Important lessons from a neglected Christian writer.
If asked to list important lay Christian writers from the twentieth century, people tend to list names such as GK Chesterton, CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien. One name that will probably not figure is John Buchan. Yet this omission is unfortunate, because Buchan was one of the twentieth century's most prolific and widely read British Christian authors, and, more importantly, he is an author whose works still have much to teach Christians today.
Buchan is best remembered today as the author of The Thirty-Nine Steps, but there was far more to his life than the writing of this single book. Born in Scotland in 1875 in relatively humble circumstances as the son of a minister in the Free Church of Scotland, Buchan was a journalist, historian, biographer, novelist, poet, historian, lawyer, and politician who died in office as the Governor General of Canada in 1940.
As his most recent biographer, his granddaughter Ursula Buchan, explains in her book Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps – A Biography of John Buchan, Buchan was a devout Christian whose 'Christian faith was the foundation of his understanding of the cosmos and the motivation for his way of living.'
Because his Christian faith shaped the way Buchan saw the world, it is also reflected in his writings and, the result is, as I have noted, that his works have important lessons to teach Christians today.
Today the proponents of 'critical theory' argue that right and wrong are invented by groups with political power in order to support their dominance over others. Buchan, however, stands in the Christian tradition of moral realism. In his writings he teaches us that right and wrong, good and evil, are not mere human political inventions, but have objective existence, and that human beings have to take the right side in the battle between them.
Today it is widely believed that the course of history is either a complete accident, or wholly determined by human activity. Buchan teaches us, on the other hand, that what happens in history is the result of the providential action of God. However, this does not mean that human beings have no role to play. Their role is to trust God and work with his providential activity by performing the tasks he gives them to do.
As the American Walter Blenkiron puts it in Buchan's novel Greenmantle, 'I believe in an all-wise and beneficent Providence, but you have got to trust him and give him a chance.' It is not a question of either God's activity or human activity, but of God's activity and human activity as the proper response to this.
For Buchan, the shape of this proper response is determined by the moral teaching found in the Bible and the mainstream Christian tradition, and everyone has the choice to either behave in a way that is in line with this teaching, or to fail to do so. CT.
