Victory from Defeat

 By Pastor Jim Woychuk

“…You will be hated by all for My name’s sake. When they persecute you in this city, flee to another…. When they exclude you and revile you and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of Man’s sake.” Matthew 10:22-23

Jesus predicted His disciples would lose the audience. Get run out of town. Find themselves mocked and excluded.

That’s what happened at the Scopes Trial, 100 years ago. In the end, caricatured by jaundiced media (H. L. Mencken), Bryan lost in the court of public opinion. Misleading cinema portrayals such as “Inherit the Wind,” sealed the deal. Spencer Tracy, playing the Clarence Darrow character, nobly stands against the benighted yokels and declares the very “right to think” to be on trial. The Bryan character cries like a baby and loses his mind.

According to Noll’s Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, Bryan’s defeat at the Scopes Trial traumatized the whole fundamentalist/evangelical academic community, which then departed into self-inflicted exile, adopting a fortress-mentality evident even in the architecture of its academic institutions.

Bryan did indeed fall victim to one of the classic blunders, only slightly less fatal than getting involved in a land war in Asia! Never take the witness stand against the best courtroom lawyer in America! Darrow had diligently laid his ambush, had rehearsed carefully with Dudley Field Malone playing the part of Bryan. Because Malone had debated Bryan previously, Darrow likely knew Bryan’s arguments before he uttered them.

Before the trial ended, as he walked the hills near Dayton, Bryan had expressed the wish that a college be founded in these lovely mountains, where God’s word would be taught side-by-side with the arts and sciences. Some in the media found such an idea laughable and predicted the new Bryan school would quickly lose its zeal for the Bible and the Gospel of Jesus Christ. A Greensboro, NC newspaper mocked Bryan College as a poor place where administrators would soon worry more about graduates’ cultural background than their salvation and whose students who would think Leviticus was the friend of Spartacus. Clarence Darrow, re-visiting Dayton in 1928, saw the apparently abandoned excavation for Bryan College and deemed the large hole a fitting grave for Bryan’s outdated allegiance to Bible and Savior. Darrow ended his life encouraging anyone who’d listen to abandon any thought of immortality, and deeming purpose and design in life a “delusion,” as we all “are drifting side by side to our common doom.”

But history’s verdict and Darrow’s epitaph forgot what Jesus’ enemies forgot about him. The grain of wheat falling down in the ground and dying… doesn’t stay dead! (John 12:24). Jesus rose! And so did the dream that would become Bryan College.

Courtroom verdicts don’t determine God’s plan. Children of God are born again not by strength of argument or public popularity but through the Good News of Jesus Christ, God’s power to save everyone who believes! (Romans 1:16).

Darrow thought to have the last laugh over Bryan’s faith, sending him and his beliefs into intellectual exile from polite society. But like the Apostle John, writing Revelation from exile because of his faith in the word of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ (Rev. 1:9), Bryan College graduates for 100 years have demonstrated: that all human beings bear the divine image thus making them worthy of honor (Gen. 1:28; 1 Pet. 2:17), that Jesus and His word offer a firm foundation for life (Matt. 7:24-27; 1 Cor. 3:11), that the Church overcomes the world not by outfighting, outspending, or outthinking, but by outloving the world (John 13:34-35; Rev. 12:11), and that to see people change from the inside out, all you have to do is lay down your life for them (1 Thess. 2:8; 1 John 3:16; John 12:24).

As J. S. Bach concluded each composition, SDG, Soli Deo Gloria, “To the Glory of God Alone!”

1 Randall Balmer, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory.
2 Bryan College Archives.
3 Clarence Darrow, The Story of My Life, 423.
4 Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity.