"At the cross God wrapped his heart in flesh and blood and let it be nailed to the cross for our redemption." -- E. Stanley Jones
E. (Eli) Stanley Jones (1884—1973) was a 20th century Methodist Christian missionary and theologian.He is remembered chiefly for his interreligious lectures to the educated classes in India, thousands of which were held across the Indian subcontinent during the first decades of the 20th century. According to his and other contemporary reports, his friendship for the cause of Indian self-determination allowed him to become friends with leaders of the up-and-coming Indian National Congress party. He spent much time with Mahatma Gandhi, and the Nehru family. Gandhi challenged Jones and, through Jones' writing, the thousands of Western missionaries working there during the last decades of the British Raj, to include greater respect for the mindset and strengths of the Indian character in their work.
This effort to contextualize Christianity for India was the subject of his seminal work, The Christ of the Indian Road (ISBN 0-687-06377-9), which sold more than 1 million copies worldwide after its publication in 1925.
He is also the founder of the Christian Ashram movement. He is sometimes considered the "Billy Graham of India".
"Being born in a Christian home does not make you a Christian.""Character is supreme in life, hence Jesus stood supreme in the supreme thing - so supreme that, when we think of the ideal, we do not add virtue to virtue, but think of Jesus Christ, so that the standard of human life is no longer a code but a character.""Continuing a Lenten series on prayer: Prayer is co-operation with God. It is the purest exercise of the faculties God has given us - an exercise that links these faculties with the Maker to work out the intentions He had in mind in their creation.""God, to redeem us at the deepest portion of our nature - the urge to love and be loved - must reveal His nature in an incredible and impossible way. He must reveal it at a cross.""Here he tells us that the new birth is first of all 'not of blood'. You don't get it through the blood stream, through heredity. Your parents can give you much, but they cannot give you this.""If the Holy Spirit can take over the subconscious with our consent and cooperation, then we have almighty Power working at the basis of our lives, then we can do anything we ought to do, go anywhere we ought to go, and be anything we ought to be.""In conversion you are not attached primarily to an order, nor to an institution, nor a movement, nor a set of beliefs, nor a code of action - you are attached primarily to a Person, and secondarily to these other things.""In the ordinary church, it is suppressed by respectability, by a desire to appear better than we really are.""Life is supplied with a basic adequacy.""Our actions are the results of our intentions and our intelligence.""Our intentions may be very good, but, because the intelligence is limited, the action may turn out to be a mistake - a mistake, but not necessarily a sin, for sin comes out of a wrong intention.""Prayer is aligning ourselves with the purposes of God.""Prayer is commission. Out of the quietness with God, power is generated that turns the spiritual machinery of the world. When you pray, you begin to feel the sense of being sent, that the divine compulsion is upon you.""Prayer is commitment. We don't merely co-operate with God with certain things held back within. We, the total person, co-operate. This means that co-operation equals committment.""Prayer means that the total you is praying. Your whole being reaches out to God, and God reaches down to you.""Some have said that the power of a Redeemer would depend upon two things: first, upon the richness of the self that was given; and second, upon the depths of the giving. Friend and foe alike are agreed on the question of the character of Jesus Christ.""The action carries a sense of incompleteness and frustration, but not of guilt. Victorious living does not mean perfect living in the sense of living without flaw, but it does mean adequate living, and that can be consistent with many mistakes.""The conscious mind determines the actions, the unconscious mind determines the reactions; and the reactions are just as important as the actions.""To pass from estrangement from God to be a son of God is the basic fact of conversion. That altered relationship with God gives you an altered relationship with yourself, with your brother man, with nature, with the universe.""Victorious living does not mean freedom from temptation, nor does it mean freedom from mistakes.""We are personalities in the making, limited, and grappling with things too high for us. Obviously we, at very best, will make many mistakes, but these mistakes need not be sins.""Whatever our creed, we stand with admiration before the sublime character of Jesus.""When the depths are upheld by the Holy Spirit, then the reaction is Christian.""When we think of the ideal, we do not add virtue to virtue, but think of Jesus Christ, so that the standard of human life is no longer a code, but a character.""You cease to move into yourself, away from others. You give up your antagonism. You begin to move toward others in love. God moved toward you in gracious, outgoing love, and you move toward others in that same outgoing love."
Jones was born in Baltimore, Maryland January 3, 1884. He was educated in Baltimore schools and studied law at City College before graduating from Asbury College, Wilmore, Kentucky in 1906. He was on the faculty of Asbury College when he was called to missionary service in India in 1907 under the Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church. He traveled to India and began working with the lowest castes, including Dalits. He became close friends with many leaders in the Indian Independence movement, and became known for his interfaith work. He said, "“Peace is a by-product of conditions out of which peace naturally comes. If reconciliation is God’s chief business, it is ours...between man and God, between man and himself, and between man and man.”
In 1925, while home on furlough, he wrote a report of his years of service...what he had taught and what he had learned in India. It was published in a book titled "The Christ of the Indian Road" and became a best seller. It sold over a million copies. Other books followed and certain books or single chapters became required reading in various theological seminaries or in degree courses at government colleges in parts of the world.
His work became interdenominational and world-wide. He helped to re-establish the Indian “Ashram” (or forest retreat) as a means of drawing men and women together for days at a time to study in depth their own spiritual natures and quest, and what the different faiths offered individuals. In 1930, along with a British missionary and Indian pastor and using the sound Christian missionary principle of indigenization. (God’s reconciliation to mankind through Jesus on the cross. He made Him visible as the Universal Son of Man who had come for all people. This opening up of nations to receiving Christ within their own framework marked a new approach in missions called "indigenization") Dr. Jones reconstituted the “Ashram” with Christian disciplines. This institution became known as the ”Christian Ashram.”
In the months prior to December 7, 1941, he was a constant confident of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Japanese leaders trying to avert war. Stranded in the United States during World War II with his family in India (because the only overseas travel allowed was for the military), he transplanted the Christian Ashram in the United States and Canada, where it has become a strong spiritual growth ministry. During this time, Dr. Stanley Jones spent six months in North America, conducting city-wide evangelistic missions, Christian Ashrams, and other spiritual life missions and the other six months overseas. He preached and held Christian Ashrams in almost every country of the world.
He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his reconciliation work in Asia, Africa, and between Japan and the United States.
In 1947 in the United States, he launched the Crusade for a Federal Union of Churches. He conducted mass meetings from coast to coast and spoke in almost five hundred cities, towns and churches. He advocated a system through which denominations could unite as they were, each preserving its own distinctive emphasis and heritage, but accepting one another and working together in a kind of federal union patterned after the United State’s system of federal union.
In 1950 Dr. Stanley Jones provided funds for India’s first Christian psychiatric center and clinic, the now noted Nur Manzil Psychiatric Center and Medical Unit at Lucknow. The staff includes specialists from India, Asia, Africa, Europe, and America who had given up lucrative practices to serve in this Christian institution which serves thousands of patients.
In 1959 Dr. Stanley Jones was named “Missionary Extraordinary” by the Methodist missionary publication World Outlook.
In 1963, Dr. E. Stanley Jones received the Gandhi Peace Award.. Dr. Jones had become close friends with Mahatma Gandhi, and after Gandhi's assassination wrote a biography on his life. It is noted that later in time, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told Jones' daughter, Eunice Jones Mathews, that it was this biography that inspired him to "non-violence" in the Civil Rights Movement.
In December 1971, at the age of 88, while leading the Oklahoma Christian Ashram, Dr. Stanley Jones suffered a stroke that seriously impaired him physically but not mentally and spiritually. He was severely impaired in his speech, but dictated onto a tape recorder his last book "The Divine Yes" and in June 1972 gave moving messages from his wheel chair at the First Christian Ashram World Congress in Jerusalem.
These are the British publishers' titles; American titles may be different.
Books:
The Christ of the Indian Road (1925)Christ at the Round Table (1928)The Christ of Every Road — A study in Pentecost (1930)The Christ of the Mount — A Working Philosophy of Life (1931)Christ and Human Suffering (1933)Christ’s Alternative to Communism (1935) US titleChrist and Communism (1935) UK titleVictorious Living (1936) (devotional)The Choice Before Us (1937)Christ and Present World Issues (1937)Along the Indian Road (1939)Is the Kingdom of God Realism? (1940)Abundant Living (1942) (devotional)How to Pray (1943)The Christ of the American Road (1944)The Way (1946) (devotional)Mahatma Gandhi: An Interpretation (1948); 2nd ed.: Gandhi — Portrayal of a Friend (Abingdon, 1993)The Way to Power and Poise (1949) (devotional)How to be a Transformed Person (1951) (devotional)Growing Spiritually (1953) (devotional)Mastery (1953) (devotional)Christian Maturity (1957) (devotional)Conversion (1959)In Christ (1961) (devotional)The Word Became Flesh (1963) (devotional)Victory Through Surrender (1966)Song of Ascents (1968) (autobiography)The Unshakable Kingdom and the Unchanging Person (1972)The Reconstruction of the Church — On what Pattern? (1970)The Divine Yes (1975) (posthumously)
