Athlete and missionary Eric Liddell had been largely forgotten until the 1981 film Chariots of Fire reminded the world of him.
Liddell was born in China to Scottish missionaries in 1902. At the age of five, he was sent to a London boarding school while his parents continued in China. For twelve years they had only brief times of family reunion.
Liddell grew up surrounded by Christianity and acquired a firm faith at a young age. He studied science at Edinburgh University where, despite a reserved and shy personality, he became involved in evangelistic preaching with the Christian Union.
That Liddell had outstanding sporting ability was something that had been identified at school, and at university he played for Scotland’s national rugby team. In 1923 he shifted his focus to athletics where he was soon recognised as the fastest runner in Scotland. Liddell was selected for the British team for the 1924 Olympics in Paris with the expectation that he would run in several races, including the 100 metres where he was tipped to be the likely winner. However, holding beliefs on sport on the Lord’s Day, he refused to take part in the heats that would be held on a Sunday. His action brought him under enormous pressure from both the British Olympics management and the popular press to compromise his faith. He refused to yield.
In the 200m Liddell won a bronze medal. He prepared for the 400m, a distance over which he was not expected to do well. On the morning of the race, he was handed a paper which read, ‘In the old book it says, “He that honours me, I will honour.”’ Recognising the words from 1 Samuel 2:30, Liddell was encouraged. He took the race at a sprint pace and won, breaking the Olympic and world records. Already well known because of his moral battle, Liddell’s dramatic and unexpected victory now made him a global celebrity.
After the Olympics, Liddell continued to compete but, rejecting various appealing offers associated with sport, expressed his firm belief that ‘God made him for China’. In 1925 he returned to north China as a teacher in a missionary college. In China, Liddell, busy with work and evangelism, continued to compete occasionally. He travelled to Scotland in 1930 to be trained and ordained in the Congregational Church of Scotland and, returning to China, married Florence Mackenzie whose parents were Canadian missionaries.
During the 1930s a brutal three-way war between the Nationalists, the Communists and the invading Japanese made China perilous. With the situation becoming ever more dangerous, Liddell, his wife and their two daughters made a final visit to Scotland in 1939 before returning to China. By 1941 Japanese attacks meant that British nationals were advised to leave. Liddell said goodbye to his children and his wife, now pregnant with their third child, while he himself stayed on at a rural mission station with his brother Rob who was a doctor. It was a difficult, dangerous and wearying time.
In 1943, along with other missionaries and foreigners, Liddell was interned by the Japanese and sent to a brutal prison camp where conditions were harsh and insanitary. There, Liddell became a leader, helping the elderly, encouraging the depressed, defusing quarrels and teaching Bible classes. He studied the Bible and prayed deeply both for inmates and for the Japanese. He wrote a book on discipleship, which is still in print, and was able to maintain an interrupted correspondence with Florence in Canada.
Liddell, malnourished, suffered an alarming decline in health in 1945 and, just five months before liberation, died from a brain tumour. His grave at the camp is now marked with a memorial headstone inscribed with Isaiah 40:31: ‘They shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary.’
At the war’s end Liddell was greatly mourned and funds were raised for the support of his daughters, a missionary scholarship and an athletics trophy. However, with the withdrawal of missionaries from China in 1949, Eric Liddell became increasingly forgotten until Chariots of Fire brought him once more to the world’s attention. Although, inevitably, the film alters details, its depiction of a man who put God before his sporting career is authentic and true.
Liddell is an outstanding Christian hero and let me suggest three things that are striking about him.
First, Liddell lived a life of surrender. His last words were about surrendering to God, an attitude that was central to his life. He took the lordship of Christ seriously and his breath-taking commitment stands as a rebuke against everything that risks taking the place of God in our lives, whether it be sport, pleasure or our careers. Whether we agree with Liddell’s attitude to sport on Sunday is irrelevant; it was a ruling that he believed God had laid upon him and, quite rightly, he refused to break it.
Second, Liddell lived a life of sacrifice. It’s easy to utter pious words about ‘surrendering to God’ until you have to pay the price. In being willing to forfeit success at the Olympics, Liddell showed he was prepared to pay what it demanded. He paid the price of surrender again when he rejected promising careers to take on a humble teaching job in China. And, most awesomely, he paid the price of surrender when, saying farewell to his family and a daughter he would never see, he chose to stay in China and serve God.
Finally, Liddell lived a life that shone. By portraying Liddell as a modern saint, Chariots of Fire invited a cynical world to explore for stains and blemishes. Yet forty years on, everything discovered about Eric Liddell has simply enhanced his reputation as someone who could live for others because he lived for Christ.
Few of us will have the opportunity to gain Olympic gold, but all of us have the opportunity to be those who, whatever the cost, stand firm for Christ.
‘And when the Chief Shepherd appears, you will receive the crown of glory that will never fade away.’ (1 Peter 5:4 NIV)
J.John
Reverend Canon
