What D. L. Moody's Life Teaches Us

Hey, everyone, welcome to Thinking Christian. I'm here with Dr. Greg Quiggle. My name is James Spencer, your host. And we're going to be talking a little bit today about just some of the things that Greg Quiggle's got going on. Greg and I have known each other since I was dean at Moody Bible Institute, and we've stayed connected throughout the years. And we recently had a project together, a book called A Fraying People, that was recently published by Wifinstock Publishers. So we're going to be talking a little bit about the essay that he contributed to that volume. We're going to talk a little bit about just D.L. Moody in general. Greg is one of the foremost experts on D.L. Moody on the planet. And then we're just going to get a little bit of insight into what a retired Moody professor's life is like on a day-to-day basis. Greg, how are you doing, man? I'm all right. How are you, James? I'm good. I'm good. So tell me, fill me in on what you've been doing these days. What do you got going on? I'm finishing a book for Moody Publishers called Bread and Bibles. And it's on Mr. Moody and his understanding of the relationship between evangelism and social work, or I guess we would call it social gospel kind of things. Serving urban poor is maybe the better way to do it. Social gospel is kind of loaded. So I'm doing that. I've been doing some speaking at various churches. I've done several series on the Reformation. I did a series on the Apostles' Creed. I'm always looking for speaking gigs. And I've also tried to start a little tour company. You know, I ran study abroad at Moody for 20 years, and I miss that immensely. So myself and another fellow you know, Michael McDuffie, we've got something going in Germany here, boy, really in a month, December the 1st. We've still got a few empty seats, but if you want to go, you've got to let us know now. You can contact me at my email, simply ranch812 at hotmail.com. That's ranch812 at hotmail.com. Maybe James will throw up a link or something at some point. Yeah, we'll make sure we include it in the show description. So if people want to go, they can get in touch with you. I'll tell you, I was just over in Germany. I just got back. And I missed you and Mike. Last time I was over in Berlin and Wittenberg, I had my own little private tour company with Greg and Mike, and it was fantastic. So I'd encourage anybody who's interested and you've got the time. Germany's a beautiful place, and I'm sure in Christmas time, the Christmas market there in Nuremberg would be amazing. And I'm just traveling around Germany, seeing the stuff with Martin Luther and Bonhoeffer, all the World War II sites, the Berlin Wall. It was really fantastic. We enjoyed ourselves. But yeah, I did miss you guys. Yeah, well, what we're focusing on in this trip is we want to do the Christmas markets. They're kind of world famous, so we'll go to several of those. But we're also going to look at the Holocaust. And Mike is an expert at that. He taught courses on that at Moody. And then I will be doing Reformation things, and we'll go from Bavaria up to Wittenberg and back. We'll see some Luther stuff. We'll see some Bonhoeffer stuff. And you remember Eric Redman. He's a New Testament professor. He's going to do sort of daily devotions on the Advent since it is the season of Advent. So we're real looking forward. Love to have a few people come. Like I said, we've got a few seats left. So I'm doing that. Trying to get some things going in the summer. Trying to do a C.S. Lewis, Dwight Moody thing this summer. And I'm also monkeying around with an American civil religion and revivalism thing on the East Coast that would include Mr. Moody and some of the folks that were part of major revivals on the East Coast in the United States. That sounds fantastic. Yeah, so we'll make sure we get your email up in the show notes. And so if people are interested in the Germany trip or anything else you have coming up, they can just shoot you an email, I assume. That's cool. Yeah, that's very cool. I'd love to hear from people. Very good. Very cool. Well, let's circle back around to the first thing you were talking about, Bread and Bibles. This is based on your dissertation, correct? Yes, yes. Okay, so talk a little bit about the book. Talk a little bit about what you're going to be addressing there. And maybe, if you don't want to give too much away, a couple of the conclusions. Well, the stereotype that has been established about Mr. Moody is that he is the person most responsible for turning evangelicals away from social action. And I just think that's fundamentally flawed. There was a book by a sociologist named David Moberg in 1972, I believe it was. He called it The Great Reversal. And what he meant by that is evangelicalism reversed from addressing social concerns to just pure evangelism. And he was decrying, you know, like the days when there were the abolitionists and child labor laws and orphanages and multiple social activities that evangelicals engaged in. And he said, Dwight Moody's the guy that said, no, we're not going to do that stuff. We're just going to do evangelism. And I didn't think that was right. And so I started doing some digging. And I've been digging around now for... 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 don't know, 10, 15 years at least. And it is true that Moody prioritized evangelism. It is absolutely false that he did nothing to serve the poor. Many of your listeners may not know that he started two schools in Massachusetts before Moody Bible Institute. They may be familiar with Moody Bible Institute, but the first two schools he started were for poor boys and girls. They were not Bible training schools. They were educational schools, very Christian, very Bible-oriented. But they were designed to provide education for poor children. And the first one was for women, which in and of itself was incredibly progressive. And one of the most interesting things about that is as it was starting, he had a burden for Native Americans. And so he said, I can't remember if she was the headmistress or what, but he said, you go out to one of these reservations and you find 12 women, young girls, that would benefit from this education and would go back and educate their own people. And she wrote, sending me a telegraph, you know, I got 16. He said, send them, I'll find the money. So these were children of slaves. These were Native Americans. They were poor white folks. In addition to that, there's just a plethora of what we, I guess we would call them kind of rescue mission sorts of things in the United States. In Great Britain, it's amazing. In fact, the guy that was the kind of developed the Labour Party, which is hardly right wing, was influenced by Dwight Moody. He got converted at a Moody meeting in, I believe, was Scotland. And and he credited his Christianity with his concern for the poor. So, you know, the idea that he didn't care about poor people and he said, just get them saved and forget about it. I can go on for hours on this, but but it's absolutely false. Yeah, I mean, I think the first place I ran across this, I was reading a book called I believe it was called Consuming Jesus by Paul Lewis Metzger. And in there he he has just one Moody quote, as I recall, about not giving people bread. Right. You know, once you give them the bread, they're not going to listen to the gospel. And so, you know, you read that in isolation. And at the time, before I even did any more study on D.L. Moody or anything like that, I was kind of like, oh, that's interesting. Like that seems a little myopic, but OK. But then as you as I got to know.

So, more about what D.L. Moody did. You know, that one-liner, it's a great one-liner, which Moody had a million of them, right? But it didn't really express what D.L. Moody was all about and what he was doing. I mean, even just basic stuff like early on in his career, you know, serving as a Civil War chaplain. Well, that's not something that you do just to get people saved. You're not, you know, you're, you know, you organized, you know, relief efforts after the Chicago Fire. You know, part of the, my understanding is part of he went to New York to raise money for the YMCA and Illinois State Street Church after the Chicago Fire. And he didn't really want to. He was just like dead tired, but he's like, well, somebody's got to fix this problem. Right. And so, he wasn't just a, yeah, I don't, I don't think he was really, if you read his whole life, you don't get the impression that this is a guy who just wants to get people saved and move on. I think it's a little more complex than that. It's much more complex. Yeah, I think it's great you're doing the book. I've read your dissertation, so I was the other person who read your dissertation, right? You know, dissertations are normally written just to be completely unreadable. I know mine was. I think my mom tried to get through it, but she was like, forget it. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, I've read through your dissertation. I think it's a compelling topic and an important one because it really does, you know, I think sometimes Moody, I see it also when we talk about the Holy Spirit, you know, Moody's teachings about the Holy Spirit, they can tend to get co-opted into our more contemporary discussions about, you know, the baptism of the Holy Spirit or, you know, you know, sort of the charismatic gifts and those kind of things. And I tend to think that this conversation about Moody and social work and social gospel really is just an anachronism. It's something we're importing back into him that he didn't have any trouble with. Yeah, and that bread and Bibles quote, which shows up everywhere, and is made as the definitive statement of who he is. First off, he was speaking to evangelists. Second off, the topic was Matthew 6.33, seek first the kingdom of God and all these things will be added unto you. So, okay, let's take this way out of context and say, this defines the guy's life. Well, all you have to do is look at his Sunday school. I mean, he was feeding people. He was literally going out buying food, buying coal. And the YMCA, they had this thing about the number of people that Moody was personally taking care of. He'd go out on the weekends and go out of the city and buy coal and food and all kinds of other, got boots for kids that didn't have shoes, all this kind of, none of that gets talked about. But I think so much of it, you know, maybe people don't fully. 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. understand who Moody was or how he grew up. But I mean, his experience of poverty early on had to have shaped his understanding of what it looked like to help others. And I mean, I think, you know, you talked about his Northfield work with the schools, right, for poor young men and women. But I mean, I would see that carrying through in so many other ways. Just his willingness to sacrifice himself and to give of himself to help the poor. Even his work in Chicago among the, you know, sort of the ragtag kids over in the bad part of town. I don't know that he does that if he grows up in a privileged home. I think it's much more natural for him because he's poor. And so he's looking at these kids and like, he's just reaching out back out to himself almost. He knows what it's like. He grew up with nothing. His father was, at least by some accounts, an alcoholic. He died when Moody was four. His mom was eight months pregnant with twins. And they were so far in debt that the debt collectors came and stripped everything out of the house by the end of the day. His dad died in the afternoon and his dad was a bricklayer. The only way they were able to keep his tools is they hid them. I think they hid them up in the attic. They still have them out at Northfield in the birth home. But yeah, I mean, he knew what this was like, not just intuitively, but sort of at a gut level. He knew what it was like to be hungry. He knew what it was like to not be able to go to school because you had to work. He understood all these things. And so in many ways, these were his people. Those kids were his kids. And he loved those kids. Well, you know, I was just doing a little research today on D.L. Moody and his preaching. Right. And so I was reading through some accounts of his preaching. And one of the things that just kept coming up was he is, I'll use my word, unadorned. Right. He's not he's not a flashy dude. Right. He's not slick. He's not he's not rhetorical. He's nothing like that. But to a person, it was like nobody could quite understand why this style of preaching that he was engaging in worked because it wasn't stylish. It wasn't flashy. It wasn't particularly convincing. But at the same time, it really was. And it's just fascinating to think about it because the vocabulary they're using for this guy is that he's just authentic and sincere and earnest. And I think that goes back to this idea of, you know, he not only knew what it was like to be hungry physically, I think he had a deep sense of what it meant to be hungry spiritually. Like he really did speak from a depth of experience in his life. He wasn't saying anything that he didn't really and truly own himself. That's the impression I get when I when I read the accounts of his preaching. That's that's what really starts to come to the surface. Yeah, I think, I mean, in some ways, it's like Martin Luther, but in other ways, it's significantly different because, you know, Luther grew up religious. Moody really didn't. But they both shared this sense that Jesus saved them, that Jesus really saved them. And I was just skimming through the chapter in our book, and I have a couple paragraphs there on his preaching. And I forget what the sentence was that he was speaking at Cambridge, but it was like some weird form of English, you know, and you can see all these upper class English boys at Cambridge in 1880 or whatever sitting there going, who is this guy? And they did. They laughed at him at first. But they but they said. They finally had to listen because he was so earnest. There was nothing, nothing slick about Moody. Yeah. He spoke at an outrageous rate of speed, about 230 words a minute, which is just try that sometime. It's insane. Spurgeon said Moody's the only man I know who can say Mesopotamia in two syllables. He never said Daniel. It was always Danel. Yeah. So, you know, he did everything wrong. In fact, if you're reading on his preaching, you may not know this, but I actually wrote a chapter on his preaching for that Zondervan series on preachers. Yeah. And, you know, it's what is there to model for other people here? There's not a whole lot of homiletics here. He does this stuff is. But but it's not about polish. Yeah, it is. It's part and parcel of, I think, what made him work. You're listening to Thinking Christian with Dr. James Spencer. When we come back, we will talk a little bit more with Dr. James Spencer about a praying people and the life of D.L. Moody. You're listening to Thinking Christian on Life Audio. Praying Christian Women, the podcast that brings Christian women together to talk about the deep questions about prayer that we're all thinking, but sometimes afraid to ask. 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