Meta Chestnutt Sager's Letter to Eva Heiliger, February 11,1945 (2)

One of the more remarkable notes found in the letter comes at the very beginning, where Sager speaks of her "salary," and refers to the financial struggles of "us school people." Apparently, at the age of eighty-one, she was still working at the Oklahoma College for Women in Chickasha. The campus of the college, now the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma, is less than a mile from the house where she lived at 1528 South 7th Street. It seems likely that Sager, very much a woman of the nineteenth century, never drove an automobile. Most days she would have walked to and from her workplace, each time passing by the Rose Hill Cemetery where her husband lay buried.[1]

In response to what must have been Eva Heiliger's questions or challenges regarding baptism, Sager denies that her position detracts from the essentiality of faith. (Again, today the Church of the Nazarene asserts that the Lord grants salvation "to all who believe on Jesus Christ and receive Him as Lord and Savior"). At the same time, paraphrasing part of James 2:20, she adds that "faith without works is dead." This marks an opening salvo in an argument according to which Meta will insist that just as the New Testament connects faith to salvation, it also connects repentance, confession, and baptism to salvation. Coming to faith is not the end, but is rather the beginning of a process by which a person becomes a Christian, a series of steps culminating with the immersion of the penitent believer who has confessed his faith in Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God. And, "[j]ust as you must come every step of the way into the house, so you must come every step of the way into the Church of the living God."[2] On this point, she notes Acts 2:36-38, where the Apostle Peter did not tell people who had just concluded Jesus was the Messiah that they should believe. "It would have been silly to tell them to believe, for that they had already shown." Yet, neither did Peter suggest that their faith was sufficient for salvation. Instead, when they asked what they should do, Peter "told them to do what they had not done, repent and be baptized."[3]

Notes

[1] Meta Chestnutt Sager to Eva Heiliger, February 11, 1945, Meta Chestnutt Sager Collection, Oklahoma History Center, Oklahoma City. The author has made several visits to Chickasha, Oklahoma, researching the life of Meta Chestnutt Sager.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.