1184 – 1226

“Horse manure,” the little man snorted mischievously. “That’s all it is!”

No one doubts the value of horse manure. It is certainly more effective than chemical fertilizers. But what sane person hugs it to himself, spends his life amassing it, and glories in what he has managed to hoard? “Horse manure” summed up Francis’s attitude to money.

Yet we must not think Francis a sour-faced ascetic. On the contrary, few people have radiated greater joy, for few people have found greater pleasure in the riches of God’s creation. The birds and the animals, the trees and flowers, the sunshine – even the pleasure of falling contentedly asleep from day’s end tiredness – all these to him were tokens of the love God floods upon people without distinction.

At the same time Francis was not the nature-mystic of poplar exaggeration. He was an evangelist. He lived only to declare and exemplify the good news of God’s mercy and patience in Jesus Christ. Everything about him served this calling. His plain dress, sparse diet and transparent simplicity did not, in his view, point to the heroism of extraordinary self-renunciation, but rather to the common sense of the ordinary person who knows that a suit of armour doesn’t help a swimmer, nor alligator shoes a mountain-climber.

Francis Bernardone was born in the Italian city of Assisi. His father was a prosperous clothing merchant who fostered in his son an appreciation for French literature, music and theatre. Francis became the fashion-piece of Assisi, and the acclaimed leader of the wealthy young aristocrats. At parties he was given the title “master of revels”; he was the party-animator who could be counted on to liven things up if the carousing was in danger of losing steam. Snobbish beyond imagining, Francis disdained anyone he deemed his social inferior, and singled out lepers as especially contemptible. He fancied himself becoming a French poet or a decorated soldier.

Having had a vision of two swords forming a cross, Francis zealously pursued military training, boasting he would one day be honoured as a prince. Alas, his health proved far too fragile in the face of the rigours of soldiering, and he returned from the military campaign humiliated. Plainly he had misinterpreted the vision.

Crushed, Francis began to pray in a dilapidated church. Soon he had another vision, this one accompanied by the words, “Restore my Church.” In order to refurbish the run-down building he naively began selling off his father’s cloth. His father had him jailed as a thief. Ordered by the court to make restitution, he reacted in a manner as unselfconscious as it was dramatic; he stripped off his clothes, piled them on the floor, placed his money on top, and announced to his father that from that moment on God alone would be addressed “Father.”

Together with the “friars minor” he attracted to himself, Francis became “God’s troubadour.” Troubadours were a school of poets from the south of France who wrote and sang loftily and light-heartedly of lady-love. They good-naturedly exposed materialistic grasping as unworthy – even impossible – of those who are intoxicated with the one they love.

Francis loved God. He adored the one who had rescued him from flashy frivolity. He came to cherish his neighbor, particularly the suffering neighbor – even, now, the leper. Through his work on behalf of the needy, the suffering, the victimized, the incurably ill, it was said o him that he did what no social welfare scheme, however necessary and effective, could ever do: he gave broken people back their self-respect.

Reading scripture through eyes unaffected by hoarding, Francis could hear that aspect of the Word to which our acquisitive modern age remains deaf. So far from trying to dodge or dilute the Master’s teaching, he welcomed it as truth that liberates its hearers and renders them citizens of a new country. “No one can serve two master,” Jesus had said, “for either you are mastered by God or you are mastered by money” (Matt.6:24).

Rejoicing in the company of his Lord, and finding his security there, he throbbed with the conviction o the first Christians: “You joyfully accepted the plundering of your property, since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession and an abiding one” (Heb.10:34). Attuned to the itinerant Nazarene evangelist himself, Francis knew that the New Testament consistently points to money as the greatest spiritual threat of all. (In the first three gospels one verse in ten has to do with money; in Luke one in eight; in the Epistle of James, one in five.)

Yet in all this, his calling in the end was not to poverty but to penitence, for from penitence came forgiveness, joy and reconciliation. He knew that the gospel can and will melt the sin-hardened heart, satisfy the nameless longing, cheer the dispirited, and crumble the walls of hostility. He knew, in a word, that the gospel will brighten everything through the glow of those who know themselves welcomed home. He possessed few of this world’s goods only because he wanted to testify to his being possessed by the gospel alone.

In 1225 Francis went blind. A white-hot iron was applied to his face from jaw to eyebrow in order to “open the veins” and restore sight. The other friars fled the room, unable to endure the horror. Not surprisingly, within a few months Francis was mortally ill. He wanted no shrine in his honour, no fuss made of him as though he had done something extraordinary. Gathering this friars around him, he undressed. Then he lowered himself upon the bare earth. “As soon as my spirit has left my body,” he instructed them, “speak of me only for as long as it would take a man to walk a mile.” For twenty minutes, then, his friends did nothing except recall the witness of him, who, like so many other noble Christians, is now buried we know not where, and whose work in the Lord is the only monument they shall ever need.

1342-1416

Agnostics and atheists frequently announce that the world’s pain and distress loom so large as to contradict God and render faith in him impossible. They seem unaware that many whose lives unfold amidst unspeakable suffering nevertheless exemplify a throbbing faith and a vivid apprehension of God that not only attests the possibility of faith but even renders God undeniable. Julian’s book, Revelations of Divine Love, was the distillate of a divine visitation that occurred amidst horrific developments in the fourteenth century.

Edward III, the monarch who came to power in 1330 and reigned until Julian was 35, ascended the throne when his adulterous mother and her lover trashed his father. In 1334 Scotland and France ganged up on England and plunged the country into the Hundred Years’ War, searing everyone in the land for generations. Pestilence loomed in the midst of war as the Black Death, the plague that was to kill one-third of Europe, galloped everywhere. In 1351 a mutant strain of the scourge especially lethal to children scythed the population. As clergy ministered the comfort of the gospel to victims dying agonizingly, the clergy succumbed at even higher rates. The crop failures of 1348 and 1363 were climaxed by that of 1369, and this one in turn inflamed the Peasant Revolt of that year. In 1377 the church appeared less than “one” when rival claimants to the papacy headquartered in Rome (Urban VI) and Avignon (Clement). The former recruited Julian’s bishop, Despenser of Norwich, to lead armed forays against his Avignon counterpart. Militarily crushed, the bishop stumbled back to Norwich in disgrace. In it all Julian’s confidence in the gospel and her affirmation of “Holy Church” and her grasp of the meaning of her “revelations” remained resilient.

In 1373, at age 30, the cloistered nun had found herself “visited” by her Lord as she lay near death. Upon recovering she described in writing the vivid visions vouchsafed to her (the “short text.”) She refrained from speaking of them ( never mind preening herself on account of them), wisely knowing that the visitation was brief while the disclosure of its meaning was protracted. She pondered them for the next twenty years, steeping them in prayer, living the truth disclosed in them, awaiting further illumination from their author and object. In 1393 she wrote the “long text” (a book of 170 pages), elucidating their significance for her and readers that had been entrusted to her. (She knew that God intended others to profit from her experience and reflection, and for this reason had written in English rather than Latin.)

Like prophets and apostles of old, Julian knew that vividness alone is the measure of nothing. Who is possessed of greater vividness, after all, than the drug-intoxicated or the deranged? And yet like prophets and apostles, she knew that apart from our experience of our Lord doctrine is only a mental abstraction, scripture but a quarry whose nuggets are buried in tons of lifeless rock, and the church too often a principality that misrepresents the gospel and victimizes its members. While visions and auditions, raptures and ecstasies, consolations and desolations (the latter two being the feeling of God’s presence or absence) strike most Protestants as bizarre and therefore dismissible, the fact is that all of this is found in biblical personages. We need only think of David and his “Why dost thou hide thyself in times of trouble?” (Ps. 10:1) and “When the cares of my heart are many, thy consolations cheer my soul.” (Ps. 94:9) Like Paul before her, Julian never preached her experience; she declared only the gospel, the “word of the cross.” Still, again like Paul, without her experience she would never have proclaimed anything. In it all she insisted that God isn’t known as we wait for visions and ecstasies, but rather as we wait on God through relentless prayer and diligent study.

Consider the first revelation. “And immediately I saw the red blood trickle down from under the garland of thorns. I was overwhelmed with wonder that he, so holy and awesome, should be at home with the likes of me. I knew that in this revelation there was strength enough to enable me to withstand every spiritual temptation.” The sixteenth revelation pertains to those whom God’s grace has rendered a child of God: “What can give us more joy in God than to see that he has great joy in us, the pinnacle of his creation?” Like all the spiritually attuned, her sense of the encroachment of evil, together with its subtlety, cunning and consequences, was exquisite: “After this the devil came back again with his heat and stench. The smell was so vile and sickening and dreadful and oppressive that he kept me busy…and I scorned him.”

More exquisite still was her awareness that much delights God, especially the believer’s delight in God. (John Wesley, a direct descendant of Julian in the tradition of English spirituality, never wearied of saying that unbelievers forfeit the enjoyment of God.)

Julian never hesitate to speak of Jesus Christ as “our mother.” In this, however., she was not supporting the current feminisation of God. She knew that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — eternally, and that this God dwells in Jesus of Nazareth. (Col. 2:9) In speaking of Christ as “our mother” Julian was merely likening the work of Christ to that of a mother. He gives birth to those who are “born again.” Like a mother, he suffers for them before, during and after “delivery.” He must patiently nourish, safeguard and instruct those who are born of him. In none, of this, however, was Julian anticipating the contemporary argument that God is “she.”

Julian lived in an era of atrocious, undeserved suffering as plague rampaged throughout Europe. In reflecting on human pain in the light of God’s truth and mercy, she proffered no “quick fix” or shallow legitimation. Instead she admitted that beyond the suffering that serves a cautionary or corrective purpose there is colossal suffering that appears random and arbitrary, pointless and inexplicable. At the same time she insisted that no future reward or blessing or delight at God’s hand, however protracted or intense, can ever compensate for such suffering so as to “outweigh” it. Rather, in God’s economy there will be reward or blessing that is seen to be intrinsic to our suffering and impossible without it; on the great Day our capacity for suffering will be seen to be essential to that human creature whom God has finally rendered “the apple of his eye” and who can now enjoy him forever.

Since Julian spoke the truth of the gospel she speaks to people of an era. Lest anyone think, however, that because she lived in the fourteenth century she knows nothing of the institutions and principalities that beset us, we should understand that the fourteenth century saw the invention of the clock (with huge private and public consequences for humankind), as well as the birth of the modern university, parliament, and the banking system.

Victor Shepherd

1369-1415

Jan Hus was born of a peasant family in the Czech region of Husinec. A brilliant scholar, he was ordained after eleven years of intense intellectual work, and two years later was appointed to a preaching ministry in the Bethlehem Chapel. The chapel stood adjacent to the University of Prague, foreshadowing the relationship between church and university that would occur in city after city of the Reformation. (The University of Prague is the oldest German university, political boundaries changing frequently in central Europe as territorial wars surged and abated.) Czech nobles had built and maintained the chapel as a venue for redressing the lack of preaching in parish churches and for promoting vernacular sermons. A scholar/preacher always occupied the chapel’s pulpit — and always attracted the hierarchy’s suspicion on the grounds that such a priest couldn’t be controlled. Supported and protected by the nobility, however, preacher after preacher managed to survive both the hierarchy’s suspicion and its eagerness to dismantle the institution.

Hus distinguished himself through sermons that “notched up” a homiletical tradition already featuring gospel-suffusion and intellectual rigour. He preached twice each Sunday to a congregation of earnest, thoughtful Christians, virtually all of whom were nobles, the one group that would threaten, one hundred years later, both secular ruler and religious potentate in Germany. (Without the political support of the princes Luther’s theological revolution would have gone nowhere.) Soon Hus was appointed chaplain to the royal court, confessor to the queen, and rector (president) of the University of Prague.

Having learned of the work of Wyclif, the English proto-reformer soon to be known as “the morning star of the Reformation”, and having seen first-hand the corruption of the church, Hus announced relentlessly the need for a reform engendered by the substance and spirit of the gospel. The church’s hierarchy dispatched spies to monitor his pulpit pronouncements. Seeing through the disguise of a dissolute monk “planted” in the service, and aware that the man was interested in him only in order to betray him, Hus pointed out the man and exclaimed, “Monk, be sure not to miss the next sentence!”

The king (“Good Wenceslas” of Christmas carol fame) supported Hus. The archbishop did not, and immediately co-opted the king of Hungary who, like any ambitious person, was malleable in that he wanted to be emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. From the hierarchy the archbishop secured a two-fold mandate: Wyclif’s works were to be burned, and non-parish churches (e.g., Bethlehem Chapel) were to be shut down. Hus disregarded the order and continued to preach.

Hus catalysed the Czech nobles’ protest against the order at the same time that civil courts insisted the archbishop would have to reimburse the University of Prague for the Wyclif works he had had destroyed. The courts confiscated the archbishop’s property. Riots ensued.

Now Cardinal Colonna was appointed to handle the matter. He summoned Hus to Rome. When Hus refused to go, the cardinal excommunicated him and ordered his execution. Hus, supported by the people who had been commissioned to slay him, again continued to preach.

The church’s hierarchy, meanwhile, having declared war on Naples, needed vast revenues to fund the war effort. Indulgences were declared sold. When the indulgence-peddlers arrived in Prague they were greeted in much the same way they would be in Luther’s Wittenberg: a disputation was scheduled at the university. When the sale continued, riots broke out. Three pro-Hus students were beheaded, and then buried to public acclaim in the Bethlehem Chapel. The hierarchy countered by excommunicating Hus (for the second time.) The archbishop “interdicted” the city; that is, he deprived the people of al the spiritual resources of the church, a terrifying development in the middle ages. Hus was hidden for several years in the castles of noblemen (as Luther was to be after him.)

In October, 1414, the hierarchy convened a General Council in Constance, Switzerland, and guaranteed Hus a “safe conduct.” Trustingly, Hus went to Constance eager to refute the charge of heresy. There, however, he was convicted for theological positions that in fact he had never held (e.g., that eucharistic bread wasn’t the body of Christ.) Authorities arrested him, chained him in a dungeon, and interrogated him under torture for several months. Refusing to recant, Hus appealed to his conscience under the norm of scripture. Taken to the stake in July, 1415, he again refused to recant, declaring instead, “In the truth of the gospel which I have written, taught and preached, I will die today with gladness.”

Hus ought never to be forgotten. His preaching combined finely-wrought scholarship with zeal for the gospel. He reminds us that in the midst of pulpit shallowness and clergy fatuity lay people hunger for the Word of God. In an era when universities are prepared to sacrifice everything to “political correctness” Hus recalls a day when the university cherished intellectual rigour and theological profundity, even as the university recognized the cruciality of theology and provided the venue for debating what concerns the wellbeing of people above all else. His predicament highlights the unholy alliances between the church’s hierarchy and the secular powers as each uses the other opportunistically. He cues us yet again to the fact that the gospel will always mobilize faithful hearers against a specifically religious or churchly betrayal of the gospel. He embodies a truth cherished by early-day Christians that the living Lord again and again will “once more…shake not only the earth but also the heaven…in order that what cannot be shaken may remain.” (Hebrews 12: 26, 27) And for beleaguered people in mainline denominations today who feel helpless amidst the hierarchy’s treachery, he fortifies our resistance as he stands forth, like his risen Lord, as living proof that God keeps the promises he makes. For indisputably God vindicates his servants; vindicates them, acclaims them, and appoints them to judge not only the world but even angels. (1 Corinthians 6:2,3)

Perhaps Luther said it best: “The truth is, we [i.e., gospel-believers] are all Hussites.”

Victor Shepherd
June 2000

1483 – 1546

In my opinion Isaac Watts is the finest English hymnwriter (although many would cast their vote for Charles Wesley), Thomas Crammer the best liturgist, William Tyndale the most perceptive Bible translator, High Latimer the finest preacher, and the Westminster Divines the ablest catechists. Imagine all of these gifted people gathered up into one individual. Luther! What it took a dozen Englishmen two hundred years to do Martin Luther did in twenty.

Born in Eisleben, Germany, in 1483, Luther quickly distinguished himself academically and appeared headed for a career in law. His family was shocked when he announced he was entering a monastery. As part of his preparation to become a monk he made a pilgrimage to Rome, walking all the was there and back! Returning to Germany he completed his studies for his doctoral degree and was hired as professor of theology at the University of Wittenberg.

Nevertheless he remained haunted by one mater for which his learning provided no help: how does a sinner get right with an all-holy God?

The abstract guessing-games of much medieval theology only increased his frustration. Luther sought the answer in the confessional. Time after time he confessed his sins until those hearing his confession grew weary. He was much too severe with himself, they thought – too much given to dwelling in minor matters, upsetting himself unnecessarily.

But, in fact Luther was not just worrying about trivial matters. And he was certainly not neurotic. He simply knew that God is not to be trifled with, that sin is undeniable and judgment inescapable. It was the spiritual director of the monastery, John Staupitz, who finally shed some light on Luther’s perplexity: “Look to the wounds of Christ,” Staupitz advised again and again, “for there you will find a full and sufficient pardon.”

And then it happened! While he was reading Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, he stumbled on a text which rang with the profoundest truth, and which continues to echo in the hearts of God’s people everywhere: “The just shall live by faith” (Rom. 1:17). Through his fine appreciation of Hebrew and Greek grammar, as well as his grasp of the gospel that Paul is describing, he caught the force of God’s “justice” or “righteousness” (both English words translate the same Greed word).

God’s righteousness, he discovered, is not courtroom-type justice which gives people exactly what they deserve (no comfort for troubled sinners here!). God’s righteousness, rather, means that God justifies (puts in the right with himself) those who cling in faith to Christ crucified, the provision God has made for us through his sheer mercy. “The just shall live by faith,” Luther realized, meant that when we abandon any pretense to self-justification before God on the grounds of self-righteousness, we become rightly related to God through simply trusting his provision for us and entrusting ourselves to him.

It was, and is, impossible to exaggerate the cruciality of this gospel-truth. It meant that as often as earnest people looked within themselves and stood aghast at the ravages of sin there, they also know themselves pardoned in the provision God had made for them in the cross. To say the same thing differently: Since faith, for Paul, was keeping company with Jesus Christ, as often as sinful people wondered about their status before God they now realize that when God looked upon them he saw them included in that Son with whom his is ever pleased. The relief was indescribable.

To know that the “just” (justified) live by faith, said Luther, is to be the freest person alive. In 1520 he wrote a delightful pamphlet, “On Christian Liberty.” In it he maintained that Christians are gloriously freed from their self-preoccupations. Christians do not live in themselves – they live in Christ, through faith, and in their neighbours, through love. Christians are taken out of themselves, directed toward their Lord and toward those whom their Lord has given them to serve. The result? Christians are free from anxious self-concern and free for self-forgetful service of their fellow-sufferers.

From 1521 until his death in 1546 a reward was promised anyone who slew Luther. He remained undeterred. He was asked where he would be if the worst happened – that is, if he and everything he stood for were trampled and destroyed. He reply? “I shall be then where I am now: in the hands of God.”

Victor Shepherd

1484 — 1531

The most accomplished musician of the Reformation era, he trashed the grand organ in Zurich’s cathedral when he discovered that the music there was nothing more than “high-brow” entertainment devoid of gospel-significance. Superbly educated in Renaissance humanism (including the glories of fine art), he directed the demolition of priceless icons as soon as he saw that they were superstitiously venerated as magic. Sickened at the slaughter of Swiss youth in foreign wars, he helped mobilize military forces in defense of his native land and perished in battle himself.

Zwingli was born on New Year’s Day, 1484, seven weeks after Luther. University studies at Berne and Basel equipped him with the “new learning” then capturing younger scholars throughout Europe. When Erasmus, a gifted linguist, sifted and sorted and finally assembled several manuscript-fragments to form a usable Greek testament (without which there would have been no Reformation), Zwingli hand-copied Erasmus’s entire Greek text and memorized all of Paul’s epistles.

Luther had come to gospel-conviction when tormented by his conscience: “How can an unrighteous sinner get right with the all-holy God?” Zwingli, on the other hand, came to the core of scripture when distressed not at himself but at the plight of his people, defenceless as they were on all life’s fronts. Ordained to the priesthood in 1506, he was sent as assistant to a church in the province of Glarus, where he continued his humanist studies and produced his first book, a biblical critique of the social distresses prevalent in Switzerland.

The year 1513 found him accompanying Swiss soldiers-for-hire to Italy. Sickened at the carnage of Switzerland’s most able-bodied, and appalled at the greed, coarseness and cruelty fostered in young men who pillaged civilians remorselessly, Zwingli determined that the iniquitous practice of mercenaries would end. He remained undeterred despite opponents who protested that the mountainous regions of Switzerland had to export soldiers in order to acquire the money needed to purchase grain and avert starvation.

Now Zingli’s preaching took on a decided gospel-flavour as Luther’s influence seeped into him. Soon his bishop transferred him to Zurich, the city where he would remain for the rest of his life and to which his name would be fixed as surely as Luther’s was to Wittenberg and Calvin’s to Geneva. As there grew in Zwingli the conviction that scripture is the normative witness to Jesus Christ and the primary source of Christian understanding and discipleship, he put aside the mediaeval practice of delivering snippet-sermons from a few prescribed texts (the lectionary) and instead preached straight through the New Testament — in the course of seven years!

His preaching bore much fruit. One aspect of it was the gospel-freedom that led several parishioners to reject Rome’s prohibition of meat during Lent. These people embodied their convictions by eating sausages immediately prior to Easter. Zwingli’s bishop, formerly a supporter, now denounced him. Zwingli in turn petitioned a nation-wide church conference to authorize unimpeded preaching of the gospel together with all the implications of the gospel — chief among which now wasn’t sausages but clergy marriages. When the conference dawdled over the last point Zwingli sought to move it along by reminding delegates of what they could expect if the clergy weren’t allowed to marry: another 1500 children born to “celibate” priests in one year in one province of Switzerland! (Frustrated at the conference’s slowness, Zwingli secretly married Anna Reinhart, a widow with three children. Subsequently Anna and Ulrich had another four. They were publicly “married” several years later.) The city council, long nurtured by the ferment of reform effervescing everywhere in Europe, officially declared Zurich to be Protestant. In yet another of his political victories at this time the city council decreed that none of its citizens could be mercenaries under any flag.

A huge controversy exploded over the nature of Christ’s presence in the Lord’s Supper. Summoned to the castle in Marburg (1529) Luther and Zwingli squared off in a formidable debate that settled nothing. Luther foamed, “Before I drink mere wine with the Swiss I shall drink blood with the pope.” Little did he know that Zwingli never advocated “mere wine”. Luther feared having the living person of Jesus Christ disappear from the Lord’s Supper. Zwingli feared the superstition of suggesting that Christ’s people bite their Lord and chew on him during the communion service. Luther accused Zwingli of an empty celebration. Zwingli accused Luther of cannibalism. They simply talked past each other. In addition, Luther failed utterly to appreciate the ecclesial dimension of Zwingli’s eucharistic understanding: the Lord’s Supper bespeaks not only the presence and power of Jesus Christ but also the transformed fellowship of believers, a fellowship characterized by love, mutual concern and service.

When Emperor Charles V, supported by Austrian troops, threatened Protestant Switzerland, Zwingli rescinded his condemnation of war and insisted that the citizens of Zurich be protected. He helped organize the defensive forces, even accompanying them into the conflict. Wounded terribly at the battle of Capel, an enemy soldier recognized him as Zurich’s leader and leapt to impale him with a sword-thrust.

The 47-year old had spent his life on behalf of the people he loved, much more involved politically than the other Reformers. No aspect of the city’s communal life had escaped him. He worked as tirelessly to procure foodstuffs as he did to have divorces granted on the grounds of wife-beating, desertion, mental cruelty and sheer incompatibility.

His love for his people shone most brightly when plague overtook the city and he spent himself self-forgetfully on behalf of the sick and the dying, only to be plague-infested himself. When he had survived the pestilence he wrote his “plague-hymn”, with its first stanza,

Help me, O Lord,
My strength and rock;
Lo, at the door
I hear death’s knock.

When death knocked at his door in 1531 his memorable watchword was still on his lips: “Not to fear is the armour!”

Victor A. Shepherd
November 1995

1489-1556

Cranmer’s theological depth and poetic gifts are evident above all in his matchless liturgies. Consider the Collect for Holy Communion (a “collect” collects or gathers up the aspirations of worshippers’ hearts):

Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid; Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love thee, and worthily magnify thy holy name, Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

And of course Christians of all denominations use his Prayer of Confession as the vehicle of their heart’s outpouring:

Almighty and most merciful Father, we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts….

Cranmer was born in Nottinghamshire, began studying at Cambridge in 1503, and married upon graduating. When his wife died within a year, however, he returned to Cambridge and was ordained priest. His native brilliance and his unrelenting diligence saw him acclaimed a theologian of immense learning. In 1520 he began meeting with other Cambridge scholars whom Lutheran winds blowing across the North Sea informed and invigorated. “Little Germany”, as the group was called, had within it many who would subsequently become leaders in the English Reformation — and pay dearly for it.

Political developments as bizarre as they were dangerous soon plunged Cranmer’s life into that cauldron whose seething toxicity would torment and terminate his life. For two years Henry VIII, King of England, had wanted to divorce Catherine of Arragon on account of her “failure” to provide him with a male heir. Cranmer was consulted. He concluded that scripture, the church fathers, and church councils concurred that Henry was unlawfully married. (Catherine was a relative.) Sent to Germany to confer with Lutheran princes on the matter, Cranmer met and loved Margaret, niece of Andreas Osiander, a prominent Lutheran theologian. They married clandestinely. While as a priest Cranmer had already taken a vow of celibacy, his reading of scripture (especially his noting that apostles had married) convinced him that marriage was permitted the clergy and to be esteemed among them. For years, however, Cranmer dissembled and kept his marriage secret.

By January, 1533, Henry was desperate for a divorce, if only because the woman he wanted to marry next, Anne Boleyn, was already pregnant. Since the Archbishop had died, Henry appointed Cranmer, assuming Cranmer to be a supporter. Cranmer pronounced Henry’s marriage to Catherine void and that to Anne (they had meanwhile been married secretly) valid.

Lest we think Cranmer to be nothing more than a self-serving chameleon, it must be understood that he believed, on his reading of Romans 13 and 1 Peter 2, that the king was God’s appointed ruler. This belief would be tested repeatedly for the rest of his life. For in 1536, when Cranmer learned that Henry had been fornicating prior to his marriage with Anne Boleyn, he pronounced this marriage invalid — thus permitting Henry to marry Anne of Cleves, only then to pronounce it invalid too on the grounds that it had been entered upon unlawfully. Henry, more simply, had found Anne of Cleves personally revolting.

Yet when Henry despised those who disagreed with him and ordered their execution, Cranmer pleaded for clemency, albeit in vain. Thomas More and John Fisher (after whom residences are named on the campus of St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto) were loyal Catholics, martyred for insisting that Henry wasn’t the head of the Church. Men like More and Fisher were adamant: the pope alone was God’s vice-regent on earth, even though the English Church, now severed from Rome (1536), announced the English monarch to be its supreme head.

By now Cranmer’s theology was largely Lutheran. Henry continued to insist on non-papal Catholicism. Still, Henry found much in Cranmer that he admired and liked, even summoning Cranmer to minister to him on his deathbed.

Edward VI ascended the throne. Under him the Church of England became much more Protestant. In the freer political climate Cranmer penned the Book of Homilies, a theological compend summarizing Protestant doctrine; the Book of Common Prayer, still used by Anglicans worldwide; and the Forty-Two Articles, closest to the Reformed theology of the continent. The favourable climate turned into a reign of terror, however, as “Bloody Mary” became sovereign in 1553. The English Reformation appeared about to crumble. Cranmer was charged with treason and imprisoned but not brought to trial for 22 months. He was old, sick, weakened by incarceration, and haunted by the sight of Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, fellow-Reformers, burning excruciatingly at the stake.

Theologically learned but never psychologically resilient, and mentally depleted after almost two years of harassment, Cranmer appeared to flip-flop as he struggled to hold together his belief in the God-ordained absolutism of a Catholic ruler and his Protestant theological convictions. He signed four recantations in which he acknowledged his duty to a Catholic king. The fifth, however, found him recanting even his heart’s convictions. Not satisfied, Queen Mary wanted him killed. On the day of his execution he calmly recited the Nicene Creed, and then stunned onlookers with a ringing recantation of his recantations. Boldly he declared himself possessed of the faith of the gospel. Since his right hand had shamefully signed the earlier recantations, he thrust his right hand into the fire as the flames slowly licked up his body.

Cranmer knew the doctrine of salvation to be the heart of theology. He knew that grace-wrought salvation always implied faith. For this reason he returned repeatedly to a favourite gospel story, the penitent thief at the point of death. The unadorned faith by which the penitent had flung himself upon the crucified had been met with the assurance, “Today, with me, in paradise.”

Cranmer’s vacillations appear born of incommensurable convictions concerning crown and cross, rendered all the more complicated by a temperament that tended to see-saw in the face of severity. Still, any who fault him should ask themselves if they have tasted the terrors of the 16th century. All of us, in any case, should cry to heaven in the words of Cranmer’s collect for Evening Prayer: “Lighten our darkness, O Lord, we beseech the….”

Victor Shepherd

1494 – 1536

I: — He was not someone who made trouble for the sake of making trouble. Neither did he have a personality as prickly as a porcupine. He didn’t relish controversy, confrontation and strife. Nonetheless, he was unable to avoid it. At some point he became embroiled with many of England’s “Who’s Who” of the sixteenth century. Anne Boleyn, one of Henry VIII’s many wives, flaunted her notorious promiscuity — and Tyndale called her on it. Thomas Wolsey, cardinal of the church and sworn to celibacy, fathered at least two illegitimate children — and drew Tyndale’s fire. Thomas More, known to us through the play about him, A Man For All Seasons, advanced theological arguments which Tyndale believed to contradict the kingdom of God and imperil the salvation of men and women — and Tyndale rebutted him bravely.

William Tyndale graduated from Oxford University in 1515, and then moved over to Cambridge to pursue graduate studies, Cambridge being at that time a hotbed of Lutheran theology and Reformation ferment. As he was seized by that gospel which scripture uniquely attests, Tyndale became aware that his vocation was that of translator; he was to put into common English a translation of the bible which the public could read readily and profit from profoundly. There was enormous need for him and his vocation, as England was sunk in the most abysmal ignorance of scripture. Worse, the clergy didn’t care. Tyndale vowed that if his life were spared he would see that a farmhand knew more of scripture than a contemptuous clergyman.

But of course his life would have to be spared. The church’s hierarchy, after all, had banned any translation of scripture into the English tongue in hope of prolonging the church’s tyranny over the people. Tyndale wanted only a quiet, safe corner of England where he could begin his work. There was no such corner. He would have to leave the country. In 1524 he sailed for Germany. He would never see England again.

Soon his translation of the New Testament was under way in Hamburg. A sympathetic printer in Cologne printed the pages as fast as he cold decipher Tyndale’s handwriting. Ecclesiastical spies were everywhere, however, and in no time the printing press was raided. Tipped off ahead of time, Tyndale escaped with only what he could carry.

Next stop was Worms, the German city where Luther had debated vigorously only four years earlier, and where the German reformer had confessed, “Here I stand, I can do nothing else, God help me!” In Worms Tyndale managed to complete his New Testament translation. Six thousand copies were printed. Only two have survived, since English bishops confiscated them as fast as copies were ferreted back into England. In 1526 the bishop of London piled up the copies he had accumulated and burnt them all, the bonfire adding point to the sermon in which he had slandered Tyndale.

Worms too was a dangerous place in which to work, and in 1534 Tyndale moved to Antwerp, where English merchants living in the Belgian city told him they would protect him. (By now he had virtually completed his translation of the entire bible.) Then in May, 1535, a young Englishman in Antwerp who needed a large sum of money quickly to pay off huge gambling debts betrayed Tyndale to Belgian authorities. Immediately he was jailed in a prison modelled after the infamous Bastille of Paris. The cell was damp, dark and cold throughout the Belgian winter. He had been in prison for eighteen months when his trial began. The long list of charges was read out. The first two charges — one, that he had maintained that sinners are justified or set right with God by faith, and two, that to embrace in faith the mercy offered in the gospel was sufficient for salvation — these two charges alone indicate how bitter and blind his anti-gospel enemies were.

In August, 1536, he was found guilty and condemned as a heretic — a public humiliation aimed at breaking him psychologically. But he did not break. Another two months in prison. Then he was taken to a public square and asked to recant. So far from recanting he cried out, “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes!” Immediately the executioner strangled him, and the firewood at his feet was ignited.

His work, however, could not be choked off and burned up. His work thrived. Eventually the King of England did approve Tyndale’s translation, and by 1539 every parish church was required to have a copy on hand for parishioners to read.

Tyndale’s translation underlies the King James Version of the bible. Its importance cannot be exaggerated. A gospel-outlook came to penetrate the British nation, its people, its policies, and its literature. Indeed, the King James Version is precisely what Northrop Frye came to label “The Great Code”, the key to unlocking the treasures of English literature, without which key the would-be student can only remain mystified and ignorant. More importantly, however, the translation of the bible into the English tongue became the means whereby the gospel took hold of millions.

Tyndale’s promise was fulfilled. He was spared long enough to see the common person know more of God’s Word, God’s Truth and God’s Way than a contemptuous clergy. In the history of the English-speaking peoples Tyndale’s work is without peer.

II:(A) — Why did Tyndale do it? Was he a ranting bible-thumper akin to the ranting bible-thumpers who put you off as readily as they do me? There is no evidence that T. was anything like this. Did he then believe something bizarre about the bible, akin to what Joseph Smith claimed for the original gold plates of the Book of Mormon? Joseph Smith, the father of Mormonism, maintained that he was sitting under a tree when there descended to his feet the gold plates inscribed with the Book of Mormon. There isn’t a person in this room who believes that that, or anything like it, happened. Neither did T. believe anything like it about scripture.

Then why was he willing to make the sacrifice he did — himself? Because he knew two things. One, he knew that intimate acquaintance with Jesus Christ matters above everything else. Two, he knew that scripture is essential to our gaining such knowledge of our Lord. Concerning T. himself there was nothing fanatical, silly, or unbalanced.

Since a preacher’s work is done under the public eye as the work of few others is done under the public eye, the preacher’s weaknesses, pet peeves, idiosyncrasies, hobby horses and neuroticisms cannot be hidden. Many of you have known me for a decade. And therefore my oddities are more evident to you than they are even to me. Nevertheless, I don’t think I appear like a ranting bible-thumper. Neither, I trust, do I appear to be fanatical, silly or unbalanced; I am like T. in this respect. Like him too in another respect: I agree that intimate acquaintance with Jesus Christ matters above everything else, and that scripture is essential to this engagement.

(B) — And so scripture is read in church every Sunday, and I read it at home every day. Once in a while someone asks me why we don’t set scripture aside in public worship and read something edifying; specifically, something that is religiously edifying. To be sure, there is much that is religiously edifying and could therefore be read with profit: the prayers of Peter Marshall, a biography of Mother Teresa, a history of the Reformation, the poetry of Madeleine L’Engle. The material is inexhaustible. Yet however edifying these edifying discourses may be, they do not supplant scripture. Why not? Because the role of scripture as witness to God’s presence and activity is unique, irreplaceable, and essential.

I want you to imagine yourself a curious by-stander, one of dozens in a crowd, listening to Jesus in the days of his trampings-about in Palestine. As he speaks you find that his teaching has the “ring of truth” about it. Your scepticism and doubt are dispelled. You are inwardly compelled to say “yes” at the same time as you own it freely. Then as the Nazarene invites you to become a disciple you step ahead, ignoring snickers and sneers as well as quizzical looks and sidelong glances. As your life unfolds in the company of Jesus Christ all that you gain from his proximity goes so deep in you that you are now possessed of ironfast assurance concerning him, his truth, his promises, his way, and his future (which, of course now has everything to do with your future). He calls other people into his company; the band swells of those who are possessed of like experience, like conviction and like satisfaction.

After Jesus is put to death and then raised from the dead none of this is lost. The ascension of our Lord doesn’t mean that those who knew him so very intimately are now left with aching emptiness and devastating disillusionment. On the contrary those who kept company with him in the days of his earthly ministry still do. To say he is ascended is not to say he is absent; to say he is ascended, rather, is to say that he is now available to everyone, available on a scale that wasn’t possible in the days when he couldn’t be found in Bethany if he happened to be in Jerusalem.

Nonetheless there is one crucial difference in the manner in which Jesus Christ is known following his ascension. Following his resurrection and ascension Christian spokespersons preach in his name, always and everywhere pointing to him. They are not he. They are never confused with their Lord. They merely point to him. They are witnesses.

And then something wonderful happens. As they point to him, as they bear witness to him, God owns their witness and his Spirit invigorates it. As witness to Jesus Christ is honoured by God, Jesus himself ceases to be merely someone pointed to; now he himself comes forth and speaks, calls, persuades and commissions exactly as he did in the days of his flesh. As witness to him is honoured by God, he ceases to be merely someone spoken about, and instead becomes the speaking, acting, impelling one himself. Now people without number in Rome and Corinth and Ephesus, people who had no chance of meeting him in the days of his earthly ministry simply because he never travelled to those cities; these people now meet him and know him and walk the God-appointed way with him as surely as did those who saw him in Bethany and Jerusalem years earlier.

Let me repeat. The apostles are spokespersons for our Lord who point to him. They do not point to themselves. Like John the Baptist they point away from themselves to him. They are witnesses. And by the hidden work of God their witness to him becomes the means whereby he imparts himself afresh. Those who have been listening to the apostles, assessing what Peter, Paul and John have to say, are startled as they realize that the issue is much bigger. Far more is at stake. They now know themselves invited, summoned even, to the same intimacy, self-forgetfulness and obedience that Peter, Paul and John have known for years. In other words, the distinction between hearing about Jesus Christ and meeting him has fallen away.

But Christian spokespersons or apostles do not live for ever. As it becomes obvious that history will continue to unfold after the apostles have breathed their last breath, their testimony written is treasured. Their testimony written now functions in exactly the same way as it used to function spoken. In other words, as the apostolic testimony written is owned and invigorated by God, men and women who read it find themselves acquainted with the selfsame Jesus Christ.

The bible is not a book of biology or astronomy or chronicle-exactness. It is the prophetic-apostolic testimony to Jesus Christ. He and it are categorically distinct, never to be confused. At the same time, knowledge of it and knowledge of him can never be separated, for he has chosen to use the witness to him as the means whereby he gives himself to us, speaks to us, and convinces us of his will for us and his way with us.

If you wanted to explore the heavens, the truth and wonder of the stars, you would get yourself a telescope. You would not waste time debating whether you should have a telescope; far less would you waste time on whether the telescope should be black or brown, handsome or ugly. Above all, you would never look at the telescope hour after hour, complaining that you had looked at it for so long and still knew nothing about the stars. You would look through it. In looking through it you would demonstrate that you understood how it functioned. And your hunger for knowledge of the heavens would be met. Scripture is not something we look at. To look at it is to be left with nothing more than another book about antiquity. We are to look through it. Insofar as we look through it the nameless longing we all have will be met, just because our Lord himself will be ours.

I know why Tyndale did what he did, why he had to do it. I trust that you know too.

Victor A. Shepherd
December 01, 1991

1491 — 1556

Hundreds of them were crucified in Nagasaki, 1597. Ironically, crucifixion as a means of execution was unknown to the Japanese prior to the Jesuit missions that acquainted them with the story of Jesus. Still, the Jesuit missioners were undeterred. They returned to Japan, only to be beheaded and burnt in 1622. Two members of the order, Fathers Brebeuf and Lalemant, would suffer a similar death (1649) as missioners in southern Ontario.

Loyola’s student days left him with a reputation for little more than gambling, womanizing, brawling. Student frivolity soon gave way to near-lethal seriousness, however, when French forces assaulted the Spanish city of Pamplona. Loyola was crumbled by gunshot wounds that smashed his right leg and left gaping flesh wounds in the left. French surgeons dressed his wounds and set the leg. Nine months later his limb was found to have healed improperly. The leg was broken and re-set — all without benefit of anaesthesia. Soon a grotesque projection appeared at the site of the break. Loyola knew that such a disfigurement would disqualify him for all the knightly pursuits necessary for wooing upper-class women. (At the very least he couldn’t wear the skin-tight breeches and boots favoured by courtiers.) Whereupon the vain man agreed to a third operation despite the warning that the pain of having the projection sawn off would be indescribable.

As he recovered he cast around for the adventure-tales he had always devoured. Finding none, he put up with the two books given him: a life of Jesus and the lives of the saints. Among the latter Francis of Assisi electrified him, especially Francis’s love of singing and dancing, the fact that a major illness had been the occasion of God’s changing him from vain worldling to cheerful evangelist, his transparent life embodying his announcement of grace. All of it enthralled the pain-ridden convalescent.

Gradually Loyola’s vocation seeped into him — and then surged over him as a vision (the first of many he was to have) surrounded him with a presence, the presence, and filled him with loathing for his dissolute life. There would be no turning back. Out of his new-found peace and his reflection on the life-altering event came the seeds of his Spiritual Exercises, the small book that would thereafter lend shape and substance to the spiritual direction (discerning and magnifying the work and will of God in a fellow-Christian) for which Jesuits are known everywhere. Loyola had demonstrated his uncanny perception of the subtleties and subterfuges of humankind’s heart, as well as means to exploring, exposing and neutralising them.

His heart aflame now, Loyola knew he must also attend to his head if he were going to be of greatest Kingdom-service. He enrolled at the University of Barcelona, supported by wealthy women who recognized his vocation and wanted to assist him with it. (Their precedent was the wealthy women in Jerusalem who funded Jesus and the twelve in their apostolic endeavours. Luke 8:3)

In view of his frequent visions he was suspected of being among the “illuminists” whose private scintillations lifted them (they thought) above scripture, the tradition of the church, and even elemental morality. The Inquisition had him imprisoned until he could be tried. Four months later he was acquitted, yet told as well not to gather people publicly for instruction until he had completed another four years of study.

Invariably he attracted to himself men of extraordinary gifts and dedication. In addition his unselfconscious godliness ignited his fellows (“Ignatius” means “born of fire”) as they found him larger, greater, more impressive, and vastly more influential than anything he penned. In the words of the apostle Paul, Loyola himself was the letter the Spirit wrote.

At the age of 31 he graduated 30th in a class of 100 at the University of Paris. He would never be a theological giant. A spiritual colossus, however, his major gift was his laser-penetration of the heart of those offering themselves for the company of the Jesuits. His motivation was simply the salvation of men and women anywhere. His method included outdoor preaching to large crowds who found the Spaniard unpolished, speaking poor Italian, yet simple, direct, transparent as he fused the Word of God to the word of earth. Never one to preen himself, he worked quietly in the hospitals sweeping floors, making beds, emptying bedpans and burying the dead. (The hospitals were stretched on account of two “new” diseases, typhus and syphilis.) Disgusted at the church’s practice of licensing brothels, he struggled to rehabilitate as many prostitutes as possible, accommodating them in a house where they could be educated and prepared for marriage. Alarmed at the vulnerability of Jews in Rome, he protected them relentlessly and endured the wrath of the anti-semites.

When he was 50 the pope (after years of scepticism) officially recognized the “Society of Jesus”. Loyola was elected unanimously as its superior. As head he insisted on a four-year university course in the humanities followed by seven years of intense study in philosophy and theology, together with rigorous physical training (since Jesuits would face the severest physical challenges), and before any of this a searching assessment of candidates’ suitability.

Before he died six years later there were 240 Jesuit missioners in India, Brazil and Africa, as well as five Jesuit centres in Japan. Sixty years after his death there were 15,000 Jesuits at work throughout the world.

Protestants who are perplexed at the many visitation-visions that formed him, informed him and sustained him have yet to come to terms with the same in St.Paul: the Damascus road episode, his being “caught up to the third heaven” where he heard and saw “what may not be uttered”, his vision of the man from Macedonia requesting help, his trance in Jerusalem in which he was told to leave the city.

Nothing was dearer to Ignatius than the Jesuit order. Yet when he was asked how he would react if a hostile pope were to disband it he replied, “Two hours on my knees and I should never think of it again.”

The little Spaniard known for his laughing eyes exemplified the apostle’s word, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” (Galatians 2:20)

Victor Shepherd

1496 — 1561

Menno Simons and Ignatius Loyola (see “Heritage”, FM, Sept./Oct. ’95) would appear to disagree almost everywhere. Loyola was a priest of the Church of Rome who never wanted to be anything else; Simons renounced his Roman ordination when he despaired of seeing any reform in the Church. Loyola thought the doctrine of transubstantiation (bread and wine are changed into the body and blood of Christ by the prayer of consecration) to be worth dying for; Simons looked upon it as pagan superstition and an abomination to God. Loyola had his Jesuit followers swear a special vow of loyalty to the pope; Simons looked upon the papacy as reprehensible.

Nonetheless, in their service of that “kingdom that cannot be shaken” (Hebrews 12:28) they exemplified the oneness that Christ’s people display unknowingly. Both these spiritual giants possessed a singlemindedness concerning their vocation that religious dabblers will never grasp. Both were eager to make whatever renunciation their Lord required of them. Both knew that discipleship entails hardship. Both saw that mission is of the essence of the church. And both suffered unspeakably in hearing and heeding him whose word abides: “As the Father has sent me, even so I send you.” (John 20:21) While they would appear enemies to sixteenth-century observers, before the one whose perspective is not warped and who alone searches hearts they are brothers.

Menno Simons is the most notable leader of the “Radical” Reformation. (The “Magisterial” Reformation — led by such figures as Luther and Calvin — established Reformed congregations with the help of the “magistracy”, political rulers who supported and defended the new expression of the church in different Reformed cities of Europe. The Radicals enjoyed no such protection, in view of their antithetical stance to civil government.)

Born to dairy farmers in Witmarsum, Holland, Menno distinguished himself as a Latin scholar throughout his schooling. Equipped thereby to read scripture for himself (there were no vernacular translations at this time), he nonetheless did not become acquainted with the bible until two years after his ordination to the Roman Catholic priesthood. His seven-year pastoral ministry found him performing customary parish tasks, as well as achieving extraordinary feats of drinking and card-playing!

Little-by-little doubts as to the truth of transubstantiation dismantled the theology he had held since childhood. A German preacher lent him a book that stated believers’ baptism alone to be found in the New Testament. When a Dutch tailor, Sicke Freerks, was beheaded because he had been re-baptized as an adult, Menno wondered what could be so important about baptism. Having ransacked the teaching of the Magisterial Reformers on infant baptism, he concluded there were no grounds at all for it. Baptism, he believed now, represented everything about one’s understanding of the faith, the nature of discipleship, and the Christian community’s fate before the world.

Frustrated in his attempts at a gospel-renovation of the Church of Rome, the Spirit-infused man departed in 1536. Dutch sympathizers asked him to be their shepherd — whereupon he was re-baptized (hence the term “anabaptist”, “ana” being Greek for “again”) and re-ordained. For the next 25 years he (like Luther before him) lived with a price on his head. While Luther at least could exercise a ministry in a friendly political environment, Menno’s ministry had to be clandestine on account of political hostility. He and his people were harassed by Roman and Reformed authorities alike.

The tenaciously-held tenets of the Radical Reformers were few and stark:

– “Christian” pertains only to those possessed of personal, self-conscious salvation;

– where there is no evidence of changed life the “old” man or woman is still ascendant;

– what matters is what you do after you say “I believe”.

– where there is no aspiration to godly living there is no faith;

– the Magisterial Reformers’ insistence on predestination is to be repudiated (God does not foreordain anyone to eternal blessing or curse), and with it their notion of the bondage of the will (anyone at all may respond to the gospel-invitation).

Now Menno rehearsed his “heroes of faith. Abraham left his country and offered up his son Isaac. Moses forsook the luxuries of Egypt and led his people out of slavery. The dying thief confessed Jesus publicly and reproved his accomplice. Zacchaeus (Menno’s favourite) “walked no more in his evil ways.”

Rightly or wrongly the Mennonites maintained that the New Testament does not permit Christians to kill other humans under any circumstances. For this reason they refused to bear arms in defence of their nation — and for this they were deemed traitorous. (In World War II Mennonites accounted for 80% of Canada’s conscientious objectors.) They refused to take an oath to tell the truth in court. (Since Christians are to tell the truth all the time, why would any Christian promise to tell the truth on a particular occasion?) They insisted that baptism conveyed nothing magically to an infant but rather testified publicly to the commencement of radical discipleship. “Fat-cat” Christians whose life-style differed not a whit from that of unbelievers simply appalled them.

Menno’s followers bequeathed to the church no outstanding theology but much good devotional material and many fine hymns. Above all they bequeathed a blood-wrought reminder that Jesus doesn’t hide his scars in order to win disciples: suffering born of persecution is a mark of the church, and discipleship will always entail rigorous crossbearing.

The crossbearing they endured must never be discounted. Hounded out of Holland, Switzerland and Germany, they sought refuge in Russia — only to be savaged again and driven to the New World. In our century they have sought refuge throughout the Americas, faring much better in Canada and the U.S.A than in Central and South America where they have been victimized repeatedly.

Amazingly, Menno himself died of natural causes at age 66, badly disabled by arthritis.

When political authorities were preparing Balthasar Hubmaier, Menno’s colleague, for burning by having gunpowder and sulphur rubbed into his hair and beard, he cried out, “Oh, salt me well; salt me well!”

His words should sear upon the mind of all Christians the Master’s insistence that every believer is to be salted with fire. (Mark 9:49)

Victor Shepherd
September 1995

1497-1560

Although his body was slightly misshapen (a congenital defect) and his tongue stammered, there was nothing wrong with Melanchthon’s head. Luther assessed him as the greatest theologian ever, a man whose writings were superseded only by Holy Scripture. He was the first systematic theologian of the Reformation. (Like a spewing oilwell, Luther geysered theological riches; Melanchthon gathered, refined and distributed a finished product that lent millions untold light and warmth.) He established the first public school system in Germany. He wrote Protestantism’s basic doctrinal statement, the Augsburg Confession. (The Confession, together with his accompanying Apology, remain the theological benchmark of worldwide Lutheranism.) His commentary on Romans was the foundation of all 80-plus Romans commentaries written in the Reformation era. He was Protestantism’s chief spokesperson in virtually every colloquy for 30 years. Never ordained, he preached learnedly and winsomely Sunday-by-Sunday.

Philip Schwartzerd (the surname means “black earth”) was born in Bretten, near Frankfurt in western Germany. Having distinguished himself in highschool in Pforzheim, Philip entered Heidelberg University at 13. Following the custom of humanist scholars of his day, he was known thereafter by the Greek version of his name, Melanchthon. (When his major work was translated into Italian, the author’s name was printed as Terra Negra!) Finishing his B.A. degree in only two years, he pursued the M.A., only to be told that he was too young and too young-looking to be awarded the degree. Tuebingen University was glad to receive the brilliant scholar, and shortly conferred the M.A. on 17-year old. Immediately he began lecturing in classics. The university came alive, as did the envy of his colleagues. Ingolstadt University wooed him, but he preferred to teach at the new university in Wittenberg. Thoroughly trained in the humanities and utterly convinced of their importance — “On earth there is nothing next to the gospel more glorious than humanistic learning, that wonderful gift of God” — he insisted that all candidates for the ministry master the classical languages, as well as philosophy, logic, history and physics (the lattermost illustrating the harmony of the creation!) In no time student enrolment was expanding and Luther himself exclaiming, “God himself will despise anyone who despises this man.”

When most of Europe’s Renaissance humanists forsook Reformation theologians in 1525 following Luther’s insistence that the righteousness in which believers stand before God is a gift and not our achievement, Melanchthon remained adamant in his conviction concerning the place of a humanist education. Because we are commanded to love God with our mind, the study of the humanities was a divinely-appointed good; yet it was not without its usefulness, said Melanchthon, since apart from humanist learning, zeal for church Reform would turn shrill and even violent, while citizens’ self-government could never be maintained. In humanism Melanchthon always found educational tools that furthered the articulation of the gospel.

Four years earlier Melanchthon had published his Loci Communes (“commonplaces”), the book that ordered the theological discussions arising from and oriented to the Word of God. Within a few years 18 Latin editions had appeared, as well as several printings of a German translation. The role of the book in forming and informing the mind and heart of the newly-awakened cannot be measured. Suffice it to say, however, that it was required reading at Cambridge University; Queen Elizabeth I memorized virtually all of it in order to grasp the theological foundation of English Christendom (she also found herself enthralled with the elegance of its language); it remained the chief textbook in theology throughout Germany for the next 100 years. And yet Melanchthon wanted to be relieved of all teaching in the faculty of theology at Wittenberg in order to concentrate on languages and the classics; for without these latter disciplines, he insisted, the clergy would remain irremediably underequipped.

Melanchthon’s educational reforms may be his most enduring accomplishment. In 1524 he began establishing public schools, reorganizing universities, developing the pedagogical methods in which hundreds of teachers were instructed, and writing textbooks to be used by pupils without number. Humanist detractors taunted him, “Where Lutheranism reigns, knowledge shrivels.” He contradicted them relentlessly. More learned than even his humanist opponents, he adopted the best of the Renaissance and forged a new era in German education. Recognizing that the universities were the fountainhead of public education inasmuch as teachers were trained in them, he was instrumental in founding new universities in Koenigsberg, Jena, and Marburg; he wholly revised the curricula at Cologne, Tuebingen, Leipzig and Heidelberg; he indirectly reformed Rostock and Frankfurt-on-the-Oder. His influence in Canadian education is inestimable: when Egerton Ryerson, the architect of public education in Ontario, was looking for help in creating a tax-supported system that delivered quality education regardless of the student’s financial situation or denominational affiliation, he looked to Melanchthon’s Germany.

While Melanchthon’s work-day began at 2:00 a.m., ended at 9:00 p.m., and was crammed with research, writing, lecturing and travel, his domestic difficulties were always wearing. His son George died at age two. When his sister-in-law and her husband died suddenly, the Melanchthons adopted the bereft children. Years later his daughter Anna died at 25, leaving four children and a poet-husband who seemed unable even to fend for himself. Once again Philip and Katherine expanded their family to include five more. Ten years later Katherine died. Now Philip, 60 years old, reflected, “Passionate and sorrowful yearning for a deceased wife is not effaced in the old man as it may be in the younger.” Shortly he fell ill himself. On April 9, 1560, he staggered to the classroom for the last time, able to lecture for fifteen minutes only. Still, he spoke to the students about the atonement, the reconciliation with God wrought on the cross for us all. Ten days later he slipped away quietly. It was a fitting parting for the godly, humanist scholar and theologian who had remarked years earlier, “I ask not to live happily but righteously and Christ-like.”

Victor Shepherd
October 1997

1515 – 1582

She was born Teresa Sanchez y Cepeda, a name whose aristocratic ring points to her father’s vast wealth and social privilege. Rich enough to buy his shirt-cuffs and collars in Paris, he was yet denied admission to the most elite levels of society. For in 16th century Spain, “honour” was everything, and Teresa’s grandfather had been Jewish. (Actually her grandfather had “converted” under the arm-twisting of the Inquisition.)

The town of Avila knew Teresa to be beautiful, an able chess-player, an accomplished horsewoman, and a fine dancer. Her teenage days in a convent-school left her thinking that she had been driven into a box that offered no escape. After all, marriage appeared loathsome in that it entailed, in 16th century Spain, a wife’s servile submission to a tyrant-husband. Convent life, on the other hand, required its own form of submission. Her independent spirit raged at the dilemma. She was helped past it through reading the letters of Jerome, a theologian and spiritual guide from the Patristic era. Her feistiness now tempered by her vocation, she entered the Carmelite Convent of the Incarnation. She was 21 years old.

To Teresa’s surprise she relished convent life, never missing the clutter of former luxuries. Nevertheless, as her vocation intensified day by day, she was puzzled and then disquieted at a contemplative order that belittled protracted private prayer, content as it was to have outer liturgical formalities disguise inner spiritual impoverishment. Seeking out the priest who had provided spiritual assistance to her dying father, he urged her to attend Holy Communion at least twice monthly and to persist in concentrated mental prayer. Gradually her inner aridity gave way to a spiritual fecundity that was to became famous the world over.

Helped by Augustine’s Confessions, Teresa faced the horror of her sin-corrupted heart. In the midst of an unpromising service of rote-worship she beheld Christ wounded for her. “So great was my distress when I thought how ill I had repaid Him for those wounds”, she blurted through her tears, “that I felt as if my heart was breaking, and I threw myself down beside him.” She was 40 years old.

At this point she began to undergo mystical visions and raptures. Protestants tend to find all of this incomprehensible. Alas! What, then, are we to make of Paul’s Damascus Road episode when the vision and locution arrested and redirected the man whose doctrine Protestants cherish –forgetting, as we do, that his doctrine arose only as a result of his experience? Plainly he thought that his telling the Corinthians of being “caught up” and hearing “things that cannot be told, which man may not utter” (2 Cor. 12:3-4) would help correct the Christians there. How can Protestants deny the mysticism of Isaiah’s experience in the temple amidst incense-fumes that he saw to be nothing less than the train of God’s royal robe, even as he heard and beheld what left him convinced he was going to perish in the collision between his uncleanness and God’s purity? What do Protestants make of God’s “still, small voice” that Elijah heard more clearly than he heard an earthquake? of God’s lion-roar that caused Amos to roar in turn? And concerning our denominational foreparents, what are we to make of Charles Wesley’s mysticism when he writes of being “drowned” in God, “lost” in His oceanic “immensity”, “plunged” so deeply into God’s depths as never to find his way out (or even want to)? Before we snicker at Teresa’s finding relief from spiritual assault by flinging holy water at the devil we should recall Luther’s relief upon hurling the inkpot!

In any era triflers resent those who have abandoned themselves to God and dwell where the uncommitted gain no entry. Not surprisingly, then, the spiritual dabblers who occupied the pulpits of Avila reviled Teresa as deluded herself and dangerous to others.

Undeflected, she knew God had summoned her to reform an order long since riddled with frivolity, shallowness, corruption, materialistic preoccupation; in her words, “the great evils that beset the church.” She began her momentous task with only four sisters. They found a mud and stone house in Avila, so small and frail, said Teresa wryly, that “it wouldn’t make much noise when it fell on Judgement Day’’ – even as the five women exulted, dancing to flute and tambourine.

The reformers proceeded on several fronts: frequent attendance at the Lord’s Supper, renewed attention to spiritual direction, immersion in the works of the spiritual masters, discipline to fend off cavalier self-indulgence.

Her influence rippled throughout Spain. A Jesuit at Salamanca, famous for its superb university that trained legions of intellectual, political and ecclesiastical leaders, pleaded with her to establish a reformed house there. As the reform movement spread, embarrassed church authorities scrabbled for any pretext to sue, ceaselessly multiplying lawsuits against her.

At age 60 she met the man who would be the closest friend she ever had. He was half her age, a Jesuit, a brilliant graduate of Alcala (the other famous university in Spain.) He became her soul-mate, ending the isolation that mystical vivedness had forced upon her. Such a friendship, given but once in a lifetime, was slandered as malicious gossip exploded. Undeterred, she knew that the deeper the Christian sinks into God, the more urgently a human soul-mate is needed.

The church’s persecution reached its worst from 1576-1580. Imprisoned for one year at Toledo and then released, she was welcomed among sisters whom church authorities promptly excommunicated. Only the intervention of King Phillip – that is, only the intervention of civil authority – fended off the church’s injustice and reinstated the nuns. Nothing daunted her. Upon departing a convent where community-life had degenerated into endless idle amusement, she denounced it: “I find a puerility about that house which is intolerable.”

Ill-health shortly overtook Teresa. “We can die, but we cannot be conquered”, she reminded those who shared her zeal. Two years later she slipped away, having told her readers that discerning God’s will and desiring to do it above all else was everything. The prayerbook she was using at her death contained her “bookmark”, the outpouring of her own heart:

Let nothing disturb you,
Let nothing frighten you,
All things pass away:
God never changes.
Patience obtains all things.
He who has God
Finds he lacks nothing;
God alone suffices.

As recently as 1969 the Roman Catholic Church pronounced her Doctoris Ecclesiae, a teacher whom Catholics and Protestants alike should hear and heed. Her books have been translated into scores of languages. Apart from Cervantes’ Don Quixote, her works are the most widely read today of any Spanish author.

Victor Shepherd
June 1998

1509 – 1564

The list of ailments from which Calvin suffered is enough to make a person wince: kidney stones, nephritis, hemorrhoids, migraine headaches, chronic pulmonary tuberculosis, intestinal parasites, spastic colon. Theodore Beza, his successor in Geneva, wrote of him, “A brave spirit was the master of a feeble body.” Nevertheless, Calvin persevered throughout his suffering, working in the last, most difficult years, preaching until eight days before his death. Undeflectable in his vocation, he finally had to be carried into the pulpit in Geneva in a chair. A remark in the dedication to his Commentary of II Thessalonians says it all: “My ministry . . . is dearer to me than life.”

Jean Cauvin (his name was later latinized to “Calvinus,” then abbreviated to “Calvin”) was born in the town of Noyon, France, fifty miles northeast of Paris. At age eleven he left home for the capital city, where he enrolled at the Collège de la Marche. Here he began his study of Latin (the language of every educated person in the sixteenth century), mastering the language by memorizing the rules in verse – a total of 2645 lines! Advancing to the Collège Montaigu, he was exposed to the gospel-oriented theology of the German Reformers. His father began to think better of training his son for the priesthood and sent him to the Faculty of Law at the University of Orléans. The university conferred its Doctor of Laws degree upon him at age twenty-three. Yet Calvin’s first love was not for the law but for the languages and literature of antiquity. He was becoming a classical humanist scholar. (All of the major Reformers were first trained as humanists, the sole exception being Martin Luther.) His first published work, Commentary of Seneca, was an exploration of political ethics.

Then in 1534 something happened to turn the humanist scholar into a theologian, preacher and pastor. Always disinclined to self-advertisement or exhibitionism, Calvin remained reticent about the derails of his conversion. All we know is the little he tells us in the preface to his Commentary on the Psalms: “God subdued me an made me teachable.”

From this point on Calvin openly associated with men whose theology was suspect. Suspicion quickly hardened into persecution. Two hundred were arrested in one month; in the next three months twenty were executed. The king promulgated a decree against “Lutheranism.” Calvin fed to Basel, Switzerland.

Once in Basel Calvin began his major work, the Institutes of the Christian Religion. The first edition appeared in 1536, and it was steadily expanded until the final edition of 1559. Designed as a primer for Reformed theology students, it became the most significant writing of the Reformation era. Its influence was incalculable. While that influence was perhaps most visible in Scotland and the Netherlands, the sway of the Institutes is evident in many different contexts and countries: the Anglican prayer book, seventeenth-century Puritanism, New England Congregationalism, and the theology of the Eighteenth-Century Awakening. (John Wesley said there was “but a hair’s breath” between him and Calvin.)

Calvin left Basel for Italy, only to be hounded back into Switzerland. In 1537 he was appointed pastor of one of Geneva’s churches. Although he was the leading thinker of the Reformation and its most prolific writer, he was not a university recluse who was guaranteed solitude for the purpose of research and writing. Rather, he was a pastor who had to preach (every day!), visit the ill, bury the dead, adjudicate congregational disputes and counsel parishioners who had sinned notoriously.

A Frenchman living in Switzerland, Calvin was suspected of being a spy in the service of the French government. Genevan mobs demonstrated outside his house, firing guns and threatening to drown him in the river. City officials allowed him three days to leave. He went to Strasbourg (at this time not part of France), the chief city of refuge for persecuted Protestants form France. Even though the city was largely German-speaking and his congregation small, Calvin was happy here, not least because it was in Strasbourg that he met and married his wife, Idelette de Bure.

Now devoid of the leadership of the man it had expelled, Geneva degenerated rapidly. The city council urged him to return. He declined, writing to a friend, “It would have been far preferable to perish once and for all than to be tormented in that place or torture.” Yet return he did, and spent the rest of his life in the Swiss city.

Calvin’s output was immense. In addition to the Institutes (1700 pages) he wrote commentaries on almost all the books of the Bible: many tracts and treatises discussing important theological controversies; hundreds of sermons (342 on Isaiah alone!); and numerous letters. Every Christian, Calvin insisted, must possess a measure of doctrinal sophistication or be at the mercy of every theological ill-wind. Pastors in particular must be provided with the tools needed for life-long study in service of the Word of God.

In the course of his vast writing he imparted that shape to the French language which it bears to this day, doing for the French language what Shakespeare did for English.

Calvin penned his last letter to his dearest friend, Guillaume Farel, only days before he died: “It is enough that I live and die for Christ, who is to all his followers a gain both in life and in death.” His grave is unmarked. Yet his imprint – on such diverse subjects as art, economics and politics – is indelible. Still, it is as the theologian of the refugee that Calvin shines preeminently. And it is here that he will once again sustain so many people in present-day denominations who have learned what it feels like to be exiled.

Victor Shepherd

c. 1513 — 1572

“God is my witness, that I never preached Christ Jesus in contempt of any man”, declared Knox at the height of his struggle against all manner of tyranny and corruption. He had been accused of disdaining opponents when in fact he simply feared none of them. He could have been afraid. When Knox was only fifteen Patrick Hamilton, a young scholar newly enthralled by Luther, had been burned at the stake. Knox would never forget.

John was born in a village a few miles outside Edinburgh. Rough-hewn all his life, he never apologized for his rustic origins even as providence pushed him among the high-born of his era. He loathed the intrigues of the courts, despising their scheming, their manipulations and their influence-trading; his unself-conscious transparency would never be able to endure cultivated murkiness in others.

Knox’s early life unfolded in a church whose corruption and avarice were the worst in Christendom. (In Scotland the church had accumulated half of the country’s wealth.) Upon leaving St. Andrew’s University Knox was ordained priest, then assigned not to a parish but to the legal department of the ecclesiastical bureaucracy. Gradually he lost interest in the abstract disputes of many mediaeval thinkers at the same time as he found himself electrified by the Church Fathers. Augustine and Jerome in particular introduced him to the grand themes of scripture: grace, faith, sin, justification, providence. For the rest of his life his favourite passage would be John 17 where Jesus, on the eve of his betrayal and death, prays for those the Father has given him; and prays specifically that they will be sustained throughout the torments soon to be visited on them — as on godly people of any era.

Soon Knox was preaching in the fearless style that would endear him to his followers for ever. On Easter, 1547, he preached at St. Andrew’s castle, flaying the garrison there for its degradation — and was startled at being called as the congregation’s pastor!

But it was not to last long. Two months later twenty-one French galleys bombarded the castle furiously. Already weakened by plague, the garrison surrendered. The men — Knox included — were chained to rowing benches and whipped to greater exertion by day; by night they huddled under the benches, wolfing down bean porridge and horsemeat. The king of France, assuming he could now use Scotland as a base for attacking England, assumed as well that a patriot and leader like Knox would help him do this. He released the Scot after nineteen months of agony.

The Frenchman had miscalculated; the Scot was anything but anti-English. Soon Knox was in England preaching to the thriving congregation he had gathered. Here the English Reformers drew on his gifts in theology and liturgy, incorporating his work in the Anglican prayerbook.

Then Mary I succeeded the late Edward VI. In four years “Bloody” Mary would engineer the horrible deaths of three hundred men and women. Knox had to leave England immediately. He moved to Geneva, and daily gained from his friend John Calvin the theological equipment he had to have for the final spiritual assault on his homeland.

His sojourns in Geneva were the happiest periods of his life. He preached three times per week to an English congregation, was given long hours for study, immersed himself in Hebrew and Greek. At the same time he knew that Geneva was Gospel-infused while Edinburgh was not. When three Scottish nobles wrote him, pleading with him to return, he could not decline.

Before leaving Geneva for the last time he published his tract, The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. The “regiment” consisted of two: “Bloody” Mary, who had done her utmost to bury his work in England, and Scotland’s Mary of Guise, soon to give way to her daughter, Mary Queen of Scots. The “Blast” was no firecracker. The penalty for possessing a copy of it, or for failing to destroy a copy which found its way into one’s hands, was death.

Fearing that Mary of Guise had heartlessly sacrificed Scotland to France (or at least had tried to), the Scottish nobles deposed her. With Mary out of the way the Reformers’ situation appeared to improve. Knox and his fellow-strugglers now had the breathing space required to write the Scots Confession of Faith. Alongside it provisions were made for each pastor in the Kirk to be paid a stipend, large enough to support spouse and children and render unnecessary the distraction of a second job. All of Scotland was to be divided into self-supporting parishes, with a parish-supported school in each. Here there was bred the Scots’ reputation for their veneration of education, their repugnance at tyranny, their insistence on democracy, and their love of literature.

Mary Queen of Scots was soon monarch. She brought Knox to trial, laughing all the while. “Do you know what I am laughing at?”, she asked the nobles around her. “That man once made me weep…. I will see if I can make him weep.” She could not. When she asked the nobles to render a verdict they acquitted Knox — unanimously! Enraged, she demanded another vote. The result was identical.

Mary was soon weeping herself. Her husband having been murdered, she quickly married the murderer! Scottish nobles, disgusted now, seized her and carried her to Edinburgh while crowds in the streets shouted, “Burn the whore!” Elizabeth I, never one to suffer fools, had her beheaded.

Knox’s remaining years were difficult. Slander surrounded him. He was said to have bedded his mother-in-law and his stepmother as well. The slander continued for fifty years, becoming increasingly ridiculous; it was said that he committed incest, when the date of the supposed deed was twenty years after Knox had died.

The thundering voice could only whisper now. As death moved closer he had his wife read and re-read his favourite scripture passages, always concluding with John 17, “the place where I cast my first anchor.” At the grave a mourner remarked, “Here lies one who neither flattered nor feared any flesh.”

Victor Shepherd

                1536 – 1587                              1534 – 1583

The two young men (only 26 and 28 years old respectively) couldn’t have guessed that their Heidelberg Catechism, designed for teenagers, would find adult readers annually buying more than 100,000 books that discuss the crown jewel of the shorter Reformation writings. Written in German, within 25 years it would be translated into Dutch, Latin, Hebrew, Greek, French, Italian, Polish, English, Lithuanian, Czech and Rumanian. At present it can be read in 30 languages. Plainly the Catechism is cherished inasmuch as it continues to fortify Christians who find themselves beleaguered in any way for any reason.

Four hundred and fifty-three years after its publication (1563), Christ’s persecuted still find in it the substance their head requires and the stiffening their heart craves if they are going to stand firm in their struggle against all principalities and powers. Designed to be memorized, the Catechism has readily sunk to the bottom of the minds of young people only to effervesce years later when the assaults and seductions of adult life are threatening to bend them and break them. “What is your only comfort in life and in death?”, Question #1 asks without apology. Then it provides an answer that millions have found not only fathomlessly profound but also endlessly moving: “My only comfort is that I am not my own but belong – body and soul, in life and in death – to my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ….”

The comfort spoken of here is more than the “warm fuzzy” of religious sentimentality. Con is Latin for “with”; fortis for “strength.” This “comfort” consoles only because it first strengthens Christ’s people in the face of pressures that will otherwise find them capitulating and collapsing.

The second question is similarly pithy and pertinent: “What must you know to live and die in the joy of this comfort?” Answer #2: “Three things: first, how great my sin and misery are; second, how I am set free of all my sins and misery; three, how I am to thank God for such deliverance.” The first section is the shortest and the second (the setting-forth of our salvation) is the longest, while the third section (Christian obedience or the life of discipleship) has the simple yet grand title, “Thankfulness.” In other words the whole of the Christian life is a response neither resented nor grudged but rather rendered freely, joyfully, spontaneously, thankfully.

Caspar Olevianus was born in the city of Treves on the border of Luxembourg. His father, Gerhard von der Olewig, headed the baker’s guild of the city. The family was well-to-do and could afford a fine education for its gifted son. Graduating from a Roman Catholic monastery school, Olevianus was haunted for years by the parting words of a godly priest: “My boy, never forget that God’s people in all ages have found their comfort in the atoning life and sacrifice of Jesus Christ.”

A age 14 Olevianus moved to Paris to study law. Startled at his brush with death when several drunken fellow-students drowned in a boating mishap, he allied himself with French Protestant students whose spiritual depth and searching friendship soon won him to the Reformation. Afire now with the gospel, he finished law school and began devouring the theology of the Reformers. His insatiable appetite took him to the classrooms of Peter Martyr in Zurich, Theodore Beza in Lausanne, and John Calvin in Geneva.

Upon returning to Treves, Olevianus forthrightly announced the gospel and denounced the “holy coat” of Joseph, together with similar superstitions that impeded Word-quickened faith. And just as quickly city authorities imprisoned him. A wealthy benefactor was allowed to ransom him on condition that he leave the city permanently. Heidelberg immediately welcomed him, installing him as pastor and principal of the university’s faculty of theology. In the spring of 1562 he, along with Ursinus, was asked to write a catechism instructing young people in the faith.

Zacharias Baer was born in Breslau (today a city in Poland.) Like all young humanist scholars of that era he gave himself a Latin name (ursus, “bear”; olevianus, “wrestling school”) in order to identify himself with the learning of antiquity. He enrolled at Wittenberg University, boarding for the next seven years with Melanchthon, Luther’s erudite successor. Melanchthon admired the young man for his intellectual gifts and his spiritual maturity, commending him to mentors throughout Europe. Subsequently Ursinus too studied under Reformation giants at Strasbourg, Basel, Lausanne and Geneva. Sojourns in Lyons and Orleans gave him expertise in Hebrew. Returning to Breslau he published a pamphlet on the sacraments. Opponents’ vitriolic reaction succeeded in driving him out of the city. Eventually he was brought to Heidelberg as professor of theology.

Ursinus and Olevianus never disdained the work of their predecessors. For this reason they began writing their catechism only after they had researched all the instructional material they could procure. By 1563 they had fulfilled their commission, and two copies, in Latin and German, were sent to Heinrich Bullinger in Zurich, accompanied by the note, “It is obvious how much we owe to you and to the Swiss reformers. We have drawn not from one but from many sources. To God alone be glory.”

When political power changed hands in Heidelberg both men were expelled. Olevianus moved to Herborn where he gave himself to practical church reforms, visiting congregations, administering discipline, and ordering church life. Ursinus fled to Neustadt where his health soon broke and his wife, Margaretha Troutwein, nursed him as his life dribbled away. Neither man saw old age. Yet both will be remembered throughout Christendom for their 129 questions and answers. They were alike devout, brilliant, dedicated and diligent. Possessed of immense affection for students and parishioners, they were also relentlessly industrious, always “making most of the time” (Colossians 4:4) – as the motto above Ursinus’s desk indicated:

Friend, who comest here to stay,
Be brief, or go away I pray,
Or help me while I work today.

Victor Shepherd
September 1998

1560-1609

Arminius may never have had a tranquil day in his life. He was born in the Dutch town of Oudewater the year his father died. His mother and siblings perished there fifteen years later when Spanish forces massacred its inhabitants.

Cared for and subsidized by relatives, Armininus studied at the University of Leiden, gaining recognition as a star in the theological firmament. Church officials, however, deemed the twenty-one year old, aspiring pastor too young for the office.

Undeterred, Arminius continued his education in Geneva, speaking daily with Theodore Beza, Calvin’s successor in the Reformation city. By rearranging Calvin’s emphases Beza largely retained the content of Calvin’s theology while largely distorting its spirit. Whereas Calvin, for instance, had spoken of the grandeur of God and the majesty of God but not of the “sovereignty” of God, Beza thrust into the centre of his thought a sovereignty that seemed indistinguishable from the arbitrary assertion of naked power. And where Calvin had concentrated on our life in Christ, with predestination merely the means whereby sin-deadened people come to be “in Christ”, Beza made predestination a controlling principle.

Arminius was appointed pastor in Amsterdam upon returning from further studies in Italy. The Sunday the twenty-eight year old began his ministry there he mounted the pulpit with his cap on his head — the cap being the symbol of freedom — and removed it only when he invoked God at the commencement of the service. He knew that those whom the Son makes free submit to no one except the One who has restored their freedom. The people of the city relished his theology, since it reflected the convictions of Dutch people whose thinking concerning the gospel had fermented quietly for at least two centuries.

Since it was a reformed pastor’s custom to preach through a book of the bible, Arminius began with Romans. Three years later he was up to chapter 7. Controversy erupted when he maintained that the “wretched man” spoken of there was the pre-Christian person, not the regenerate believer, as Beza insisted. When his theological enemies pronounced him heterodox, Arminius replied, “I believe that our salvation rests on Christ alone and that we obtain faith for the forgiveness of sins and the recovering of life only through the grace of the Holy Spirit.” Now they accused him of “Pelagianism”, the heretical notion that the Fall has affected humankind so slightly that we can will ourselves, unaided, into fellowship with God. The charge of Socinianism (unitarianism) followed. Arminius countered that he had always affirmed the deity of the Son.

Concerning Romans 7 Arminius maintained:

His position with respect to the “wretched man” is a viewpoint that has been defended throughout the church’s history and has never been deemed heretical;

No heresy, including Pelagianism, can be derived from it;

The viewpoint of modern theologians (e.g., Beza) that Romans 7 speaks of the Christian is an opinion none of the church fathers held, including Augustine, the church father dearest to the Calvinists;

To say that Romans 7 describes the Christian is to slight the grace of God (grace appears impotent in the face of sin) and to foster wanton behaviour (even the regenerate can’t help doing the evil they don’t want to do.)

In all of this Arminius maintained, with the universal church, that free will is found only in the regenerate, in those whom God has freed to know and obey him. Unbelievers remain in bondage to sin.

A few months later Arminius was expounding Romans 9. An opponent accused him of preaching that unrepentant sinners are condemned only on account of their sin. In other words, they aren’t condemned on account of a hidden decree of God enacted before they were born and therefore before they could have sinned. The same fellow denounced him for declaring that while good works don’t merit God’s pardon, the pardoned should do all the good they can.

In his detailed examination and closely reasoned exposition of Romans 9, Arminius articulated a doctrine of grace that recognizes the humanness of the beneficiaries of grace and that honours them as human agents, God’s covenant-partners made in his image. Arminius protested any notion that even sinful humans are entities like sticks and stones to be manipulated mechanically. Concerning Romans 9 he upheld the following:

The question that his opponents said predestination answered, namely, “Why do some individuals believe when others don’t?”, is neither asked nor answered in the chapter;

Romans 9 doesn’t discuss individuals but rather classes of people: those who affirm righteousness by faith (i.e., through intimacy with the Righteous “elder brother”), and those who seek to merit God’s recognition. God “predestines” to salvation all who believe in Jesus Christ.

To speak of the predestination of individuals to eternal blessing or curse before they have been created (and therefore before they could have sinned) is to render God arbitrary, even monstrous;

To postulate both a hidden and a revealed will in God is to falsify the New Testament’s insistence that Jesus Christ is God’s entire will now revealed.

God’s command and God’s promise are co-extensive. God doesn’t command all to believe while visiting only some with faith-quickening mercy.

Even as the controversy raged in Amsterdam, the University of Leiden, a centre of Renaissance Humanism and the hub of Dutch language and culture, recognized Arminius’ brilliance, installing him as rector (president) in 1603.

Among the intellectually exhilarating now, he wasn’t among the theologically sympathetic. Within a year he was dragged into a public dispute on predestination. Again he stated and defended his position, having refined it even more profoundly. Celebrated in the university, Arminius was savaged in the church by ultra-Calvinist refugees from France whose spirit was alien to the Christian convictions native to Holland. Opposition to him approached hysteria. Slanderous foes, knowing of his student-trip to Italy, lied that he had kissed the pope’s slipper and was “infected” by the Jesuits.

Relief came only as the pulmonary tuberculosis that had left him coughing for months galloped ahead. He died surrounded by his wife Lijsbet and his nine surviving children, the youngest only thirteen months. Lijsbet would live on the clergy-widow’s pension that grateful Amsterdam officials had promised her years earlier the day the family had moved to Leiden.

Admittedly, Arminius had not spoken the last word on either Romans 7 or 9 (or on the notion that philosophy is the necessary foundation to theology.) Still, he never deserved the abuse heaped on him. He had said he wanted only “to inquire with all earnestness in the Holy Scriptures for divine truth…for the purpose of winning some souls to Christ, that I might be a sweet savour to him.”

Victor Shepherd
August 2000

1616–1683

He came by it honestly. His father (the last of 15 children, all sons) longed so to see a corrupt church reformed that his zeal was labelled “Puritan”, the badge that son John would wear for decades and adorn with his gifts.

Owen was born in the village of Stadham, Oxfordshire, to a thoughtful couple who “home-schooled” their precocious youngster before sending him on to high school and thence, at age 12, to Oxford. At the university Owen applied himself to mathematics and philosophy, with time allowed for music lessons as well. (Years later, when he was chief administrative officer of Oxford, he appointed his flute-instructor as professor of music.)

While Owen immersed himself in his studies (permitting himself no more than four hours sleep per night), a campus figure loomed menacingly before him whose approach set the tone for so much of what Owen would have to contend with for the rest of his life. Archbishop Laud, chancellor of Oxford and implacable foe of all that the English Reformers had initiated; Laud decided to rid the university of all who wouldn’t assent to his anti-gospel agenda. Deliberately he enacted religious innovations that he knew reform-minded students could never assent to, and then used their non-assent as a pretext for expelling them. Those who were slow to leave he “encouraged” by means of his infamous “Star Chamber” and “High Commission”. The Commission dragooned suspects before the London Chamber, the venue for ruthless, arbitrary, arm-twisting interrogation without appeal. Laud watched a heartbroken Owen stumble out of the university where he had spent nine glorious years wedded to the love of his life: learning.

Meanwhile Laud’s master, King Charles I, was outraging millions with his contempt for parliament and his illicit forays into money-raising. Civil war irrupted.

In the midst of it all a spiritually-disoriented young man trudged miles to a chapel to hear its celebrated preacher. The fellow was absent that day. The substitute preacher announced the text, “Why are you afraid, O men of little faith?” (Matthew 8:26). By sermon’s end Owen knew the peace which does pass understanding since it is given in the midst of turbulence within and without. The Lord whom he had spent years fleeing but couldn’t escape had finally freed him by taking him captive. Thereafter Owen persistently sought — but never found — the name of the man whose message had been the lens focusing the light of God to the point of penetration.

Soon Owen was cheerfully at work as a pastor and diligently at work as a scholar-writer as the first of 27 dense tomes emerged from the point of his pen.

January, 1649, saw the trial and execution of Charles I for treason, tyranny and murder. Summoned to preach to parliament in April, Owen expounded “On the Shaking of Heaven and Earth”. (Hebrews 12:27) Here he caught the eye of Oliver Cromwell, leader of the parliamentary forces in the civil war. Cromwell discerned in Owen not merely the superb scholar but also the consummate administrator. In no time Owen was vice-chancellor of Oxford University, the position that managed all university affairs. Executive skill was needed here as academic rigour had declined, many member-colleges had closed, others were quartering soldiers and supplies, and money was scarce; in fact the university was colossally in debt. Owen cut short the petulant self-pity of college heads as he declared, “…groans become not grave and honourable men. It is the part of an undaunted mind boldly to bear up under a heavy burden.” Soon the university rebounded, internationally-acclaimed professors were appointed, needy students were subsidized, and one penniless fellow who wrote Owen in brilliant Latin was hired as the household’s tutor! In it all Owen sat on Cromwell’s committees, wrote theology the world will never be without, and even became a member of parliament.

When a parliamentary majority proposed making Cromwell king, Owen wrote the brief that dispelled the proposal. Angry now, Cromwell appointed his son, Richard, as Chancellor of the university. In six weeks Richard had removed Owen. With no trace of bitterness but only much magnanimity Owen moved to a village congregation.

In 1660, following Cromwell’s death, the monarchy was restored. Once again Puritans were proscribed. An Act made it illegal for more than five Puritans to meet in their own place of worship. Owen’s pulpit disappeared and his flock scattered. In 1662 another Act (it gave rise to “The Great Ejection”) rendered 2000 Puritan pastors homeless and penniless. They travelled by night and preached by day to handfuls of the faithful in barns and fields. Another Act rewarded informers for betraying them.

Prison populations were swelling and emigrant ships “sardining” their human cargo when the plague settled on London. The clergy of the Established Church fled to avoid infection, while Puritan ministers stepped forward self-forgetfully to succour the dying and the surviving. In the large cities newly-formed congregations cherished their newly-found pastors — as yet another Act outlawed any Puritan pastor who was found within five miles of a city or within five miles of any place he had preached in previously. Relegated now to remote rural areas, they returned to London when “The Great Fire” consumed church buildings that disappeared as quickly as large, Puritan-built, wooden tabernacles arose. Owen himself returned to London and, with upheavals everywhere, penned his most trenchant diagnostic tool of the human heart, Sin and Temptation. Steadfast, he remained in London even as parliament re-endorsed the earlier Acts outlawing Puritans.

The day before he died Owen wrote, “I am leaving the ship of the church in a storm; but whilst the great Pilot is in it, the loss of a poor under-rower will be inconsiderable.”

Others knew better. The Sunday following Owen’s death his successor, Rev. David Clarkson, lamented, “We have had a light in this candlestick. We did not sufficiently value it.”

Do we? The light that streamed from the Puritans was — and is — nothing less than invaluable.

Victor Shepherd
April 1997

c. 1620 — 1686

Two decades ago my mother gave me Watson’s A Body of Divinity as a birthday gift. The book introduced me to the Puritan genius: mind and heart — the dialogue between theological learning and spiritual experience. Soon I had moved from Watson’s many volumes to the works of other Puritans, such as Richard Baxter, John Owen and Jonathan Edwards. I was awed at the prodigious output of men who preached several times each week, called on every family in the congregation (at which time they reviewed the family’s knowledge of scripture and catechism), and still managed to write thousands of pages by candlelight and oil lamp.

While the 16th Century Protestant Reformers knew they had to forge doctrine that did justice to the truth and reality of God’s search-and-rescue mission in Jesus Christ, the 17th Century Puritans knew the doctrine they had inherited was sound. Instead they were charged with applying doctrine; they made sin-infected hearts writhe under the scalpel of the gospel even as the same hearts, relieved of “pollution”, began to be whole.

Impressed by their ability and industry, I was overwhelmed by their capacity for suffering. The Church of England, enforcing ecclesiastical uniformity as a tool of political unity, persecuted them ruthlessly. In “The Great Ejection” of 1662 thousands of Puritan clergy were expelled from pulpit and manse, their families reduced to poverty as they scrabbled to feed their children. These men slept in barns, crept through fields, preached to clandestine congregations hastily assembled in a remote meadow or clump of trees before informers could betray them.

Thomas Watson was a Puritan giant. Surprisingly, then, his birthdate remains unknown. It is known, however, that he studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge University. One hundred years earlier Cambridge University had been the site of electrifying gatherings of divinity students whom “Lutheran” ideas had newly seized and who would shortly find themselves leaders and martyrs in the English Reformation. Emmanuel College had long cherished its reputation as the “nursery” of those for whom the gospel was dearer than life.

Following his studies, Watson was ordained a Church of England clergyman and appointed to a large congregation in London. Soon he spoke and wrote in the typically Puritan idiom: pointed, poignant, pithy, and therefore always memorable. Ponder “The eye is made both for seeing and for weeping. Sin must first be seen before it can be wept for.” To read this sentence but once is never to forget it. Little wonder, then, that those who read others like it find their imagination lit up for the rest of their lives. “Such as will not weep with Peter shall weep like Judas.” Plainly either we must come to “godly grief” (2 Cor. 7:10), owning our inexcusable sin, or we are going to lament our having forfeited the One who could have been our Saviour. Watson’s condensation, “Such as will not weep…” is as haunting as it is indelible.

Sixteen years after he had begun his work in London, the government passed the Act of Uniformity. Since this Act mandated that all pronouncements and practices of the state church be adhered to (however unscriptural), many aspects of it contradicted Puritan convictions. Unable to endorse the Act, Watson had nevertheless always been loyal to the crown. Unlike virtually all his fellow-Puritans, he had protested the execution of King Charles I; and unlike them too he had supported Charles II. There was nothing seditious about him. Still, he refused to countenance a diluted gospel and a stifled conscience. His congregation, distressed at his eviction, listened in anguish to his farewell sermon from 2 Corinthians 7:1: “Having therefore these promises, dearly beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God.” Soon he too was preaching as often as his outlaw existence permitted. A few years later the government’s Act of Indulgence rescinded the strictures of the Act of Uniformity, and Watson “surfaced” in London where he ministered once more for several years, until he was found dead on his knees.

While Watson had many peers as a “heart specialist”, he had no betters. Exquisitely gifted with laser-like penetration of our innermost self, he could pierce layer after layer of self-deception, only to conclude with indisputable wisdom: “Christ is never loved till sin be loathed.” “Trust not in a passionate resolution; it is raised in a storm and will die in a calm.”

Were critics to pronounce Watson “negative” or “pessimistic” he would remind them that all real cures begin with accurate assessments. He would also point out that since God himself has said, “I the Lord search the mind and try the heart” (Jeremiah 17:10), the psalmist’s plea makes perfect sense: “Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” (Psalm 139:23)

And yet to think Watson one-sidedly self-critical is to misrepresent him. He exulted in a salvation known and enjoyed now, and he insisted that the Christian’s manifest joy is as contagious as it is profound: “Cheerfulness is a perfume to draw others to godliness. As there is a seriousness without sourness, so there is a cheerfulness without lightness.” Realistically he recalled that love for God is never idle: “it sets the head a-studying for God, the feet a-running in the ways of his commandments.”

Watson’s caution sobers thoughtful Christians: “The sins of the wicked pierce Christ’s side; the sins of the godly go to his heart.” His wisdom strengthens us: “Trust him [God] where you cannot trace his footsteps.” And his conviction of God’s promise reassures us of a safe journey home: “You are called, and therefore are sure to be crowned.”

The Puritans were expert diagnosticians of the human condition. While the Jesuits, thanks to the Spiritual Exercises of their founder (Ignatius Loyola) have helped Roman Catholics for 450 years to come to terms with the ravages and rationalisations of sin, Protestants have in Puritan thinkers those soul-physicians from whom they, and the whole church with them, will continue to profit until all Christ’s people are “found by him without spot or blemish.” (2 Peter 3:14)

1628 – 1688

It was his blind daughter Mary, a teenager, who upset him most when he was in prison. Day by day she groped and stumbled her way to the jail where her father was to spend thirteen years, supplementing the wretched prison fare with whatever food she could carry. Bunyan was haunted by what might befall her in a cruel world. If he died in prison, who would look out for her? How could a penniless blind woman survive?

Already the shock of his sudden imprisonment had caused his wife Elizabeth to miscarry. Seeing his agitation, prison authorities informed him that he need not remain in jail; in fact, he could go home that afternoon. All he had to do was sign a paper promising never to preach again. Immediately he knew what he head to do: he had been called to preach and would no nothing else.

John Bunyan was born at Elstow, near Bedford, England. When only sixteen he was conscripted for the Parliamentary (that is, the anti-Royalist) Army in the English Civil War. The Parliamentary Army included many soldiers and officers of the Puritan persuasion. Two sermons were preached to the men every Sunday (plus another on Thursday!), while scripture reading and prayers customarily began the soldier’s work-day. A twelve pence fine was assessed any soldier found swearing. (Bunyan’s vocabulary, at this time, contained little else.)

In the unforeseeable providence of God, it was while he was an unbeliever, hostile to the Christian faith and rendering enforced military service, that Puritan tenets began to seep into his mind and heart. He became convinced of the authority of scripture, the need for holy living, the centrality of preaching in worship, and God’s sovereign ordering of life. Seeds were sown which later brought for the fruit in profusion.

Discharged from the Parliamentary Army, Bunyan returned to the family trade of tinker. (Tinkers were blacksmiths who worked in assorted metals from heavy iron to kitchen cooking utensils.) One morning, looking as usual for business from homemakers, he came upon three or four poor women who were resting briefly from their domestic responsibilities. Bunyan sidled closer and found them talking earnestly to each other. “They talked of how God had visited their souls with his love in the Lord Jesus. . . .” Bunyan later reported. “They spake as if joy did make them speak . . . they were to me as if they had found a new world.” And so they had.

The women were members of the Puritan Free Church of Bedford. Its pastor, John Gifford, had been an officer-physician in the Royalist (anti-Puritan!) Army. Grace had subsequently overwhelmed this notorious blasphemer, drunkard and gambler. He gave up his medical practice in Bedford to become the first pastor of the Nonconformist congregation. Under the threefold influence of the women, the pastor, and Luther’s commentary on Galatians, the tinker was forged into that force whose name would become known throughout the English-speaking world.

Bunyan’s ministry unfolded just as the Royal Restoration of 1660 rendered illegal all worship not conducted according to the forms of the Church of England. In no time Bunyan was arrested and sentenced. Prison conditions were unspeakable. Yet it was in prison that his preaching and counselling brought salvation and comfort to scores of men whose bleak prospects were otherwise unalterable. It was also in these most trying circumstances that he produced at least nine books! (He wrote more than sixty.)

Upon his release from prison he drafted the masterpiece which was to be a trophy of Puritan thought and a classic of English literature. Who will ever forget the characters from Pilgrim’s Progress? Mr. Talkative; Mr. Formalist; Mr. Ready-to-Halt; Judge Hategood; even the young woman, Dull. Not to mention Giant Despair, who lurked near the Slough of Despond and Doubting Castle. (Release from the Castle was secured only as Christian used the Key of Promise.)

Courageous in the face of social and political harassment, Bunyan exemplified the apostle Paul’s “in any and all circumstances” (Phil. 4:12), for while in prison he upheld the gospel at the same time as he made thousands of bootlaces to support his family. Rightly distinguishing between the core of the gospel (which cannot be compromised) and church practices (which admit of different interpretations), Bunyan refused to take sides in the denominational wrangle over believers’ versus infant baptism. He insisted that faith alone rendered one a Christian, and faith was sufficient to endear Christians to each other and make them welcome at each other’s communion table.

In August, 1688, he began a forty-mile ride on horseback from Bedford to London. An icy rain drenched him. In two days he was delirious with pneumonia. Within two weeks he was dead.

Bunyan’s remains are buried in Bunhill Fields, London, surrounded by the remains of the other saints. John Owen, the greatest Puritan intellect; Isaac Watts, the finest English hymnwriter; William Blake, poet; Susanna Wesley, mother of John and Charles.

Bunyan’s influence is inestimable. By 1692 one hundred thousand copies of Pilgrim’s Progress were in print. Today the book is found in over one hundred translations. When China’s Communist government printed two hundred thousand copies as an example of Western cultural heritage, the printing sold out in three days.

While Bunyan lacked almost all formal education, his English was singularly precise, fluid and expressive. What accounts for it? Robert Browning, the poet, offered this explanation:

His language was not ours;
‘Tis my belief God spake;
No tinder has such powers.

1669 — 1742

“Children, as soon as I am released sing a psalm of praise to God”, whispered the seventy-three year old mother of the Wesleys minutes before she died. Five of her children were present. She had had nineteen, ten of whom had survived infancy. The most famous would be John (fifteenth) and Charles (eighteenth). A large family was nothing new to her. The day she was baptized her father had written a friend that Susanna was the most recent of “twenty-four or a quarter of a hundred, I am not sure which”. (The latter estimate was correct.)

Susanna’s spiritual and intellectual formation was rich. Her father was a learned puritan clergyman whose home welcomed a stream of puritan preachers, scholars and writers, among whom were Thomas Manton (his Works comprised twenty-two volumes) and John Owen, the ablest theologian among the puritans and at one time the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University.

In 1662 The Act of Uniformity decreed that all clergy must conform to all beliefs and practices of the Church of England. Two thousand refused, and were expelled from pulpit, parsonage and university during “The Great Expulsion”. John Bunyan (author of Pilgrim’s Progress) was imprisoned. Others scrabbled to feed their dependents, teaching school or preaching clandestinely whenever and wherever they emerged from hiding.

Little wonder that Susanna horrified her parents when she was only twelve as she announced that she was returning to the Church of England! (Subsequently she wrote down her reasons for doing this, but her documents were destroyed in the Epworth rectory fire of 1709, the blaze in which six-year old John narrowly escaped perishing with his mother’s papers.)

One year later at her sister’s wedding she met nineteen-year old Samuel Wesley. He too was moving from Dissent back to the Church of England even though his father had been fatally mistreated during The Great Ejection. (His father had died at forty-two during his fourth imprisonment.) In 1688 Samuel and Susanna were married. The marriage was troublous. Samuel, chronically in debt, kept his family in financial hardship; in addition he fancied himself a poet and scholar, deflecting time and energy and preoccupation to entirely forgettable poetry and a Latin commentary on the book of Job which consumed twenty-five years. Not surprisingly Susanna wrote, “I think we are not likely to live happily together”.

One day Samuel noticed that Susanna did not say “Amen” to his prayers for the king. When asked to explain herself Susanna replied, “He (i.e., William of Orange) is no king; he is but a prince”. Susanna supported British royal descent; the Dutchman was an interloper. “If we are going to have two kings in this house then we shall have two beds”, fumed Samuel as he departed for London. Susanna insisted she would apologize if it could be shown where she was wrong; but to “apologize” insincerely for mere expedience would be a lie and therefore sin. An archbishop agreed that Samuel’s absence was a violation of his marriage vows (by now they had had fourteen children). Five months later Samuel returned home; the night he and Susanna were reconciled John was conceived.

Cherishing the rich puritan heritage of academic excellence Susanna set up a school in her home. Classes were held six hours per day, six days per week. “It is almost incredible what a child may be taught in a quarter of a year by a vigorous application”, commented Susanna, “…all could read better in that time than most women can do as long as they live”. The curriculum consisted both of academic subjects and of Christian instruction. The spiritual formation of her children was undertaken through her weekly private conversations with them all: “On Monday I talk with Molly, on Tuesday with Hetty, …on Thursday with Jacky (as she always called John).

Judging the sermons of Samuel’s assistant to be vacuous Susanna decided that whenever her husband was out of the pulpit the assistant’s feeble pronouncements should be supplemented by more nourishing fare. Whereupon she took it upon herself to read from a book of sermons to villagers who spilled out of her home on Sunday afternoons. (As a woman in the Church of England Susanna was not allowed to “preach”; nonetheless authorities deemed reading someone else’s sermon aloud in public to be acceptable!) Years later when John hesitated at allowing a layman to preach Susanna wrote, “That fellow is as much called as you are”.

Her influence upon John and Charles, and through them upon worldwide Methodists, is incalculable. While Methodism came to display its characteristic spirit, its unique style (outdoor preaching to huge crowds of the unchurched, for instance), and its special emphases (not least its conviction that God could do something about sin beyond forgiving it) Susanna was the conduit for the puritan riches which so largely formed the substance of Methodism. Like Deborah of old she was “a mother in Israel” (Judges 5:7) as she bequeathed to her sons and their heirs the wealth for which her foreparents had suffered unspeakably: the necessity for doctrine as a provisional statement of the truth of God, vigorously disciplined discipleship, the believer’s assurance of fellowship with Christ, intense concern for evangelism and pastoral care, veneration of the sovereignty of grace, insistence on “faith working through love”.

A few years before she died she had written John, “I have long since chosen him [i.e., God] for my only good, my all…”. The Holy One of Israel who had kept Deborah and Rachel, Ruth and Naomi, Elizabeth and Mary, Lydia and the unnamed woman who was a “mother” to the apostle Paul (Romans 16:13) proved sufficient to keep her as well.

Her remains are buried in the same cemetery as those of her puritan foreparents: John Bunyan, John Owen, and Isaac Watts.

Victor A. Shepherd
July 1993

1674 – 1748

More information

The “father of the English hymn” was unusual in many respects. A short man (five feet tall), his sickly body was capped with a disproportionately large head. Virtually all portraits depict him in a large gown with large folds — an obvious attempt at having him appear less grotesque.

A working pastor, he wrote a textbook on logic that was used for decades at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Yale.

He wrote a tome on metaphysics (the branch of philosophy that deals with “being”) even as his book of children’s poetry (the first such book to be published) went through 95 editions within 100 years of publication.

No other thinker has published a major work on astronomy as well as age-graded catechisms for youngsters (the first for five-year olds!).

His hymns have been translated into dozens of languages from Armenian to Zulu.

His voice was thin, and his recurring psychiatric illness (at times incapacitating him) was common knowledge; yet whenever he was well enough to preach crowds hung on words they knew to pour from a heart wrapped in the heart of God.

The eldest of eight children, Watts was born in troubled times. Dissenters (those who refused to conform to the established church) were not only denied access to the universities and suitable employment; they were also liable to prosecution and punishment for no greater “crime” than persistently worshipping God according to their conscience. Watts’s father, a Dissenter, was imprisoned one year after he was married. His wife gave birth while her husband was in jail. She regularly nursed the infant Isaac on the jail steps in the course of visiting her husband.

The youngster was plainly precocious. He had learned Latin by age four, Greek at nine, French at eleven, and Hebrew at thirteen. French was not usually studied in English elementary schools during the 1600s, but Watts was raised in Southampton, and Southampton was a city of refuge to hundreds of refugees who were fleeing persecution in France. The boy thought he should know French so that he could converse with his neighbours.

A physician recognized the teenager’s intellectual gifts and offered to finance his education at either Oxford or Cambridge. But regardless of his brilliance Watts would be admitted to either university only if he were willing to renounce the convictions that had exacted terrible suffering from his parents. He wouldn’t surrender conviction to expediency. As a result he went to a Dissenting Academy, the post-secondary institution for those barred from the universities. While completing his formal education he wrote much poetry, most of it in Latin.

In this era hymns weren’t sung in English churches. German Lutherans had been singing hymns for over 100 years. Calvinists in France and Switzerland, however, had not. Calvin had wanted his people to sing only the psalms of scripture. English Protestants of Calvinist parentage had adopted the practice of singing only metrical psalms in worship. These metrical arrangements were awkward (“But we remember will the name/Of our Lord God alone”), the mood was ponderous, the tone of the entire service dreary. One day Watts discovered he couldn’t endure any of it a minute longer. Returning from the service one Sunday morning he complained vehemently to his father about the stodgy psalm-singing that put people off worship. “Why don’t you write a hymn suitable congregational singing?”, his father challenged him. Throughout the afternoon Watts did just that, and at evening worship that day the congregation sang hymn #1, “Behold the glories of the Lamb”. Six hundred and ninety-six followed.

Not everyone thanked him. Some of his contemporaries complained that his hymns were “too worldly” for the church. One critic fumed, “Christian congregations have shut out divinely inspired psalms and taken in Watts’s flights of fancy!”. His hymns outraged many people, split congregations (most notably the congregation whose pastor, years earlier, had been John Bunyan, the author of an English classic), and got pastors fired. Still, the multi-talented thinker knew what his preeminent gift was and why he had to employ it.

Watts, like other hymn-writers of his era, wrote of God’s seizure of the human heart and God’s transmutation of our understanding. Yet Watts was unique in his emphasis on the backdrop of God’s intercourse with the human heart: the cosmos in its unspeakable vastness. Watts sees the drama of the incarnation and the cross, the dereliction and the resurrection, as seemingly small events that are in fact possessed of cosmic significance. Watts’s universe is simply more immense than anything other hymn-writers imagined. (Perhaps this is to be expected from an astronomer!)

Convinced of the immensity of God and immersed in the passion of God, Watts himself was possessed of the profoundest experience or God.

Turn, turn us mighty God,
And mould our souls afresh;
Break, sovereign grace, these hearts of stone,
And give us hearts of flesh.

By age 50 he was a national figure, esteemed now by Anglicans and Dissenters alike. John Wesley (an Anglican) had long acknowledged the genius, discipline and piety of Watts, and when Wesley came to publish his first hymn book, one-third of the its hymns were Isaac’s. An able theologian as well, he found 44 pages of his Ruin and Recovery in Wesley’s The Doctrine of Original Sin.

As unusual as he was in appearance, gifts, productivity and psychiatric history, Watts was not unusual at all in one important respect. Like all Christians this logician knew that God is to be loved with the mind, and therefore reason must never be discounted in the exercising of faith or the discipline of the Christian life. Yet he knew too that the mystery of God himself, while never irrational, is finally oceans deeper than anything reason can fathom.

Where reason fails,
With all her pow’rs,
There faith prevails
And love adores.

Victor Shepherd

1683 – 1761

All who thank God for the 18th century revival long to see its flames leap across two centuries and set ablaze today’s frozen church and wooden-hearted society. Hoping to gain information and inspiration from our foreparents’ awakening in Britain, we immerse ourselves in the work and works of the “three-fold cord not quickly broken” (Ecclesiastes 4:12); namely, John and Charles Wesley, together with George Whitefield. Few of us, however, are aware of Griffith Jones, the “morning star” of the revival, a man whose name is fragrant in Wales to this day.

In 1649 Oliver Cromwell, Parliamentary leader during the “Interregnum” (the brief period following the English Civil War when Puritan rule replaced royalty), insisted that Wales be given 150 ministers as well as one schoolteacher in every market town. Cromwell wanted to relieve the many-faceted darkness that had kept the Welsh people iniquitous and ignorant in equal measure. When the monarchy was restored in 1660, however, Charles II (the royal family’s all-time “playboy”) immediately suspended the nascent work in Wales, pleased to see the darkness reclaim the people.

Light was to come forth, none the less, from that “morning star” which didn’t merely scintillate but rather burned brightly as a flare, providing illumination beyond anyone’s capacity to foresee it. Twenty years before the Wesleys and Whitefield were even “lit”, Jones was doing what the three Englishmen would subsequently render notorious: a forthright declaration of the gospel, without fear or favour, to the neglected poor and the smirking rich; a compassion for those either alienated from the church or unaware of its mission; outdoor preaching that reached men and women who were otherwise never going to hear the word of life; alleviation of shocking material distresses and deprivations; and, most ominously, persecution from ecclesiastical authorities.

Jones was born into a Dissenting church family that early acquainted him with “the whole counsel of God.” (Acts 20:27) Overwhelmed one day by means of a vision (unusual in that visions are more typically found among Roman Catholics), Jones had seared upon his heart the immensity of God’s mercy, humankind’s helpless enthrallment to systemic sinnership, and the final fixity both eternal blessedness and ultimate loss. An unmistakable, undeniable vocation to the ministry accompanied the vision. Jones set about preparing himself for this work. With preparation ended, he moved from the Dissenting denomination of his upbringing to the Anglican Church. (No one knows why, as no one knows why John Wesley’s mother, Susanna Annesley, made the same move when only a young teenager.) Upon ordination in 1709 Jones began travelling beyond his parish into the mountain villages of south Wales. And just as quickly an ecclesiastical indicted and tried him on charges that he had neglected his own parish and was encroaching, uninvited, upon the precincts of other Anglican clergy, even preaching outside church buildings. The trial disclosed something entirely different. He preached in other parishes only when the incumbent invited him to, and he preached outdoors only when sanctuaries couldn’t contain the thousands who hungered for the bread of life. Now exonerated, and having turned the tables on his accusers, Jones laid before the presiding bishop incontrovertible evidence of cavalierly negligent clergy and spiritually destitute people whose total existence (not merely their “religious life”) was dissolute and desolate.

In 1716 Jones was installed as rector of the parish of Lladowror, where he ministered until his death 45 years later. As is always the case when the whole Christ wholly possesses the preacher, Jones scrabbled unashamedly to provide his people with food, clothing and medicine.

In the course of conducting his wintertime catechism class in the rectory Jones noticed that far too many of his people couldn’t read. He begged money to provide salaries for schoolteachers, trained them himself (they had to be godly but they didn’t have to be Anglicans), and then had them itinerate as Methodist ministers were to do so very effectively two decades later. The teachers of these “Charity Schools” remained in a village for three months at a time, instructing young and old alike intensively, only then to move on to another village but of course to return in order to move students ahead to the next level. The students weren’t children alone. Adults up to age 70 flooded the schools, soon to be freed gloriously as only the ability to read frees the illiterate. For the first time in the history of Wales servants, labourers and farm workers had access to books. The result was startling, as Wales became the first territory in Europe to have a literate peasantry.

Jones had early seen the pointlessness and futility of having the Welsh people forced to learn in English when they had no opportunity to speak the language with others who knew it well. People with next-to-no English can’t help those with no English to learn it. For this reason Jones resolutely maintained that Welsh had to be the lingua franca, and to this end translated thirty books himself from English to Welsh, these books being the chief texts of his “Charity School” curriculum. Within 30 years 4,000 schools had been set up and 250,000 people enabled to read.

Jones maintained that not only did the gospel address the whole person, thus rendering education an essential aspect of Christian mission; education was essential for the fullest reception of the gospel. In other words, education was as much the condition of evangelism as its fruit, and therefore as much needed for people’s salvation as for their edification. Not surprisingly, he distributed over 30,000 bibles throughout the land.

To this day Jones is deemed one of the makers of modern Wales, and the single most significant factor in the purity and preservation of the Welsh tongue.

Still, if he were able to speak to us now concerning his greatest Kingdom-usefulness he would undoubtedly point not to anything mentioned so far but rather to his three “sons in the gospel”: Daniel Rowland, Howell Harris and Howell Davies. It was these men who, only a few years later, would ignite Wales at the same time as “the threefold cord” torched England. Their “Calvinist Methodist Church” — Calvinist in theology yet Methodist in ethos and expression — would typify the marvellous diversity of the 18th century revival, a reflection, of course, of the diversity of the kingdom itself.

Victor Shepherd March 2000

1703 — 1758

Philosopher, theologian, pastor, evangelist, psychologist, naturalist: Jonathan Edwards was all of these at once, and all of these superbly. A philosopher without peer to this day in America, he was the only philosopher of note until the 20th century. The best theologian to appear in the U.S.A., he missed living during the richest era of new-world Puritan erudition, emerging only in the dying days of the movement. Expected to voice its death-rattle, he paradoxically thundered like a cataract into which there poured the streams of fathomless spirituality and measureless intellect.

Yet Edwards’s own congregation would eventually vote 200 to 20 to dismiss him. Unemployed for six months, and with seven children to feed (eventually there were 12), he was exiled to a mission outpost consisting of 12 caucasian families and 250 aboriginal. Unquestionably isolated academically and deprived culturally, he managed in this seemingly inhospitable environment to produce scholarly works that have made him America’s intellectual showpiece.

It is Edwards’s sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, that so many have fastened on as the excuse for disregarding him as the conscienceless exploiter of people’s emotional vulnerabilities. Or rather it has to be the title of the sermon, since virtually none of those who disdain him as mean-spirited and heartless have even bothered to read the sermon! Neither do they know that so far from manipulating the heart-strings of his hearers with rhetorical trickery, he read the sermon word-for-word, hunched over the lectern, rarely lifting his head to look at the congregation — and all of this in a drone-dull monotone guaranteed to anaesthetize the most watchful. The result? New Englanders convulsed as the Spirit convicted them of their sinnership and their precariousness before the Holy God whose judgement cannot be deflected. (Sinners, it should be noted, is only one of 1200 manuscript sermons by Edwards housed in the library of Yale University.)

One of 12 children, the precocious youngster began learning Latin, Greek and Hebrew at age five. By 13 he was a student at Yale, a graduate at 17. After two years of schoolteaching he moved to Northampton, Massachusetts, as assistant pastor to his grandfather.

The spiritual tepidness of the congregation there dismayed him. Driven back to the resources acquired during his theological training, Edwards preached repeatedly on the Reformation pillar of “justification by faith”: sinners are set right with God as they gratefully embrace in faith the provision God’s grace has wrought for them in the mercy of the cross. His expositions appeared hopelessly ineffective in the face of the desiccated hearts of his hearers — except that their hearts were tinder-dry and could therefore be ignited! A spiritual quickening smouldered in the congregation for several months and then flickered into flame. Neighbouring congregations came alive as the Spirit thawed the frigid and illumined the shuttered. Suddenly the quiet conversions of individuals and the gradual renewal of congregations exploded into the “Great Awakening” of 1740. No single metaphor seemed sufficient to describe it. Avalanche, landslide, tidal wave, prairie- fire: no expression, however suggestive of immensity, relentlessness and power does justice to the development.

Needless to say, sceptics appeared instantly. Was the Great Awakening a new-world, latter-day “Pentecost”, or was the “prairie-fire” the uncontrollable destruction of wildfire? Was the revival at best a pretext for expressing psychological aberration and at worst a danger bordering on the demonic? Wisdom rivalling Solomon’s was plainly needed. Edwards’s Treatise Concerning the Religious Affections appeared in 1746, unsurpassed in helping to distinguish between emotional boilovers devoid of light and genuine Spirit-penetrations of the heart that caused the convicted to cry out, groan or wail. Edwards knew that those newly horrified at their quandary before the uncompromisingly Holy could very well shriek or faint, even as he knew that no amount of shrieking or fainting of themselves proved that the Spirit of God had cut to the heart. How to distinguish between the hallucinations of the hysterical and the torment of the heart-rent? Here Edwards showed himself a master of discernment: the authentic must be distinguished from the counterfeit, even as the Spirit must no more be quenched than emotional “geysering” be encouraged.

By 1750 a non-revival element in Edwards’s congregation had become ascendant, and the controversy that was to terminate his pastorate in Northampton could not be stifled. The “Halfway Covenant” had been a social expedient granting church-membership (together with the right to have their children baptized) to those who neither professed faith in Jesus Christ nor acknowledged his claim upon their obedience. These people wanted the social and business advantages of institutional membership while disdaining the self-abandonment of discipleship. Edwards rightly insisted that scripture knew nothing of a “halfway” following of the Master. One was to be a church-member only on the grounds of one’s unqualified submission to Jesus Christ and one’s unreserved aspiration to godliness. When unruly voices clamoured for quick dismissal, Edwards declined to speak in his own defense, simply asking that he be judged by those who had heard him preach on the matter or who were acquainted with his writing. He was refused. The congregation, having been graced for years with the ministry of the nation’s spiritual giant, mysteriously displayed its spiritual puniness as it fired its pastor.

After several years in outpost work he was asked to serve as president of Princeton University. By this time smallpox was raging up and down the Atlantic seaboard. Some pastors railed against vaccination while others insisted on it. Edwards said nothing, content to “speak” by having himself vaccinated. The mini-dose of the disease proved too much for the man rendered frail through several years’ hardship. He died one month after assuming the presidency.

The architect of Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God knew something his detractors have never learned: it is far worse to be sinners in the hands of angry humans, as King David of old knew when he cried, “I am in great distress; let me fall into the hand of the Lord, for his mercy is very great; but let me not fall into the hand of man.” (1 Chronicles 21:13) God’s anger subserves his mercy, while humankind’s anger subserves its cruelty.

The man whose sole recreation had been horseback-riding had consistently testified to that horse and rider who “went out conquering and to conquer.” (Revelation 6:2)

Victor Shepherd

1703 – 1791

He had been ordained for more than a decade when it happened. Sitting in an evening service one Sunday, following his return to England after a disastrous spell as a missionary in Georgia, he listened to someone reading from the preface to Luther’s commentary on Romans. The most notable event in eighteenth-century English history was only seconds away: “About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. 1 felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.” It was May 24, 1738.

Immediately the dominant theme in the thirty-five year old’s ministry became justification by faith: sinners are justified or set right with God as in faith they trust the pardoning mercy God graciously presses upon them. Gone were his preoccupations with moralism (the notion that we can put ourselves right with God through moral achievement) and mysticism (the notion that we have a natural capacity to ascend to a God who remains forever vague). He would know for the rest of his life that the God who is apprehended in the face of Jesus Christ had condescended to him and done for him precisely what he could never have done for himself. His earlier zeal for holy living he retained; only now the motive for it was gratitude for mercy given instead of recognition for superiority attained.

The results among the people who heard him were electrifying. Thousands who had swung between self-exalting pride and self-rejecting despair now had assurance of their new life as children of God. However, those who objected to the manner in which Wesley held up the need for Spirit-wrought birth made no secret of their derision. The Duchess of Buckingham complained that Methodist doctrines (they were really Anglican!) were “most repulsive…… It is monstrous,” she continued, “to be told that you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl on the earth.”

Ecclesiastical officialdom, as nasty as it was spiritually inert, lost no time harassing Wesley. Pulpits were closed to him. Driven out-of-doors, he decided to become “the more vile” (as he had always considered what he was about to do) and began “field-preaching.” Together with his friend George Whitefield, a fellow Oxford graduate, Wesley was soon “declaring the glad tidings of salvation” and “spreading scriptural holiness” to throngs numbering in the thousands, people who had never been found in church.

Again the bureaucracy moved to stop him. Magistrates were instructed to hound him even as mobs were incited to beat him. Yet the physically diminutive man stood his ground. “Always look a mob in the face,” he instructed his growing band of preachers. Usually the mobs dispersed; the scars on Wesley’s face were reminders of the ones that hadn’t.

Always an evangelist first of all, Wesley nevertheless attended to the sick, the dying, the imprisoned, the forgotten. He managed to author and edit hundreds of books, write hymns, collect and publish those of his brother Charles, and translate from the German those of Paul Gerhardt. He also wrote grammar textbooks for English, French, Greek, Hebrew and Latin, plus a history of the world.

Faced with the ravages of eighteenth-century poverty (worsened by the Industrial Revolution just under way) he spent himself tirelessly on behalf of the socially submerged. In 1746 he established the first free pharmacy in London. Haunted especially by the plight of widows, he reconditioned two small homes for them. Outraged that his people were denied access to banks, he scraped together fifty pounds and began assisting those who needed small amounts of investment capital. (One fellow established a bookselling business which eventually became the largest in England.)

It is impossible to exaggerate the hardships Wesley sustained: 250,000 miles on horseback, 40,000 sermons preached without amplification, 22 crossings of the Irish Sea, exposure to inclement weather, hostility from those with vested interests, life-long conflict from those who disdained his vehement rejection of predestination and his equally vehement insistence on godliness.

Wesley persisted in telling his people that God could do something with sin beyond forgiving it: they could know victory. As his people stepped forward out of filth, hopelessness, self-contempt, alcoholic delirium, debt and disgrace he insisted that there was no limit to the work of grace which God longed to effect in them. When the established church accused him of fanaticism he met them head-on: since they prayed the line from the prayerbook every day, “. . . that we may perfectly love thee. . . .” they must believe it themselves or else be manifestly insincere. There were no grounds for pronouncing his people fanatics.

But no grounds were needed. When a bishop slandered those whose temporal fortunes and eternal destiny had been transformed, Wesley replied with an irony both trenchant and tragic: “But all is fair toward a Methodist.” Yet he harboured no ill-will. Discovering that the cowardly bishop who had refused to name himself was from Exeter Cathedral, Wesley worshipped there in 1762, commenting, “I was well-pleased to partake of the Lord’s Supper with my old opponent, Bishop Lavington. 0 may we sit down together in the Kingdom of our Father.” Fifteen days later Lavington was dead.

Wesley was to live another thirty-one years. When an old man, he spent four consecutive winter days begging, ankle-deep in slush, to raise two hundred pounds for his beloved poor.

In 1789, aged eighty-six, he returned to Falmouth, Cornwall. The streets were lined. Forty years earlier mobs there had abused him. Now he was overwhelmed at the affection that greeted him. “High and low now lined the street,,” he wrote, “from one end of the town to the other, out of stark love and kindness, gaping and staring as if the king were going by.”

He was not the king. He was a very great ambassador.

Victor Shepherd

1707 – 1788

Nine thousand poems; 27,000 stanzas; 180,000 lines. The output of Charles Wesley was prodigious. It was, in fact, three times the total output of William Wordsworth, one of England’s most prolific poets. Had Wesley written poetry every day, he would have written ten lines per day for fifty years.

Charles could write poetry for any occasion. When his wife Sally was entering upon the rigours of childbirth, he wrote a poem for her, one which she could use as a prayer:

Who so near the birth hast brought,
(Since I on Thee rely)
Tell me, Saviour, wilt thou not
Thy farther help supply?
Whisper to my list’ning soul
Wilt thou not my strength renew,
Nature’s fears and pangs control,
And bring thy handmaid through?
(Since I on Thee rely)
Tell me, Saviour, wilt thou not
Thy farther help supply?
Whisper to my list’ning soul
Wilt thou not my strength renew,
Nature’s fears and pangs control,
And bring thy handmaid through?

At the funeral of George Whitefield (considered to be the finest preacher of the eighteenth-century Evangelical Awakening) he praised his departed friend in a poem 536 lines long!

While Wesley’s poetry chiefly concerned the themes of the gospel message, he tried to enter imaginatively into the stresses of all manner of people. Today we can read his poetry about wives and widows, coalminers and criminals, high school students, and soldiers who remained loyal to the British crown during the American War of Independence.

Susanna, mother of the Wesleys, was the twenty-fifth (and last!) child of a well-known Puritan preacher. She in turn had nineteen children herself, John being the fifteenth and Charles the eighteenth. Both boys were academically gifted, both eventually studied at Oxford, and both were ordained to the Anglican priesthood.

After a period of frustration, rejection, and self-doubt as missionaries in Georgia, John and Charles returned to England. Kezia, their youngest sister, told them she had come to believe and to understand that God could perform a work of transforming grace in the human heart. Believers were granted new standing before God, a new nature, new outlook, new motivation and new affections. Charles proved it all for himself on May 21, 1738. He wrote in his journal. “By degrees the Spirit of God chased away the darkness of my unbelief. I found myself convinced. . . . I saw that by faith I stood.” His experience resulted in the writing of a hymn which Christians still sing:

And can it be that I should gain
An interest in the Saviour k blood?
Died He for me, who caused His pain ?
For me, who Him to death pursued?
Amazing love! how can it be
That Thou, my God, shouldst die for me?

Three days later, his older brother came to the same conviction and experience: “I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins … and saved me from the law of sin and death.” The spark which ignited Methodism had been struck.

In no time, the conflagration was spreading everywhere. Together with Whitefield (the third strand in their “threefold cord”), the Wesleys soon found that hostile church officials had barred them from pulpits. They moved out-of-doors, where they were free to announce the Good News to people who were as unacquainted with the Bread of Life as they were hungry for it. Crowds of up to 25,000 gathered regularly to hear them.

While both John and Charles were gifted at preaching and hymnwriting, Charles was especially noted for his genius at Christian song. Yet there was more than genius here. Charles had been prepared for his music-ministry by nine years of studying classics at Oxford, particularly the work of the ancient Greek and Latin poets. Most importantly, his whole-souled encounter with his Lord had issued in such passion and depth as to fuse and focus all gifts and graces, talents and training.

Brother John thought highly of Charles’ work: “Here is no doggerel, no botches, nothing to patch up a rhyme, no feeble expletives. Here are … the purity, the strength, and the elegance of the English language.”

John was in Newcastle when he learned of the death of Charles. The next Sunday, as he was conducting worship, the congregation sang one of Charles’ earliest hymn-lines: “My company before is gone, And I am left alone with Thee. . . .” John unravelled. He staggered back into the pulpit, weeping profusely. The congregation waited for him, and he recovered enough to finish the service.

The hymns of Charles Wesley breathe the man’s life in God. It was rich; so rich, in fact, that later Methodists were sometimes reluctant to sing many of his hymns, as their experience of God was not his. Whereas God’s grace and truth had moved Charles profoundly and had found stirring expression in his hymns, the same hymns struck some of his descendants as mere literary exaggeration.

His descendants were wrong. There was no exaggeration. He who wrote, “Love divine, all loves excelling,” wrote that hymn and many others only because he had been taken up into a reality infinitely greater than even he could express.

Victor Shepherd

Samuel Johnson’s remark is as arrogant as it is cruel. He compared women who preach to dogs who walk on their hind legs. While neither does it very well, it’s surprising to see it done at all. Plainly it never occurred to Johnson that the women gathered around the event of the world’s redemption were exemplary, last at the cross and first at the tomb out of limitless love and loyalty for their Lord. Was it not a woman, Mary Magdalene, who first recognized the risen Jesus as he called her by name and commissioned her a witness on his behalf?

No less a philosopher than Aristotle had said that a woman is halfway between a male and an animal. Jesus, on the other hand, had dignified women every day in the course of his earthly ministry. In his Spirit the daughters of Phillip had “prophesied” in the congregation at Caesarea. And women, we know from Paul’s greetings at the conclusion of his letter to the Roman Christians, had been leaders of the house-churches in the capital city of the Roman Empire.

In 7th century England Hilda, abbess of Whitby, had come to prominence as founder and leader of a community for both men and women. In 14th century England the gospel-movement centred in Wycliffe had seen women preaching throughout the English countryside. In 17th century England the more radical developments within Puritanism (e.g., the Quakers) had seen women preach.

Not everyone rejoiced at such occurrences. John Vickers, Anglican clergyman, fumed in the later 1700s that “impudent housewives”, lacking intelligence, attempted to compensate for their deficiency by being talkative, quick-witted, and possessed of good memories (all of which he thought were natural to women.) Such women, Vickers hissed, were none the less both immodest and ignorant of scripture.

John Wesley hadn’t been one to trumpet the appearance of the woman preacher. Still, he couldn’t deny that his mother had conducted worship for villagers when her clergyman-husband had been in London attending parliament. When Anglican officialdom suggested that Samuel rebuke his “uppity: wife, Susannah said she would not capitulate to his opinion or recommendation; only a direct order would induce her to desist. Her husband, observing the fruits of her ministry, backed off.

Following his own spiritual awakening in 1738, Wesley set about organising the Methodist “Societies”, a society composing all Christians of Methodist persuasion in any one town or city. The “class” consisted of the same folk, now divided into groups of twelve according to geographic proximity. The “band” was smaller still, only four or five people eager to be transformed utterly by God’s work of sanctification or holiness. Women quickly arose as the “sparkplugs” of all three. When Elizabeth Fox, a leader in the Oxford Society, was about to move to another town, Wesley implored her to stay, since “…the enemy [could not] devise so likely a means of destroying the work which is just beginning among them as the taking away of their head.”

By April 1742, the London Society listed 66 leaders, 49 of them women. These women were highly visible as leaders, less visible but no less essential in their ministry of hospitality as they accommodated itinerant preachers travelling ceaselessly.

Treasuring the leadership women provided in early Methodism, yet nervous of seeming scandal, Wesley sought to distinguish Methodism from Quakerism, for instance, on the grounds that Quakers encouraged their women to preach. “Preaching” was defined narrowly as exegesis and exposition of a scriptural passage. In 1748 Wesley was still denying that Phillip’s four daughters, the women who worked with Paul in the gospel, and the prophesying of the women who fulfilled Joel’s prophecy at Pentecost were actually preaching. He never denied, however, that women were exercising by far the larger part of Methodism’s diaconal ministry (concrete caring for the sick and imprisoned.) In other words, the current that Wesley resisted formally he enhanced informally.

Not infrequently a woman led a “class” consisting of men only. When Dorothy Downes wondered about both the propriety of her doing this and its credibility, Wesley urged her on: “It is an act of friendship and brotherly love.” When others remarked that women were to be seen rather than heard, he retorted, “Is this doing honour to the sex? No; it is the deepest unkindness; it is horrid cruelty.” Then he fortified the women directly: “Yield not to that vile bondage any longer. You, as well as men, are rational creatures, made in the image of God.”

At this point women prayed in public. “Such a prayer I never heard before”, he said of one, “odd and unconnected and made of disjointed fragments, yet like a flame of fire.” From praying they moved to “exhorting”, exhortation being a declaration of Christian truth, personal testimony concerning one’s experience of it, and invitation to hearers to own it. From exhorting it was a small step to “preaching.”

Years earlier, when Wesley had been challenged about “field preaching” and his deployment of lay preachers, he had pleaded an “extraordinary call.” Soon he was describing the revival itself as “extraordinary”, a novum calling for “extraordinary means” of many sorts. His understanding of “extraordinary” came to include women preachers. At this point he abandoned all earlier inhibitions, counselling them to go all the way and preach as he advised them to “take a text.” If their natural reticence or lack of confidence found them hesitating, he urge them, “Speak, therefore, as you can, and by-and-by you shall speak as you would.”

These women were as resilient as spring steel. Sarah Crosby, Methodism’s first woman preacher, itinerated for 20 years. Elizabeth Tonkin began preaching at nineteen, married, and continued to “offer the people Christ” for the next two decades while she mothered eleven children. Margaret Davidson, Ireland’s first woman preacher, spoke as often, and travelled as much, as her blindness allowed. Mary Bosanquet never relented despite the abuse the suffered at the hands of the church: “All that I have suffered from the world in the way of reproach and slander is little in comparison with what I have suffered from some professors of religion, as well as even ministers of the gospel.”

Everything changed with Wesley’s death. Jealous males could no longer be suppressed. The women preachers, now silenced in Methodism, fled to other denominations. The major issue at the 1803 conference was, “Should women be permitted to preach among the Methodists?” Once again, as church history illustrates repeatedly, the institution feared the Spirit’s freedom.

While the church talks constantly about the world’s need of the gospel, it’s plain the church needs to hear it no less urgently. For only as the church hears the gospel will the apostle be spared seeing in the church what he dreaded seeing in Galatia (5:1); namely, those whom Christ had freed from slavery being betrayed into bondage by the church.

Victor Shepherd March 2000

1714 – 1770

He was born into situation that didn’t reflect Wesley’s privilege, yet he evangelized many among the social elite of England. He was afflicted with a squint so severe that no one know exactly where (or at whom) he was looking, yet he drew vast outdoor crowds who never took their eyes off him. Benjamin Franklin, who heard him preach many times in Pennsylvania, declared that he had a “voice like an organ.”

George Whitefield was born in Gloucester, England; his remains are buried in Newburyport, Massachusetts. He voyaged to the New World seven times (a one-way trip took two months) and was equally at home on both sides of the Atlantic.

Having languished in spiritual emptiness and disquiet for several years, Whitefield’s “birth” was aided by the spiritual midwifery of a godly bishop who directed him to John 7:37: “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me [i.e. Jesus].” Whitefield exclaimed aloud, “I thirst!” – and recalled that when Jesus uttered these words his struggle was almost over. He realized too that for the first time in his life he had implicitly renounced any claim upon God’s favour and explicitly acknowledged his helplessness. Immediately he was granted assurance of his new nature in Christ and his new standing before God.

The young Anglican preacher was transparent to the message that had altered him. The day the twenty-two year old was ordained his sermon won over the hungry even as it antagonized the hardened. On this occasion his opponents complained that his preaching had driven fifteen people mad. “I hope their madness lasts until next Sunday,” replied the bishop who had sponsored him.

In 1738 he stumbled into a development that was to characterize the Evangelical Awakening. Standing in the pulpit of the crowded-out church in Bermondsey, he was haunted by the fact that a thousand-plus stood outside, and haunted doubly because of the reason they were there: they gave off an odour that no one could deny and few would endure. He told his friend John Wesley of his plan to begin “field-preaching.” Wesley thought the scheme insane (until he had to admit its effectiveness). It was also illegal since the Conventicle Act permitted outdoor preaching only at public hangings!

Before long, however, a scheduled execution brought it about. Whitefield’s heart had been broken by the coalminers at Kingswood, Bristol – men as violent as they were vulgar. Once the date for the hanging had been set the miners began anticipating the celebrations surrounding the entertainment. When the murder “cheated” them of their amusement by committing suicide, the miners dug up the corpse and partied around it.

They and their families were 100 percent illiterate, stuck in a degradation that defies description. Whitefield walked among them, in full clerical attire, and began speaking to them from Matthew 5: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Thoroughly despised and contemptuously shunned, these people found in Whitefield someone who loved them and therefore did not fear them. Grimy with caked-on dirt and coated in coal dust as they were, Whitefield wrote of them in his diary that as he preached he saw “the white gutters made by their tears down their black cheeks.”

Immediately church authorities arranged for all Anglican pulpits to be closed to him. He was undaunted. The next Sunday ten thousand people joined themselves to the Kingswood miners. Opposition intensified. When Whitefield attempted to visit prisoners in Newgate jail, the Corporation of Bristol suddenly “remembered” to appoint a prison chaplain! Nonetheless, disadvantaged people returned his love for them. After hearing Whitefield preach time after time poverty-stricken miners collected money to build a school for their children: the impoverished were not to be exploited by the socially privileged!

Yet more than the high-born opposed Whitefield. At Moorfields one lout climbed a tree overlooking the preacher and urinated at him. Ever the master at turning opposition into gospel-advantage, Whitefield rhetorically asked the crowd, “Am I wrong when I say that man is half devil and half beast?” – and then commended anew that gospel whereby anyone at all may become a child of God.

In the New World Whitefield preached form Georgia to New England, always raising money for the orphanage he had established in Savannah. New York, Boston, Philadelphia, the Carolinas, Harvard University: all were beneficiaries of his ministry as he was anything but “the generality of preachers who talk of an unknown and unfelt Christ.”

Before he died the “threefold cord not quickly broken” (Whitefield, plus John and Charles Wesley) was reknit. He and the Wesleys had agonized and grown apart over Whitefield’s adherence to the doctrine of predestination. When they were joyfully reconciled he wrote in his diary, “Prejudices, jealousies and suspicion make the soul miserable.”

John Wesley preached at the memorial service which was held for Whitefield in England. “He had nothing gloomy in his nature,” said John, “being singularly cheerful, as well as charitable and tender hearted.” It was true. When a Quaker had chided Whitefield for wearing full Anglican vestments Whitefield had replied good-naturedly, “Friend, you allow me my vestments and I shall allow you your peculiar hat.”

When their disagreement had been sharpest concerning predestination Wesley was asked if he expected to behold Whitefield on the final Day. “I fear not,” John had replied, “for George will be so much nearer the throne of grace.” It was in the memorial sermon that John spoke most succinctly of his friend: “Can anything but love beget love?”

Victor Shepherd

1725 – 1796

The recently converted man in full military dress, unforgettable in the green patch over his sightless eye-socket, dramatically laid his sword alongside an open bible and announced to the small congregation that he was a soldier of the cross and a true spiritual descendant of John Wesley.

Born in either Bath or Salisbury in the west of England, Thomas planned on a career as a Redcoat and was commissioned a quartermaster in the 48th Regiment of Foot. One year later he was promoted to lieutenant. In 1758 he was transferred, together with his regiment, to North America where the French forces were gaining in the Seven Years’ War. In July of the same year Webb was serving with Amherst and Wolfe, famous British generals, when Louisburg was captured in Nova Scotia. It was a turning point in the war. Not even the French victory at Montmorency in July, 1759 (where Webb lost an eye to musket-fire) could stem the military disaster coming upon Montcalm one month later at Quebec.

In the momentous summer of 1759 Webb had published A Military Treatise on the Appointments of the Army, his reflections on the science of waging war. In it he indicated how warfare in the new world differed from that in the old, and why less cumbersome weapons were needed in terrain that demanded mobility. (Fifteen years later a soon-to-be-famous general, foreseeing a revolution, was to read and distribute the book and turn it tellingly against the British. George Washington’s copy of Webb’s treatise is currently housed in a Boston museum.)

Subsequently recommended for a captaincy, Webb declined the promotion, wanting neither to return to Britain nor to submit his new wife to the rootlessness of military life. When his wife died shortly, however, he crossed the Atlantic in order to sell his commission.

The winter of 1764 found Webb depressed, convinced that he was a sinner whose sinnership was irremediable and he himself hopeless. He was directed to a Moravian preacher whose Passion Sunday sermon (March 24, 1765) persuaded the forty year-old that the crucified had borne his guilt and shame and had borne them away. His hopelessness cancelled, Webb found the assurance of his salvation swelling as he testified for the rest of his life of his certainty of seeing his Lord in glory. The Moravian preacher introduced him to Rev. James Rouquet, who in turn had come to faith under Rev. George Whitefield. Immediately Webb found a spiritual home among the Methodists, enjoying a “fit” so fine that he always regarded them and him to be made for each other.

When the scheduled preacher failed to appear at Bath, one Sunday, Webb was asked to speak. Knowing nothing of sermon-technique, and lacking formal training in theology, he could only relate simply, unselfconsciously, the unvarnished account of his conversion. The Spirit-quickened story-telling of the battle-scarred veteran thawed frozen hearts and confirmed his vocation among the Methodists.

Having sold his commission in 1766, Webb returned to New York as a civilian. As befitted someone whose book on military science had enhanced the deployment of troops and materiel, he was soon to prove hugely fruitful in consolidating the diffuse personnel and resources of early American Methodism. In addition, his public utterances now included not only the retelling of his own awakening but also “the whole counsel of God.”(Acts 20:27), never neglecting the Wesleyan emphasis for which he was unapologetic because unashamed; namely, Christian perfection.

Possessed of immense patience, six months’ intense evangelistic work around greater New York City found him not complaining but rejoicing as twenty-four people newly declared their faith in Jesus Christ, half of them black and half white. A tireless worker on behalf of any Methodist concern, he didn’t consider it beneath him to peddle books in the metropolis in order to raise the purchase price of a church-site. Always keen, like the apostle Paul before him, to announce the gospel (of Methodism) where it had never been heard before, he inaugurated Methodist work in New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and many areas of Pennsylvania. (In Philadelphia he fuelled the evangelical flame that had sprung from Whitefield’s fire.)

August, 1772 found Webb back in England, a delegate to the Methodist Conference at Leeds. Recognizing his administrative talents, John Wesley sent him to Ireland to remedy long-standing difficulties in the Methodist Societies of Limerick and Dublin.

In April, 1773 Webb returned to America, accompanied by his new wife, Grace. An American spy, Samuel Purviance, accused him of being a spy in the service of the British forces. (Although Webb was a civilian he had continued to draw a military pension.) Webb was arrested and confined to a Prisoner of War camp in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where he ministered to the internees. In 1778 he was given a passport that allowed him to travel the few miles to Philadelphia. There he hoped to have himself exchanged for an American Prisoner of War. The authorities, however, disdained his passport and reinterned him. Undaunted, his wife pleaded with George Washington and was granted the sought-after exchange.

In Britain once more in 1778, Webb pursued his non-stop work on behalf of the Methodists, preaching and encouraging, always raising money for chapels to house the burgeoning crowds. He was singularly instrumental in securing funds for a second chapel in Bristol on Portland Heights. On Christmas Eve, 1796 his remains were buried there. When Portland Chapel was closed in 1972, one hundred and seventy-five years later, and his remains were disinterred, the identifying green patch was found almost intact. His remains, including those of his wife, were reburied at the New Room, Bristol, long the site of brave Methodist forays into the new world in Wesley’s era.

What the old soldier lacked in formal education and social sophistication he more than made up for in singlemindedness, always exemplifying the apostle’s reminder, “Share in suffering as a good soldier of Jesus Christ. No soldier on service gets entangled in civilian pursuits….”(2 Tim. 2:3f) Certainly John Wesley had appreciated Webb’s undeflected resolve. When Charles Wesley had written from Bristol, “Webb has much life and zeal, though far from being a clear or good preacher”, John had replied from London, “He has been long enough with you; send him to us.”

Victor Shepherd
December 1997

1725 – 1807

‘Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears relieved.

Are you ever startled, even awed, that someone loves you unspeakably? When spouse, or friend, or parent, or child loves you beyond anything you deserve, anything you could expect, even beyond any love you will ever be able to return? John Newton was awed to the point of writing “Amazing Grace,” the hymn by which he is known and from which the two lines above are quoted.

When Newton was nineteen years old a press gang “captured” him, as they did may young men, and forced him to serve in the Royal Navy. Living conditions on warships were deplorable. There was less room than in a prison, the company was worse, the food worse, and there was always the prospect of terrible suffering through enemy fire, as well as the constant danger of drowning. Most of the food was slightly rotten, flavoured with bitter tasting insects called weevils. Very rotten food festered with black-headed maggots.

During one seven-year period in the 1700s the Royal Navy raised 185,000 men for sea duty. Two-thirds of them died of disease. Many succumbed to malnutrition, and more than a few to syphilis. Sailors were regarded as the scum of the earth. Newton boasted of a vileness and moral degeneracy so pronounced that even hardened sailors preferred to leave him alone.

Annoyed by the incorrigible troublemaker, the warship’s captain eventually had him lashed until the young sailor fell into a coma. Vinegar, salt water and alcohol were poured into his wounds. He nearly died. Wanting only to be rid of him, the captain put Newton on board a merchant ship involved in the slave trade.

By age twenty-five Newton was captain of a slave ship. The vessel’s round trip took slightly more than a year: from England to Africa with trade goods plus chains, neck-collars, handcuffs and thumb-screws; from Africa to the Caribbean with slaves; finally, from the Caribbean to England with molasses and rum. The inhumanity of the long middle passage still haunts the world. Black people on board were forced into pens only two feet high. They were stacked together like cordwood and chained to one another. There were no toilet facilities and no ventilation. So overpowering was the stench that a slave ship could be smelled twenty miles downwind. Sailors raped black women at will. Newton later wrote of his exploitation here, “I was sunk into complacency with the vilest of wretches.”

Several years before becoming a captain, Newton had been caught in a fierce storm off Newfoundland. The crew pumped water until they collapsed. The ship barely staggered into port. For the first time Newton wondered where his life was going. He prayed. Six years, including his slave-trading days, were to pass before the seed sown during the storm was to bear fruit. But bear fruit it did. That grace before which believers are speechless in silent amazement “saved the wretch.” Newton applied for the Anglican ministry but was at first rejected because he lacked a university degree. Eventually a discerning bishop agreed to ordain him. He was thirty-nine years old.

Although Newton was a clumsy preacher, people flocked to him. They knew they were face-to-face with a man who was utterly transparent to the grace and power and purpose of God. Soon he was devoting most of his time to earnest people who sought Christian counsel. (You can read his wise advice in the little book, Letters of John Newton) Aware now of both the surge of God’s power and the throb of the needy human heart, Newton began writing hymns, often one per week, (The hymn he penned to commemorate his wife on the first anniversary of her death had twenty-six stanzas!)

Newton knew that there are no limits to human degradation, not merely because of Paul’s insistence in Romans 1 that God “gives up” those who reject him to the consequences of not wanting him, but also because his days as sailor and slave-ship captain had acquainted him with such degradation in himself and others. Gloriously he also knew that there are no limits to God’s renewal in righteousness. His entire ministry – preaching, writing, counselling – echoed the note of the great sinner who has come to know a greater Saviour. Never naïve concerning sin, he often expressed to William Cowper (another famous hymnwriter) his sorrow at the curse of slavery he had helped unleash on the world, and as often waited to hear Cowper’s pronouncement of pardon. When a parishioner spluttered her delight at having won the British lottery, Newton replied solemnly, “I shall pray for you as one under affliction.”

In his latter years, his memory began to fail. When the sermon meandered and appeared to have lost its way the congregation patiently reminded its pastor of the point he had been trying to make. A friend suggested he preach no longer. “What, shall the old blasphemer stop while he can speak?” Newton roared back, as though raising his voice over the din of an ocean storm. He preached his final sermon in 1806 at a benefit service for the widows and orphans of the Battle of Trafalgar.

Shortly after came the day when he could speak no longer. He had anticipated it in the last stanza of another of his much-loved hymns, “How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds”:

Till then I would Thy love proclaim
With every fleeting breath;
And may the music of Thy Name
Refresh my soul in death.

1729-1785

The tribute Fletcher’s wife, Mary Bosanquet, penned concerning her husband is the envy of all married Christians: “Since the time I had the honour and happiness of living with him, every day made me more sensible of the mighty work of the Spirit upon him….I never knew anyone walk as closely in the way of God as he did.” He deserved the reputation his name still enjoys among Methodists. The key to Fletcher’s saintliness was a humility that, so far from self-belittlement (a sign of psychological illness rather than of godliness) was utter self-forgetfulness. Genuinely humble because never conscious of it, Fletcher remained preoccupied with something vaster, grander, and unspeakably glorious. This accounted for a sanctity authentic and attractive in equal measure.

What was the vaster, the grander, the glorious that had first overtaken Fletcher, then inflamed him, and finally borne such fruit in him as to leave John Wesley awe-struck? We can glimpse it if we steal upon the Anglican clergyman’s residence in Madeley, ten miles outside London, where Fletcher is dying. His wife is singing a hymn they both cherish:

Jesus’s blood through earth and skies,
Mercy, free, boundless mercy cries.

— and the tuberculosis-weakened man gasps, “Boundless! Boundless! Boundless!” — boundless mercy visited upon sinners in bondage to anything and everything; boundless mercy visited upon all without exception or qualification. This theme reverberated throughout his theology, his life and his ministry.

Fletcher was born in Nyon, Switzerland, to parents whose social privilege allowed him to enrol at the University of Geneva. There he distinguished himself as a brilliant classics scholar. Possessing the intellectual qualifications for work as either professor or clergyman, he preferred the risky adventures of the mercenary soldier. He was scheduled to sail on a Portuguese warship that would take him to Brazil when a pre-boarding accident confined him to land. Next a wealthy uncle promised him a commission in the Dutch army but died before the nephew could become an officer. Dispirited now, Fletcher immigrated to England and found work as a tutor to the sons of a prominent family. Idling away several hours in the London marketplace while his master finished parliamentary business, Fletcher overheard an impoverished, elderly, uneducated woman speaking unselfconsciously — and compellingly, as was soon to be evident — of her intimate life in her Lord. When Fletcher mentioned the incident to his master’s wife she sniffed haughtily, “I will be hanged if our tutor doesn’t turn Methodist by this.” She was never hanged, but Fletcher did turn Methodist. Shortly he came to treasure the Methodist expressions of faith, discipleship and devotion. An Anglican bishop, having reviewed Fletcher’s academic record from the Swiss university, ordained him. Soon he was ministering with another Anglican, John Wesley, at West Street Chapel, as well as wherever French speaking Protestant refugees (“Huguenots”) congregated in London.

Fletcher’s next responsibility was the parish church in Madeley, Shropshire. While itinerancy was the rule among Methodist preachers, an exception was made for him. He relished remaining in the one place for the rest of his life, working relentlessly for the spiritual renewal of a parish whose members were distinguished only by their ignorance and worldliness, as callous toward their fellows as they were toward God. So far from dwelling amidst the one congregation lest he have to move beyond his “comfort zone”, Fletcher believed his situation to be a divine appointment, and cheerfully withstood abuse that included physical and legal threats. Parishioners quickly learned that the selfsame appointment rendered him as resilient as spring steel.

Soon his theological ability and spiritual maturity were recognized in his elevation as head of Trevecca College (Wales.) The Countess of Huntingdon funded this institution, a centre designed to train evangelical leaders during the 18th century revival. Fletcher travelled there as often as his pastoral responsibilities permitted. The countess’s college, however, soon displayed a stark Calvinism, denying mercy to be “boundless” but restricted rather to the “elect”, those selected from the mass of humankind and marked out for favourable treatment. When the Countess of Huntingdon insisted he disown the tenets of Methodism or depart her home, Fletcher left without rancour or recrimination.

John Wesley, aware that Methodism needed a strong leader to succeed him, had already decided upon Fletcher. Fletcher, more than any other thinker of that era, had grasped the spirit and genius that Wesley had imparted to Methodism. For years Wesley had insisted that God could do something with sin beyond forgiving it; specifically, God could deliver people from sin’s paralysing grip. If the church held up less than this then its proclamation was no more than a counsel of despair. Fletcher resonated with Wesley’s understanding of sanctification in its substance and depth and power. At the same time Wesley knew that no theological perception, however necessary, was sufficient qualification for the leader of a Spirit-forged movement. The chief qualification was that numinous godliness which the

Spirit-quickened can discern but not define. Ultimately Wesley was to write, “Many exemplary men have I known, holy in heart and life, within fourscore years. But equal to him I have not known, one so inwardly and outwardly devoted to God.”

Wesley was dismayed to learn of Fletcher’s death. The heartbroken 82-year old agreed to conduct the funeral. The text for Wesley’s address leapt off the page at him: “Mark the perfect man, and behold the upright.” (Psalm 37:37)

Fletcher’s single largest work, Checks to Antinomianism, expounded the theology of early Methodism and for years was a principal textbook in both England and America. The book reflects his elegant written English even as his spoken English remained awkward. There was nothing inferior, however, about his immersion in the depths of the One whose holiness was origin, invitation and reward for the man who had insisted to his wife, “Write nothing about me; God is all.”

In 1776 he had scripted a tract decrying the American Revolution. A copy was forwarded to the king of England. The latter wanted to repay him with any ecclesiastical “plum” Fletcher cared to name. Graciously he turned down his monarch, adding, “I want only more grace.”

Victor Shepherd
March 2000

1734 – 1804

Two brass candlesticks sit on two small tables flanking the pulpit chair in John Street Methodist Church, New York City. The candlesticks belonged to Barbara Heck. She brought them every Sunday to the early service of worship. They are lighted at every service in the church today. The lamp which she herself was has not been hidden under a bushel.

Barbara von Ruckle was born in County Limerick, Ireland, to parents whose Protestant forebears had fled persecution in Germany. French soldiers under King Louis XIV pillaged the southern part of Germany, harassing all who clung to the truths of the Reformation. The beleaguered people scattered. In 1709 a group of 110 families fled together, getting as far as Rotterdam where it seemed the ocean would frustrate them forever. Pitying their plight, Queen Anne of England dispatched British ships to the Dutch seaport to salvage the refugees. The grateful people were set down in County Limerick, while the government eased them into their new life by paying rent on the land which they farmed for the next two decades.

In no time the recently-arrived German refugees demonstrated their superiority to the wild native Irish peasants in all aspects of agriculture. Resentment mounted. Rents were raised 600%. John Wesley (who made 22 trips to Ireland) was aghast when he visited the German-speaking colony and witnessed the manner in which they had been penalized for their industry. He wrote in his journal, “I stand amazed! Have landlords no common sense (whether they have common humanity or no) that they will suffer such as these to be starved away from them?”

Wesley noted too that these people were starving for the bread of life as well. He had observed that in the fifty years since they had left Germany these people had become “eminent for drunkenness, cursing, swearing and utter neglect of religion.” He attributed their downward slide to the fact that for fifty years they had been without a German-speaking pastor. Wesley himself, however, was fluent in German. He was overjoyed to see the Methodist articulation of the gospel seize the people and change them profoundly.

At age eighteen Barbara had publicly professed her faith in Jesus Christ. When Wesley visited the emerald isle several years later the two of them resonated. The distinctive emphases of Methodism, rooted in Barbara, would eventually be transplanted into the soil of the new world.

By now the gentry in Ireland were confiscating the pastureland which the German refugees held in common. Deprived of land and afflicted with unpayable taxes, many of them decided to emigrate to America. Barbara married Paul Hescht (the name was anglicized to “Heck”), and together they braved a sixty-three day trip to New York City.

New York City, in 1760, was populated with 14,000 Dutch, English, German, Spanish and Afro-Americans. The city’s spiritual carelessness startled Barbara, as did a similar degeneration in those of the extended family (cousins, in-laws, more distant relatives) which had emigrated with her. She pleaded with her cousin, Philip Embury, to preach. He maintained he couldn’t inasmuch as he had neither church nor congregation. “Preach in your own home, and I will gather a congregation”, Barbara replied. The mustard seed beginning consisted of four people: Barbara, her husband, a labourer, and a black female servant. They persevered. Just when it seemed that the mustard seed would never germinate and multiply, Captain Thomas Webb appeared. He was regimental commander of the British forces at Albany. Standing erect in his military bearing, attired in the famous redcoat, Webb preached and the congregation grew. (In addition to his redcoat Webb wore a green patch over one eye. He had been wounded at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, when Quebec fell to the British.) Soon the congregation had outgrown the private home where it was meeting. A church-building would have to be built, and Barbara herself designed it, the first Methodist church-building in the new world. At the service of dedication the preacher expounded Hosea 10:12:

Sow for yourselves righteousness,
reap the fruit of steadfast love;
break up your fallow ground,
for it is time to seek the Lord.

This building was soon outgrown, and in 1768 another was raised in New York City. The seats had no backs and the gallery was reached by means of a ladder. Hundreds thronged it every Sunday.

When the American War of Independence loomed, Barbara and her husband, together with their five children, left New York City for a farm in Camden, near Lake Champlain. Angry neighbours who supported the coming revolution burned them out, destroying all their livestock and forcing them off the land. Once again the Heck family moved, this time to the Montreal area. A few years later they settled in the region of what would become Brockville. Compared to New York City their habitat was a wilderness. Undaunted, however, Barbara commenced her mustard seed sowing all over again. It took her years to gather enough people to form the first Methodist class in Canada. The people she had brought together ministered out of their own resources for five years; only then did a circuit-riding saddlebag preacher arrive to lead them.

When she was seventy years old one of her three sons found Barbara sitting in her chair, her German bible open on her lap. The woman who had never spoken English well, yet who was the mother of English Methodism in Canada, had gone home.

Victor A. Shepherd
December 1991

1745 — 1816

As he embarked for America in 1771 the twenty-six year-old wrote in his journal, “Whither am I going? To the new world. What to do? To gain honour?…To get money? No. I am going to live to God, and to bring others to do so.”

Francis Asbury grew up in the Birmingham area, England, where Methodism flourished, as it customarily did wherever the human ravages of the Industrial Revolution were worst. Only two years before Asbury’s birth, near-by Wednesbury had seen dreadful riots, memories of which would be healed wholly only in heaven. Homes had been pillaged, shops looted, bodies broken, women raped. For more than a century Methodists in this area would preserve hacked furniture as a tribute to the courage and sacrifice of their foreparents in faith.

An intellectually gifted boy, Asbury was set upon so viciously at school that he had to be withdrawn, only to become servant to a vulgar, affluent family whose riches were matched by their ungodliness. Escape was provided when he was taken on elsewhere as apprentice metalworker.

When he was sixteen Asbury became aware of a deeper work of grace within him and began to preach, speaking up to five times per week, walking several miles to get to each appointment. In order both to preach and retain his livelihood he found it necessary to rise at 4:00 am and retire at midnight — a practice he employed for the rest of his life.

His abilities widely known now, he was assigned to assist James Glassbrook, himself a forceful Methodist minister. Glassbrook had been travelling-companion to John Wesley, and no doubt informed his protege of what had befallen him and Wesley in their roving together. For instance, an Irish magistrate had vindictively flailed at Glassbrook with his walking-stick until he had broken it over the Glassbrook’s arm, so irate was he that the latter had protected Wesley against a mob which the magistrate himself had incited!

Meanwhile help was needed desperately in America. In 1771 Wesley challenged, “Who will go?” His word became the Word of the Lord as Asbury stepped forward. (Four “affectionate sisters”, as they described themselves, wrote his mother of their dismay at this turn of events!) His last service on English soil found him preaching on Psalm 61: “From the end of the earth I will cry unto thee.”

In no time he reflected the practicality of American life, putting behind him the old world’s concern for pretentious titles and social position. Concerning slaveowners who would not free black serfs he announced without hesitation, “God will depart from them.” A minister was someone who did the work of the ministry and was manifestly used of God in that work; to forsake the ministry for a less rigorous job and expect to retain “Reverend” was ridiculous. Ordination at the hands of the church conferred nothing; it merely acknowledged that someone had been ordained at God’s hand already. At the same time he was upset at the scarcity of qualified preachers, and startled that many without qualification assumed none was needed. Like Wesley before him, Asbury insisted that those claiming a call to preach must study five hours per day — or return to shop and farm. When resisted by older ministers whose ardour had diminished and who preferred to minister amidst comfort, Asbury stated, “I have nothing to seek but the glory of God; nothing to fear but his displeasure…. I am determined that no man shall bias me with soft words and fair speeches.” He sought no comfort for himself as he preached everywhere: a widow’s rented room, a tavern, a cabin filthy as a stable, an orchard, a paper-mill, a crowd at a public hanging, a wagon carrying men to their execution. When many Methodist clergy left America during the Revolutionary War Asbury remained — and never renounced his British citizenship!

In 1784 Wesley named him superintendent of the entire Methodist work in America. Yet Asbury knew that old world authoritarianism had no place in the new; he had his colleagues elect him superintendent — a clear indication that ministry in the new world needed new wineskins. (“Superintendent” was translated “bishop” in America, a title which Wesley opposed inasmuch as it suggested spiritual sterility, worldly pomp, and a measure of wealth inexcusable in any Christian!)

Asbury’s work took him far afield. He crossed the Allegheny mountains sixty times, often through trackless underbrush. No house provided shelter at night. His rheumatism, worsened by repeated drenchings and cold winds, left his feet grotesquely swollen; someone lifted him onto his horse, his dangling feet unable to get through the stirrups. Incapacitated as well by asthma and pleurisy in the last two years of his life he had to be carried like a child everywhere. When urged to give up travelling he replied that “Come” had always been the operative word he used with younger preachers, never “Go”. He loved the young ministers as his family, naming them aloud before God in anguished prayer, interceding for them in view of the suffering they could not avoid.

Under his leadership Methodism had grown from 5000 members in 1776 to 214,000 at his death. Little wonder that in 1787 a letter addressed to “The Revd. Bishop Asbury, North America” had found its way to him.

When reminded that he had been unable to stand up to preach for the last seven years of his ministry — only one of the hardships he had endured for the sake of the kingdom — he replied, “But what of this? I can trust in nothing I have done or suffered. I stand alone in the righteousness of Christ.”

Victor A. Shepherd
October 1992

1747 – 1814

Wesley spoke affectionately of Thomas Coke as a flea, for it seemed the man “hopped” relentlessly in the service of the gospel. (“Flea” may also have described the physical appearance of the chubby fellow who stood one inch over five feet.) The son of an affluent pharmacist, Coke attended Oxford University, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in arts and a doctorate in civil law.

Yet Coke spent little time in legal work as he knew himself called to the ministry. His first appointment following ordination as an Anglican clergyman was as assistant in a parish in Somerset. The flame that had ignited so many people fired soon him too, and in August, 1776, he sat down with John Wesley and offered himself as an itinerant preacher willing to go anywhere in the world. Wesley’s response was not what Coke expected: the young man was to “go on in the same path…visiting from house to house.” A few months later a new senior minister, hostile to Methodist convictions, arrived in the parish. Soon angry at his young assistant, the older man fired Coke on Easter Sunday, 1777 — and encouraged everyone to celebrate the dismissal by ringing the church bells and opening a hogshead of cider. (Thirty years later Coke would be vindicated: he returned to town and church and addressed a crowd of 2000.)

Throughout the Methodist awakening Wesley had forbidden his lay-preachers to administer the sacraments lest his people be accused of separating from the Church of England. An Anglican by conviction, Wesley wanted his unchurched converts to find a spiritual home in Anglicanism too. He knew as well that the Toleration Act that provided refuge for Dissenters wouldn’t protect his people, since he had never had them register with the authorities as Dissenters. His people would be seen as disruptive concerning the established church (and therefore liable to criminal prosecution) yet unsheltered by the laws safeguarding Christians who had publicly identified themselves as non-Anglicans. Wesley had always wanted Methodism to remain a renewal movement within the mother-Church.

In America the Methodist people were largely deprived of clergy and the sacramental ministry they provided. Wesley asked the Bishop of London to ordain men for the new world. The bishop refused. The shortage worsened after the American Revolution when nearly all the Anglican clergy, steadfastly loyal to the crown, returned to England. After much anguish Wesley “laid hands on” Coke. To anyone steeped in Anglicanism this could mean only that Coke had been consecrated bishop. On the same occasion Wesley ordained two lay-preachers as clergy for the New World. In the face of outrage from Anglican officialdom — and fury from his brother Charles who had always vowed, “Ordination means separation!” — Wesley resolutely stood by an insight that all biblical scholars today agree on: in the New Testament “bishop” (overseer) and “presbyter” (elder) describe the same person. Coke was to be the first Methodist bishop in the new world.

On the trip to America the learned man read Augustine’s Confessions for spiritual reflection, Virgil’s Latin Georgics for cultural enrichment, the lives of Francis Xavier (Jesuit missionary to India) and David Brainerd (Puritan missionary to North American aboriginals) for inspiration, plus 556 pages of a treatise on episcopacy so as to understand what sort of authority Wesley had conferred on him.

Upon landing in the new world Coke embarked on an 800-mile preaching tour of hinterland Methodism, noting with disgust and anger the abomination of slavery. Boldly he wrote an impassioned letter to George Washington — who later received him twice and in 1804 would ask him to preach before the United States Congress (all this in spite of Coke’s British citizenship!)

In 1791 the “flea” hopped over to France where, with the French Revolution at its most violent, he assembled hungry people in Paris and addressed them in French. In England he used his legal training to draft the “Deed of Declaration”, a document that secured legal protection for the Methodist Conference. In America again (he made nine round-trips) he collected money for a new college.

The year 1805 saw the 58-year old bachelor marry Penelope Smith, an aristocrat with the same financial privilege that Coke had known. Having spent his entire personal fortune to fund Methodist missions, he found his new wife willing to liquidate her estate for the same purpose — and thereafter to accompany her husband on his homeless journeyings.

While the aristocrat-turned-missionary found begging “a vile drudgery”, he did it unashamedly for the sake of supportirng the missions dear to him. And when his wife’s sudden death rocked him he fought his way out of the valley of the shadow with intensified preaching and “drudgery.”

Missions at home and abroad preoccupied him for decades. Four trips to the West Indies, a trip to Sierra Leone in Africa, the oversight of the Methodist work in Ireland, the provision of Methodist missionaries in Scotland and Wales, arranging for similar outreach in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia (he personally paid for long underwear for the Methodist preachers in Nova Scotia when he learned of the Canadian winter); this is what animated him above all else.

Following the death of his second wife after only one year together (they had married in 1811) Coke believed himself divinely appointed to Asia. He set out in the company of several missionaries, planning for concentrated work in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and India. Several ships in the party were lost in horrendous storms around Cape Horn. His survived and was moving quietly through the Indian Ocean with the Ceylon mission-field before it when he was found dead in his cabin.

Francis Asbury, now the bishop of American Methodism, preached a memorial sermon in which he paid tribute to the man he had long loved and admired: “…a gentleman, a scholar, a bishop to us; and as a minister of Christ, in zeal, in labours, in services, the greatest man in the last century.”

Victor Shepherd
June 1997

1759 – 1833

On the 24th of February, 1793, a tired eighty-eight year old man wrote Wilberforce, “Unless God has raised you up . . . I see not how you can go through with your glorious enterprise in opposing that execrable villainy. . . . You will be worn out by the opposition of men and devils; but if God is with you, who can be against you? Oh, be not weary in well-doing. Go on, in the name of God and in the power of his might, till even American slavery, the vilest that ever saw the sun, shall banish away before it.” One week later John Wesley was dead. It was the last letter he would ever write.

William Wilberforce entered the world sickly and nearly blind. When he was only nine his father died; his mother, unable to care for him, consigned him to the care of relatives. These people took him regularly to their evangelical Anglican parish church. What the youngster heard there, especially the stories and sermons of his favorite guest-preacher, The Reverend John Newton, went deep. For Newton had been captain of a slaveship, but had by the grace of God been rendered preacher, hymnwriter (“Amazing Grace”) and spiritual counselor. His influence upon the boy was incalculable: ” I revered him as a parent when I was a child,” Wilberforce would later write.

Slaves were picked up in West Africa and brought in chains to England in ships without sanitation facilities. Once put ashore, they were fattened up to disguise the ravages of months of poor nutrition and seasickness. Then they were oiled (dull skin being a sign of ill health) and paraded naked before buyers so that their physique could be assessed and market-value assigned. In the ten years following 1783 one British seaport alone (Liverpool) shipped 303,737 slaves to the New World. In no time Britain, the world’s leader in the trade, had supplied three million to French, Spanish and British colonies.

The captain of a British slaver threw 132 slaves overboard during a mid-ocean storm in order to lighten the vessel. Upon returning to England he made an insurance claim on the lost cargo! Sensitive people were outraged. The Attorney-General, however, insisted that the captain was without “any show or suggestion of cruelty”; it was his privilege to do with the cargo as he pleased. In any case, no public outrage was going to overturn anything unless a Member of Parliament, championing the welfare of slaves, cold persuade fellow-politicians. Besides, slaves were economically essential as a cheap source of labour, even as the trade was militarily necessary in training personnel for the Royal Navy.

In the meantime Wilberforce had found his way to Cambridge University, where he did little besides play cards. Soon his talent for eloquence got him elected to Parliament. He was twenty-one, and newly immersed in upper-class degradation. His earlier Christian formation appeared to recede as he groped and stumbled in gambling and intemperate drinking. By now he had scorned his Methodist upbringing as “vulgar” and “uninformed.”

Then, while he holidayed in the south of France, a devotional book by Philip Doddridge, an English clergyman, found its way into his hands and heart. Soon he was reading the New Testament in Greek. Torment consumed him as he became convicted of his depravity. Now he deplored the “shapeless idleness” of his frivolous life, speaking of it in terms of “deep guilt” and “black ingratitude.” With gospel-quickened insight he acknowledged “a sense of my great sinfulness in having so long neglected the unspeakable mercies of my God and Saviour.”

Assurance of his salvation turned the badge of “Methodist” from contemptible disgrace to glorious declaration. Immediately he resigned from five fashionable clubs, renounced gambling, and found himself fired with an intellectual zeal unknown at university. For the rest of his life he would labour ceaselessly on behalf of the earth’s wretched.

Wilberforce’s first target was the abolition of the trading in slaves. (He felt that if trafficking in black people ceased, slave-owners would have to treat their “property” more humanely, there being no replacement.) Admiral Nelson wrote from his ship, H.H.S. Victory, that as long as he would speak and fight he would resist “the damnable doctrines of Wilberforce and his hypocritical allies.” An irate sea-captain pummeled Wilberforce on the street. It was whispered slanderously when he was yet unmarried that his wife was black and that he beat her. His friends were accused of being spies in the service of the French.

While petitions poured into government offices to end slavery, the petitioners themselves were not at risk. Wilberforce was, for his position was never going to advance his political career even if he survived assassinations. In 1793 he advanced a bill in the House of Commons advocating gradual abolition. It failed by eight votes, most members absenting themselves form the House so as not to have to vote. Next he brought forward a bill prohibiting British ships from carrying slaves to foreign territories. It lost by two votes in a near-empty House. Promised the support of some Members of Parliament, he found himself abandoned. Nevertheless his resolve never abated even as his courage and eloquence never diminished. The tide began to turn. In 1807 Britain outlawed trading in slaves. Wilberforce incessantly lobbied the governments of other nations and was rewarded by seeing them do the same.

One task remained: the freeing of those already enslaved. That task absorbed all his energies for the next twenty-five years. The night that Wilberforce died, his supporters in the House of Commons were passing the clause in the Emancipation Act that declared all slaves free in one year and their masters given twenty million pounds in compensation.

The villainy, as vile as it was execrable, was over.

1801 – 1885

“There are not two hours in the day but I think of the second advent of our Lord. That is the hope of the church, for Israel, and the world. Come, Lord Jesus, come quickly”.

Like most who eagerly anticipate the day of our Lord’s appearing Shaftesbury was riveted to this world and its relentless suffering. Haunted by the barbarous exploitation of children, the formally attired, 42-year old politician was seen stepping into the unprotected bucket at the end of a single cable which lowered him 450 feet to the mine floor. Only weeks earlier a child assigned to apply the brake had left his post to chase a mouse; the bucket had plummeted and crashed, killing the miners descending in it. Once in the mine Shaftesbury found children hunched over on all fours, struggling to push loaded coal-carts. Some coal-seams were so narrow that only a small boy, lying on his back and wielding an undersized pick, could extract coal from the face. Most of these boys grew up deformed.

Shaftesbury was born to the aristocracy and was never without the privileges belonging to it. Nonetheless one incident in particular impelled him to spend himself on behalf of those who would never appear in his social class. Walking through a shabby area of London he came upon several intoxicated men who were carrying the crude sort of coffin used by the poorest. As they lurched toward the cemetery one fellow stumbled; the rest fumbled the casket, swearing uproariously. Shaftesbury was appalled that the remains of anyone could be subject to such indignity. On the spot he vowed to give himself to living wretches whose indignity was worse.

Following an Oxford University degree in classics he was elected to the House of Commons. Soon the young Member of Parliament was assigned to a sub-committee charged with investigating “Pauper Lunatics” and “Lunatic Asylums” generally. He found deranged people, incontinent, confined to “crib- rooms” consisting of large wooden boxes stuffed with straw. (It was easier to replace straw than to change adults’ diapers.) Winter and summer the ill were taken outside and swabbed by an attendant wielding a long-handled mop.

For Shaftesbury the only consideration was what was right. If upholding the right resulted in social disruption, then disruption there had to be. When British officials excused their silence (lest riots ensue) about the Indian custom of a widow throwing herself on the fire consuming her dead husband’s body he denounced the custom as “a most outrageous cruelty and wrong”. (When the British abolished the practice in 1829 there were no riots!) He alienated his father by supporting Catholic Emancipation in England, convinced that Roman Catholics should not remain politically disadvantaged.

Horrified at the 15-hour days children spent in factories Shaftesbury laboured to implement the ten-hour day. (He knew that six-hour shift would find employers bringing back children for a second shift, as well as lengthening the work-day for the adults whom they assisted.) Industrialists who opposed the ten-hour day complained that British industry would not be able to compete with the continent. He was accused of undercutting industry in north England in order to favour agriculture in the south. Whereupon he organized a huge demonstration of filthily-clad children from Manchester’s factories.

While his newly-implemented laws protected children in factories, no law protected the “climbing-boys” who were the virtual slaves of chimney-sweeps. Each sweep retained several boys to climb up and down flues to dislodge soot. Knees and elbows chronically raw and infected, a climbing-boy not infrequently became stuck in a chimney. Some suffocated; many died miserably of cancers spawned through the workday environment. The Climbing-Boy bill became law in 1840, but the fury of fastidious housewives kept it unenforced until the Shaftesbury Act of 8175.

The Factory Acts had not protected children in the mines. The government had attempted — unsuccessfully — to keep the report of its investigation from the public. Those who had dismissed Shaftesbury as a cranky do-gooder could not bear to read of the young girls, nearly naked in hot mines, working alongside naked men who tormented them sexually; five-year olds who worked trap doors in total darkness fourteen hours per day, six days per week. When Shaftesbury brought forward the Colliery Bill the government opposed it. (It became law in 1842.)

Nonetheless Shaftesbury always knew that freeing children from servitude was incomplete without education. Soon his dearest project was the Ragged School Union where children, barred through social class from the nation’s schools, were taught Thursday and Sunday evenings.

For years he campaigned for better public health. Underground sewers should replace street-level gutters. Flushing these gutters into the Thames — from which Londoners drew their drinking water — would only perpetuate the cholera which claimed 14,000 Londoners in 1849 alone. Cities should have piped water. Overcrowded cemeteries with fetid graves dug much too shallow should be closed. Yet it was years before Shaftesbury was heard.

Still, Shaftesbury never became a social reformer devoid of the gospel. In the face of the “wine-into-water” drift of the Church of England he strenuously contended for the faith. Justification by faith he pronounced “the great saving truth without which no other truth in scripture would be worth knowing…” Having wrestled with social wretchedness all his life he never thought its origin to be merely social, insisting rather on every individual’s innermost depravity: “We have to struggle…for the very atonement itself, for the sole hope of fallen men…”

On his death-bed he likened himself to the menhorraegic woman in the gospels: now at the feet of Jesus, soon to look up into the master’s face and know himself healed.

Victor A. Shepherd
October 1993

(Illustration by Marta Lynne Scythes)

1803 — 1882

Ryerson’s father was as unyielding as he was uncharitable: “Egerton, I hear that you have joined the Methodists; you must either leave them or leave my house.” The eighteen year-old chose to leave home.

One of nine children (including five sons who became Methodist ministers) Egerton was born near Vittoria, a village close to present-day Port Dover. His Dutch foreparents had been in the new world since the early 1600s. When New Amsterdam fell to the British in 1664 and was renamed New York, they anglicized the spelling of “Reyerzoon.” Upon the outbreak of the American Revolution their descendants declared their loyalty to the crown and, together with thousands of other United Empire Loyalists, migrated to what remained of British North America.

The farm boy found his way to a school in Vittoria where James Mitchell, his teacher, fostered in him a love of learning and a facility with the English language. He also exposed Ryerson to the surge of world-occurrence and all it boded for actors and spectators alike.

The educational vista soon complemented a religious vision, for the teenager had apprehended Jesus approaching him. Eager to refute the scornful who sneered at religion as an excuse for laziness, Ryerson prepared himself for the ministry by arising daily at 3:00 a.m. in order to study until 6:00, when he commenced the 14-hour day’s work required of all farm labour.

His father, undeflectably Anglican, viewed Methodists as near-American (the first Methodist Circuit in Upper Canada, established by the American Methodist Episcopal Church in 1791, was part of the District of Genesee, New York State) and near-anarchic, assuming republicanism and revolution to imply each other.

Undiscouraged by his father’s intransigence, Ryerson became the itinerant preacher on the Yonge Street Circuit. Its boundaries were Pickering, Weston and Lake Simcoe. He needed a month to visit the people in his charge, delivering scores of sermons in scattered settlements. Always concerned to enhance human well-being, he ministered in the First Nation community on the Credit River where Peter Jones, an aboriginal Methodist, had evangelized the Mississauga natives. Here he slept in a wigwam, learned the language and set about erecting a multi-purpose building to serve as church and school. He supplemented the natives’ gifts with monies garnered from friends and former members of his Yonge Street circuit — none of whom was affluent. He had the structure paid for in six weeks.

The challenge in this regard, however, was nothing compared to that posed by his most formidable foe. Bishop John Strachan, of Scottish Presbyterian background, had emigrated to Canada in 1799. Rejected as a candidate for the Presbyterian ministry, he had joined the Anglicans, soon becoming the episcopal power-broker and the implacable foe of all who threatened the grip of the wealthy, oligarchic “Family Compact.” The latter was a handful of rich families whose stranglehold on business, finance and education sought to petrify the social stratification it exploited. Newly admitted to the Compact, Strachan spoke for it and speared any who opposed it.

Twenty-five years older than Ryerson, Strachan denounced Methodists as poorly-educated, irresponsible and traitorous (conveniently forgetting that they were descendants of United Empire Loyalists.) Already denied the right to own land for churches and parsonages, as well as the right to baptize and solemnize marriages, Methodist people were outraged. It fell to the 23-year old “David” to confront “Goliath.” Ryerson penned a riposte brilliant and effective in equal measure. In four years the Methodists were granted what they had long been refused.

Notorious now, Ryerson was appointed editor of a brand new Christian Guardian, soon the most widely read newspaper in the province, superseding many times over the official Upper Canada Gazette. The Guardian followed up with a bookstore, and this in turn metamorphosed into Ryerson Press, at one point the largest printing and publishing enterprise in Canada. Operating until 1970, it did much to shape the Canadian identity through the novelists, poets, biographers and historians whose works it disseminated.

In 1836 the Methodists built Upper Canada College at Cobourg, Ontario, expanding it into Victoria College (1841) and Victoria University (1865, when faculties of law and medicine were added.) Named its first principal, Ryerson announced a curriculum as broad as it was deep. In addition to Classics (a mainstay at any university at this time), he added a science department offering courses in chemistry, mineralogy and geography, as well as new departments of philosophy, rhetoric and modern languages (French and German.) Always eschewing one-sidedness anywhere in life, he insisted that each student pursue a balanced programme of the arts and the sciences.

Yet Ryerson’s monumental victory soon eclipsed the achievements that had already made him a household name. Dismayed to see one-half of school-aged children with no formal education and the remaining half averaging only a year’s, he knew himself handed unparalleled opportunity the day he was appointed Chief Superintendent of Common Schools for Canada West in 1844. (A “common” school was the social opposite of the elitist private schools.) Only forty-three, Ryerson persuaded the provincial government to assume responsibility for education. Soon common schools, aided by government grants, appeared wherever twenty students could be gathered. The arrangement was a quantitative leap over the log cabin schoolhouses whose instructors were frequently minimally literate themselves.

Thinking ill of a British school system that perpetuated the worst class divisiveness in Europe, Ryerson visited Continental common schools in Holland, Italy and France, “bookending” his trip with visits to Germany where he could observe the education system that Philip Melanchthon had implemented 300 years earlier. Upon his return to Canada he wooed the provincial government into marrying education and tax revenues, thereby providing free education for all. Of course the rich objected, arguing that they shouldn’t have to support the schooling of their social inferiors. Ryerson triumphed. His free education was soon compulsory as well. In it all he elevated teaching from a miserable job to a calling akin to that of the ordained ministry.

George Brown, editor of Toronto’s Globe newspaper, ranted that Ryerson had imported “Prussian” education into Ontario. Ryerson, cultured where Brown was crude, quietly immersed himself in French literature, having taught himself the language so well that he and the pope had conversed in it during his visit to Italy.

His educational programme quickly spread to other provinces, thereby magnifying his contribution to public life in Canada. The Methodist people, who for several decades hadn’t always appreciated what he was coaxing into place for all Canadians, realized his accomplishment. In 1874 they honoured the seventy-four year old giant by electing him the first president of the General Conference of the newly-amalgamated Methodist Church of Canada.

Victor Shepherd 5th October 2001

1813 – 1855

“Don’t be a Soren!”, Danish parents admonish their children to this day, “Soren” being synonymous with a ridiculousness so pronounced as to be both laughable and contemptible. Nevertheless my friend and former philosophy professor, Emil Fackenheim, himself a world-renowned thinker, casually mentioned to me that Kierkegaard is the greatest thinker to arise in Christendom.

Really? What about giants like Augustine, Aquinas, Luther? While I pondered Fackenheim’s remark I found Ludwig Wittgenstein, a leading philosopher in our century, saying the same thing: no Christian thinker has surpassed the physically grotesque man with the inimitable mind.

Soren Kierkegaard was the youngest of seven children born to Michael and Ane, the illiterate household servant he impregnated and subsequently married. Five of their children wouldn’t live past 34, leaving Peter, the eldest son, and their “Benjamin”. (Soren spoke agonisingly of himself as his father’s “Isaac.”) Years later, while Peter supported himself as a clergyman, Soren’s ten years at the University of Copenhagen and his work as an author – at one point he produced fourteen books in two years – would be funded out of the residues of his father’s business career as cloth merchant, hosier and wholesale grocer.

While Soren excelled in Latin, Greek, history, mathematics and science, his mastery of philosophy was stunning. With laser-like penetration he saw that the philosophers’ metaphysical systems were just that: systems in thinking; or, as he preferred to speak of them, protracted “thought-experiments.” While admiring the logic whereby philosophers integrated and advanced their comprehension of every facet of human history and every dimension of human understanding, he insisted that all such systems confused the realm of thought with the realm of existence. Glad to acknowledge that scholarly objectivity requires personal detachment, he none the less insisted that ultimate Truth calls for radical commitment. Truth is to be embraced in impassioned “inwardness.” His “Truth is subjectivity” soon had the intellectual and ecclesiastical worlds buzzing.

Of course Kierkegaard never meant that truth is subjectivism. Subjectivism is nothing more than fantasy or self-indulgence, even the silly notion that our preferences or pleasures constitute reality. Reality, rather, is the God who looms before us yet rises above us in an “infinite qualitative difference.” Quite simply, Kierkegaard knew that existence could never be reduced to thought. The more he read Hegel, Europe’s leading philosopher, the more convinced he was that being schooled in a philosophical system was “like reading out of a cookbook to a man who is hungry.”

Kierkegaard disagreed most vehemently with Hegel’s notion that Christianity was merely a pictorial representation in concrete, colourful images of a truth that the philosopher could apprehend by means of rising to the standpoint of the Absolute through pure thought. Kierkegaard disagreed that from this exalted perspective the philosopher could grasp that “God” and man had been brought together in a higher unity, and therein grasp that “God” was nothing more than the essence of humankind. He rejected the notion that religious consciousness was to philosophical consciousness as illustrations are to argument. Sadly, he understood why other philosophers were soon saying that “God” was no more than humankind’s self-projection now hugely inflated, that theology had been exposed as anthropology.

Kierkegaard knew better. The living, lordly, holy One is. The “infinite qualitative difference” between him and us can never be eliminated through thought. Since no “thought-experiment” can ascend to him, he must descend to us. This he has done in the Incarnate One. And this one can be known only in faith, with all the risks that attend upon faith – “lying out upon 70,000 fathoms of water.” The self-abandoned self “leapt” in faith to embrace God-Incarnate, and therein learned that “being a Christian” wasn’t the indifferent shallowness of the state church wherein, said Kierkegaard, “Everyone is a Christian. What else?” To become a Christian is properly to exist. To exist, his Greek studies reminded him, is ex-stare, to stand out: stand out from the crowd, stand out from public opinion, stand out from the Spirit-less religion of soulless conformity. So far from the disinterest of “thought-experimenters”, Kierkegaard espoused the “interest” of faith. Inter-est, his Latin studies reminded him, is to be “between.” It’s in the “between” of God and us; it’s in the relationship that Truth, embraced in impassioned inwardness, is held in utmost subjectivity.

Not surprisingly, his philosophical perception and his spiritual profundity issued in a stinging denunciation of a lumbering church’s “Christianity.” At the same time his honesty, forthrightness, and love for simple people (he was always in the streets conversing with common folk) found him writing newspaper articles that exposed the cruelty and compromises of the socially prominent. These people retaliated, pillorying Kierkegaard in the press. Thereafter when he went to church, louts stared at him endlessly, hoping their icy aggression would unnerve him. When he went on carriage drives in the country (the one relaxation he permitted himself), hired toughs threatened him. Cartoonists caricatured him, jeering at his clothing and mocking his bodily deformities. “No one dares to say ‘I’”, he noted as so-called individuals hid in the crowd and weakly intoned en masse what they would never dare to say alone. His society was afflicted with a sort of “ventriloquism”, he liked to say, wherein the individual was merely the mouthpiece for the mob. “And this”, he insisted, “is the specific immorality of the age.”

The day he was walking home with the last of the money his father had willed him he collapsed in the street and was carried, paralysed, to the hospital. He died five weeks later. The common people who thronged his funeral were restive to the point of a near-riot. The clergy, however, absented themselves except for the dean of the cathedral and Peter, his brother, now a bishop, who publicly “apologised” for little Soren’s “excesses.”

The man who addressed his work to “that solitary individual”, the person who resists the crowd, flings himself upon the crucified, risks all as did Abraham of old ascending Mount Moriah, lives thereafter in the “between”, and appropriates Truth in ever-greater subjectivity; this one had said of himself years earlier, “I shall never know the security of being like others.” His place is secure in the hearts of those who cherish his intellect and spirit. Above all, he himself is secure in the grasp of him from whose hand nothing will ever snatch him. (John 10:29)

Victor Shepherd June 1999

1816–1900

Never lacking mordant expressions, Ryle diffused them throughout his denunciations of sinful folly and naïve self-delusion, but also throughout his depictions of the glories and joys of the Christian life and the unutterable grandeur of heaven. For instance, few things upset him as much as clergy, entrusted with the spiritual shepherding of their people, who started off redolent with promise only to make their peace, here a little and there a little, with church and world as conviction and nerve gradually failed them until – until “…at the last the man (sic) who at one time seemed likely to be a real successor to the apostles and a good soldier of Christ, settles down on his lees as a clerical gardener, farmer, or diner out, by whom nobody is offended and nobody is saved”.

Yet he didn’t target the clergy. Zealously urging all to embrace the Saviour, he solemnly warned all alike of the peril of spiritual neglect or somnolence – as when he told hearers of Lot ’s wife and the spiritual disaster coming upon her: “The world was in her heart, and her heart was in the world.”

Collapsing the imaginary refuge of those who think their privilege (of any sort) will see them past the just Judge, Ryle recalled, “Joab was David’s captain; Demas was Paul’s companion; Judas Iscariot was Christ’s disciple. These all died in their sins.”

So reads Ryle’s landmark book Holiness. First published as a collection of addresses and essays in 1879, it has been reprinted seven times, and continues to stiffen the spines of Christians in danger of becoming spiritually amorphous, even as it lends encouragement and hope to Christians who are on the point of giving up.

J.I. Packer, recently retired professor of theology at Regent College , UBC, was near despair as a young man concerning his seeming failure to “move into the space” that popular holiness teachers counselled. Packer found their “Let go [of what?] and let God [do what?]” – and similar exhortations — too vague to help and too condemnatory to console. He was ready to write himself off as spiritually hopeless when Ryle’s Holiness came into his hands. Ryle showed him that holiness, so far from a passive “surrender” or self-wrought “consecration”, is simultaneously God’s gift, God’s command, and the believer’s pursuit. Holiness is to be done. And since such “doing” occurs in the world, the Christian is involved in a fight. Packer’s life turned around and he stepped ahead.

Fight? “The saddest symptom about many so-called Christians is the utter absence of anything like conflict and fight in their Christianity”, Ryle lamented. Unwilling to deny the obvious in scripture, he reminded his people, “There are no promises in the Lord Jesus Christ’s epistles to the seven churches, except to those who ‘overcome’”.

Ryle was born to a wealthy family and to the prerogatives that wealth brings. Sent to Eton , England ’s most prestigious private school, he distinguished himself in Greek and Latin before moving on to Oxford University , where he excelled in football and rowing even as he gained academic honours. Through it all he was never exposed to anything but spiritual tepidity and torpor. Later he was to speak of the sermons offered weekly at Eton as “a perfect farce and a disgrace to the Church of England.”

Confined to bed for several weeks at age 21, he began reading scripture. As its truth and force fermented within him, he was brought to that moment when, several months later, he happened upon a church service whose text-for-the-day was the ringing evangelical declaration of Ephesians 2: “By grace are you saved through faith….it is the gift of God.” In the wake of the gospel’s luminosity he grasped several implications: the deplorable condition of the sinner, the sufficiency of the atonement, the need for Spirit-wrought new birth, the believer’s holiness as the only authentic sign of faith, and (a point he would make tirelessly thereafter) the utter speciousness of baptismal regeneration or any hint of it.

Immediately he found no shortage of people who looked at him askance. The joy of his new beginning was matched by the grief of finding his friends uncomprehending and himself unable to remove the impasse.

Disaster overtook the family in 1841. His father had loaned a brother-in-law 200,000 pounds to finance a new business in cotton manufacturing. The business failed. His father had had lands and houses whose rents kept the family awash in money. The family had lived on a 1000-acre estate. The family foreparents had to come to England as “Royle” during the Norman Conquest, 1066. Ryle’s annual allowance had been 15,000 pounds. Everything vanished overnight. In his first appointment following ordination (1841), Ryle’s stipend was 84 pounds.

The year 1844 saw him immersed in the work for which he would remain known long after his preaching voice was silent; namely, his intense study and practical renderings of the English Reformers, the Puritans who followed them, and the leaders of the Evangelical Awakening after that, together with numerous histories and accessible expositions of the Gospels.

The days were not easy. Ryle’s first wife became psychotic following the birth of their first child. Only a few years later she died of a pulmonary aneurysm. His second wife lived ten years, leaving him with five children under fourteen.

Amidst it all he pastored and preached, attracting huge crowds. He conducted open-air services. He emerged as the spokesperson for the Evangelical party within the Church of England, resisting Anglo-Catholicism’s attempt at undoing the Reformation and introducing ritual that lacked scriptural warrant.

As retirement age approached, he published two seminal works (perhaps his best-known), Old Paths and Knots Untied, expositions of doctrine he deemed essential.

Then retirement receded in 1880 when he was appointed bishop of the new Diocese of Liverpool. Noting that only 10% of Liverpool attended church, he intensified evangelistic efforts. Deploring the poverty of the clergy, he initiated the first clergy pension plan in England . Release from his ardours was granted in June 1890.

His epitaph could have been taken from the last chapter of his Holiness. “‘Christ is all.’ These words are the essence and substance of Christianity.”

1824 — 1905

“I know hardly any other writer who seems to be closer, or more continually close, to the Spirit of Christ himself.” Not everyone would agree with C.S. Lewis’s assessment. Congregational authorities in Arundel (England) voted him out of their pulpit. (All the more striking in view of Lewis’s insistence that the “preachments” are the best part of MacDonald’s novels!) The young Scot had not been long in the English congregation before his convictions were evident. Genuine faith, he insisted, longs to exhibit the “fruits of the Spirit”, not merely subscription to a creed. Genuine faith disdains the values of the world and forswears the vanities of the world. God longs not merely to save us from hell but even to save us from our sins now, the sins which we must repudiate lest they disfigure us even more hideously. Objectors in the congregation tried to force him out by reducing his stipend by two-thirds. He stayed on for the sake of the few earnest people in the congregation, but had to leave soon, unable to deal with people who were unwilling to think and unresolved to obey.

George MacDonald was born in the north of Scotland, where Gaelic myths and Old Testament stories sank into him and formed the mind that would later cherish imagination as the vehicle of spiritual truth.

Even as a youth he was sensitive to the implications of what older people appeared to say thoughtlessly. When a preacher persistently expounded a doctrine of predestination (with its notion that God did not love and would not redeem a large class of humankind) he announced to his family that he didn’t love God if God didn’t love everyone. This kind of hyper-Calvinism would arouse his antipathy for the rest of his life. While still a young boy he was repulsed in equal measure by the established Church of Scotland (it struck him as intellectually abstract and spiritually ineffective) and by the sects (they struck him as all heat and no light). Yet he admitted that the sincere seeker could find God in either.

Although the Scots had a reputation for theological precision, MacDonald thought it to be the product of the dissecting knife: fine work done on something lifeless. For doctrine (as he had seen it handled) appeared to have been made a substitute for living faith where the believer’s heart is rightly related to the heart of God.

1840 found him at Aberdeen University where he gained his highest marks in chemistry and physics. A severe shortage of money evaporated his plans to study medicine. He gave himself to literature, his passion for the rest of his life.

MacDonald supported himself by teaching arithmetic in a school and tutoring privately, in Latin and Greek, children of the Victorian era’s merchant class. He was never at home with the rising business class, repulsed as he was by its eagerness to sacrifice everything to “getting on”, and heartsick as he was at evangelical churchfolk who regarded financial prosperity as a reward for righteousness.

Horrified at the spiritual suffocation of affluence, he came to the conviction, never to be surrendered, of the centrality of the teachings of Jesus. These would the be the core of his life and work. The New Testament epistles were to be read in the light of the master’s teachings. For too long the Non-conformist churches had elevated the epistles above the gospels, with the result that abstract theological statements had become the means of evading the concrete claim of the gospels on one’s daily obedience.

In the course of his preparation for the ministry MacDonald had come to see that reason, while essential to our knowledge and worship of God, of itself does not open the door to that Kingdom whose key is Spirit. Not surprisingly, the only congregation he pastored told him he should use more evangelical cliches (code-words) and bend the teachings of Jesus to conform to denominational pronouncements. He left.

For the next several years poverty wrapped itself around him and his family. (He and Louisa had eleven children.) His financial plight was eased through teaching Shakespeare and poetry at a new Ladies College. Then the breakthrough! Longman’s (a major British publisher) was bringing out Within And Without, a lengthy poem, and was assigning him half the profits.

Convinced that fantasy is an effective vehicle of spiritual truth, he produced Phantastes, an exploration of God’s Fatherhood. Reviewers promptly condemned it. One journal argued that every author is permitted one mistake, and MacDonald had just made his!

Nevertheless, an appointment to a chair of English literature recognized his talent. Soon he was compared to Sir Walter Scott, Scotland’s greatest novelist. Aberdeen University awarded him an honourary doctorate. Americans insisted on a whirlwind tour of major U.S. cities (with stops, however, in Niagara Falls and Toronto). He returned home ill, only to find his daughter Mary dying of tuberculosis. His heart broken but his faith resilient, he asserted, “I will not acknowledge concerning death what our Lord denies of it.” In the same vein he wrote, “No one can be living a true life to whom dying is a terror.”

From 1851 to 1897 he wrote over 50 books: novels, essays, plays, poems, sermons, fairy tales, adult fantasy. His spiritual convictions throb throughout them all. God’s love is “love which will punish fearfully [in this life] rather than leave the beloved in sin.” Because we are made in the image of God, we “must love him or be desolate.” “Obedience is the one key of life.” “Men would rather receive salvation from God than God their salvation.”

MacDonald’s Christian literary descendants are now household names: G.K. Chesterton, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and America’s Madeleine L’Engle.

Everything he was and wrote is gathered up finally in one of his matchless aphorisms: “The response to self-existent love is self-abnegating love.”

Victor Shepherd

1829 – 1912                            1829 – 1890

“Never!” Catherine cried form the first row of the balcony, before her husband could utter a word. William Booth, a Methodist minister, had been faulted for welcoming the poor, ne’er-do-wells and street toughs to his services. Church leaders wanted him to promise that the welcome mat would be rolled up and put away. Catherine answered for him. Little wonder that she wrote, “The more I see of fashionable religion, the more I despise it.”

William Booth was born in Nottingham, England, into a home that knew the bitter taste of poverty. His father died when he was fourteen, and William became a pawnbroker’s apprentice. He never forgot the anxiety, the bleakness and, above all, the degradation of penury. He would eventually startle Britain with his book, In Darkest England and the Way Out. Booth knew the socially wretched intimately, the people who worked themselves into exhaustion and then died from starvation, unable to afford as much food as the British government guaranteed the worst criminals in the nation’s jails. In 1890, the year his book appeared, there were three million such people in England. Their enslavement meant unyielding despair.

Yet Booth was never tempted to become a secular programmer of social change: he was always the evangelist. Converted at age fifteen in a Wesleyan chapel, he ever after wanted only to declare that the Word of Truth which brings Life to its hears and sets them on the Way of discipleship. Ordained a Methodist minister, he was soon dismissed by church authorities as a “reformer” and was stripped of his clergy-standing.

He found a temporary new home among New Connexion Methodists, but a few years of “settled ministry” convinced him that this was not his vocation. Together with his wife, Catherine Mumford, he began conducting preaching missions in Wales, Cornwall, and the Midlands – areas that had suffered the worst economic and human blight in the shadow-side of industrialization. Once again, church authorities attempted to appoint him to a settled ministry. By now he had wearied of their inability to recognize his calling. He left. In 1865 the Christian Mission opened in East London. In 1878 it was renamed The Salvation Army.

Persecution began immediately. “Take their flag, tie it round their necks and hang ‘em,” fumed the mayor of Folkestone. Following outdoor services in Sheffield in 1882, William Booth “reviewed” his stalwart soldiers. They were bespattered with egg-yolk, mud, and blood, their brass instruments battered beyond repair. “Now is the time to have your photographs taken,” he commented wryly. In that year alone seven hundred Salvationists were assaulted on the streets of Great Britain.

Catherine was the intellectual genius of the organization. As highly-born as her husband was not – her father had been a clergyman – Catherine was gifted with a keen mind, undeflectable conviction, and resolute courage. Long periods of childhood illness had led her to probe philosophy, theology and history. She had read through the entire Bible by age twelve. She would eventually write compellingly on behalf of women preachers. Her husband agreed with her it this. The Orders and Regulations that he drafted maintained that “women should have the right to equal share with men in the work of publishing salvation.” And in a vein that would cause modern feminists to rejoice, William also insisted that “women must be treated as equal with men in all intellectual and social relationships of life.”

Booth continued his multi-pronged attack on the strongholds of evil. On the one hand, he unashamedly instructed the evangelists he trained to “preach damnation with the cross at the centre.” On the other hand, he never rested until he had secured permanent changes in the world around him. No longer did dirt-poor “phossy-jawed” workers in the match-making industry find their jawbones glowing in the dark and their lives at risk because of the phosphorus they were obliged to work with. Tirelessly he exposed the “white salve” trade: thirteen to sixteen year old prostitutes who were much in demand in Paris and London. Three hundred and ninety-six thousand signatures later, he saw the practice outlawed.

At his death in 1912 The Salvation Army had 9,415 congregations throughout the world. The organization is now found in ninety-four countries, stretching form India, the site of the first major overseas venture, to El Salvador, added in 1989. The most recent additions are Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Latvia and Russia.

The Booths had always known that the work of God would advance only if Christians dedicated themselves without hesitation or qualification. Catherine urged this upon all as she wrote, “There comes a crisis, a moment when every human soul which enters the Kingdom of God has to make its choice of the Kingdom in preference to everything that it hold and own.” Always less reflective than his wife, William himself asserted,

While women weep, as they do now, I’ll fight;
While little children go hungry, I’ll fight;
While men go to prison, in and out, in and out, I’ll fight;
While there is a drunkard left,
while there is a poor lost girl on the streets,
where there remains one dark soul without the light of God – I’ll fight!
I’ll fight to the very end!

When Booth’s funeral cortège wound its way through the streets of London, city offices closed. One hundred and fifty thousand people filed past his casket. Queen Mary was one of the 40,000 who attended his funeral. Spared another day’s fighting, the General had been promoted.

Victor Shepherd

1834 – 1892

Everything about him seems prodigious. Typically absorbing six books per week, he expanded his personal library until it contained 12,000 volumes. In an era that had not yet been introduced to sound-amplification, he could address an audience of 23,000 without a public address system. In 1865 his sermons sold 25,000 copies per week and were translated into over twenty languages. Members of his congregation were occasionally asked not to attend next Sunday’s service so that newcomers might find a seat.

C.H. Spurgeon was born in Kelvington, Essex, in a part of England that cherished the memories of stalwart Christians who had counted no price too dear for the faith that saves. The Reformation martyrs who had burned at the stake, as well as John Bunyan (imprisoned for thirteen years), encouraged the young man whose courage would later be called for again and again but never questioned.

In 1850 the teenager became aware of persistent spiritual need. Determined though he was to attend services at his family’s church, a snowstorm re-routed him to a sparsely-attended Methodist chapel. The preacher that day was earnest but not eloquent. Having little to say, he filled up the time allotted for the sermon by continually repeating his text: “Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth! For I am God, and there is none other” (Isaiah 45:22). It was enough. The formation of England’s most powerful Christian spokesperson was under way. Within a year his theological grasp and spiritual discernment were awesome. By the time he was nineteen he had been called to one of the largest Baptist congregations in London.

His detractors, preoccupied with the shallow niceties and “good taste” of Victorian England, criticised him relentlessly. “Clerical poltroon” (a poltroon is a spiritless coward), “pulpit buffoon,” “demagogue,” they sniffed at him dismissively, comparing him to a circus performer who entertains the masses mindlessly. As it happens, his sermons are still read today, and in printed from fill sixty-three volumes equal to the contents of the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Helmut Thielicke, a leading Lutheran theologian and veteran of the German church struggle, advised his post-World War II seminarians to sell whatever books they owned in order to buy Spurgeon!

Through humour Spurgeon ensured that his critics did not unsettle him or deflect him. “He stinketh,” first said of Lazarus and now said of Spurgeon himself, merely proved that Spurgeon had been buried with Christ and was now dead to the world’s slander.

Yet not even his gift of humour could rid him of the horror that would haunt him for the rest of his life. On an October evening in 1856 Surrey Hall was filled to capacity with a crowd of 12,000 while another 10,000 pressed on the building from outside. Part way through the service, several of Spurgeon’s opponents shouted “Fire!” Seven people died in the panic that ensued; 28 others were hospitalized. Spurgeon himself was carried from the pulpit and hidden away in a friend’s home. Later he was to say that the nightmare had brought him to the verge of insanity.

In truth, his health was never robust. Each year found him in bed for weeks at a time with a variety of ailments, including chronic inflammation of the kidneys. Not least among his miseries was an inclination to recurring bouts of depression. (No doubt exhaustion had much to do with this. He had oversight of a congregation of 4,000 members, preached every Sunday, conducted weddings and funerals, edited a magazine, and dealt with 500 letters each week.)

Appalled at the housing conditions in London and determined to have the congregation “show our love of truth by truthful love,” Spurgeon established the Stockwell Orphanage. As attacks against his evangelical stance mounted, Spurgeon had a response: “The orphanage is an eloquent answer to the sneers of infidels and scoffers of the modern school who would fain make it out that our charity lies in bigoted zeal for doctrines but does not produce practical results. Are any of the new theologians doing more? . . . What does their socialism amount to beyond words and theory?” Political injustices were addressed with the same forthrightness. Tirelessly he advocated the removal of special privileges for the Church of England, arguing as well that any qualified student would be able to attend Oxford or Cambridge University, and that any non-Anglican pastor should have the right to bury his people in parish graveyards.

Believing that “each man should give his vote with as much devotion as he prays” Spurgeon denounced Home Rule for Ireland and governmental neglect of education in England. His strongest criticism he reserved for American slavery. When publishers in the United States began deleting references to slavery in American edition of his books Spurgeon redoubled his insistence that slavery was a “soul-destroying sin.”

Like John Calvin before him, Spurgeon devoted himself to the preparation of preachers. His Pastors’ College schooled hundreds. The instructors were working pastors who modelled both academic rigour and pastoral excellence.

Yet it was the writings of the Puritans that effervesced in him throughout his ministry. In these works he claimed to have found what every minister needs but which few seminaries seem able to provide: rigorous theology, warm faith, and practical pastoral wisdom. Despite the thousands of Puritan volumes on his shelves, however, Spurgeon was aware that it is suffering, in the end, that shapes the pastor as nothing else can. The prince of preachers who had suffered so much himself maintained to the end that “affliction . . . is the best book in a minister’s library.”

1886-1968

“Jesus Christ, as he is testified to us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and death.”

So reads the first article in the Barmen Declaration, a theological document framed by Karl Barth in May of 1934. It ranks with the famous Protestant confessions of faith. Like them it came to birth at a time when the Church was floundering. Like them it spoke to a Church that had lost sight of its Lord, and had confused the Kingdom of God with the kingdoms of this world.

Nazism insisted that Hitler had the right to control the life and work of the Church. “German Christianity” was in reality no more than a centuries-old paganism wrapped in a flag the world came to dread. The National Church had bent the gospel out of shape as surely as the Swastika was a bent cross.

Lest anyone misinterpret the opening words of the Barmen Declaration (above), a supporting paragraph followed immediately: “We reject the false doctrine that the Church may and must acknowledge as sources of its proclamation other events, powers, forms and truths as God’s revelation beside this one Word of God.”

Barth was a forty-eight year old professor of theology at the University of Bonn when the Gestapo (the Nazi secret police) burst into his lecture and forcibly deported him to his native Switzerland. Before he died, Barth would demonstrate yet again that the Church’s best theology (like its best hymnwriting) emerges form its worst suffering.

Eventually his output was overwhelming: fourteen huge tomes of theology discussing the historic doctrines of the Christina faith as well as contemporary intellectual developments; dozens of shorter works; and four hundred journal articles and books of sermons.

Indisputably the leading Protestant theologian of the twentieth century, Barth was eventually even recognized by the Church of Rome (a teacher to be listened to by Christians of all persuasions). He was wooed by seminaries and churches everywhere. Yet he rarely ventured abroad on speaking engagements, preferring to preach each Sunday afternoon men in prison.

Barth was born in Switzerland, ordained to the ministry of the Reformed Church, and appointed to the village of Safenwil. Wile he busied himself in church and village the world convulsed with the declaration of the First World War in August, 1914. Ninety-three German intellectuals publicly declared their support for the war policies of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Barth was horrified to see virtually all of his former theology professors included in the list of names. At that moment he know they had nothing to teach him; nothing concerning scripture, theology, ethics or history.

Driven back to the New Testament, Barth recognized within its pages the centrality and sufficiency of “the Word made flesh.” He saw that the basis of the Church’s proclamation and pastoral care was not the world’s self-understanding, but rather the very Godness of the God who is “wholly other” than his creation and is therefore “wholly free” to give himself to us and for us.

A commentary on the Book of Romans soon followed. Embodying Barth’s discernment, it “burst like a bombshell on the playground of the European theologians,” according to a Roman Catholic scholar. Controversy erupted and never abated. Yet Barth refused to surrender the apostles’ conviction of the uniqueness of the Incarnation. When he was harassed and mocked by political authorities, university faculties, and ecclesiastical bureaucrats, he insisted that the Church always falls down in unfaithfulness and disgrace when it fails to understand three small words: his only Son.

Throughout World War II one huge volume succeeded another. An Englishman visiting an endangered pastor in Germany was startled at the man’s relief upon receiving yet another thousand pages form Barth: “It was as if a year’s supply of food had come to save a beleaguered city that would otherwise have starved to death.”

Hard at work each day form 7:00 a.m. until midnight, Barth still found time for other pursuits, especially music. He was particularly fond of Mozart, and listened to him daily. In the midst of work-filled days Barth wrote, “. . . Our daily bread must also include playing. I hear Mozart – both younger and older – at play. But play is something so lofty and demanding that it requires mastery. And in Mozart I hear an art of playing as I hear it in no one else. . . . When I hear him, it gladdens, encourages and comforts me as well.”

Barth travelled to America only towards the end of his life. By then he felt he had acquired sufficient English to make the journey, even though he waggishly told people that his English, gained from reading detective mysteries, was “simply criminal.” When asked for advice concerning young people about to enter the ministry he responded without hesitation, “They should know their Bibles and they should love people”

When he was over eighty an elderly woman in a Zurich nursing home wrote to tell him how much his printed sermons meant to her and to the ninety-eight year old resident to whom she red them. He replied, “I have no fewer than eleven honorary doctorates, but none has given me more pleasure than your little letter. . . .” He concluded, “God grant you both more of his incomparable light.” Soon he was dead himself.

He will be remembered as one who recalled the Church to its foundation: Jesus Christ is given to us as Judge, Saviour and Lord inasmuch as the world’s sin renders it both ignorant of its condition and impotent to do anything about it.

It had all been anticipated decades before in a remark of the young pastor in Safenwil: “The little phrase ‘God is’ amounts to a revolution.”

Victor Shepherd