Book Review: These Were Victors

Title: These Were Victors

Author: Leslie Hardinge

Date: 1983

Publisher: Pacific Press

ISBN: none

Length: 96 pages

Quote: "These persons were not among the most famous or best known in Scripture. Inspiration has recorded only enough information to show us their road to triumph."

Do you read Sunday School lesson books from churches you don't attend? Many people never do. I recommend this exercise, though, to anyone who'd like to learn more about a denomination. When churches are big enough to have these little books officially published, they often give them to members and visitors free of charge, and studying the lesson books can teach you a lot. 

I have a few "quarterlies" for sale in real life. They come from different denominations; many came in boxes of secondhand books, although These Were Victors was one I brought home from church--it's a Seventh-Day Adventist quarterly, and I attended that church faithfully from 1982 to 1987. I think the Seventh-Day Adventist quarterlies are among the "meatiest" daily Bible study guides. Seventh-Day Adventist "Sabbath Schools" really are schools of Bible study, the shuls where discussion and debate go on before people settle down in the sanctuary to hear the service. Each quarterly lesson book offers a full day's study, with triple spacing between paragraphs so readers can write out their answers to the questions discussed in the lesson (if they write small).Although the idea of a monthly or quarterly lesson book is for readers to meet and discuss what they've read on one specific day, the Bible doesn't change; a Bible study written for discussion in specific churches on April 21, 1983, is still just as informative now as it was then.

This one discusses thirteen Bible characters whose stories can be covered in one week each: Stephen, Lydia, Onesiphorus, Hannah, Onesimus, Ruth, Barnabas, Abigail, Eliezer, Dorcas, Caleb, Miriam, and Jonathan. "The victories gained by these persons were not seen as spectacular to men. Stephen was stoned as a martyr to his faith, while Jonathan's loyalty to his insane father cost him his life...Yet we believe that in the sight of [H]eaven each of these men and women were [sic] victors."

In the interpretation of these stories I detect some of the prejudice against introverts that I remember encountering among Seventh-Day Adventists in 1983. Hannah, we are told in 1 Samuel 1:7-10, was unhappy and was praying alone, apart from others, in the temple. (Temple services focussed on barbecues with plenty of wine, also featured shouting and dancing and singing and banging on cymbals, and probably had more in common with raves than with Seventh-Day Adventist church services.) Her silent, solitary prayer was a sign of passionate intensity. But Hardinge goes further to cast an unfavorable light on the fact that "she left to be by herself": "Hannah could stand the family pressures no longer...Perhaps in her anguish she felt that she might give way to anger or even revenge." And then again, perhaps she just had faith that if God could hear anything in the general commotion God could hear the prayer of someone who'd stepped aside from the clamorous mob...though poor old Eli was such an ineffectual religious leader that he thought someone not raving was more likely to be sick, or pass out, than to be praying, just as people in twentieth century churches that tried to normalize extroversion were likely to think a person bowed in prayer was dozing or suffering from a toothache.

Barnabas, on the other hand, we are told was "obviously a warm, outgoing, people-oriented person." The Bible does not positively affirm that Barnabas was an introvert, nor did he leave behind anything well enough written to prove that he was one. What we're told about Barnabas was that he was generous, that he was among the first to trust Paul, that he later championed his young cousin Mark against Paul, and that he wanted to avoid a direct confrontation about a point of doctrine. This could easily be the profile of an introvert. Introverts avoid confrontations about their beliefs because they don't feel ready to defend their beliefs in a perfect, winning yet conciliating way; extroverts, because they want to feel that people liiiike them more than they want to be right. (Likewise, Mark's terse writing style could be that of an introvert who thinks most people run on too long, or an extrovert who doesn't want to sit still and write down his thoughts.)

But these are the only ideological prejudices that leap out as I glance over this little book. On the whole it's a tiny treasure box of historical studies. "Barnabas" looks like a surname--bar meaning "son"--but how many commentaries bother to tell us what his given name was? How many mention that Lydia came from Turkey? (Yes, Turkey, and this web site devoutly hopes that our current multitude of Turkish readers are motivated by a spirit as good as Lydia's.) That the elaborate displays of friendship between David and Jonathan were political pageantry rather than same-sex courtship, and that, nevertheless, each of those men risked his life for the other--and for peace between their parties--more than once, is not such an unusual point for a Sunday School book to make. That Onesimus's apologies and pleas for forgiveness did not take the place of, but rather gained their credibility from, his willingness to make restitution used to be more often commented on than it is today.