Post Christian Literary Great

 By Al Baker - Posted at Forget None Of His Benefits:

“For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul?” -Mark 8:36

Ernest Hemingway, the great American novelist, who wrote notable works like A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and the Old Man and the Sea was born on July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. He was reared in the evangelical Christian faith. He was baptized as an infant in an evangelical Congregational church and gladly professed faith in Christ as a child and early teen. His grandparents were missionaries and his father was a committed churchman and friend of the evangelist D.L. Moody.

 
Hemingway left home at age eighteen and joined the Red Cross and was an ambulance driver in World War I and was severely wounded in battle by shrapnel from an Austrian mortar attack. It was around this time that Hemingway walked away from the faith of his parents and childhood. Hemingway’s mother was very concerned for her son’s soul and wrote in 1920, “Unless you, my son, Ernest, come to yourself, cease your lazy loafing and pleasure seeking, stop trading on your handsome face, and neglecting your duties to God and your Savior Jesus Christ, there is nothing for you but bankruptcy. You have overdrawn.” We know that Hemingway later became a Roman Catholic but his lifestyle was anything but Christian. He was married four times and had countless adulterous affairs.

By 1956 Ernest Hemingway was a well known celebrity, living for many years in Paris, then Key West, and Cuba. He cultivated a tough guy image and lived a life many people admired. He was a bull fighter, a big game hunter, a man’s man who could outdrink just about anyone. He seemed to live without a sense of guilt or self-restraint. In an interview which appeared that year in Playboy magazine he said, “What is immoral is what you feel after.” In the same article the author wrote, “People with different ideas about morality would call him a sinner, and the wages of sin is death. But Hemingway has cheated death time and time again to become a scarred and bearded American legend, a great white hunter, a husband of four wives, and a winner of Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes. Sin has paid off for Hemingway.”[1]

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