All Saints’ Day is upon us. Today, Christians throughout the world will reflect on the lives of saints who have – to quote the Apostle Paul – ‘fought the good fight, finished the race and kept the faith’. But while we still sing William Walsham How’s magnificent hymn ‘For All the Saints’, most congregations will stop short of the stanza that named the martyrs:
For Martyrs, who with rapture-kindled eye,
Saw the bright crown descending from the sky,
And seeing, grasped it, Thee we glorify.
Alleluia, Alleluia.
How wrote eleven stanzas in 1864, inspired by the ‘cloud of witnesses’ described in Hebrews 12. Later hymnals, including the 1906 English Hymnal for which Ralph Vaughan Williams set the hymn to his exquisite tune ‘Sine Nomine’, dropped the three stanzas that named the apostles, the evangelists and the martyrs by office. We still sing of ‘the well-fought fight’ and of soldiers ‘faithful, true and bold’ who ‘fight as the saints who nobly fought of old’. However, we no longer, as a rule, sing of the men and women who saw the ‘bright crown’ descending and died to grasp it.
The same instinct to sanitise martyrdom appears elsewhere in hymnody too. Julia Ward Howe’s ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’ originally closed with the line ‘As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free’. Many modern hymnals have softened this to ‘let us live to make men free’. Dying for the cause has become living for the cause, and we’ve blunted the sharp blade of sacrificial faith.
Today’s comfortable believer rarely teaches his children the hard edges of the faith
Changes such as these are small and have gone largely unnoticed, but they tell us something about the mindset of the Anglican church in Britain in 2026. A church that will keep the martial metaphors but drop the martyrdoms and focus on ‘living bravely’ rather than ‘dying bravely’ has decided that faith is a refined struggle, a kind of spiritual niceness under pressure, but it’s not worth dying for. Forget about the Lord’s commandment to ‘take up thy cross’ – that’s far too messy if taken to its natural conclusion. Invite a friend to cake and Christianity Explored instead.
Walk into almost any well-heeled Church of England congregation – evangelical, Anglo-Catholic or liberal – and you will find people convinced that they are being bold. They run Alpha courses, toddler groups and carol services with mulled wine. They congratulate themselves on their ‘outreach’ and then they go home. This is the spiritual equivalent of Pilates: gentle exercise that leaves the core unchallenged.
Compare these people with the saints of old whose biographies they read and whose legacies they revere. The American missionary Jim Elliot was speared to death by members of the Huaorani tribe in Ecuador. Another, Eric Liddell, sacrificed the comfort he was entitled to as a gold-medal-winning Olympian and died in a Japanese internment camp. Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Ridley and Thomas Cranmer went courageously to the stake in 1555 and 1556, respectively, for their beliefs.
They all counted the cost and paid the ultimate price. Meanwhile, today’s comfortable believer rarely teaches his children the hard edges of the faith, and in particular what it means to live a life in which your mortal life is no longer yours but Christ’s, who bought you on the cross. This matters: in quietly editing out the martyrs, we have lost sight both of what martyrdom means and of what makes Christian martyrdom unique.
The early church narrowed the word ‘martyr’ to being a technical term: someone who dies rather than recant the confession of Christ. In Acts 7 of the Bible we read that Stephen was stoned for claiming to have witnessed the risen Christ sitting at the right hand of God. The Church Father and 1st century Bishop of Smyrna, Polycarp, was offered the chance by the Roman proconsul to curse Christ and swear by the emperor’s genius. His reply took him to the stake:
Eighty and six years have I served Him, and He has done me no wrong. How then can I blaspheme my King and Saviour?
In 1949, Elliot wrote these words in his journal, seven years before a Huaorani spear ended his life in the jungles of Ecuador: ‘He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.’ After his martyrdom, people quoted Jim’s words and said that he paid the ultimate price to secure eternal life. But this wasn’t so. The interesting thing about Elliot – and about the great company of martyrs to which he belongs – is that he had already gained what he could not lose. He gave his life to Christ when he became a Christian and had assurance of his place in eternity from then. He didn’t die to acquire salvation; he died as a man who believed he already possessed it.
Most of the world views the act of dying for a cause as a transaction. Islam, in popular telling and in some of the hadith literature, attaches to the shahid – ‘martyr’ – a set of rewards: a seat in Paradise and, in certain narrations, the ‘houris of heaven’. Death is the price and paradise is the purchase.
Political martyrdom works the same way. Emily Davison went under the King’s horse at the 1913 Epsom Derby for a cause that had not yet been won. Her fellow suffragettes who starved and were force-fed in prison didn’t yet possess the vote; they were dying to obtain it. They gave what they could not keep to gain what they did not yet have.
Christian martyrdom is different because the reward has already been given: ‘Whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life,’ says Christ in John’s Gospel. In John’s First Epistle we read:
I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life.
Being justified by faith isn’t probationary or conditional, and the man or woman who dies rather than recanting it is not improving their odds or purchasing the crown of heaven. Note that the crown in ‘For All the Saints’ is already descending. The martyrs simply see it and take hold of what is already theirs; their death is a witness rather than an acquisition.
All Saints’ Day without the martyrs is a feast for the polite and the comfortable. It can still inspire courage and speak of a ‘well-fought fight’ but it cannot do justice to the men and women who saw the crown and grasped it.
The church should be ashamed of its hollowed-out definition of courage and sacrifice. How’s original text and Jim Elliot’s famous quote demonstrate that they knew what real courage was. The martyrs of old knew that the crown was already on its way, and their deaths weren’t the price but a consequence of their life of faith. They died rather than denied what they’d been promised, and they claimed what was already theirs. If this sort of faith isn’t something to celebrate and commemorate, I don’t know what is.
Comments