27. Books without depth
27
Books without depth
The very vocabulary of scriptural and evangelical religion has been scorned and set aside by the novice authors of our superficial day. As I have read those ephemeral writers I have honestly tried to fit their newfangled words and phrases into my mind and into my heart and into my conscience and into my imagination, but, I am bound to say, they do not fit into me at all. The new vocabulary of the new books has all been fashioned by men who are wholly different from me in their whole mental upmake and operation. So different are they from me that they seem to me to belong to another race of men altogether. To me the religious phraseology of the present day wholly lacks the apostolicity, and the authority, and the height, and the depth, and the substance, and the strength, and the intellectual, and the spiritual satisfactoriness and finality of the old phraseology.
I entirely agree with what Dr. John Duncan says,…“You do no good by changing the vocabulary of your religion. If you change the words you change the things. The more I study language the more I am convinced of this, that particular shades of thought are wedded to particular words. If you cut the one, you wound the other; they are dermis and epidermis. I find that my best words are scriptural words, and my next best words are ecclesiastical words….”1
Now, you will be sure to ask me why it is that our day is so barren of the best books of the soul? Well, I often ask myself that same question. And I confess I cannot answer that question so as to satisfy myself about it. But this may be said. There have been great flowings and great ebbings of spiritual truth and spiritual life all along the history of the Church of Christ. There was a great and an incomprehensible ebbing of spiritual truth, if not of spiritual life, at the very beginning of the Church of Christ. To this day it is an amazement and a mystery to students why the Apostle Paul and the Epistle to the Romans should have so fallen out of sight for hundreds of years in the early Church. And, indeed, what an astonishment it is to see that the greatest of the apostles and his special gospel never once got their true place in the pulpit of Christendom all down the ages till Luther was raised up of God to give them their true place. And then again even since Luther’s great gospel day there have been whole generations, even in evangelical Christendom, in which both Paul and Luther and justification and sanctification by faith have been all but completely misunderstood and misrepresented. And this present generation, if we do not take good care, may yet be written down to our shame in Church history as one of those wholly misunderstanding and wholly misrepresenting generations. Then again, some of the ablest and best men of our day have been drawn away from the deepest and the most central doctrines of the Christian faith, and have wholly given themselves up to the study of sacred history, sacred scholarship, and sacred criticism. Noble and fruitful studies, in their own place. But even such legitimate and necessary studies may wholly take the place in our minds that belongs by right to Christian doctrine and to Christian experience. Dr. Duncan, already quoted, was wont to say that his Semitic studies were the wine and the whoredom of his heart.
Then, again, account for it as we may, there have been whole generations when the spiritual sense of sin, the spiritual sense of the depth and the deceitfulness and the malignity of sin has been all but completely lost, and that even among God’s best thought and most deeply exercised people. And so far as I can read the heart of my day that is one of its most deadly and most deplorable declensions. For myself I scarcely ever hear a sermon or read a page or kneel under a prayer in which the unspeakable evil of my own sinfulness is at all felt or is at all attempted to be expressed. All these things combine with some other things to make both our preachers and our publishers somewhat ashamed and somewhat shy of the Gospel of Christ. And yet I feel sure that the apostolic doctrines of grace and truth must be far from preached in our pulpits than the silence of the press would lead us to think. There must be many able, deeply doctrinal, and genuinely evangelical preachers who feel that they do not possess enough of the gift and grace of English style to justify them in challenging a place among the literary men of our day. Paul himself must have felt something of the same shrinking. He must have felt tempted to water down certain of his pulpit doctrines in Greece and in Rome, else he would never have written, and with such emphasis, that he was not going to be ashamed of the scandal of the cross, but was determined at all costs to preach everywhere that so scandalising doctrine. “I was with you in weakness,” he says to the Corinthians, “and in fear, and in much trembling.”2 But Paul was a strong man; and he conquered and cast out his fear and his weakness far better than some of his successors have done.
But the true and proper point of all that for you is this: You are independent both of your new preachers and of your new publishers. That is to say, if your new preachers are at all like those preachers of William Law’s day who preached in the morning on the wind called Euroclydon, and in the evening on the times when the Gospels were writ.3 You are happily independent of such preachers. For you have the Psalms, and the Gospels, and the Epistles at home. And you have the Confession4—one of our elders died with the chapter of Justification open on his pillow beside his Bible—and the Catechism,5 and the Hymn-book at home. And you have Bunyan, and Baxter, and Rutherford; and perhaps Shepard and Brea and Halyburton.6 And you have Boston’s Life, and Chalmers’ Life, and McCheyne’s Life, and Spurgeon’s Sermons.7 “How are you getting on?,” I said to an old saint who was so full of years and rheumatism that she never got across her doorstep, and never saw her so-called pastor. “O,” she said, “I get on fine, for I have Spurgeon’s Sermons.”
*From “Books Without Depth,” The Banner of Truth, 94-95 (July-August 1971), 15-17. This selection was taken from Bunyan Characters, Fourth Series (Edinburgh/London: Oliphant Anderson and Ferrier, [1908]).
1. John Duncan (1796-1870) was converted out of the despair of atheism through the witness of the great French evangelist César Malan. He was nicknamed “Rabbi” because of his vast knowledge of Semitic languages and Judaism. He was probably close to being a linguistic genius. He was the Church of Scotland’s first missionary to the Jews, ministering for a number of years in Budapest. Later he was appointed to the Chair of Hebrew and Oriental Languages at the Free Church College in Edinburgh.
2. 1 Corinthians 2:3.
3. William Law (1686-1761). On Whyte’s appreciation of Law, see Characters and Characteristics of William Law, Nonjuror and Mystic (London: Hodder and Stoughton, [1907]). While Law was influential in the lives of a number of eighteenth-century Evangelical leaders, many of them came to the conviction that there were mystical strains in Law’s writing that were neither helpful not biblical.
4. The Westminster Confession of Faith.
5. The Westminster Shorter Catechism.
6. The Westminster Shorter Catechism.
7. For Thomas Boston, see above, pages 100-101, n. 4; for Thomas Chalmers, see above, pages 75-76, n. 4. Robert Murray McCheyne (1813-1843) was the most remarkable preacher of his generation; his piety was a decisive factor in shaping nineteenth-century Scottish Evangelicalism. On Spurgeon, see above, pages 75-76, n. 4.