Honoring the Memory of Dale Moody
Honoring the Memory of Dale Moody
By Dwight A. Moody, Dean of the Chapel, Georgetown College, KY
My journal places the adventure on the eighth day of the Yom Kippur War and that would date it Sunday, October 11, 1973. Baptist Missionary to Israel Norm Lytle pulled his Volkswagen Bus to a stop on the eastern slope of theArab village of Silwan, just south of the old city of Jerusalem. Out climbed two men by the name of Moody. The older of the two was the famous and influential Christian theologian Dale Moody; the other was a fresh-out-of-college ministerial student named Dwight A. Moody. That would be me.
"Mr. Moody and I plunged into the chilling waters of Gihon Spring," my journal records, "and wound our way under Mt. Zion to Siloam." We had only our flashlights during our walk through what may be the most authentic remains of the entire biblical record: Hezekiah`s Tunnel. The tunnel diverts the water of the spring through a 1749-foot, s-shape channel cut through solid rock into a pool on the western slope of the ridge that once was known as Zion, the City of David.
Dale Moody and I talked about all of this as we walked slowly through the water tunnel. The rock walls touched our shoulders on both sides; at one point, the rock ceiling was so low only 15 inches separated the rock above our heads and from the chest-high water through which we were walking. When his flashlight failed, I slowed the pace so my single light could illumine his way as well, although in that pitch-dark place we had little choice about where to walk and how. We noted as we walked, the suddenly-elevated ceiling, giving evidence of some miscalculation by the ancient engineers. We stopped at the place where the two work parties met, feeling with our hands the abrupt change in direction of the pick grooves in the stone walls. We pointed to the place where the original commemorative inscription had been first chiseled into the wall and then, two and a half millennia later, chipped from the wall (and hauled off to a museum in Istanbul). Finally, we passed through an iron gate and up the stone stairs where our good missionary friend was waiting to take two dripping-wet explorers to a change of clothes in his home on the Mount of Olives. "It took me over an hour of hot tea and Lytle hospitality to restore my equilibrium," is the way my journal describes the aftermath.
Dale Moody had advised me against our trip to Israel, suggesting I first get some seminary under my belt. I wrote for his judgment on the matter because three years earlier he had entered my life as the energetic, entertaining expositor of Paul`s letter to the Ephesians. It happened this way.
In the fall of 1970, I led a delegation of Georgetown College students to Louisville to invite Dr. Moody to come to our campus and speak to the students. We wanted teaching from the book of Philippians, but he countered with Ephesians, with the theme, "Christ and the Church." Students were promised "small reaction groups led by members of the college family . . . to give . . . an opportunity to discuss the content of Dr. Moody`s lectures . . . as well as sharing, praying, studying and growing as Christian Students." He was delighted at the opportunity and indifferent to the paltry sum we promised him. For six of the next seven weeks he spoke to standing-room crowds in the Science Center lecture hall. I remember very few speakers who stood on the various platforms of our college in those days–two others who made a lasting impression on me were Ken Chafin and Charles Malik–but I have vivid memories of Dr. Moody, with Greek testament in hand, standing behind the waist-high lecture counter quoting the text, telling a story, slicing the air, raising his voice, ranging over centuries, cultures, and commentaries to drive home one memorable point after another to a mesmerized young ministerial student on the front row. It was intoxicating!
Later it was thrilling to discover that Dale Moody and his wife Mildred would be on a six-month sabbatical in Israel during the ten months that my wife Jan and I spent in that same location. We lived on Mt. Zion at what was then called the American Institute of Holy Land Studies (and later the Jerusalem University College). They lived to the south of us on the road that leads from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, at the Ecumenical Institute for Advanced Theological Studies at Ton Tur. Together we hiked the countryside, explored the cultural and religious wonders of the Holy Land, and shared many meals.
I remember one day when he and I drove out to the Plain of Benjamin, just north of Jerusalem. We climbed the stairs to the upper level of the mosque at Nabi Samwil. I had with me a paperback copy of the 1931 edition of George Adam Smith`s classic The Historical Geography of the Holy. As I read aloud from chapter 13, Dr. Moody traced with pointed finger and focused eyes the movements of General Sir Edmund Allenby and his British troops as they advanced up the Ascent of Beth Horan toward Jerusalem in November of 1917. Smith concluded his description with this memorable sentence: "This capture of the city was the thirty-fourth or thirty-fifth in her history."
Dr. Moody taught the Bible each week during the Bible study hour at the West Jerusalem Baptist Church on Narkis Street. We were faithful learners each Saturday (Shabbat) morning as he expounded his theory of the quinquennial organization of the Acts of the Apostles. He contended that the book is divided into six sections, each representing five years, modeled on the five-year Olympiad pattern of the Roman Empire. I will never forget the day when, in the middle of his lesson and after I had asked a question, he leaned in my direction and said with a smile and a wink: "I am saving a seat for you in my theology class at Southern Seminary."
Seminary in Louisville had not been in my plans but that is where I enrolled in the fall of 1974. During my first three years on campus I had not one single class with Dale Moody although my father and I, when he was on sabbatical from his ministry in Murray, Kentucky, sat in on Dr. Moody`s summer-term lectures on the Holy Spirit. Even with such limited classroom contact, I felt his interest in me and valued his influence upon me. At my suggestion, my home-church pastor Dr. Bill Whitaker invited him to preach my ordination sermon at the First Baptist Church of Murray on June 19, 1977.
That itself is a story, not least so because the Murray church had been, decades earlier, the epicenter of the Landmark movement whose lingering influence among Baptists Dr. Moody so vigorously opposed. The charge to the candidate that morning was delivered by my father, now an Alzheimer patient in Louisville. He challenged me to love the book, love the Lord, and love the people, a message consistent with his own life and ministry. Dr. Moody took as his text the entire book of 2 Timothy and with his robust dignity delivered a sermon whose simple outline I recall clearly: spirit, strength, scripture, and sound doctrine. I am sure it was a sermon he had preached many times for many young men. During the introduction, he described me as "brilliant and devout," neither of which was true then nor now, but it lingered with me as a blessing and has reverberated in my mind for thirty years as a treasured affirmation. Every now and then I pull out the "old technology" recording–a cassette tape–and listen once again to Dale Moody exhorting me to be the person he thought I could be and the minister I aspired to be. Afterward Dr. and Mrs. Moody came to the home of my parents on Olive Street for dinner and conversation.
It was not until doctoral work that I had my full dose of his immense learning and enthusiastic classroom style. As one of his Garrett Fellows, I often walked with him to and from class, and even though these hallway discussions were memorable, what is most deeply embedded in my imagination are the days I sat in the large lecture hall at the seminary and listened as he explained the text of Holy Scripture and expounded the doctrines of the Christian faith. He routinely began class with a prayer that was as deep as his love for the Bible and as wide as his hospitality to all people and all learning. He seemed always to wear the same suit, having never developed a desire to impress anybody with the way he dressed. With his white hair and stout frame, he looked good in a light grey suit, white shirt, and tie, and it always seemed to be the same suit, shirt, and tie. But what was always new, even startling, was what he said when he strode into class and started talking, often without opening either a Bible or his notes–it was all in his head. "If every copy of the New Testament was lost," I have heard him say more than once, "I could get together with a few others here at the Seminary and we could reconstruct ninety-five percent of the Greek text."
Most students did not think about this when they raised a hand to challenge Dr. Moody on some point of theology or biblical interpretation–which happened quite often. They would refer to some text other than the one Dr. Moody had read, thinking it was sufficient to correct his theology. Without losing stride Dr. Moody would quote and identify the text, comment on its Greek construction, and rehearse the various ways it had been translated in both the older and new versions. It was a tour de force that demonstrated his dexterity with the biblical text and the seriousness with which he had studied every portion of it.
Hallway conversation and classroom lectures were not the only episodes of influence. One day in 1981, shortly after the death of Clyde Francisco, Dale Moody and I (and mutual friend Badgett Dillard, then vice president of the Seminary) drove to Cave Hill Cemetery. This was my introduction to the famous burial ground in Louisville. He took me to see the markers of such people as George Rogers Clark (brother of William Clark of Lewis and Clark fame) and Col. Harlan Sanders (of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame). But it was our visit to the burial plots of the seminary family that made the most lasting impression
We stood in the original site, dominated by the obelisk of James P. Boyce and the graves of such luminaries as John A Broadus, Basil Manly, Jr., W.O. Carver, A. T. Robertson and John R. Sampey. Moody pointed to the space between Carver and Robertson, his two most valued predecessors at the Seminary, and said: "Here is where I will be buried." There was a long silence.
Later, as we completed our examination, he said: "E. Y. Mullins bought a new burial plot." "That is fitting," I replied, "because Mullins also wrote a new systematic theology for the Seminary."
Mullin`s book, The Christian Religion in its Doctrinal Expression, replaced, as a classroom textbook, the older work by Southern Seminary founder and first president, James P. Boyce, Abstract of Systematic Theology.
As we stood in that second seminary section before the memorials to E. Y. Mullins and Ellis Fuller, both presidents of Southern Seminary, we discussed two other significant accomplishments of the Mullins presidency: the relocation of the seminary from the center of Louisville to its current location on Lexington Road, and the adoption of the Baptist Faith and Message, a basic doctrinal statement of the Southern Baptist Convention. Mullins served as the chairman of the committee that adapted and expanded the older New Hampshire Confession of Faith into a document less Calvinistic than the Abstract of Principles used as the doctrinal standard of our seminary. Later, such friends and colleagues of Dale Moody as Leo Crismon and Eric Rust would be buried in this second cemetery section.
Little did we know on that pleasant day in 1981 that Badgett Dillard would buy the third seminary burial site in 1984. It sits on the elevated eastern edge of the cemetery and offers a view, through the trees, of the spire of Norton Hall, the central building of the seminary campus. Two years later, on March 29, 1986, Dillard himself became the first to be buried in the new plot. Now, it includes the remains of other seminary scholars, such as Allen Graves, James Blevins, Harold Songer, Page Kelly, J. J. Owens, Roy Honeycutt and, surprisingly, Dale Moody. As it turned out, there was insufficient room for Dr. Moody to be buried between his two great heroes in the original Seminary site, and not long before death, he purchased a double plot at the new site.
I was pastor of Third Baptist Church in Owensboro, Kentucky when I received word of Dr. Moody`s death on January 22, 1992. Jan and I attended the funeral at Crescent Hill Baptist Church in Louisville. As providence would have it, I had just begun preaching through Paul`s letter to the Ephesians, and on the following Sunday morning I spoke of my affection for Dr. Moody and dedicated the sermon series to his memory.
I am sure many of his students mourned his passing; but few, if any, can claim to have lived with him at any time during his long and illustrious career. Here is how it all began. In May of 1981, I stopped Dr. Moody in the hallway near the seminary post office.
"I am not getting my research done," I said, referring to my doctoral dissertation. "I am resigning my church in Indiana and moving back to Louisville."
He turned and looked at me a long time, then asked: "Where are you going to live?"
"I don`t know," I replied.
To which he said, "Come and see me next week. I have an idea."
Unbeknownst to me, he and his wife were leaving their long-time home on Grinstead Avenue and moving to Old Cannons Lane.
"In our new home," he explained the following week, "we have an entire apartment complete with private entrance and kitchen. Why don`t you bring your family and live with us?"
And so it was that I painted the ground-floor room that was designated as his library, installed the shelves, unpacked the books, and arranged them around the walls. Then I set up the bunk beds for my two sons, Allan and Isaac; they were seven and five years old and, of course, had no awareness of the significance of their sleeping quarters. My wife and I took our newborn baby into the second bedroom and there we all lived for seven months, until I completed my research and was called to be pastor of the North Park Baptist Church in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I began my work there in January of 1982, defended my dissertation April 20 (the very day Roy Honeycutt was inaugurated as president), and graduated on May 21.
In the meantime, his great work of theology was published: The Word of Truth: A Summary of Christian Doctrine Based on Biblical Revelation. I am proud that my name is included among those who "made the final corrections on the proofs and compiled the indexes." Then and now, I consider the book one of the truly significant contributions to the Baptist theological tradition. It was part of a great wave of systematic theology that swept through the Protestant world during the last quarter of the twentieth century.
Not everyone felt so fine about Dr. Moody`s new book, for his chapter on "Salvation and Apostasy" resurrected a controversy that had dogged him throughout his illustrious career. My last days in his company were spent discussing his adversaries in Arkansas and the wavering support of the new seminary president, Roy Honeycutt.
"The man we need," he had said to me in 1981, when the school was in the hunt for a new leader, "is already on our faculty. His name is Roy Honeycutt."
But President Honeycutt could not defend a professor, even a senior professor of Dr. Moody`s stature, who constantly challenged the doctrinal statement of the seminary and consistently called for its revision on many issues, but especially as it related to perseverance and apostasy. My files are filled with articles, letters, interview transcripts, and newspaper clippings about the turbulent years between 1979 and 1983. These years coincide almost precisely with my own doctoral research on "Doctrines of Inspiration in the Southern Baptist Theological Tradition." For this I recorded and transcribed an interview with Dr. Moody, gathered into one collection the various letters, articles, documents relevant to the subject, and wrote a chapter about Dr. Moody.
Dr. Moody`s last annual contract as Senior Professor of Christian Theology expired without renewal on June 9, 1983, just eight months after he traveled to Arkansas to engage in a pulpit battle with his detractors. There, on November 15, he preached a sermon on Hebrews 10:26-31 entitled, "Willful Sin."
The sermon ends with this memorable and typical flourish: "As long as God gives me breath to breathe, I`ll hold this [Bible] in my hands and I`ll be preaching it in my last breath because I think I will be accountable for what I said today and what I said over the years and in the resurrection. Some ask me, `Why are you so happy: because your burial plot is between W. O. Carver and A. T. Robertson?` I`ll tell you why I`m so happy about it: because both of them are going to get up on resurrection morning and say, `That boy was right all the time.`"
1 See 2 Kings 20:20, which reads: “The rest of the deeds of Hezekiah … how he made the pool and the conduit and brought water into the city, are they not written in the Book of the Annals of the Kings of Judah?” See also articles on Hezekiah and the Siloam Inscription in most Bible dictionaries.
2 The quotes in this description of our walk through Hezekiah’s tunnel are from the unpublished journal which I kept during the time my wife and I lived in Israel, from July 1973 to May 1974. Dale and Mildred Moody were there also for the fall of 1973.
3 “Dr. Dale Moody Lectures” by Dwight A. Moody, “The Georgetonian,” volume 85, issue 6, October 6, 1970, 1.
4 George Adam Smith, The Historical Geography of the Holy Land (New York: Harper & Row, 1966, 198-202.
5 His work on that subject was published as “A New Chronology for the Life and Letters of Paul” (Finegan Festschrift,” ed. Jerry Vardaman, Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns, 1987)
6 See the chapter on Dale Moody in Dwight A. Moody, “Doctrines of Inspiration in the Southern Baptist Theological Tradition,” (unpublished Ph. D. dissertation, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1982), 179-206. Dale Moody spent his career fighting Fundamentalism, Landmarkism, Calvinism, and Dispensationalism, three of which have made a serious and sustained reentry into the life of both the denomination and the seminary that Dale Moody served.
7 Phone conversation on November 26, 2007 with Michael Higgs of the staff of Cave Hill Cemetery; according to Higgs, the first seminary plot (in section T) was purchased on April 11, 1889, the second (in section 4) on March 15, 1915, and the third (in section 37) on March 5, 1984.
8 Abstract of Systematic Theology (1887) was the published version of Boyce’s lecture notes; it was a mildly-baptized version of the Calvinism he had learned at Princeton Seminary; The Christian Religion in its Doctrinal Expression (1917) was Mullins’ attempt to pull the Seminary away from the strict Calvinism of its founders toward a more experiential approach to theology.
9 Phone conversation with Wayne Ward, long-time friend of both Dale Moody and me, December 3, 2007. Ward, perhaps more than any other person, carries the memory of the life and legacy of Dale Moody.
10 Dale Moody, The Word of Truth: A Summary of Christian Doctrine Based on Biblical Revelation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981), xii.
11 The best account of this end-ofcareer controversy is written by E. Glenn Hinson, “Dale Moody: Bible Teacher Extraordinaire” in Perspectives in Religious Studies, vol. 14, no. 4 (Winter 1987), 3-18. See also “Perspectives on Scripture and Tradition: A Response by Dale Moody,” vol. 15, no. 1, Spring 1988, 5-16. See also the complete bibliography of Dale Moody’s writings compiled by Paul Debusman in 1986 and available in the library of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
12 See Dale Moody, “The Inspiration of Scripture,” edited by Dwight A. Moody, 1982, unpublished manuscript in the library of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
13 See “Willful Sin,” ibid. A more complete presentation of Dale Moody’s teaching on salvation and apostasy can be found in his little book, Apostasy: A Study in the Epistle to the Hebrews and in Baptist History (Macon: Smyth & Helwys, 1986).
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