Eric Liddell

1902–1945ScottishCongregational

Refused to run on a Sunday, won Olympic gold in another race entirely, and died twenty years later in a Japanese internment camp in China.

Summary

Eric Liddell lived 1902–1945, and was Scottish. This wing places Eric Liddell in The Church Under Fire & Into All the World, 1930–today.

Lived 1902–1945, Scottish.
Stood in The Church Under Fire & Into All the World (1930–today).
Hangs on The Missionaries.
Tradition: Congregational / missionary.

The life

Eric Liddell was born in China to missionary parents, raised in Scotland, and was the fastest man in the country - a rugby international as well as a sprinter. When the 1924 Olympic schedule put the 100 metres heats on a Sunday, he withdrew from his best event and trained for the 400 instead, a distance he was not expected to win. He won it, in a world record.

Then he went back to China as a teacher, married Florence Mackenzie in Tianjin, and stayed on as the Japanese invasion closed in, sending his pregnant wife and daughters to safety in Canada in 1941 while he remained. Interned at Weihsien camp in 1943, he taught the children, refereed their games, carried coal for the elderly, and gave away his own rations. He died in the camp on 21 February 1945 of an undiagnosed brain tumour, five months before liberation, and never saw his youngest daughter.

What was happening while he lived4 moments · 1930–today

May 1934The Barmen DeclarationOne hundred thirty-nine delegates met in a church hall in Barmen, a district of Wuppertal, while the German government was busy fusing the Protestant church to the Nazi state. Their six short theses, drafted mainly by the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, said the church listens to one Word, Jesus Christ as Scripture presents Him, and to no other lord, event, or leader.
October 1945The Stuttgart Declaration of GuiltGerman church leaders, Niemöller among them, admitted before the world that they had not resisted enough, not prayed enough, not believed enough. It is one of the rare times a national church has said plainly that it failed.
1948–1964Richard Wurmbrand's fourteen yearsA Romanian Lutheran pastor of Jewish descent, converted at thirty, was seized off the street in February 1948 and spent fourteen years in communist prisons, about three of them alone in an underground cell where he kept his mind by preaching a sermon every night to no one. He was released in 1964 under Romania's general amnesty for political prisoners and left the country in 1965, after Western Christians paid for his exit.
1949–1955China's long night beginsAfter the communist victory, foreign missionaries were pushed out within a few years and churches were pressed into a single state-supervised body. Wang Mingdao, a Beijing pastor who had refused Japanese pressure a decade earlier, refused this too, and was arrested in August 1955. He signed a confession under interrogation, could not live with it, took it back, and served roughly twenty-two more years.

The Church Under Fire & Into All the World: the whole era→

Go further

Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.

Search Eric Liddell at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites

Why this one hangs here

Gave up his best Olympic event rather than run on a Sunday, won a different one in world-record time, and died in a prison camp teaching other people's children.

Hangs on The Missionaries: The ones who looked at a map and could not stay home.

On the wall

Era: The Church Under Fire & Into All the World (1930–today)

Hangs in: The Missionaries

The years he lived in

The Church Under Fire & Into All the World 1930–today

Two counts of the twentieth century's Christian dead are in circulation and they are built differently, so the page gives both. David Barrett and Todd Johnson put the figure near forty-five million in the World Christian Encyclopedia, first edition 1982 and second edition 2001. They counted every believer whose life was cut short by human hostility. That takes in whole populations killed in wars and famines where faith was one cause among several. Thomas Schirrmacher, working for the International Institute for Religious Freedom, puts the yearly figure near seven to eight thousand, counting only deaths documented case by case as killings for confessing Christ. Barrett and Johnson's own Center for the Study of Global Christianity revised the annual rate down in the third edition of 2019. The wide number and the narrow number measure two different things, and even the narrow one is large. The same century saw the church grow faster than it ever had. Both are true of the same hundred years.

The whole era →

Known for

Refusing the 100 metres at the 1924 Paris Olympics because the heats fell on a Sunday
Winning the 400 metres in a world-record 47.6 seconds instead
Nineteen years as a missionary teacher in China, and death in the Weihsien internment camp, 1945

Standing beside himThe Church Under Fire & Into All the World · 37 on this stretch of wall

Corrie ten Boom1892–1983

Hid Jews behind a false wall in her family's watch shop, survived Ravensbrück, and went back to Germany to forgive.

Maximilian Kolbe1894–1941

Stepped out of the Auschwitz line and asked to be starved to death in place of a man he had never met, who lived another fifty-four years.

C.S. Lewis1898–1963

The Oxford atheist who came in kicking and struggling, then explained the faith to a whole century.

Wang Mingdao1900–1991

Signed the confession his interrogators wanted, could not live with it, took it back - and paid for that with twenty-two more years.

Watchman Nee1903–1972

Built China's house churches, then spent the last twenty years of his life in a labor camp for it.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer1906–1945

Left safety in America to go home to Hitler's Germany, and was hanged days before the camp was liberated.