Remembering Buddy Hanson
December 19, 1941 – September 17, 2018
By Martin Selbrede
Those who knew Buddy Hanson realize exactly how much we all have lost by his departure to be with the Lord. Buddy was one of a very tiny handful of Christians who took the nuts and bolts of the faith so seriously that he was willing to dedicate his life to teaching them to others. In that regard, Buddy was the polar opposite of the ivory tower type of theologian. To extend that analogy, he forged tools to build exercise equipment he’d put in the weight room he designed for coaching his fellow Christians to become ever stronger in His service.
Pastors, preachers, and theologians have long exploited the scriptural allusions to athletic contests before, but nobody ever made them as relevant and practical as Buddy did. His heart for God’s people reflected a fierce intensity, a singular focus upon equipping them not merely for battle, but preparing them for victory. It’s no surprise that the closest he came to writing an extended commentary (Thy Will Be Done On Earth, a commentary on Isaiah) reveals his fingerprints so clearly in its subtitle: Heavenly Insights for Down-To-Earth Living. Of course, his commentary on the Ten Commandments (God’s Ten Words) cannot help but focus on where the rubber hits the road.
When P. Andrew Sandlin pointed out that we need to build a new kind of Christian, we find that Buddy Hanson has providently hauled the right blueprints and tools to the job site. He’s ready to show us, in methodical detail, how to put off the old man and put on the new (without a single pietistic, navel-gazing lapse anywhere to be detected). At every opportunity, Buddy made sure we had our senses exercised to discern good and evil (Heb. 5:14).
One Career Prepares for the Next
St. Paul’s prowess as a tentmaker didn’t have a direct impact on history, but it had an impact on Paul in preparing him for the Lord’s work. By the same token, Buddy Hanson’s involvement with professional sports in the first half of his life would shape his subsequent ministry in profound ways. His achievements in the sports world are noteworthy in themselves, but for the Lord’s work they served as a crucible for helping him see critical needs and meet them head-on. He had gained a perspective on the practical aspects of the faith that few had, and even fewer had acted upon.
Buddy described the nature of these issues to me on November 25, 2008:
You know my complaint about the Reformed community ... very good at describing the issues, but very weak at prescribing God’s solutions. If it weren’t for the fact that only 5 percent of American Christians have a Christian worldview, your articles would set the stage for them to begin conforming their lives to Biblical ethics.
However, since they are clueless in how to do that, I’m afraid that your articles will only serve to frustrate them because they can’t see a way out. This doesn't mean that they can’t present an airtight case for postmillennialism to an amil or premil, but as for their lifestyle, they will continue to live as incipient amils. (And they probably don’t even realize it!)
As Biblically accurate and well-written as these articles are, they will only lead our brothers and sisters to the water of how to live as a member of God’s family and Christ's Kingdom ... but 95 percent of them don’t know how to drink it!
Since you are one of the few heroes I have, and therefore only one of a few people who “gets it” about how to live as a Christian, I pray that you follow up each of these articles with a “This is how you and your family can begin to make a positive difference in this area” explanation.
Never forget, while the “how-to” may seem elementary to you, it is a foreign language to even our well-read Reformed friends, because all they do is read, discuss and debate and think that just because they are continuing to fine-tune their theology, that’s all God expects of them. In other words, they view Chalcedon’s excellent books as a non-Christian views nightly TV or a sporting event ... an escape from reality. For America to survive, if it can survive, we need to reduce our instruction time in half, and fill it with teaching.
As Buddy saw it, the work that we were doing at Chalcedon was necessary, but not sufficient:
The easy part is describing how different a Christian worldview and lifestyle should be from a non-Christian one. The challenge is to present these distinctive differences in a way that the typical 21st century Christian will appreciate and be convicted to repentance.
While Francis Schaeffer popularized the question, How Should We Then Live?, it was Buddy Hanson who labored to actually answer the question. So, he took up the mantle to stand in the gap.
Keep up the great work at Chalcedon. Y’all are Christianity’s intellectuals, and I'm merely a blue-collar worker bee who does the best God allows to assist in disseminating y’all’s message to the masses.
But he was far more than a promoter of the work of others (although he surely commended valuable resources when appropriate). On his own volition, he chose to grapple with Niccolò Machiavelli, simply because no serious Christian attempts to do so were, in Buddy’s view, remotely satisfying. Standing toe-to-toe against Machiavelli’s The Prince we now have Buddy Hanson’s The Christian Prince, a long-overdue answer to a festering, centuries-old broadside launched by humanism:
Of all the Chalcedon disciples, I don’t know why our Lord, Savior and King put a burden on my heart to provide the first refutation of Machiavelli’s work, but He did, and I pray that The Christian Prince gets wide distribution among not only our Christian brothers and sisters, who have political interests, but among CEOs (management by intimidation) and military leaders who assign Machiavelli’s tactics in their advanced leadership courses.
Christendom will become more robust when she learns to counter a Machiavellian argument with a well-reasoned Hansonian rebuttal...
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