India.

In Honest Religion for Secular Man (1966), Newbigin writes about how Indian society has changed, largely for the better, through the process of secularization. He gives these examples: “the abolition of untouchability, of the dowry system, of temple prostitution, the spread of education and medical service, and so on” (p. 17). And he contends that secularization, which must be clearly distinguished from secularism, has roots in the Judeo-Christian faith.

Along with Harvey Cox (The Secular City, 1965), Newbigin sees secularization as being rooted in what both he and Cox refers to as the desacralizing or desacralization of nature. “The freedom to make revolutionary changes . . . came along with liberation from bondage to the sacral powers presiding over the natural world” (p. 33). The Old Testament clearly presents a worldview based on history rather than on nature, and that worldview is partly responsible for the rise of secularization.

In two previous posts, I wrote about the difference between cyclical and linear worldviews. Similarly, in Honest Religion Newbigin says that in India the traditional religious view is a “cyclical, non-historic, way of thinking” that seeks an escape from history. Such views are challenged by “the idea of God’s acts in fulfillment of his purpose—in other words, by a linear way of thinking about the world of change” (p. 50).

In direct connection with that assertion, Newbigin wrote in The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (1989), “For centuries Orthodox Hindus believed that the miserable condition of the outcastes or untouchable communities was the result of the sins of their previous birth [karma] and that it was therefore part of the cosmic order not to be interfered with. By common consent the preaching of missionaries among these communities was one of the major factors, if not the decisive factor, in bringing about the change of view which has led to legislation . . . to give them justice” (pp. 158-9).

It is widely known, of course, that many of the social changes in twentieth-century India were because of the work of Gandhi, a man for whom I have long held great admiration. It also has to be recognized that Gandhi was, and remained, a Hindu. But there is ample reason to believe that most of what he accomplished in terms of social justice for the people of India was in spite of his Hindu faith rather than because of it.