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Foreword

Foreword

So Much the Better

I used to play racquetball three times a week. My favorite T-shirt bore these words: “The older I get, the better I was.” Aging is mostly another way of talking about “so much the worse.” For some special individuals, however, the more time passes “so much the better.” E. Stanley Jones is one of those few historical figures whose life and writings seem to get better—-more rewarding, more relevant, more magical—the more time passes.

E. Stanley Jones (1884–1973) was a Methodist missionary most known for indigenizing Christian faith in Hindu culture. A preacher, evangelist, and best-selling author who gave away all his royalties, Jones was a prolific writer and speaker who preached more than sixty thousand sermons, twenty thousand more than John Wesley himself. Jones was also an early human rights advocate both in India and in the USA.

Jones went to India in 1907 as a missionary when just twenty-three years old, and stayed there for fifty years. Very early in his career, Jones urged Indian Christians to remain within their culture. He was convinced that Christianity could be truly indigenous in every culture. For example, we translate “Logos” as “Word,” as in John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God” (emphasis added). But God doesn’t think in “words.” God’s original “word” for dirt is the dirt. God’s original “word” for flower is the flower. God’s original word for “water” is the water. God’s original “word” for wind is the wind.

God’s original “word” for Truth is Jesus. In Jones’s theology, God speaks the language of incarnation. Since there are no words outside of languages, if God spoke in “words,” what language does God speak? God speaks the language of love, the language each of us hears. And the mission of Jesus, helped by the missionary, is to speak Jesus in every language of the world.

The foundation of faith, Jones believed, was not the superiority of Christianity but the supremacy of Christ. When you think of E. Stanley Jones you think of one thing: Jesus. Jones didn’t talk or write about Christianity or about being a Christian. He was all about Jesus, or what he called the “treasure” of Jesus. The kingdom of God is not a geographic domain with set boundaries and settled decrees, but a set of relationships in which Christ is Sovereign.

In Jones’s theology, what made paradise paradise was not pearly gates or golden pavement. Not crystal fountains or jasper walls. Not endless buffets or perpetual Bible studies. Jesus makes paradise “paradise.” Jesus’ paradise calls all of us not to “settle down” in our dwellings or our religious systems or our routines, but to “settle in” to a new paradigm of living. In fact, Jesus leaves us more unsettled than settled, and Jones left his contemporaries unsettled with his non-goring of sacred cows. E. Stanley Jones’s Jesus takes us where we’ve never been, by paths we’d never take, even as he calls us to go further.

While Jesus is the head of the church, Jones insisted that he is not the church’s private property nor can he be held hostage by it. Jesus belongs to the world. Jones presented Jesus as a universal Christ, belonging to all cultures and races and the answer to all human need. In his first book, The Christ of the Indian Road (1925), Jones made this point clear with a threefold approach for the embodiment of Jesus in all cultures.

First, E. Stanley Jones held his lectures (not sermons) in public halls, a neutral ground for non-Christians. After a lecture he would reserve the next two hours for interactions with the audience, and would answer any question anyone chose to pose.

Second, Jones sponsored Round-Table Conferences at which he positioned himself as a learner and receiver, willing to be changed and open to conversion himself. At these Round-Table conversations, representatives of different faiths, including agnostics and atheists, would be invited to share what their faith or lack thereof meant to them in experience. “Tell us all what you have found through your faith,” Jones would sincerely ask. “What does it do for you in your everyday life?”

Third, Jones believed that each culture must write a fifth gospel—“the gospel according to. . . .” He symbolized the incarnation of faith in indigenous culture by taking a Sanskrit word and baptizing it for religious purposes. In Sanskrit, for example, Ashram means a place of withdrawal from the everyday world of work, or it can mean a place of intensified experience, including the most intense “experience” of all—PRAYER. In every Jones Ashram, Jesus became the guru or teacher.

E. Stanley Jones’s life and service in India brought him into contact, and ultimately into a close friendship, with Mahatma Gandhi. As Gandhi worked out his own version and vision of protest—both against the British rulers of his country and the divisive caste system of his own countrymen—Jones offered Gandhi the example of Jesus as a possible model to follow. Jones suggested to Gandhi that the gospel of the kingdom defined options of love and suffering as ways and means to the end of peace and justice. Gandhi is famous for his quotation “I would suggest, first, that all of you Christians . . . must begin to live more like Jesus Christ.” The quotation could just as easily have come from Jones himself, since he believed the same thing.

Mahatma Gandhi’s idiosyncratic fusion of slices of Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity proved a powerful beverage for the Indian people. But Gandhi founded much of his nonviolent resistance movement upon what he learned from his Methodist friend’s Jesus-centered messages. Gandhi took to heart the teachings that Jesus offered in his Sermon on the Mount, his parables of love and forgiveness, his morality of turning the other check, of loving one’s enemies. Satyagraha transformed and ultimately freed India from its oppressors and its own oppression.

Shortly after Gandhi’s assassination in 1947, Jones was asked by the Methodist Publishing House to write a book about his friendship and relationship with Gandhi. Reluctant at first, and after great hesitation, Jones finally produced his version of a biography that he called “an interpretation.” These were Jones’s firsthand reflections on the nonviolent yet confrontational campaigns of Gandhi and how Gandhi’s strategies in a Hindu culture reflected the teachings of Jesus.

Even though E. Stanley Jones was “the Billy Graham of his day,” as someone called him, or “the most important missionary force in Christian history since the Apostle Paul,” as another person celebrated him, Mahatma Gandhi: An Interpretation went over like a sack of stale bread. It bombed. Sales were nil, and the feedback was deafening in its silence. Jones felt that the publication was his least successful book, and its messages completely ignored. In 1948, messages about the civil rights of all individuals, regardless of race or class, were not exactly welcomed.

A few years later, a recent graduate of Crozier Theological School and a doctoral candidate at Boston University was looking up some references about Mahatma Gandhi and happened upon E. Stanley Jones’s unsung volume. As he read about Gandhi’s commitment to a nonviolent, yet noncompliant form of protest, this young pastor and civil rights leader found a basis for forming his own resistance to abuse and oppression. The book that Jones deemed his greatest failure was pulled from the stacks of a theological library and then had enthusiastically penned in its margins “THIS IS IT!” by a single student: Martin Luther King, Jr.

You can still see King’s marginal notation in the Martin Luther King Library in Atlanta, where the full handwritten sidebar reads: “This is it! This is the way to achieve freedom for the Negro in America.” The backstory of how one of Jones’s worst-selling and least-known books (Jones’s books sold 3.5 million copies and were translated into thirty languages) became the inspiration for the civil rights movement was revealed by King himself after a convocation where he was honored by Boston University just before leaving for Sweden to receive the 1964 Nobel Peace prize.

When King was introduced to Jones’s daughter Eunice Jones Mathews at a reception following the convocation, King immediately started touting the praises of E. Stanley Jones, but not for Jones’s nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize. “E. Stanley Jones was a very important person to me, for it was his book on Mahatma Gandhi that triggered my use of Gandhi’s method of nonviolence as a weapon for our own people’s freedom in the United States.”

King had been very familiar with Gandhi’s concept of Satyagraha and had studied Gandhi’s method of nonviolence for years. But it was not until he read Jones’s treatment of Gandhi did it click with him that nonviolence could be the primary vehicle for civil rights reform in the United States. Dr. King formed and formulated the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott and the nonviolent resistance model of the early civil rights movement in part by what he read in a “failed” book by an author who thought that no one was interested in what Gandhi had done in India thirty years earlier. The book Jones considered his biggest failure turned out to be one of his greatest successes, and its impact is still being felt today.

Jones found the Christian movement absorbed in the ding-dong of doctrinal debate and the ping-pong of denominational scuffling and shuffling. He left it focused on Christ.

Jones found a religion where the church was a collection of objects--rules, regulations, rituals, resolutions. He left it a communion of subjects—saints and sinners together around a common table.

Jones found evangelism a dirty word and an embarrassing presence. He left it an enchanted word and a compelling presence.

Jones found a church that was all about the harvest. Jones left it planting seeds, and seeing evangelism as “seedtime.” It’s a rare and special gift when seedtime and harvest are one season.

Jones found a gospel either social or personal. He left it a whole gospel, a total way of life.

Jones found a theology where the “human” was sinful and shameful. He left it where the “human” is what Jesus came to show us how to be.

Jones found the kingdom of God an inward and mystical concept. He left it as Christ’s alternative to all the isms, wasism, or ismisms of the world.

Jones found Christianity colonialist and westernized. He left it more localized and globalized.

Jones found a church where Jesus was little more than a cultural veneer, a lifestyle accessory at worst, a values choice at best. He left it where the name of Jesus is what made the church’s heart sing and its mind dance.

One of E. Stanley Jones’s granddaughters, Anne Mathews-Younes, likes to quote her grandfather’s ritual affirmation that it does not take much of a man or woman to be a Christian, but it takes all of them that there is: “It doesn’t matter how much you’ve got; it matters how much God’s got of you.” God had enough of E. Stanley Jones to change, not just the face but the very heart of humanity.

Leonard Sweet

Professor (Drew University, George Fox University)

Chief Contributor to sermons.com