Chariots of Fire; Shantung Compound; Abuse and Healing

It was in January 1982. At this time I was in seminary doing doctoral work in Dallas, we had two young boys and Kay was pregnant with our third son.  I started hearing about a new movie that I had to go see. This struck me as strange in a couple of ways. First I was getting this recommendation from other Christians and from church as well as from classmates. Why was the strange? 28 years ago in Dallas the Christian community was still very very conservative and generally looked at film from a very skeptical perspective. At that time Evangelicalism was still just emerging from the culture denying attitudes of fundamentalism. Why were Christians who were generally averse to films recommending this movie? The movie itself had a strange name, Chariots of Fire. As I heard the title what came to mind were visions out of Ezekiel's prophecies. But the movie was supposed to have some kind of a Christian theme about it. As I dug deeper I learned that one of the main characters was named Eric Liddell, a young Christian Scotsman who had competed in the 1924 Olympics in Paris and had in fact won a gold medal.

Needless to say Kay and I went to see the movie. It was truly inspiring. I have seen it several times since the initial screening and never cease to be amazed by the depth of character and the courage displayed by Eric Liddell. For those of you who don't remember (or are maybe too young to remember), the movie opens at the funeral of one of the major characters, Harold Abrahams and then the story is told in flashback. At the end of the film we see the credits of what it was that Harold Abrahams accomplished during his life. His accomplishments were impressive particularly in light of the fact that he was Jewish in a very Anglican University. After listing Abrahams impressive accomplishments the next screen informed us that Eric Liddell and become a missionary to China where he died in a Japanese internment camp in 1945. His epitaph was "all Scotland mourned."

Several years later in my first year of teaching at Simpson College in San Francisco, I was using Millard Erickson's Christian Theology as my major textbook. In the chapter on the nature of sin Ericsson quoted at length from the book Shantung Compound written by Langdon Gilkey. I was so impressed by the quotes that Erickson lifted from Gilkey's work that I bought the book and read it. The book is the true story of Gilkey's experience in a Japanese internment camp in China during World War II.  Gilkey was at that time a young liberal optimistic professor of English who had recently graduated from Harvard University with a degree in philosophy. Gilkey tells us that he viewed the internment at the Shantung (Weihsien) Compound as a grand experiment.

 During the war he and the other expatriates in China were rounded up and placed into an internment camp. Although told that the camp would provide every comfort of Western culture he soon discovered that the only thing Western about it was that it was located on a former Presbyterian mission compound. In this small compound, about the size of one city block were housed several thousand Westerners. These were by and large the best of society, Americans, Brits, Australians, businessmen, diplomats, educators, professionals (bankers, lawyers, doctors) as well as monks and missionaries (and hookers).

As I said he viewed this as a grand experiment because the people were by and large good people. They were educated. They were religious. They were moral. They represented the best of society. As an optimistic young liberal Gilkey saw this as an opportunity to create the ideal society. The book is about Gilkey's education in human nature. What is so fascinating is that by the end of the book we see that his optimism is gone. Simply his own experience brought him to something close to an orthodox understanding of original sin. This was not because of cruelty from the Japanese captors. Unlike the Japanese prison camps where soldiers were starved, tortured and worked to death, in the internment camp four Japanese merely guarded the walls and left the internal administration of the camp to its inhabitants.

What he observed was the interaction of the “good” people in the camp.  Particularly sobering for me is that Christian missionaries do not come off well. As a group they were aloof and self-righteous. They came up with pious sounding rationale for their self-serving behavior. They would not associate with the “sinners,” lest they be polluted. The two significant exceptions were the Salvation Army missionaries and the Jesuits.  The Salvation Army people were dedicated to service, including doing all the dirty jobs, such as cleaning latrines, that no one else would touch. The Jesuits receive special mention because of their ability to mix freely with the “sinners” and not be affected by the sin.

About two thirds of the way through the book Gilkey describes the work of a younger missionary from Scotland who took it upon himself to organize and minister to the young people of the camp. The teenagers had nothing to do and as teenagers will, were getting into trouble. He had a tremendous effect on the morale of the high schoolers. But to everyone's dismay he was struck down and died suddenly of a brain aneurysm. That man was Eric Liddell.

All this has been brought back to my attention this past week. I have taken the forgiveness class (Freedom to Love Again [freedomtolove.info]) that I wrote last summer for EduPlex Ministries and have repackaged it as a seminar. For the past three Sunday evenings I have given this seminar at a small Baptist church in the Bay Area.

This past week as I was wrapping up the three-week series an elderly gentleman (whom I will call Frank)  who had been there every week (and with whom I have had an acquaintance for about 10 years), was taking issue with the whole idea that we can find a measure of spiritual emotional healing by forgiving those who have injured us. He insisted that there is no real healing this side of heaven. Frank is a man who has been a pastor for much of his adult life and is now retired. He insisted that the only way that we can see any meaning to suffering is to view it as a result of the sovereignty of God. He also is quite resistant to the current emphasis among contemporary theologians on God's love, mercy and forgiveness.

Last Sunday night all pieces fell together. I discovered that as a child, Frank was an MK (missionary kid) who grew up in China. His parents sent him away to mission boarding school when he was four or five years old. He shared with me that at that school he was beaten with canes every day and, in his own words, "that wasn't the half of it." He went on to tell me that he had been one of the internees in the Shantung (Weihsien) compound. He insisted that the fact that he was removed from the missionary school to the compound was his salvation from the hell of torture that he underwent daily at the school. He said that all his life he has borne the emotional scars of the abuse he suffered at the hands of the Christian school authorities. He survived by stuffing his emotions and memories deep into his subconscious. But in recent months the events have come back to haunt him again and again and again.

Tragically the only avenue he had for survival was holding onto the fact that God is sovereign and righteous and he repays those who do evil. He grew up in an era when it was not permissible to open his heart to anyone. Because of this he remains spiritually and emotionally in great pain to this day.

In the mid-1980s when I was first teaching at Simpson College there was a great controversy in the Christian and Missionary Alliance (of which Simpson College [now University] is a part) about requiring that children of C&MA missionaries be separated from their parents and sent to boarding schools. Paul Young (author of The Shack) was one of those C&MA MKs (missionary kids) who was sent away to boarding school and there, suffered years of abuse. Recently the C&MA has concluded an investigation of conditions in the schools to which the MKs had been sent and they offered a formal apology for the abuse that they had been forced to endure.  Lest you think I am singling out one group here, this same dynamic has been repeated in other mission schools where children of missionaries from various different agencies were sent because conditions (not necessarily mission board policy) did not allow the parents to oversee the education of their own children.  One of my high school friends, the son of Overseas Crusade missionaries in South America, was sent to a mission school. There he too suffered abuse.  He never recovered from the pain; he became a drug addict and died in his early 40s.  

Abuse unaddressed, whether it be emotional, spiritual, physical or sexual, leaves lifelong wounds (I will not call it scars, because scars imply healing of some sort).  Despite Frank’s protestations that there is no healing this side of heaven, and that all such talk is just psychobabble, my experience of seeing and working with  abuse victims up close and personal over the past fifteen years tells a different story.  I know that substantial healing can take place.  I have watched victims of sexual abuse move from a place of being totally consumed by the pain, to a place where they are again functional human beings who are no longer bleeding emotionally, but have come through a healing process and have seen God work in marvelous ways in restoring them to spiritual and emotional health.

Unfortunately, the healing has usually come apart from a church context.  Both Philip Yancey as well as Henry Cloud and John Townsend have made the sobering but profound observation concerning alcoholics:  in AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) people look worse but get better, whereas in the church people tend to look better, but get worse.

Is the church missing something important here?  I for one think so.