Ressourcement: a definition

Here is an excellent definition of ressourcement by the French poet and Catholic essayist Charles Péguy (1873–1914): it is a movement “from a less perfect tradition to a more perfect tradition, a call from a shallower tradition to a deeper tradition, an overtaking of depth, an investigation into deeper sources, a return to the source in the literal sense.” Cited Nicholas J. Healy, Jr., “Evangelical Ressourcement”, First Things 213 (May 2011), 56.

More on Beddome

I hope to teach a doctoral course on the piety of Benjamin Beddome this fall. Here is the syllabus course description. Would appreciate prayer that the course would both inform and inspire:

“This course entails an advanced study in the history of piety in the English Particular Baptist community during the “long” eighteenth century (1688–1815). The special focus of the study is the life, ministry, and written corpus of Benjamin Beddome (1717–1795), pastor of the Baptist cause in Bourton-on-the-Water from 1740 till his death. His piety will be examined via his pastoral ministry, catechism, hymns, and sermons. The main goal of the course is to deepen the student’s ability to understand historic Baptist piety in situ and as a vehicle of spiritual and ecclesial ressourcement.”

Andrew Fuller's three examples of a pious, learned ministry

“A Pearce, a Francis, or a Beddome”: I find it very instructive that when Andrew Fuller thought of the combination of theological learning and spirituality—what he called “personal religion”—three names came to mind: Samuel Pearce (1766–99), Benjamin Francis (1734–99), and Benjamin Beddome (1717–1795), from three different generations of Particular Baptists in the eighteenth century (The Young Minister exhorted to make full proof of his Ministry in The Complete Works of the Rev. Andrew Fuller [Repr. Harrisonburg, Virginia: Sprinkle Publications, 1988], I, 520). This fall I have the unspeakable privilege of teaching a PhD course on Benjamin Beddome’s life, thought, and ministry: please pray that those who take it will learn the lesson Fuller found in his life—the blessing that personal holiness gives to a learned ministry.

Getting along in the Church and being truly Catholic, with a p.s. on Oliver Cromwell and John Calvin

Getting along: of all places in the world where this should happen, it should be in the church, should it not? But what do we see: the lovely garment of the church rent in pieces. And why? The sinful pride of men; their willingness to indulge in bitter attacks on brothers who differ with them, tho’ not in primary issues; their being more conformed to the world than to the mind of Christ. And the Reformed in all of their manifestations, be they baptist or paedobaptist, do not have a great track record. Let’s face it: the divisions between Reformed brothers and sisters is scandalous. Why will no one call it what it is? What we hear is “standing for the gospel”—but the reality often ain’t so: it is all too frequently just plain old sin or simple cantakerousness! "We alone are the truly reformed." Give me a break, how often have I heard that line! Of course, I believe in standing for truth in primary and secondary issues, but so frequently our divisions involve tertiary matters. One of the most beautiful words in the Greek Christian vocabulary is katholikos. The Fathers, blessed be God for the witness of those men, were right when they said that the true church is “one, holy, catholic and apostolic.” No, this is not the Roman Catholic Church—I was enrolled in that body when I was an infant, and I have no desire to belong to that communion again. But that group is hardly the true Catholic Church. No sir, the Church I love is that Body, fair as the moon and as brilliant as pure glass reflecting the rays of the sun, an awesome army to behold in all of her glory: rank upon serried rank of saints. That is the people among whom I wish to spend my days and spend eternity. And if I am going to live there with such saints, should I not begin here in this world preparing for eternity, and living in peace with my brethren? I do not expect to see eye to eye here with all of my brothers and sisters—that is for another Day—but surely, I can demonstrate the love that marks the truly born-again, the love of the saints.

A p.s.: Let me tell you something amazing: two Christian saints who demonstrated such love were the remarkable Oliver Cromwell and his theological mentor John Calvin. Do not scoff; read their letters and in Oliver's case, also his speeches to Parliament and see true Christianity in action.

Further on Andrew Fuller's ordination sermon for his friend William Carey

Did you notice what Fuller said about the way God would dwell among his people? " 'Will God indeed dwell with men?' He will; and how? It is by the means of ordinance and ministers. A church of Christ is God’s house, and where anyone builds a house it is a token he means to dwell there.” (Importance of Christian Ministers considered as the Gift of Christ inThe Complete Works of the Rev. Andrew Fuller [Repr. Harrisonburg, Virginia: Sprinkle Publications, 1988], I, 522).

In other words, the ordinances, including baptism and the Lord's Table, are means by which God dwells among us. This is in line with Baptist thought from the 17th and early 18th centuries but a distinct challenge to us today. On the other hand, Fuller's close friend, John Sutcliff, argued that Christ was absent from his ordinance of the Table. Yet, they were close friends. This is glorious--I mean their friendship despite such differences.

Words heard by William Carey and his church at Moulton when he was ordained

Yesterday evening I received from my friend Chisso Wang, who is working with me on a book on William Carey, the covenant that Carey drew up for his first church at Moulton (more on this anon). Around the time of the writing of this covenant, Andrew Fuller spoke to this church on the occasion of Carey’s ordination on August 1, 1787. Fuller took as his text Psalm 68:18: “Thou hast ascended on high, thou hast led captivity captive: thou hast received gifts for men; yea for the rebellious also, that the Lord God might dwell among them.” Fuller rightly drew attention to the fulfillment of this text in Christ’s ascension according to Ephesians 4:8, and said: “If you love Christ, you will make much of your minister, on account of his being his gift. A gift designed to supply Christ’s absence in a sort. He is gone, (“ascended,”) but he gives you his servants.” (Importance of Christian Ministers considered as the Gift of Christ [The Complete Works of the Rev. Andrew Fuller (Repr. Harrisonburg, Virginia: Sprinkle Publications, 1988), I, 521]. And the goal of Christ’s giving such ministers is that “the Lord God might dwell among them [i.e. his people].” Here Fuller discerned a difference between the old and new covenants: “God had not dwelt with the world, nor in it, while sin bore the rule; but Christ’s mediation was for the bringing it about. “Will God indeed dwell with men?” He will; and how? It is by the means of ordinance and ministers. A church of Christ is God’s house, and where anyone builds a house it is a token he means to dwell there. What a blessing to a village, a country, for God to build a house in it. It is by this that we may hope for a blessing upon the means to the conversion of our family and friends, and for the edification of believers.” (Importance of Christian Ministers [Complete Works, I, 522]). This entire passage is quite intriguing.

What should I read first in Andrew Fuller?

A friend just asked me: “before jumping in and trying to read the whole of Andrew Fuller’s works, what would you recommend to start with?”

Well, without being self-promoting I would first of all recommend reading my edited The Armies of the Lamb: The spirituality of Andrew Fuller (Dundas, Ontario: Joshua Press, 2001). This is a great entry point into Fuller: there is a small bio, an essay on his piety (the heart of all of his writing, preaching, and living), and a judicious selection of his letters. Letters are always a tremendous way to understand a person.

Then, assuming you have access to the three-volume Sprinkle reprint [The Complete Works of the Rev. Andrew Fuller (Harrisonburg, Virginia: Sprinkle Publications, 1988)], you need to read the following to begin:

1.      The “Memoir” by Fuller’s son Andrew Gunton Fuller in vol. I (pages 1–116): this is fabulous for the diary extracts. The whole diary is not there—we hope to have this in the new critical edition—but there is enough to reveal the tenor of his life and thought.

2.      The nine circular letters that Fuller wrote for the Northamptonshire Baptist Association on key theological and practical issues: vol. III, 308–66. These would were an annual custom where the association would ask one of her ministers to draft such a letter on behalf of the association and it would be sent to all of the churches in the association.

3.      Strictures on Sandemanianism (vol. II, 561–646). A rebuttal of a significant theological error. But in the course of it, Fuller explores a lot of theological ground.

4.      The Atonement of Christ, and the Justification of the Sinner, edited Andrew Gunton Fuller (New York: American Tract Society, n.d.): this is a compilation of Fuller’s thoughts on two key issues.

5.       Sample his sermons in vol. I of his Complete Works of the Rev. Andrew Fuller.

Blessings on you as you read!

Andrew Fuller's self-understanding

Dominating my academic thinking for a number of years now has been the Andrew Fuller Works project, which seeks to produce a critical edition of all of the works of Andrew Fuller. At the heart of it is Fuller’s self-understanding as an English Christian, a Baptist, and an Anglo-American Reformed pastor-theologian. Understanding Fuller is a central key to understanding the Anglo-American Baptist scene in the nineteenth century. By no means the only key, but a central hermeneutic. Witness the admiration of such theologians as Jesse Mercer, the Manlys and James Petigru Boyce, Christmas Evans, and CH Spurgeon for Fuller, not to mention men like Thomas Chalmers and Archibald Alexander.

Why should I write?

There are workshops aplenty on learning how to write. And occasionally I have been asked about developing writing skills. But a much more important question is this: why should I write? Here is a nugget of wisdom from my early Particular Baptist forebears on why they wrote their tracts and their confessions.

In a word, they said, it was “the honor of God, the love of his Truth, zeal for his Name, and…the saving of souls from death” that motivated their writing [Heart-Bleedings for Professors Abominations (London, 1650), 15]. Worthy motives—indeed the very best.

PS Among those who took responsibility for these words were John Spilsbury, William Kiffin, Henry Forty, Thomas Patient (Heart-Bleedings, 16). Anyone writing on these men today has a lot of hard work to do: so many ephemeral pamphlets and broadsheets went abroad under their names in those halcyon days for the Baptist cause. Seventeenth-century scholarship is, I think, a lot more difficult in this regard than the study of the eighteenth.

Speaking the truth in love in a day of theological declension

In one of his books, Francis Schaeffer depicts the two problems that can afflict those desiring to be true to the Christian Faith in days when biblical truth is under attack. On the one hand, some become hard and brittle in their response to errorists and develop low tolerance levels. Such men and women become schismatics and dare to break fellowship over secondary, even tertiary, issues. The history of the Church in North America in the twentieth century is strewn with such. But there is another danger. In such times, the desire to be balanced and to act in love can lead to a latitudinarianism that has lost any geographical sense of where the boundaries of orthodoxy lie. Such people, albeit, I trust, acting out of good motives, become so tolerant that they do not realize they are no longer faithful gatekeepers. They fail in affirming the boundaries that guard the core of biblical Christianity and thus betray what has been entrusted to them. As Dr. R. Albert Mohler, Jr., has rightly noted, “A word that can mean anything means nothing. If ‘evangelical identity’ means drawing no boundaries, then we really have no center, no matter what we may claim.” [“Reformist Evangelicalism: A Center without a Circumference,” in A Confessing Theology for Postmodern Times, ed. Michael S. Horton (Wheaton: Crossway, 2000), 146].

I have never forgotten being told by one who was entrusted with an important charge that as he got older in the Christian life, there was more and more that was simply grey and unclear. I am thoroughly convinced now that at work in such a life was a loss of biblical priorities and imperatives and the emergence of an unhealthy latitudinarianism.

For the past thirty years or so Evangelicalism has found herself increasingly embattled within as she is being forced to engage with what are concessions to the spirit of the age that imperil the gospel. And no surprise, we are seeing the emergence of a latitudinarian spirit that is deeply disturbing. Let us guard the gospel and affirm the clear boundaries of the Faith—and let us do so with love. “Speaking the truth with love”: both are needed.

William Vidler, eighteenth-century Universalist

Just read F.W. Butt-Thompson’s study of William Vidler (1758–1816), a nemesis of Andrew Fuller, and by successive degrees a Calvinistic Baptist who turned Universalist and then Unitarian. His church, Butt-Thompson tells us, eventually became “an Ethical Society without any distinct Christian bias” [Transactions of the Baptist Historical Society 1 (1908), 42–55, quote at page 54]. I am looking forward to Chris Chun’s treatment of the controversy between Vidler and Fuller—that has so much contemporary significance—at ETS this November in San Francisco.

Transactions of the Baptist Historical Society available online

Just accessed the entire series of the Transactions of the Baptist Historical Society volumes from 1908–1921 at BiblicalStudies.org.uk. You can work with the individual articles or download the entirety as a .zip file containing all of the .pdfs and an index. The download is big (65 MB) but worth the time and effort. For Baptist historians it is like gold as it contains a lot of primary sources docs. Thanks to Rob Bradshaw for doing this.

HT: Sean Winter.

"The tyranny of correspondence"

"The tyranny of correspondence in these days becomes a formidable thing... To answer even a dozen letters carefully will take up the best part of a morning, and many of us have not the time to spare. Our energy is consumed attending to other work. ...Letters, I have no doubt, are doing much to kill public men." Sounds quite contemporary, does it not? You might be surprised to learn that this is Robertson Nicoll (writing under the alias of Claudius Clear) in 1901: see his Letters on Life (Toronto: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1901), 149, 151. What would he say about e-mail?

Why I do theology

Many years ago, when I made the decision to go to Wycliffe College and study for a ThD there, my father, who was doing extremely well as an electrical engineer, was asked by one of his friends, who was a believer, about what I was doing. My father told him and then added, "there is no money in theology"! About three years ago, this man to whom my father said those remarks, conveyed them to me when I was teaching at Muskoka Baptist Conference one summer's night. From the point of view of my father then, I could have done much better for myself in another field. Recently, someone whom I love dearly (not my wife!) said much the same to me: I should have gone into a university setting where I could have made the double the amount of money. This was my response then and still is now: I was called in February of 1974 by the Lord Jesus to serve his people and he has yet to rescind that call. And I love the Lord Jesus Christ more than anything this world has to offer--and its offers are very attractive--but he is sweeter than all of his creation and it affords the deepest joy to live for him. 

More recently I have thought of Paul's statement in 2 Cor 11:28-9, a word that has been much with me in recent days: when an apostolic prayer/burden like that is given, it cannot, without serious spiritual risk, be ignored.

A word to the wise from the Ancient Greeks for the use of our social media

The description of Facebook and Twitter as social media is somewhat deceptive. Do they get people in touch? Oh yes, and sometimes long lost buddies re-connect, which is for the good. But, as vehicles of significant social interaction, do they qualify as social media? Not really. Some people seem to think they do and they use them to air all kinds of things best left unsaid in even as liquid a medium as the digital. Simply put: Facebook is not the place for some of the rant and rave that I have seen. In the final analysis, there is nothing like the face to face discussion. Maybe Plato and the Greeks were not all wrong in their complaints about the written word in the social medium of their day--the letter and the book: it is a dead word, cannot speak, cannot respond, can never serve in the stead of the spoken word. Of course, as a Christian who lives on the the written Word of God, I do not buy this. But the point they are making does seem to fit our day's social media: they appear to be responsive, but in reality they do not meet the heart's needs for love and companionship.

Newton on doing controversy--needed now as much as ever

Over at Tom Hicks' blog, Life in Christ,he cites some portions of a John Newton letter regarding controversy. Am always amazed at that saint's wisdom! No wonder he is well described as the letter writer par excellence of the Great Awakening. See here: http://lifeinchrist-tom.blogspot.com/2011/04/how-should-we-treat-our-opponents-in.html?spref=fb and follow the link to the whole letter here on the OPC website: http://www.opc.org/nh.html?article_id=217. We live in perilous days when there be dragons abroad, and it is so easy for the snarkiness latent in some of our Evangelical tradition to emerge when confronting these dragons. I deem Newton's letter a sane corrective.

The fallout of Montanism: looking to canon, creed, and bishop (overseer/elder)

While I do not always agree with Jaroslav Pelikan, he is without doubt the doyen of 20th century church historians. Here is his reflection on the fallout of the Montanist controversy. Pelikan is noting that as a result of the controversy, the church rightly judged Montanism to be obsolete for she "looked increasingly not to the future, illumined by the Lord's return, nor to the present, illumined by the Spirit's extraordinary gifts, but to the past, illumined by the composition of the apostolic canon, the creation of the apostolic creed, and the establishment of the apostolic episcopate." [The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600) (The Christian Tradition, vol. 1; Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 107].

Very true as an historical reality--its biblical validity is another question. And here I am thinking of the episcopate. The New Testament clearly supports both the looking to canon and creed. But does it support the idea of the historic episcopate?

New "A few acres of snow" post: Math and the Future of Religion

Dr. Haykin has written a new piece for the "A few acres of snow" feature. The newest post analyzes a recent article on the decline of religion in Canada by Daniela Syrovy. Check out "Math and the Future of Religion" and feel free to interact with the post in the comments section below.

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