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March 8
John of God, Henry Ward Beecher, and Pelagius
David Barnhart
March 08, 2025
Golf course at Iona. 2011. Own photo
Today marks both the first and last breath of John of God, who lived from 1495 to 1550. He was a former soldier who felt called to ministry but struggled to find his calling, until at last he had a revelation that his work would be with the poor and sick. He founded the Brothers Hospitallers, which today operates hundreds of hospitals around the world.
Today marks the death, in 1887, of Henry Ward Beecher, perhaps the most famous ever progressive preacher. He emphasized the love of God, advocated for women’s suffrage, argued for the abolition of slavery, and helped promote scientific ideas in the church, including evolution. For all that, I am not including him in this devotional about saints, because I suspect what was described as his womanizing in his day would be sexual harassment in ours, and the world is too full of disappointing “inspirational” celebrity men. I am sharing about him mostly because he is a historical example that contradicts the popular idea that only conservative evangelical pastors can achieve a mass hearing in the United States. Beecher’s influence was massive, and I think modern progressive Christians give up too easily when the odds seem stacked against us.
I’m also choosing today to include Pelagius in my list of saints. We do not know the dates of his birth and death. He was declared a heretic and he became Augustine’s nemesis. I was only taught that he preached works-righteousness, but John Philip Newell’s book Sacred Earth Sacred Soul makes a convincing argument that he was simply teaching out of his Celtic Christian tradition. Pelagius was a mystic who emphasized the goodness of creation. Instead of original sin, he preached original blessing.
Reflection:
Pelagius wrote:
Look at the birds flying across the sky: God’s spirit dwells within them . . . Look at the fish in the river and the sea: God’s spirit dwells within them. There is no creature on earth in whom God is absent . . . The presence of God’s spirit in all living things is what makes them beautiful; and if we look with God’s eyes, nothing on the earth is ugly.
“Pelagianism” has come to mean works-righteousness, but that is mostly because of Augustine’s writings about him. His works that survive do not seem to bear this out. I think the world is ripe for a theology that emphasizes original blessing instead of original sin. And I think Beecher’s example shows that it is possible for such a sea change in Christian theology.
Henry Ward Beecher wrote:
I ask myself: "What is that tree?" It is everything. It is God's voice, when the winds are abroad. It is God's thought, when in the deep stillness of the noon it is silent. It is the house which God has built for a thousand birds. It is a harbour of comfort to weary men and to the cattle of the field. It is that which has in it the record of ages. There it has stood for a century. The winter could not kill it, and the summer could not destroy it. It is full of beauty and strength. It has in it all these things ; and as different men look at it, each looks at so much of it as he needs ; but it takes ten men to see everything that there is in that tree — and they all do not half see it. So it is with truths. Men sort them. They bring different faculties to bear in considering them. One person has philosophical reason; another has factual reason. One man brings one part of his mind to it ; another brings to it another part of his mind. The truth is larger than any one man's thought of it. The truth of God usually has relations that stretch out in such a way that men may see it very differently, and all of them be true in spots, although they do not have the whole truth.
Prayer: God whose spirit dwells in all creatures and in the universe itself, open our eyes to our original blessing. Amen.