Dwight Moody's Evangelism and Social Action: An Interview with Dr. Gregg Quiggle

The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm Dr. James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful, theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now, on to today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey, everybody, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I am joined today by Dr. Greg Quiggle. Greg and I have been friends for a long time now. He is actually a retired professor of D.L. Moody, professor of historical theology from the Moody Bible Institute and is really just scholar at large for the D.L. Moody Center. More importantly, he's the author of a new book that's being released on May 7th. It is available for pre-order right now on Amazon.com. And the title of that book is Bread and Bibles, D.L. Moody's Evangelism and Social Action. So, Greg, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here, man. Hey, thanks. Good to be here. Yeah, so tell us a little bit about the book. How did you come to this? Why is it an important topic? I came to this, well, short version. I started at Moody, what, 37 years ago now, and I really didn't know who Dwight Moody was. Interestingly, I got introduced to Dwight Moody through a class I was taking on social gospel. It was a Ph.D. seminar at Marquette University. Okay. And I wrote a paper on Mr. Moody, and it was pretty critical of his lack of social action because that was the standard scholarly fare on Moody. There was a book in 1972, The Great Reversal, by a guy named David Moberg, and he said Moody was critical in turning evangelicals away from social action to purely evangelism. So I wrote this paper, and, you know, I did what you do when you're a young scholar. You look for the sources that will reinforce that. So I presented the paper, and, you know, my professor, who happened to be a Roman Catholic American church historian, looked at me and he says, What's the name of the place you work at again? Moody Bible Institute? He said, Is there a Rauschenbusch Bible Institute anywhere? I went, No. And he said, Well, who's been running all these rescue missions and all these kinds of things all these years? And I went, Oh. He said, Well, maybe you ought to rethink this. So that started me down a long trail where I kept on running into, in sort of surveys of American religion, this mantra, Moody turned evangelicals away, yada, yada, yada. And the more I dug, the more I just went, Well, that's just baloney. And most of these one quote, Moody was speaking to a group of evangelists on Matthew 7, 33, Seek ye first the kingdom of God. And he made some comment like, I used to go to poor sinners with a loaf of bread in the Bible in the other, and I always gave him the bread first, but I learned they just wanted the bread and not the Bible. So now I reverse the order. That's a paraphrase. Yeah. Okay. This guy spoke to 100 million people. I can't even begin to tell you how many billions of sentences. So what we're going to do is take one sentence out of context because he's speaking to evangelists in the context of that verse and say, Well, this sums up his whole approach to this. That's absolutely baloney. And so I just began to dig and I got increasingly stunned at the breadth and the degree to which he was actively engaged in dealing with the social problems of his day. Yes. I don't think I've ever, and I don't remember hearing that whole story, so that's pretty fascinating that you actually started out on the other side of it. What do you think, like, why is it that people wanted to frame Moody like that? You know, I mean, I've done a little work on D.L. Moody myself here, and so a lot of times, you know, you see this with the social action, you definitely now see it with reconstruction and some of the things that he did, you know, after the Civil War, you know, and they tend to frame Moody as negatively influential on the social and political side of things. Is that an approach to history or is that, you know, a particular methodology that leads people down that path? Or is that something that you actually see in those records that would be feasible to trace? You know, obviously you're writing it in bread and Bibles that this doesn't seem to be feasibly the case. So, yeah, what is it about the methodology, do you think, or maybe the ideology behind it that sort of drives people to that conclusion? Well, here's an educated guess. I mean, the story that came out in the 1940s, and this would have been the early movement called then neo-evangelicalism, of which Billy Graham became the poster boy. They were critiquing fundamentalism. And so there's a guy who was, oh, I've lost his name. He was the second president at Fuller. Struggled with mental health. Carnell, E.J. Carnell. E.J. Carnell. Okay. And he wrote a book. There was a series, you know, The Case for the Modernist Faith, The Case for, and he wrote a book called The Case for the Orthodox Faith, which you would have thought would have been mostly going after liberalism and neo-orthodoxy. But he spent a good part of the book going after fundamentalism. And their whole thing was the fundamentalists withdrew from culture. They abandoned the universities, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Now, that is on one level true. Right. And it is absolutely true that Moody did not engage in political conversations or very little on structural conversations. But that doesn't mean that he didn't actively engage to solve what he saw as the problem. So I think this got overlaid and they were looking for who can we lay this at whose doorstep. Oh, Moody was the guy. So, look, I found where he said I should give Bibles instead of bread. Yep, there's your answer. And it's interesting. I mean, you know, because you think about who else they could have picked, right, in sort of Moody's era. But Moody would almost seem like a prime candidate because he wasn't well-educated, you know, formally. You know, even though he started sort of Bible institutes and those kind of things, I doubt they were viewed as being of sufficient academic rigor, especially after, you know, in the 1940s. And then you have some of these quotes and different things that he did that would sort of lend themselves to framing him in this way. But you really do have to omit a whole lot of what he did in order to see it actually like that, you know. Oh, yeah. And that, again, I think he gets clouded in the modernist fundamentalist debate in the 20s because what happens is, well, let me frame it this way, James. I talk about Moody and I put him in a way that I think about American presidents. So the founding father is George Washington, and then who is it that redefines the country? Well, it's Abraham Lincoln. So if we were to do the same thing with evangelicalism, revivalist evangelicalism, it's George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, and the Wesleys. They're Washington. Dwight Moody is Abraham Lincoln. Dwight Moody is the guy that sets the agenda. So I think most of evangelicalism is much more influenced by Dwight Moody than Edwards and Whitefield. I just think that's the way it went. So that being the case, when the modernist fundamentalist debate breaks out in the 20s, 30s, it had been going on before then, but it gets really wild then. Then the question is, who gets Moody? Everybody wants Moody on their side. Who gets Moody? And so the modernist magazine, The Christian Century, did a whole series where in the 20s where they're talking about how Moody Bible Institute had misrepresented who Moody was and turned him into a fundamentalist. Well, of course, they're misrepresenting who Moody was and then turning him into a moderate, you know. So it's that same old thing.

It's like, who gets Augustine, the Catholics or the Protestants? And so everybody wants this guy, and he gets blended in all that, buried in that, and so, you know, we'll probably talk about it later, but he's got these educational institutions. He's got two in Northfield, Massachusetts. He's got one in Chicago. So if you go to Chicago, Moody is a fundamentalist evangelist. If you go to the schools in North, a cutting-edge guy in education who's concerned about poor kids. Neither one of them presents what I think is a complete picture. They've taken the part that ties to their mission and portrayed him that way. So do you think he was particularly susceptible to this? Because, you know, as I think about it, you know, okay, who gets Mr. Moody, right? But you read through his work. You read many of his works that we're familiar with, something like Overcoming Life or, you know, some of these compiled books of sermons are actually just sermons. They're just talks that he gave that are rewritten down. It seems evident to me that he had help writing Prevailing Prayer, What Hinders It, Secret Power, you know, those kind of things. His thought as a scholarly corpus, let's say, has not been particularly influential, right? I mean, you could look at, like, A.W. Tozer or C.S. Lewis or even Spurgeon and say, you know, they've had a more codified thought process within their printed works, right, that have been more influential and continue to be sort of studied and looked at overall. Moody wasn't really viewed like that. So when they're arguing over Moody, are they arguing over his thought or are they arguing over his style and persona? Or is it a little of both? It's a little of both. So here's why Moody makes it confusing. He is the father or the Abraham Lincoln in this sense. He is doggedly, doggedly interdenominational. I don't want to call him non-denominational because he didn't have a problem with denominations, but he absolutely hated it when denominations emphasized their distinctives to the disadvantage of the broader work of evangelism and discipleship. So, you know, the Presbyterian says, I can't work with Methodists. He's an Arminian. And so what happens is the city doesn't get evangelized. He hates that. So there is a blurring of denominational distinctions that are functions of his ministry. And we certainly see that. We see where that went with evangelicalism. I mean, he's the guy that starts this. Now, is that what he wanted? No, but that's how it goes. Once the rock goes down the hill, ain't nobody stopping it. So you've got that going on. The other thing is he is deliberately at times ambiguous because he wants as broad an audience as possible. And because he is so admired during his lifetime, guys that are going to turn on each other like crazy the moment. 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He dies are working together while he's alive. And you probably heard the story, James, you know, the North Bible conferences and you look at the roster of speakers and you're going, how in the world? Because you've got prominent liberals and you've got prominent fundamentalists and they're speaking at the same conference. And there's a story that comes out. I think it was Washington Glad and the social gospel guy told it and a fundamentalist was mad at a modernist guy. And he went to Mr. Moody complain. And so Moody brings him into his study and listens to them both. And then says, Okay, we're going to pray. Dear God, help our liberal friend in his biblical studies. These are very important. And dear Lord, give our fundamentalist friend more love. Amen. And that's it. And so what does he believe? You can see how that naturally comes out. Now, if you read the sermons and stuff carefully, he's clearly very conservative. But he doesn't want to create unnecessary boundaries as he sees it in his mind. Yeah, so he opens himself up to that ambiguity in a lot of ways. And then afterwards, when his persona maybe wasn't there to sort of hold these people together and toe the line so that he can't, he can be shoved and pulled wherever he wants. And this creates then a fissure because Arguably, I mean, labeling Moody as a fundamentalist. Sure, conservative, I get. Fundamentalist in the sense that he was very much committed to biblical teaching and what the Bible said. I think you could frame him as a fundamentalist, but I don't know that that was the critique that was really given of fundamentalism at that point. Right. Like that may have been a component of it, but it wasn't the full thing. And so there are aspects of Moody in that. But definitely you see he would have resonated with a liberal audience because of the social action that he's taking on. Like he really saw the Bible needed to be worked out in society. And he also didn't, he didn't push what he pushed was still safe for both sides, to some extent. So you can see exactly what's going to happen. 20 years after he's dead, the left side is going to say, well, see, he was tolerant and he accepted people and blah, blah, blah. And the right side is going to say, look, he defended the Bible. The Bible is true. He taught the old fashioned gospel. And so, I mean, you can find both elements in there. So maybe a way to put it is Moody is a fundamentalist theologically, but kind of socially and culturally more of a modernist. Yeah. And it's really interesting. I mean, you know, we read it back through this history. Right. And so we're making these finer distinctions. But, you know, it's almost like the reality is that because he is reading the Bible fairly, what we might phrase as literally. Right. And I know that's a loaded term. But because he's reading it in that way and because he's trying to live it out so well, he is open to all these other people. He's trying not to offend with anything but the gospel. Right. Like he's out there serving his fellow man because that's what God tells us to do. And so there's this weird sense in which we've divided what he didn't and created a problem where he didn't have one. Now, that isn't to say his life was without tensions. I realized he had a lot of issues there, but there was something as I read back through his stuff and look at his life and all that. There is an odd purity about what he did. There is. It's a very simple. And you can see the through line in almost everything that he did. It's sort of fascinating to look at. Yeah. And, you know, would he have been able to maintain that had he lived another 15 years? Because the reality was these two sides were getting further and further apart. And there's a level of naivete both on Moody's side and ironically, among some of the, I mean, William Rainey Harper was not stupid. Okay. He's a leading biblical liberal scholar. He's writing letters in the 1890s to Dwight Moody asking Mr. Moody to come down to the University of Chicago to lead revivals among the students there. Now this is a liberal seminary. And he says in the letter things like, people say you and I disagree, but we know that's not true. Come on. I mean, they.

You know, but the flip side to that is, the modernists want to hold that pietistic strain that is so deeply wound in a guy like Moody. And, you know, and Moody, you know the other story, James, about he'd sit and listen to these guys preach, sit in the front row, and they'd be preaching, and he'd say out loud, oh, there goes that sermon, you know, because they would actually cheat the text, and he would say, oh, you know, there's another one gone because they were telling him the text didn't mean what he thought it meant. So, and some of these guys are higher scholars. It's really an interesting thing. Well, where do you see, you know, obviously you've written this book, so you would say, and maybe just a quick summary before we dig into the details, you would say that Moody is both involved in evangelism and in social action, and that these two really do, in his mind, converge in some very real way. That there's not a way for you to proclaim the gospel in just word. It also has to be proclaimed in deed. And so, dig down into the details of that a little bit, Greg. Like, where do you really see this coming out in D.L. Moody? How did he really think about this? Okay, so, you know, here's the stunning thing. He only cared about evangelism. Oh, really? He started five schools. Only one of those schools, well, two, were designed primarily for training Christian workers. The one he started was for poor girls because he was concerned that poor girls would not get an opportunity to get an education. Now, was it Christian? Of course it was. But his goal wasn't to create a generation of women Christian workers. He hoped some of them would be, but he was preparing them to some extent to go to Wellesley, which is, you know, upscale now. But, so, that. Then you've got his involvement in the temperance movement. Then you've got story after story after story after story of, oh, it's the Civil War. People need jobs. Okay. You know, Moody Church, what are we going to do? Let's start an employment center right after the fire. What does Moody Church do? Sets up a place to provide food for people. You can go on and on with this stuff. Or, he's involved in orphanages. He's involved in providing good meals. He's involved in providing homes for girls that had gotten involved in prostitution in cities. I mean, just over and over and over again, he does this where he comes in, he sees a problem, and he starts something to deal with it. Yeah. And so, I've seen, you know, there's been a lot of conversation about this. I didn't actually know about the orphanage work. Was that overseas? Yeah, mostly in Scotland, if I'm remembering correctly. But there are probably, I'm trying to remember David Bevington, who was one of my examiners, has done a lot of work. And he lists the numbers of ministries that are directly traceable to Moody's work in Scotland or England and how they are. He set up a place for men to get lunches other than a pub because he was concerned about the degree of alcoholism. And so, okay, where else can they get food? And he'd set up those things. So, yeah, there's a whole list of these things that, again, almost very little work has been done on, at least popularly, that gets out into the populace, about what he actually did. And do you see, so, like, one of the things that I think we see today, again, you know, thinking through that sort of division is that I think there's a lot of, there are many Christians who would just engage in humanitarian work. And then, you know, some of the concern would be, well, is the gospel being preached through that humanitarian work or are we really just hoping that people will see Christ's light shining through us as we're serving and then come to Jesus somehow? My question is, you know, in Moody's time, would that have just sort of been in the ether? So, in other words, people would have known, like, similar to what the YMCA was back then versus what it is now, that it was an explicitly Christian organization and that these social efforts had sort of that gospel vibe almost built into every one of them. Is that more the case or is it more like what we have today where, you know, there are these humanitarian organizations and sometimes you have to work to find Jesus? You would never have to work to find Jesus in anything Dwight Moody did. Now, the degree to which he is front and center probably varies some. Probably the best modern illustration would be rescue missions. You know, nobody who goes to get a meal at a rescue mission is going to walk away without knowing that they're Christians. And so, that's, I think, I'm not going to argue Moody did it exactly that way, but I think that's the ethos that he's trying to get at. Yeah, I mean, I think that's important just because, again, you know, it's one thing to say he's involved in this social action, but if we're thinking through that sort of grid of the 1940s where people are trying to own D.L. Moody, what we have to understand is when we're looking at some sort of social action today, it's probably very different than what they were doing back then, right? There's even a difference between something like a Christian liberal arts college, let's say, that, you know, maybe brings students in and they learn all these different disciplines and it really is about upward social mobility and Christ on some level, right, versus what D.L. Moody did in Northfield. I mean, if you look at that Northfield handbook there, the Bible is the central textbook in everything that they do. Like, there was a big emphasis on the scriptures and that was part of their learning activities. Like, you can see some of those things historically, which is just different than what we know today. And what makes that interesting is upward mobility was part of the agenda there. He never divorced that from intense commitment to scripture. Now, some of that you can explain as the culture was much more open to Christianity than it is now. But there was an ethos in Moody about, don't ever give bread without a Bible. You know, he would say that, but he wouldn't say, don't, you know, just give them a Bible. Right, only give the Bible, never give bread kind of vibe. It's always the two together. You know, you can't separate the two. And, you know, why did he believe that? Because he read the Bible. I mean, when you read the Bible, what are we supposed to do? Well, the last time I checked, what is pure and undefiled religion? Widows, orphans, people in prison. Okay. And also, how shall they hear without a preacher? So, you know, he read these. He's a flatliner in that sense. He says, what am I supposed to be doing? Well, I'm supposed to share the gospel and I'm supposed to take care of people around me who are in need. Oh, okay, I'll do that. Did he ever do anything, you know, I mean, as we're talking, what passage comes to my mind is John 6, right? Where all these people are following Jesus. Jesus feeds them. They keep coming back. And he's like, you're just here for the food. Let me tell you what this is really all about. And then he says, you know, you're going to have to eat my flesh and drink my blood. And many disciples left him that day, right? That's kind of the flow of that text. Does Moody ever deal with that? Because it just seems to me like that's such a, it's such an interesting passage where you sit back and you look at Moody's ministry and you go, this is kind of what he was doing. And that's kind of what he's critiquing is, listen, let's make sure that these people aren't just coming back for the bread all the time. Let's also make sure that they understand the gospel and let's put them to some sort of a decision so that it's not just, oh, these Christians are wonderful for bread, but I could take or leave what they're saying about Jesus. Yeah, I think, and I think that's a distinction that we're losing today. The notion today is, oh, I just need to feed them and they'll figure out that it's Jesus somehow. And Moody would not accept that at all. That's just not where he's at. But yeah, I mean, I call John 6, my favorite church growth strategy passage in all of the Bible. Let's be culturally relevant. Let's tell Jewish people to be cannibals.

Wait a minute, are you telling them to be a cannibal? Yes, I am, unless you guzzle my blood and stuff your face with my flesh. Oh, this is a hard saying. Okay, then leave. Yeah. I mean, it was like, Jesus does everything wrong by church growth strategy because that was a winnowing moment. You with me or not? And why are you here? Let's pivot and talk a little bit about Moody's theology. How did he see the world? Do you deal with that in bread and Bibles, like how he kind of saw the world and what his framework for all of this really was as he's approaching these different, really a very changing world? I mean, you and I have talked about the three factors of industrialization, immigration, and urbanization, right? So we see seeing the world change. He's obviously facing a lot of these problems you've mentioned, drinking and the issue of alcohol, which was arguably still a social problem, but back then was a much larger social problem, it seems, and skewed toward the poor as a social problem. So how is he seeing this world before him? What's his framework for dealing with really all of these issues? There's two frameworks, I think, that are in place, and they support each other. The theological framework is, you know, his basic theological structure is what's called the three R's, ruined by sin, redeemed by Christ, reach created by the Holy Spirit. So he sees the world as ruined. And here's the other famous quote, the world is sinking. God gave me a lifeboat and said, Moody, save all you can. So he sees things as a mess, and he comes to a position known as premillennialism, which argues that the world is not getting better. In fact, it's getting worse. And he gets this from among other people, Spurgeon. So he's not at least intellectually, theologically optimistic, but he is. So he'll say, you know, I think we can, it can get better. I think more people can get saved. You know, don't tell me I'm a downer. I'm optimistic. I believe in the power of the gospel, et cetera, et cetera. So there's that piece. There's the theological piece. But I think the theological piece is laid over top of life. I think there are two definitive life experience moments. One is the death of his father. And that plunges the family into incredible poverty, single mom, single mom with no source of income. And so, you know, I go through that a little bit in the book that unbelievable trauma of not only psychologically losing my dad, but literally not having firewood and, you know, just being incredibly cold for the first period of time after his dad dies, not to mention food. So there's that piece. And then the other defining piece, I think, is the civil war. He's at the front nine times. And he's involved in ministering to the wounded and burying the dead. And Americans don't understand today the trauma of the civil war, estimating about 800,000 casualties. OK. So to put that in today's numbers, that would be the equivalent of about six million. So just think about this for just a minute. Right. Imagine there's a war. We'll just do it east of the Mississippi. And it's in your backyard. There are six million people dead in the United States. They died in your yard. This wasn't in France or something. And you can't get away from this. You just see this over and over and over again. It's a meat grinder war. So I think that tempers any that makes him a realist. He knows what life is like and it's hard. And he knows that. I think that drives his evangelism, too. I think he knows, listen, you're going to die. People are going to die. This is not a safe place. We need to get them to Jesus. So I think that mixed with the theological piece causes him to see the world as deeply, deeply flawed and troubled. And life is flawed and troubling. I just want to kind of clarify this for the folks listening. I would say, and I'm interested to see if you agree. So premillennialism, right, as a sort of an interpretive system or orientation. Yes, it sees the world going downhill. Right. I don't know that that's different or let's say amillennialism. Right. I want to just make sure that we distinguish that, that this isn't only a distinctive of premillennial. Right. That is seeing that world cycle downward. Yes. Okay. But I would say this, James. I'm not sure. I don't think amillennialism has ever been terribly dominant in American evangelicalism. The world that Moody was born into was post-millennialism where everything was supposed to be getting better. The world was being Christianized. And that's what I wanted to. Yeah, that's what I wanted to clarify is that pre-millennium was almost, you hate to call it like a reaction. I know that's probably not the most nuanced way we could talk about it. But in some degree, it was a counter to a very specific belief that said, no, no, no, we can make the world a better place. Yeah. And look, anybody that thinks that human beings do theology objectively without any context affecting their reading of the Bible, I'll pray for you. I mean, look, what killed post-millennialism in the United States? Well, let's start with the Civil War. Okay. Oh, I got a great idea. Let's have Europe go to war and we'll have the most Christian advanced society in the world. Germany start this thing. So you get millions of men living in ditches shooting mustard gas at each other. This is followed by an economic collapse worldwide, followed by fascism in Germany, Mexico, Spain, totalitarianism in Russia. I mean, on and on and on. And it ends with the atomic bomb. The world is clearly getting better and better. I mean, how do you get that out of the Bible when you're living through that? I do find it. I think it's a really important point, though, and I don't want to lose it because I think when Moody sees the world is ruined, it doesn't mean that he is without optimism. But much of that optimism is rooted in the three R's. Right. Or the latter two of the three R's, because I think a lot of people even today, there is a stream of progressivism. And I don't mean that in a liberal sense, but in the sense that people tend to think that we can make the world a better place. You're seeing it in the technology sector. You see it a lot of times in more sentimental notions about American politics and those kind of things. And I think there is a dose of Moody that speaks to that as well, that there's a realism that we need to have about this. And there is something theologically, deeply theological about the solution that Moody is chasing. Go ahead, please. No, that's true, James. The other thing that overarches all of this is we're Americans. Yeah. The essence of America is it's going to be better for my kid than it was for me. So there's an inherent cultural optimism that you just can't get out of the water here. That's part of what it means to be an American. It can be better. So that's part of the world in which we worked, let alone Moody worked. Right, right. I think it's just sort of an enduring characteristic, but I like the way he obviously didn't deal with it perfectly, I don't think. But nobody does. But I do think that Moody's insight on this, that realism that he that was forged really in the hard life that you described, along with sort of a deepening theological conviction that the gospel had to be the solution to the human problem if there was ever going to be a solution to the human problem. Like this has to be there. Yes. And if it isn't, it is ruined. I mean, those three hours really paint the picture. And whatever optimism you think you can gain to sort of restrain evil, hold it back, you know, as you're trying to share the Christ with people.

He would have never separated the gospel out from any of these other aspects. Absolutely. I mean, and at one level, it's insanity, because here's the ultimate end for all of us. We're going to die. Right. Unless the Lord returns, every single one of us is going to die. It is not an optimistic end. We are not going to win. We're going to die. Yeah. And there is no solution to that other than the birth, life, death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. Otherwise, death wins. It's sort of a, yeah, it's a really fascinating thing. And I, you know, I don't know whether, I don't know whether Moody ever deals with this, but, you know, you have these filling up the sufferings of Jesus Christ. You know, we fill up those sufferings. We fulfill those sufferings. We, we hasten the day of God through our godliness and holiness and living. Right. I don't know whether Moody ever drew on those passages, but they would seem to fit very much in the way he sort of does his work. It's let's be people of character. Let's be people of distinction. Let's do the mission of God. And all these other things, whether they're fixed or not, doesn't really matter. We're just going to keep doing the mission of God. Yes, because in some ways he's a throwback. I've taught Reformation for years, and one of the things I have to tell students over and over again is medieval people had more belief in the life to come than this life. And that's because their life was so miserable. Yeah. Our lives are easy by standards, by human standards. Right. And I don't mean that to diminish anybody that's listening's struggle, but just look at the numbers. You're talking about 50 dead before they reach the age of 10. Yeah. It's just death is everywhere. And so Moody thought about it that way. Yeah. He really believed in, he believed in death. He believed in hell. And he also believed in heaven. Yeah. Well, where do you see, I mean, when people read Bread and Bibles, Greg, and this is your adapted dissertation, am I correct about that? That is correct. All right. So I have read your dissertation. I'm looking forward to reading a more simplified version, Bread and Bibles. But what do you think that, like, what do you want people to walk away with from Bread and Bibles? What do you think the lesson really for today's people is as they're reading about the life of D.L. Moody and understanding his way of doing things in the 19th century? Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian-owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 94878 to receive your free Retirement Defense Guide. Or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. I think there's three or four things. One is that Moody had this, I'm paraphrasing it, find the thing that needs to be done that nobody else is doing and do that. I'm a child of evangelicalism. I'm 66 years old. I don't know how much money we've wasted duplicating something that's already working. So this ministry is effective. It's doing what it's doing. And somebody says, well, we have to do it with our name over the door. So we end up doing the same thing instead of... And, you know, Moody wasn't that way. Moody would say, they're doing that. That's good. Lyle Dorsett, who did one of Moody's biographies, said once, I think it was Lyle, there are lots of divisions in the Lord's army. And one of the things that Moody did was say, I'm going to trust the Lord to do what he needs to do with that division. And their job is maybe artillery. So I'm not going to do artillery. I'm going to do infantry. And I'm not going to worry about... I'm going to trust God that they'll do what they do, and I'm going to ask God to help me to do what I do, and I'm going to make sure I'm not overlapping with somebody else so that we're maximizing the resources. And I just think that's one thing. And corollary to that is there's an essential humility to the man that is critical to this thing. And I think these two are connected. He doesn't care whose name is over the door. He genuinely doesn't. He didn't want anything named after him. Nothing was named after him until after he was dead, and he's still twirling in his grave, I bet. So I think the next one is connected to the first one. There's a profound sense of humility that marks Mr. Moody's life and ministry. He never wanted anything named after him. In fact, you know, both the church and the school didn't do so until after he was dead. And, you know, I think he's probably still twirling in his grave. He never wanted his picture taken because he didn't want it to be about him. When they would interview him, he would just quote big chunks of the Bible because he knew they were going to print whatever he said. And, you know, when you're functioning that way, it's easy to start something and walk away. Here, I'll help you get this started. You run it. Yep, I can see that there's that need. Let's help you find a way to get that thing done. I'll stay here. I'll kickstart it. I'll do whatever, you know. So this humility and people probably won't like this, but I think we set people up today with branding and marketing. You know, if I had a group of people whose job it was in life to make my name a household word, my head would be so big it not only wouldn't fit through the door, it wouldn't fit in the house. And then you wonder why they'd get in trouble. It's just nuts. And I just think we've played the devil's tune on that. I'm not opposed to ministry, but I just think you have to be careful about how you're structuring and marketing and branding and all that stuff. I understand the need for it on one hand. On the other hand, when the ministry becomes an end in itself and it's not about Jesus anymore, you're in deep weeds. Third thing is, there's a practical thing to Mr. Moody about this that I think is really compelling. It's also a flaw. Moody doesn't deal with issues structurally or politically, which is a marvelous thing. How many churches would be better off if they spent their time concentrating on, let's find the people in our community that have a desperate need and let's create a way to minister to them instead of arguing about who you should vote for in the next election. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't vote or you shouldn't care who you vote for. But when that becomes the end, you're shoveling responsibility off. If you think your Christian responsibility is merely to vote for the right guy and not to actually be engaged in your community, you're not reading the Bible properly. So really good churches have witnesses in the community that's practical and deals with the needs that they see there. And they pour their energies into that. If churches did that, I think there would be a lot less problems in communities. Or even partner. Fine, you're a big, wealthy suburban church. Find an urban church that wants to set up a community center or desperately needs some partner with them, work with them. So there's that piece. The sword that cuts both ways is

He didn't address structural issues. And what I mean by that is, specifically, I think he failed to address aggressively the social ills of his day in this case, in these two cases. Number one, segregation, and number two, lynching. And look, yes, he was a child of his time. Well, okay, the Bible doesn't say you get a free pass if you're a child of your time. And Mr. Moody would say, I don't want you to evaluate my life and work on the basis of anything other than Scripture. So people get upset about, why are you bringing that up? Would be very upset if people today refused to speak on abortion. Oh, that's a great evil. Our country has to be saved from that. If you don't talk about abortion, when you vote, this has to be front and center. But when we talk about the failure to talk about something as egregious as lynching, you're going to give them a pass? And that doesn't mean that you cancel them. Large portions of the Bible are screw-up stories. God put them there for a reason. You're going to say, well, David was a product of his culture, and so it was culturally okay to watch this woman bathe on and on and on. I'm not going to say that. And just because the culture was corrupt on this question doesn't give us a pass. Are we all blind? Absolutely. James, you and I both know if the Lord tarries a hundred years, they could write books about us and how stupid we were. Because we're missing stuff. But the lesson is you cannot choose to not engage in overt comments about structural evil in your culture. You have to say something. You and I have been to Germany. Where was the German church? Well, they punted. To a large extent, they punted. And so, I think while Moody's genius is, you know what? Don't worry about the big stuff. Just do what you need to do in your town. You can't not think about the big stuff and not at least address the big stuff. I agree that if you spend all your time addressing the big stuff and your neighbor is starving to death, you've failed. But if you're feeding your neighbor and they're taking all the juice to Auschwitz and you're not saying anything, I don't think that's a win either. I think, you know, you and I have had conversations about this. And I do think, I don't think we should be in the business of giving anybody a pass, for one. I also think that, you know, as I read Hebrews 11 and I look at the great cloud of witnesses, there's not one person in that great cloud of witnesses that didn't have some sort of mistake or fall. And so, I don't think that we are, I think the mistake is venerating these people or demonizing them, as opposed to recognizing a trajectory of faithfulness that we can learn from. I also think that studying the Barmen Declaration has given me a slightly different perspective on this. So, when we look at Moody, you know, it's hard to disagree with his individual emphasis, right? People have to be saved in order to be regenerated. That's his, you know, those three R's. At the same time, in not speaking to the church, I don't even think you have to get, you know, I think this is a mistake in our time, right? Just like you were saying, if you think your Christian responsibility ends at the voting booth, you've got issues, right? Like, we're passing that problem off. And so, I don't know that Moody needed to get involved politically, right? In other words, writing to his congressman or his senator or whoever, and I don't hear you saying that. But I think just to clarify for people, the Barmen Declaration spoke to the church. It spoke to the German evangelical church and it said, we're no longer being the church. And if we're not going to be the church, we've got problems. I mean, that's the simple summary of the Barmen Declaration, right? There are a lot of wrinkles. And I think Moody's refusal to do that, to actually speak to the church as an entity and say, look, yes, we need individuals to be saved, but they need to be saved into something that's an alternative community that is doing things differently and not tolerating ridiculousness and abhorrent activities. He doesn't ever even say that. Now, he says it about poverty. He says it about, you know, sort of the, if I'm recalling them correctly, the mission churches, right? Where he felt like there was a structural division between the rich and the poor. But he doesn't say it until much later about the segregated campaigns in the South and those kind of things. And so I've tended, again, you know, sort of through the Barmen Declaration to have a different, a slightly different view on that and just say, yeah, there needed to be, he didn't need to be politically engaged, but he needed to recognize that the church needed to change in this issue and that he could have been a prophetic voice speaking to the church for reform. Yes, and what's interesting about that, which is stuff in the new book that wasn't in my dissertation. Nice. Okay. Is I read black pastors and their critique, not only of Mr. Moody, but the white church. Yeah. You know, and Moody, when Moody first goes into the South, he's angry, but he capitulates. And he does in Texas in 18, late 80s or something like that, knock down that railing. Yes. I thought that meant his meetings were unsegregated from that time. I've subsequently found more information saying, no, he segregated them again. So that was a, yep, that was a one-off in Texas because he got mad, or at least there are accounts of segregated meetings that Moody is running after then. And the, when you read guys like Francis Grimke, who is a fine evangelical committed to the Bible, he loved Dwight Moody. He wrote marvelous things about Dwight Moody, but he also wrote, don't you care about black people? Yeah. Doesn't it matter to you? And all this stuff about, well, white people won't come if black people are there. He said, you run black services in the South. They're supposed to be black only. There's a lot of white people there. Right. So really, come on. And there's a whole, I think the African Methodist Episcopal Church even made a declaration about, we can't support this unless you're going to treat us as equal before the Lord. Sure. So what do you think then? I mean, because that's new information. I didn't, I had always assumed that he stopped after Texas as well. And so what do you make of that? Is it just... I make of it... Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. Well, I make of it, he did ends justify means. And I think that was naive because he knew literally thousands of white Christians that were racist bigots. And being a Christian doesn't fix everything. Right. He should have known that from reading the Bible. I mean, when did Peter stop having problems with Gentiles? Yeah. So, I just think he didn't have the stomach to fight it. So he didn't and he justified it. Which is really interesting because, I mean, almost on every other score, he didn't. You know, there were a lot of things that he was very staunchly against that he, you know, seemed more consistent on than that. And it must have just, you know, it's... That's a tough one. That's really interesting. I think... Yeah, go ahead. Well, he sure goes after alcohol. Yeah, you want to go after alcohol. It's a social problem, then you need to go after racism as well. And I say this as a man who, if I died one one hundredth of a Christian that Dwight Moody was, I love this man. I admire this man. He inspires me. Yeah. But he's not Jesus. Right. And it doesn't do Jesus any favors.

this dog making too much noise? No, no, you're good. Okay. No, I agree. I mean, I think that, you know, at the end of the day, like I said, you know, we make a mistake if we venerate these people or if we demonize them. That's really just it, you know. And so we have to view them not with rose-colored glasses and we need to not condemn them and just leave them back in their time as if they've been the scourge of the earth and we're evolved beings who are now, you know, holier than them. It's not that. It's obviously he's going to have made mistakes and we need to acknowledge and learn from those mistakes just as we acknowledge and learn from the faithful things that he did. And so I think that's the way we need to frame it. Yeah. Was it right for Jonathan Edwards to own a slave? Of course not. How did he do that? I have no idea. But that doesn't mean that I shouldn't read anything he wrote. And the same sort of thing with other people, this cancel thing. No, you read them with the reality that they're flawed. And that's ad hominem argumentation. If God could use Balaam's donkey, he could certainly use a guy who did something as egregious as own another human being to say something that's meaningful to people. And so... No, I agree. I think the important thing, and maybe we'll leave it here, I'll give you a kind of last word. I mean, if people were going to, obviously, other than bread and Bibles, which I think would be a great place for people to start with D.L., just a fantastic spot. Like I said, I've read your dissertation, and I think you give a really great introduction, even in your dissertation, to the life of D.L. Moody and some of the formative events that he goes through that really shape him and mold him into the person that he ultimately becomes. But what would you say is the one, or maybe just that one final lesson that you would leave people with as they're reading through your book and you say, this is what we need to learn from Mr. Moody. Do what the Bible says. Don't complicate it. There's a practicality to Moody that is very challenging, but ultimately true. And, you know, feed the poor. Okay. The guy across the street doesn't have anything to eat. I better go buy him something. His family's really cold. I better go get him some coal. Spurgeon was the same way. One or two days a week, he'd bang doors. And he'd take a Bible, and he'd fill his pocket with shillings. And if they didn't have anything to eat, he gave them shillings. And if they didn't know the Lord, he gave them the gospel. And that was Mr. Moody. Just do it. To be Nike about it. Yeah, that's very cool. And I agree. As much as I've read of D.L. and some of his biblical interpretation, it's like, I could overcomplicate it. But at the end of the day, all the nuances that maybe he misses, he catches what it actually is telling him to do. And he does it. And I think there's something compelling about that. So thanks, Greg, for being here. We're going to close it out now. But everybody, go to Amazon.com. Like I said, you can preorder Greg's book now before May 7th. After May 7th, you can actually just order it. But I'd encourage you to get Bread and Bibles, D.L. Moody's Evangelism and Social Action. It will be a great introduction, D.L. Moody. And I would just say, personally, as I've studied D.L. Moody, he has reframed and helped me kind of reorient my faith. I think there's an innocence about D.L. Moody's way of doing things and a purity about it that I just really appreciate. And that is not to say, you know, that he is, as we've said here, we're not venerating him. We're not demonizing him. But there is just something fresh about the way he approaches Scripture and life that I have come to appreciate and benefit from greatly. And so I would just encourage you. This is going to be a great introduction to it. Bread and Bibles, D.L. Moody's Evangelism and Social Action. We'll put links to it in the show description. But I would encourage you to preorder it or order it after May 7th. So thanks again, Greg, for being here. This is fantastic. Thanks, James. Yeah. Thanks, everybody, for listening. And we'll catch you on the next episode of Thinking Christian. I just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio.com, you'll find dozens of other faith-centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more. Want to learn more about God and his will for your life one verse at a time? I'm Quinice Petway, co-host of the Your Daily Bible Verse podcast. I'm inviting you to tune in and subscribe at lifeaudio.com.