2. Experiencing one’s own sinfulness
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Experiencing one’s own sinfulness
Now by far the deepest and by far the most personal experience of every spiritually minded man is his experience of his own inward sinfulness. The sinfulness of his sin, as Paul has it;1 the malignity of his sin, the dominion that his sin still has over him, the ungodliness and the inhumanity of his sin, the simply indescribable evil of his sin in every way—all that is a matter, not of any man’s doctrine and authority, all that is the personal experience and scientific certainty, as we say, of every spiritually minded man: every man, that is, who takes any true observation of what goes on in his own heart. The simply unspeakable sinfulness of our sin is not the doctrine of David, and of Christ, and of Paul, and of [Martin] Luther, and of [John] Calvin, and of [John] Bunyan, and of [Jonathan] Edwards, and of [Thomas] Shepard only.2 It is their universal doctrine—indeed it could not be otherwise—but it is also the everyday experience and the everyday agony of every man among yourselves whose eyes are at all open upon his own heart.
And then, if you are that spiritually enlightened man, from the day you begin to have that heart-sore experience of yourself, you will begin to search for and to discover those great passages of Holy Scripture that contain the recorded experiences of men like yourself. “I am…dust and ashes,”3 said the first father of all penitent and believing and praying men. “I am vile,” sobs Job. “Behold I am vile,…and I will lay my hand upon my mouth.… I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee. Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.”4 And David, poor sinner, has scarcely a heart or a pen for anything else. “There is no soundness in my flesh because of thine anger: neither is there any rest in my bones because of my sin.… My loins are filled with a loathsome disease.… For behold, I was shapen in iniquity.”5 And Daniel, the most blameless of men, and a man greatly beloved in heaven and on earth: “I was left alone,…and there remained no strength in me: for my comeliness was turned to corruption, and I retained no strength.”6 And every spiritually minded man has Paul’s great experimental passage by heart: that great experimental and autobiographic passage, which has kept so many of God’s most experienced saints from absolute despair, as so many of them have testified.…7
And then among many other alterations of intellectual insight and spiritual taste that will come to you with your open eyes, there will be your new taste, not only for your Bible, but also for biblical and spiritual and experimental preaching. The spiritual preachers of our day are constantly being blamed for not turning their pulpits to the new themes of our so progressive day. Scientific themes are pressed upon them, and critical themes, and social themes, and such like. But your new experience of your own sinfulness and of God’s salvation, your new need and your new taste for spiritual and experimental truth will not lead you to join in that stupid demand.…
There is another equally impertinent advice that our preachers are continually having thrust upon them from the same secular and superficial quarter, and that is that our preachers ought entirely to drop, in our advanced and enlightened day, the old language of the Scriptures and the creeds and the classical preachers, and ought to substitute for it the scientific and the journalistic jargon of the passing day. But with your ever-deepening knowledge of yourselves, and with the disciplined and refined taste that will accompany such knowledge, you will rather demand of your preachers more and more depth of spiritual preaching and more and more purity of spiritual style.
*From Thomas Shepard: Pilgrim Father and Founder of Harvard: His Spiritual Experience and Experimental Preaching (Edinburgh/London: Oliphant Anderson and Ferrier, 1909), 27-30.
1. This appears to be an allusion to Romans 7:13.
2. Martin Luther (1483-1546) and John Calvin (1509-1564) are widely recognized as the two leading figures of the sixteenth-century Reformation. John Bunyan (1628-1688) was an important seventeenth-century Puritan author, whose Pilgrim’s Progress (1678 and 1684) was one of Whyte’s favorite works. Whyte preached a whole series of sermons on this work as well as on Bunyan’s Holy War (1682) and Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666). They were eventually published in his four-volume Bunyan Characters.
Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) was the greatest theologian of the eighteenth-century and a key figure in the First Great Awakening. Whyte had a very high regard for Edwards. “That mighty Puritan,” he calls him on one occasion [Bunyan Characters, Fourth Series (Edinburgh/London: Oliphant Alexander and Ferrier, [1908]), 247. Other times, he describes him as “that prince in our Puritan Israel” (Bunyan Characters, Fourth Series, 125) and “the greatest mind since Aristotle” [The Spiritual Life: The Teaching of Thomas Goodwin (Edinburgh/London: Oliphants Ltd., [1918]), 12]. Thomas Shepard (c. 1605-1649) was a Puritan minister who left England in 1634 for New England, where he became one of New England’s leading theologians.
3. Job 30:19.
4. Job 40:4; 41:5-6.
5. Psalm 38:3, 7; 51:5.
6. Daniel 10:8.
7. This must be a reference to Romans 7:14-25.