Tuesday, March 11, 2025

It is the 11th of March 2025. Welcome to the Christian History Almanac, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org; I’m Dan van Voorhis.

It is unlikely that you have heard the name and story of Henry Drummond. A Scottish scientist by trade, he was also a lecturer, author, and revivalist. He shared a stage with D.L. Moody and gave lectures on his travels from the Canadian Rockies to the East Coast of Africa.

It is unlikely that you have heard the name as he belongs to a class of evangelical thinkers in the 19th century who would be eclipsed by Fundamentalism in the first half of the following century. Henry Drummond of Stirling, Scotland, was born in 1851 and died on this day, March 11, 1897. [This Henry Drummond is the Scottish Scientist and theologian, not the English Banker and one of the founders of the Catholic Apostolic Sect.]

Drummond studied at the University of Edinburgh and was preparing for a career in ministry in the “Athens of the North” when the American evangelist Moody came to town in 1873. Moody’s career as an “evangelist” would serve as a model for Drummond, who decided not to go into ministry as a pastor but to be an author and speaker and lead Sunday night evangelistic services when Moody went back to the United States.  

1859 marked the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species and the eventual schism between the so-called “modernists” and “fundamentalists” but Drummond proposed a third way, rather than follow the Enlightenment path of elevating rationality and arguing against Darwin, Drummond would try to separate the wheat from the chaff in evolutionary theory and propose a romantic model that prioritized the feeling over the thinking (he was a scientist, so thinking was important, but he was concerned that the Christianity of his day was devolving into “mere knowledge” instead of a living faith).

His work, the Ascent of Man- initially given as a series of lectures at the Lowell Institute in Massachusetts sought a kind of judo move against some of Darwin’s followers by suggesting that in the Survival of the Fittest we find not only the desire to protect oneself, but also others- and that this is the mysterious origin of altruism- the curious notion of love that has baffled hard core rationalists and Drummond believed pointed us to the ultimate act of altruism- the work of Christ on the Cross.

And while that work is dated, it was another work on love that has kept Drummond’s memory alive for over a century- it was a sermon he gave (er…. “Lecture” as he was vocal as not being a preacher- but a scientist and evangelist) it is entitled “the Greatest Thing in the World” a reflection on 1 Corinthians 13 and the superiority of love over all the other virtues and gifts.

In his day, he would be most famous for his work “Natural Law and the Spiritual World,” which sought to link Darwin and Christianity. Published in 1883, it was still at the presses when he was called on an expedition to Africa. While away from any forms of communication back home, it became a best seller and he returned to Scotland to find himself a minor celebrity. Never marrying, he worked as a teacher, lecturer, explorer, and author, and saw “work” as a vital component of worship. He wrote: “Our work should be just as religious as our worship, and unless we can work for the glory of God, three-fourths of life remains unsanctified”.

His blending of romantic themes (in the sense of validating emotion and imagination as primary ways of knowing) and scientific research (he has been categorized as a “theistic evolutionist”- and while that’s an oversimplification he was not troubled by the idea of a long gap between Genesis 1 and 2 enough for the geological record to be validated).

His final years were marked by increasing debilitation from bone cancer, which finally took his earthly life on the 11th of March in 1897, born in 1851, Henry Drummond was only 45 years old.

The Last word for today comes NOT from the daily lectionary but from 1 Corinthians 13, the passage used by Drummond for his most famous talk:

If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast,[b] but do not have love, I gain nothing.

4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

8 Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. 11 When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. 12 For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

13 And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

This has been the Christian History Almanac for the 11th of March 2025 brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org.

The show is produced by a man who was waiting for the story of when Henry adopted those two funny boys… he is Christopher Gillespie.

The show is written and read by a man now 46 who wonders how Drummond did all of that with one fewer year than he—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.