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
