Sixty Countries

“preach the word; be urgent in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort, with all longsuffering and teaching.”

— 2 Timothy 4:2, ASV

America, 1946

In 1946, a little more than a year after her release, Corrie ten Boom crossed the Atlantic for the first time. She spent about ten months in the United States and Canada, speaking wherever she was invited, in churches, colleges, prisons, and homes. She had almost no money and no organisation behind her. By her later account she arrived with very little money, and she went from one invitation to the next. It was the fulfilment of one of the plans the sisters had made in Barracks 28, that they would go to America and tell of the marvellous way God had kept them. Corrie went alone.

It was the beginning of more than thirty years of almost constant travel. The museum and the Dutch sources say that she spoke in more than sixty countries. She travelled on several continents, including behind the Iron Curtain in Communist Europe. The archives at Wheaton College in Illinois, which hold her papers, include five passports from the years 1948 to 1971, thick with stamps. She had no settled home for much of that time. She called herself, in the title of a later book, a tramp for the Lord.

“Jesus Is Victor”

Her message was simple, and she repeated it thousands of times. She told her story: the watch shop, the hiding place, the raid, her father’s death, Ravensbrück, and Betsie. But the story was never the point. The point was what she and Betsie had learned there: that God’s love is stronger than the deepest darkness, that Jesus is the conqueror, and that forgiveness is possible because God gives it.

“Jesus is Victor” was her motto all her life. It had hung on the fireplace in the Beje on the day of the raid, burned into a wooden plaque. The phrase echoes the cry associated with the nineteenth-century German pastor Johann Christoph Blumhardt, Jesus ist Sieger, which was widely used among Dutch and German Christians of the holiness tradition. Corrie wrote it in autograph books, repeated it at the end of talks, and returned to it in every crisis. The phrase runs all through her 1945 book in another form: Jesus is the Conqueror.

The Circles She Moved In

Corrie’s theology was shaped first by the Dutch Reformed Church in which she grew up, and by the warm evangelical piety of the Réveil that lay behind her family’s faith. After the war she moved in wider circles. Her early English books were published by the Christian Literature Crusade, the publishing arm of the Worldwide Evangelization Crusade. The foreword to her 1953 book Amazing Love was written by Norman Grubb, a leading teacher of the “victorious Christian life” associated with the Keswick movement. In later decades she worked closely with Youth for Christ, and she became a friend of Billy Graham, whose film company made the movie of her story. She was welcomed in Pentecostal and charismatic circles as well. She appeared, for example, with the healing evangelist Kathryn Kuhlman, and spoke at the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization in 1974 about the power of the Holy Spirit.

She was, in other words, an evangelical of broad sympathies. She was at home with anyone who loved Jesus, and she was less interested in denominational lines than in whether people knew him. That was already true in Ravensbrück, where she had reflected that there would be no separate Protestant and Catholic areas in heaven.

The Hiding Place

In the late 1960s the American writers John and Elizabeth Sherrill met Corrie and heard her story. They spent many hours interviewing her. The result was The Hiding Place, published by Chosen Books in 1971. It became one of the best-selling Christian books of its generation and has been translated into dozens of languages. In 1975 World Wide Pictures, the film company of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, released a film version, directed by James F. Collier. It was shown in cinemas around the world and brought her story to many who would never have read the book.

This biography has compared The Hiding Place with Corrie’s earlier accounts, and noted that some of its most famous scenes do not appear in them. That comparison is not a criticism of the book. The Hiding Place is a work of great skill and real truthfulness, and it is the book through which most people have met Corrie ten Boom. It is also a book written a quarter of a century after the events, by professional writers shaping her memories for a wide audience. It stands in the same relation to her 1945 account that a mature testimony stands to a diary. Both are true. They are not the same kind of truth.

Honours

Honours came, late. In 1962 Queen Juliana made her a knight of the Order of Orange-Nassau. On 12 December 1967 Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, recognised her as one of the Righteous Among the Nations, the title given to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews. A tree was planted in her honour on the Avenue of the Righteous in Jerusalem. The ceremony took place on 28 February 1968, twenty-four years to the day after the raid on the Beje. The family’s century of prayer for the peace of Jerusalem had come, in a sense, full circle.

She also went back to Ravensbrück. The dates given in the sources differ, around 1959 by the museum’s account, perhaps later by others. The camp was then in Communist East Germany. It was on that visit, according to the museum, that she learned what she came to believe was the clerical error behind her release.

Controversies

Corrie ten Boom was widely loved, but she was not above criticism, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Three matters deserve brief mention.

First, in the strict Reformed circles of her own country, some objected on principle to a woman preaching. Corrie did not defend herself at length. She simply went on speaking where she was invited. Even those who disagreed with her on this point generally spoke of her with respect.

Second, in the 1960s and 1970s she taught about spiritual warfare, demonic oppression, and deliverance, notably in a booklet called Defeated Enemies published in 1962. Her growing association with charismatic circles made some of her admirers uneasy. Christians who do not share that emphasis may find parts of her later teaching unconvincing. But she held it in the same spirit as everything else, as part of her conviction that Jesus is victor over every power.

Third, a letter warning against belief in a secret pre-tribulation rapture of the church has circulated widely under her name. It is said to date from 1974 and to draw on her experience of Christians unprepared for persecution. It is quoted in several books. But its origin has never been verified, and it should not be quoted as hers without the original document.

None of these controversies touches the core of her witness. She never claimed to be a theologian. She was a witness who told what she had seen, and pointed to the One who had kept her.

Better Known Abroad

There is one irony in Corrie’s fame. For much of her life she was far better known in the United States than in her own country. The phrase “unknown in her own land” recurs in Dutch writing about her. For years the museum in Haarlem drew most of its visitors from abroad. Only in recent decades, as the Netherlands has reckoned more fully with its wartime history, have Dutch visitors come in equal numbers.

For Reflection

Paul’s charge to Timothy, at the head of this chapter, was written near the end of his own life: “preach the word; be urgent in season, out of season” (2 Timothy 4:2, ASV). For more than thirty years Corrie ten Boom did just that, in season and out, in comfortable churches and behind the Iron Curtain, before crowds and before single listeners. She was not an eloquent speaker in the usual sense. Her English was accented, her stories were simple, and she repeated herself. But she had seen something, and she could not stop telling it.

Most of us will not travel to sixty countries. But all of us have seen something of God’s faithfulness, in small ways or large. The question her life puts to us is whether we are telling it.