Friday, August 9, 2024

It is the 9th of August 2024. Welcome to the Christian History Almanac, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org; I’m Dan van Voorhis.

 

If you’ve met anyone named Judson or Adoniram, I am willing to bet your parents or their parents were missionaries.

Sure, Adoniram was the name of the tax collector stoned under the reign of Rehoboam and thus may be an interesting name- but it seemed fit to his grandfather, who named his son Adoniram, making his son with Abigail: Adoniram Judson, Jr.- one of the most popular 19th-century American missionaries and a man who spent most of his life serving in Burma.

Livingston, Brainerd, Carey, and Adonirum Judson… imagine a mountain with four big faces… never mind.  

Adoniram was born on this, the 9th of August in 1788 and grew up in his fathers congregational congregation. Quick to pick up languages and other disciplines he envisioned a number of jobs until a prick of his conscience in his teen years than lead to him to devote himself to ministry.

His parents sent him to Brown University, according to one historian on account of their fear that he would be affected by the perceived “liberal” Harvard University. Nonetheless he wandered from the faith during his college years, in his own words “a wretched infidel”.

The VERY famous anecdote about Judson at this time was that he was sleeping one night at an inn where he was kept up all night by the sounds of a man in pain in the next room over. Judson wondered about that man's eternal fate and then his own. By the next morning, he had come back to faith; when he inquired of the man in the room over, he was told the man died, and learning his name, Judson realized it was one of his college friends with whom he had walked away from the faith.

Reinvigorated by his new faith, he also came across a book on India. He had heard of William Carey, and he and five others petitioned the Congregational church to form a society and send them, which they did, making Judson among the very first missionaries sent out from the new country.

While intending to make it to India, he studied Baptist theology, knowing he would be meeting Carey and would want to discuss his view on the matter. According to Judson, his studying Baptist theology leads him to become a Baptist- cutting him off from funds from the Congregational church. This would lead to the creation of the American Baptist Foreign Missionary Society.

On account of the war of 1812 Americans weren’t welcome in a British territory such as India and so Judson and his wife, Ann went to nearby Burma.

Adoniram and Ann learned Burmese in order to translate a Bible and to create an English-Burmese dictionary. In 1824 amidst the Anglo-Burmese War Adoniram was suspected of being British and arrested, imprisoned and beaten. Ann kept him alive by ministering to him as best she could with him in jail. He was let out when the Burmese needed his linguistic skills to negotiate with the British.

All the while, mostly through Ann, America was learning of their trials through her dispatches back to newspapers. When he came back on furlough, it was to crowds of people who had heard his name either from friends in the newspaper or from the pulpit where new missions were spreading with Judson as the star example.

After his imprisonment Ann and the couple’s third child would die, Adoniram would remarry, be widowed again and marry a third time. All three of his wives would be famous- Anne by her own writing, his deceased second wife on account of the book written by his famous third wife, Emily. Six of his eleven total children would survive into adulthood.

It was not just his piety and the adventure of his life, it was his first wife’s writings which captivated a nation, her early death a national tragedy and Judson the suffering hero. Ann Judson would become the model for missionary wives- a kind of 19th c. Elisabeth Eliot.

But Adoniram’s legacy was his Burmese bible and dictionary and his native church, which would come to number half of a million. That, and legions of missionaries who heeded the call and the example of Judson- whose first of ten missionary aphorisms was “let it be a missionary life; that is, come out for life, and not for a limited term”- and indeed he did spending 39 of his 61 years as a missionary, eventually dying on board a ship in the bay of Bengal in 1850.

 

The last word for today is from the daily lectionary from Psalm 130:

Out of the depths I cry to you, Lord;
    Lord, hear my voice.
Let your ears be attentive

    to my cry for mercy.

If you, Lord, kept a record of sins,

    Lord, who could stand?

But with you there is forgiveness,

    so that we can, with reverence, serve you.

I wait for the Lord, my whole being waits,

    and in his word I put my hope.

I wait for the Lord

    more than watchmen wait for the morning,

    more than watchmen wait for the morning.

Israel, put your hope in the Lord,

    for with the Lord is unfailing love

    and with him is full redemption.

He himself will redeem Israel

    from all their sins.

 

This has been the Christian History Almanac for the 9th of August 2024, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org.

The show is produced by a man reminding you that Myanmar is simply the formal version of the country also called Burma- you can use either- He is Christopher Gillespie.

The show is written and read by a man who knows that A.J. Gordon of Gordon College and Seminary fame, the A.J.? Adoniram Judson. I’m  Dan van Voorhis.

You can catch us here every day- and remember that the rumors of grace, forgiveness, and the redemption of all things are true…. Everything is going to be ok.