John Waddey died recently, according to an obituary in the
Christian Chronicle. After reading about
his death, I got to wondering how we are to respond when somebody dies who was
a terrible and corrupting influence on the church?
For the past decade or so both churches for which I preached
received every month this little rag called ‘Christianity Then and Now’, which
was a nasty little polemic against any kind of post-1957 change in the church. It was put together by one man,
John Waddey, and mailed to who knows how many other churches in this country
and around the world. It was complete
and utter garbage and seemed to serve the singular point of making Christians
suspicious of one another. In almost
every issue Waddey would speak about the nefarious methods of ‘change agents’
in the church. In Churches of Christ,
these are those who dare to challenge the dogma about instrumental music,
women’s role in the church, fellowshipping with ‘other’ kinds of churches, and
basically any kind of move to make the church not seem like a monument to the church methods and structures popular during the Eisenhower administration.
Not long after I moved here, for about a year I would respond
back in a letter each month to Waddey, pointing out his continual misuses of
Scripture, his oversimplification of the issues, and how he was instigating
divisiveness within the church. For two
or three months he wrote back angry and bitter letters about how I must
certainly be one of those change agents and why didn’t I want to just leave the
church rather than pull good people down with me. Eventually, though, he stopped writing, and I
decided after a year that this garbage wasn’t worth my time. It was just getting me mad that somebody could
find those willing to pay to have crap like this sent out even while so many
other needs were being unmet in the church.
I sought to apply the principle of Romans 16:17-18, in which Paul told
them to ‘watch out for those who cause divisions and create obstacles contrary
to the doctrine that you have been taught; avoid them. For such persons do not serve our Lord
Christ, but their own appetites, and by smooth talk and flattery they deceive
the hearts of the naïve.’ I’m not sure
Waddey was ever smooth or flattering, as he seemed to hate just about
everybody, but from my conversations with other preachers it did appear that he
had gained something of a following of those who were naïve.
So, how can we speak of Waddey, if we do not want to speak
ill of the dead? When I was in grad
school at Harding back in the 1990s I often had conversations with some of my
fellow students about rags like this (and sadly, there have always been too
many to keep track of) which seem to do little more than boast self-righteously
about how right their own little group is and how wrong and condemned everybody
else is. Going all the way back to magazines
like Arthur Crihfield’s Heretic Detector
and continuing on through the 1990s to Ira Rice’s Contending for the Faith, we’ve had far too many magazines
dedicated to dogma and destruction rather than building one another up. But in those days, I used to be on the side
of thinking that those magazines were helpful, as 1)they gave an outlet for
disaffected malcontents and 2)helped keep those of us who were more progressive
in line.
As I have gotten older, though, I have become much more
cynical about the place of these kinds of magazines. Through their writings malcontents enable
themselves to be paper popes and drag others into following them (and thus make
them suspicious of others); they become much like the church in Corinth in
which everybody has somebody whom they follow instead of all following Christ
first.
What may be worse, though, is that after reading these rags
for several years I find how untruthful they are about what the motivations and
teachings of the progressives usually are.
It’s hard to have an open and frank conversation with somebody steeped
in hyper-conservative dogma when they are convinced that those on the other
side are Satan-inspired heretics who are out to destroy the church and nothing
will convince them otherwise. Thus they
feel compelled to proof-text Scriptures that have nothing to do with the issue
at hand, misrepresent the motivations of those calling for change, and even
distort the Bible to make it say something that the Biblical writers never
intended to say. I remember one time
with John Waddey when he had used Galatians 1:6-9 to condemn change agent
liberals on some issue, and I pointed out in a letter that he was using that
Scripture to mean the opposite of what Paul intended (for in Galatians Paul is
opposed to the legalists, not the liberals).
He wrote back and basically tried justify what he had done because
liberals were the great danger and he had to find something in scripture that
would point out the error of their ways.
In the end, his argumentation became even more ridiculous and desperate
and unbiblical.
I’d like to think that there were some whose faith was
strengthened by Waddey’s magazine. Once
a year there might be something worth reading, and I’m hoping that the little
good it contained was more read than the many other worthless articles. I doubt that happened, but I can hope. Regardless of how horrible his writing became
in the last decade of his life, though (and in recent years it went straight
into the trash), I think that the Chronicle and others who memorialize him will
hopefully remember whatever good he did.
He did train preachers and preach (though I can only imagine what that
was like and shudder), after all. Surely
some came to Christ by his efforts.
Most importantly, though, in his death he will have learned
that his salvation was not dependent upon his own works-righteousness or his
ability to root out error (imagined or not).
Rather, he will have learned in eternity that he is saved by the grace
of God, that it is by the blood of Jesus Christ that he had any hope at
all. If Jesus can save me in my
wickedness and Paul who was the ‘chief of sinners’, then surely God will also
save a divisive and angry man who at one time accepted Jesus and died with him
in baptism to be raised forever. Maybe
this is what the death of John Waddey can teach me today.
