One of the things I value most about reading biographies is that it enables me to view these famous persons not as larger-than-life, almost mythic figures, but as human beings. When I learn more about someone’s life it takes them off the pedestal and puts them back on solid ground right next to me—they are human beings created in the image of God, yet human beings who are imperfect sinners. I think that prior to, let’s say the 1960’s, the blemishes on the lives of heroic figures were often hidden by their biographers. However, since the late 1960’s, I think it is much more common to vilify heroes in an effort to show that no one can be trusted. Before this change, George Washington couldn’t tell a lie and singlehandedly defeated the British. Since the change, George Washington is a nominally religious rich boy who owned slaves. Neither of these dichotomous ways of looking at people’s lives is accurate or helpful. People are complex. We do good things and we do bad things. We’re sinners that God can make into saints but who never, at least in this life, fully shed the sin within the saint. There are some people who I believe were so broken that they were just plain evil—Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Pol Pot to name a few—but they are the exception to the rule.
Many of the great men I’ve read about left broken hearts in their wake as they were accomplishing great things. It is a verifiable fact that Martin Luther King Jr. had an adulterous relationship during the height of his Christian based civil rights work. His adultery is still inexcusable, but it doesn’t negate all the good he accomplished as a broken, sinful man of faith. The abolitionist preacher Henry Ward Beecher was a pretty big sleaze but he did contribute to the cause of abolition. John Knox said a lot of really bad things about women, mostly about the female monarchs of England, but he also insisted that girls be educated alongside boys in Scotland, which was extremely rare in those days. C.S. Lewis exchanged letters with admirers all over the world, but let his relationship with his best friend, J.R.R. Tolkien (who wrote the Lord of the Rings trilogy) fizzle, and he also made some really strange choices late in his life. Woody Guthrie not only supported worker’s rights and showed the power of music to unite people, but he was an out of control alcoholic and a terrible husband and father.
In Psalm 8, we read, “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor.” That’s the good of it. In Romans 3 we read, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” That’s the bad of it. In reading biographies I have come to see both the good and the bad of important people in history. We are sinners, all of us and that includes George Washington, Anne Bradstreet, and C.S. Lewis. But, as Albert Einstein once said, “We cannot despair of humanity, since we ourselves are human beings.” I think that's Einstein's version of Jesus' "let he who is without sin cast the first stone." I have read of the image of a great circle. Inside that great circle it says “Sinners Here.” Every person who ever lived is inside that circle. Only Jesus stands on the outside of that circle, yet Jesus is willing to get in that circle with us to bring us back into relationship with God and with one another.
Whenever I read about the lives of my heroes and I am forced to take off the rose colored glasses, at least three things happen. Firstly, an idol is crushed, which is always a good thing (see commandments 1 & 2). Secondly, it encourages me that if God can use these broken sinful people to do great things, maybe God will use this broken sinful person to do great things. Thirdly, it makes me give thanks for the grace of God in Jesus Christ, because it reminds me of what we are without God. So I encourage you to read some biographies, to teach your kids to read biographies, and to allow those biographies to give you a realistic look at human beings. With this in mind, I’ll leave you with Ephesians 2:1-10:
As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.
