Among the early Methodists used by God to cultivate the hard ground of Catholic Ireland was Gideon Ouseley (1762–1839). Ousely serves as an example to those of us who would, because we lack great abilities or knowledge, do nothing. Iain Murray writes:

In a lonely part of Ireland [Ouseley] acted simply because he was constrained to do so. In some respects he lacked the knowledge that was needed, and he was aware of it, but when the lack prompted him to stay silent other thoughts compelled him. He would say to himself, ‘Do you not know the disease? And do you not know the cure?’ And his conclusion had a divine authority about it, ‘go then and tell them these two things, the disease and the cure; never mind the rest.’

—Iain Murray, Wesley and Men Who Followed (Banner of Truth, 2003), 166–167.

When John Wesley arrived in Ireland, he discovered a situation similar to ours in the United States. Substitute “secular humanist” for “Roman Catholic,” and “evangelical” for “protestant,” and see if you don’t agree.

[Wesley] described his first contacts in Dublin as people who exceeded all he knew for their ‘sweetness of temper, courtesy and hospitality,’ but they were ‘English transplanted into another soil.’ They belonged to the Protestant establishment and it was from their number that the members of his first Society in Dublin came. Noticeably absent from the Society were the native Irish-speaking people, of whom Wesley said, ‘At least ninety-nine in a hundred remain in the religion of their forefathers.’ For this sullen majority he had genuine sympathy and regarded it as no surprise that they should live and die as Roman Catholics ‘when the protestants can find no better ways to convert them than penal laws and act of parliament’.

—Iain Murray, Wesley and Men Who Followed (Banner of Truth, 2003), 139.

In a Previous post on Wesley and Men Who Followed, I offered my impression of John Wesley as “an Arminian unlike most Arminians I have known.” The “men who followed” seem to fit that description as well. Among those men was William Bramwell (1759–1818). Bramwell was zealous for the purity of the church, and lamented the fact that, in some instances, individuals were being received into membership without having proven the genuineness of their conversion. He deplored such lack of discipline, and avoided practices which might encourage false professions of faith.

   In regard to seekers and the distressed there is a significant difference between Bramwell’s practice and that of a later generation. Whereas he would sometimes invite the awakened and the concerned to meet with him separately for spiritual advice, there is no record of his calling people to meet at the communion rail or ‘the penitent’s bench’ at the end of a service. When the latter practice was first adopted by the Methodists it was only as a means to make counseling more easy and immediately available; but this was to prove a half-way to the practice of making coming to the front necessary for securing immediate professions of conversion. When that final stage came, the prevailing understanding of evangelism was very different from that of Bramwell’s generation. And the final development encouraged the very danger of a premature profession that the earlier generation had tried to avoid. Bramwell’s generation wanted to see repentance resulting in a changed life before they accepted any Christian profession.

—Iain Murray, Wesley and Men Who Followed (Banner of Truth, 2003), 124–125.

John Wesley claimed to be “a man of one book.” Nevertheless, his system of thought, which became Methodism, was clearly molded by extra-biblical influences. Murray names these as “High Church divinity, Christian mysticism, and Moravian evangelicalism,” and adds, “It would be a mistake to suppose that the influence of the first two ended when he embraced the third.”

   High church thinking remained with him in more than one area. On baptism, for instance, he continued to believe that a decisive change occurs when a child receives the sacrament. Before that event original sin operates in its full power in all the sons of Adam, but in baptism the merit of Christ’s death begins to be applied to all and there is a general giving of the Holy Spirit sufficient to enable a response to the gospel. This was his teaching on ‘prevenient grace’. He also believed that the Lord’s Supper could be viewed as a means of conversion. His ‘High’ beliefs about the sacraments likewise may have entered into his readiness to allow unordained preachers to expound Scripture, whereas they were not to baptize or to administer the Lord’s Supper.
   From this same High Church came what can only be called a form of ‘asceticism’ which remained in Wesley’s thinking. High Church and mystical writers majored on self-denial. Certainly, self-denial is a Christian duty, and it was to contribute largely to the spirituality and vigour which would characterize Methodists. In Wesley, however, it could pass into asceticism, not simply in such things as early rising and abstinence from tea-drinking but, more seriously, in his whole view of marriage. To a young preacher who nearly fell into matrimony he could write, ‘I congratulate you on your deliverance . . . remember the wise direction of à Kempis, “Avoid good women, and commend them to God.”’ . . . [Wesley’s own] marriage was a disaster. This might have been the case whoever he had married, given his estimation that celibacy remained a higher state, and that marrying for happiness was somehow beneath a Christian: ‘I married because I needed a home’, he tells a correspondent, ‘in order to recover my health; and I did recover it. But I did not seek happiness thereby, and I did not find it.’ Who can be surprised?
   . . .
   Asceticism is not a charge which Wesley would have recognized, but there was another strand in his thinking that he willingly attributed to his early reading of High Church authors and the mystics. This was his teaching on ‘Christian perfection’ . . . in its final form his teaching, in brief, was that the mature or ‘perfect’ Christian . . . can attain to loving God with heart and soul and strength before death, and so overcome all inbred sin that sinning may be said to have ceased. To describe this attainment he used several terms, ‘full sanctification’, ‘pure love’, ‘Christian perfection’, and less commonly, the ‘second blessing’. This condition might be received by faith in an instant. ‘Full deliverance from sin, I believe, is always instantaneous.’ . . .
   . . . it is no conjecture to believe that Wesley’s ‘evidence’ for the opinion rested quite as much upon alleged experiences as upon any interpretation of Scripture . . . although Wesley criticized the mystic writers with the words, ‘each of them makes his own experience the standard of religion’, a propensity to depend on experience as a guide to truth also remained with him. For example, to support his assertion, given above, that full deliverance from sin, I believe, is always instantaneous’, he adds, ‘at least, I never yet knew an exception.’

—Iain Murray, Wesley and Men Who Followed (Banner of Truth, 2003), 44–48.

After reading Spurgeon v. Hyper-Calvinism, I’m shifting my attention to the other end of the soteriological spectrum in another historical volume by Iain Murray, Wesley and Men Who Followed.

I know relatively little about John Wesley. My impression of him, from the little I have read about him, is that he was an Arminian unlike most Arminians I have known, and certainly unlike I was. I am eager to see if my impression is correct. If the following account of an exchange between Wesley and pseudonymous critic “John Smith” is any indication, it is.

‘You seem to me,’ wrote ‘Smith’, ‘to contend with great earnestness for the following system, viz., that faith (instead of being a rational assent and a moral virtue for the attainment of which men ought to yield the utmost attention and industry) is altogether a divine and supernatural illapse from heaven, the immediate gift of God, the mere work of omnipotence.’ With obvious qualification, this was what Wesley believed; faith is supernatural, ‘wrought in us (be it swiftly or slowly) by the Spirit of God’. He replied to ‘Smith’:

Supposing a man be now void of faith and hope and love, he cannot effect any degree of them in himself by any possible exertion of his understanding, and of any or all of his other natural faculties, though he should enjoy them to the utmost perfection. A distinct power from God, not implied in any of these, is indispensably necessary before it is possible that he should arrive at the very last degree of Christian faith, or love, or hope. In order to his having any of these (on which very consideration I suppose St. Paul terms “the fruits of the Spirit”) he must be created anew, thoroughly and inwardly changed by the operation of the Spirit of God, by a power equivalent to that which raises the dead, and which calls the things that were not as though they were.’

—Iain Murray, Wesley and Men Who Followed (Banner of Truth, 2003), 32–33.

Pithy statement of the day:

None can trust in the merits of Christ until they have renounced their own.

—John Wesley, quoted in Iain Murray, Wesley and Men Who Followed (Banner of Truth, 2003), 9.

We will take a momentary break from our holiday frivolity to bring you a final installment from Iain Murray’s Spurgeon v. Hyper-Calvinism. We will return tomorrow with more pointless drivel.

The last of four “Lessons from the Conflict” with the Hyper-Calvinists of Spurgeon’s day is that doctrine not kept in perspective can become a master rather than a servant. Iain Murray writes:

The final conclusion has to be that when Calvinism ceases to be evangelistic, when it becomes more concerned with theory than with the salvation of men and women, when the acceptance of doctrines seems to become more important than acceptance of Christ, then it is a system going to seed and it will invariably lose its attractive power. As we have seen, in his early ministries Spurgeon was opposed by those who believed that the Hyper-Calvinism of such eighteenth century-Baptists as John Gill represented the purest Christianity under heaven. That interpretation of history he knew to be wrong, not simply because it fell short of Scripture, but because its effect was to reduce endeavors for the conversion of sinners. ‘During the pastorate of my venerated predecessor, Dr. Gill, this Church, instead of increasing, gradually decreased . . . But mark this, from the day when Fuller, Carey, Sutcliffe, and others, met together to send out missionaries to India the sun began to dawn on a gracious revival which is not over yet.’
   In this connection it is noteworthy that just as renewed understanding of the free offer of the gospel led to the age of overseas missions in England it did also – by different means – in Scotland. As James Walker writes, Boston and the Morrow men ‘entered fully into the missionary spirit of the Bible’ and ‘were able to see that Calvinistic doctrine is inconsistent with world-conquering aspirations and efforts.’ Robert Moffat, Scots pioneer missionary in South Africa, was one of the outstanding results of this rediscovery. A Calvinist who made the Shorter Catechism of the Westminster Assembly one of the first publications of the infant missions press at Kuruman, Moffat had no hesitation in writing as follows in 1834:
   ‘I see nothing in the world worth looking after if it has not a direct reference to the gory and extension of the Redeemer’s kingdom; and were we always able to have a lively view of the myriads of who are descending into the horrible pit, our zeal would be proportionate. Much depends on us who have received the ministry of reconciliation, assured that God our Savior willeth the salvation of all.’
   To say this is not to deny that there have been preachers of Hyper-Calvinistic views whose preaching has been used In the conversion of many. Spurgeon was thankful for such men as John Warburton and John Kernshaw, men whose Christ-centeredness often enabled them to rise above their system. But in the hands of the general run of men who regarded Hyper-Calvinism as scriptural he believed the tendency of the preaching was inevitably injurious. By distorting and exaggerating truth the system misrepresented vital doctrines and made them offensive instead of appealing to the wider Christian world. He was convinced that the truths called Calvinistic would never be more widely received among the churches if the impression was allowed to prevail that these truths inhibited earnest evangelism, as they commonly did where Hyper-Calvinism became the accepted tradition. ‘I have seen,’ he says, ‘to my inexpressible grief, the doctrines of grace made a huge stone to be rolled at the mouth of the dead sepulcher of a dead Christ.’
   Hyper-Calvinism still exists today but what is needed far more than a renewed controversy on the subject is living evidence that the doctrines of grace are harmonious with true evangelistic preaching. The ministries of such men as Whitefield, Spurgeon, and, more recently, Lloyd-Jones, proved that more than a thousand books could ever do. Such preaching can only come from a baptism of new and deeper devotion to Christ. Much more than a change of opinion is needed. Spurgeon labored all his ministry for purity of doctrine but his final word was always this:
   ‘What is doctrine after all but the throne whereon Christ sitteth, and when the throne is vacant what is the throne to us? Doctrines are the shovel and tongs for the altar, while Christ is the sacrifice smoking thereon. Doctrines are Christ’s garments; verily they smell of myrrh, and cassia, and aloes out of the ivory places, whereby they make us glad, but it is not the garments we care for as much as the person, the very person, of our Lord Jesus Christ.’

—Iain Murray, Spurgeon v. Hyper-Calvinism (Banner of Truth, 2002), 120–122.

The third of four “Lessons from the Conflict” with the Hyper-Calvinists of Spurgeon’s day is the vanity of expecting to answer every question satisfactorily to human reason. Murray writes:

This controversy directs us to our need for profound humility before God. It reminds us forcefully of questions about which we can only say, ‘behold, God is great, and we know him not’ (Job 36:26), and, ‘O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!’ (Rom. 11:33). We do not know why God has purposed to save some and not others, nor why, given his desire for the good of all, many are left in their sin. We cannot say why his love to all men is not the same to the elect. We do not know how God works in us ‘to will and to do’ and yet leaves us wholly responsible for our own actions, nor how invitations to all to believe on Christ are to be harmonised with electing grace. As Crawford said, various attempts have been made to solve such mysteries, ‘but, it must be owned, they have been signally unsuccessful.’ He concludes: ‘We do well to be exceedingly diffident in our judgments respecting matters so unsearchable as the secret purposes of God.’
   It is to be feared that sharp contentions between Christians on these issues have too often risen from a wrong confidence in our powers of reasoning and our assumed ability to draw logical inferences. It is arguable that in the eclipse of Calvinistic beliefs at the beginning of the eighteenth century, at a time when ‘reason’ was being made the test of all religious belief, the would-be defenders of orthodoxy who became Hyper-Calvinistic fell into the very mistake which they were seeking to correct. As J. I. Packer writes, ‘In an increasingly rationalistic age, the reaction itself was rationalistic, within the Reformed supernaturalistic frame.’ Joseph Hussey, the standard bearer of the movement, certainly gave justification of that charge. The contentious spirit in which he advocated his views was a discredit to the truth. John Newton was not the only Calvinist to complain that in Hussey’s writings, ‘I frequently found more bones than meat, and seasoned with much of an angry and self-important spirit.’
   Spurgeon, like all the children of men, had to learn humility, and he was not always entirely blameless in this regard in his early years, but it was given to him to see how a system which sought to attribute all to the grace of God had itself too much confidence in the powers of reason. His mature judgment on that point, given below, constitutes a statement of great value. Probably as a young man Spurgeon was, at times, over concerned to assert his agreement with Calvin but in his deepening humility before God, and his refusal to trust in human reason, he truly followed in the spirit of that leader and of all true teachers in the church of God. It was Calvin, shortly before his death, who, on the words, ‘have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die? saith the Lord God: and not that he should return from his ways, and live?’ (Ezek. 18:3) said this: ‘If any one again objects – this is making God act with duplicity, the answer is ready, that God always wishes the same thing, though by different ways, and in a manner inscrutable to us. Although, therefore, God’s will is simple, yet great variety is involved in it, as far as our senses are concerned. Besides, it is not surprising that our eyes should be blinded by intense light, so that we cannot judge how God wishes all to be saved, and yet has devoted all the reprobate to eternal destruction, and wishes them to perish. While we now look through a glass darkly, we should be content with the measure of our own intelligence (1 Cor. 13:12).’

—Iain Murray, Spurgeon v. Hyper-Calvinism (Banner of Truth, 2002), 117–119.

The second of four “Lessons from the Conflict” with the Hyper-Calvinists of Spurgeon’s day:

   This controversy brings out the danger which is created when biblical truths are constantly presented to the non-Christian in the wrong order. Spurgeon believed all the truths commonly called Calvinistic but he did not believe that all the truths commonly so designated had to be presented to sinners in order to their conversion. As noted, he wanted to see both divine sovereignty and human responsibility. The tendency of Hyper-Calvinism was to make sinners want to understand theology before they could believe in Christ, as though ‘they cannot be saved until they are theologians.’ But the non-Christian can hear ‘the soul and marrow of the gospel’, that is, Christ as the Savior, and see his responsibility to repent and believe, without understanding ‘the doctrines commonly called Calvinistic’. It is with his responsibility, says Spurgeon, that ‘the sinner has the most to do’, whereas God’s predestining grace is the subject of with which ‘the saint has most to do. Let him praise the free and sovereign grace of God, and bless his name’.
   In so thinking Spurgeon was surely siding with what the wisest preachers in the church had always taught. While Reformed Confessions may begin with statements on the doctrine of God and divine decrees, that is not where preachers and teachers need to begin in addressing men about salvation. In the apostolic teaching to the lost, recorded in the book of Acts, nothing is said of the doctrine of election, while in the Epistles ‘it is scarcely ever omitted’. In accordance with his approach, Calvin, in the later editions of his Institutes, moved his treatment of election to follow teaching on justification. He recognized that Scripture generally introduces the doctrine of election to show believers the security and certainty of their salvation and to make clear who made them to differ. But when election is constantly introduced as a preliminary to hearing the gospel it inevitably comes to be seen as though it were designed to limit or obstruct the salvation of men and women. No one put this point better than John Bradford, the English reformer, whose words were often quoted by Whitefield, ‘let a man go to the grammar school of faith and repentance, before he goes to the university of election and predestination.’
   It ought not to be the business of the evangelist to teach God’s decrees to the unconverted. It is certainly God’s decree of salvation which is fulfilled in conversion but knowledge of that decree is no part of saving faith. As Crawford says, God’s decrees are his fixed purposes and his ‘secret designs for the regulation of his own procedure; but they are not rules of laws prescribed for the guidance of others . . . The doctrine of election is not to be regarded as what an apostle calls “milk that babes have need of,” but as the “strong meat that belongs to them who are of full age.” It ought not, therefore, to be prefixed to the calls of the Gospel, or placed in the fore-front of the calls and invitations which are therein addressed without restriction to all sinners. When so placed, it is apt to perplex and disquiet humble souls . . . No man can be of the number of the elect if he utterly neglects the appointed means of salvation; and no man can be of the number of the non-elect if he truly repents and unfiegnedly believes the Gospel. The salvation of a sinner is actually brought to pass, according to the plainest declarations of the Holy Scripture, in the way of faith and repentance, and no otherwise.’

—Iain Murray, Spurgeon v. Hyper-Calvinism (Banner of Truth, 2002), 114–117.

Iain Murray lists four “Lessons from the Conflict” with the Hyper-Calvinists of Spurgeon’s day. The first concerns the divisiveness of the Hyper-Calvinists, which Spurgeon deplored. Murray writes:

   Genuine evangelical Christianity is never of an exclusive spirit. Any view of the truth which undermines catholicity has gone astray from Scripture. This was the point which played a considerable part in Spurgeon’s inability to join with the Strict Baptists. He could speak of them as ‘about the best people in the world,’ but the practice of many of their churches in restricting the Lord’s table to Baptists grieved him. Christians may be divided over their beliefs concerning the outward sign; they are not divided in the spiritual reality of symbolized: ‘I always say to Strict Baptist brethren who think it is a dreadful thing for baptized believers to commune with the unbaptized: “But you cannot help it; if you are the people of God you must commune with all saints, baptized or not. You may deny them outward and visible sign, but you cannot keep them from the inward and spiritual grace.” If a man be a child of God, I do not care what I may think about him – if he be a child of God I do commune with him and I must.’
   But he saw this professed separation of Strict Communion Baptists from the rest of the visible church was frequently made the more serious by the tenets of Hyper-Calvinism. Its teachers, from Huntington onwards, has commonly made faith in election a part of saving faith and thus either denied the Christianity of all professed Christians who did not so believe, or at least, treated such profession with much suspicion. In so doing they had spread the idea that Calvinism is necessarily exclusive, that there is something inherent in its tenets which lead men to separate from others. Spurgeon deplored the way that the abuse of the doctrine of election had thus been used to foster division:
   ‘We give our hand to every man that loves the Lord Jesus Christ, be he what he may or who he may. The doctrine of election, like the great act of election itself, is intended to divide, not between Israel and Israel, but between Israel and the Egyptians, – not between saint and saint, but between saints and the children of the world. A man may be evidently of God’s chosen family, and yet though elected, may not believe in the doctrine of election. I hold there are many savingly called, who do not believe in effectual calling, and that there are a great many who persevere to the end, who do not believe the doctrine of final perseverance. We do hope that the hearts of many are a great deal better than their heads. We do not set their fallacies down to any willful opposition to the truth as it is in Jesus, but simply to an error in their judgments, which we pray God to correct. We hope that if they think us mistaken too, they will reciprocate the same Christian courtesy; and when we meet around the cross, we hope that we shall ever feel that we are one in Christ Jesus.

—Iain Murray, Spurgeon v. Hyper-Calvinism (Banner of Truth, 2002), 110–112.

Spurgeon, contra Hyper-Calvinism, believed in the universal love of God for all men. He also believed, contra Arminianism, in the particular electing love of God for his chosen bride.

From what [Spurgeon taught] on the universal love of God, Hyper-Calvinists deduced that Spurgeon did not believe in a special electing love which secures the salvation of all those for whom Christ died. Sometimes Christians of Arminian persuasion, with a superficial knowledge of Spurgeon, have reached the same conclusion on Spurgeon’s position. But this is the same mistake as can be made in reading the Bible itself. All references to divine love in Scripture are not to be interpreted as universal (Arminianism), neither are they all to be made particular (Hyper-Calvinism). There is a differentiation observable in Scripture. In speaking to Christians Spurgeon would often make the difference clear: ‘Beloved, the benevolent love of Jesus is more extended than the lines of his electing love . . . That [i.e. the love revealed in Matthew 23:37] is not the love which beams resplendently upon his chosen, but it is true love for all that.’ God’s special love ‘is not love for all men . . . There is an electing, discriminating, distinguishing love, which is settled upon a chosen people . . . and it is this love which is the true resting place for the saint.’
   Arminianism, by making universal benevolence the only love revealed in Scripture, denies the sovereignty of grace and leads men to suppose that God had to make salvation equally available to all. Hyper-Calvinism, on the other hand, denies, in the words of John Murray, ‘that there is a love of God that goes forth to lost men and is manifested in the manifold blessings which all men without distinction enjoy, a love in which non-elect persons are embraced, and a love that comes to its highest expression in the entreaties, overtures and demands of gospel proclamation.’
   While holding firmly to these important theological distinctions, Spurgeon did not believe that they were ones which had necessarily to be introduced in presenting the gospel to the unconverted and he warned against the kind of preaching which appears more concerned to safeguard orthodoxy than to save the lost. ‘Many good people think they ought to guard the gospel . . . When we protect it with provisos, and guard it with exceptions, and qualify it with observations, it is like David in Saul’s armour.’
   He refused to explain how men could be held accountable for not trusting in a Saviour in whom they were never chosen, on the grounds that Scripture itself offers no explanation. It was enough for him that there is a salvation to be preached with love to all and that he call all to come to Christ and to say, ‘If he died for all those who trust him, I will trust him; if he has offered so great a sacrifice upon the tree for guilty men, I will rely upon that sacrifice and make it the basis of my hope.’

—Iain Murray, Spurgeon v. Hyper-Calvinism (Banner of Truth, 2002), 97–99.

The third reason given by Murray for Spurgeon’s rejection of Hyper-Calvinism was the denial of human responsibility.

Spurgeon regarded an emphasis on man’s free-agency as absolutely essential to true evangelism. Because Scripture teaches that conversion is the work of God, Hyper-Calvinism fears to appeal for human action lest it interferes with God. But Scripture also presents conversion as the work of man and recognizes no inconsistency in calling upon men to be reconciled to God. Because it does not recognize this, Hyper-Calvinism fails to tell the unconverted that it is heir fault alone if they remain unsaved under the gospel and that their damnation will be their own work. Not only is faith in Christ a duty, but as Spurgeon often showed from Scripture, a refusal to believe on Christ will be found at last o be a greater offence than the iniquities of Sodom and Gomorrah. ‘Is it not the very summit of arrogance and the height of pride for a son of Adam to say, even in his heart, “God, I doubt thy grace; God, I doubt Thy love; God, I doubt Thy power”? I feel that, could we roll all sins into one mass, — could we take murder, blasphemy, lust, adultery, fornication, and everything that is vile, and unite them all into one vast globe of black corruption, — they would not even then equal the sin of unbelief.’’
     In his autobiography Spurgeon reports how in his early days, before he came to London, he found himself with some ministers and others of Hyper-Calvinistic views ‘who were disputing whether it was a sin in men that they did not believe the gospel.’ The shock he felt on that occasion was to remain with him all his days: ‘Whilst they were discussing, I said, “Gentlemen, am I in the presence of Christians? Are you believers in the Bible or are you not?” They said, “We are Christians, of course.” “Then,” said I, “does not the Scripture say, ‘of sin, because they believe not on Me?’ And is it not the damning sin of men, that they do not believe on Christ?”’
     Spurgeon used this incident in the second sermon of the first volume of the New Park Street Pulpit, entitled ‘The Sin of Unbelief, and, as we have seen, much of the contention of Hyper-Calvinism against his preaching concerned this point. ‘I hold,’ he says, ‘as firmly as any man living, that repentance and conversion are the work of the Holy Spirit, but I would sooner lose this hand, and both, than I would give up preaching that it is the duty of men to repent and believe and that it is the duty of Christian ministers to say to them, “Repent and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out.”’
     Spurgeon frequently spoke against Hyper-Calvinism in his sermons. He did so at some length in an ‘Exposition of the Doctrines of Grace’ at the time of the opening of the Metropolitan Tabernacle in 1861 when he forcefully repudiated any idea of fatalism and insisted, ‘If he be lost, damnation is all of man; but, if he be saved, still salvation is all of God.’ God did not make men to be damned but, as Spurgeon showed from the Westminster Assembly’s Larger Catechism, wrath is only inflicted on men on account of sin: ‘This is no more than what the Methodist and all other Evangelical bodies acknowledge — that where men perish it is in consequence of their sin.’
     In his Preface to the Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit for 1863 he made what was possibly the last of his open appeals to those whom he describes as ‘led captive by ultra-calvinistic theories’, calling upon them to ‘preach the whole gospel, instead of a part’: ‘Divine sovereignty is a great and indisputable fact, but human responsibility is quite as indisputable . . . Faith is God’s gift, but it is also the act of renewed manhood. Damnation is the result of justice, not of arbitrary predestination. O that the time were come when seeming opposites would be received, because faith knows that they are portions of one harmonious whole. Would that an enlarged view of the dispensations of God to man would permit men to be faithful to the human race, and at the same time true to the Sovereign Lord of all.’

—Iain Murray, Spurgeon v. Hyper-Calvinism (Banner of Truth, 2002), 84–87.

Last week, I began looking at four reasons why Spurgeon rejected Hyper-Calvinism. The first was the universal invitation of the gospel, denied by the Hyper-Calvinists. The second is

that it turned individuals away from their only sure warrant for trusting in Christ, namely, the objective commands and invitations of the gospel. Hyper-Calvinism denies such a universal warrant, applicable to all, and claims, instead, that Scripture only addresses invitations to specific people — to the penitent, the ‘heavy laden’, to the convicted, to the ‘sensible’ sinner and so on. Under such preaching, gospel hearers must first find some warrant within themselves for thinking that Christ’s invitations are addressed to them personally. Subjective experience is thus made a kind of necessary preliminary and qualification before anyone can trust in scriptural promises. Against this, Spurgeon held that the scriptural warrant for the unconverted to trust in Christ rests on nothing in themselves; the warrant lies in the invitation of Christ. His entire presentation of the gospel turned on the truth that no sinner has any more warrant than any other for trusting in Christ. The warrant lies in Scripture alone. Before a man has any willingness to be saved, it is ‘his duty to believe in Christ, for it is not man’s willingness that gives him a right to believe. Men are to believe in obedience to God’s command. God commandeth all men everywhere to repent, and this is his great command, “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved”.’ Christ’s ambassadors are authorised to call ‘on all people of every clime and kindred, to believe the gospel with a promise of personal salvation to each and every one that believes.’ The message is not, ‘Wait for feelings’, it is, ‘Believe and live’. ‘I find Jesus Christ says nothing to sinners about waiting, but very much about coming.’
   To this the Hyper-Calvinists replied that if all are called to trust in Christ then such trust must involve them in believing a falsehood because Christ has not died for all. In their view, to preach a universal warrant is to deny that redemption is definite and particular. This was a further ground for charging Spurgeon with inconsistency, for he believed in particular redemption and yet summoned all to believe in Christ. But Spurgeon, along with Scripture, did not make, ‘Believe that Christ died for you’, part of faith to which the unbeliever is summoned. The call to the sinner is to commit himself to Christ, not because he has been saved but rather because he is lost and must come to Jesus in order to be saved.
. . .
   To deny a universal warrant, and to require subjective experiences before Christ is trusted, is bound to lead to confusion and legality. Such teaching makes men look at themselves instead of the Saviour. It leads people to suppose that possessing a broken heart and feeling the burden of sin are some kind of qualification for believing. But this is to require a discernment on the part of would-be converts for which Scripture does not ask. The truth is that individuals under conviction are unable to understand themselves and it is common for those who are most burdened to fear that they have no true sense of sin at all. The Holy Spirit is indeed given to convict of sin but Scripture says nothing about him assuring the convicted of their convictions prior to faith. On this Spurgeon says in the same sermon on ‘The Warrant of Faith’:
   ‘I believe the tendency of that preaching which puts the warrant for faith anywhere but in the gospel command, is to vex the true penitent, and to console the hypocrite; the tendency of it is to make the poor soul which really repents, feel that he must not believe in Christ, because he sees so much of his own hardness of heart. The more spiritual a man is, the more unspiritual he see himself to be . . . Often the most penitent men are those who think themselves the most impenitent.’
   ‘If we begin to preach to sinners that they must have a certain sense of sin and a certain measure of conviction, such teaching would turn the sinner away from God in Christ to himself. The man begins at once to say, “Have I a broken heart? Do I feel the burden of sin?” This is only another form of looking at self. Man must not look to himself to find reasons for God’s grace.’

—Iain Murray, Spurgeon v. Hyper-Calvinism (Banner of Truth, 2002), 71–74, 77–78.

Iain Murray presents four reasons for Spurgeon’s vehement opposition to Hyper-Calvinism. The first is the universal invitation of the gospel, which the Hyper-Calvinists denied and assiduously avoided.

Spurgeon believed that historic evangelicalism differed from Hyper-Calvinism over the persons to whom the promises of the gospel are to be preached. Hyper-Calvinism views gospel preaching solely as a means for the ingathering of God’s elect. It argues that such words as, ‘Trust in Christ and you will be saved’, should only be addressed to elect sinners for it is their salvation alone which the preacher should have in view. For a preacher to convey to his hearers the impression that they are all called to receive Christ, and to believe in him for salvation, is to deny, in the opinion of Hyper-Calvinists, the sovereignty of divine grace. It is to represent salvation as available to those whom God has excluded by the decree of election. Gospel preaching for Hyper-Calvinists means a declaration of the facts of the gospel but nothing should be said by way of encouraging individuals to believe that the promises of Christ are made to them particularly until there is evidence that the Spirit of God has begun a saving work in their hearts, convicting them and making them ‘sensible’ of their need.
   Spurgeon rejected the placing of such a restriction upon the invitation of the gospel. The gospel is ‘good news’ which God would have proclaimed throughout the world and to ‘every creature’. Its message is not simply a statement of facts. It also contains clear, unrestricted general promises, such as, ‘He that believeth on him is not condemned’ (John 3:18); ‘Whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved’ (Rom. 10:13); ‘Whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely’ (Rev. 22:17). So the preacher has not done his work when he has spoken of Christ and proclaimed the historic facts of salvation. From there he must go on to urge the reception of Christ upon all men. In the name of God he must assure all of the certainty of their welcome and forgiveness on their repentance and faith. Thus Paul said to all his hearers at Antioch in Pisidia: ‘Be it known unto you, men and brethren, that through this man is preached unto you the forgiveness of sins: And by him all that believe are justified from all things, from which ye could not be justified by the law of Moses’ (Acts 13:38–9). The apostle evidently knew of no limitations. Christ was to be preached, ‘warning every man’ — any one, every one — ‘and teaching every man in all wisdom; that we may present every man perfect in Christ Jesus’ (Col. 1:28). Words could scarcely be more embracing and individual.
   Hyper-Calvinists argued that gospel promises and invitations cannot be made universal because saving grace is special and particular. Spurgeon replied by asserting that the language of Scripture can be given no other meaning. In a sermon entitled ‘Apostolic Exhortation’, on Peter’s words to all his hearers, ‘Repent ye therefore and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out’ (Acts 3:19), he says:
   ‘Peter preached the Christ of the gospel — preached it personally and directly at the crowd who were gathered around him . . . Grown up among us is a school of men who say that they rightly preach the gospel to sinners when they merely deliver statements of what the gospel is, and the result of dying unsaved, but they grow furious and talk of unsoundness if any venture to say to the sinner, “Believe”, or “Repent”. To this school Peter did not belong — into their secret he had never come, and with their assembly, were he alive now, he would not be joined.’
   In another sermon he refers to brethren who ‘do not think it to be their duty to go into the highways and hedges’ and bid all, as many as they find, to come to the supper. Oh, no! They are too orthodox to obey the Master’s will; they desire to understand first who are appointed to come to the supper, and then they will invite them; that is to say, they will do what there is no necessity to do [i.e., present the gospel to those who are already saved]. In contrast with this, the apostles ‘delivered the gospel, the same gospel to the dead as to the living, the same gospel to the non-elect as to the elect. The point of distinction not in the gospel, but in its being applied by the Holy Ghost, or left to be rejected of man.’

—Iain Murray, Spurgeon v. Hyper-Calvinism (Banner of Truth, 2002), 69–71.

At the end of his notes on John 6:3, Charles Spurgeon wrote the following comment:

Read, write, print, shout, – “Him that cometh to Me I will in no wise cast out.” Great Saviour, I thank Thee for this text; help Thou me so to preach from it that many may come to Thee, and find eternal life!

—Iain Murray, Spurgeon v. Hyper-Calvinism (Banner of Truth, 2002), 50.

Throughout most of Spurgeon’s ministry, both he and his wife suffered greatly with ill health. But rather than remonstrate bitterly with God, he recognized trials as a necessary part of his sanctification, and as a part of fitting him for ministry. As Iain Murray writes, Spurgeon believed that without without difficulties,

he would have been ruined. Fallen men, though Christians, cannot long be surrounded by popularity and success without the special help of God. ‘Our God takes care always to have the security that, if He works a great work by us, we shall not appropriate the glory of it to ourselves. He brings us down lower and lower in our own esteem . . . Some trumpets are so stuffed with self that God cannot blow through them.’ ‘You may rest quite certain that, if God honors any man in public, he takes him aside privately, and flogs him well, otherwise he would get elevated and proud, and God will not have that.’ ‘Many a man has been elevated until his brain has grown dizzy, and he has fallen to his destruction. He who is to be made to stand securely in a high place has need to be put through sharp affliction. More men are destroyed by prosperity and success than by affliction and apparent failure.’

—Iain Murray, Spurgeon v. Hyper-Calvinism (Banner of Truth, 2002), 17–18.

It is with great pleasure, as usual, that I pick up another Iain Murray volume from Banner of Truth. This one, Spurgeon v. Hyper-Calvinism, is different from the others I’ve read in a couple of ways. First, it’s a paperback. (I pause here to direct a frown in the Banner’s direction. It was never published in hardcover, so I couldn’t even track down a used copy, as I often do, and I can't set it next to my cloth-bound Murray volumes on the shelf.) Second, it turns our critical eye one hundred and eighty degrees from its usual orientation, away from the Arminians, and toward the hyper-Calvinists.

Murray begins with a little biographical information, and comments on the remarkable scope of Spurgeon’s influence. Spurgeon’s preaching ministry in London spanned thirty-seven years, from 1854–1891. During that time, “If we take into account [Murray writes] both his spoken and written words, it is estimated that each weak his ‘congregation’ amounted to about a million people.” Beginning in 1855, his sermons were published weekly, and also compiled in annually, the 63rd and final volume published twenty-five years posthumously. And that was just his preaching. In addition, he published “about 50 other works and edited 28 volumes of The Sword and Trowel.” His publishers, Passmore and Alabaster, were kept busy — and in business — with publishing Spurgeon’s works alone. Murray writes:

   The obvious question is, how could any man retain such influence over so many people through such a long period? How can we account for the enduring interest? How could a man speak so often, and write so much, without losing his freshness and his appeal? It is true Spurgeon possessed unusual gifts, and that he worked very hard, but we cannot get anywhere near the real answer if we think merely in terms of what he was or did. The explanation lies in the Book that was in his hands, the Book that was his constant companion, and which he lived to preach and study. All the blessing he attributed to that source. His own thoughts, his own opinions, would have achieved nothing:
   ‘“The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul”; nothing else but the living Word of God will convince, convert, renew and sanctify. He has promised that this shall not return unto him void; but He has made no such promise to the wisdom of men, or the excellency of human speech. The Spirit of God works with the Word of God . . . All his paths drop fatness; but man’s paths are barrenness.’
   In possessing the Bible Spurgeon believed that the church has an inexhaustible source of light and heat. What he said once of John Bunyan could be equally said of himself, ‘Prick him anywhere and his bloodline is bibline’. The content of his sermons and his books is plain, you might say, ordinary, Scripture. The energy of his prayerful adherence to Scripture is the true explanation of his work:
   ‘The Bible is a wonderful book . . . You can use it for a lamp at night. You can use it for a screen by day. It is a universal book; it is the Book of books, and has furnished material for mountains of books; it is made of what I call bibline, or the essence of books . . . This one book is enough to last a man throughout the whole of his life, however diligently he may study it.’

—Iain Murray, Spurgeon v. Hyper-Calvinism (Banner of Truth, 2002), 12–13.

One last word from Leland Ryken on the Puritans:

   We live at a moment in history when evangelical Protestants are looking for “roots.” One of the foibles that some would foist on them is that the only traditions from the past to which they can return are the Catholic and Anglo-Catholic traditions. Like Nicodemus, who was a teacher in Israel but did not know about the New Birth, evangelical Protestants tend to be strangers to what is best in their own tradition.
   Puritanism can give us a place to stand. The Puritans believed that all of life is God’s. This enabled them to combine personal piety with a comprehensive Christian world view. Beginning with the premise that the Bible is a reliable repository of truth, the Puritans had a basis from which to relate their Christian faith to all areas of life — to work, family, marriage, education, politics, economics, and society.
   The Puritan’s zestful approach to life and the world was fed by the spiritual springs of the new life — prayer, Christian fellowship, meditation, preaching, and contact with the Bible. In Puritanism, a theology of personal salvation was wedded to an active life in the world.

—Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Academie Books, 1986), 220–221.

To say that the Puritans were very serious thinkers is an understatement bordering on absurdity. This characteristic — a virtue, really — was also the cause of their greatest faults. As much as I want to defend the Puritans and correct popular misconceptions about them, it cannot be denied that they had their faults, and that those faults provide impetus for the slanderous treatment they have received. And it seems to me that an almost pathological seriousness was at the root of all of their failings. In Worldly Saints, Leland Ryken includes a chapter called Learning from Negative Example: Some Puritan Faults. He lists the following (among others):

An Inadequate View of Recreation
The Puritans were opposed to sport on Sundays, and against gambling and certain sports such as cock fighting, but they were certainly not against recreation, as some have concluded. They considered it a good and necessary part of life. They believed this so strongly that in England in 1647, a Puritan-controlled Parliament decreed that on every second Tuesday of the month, all businesses were to be closed from 8 A.M. until 8 P.M. to give workers time for recreation. Ryken writes that American Puritan “Thomas Shepard advised his son at college, ‘Weary not your body, mind, or eyes with long pouring on your book. . . . Recreate yourself a little, and so to your work afresh.’” [Worldly Saints, 190.] The problem with the Puritan view of recreation was that it was entirely utilitarian. They had no appreciation for the enjoyment of leisure as an end in itself. Its sole purpose was to refresh the body and mind for more work. The following statement from William Perkins is typical:

In commanding labour, [God] alloweth the means to make us fit for labour. And therefore . . . he admitteth lawful recreation, because it is a necessary means to refresh either body or mind that we may better do the duties which pertain to us. . . . And therefore recreation . . . serveth only to make us more able to continue in labour. [Ibid.]

Too Many Rules
The Puritans were a disciplined people who enjoyed living well regulated lives. This virtue was carried out so enthusiastically that it often became the vice of legalism. Ryken writes that “such legalism produced false guilt and a loss of discrimination about what constituted a serious sin.” [Ibid, 192.] The diary of sixteen-year-old Nathaniel Mather records,

When very young, I went astray from God. . . . Of the manifold sins which I was then guilty of, none so sticks in my mind as that . . . I was whittling on the Sabbath Day; and for fear of being seen, I did it behind the door. A great reproach to God! a specimen of that atheism that I brought into the world with me. [Ibid.]

Too Many Words
Ryken writes:

The characteristic Puritan style . . . is to take at least wice as many words as possible to express a thought. Like the poets of the Bible (but without their poetic conciseness and artistry), the Puritans seemed to search for ways to say everything at least twice in different words. A random specimen [Richard Sibbes] of such redundancy is this:

God hath placed us in the world to do him some work. This is God’s working place; he hath houses of work for us: now, our lot here I to do work, to be in some calling . . . to work for God.” [Ibid., 194.]

[Ibid., 194.]

Too Much Pious Moralizing
It seems they could not simply enjoy a worldly pleasure without finding some moral to teach or adding a theological qualifier. Ryken writes, “When Cotton Mather’s children fell sick, he would remind them of ‘the analogous distempers of their souls’ and instruct them ‘how to look up unto their great Saviour for the cure of those distempers.’” [Ibid.] John Winthrop wrote to his wife “that she was ‘the chiefest of all comforts under the hope of salvation.’” [Ibid.]

My own analysis is that legitimate criticisms of the Puritans can all be boiled down to two causes: the chronic seriousness already mentioned, and a proclivity for taking every good thing to the most absurd extreme. It must also be noted that the most extreme examples are not necessarily representative of the Puritans in general. Ryken concludes:

   I know of no group that has been more victimized by what today we would call its “lunatic fringe” than the Puritans. I refer to individuals whose aberrations made them a liability to the movement or good people whose blunders have been paraded through the years to the discredit of the Puritans. Throughout subsequent history, anyone wishing to discredit the Puritans has found it easy to find material, which is usually far from the norm for Puritanism generally. [Ibid., 201.]

A point that seems to come up continuously regarding biblical interpretation is that of context. The practice of wresting Scripture from its natural setting and interpreting and applying it in a user-friendly manner is nothing new.

The Puritans were as insistent as good scholars today that a given passage in the Bible must be interpreted in its context. One of them wrote, “It is the best rule to come to the understanding of the phrases of Scripture, to consider in what sense they were taken in that country, and among the people, where they were written.” William Bridge added, “If you would understand the true sense . . . of a controverted Scripture, then look well into the coherence, the scope of and context thereof.” William Perkins’s stock questions for a passage were: “Who? to whom? upon what occasion? at what time? in what place? for what end? what goeth before? what followeth?”

—Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Academie Books, 1986), 147.

While Rome had held the clergy above the common people, declaring that only they could interpret the Scriptures, the Puritans followed the Reformers in insisting

that the Holy Spirit illumines the mind of any Christian as he or she reads the Bible. “Every godly man hath in him a spiritual light,” declared John White, “by which he is directed in the understanding of God’s mind revealed in His word.” Thomas Goodwin said with equal confidence that

The same Spirit that guided the holy apostles and prophets to write it must guide the people of God to know the meaning of it; and as he first delivered it, so must he help men to understand it.

What are we to make of this confidence that the Holy Spirit guides us in understanding the Bible? We must realize that Catholic allegorizing of the Bible had obscured Scripture, in effect making “the Pope the doorkeeper of Scripture, not the Holy Spirit.” Set in the context of ingenious Catholic allegorizing in which the Bible’s message was decipherable only by the clergy, the Puritan belief in the illumination of the Holy Spirit put the Bible back within the grasp of every reader. Thus John Ball could write:

We are not necessarily tied to the exposition of Fathers or Councils for the finding out of the sense of Scripture. Who is the faithful interpreter of Scripture? The Holy Ghost speaking in the Scripture is the only faithful interpreter of the Scripture.

—Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Academie Books, 1986), 146–147.

Leland Ryken on Puritan hermeneutics:

The logical starting place is the Puritans’ belief that the Bible must ordinarily be interpreted literally or historically, not arbitrarily allegorized. To understand why the Puritans made so much of the literal or single interpretation of Scripture, we need to know something about the centuries-long Catholic practice of attributing allegorical interpretations to virtually all of Scripture.
   Catholic interpreters, for example, claimed that in the story of Rebekah, Rebekah’s drawing water for Abraham’s servant really means that we must daily come to the Bible to meet Christ. The six water pots at the marriage in Cana refer to the creation of the world in six days. The woman’s comment in the Song of Solomon that “my beloved is to me a bag of myrrh, that lies between my breasts” was interpreted as meaning the Old and New Testaments, between which stands Christ. Another commentator found the breasts to denote the learned teachers of the church, and yet another thought the verse referred to the crucifixion of Christ, which the believer keeps in eternal remembrance between his breasts, that is, in his heart.
   To the Puritans, such allegorizing was ridiculous and unreliable. “The Scripture hath but one sense,” claimed Tyndale, “which is the literal sense, and that literal sense is the root and ground of all, and the anchor that never faileth.” Thomas Gataker agreed: “Sir, we dare not allegorize the Scriptures, where the letter of it yields us a clear and proper Sense.
   We should pause to note what the Puritans did not mean when they insisted on the literal or plain interpretation of Scripture. They did not mean that the Bible is literal rather than figurative. William Bridge, for example, commented that “though the sense of the Scripture be but one entire sense, yet sometimes the Scripture is to be understood literally, sometimes figuratively and metaphorically.” The Puritans did not even deny that there were allegorical passages in the Bible. James Durham wrote, “There is great difference betwixt an allegoric exposition of Scripture, and an exposition of allegoric Scripture.”

—Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Academie Books, 1986), 145.

Leland Ryken quotes Puritan Robert Coachman [Cushman] (1617–1855):

. . . it is no small privilege . . . to live in such a society, as where the eyes of their brethren are so lovingly set upon them, that they will not suffer them to go on in sin.

—Robert Cushman, The Cry of a Stone, cited in Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Academie Books, 1986), 133.

It’s a nice thought, but I wonder, how many enjoy that kind of fellowship? Does anyone watch over us like that, and if so, do we appreciate it, or resent it? Do we watch over our brothers and sisters with that kind of love?

The word-based faith of the Puritans and their disdain for religious images has led some to conclude that theirs was an abstract religion, offering nothing concrete to enliven the imagination. But, while the Puritans did do away with all physical images, their worship was hardly lacking in imagery. As Ryken puts it, they “expected the verbal imagination to do the work that Catholic/Anglican worship had placed on the visual and aural imagination.” Ryken likens Puritan worship to the plays of William Shakespeare, who “was content with the scantiest of stage props and built scenery and imagery into the texts of the plays themselves.” Likewise, Puritan sermons contained ample imagery to engage the mind.

   Puritan worship services . . . were far from being devoid of images and symbols. These were simply embodied in the sermon instead of visible to the eye in the church sanctuary. To test that thesis, I once randomly opened three books of Puritan sermons that a student had just brought in to my office. Here are the specimens that greeted me:

The sinner is a bramble, not a fig tree yielding sweet fruit. . . . A wicked man, like Jehoram, has “his bowels fallen out” (2 Chronicles 21:19). Therefore he is compared to an adamant (Zachariah 7:12) because his heart does not melt in mercy. Before conversion the sinner is compared to a wolf in his savageness, to a lion in his fierceness (Isaiah 11:16). . . . [Thomas Watson, The Beatitudes, 143.]

Adam’s posterity has not been so numerous as his sins. A little cloud, no bigger than a man’s hand — so it seems at first — grows and spreads to cover the whole hemisphere. The water at first seemed little and shallow, swells more and more from the ankles to the knees, from the knees to the loins, from there to the head until it grows into such a great river that it cannot be passed over. In this way grows sin. . . . It is as a snowball that grows bigger by rolling in the snow. [Ralph Venning, The Plague of Plagues, 165.]

The law may chain up a wolf, but it is the Gospel that changes the wolfish nature; the one stops the stream, the other heals the fountain. [Samuel Bolton, The True Grounds of Christian Freedom, 84.]

No worship service that includes such appeals to the imagination can be said to be excessively abstract.

—Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Academie Books, 1986), 125–126.

A key characteristic of Puritan life was simplicity; and nowhere was that simplicity more intentional than in their formal worship. Leland Ryken comments on what that meant, as well as what it did not mean.

[T]he Puritans simplified church architecture and furnishings. They took images and statues out of churches. They replaced stone alters with communion tables. The multiroom floor plan became a single, rectangular room. The walls were painted white. The physical objects that would have caught one’s eye upon entering a puritan church were a high central pulpit with a winding stairway to it, a Bible on a cushion on a ledge of the pulpit, a communion table below the pulpit, and an inconspicuous baptismal font.
   All this simplicity should not be interpreted as an attempt to avoid symbolism. It was the symbol of Puritan worship, and it was a richly multiple symbol. Here in visual form was the Puritan aversion to idols and human intervention between God and people. Here was a sign of humility before God and His Word. Here was a sign of the essentially inward and spiritual nature of worship. Here was a reminder that God cannot be confined to earthly and human conceptions, that he is transcendent and sovereign. By calling their buildings “meeting houses,” moreover, Puritans stressed the domestic aspect of worship as a spiritual family meeting with their heavenly father.
   This triumph of simplicity was not necessarily unaesthetic. The simple is a form of beauty as well as the ornate. Horton Davis calls the simple beauty of Puritan church architecture “a study in black and white etching, rather than the colored and multi-textured appearances of Anglican . . . churches.” a study of Puritan vocabulary shows that “naked” was one of their positive words when applied to worship. In the Puritan Church, the individual worshiper stood “naked” before the light and purity of God’s word and presence. An authority on church architecture writes about Puritan churches, “Clean, well-lighted, they concentrated on the essentials of Puritan worship, the hearing of God’s Word, with no distractions.”

—Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Academie Books, 1986), 121–122.

Six hundred years ago, Jan Hus wrote that “neither is the pope the head nor are the cardinals the whole body of the holy, universal, catholic church. For Christ alone is the head of that church, and his predestinate are the body and each one is a member, because his bride is one person with Jesus Christ” [The Church, ed. David S. Schaff (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915), 66.]. One hundred years later, Luther echoed those words. That Reformation tradition was carried forward by the Puritans. Leland Ryken writes:

   The greatest of all Puritan legacies in regard to ecclesiastical theory was also the most revolutionary in its time. It was the notion that the church is a spiritual reality. It is not impressive buildings or fancy clerical vestments. It is instead the company of the redeemed.
   The Puritans repeatedly showed their acceptance of Luther’s dictum that “The church is a spiritual assembly of souls. . . . The true, real, right, essential church is a matter of the spirit and not of anything external.” For William Gouge the church consists of those who “inwardly and effectively by the spirit . . . believe in Christ.’’ John Hooper denied that the church consists of “bishops, priests and such other,” affirming rather that it is “the company of all men hearing God’s Word and obeying unto the same.” Richard Baxter agreed: the church is “a holy Christian society for ordinary holy communion and mutual help in God’s public worship and holy living.”
   Implicit in these definitions of the church is a Puritan preference for the invisible church over a type of institutional structure. The church is emphatically not the professional clergy and their rituals. “What understand you by the church?” asked John Ball’s Catechism. The answer: “by the church, we understand not the pope. . . ; nor his bishops and cardinals met in general council. . . ; but the whole company of believers.” If the church is essentially invisible rather than institutional, its head is obviously not a pope or church council, but Christ. The Puritans reiterated this again and again, as when Gouge spoke of “that church whereof Christ is properly head.”

—Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Academie Books, 1986), 115.

As we have seen, Puritans preachers were diligent scholars, meticulous in their sermon preparation. But they were not show-offs, concerned with demonstrating just how scholarly they were. The purpose of their scholarship was to bring the message to all classes, from the most learned to the most simple.

William Perkins theorized that preaching “must be plain, perspicuous, and evident. . . . It is a by-word among us: It was a very plain sermon: And I say again, the plainer the better.” Richard Sibbes claimed that

truth feareth nothing so much as concealment, and desireth nothing so much as to be laid open to the view of all: when it is most naked, it is most lovely and powerful.

   And Henry Smith said that “to preach simply is not to preach rudely, nor unlearned, nor confusedly, but to preach plainly and perspicuously that the simplest man may understand what is taught, as if he did hear his name.”
   Plain preaching was defined by what it lacked as well as by what it contained. What is avoided was such things as the “heaping up of citations of Fathers, and repeating words of Latin or Greek.” What the Puritans did not want was a pastiche of quotations or an embellished style that called great attention to its own ostentatiousness. For Samuel Torshell it was a sign of bad preaching to “tell you how many Fathers we have read, how much we are acquainted with the schoolmen, what critical linguists we are or the like. It is wretched ostentation.”
   Why did the Puritans dislike the high style in sermons? For one thing, they felt it diverted attention from the content of the sermon to the preacher, for whom the occasion became, in modern parlance, an “ego trip.” In the ostentatious style, said Perkins, “we do not paint Christ, but . . . our own selves.”

—Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Academie Books, 1986), 104–105.

Puritan preaching was the bane of the Anglican establishment. Starved on a diet of liturgy and homilies prescribed by the Book of Common Prayer, parishioners would travel for miles to hear the genuine preaching of Puritan pastors. Congregations sat with pleasure through typically hour-long sermons, usually two per Sunday.

The Puritans favored “painful preaching.” By “painful” they meant painstaking, meticulous, prepared with diligence to rightly divide the Word.

   Despite their bent toward doctrine and theology, the Puritans overwhelmingly favored expository sermons that “opened” the meanings of a specific biblical passage. William Ames paid his disrespect to topical preaching that slighted the announced text from the Bible:

Ministers impose upon their hearers and altogether forget themselves when they propound a certain text in the beginning as the start of the sermon and then speak many things about or simply by occasion of the text but for the most part draw nothing out of the text itself.

   The physical opening of the Bible in the pulpit during the service symbolized the aim of expository preaching, which was to unfold the latent meanings of a specific biblical text.
   This aim, in turn, determined the methodology of Puritan preachers, which was to tie the entire sermon to the chosen text in the Bible. William Chappell defined a sermon as “a discourse on a text of scripture, disposing its parts according to the order of nature.” the Puritans were strong advocates of application in a sermon, as we will see, but it all started with the Bible itself. In the words of William Ames, “first the things in the text must be stated. . . . In setting forth the truth in the text the minister should first explain it and then indicate the good which flows from it.”
   Of the customary three parts of a Puritan sermon, two were closely tied to the Bible itself. According to the Dictionary of Public Worship adopted by the Westminster Assembly,

In raising doctrines from the text, his care ought to be, first, that the matter be the truth of God. Secondly, that it be a truth contained in, or grounded on, that text that the hearers may discern how God teaches it from thence.

This conviction about the centrality of the Bible in preaching was reinforced by the practice of largely or exclusively limiting the details of the sermon to biblical material. William Perkins, for example, encouraged the reading of patristic sources in sermon preparation, but also the concealment if his study in the citations made from the pulpit.
   The effect of this type of biblical preaching has been well summarized by a modern scholar who studied a century of the St. Paul’s Cross sermons preach in London:

For the Puritans, the sermon is not just hinged to Scripture; it quite literally exists inside the Word of God; the text is not in the sermon, but the sermon is in the text. . . . Put summarily, listening to a sermon is being in the Bible.

—Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Academie Books, 1986), 98–99.

In my previous post on the Puritans, I gave them credit for the American system of free enterprise. I even went as far as to call them capitalistic. That does not mean they were greedy opportunists. Capitalists may be greedy and unethical, but greed, corruption, and free enterprise are not inseparably linked, as the Puritans demonstrated. While they believed in a legal economic freedom, they did not believe they were morally free to do business as they pleased.

It has become an axiom of modern business that the goal of business is to make as much profit as possible and that any type of competition or selling practice is acceptable as long as it is legal. The Puritans would not agree. For one thing, they looked upon business as a service to society. “We must therefore think,” wrote John Knewstub, “that when we come to buying and selling, we come to witness our love towards our neighbor by our well dealing with him in his goods.” William Perkins said, “The end of a man’s calling is not to gather riches for himself . . . But to serve God in the serving of man, and in the seeking the good of all men.” —Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Academie Books, 1986), 69.

While believing that their labors were a “service to society” for “the good of all men,” they were not concerned with the pursuit of economic equality.

A final force of modern life of which the Puritans would not approve is socialism, whether in its overt form of government ownership or in its subtle form of the welfare state. William Ames wrote, “Ownership and differences in the amount of possessions are ordinances of God and approved by him, Prov. 22:2; 2 Thess. 3:12.” John Robinson commented:

God could, if he would, either have made men’s states more equal, or have given every one sufficient of his own. But he had rather chosen to make some rich, and some poor, that one might stand in need of another, to help another, that so he might try the mercy and goodness of them that are able, in supplying the wants of the rest.

—Ibid., 70.

The Puritans, as we have seen, were industrious, hard-working people. This has led some to paint them as avaricious, materialistic capitalists. It is true that they were capitalistic, and it is them we have to thank (and thank them, I do) for American free enterprise. But it is not at all fair to call them greedy and materialistic. Their view of wealth was much the same as their view of work: that it was ordained by God, and therefore good in itself.

   In affirming the goodness of money, the Puritans found it necessary to defend the legitimate aspects of money against its detractors. William Perkins did so in a sermon an Matthew 6:19-20, in which he listed what Christ did not forbid:

Diligent labor in a main vocation, whereby [a person] provides things needful for himself, and those that depend on him. . . . The fruition and possessions of goods and riches: for they are the good blessing of God being well used. . . . The gathering and laying up of treasure is not simply forbidden, for the word of God alloweth herefor in some respect. 2 Corinthians 12:14.

   The puritans had no guilt about making money; to make money was a form of stewardship. . . . [Richard Baxter wrote]:

If God show you a way in which you may lawfully get more than in another way (without wrong to your soul, or to any other), if you refuse this, and choose a less gainful way, you cross one of the ends of your calling, and you refuse to be God’s steward.

In the broader context of Baxter’s writing on economics, this call for efficiency and productiveness is simply evidence of common sense and a strong sense of wishing to be a good steward of God’s gifts. —Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Academie Books, 1986), 58.

Likewise, the Puritans defended the concept of private property:

   The Puritans’ defense of private property was an extension of their belief in the legitimacy of money. William Ames wrote that private property is founded “not only on human but also on natural and divine right.” Elsewhere Ames wrote that there is justice “in the lawful keeping of the things we have.” when John Hull, one of the first merchant princes of Massachusetts, lost his ships to the Dutch, he took consolation in God’s providence: “The loss of my estate will be nothing, if the Lord please join my soul nearer to himself, and loose it more from creature comforts.” but when his foreman stole his horses, Hull took the view that “I would have you know that they are, by God’s good providence, mine.” —Ibid., 59.

While the puritans believed that hard work was godly, and that the success gained thereby was good, it did not follow that success was an automatic sign of godliness, or that poverty was a sign of wickedness.

   If godliness is not a guarantee of success, then the converse is also true: success is not a sign of godliness. This is how the Puritans understood the matter. John Cotton stated that a Christian “equally bears good and evil successes as God shall dispense them to him.” Samuel Willard wrote, “as riches are not evidences of God’s love, so neither is poverty of his anger or hatred.” Samuel Hieron said that just as many of God’s “beloved servants do feel the smart of poverty, so even the most wicked . . . have a large Portion in this life.” —Ibid., 60.

The Puritans believed that wealth was often a temptation and the cause of spiritual downfall. Yet they did not make a virtue of poverty.

   The puritans did not idealize poverty as something to be sought. Contrary to Catholic monastic theory, the Puritans theorized that poverty is no sure way to avoid temptation. Richard Baxter commented:

Poverty also hath its temptations. . . . For even the poor may be undone by the love of that wealth and plenty which they never get: and they may perish for over-loving the world, that never yet prospered in the world.

—Ibid., 61.

Further, the puritans believed that poverty existed to display God’s glory, both through the impoverished, and through the wealthy.

   The Puritans also rejected the ethic of unconcern that is content to let the poor remain poor. In their view, poverty is not an unmitigated misfortune, but it is certainly not the goal that we should have for people. “The rich man by liberality must dispose and comfort the poor,” said Thomas Lever in a sermon. “God never gave a gift,” preached Hugh Latimer, “but he sent occasion at one time or another to show it to God’s glory. As if he sent riches, he sendeth poor men to be helped with it.” Latimer even went so far as to say that “the poor man hath title to the rich man’s goods; so that the rich man ought to let the poor man have part of his riches to help and comfort him withal.”
   On the subject of poverty, then, the Puritans taught that it is sometimes the lot of godly and that it can be a spiritual blessing. It is not, however, meritorious in itself, and poor people require the generosity of people who have resources to help them. —Ibid.

We all know, don’t we, that the puritans hated sex and considered it to be exceedingly sinful. After all, that is what “puritanical” means, isn’t it? Well . . . maybe not. According to Leland Ryken, that attitude belongs to the Roman Catholics, particularly during the middle ages. Rome taught that sex, although less sinful for some than the alternatives, was always sinful, not in the act itself, but in the driving passions and resulting pleasure. This view was held by no less than our beloved Augustine, who commended married couples who abstained from sex!

The Puritans rejected that attitude wholeheartedly, and made no secret of their opposing view. Ryken writes that “When a New England wife complained, first to her pastor, and then to the whole congregation, that her husband was neglecting their sex life, the church proceeded to excommunicate the man.” [Worldly Saints, 39.]

Catholic doctrine had declared virginity superior to marriage; the Puritan reply was that marriage “is a state . . . Far more excellent than the condition of single life.” Many Catholic commentators claimed that sexual intercourse had been the resultof the Fall and did not occur in Paradise; the Puritan comeback was that marriage was ordained by God, “and that not in this sinful world, but in paradise, that most joyful garden of pleasure.”
   . . .
   Given the Catholic background against which they wrote and preached, the Puritans’ praise of marriage was at the same time an implicit endorsement of marital sex as good. They elaborated that point specifically and often. This becomes clearer once we are clued into the now-outdated terms by which they customarily referred to sexual intercourse: “matrimonial duty,” “cohabitation,” “act of matrimony,” and (especially) “due benevolence.”
   Everywhere we turn in Puritan writing on the subject we find sex affirmed as good in principle. [William] Gouge referred to physical union as “one of the most proper and essential acts of marriage.” It was Milton’s opinion that the text “they shall be one flesh” (Gen. 2:24) was included in the Bible

to justify and make legitimate the rites of the marriage bed; which was not unneedful, if for all this warrant they were suspected of pollution by some sects of philosophy and religions of old, and latelier among the Papists.

William Ames listed as one of the duties of marriage “mutual communication of bodies.”
   So closely linked were the ideas of marriage and sex that the Puritans usually defined marriage partly in terms of sexual union. [William] Perkins defined marriage as “the lawful conjunction of the two married persons; that is, of one man and one woman into one flesh.” Another well-known definition was this: Marriage

is a coupling together of two persons into one flesh, according to the ordinance of God. . . . By yoking, joining, or coupling is meant, not only outward dwelling together of the married folks . . . but also an uniform agreement of mind and a common participation of body and goods.

   Married sex was not only legitimate in the Puritan view; it was meant to be exuberant. Gouge said that married couples should engage in sex “with good will and delight, willingly, readily, and cheerfully.” An anonymous Puritan claimed that when two are made one by marriage they

may joyfully give due benevolence one to the other; as two musical instruments rightly fitted do make a most pleasant and sweet harmony in a well tuned consort.

Alexander Niccholes theorized that in marriage “thou not only unitest unto thyself a friend and comfort for society, but also a companion for pleasure.”
   In this acceptance of physical sex, the Puritans once again rejected the asceticism and implicit dualism between sacred and secular that had governed Christian thinking for so long. In the Puritan view, God had given the physical world, including sex, for human welfare.

—Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Academie Books, 1986), 42, 43–44.

The Puritans were known as a hard-working people. Even today, when the words “puritan” and “puritanical” are meant as insults, one hears references to the “puritan work ethic.” Few, however, understand the motivation for that ethic, which stemmed from a conviction that Jesus was Lord of all of life. Leland Ryken writes:

   To understand Puritan attitudes toward work, we must take a look at the background against which they were reacting. For centuries it had been customary to divide types of work into the two categories of “sacred” and “secular.” Sacred work was work done by members of the religious profession. All other work bore the stigma of being secular.   This cleavage between sacred and secular work can be traced all the way back to the Jewish Talmud. One of the prayers, obviously written from the scribe’s viewpoint, is as follows:

I thank thee, O Lord, my God, that thou hast given me my lot with those who sit in the house of learning, and not with those who sit at the street-corners; for I am early to work and they are early to work; I am early to work on the words of the Torah, and they are early to work on things of no moment. I weary myself, and they weary themselves; I weary myself and profit thereby, and they weary themselves to no profit. I run, and they run; I run towards the life of the age to come, and they run towards the pit of destruction.

   The same division of work into categories of sacred and secular became a leading feature of medieval Roman Catholicism. The attitude was formulated already in the fourth century by Eusebius, who wrote,

Two ways of life were given by the law of Christ to his church. The one is above nature, and beyond common human living. . . . Wholly and permanently separate from the common customary life of mankind, it devotes itself to the service of God alone. . . . Such then is the perfect form of the Christian life. And the other, more humble, more human, permits men to . . . have minds for farming, for trade, and the other more secular interests as well as for religion. . . . And a kind of secondary grade of piety is attributed to them.

This sacred-secular dichotomy was exactly what the Puritans rejected as the starting point of their theory of work.
[Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Academie Books, 1986), 24.]

The Puritans, following the lead of Luther and Calvin, believed that all honest labor was holy. The differences between sacred secular were extrinsic only. The most common, menial labor was intrinsically as valuable and God-glorifying as the most honored vocations, including preaching. According to Hugh Latimer,

This is a wonderful thing, that the Savior of the world, and the King above all kings, was not ashamed to labor; yea, and to use so simple an occupation. Here he did sanctify all manner of occupations. [Ibid., 25.]

The Christian faith of the laborer was believed to sanctify the most humble calling. John Cotton wrote:

Faith . . . encourageth a man in his calling to the homeliest and difficultest. . . . Such homely employments a carnal heart knows not how to submit unto; but now faith having put us into a calling, if it require some homely employment, it encourageth us in it. . . . So faith is ready to embrace any homely service his calling leads him to, which a carnal heart would blush to be seen in. [Ibid.]

This was the puritan’s view of every activity. Ryken continues:

   For the Puritans, all of life was God’s. Their goal was to integrate their daily work with their religious devotion to God. Richard Steele asserted that it was in the shop “where you may most confidently expect the presence and blessing of God.” The Puritans revolutionized attitudes toward daily work when they raised the possibility that “every step and stroke in your trade is sanctified.” John Milton, in his famous Areopagitica, satirized the businessman who leaves his religion at home, “trading all day without his religion.” . . .
   The Puritan goal was to serve God, not simply within one’s work in the world, but through that work. John Cotton hinted at this when he wrote,

A true believing Christian . . . lives in his vocation by his faith. Not only my spiritual life but even my civil life in this world, and all the life I live, is by the faith of the Son of God: He exempts no life from the agency of his faith.

And Cotton Mather said,

A Christian should be able to give a good account, not only what is his occupation, but also what he is in his occupation. It is not enough that a Christian have an occupation; but he must mind his occupation as it becomes a Christian.

With the Puritan emphasis on all of life as God’s, it is not surprising that a late seventeenth-century pamphlet entitled St. Paul the Tentmaker could note that the Protestant movement had fostered a “delight in secular employments.” [Ibid., 25–26.]

Having completed John Calvin: A Heart for Devotion, Doctrine, and Doxology, the next church history book in my queue is Worldly Saints by Leland Ryken.

You’ve no doubt heard the terms “puritan” and “puritanical” used pejoratively; but those who use those words in that way know nothing of the faith and character of the Puritans. In truth, most of us probably know little about them; so when I discovered Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were by Leland Ryken, I knew I had to get it and put it near the of my to-read stack.

The Puritans, as you likely know, were Calvinists. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that truth was extremely important to them. Ryken writes:

   The Puritans placed a high premium on religious truth. The intellectual content of a person’s faith was not an indifferent matter for them. Thomas Hooker claimed that “all truth, though the least that God reveals , is it not better than all the world?” John Owen urged Christians to “look on truth as a pearl, as that which is better than all the world, bought with any price.”

—Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Academie Books, 1986), 17.

It should not be believed, however, that bare dogma was the sum of the Puritans’ religion. The possibility that religious belief could be intellectual without touching the heart was very real to them. They were diligent in self-examination (perhaps sometimes too much so) as a defense against that deplorable condition.

   The idea of cold or coldness and the synonyms for dull and dullness, were major spiritual aversions for the Puritans. Richard Rogers recoiled from “the coldness and half-service . . . Which is in the world.” wile Cotton Mather warned, “beware of . . . A strong head and a cold heart.” Samuel Ward recorded in his diary the self-accusation “How on the 15 and 16 of February thou was very dull in God’s service.” as a counterpart to these rejections of coldness, zeal and zealous were recurrent positive value-terms in Puritan vocabulary.
   Spiritual complacency and mediocrity were the greatest of all Puritan aversions. Richard Baxter wrote,

As mere idleness and forgetting God will keep a soul as certainly from heaven as a profane, licentious, fleshly life, so also will the usual company of such idle, forgetful, negligent persons as surly keep our hearts from heaven, as the company of men more dissolute and profane. [The Saints’ Everlasting Rest (Fleming H. Revell, 1962), 125.]

Samuel Willard lamented that in New England “forwardness and zeal for God is almost out of date” while “lukewarm-confession is much in credit.”

—Ibid.

The Prayer life of John Calvin reflects a profound sense of the majesty of God, and a deep appreciation for the privilege of communing with him in prayer. Joel Beeke writes:

Throughout his writings, Calvin offers a theology of prayer. He presents the throne room of God as glorious, holy, and sovereign, while also accessible, desirable, and precious in and through Christ. Given the rich blessings accessible to us through prayer, those who refuse to pray “neglect a treasure, buried and hidden in the earth, after it had been pointed out” [Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.20.1.] to them. They also commit idolatry by defrauding God, since prayerlessness is a blatant denial that “God is the author of every good thing.” [Ibid., 3.20.14.]
   We must persevere in pursuing precious access to God in prayer, Calvin concludes. [Ibid., 3.20.51–52.] Discouragements may abound and almost overwhelm us: “Our warfare is unceasing and various assaults arise daily.” But that gives all the more reason to discipline ourselves to persevere in prayer, even if “we must repeat the same supplications not twice or three times only, but as often as we need, a hundred and a thousand times.” [Cited in Hesselink, On Prayer: Conversations with God, 19.] Ceasing to pray when God does not answer us quickly is the surest mark that we have never become believers. [Commentary on Psalm 22:4; Wallace, Calvin, Geneva, and the Reformation, 214.]
   Calvin counsels believers not only to better methods of prayer, but to a deeper devotion and a surer access to the triune God who has given the gift of prayer. He modeled this prayer life by accompanying every public act with prayer, by providing forms of prayer, [John Calvin, Treatises on the Sacraments of the Church of Geneva, Forms of Prayer, and Confessions of Faith, trans. by Henry Beveridge (repr. Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2002)] and by appointing days of prayer for a variety of occasions—as well as privately in his own life. [Elsie McKee, John Calvin: Writings on Pastoral Piety (New York: Paulist Press, 2001), 29, 167ff.] These merge well in the last prayer he records in his commentary on Ezekiel, which, because of failing health, he was not able to complete:

Grant, Almighty God, since we have already entered in hope upon the threshold of our eternal inheritance, and know that there is a certain mansion for us in heaven after Christ has been received there, who is our head, and the first-fruits of our salvation: Grant, I say, that we may proceed more and more in the course of thy holy calling until at length we reach the goal, and so enjoy that eternal glory of which thou affordest us a taste in this world, by the same Christ our Lord. Amen. [Commentary on Ezekiel 20:44.]

   Ultimately, for Calvin, prayer is a heavenly act, a holy and precious communing with the triune God in His glorious throne room, grounded in an assured eschatological hope. [Wallace, Calvin, Geneva, and the Reformation, 214.]
   “Lord, teach us to pray” (Luke 11:1).

—Joel R. Beeke, John Calvin: A Heart for Devotion, Doctrine, and Doxology, ed. Burk Parsons (Reformation Trust, 2008), 241–242.

In the writings of John Calvin you will find a great emphasis on prayer in the Christian’s life. Calvin considered habitual prayer to be so important that, according to Joel Beeke, “Calvin focused more on the practice of prayer than on its doctrine.” The following guides are Calvin’s Rules for Prayer:

   The first is a heartfelt sense of reverence. In prayer, we must be “disposed in mind and heart as befits those who enter conversation with God.” [Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.20.4–5.] Our prayers should arise from “the bottom of our heart.” [John Calvin, Sermons on the Epistle to the Ephesians (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust,
1973), 679.] Calvin calls for a disciplined mind and heart, asserting that “the only persons who duly and properly gird themselves to pray are those who are so moved by God’s majesty that, freed from earthly cares and affections, they come to it.” [Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.20.5.]
   The second rule is a heartfelt sense of need and repentance. We must “pray from a sincere sense of want and with penitence,” maintaining “the disposition of a beggar.” [Ibid., 3.20.6–7.] Calvin does not mean that believers should pray for every whim that arises in their hearts, but that they must pray penitently in accord with God’s will, keeping His glory in focus, yearning for every request “with sincere affection of heart, and at the same time desiring to obtain it from him.” [Ibid., 3.20.6; cf. Wallace, Calvin’s Doctrine of the Christian Life, 280–281.]
   The third rule is a heartfelt sense of humility and trust in God. True prayer requires that “we yield all confidence in ourselves and humbly plead for pardon,” trusting in God’s mercy alone for blessings both spiritual and temporal, [Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.20.8–10.] always remembering that the smallest drop of faith is more powerful than unbelief. [Ibid., 3.2.17.] Any other approach to God will only promote pride, which will be lethal: “If we claim for ourselves anything, even the least bit,” we will be in grave danger of destroying ourselves in God’s presence. [Ibid., 3.20.8.]
   The final rule is to have a heartfelt sense of confident hope. [Ibid, 3.20.11–14.] The confidence that our prayers will be answered does not arise from ourselves, but through the Holy Spirit working in us. In believers’ lives, faith and hope conquer fear so that we are able to “ask in faith, nothing wavering” (James 1:6, KJV). This means that true prayer is confident of success, owing to Christ and the covenant, “for the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ seals the pact which God has concluded with us.” [Cited in Niesel, The Theology of Calvin, 153.] Believers thus approach God boldly and cheerfully because such “confidence is necessary in true invocation . . . which becomes the key that opens to us the gate of the kingdom of heaven.” [Commentary on Ephesians 3:12. For a helpful explanation of Calvin’s four rules of prayer, see Don Garlington, “Calvin’s Doctrine of Prayer,” The Banner of Truth, no. 323–324 (Aug.–Sept. 1990): 45–50, and Stephen Matteucci, “A Strong Tower for Weary People: Calvin’s Teaching on Prayer,” The Founders Journal (Summer 2007): 21–23.]
   These rules may seem overwhelming—even unattainable—in the face of a holy, omniscient God. Calvin acknowledges that our prayers are fraught with weakness and failure. “No one has ever carried this out with the uprightness that was due,” he writes. [Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.20.16.] But God tolerates “even our stammering and pardons our ignorance,” allowing us to gain familiarity with Him in prayer, though it be in “a babbling manner.” [Ibid.; John Calvin, Commentary on the Book of Psalms, trans. James Anderson (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845; repr. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003), 2:171.] In short, we will never feel like worthy petitioners. Our checkered prayer life is often attacked by doubts, [Commentary on Matthew 21:21.] but such struggles show us our ongoing need for prayer itself as a “lifting up of the spirit” [Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.20.1, 5, 16; cf. Joel R. Beeke, The Quest for Full Assurance: The Legacy of Calvin and His Successors (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1999), 49.
] and continually drive us to Jesus Christ, who alone will “change the throne of dreadful glory into the throne of grace.” [Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.20.17.] Calvin concludes that “Christ is the only way, and the one access, by which it is granted us to come to God.” [Ibid., 3.20.19.]

—Joel R. Beeke, John Calvin: A Heart for Devotion, Doctrine, and Doxology, ed. Burk Parsons (Reformation Trust, 2008), 236–237.

Jerry Bridges on Calvin on carnality vs. holiness, and personal discipline vs. charity towards others:

   For Calvin, there is no such thing as the so-called “carnal Christian.” Rather, he writes, “The apostle denies that anyone actually knows Christ who has not learned to put off the old man, corrupt with deceitful lusts, and to put on Christ.” [Calvin, Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life, 20.] And again, “[The gospel] will be unprofitable if it does not change our heart, pervade our manners, and transform us into new creatures.” [Ibid., 21.] He continues: “Perfection must be the final mark at which we aim, and the goal for which we strive. It is not lawful for you to make a compromise with God, to try to fulfill part of your duties and to omit others at your own pleasure.” [Ibid., 22.]
   At the same time, Calvin guards against setting too high a standard for other believers. He writes, “We should not insist on absolute perfection of the gospel in our fellow Christians, however much we may strive for it ourselves.” [Ibid., 21.] To use a contemporary expression, we should be tough on ourselves and tender with others. Unfortunately, the opposite is too often true. We expect a lot from others while excusing ourselves.
   While urgently pressing the importance of our diligent pursuit of holiness, Calvin is realistic about our meager attainments. He acknowledges that the vast majority of Christians make only slight progress. But this is not to excuse us. Rather, he writes, “Let us not cease to do the utmost; that we may incessantly go forward in the way of the Lord; and let us not despair because of the smallness of our accomplishment.” [Ibid., 23.]

—Jerry Bridges, John Calvin: A Heart for Devotion, Doctrine, and Doxology, ed. Burk Parsons (Reformation Trust, 2008), 223.

Union with Christ confers upon us the dual benefits of justification and sanctification. That is, we are both declared righteous (justified), and made righteous.

   The double benefit of justification and sanctification provides an immediate answer to the Roman Catholic objection that Calvin and the other Reformers wrongly divided these doctrines, or removed good works from their proper place in the Christian life. On the contrary, Calvin’s doctrine of union with Christ unifies his theology of salvation. Viewing both justification and sanctification from the perspective of union with Christ shows how intimately these saving benefits are related.
   Calvin was convinced that the several benefits of salvation, though distinct, could never be divided. To receive Christ by faith is to receive the whole Christ, not just part of Him. Thus, in coming to Christ we receive both justification and sanctification. To separate these benefits, Calvin said, would virtually tear Christ in two. But of course “Christ cannot be torn into parts, so these two which we perceive in him together and conjointly are inseparable—namely, righteousness and sanctification.” [Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.11.6.]
   A key text for Calvin’s doctrine of salvation was 1 Corinthians 1:30, where Christ is described as “our righteousness and sanctification.” “If you would properly understand how inseparable faith and works are,” Calvin wrote, “look to Christ, who, as the Apostle teaches, has been given to us for justification and for sanctification.” [John Calvin, Responsio, in Ioannis Calvini opera selecta, ed. P. Barth, W. Niesel, and Dora Scheuner (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1926–1952), 1:470.]
   First Corinthians 1:30 clearly distinguishes the two benefits of union with Christ, so that we comprehend God’s full work of salvation in declaring us and making us righteous. Yet justification and sanctification are also joined together as inseparable benefits we receive simultaneously in Christ:

Although we may distinguish them, Christ contains both of them inseparably in himself. Do you wish, then, to attain righteousness in Christ? You must first possess Christ; but you cannot possess him without being made partaker in his sanctification, because he cannot be divided into pieces (1 Cor. 1:13). Since, therefore, it is solely by expending himself that the Lord gives us these benefits to enjoy, he bestows both of them at the same time, the one never without the other. [Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion. 3.16.1.]

—Philip Graham Ryken, John Calvin: A Heart for Devotion, Doctrine, and Doxology, ed. Burk Parsons (Reformation Trust, 2008), 197–198.

When discussing biblical soteriology, we often speak of the substitutionary aspect of the atonement. Less often do we think of our union with Christ as vital to our salvation. Philip Ryken writes:

   Apart from union with Christ, it is impossible to receive any of the saving blessings of God. Not even the cross and the empty tomb can save us unless we are joined to Jesus Christ. Calvin was emphatic:

We must understand that as long as Christ remains outside of us, and we are separated from him, all that he has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value for us. Therefore, to share with us what he has received from the Father, he had to become ours and to dwell within us. . . . We also, in turn, are said to be “engrafted into him” [Rom. 11:17], and to “put on Christ” [Gal. 3:27]; for, as I have said, all that he possesses is nothing to us until we grow into one body with him. [Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.1.1.]

   Simply put, if we are not in Christ, we have no part in His death on the cross to atone for sins and no share in His resurrection from the dead. We are not justified, adopted, sanctified, or glorified without being united to Christ. “I do not see,” wrote Calvin, “how anyone can trust that he has redemption and righteousness in the cross of Christ, and life in his death, unless he relies chiefly upon a true participation in Christ himself. For those benefits would not come to us unless Christ first made himself ours.” [Ibid., 4.17.11.] Union with Christ, therefore, is nothing less than a matter of spiritual life and death.

—Philip Graham Ryken, John Calvin: A Heart for Devotion, Doctrine, and Doxology, ed. Burk Parsons (Reformation Trust, 2008), 193–194.

Years ago, the doctrine of “once saved, always saved” was a big stumbling block for me as I approached the doctrines known as “Calvinism.” Having read and heartily agreed with The Gospel According to Jesus (ironically, I thought, by a Calvinist), I abhorred the notion that one could “accept Jesus” and be secure in his salvation while living an unchanged life; and I still do. The doctrines known as “Free Grace Theology” are no less than anti-gospel heresies. But isn’t that the logical conclusion of Calvinism?

If you have been taught the “once saved, always saved” doctrine, you may think that there is no difference between that teaching and the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints. But while it is certainly true that those who are once saved will always be saved, the concept of the perseverance of the saints encompasses a vitally important truth that is rarely emphasized by people who teach the “once saved, always saved” view. That missing emphasis is the fact that a person is saved through perseverance, not apart from it. The “once saved, always saved” view may lead those who hold it into quietistic thinking. That is to say, they may think that they have little or no part to play in maintaining their salvation, but that God does it all for them. While a person is not saved by works (as Romanists believe) and does not remain saved because of works (as the Churches of Christ believe), God saves only those who persevere in the faith.
   In a section of the Institutes of the Christian Religion titled “Perseverance is exclusively God’s work; it is neither a reward nor a complement of our individual act,” Calvin writes:

Perseverance would, without any doubt, be accounted God’s free gift if a most wicked error did not prevail that it is distributed according to men’s merit, in so far as each man shows himself receptive to the first grace. But since this error arose from the fact that men thought it in their power to spurn or to accept the proffered grace of God, when the latter opinion is swept away the former idea also falls of itself. However, there is here a twofold error. For besides teaching that our gratefulness for the first grace and our lawful use of it are rewarded by subsequent gifts, they add also that grace does not work in us by itself, but is only a co-worker with us. [Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2.3.11.]

Perseverance is the result of the work of the Spirit in believers’ hearts. Nevertheless, it is a work that enables them to keep on believing, as Peter says. God does not believe for them. Rather, they are “guarded” through faith.
   In John 15, we read about the sanctification that is necessary for a believer to be saved. [I.e., the sanctification that is always present, giving evidence of the fact that one is saved.] A so-called “abiding” condition, which some Higher Life adherents take to mean a special sort of holiness, is not taught in the passage. That idea distorts the apostle’s teaching. The Greek word meno, which the King James Version translates as “abide,” means “remain, continue, stay.” It does not refer to some special state of “resting” in Christ that only super saints achieve. Rather, this abiding is equivalent to persevering in the faith. And it is true not of a select few, such as the apostles only, but of all Christians. Indeed, persevering in one’s faith in Christ is necessary not only for bearing “much fruit,” as the passage teaches, but also for salvation.
   Unless one remains in the vine, “he is thrown away like a branch and withers,” eventually to be burned up (v. 6). Jesus, therefore, commands, “Abide [or remain] in my love” (v. 9b). The apostles had to persevere in their faith or be cast aside like a branch broken off the vine, and the same is true for all believers. Christ, the Vine, requires every professed Christian to remain in Him by genuine faith or eventually be thrown into the fire.
   So perseverance is the result of true faith, nourished and maintained by the Spirit. But the believer himself must continue to exercise it. He may never sit back and say, “I’m saved, I may do as I please, since I can never be lost.” To think that way indicates either that he has received very faulty teaching or that he is not a believer. No one who is truly converted can think that way for very long, if at all. True Spirit-given and Spirit-nourished faith leads to biblical thinking. A professed Christian must persevere—remain, continue, stay—in the Vine.
   Jesus spoke not only of believers remaining in Him, but also of His “words” remaining in believers (v. 7). Moreover, in verse 14 He said, “You are my friends if you do what I command you.” After justification, by means of divinely guarded faith, one remains in salvation by the work of the Spirit, who, through that faith, enables him to continue obeying Jesus’ words and commandments. That is perseverance.
   This precious doctrine of the perseverance of the saints, coming down to us from the Reformation, must be preserved at all costs. We may neither abandon it nor compromise with those who would do so. The certainty of salvation, which Calvin so dearly wished his congregation to know and which he bequeathed to subsequent generations, must not be lost.

—Jay E. Adams, John Calvin: A Heart for Devotion, Doctrine, and Doxology, ed. Burk Parsons (Reformation Trust, 2008), 187–189.

Can Christians lose their salvation? Jesus said no, and that promise is repeated in the New Testament epistles. Yet anecdotes abound of those who have abandoned the faith. Many of us know someone who we believed to be saved, but has gone back to the world. Calvin said “it happens daily.” Is this proof that salvation can be lost? Jay Adams writes:

When, for instance, preachers from the heretical denomination called the Churches of Christ speak of “the possibility of apostasy,” they mean that those who are truly saved may leave the faith, lose their salvation, and turn against the Lord Jesus Christ. Plainly, the Bible speaks about apostasy, but that is not what it means by the word. A very important verse that makes the truth about apostasy clear is 1 John 2:19: “They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out, that it might become plain that they all are not of us.”
   In this verse, John is addressing the fact that certain gnostic teachers who had been in the fold had left and had begun teaching their heresy. Previously, they had seemed to be true Christians, because they gave no outward indication of their heretical belief. But their false views of the nature of Christ solidified and came to the fore, and they found that they could no longer fellowship with genuine Christians. So they apostatized and denied that Christ died for our sins.
   In this verse, two important facts emerge. First, those who apostatized were never true believers. John says that by leaving they made it clear that this was so (“they were not of us”). While they had been a part of the visible church, they had never belonged to the invisible church. Their profession of faith was false. This problem of a false profession of faith in Jesus Christ, which we so often encounter in our churches today, was a problem in apostolic times and in the sixteenth century as well. In fact, Calvin describes it as a “daily” occurrence:

Yet it daily happens that those who seemed to be Christ’s, fall away from him again, and hasten to destruction. Indeed, in that same passage, where he declares that none of those whom the Father had given to him perished, he nevertheless excepts the son of perdition [John 17:12]. True indeed, but it is also equally plain that such persons never cleaved to Christ with the heartfelt trust in which certainty of election has, I say, been established for us. [Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.24.7.]

   Those who teach that believers may apostatize from the church disregard John’s plain explanation of the facts. We must not do so. Instead, we must maintain that those who denounce the faith never had true faith in the first place. They may have been among believers, but they were not of them. Otherwise, as John says, they would not have failed to persevere with them.
   Second, note the corollary: John affirms that “if they had been of us, they would have continued with us.” True believers remain in the faith and in the church. They endure to the end. It is certainly possible for a believer to defect for a time, but, like Peter or John Mark—who both had temporary lapses—in the end they repent and return.

—Jay E. Adams, John Calvin: A Heart for Devotion, Doctrine, and Doxology, ed. Burk Parsons (Reformation Trust, 2008), 184–185.

Arminians have often caricatured the doctrine of Irresistible Grace as dragging sinners, against their will, into the Kingdom of God. But that is not what any Calvinist believes, and it is certainly not what Calvin himself believed. Keith Mathison writes:

   In 1542, the Dutch Roman Catholic theologian Albert Pighius wrote a work titled Ten Books on Human Free Choice and Divine Grace. Pighius was critiquing Calvin’s teaching on the subject of free will and predestination as found in the 1539 edition of the Institutes. In 1543, Calvin wrote a response to Pighius titled The Bondage and Liberation of the Will. This book contains Calvin’s most extended treatment of the relationship between God’s grace and man’s will. In it, Calvin sums up his argument against Pighius in the following statement:

But all that we say amounts to this. First, that what a person is or has or is capable of is entirely empty and useless for the spiritual righteousness which God requires, unless one is directed to the good by the grace of God. Secondly, that the human will is of itself evil and therefore needs transformation and renewal so that it may begin to be good, but that grace itself is not merely a tool which can help someone if he is pleased to stretch out his hand to [take] it. That is, [God] does not merely offer it, leaving [to man] the choice between receiving it and rejecting it, but he steers the mind to choose what is right, he moves the will also effectively to obedience, he arouses and advances the endeavor until the actual completion of the work is attained. [Calvin, The Bondage and Liberation of the Will: A Defence of the Orthodox Doctrine of Human Choice Against Pighius, 114.]

   Contrary to Pighius, Calvin affirms that grace is efficacious:

[In the Institutes] I say, then, that grace is not offered to us in such a way that afterwards we have the option either to submit or to resist. I say that it is not given merely to aid our weakness by its support as though anything depended on us apart from it. But I demonstrate that it is entirely the work of grace and a benefit conferred by it that our heart is changed from a stony one to one of flesh, that our will is made new, and that we, created anew in heart and mind, at Transforming Grace length will what we ought to will. For Paul bears witness that God does not bring about in us [merely] that we are able to will what is good, but also that we should will it right up to the completion of the act. How big a difference there is between performance and will! Likewise, I determine that our will is effectively formed so that it necessarily follows the leading of the Holy Spirit, and not that it is sufficiently encouraged to be able to do so if it wills. [Ibid., 174.]

   As we see, Calvin clearly taught that in order for man to be saved, the Holy Spirit had to work efficaciously and irresistibly to bring him from a state of spiritual death to spiritual life.
   In his teaching on the subject of saving grace, Calvin merely followed the doctrine set forth in the Scriptures. The doctrine of efficacious grace is necessary because of the state of fallen man. Man is born dead in sin (cf. Rom. 5:12; Eph. 2:1; Col. 2:13), with his mind and heart corrupted (Gen. 6:5; Jer. 17:9; Rom. 8:7–8; 1 Cor. 2:14). He is a slave to sin (Rom. 6:20; Titus 3:3) and therefore unable to repent and come to God (Jer. 13:23; Matt. 7:18; John 6:44, 65). Because of this, man must be born again (John 3:5–7). Those whom God elected and for whom Christ died are brought to life by the Holy Spirit (John 1:12–13; 3:3–8; 5:21; Eph. 2:1, 5; Titus 3:5). God gives them faith and repentance (Acts 5:31; 11:18; 13:48; Eph. 2:8–9; Phil. 1:29; 2 Tim. 2:25–26), and they are justified.

—Keith A. Mathison, John Calvin: A Heart for Devotion, Doctrine, and Doxology, ed. Burk Parsons (Reformation Trust, 2008), 173–174.

Tom Ascol and John Calvin on expiation (the taking away of sin, not to be confused with propitiation):

   Christ accomplished [expiation] in His death. Paul writes that it was “while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son” (Rom. 5:10). What Jesus did on the cross removed the cause of the breach in the relationship between God and sinners. His death expiated our sins.
   Calvin’s comments on the announcement of John the Baptist upon seeing Jesus for the first time (John 1:29) underscore this truth. Calvin writes:

The principal office of Christ is briefly but clearly stated; that he takes away the sins of the world by the sacrifice of his death, and reconciles men to God. There are other favors, indeed, which Christ bestows upon us, but this is the chief favor, and the rest depend on it; that, by appeasing the wrath of God, he makes us to be reckoned holy and righteous. For from this source flow all the streams of blessings, that, by not imputing our sins, he receives us into favor. Accordingly, John, in order to conduct us to Christ, commences with the gratuitous forgiveness of sins which we obtain through him. [John Calvin, Commentary on the Gospel According to John, 1:63.]

   In the old covenant, expiation of sins was portrayed by means of animal sacrifices. All of the ceremony surrounding the sacrificial offerings was designed to point to the work of Christ on the cross. Calvin elaborates:

The sacrifice was offered in such a manner as to expiate sin by enduring its punishment and curse. This was expressed by the priests by means of the laying on of hands, as if they threw on the sacrifice the sins of the whole nation. (Exodus 29:15) And if a private individual offered a sacrifice, he also laid his hand upon it, as if he threw upon it his own sin. Our sins were thrown upon Christ in such a manner that he alone bore the curse. . . . [This describes] the benefit of Christ’s death, that by his sacrifice sins were expiated, and God was reconciled towards men. [John Calvin, Commentary on the Prophet Isaiah, 4:124–125.]

—Thomas K. Ascol, John Calvin: A Heart for Devotion, Doctrine, and Doxology, ed. Burk Parsons (Reformation Trust, 2008), 164–165.

Tom Ascol and John Calvin on sin, and God’s simultaneous love and hatred toward sinners:

   God’s response toward all sinners is anger and opposition. His wrath is provoked and stored up against all sin.
   The distinction that Roman Catholicism makes between venial and mortal sins is baseless. While Protestants rightly reject that kind of distinction theologically, it often subtly informs much of their thinking about sin and judgment. Many are under the false impression that God’s wrath in general, or hell in particular, is reserved for those guilty of “major sins,” such as Adolf Hitler or Saddam Hussein. Lesser sinners are tempted to hope that their case is significantly different. This is why even the title of Jonathan Edwards’ famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” so often evokes scorn. It is assumed that while it might be conceivable that some sinners would be in that horrible position, surely it is not true of all.
   To this Calvin answers, “Every sin is a deadly sin!” [Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2.8.59.] In saying this, he was merely echoing the prophet Ezekiel, who teaches, “the soul who sins shall die” (18:4, 20), and the apostle Paul, who writes in Romans 6:23, “The wages of sin is death.” Calvin exhorts Christians to acknowledge this fundamental, vital point of biblical teaching: “Let the children of God hold that all sin is mortal. For it is rebellion against the will of God, which of necessity provokes God’s wrath, and it is a violation of the law, upon which God’s judgment is pronounced without exception.” [ibid.]
   This is true even for those whom God chose before the foundation of the world to receive salvation (Eph. 1:4). Though they are the objects of eternal, divine love, they are nevertheless liable to God’s anger because of their sin. Paul reminds the Ephesians of this fact when he writes that Christians were “by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind” (2:3). This means that, before their conversion, the elect are both deeply loved by God and at enmity with Him. Calvin explains the matter quite starkly by quoting Augustine after invoking Romans 5:8:

Therefore, [God] loved us even when we practiced enmity toward him and committed wickedness. Thus in a marvelous and divine way he loved us even when he hated us. For he hated us for what we were that he had not made; yet because our wickedness had not entirely consumed his handiwork, he knew how, at the same time, to hate in each one of us what we had made, and to love what he had made. [Ibid., 2.14.4.]

—Thomas K. Ascol, John Calvin: A Heart for Devotion, Doctrine, and Doxology, ed. Burk Parsons (Reformation Trust, 2008), 160–161.

There are certain people to whom I may or may not be related who would dispute my humility, or might in Churchillian fashion say, “Well, yes, but then he has good cause to be humble.” Calvinists in general are often characterized as lacking humility. While there no doubt are arrogant Calvinists, I believe this is a misrepresentation of Calvinists. We are, as our theology dictates, the first to admit that we have good reason to be humble, and no cause for pride. That is not to say that we don’t struggle with pride the same as everyone else. But God is faithful to provide humbling experiences (Daniel 4:37), as he did on this day last month . . .

Writing on “The advantages of predestination” according to Calvin, Richard Phillips presents the doctrine of election as a source of assurance to believers:

   Calvin also saw the doctrine of predestination as possessing great pastoral value, especially in rightly grounding our assurance of salvation. But first he warned against a vain and dangerous attempt to base our assurance on direct knowledge of God’s decree. One must not attempt, he writes, “to break into the inner recesses of divine wisdom . . . in order to find out what decision has been made concerning himself at God’s judgment seat.” [Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.24.4.] No mere creature has direct access to God’s eternal counsel, so to seek assurance through knowledge of election is to be dashed against the rocks like a shipwrecked mariner.
   So how does the doctrine of election contribute to assurance? Calvin preached: “How do we know that God has elected us before the creation of the world? By believing in Jesus Christ. . . . Whosoever then believes is thereby assured that God has worked in him, and faith is, as it were, the duplicate copy that God gives us of the original of our adoption. God has his eternal counsel, and he always reserves to himself the chief and original record of which he gives us a copy by faith.” [John Calvin, Sermons on the Epistle to the Ephesians (1577; repr. Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1973), 47.] Election is always “in Christ” (Eph. 1:4), so the distinguishing mark of the elect is their union with Christ in faith. “Therefore,” Calvin explains, “if we desire to know whether God cares for our salvation, let us inquire whether he has entrusted us to Christ, whom he has established as the sole Savior of all his people.” [Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.24.6.]
   On this basis, true believers can and should look to the future without anxiety, knowing that their faith in Christ testifies to their eternal election. But this does not encourage presumptuous abuse of our privileges, since apart from discipleship to Christ our grounds for confidence vanish. Most importantly, Christians look for perseverance in faith not to themselves but to the promise of Christ: “This is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day” (John 6:39). Likewise, we rely for our perseverance in faith on the determination of God’s sovereign will, since, Paul writes, “He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ” (Phil. 1:6).
   How many Christians stumble on in weakness, burdened with doubts that would be erased if only they knew their salvation rested not in themselves but in God? The doctrine of election tells us that it was God who sought us and not we who sought Him; that God called us to Himself in time because He chose us in eternity. No longer seeking confidence in a decision we have made or in our feeble resolves for the future, we put our confidence in God, as Paul insists: “God’s firm foundation stands, bearing this seal: ‘The Lord knows those who are his’” (2 Tim. 2:19a). Notice Calvin’s pastoral sensitivity as he preaches on this theme:

We are as birds upon the boughs, and set forth as a prey to Satan. What assurance then could we have of tomorrow, and of all our life; yea, and after death, were it not that God, who hath called us, will end His work as He hath begun it. How hath He gathered us together in the faith of His gospel? Is it grounded upon us? Nay, entirely to the contrary; it proceedeth from His free election. Therefore; we may be so much the more freed from doubt. [Calvin, The Mystery of Godliness, 103–104.]

—Richard D. Phillips, John Calvin: A Heart for Devotion, Doctrine, and Doxology, ed. Burk Parsons (Reformation Trust, 2008), 152–153.

In his chapter of the book John Calvin: A Heart for Devotion, Doctrine, and Doxology, “Election and Reprobation,” Richard D. Phillips presents John Calvin’s doctrine, as well as Calvin’s answers to some common objections. Of particular interest to me is his response to the position I formerly held:

   First among [the objections to the doctrine of Unconditional Election] is the assertion that election is based on God’s foreknowledge. This approach seeks to counter Calvin’s doctrine of election by asserting that God foresees which people will believe His Word in the future, then predestines them for salvation on that basis. Likewise, God foreknows those who will not believe, and thus elects them for condemnation. Calvin explains, “These persons consider that God distinguishes among men according as he foresees what the merits of each will be” [John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill; trans. Ford Lewis Battles; Library of Christian Classics, XX–XXI (Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox, 1960), 3.21.3.].
   In reply, Calvin first notes that the true issue involves the origin of salvation. Under the foreknowledge view, God’s grace finds its origin in the worthiness of the recipient; since God can give grace only in response to foreseen merit, it is not His freely to give. But the Bible presents a different picture: as Calvin states, “God has always been free to bestow his grace on whom he wills” [Ibid., 3.22.1.].
   Calvin then unfolds the teaching of Scripture, which insists that salvation originates not in the worthiness of the recipient but in the free grace of God. He notes that the Bible’s teaching that God chose His people before the creation of the world (Eph. 1:4) clearly means merit plays no part in their election. We are chosen “in Christ”—since we have nothing in ourselves to commend us to God’s grace, God views us by our union with Christ. This shows that the elect possess no merit of their own for God to foresee. In fact, Calvin says, Ephesians 1:4 declares that “all virtue appearing in man is the result of election” [Ibid., 3.22.2.].
   Here, then, is the question: is our faith the cause or the result of our election? If we are elected because of foreseen faith, then we can make no sense of Paul’s teaching: “He chose us in [Christ] before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him” (Eph. 1:4). As Calvin explains, the foreknowledge objection inverts the order of Paul’s reasoning: “If he chose us that we should be holy, he did not choose us because he foresaw that we would be so” [Ibid., 3.22.3.]. This is abundantly confirmed in Paul’s subsequent teaching, when he states that our election is “according to the purpose of his will” (Eph. 1:5) and “according to his purpose” (Eph. 1:9). Paul uses similar language in 2 Timothy 1:9, writing that God “saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works but because of his own purpose and grace.” Preaching on this text, Calvin asserts: “He saith not that God hath chosen us because we have heard the gospel, but on the other hand, he attributes the faith that is given us to the highest cause; to wit, because God hath fore-ordained that He would save us” [John Calvin, The Mystery of Godliness and Other Sermons (1830; repr. Morgan, Pa.: Soli Deo Gloria, 1999), 46.]. Therefore, instead of teaching that salvation originates in what God foresees in us, Calvin insists, “all benefits that God bestows for the spiritual life, as Paul teaches, flow from this one source: namely, that God has chosen whom he has willed, and before their birth has laid up for them individually the grace that he willed to grant them” [Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.22.2.].

—Richard D. Phillips, John Calvin: A Heart for Devotion, Doctrine, and Doxology, ed. Burk Parsons (Reformation Trust, 2008), 147–149.

John MacArthur explains Calvin’s view of human depravity:

The phrase “total depravity” (not an expression of Calvin’s but a phrase descriptive of his view) has an unfortunate ambiguity about it. Many who are exposed to that terminology for the first time suppose it means Calvin taught that all sinners are as thoroughly bad as they possibly can be.
   But Calvin expressly disclaimed that view. He acknowledged that “in every age there have been persons who, guided by nature, have striven toward virtue throughout life” [Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2.3.3.]. Calvin suggested that such people (even though there are “lapses . . . in their moral conduct” [Ibid.]) are of commendable character, from a human point of view. “They have by the very zeal of their honesty given proof that there was some purity in their nature” [Ibid.]. He went even further: “These examples, accordingly, seem to warn us against adjudging man’s nature wholly corrupted, because some men have by its prompting not only excelled in remarkable deeds, but conducted themselves most honorably throughout life” [Ibid., emphasis added.].
   Nevertheless, Calvin went on to say, such thinking actually points the wrong direction. Instead, “it ought to occur to us that amid this corruption of nature there is some place for God’s grace; not such grace as to cleanse it, but to restrain it inwardly” [Ibid.].
   Calvin was describing here what later theologians called “common grace”—the divine restraining influence that mitigates the effects of our sin and enables even fallen creatures to display—never perfectly, but always in a weak and severely blemished way—the image of God that is still part of our human nature, marred though it was by the fall.
   In other words, depravity is “total” in the sense that it infects every part of our being—not the body only; not the feelings alone; but flesh, spirit, mind, emotions, desires, motives, and will together. We’re not always as bad as we can be, but that is solely because of God’s restraining grace. We ourselves are thoroughly depraved, because in one way or another sin taints everything we think, do, and desire. Thus, we never fear God the way we should, we never love Him as much as we ought, and we never obey Him with a totally pure heart. That, for Calvin, is what depravity means.
   Calvin’s thorough treatment of human depravity is one of his most important legacies. Next to his work on the doctrine of justification by faith, it may be the most vital aspect of his doctrinal system. He brought clarity to a crucial principle that had practically fallen into obscurity over the centuries since Augustine’s conflict with Pelagius: to magnify human free will or minimize the extent of human depravity is to downplay the need for divine grace, and that undermines every aspect of gospel truth.
   Once a person truly grasps the truth of human depravity, the more difficult and controversial principles of Calvinist soteriology fall into place. Unconditional election, the primacy and efficacy of saving grace, the need for substitutionary atonement, and the perseverance of those whom God graciously redeems are all necessary consequences of this principle.

—John MacArthur, John Calvin: A Heart for Devotion, Doctrine, and Doxology, ed. Burk Parsons (Reformation Trust, 2008), 137–138

Thabiti Anyabwile writes on Calvin’s view of the Holy Spirit in the corporate life of the church:

Calvin perceived the intertwining of Jesus’ person and work with that of the Holy Spirit and the local church. According to Calvin:

[Jesus] was anointed by the Spirit to be herald and witness of the Father’s grace. We must note this: he received anointing, not only for himself that he might carry out the office of teaching, but for his whole body that the power of the Spirit might be present in the continuing preaching of the gospel. [Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2.15.2.]

   Calvin understood what some habitually forget—effective gospel preaching depends wholly on the power of the Spirit as Christ offers Himself in the gospel. If we neglect to proclaim the work of Christ or to beseech the work of the Spirit, all preaching is lifeless and impotent.
   But Calvin reminds us also that the Spirit is necessary for producing the unity fitting for renewed life. In His atonement, Christ becomes “our peace,” and purchases and makes for Himself “one new man” (Eph. 2:14–15). But the Spirit is the agent who applies this reality.
   Commenting on Ephesians 2:16–19, Calvin writes, “We must all participate in one Spirit.” That participation in the Spirit of God produces “such a union among us as might show that we are in very deed the body of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is not enough for us to be piled up together like a heap of stones, but we must be joined together with cordial affection.” [Calvin, Sermons on Ephesians, 326.] Calvin unswervingly proclaimed that “when God’s Spirit governs us, He reforms our affections in such a way that our souls are joined together.” [Ibid.]
   What a beautiful picture of life together in the local church. But this was no preacher’s flourish for Calvin; he believed Scripture teaches that unity is a mark of the church of God. He writes:

We must keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. For here he puts down the unity of the Spirit as a mark that is required in the church and flock of God, insomuch that if we are divided among ourselves, we are estranged from God. And with this, he shows us what we have seen briefly before, which is that if we are not at one among ourselves, God disclaims us and tells us we do not belong to Him. This unity therefore is something which ought to be valued nowadays seeing it is the way in respect of which we are acknowledged as God’s children. [Ibid., 323.]

   If this unity was to be prized in Calvin’s day, it is no less needed in our day. Unity in the truth and in God’s Spirit is essential. It must be among the ends for which gospel preachers and all Christians labor, remembering that our love and unity commend to a perishing world the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ (John 17:20–21).
   The twenty-first-century church needs a number of things, including a deeper understanding of saving faith and conversion, a greater desire for sanctification and deliverance from worldliness, a resurgence of powerful gospel preaching, and a unwavering commitment to unity in the church. Five hundred years after his life and ministry, Calvin teaches us that essential to meeting all of these needs is daily reliance on God the Holy Spirit, “the chief key by which the gate of paradise is opened to us.” [Ibid., 207.]

—Thabiti Anyabwile, John Calvin: A Heart for Devotion, Doctrine, and Doxology, ed. Burk Parsons (Reformation Trust, 2008), 105–107.

As we have previously seen, the pastoral character of John Calvin can perhaps be seen best in the more than four thousand of his letters that have been published. In these letters, a gentle, genuine concern, even for those who opposed him, is evident. Phil Johnson writes:

   Most of Calvin’s letters convey the great tenderness of his pastor’s heart—especially when he wrote to admonish or correct someone who was in error. The tone of the letters belies the modern caricature of Calvin as a stern, fire-breathing, doctrinaire authoritarian. Still, his passion for the truth, his vast knowledge of Scripture and church history, and his meticulous logic are perpetually evident. There are occasional touches of emotion, ranging from frustration to humor, and throughout we get the sense of a man who (while consistently plainspoken) was never aloof or unapproachable but always sociable, affectionate, and cordial. The letters give us the best and most intimate sense of Calvin as a man.

Calvin corresponded with Laelius Socinus, the Italian father of the heresy known as Socinianism. Phil continues:

[Socinus’s] theology (such as it was) consisted of a particularly pernicious blend of skepticism and humanistic values, posing as Christianity but denying practically everything distinctive about the faith. Socinus was, in short, a theological liberal, and his system laid the foundation for deism, Unitarianism, and a host of similar variations, ranging from process theology and open theism to the pure skepticism of the so-called “Jesus Seminar.”
   Like many of today’s “Emergent” and post-evangelical writers, Socinus preferred to question everything rather than assert anything definitively. He lived for a time in Wittenberg, Germany, and while there, wrote to Calvin with a list of questions, which apparently were nothing more than thinly disguised protests against Calvin’s teaching. Calvin’s reply is full of good advice for many professing Christians in these postmodern times who like to toy with skepticism:

Certainly no one can be more averse to paradox than I am, and in subtleties I find no delight at all. Yet nothing shall ever hinder me from openly avowing what I have learned from the Word of God; for nothing but what is useful is taught in the school of this master. It is my only guide, and to acquiesce in its plain doctrines shall be my constant rule of wisdom. Would that you also, my dear Laelius, would learn to regulate your powers with the same moderation! You have no reason to expect a reply from me so long as you bring forward those monstrous questions. If you are gratified by floating among those airy speculations, permit me, I beseech you, an humble disciple of Christ, to meditate on those things which tend towards the building up of my faith. And indeed I shall hereafter follow out my wishes in silence, that you may not be troubled by me. And in truth I am very greatly grieved that the fine talents with which God has endowed you, should be occupied not only with what is vain and fruitless, but that they should also be injured by pernicious figments. What I warned you of long ago, I must again seriously repeat, that unless you correct in time this itching after investigation, it is to be feared you will bring upon yourself severe suffering. I should be cruel towards you did I treat with a show of indulgence what I believe to be a very dangerous error. I should prefer, accordingly, offending you a little at present by my severity, rather than allow you to indulge unchecked in the fascinating allurements of curiosity. The time will come, I hope, when you will rejoice in having been so violently admonished. Adieu, brother very highly esteemed by me; and if this rebuke is harsher than it ought to be, ascribe it to my love to you. [Schaff, History of the Christian Church, Vol. VIII: Modern Christianity: The Swiss Reformation, 128–129.]

—Phil Johnson, John Calvin: A Heart for Devotion, Doctrine, and Doxology, ed. Burk Parsons (Reformation Trust, 2008), 105–107.

John Calvin is famous — or infamous, depending on whom you ask — for his systematic theology. I’ve read portions of his Institutes in various electronic forms, and now that I’ve recently acquired a hard copy, I hope to get through it all. But I’ve been increasingly drawn towards Calvin’s expositional works (I just got a set of his commentaries, too!). Systematic theology is a necessary discipline, but exegesis must come before systematics.

Phil Johnson writes of the relation between Calvin’s Institutes and Commentaries:

   Some critics have imagined that they see numerous contradictions between Calvin’s Institutes and his commentaries, but on close inspection these invariably turn out to be differences in emphasis, determined by whatever text Calvin is commenting on in its native context. For example, Calvin’s famous remarks on John 3:16 are often singled out by Arminians as contradictory to fundamental Calvinist soteriology—especially the doctrines of election and effectual calling. Calvin writes:

Christ brought life, because the Heavenly Father loves the human race, and wishes that they should not perish. . . . And he has employed the universal term whosoever, both to invite all indiscriminately to partake of life, and to cut off every excuse from unbelievers. Such is also the import of the term World, which he formerly used; for though nothing will be found in the world that is worthy of the favor of God, yet he shows himself to be reconciled to the whole world, when he invites all men without exception to the faith of Christ, which is nothing else than an entrance into life. [John Calvin, Commentary on the Gospel according to John, trans. William Pringle (repr. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1963), 1:123–125.]

   In reality, nothing in those comments is the least bit incompatible with Calvin’s views on salvation or the doctrine he lays out in the Institutes. Calvin affirmed both the doctrine of election and the indiscriminate proposal of reconciliation in the gospel message. Like most strains of Calvinism even today, Calvin saw no conflict between the truths of God’s sovereign election, His well-meant proposal of mercy to all sinners, the sinner’s own duty to repent and believe, and the truth that sinners are so depraved none can or will respond to the gospel apart from God’s enabling grace.
   Half a century ago, a helpful review of Calvin’s commentaries in a theological journal gave this sound advice:

The commentaries complement the Institutes. Many of the controversies which have racked and sometimes splintered the Reformed Churches could have been avoided if the commentaries had been studied as assiduously as the Institutes. The student who knows only The Institutes does not have a complete picture of the theology of the French reformer. Questions such as inspiration, natural theology, and predestination are dealt with in another way in the exegetical works of Calvin, This is not to say that there is any contradiction between the Institutes and the commentaries. They must be taken together, however, to get a clear understanding of Calvin’s theology. [Walter G. Hards, “Calvin’s Commentaries,” Theology Today (April 1959), 16:1:123–124.]

   The commentaries are at once warm and pastoral, powerful and lucid, sumptuous and scholarly. They are a remarkable achievement, and if this had been Calvin’s only contribution to the literature of the Reformation, his reputation as the greatest biblical thinker among the leading Reformers would have been secured.

—Phil Johnson, John Calvin: A Heart for Devotion, Doctrine, and Doxology, ed. Burk Parsons (Reformation Trust, 2008), 102–103

John Calvin is known today primarily for his work as a theologian. In fact, it is difficult to imagine that the man who published as many as half a million words in his most prolific years had time for anything else. But though he was an almost constant writer, he was first and foremost a committed pastor, personally involved in the lives of his flock. This aspect of his life gives the lie to many popular representations of Calvin as a hard, cold academic. While most people (who are aware of Calvin at all) are only aware of his theological works, we also have a large body — numbering more than twelve hundred — of letters. It is in these letters that we best see the pastoral character of John Calvin. W. Robert Godfrey presents an example:

ENCOURAGEMENT TO A PERSECUTED SAINT

Mathieu Dimonet, a Reformed Christian from Lyon, was arrested on Jan. 9, 1553, and martyred on July 15 of that year. Shortly after his arrest, Calvin wrote to encourage him. . . .

You need not be daunted, seeing that God has promised to equip his own according as they are assaulted by Satan. Only commit yourself to him, distrusting all in yourself, and hope that he only will suffice to sustain you. Further, you have to take heed chiefly to two things: first, what the side is you defend, and next, what crown is promised to those who continue steadfast in the Gospel.

   Calvin writes that Dimonet’s future is uncertain, but that even if he faces death, God’s love and provision are certain:

We do not know as yet what he has determined to do concerning you, but there is nothing better for you than to sacrifice your life to him, being ready to part with it whenever he wills, and yet hoping that he will preserve it, in so far as he knows it to be profitable for your salvation. And although this be difficult to the flesh, yet it is the true happiness of his faithful ones; and you must pray that it may please this gracious God so to imprint it upon your heart that it may never be effaced therefrom. For our part, we also shall pray that he would make you feel his power, and vouchsafe you the full assurance that you are under his keeping; that he bridles the rage of your enemies, and in every way manifests himself as your God and Father.

   On July 7, 1553, Calvin wrote again to Dimonet and others imprisoned with him in Lyon to assure them that God had promised them strength for what they must endure. Calvin writes, “Be then assured, that God who manifests himself in time of need, and perfects his strength in our weakness, will not leave you unprovided with that which will powerfully magnify his name.”
   Calvin acknowledges that according to human reasoning their suffering is wrong, but he urges them to be confident in God and his purposes:

It is strange, indeed, to human reason, that the children of God should be so surfeited with afflictions, while the wicked disport themselves in delights; but even more so, that the slaves of Satan should tread us under foot, as we say, and triumph over us. However, we have wherewith to comfort ourselves in all our miseries, looking for that happy issue which is promised to us, that he will not only deliver us by his angels, but will himself wipe away the tears from our eyes. And thus we have good right to despise the pride of these poor blinded men, who to their own ruin lift up their rage against heaven; and although we are not at present in your condition, yet we do not on that account leave off fighting together with you by prayer, by anxiety and tender compassion, as fellow-members, seeing that it has pleased our heavenly Father, of his infinite goodness, to unite us into one body, under his Son, our head. Whereupon I shall beseech him, that he would vouchsafe you this grace, that being stayed upon him, you may in nowise waver, but rather grow in strength; that he would keep you under his protection, and give you such assurance of it that you may be able to despise all that is of the world.

   These two examples are only a brief sample of Calvin’s work of counseling as a faithful pastor. He sought always to minister the truth and comfort of God’s Word to the children of God. His counsel had both a tough realism and a sensitive compassion to it. He faced the miseries and struggles of this life straightforwardly, and he pointed Christians to God’s fatherly care both in this life and in the life to come. Above all, he encouraged Christians to look to Christ as the one who deserves the Father’s love, and he assured them that while weeping may last for the night, joy comes in the morning.

—W. Robert Godfrey, John Calvin: A Heart for Devotion, Doctrine, and Doxology, ed. Burk Parsons (Reformation Trust, 2008), 90–92

As you are no doubt aware, Calvinists are not concerned with evangelism. Calvinism itself declares evangelism unnecessary. Right? History tells a different story, a story that goes back to Calvin himself.

CALVIN AS PASTOR/EVANGELIST/MISSIONARY

Most are aware of the stereotypical charge that Calvinists are concerned only about doctrine and are indifferent to evangelism and missions. It is further charged that Calvinism is actually counterproductive to the missionary/evangelistic enterprise. Not only is that historically untrue, as revealed by examining the roster of great evangelistic pastors and missionaries who were avowed Calvinists, (i.e., George Whitfield, Charles H. Spurgeon, William Cary, David Brainerd, Jonathan Edwards, etc.), it is patently untrue of Calvin himself.
   Calvin’s passion as a pastor/evangelist was revealed in multiple venues. Calvin persistently evangelized to the children of Geneva through catechism classes and the Geneva Academy. Moreover, he trained preachers to appeal for men and women to follow Christ. The visitation of the sick prescribed an evangelistic inquiry. Even a cursory examination of Calvin’s sermons readily reveals an unquenchable zeal for men and women to be converted to Christ.
   But what about missions? In the Registry of the Venerable Company of Pastors, it is recorded that eighty-eight missionaries had been sent out from Geneva. In actuality, there were probably more than one hundred, and most of them were directly under Calvin. But missions work also went on at a more informal level. Geneva became a magnet for persecuted believers, and many of these immigrants were discipled and eventually returned to their own countries as effective missionaries and evangelists.
   As the troubled times in Calvin’s pastoral ministry subsided, the opportunity for intentional missionary expansion, and church planting ripened. The blessing of God upon the missionary endeavors of Calvin and the Geneva churches from 1555 to 1562 was extraordinary—more than one hundred underground churches were planted In France by 1560. By 1562, the number had increased to 2,150, producing more than three million members. Some of these churches had congregations numbering in the thousands. The pastor of Montpelier informed Calvin by letter that “our church, thanks to the Lord, has so grown and so continues to grow every day that we are preaching three sermons every Sunday to more than 5 to 6 thousand people.” another letter from the pastor of Toulouse declared “our church continues to grow to the astonishing number of 8 to 9 thousand souls.” Calvin’s beloved France, through his ministry, was invaded by more than thirteen hundred Geneva-trained missionaries. This effort, coupled with Calvin’s support of the Waldensians, produced a French Huguenot Church that almost triumphed over the Catholic Counter-Reformation in France.
   Calvin did not evangelize and plant churches in France alone. Geneva-trained missionaries planted churches in Italy, the Netherlands, Hungary, Poland, Germany, England, Scotland, and the independent states of the Rhineland. Evan more astonishing was an initiative that sent missionaries to Brazil. Calvin’s commitment to evangelism and missions was not theoretical, but as in every other area of his life and ministry, a matter of zealous action and passionate commitment.

—Harry L. Reeder, John Calvin: A Heart for Devotion, Doctrine, and Doxology, ed. Burk Parsons (Reformation Trust, 2008), 67–68

It is always a difficult tension in the Christian life to live in this world, today, while remembering that we are in reality citizens of another world, the fulfillment of which is yet to come.

It is commonplace today in Reformed theology to recognize that the Christian lives “between the times”—already we are in Christ, but a yet more glorious future awaits us in the final consummation. There is, therefore, a “not yet” about our present Christian experience. Calvin well understood this, and he never dissolved the tension between the “already” and the “not yet.” But he also stressed the importance for the present of the life-focus on the future.
   Calvin sought, personally, to develop a balance of contempt for the present life with a deep gratitude for the blessings of God and a love and longing for the heavenly kingdom. The sense that the Lord would come and issue His final assessment on all and bring His elect to glory was a dominant motif for him. This, the theme of his chapter “Meditation of the Future Life,” was a major element in the energy with which he lived in the face of the “not yet” of his own ailments and weakness. When he was seriously ill and confined to bed, his friends urged him to take some rest, but he replied, “Would you that the Lord when he comes, should find me idle?” By living in the light of the return of Christ and the coming judgment, Calvin became deeply conscious of the brevity of time and the length of eternity.
   This sense of eternity overflowed from his life into his work. It was so characteristic of him that it flowed out naturally in his prayers at the conclusion of his lectures. Here we see the wonderful harmony of his biblical exposition, his understanding of the gospel, his concern to teach young men how to live for God’s glory, and his personal piety. A fragment of one of these prayers, chosen almost randomly, fittingly summarizes this all-too-brief reflection of the heart for God that Calvin expressed in his learning and leadership:

May we be prepared, whatever happens,

rather to undergo a hundred deaths

than to turn aside from the profession of true piety,

in which we know our safety to be laid up.

And may we so glorify thy name

as to be partakers of that glory which has been acquired for us

through the blood of thine only-begotten son. Amen.

—Sinclair Ferguson, John Calvin: A Heart for Devotion, Doctrine, and Doxology, ed. Burk Parsons (Reformation Trust, 2008), 40–41

Last week, Burk Parsons introduced us to the heart of true Calvinism. Today, we’ll hear from Sinclair Ferguson on Calvin’s gospel.

For Calvin, the gospel is not predestination or election, the sovereignty of God, or even the five points of doctrine with which his name is so often associated. These are aspects of the gospel but the gospel is Jesus Christ Himself. That may seem a truism—who would think anything else? But this truth takes on fresh significance in Calvin’s understanding.
   By the time of the second (1539) and subsequent editions of the Institutes, Calvin’s ongoing study of Scripture had brought a new depth to his understanding of the gospel (he completed his commentary on Romans in the same year). With this new understanding, he insisted that salvation and all its benefits not only come to us through Christ but are to be found exclusively in Christ, crucified, resurrected, ascended, reigning, and returning.
   Two considerations followed. First, Calvin realized that through faith in Christ all the blessings of the gospel were his. Second, he saw that his life must be rooted and grounded in fellowship with Christ. Perhaps it was the personal realization of this that led him to wax lyrical at the climax of his exposition of the Christological section of the Apostles’ Creed:

We see that our whole salvation and all its parts are comprehended in Christ (Acts 4:12). We should therefore take care not to derive the least portion of it from anywhere else. If we seek salvation, we are taught by the very name of Jesus that it is “of him” (1 Corinthians 1:30).
   If we seek any other gifts of the Spirit, they will be found in his anointing. If we seek strength, it lies in his dominion; if purity, in his conception; if gentleness, it appears in his birth. . . . If we seek redemptioon, it lies in his passion; if acquittal, in his condemnation; if remission of the curse, in his cross (Galatians 3:13); if satisfaction, in his sacrifice; if purification, in his blood; if reconciliation, in his decent into hell; if mortification of the flesh, in his tomb; if newness of life, in the resurrection; if immortality, in the same; if inheritance of the Heavenly Kingdom, in his entrance into heaven; if protection, if security, if abundant supply of all blessings, in his Kingdom; if untroubled expectation of judgment, in the power given to him to judge. —Institutes, 2.16.19

   Calvin had make a great discovery, one that dominated both his theology and his life: if Christ is our Redeemer, then Christ was formed in the incarnation in order to deal precisely, perfectly, and fully with both the cause of our guilt and the consequences of our sin. Union with Christ was the means the Spirit used to bring this about.

—Sinclair Ferguson, John Calvin: A Heart for Devotion, Doctrine, and Doxology, ed. Burk Parsons (Reformation Trust, 2008), 35–36

Yes, I really blew it. I don’t know why, but I posted this a month early. Go ahead, have a chuckle at my expense, and then get a head start on celebrating. The links below are good, even if the date isn’t.

On this date in 1509, John Calvin, or Jean Chauvin, was born in Noyon, Picardie, France. If not for his premature death on 27 May, 1564, he would be 500 years old today. Even so, his early demise notwithstanding, “he being dead, yet speaketh” — loudly and eloquently.

•  Watch as Steve Lawson discusses his book on John Calvin
•  Meet John Calvin, hymn writer: I Greet Thee, Who My Sure Redeemer Art
•  Watch as Sinclair Ferguson, Steve Lawson, Albert Mohler, and Ligon Duncan discuss why John Calvin is still important today
• Read Theopedia on John Calvin
• Read Calvin’s Commentaties, Institutes of the Christian Religion, and more at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library
• Take advantage of he best deal you’ll find anywhere on Calvin’s Commentaries
• Download the portrait of Calvin that hangs on my office wall, formatted for printing on 8½×11 stock (borderless)

I appreciate pastors who can preach with passion. What I don’t appreciate are those who preach about their passion. But let them be passionate about God and his Word, like Calvin:

[Calvin] was a man who preached not himself, but the Word of God (2 Tim. 4:1-2). According to Parker, Calvin “had a horror of those who preached their own ideas in place of the gospel of the Bible: “When we enter the pulpit, it is not so that we may bring our own dreams and fancies with us” [Parker, Portrait of Calvin, 83.]. Calvin was not concerned with offering to his congregation the quaint meditations of his own heart. Although it has become popular in many churches for the pastor to strive to “pour out his heart” to his congregation, such was not Calvin’s aim in his preaching, for he had offered his heart to God alone. As a result, Calvin did not think it was profitable to share the ever-changing passions of his own heart, but to proclaim the heart of God in His never-changing Word. Calvin was not concerned that his congregants behold him but that they behold the Lord. This should be the aim of every pastor, and, if necessary, every pastor should place a placard behind his pulpit with the following words inscribed: “Sir, we wish to see Jesus” (John 12:21). Such was Calvin’s aim in his preaching and in all his life.

—Burk Parsons, John Calvin: A Heart for Devotion, Doctrine, and Doxology, ed. Burk Parsons (Reformation Trust, 2008), 7–8

To many people, Calvinism is nothing more than five points. But, while the five points are a fair partial summary of Calvin’s soteriology, that is all they are. Calvin’s theology was so much broader than that, and could by no means be reduced to any mnemonic acrostic (TULIP). Burk Parsons writes on “the heart of Calvin and God’s sovereign mastery of it.” This is the essence of Calvinism.

So what is true Calvinism according to Calvin? In one sense, Calvinism is as systematically profound as Calvin’s life’s work, as historically extensive as all that has been deduced from Calvin’s writings during the past five centuries, and, as Calvin would have it, as doctrinally narrow as the sixty-six books of sacred Scripture. A true Calvinist is one who strives to think as Calvin thought and live as Calvin lived—insofar as Calvin thought and lived as our Lord Jesus Christ, in accordance with the Word of God.
   As Christians, we understand that we are not our own but have been bought with a price. By His saving grace, the Lord has taken hold of our hearts of stone, regenerated and conformed them into spiritually pliable hearts, and poured into them His love by the Holy Spirit who was given to us. This was Calvin’s perception of the Christian life:

If we, then, are not our own [cf. 1 Cor. 6:19] but the Lord’s, it is clear what error we must flee, and whither we must direct all the acts of our life.
   We are not our own: let not our reason nor our will, therefore, sway our plans and deeds. We are not our own: let us therefore not set it as our goal to seek what is expedient for us according to the flesh. We are not our own: in so far as we can, let us therefore forget ourselves and all that is ours.
   Conversely, we are God’s: let us therefore live for him and die for him. We are God’s: let his wisdom and will therefore rule all our actions. We are God’s: let all the parts of our life accordingly strive toward him as our only lawful goal [cf. Rom. 14:8; cf. 1 Cor. 6:19]. O, how much has that man profited who, having been taught that he is not his own, has taken away dominion and rule from his own reason that he may yield it to God! For, as consulting our self-interest is the pestilence that most effectively leads Io our destruction, so the sole haven of salvation is to be wise in nothing through ourselves but to follow the leading of the Lord alone. [Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.7.1]

   We are not our own; we belong to the Lord. That confession, in essence, is the heart of true Calvinism. Our salvation belongs to the Lord, from beginning to end (Ps. 3:8; Rev. 7:10). He has captivated our minds and has made His light to shine abroad in our hearts (2 Cor. 4:6, 10:5). Our whole being belongs to Him—heart, soul, mind, and strength. This is what Calvin proclaimed, and this is the foundation on which his life was established.
   The Lord took hold of Calvin, and Calvin thus could not help but take away “dominion and rule from his own reason” [ibid.] and yield it Lord alone. That is the glorious brilliance reflected by any study of Calvin. There was nothing in Calvin himself that was superhuman, super-theologian, or super-churchman. Calvin was a man whom God chose to call out of darkness and into His marvelous light so that he might go back into the darkness and shine brightly unto every generation of God’s people until Christ returns.

—Burk Parsons, John Calvin: A Heart for Devotion, Doctrine, and Doxology, ed. Burk Parsons (Reformation Trust, 2008), 6–7

Some time ago I heard a pastor express the following complaint: “Some Calvinists are more Calvinistic than Calvin.” What he meant was that, while Calvin sought to develop a biblical theology, and largely succeeded, some Calvinists develop their theology beginning with Calvinistic presuppositions rather than Scripture.* Calvin would not have been pleased. Burk Parsons writes:

   Christopher Catherwood, in his book Five Leading Reformers, offers a word of warning to all Calvinists:

We must be “Bible Calvinists” not “system Calvinists.” We can all too easily get sucked into what we feel is a neat system of thought, and forget that we ought to make everything that we believe compatible with Scripture, even if that means jettisoning ideas that flow well in a purely logical sense but are nonetheless incompatible with what the Bible teaches. Although Calvin did not make that mistake himself, it is arguable that many of his followers have done so over the ensuing centuries—and I include myself, as a Calvinist, in that caution!

   Although I would argue that “Bible Calvinism” necessarily, and rightly, engenders “system Calvinism,” Catherwood’s admonition is one we all should heed with care. Calvin was a Christian who fitst and foremost lived and breathed the living and active Word of God, and all true Calvinists must follow his example. Calvin labored over his Institutes of the Christian Religion—which is unquestionably the most majestic volume in all of human history next to sacred Scripture—in ordered to help those preparing for the pastoral ministry to study the Word of God and have “easy access to it and to advance in it without stumbling.”
   According to Calvin, we are to be “daily taught in the school of Jesus Christ.” Thus, we must be students of Scripture if we are to possess right and sound doctrine: “Now in order that true religion may shine upon us, we ought to hold that it must take its beginning from heavenly doctrine and that no one can even get the slightest taste of right doctrine unless he be a pupil of Scripture.” Elsewhere Calvin writes, “Let us not take it into our heads either to seek out God anywhere else than in his Sacred Word, or to think anything of him that is not prompted by his Word, or to speak anything that is not taken from that Word.” This, writes T. H. L. Parker, “is Calvin’s theological programme—to build on the Scripture alone.”
   The entirety of Calvin’s ministry was established fundamentally on the Word of God. In accordance with the Reformation credo ad fontes, “to the sources” (particularly to the only infallible source), Calvin’s Institutes was a summary of the Christian religion according to Scripture. This was Calvin’s theological modus operandi, as Calvin scholar Ronald S. Wallace maintains: “We could, of course, argue cogently that the whole of his later teaching and outlook developed from the Bible. He insisted always that tradition must be constantly corrected by, and subordinated to, the teaching of Holy Scripture.”

—Burk Parsons, John Calvin: A Heart for Devotion, Doctrine, and Doxology, ed. Burk Parsons (Reformation Trust, 2008), 4–5.

*A note to Arminian readers who are now nodding gleefully at an apparent admission that Calvinism is certainly not biblically derived: This is no such confession, only an acknowledgement that some Calvinists are more systematic than biblical. Now consider whether or not you approach Scripture without presupposing Arminian free will.

The following excerpt from a sermon preached in 1892 by Francis J. Grimké (1850-1937) addressed the rampant emotionalism in the pulpits of black churches of his day. More than one hundred years later, we can see not only that the same tendencies still exist, but that Grimké’s message applies equally to people of all colors. The emotionalism of, say, an American of Scandinavian descent may lack the exuberance Grimké saw, but it is no less superficial and no less spiritually retarding.

—Francis J. Grimké, cited in Thabiti Anyabwile, The Faithful Preacher: Recapturing the Vision of Three Pioneering African-American Pastors (Crossway, 2007), 130–131.

Can your church be described by the color of its members? That is, do you belong to a “black” church, a “white” church, etc? Maybe your community, like mine, is not ethnically diverse enough to manifest such distinctions. If it is, and your church does not reflect that diversity, you should probably be asking why that is.

Why should there be churches made up of white Christians, and churches made up of colored Christians in the same community, and, where all speak the same language; why should white Christians and colored Christians not feel perfectly at home with each other in the same religious gatherings, if they are all Christians, if they all believe in the Fatherhood of God, and the brotherhood of man, in doing by others as they would be done by, in loving each other as they love themselves, in their oneness in Christ Jesus, and if the same holy Spirit dwells alike in their all hearts?

—Francis J. Grimké, cited in Thabiti Anyabwile, The Faithful Preacher: Recapturing the Vision of Three Pioneering African-American Pastors (Crossway, 2007), 119–120.

Some good words for the church, the family, and parents of daughters in particular:

   There are also your daughters. They ought to be the objects of your special regard. To educate them in such a manner as to render them fit to do Christian work is the highest duty of the church herself. She can perform none higher, none more beneficial for the community. And whenever a young woman of talents and piety is found, who has aptness for teaching and who is desirous to qualify herself thoroughly for such a work but has not the means to meet the expenses, this church ought to undertake to educate her. Perhaps there is no greater power in a given community than that of educated women. I use the term in its broadest, highest sense, by which I do not mean a smattering, or even excellence in music, instrumental and vocal, in drawing and painting; nor do I mean a mere classical or scientific and mathematical training. But I do mean a Christian education, that which draws our head and heart toward the Cross, and after consecrating them to the cross sends the individuals from beneath the cross with the spirit of him who died upon it, sending them abroad well fitted for Christian usefulness, a moral, a spiritual power, molding and coloring the community, and preparing it for a nobler and higher state of existence in that world where change never comes, unless it be a change from the good to the better and from the better to the best.
   The past, the dark past is gone—I hope forever gone. It was a time when ignorance sat in high places and ruled, when vice was as respected as virtue. The present and the future demands a different spirit and different conduct. The almighty fiat has gone forth. “Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased” (Dan. 12:4). Hence the future demands educated women in order that there may be educated wives, and consequently educated mothers who will give to the race a training entirely and essentially different from the past. In other words, the future demands wives and mothers who will, like Susannah Wesley, convert the homestead into a schoolhouse, and that schoolhouse into the church where young immortals shall be trained for their heavenward flight. The wants of the race demand such women to descend into the South as educators, to assist in correcting the religious errors of the freedmen and to bridle their wild enthusiasm. These religious errors, the wild enthusiasm of the freedmen, are results of the slavery that had been operating on them and their forefathers for nearly 250 years and cannot be removed in a day, nor by one man, nor by one kind of human agency. The Deity does not operate upon humanity in that fashion. He applies a multitude of instrumentalities and different agencies to civilize and Christianize a race. But of these none are more potent than the educated wife, the educated mother, the educated school-mistress, but educated under the Cross and in the spirit of him who died upon the cross.

—Daniel A. Payne, cited in Thabiti Anyabwile, The Faithful Preacher: Recapturing the Vision of Three Pioneering African-American Pastors (Crossway, 2007), 109–110.

From the “Nothing New under the Sun” file comes this quote by Bishop Daniel A. Payne, from a sermon preached in 1859.

   The moral character of the minister of Jesus, then must be so elevated that he will be an example to believers:
   a. In his words. This has reference to both his speech inside the pulpit and outside of it. No foolishness, no arrogant sayings, no ludicrous antidotes, no filthy comparisons, no vulgarity, no obscene epithets, no blasphemous expressions should ever come from his lips—darkening, confusing, disgracing the text he has undertaken to expound. The doctrine, the pure doctrine—the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth—should ever be his utterances, both inside the pulpit and outside of it. In the sanctuary and in the parlor, the lips of the righteous man must speak wisdom, and his tongue must talk of judgment, so that every word and all his words shall be “like apple of gold in pictures of silver” (Prov. 25:11).
   The moral character of the minister of Jesus must be elevated, so he will be an example of the believer.
   b. In conversation, i.e., in conduct. Oh, how careful we should walk before God and man! Rudeness in behavior disgraces the minister’s character, for it lowers the dignity of the Christian ministry. So does buffoonery, especially pulpit buffoonery, in which some men seem to pride themselves. I have seen such men whom people fond of fun would just as soon pay twenty-five cents to hear as see a clown perform in the circus.

—Daniel A. Payne, cited in Thabiti Anyabwile, The Faithful Preacher: Recapturing the Vision of Three Pioneering African-American Pastors (Crossway, 2007), 92.

A very short answer to a very important question:

. . . who is sufficient to preach the gospel of Christ and govern the church that he has purchased with his own blood? Who is sufficient to train his host of the Lord and to lead it from earth to heaven? Who is sufficient to guide it through this war against principalities and powers, against spiritual wickedness in high places, against all the hosts of earth and hell, and place it triumphant upon the shining plains of glory? Who is sufficient? I answer, the man who makes Christ the model of his own Christian and ministerial character. This man, and he alone, is sufficient for these things.

—Daniel A. Payne, cited in Thabiti Anyabwile, The Faithful Preacher: Recapturing the Vision of Three Pioneering African-American Pastors (Crossway, 2007), 88–89.

Bishop Daniel Alexander Payne (1811–1893) was a free black, born in Charleston, South Carolina during the height of slavery. He joined the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) in 1841, and in 1852 was, against his wishes, elected bishop of the New England Conference. His passion was for an educated church, beginning with the man in the pulpit. Thabiti Anyabwile writes, “In [Payne’s] view, an undereducated and ill-prepared minister was a scandal and affliction upon black churches.” (The Faithful Preacher, Part Two, Bishop Daniel A. Payne: A Vision for an Educated Pastorate)

   At the General conference of 1852, Daniel Payne received from Bishop Morris Brown a last-minute request to provide the opening address. Payne proved “instant in season, out of season” (2 Tim. 4:2) as he selected 2 Corinthians 2:16 and the theme “Who is Sufficient for These Things?” perhaps the text indicated Payne’s four-year-long resistance to and fear of being chosen as a bishop, but it also provided a short outline for a preacher’s calling as Payne saw it. First the preacher is to preach the gospel. That vocation did not consist of “loud declamation or vociferous talking” or “whooping, stamping and beating the Bible and the desk” or seeing who “halooes the loudest and speaks the longest.” Preaching the gospel, according to Payne, required acquainting man with the holy God of heaven, with man’s just condemnation, with his need for the savior, and with the necessity of repentance and faith. Second, a faithful minister cultivates maturity in the flock and thereby “train[s] them for usefulness and for heaven.” Third, a good pastor disciplines and governs the church. This difficult duty requires the pastor “to make his flock intimately acquainted with the doctrines of the Christian Church, instruct them in the principles of Church government, reprove them for negligence and sin, admonish them of their duties and obligations, and then try and expel the obstinate, so as to keep the Church as pure as human wisdom, diligence and zeal, under divine guidance, can make it.”
   Payne could rightly ask along with the apostle Paul, “who is sufficient for these things?” These tasks—preaching the gospel, cultivating Christian maturity in the congregation, and exercising biblical church discipline—were only possible by fusing an educated mind with true Christian experience and piety while depending wholly on the sufficiency of God. The one who is sufficient for the life and work of the ministry is the one who “lives the life of faith and prayer” and who seeks to fill “his head [with] all knowledge and his heart with all holiness” in pursuit of his Lord.

—Thabiti Anyabwile, The Faithful Preacher: Recapturing the Vision of Three Pioneering African-American Pastors (Crossway, 2007), 81–82.

The following quote is taken from the farewell address of Lemuel Haynes on 24 May, 1818 to the congregation he had served for thirty years.

All gospel ministers know experimentally, in some degree, “the terror of the Lord” and are led to “persuade men” (2 Cor. 5:11). The man who does not appreciate the worth of souls and is not greatly affected with their dangerous situation is not qualified for the sacred office. It was the saying of a pious minister who would arise at midnight for prayer, “How can I rest, how can I sleep, when so many of my congregation are exposed every moment to drop in hell!”

—Thabiti Anyabwile, The Faithful Preacher: Recapturing the Vision of Three Pioneering African-American Pastors (Crossway, 2007), 56.

The preceding quote applies, of course, to pastors. If a man is not burdened for the souls of his flock, he is not qualified to be their shepherd. But let’s apply this principle more broadly. The Lord Jesus has sent each of us into the world with an assignment: to preach the gospel and make disciples. This is the office to which we are all ordained when we ourselves become disciples. If we are not burdened for the souls around us who are “exposed every moment to drop into hell,” are we worthy of that office?

We make much of the responsibilities of elders in the church. We expect a great deal from them, and, if they are faithful shepherds, they expect much of themselves. They work with tireless diligence to shepherd the flock the Master has entrusted to them, profoundly sensible of the burden they carry. And, while many congregations heap responsibilities and expectations onto the backs of their pastors that are both unreasonable and unbiblical, the charge given to them in Scripture is heavy enough. Yes, we are all — biblically or not — aware of the responsibilities of our pastors.

But how often do we think of our responsibility? Pastors do not work independently. The purpose of the sermon is not achieved until it has been received. He does the work of preparing and delivering; we do the work of hearing and responding. And it is no inconsequential thing how we respond to the exposition of God’s Word.

The following is another excerpt from an ordination sermon preached by Lemuel Haynes in 1791. After charging the ordinand with his responsibilities as shepherd, Haynes turned to the congregation to call them to serve with their pastor in the mutual ministry of the Word.

My brethren and friends, the importance of a gospel minister suggests the weighty concerns of your souls. As ministers must give account as to how they preach and behave, so hearers also are to be examined as to how they hear and improve. You are to hear with a view to the day of judgment always remembering that there is no sermon or opportunity that you have in this life to prepare for another world that shall go unnoticed at that decisive court. Your present exercises, with respect to the solemn affairs of this day, will then come up to public view.
   God, we trust, is this day sending you one to watch for your souls. Should not this excite sentiments of gratitude in your breasts? Shall God take so much care of your souls and you neglect them? How unreasonable it would be for you to despise the pious instruction of your watchmen! You would therein wrong your own souls, and it would be evidence that you love death. You must bear with him in not accommodating his sermons to your vitiated tastes because he must give an account. His work is great, and you must pray for him, as in the verse following the text, where the apostle says, “Pray for us.” Since it is the business of your minister to watch for your souls with such indefatigable assiduity, you easily see how necessary it is that you do what you can to strengthen him in this work and that you minister to his temporal wants, so that he may give himself wholly to these things. The great backwardness among people in general with respect to this matter at present has an unfavorable aspect. “Who goeth a warfare any time at his own charges? who planteth a vinyard and eateth not the fruit thereof? or who feedeth a flock, and eateth not of the milk of their flock?” (1 Cor. 9:7).
   Doubtless this man is sent here for the rise and fall of many in this place. We hope he will be used as a mean of leading some to Christ; on the other hand, we tremble at the thought that he may fit others for a more aggravated condemnation. Take heed how you hear.

—Lemuel Hanes, cited in Thabiti Anyabwile, The Faithful Preacher: Recapturing the Vision of Three Pioneering African-American Pastors (Crossway, 2007), 35.

Lemuel Haynes (1753–1833) is one of three pastors profiled in Thabiti Anyabile’s book The Faithful Preacher: Recapturing the Vision of Three Pioneering African-American Pastors. Married to a white woman, and for thirty years the pastor of an all white congregation, to say he was unusual for his time is a huge understatement. Educated In Latin and Greek, and influenced by Calvinists such as Jonathan Edwards, George Whitfield, and Philip Doddridge, he really blows apart our expectations.

The following excerpt is from a sermon entitled The Character and Work of a Spiritual Watchman Described. The text is Hebrews 13:17, “For they watch for your souls, as they that must give an account.” Delivered on 23 February, 1791, on the occasion of the ordination of Rev. Reuben Parmelee (1759–1843), the focus is on the responsibilities of the shepherd. However, as with all biblical sermons, there is application for us all. In this portion of the sermon, the preacher is reminded that he must watch over the souls of his flock because they are prone to stumble and fall.

   Being commanded to be the watchmen over the souls of men implies that they are prone to neglect or be inattentive to those souls. When one is set to inspect or watch over another, it supposes some kind of incapacity that the individual is under to take care of himself. The Scripture represents mankind by nature as fools, madmen, being in a state of darkness, etc.
   Men in general are very sagacious with respect to temporal affairs and display much natural wit and ingenuity in contriving and accomplishing evil designs; “but to do good they have no knowledge” (Jer. 4:22). This is an evidence that their inability to foresee danger and provide against it is of the moral kind. If there were a disposition in mankind, correspondent to their natural powers, to secure the eternal interest of their souls in the way God has proscribed, watchmen would in a great measure be useless.

—Lemuel Haynes, cited in Thabiti Anyabwile, The Faithful Preacher: Recapturing the Vision of Three Pioneering African-American Pastors (Crossway, 2007), 26–27.

Although this sermon was directed toward shepherds, the application to the flock is to recognize that they — that is, we — need to be watched over. We cannot trust ourselves outside of the communion of saints and the ministry of those God has placed over us. We are “prone to neglect or be inattentive” to the state of our souls. We must take care to watch ourselves, and to see that we are in a place and attitude in which we can be watched.

Jesus loves the little children,
   All the children of the world;
Red and yellow, black and white—
   They are precious in his sight.
Jesus loves the little children of the world.

I sang that song as a child in Sunday School. Maybe you did, too. In these ridiculously sensitive times, I don’t know if anyone sings it anymore, but the simple truth of it endures.

Indulge me as I ramble a bit. While I sang and was taught that Jesus loves all children of all colors, all those children were really very far away. I knew a few of the “red,” but “yellow” and “black” were exotic varieties that I knew only from television and the pictures missionaries brought. This was not the result of racism. My family was not avoiding people of other ethnicities, choosing our neighborhoods according to who inhabited them; it was just the way it worked out. We couldn’t have integrated if we wanted too, because there just wasn’t anyone to integrate with. My life has been spent almost entirely in rural states where “minority” means German in a Scandinavian community or, as is our current situation, Norwegian in a German community. So I roll my eyes when some “racial reconciliation” zealot contends that if I don’t have any black friends, or if my church is all white, I have a problem that needs correcting. Sorry, but I can’t help it; there are nearly as many snakes in Ireland as black folks in my county.

So the lack of ethnic diversity in my community does not concern me. It is virtually unavoidable, however, that we are somewhat ignorant of the cultures that are not here represented.

That is one reason I have been eager to read The Faithful Preacher: Recapturing the Vision of Three Pioneering African-American Pastors by Thabiti Anyabwile. John Piper writes in the Preface:

   In this book, we who are not African-American receive the double profit of not only reading across a culture but across the centuries—and thus across another culture. And, of course, that implies that the African-American reader will read across another culture as well. My guess and my prayer is that these unusual crossings will weave our lives and ministries together in ways we have not foreseen.

—John Piper, Preface to Thabiti Anyabwile, The Faithful Preacher: Recapturing the Vision of Three Pioneering African-American Pastors (Crossway, 2007), 9.

That is my hope as well.

I remember the first time I heard a black preacher on the radio, riding in the back seat somewhere in South Dakota. (This was back when pretty much everyone had AM radios in their cars, most had FM, and some had eight-track tape decks. Cassettes were a few years away. I was really young.) I have no idea what denomination he was, but he was wild. I don’t mean like a loud-mouth yelling Baptist. He was as much singing as preaching, and was accompanied by an organ and drums. It reminded me a little of the ’70s rock-and-roll I sometimes listened to on the sly on my transistor radio. The congregation was clapping and hooting and hollering — man, he was cool, and I took note of the time so I could try to catch him again. That was my introduction to black church.

Since then, I have wondered about the state of churches that are predominantly black. Are they all marked by out-of-control emotions and shallow theology? How did they get this way? Have they always been this way? Apparently not. Thabiti introduces us to three black pastors whose lives spanned nearly two hundred years, and demonstrates that America’s spiritual heritage was not passed down from Anglo divines only, but from godly, erudite men of African descent as well. And we would do well to learn from them.

From the introduction:

   As I have prepared for my own journey into ministry, wading through a truckload of trees used to print hundreds of books aimed at pastors, my experience confirmed that that old folk wisdom, “all that glitters is not gold”—especially when it is extolled as a new form of gold. As I have sought for a better way, a better understanding, and a biblically faithful perspective it has pleased my soul to realize that the old ideas are still the best ideas. Those who have gone before us, old friends with old ideas, have left a proven track record of faithfulness and fruitfulness. And the two do go together: where there is faithfulness, fruitfulness is sure to follow.
   We are told from the time we are schoolchildren that “those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Maintaining an ignorance of history will not result in the replication of greatness and earlier success. Those who learn from history, who wisely consult those who have gone before, are the only ones who have a real chance at succeeding and avoiding pitfalls. Faithfulness and fruitfulness in ministry require wisdom, hard work, time, and the providential blessings of God, all of which are enhanced by a humble study of our predecessors.
   The best place to learn and prepare for the ministry is still at the feet of the Master Himself, and from His apostles. Who would not want to study under Paul or Peter? To hear their account of firsthand experiences with our Lord? Jesus, Paul, Peter, and others are still available to us, to speak with us through God’s Word. And I trust that every faithful pastor is learning, studying, praying, and seeking wisdom and grace for the task from them.
   But also available to us are the “lesser” luminaries, men who were not apostles but who were faithful students and shepherds. Christian history is filled with Spurgeons, Calvins, Luthers, and others who have had to answer tough questions, face uncertainties, and persevere in faith as they led God’s people. From them the wise pastor gains valuable insights and observes patterns of godliness for his own ministry.

—Thabiti Anyabwile, ibid., 14–15.

We read last week of the need for preaching that engages the mind with sound doctrine. We must add to that imperative the truth that preaching can be doctrinally sound and yet lifeless. The preacher must not merely know the message, he must be owned by it. He must have experienced it, and lived it, in order to preach it as he ought.

Ought not preachers themselves to live on the great fundamental truths of the gospel? Ought not our souls to be continually fed from them, and our hearts continually thrilling with them? Ought not a fresh glow to come over our hearts every day as we think of Him who loved us, and washed us from sin in His blood, and made us kings and priests unto God and to the Father? Give us the plainest preacher that ever was; let him preach nothing that a whole congregation do not know; but let him preach with a thrilling heart; let him preach like one amazed at the glory of the message; let him preach in the tone of wonder and gratitude in which it becomes sinners to realise the great work of redemption, — not only will the congregation listen with interest: they will listen with profound impression . . . We greatly need preachers for the people. A preacher to the people needs to be very clear in his views, homely in his style, full of illustration, direct and courageous in his application, rich in brotherly sympathy, and very warm and vigorous in delivery. Alas! they are not common. I believe that if only every tenth student that passes through our hands were a man of this stamp, we should soon see a change on the face of society.

—W. G. Blaikie, cited in Iain Murray, A Scottish Christian Heritage (Banner of Truth, 2006), 333–334.

The gospel that saves souls and changes lives is not merely a message that inspires the emotions. It is a message that first brings the truth of God’s Word to the minds of listeners.

   The existence of real Christianity requires a stronger basis than feeling. The nature of that basis is clear in Paul’s injunctions to Timothy and Titus: it is ‘sound doctrine’, ‘sound words’, ‘the word’ (1 Tim. 1:10; 2 Tim. 1:13; 4:2–3; Titus 1:9; 2:1).
   The reason for this apostolic priority is twofold: first, as already said, it is the mind of man that has first to be engaged and convicted; second, it is the Word of God that the Spirit of truth honours and nothing will convince without his witness. These convictions were the starting point for the evangelical preachers of Scotland. They did not see themselves as in charge of the situation. They were only the spokesmen for God and real preaching must have with it something more vital than their speaking. It must be ‘in demonstration of the Spirit and of power: that your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God’ (1 Cor. 2:4–5). Andrew Bonar understood this when he noted in his diary, ‘It is one thing to bring truth from the Bible, and another thing to bring it from God himself through the Bible.’
   If the content of preaching is biblical, it follows that it will be ‘theological’, that is to say, it will concern the knowledge of God. ‘Brethren,’ Spurgeon could tell his students, ‘if you are not theologians, you are in your pastorates just nothing at all. We shall never have great preachers until we have great divines.’ Closeness to Scripture and love for sound doctrine belong together.
   History has proved that when the influence of true preaching is at its greatest, commitment to sound doctrine will ever be present.

—Iain Murray, A Scottish Christian Heritage (Banner of Truth, 2006), 330–331.

The demands on a pastor are many: he must be a scholar, a teacher, a preacher, and a counselor, just to name the most obvious of his duties. But before he can be an effective shepherd, he must meet a much more basic requirement: he must have a genuine love for the people in his care. Iain Murray offers an example of this pastoral love in the Scottish Presbyterian Samuel Rutherford (1600-1661):

   For a seventeenth-century example of the closeness of pastors and people Samuel Rutherford’s Letters are unforgettable. Separated from his parish in days of persecution, he was forced to resort to letters, and the personal issues about which he writes show how his pastoral work was conducted, The spiritually cold, the sorrowing, the individual struggling with temptations, the believer lacking assurance, and many more, all have his attention and sympathetic interest. To an old man about whom he had some doubt he can write:

My soul longeth exceedingly to hear how matters go betwixt you and Christ; and whether or not there be any work of Christ in that parish that will bide in the trial of fire and water. Let me be weighed of the Lord in a just balance, if your souls lie not weighty upon me. Ye go to bed and rise with me: thoughts of your soul, my dearest in the Lord, depart not from me in my sleep. You have a great part of my tears, sighs, supplications, and prayers. Oh, if I could buy your soul’s salvation with any suffering whatsoever, and that ye and I might meet with joy up in the rainbow, when we shall stand before our judge! [Letters of Rutherford, p. 344]

—Iain Murray, A Scottish Christian Heritage (Banner of Truth, 2006), 126.

Our generation is not the first to doubt the sufficiency of Scripture to change lives. In Robert Moffat’s day, many believed that civilization needed to precede the gospel. Moffat and other pioneer missionaries challenged and disproved that theory. In 1816, Moffat was formally commissioned as a missionary of London Missionary Society and was sent to South Africa. Twenty-six years later, he could testify to the power of the gospel to transform lives.

‘It is now demonstrated,’ [wrote Moffat] in 1842, ‘that the Gospel can transform these aceldamas [fields of blood], these dens of crime, weeping and woe, into abodes of purity, happiness, and love . . . We are warranted to expect, from what has already occurred, great and glorious results.’ A moral improvement in society in general is not needed to prepare the way for spiritual success. On this point Moffat wrote:

Much has been said about civilizing savages before attempting to evangelize them. This is a theory which has gained extensive prevalence among the wise men of this world, but we have never yet seen a practical demonstration of its truth. We ourselves are convinced that evangelization must precede civilization. It is very easy in a country of high refinement to speculate on what might be done among rude and savage men, but the Christian missionary, the only experimentalist, has invariably found that to make the fruit good the tree must first be made good. Nothing less than the power of Divine grace can reform the hearts of savages, after which the mind is susceptible of those instructions which teach them to adorn the gospel they profess.

   This lesson needs to be remembered wherever the moral decay of society tempts Christians to suppose the plain preaching of the gospel cannot meet the situation. Moffat was certain that only one source is adequate to answer the effects of sin upon society, whether these are among ‘barbarians’ or ‘the civilized nations of Europe’: ‘Nothing but the Bible can save man from his woes.’

—Iain Murray, A Scottish Christian Heritage (Banner of Truth, 2006), 269–270.

This is a review by Pastor Jerry Drebelbis, who has the dubious distinction of being my pastor.

Augustine As Mentor: A Review
By Jerome Drebelbisi

   Take a moment and peruse the number of books written by or about Aurelius Augustine, or Augustine of Hippo, 354–430 A.D. One reason for the numerous volumes is, in part, because Augustine, himself, was a prolific writer. More than 100 books along with sermons, letters and notes to friends and fellow church compatriots are attributed to him. So it is no wonder the copious number of books written about Augustine. Among these writings Edward Smithers, assistant professor of Church History and Intercultural Studies at Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary, brings us another perspective — Augustine as Mentor, A Model for Preparing Spiritual Leaders1.
   Mr. Smithers believes that “many pastors today . . . are struggling in isolation without a pastor to nurture their souls” (p. v). He is not alone in this concern. Anderson and Reese emphasize this same problem in the forward of their writing. We live in a world of “disenchantment with ‘knowledge for knowledge’s sake.’”2 If this spiritual isolation impacts church leaders today then what is the solution to escape the dilemma? Augustine as Mentor attempts to address this issue looking back at the beginning of the Church and one of its giants as a leader.

Analysis:
   The book divides into six chapters. Chapter one examines biblical examples of mentors in the first century. While the author admits that the word “mentor” is not in Scripture he does recognize the discipline can take other forms, such as that of discipling. He uses Jesus and Paul as primary examples of those who mentored/discipled those around them. Numerous New Testament references are given to support the position.
   Chapter two unpacks mentoring as it appeared in the third and fourth centuries. The author, with copious references, details the lives of men like Cyprian of Carthage, Pachomius of Egypt, and Basil. These men and others formed in the author’s view a backdrop and example from which Augustine developed his own style of mentoring.
   Chapter three asks the question, who was Augustine’s mentor? Obviously some time is spent examining the way Augustine’s mother, Monica, influenced his spiritual development. Her example of holiness and practical faith are featured with numerous references to Confessions. The reader is then given a look at several of Augustine’s friends and companions. Alypius, Evodius and Ambrose were not only close companions to Augustine but also mentors. Smithers convincingly argues that while he finds that Augustine wrote very little about Valerius, Augustine’s predecessor, Valerius was his most “significant mentor.”3
   Chapter four, the longest chapter — 88 pages, brings the work to a climax. How did Augustine mentor others? The author draws from Augustine’s forty years in the ministry, 391–430, with citings from his numerous letters, books and preaching and supervisory method as examples of how Augustine discipled both subordinates and fellow bishops.
   Chapter five gives us Augustine’s thoughts on the subject. Once again from abundant references, the reader is given Augustine’s perspective of how a mentor should live and work. Five principles are mentioned as the framework of a mentor’s life. This leaves the reader wondering if Augustine, himself, adhered to his own ideals. The author answers the question by quoting Possidius, Augustine’s friend and biographer; “I believe, however, that they profited even more who were able to hear him speaking in church and seeing him there present, especially if they were familiar with his manner of life.”4 In specific, Augustine lived what he preached and proclaimed. As great a man as Augustine was the author does admit that one failure, if we can consider it such, in Augustine’s life was that few, if any, of his disciples followed in Augustine’s example to defend the church from heresy or to supply others with theological thought and exegesis (p. 257).
   The final sixth chapter is a short exhortation for leaders today. The author reminds the reader that a mentor must always be a disciple at heart, always learning, always growing in the faith, as did Augustine. He was disciple, mentor, leader, releaser of other into ministry, but most of all follower of Jesus Christ. The author leaves the reader with the question; “will today’s church leaders intentionally look at leadership potential around them and search for able people to outshine them?” (p. 259).

Synthesis:
   The reader can be assured that Mr. Smithers is very familiar with the subject. The book is well documented referencing many sources both from early church writings to more recent analysis. One easily moves through the author’s thoughts as he presents his arguments for discipleship and mentoring. His style, easy to follow, often opens with a question. For example, “How Did Augustine Mentor?” (p.134). The author then supports his answers by partitioning Augustine’s life into various elements to demonstrate how Augustine mentored in each one, the monastery, books, letters, councils, etc.
   While the book is well documented and thoughts expanded in an orderly fashion, progressing through the book becomes almost tedious. One wants to say, “Alright, I get the idea; let’s move on.” Unless the reader truly wants to know more about Augustine, for the average, sometimes overwhelmed, busy pastor, the book has too much detail. And while the book is true to its title, Augustine as Mentor, one wonders if Mr. Smithers is writing for the average church leader or his own colleagues.
   The last chapter, “Shepherding Shepherds Today” is only two pages. While there is benefit in knowing about mentoring in the early church, more thought and space could have been afforded to application today. Many pastors are, like this one, interested in not only the what but even more so, the so what. In the final analysis the reader wants to know what the author’s suggestions are that he has gleaned from his study. What from the author’s perspective, in twenty-first century culture, does he believe the pastor can and should pursue in depth? With this question always in mind there is a disheartening realization that the reader is given 257 pages of information but only two pages of application. The reader may have been more ably assisted if the author had balance the work more evenly.
   For example, one theologically prominent subject today is that of spiritual formation. Using Augustine’s writings the author could easily have moved into this realm of current significance. After all, is this not what Augustine was attempting to do with his contemporaries? In other words Augustine, who relied upon his biblical and theological premises, challenged heresies like Pelagianism, Arianism. How could those thoughts apply to our relativistic postmodern culture? How could Augustine’s thoughts have been organized to enhance one’s growth in spiritual formation? Answers to questions like these would have greatly enhanced the work.

1 Edward L. Smithers, Augustine as Mentor, A Model for Preparing Spiritual Leaders, B & H Publishing Group, Nashville, 2008. ↑ 

2 Keith R. Anderson and Randy D. Reese, Spiritual Mentoring: A Guide for seeking and Giving Direction (Intervarsity Press, Dowers Grove, 1999), forward. ↑ 

3 Ibid, p. 112. ↑ 

4 Ibid, p. 229. ↑ 

i Jerome Drebelbis has pastored Grace Evangelical Free Church in Beulah, North Dakota, for ten years. He is a graduate of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School with a Masters of Divinity. ↑ 

Some time ago, I was asked why, if I had already read the Bible, I would want to read it again, not just once, but over and over, as long as I live? Obviously, this question came from an unbeliever. But I’m afraid many Christians feel little need for repeated readings of God’s Word. Many who have professed faith for years still have portions of their Bibles that remain unread.

Robert Moffat (1795–1883), Scottish missionary to Africa, would have been bewildered by such attitudes. Moffat dedicated his life to bringing the gospel to the Bechuana tribes of South Africa. Much of that time was spent in translating the entire Old and New Testaments into Sechuana (the native language). Yet, near the end of his life, he still felt inadequate in his knowledge of Scripture. In a letter to Mary, his wife, he wrote:

It was only yesterday, after laying down the Bible, that I wondered what kind of a mind I would have had if I had not the Book of God, the Book containing the astounding idea of ‘from everlasting to everlasting’, the development of all that is worth knowing . . . One would think, that as I have critically, and, I think, devoutly read and examined every verse, every word in the Bible, some a score of times over, I should not require to open the pages of that unspeakable and blessed Book. Alas, for the human memory! I read the Bible today with that same feeling I ever did, like the hungry seeking food, the thirsty when seeking drink, the bewildered when seeking counsel and the mourner when seeking comfort. Don’t you believe all this? For alas, I read it sometimes as a formal thing, though my heart condemns afterwards . . . I am yet astonished at my own ignorance of the Bible!

—Robert Moffat, quoted in Iain Murray, A Scottish Christian Heritage (Banner of Truth, 2006), 266–267.

The Holy Spirit is seen by many as a source of extra-biblical revelation to those who are “sensitive to the Spirit’s leading.” The spiritually mature, those who are “spirit-filled,” may receive a “word from the Lord,” a “word of knowledge,” or just some added insight that can’t be had simply by reading the Bible. But the Spirit does not work that way. He uses a tool given for this purpose: the sword of the Spirit. Thomas Chalmers wrote:

   The Holy Spirit’s office, as defined by the Bible itself, is not to make known to us any truths which are not contained in the Bible; but to make clear to our understandings the truths which are contained in it. He opens our understandings to understand the Scriptures. The Word of God is called the sword of the Spirit. It is the instrument by which the Spirit worketh. He does not tell us any thing that is out of the record; but all that is within it he sends home, with clearness and effect, upon the mind . . .

—Thomas Chalmers, quoted in Iain Murray, A Scottish Christian Heritage (Banner of Truth, 2006), 101.

Iain Murray Summarizes some of Thomas Chalmers’ thoughts on the work of the ministry:

   1. The governing principle upon which the strength of all ministerial duties depends is regard for the approval of God. If a minister lacks that principle his public work will be dominated by regard for himself or for the approbation of men. Where that principle is truly present it will operate first in the sphere of the preacher’s own inner life; he will not ‘strenuously urge sanctification’ without attending to that duty himself. His primary concern in all things must be to see that God approves him. ‘By far the most effective ingredient of good preaching’, he writes, ‘is the personal piety of the preacher himself.’ ‘How little must the presence of God be felt in that place, where the high functions of the pulpit are degraded into a stipulated exchange of entertainment, on the one side, and of admiration on the other! and surely it were a sight to make angels weep when a weak and vapouring mortal, surrounded by his fellow sinners, and hastening to the grave and the judgment along with them, finds it a dearer object to his bosom to regale his hearers by the exhibition of himself, than to do, in plain earnest, the work of his Master.’
   2. Ministers should never rest satisfied without growth in personal holiness of life. Chalmers’ private diary reveals a great deal of this: ‘Advance the power and life of religion in my own heart’ was his prayer. To friends he writes in similar terms: ‘Pray unceasingly for the progress of His work in your heart . . . Strike the high aim of being perfect even as God is perfect . . . Never let go your aspirings . . . Oh! with what unceasing progress towards perfection should we be enabled to advance did we cast all self-seeking and self-confidence away from us — did we consent be altogether guided by His strength, and be altogether accepted in His pure and unspotted righteousness.’
   Andrew Bonar, one of Chalmers’ students, used to repeat a saying heard when he was entering the ministry: ‘Remember that very few men, and very few ministers, keep up to the end the edge that was on their spirit at the first.’ It was a warning which could well have been heard from Chalmers. The prayerfulness and the desires after greater holiness which marked his early Christian life were with him to the end.
   3. Ministers must give themselves wholly to their true work: ‘Be assured that a single and undivided attention to the peculiar work of a Christian minister is the way of peace and of pleasantness.’ One of the greatest struggles which Chalmers ever had was to break free from the many secular duties and activities which had come to be expected of ministers. For him it was imperative, if the church was to be revived, that preachers should be left to concentrate exclusively upon their proper calling. In Glasgow he had found that ministers were continually required to be at funerals (four at one funeral was considered a ‘respectable number’), at committees of all the societies, at public functions of every kind, and so on. At one committee meeting, for example, arranged on behalf of the Town Hospital, he found himself with an honoured place among ‘some of the gravest of city ministers, and some of the wisest of the city merchants’ to engage in a solemn and, at length, warm discussion on whether pork broth or ox-head should be served to the inmates of the Hospital! After such experiences at that time in his life he wrote: ‘I am gradually separating myself from all this trash, and long to establish it as a doctrine that the life of a town minister should be what the life of a country minister might be, and his entire time disposable to the purposes to the purposes to which the Apostles gave themselves wholly, that is, the ministry of the word and prayer.’ Speaking again of the secular duties to which so many ministers had given in, and which turned a preacher from being ‘a dispenser of the bread of life into a mere dispenser of human benefits’, he says, ‘This I have set my face against, and though I have a great deal of opposition to encounter, yet I am persuaded that I will have the solid countenance and approbation of all who value the pure objects of the Christian ministry.’
   4. A minister must deal directly with the men concerning their need of salvation. ‘Let us pray for that most desirable wisdom, the wisdom of winning souls.’ ‘A single human being called out of darkness, though he lived in putrid lane of obscurity, is a brighter testimony than all the applause of the fashionable.’ This meant plain, direct preaching to the heart and conscience. Commending Alleine’s Alarm, he warned against the ‘diseased touchiness’ of the age which disliked the urgent preaching of repentance. He told his prospective candidates for the ministry that their work must ot be to show their hearers the consistency between geology and the Bible, rather these hearers must be won ‘by entering into the chambers of their consciences and telling them of that sin which is their ruin and of that Saviour who alone can hush the alarms of nature’.

—Iain Murray, A Scottish Christian Heritage (Banner of Truth, 2006), 94–96.

Thomas Chalmers (1780–1847), little known today, has been described by one biographer as “the greatest spiritual force Scotland saw in the nineteenth century.” He is credited with the recovery of Presbyterianism in Scotland, leading to the “Disruption of 1817” (a schism between Church of Scotland “moderates” and “evangelicals” over how much influence the State had in appointing ministers). Iain Murray writes that “He was at the centre of a recovery which brought the churches of Scotland from mediocrity, indifference, and unbelief to new conditions of spiritual vitality.”

But Chalmers had not always been the great man of God that he became. At the young age of eleven, he entered the University of St Andrews, and began his theological studies at fifteen with the intent of pursuing professional ministry. Of this time he wrote, “St Andrews was at this time overrun with Moderatism, under the chilling influences of which we inhaled not a distaste only but a positive contempt for all that is properly and peculiarly gospel.” Chalmers became one of these Moderates. His view of ministry was that it was a good profession for making one’s name in the world. He devoted little time to pursuits of actual ministry, often leaving preparation for preaching until Sunday morning. “After the satisfactory discharge of his parish duties,” he wrote, “a minister may enjoy five days in the week of uninterrupted leisure . . .”

In 1808, his career plans were interrupted. Intending to go to London “to get introduced into some of the literary circles,” he instead found himself at the bed-side of a sister, who soon died. Then it was the death of a beloved uncle, followed by his own severe illness, which kept him in his own room for four months. During that time, Chalmers was converted, and his life was dramatically changed. Previously, ministry had consumed little of his attention, and genuine spiritual issues none at all. His energies had been directed towards the study of science and mathematics. Murray writes:

Chalmers was to confess that he was then blind to the lesson which even those scientific studies should have taught him: ‘What, sir, is the object of mathematical science?’ he had replied. ‘Magnitude is the proportion of magnitude. But then, sir, I had forgotten two magnitudes. I thought not of the littleness of time — I recklessly thought not of the greatness of eternity.’

—Iain Murray, A Scottish Christian Heritage (Banner of Truth, 2006), 83.

Chalmers’s ministry was dramatically effected by his conversion. Murray quotes biographer William Hanna:

His regular and earnest study of the Bible was one of the first and most noticeable effects of Mr Chalmers’ conversion. His nearest neighbor and most frequent visitor was old John Bonthron, who, having once seen better days, was admitted to an easy and privileged familiarity, in the exercise of which one day before the memorable illness, he said to Mr Chalmers — ‘I find you aye busy, sir, with one thing or another, but come when I may, I never find you at your studies for the Sabbath.’ ‘Oh, an hour or two on the Saturday evening is quite enough for that,’ was the minister’s answer. But now the change had come, and John, on entering the manse, often found Mr. Chalmers poring eagerly over the pages of the Bible. The difference was too striking to escape notice, and with the freedom given him, which he was ready enough to use, he said, ‘I never come in now, sir, but I find you aye at your Bible.’ ‘All too little, John, all to little’, was the significant reply.

—ibid., 84–85.

Another testimony in death, this one from the Scottish preacher Robert Bruce:

Bruce was now some seventy-five years of age, his wife had been dead for several years and he was also ready for home. “I wonder why I am kept here so long,” he would say to friends. The following year, while having breakfast, his daughter, Martha, was about to prepare him another egg when he said, “Hold, daughter, hold; my Master calleth me.” He then asked that the house Bible, the Geneva Version, be brought. Unable himself to read it, he said, “Cast me up the 8th of Romans,” and he began to recite much of the second half of the chapter until he came to the last two verses: “For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” “Set my finger on these words,” he asked. “God be with you my children. I have breakfasted with you, and shall sup with my Lord Jesus this night. I die believing these words.”

—Iain Murray, A Scottish Christian Heritage (Banner of Truth, 2006), 56–57.

The following rather humorous anecdote from the life of the Scottish preacher Robert Bruce (1555–1631, not Robert Bruce, King of Scotland, 1274–1329) is also a good reminder to all preachers, as well as anyone who would be a witness for Christ. In other words, every Christian.

On a day when Bruce was engaged to preach twice at the church, the interval between the services was extended longer than usual due to the preacher’s absence. Some noblemen who were present became anxious because of the time on account of the distance they had to ride to their homes later that day. They therefore asked the bellman to find Bruce and request him to begin the service in view of the journey they had before them. The bellman knew where Bruce was – in a room in a house near the church which he commonly used before the afternoon service. On going to the door the man knocked, but declined to enter when he heard the preacher talking to someone inside. He went back to those who had sent him and explained that he could not tell how long Bruce would be: ‘I think he shall not come out the day at all, for I hear him always saying to another that he will not nor cannot go except the other go with him, and I do not hear the other answer him a word at all.’

—Iain Murray, A Scottish Christian Heritage (Banner of Truth, 2006), 62.

I love reading of the last days of great saints. While death is a fearsome thing to most, for the believer it is a gateway into life — life like we have not yet known, and cannot imagine. At long last, we will be at home with the Lord, free from all pain and suffering, disappointments and failures, and, most wonderful of all, free from sin. It is a day we should all long for, and be able to say with John Newton, “It is a great thing to die.” John Knox was such a man, and so was able to pass from this world in peace. Iain Murray writes,

   In the spring of 1572, while Knox was still in St. Andrews, there was a marked decline in his health, yet in August he was able to return to Edinburgh, and, after thirteen months absence, preach again in the pulpit of St. Giles. But the vast congregation could no longer hear his now feeble voice, and thereafter he chose the pulpit of the much smaller Tolbooth Church where he began to preach on the crucifixion on 21 September. The English ambassador reported on 6 October, ‘John Knox is now so feeble as scarce can he stand alone, or speak to be heard of any audience,’ Yet he was able, on Sunday, 9 November, to preach at the installation of his successor, James Lawson. It was the last time he was to leave his home. The following Thursday he had to lay aside reading and on the Friday, confused which day it was he declared he meant to go to church and preach on the resurrection of Christ. A week later, with increasing difficulty in breathing, he ordered his coffin to be made and waking hours were now spent in hearing Scripture read (especially Isaiah 53, John 17 and Ephesians), saying good-bye to friends, and speaking brief words of testimony and prayer: ‘Live in Christ. Live in Christ, and then flesh need not fear death – Lord, grant true pastors to thy Church, that purity of doctrine may be maintained.’
   On Monday, November 1572, he insisted on rising and dressing but within half an hour he had to be put back to bed. To the question of a friend, Had he any pain?, he replied: ‘It is no painful pain, but such a pain as shall soon, I trust put an end to the battle.’ There was further intermittent conversation that day and the last reading of 1 Corinthians 15 at which he exclaimed, ‘Is not that a comfortable chapter?’ About eleven o’clock that evening, he said, ‘Now it is come’, and, lifting up one hand, he passed through his final conflict in peace. In the words on his secretary, Richard Bannatyne,

In this manner departed this man of God: the light of Scotland, the comfort of the Church within the same, the mirror of godliness, and pattern and example of all true minister.

—Iain Murray, A Scottish Christian Heritage (Banner of Truth, 2006), 32–33.

Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints. (Psalm 116:15)

The life of John Knox is largely a narrative of persecution. I was already aware of this as I began reading Iain Murray’s A Scottish Christian Heritage, but I was surprised to learn that among his experiences was nineteen months spent as a slave in a French galley, chained to a bench with six other men pulling a fifty-foot-long oar. Following his release in 1549, he enjoyed a scant four years of peace in England before “Bloody” Mary Tudor ascended to the throne and restored Roman Catholicism as the state religion (her half-brother and predecessor, Edward VI, had been Protestant). Knox fled England, ending up finally in Geneva. His exile ended in 1559, when Mary Tudor died, and the Protestant faith was publicly restored in England.

His years of exile served as preparation for difficult years to come. “Of the lessons he had learned during that period,” Murray writes, “there are three which stand out:”

   1. Knox became a man of prayer. Prayer as ‘an earnest and familiar talking with God’, is not natural to us. It is be sanctified trouble and by the recognition of our own helplessness that were learn to pray. ‘Out of weakness made strong’ is the biblical principle. ‘Call upon me in the day of trouble’, became a promise of special significance to Knox. His first writing when the Marian persecution broke in England in 1554, was on What True Prayer Is, How We Should Pray, and For What We Should Pray. In another place he says that the Apostle Peter, as he sought to cross the water to Jesus, was allowed to sink because there was in him too much ‘presumption and vain trust in his own strength’. ‘Unless it had between corrected and partly removed,’ he comments, Peter ‘had never been apt or meet to feed Christ’s flock’ this was surely what Knox himself was being taught. He says that he wrote so much on prayer because,

I know how hard is the battle between the spirit and the flesh, under the heavenly cross of affliction, where no worldly defence but present death does appear. I know the grudging and murmuring complaints of the flesh . . . calling all his promises in doubt, and being ready every hour utterly to fall from God. Against which rests only faith, provoking us to call earnestly and pray for assistance of God’s Spirit; wherein, if we continue, our most desperate calamities shall be turned to gladness, and to a prosperous end. To thee alone, O Lord, be praise, for with experience I write this and speak.

   . . .

   2. Knox’s lone exile made him and international Christian. Had he remained always in Scotland he might have remained as parochial as some of his contemporaries. It was in God’s design that he spent most of his time away from home among the English. These were the people against whom his forefathers had fought but in Christ the old enmity was gone. He was ahead of his time in foreseeing a common Protestant faith binding the two nations together, and that hope became central to his life. ‘Grant, O Lord,’ he prayed, ‘we never enter into hostility against the realm and nation of England.’ . . .

   3. It was during Knox’s exile, and especially in the final years in Geneva, that the master-principles which governed his thought on Reformation came to maturity. In outline, they may be stated as follows:
   i. We exist for God’s glory; therefore zeal for the honor of God is essence of true piety; conversely, to despise God, to offend his majesty, is the darkest form of human depravity. The indignation Knox felt against Roman Catholicism sprang from this source. He saw it as a system bound up with giving to men and to idols that which belongs to God alone. . . .
   ii. Christians are bound to a universal obedience to the Word of God, no matter what the cost, no matter what the consequences. More particularly, nothing is lawful to the church unless it is to be found in Scripture. To quote the Reformer’s later words to Queen Elizabeth: ‘Whatsoever He approves (by his eternal word) that shall be approved, and what he damneth, shall be condemned, though all men in the earth should hazard the justification of the same.
   iii. The true church is to distinguished from the false church in this manner; the true has Christ as its living head, it hears his voice it, follows him, and a stranger it will not follow. This church, further, is to be kept separate from the world by the faithful exercise of discipline in order that reproach is not brought upon God by the character of it’s members, so that the good is not affected by the evil, and so that those corrected may be recovered.

—Iain Murray, A Scottish Christian Heritage (Banner of Truth, 2006), 13–15.

Iain Murray writes of “Five Leaders in the Northeast” during the Second Great Awakening:

The secret of the influence of these men was that in their being much with Christ they were indeed the reflectors of ‘his beams’.
   But if it be asked how they attained to being such close disciples the answer may be surprising. It was not that they had reached some higher ground in the way of holiness. On the contrary, what marked them most was their low views of themselves. ‘The leading element of Doctor Griffin’s Christian character’, remarked Sprague, ‘was a deep sense of his own corruptions and of his entire dependence on the sovereign grace of God.’ ‘I fear that I am little better than a cumberer of the ground,’ Spring recorded in his diary, and Payson, similarly, often noted the pain of his unworthiness and his failure as a Christian. On 18 December 1817 he recorded in his diary: ‘Began to think, last night, that I have been sleeping all my days; and this morning felt sure of it . . .  How astonishingly blind have I been and how imperceptible my religious progress.’ again, in 1821 he told a ministerial friend, ‘My parish, as well as my heart, very much resembles the garden of the sluggard; and what is worse, if find that most of my desires for the melioration of both proceed either from pride, or vanity of indolence.’
   Statements such as these show us the nature of the relationship with God that these men had. Their felt need lay behind their frequent prayer and their dependence on Christ. Earnestness in prayer, says Payson, requires a true view of oneself: ‘You cannot make a rich man beg like a poor man; you cannot make a man that is full cry for food like one that is hungry: no more will a man who has a good opinion of himself cry for mercy like one who feels that he is poor and needy.’

—Iain Murray, Revival & Revivalism, 218-219

The following quote from Revival & Revivalism by Iain Murray continues in the same vein as the one posted earlier this week.

. . . A Baptist author, . . . describing the revival at Hartford in 1798–1800 , wrote: ‘The Lord seems to have stepped out of the usual path of ordinances, to effect his work more immediately in the displays of his Almighty power, and outpouring of his Spirit; probably to show that the work is his own.’
   Thus what characterizes a revival is not the employment of unusual or special means but rather the extraordinary means of blessing attending the normal means of grace. There were no unusual evangelistic meetings. No special arrangements, no announcements of pending revivals. Pastors were simply continuing in the services they had conducted for many years when the great change began. That is why so many of them could say, ‘The first appearance of the work was sudden and unexpected.’ Their theology taught them that there is no inherent power in the truth to convert sinners and they rejoiced in the knowledge that the size of the blessing which God is pleased to give through the use of means is entirely in his own hands. As William Rogers of Philadelphia wrote to Isaac Backus in 1799, ‘The revivals of religion which you speak of are peculiarly illustrative of the glorious doctrines of grace, — “the wind bloweth where it listeth”.’
   On the subject of means, something needs to be said more particularly on prayer. As with the truth that is preached, prayer has no inherent power in itself. On the contrary, true prayer is bound up with a persuasion of our inability and our complete dependence of God. Prayer, considered as a human activity, whether offered by few or many, can guarantee no results. But prayer that throws believers in heartfelt need on God will not go unanswered. Prayer of this kind precedes blessing, not because of any necessary cause and effect, but because such prayer secures an acknowledgement of the true Author of the blessing. And where such a spirit of prayer exits it is a sign that God is already intervening to advance his cause. One thing that can be said with certainty about the 1790s, before any general indications of a new era were to be seen, is that there was a growing concern among Christians to pray. Later on, when the evidence of records from those years was compared, it was recognized that across the Union, from Connecticut to Kentucky, the 1790s were marked by a new spirit of intercession.

—Iain Murray, Revival & Revivalism, 128-129

From Revival & Revivalism by Iain Murray:

From the general introduction to the period of the Second Great Awakening we turn to some particular observations.
   In the first place, if it be asked, What special means were used to promote these revivals? The answer is that there were none. The significance of this fact will be more apparent in later pages. This is not to say that the spiritual leaders of this new era held the view that the gospel could be advanced without means being employed. They were united in regarding such an attitude as a serious abuse of the doctrine of divine sovereignty. As Ebenezer Porter affirmed:

The God of this universe is not dependent on instruments . . . He could fill the world with Bibles by a word, — or give every inhabitant of the globe a knowledge of the gospel by inspiration. But he chooses that human agency should be employed in printing and reading and explaining the Scriptures. God is able to sanctify the four hundred millions of Asia, in one instant, without the agency of missionaries; but we do not expect him to do this without means, any more than we expect him to rain down food from the clouds, or turn stones into bread.

These men were united in the belief that God has appointed the means of prayer and preaching for the spread of the gospel and that these are the great means in the use of which he requires the churches to be faithful. There are no greater means which may be employed at special times to secure supposedly greater results. It is therefore the Spirit of God who makes the same means more effective at some seasons than at others.    This has perhaps not always been as evident as it was in 1800. Sometimes revivals have coincided with the emergence of hitherto unknown preachers whose abilities have been credited with securing change. But in the case of the Second Great Awakening, nearly all the preachers prominent at the outset had already been labouring for many years. . . .
   The facts are indisputable. A considerable body of men, for a long period before the Second Great Awakening, preached the same message as they did during the revival but with vastly different consequences — the same men, the same actions, performed with the same abilities, yet the results were so amazingly different! The conclusion has to be drawn that the change in the churches after 1798 and 1800 cannot be explained in terms of the means used. Nothing was clearer to those who saw the events than that God was sovereignty pleased to bless human instrumentality in such a way that the success could be attributed to him alone. . . . Jeremiah Hallock, a leader in Connecticut, wrote: ‘As means did not begin this work of themselves, so neither did they carry it on. But as this was the work of the Omnipotent Spirit, so the effects produced proclaimed its sovereign, divine author.’ Asahel Hooker, another eminent Connecticut pastor, drew the same conclusion after seeing the same change among his own people: ‘It is the evident design of Providence to confound all attempts which should be made by philosophy and human reason to account for the effects wrought without ascribing them to God, as the marvelous work of the Spirit and grace.’

One of the books I am presently reading is Revival & Revivalism by Iain Murray. The following quote refers to a revival that took place in Virginia in 1787–1790.

The most important consequence of the Great Revival for the Presbyterians was the new ethos which came to prevail in the churches. Old Side prejudices lost their hold and a ‘unanimity of sentiment’ came to distinguish the denomination in the South. The main cause for this was undoubtedly the priority now given to experimental religion. Prayer was restored to its rightful place and ‘fervent charity’ came to be expected among all Christians. The same influence inevitably brought a return to biblical standards of church membership. It was no longer assumed that those who attended church from birth were Christians, nor was ‘profession of faith’ henceforth taken as sufficient evidence of conversion. Ministers and elders considered how people lived, and what they did, as well as what they said. It was understood afresh that the true usefulness of the church is bound up with her spirituality and her unity. The premature admission of men and women and young people to the Lord’s Table (communicant membership), which had formerly been too common, now gave way to a more faithful examination of candidates. The wisdom of the counsel of John Blair Smith was universally recognized: ‘He advised those who were awakened not to be too hasty in professing conversion, and urged them to examine the foundations of their hopes well before they entertained a hope they had made their peace will God . . . Generally months, and in some instances a year or more was suffered to pass before they were received into the church."

William Hill believed that the revival ‘gave a character to the Presbyterian Church of the South for vital, exemplary piety which has pervaded several States and given a tone to religious exercises far and wide’. How this affected the churches in practical way is well illustrated by a statement of principle drawn up by one of the many new churches of the 1790s:

1. A church is a society of Christians, voluntarily associated together, for the worship of God, and spiritual improvement & usefulness.
2. A visible church consists of visible or apparent Christians.
3. The children of visible Christians are members of the visible church, though in a state of minority.
4. A visible Christian is one, who understands the doctrines of the Christian religion, is acquainted with a work of God’s Spirit in effectual calling, professes repentance from dead works, and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, and subjection to him as a king and whose life and conversation corresponds with his profession
5. Sealing ordinances ought not to be administered to such as are not visible Christians.
6. A charitable allowance ought to be made for such, whose natural abilities are weak, or who have not enjoyed good opportunities of religious instruction, when they appear to be humble and sincere.
7. Children and youth, descended from church members, though not admitted to all the privileges of the church, are entitled to the instructions of the church, and subjected to its discipline.

What would our churches look like today if this represented the general practice of congregations?

— Samuel Davies (1724–1761), as quoted by Murray in Revival & Revivalism