Amy Carmichael, “Beauty for Ashes”, by Iain H Murray, published by the Banner of Truth Trust, paperback, 186 pp, £6.50.
Amy Beatrice Carmichael (1867-1951), the missionary and writer, is the subject of Iain Murray’s latest biography. She was born into a well-to-do Presbyterian family in Northern Ireland and educated privately until her father’s business failed. Her conversion took place while at boarding school. In her early twenties she came into contact with the kind of Evangelicalism embodied in the early Keswick Convention. After her father’s early death she became a kind of adopted daughter to a Quaker businessman regarded as a founder of the Convention. In early 1892 Carmichael sensed a call to the mission field. One of her biographers states, “As clearly as a human voice, she heard God say, ‘Go ye’; it was inescapable, irresistible”1. In 1893 she
1Elizabeth Elliot, Amy Carmichael: Her Life and Legacy, Kingsway, 1988, pp 53-54.
sailed to Japan to work with the holiness evangelist Barclay Fowell Buxton.
Due to illness, Amy Carmichael spent just one year in Japan and, after a short spell in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, she was advised that the climate in Bangalore would be better for her health. Accordingly she set out for India and arrived there in 1895. She was never to return. Her work in India was at first under the auspices of the Church Missionary Society’s Zenana Mission, although her financial support came from the Keswick Convention’s Mission Council.
From 1896 onward her home was in the extreme south of India. There she made it her mission to rescue young girls from child prostitution in Hindu temples. With the help of a Church of England missionary, she created the Dohnavur Fellowship, which provided a home for the girls she had rescued. From 1918 the plight of boys involved in the dramas that accompanied Hindu worship led to a parallel boys’ work being developed. In 1925 Dohnavur became independent of the Zenana Mission. The work continued to be supported by the Keswick movement and an ever-widening circle of supporters. In 1928 a medical branch of the work was established.
After an accident in 1931, she was virtually crippled for the rest of her life and increasingly confined to bed. However, she continued to read, write and direct the work at Dohnavur as far as was possible. She died in 1951 at the age of 83, by which time the Dohnavur family numbered over 900.
Iain Murray’s biography is very brief in comparison to those of Frank Houghton2 and Elizabeth Elliot. Yet one would have expected someone holding a distinctly Reformed theological commitment, as Mr Murray does, to have referred to at least some of the following:
-
Amy Carmichael’s commitment to the defective theology of Keswick. Mrs Elliot observes, “What Keswick stood for Amy Carmichael stood for. The great principles enunciated in the tent described precisely what she most longed for and were echoed in her writings for the rest of her life.”3
-
Her setting up a group in Dohnavur called the “Sisters of the Common Life”. It was based on one founded by Gerhard Groote (1340-1384), a Dutch Roman Catholic deacon. Groote called his organisation the “Brethren of the Common Life”, in which the pivotal point was a search for inner peace through “ardour” and “silence”. Amy Carmichael had been introduced to the idea of silence by a Quaker. Gaius Davies has written, “It was as near as could be
2Frank Houghton, Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, SPCK, 1953.
3Amy Carmichael, p 50. Keswick theology has been effectively critiqued by J C Ryle, Holiness, James Clarke, 1956, pp vii-xviii; John Murray, Collected Writings, vol 4, pp 281-286; James I Packer, “Keswick and the Reformed Doctrine of Sanctification”, in Evangelical Quarterly, vol 27, (July 1955) pp 153-167; Geoffrey Thomas, “The Keswick Theory of Sanctification,” in Evangel, vol 9:3 (Autumn 1991) pp 27-32.
to a religious order, with vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, and undoubtedly [she] functioned as the mother superior”.4
-
When the Dohnavur family ceased attending the Church Missionary Society’s church next to the compound and commenced their own services, the arrangement was, “according to Amy’s eclectic tastes, incorporating some of the of the silence of Quaker meetings . . . some of the liturgy . . . from the Anglican service, and some of the freedom of the Free churches”.5
-
In addition to recommending to the Sisterhood books by John Bunyan and Samuel Rutherford, Amy Carmichael also urged them to read a range of High Anglican and Roman Catholic books of devotion.6
Despite these comments on some of Mr Murray’s omissions, he has made clear in the book his disapproval of Amy Carmichael’s view of guidance from God. She believed that definite guidance might be received through a verse of Scripture being strongly impressed on her mind. As he points out, “This direction was different from the type of guidance gained from general biblical principles and prayerful reflection. It rested on a particular verse which was to be understood to mean something other than the meaning in the original context” (pp 123-124).
In addition to providing a sketch of Amy Carmichael’s life, which is in many respects quite heart-warming, and focuses on her undoubted love for Christ and her sterling work in rescuing children from prostitution in the Hindu temples, Mr Murray also highlights her stand for the authority and inerrancy of Scripture. These were doctrines on which old Keswick remained sound, at a time when they were being undermined even on the mission field. He deals at some length (pp 84-87) with the dismissal of Stephen Neill (later to become a Bishop) from Dohnavur for his “thought that a change of belief over the trustworthiness of Scripture could be accommodated within a ‘new type of Evangelicalism'” (p 84). The last chapter, “The Bible and World Evangelism”, is excellent. It deals with the abandonment of the authority of Scripture and its effect on missions.7
Roy Middleton
4 Gaius Davies, Genius, Grief & Grace, Christian Focus Publications, 2008, p 249. Amma was the name given to Carmichael by the children; it was the Tamil term for mother.
5Elizabeth Elliot, Amy Carmichael, p. 272.
6 Carmichael had a bookcase that contained her favourite books. Elliot has given us details of a significant number. Those she lists are practically all High Anglican or Roman Catholic devotional books. See Elizabeth Elliot, Amy Carmichael, p 315.
7 Iain Murray has also ably dealt with the need to maintain a stand for the inerrancy of Scripture in a recent lecture in America, printed in the August-September 2015 issue of the Banner of Truth magazine. The lecture is titled, “How Scotland lost its hold of the Bible”, and details the apostasy in the 1843 Free Church of Scotland. This declension led to the formation of the Free Presbyterian Church in 1893 so that these truths might be maintained.