Victorious Living. E. Stanley Jones
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
Author’s Introduction
Author’s Introduction
Three years ago the Inner Urge came to me to write on Victorious Living. The Voice seemed to sum up what through years of dealing with inquirers has become to me a pressing fact, namely, that the most urgent necessity in human living is to be able to face life victoriously. For many—the number is appalling—are living morally and spiritually defeated. They are inwardly beaten, hence outwardly ineffective. They do not know how to live and to live victoriously. They lack resources. This book is addressed to that need.
I have tried to combine the individual and the social emphases in a living blend, with a devotional spirit running through all. The socially minded must be patient if I seem in the beginning to stress overmuch the personal emphasis. I think we should begin just there. But we must not end there. The end is the sum total of human relationships.
In the structure of the book I have tried to meet three needs: (1) A book of daily devotions for personal, group, and family devotions. Instead of making it, as usual in devotional books, a book of scattered thoughts, changing from day to day, I have woven the devotions around one theme, Victorious Living. (2) I have gathered these daily studies into groups of seven, so that the book can be used as a weekly study book by classes of various kinds. (3) I have tried to put the subject matter into such a continuous whole that it may be read through as an ordinary book.
I have begun at the lowest rung of the ladder, and have tried to go step by step to the full implications of victorious living. Mature souls must be patient with the first steps, remembering that many are not able to live a victorious life because they do not know how to link up with God’s power. I have tried to make the first steps very clear. In doing so I have endeavored to answer this letter:
I am an average young American mother. I have two very small children. I have read your last book, Christ’s Alternative to Communism. It is great, soul-stirring, ringing with truth, but it leaves me with a terrific thirst—how do you get it? You advised a bored young woman to “Try Christ, and I give you my word of honor that it will work to the degree you work it.” But how? Where to start? Then again in chapter eleven: “Today so far as I am concerned this program begins”—and, still, how? How to achieve a life evidencing the peace that passes understanding, even in myself, let alone passing it on? How does the kingdom of God start within my unruly, discontented, selfish, ungrateful, impatient, and sullen self, before I can begin to spread it? Your books (I have read several) paint a glorious picture of living life—but you forgot to tell us what brushes and colors to use, and how. I believe there must be thousands like me. Won’t you write a book about “Christ and the Kingdom Within”?
I am sure that the writer of this letter represents many, and I have written for them as well as for the mature Christian. I mentioned in my last book that I had received a request signed by many prominent Christians of America asking me to write a book on the “Inner Life.” I trust that this book fulfills that request—a request that I deeply appreciated. But, as the reader will see, it goes beyond it, for all life is one, the inner and the outer being indissoluble.
The book was written during a three-month retreat in the Himalayas, the mornings being spent in writing and the afternoons and evenings in going through a course of reading—the only vacation, if it can be called one—that I have had for some years. It was the cold season, and these hills were deserted at that time, so that my only companions were an Indian secretary and the wild animals that roamed the estate—the deer, the panther, the tiger, and the wild pig. At noon, after a morning of writing, I would take a walk through these lovely mountain paths to clear my brain, only to return to find that my faithful secretary, who was unused to the mountains, had been spending anxious moments of prayer for me until I got back safely! It was the unknown to him—to me it was the beloved known. Perhaps many of my friends across the seas will share that same anxiety and will be in anxious prayer as we penetrate from the known personal to the jungle of social relationships, and will wonder if we should not stick to the beaten paths of personal religion. But this jungle of social relations must be Christianized, for Christ must claim all life.
At the close of the retreat I had the unspeakable privilege of presenting the manuscript, during May and June, to the Sat Tal Ashram Group, made up of many nationalities, and of receiving their criticisms and suggestions.
Many