First published in InterLit, December 2005. By Jim Garlow.
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This article is adapted from an address given by Dr. Jim Garlow, coauthor of Cook’s best-selling title, Cracking Da Vinci’s Code, at the Cook Communications Ministries International President’s Conference West 2005, held April 22–24, 2005 in Palm Springs, California, U.S.A.
I want to talk to you about something very significant called the pen. Two years ago I called an acquaintance in Canada, where I was scheduled to speak, and said, “I have a problem. I contracted with two books back to back and am really pressed for time. Would you consider releasing me from coming to speak? I would be so appreciative.” He said, “Oh, we will release you because we do not want you to be an Apollos.” I said, “I heard the part about releasing me, but what do you mean when you say you do not want me to be an Apollos?” He explained, “Paul was a great preacher, and so was Apollos. One of them wrote and we have half the New Testament. The other one didn’t write anything and we don’t have the foggiest idea what he said. We do not want you to be an Apollos.”
I’ve thought many times about that—the difference between Paul and Apollos. Both were good preachers, but only one left a legacy, because he wrote. Christian publishers participate in a Paul-type of ministry—one that leaves a significant legacy. The major enterprise you are involved with is the passage of truth from one generation to another. You are trustees, stewards of the gifts for the next generation, charged to produce some Pauls instead of Apolloses.
You and I are part of a relay. We are not some tiny group of people isolated from history, but are part of a massive relay, receiving the baton that has been handed down for 2,000 years. To make my case, allow me to tell part of the story of that relay, starting just after Christianity’s first 100 years, the New Testament period.
In the 100s lived a man named Justin Martyr. He wrote a letter that is now referred to as one of his “Apologies”—apology meaning a defense. Some apologists articulated the Gospel so clearly in the second and third centuries that they even won over emperors. You are a part of a legacy of truth with a man named Justin Martyr, who ended up giving his life to be one of the early trustees.
In the 200s, Tertullian penned theological treatises—apologies, defenses of the faith. Also in the 200s, there lived a man named Origen. Jerome, a scholar who a century later translated the Bible into Latin, said that Origen was the second greatest teacher of the entire church—second only to Paul himself. His literary output was staggering. He wrote the Hexapla, six columns of Scripture compared with each other. It was one of the first parallel versions of the Bible ever done.
The Church was hit with theological tsunamis at that time. It dealt, for example, with Arianism, Docetism, Donatism, Ebionism, Manicheanism, Modalism, Monophysitism, Nestorianism, and Pelagianism. One after another, all of these movements challenged the very essence of what we believe, particularly about the nature of Christ, that He is fully human and fully divine at the same time. Now what did the early Christians do? They didn’t wring their hands. They reached for a pen.
Irenaeus wrote in the 100s, a book entitled Adversus Haereses (Against the Heresies). He specifically attacked what Paul alluded to slightly, and what John alluded to a great deal—the movement called Gnosticism. If you look carefully at the language of I John, chapter one, [John] says, “We have seen [Him]” (I Jn. 1:2). [John] used an intense word in the original languages, which doesn’t mean he just glanced at Him or even embraced Him. It means, essentially, “I know Him.”
And who was John writing against? He wrote against the Gnostics, who believed that all physical matter was evil. They were called Docetists sometimes, derived from dokeo, a Greek word meaning “to seem.” They taught Jesus only seemed to have a physical body, that He didn’t really have a body. So what does John do? He does away with the Gnostics, whose teachings do away with the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection as we understand them. The implications are incredible and profound.
Who would have thought that after two thousand years we are still battling Gnosticism? If you know anything about Dan Brown’s book The Da Vinci Code, it embraces Gnosticism. My book, Cracking Da Vinci’s Code, fights the same ugly rumors battled by John, Irenaeus, and Tertullian.
And then there’s the writing giant, Augustine. In 386 he was converted from a life of immorality. He’d had a son by a prostitute. He lived immorally in every respect. His mother Monica had prayed for him, but she died and never got to see him help us understand the nature of sin and the depravity of the human heart.
We are blessed to live when we live. We know far more now about the depravity of the human heart and the nature of sin than we did before Augustine. We know more about faith now than we knew before Luther. We know more about holy living now than we did before John Wesley’s time. What is the difference? The massive amount of information that has been preserved for us, our trusteeship, this legacy that helps us to understand who we are.
I take you to Jerome, who in the year 405 completed a translation of the Bible. Jerome was not a pleasant character; he argued with everybody. He was in the city of Bethlehem. Why? He had wanted to be voted to a particular bishopry and he did not get it, so he got mad and took off for Bethlehem. Then he figured that he was by himself, and that he might as well do something, so he translated the Bible. It took him 23 years to complete it. Somehow God used him, with all his eccentricities, to be part of the trustees in this great legacy of handing down the truth.
If you speak English, do you know the story about the faith that came to you? You only know about it through a particular writer. He is so honorable they called him the “venerable”—the Venerable Bede, who wrote The Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum) in the year 731 A.D.
In the 13th century, there was a man who was called a “dumb ox” because he was so unsightly. His face was asymmetrical; he was overweight; he was perfectly ugly by any standards. Later, his nickname became the “angelic doctor.” Now, how do you go from being a dumb ox to an angelic doctor? This man was brilliant. He wrote the masterpiece of all time, the Summa Theologica, which is an attempt to merge, during the pre-Renaissance and Renaissance time, faith with reason, biblical roots, and the flow of information from sources outside the Bible. He is the theological Mount Everest of his time, the most influential theological thinker in 1,000 years. Thomas Aquinas’ theology is still so prevalent in Roman Catholic circles it is known as Thomistic theology, after his first name.
About 200 years later, who would be the world’s most famous author for the first 1500 to 1700 years of Christianity? Another Thomas. His name is Thomas Haemerken. You may not know him by that name, but if I told you he came from Kempen, Germany, and adopted his town as his last name, you would recognize Thomas à Kempis, who wrote the Imitation of Christ (De imitatione Christi). It probably sold more copies than any book except for the Bible. And what do we know about the world’s most successful author up to that point? Almost nothing. He was a bookkeeper in a small monastery. He was influenced by a man named Gerard Groote in Deventer in the Netherlands, who called others to cultivate intimacy with Christ. All we really know about Thomas à Kempis is this: he wanted to imitate Christ. Isn’t that a wonderful legacy?
And then, there was John Wycliffe, who at Balliol College in the University of Oxford, in England, taught that salvation could not be earned. It is a free gift from Christ Himself. That was radical new teaching. He had the most influential, most brilliant mind in all of Europe at the time. Wycliffe was thrown out of the university to a non-descript village, intentionally sent away from his library. And, 44 years after his death, they exhumed his body, burned it, and threw the ashes into the Avon River, saying that would get rid of his influence. They did not realize that just as his ashes were carried everywhere, so was his message.
One hundred and fifty years after Wycliffe’s death, on October 31, 1517, Martin Luther nailed the well-known Ninety-Five Theses to the church door. He did not do that in a fit of rage, as some suggest. He was a professor at Wittenberg University and that was the way to state what you wanted to debate in the academic community. What Luther did not know, however, was that somebody would take his paper down, take it a short distance away to where the Gutenberg Press had been invented, and within three weeks it would fan all over Germany and set off a revolution. Gutenberg’s invention made the dissemination of information much easier—and our responsibilities, as purveyors of the legacy of truth, became far greater.
On April 1, 1521, Luther started his journey to the city of Worms; he went supposing there would be a discussion there about his beliefs. He had rediscovered the essence of the Gospel, that through Christ Jesus we are saved of our sins, a radical thought at that time. At Worms he found they were not going to allow him to debate. They said, “Martin Luther, we have two questions. Did you write these books? And are you going to recant them?” He said, “I came to debate,” and they said, “Well, there will be no debate.” So he requested 24 hours to think over the answers to those questions, knowing if he answered them wrongly, it could cost him his life.
He came back the next day and said, “My conscience is held captive by the Word of God. I cannot—I will not recant. Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen.” He knew that could be the death sentence for him, and his friends did too. They also knew there was a plot to capture [and] maybe [even] kill him. So they prevailed on him, “Don’t travel that road.” Luther went anyway. He was kidnapped; but not by his enemies. His friends got there first. They hauled him away to the Wartburg Castle and held him in a small room, to protect his life. And what did he do while he was there? He had a copy of Erasmus and copy of a Greek New Testament. He translated the Bible into everyday German. That’s the trusteeship you have.
Luther’s message exploded. Martin Bucer picked up on the tenets in Strasburg. Ulrich Zwingli picked up on them in Zurich. Johannes Oecolampadius picked up on them in Basel, in Switzerland. They spread from city to city all the way to Geneva, where John Calvin wrote the Institutes of the Christian Religion. The Institutes are probably the most elaborate systematic theology ever written. That is part of your trusteeship.
The Gospel, when it exploded from Germany and went from country to country, was blocked from coming to England for a long time. There, a young man named William Tyndale said, “The Germans have the Bible in their language. Why can’t we have the Bible in our language, in our country, now?” The English bishops and civil authorities warned Tyndale that Henry VIII would not allow Reformation teaching, saying, “Don’t you dare translate the Bible because that will put it into the hands of common people, and they won’t understand it.” Tyndale replied, “The day is coming when every plowboy in England’s going to know the Bible better than you bishops.”
In 1524 he escaped to the continent, set up a printing press, and started translating the Bible and smuggling it back in to England in bales of cotton and sacks of flour. He heard that Bishop Tunstall had commissioned Augustine Packington to buy the Bibles and pay whatever price was necessary to get them destroyed. Tyndale, in Europe, raised the price and revealed where the Bibles were. Packington bought them, paid the exorbitant price, and destroyed them all. Tyndale said, “Great! Now I’ve got some cash. I can do a better translation of the Bible and print far more.” And that is exactly what he did.
He continued doing that on the move, staying ahead of the authorities that wanted to stop him and kill him. Henry Phillips found him in 1535 and promptly turned him over to the authorities. As they choked him to death, Tyndale’s last gasp was, “Oh Lord, open the eyes of the king!” Two years later, that prayer was answered. In 1538, Henry VIII changed his mind and had Tyndale’s Bible published throughout England so that everyone could see what the Bible had to say.
I take you to the 1550s, to a book that makes us all examine our commitment to Christ. Lady Jane Grey, that brilliant teenager who at 16 was killed for her faith, turned on one occasion to John Foxe and said this word: “Write.” And he did. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs has [shown] how high the bar of excellence is supposed to be if you are a follower of Jesus Christ. He wrote so much that a complete edition of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs only became available in the 1990s.
I take you now all the way to the 1600s. Imagine you are riding with me down City Road in London, England, to Bunhill Fields Cemetery. Buried there are Susanna Wesley; Isaac Watts, the great hymnologist; and Daniel Defoe, the writer. At one more gravesite, we find John Bunyan.
John Bunyan had a poor education. He taught himself to read. He was thrown into prison for his non-conformist views. There, he began to write the story of the Christian life. This man, known for his wickedness and cursing, had an encounter with Jesus Christ. He walked through the challenges of growing in Christ and as a result, he used phrases like “the valley of humiliation,” “the valley of the shadow of death,” “the dungeon of doubting castle,” and “the giant of despair.” In 1678, book one of Pilgrim’s Progress came out, and it has helped us understand the journey of faith as much as any book ever written.
Across the street from that little cemetery is the famous chapel that John Wesley built and the home where he lived and died. More doctoral dissertations have been written about John Wesley than almost any other figure in history, except for Christ and Martin Luther. Wesley left behind a massive amount of writing. His 50-year ministry involved him preaching some 16,000 sermons and riding 300,000 miles by horseback. He wrote letters about every place he went, every city he visited, and every sermon he preached. He also wrote around 200 books. As a result, we have new denominations and churches.
These are all people who wrote. They picked up the pen. Is it because writing is easy? Oh no. Nobody likes writing books; everybody likes having written a book. Writing is hard, difficult, even painful work. You encourage the people who pick up the pen and make a difference. You have been commissioned as trustees in this legacy of truth.
Is it easy keeping the writing enterprise going? Oh no. But people like you—trustees—have been a part of this all these years and, as a result, we have what we have.
I take you to the United States. It’s the 1800s. President Abraham Lincoln meets a lady who changed the course of American history. He looked at her and said, “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!” Who was she? Harriet Beecher Stowe. She was challenged by her sister-in-law, “Why don’t you write something about slavery?” She started writing. Her story was published in a newspaper. The newspaper readership shot up until finally Uncle Tom’s Cabin literally changed the course of the nation.
I take you to the late 1800s, to Kansas, where a poor man died in the streets of Topeka. The man who saw him die asked, “What would Jesus have done?” He lived out the answer to that question by becoming an editor for the Topeka Journal for one week. Readership shot up that week as he tried to act as Jesus would have if He had been the editor of the paper. Charles Sheldon wrote a book about that experience called In His Steps. The presses could literally not keep up with demand. Later Charles Sheldon’s famous question, “What would Jesus do?” would even become a youth movement in bracelets. And by the way, Cook Communications, then David C. Cook, was one of the publishers of that incredible book that changed the way we think about life.
Across the country in Pennsylvania, two brothers, Milton and Lyman Stewart, heard about the discovery of oil in California. They moved West, to a little tiny struggling town called Los Angeles. They began to develop oil and gasoline and realized that people with cars might need gas stations. Theirs are known by the name Union or 76 gas stations.
The Stewart brothers founded the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, now known as Biola University. They started what has become the largest Gospel mission on earth, Union Rescue Mission. In addition, they decided to collect several articles defending the Christian faith. They put them together in a little paperback series of 12 volumes called The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth. They printed 3 million copies of that 12-volume set and circulated them free of charge to every single pastor, missionary, and Sunday school teacher in America. People who picked up the pen, and, in this case, those who published these authors made it possible.
The power of the pen, the power of our legacy, reaches across the centuries. I was with my friend Gayle Beebe, the president of Spring Arbor University. We had stayed up much too late talking about the writings of Pascal, and Gayle started reading from his copy of Pascal’s Pensées. I wanted to say, “I am too sleepy at 2 a.m. to listen to someone who wrote in the 1600s,” but as tired as I was, the book captured my heart. Pascal was a brilliant mathematician, philosopher, physician, physicist. The devotion to Christ that came through those pages re-enlivened me. I said, “Wow. Keep reading.” That’s the power of the pen.
Do you think Rick Warren, when he wrote The Purpose Driven Life, could ever have guessed that, in an apartment in Atlanta, Georgia, a young widow being held hostage by a murderer would cook that murderer breakfast, read him sections of the book, and calm him down so that he would turn himself in to the police? No. Rick Warren had no idea this would happen. He picked up the pen and started writing, and the results are immeasurable.
Not everyone writes bestsellers. My dad, a Kansas farmer, was an author too. When he died at 82, he left behind 47 notebooks about his walk with God. He was concerned no one would read them, but his fears were unfounded. My son Jacob told me “I’m up to my ninth notebook.” You may not write for the world, but if you want to influence your world, your sphere of influence, you’ll pick up the pen—or encourage those who do.
You are commissioned; you are called to a trusteeship of this legacy of truth. The pen is really a baton. You are in a relay race. It does not make any difference how fast you run the race if you drop the baton. Get that baton from the person who’s handing it to you to the hands of the next generation. We are participating in a 2,000-year-old relay.
We do not take lightly, Father, the fact that we could falter, trip, or drop the baton. Help us not to do that. By Your grace, by Your strength, by the discernment You have put in our hearts, we humbly receive Your commission.
© 2005 Cook International. Presented courtesy of David C. Cook.