Remembering My Father on the Centenary of His Birth

 

So when a great man dies,
For years beyond our ken,
The light he leaves behind him lies
Upon the paths of men

~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "Charles Sumner" (1875)

My father, the Rev. Dr. John F. McGahey, was born 100 years ago today in Montchanin, Delaware. I find these words as hard to believe as they feel surreal to write for, though he has been gone from this earth nearly 35 years, not a day goes by that I don't think of him, and his memory―indeed his very voice―remains as fresh in my mind today as if I had just heard it yesterday, not on November 18, 1986, when indeed I last spoke to him on the phone in Dallas from a distance of over 1400 miles. He was taken from us shortly after his 65th birthday, the victim, as his beloved British used to say, of a hereditary "dicky ticker." Only the good die young, indeed. Yet, as Longfellow wrote in his tribute to Charles Sumner, the light he left in his wake still lies upon the paths trod by those diminishing numbers of us who follow in his footsteps.

Years ago I wrote a tribute to dad, honoring him on the 28th anniversary of his death. In that piece, reflecting an earlier tribute to F. F. Bruce by his friend Charlie Moule, I focused on the twin Christian virtues of grace and truth, so rarely found in combination, which I believe found their dual embodiment in dad to a degree rarely seen in my experience: his legendary zeal for what he considered the truth was matched by a life committed to, and profoundly conditioned by, God's grace in Christ.

The earliest picture of dad

I can hardly improve now on what I wrote then, so I would like to focus today on what is both to me, personally, and for the present Zeitgeist, I believe to be the most significant consequence of his life. The marks of his influence on my life are everywhere present. One thinks particularly of the love of sports. He was a great athlete, perhaps the greatest natural athlete I have ever known (the memory of him, as a 50-year old, running down an all-Central League high school soccer player from behind in a touch football game still stands out, not to mention the one-armed pull-ups he used to do in the stairwell to our attic). As a wee lad, there was always a football, basketball, or baseball game on TV on the weekend whenever he was not away preaching. I still remember watching, at the age of 6, the Bears-Giants 1963 NFL Championship Game with him and my cousin Tommy in the latter's house in Piscataway, New Jersey on December 29, 1963. Likewise, I still remember him telling my brother and me stories about the greatness of Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays, and before them, his childhood heroes Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, when he started buying baseball cards for us from the Jack and Jill ice cream truck that passed through our West Philadelphia neighborhood in the spring of 1964. He taught us how to play the various sports at an early age (hitting fungoes directly at us and zipping passes to us so we would learn not to be afraid of the ball, improvising basketball by shooting an inflatable ball between the power line and the back wall of our row house in the alley), was always the dad who played the games with us and our friends, and who took us to multiple Phillies and Sixers games each year. 

The love of all things British is another tell-tale sign of his influence. This, of course, is not surprising, considering he came from an immigrant Protestant family from the north of Ireland, with three siblings born in the old country and two sisters with Brits as husbands. Only as I have grown old(er), however, have I realized the degree to which his insistence that our family was both American and British was unusual, to say the least, in the country of my birth. (And I still can't fathom how someone won't put a splash of milk in their tea.) My sensibilities, in more ways than I can count, were shaped by my 22 years of life apprenticeship with him.

Dad with other family members, including
his father, John (with the pipe) and brother,
Bill (in rear at right).
Montchanin, Delaware, ca. early 1930's

Most importantly, however, and I say this with no hesitation, I am a Christian, and remain one to this day, largely because of my father and the influence of the towering example provided by his life. As I mentioned in my earlier tribute, Dartmouth historian Randall Balmer perceptively opined that "conversionist" evangelicalism's greatest challenge, indeed difficulty, when compared to, say, Roman Catholicism, is the passing on of the faith from one generation to the next. This structural difficulty was exacerbated in my case as the son, not just of some run of the mill preacher or Bible teacher, but of a theology professor of some repute within certain ecclesial circles in the wider Mid-Atlantic region (I think likewise of the experiences of Balmer and Frank Schaeffer, though the latter is the son of a far more famous figure and has rejected far more of what he had been bequeathed). Considering his theological proclivities and feisty temperament, I have often joked, though only somewhat in jest, that it was like being raised by the Apostle Paul himself. Quite a daunting experience! It wasn't simply the fact that others expected a demonstrable, outward "piety" from me to which I was (and am) temperamentally incapable (the transparency of character I inherited and/or learned from dad made sure of that; there were few things he scorned more than such spirituality-for-show). More to the point was my own constant desire not to disappoint him and mom, and my usual awareness that I hadn't done as well as I could or should have (though they never showed or articulated any such disappointment).

As a theologian, dad is probably best remembered by his former students as a Dispensationalist ("Israel is not the Church!"), which he taught and defended throughout his 29 years at Philadelphia College of Bible. Like all of us, dad was a man of his time, perhaps more evident in his case here more than in any other area (though I say, with some pride, that it was his 1957 Dallas Th.D. dissertation on the New Covenant that sowed the seeds for the ultimate demise of the classic dispensationalism he inherited as a viable theological system). In a similar vein, he was decidedly old-fashioned in proudly wearing the label of "fundamentalist," and was disappointed in me when, after reading J. I. Packer's "Fundamentalism" and the Word of God for an undergraduate theology class, I told him I didn't think it wise or helpful to use the term as a designation. Yet he wasn't a fundamentalist of the variety all too well-known in America. To be sure, he made sure to stress that the Bible was inerrant as well as infallible, but he was a fundamentalist the way J. Gresham Machen was, the Princeton/Westminster New Testament scholar who wrote the classic Christianity and Liberalism, a book dad still assigned as a text more than 50 years after it was originally written in 1923. He derided anti-intellectualism, the overt racism of southern fundamentalists like Bob Jones and Jerry Falwell, and the rigid "secondary" separationism of northern fundamentalists like Carl McIntyre and the Regular Baptists. His, in other words, was a decidedly northern, urban fundamentalism of the old sort, a far cry culturally from the fundamentalism that most people, then no less than now, associated with the term. It must be remembered that he came from Anglican stock, and there remains to this day a plaque in a beautiful Episcopal church outside of Wilmington, Delaware, with his name on it as a baptized member of the church who had served in the country's armed services. When his family moved to North Jersey, they began attending Elmwood Presbyterian Church in East Orange. Later, when I came of school age, my parents sent me to a Lutheran elementary school in Havertown, PA. Later still, even as a "fundamentalist" Bible professor, he often pointed me as a student to Anglican New Testament scholars like J. B. Lightfoot and especially Presbyterian theologians like the Hodges, B. B. Warfield, and John Murray―he especially admired Murray's commentary on Romans―for help. He was no anti-intellectual. Moreover, he was a Calvinist, after all!

Dad and Mom, Moody Bible Institute, Chicago, 1946

As I reflect back on dad's life, the more I come to realize that the North Star of his life as well as his theology was the Apostle Paul, especially the Paul of the Epistle to the Romans, which he considered―rightly, in my view―the greatest, most important book of the New Testament. One lesson he learned and internalized from Paul in that book is the concept of Christian liberty that had, to say the least, been largely perverted in American fundamentalism at the time. At this late stage of my life, from a distance of more decades than I care to admit, it is hard to fathom, but in those circles the idea of the Christian life had too often been reduced to a convoluted hodgepodge of an emotionalistic pietism, a selective, sexually-oriented moralism, and a boundary-marking legalism. The last of these, of course, consisted of elements that often attained a sociological importance far out of proportion to their intrinsic worth, which wasn't much to begin with: drinking, smoking, movies, playing cards, rock and roll (and other forms of the "devil's music," such as blues and jazz). Most of these didn't concern me. But I loved music, and was an aspiring trumpet player who especially loved jazz and the rock music emanating from the new FM radio stations like WMMR in Philly. Even though he, of course, didn't like such music in the least, not once did dad say anything about my listening to it; nor did he ever prohibit me from purchasing jazz or rock records (indeed, I still recall one time in the summer of 1973 when, on the drive back home from the shopping center, he saw my copy of Chicago VI I had just bought; he asked, "Are you sure that's OK to listen to?" When I responded in the affirmative, that was sufficient for him). And of course he enthusiastically supported my playing jazz in the high school stage band. When I arrived at my fundamentalist college and found out how many of my friends had not been allowed to listen to such music, I was shocked. Sadly, I learned quickly not to be surprised when looked down upon as "unspiritual" by the "spiritual elite" for doing so. Dad may have been "Snappin' Jack," with strong convictions and a pronounced zeal for defending them, but he knew the difference between adiaphora and sin, and was perfectly willing to stand up, alone if need be, to support a Christian's right to the former.

Dad with the author, Philadelphia, early 1960's

As is increasingly obvious, the evangelical church in America is in disarray. I myself wrote my own obituary for the movement back in January in the wake of yet another election in which Donald Trump had won 80% or so of the white evangelical vote. Younger folks raised in the movement appear to be leaving in droves, leading to the "Exvangelical" phenomenon, even as more Trump supporters, or Republicans in general, are now adopting the label, irrespective of whether or not they attend church, or even are Christian at all. In these dark days I have, because of my implacable and outspoken criticism of Trump, lost not a few friends. "Meaningful Christian community" has, for all practical purposes, become for many an oxymoron as hordes have compromised their devotion to the Lord Christ by their inexplicable devotion to a human political ideology and a criminal, amoral (indeed blatantly immoral) former president. Many have asked me why I hang on, why I refuse to quit, why I persevere in the faith entrusted to me by my dear, departed father.

With his brother Bill in the Shenandoah Valley, Virginia, August 1975

To be honest, that's a good question, one to which I gave a lengthy response some eight years ago. The short answer is that I won't quit and can't quit. Why?  Because I know the faith is true. And I know this, not from personal experience―"you ask me how I know he lives?/he lives within my heart;" dad hated that hymn, realizing, correctly, the deceptive potential of subjective feelings and emotions―but because I have seen the faith work itself out in the life of my father. To be sure, I believe in the truth of Christianity intellectually because I believe the testimony of Scripture to the bodily resurrection of Jesus (Dad would have said, "You ask me how I know he lives?/The Bible tells me so"). But I wonder sometimes how many Christians in America, especially those of us of a certain age raised in Christian homes in a culture where Christianity was the dominant cultural expression, ever sit down and consider how truly outrageous the claims of our religion are, to wit, that the god of a middle eastern nomad named Abraham, and of only one branch of his family (the Jacobean line)―a historically insignificant people who had been dominated by the major players of the ancient world such as the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Syrians, and Romans― this god is the one and only God of the whole world; even more outrageous: that the Galilean man Jesus of Nazareth not only was this God's incarnate Son, but that his crucifixion by the Romans was God's ultimate victory over sin and evil, that he was vindicated by being raised bodily to immortal life two days later, and that this resurrected Jesus will return again at some undisclosed time in the future to establish God's kingdom on earth as in heaven.  As I said, these claims are outrageous … and yet they are non-negotiable, claims Christians by definition stake their lives upon. As counterintuitive as it may seem, I nevertheless do believe there are good, abjunctive historical arguments for affirming the truth of the resurrection, as N. T. Wright and Michael Licona, among others, have argued in meticulous detail (somewhat less orthodox, though not entirely skeptical, is Dale Allison), not the least of which concerns the conversion and testimony of the Apostle Paul himself. In the nature of the case, historical reasoning cannot convey mathematical certainty. But the historical case, to my mind, is sufficient to justify belief. But what settles it for me, and I don't write this lightly, is the example provided by the life lived by my father as one thoroughly transformed by the grace of God. As I wrote seven years ago, "his life served as an embodied apologetic for the Christian faith."

With his friends and colleagues Gordon Ceperley and John Cawood,
Jerusalem, June 1976

In particular, as a student and de facto disciple of the Apostle Paul, dad, having experienced the grace of God, was profoundly gripped by it and thoroughly absorbed the apostle's teaching on the subject. He was a man of uncompromising integrity and unfailing graciousness. To love God, for him as well as for the Torah and Jesus, entailed, as a necessary corollary, loving one's neighbor as oneself. For him, "considering others better than himself" (Philippians 2:3) wasn't simply a pious platitude to be passed over after it warmed one's heart; it actually meant we should look to the interests of people other than ourselves (Philippians 2:4). For him, the "cheap grace" of so much American fundamentalism had no currency. He knew that the incongruous grace (J. Barclay) that saved the undeserving was, through the Holy Spirit, both efficacious in calling people to faith, leading to their justification, and transformative, leading to the sanctification and "life" granted on the last day. And because he was a theologian of grace, this means as well that he was fundamentally a proponent of Paul's theology of the cross. His only boast, like that of the apostle, was in the cross, through which the relationship he had by birth to this present age had been definitively severed (Galatians 6:14). For it was at the foot of the cross that he, like I, like Martin Luther, and like all who have followed in the footsteps of Paul, had found grace in the person of the crucified Messiah and Savior who loved him and gave himself for him (Galatians 2:20). It is here, despite his brilliance and all his selfless service for God's people, that the ultimate simplicity of his faith comes to the fore, a simplicity which all of us should strive to emulate. I thank God each and every day that I was his son, that in God's providence I was privileged, not only to be taught the gospel plainly, but to see it embodied in one who remains my greatest teacher.

I conclude with words from what he described as his favorite hymn, "My Faith Has Found a Resting Place," written in 1891 by Eliza Edmunds Hewitt of Olivet Presbyterian Church at 22nd and Mt. Vernon Streets in the Fairmount section of Philadelphia, words that convey this simplicity in a nutshell:

My faith has found a resting place,
Not in device or creed;*
I trust the ever living One,
His wounds for me shall plead.

I need no other argument,
I need no other plea,
It is enough that Jesus died,
And that He died for me.

*For those wont to criticize the apparent anti-creedal nature of Ms. Hewitt's lyrics here, remember that she was a Presbyterian, and thus not averse to creeds or confessions. Her point is a salutary one: creeds and confessions are good―indeed, I would argue, failure at catechesis is one one the primary causes of evangelicalism's current malaise and downfall―but simple creedal assent, though necessary, is not sufficient. Saving faith involves more than knowledge and conviction of the truth of the gospel. It involves trust, the entrusting of ourselves to Christ as Savior and Lord (notitia, assensus, fiducia).

With his friend Ted Deibler, Dallas, January 1980

Holding his first grandchild, my daughter Lauren, Havertown, July 1982

At my Th.M. graduation, Dallas, 29 April 1985

My last picture of dad: Ocean City, New Jersey, July 1986