The Ancient Church Fathers: senior partners in a conversation

I vividly remember a conversation in the early 1990s I had with a person transitioning from Fundamentalism to something further to the left theologically. It was, for me, a defining moment. The topic of the Nicene Creed had been raised and this individual stated that such a document was of no authority in his life since it was written by men and had no divine input. Such a statement then and now strikes me as both arrogant and false. It fails to understand the profound biblical import of the document concerned. Also at one fell swoop, the entire cast of characters in the history of the Church is disposed of and all that matters is the individual’s own mind and his or her Bible. Of course, I know where this person was coming from: nuda Scriptura, which is essentially an exaltation of autonomy at the expense of all tradition that ultimately leads to a radical individualism well-nigh indistinguishable from a Paine or Emerson—well, the individual would have given this caveat, a commitment to biblical authority. Essentially, though, his view was crafted in the same crucible that saw the rise of the Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons and the entire nineteenth-century reaction against a learned ministry.

The inimitable Victorian Baptist Charles H. Spurgeon, though, well answered this errant position: “It seems odd, that certain men who talk so much of what the Holy Spirit reveals to themselves, should think so little of what he has revealed to others.” [Commenting and Commentaries (London: Passmore & Alabaster, 1876), 1].

And, if I were to have that discussion today, I would ask the person to ponder these wise words of J.I. Packer: “Tradition--is the fruit of the Spirit’s teaching activity from the ages as God’s people have sought understanding of Scripture. It is not infallible, but neither is it negligible, and we impoverish ourselves if we disregard it. I am bold to say that evangelicals, even those of Anabaptist polity, should be turned by their own belief in the Spirit as the Church’s teacher into men of tradition, and that if we all dialogued with Christian tradition more we should all end up wiser than we are. [“Upholding the Unity of Scripture Today”, Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, 25 (1982), 414].

How then to read the Ancient Church Fathers in whose era the Nicene Creed was framed? As Evangelicals who adhere to the Reformation principle of sola Scriptura (something quite different from nuda Scriptura), we cannot read them as authorities alongside Holy Scripture. But we cannot utterly discard them either. Rather, just as the Bible admonishes us to honour the aged among us, so we need to consider the Fathers as senior conversation partners in our theological task—as Packer says, “not infallible, but neither…negligible, and we impoverish ourselves if we disregard” them.

Volume on John Broadus Reviewed

One of Dr. Haykin's many responsibilities is to serve as the series editor for a new series "Studies in Baptist Life and Thought" published by B & H Academic.  The first volume of this series was published this past year and it features a collection of essays on the life and legacy of John A. Broadus.  W. Madison Grace II, a PhD student at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, has recently reviewed this volume for their Baptist Theology website.  Be sure and check out the review as well as the many other valuable resources available on this website devoted to the study of issues related to Baptist life.

Posted by Steve Weaver, Research and Administrative Assistant to the Director of the Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies, Dr. Michael A.G. Haykin.

Tea and the Glory of God

I was in a Barnes and Noble tonight and dipped into a book by Rebecca St. James—Sister freaks: Stories of Women who gave up everything for God (New York: Warner Faith, 2005). I didn’t get beyond the first page, where I read this quote from Watchman Nee: “Everywhere Jesus went, there was revolution. Everywhere I go, they serve tea” (p.xi). She didn’t footnote it, so I am not sure where she got this from. But two thoughts immediately came to mind. First, what a way to express the difference between us and our Lord: even as committed a disciple as Watchman Nee (though I would dissent from some of his views about discipleship) knew well the difference. The presence of Jesus was true revolution, beside which the French and Russian Revolutions, American and Industrial Revolutions, and all of the political hype of the last few weeks, pale into insignificance. Second, I thought of a remark I read this week in the Miscellaneous Works of Rev. Charles Buck (New Haven: Whitmore and Minor, 1833), which I found in the library of Knox Theological Seminary, Fort Lauderdale. I had never heard of Buck (1771-1815), who was a Congregationalist minister and who once served as the amanuensis of John Ryland, Sr (p.16-17). When I read about Buck’s connection with Ryland I was hooked and went through the entire book. Among other things, Buck published two collections of anecdotes. One of these books contained the following story—and tea is the link with the Watchman Nee quote.

According to the London Anglican evangelical William Romaine (1714-1795), the “glory of God is very seldom promoted at the tea-table” (p.486). Watchman Nee would definitely have agreed! But not so, Romaine averred, when one drank tea with fellow-Anglican James Hervey (1714-1758), who was also a close friend of both John Wesley and John Ryland. “Drinking tea with him,” Romaine observed, “was like being at an ordinance; for it was sanctified by the word of God and prayer” (p.486).

So drinking tea could be revolutionary!

The Spirit of Truth, traditionalism and tradition

When revival comes, the Spirit who brings it also—and always—comes as a Spirit of Truth. He brings heart renewal to God’s people—their eyes sparkle with fire and light—and he reforms theological thinking. Semper reformanda, the Spirit reforming us ongoingly, do we not confess that? Take the revival among English and Welsh Calvinistic Baptists at the close of the “long” eighteenth century. In the wake of this dramatic renewal came a fresh evaluation of what constituted the parameters of the Calvinistic Baptist community. During the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries these parameters had been oriented around the concept of the church as a congregation of baptized believers and any missional component largely lost. Revival came to be linked to Baptist polity. This focus among Calvinistic Baptists on ecclesiological issues and their linking of spiritual vitality to church order, however, received a direct challenge from the Evangelical Revival. The participants of this revival, who knew themselves to be part of a genuine movement of the Spirit of God, were mainly interested in issues relating to salvation. Ecclesial matters often engendered unnecessary strife and, in the eyes of key individuals like George Whitefield, robbed those who disputed about them of God’s blessing.

By the end of the century many Calvinistic Baptists agreed. While they were not at all prepared to deny their commitment to Baptist polity, they were not willing to remain fettered by traditional patterns of Baptist thought about their identity. Retaining the basic structure of Baptist thinking about the church they added one critical ingredient drawn from the experience of the Evangelical Revival: the vital need for local Baptist churches to be centres of vigorous evangelism. There is no doubt that this amounted to a re-thinking of Baptist identity. From the perspective of these Baptists, Baptist congregations and their pastors were first of all Christians who needed to be concerned about the spread of the Gospel at home and abroad.

May we, the spiritual descendants of those brethren—oh what a joy to have men and women like Andrew Fuller and John Sutcliff, Samuel Pearce and Anne Steele, Benjamin Beddome and Benjamin Francis as our forebears!—not fail to learn the lessons they learned so well!

Oh to treasure the traditions these brothers and sisters have handed on to us, but a pox on traditionalism! This is not a contradiction: to love our traditions, but to want nothing to do with traditionalism. The latter loves the past becuase it is simply the past and thinks that things were always done better then. The former loves the traditions of the past for they are bearers of truth and we dare not lose that treasure.

Oh to be found faithful to the end of our days to the faith once for all delivered to the saints and which these brethren have handed on to us. But oh to avoid like the plague the aridity of traditionalism in second- and third-order theological truth, not daring to think new thoughts in these areas. Fuller and his friends were not so fearful.

May we be found faithful to their heritage. May we, like them, be found utterly passionate in our love for the Lord Jesus and his great kingdom—the only community of good and blessing that will last for all eternity—but God help us to know what must be done to be true to this passion in our day!

"Dyed with Jesus' blood": the type of men needed in the ministry--the view of Basil Manly, Jr

More from Basil Manly, Jr. This time a portion of one of his best sermons, that on what constitutes a call to the ministry: “Now we need numbers in the Ministry. The plenteous, perishing harvest wails out a despairing cry for more laborers. But we need purity more than numbers; we need intelligence more than numbers; we need zeal more than numbers. Above all, we need consecrated men, men who have stood beneath the Cross, till their very souls are dyed with Jesus’ blood, and a love like his for perishing millions has been kindled within them.”

[A Call to the Ministry (Greenville, South Carolina: G.E. Elford’s Job Press, 1866), 16].

Basil Manly and his love of new books

I have been reading as many of the primary sources from the hand of Basil Manly, Jr. (1825-1892) in recent days as I can, as well as key secondary sources. Manly was a keen reader, like the other founders of Southern Seminary. At one point, just before the Civil War, he became concerned that the coming war might produce a shortage of new books. Some might think this sounds petty in such circumstances—but not me! I love new books and can fully sympathize.

Manly, though, was able to poke fun at his fears. “What shall we do without new books?” he wrote to his parents (his father, Basil Manly, Sr., one of the most significant ante-bellum Southern Baptist pastors, was also a lover of books), and then answered his own question: “Read those we have, I suppose”!

[Basil Manly, Jr., Letter to Parents, March 8, 1861, cited James M. Manley, “The Southern Baptist Mind in Transition: A Life of Basil Manly, Jr., 1825-1892” (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Florida, 1999), 170].

James Petigru Boyce 120 years on

Thanks to God for the life and testimony of James Petigru Boyce (1827-1888), one of the co-founders of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who went home to be with the Lord on Friday, December 28, 1888. His legacy is still bearing rich fruit, God be praised.

In the faculty minutes of January 2, 1889, his colleagues acknowledged Boyce "as the foremost leader in the enterprise of establishing our seminary" and recognized the "many years of thought and exertion" he gave to the school "and for which he made many sacrifices."

What a privilege for Southern today to have a man of such sterling spiritual calibre as Boyce (not to mention Broadus, Manly and Williams) as a founding father. May the truths he loved be adored by all who teach at and attend the school he co-founded and sacrificially laboured to make a beacon for truth and for the glory of God.

Fabulous discovery about Thomas Wilcox (1622-1687), author of a minor spiritual classic

“Praying will make thee leave sinning or sinning will make leave praying.” [1] This well-known saying may well have originated with Thomas Wilcox (1622-1687), the author of the minor spiritual classic A Choice Drop of Honey from the Rock Christ, which was published before the Great Fire of London in 1666. When I first wrote my Kiffin, Knollys, and Keach in the early 1990s, I included this spiritual classic as an appendix. It was excluded by the publisher, which was providential, for although I knew Wilcox wrote a number of tracts, I thought the above book was the only one extant. Today, my assistant Steve Weaver kindly got for me a PDF of a 1699 edition of Wilcox’s classic work (published then under the title of A Guide to Eternal Glory). It was attached to nine other tracts (the whole being published by Nathanael Crouch, who was a printer near Cheapside, London) and in the preface “To the Christian Reader” that preceded all of the tracts, Wilcox noted that he had “subjoined some other brief tracts” (p.6), which definitely seems to indicate he is the author, especially since no other names appear with the various tracts. [2] This is a fabulous discovery because it gives us some other material by the author of a remarkable tract that by the 1840s had gone through at least sixty printings and had been translated into numerous languages, including Welsh, Irish Gaelic, French, German, and Finnish. In light of such a printing record, it is no exaggeration to describe it as a minor classic from the late Puritan era. [3] It is currently available from Chapel Library. The Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies hopes to include a fresh edition and textual commentary on it by Dr Stephen Yuille in its Occasional Monographs series, which is to be launched in the near future.

Of the numerous Calvinistic Baptist authors of the seventeenth century, there were really only three who were being read extensively a century or two later. John Bunyan was, of course, one. Another was Benjamin Keach. And the third was Thomas Wilcox, about whom we really know very little. [4] We know that he was born in 1622 at Lyndon, then in Rutland. His early career, though, is shrouded in obscurity. By the 1660s he was living in London on Cannon Street, where a congregation of believers that he pastored met regularly in his home to worship the Lord. During the following decade Wilcox preached to this congregation at the Three Cranes, a wooden building on Tooley Street in Southwark.

Though a convinced Baptist, Wilcox was catholic enough in his sentiments to be invited frequently to preach among the Presbyterians and Congregationalists. He also courageously endured imprisonment a number of times rather than sacrifice his convictions as a Dissenter. He hoped, we are told, that his death might be a sudden one, a hope that was apparently realized when he died in May, 1687. The epitaph on his tomb in Bunhill Fields, the Nonconformist burial ground in London, was a remark that he often made in this regard, “Sudden death sudden glory.” After his death the members of his congregation appear to have joined other Calvinistic Baptist causes in the city.

Do look for Stephen Yuille’s edition of A Choice Drop of Honey from the Rock Christ in our monograph series. The work is based on a phrase from Psalm 81:16 [“He should have fed them also with the finest of wheat: and with honey out of the rock should I have satisfied thee” (KJV)], and it well captures the Christ-centred piety of the early Calvinistic Baptists and the way in which their piety was nourished by those central themes of the Reformation, solus Christus and sola fide.

[1] The Serephick [sic] Soul’s Triumph in the Love of God in Thomas Wilcox, A Guide to Eternal Glory. Or, Brief Directions to all Christians how to attain Everlasting Salvation. To which are added, Several other excellent Divine Tracts (London: Nath. Crouch, 1699), 124.

[2] In a 1676 edition of this classic, there is an appended work, Spiritual Hymns Used by Some Christians at the Receiving the Sacrament of the Lords Supper, with some others (London: Nath. Crouch, 1676). The use of the term “sacrament” by this Calvinistic Baptist is noteworthy, it being a term commonly used by Baptist at this time.

[3] In this regard, see Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, “The Spirit of the Old Writers: The Great Awakening and the Persistence of Puritan Piety” in Francis J. Bremer, ed., Puritanism: Transatlantic Perspectives on a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Faith (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1993), 281.

[4] Our principal source of information about Wilcox is Thomas Crosby, The History of the English Baptists (London: 1740), III, 101. See also Joseph Ivimey, A History of the English Baptists (London: 1814), II, 465; W. T. Whitley, The Baptists of London 1612-1928 (London: The Kingsgate Press, 1928), 120.

Samuel Pearce: a call to submission to the will of God

I have spent most of this week working on the critical edition of Andrew Fuller's life of his dear friend Samuel Pearce (1766-1799). There is so much instruction in the life of that dear man. Like this one line when he was dying, from a letter to Fuller: "how can I be a Christian, and not submit to God?" (April 18, 1799) Think: a seemingly random line written by a dying man over two hundred years ago has such profound meaning for us today. In one line he captures a key aspect of the heart of our faith.

Samuel Pearce on humility

It is simply wrong to think that we as Evangelicals are great on how to enter into the Christian life but when it comes to sanctification we have no spiritual heritage to speak of and that we have to go to Roman Catholic writings to find wisdom. Here is a good example of a perennial Baptist concern for humility. In a letter that Samuel Pearce wrote to John Ryland, Jr. on October 8, 1798, he told his close friend of a sermon that he had just heard:

Cooper from London is here. I heard part of a sermon last night from him, after our service was over, which I should have very much liked if the fly of Egotism had not spoiled the ointment, e.g. "I have found that my preaching has been blessed when I etc."

Pearce then added, “O what a lovely garment is humility! May the Lord clothe [us] with it from head to foot."

Samuel Pearce on how to conduct oneself as a missionary

When Samuel Pearce was dying in 1799, momentous things were afoot with the Baptist Missionary Society, to which he had given so much energy. They were preparing to send a number of missionaries, among them William Ward and Joshua Marshman, to India. Once Ward and Marshman arrived they would link up with Carey and form the Serampore Trio, that fruitful band of brothers in the Church of that era. Pearce wrote a deeply-moving letter to Andrew Fuller, the Secretary of the Society, from Tamerton, Devon, on May 2, 1799.[1] The following are his three recommendations regarding missionary policy. They are still wise advice today.

First, as this Society is dependent for its support on the pious public, whose least compensation should be an acquaintance with the success of those for whom their benevolence is exerted, it is highly proper that each missionary under the patronage of this Society should communicate direct and personal information concerning his own efforts, and their various fruits, at least twice in every year; to which end the Society do request that each of their missionaries would keep a regular journal of his proceedings and send it, or a copy of it, to the secretary by the spring and fall ships.

Secondly, since that kingdom which we as the disciples of Jesus wish to establish is not of this world, we affectionately and seriously enjoin on each missionary under our patronage that he do cautiously and constantly abstain from every interference with the political concerns of the country were he may be called to labour, whether by words or deeds; that he be obedient to the laws in all civil affairs; that he respect magistrates, supreme and subordinates; and teach the same things to others. In fine, that he apply himself wholly to the all-important concerns of that evangelical service to which he has so solemnly dedicated himself.

Thirdly, however gross may be the idolatries and heathenish superstitions that may fall beneath a missionary’s notice, the Society are nevertheless persuaded that both the mutual respect due from man to man, together with the interests of the true religion, demand that every missionary should sedulously avoid all rudeness, insult, or interruption during the observance of the said superstitions; recommending no methods but those adopted by Christ and his apostles, namely, the persevering use of Scripture, reason, prayer, meekness, and love.

[1] From Periodical Accounts relative to the Baptist Missionary Society I (Clipstone: J.W. Morris, 1800), 516-519.

Restoring Integrity in Baptist Churches: A Book Review

A recent collection of essays on the various details of Baptist polity deserves a wide reading. It is Thomas White, Jason B. Duesing, and Malcolm Yarnell, III, eds., Restoring Integrity in Baptist Churches (Kregel, 2008). I have found it a gold-mine of informed reflection on such things as the meaning and mode of baptism, the nature of the Lord’s Table, the necessity of a regenerate church membership, and the vital importance of church discipline. And believe it or not, what I found as important as the content of the articles were the riches in the footnotes. My hearty commendation of this work does not mean that I concur with all of the sentiments and convictions expressed. I was surprised that Thomas White, for instance, affirmed that the Calvin’s view of the spiritual presence of Christ at the table “has not found favour among Baptists” (p.148). Actually, during the 18th century—those halcyon days of Baptist advance—the spiritual presence of Christ dominated Baptist convictions about the Table. See, for instance, this blogger’s “ ‘His soul-refreshing presence’: The Lord’s Supper in Calvinistic Baptist Thought and Experience in the ‘Long’ Eighteenth Century” in Anthony R. Cross and Philip E. Thompson, eds., Baptist Sacramentalism (Studies in Baptist History and Thought, vol.5; Carlisle, Cumbria, U.K./Waynesboro, Georgia: Paternoster Press, 2003), p.177-93. But this is a minor blemish in an otherwise excellent essay.

On the other hand, I was thrilled to see the point—for some, minor—made by Malcolm Yarnell that Nicene Christology went hand in hand with the affirmation of the church’s independence of the state and his drawing upon some articles of George Hunston Williams to make his point (p.235-36 and n.44). I have never forgotten reading those articles in the late 1970s and being convinced of the same.

All in all, it would be very difficult to single out an essay or essays in the book that was or were better than the others. This is rare. Usually, a collection of essays like this suffers from an uneven quality of content and argument. Not so here, I felt. White, Duesing, and Yarnell have produced an excellent compendium of contemporary—yet fully biblical—reflection on Baptist polity that every Baptist pastor would do well to read, study, and ponder, and that every Baptist seminary should use as required reading in their courses in Baptist history and polity.