“Arthur Rendle-Short: Surgeon and Christian”

(“Arthur Rendle Short: Surgeon and Christian.” By Messrs. Capper and Johnson. (Inter-Varsity Fellowship of Evangelical Unions, London.)
A Review by Ernest Gordon.
“SURGEON and Christian”—such is the descriptive subtitle to a biography of Dr. Rendle Short. His biographers are physicians who appreciate his greatness in both classifications. The Lancet (British medical journal) said of him, “He was a general surgeon in the best sense of the word and, as a diagnostician, he yielded place to none.” He was of the class of Horsley and Crile. For thirty-three years, he was active not only in the practice and theory of surgery, but in teaching, writing, editing medical works, and in research. In the back of this biography, are three pages of titles of his monographs on the most abstruse medical subjects. As editor of the Institute of Prognosis and for thirty-four years co-editor of the Medical Annual, he had the immense task of keeping up to date in all fields of medical literature. His textbook, “The New Physiology in Surgery and Medical Practice,” has been translated into German; his “Synopsis of Physiology,” is much used in university instruction.
In addition, Dr. Short was a consummate medical teacher at the University of Bristol, who trained a whole generation of students for the profession. His was certainly a crowded, useful life. One is amazed that there could be a single quarter hour in his day for anything else.
Yet his medical activities were but half of his career. His Christian activities were so varied and so extensive as to have been a lifework in themselves.
Bristol, in the West of England, is best known to Christians as the home of George Müller’s orphanages. Here, God’s faithfulness has been tested and proved for over a century. And what a test! Twenty-three times in two consecutive years they began the day with insufficient funds to provide for the day’s meals. But food and funds invariably arrived in time! So did helpers. So did buildings. During Müller’s lifetime, ten thousand orphans passed through the homes and the orphanage has outlived its founder by fifty years.
Müller was of the Brethren. So was Dr. Barnardo, another great friend of orphans; and Dan Crawford, missionary in Luanza; and the great New Testament scholar, S. P. Tregelles; and Sir William Dobbie of Malta siege fame. So too, was Dr. Rendle Short. This little group has a thousand missionaries on the foreign field. Litterateurs like Edmund Gosse (in “Father and Son”) and George Moore (in “Esther Waters”) have thought it a comely thing to poke fun at their piety. Dr. Short’s reply to them is sufficient: “They [the Brethren] have made missionaries, philanthropists, and those best of God’s ministers on earth, holy, devoted fathers and mothers. They have made men to whom the whole world is under obligation. They are deep-based, rock-ribbed in the face of Jesus Christ and the revealed will of God.” Dr. Short wrote their defense in “The Principles of Christians Called ‘Open Brethren’ ” (now out of print). He insisted that official Christendom has at various points in its history, deviated from the apostolic standards. The remedy, he believed, is to form local churches as near as possible to those simple communities described in the New Testament.
He illustrated his thought as follows: “If you want a sample of pure drinking water from the Thames, it is useless to take it below Reading or Oxford. You must go above the point where the stream has been defiled by human habitation. An attentive reading of the New Testament will reveal that each church was at first locally self-governing, led not by a single minister but by elders, and allowing all to take part by the Spirit’s leading. They had but two ordinances, baptism of believers and the Lord’s Supper. Great stress was laid on holiness of life and vigorous evangelism.
“The Church is the life of God in the soul of man”—nothing else!
So, during his whole lifetime, Dr. Short was a lay preacher of the Brethren with the greatest willingness to co-operate with all Christians. Thus, he memorized portions of the English prayer book and used them in extemporary prayer. During the period between the two wars, he organized for the candidates of the Bible Churchmen’s Missionary Society (of the State Church) courses in elementary medicine, tropical medicine, surgery, and casualty work, himself doing much of the teaching. He operated without charge on Christian ministers of all connections. Missionaries on furlough paid, in addition, nursing-home fees absurdly small. Medical missionaries going abroad were commonly told to go to the instruments department of Ferris and Company and charge to him what they needed. To one medical missionary unable to study tropical medicine he said, “I myself took the course in tropical medicine some years ago. If you can come to my home every Tuesday evening for an hour, I will take you through my notes. It will be better than nothing.”
His biographers say of him: “He kept himself every day to the task of doing everything in his power—writing, speaking, committee work, organization, advice, financial support, and prayer—to further the simple words that have done so much to regenerate mankind, “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel.” Missionary Study Circles in the universities, first started by Mott and Wilder, received great impetus from Dr. Short. He held conferences each year in Scottish and English universities, was constant contributor to Links of Help, a missionary magazine that he helped to start, and wrote ‘A Modern Experiment in Apostolic Missions.’ ”
On the home field, he was equally active. In his early days, he gave Christian testimony in the villages, walking many miles, as a boy of seventeen, from village to village. Many of these little groups became assemblies of the Brethren, which he continued to visit to the end of his days. All his life he invariably preached Sunday evenings, and often on Sunday afternoons as well, For many years, he conducted a Bible class for men in a mean and depraved part of the city, thirty weeks in the year, and “was amazed at the avidity with which they received exposition of books which would seem little to interest them, as First Peter.” Stories are told of the fruit of this work. He was a speaker for the Bible Society; also in factory meetings, as at the Fry Chocolate and Bristol Airplane factories.
His major Christian testimony, however, was to university students, having spent his whole life in touch with this class. Of the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, he was an active promoter. Little groups were rising in the universities of Bristol, Exeter, Glasgow, and Birmingham. “It is certainly a fact,” he wrote, “that a genuine work of God, like the fire against the wall in the Interpreter’s House, grows and survives in spite of the cold water thrown upon it so plentifully, because secretly it is fed with Divine oil.” The Unions had very humble beginnings and were very poor. He spoke for them in addition to the British universities, at Oslo, Stockholm, Helsinki, Uppsala, and Budapest, also in 1939, when hundreds of students from thirty nations gathered at Cambridge. Aberdeen, London, and Birmingham, elected him as their own vice-president.
“It will be by his influence on students,” say his biographers, “that he will be longest remembered. He proved to be one of the most successful of a group of speakers. His strength lay chiefly in the use of his extensive general scientific knowledge, particularly in archaeology, Biblical linguistics, biology, geology, and all the subjects which are related to an intensive study of the Bible. Knowing Greek, he had also taught himself Hebrew for greater competence. He remained, throughout his life, convinced that the theologians had needlessly permitted the Bible to be discredited in the popular mind. They had allowed a false use of scientific investigation to give the appearance that the Bible was mistaken. Rendle Short, as his book, ‘Modern Discovery and the Bible,’ reveals, had a deep, scientifically held confidence both in the accuracy and the message of the Bible. He saw no incompatibility between the Christian faith and accurately verified scientific knowledge. He was intellectually, as well as emotionally and morally, convinced of the absolute truth of the Christian revelation found in the Bible.”
“The small service I have been seeking to render,” said Dr. Short, “is to provide demonstration that, if we venture to take the Bible at its face value, we shall not need to be hypocrites, pretending to believe what we know to be contrary to facts, nor need we shun all human learning and research as though they were of the Devil. The evidence does not compel us. On the other hand, we are not bound to regard human achievements as sacrosanct and infallible. Theories come and theories go; old editions of scientific textbooks fetch very small money in the second-hand bookshops. The Bible survives them all.”
Many a student between the two world wars, whose feet had begun to slip because of an unresolved intellectual conflict, was restored to terra firma by Rendle Short.
Thus, he wrote to students: “The Bible would be useless if it were just another book of man’s imaginations. It must be a Divine revelation. It shows us what God is like in the character, work, and teaching of Jesus Christ and above all, in His passion. We shall not argue about Him. He was what man, after seeing Him, instinctively knows what God is like. He was what God desired man to be like. There is scarcely anything to be learned about Him outside the New Testament. And the New Testament stands deeply rooted in the Old. In the Alps, there is a little circular church with Statues of the twelve apostles ranged around its wall, all pointing with finger to Christ, as He is portrayed emerging from the tomb on Easter morning. Written above is the text, ‘To Him give all the prophets witness.’ ”
“The Sunday School Times” April 16, 1955