“Troublechurch” Browne

Paul W. Martin asked for more on “Troublechurch Browne”. Here is a wee sketch. In the latter part of the sixteenth century, a number of Puritans came to the conviction that the Church of England would never be fully reformed, and thus they decided to separate from the state church and organize their own congregations. These Puritans would be known as Separatists and they would argue for what was essentially a Congregationalist form of church government.

One of their earliest leaders was Robert Browne (c.1550–1633), who in a tract entitled A Treatise of Reformation without Tarrying for anie (1582), provided the “clarion-call” of the Separatist movement. Browne—nicknamed “Troublechurch” Browne by his opponents—came from a family of substance and was related to Robert Cecil, Elizabeth I’s Lord Treasurer and chief minister. During his undergraduate years at Cambridge University, Browne had become a “thoroughgoing Presbyterian Puritan.” Within a few years, though, he had come to the conviction that each local congregation had the right, indeed the responsibility, to elect its own elders. And by 1581 he was of the opinion that the setting up of congregations apart from the Established Church and its parish churches was a necessity for, he wrote that year, “God will receive none to communion and covenant with him, which as yet are at one with the wicked.” That same year he established a Separatist congregation at Norwich. Experiencing persecution he and his Norwich congregation left England the following year for the freedom of the Netherlands.

It was in the Netherlands that Browne published the book for which he is remembered, A Treatise of Reformation without Tarrying for anie (1582). In this influential tract, Browne set forth his views that, over the course of the next century, would become common property of all the theological children of the English Separatists, including the Congregationalists and the Calvinistic Baptists.

First of all, Browne willingly conceded the right of civil authorities to rule and to govern. However, he drew a distinct line between their powers in society at large and their power with regard to local churches. As citizens of the state the individual members of these churches were to be subject to civil authorities. However, he rightly emphasized, these authorities had no right “to compel religion, to plant Churches by power, and to force a submission to ecclesiastical government by laws and penalties.”

Then, Browne conceived of the local church as a “gathered” church, that is, a company of Christians who had covenanted together to live under the rule of Christ, the Risen Lord, whose will was made known through his Word and his Spirit. Finally, the pastors and elders of the church, though they ultimately received their authority and office from God, were to be appointed to their office by “due consent and agreement of the church … according to the number of the most which agree.”

The key principle that Browne had seen clearly was that the kingdom of God cannot be brought about by the decrees of state authorities and that ultimately Christianity is “a matter of private conscience rather than public order, that the church is a fellowship of believers rather than an army of pressed men” and women.

Browne returned to the British Isles not long after publishing this treatise. To the consternation of many of his friends he subsequently recanted his views, and rejoined the Church of England. But he had begun a movement that could not be held in check. Browne’s mantle fell to three men—John Greenwood (c.1560–1593), Henry Barrow (c.1550–1593) and John Penry (1559–1593)—all of whom were hanged in 1593 for what was regarded by the state as an act of civil disobedience, namely secession from the Established Church.

Prior to his death, Penry rightly emphasized to the state authorities that “imprisonment, judgments, yea, death itself, are not meet weapons to convince men’s consciences, grounded on the word of God.” The response of the English state was swift and brutal. In April 1593 a law was passed that required everyone over the age of sixteen to attend their local parish church. Failure to do so for an entire month meant imprisonment. If, after three months following the individual’s release from prison, he or she still refused to conform, the person was to be given a choice of exile or death. In other words, the Elizabethan church and state was hoping to rid itself of the Separatist problem by sending those who were recalcitrant into exile. But the preaching and writings of Greenwood, Barrow and Penry led a significant number in the English capital, London, to adopt Separatist principles. And as British Baptist historian Barrie White has noted: “For many it was but a short step from impatient Puritanism within the established Church to convinced Separatism outside it.”

Browne also ended up spending his final days in prison. He was arrested when a very old man for striking a village constable. His own personal walk may have been wanting—but he set in motion a train of events and ideas that could not be held in check.

Basil of Caesarea & Letter-Writing

Following in the train of the New Testament authors, and early Christian writers from the second century to fourth centuries, Basil of Caesarea (c.330-379), according to P.J. Fedwick, was convinced that letter-writing was an important way of exercising leadership when one could not be present in person. [The Church and the Charisma of Leadership in Basil of Caesarea (Toronto: Pontifical Institute Of Mediaeval Studies, 1979), 169-173]. This is quite different from the classical Greek suspicion of the written word. Of course, Basil was aware of the problems of written words: they seem to lack life and warmth. Thus, he could write to a philosopher named Maximus: “why do you not visit us, my noble friend, so that we may speak with each other personally and not entrust subjects of such importance [how to discourse about the Trinity] to lifeless letters…?” [Letter 9.3, trans. Agnes Clare Way, Saint Basil: Letters (New York: Fathers of the Church, Inc., 1951), I, 43].

Nevertheless, Basil had a deep—and biblical—appreciation of the way that letters can overcome various barriers, such as those of space and time. Basil thus resorted to the ministry of letter-writing to overcome these, and other, hindrances to his wider ministry.

Moreover, Basil expected those to whom he wrote to return letters to him. Thus, he could say to one person to whom he had written: “Write me, at least in the future, with pen and ink and a short piece of paper, loving us who love you.” [Letter 330 (trans. Way, Saint Basil: Letters, II, 315-316)].

And to another who also failed to respond to Basil’s letters: “One indication of life is speech. How, then, could you be considered to be upon earth, since you never speak? But put aside your silence, writing to us and making it evident that you are living.” [Letter 332 (trans. Way, Saint Basil: Letters, II, 316)].

Precision with Regard to the Small Things and Being an Historian

How does one become an historian? Well, the path is not an easy one. But then the learning of no skill or art is easy. It does not come through merely much reading. Nor does it come through merely much writing. There have been all kinds of journal-writers—currently prolific bloggers—but neither much writing nor much reading in themselves doth an historian make. There must be reading and there must be writing, but being prolific in either or both does not guarantee good history. There must be discernment. There must be reflection. But before anything else there must be an attitude that takes time to be careful and precise, an attitude that is revealed in the small things of the craft. In fact, how one tackles those small things reveals the ability to handle the larger. If, with regard to the small things, the seemingly unimportant things, there is simply the desire to get them out of the way as soon as possible to make way for the truly “significant things,” the faculty of a good historian is lacking. Such an attitude is not perfectionism—an impossibility in this life for fallible humanity—though it is the desire to make everything written the best and most precise it can be.

Without precision, the faculty of taking care to be exact and right, the interest in details, there can be no good history-writing. If such a faculty is naturally present, it must be honed. If it be not present, it must be learned.

Boyce, Broadus and the Doing of Church History

I have been working through the life of James Petigru Boyce (1827-1888) by his close friend John A. Broadus (1827-1895), just reprinted by Solid Ground Christian Books as A Gentleman and a Scholar: Memoir of James P. Boyce (2004). It is a tremendous study, exhaustive and rich with Broadus’ comments on the life and times of Boyce. I suspect the time is ripe for a new biography of Boyce, especially with the sesquicentennial of the founding of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary upcoming in 2009. Here is one priceless comment by Broadus on the teaching of Church History. He is in the midst of discussing the great sacrifice made by Boyce in 1872, for theological reasons, of giving up his favourite subject, Systematic Theology, to his colleague William Williams to teach. William Williams taught as Professor of Ecclesiastical History and Church Government. In his ecclesiological convictions, though, Williams believed that immersion in a Paedobaptist congregation or immersion by the Campbellites was a valid baptism. Understandably, there were objections to this view, and Boyce, knowing that his own views on the issue were more mainstream offered to switch teaching responsibilities. It was a great sacrifice, not least, because Broadus says, church history is “a subject so vast, and demanding boundless reading” (A Gentleman and a Scholar, 227).

How true this is! Whenever someone tells me that they would like to study church history among the traditional curricula of theology, I urge him to consider this truth about church history: it is “a subject so vast, and demanding boundless reading.” You must be a reader and be prepared to attempt to survey the vast picture. Quite a challenge!

And even more so now than when Boyce took it up. Why so? Not only do we have another 150 years of church history, but also because the breadth of methodological tools have increased. In that day, the focus was very much “a history of ideas and institutions” approach. But today an historian must be familiar with tools of sociological and cultural analysis. Who is sufficient for such things?

Lord Acton’s Principle for Historical Scholarship

Lord Acton (1834-1902)—Sir John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton—was one of the great historians of the nineteenth century. He was the holder of the Regius Chair of Modern History at the University of Oxford. Amazingly, he was appointed to the Chair in 1895 without a single book to his name, but he had written some of the most remarkable scholarly articles of the day. Among his principles was an insistence on the primacy of primary sources, which usually means archival sources, for sound historical scholarship. As he said:

“To renounce the pains and penalties of exhaustive research is to remain a victim to ill informed and designing writers, and to authorities that have worked for ages to build up the vast tradition of conventional mendacity. …By going from book to manuscript and from library to archive, we exchange doubt for certainty…”

Would that many wannabe historians and other historical pontificators would learn this vital principle! Even theologians would do well to heed this advice. All of those vacuous generalizations about church history and our culture with nary a shred of evidence! The ultimate result is vapidity. How easy it is to pontificate—but we want proof of assertions.

Irenaeus on the Beatific Vision, Part II

As we have noted (IRENAEUS OF LYONS ON THE BEATIFIC VISION, PART I), the Son’s revealing of the Father to men and women has been a continual one, yet it has not always been in the same fullness throughout history. There have been differing degrees of the vision of and knowledge of God in history (Against heresies 4.20.5). For Irenaeus, this vision and knowledge is a gradual one, thus implying a progressive revelation of God in history. This progressive revelation of God (through various economies) occurred because of humanity’s imperfection and men and women thus needed to be accustomed (assuescere) to bear the vision of God (Against heresies 4.14.2). See also Irenaeus’ use of assuescere with regard to man’s learning to receive the Spirit of God: Against heresies 3.20.2, 16.5; 4.5.4, 12.4, 14.2, 21.3.

History is therefore conceived by Irenaeus to be a process; a process by which imperfect man ascends (an ascent made possible by God) to a more perfect vision of God. Even Adam, who was created in the image and likeness of God was a child spiritually who needed to grow. Irenaeus found this view of Adam as being a child in the thought of Theophilus of Antioch. See To Autolycus 2.25; cf. Against heresies 3.22.4; 4.38.1.

Even if there had not been a Fall there would have been spiritual growth. Adam was given as much of the Spirit as he could bear. Adam therefore received a fragile incorruptibility (Against heresies 4.40.3; 5.16.2). In Irenaeus’ thinking, his loss of it was more through carelessness than malice. Yet, Irenaeus still sees it as sin and the essential cause of sin in the world.

However, the Fall does not alter God’s essential plan, that is, the raising of man to perfection and a perfect vision of God. True perfection, the destination of humanity, is nothing less than the vision of God, the crown of spiritual growth (Against heresies 4.11.1). Man, as a being of temporality, must learn to travel gradually towards God, who is not subject to time.

Old Testament history thus became, for Irenaeus, God’s work of “adjusting the human race, in manifold ways, to harmony with salvation” (Against heresies 4.14.2, 21.3, 38.1, 3, 39.2). Heresy was, therefore, for Irenaeus, an ignoring of God’s dispensations through history; that is, rejecting the historical provisions God has made for humanity’s salvation, perfection and ultimate destiny. See Against heresies 3.12.2, 16.8; 4.27.2, 29.1, 2, 35.2; 5.19.2.

Three further remarks of clarification are needed with regard to Irenaeus’ belief in the spiritual education of humanity. First, the ascending path of humanity to God in history is quite distinct from any Gnostic belief in the ascent of man to God. For Irenaeus it is the Holy Spirit which confers on man the possibility of progress.

Second, Irenaeus is not urging a cheap belief in progress qua progress. Progress is always connected to sonship and communion with God.

Third, history is intimately connected to eschatology. History does not continue ad infinitum. History has an end; but until the eschatological consummation humanity is constantly “on the way.”

Irenaeus of Lyons on the Beatific Vision, Part I

Over against all of the current inanities that are being said about Jesus Christ, why do Christians declare Jesus to be God and the only mediator between God and humanity? The second-century theologian Irenaeus (died c.202), who also had to face similar inanities in the form of Valentinian Gnosticism and Marcionism, can help us answer this question. For Irenaeus, the only way we can know and see God was through love; and not our love for him, but rather, through his love for us. We know God because he first loved us. Thus Irenaeus writes of Christ: “So he united man with God and brought about a communion of God and man, we being unable in any other wise to have part in incorruptibility, had it not been for his coming to us.” (Demonstration 31).

Humanity cannot see God the Father by its own powers (Against Heresies 1.20.5). Not only is the Father beyond perception and thus unknowable and invisible, but mankind is lost in sin because of Adam’s fall (Against Heresies 3.23.2; 5.1.3, 16.3, 21.1, 34.2; Demonstration 31, 37), and thus incapable by nature of seeing God and saving itself (sine Spiritu Dei salvari non possumus) (Against Heresies 3.18.2, 20.2-3; 4.13.3; 5.9.2, 12.3).

It is essential to bear in mind that for Irenaeus no created reality can be commensurate with God, even in heaven. God is always the Giver and humanity the recipient. See Against Heresies 4.11.2: “Et hoc Deus ab homine differt, quondam Deus quidem facit, homo autem fit.”

Although human beings cannot know God in their own strength, it does not follow that God cannot make himself known to them. Human beings can know God through divine love and are saved by this love.

Now, it is only through the Son that the Father is revealed. The Son is the agnitio Patris, mensura Patris, the manifestatio Patris, the visible Patris. The Son is the necessary mediator in imparting to men and women the knowledge of God the Father.

This revealing activity by the Son of the Father is a continuous one. It began at creation and will stretch into eternity. For Irenaeus, the Word was always present with God. Though Irenaeus does not define the relationship between Father and Son within the Godhead, his writings definitely imply the eternal generation of the Word. God was never without his Logos. The Son has, therefore, always been manifesting the Father.

This revelation of the Father by the Son depends on the good will of the Father (beneplacitum Patris) [J. Ochagavia, Visible Patris Filius (Rome, 1964), 66], for it is the Father that sends the Son (Against Heresies 4.11.2). The Son manifests the Father according to the Father’s benevolent disposition (Against Heresies 4.20.5). The Father’s transcendence rules out the possibility of his appearing to men and women; but the Father’s goodness leads to the sending of his Son to fallen humanity (Against Heresies 4.34.5).

Rethinking Patristic Exegesis, Part II

A second avenue of response to the modern distrust of patristic exegesis is to note that significant changes are afoot in the whole hermeneutical enterprise. Important questions are being raised as to how the meaning of a text is to be determined. Is it the case that the meaning of a text is determined solely by its immediate circumstances of origin? In fact, the meaning of a text, it is being increasingly argued, cannot ignore the context of the interpreter/exegete. As David C. Steinmetz puts it in a famous essay, “The Superiority of Pre-Critical Exegesis”: “Meaning involves a listener as well as a speaker.” [Theology Today, 37 (1980-1981), 36]. In fact, some scholars—and we should probably designate their work as “postmodern” exegesis—argue that there is no way of knowing what an author intended by a work or text. The only meaning of a text is to be found in what an interpreter says a text means. In other words, the meaning of a text is solely found in its destination, how its readers interpret it. Some go so far as to argue that any change in the reader means a change in the meaning of the text. To paraphrase the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, “no reader reads the same work twice.” (Steinmetz, “Superiority of Pre-Critical Exegesis”, 37).

Embracing this perspective wholeheartedly ultimately undermines any fruitful discussion of hermeneutical options as to the meaning of a text. In this regard, see further Christopher A. Hall, Reading Scripture with the Church Fathers (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1998), 29-30.

But this position does have a point: a reader’s understanding of a text will, to some extent, be shaped by that reader’s own horizon of understanding. Thus, Brian Daly can rightly state:

“Understanding a text is precisely the event of the interpenetration of horizons: the author’s and the reader’s… It can never be a simple matter of the recovery of objective, “original” meaning through a scientific historical criticism that is free of the concerns and commitments of the later reader.” [“Is Patristic Exegesis Still Usable? Some Reflections on Early Christian Interpretation of the Psalms” in Ellen F. Davis and Richard B. Hays, The Art of Reading Scripture (Grand Rapids/ Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2003), 73].

Let me give an example from Gregory of Nyssa (died c.394). He is expositing Song of Songs 4:12-15 (ESV):

“A garden locked is my sister, my bride, a spring locked, a fountain sealed. Your shoots are an orchard of pomegranates with all choicest fruits, henna with nard, nard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense, myrrh and aloes, with all chief spices—a garden fountain, a well of living water, and flowing streams from Lebanon.”

The phrase that especially caught Gregory’s attention in this text was “living water.” This image, a very familiar one to readers of the Bible, is capable of differing interpretations, and in its original setting within the Song of Songs it is linked with a number of other images: “a garden locked,” for example, or “a spring locked, a fountain sealed.” In the literary context of the fourth chapter of the Song of Songs it does not appear particularly important.

In his homilies on the Song of Songs, however, Gregory of Nyssa approaches “living water” as any Christian familiar with the usage of this phrase in the New Testament. Gregory takes the image of “living water” as emblematic of the divine life that is “lifegiving” and interprets it in the light of Jesus’ words in John about the living water that Christ gives. Gregory writes,

“We are familiar with these descriptions of the divine essence as a source of life from the Holy Scriptures. Thus the prophet, speaking in the person of God, says: “They have forsaken me, the fountain of living water” [Jeremiah 2:13]. And again, the Lord says to the Samaritan woman: “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water” [John 4:10]. And again he says, “If any one thirst, let him come to me and drink. He who believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water’ [John 7:38-39].” [Homily on the Song of Songs 9 (Gregorii Nysseni Opera 6:292].

In other words, Gregory cannot divest himself of the way in which this image is later used in Jeremiah and then even later in the Gospel of John. Old Testament texts had to be read in light of the New. All of this is simply to say that Gregory approached the Old Testament as a Christian and this horizon shaped his exegesis.

See further Robert Louis Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2003), 75-76.

Rethinking Patristic Exegesis, Part I

Generally speaking, in the last century or so, patristic exegesis has not been favourably regarded. F.W. Farrar (1831-1903), an Anglican Evangelical scholar of the Victorian era, could state in the first of his Oxford Bampton Lectures in 1885 with regard to the history of interpretation: “We shall pass in swift review many centuries of exegesis, and shall be compelled to see that they were, in the main, centuries during which the interpretation of Scripture has been dominated by unproven theories, and overladen by untenable results.” [History of Interpretation (London: Macmillan, 1886), 8]. When Farrar came to speak of patristic exegetes in particular he observed: “There are but few of them whose pages are not rife with errors—errors of method, errors of fact, errors of history, of grammar, and even of doctrine.” (History of Interpretation, 162-163). Here Farrar puts more bluntly what many twentieth-and twenty-first century exegetes have generally believed about the Fathers and their interaction with the Scriptures. Although it is conceded that so-called pre-critical exegesis may have had some insights worth listening to, it has been generally believed that the bulk of the pre-critical tradition of exegesis is largely worthless.

Central to modern criticism of the Fathers has been their tendency to allegorize and to not focus on the “plain sense” of Scripture. By the way, Enlightenment distrust of tradition has informed this criticism far more than the dethroning of tradition by the Reformation. John Calvin, for example, viewed the Fathers as allies in the exegetical task. He could be critical of Origen’s allegorization, but by and large he valued the writings of the Fathers as aids for the reading of Scripture. [John L. Thompson, “Scripture, Tradition, and the Formation of Christian Culture: The Theological and Pastoral Function of the History of Interpretation”, Ex Auditu, 19 (2003), 24-27].

Now, at the heart of this modern criticism is an hermeneutical conviction, namely, that the meaning of a biblical text is simply and no more than what the author meant. The meaning of a text is thus solely determined by its human origin.

As a result of this bias against patristic exegesis, the biblical commentaries of the Fathers, chiefly those of the fourth and fifth centuries, remain almost completely unknown to biblical scholars. The work of some of the best exegetes among the Fathers, Theodore of Mopsuestia, for instance, thus remains almost completely unknown. [Gerald Bray, “The Church Fathers and Their Use of Scripture” in Paul Helm and Carl R. Trueman, eds., The Trustworthiness of God. Perspectives on the Nature of Scripture (Grand Rapids/ Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2002), 157-158]. This lack of interest in patristic exegesis is changing. Witness in this regard the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture series, edited by Thomas Oden and published by InterVarsity (2001–).

Moreover, beyond the commentaries there is an enormous wealth of exegetical comments that come in the course of other treatises written by the Fathers. These quotations must be used with care, since the Fathers’ quotations of the Scriptures were often more akin to allusion or rough paraphrases. What these allusions and citations indicate is that the minds of the Fathers were “steeped in the Bible.” (Bray, “The Church Fathers and Their Use of Scripture”, 158). As Gerald Bray has noted, this “reflects a profound knowledge of Scripture that they would not have possessed if it had not been central to their faith.” (Bray, “The Church Fathers and Their Use of Scripture”, 158). The Fathers are saturated with Scripture.

Responding to this distrust

Specifically, how are we to respond to the modern distrust of patristic exegesis? First, it needs to be noted that while the Church Fathers did resort to allegory, it was never regarded by them as the definitive hermeneutical tool or grid. (Bray, “The Church Fathers and Their Use of Scripture”, 157, 160-161). There are certain well-known biblical texts in which allegory was the prime vehicle of interpretation. One thinks of the Song of Songs, for example, or the parables of Jesus. As Bray notes: “even a cursory reading of ancient commentaries will reveal that it [i.e. allegory] was only one device among many, and that normally it was restricted to certain well-defined instances.” Also, as Bray points out, the Fathers did not consider allegory as a principle of interpretation in its own right. Any truths discovered by allegorization were already known by a literal exegesis of other biblical texts. (Bray, “The Church Fathers and Their Use of Scripture”, 161).

The importance of the actual text to the Fathers is well seen by contrasting Origen’s exegesis—often taken as the pinnacle of allegorization—with the way that Plotinus (c.204-270), the fountainhead of Neoplatonism, deals with the key influence on his thought, namely Plato. Plotinus explicitly refers to Plato about fifty times, though scholars have detected about 900 allusions to the Platonic corpus. On the other hand, Origen quotes so much of the Scriptures that large tracts of Scripture could be reconstructed from his quotes. In other words, it was not just the spiritual meaning of the Bible that mattered to Origen. He fully believed that “every syllable [of Scripture] came out of the mouth of God and enjoyed absolute authority over his mind and life.” (Bray, “The Church Fathers and Their Use of Scripture”, 161-162).

Careful study of Origen’s exegetical practice reveals, as Brian E. Daly notes, a “constant concern for the smallest details of text and narrative and often an unexpected willingness to accept biblical passages as meaning what they say.” [“Is Patristic Exegesis Still Usable? Some Reflections on Early Christian Interpretation of the Psalms” in Ellen F. Davis and Richard B. Hays, The Art of Reading Scripture (Grand Rapids/ Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2003), 78).

Specifically, the Fathers resorted to allegory when a text in the Bible needed to be reconciled with clearer passages of Scripture. In other words, allegory was a way of dealing with more difficult texts of Scripture. (Bray, “The Church Fathers and Their Use of Scripture”, 163-164).

Eusebius of Emesa (died c.359) in Syria, could thus state that while the Christian commentator cannot rule out allegory it should not be used to excess. This statement occurs in a sermon on the barren fig-tree (Matthew 21:18–19 et par.). Eusebius says that he knows of an allegorical interpretation of this text which depicts Jerusalem as the fig tree. But this must be wrong, Eusebius argues, since he did not make Jerusalem fruitless for ever. Euesbius then interprets the text and Christ’s words with regard to the circumstances of that time in history. [W. Telfer, “The Fourth Century Greek Fathers as Exegetes”, The Harvard Theological Review, 50 (1957), 95].

Some More Thoughts on Patrick

Here are some more thoughts I have been having about Patrick on his day at the other place where I blog, Irish Reformation: Thinking about Patrick on St. Patrick’s Day.

What to Read in the Church Fathers

A correspondent, Peter Foxwell, asked about where to start in reading the Church Fathers. There are a number of good places to begin. For second-century apologetics, start with the Letter to Diognetus, a gem. Then, with regard to conversion, Augustine’s classic work of his conversion is fabulous, The Confessions. The earlier North African Father, Cyprian, also wrote a fascinating account of his conversion, The Letter to Donatus. Much smaller than the work by Augustine, but Cyprian’s work also has a keen emphasis on sovereign grace.

Much evangelism in the pre-Constantinian church was done in the courts of law, when Christians were on trial for their lives. For an account of martyrdom, see The Martyrs of Lyons, found in the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius. On evangelism, there is another gem, the Confession of Patrick, a stirring defense of mission to Ireland in the world after the fall of the Western Roman Empire.

Then, in terms of doctrinal material, two musts are Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word, and Basil of Caesarea, On the Holy Spirit. The former may have been written in response to the Arian controversy in the fourth century. The latter was the definitive work of orthodoxy in the midst of the Pneumatomachian controversy, which came at the tail-end of the Arian controversy and in which there was a battle about the deity of the Holy Spirit. Hilary of Poitiers’ On the Trinity or the Augustine’ work by the same name are very good responses overall to the Arians

Finally, a favourite of John Wesley, Macarius-Symeon’s Homilies, is an excellent analysis of the Christian life.

Of course, you won’t agree with everything, but these will give a good exposure to the best of the early Church.

Enjoy and be edified!

Why Study the Fathers?

Our generation is afflicted with a kind of historical amnesia, which, unfortunately, has not left the Church untouched. In such an intellectual ambience, the question, “Why study the Fathers?” must be asked again and answered afresh. Listed below are a number of reasons that can be considered an initial step in this direction. First, study of the Fathers, like any historical study, liberates us from the present. [C.S. Lewis, “De descriptione temporum” in Walter Hooper, ed., Selected Literary Essays (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1969), 12]. Every age has a certain outlook, presuppositions which remain unquestioned even by opponents. The examination of another period of thought forces us to confront our innate prejudices which would go unnoticed otherwise. For instance, Gustaf Aulén, in his classic study of the atonement, Christus Victor, argues that an objective study of the Patristic concept of Atonement will reveal a motif which has received little attention in post-Reformation Christianity: the idea of the Atonement as a divine conflict and victory, in which Christ fights and overcomes the evil powers of this world, under whom man has been held in bondage. According to Aulén, what is commonly accepted as the New Testament doctrine of the Atonement, the forensic theory of satisfaction, may in fact be a concept quite foreign to the New Testament. As to whether he is right or not—and I think he is quite wrong—can only come by a fresh examination of the sources, both New Testament and Patristic.

Then, the Fathers can provide us with a map for the Christian life. It is indeed exhilarating to stand on the east coast and watch the Atlantic surf and hear the pound of the waves. But this experience will be of little benefit in sailing to England. For this a map is needed. A map based upon the accumulated experience of thousands of voyagers. Similarly, we need such a map for the Christian life. Experiences are fine and good, but they will not serve as a suitable foundation for our lives in Christ. To be sure, we have the divine Scriptures, an ultimately sufficient foundation for all of our needs (2 Timothy 3:16-17). But the thought of the Fathers can help us enormously in building on this foundation.

A fine example is provided by Athanasius’ doctrine of the Spirit in his letters to Serapion, bishop of Thmuis. The present day has seen a resurgence of interest in the Person of the Holy Spirit. This is admirable, but also fraught with danger if the Spirit is conceived of apart from Christ. Yet, Athanasius’ key insight was that “from our knowledge of the Son we may be able to have true knowledge of the Spirit.” (Letter to Serapion 3.1). The Spirit cannot be divorced from the Son: not only does the Son send and give the Spirit, but the Spirit is the principle of the Christ-life within us. Many have fallen into fanatical enthusiasm because they failed to realize this basic truth: the Spirit cannot be separated from the Son.

Third, the Fathers may also, in some cases, help us to understand the New Testament. We have had too disparaging a view of Patristic exegesis, and have come close to considering the exposition of the Fathers as a consistent failure to understand the New Testament. For instance Cyril of Jerusalem in his interpretation of 1 Corinthians 7:5, which concerns temporary abstinence of sexual relations between married couples for the sake of prayer, assumes without question that the prayer is liturgical and communal prayer. (Catechesis 4.25). Cyril may be guilty of an anachronism, for he was a leader in “the hallowing of the time,” that is, the observance of holy seasons. Nonetheless, there is good evidence that such communal observances, in some form or other, are quite early. The liturgical life of the Church of Jerusalem in the fourth century was not that of Corinth in the first, but nevertheless there were links. Possibly it is the Protestant commentators who are guilty of anachronism when they assume that Paul meant private prayer; such religious individualism is more conceivable in the Protestant West than in first-century Corinth.

As T.F. Torrance writes:

“[There is a] fundamental coherence between the faith of the New Testament and that of the early Church… The failure to discern this coherence in some quarters evidently has its roots in the strange gulf, imposed by analytical methods, between the faith of the primitive Church and the historical Jesus. In any case I have always found it difficult to believe that we modern scholars understand the Greek of the New Testament better than the early Greek Fathers themselves! [Space, Time and Resurrection (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publ. Co., 1976), xii].

These three reasons are only a start towards giving a full answer to the question, “Why study the Fathers?” There are certainly other reasons for studying these ancient authors which may be more obvious or even more important. But these three reasons sufficiently indicate the need for Patristic studies in the ongoing life of the Church: to aid in her liberation for the Zeitgesit of the twenty-first century; to provide a guide in her walk with Christ; to help her understand the basic textbook of her faith, the New Testament.

William Mitchel (1662-1705): The Three Hundredth Anniversary of His Death Last Year

I missed an anniversary last year—the three hundredth anniversary of the death of William Mitchel (1662-1705). For many of my readers the name will be completely unfamiliar. But he is a great hero of my Baptist past. Mitchel was a tireless evangelist in the English Pennines from the Rossendale Valley in Lancashire to Rawdon in neighbouring West Yorkshire. He was born in 1662 at Heptonstall, not far from Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire. Nothing is really known about his upbringing. His conversion came at the age of nineteen after the death of a brother. Although he was genuinely converted, Mitchel played what he later regarded as the part of a Jonah as he sought to go into business as a clothier and become wealthy.

But God frustrated his worldly ambitions and drew him out as a preacher of the gospel. Within four years of his conversion, he began to preach as an itinerant evangelist. His cousin, David Crosley (1669-1744), a stonemason turned preacher, tells us that Mitchel’s aim in his preaching was to “chiefly set forth the exceeding rich and free grace of the gospel, which toward him had been made so exceeding abundant.” At the same time, we are told that his Christian life was one of unwearied diligence in “reading, meditation, and prayer.”

Mitchel would travel with Crosley and others over the Pennines, often during the night so as to reach preaching venues in towns and villages by early morning. Crosley remembered the toil it took to walk “many miles in dark nights and over dismal mountains.” But he also never forgot Mitchel’s “savoury and edifying” preaching that took place anywhere Mitchel could get an audience, “on mountains, and in fields and woods.” Though Mitchel was not a polished speaker, crowds would press to hear him. Many merely came out of curiosity, some came to scoff. But, later when their hearts and consciences had been impacted by Mitchel’s gospel preaching, they confessed, “the Lord is with him of a truth.”

According to the Second Conventicle Act (1670), part of the Clarendon Code designed to break the spirit of the Dissenters, what Mitchel was doing was illegal. This act forbade any one over the age of sixteen from taking part in a religious assembly of more than five people, apart from those sanctioned by the Church of England. The act gave wide powers to local magistrates and judges to “suppresse [sic] and disolve” such “unlawfull [sic] meetings” and arrest whomsoever they saw fit to achieve this end.

Mitchel was twice arrested under this law during the reign of James II (r.1685-1688), who succeeded Charles II in 1685. On the first occasion he was treated with deliberate roughness and spent three months in jail at Goodshaw. On the second occasion he was arrested near Bradford and imprisoned for six months in York Castle.

The enemies of the gospel who imprisoned Mitchel might have thought they were shutting him up in a dismal dungeon. To Mitchel, though, as he told his friends in a letter written from York in the spring of 1687, the dungeon was a veritable “paradise, because the glorious presence of God is with me, & the Spirit of glory & of God rests on me.” He is, of course, quoting from 1 Peter 4:14. He had been given such a “glorious sight of [God’s] countenance, [and] bright splendour of his love,” that he was quite willing to “suffer afflictions with the people of God, & for his glorious Truth.”

In another letter, written to a Daniel Moore during this same imprisonment, Mitchel told him he had heard that James II had issued a Declaration of Indulgence, which pardoned all who had been imprisoned under the penal laws of the Clarendon Code. But he had yet to see it. Whatever the outcome, he told Moore, “the Lord’s will be done, let him order things as may stand with his glory.”

This sentence speaks volumes about the frame of mind in which Mitchel had approached his time of imprisonment. He was God’s servant. God would do with him as he sovereignly thought best. And Mitchel was quite content with that, for, in his heart, he longed for his life to reflect above all God’s glory.

For access to these letters of Mitchel, I am indebted to the Local Studies Unit Archives, Manchester Central Library. The letters are kept in the Papers of Dr. William Farrer. Thanks are also due to David J. Woodruff of the Strict Baptist Historical Society who kindly provided me with a copy of the letters.

A Principle of Doing History

This post by Nathan Caesbolt, “Legacy”, is a good reminder of a vital biblical principle regarding the doing of history: every individual matters and makes a difference, for good or ill, in this world. History is not the clash of simply economic forces or even powerful ideologies. It is the living out of life in a distinct space and time of immortal beings, men and women bound for eternity—in heaven or hell. And what we do here in history matters—it matters intensely. And though none may remember us, this does not materially affect the truth of this fact. For there is a holy God who will render to each according to how he or she has lived.

Benjamin Keach–Baptist Hymnwriter

Benjamin Keach (1640-1704) wrote a number of key works defending the use of hymns in worship. In arguing for this he also wrote some of his own hymns. Now, it was Charles H Spurgeon who said of Benjamin Keach’s hymnody that the less said about it the better! But Paul Martin has an example of a good hymn by Keach—and a Christmas one to boot! Many thanks for this Paul: A Good Baptist Christmas Carol! PS For a great book on Keach see the recent bio by Austin Walker, The Excellent Benjamin Keach (Joshua Press, 2004). A second edition is due out in the new year.

Confessional Christianity & Baptists

Lack of interest in confessional Christianity is nothing new. Among the most fascinating figures of the 18th century is Robert Robinson (1735-1790), at one time clear in his confessional identity as a Calvinistic Baptist and the author of the well-known hymn “Come, Thou Fount of every blessing.” Yet, by the end of his life, it was said of him: “[Robinson] hath his own opinions of the nature of God, and Christ, and man, and the decrees, and so on: but he doth not think that the opinion of Athanasius, or Arius, or Sabellius, or Socinus, or Augustine, or Pelagius, or Whitby, or Gill, on the subjects in dispute between them, ought to be considered of such importance as to divide Christians, by being made the standards to judge of the truth of any man’s Christianity.” [Seventeen Discourses of Several Texts of Scripture; Addressed to Christian Assemblies in villages near Cambridge. To which are added, Six Morning Exercises (New ed.; Harlow: Benjamin Flower, 1805), p. iv-v].

This is sad, to say the least. As an excellent corrective to a replication of this state of affairs in our day is the announcement that Reformed Baptist Academic Press is soon to publish Jim Renihan’s True Confessions. Baptist Documents in the Reformed Family.

It was with a deep sense of “finally” that I heard of this new work by Dr. Renihan, who heads up The Institute of Reformed Baptist Studies at Westminster Theological Seminary in California. We have long needed this detailed and tabular comparison of the foundational documents of our Calvinistic Baptist heritage—the First London Confession of Faith (1644), the Second London Confession of Faith (1677/1689), The Baptist Catechism (sometimes called Keach’s Catechism) and Hercules Collins’ The Orthodox Catechism (1680)—and their sources. This work will remind lovers of that heritage that those who drew up these documents saw themselves as part of a Calvinist International, “a broader Reformed community” as Renihan puts it. As such, this book will be vital in helping us, who are the heirs of the men who wrote these texts, know not only what we must affirm in this day of doctrinal confusion but also know whence we have come and who belongs to our extended family, as it were, within the great body of Christian believers.

May it further these ends and the study of confessional theology among us Baptists, and so avoid the sad latitudinarianism of Robert Robinson in his final days.

Praying with Tertullian

One of the most poignant lines from the writings of the Latin Church Father, Tertullian, comes at the end of his early treatise On baptism: “This only I pray, that as you ask [in prayer] you also have in mind Tertullian, a sinner” (tantum oro, ut cum petitis etiam Tertulliani peccatoris memineritis, De baptismo 20). Who of us who writes cannot echo this request? For those brothers and sisters who think of me from time to time, please remember me, a sinner saved solely by grace, in prayer. Can you pray especially for my ongoing work on Samuel Pearce? I have been wanting to write his biography for fifteen years now, and so many other projects always seem to be intervening. Please pray that by God’s grace this will be accomplished. Thank you.

Reading Basil of Caesarea’s on the Holy Spirit

One of the great joys of my life has been the study of the classic treatise on the person of the Holy Spirit, written by Basil of Caesarea (c.330-379) and entitled simply On the Holy Spirit. In the early 370s Basil found himself locked in theological combat with professing Christians, who, though they confessed the full deity of Christ, denied that the Spirit was fully God. Leading these “fighters against the Spirit” (Pneumatomachi), as they came to be called, was one of his former friends, indeed the man who had been his mentor when he first became a Christian in 356, Eustathius of Sebaste (c.300-377). The controversy between Basil and Esuathatius, from one perspective a part of the larger Arian controversy, has become known as the Penumatomachian controversy.

Eustathius’ interest in the Spirit seems to have been focused on the Spirit’s work, not his person. For him, the Holy Spirit was primarily a divine gift within the Spirit-filled person, One who produced holiness [Wolf-Dieter Hauschild, “Eustathius von Sebaste”, Theologische Realenzyklopädie, 10 (1982), 548-549]. When, on one occasion at a synod in 364, he was pressed to say what he thought of the Spirit’s nature, he replied: “I neither chose to name the Holy Spirit God nor dare to call him a creature”! (Socrates, Church History 2.45).

For a number of years, Basil sought to win Eustathius over to the orthodox position. Finally, in the summer of 373 he met with him for an important two-day colloquy, in which, after much discussion and prayer, Eustathius finally acquiesced to an orthodox view of the Spirit’s nature. At a second meeting Eustathius signed a statement of faith in which it was stated that:

“[We] must anathematize those who call the Holy Spirit a creature, those who think so, and those who do not confess that he is holy by nature, as the Father and Son are holy by nature, but who regard him as alien to the divine and blessed nature. A proof of orthodox doctrine is the refusal to separate him from the Father and Son (for we must be baptized as we have received the words, and we must believe as we are baptized, and we must give honour as we have believed, to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit), and to withdraw from the communion of those who call the Spirit a creature since they are clearly blasphemers. It is agreed (this comment is necessary because of the slanderers) that we do not say that the Holy Spirit is either unbegotten for we know one unbegotten and one source of what exists, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, or begotten, for we have been taught by the tradition of the faith that there is one Only-Begotten. But since we have been taught that the Spirit of truth proceeds from the Father we confess that he is from God without being created. (Basil, Letter 125.3).

In Basil’s thinking, since the Spirit is holy without qualification, he cannot be a creature and must be indivisibly one with the divine nature. The confession of this unity is both the criterion of orthodoxy and the basis upon which communion can be terminated with those who affirm that the Spirit is a creature. This pneumatological position thus defines the precise limits beyond which Basil was not prepared to venture, even for a friend such as Eustathius.

Another meeting was arranged for the autumn of 373, at which Eustathius was to sign this declaration in the presence of a number of Christian leaders. But on the way home from his meeting with Basil, Eustathius was convinced by some of his friends that Basil was theologically in error. For the next two years Eustathius crisscrossed what is now modern Turkey denouncing Basil, and claiming that the bishop of Caeasrea was a Modalist, one who believed that there were absolutely no distinctions between the persons of the Godhead.

Basil was so stunned by what had transpired that he kept his peace for close to two years. As he wrote later in 376, he was “astounded at so unexpected and sudden a change” in Eustathius that he able to respond. As he went on to say: “For my heart was crushed, my tongue was paralyzed, my hand benumbed, and I experienced the suffering of an ignoble soul…and I almost fell into misanthropy… [So] I was not silent through disdain…but through dismay and perplexity and the inability to say anything proportionate to my grief.” (Letter 244.4)

Finally, he simply felt that he had to speak. His words were those of the one most important books of the entire patristic period, On the Holy Spirit.

“To Glorify Christ”: The Goal of Spurgeon’s Preaching

In one important respect C. H. Spurgeon is a great model for today’s preacher in that he consistently sought to make his sermons Christ-centred and Christ-exalting. Throughout his preaching ministry, Spurgeon was faithful to the intentions that he declared when the Metropolitan Tabernacle first opened in 1861. The various meetings and services that accompanied the opening of the Tabernacle went on for a month and Spurgeon knew that they would be widely attended and reported. As Timothy Albert McCoy has rightly noted [“The Evangelistic Ministry of C. H. Spurgeon: Implications for a Contemporary Model for Pastoral Evangelism” (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1989), 132], the words that he spoke in his first sermon in the new home for his congregation’s worship were therefore carefully chosen. “I would propose that the subject of the ministry in this house, as long as this platform shall stand, & as long as this house shall be frequented by worshippers, shall be the person of Jesus Christ. I am never ashamed to avow myself a Calvinist; I do not hesitate to take the name of Baptist; but if I am asked what is my creed, I reply, “It is Jesus Christ.” My venerated predecessor, Dr. Gill, has left a body of divinity, admirable & excellent in its way; but the body of divinity to which I would pin & bind myself for ever, God helping me, is not his system, or any other human treatise; but Jesus Christ, who is the sum & substance of the gospel, who is in himself all theology, the incarnation of every precious truth, the all-glorious personal embodiment of the way, the truth, & the life.” [C.H. Spurgeon’s Autobiography, compiled Susannah Spurgeon and J.W. Harrald (London: Passmore and Alabaster, 1899), III, 1].

We find the same emphases in a sermon which he preached on April 24, 1891, to graduates of his College who had gathered for the annual conference which took place under the auspices of the Tabernacle. “Ah, brothers! the Holy Ghost never comes to glorify us, or to glorify a denomination, or, I think, even to glorify a systematic arrangement of doctrines. He comes to glorify Christ. If we want to be in accord with him, we must preach in order to glorify Christ.”[“Honey in the Mouth!”, The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, 37:381.].

Spurgeon was conscious that devotion to the doctrines of grace and dedication to Baptist principles can well exist without the all-essential heart of Christianity, namely, devotion to the Lord Jesus. He was determined that when he preached it would be the Lord Jesus who was pre-eminently exalted in his sermons. As Nigel Lacey, an English Baptist pastor, has observed, Spurgeon detested any preaching ministry that did not centre upon the Saviour [“Spurgeon—The Preacher”, Grace Magazine (January 1992), 6].

At the same time it should be understood that he never sought to conceal his doctrinal convictions as a Calvinistic Baptist. In a remarkable address which he gave at the Tabernacle on August 19, 1861 in honour of the centenary of the birth of William Carey (1761-1834), he declared to a packed auditorium of 6,000 that Carey’s theology was profoundly influenced by what he called “the noblest type of divinity that ever blessed the world,” that is, the theological convictions of Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), the great eighteenth-century American theologian.

He then went on to emphasize that “Carey was the living model of Edwards’ theology, or rather of pure Christianity. His was not a theology which left out the backbone and strength of religion—not a theology, on the other hand, all bones and skeleton, a lifeless thing without a soul: his theology was full-orbed Calvinism, high as you please, but practical godliness so low that many called it legal.” Moreover, Spurgeon stated that he admired “Carey all the more for being a Baptist: he had none of that false charity which might prompt some to conceal their belief for fear of offending others; but at the same time he was a man who loved all who loved the Lord Jesus Christ.” [“C.H. Spurgeon’s tribute to William Carey”, Supplement to the Baptist Times, (16 April, 1992), 1].

Piper on Athanasius

In a blog entitled Four reasons there was no regular blogpost today Phil Johnson directs his readers to a three-part series of talks that John Piper is doing on the great fourth-century Church Father, Athanasius (c.297-373). Well did Louis Berkhof regard Athanasius as “by far the greatest man of the age, an acute scholar, a strong character, and a man who had the courage of his convictions and was ready to suffer for the truth” [The History of Christian Doctrines (7th ed.; Edinburgh, Scotland: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1997), 87]. Listen to Dr Piper’s series here: Oneplace.com.