In all the moments of the modern Olympics, few compare – in my view – with the legacy of Eric Liddell, the Flying Scotsman. In the Oscar-winning Chariots of Fire of Eric’s run for Olympic fame in the 1924 games, only a note at the movie’s end speaks of the defining second half of his life that “Eric Liddell, missionary, died in occupied China at the end of World War II.”
Far from the thunderous applause of the Paris games, Eric’s life ended only a couple hundred miles from his birthplace. Son of missionary parents, he left China for a boarding school in London at the age of five. But his family’s home and where he identified most in the British Isles was in Scotland. While attending the University of Edinburgh, he became known as the fastest runner in Scotland, both for his rugby fame and his lightning pace on the track.
As much as I enjoy Chariots of Fire, its two hours hardly capture the 43 years of his short life. One of Eric’s more recent biographers, Duncan Hamilton fills in missing parts. [1]
For the casual observer, Eric comes off a caricature with his uniquely odd running style and his anachronistic insistence on sabbath observance. But what Hamilton presents is the idea that Eric’s formidable character is what propels him both to the running tape in Paris and to the ultimate finish line in China. “His character constitutes the basis of his legacy, which is a gift that keeps on giving to whoever discovers both it and him.”
I have many favorite scenes in the movie. While not all literal to Eric’s story, they capture his essence. In a few stirring cinematic moments, the movie has Eric reading from Isaiah on Sunday while competitions are won and lost across town. But his actual text in Paris the Sunday after he won gold was Psalm 119:18: “Open thou mine eyes that I may behold wondrous things.” Hamilton notes the “’wondrous things’ are the commandments.” Eric understood better than most in his age that obedience to God is what truly leads to glory.
The movie compresses Liddell’s agony over the conflict between his devotion to the Sabbath and his desire to run his preferred 100-meter race in the games. The die had been cast long before with Liddell living through months of public “incredulity” even as he trained for the less familiar 400s. Arriving in Paris, he still had posted only a modest time.
At the games, few believed he had a chance. As it turned out, he bested the field to cross the line in 47.6 seconds and break both Olympic and world records. And that after earning a bronze in the 200-meter finals and beating teammate Harold Abrahams, who had taken gold in the 100s.
Public Domain: 400-meter final, Eric Liddell outruns Horatio Fitch
Eric could have remained in the U.K. to compete for almost certain gold in future games. He could have had a long and illustrious career in rugby. He certainly could have earned a fortune off his exploits. And he could have justified it all with a flood of speaking opportunities as a world-renowned Christian athlete.
But Liddell resisted the push of public acclaim and the temptation that he could serve God better in his citizenship country. To quote Hamilton: “A lesser figure would not only have given in to temptation but also convinced himself that it was the right thing to do…. He wasn’t for sale at any price.”
Just as he had believed God had made him fast, he also believed God had made him for China. As much as others thought it senseless to give up so much for China, it made perfect sense to him. Besides China being his homeland, China was where God had called him to be.
So, it was that within a year of the Paris games, Liddell found himself back in China, first in Tianjin and then in a remote and extremely poor village in Hebei province. He returned briefly to Scotland in 1932 and 1939. On that first trip, he was ordained as a Congregational minister. Back in China, he married Florence, a daughter of Canadian missionaries. They had three daughters, though Eric never met the third.
China’s Qing Dynasty was overthrown when Eric was almost 10 years old. Having struggled for a century to maintain power against internal and external foes, the dynasty collapsed in late 1911. All this occurred while Eric was studying in London. He and his family lived through the ensuing turmoil for the next three decades.
Regional, Nationalist, Communist, Japanese and other forces battled for supremacy. But Eric did not live to see the Japanese defeated, much less the final struggle between the Nationalists and the Communists.
Meanwhile, as Japan, Germany, and Itay formed the Axis powers and engulfed most of the world in World War II, pregnant Florence and their two girls embarked on a Japanese ship to return to Canada. Eric, denied permission by their missions agency to go with them, took his ailing brother’s place at the mission station in Hebei, allowing for Rob to return to the U.K. for better care.
Eventually, the Japanese overtook the mission station and Eric was forced to return to Tianjin. Even there the situation was tenuous and by 1943, Eric found himself interned with hundreds of other foreigners in the Weihsien Internment Camp.
Students of the China Inland Mission Chefoo School joined them later, including the great-granddaughter of CIM founder Hudson Taylor. Mary Taylor (later Previte) lived in the camp from ages 9 to 12. Like the other children in the camp, Mary knew Eric, whom she called “Jesus in running shoes.”[2]
When I read a biography, I don’t want a hagiography. I want to understand the person, warts and all. Yet while Eric was not without his faults (difficult as they are to find sometimes), his character and his way of treating others always stand out in stark relief to everyone else around him. Thus was his reputation in the internment camp.
Langdon Gilkey, a theologian and a prolific writer, went to China to teach English at a university shortly after graduating magna cum laude from Harvard University. Two years later he found himself in the same camp as Eric. Gilkey’s book, Shantung Compound, is based on a journal he kept while in the camp. In the book, he writes of the moral challenges arising from such a crowded cross-section of humanity.[3]
Although Gilkey believes in the innate goodness of people, he becomes disillusioned with humanity as demonstrated in the camp. And not just for the usual assortment of high (lawyers, doctors) and low (junkies, prostitutes) life, but also for the missionaries. Especially the missionaries. However, he writes that, among them all, one man brought hope. Eric overflowed with “good humour and love for life, with enthusiasm and charm.”
While nearly everyone else struggled with despair and exploitation, Eric became a self-appointed youth director of the camp, running chess tournaments, square dances, and sporting events, checking in on people, and speaking in chapel services. He became a psychological lifeline for many, including Gilkey.
Reflecting on Gilkey’s testimony of Eric, Tim Keller writes that what keeps us from our depraved selves in such times is not what we believe or do as much the power of the gospel of grace. “God’s grace confronts our human pride in all situations. Only when the church is filled with people who have had such a confrontation and allowed God’s grace to win out over their own sinful nature will we have a missionary encounter with modern society.”[4]
Hamilton writes that “nothing betrays the character of a man like his manners, a phrase slightly misquoted from the poet Spenser that Eric Liddell never forgot. Liddell even extended his courtesies to the occupying force…” Urging his fellow internees to pray for the camp guards, Eric would say, “When we hate them we are self-centered.” Others may have thought they had every reason to disrespect their captors, but not Eric.
One thing that caught my attention is how Eric finally made a concession to his “no sports on Sunday rule” in the camp. Bored youth were getting into trouble, of a very distressing nature to their parents. After much personal deliberation, Eric allowed for sports on Sundays after the midday meal. When a hockey game turned violent, Eric started arranging the Sabbath sports and refereeing the hockey games.
Among a few items Eric had brought with him were his Bible and E. Stanley Jones’ The Christ of the Mount. Jones, a missionary to India and friend of Gandhi, starts the book with these words: “Men need nothing so much as a working philosophy of life and an adequate way to live.” With that sentence, Jones launches into his study on the Sermon on the Mount.[5]
With inspiration from Jones, Eric wrote his own book, Discipleship, in the camp. Hamilton notes that Discipleship “still stands as the most significant thing Liddell wrote because the Sermon [on the Mount] permeates every thought presented in it. It is also the closest we get to hearing Liddell speak from the heart.” Written early in his time in Weihsien, its handwritten pages formed the core of what he taught other internees on Sundays and in smaller settings throughout the week.
Eric’s daughter, Heather, forced to sail away from her father at the age of four, says of him: “My father was meant to be in that camp. His whole life was designed to either care for or to inspire people.” And there were many people such as little Mary and struggling Gilkey for whom Eric was their anchor. A camp roommate, Joe Cotterill, said that Eric’s anchor was that “‘he believed God was in that situation with us.’”
The internees had little idea what was transpiring outside their cramped compound. There were hints via nearby Chinese smugglers and improvised technology. But mostly they were cut off from the world, the isolation adding to their despair.
In February 1945, Allied forces were reopening the Burma Road, waging the Battle of Iwa Jima, pushing into Manila and recapturing Bataan. By September, Japan would surrender. But Eric would not live to see liberation.
For months he had struggled physically. In a camp filled with malnourishment and disease, who wasn’t? Still, he pressed on, fighting what he thought was a nervous breakdown, even as his balance grew weak. What took him was an undiagnosed brain tumor. In his last words on February 21, he spoke of complete surrender.
One of Eric’s favorite hymns was “Be Still, My Soul,” and especially the line, “Thy heavenly Friend through thorny ways lead to a joyful end.” In Eric’s final days, an interned Salvation Army band played the hymn outside his hospital window.
Human suffering and derailed destinies are hard to explain this side of eternity. Perhaps Hamilton responds best when he writes of Eric: “He’d once – on that hot July evening in Paris – grasped for an Olympic title as well, knowing nonetheless even as he won it that the glory of gold was nothing in his world compared to the glory of God.”
Inclined to watch the Olympic games this summer? Pay close attention to the athletes’ back stories. Meanwhile, reflect on Eric’s story and what it has to say to our generation about going for gold and glory. For another good read on Liddell, see David McCasland’s Eric Liddle: Pure Gold.[6] For more resources, visit our resource page.
[1] Duncan Hamilton, For the Glory: Eric Liddell’s Journey from Olympic Champion to Modern Martyr (Penguin Press, 2016).
[2] Growing up in a Japanese WW2 internment camp in China – BBC News
[3] Langdon Gilkey, Shantung Compound: The Story of Men and Women Under Pressure (Harper, 1966).
[4] When Grace Wins — Redeemer City to City
[5] E. Stanley Jones, The Christ of the Mount: A Working Philosophy of Life (The Abingdon Press, 1931), more recent versions are available.
[6] Published by Discovery House in 2001; paperback in 2004.