Roy Hession’s little volume The Calvary Road would be dismissed by some today as unhelpful for Christian spirituality. Belonging to the school of theology known as Keswick theology, it suffers from the disfavour that Keswick has fallen into.
Keswick theology deserves some of the negativity. Some of its proponents taught something like perfectionism. Some made a two-stage Christianity (conversion and then the ‘higher life’) almost an unquestioned tenet of the faith. Some taught excessive passivity or quietism (“let go and let God”), or an almost neurotic introspection, seeking ever to further crucify any remnant of self.
But Keswick also had enough good to have edified many thousands of saints. Its basic idea, that the Christian life is experiential union with Christ, is neither novel nor a heresy. The concepts of self-emptying and filling of the Spirit are similarly neither unique to Keswick, nor cultic. Keswick simply made these themes its clarion call. Writers such as Andrew Murray, Hudson Taylor, Amy Carmichael, Ian Thomas and others wrote helpfully on these.
Such was Roy Hession, in my opinion. The Calvary Road is a simple book, calling for humility, confession of sin, the filling of Christ’s Spirit, transparent fellowship with God and man, and simple obedience. Hession speaks of this life as a life of revival, but without the ecstatic connotations. He speaks of it as a life of victory, but without the push-crash sense one has in other Keswick works.
Each small chapter seems to bring truths that were hidden in plain sight. Hession writes with a disarming humility that masks his insightful spirituality.
Some Keswick works leave one in quiet despair – feeling that there is an ever deeper surrender that would revolutionise your Christian life, if you could just get at it. The Calvary Road is not one of those. Most believers I know who have read The Calvary Road and been challenged and warmed at the same time.