S Andemanianism
16
SANDEMANIANISM
D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones
Let me begin by explaining why I have decided to speak on this subject. It is a matter to which I have frequently referred in passing during the whole of my ministry, because I have had an increasing conviction that it is in many ways the most urgent one for us to consider at the present time. If I understand the condition of the Church today—and, indeed, during the last fifty years or so—I would say that its great trouble has been that it has fallen into this particular error. I have never before, however, dealt with it specifically or tried to evaluate it as I am now going to do. But a number of things have happened this year and at the end of last year which have crystallized the general vague idea I have had throughout the years and have led me to do this.
Many of you must have noticed that during 1967 the centenary of the death of that truly great chemist Michael Faraday was celebrated; and you may have noticed that he belonged to this particular branch or division of the Christian Church which goes under the name of Robert Sandeman. That arrested me at once and brought the subject to the forefront of my mind. In addition, I read a little book called J. R. Jones, Ramoth and his Times, by a man called J. Idwal Jones. This was written because it was the bicentenary of the birth of J. R. Jones, who was more responsible than anybody else for propagating and spreading the views of Sandeman in North Wales in particular. Reading this out of historical interest made me feel again that this was an indication that I should deal with this matter.
The other thing that brought me to deal with this was that the great Christmas Evans, whom some would say was the greatest preacher that the Baptists have ever had in Great Britain—certainly he and Spurgeon would be the two greatest—was born on Christmas Day 1766. Naturally, therefore, I have been reading a good deal about him during this past year; and, as I am going to show you, the whole question of the Sandemanian heresy played a very prominent part in the life of that great preacher. Those are the things, then, that have crystallized my great interest in this subject.
Historical Background
Perhaps the best way of approach would be to tell you something of how this movement, this aberration if you like, began in the Christian Church. Here is a little of the historical background.
It all began with a Scotsman named John Glas in the 1720s. He was a very able man and a minister of the Church of Scotland at a place called Keeling in the County of Angus not far from Dundee. Glas began to feel uneasy about two matters in particular at first. One was the custom of getting ministers to subscribe to The Solemn League and Covenant which had been introduced in the previous century. This led him into difficulties in his thinking as to the relationship between the Church and the State. Principal John Macleod very rightly says of him that he became a “voluntary” a century before voluntaryism. “Glas,” says Macleod, “made such a thing as a national Church, or a national reformation, or a national religion, or a national religious covenant, a sheer impossibility.” He believed in a complete separation of Church and State. In other words he became a Separatist.
The other thing that worried Glas was subscription to documents like The Westminster Confession of Faith. He believed that it was sufficient for a man to say that he believed, and accepted, and was prepared to be governed by, the teaching of the Scriptures. He said he was ready to be governed by the Word of God, but he was not ready to submit to the words of men. In addition, he began to put forward his particular views as to the nature of saving faith. These three things got him into trouble and he was deposed from his charge and formed an Independent cause in 1733.
John Glas is undoubtedly the father of Independency as far as Scotland is concerned. He was not only a Calvinist, he was a very high Calvinist, and thoroughly orthodox in that sense. But he was in trouble over these other matters. He himself was not a very aggressive man, but he soon had a son-in-law of the name of Robert Sandeman, who was a born controversialist and one who enjoyed writing. He took up the cudgels on behalf of John Glas, and went further than Glas himself ever went. Sandeman became famous through writing a book with the title—Letters on Theron and Aspasia.1 Some of you will recall that Dialogues between Theron and Aspasia2 had been written by the saintly James Hervey of Weston Flavel, now a part of Northampton. Sandeman wrote his Letters attacking the point of view put forward by James Hervey, and in so doing gave a clear outline of the teaching, especially with regard to faith, which had been first propagated by Glas in his sermons and various books.
Added to all this these two men developed various ideas with regard to Church government. The first thing was the sharp division between the Church and State. Their desire was, as they felt, to get back to the New Testament pattern; but in doing this they went to extremes. They re-introduced feet-washing, “the holy kiss,” and a weekly Communion. They taught that the possessions of every member of the Church should be at the disposal of the Church, and that there should be no paid ministers. Incidentally this last is the reason why Lloyd George became a solicitor, and subsequently Prime Minister, rather than a minister of a church. He was brought up in a Sandeman church in North Wales—known there as the Little Baptists—of which his shoemaker uncle was the unpaid pastor. They also believed in having a multiplicity of elders in each church, and they prohibited an elder from marrying a second time. They had a very strict church discipline indeed but they always wanted unanimity, and they did not like voting. They wanted a consensus, a general consensus of opinion and unanimity. Furthermore, they believed in casting lots.
Besides these two men there is a third whom I must mention because he became very prominent later on in the century. This was Archibald Maclean, who was at one time a member of John Glas’s church, but began to feel that the discipline was too strict, and formed a church of his own in Edinburgh in 1765. While he retained much of the teaching of Glas and Sandeman, Maclean differed from them, in that he became a Baptist. He is really the father of all the Baptist churches in Scotland.
Maclean was a very able man indeed. He was a particularly great admirer of John Owen—that will tell you about his theology, his Calvinism, and so on. He exercised his main influence in the 1780s and the 1790s, and it was he who influenced the Baptist churches in Wales, particularly in North Wales. I should point out, however, that even before that, Glas, and still more Sandeman, who lived for a while in England, had considered influence. Churches were formed in various parts of England, and the teaching spread into Wales and influenced a man named Popkins, who started a church based on these ideas in Swansea in South Wales. This caused a great trouble and was dealt with, as we have heard, by the famous Daniel Rowland among others, and also by William Williams the hymn-writer of Pantycelyn.
But it was, as I say, in the late 1780s and 1790s that this Sandemanian teaching really became a menace both in England and in Wales. It produced a reaction from two notable men. The first was the famous Andrew Fuller, who dealt in particular with this teaching in an appendix to his book The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation,3 under the heading “Whether a holy disposition of heart is necessary in order to believing.” This was written in reply to the teaching of Archibald Maclean, who answered it, and then Fuller really dealt with him in a book bearing the title, Strictures on Sandemanianism in Twelve Letters to a Friend.4 It is generally agreed that Fuller more or less demolished Sandemanianism in those twelve letters.
The Sandemanian View of Faith
There, then, is the general historical background of this movement.
While it is true, as we have seen, that Sandemanianism was in itself a complete system involving matters of Church government and order and things of that kind, I want to confine attention to one aspect only. That is, the view of faith which was taught by these men. It is important that I should make this clear because Archibald Maclean was constantly at pains to say that he was not a Sandemanian. What he meant by that was that he did not agree with their entire system. But he did agree with them on this matter that we are going to discuss, namely, their view of faith. This was, in fact, common to them all, and it is interesting to observe that Dr. John Macleod says that the great Dr. Thomas Chalmers approximates very closely to this particular view of the nature of saving faith.
As we come to consider this subject I want to make it clear that I am not only going to deal with it as it was explicitly propounded by these men, but also with the modifications of it, which I believe have come down even to our day. I want also to stress the fact that this view of faith can be adopted by Calvinists as well as Arminians.
There is a danger sometimes—and I confess I have tended to drop into it myself—to equate this Sandemanian heresy concerning the nature of faith with what we have called “Believism,” and which we attribute only to Arminians. The fact is, however, that this particular view of faith is one which can be held by Calvinists as well as Arminians. As I have told you, Glas, Sandeman and Archibald Maclean were all strong Calvinists, and Maclean’s great hero was the celebrated Dr. John Owen. So you can be a high Calvinist and still be guilty of this particular error or heresy.
The vital question is, What is the true nature of saving faith? Perhaps the simplest way of putting it before you is to read a short extract from Robert Sandeman’s book. The matter on the title page of this book is, “One thing is needful,” and all along one leading point is kept in view which the author calls, “The sole requisite to justification or acceptance with God, in opposition to those who while they openly avow only one meritorious cause of justification do yet lead the guilty to seek after some inward motion, feelings or desires, as some way requisite in order to acceptance with God.” Among “those” to whom he refers he ranks Isaac Watts, Philip Doddridge, Thomas Boston, the Erskines, and among the others was John Wesley, whom he vilified and regarded as one of the most dangerous men that had ever appeared in the Church. “By the sole requisite” he understands “the work finished by Christ in His death, proved by His resurrection to be all-sufficient to justify the guilty.” Now here is the point: he maintains, “that the whole benefit of this event is conveyed to men only by the Apostolic report concerning it, that every one who understands this report to be true, or is persuaded that the event actually happened as testified by the Apostles, is justified and finds relief to his guilty conscience. That he is relieved not by finding any favourable symptoms about his own heart, but by finding their report to be true.” That is a very good definition of this position.
But let me, to make it still more plain and clear, give you Principal John Macleod’s view of it. He says: “He (Glas) puts a premium upon what is held to be orthodox doctrine, and to lay less stress than is called for on the reaction of the emotional nature to the truth of the gospel, and on the activity of the will as that goes out in the trust of the heart and its attendant obedience in life.”
The Westminster Confession, as you know, puts great emphasis upon this “trust of the heart”; that it is not merely an intellectual acceptance of the facts. Indeed, as Principal Macleod points out so rightly, the Sandemanian teaching was in a way a return to the Roman Catholic teaching, which is, that all you have to do is to believe and accept the teaching of the Church. You accept that with your mind, and that is all that is necessary. So he ends by saying that “it held itself coldly aloof from any display of feeling in the exercises of a religious life.” Now that is the very essence of this matter.
The same thing is put quite clearly by Andrew Fuller. He says, “It is a bare belief of the bare truth. It excludes from it all pertaining to the will and the affections except as ‘fruits’ produced by it.” Everything that happens in the will and in the affections is only the fruit of this belief and is not a part of it. “They will not have,” he says, “even a hearty persuasion, but emphasize only notional belief. It is knowledge without approbation.”
William Williams (Pantycelyn) puts it like this, that “it sets naked faith”—“naked” faith—“as the chief thing, believing without power, making little of conviction and of a broken heart.”
There, you have an idea as to what this particular teaching was. Its proponents were very fond of putting it like this: we are asked to believe the testimony of God in the Scriptures as we believe any other testimony. They said, “You believe the testimony of a man so you must believe this.” They said, “There is no difference whatsoever in the belief itself.” There is a difference in the object of what you believe, but they taught that as regards the belief itself there is no difference between believing the testimony, the ordinary testimony of a man or a witness in a court or in private, and believing the testimony of God in the Scriptures. So they emphasized “notional belief.” They went beyond saying that faith and other things are not the ground of justification; and said that it must be just naked belief. They therefore excluded all endeavors, and prayers, and religious exercises, and appeals that come to us, and so on. That is the essence of their position.
You may well ask, how was it that able men like this should ever have made such a point of this? What was their object in doing this; what led them to do this? Their answer was that they were trying to safeguard the doctrine of justification by faith only; and they felt that the others were reintroducing works. They were particularly opposed to those whom they called “the popular preachers,” like Wesley and Whitefield, and the others whom I have mentioned. The same thing was true of their followers in Wales. They were particularly opposed to the popular Calvinistic Methodist traveling preachers, who preached in a very emotional manner, and who provoked visible results in their congregations in the matter of emotions and so on. This was the thing which they disliked so much. They said that these men were turning faith into a work by introducing other elements.
This was put very plainly and clearly by Maclean himself. He said that to include good dispositions, holy affections, and pious exercises of the heart as demanded by law was to re-introduce works. That was the essence of their difficulty. They said that if you introduced any element of feeling, any kind of holy affections or desires you were introducing works, and that the only way to safeguard “justification by faith only” was to say that faith was something solely in the intellect. It was “naked” belief by the intellect.
On what grounds did they say this? These were scripturally minded men who accepted the authority of the Scriptures. As I say, they not only accepted them, but they thought that they were doing so more than anybody else. They were criticizing the Church of Scotland and The Westminster Confession because, as they felt, the Church was putting the definitions of men before the Word of God. And yet this was the conclusion to which they came.
On what grounds did they do so? Their great text, of course, was Romans 4:5: “But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness.” In particular it was the phrase—“justifieth the ungodly.” And they interpreted the word “ungodly” as meaning “those who were enemies of God,” who at the very time they believed were enemies of God. They argued that it was the only possible meaning you can give to this word “ungodly.” Thus you have got to say that when they believed they were ungodly. That was their great text.
The other text they used a good deal was, “Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God: and everyone that loveth him that begat loveth him also that is begotten of him” (1 John 5:1). That was their position, that it had to be “naked faith.” That might well lead perhaps to feelings and to actions by the will later, but you must exclude everything like that entirely from your definition of faith.
The questions, therefore, that are raised for us are these. What is the nature of saving faith; is it naked and notional only, or are feelings and the will included? That is the first question. The second is, does faith precede or follow repentance? And third, does faith precede or follow regeneration?
Refutation of Sandemanianism
Those questions show clearly why I suggest that this is a very contemporary subject. Indeed I would go further and suggest that it is one of the main problems before us at the present time. These were certainly the questions that were raised and debated at that time in the eighteenth century. As I have reminded you, William Williams, of Pantycelyn, the great hymn-writer, dealt with these questions very strongly in several works, and made great use of his extraordinary gift of ridicule. He settled the matter as regards the Methodists, at any rate in Wales, in the 1760s. Then, as I have told you, Andrew Fuller dealt with it in his way. In addition Thomas Scott, the commentator, dealt with it in his work The Warrant and Nature of Faith in Christ.5
What were the arguments of these men against this teaching propounded by Glas, Sandeman, and Maclean? I shall try to summarize them. The first question, obviously, is this—the exegesis of Romans 4:5. What is meant by “the ungodly”? As these protagonists pointed out very clearly, and especially Andrew Fuller, the very cases quoted by Paul in Romans 4 make the Sandemanian interpretation quite impossible. The apostle is actually dealing at that point with the case of Abraham in the first instance. He is showing how this teaching of justification by faith only, which he has been elaborating in the first three chapters of that epistle to the Romans and especially as he summed it up in chapter three, is not anything new, but that this is what happened in the case of Abraham.
They went on to show quite clearly that as you read what Paul goes on to say about Abraham you find that all this happened not when he was in Ur of the Chaldees, but long afterwards when for some time he had been a godly and a God-fearing man. It is, therefore, ridiculous to describe Abraham at the point when this term is used with respect to him, as “ungodly” in the sense of meaning an enemy of God. In the same way Andrew Fuller pointed out that the case of David, which Paul also quotes in that chapter, is exactly parallel with that of Abraham and that if you take the trouble to turn up the Scriptures you will find that both Abraham and David cannot at any point be described as “enemies of God.” They were both godly men.
What Paul is concerned to show and to emphasize is that they were not justified by their works. He is not trying to say that they were enemies of God at this point, but he is saying that it is not their works that saves them. It is through the faith which has been given to them that they are justified, that is how it comes to them. It is the action of God, and not their action. As Fuller and others pointed out, verse 20 of that chapter really settles the matter. There, the apostle, coming back to the case of Abraham, actually says about him, “He staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief; he gave God the glory.” “He gave God the glory!” The argument is that in no sense can this be described as something “notional,” “purely intellectual,” or “naked faith,” but that of necessity it includes these other qualities of heart and will.
Then, of course, you have to deal with a statement like that in Romans 10:9–10. This statement inevitably played a great part in the whole contention, “That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.” Of course the followers of Glas and Sandeman had to say that the “heart” there simply means the mind. But it was pointed out to them that this is not the way in which the Scripture uses the term “heart.” It does not confine it to the affections, but it means the center of the personality, the center of man’s being including all these various faculties, not exclusively the mind but including the others also. We shall come to the exegesis of 1 John 5:1 later on.
That is the general answer to the Sandemanian view of faith. But we must get a little closer to this and examine more clearly what the Scripture tells us directly about the nature of faith. Here are the answers which these men gave between them. They pointed out, in the first instance, that faith is a duty, and therefore of necessity the will is included.
Second, they pointed out that faith is a grace given by the Holy Spirit. Here, they quoted 1 Corinthians 13, “Now abideth faith, hope, charity. . . .” As it is a grace, it cannot be confined to the head only and to the intellect; it is not merely something notional.
Again, they pointed out how in Romans 4:20, Paul says that faith “gives glory to God,” and you cannot give glory to God only with your mind. The whole person is involved. So they argued that if you just look at what we are told about faith by way of definition in the New Testament that is what you find.
Then they went on to point out that faith, according to the scriptural teaching, depends upon choice, or upon the state of the heart with regard to God, or toward God. At this point they quoted a great deal, and rightly, from the Gospel of John, chapter 5 toward the end, where our Lord says things like this: “Ye have not his word abiding in you”; “for whom he hath sent ye believe not. Search the Scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me. And ye will not come unto me, that ye might have life” (vv. 38–40). “I know you, that ye have not the love of God in you” (v. 42). “How can ye believe, which receive honour one of another, and seek not the honour that cometh from God only?” (v. 44).
There they were able to show clearly that a question of choice is involved, and that that is determined by the state of the heart toward God.
In addition to that they said that the whole idea of faith is expressed in terms which indicate the exercise of affection. They produced many examples of this. Take the word receiving or receiving not for instance in 2 Thessalonians 2:10, where you find “receiving the love of the truth that ye may be saved.” The whole term receiving is something that includes the affection; it implies the engagement of the affections. The very term receiving or not receiving carries that implication.
Further, as we have already seen in Romans 10 the apostle puts his emphasis upon “believing with the heart.” “Confession is made with the mouth,” but you believe in the “heart.” He deliberately says that in order, as Fuller and the others argued, to show that it is not merely a matter of giving an intellectual assent, but that you whole-heartedly do this, that this has become now something vital to you and the whole of your personality. You believe with the heart. Then you have in Acts 8:37 the report of the Ethiopian eunuch asking Philip to be baptized. The reply he got was, “If thou believest with all thine heart, thou mayest.” So again you have this same emphasis upon the heart.
Another most powerful argument, it seems to me, is that want of faith is generally ascribed to moral causes, or to a want of a right disposition. Take again those verses at the end of John 5, and still more striking the series of statements in John 8 from verse 33 onwards. You remember our Lord had just said, “If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free,” and then the Jews answered Him, “We be Abraham’s seed, and were never in bondage to any man: how sayest thou, Ye shall be made free?” Here is the conflict, here is the unbelief; and what our Lord says to them is this: “I know that ye are Abraham’s seed, but ye seek to kill me, because my word hath no place in you. I speak that which I have seen with my Father: and ye do that which ye have seen with your father” (vv. 37–38). They objected to this and said, “Abraham is our father.” And He said, “If ye were Abraham’s children, ye would do the works of Abraham. But now ye seek to kill me, a man that hath told you the truth, which I have heard of God. . . . Ye do the deeds of your father” and so on. “Jesus said unto them, if God were your Father, ye would love me; for I proceeded forth and came from God” (vv. 39–42). Their whole unbelief is based upon their not loving Him, their antagonism to Him in fact, and that is something, of course, that we can link up with various other statements also. You have the phrase in Hebrews 3 about “an evil heart of unbelief.” And evil “heart” of unbelief.
Moreover, there are those statement which are to be found in Ephesians 4:17ff.: “This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind, Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart: Who being past feeling have given themselves over unto lasciviousness to work all uncleanness with greediness” and so on.
All these statements show that unbelief is due always to a state of the heart. That is what produces it and governs it. It is not a mere error of the understanding; indeed it is what Paul says in Romans 8:7: “It is enmity against God; it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be.” The trouble with the unbeliever is not simply in his mind, it is much deeper, it is an “enmity against God,” it is “an evil heart of unbelief.” There is the essential trouble.
Those were the main arguments that were bought against the Sandemanians to show the true nature of faith—saving faith—and that it clearly, in the light of all these Scriptures, is not something that you can confine to the mind or to the intellect.
Then what about that second question about the relationship between repentance and faith? Here is something which, you will agree again, is very important at this present time. Sandeman and the rest taught that faith comes first and is followed by repentance. These men in their replies were concerned to show that it is the other way around, that faith implies repentance, and that therefore if there is no repentance there is no true faith. They quoted large numbers of Scriptures here as we must of necessity do. Fuller puts it in a phrase, “Faith without repentance is not genuine.”
What were the Scriptures with which they were concerned at this point? There are many Scriptures which demonstrate that repentance always comes first. You find this in the Gospels. John the Baptist precedes our Lord and he preached a baptism of repentance. “Prepare ye the way of the Lord” was his message. You will find this summary of the beginning of our Lord’s own ministry in Mark 1:15: “Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, and saying, the time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel.” That is the order, repentance first and belief of the gospel following.
There are also a number of other passages which we can quote. You remember how at the very end just before He ascended you have the account in Luke 24 of how our Lord spoke in that upper room with those disciples and said, “Thus it is written, and thus it behooved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day: And that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.”
When you come on to the book of the Acts of the Apostles you have the notable event on the Day of Pentecost reported in Acts 2. As Peter was preaching, they cried out saying, “Men and brethren, what shall we do?” And the reply was, “Repent, every one of you, and be baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ for the remission of sins” (Acts 2:37–38). But note the order—“Repent” is the first thing, and then the other follows.
You have exactly the same thing in Acts 3:19—the same order. You have got it again in Acts 5:31. You have it in that most beautiful and lyrical statement in Acts 20 where Paul is saying farewell to the elders of the church at Ephesus, and makes his appeal to them. He calls them to witness with regard to the character of his own ministry. “Serving the Lord with all humility of mind, and with many tears and temptations, which befell me by the lying in wait of the Jews: And how I have kept nothing back that was profitable unto you, and have taught you publickly, and from house to house, Testifying to the Jews, and also to the Greeks, repentance toward God, and faith toward the Lord Jesus Christ.” The order: repentance first, and faith following it. You get precisely the same thing in Acts 26:18, in the commission given by the risen Lord to Saul of Tarsus. Indeed, as the opponents of the Sandemanians pointed out, the case of the publican in our Lord’s parable of the publican and the Pharisee who went up into the temple to pray indicates precisely the same thing (Luke 18:9–14). The feeling, and the sorrow for sin is what is emphasized.
That is the evidence which goes to show that you cannot have saving faith without repentance. You can have an intellectual assent to propositions, you can have a notional faith, but you cannot have saving faith without repentance. Repentance is involved in it, and it is in a sense because you repent that you believe. It is that which leads you to believe. It is that which shows you the necessity of believing in the Savior. To say that you can have faith without it, and that faith is something that leads to it, is clearly to be going contrary to the teaching of the Scriptures.
That brings us to the last issue that I suggested was raised by all this; the relationship between faith and regeneration. You will agree that we are living in an age when it has been the custom to say and to teach that faith leads to regeneration, and that one of the inducements held out to people for believing, is, that if they will believe then they will become regenerate and will receive a new nature. This teaching is generally based upon the teaching of 1 John 5:1; and others would try to produce evidence from John 1:12–13: “To them that received Him gave He power to become the sons of God.”
This again, is surely a very important point. How did Fuller and the other opponents of Sandemanianism deal with this matter? Their method was the obvious one if we are going to be governed in our thinking by the Scriptures. You start, for instance, with what our Lord said to Nicodemus. Here is a man who patently comes with the idea, and the supposition, that here is a new teacher who has got some novel teaching and he wants to know what it is in order that he may evaluate it and add it to his own. At once he is interrupted by our Lord’s statement, “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” There has got to be this radical change. He has got to be “born of the Spirit.” “That which is born of the flesh is flesh; that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” This miraculous, marvelous thing that no one can understand, comparable to the wind, as the eighth verse puts it, must happen to us before we either understand or accept His teaching. This is the whole basis.
Added to that, as I have said, you have Romans 8:7: “The carnal mind is enmity against God: it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be.” It is impossible. Before a man can believe and accept God’s Word and God’s way of salvation he must have a new mind. It cannot be done with the carnal mind.
But this is put still more plainly and strongly and clearly in the series of statements Paul makes in 1 Corinthians 2. We read there, “We speak the wisdom of God in a mystery,” but Paul has already said that it is “not the wisdom of this world, nor of the princes of this world, that come to nought.” That puts out the natural man, who is an enemy against God. That is not the wisdom of which he is speaking. “We speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory: Which none of the princes of this world knew: for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory”—and so on. Then from verse 10: “God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit. . . . What man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? Even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God. Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. Which things also we speak, not in the words which man’s wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual. But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. He that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man. For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ” (vv. 10–16).
There, the apostle is surely demonstrating beyond any question that the natural man—man as he is—is incapable of believing and receiving the Word of God with regard to salvation or anything else. That surely demonstrates that until a man is born again he cannot believe, he cannot exercise faith. It is an utter impossibility. It is all “foolishness” to him, and he dismisses it and rejects it as folly.
At this point I must mention what is—I must say it in fairness—a kind of complication in this whole matter. Glas, as I have told you, was a Calvinist, and he took very great pains to say that this man who is still not born again accepts the witness and the testimony of the Scriptures as the result of the operation of the Holy Spirit upon him. He has got to say that as a Calvinist, has he not? And he does say so; yet he still says that faith is something entirely notional. Sandeman accepted the same position. That was an attempt on their part to answer an obvious difficulty. But still it does not face, as it should have faced, the whole question of the relationship of faith and regeneration.
With regard to 1 John 5:1: “Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God,” what that says is, not that he shall be, but that he has been, and the fact that he believes that “Jesus is the Christ” is the proof of the fact that he has been born of God. It is John’s odd way of putting things. As you go through his Epistles you will find that John constantly uses that kind of expression. He seems to put the consequence before the cause. It is an arresting way, and the Spirit used him in that way to give us this Truth. So he puts it: “Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God”—as if to say, show me a man who says Jesus is the Christ; I tell you that man is born of God. For, as Paul puts it, “No man can say that Jesus is the Lord but by the Holy Ghost.” It is just John’s way of putting it.
That is how the answers were given to these three main questions that were raised by this Sandemanian teaching.
Consequences of Sandemanianism
What conclusions do we draw from all this? Have I been wasting your time in considering all this? I suggest that I have not, for this reason: that the consequences of this teaching are most serious. And we must examine ourselves in the light of this.
What are the consequences? Clearly it immediately affects evangelism. These men were much opposed to Boston and the Erksines and Flavel in the previous century, and all who preached the Law and called to repentance. They said that they were trying to create feelings in their listeners, and that you must not do that. You must just give them the evidence that God has sent His Son into the world to save them. You must not preach the law, and you must not call men to repentance.
There is a good deal of that kind of teaching in our age. A lady came to me in distress in my vestry not long ago saying that she belonged to a certain group of Christian people in Ireland who taught that it is wrong for a preacher to call people to repentance. They teach that that was only for the Jews at the time of our Lord, but that it is no longer the case; and what we must do is to introduce people to Jesus. They say that that is evangelism—not preaching the Law, not trying to create any feelings or holy desires or aspirations or any sense of grieving for sin, or any of the weeping and wailing that we have heard took place under the preaching of Daniel Rowland. All that they would dismiss as entirely wrong, saying that you are introducing works, and that you must not do that; you just call upon people to believe that “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son . . .” and that you accept Him as your Savior.
In the same way, of course, on this teaching you call for an immediate decision, and you do everything you can to produce one. A man has just got to receive the evidence. You put it like that to him. You have received the evidence in a law court, you have received the evidence of something that a man tells you in secular affairs, why do you not receive this evidence? And you are just asked to believe that evidence without any feelings, without any awareness of any change in yourself at all, without any holy desires—these are dangerous because they are “works,” and they must not be allowed. So you emphasize this “naked faith” which accepts the testimony, the evidence given, and it is obviously something that you should do at once. If you are going to wait and delay and query and question, it is obvious that you are dropping back under works once more.
So this teaching makes a very big difference to evangelism—it did so immediately at that time. Christmas Evans pointed out how these people were always bitterly opposed to what was called “warm preaching.” They did not like that. You see, you simply had to present the evidence, and you did it more or less like a barrister. You get Finney in the next century doing precisely this. He was a man of such an ardent constitution that he introduced a good deal of energy and of power, and perhaps almost a passion into his preaching; but he did not believe in doing that theoretically. He was still the barrister presenting the case, and all people had to do was to accept the case, and there it was. Those holding Sandemanian views are always opposed to warm, emotional preaching, and any preaching which would have the effect of bringing people to a feeling, and a sensible knowledge, of the fact that they were sinners, and the terrors of the Law, and that they were to face a holy God, and that they would have to be holy before they could face Him. So it has this great influence at once upon evangelism and preaching.
But it also has a great effect, obviously, upon the type of Christian that it produces, and this was the thing that so concerned William Williams. He said, “It chills one’s feelings until they despise Heaven’s pure breezes.” They were against emotion as such, and in particular at the point of believing. This is something that concerns us. I shall never forget how a few years ago a very well-known evangelical leader came to me and asked if I had been yet to a series of meetings that were being held here in London. I said, “No, I have not had the opportunity so far.” He said, “It’s marvellous, it’s wonderful. The people are streaming forward. No emotion! It’s marvellous, it’s wonderful—no emotion.” He was glorying in the fact that the people who were going forward to register their decision were not showing any emotion at all; this was something to be gloried in. It is just here that this teaching becomes so serious. Can you have saving faith without any emotion? Can you be a Christian without emotion? “It produces,” says William Williams, “a coldness, it chills men’s feelings.”
But let me quote what Christmas Evans says about it. Now Christmas Evans, that great Baptist preacher, was influenced by this teaching for a number of years; he fell to it, and this is what he tells us was the effect of doing so upon him:
The Sandemanian heresy affected me so far as to quench the spirit of prayer for the conversion of sinners, and it induced in my mind a greater regard for the smaller things of the Kingdom of Heaven than for the greater. I lost the strength which clothed my mind with zeal, confidence and earnestness in the pulpit for the conversion of souls to Christ. My heart retrograded in a manner, and I could not realize the testimony of a good conscience. Sabbath nights after having been in the day exposing and vilifying with all bitterness the errors that prevailed, my conscience felt as if displeased, and reproached me that I had lost nearness to and walking with God. It would intimate that something exceedingly precious was now wanting in me. I would reply that I was acting in obedience to the Word, but it continued to accuse me of the want of some precious article. I had been robbed to a great degree of the spirit of prayer and of the spirit of preaching.
This is the point at which we examine ourselves and especially those of us who are preachers. The question is not so much, are we still praying, are we still preaching—but have we got the spirit of prayer, have we got the spirit of preaching? You can preach mechanically, you can preach coldly; you can pray mechanically, you can pray coldly. The effect of this teaching upon Christmas Evans was to rob him of the warmth and the feeling and the urgency which he had known, and to introduce this terrible coldness into him. William Williams says, “Love is the greatest thing in religion, and if that is forgotten nothing can take its place.”
Sandemanianism leads to coldness of spirit, to lack of prayer; it affects very profoundly also one’s assurance of salvation, and especially the highest form of that assurance. These people taught—and many have taught it since, often following them quite unconsciously, that you must not talk of your feelings in the matter of assurance, that assurance is something that you obtain only from the Scriptures. They say that the way to get assurance is to go to the Scriptures, where you read, “whosoever believeth in him shall not perish.” They then ask, “You believe the Scriptures do you not?” “Yes.” “Well, then, you are not going to perish.” They say that our assurance is established in an objective manner, and that it is a mistake to introduce the element of feelings even into full assurance of faith. The teaching that countered this was, and which I would most certainly advocate and can support with quotations from the Puritans, John Owen included, that the highest form of assurance is the immediate assurance that is given by the Spirit Himself. There is a mediate assurance that one can get from the Scriptures. I am not disputing that. But that is the lowest form of assurance, that is the first form—you believe the Word of the Scriptures.
But you can go to a second form of assurance which is better, and that is the application of the tests suggested in the First Epistle of John: Do you love the brethren? Do you delight in His commandments and no longer find them grievous? And so on. Test yourself by those.
But there is yet another and a higher form of assurance, “The Spirit beareth witness with our spirits that we are the children of God.” The first two refer to our spirits; but the Spirit Himself also beareth witness “with” our spirits that we are the children of God. This is the highest and the most glorious assurance of all and it is “given” to us and not the result of our deductions from the Scriptures. Goodwin, and Owen, and Bolton, John Preston, John Howe, and many others of the Puritans, as well as Jonathan Edwards and indeed John Wesley have eloquent teaching concerning this. Here is something in the realm of “feeling”: immediate and direct, and not indirect. Sandemanian teaching does away with that.
It also does away with the spirit of brokenness, and a spirit of humility. Is not this the most serious thing about us as modern Christians? When did you last see someone weeping because of sinfulness? Is there evidence of brokenness of spirit among us, and humility? We are all so healthy, we are so glib. Why this essential difference between the type of piety that you see so clearly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and what we have today? Can what we have today be truly called piety? Can it be called “godliness”? It appears rather to be an intellectual acceptance of certain propositions, accompanied by hardness, an absence of feeling, a distrust of feeling, a dislike of feeling. As if the whole man were not involved, not only in faith, but in salvation!
The result is that you get a mechanical performance of duties; and people are taught to evangelize and to do “personal work” almost by numbers, and are drilled to pray. Everything is organized and arranged, you pass examinations in them, and so all these duties are done in an external mechanical manner instead of rising out of the heart.
What a contrast this is with what we are told in Acts 8 about the people who were “scattered abroad from Jerusalem because of the persecution”—the ordinary Christians, remember, the apostles being left in Jerusalem. What are we told about these ordinary Christians? “They went everywhere preaching the Word” (v. 4). That does not mean proclaiming it from pulpits; it just means “speaking” it. And then we are told in the next verse that Philip “heralded” it. He was an evangelist and a preacher. But they all spread the gospel. Not because they were trained to do so, or because they were told, this is what you have to do now that you have been saved. There is no sign of the mechanical stages we are supposed to go through. You take your decision, then you are given some work to do. You are taken from step to step; and it is all organized and arranged. And it is all done in this mechanical manner.
We expect that kind of thing from the cults, and that is always their great characteristic, but it is not the New Testament way. But if you start with a definition of faith which makes it something notional, and naked, and intellectual, and deliberately exclude the feelings and the emotions, that is the inevitable result. So you get a hardness, a coldness, a mechanical type of Christianity. What makes this so serious is that it is so discouraging to a true visitation of the Spirit of God. You cannot read the accounts of the revivals of the past without observing that the emotional element was always prominent. But, today, so many are terrified of emotion and have almost a phobia concerning excesses. Indeed I fear that it can be said of many that they seem to be so afraid of what they call excesses that they are “quenching the Spirit.” When have you known a congregation to be really moved? When have you heard a congregation crying out? Are you explaining away the great phenomena accompanying the revivals of the past in terms of the twentieth century, and saying that the people at Llangeitho listening to Daniel Rowland were a sort of primitive people lacking education, and just emotionalists? The Apostle Paul reminds the elders of the church at Ephesus of how he preached “with tears.” And Whitefield used to preach with tears. When have you and I last preached with tears? What do we know, to use the phrase of Whitefield, about preaching a “felt Christ”? Is not this the cause of the trouble today?
How can we get out of this cold and arid and mechanical type of worship and Christian living? What can we do to relieve the situation? Let me read a glorious statement from the life of Christmas Evans. He tells us how he came out of it. There he was under that blighting teaching of Sandemanism for about five years. He says:
I was weary, weary of a cold heart towards Christ and His Sacrifice and the work of His Spirit. [Are you weary of that? Do you feel anything at the Communion Table? Do you “feel” anything?] I was weary of a cold heart towards Christ and His Sacrifice and the work of His Spirit, of a cold heart in the pulpit, in secret prayer and in the study. For fifteen years previously I had felt my heart burning within, as if going to Emmaus with Jesus. On a day ever to be remembered by me as I was going from Dolgelley to Machynlleth and climbing up towards Cader Idris I considered it to be incumbent upon me to pray, however hard I felt in my heart and however worldly the frame of my spirit was. Having begun in the Name of Jesus I soon felt as it were the fetters loosening and the old hardness of heart softening, and, as I thought, mountains of frost and snow dissolving and melting within me. This engendered confidence in my soul in the promise of the Holy Ghost. I felt my whole mind relieved from some great bondage, tears flowed copiously, and I was constrained to cry out for the gracious visits of God, by restoring to my soul the joys of His salvation, and that He would visit the churches in Anglesey that were under my care. I embraced in my supplications all the churches of the saints, and nearly all the ministers in the principality by their names. This struggle lasted for three hours; it rose again and again like one wave after another, or a high flowing tide driven by strong wind, until my nature became faint by weeping and crying. Thus I resigned myself to Christ body and soul, gifts and labours, all my life, every day and every hour that remained for me; and all my cares I committed to Christ. The road was mountainous and lonely and I was wholly alone and suffered no interruption in my wrestling with God.
From this time I was made to expect the goodness of God to the churches and to myself. Thus the Lord delivered me, and the people of Anglesey, from being carried away by the flood of Sandemanianism. In the first religious meetings after this I felt as if I had been removed from the cold and sterile regions of spiritual frost into the verdant fields of divine promises. The former striving with God in prayer, and the longing anxiety for the conversion of sinners which I had experienced at Lleyn were now restored. I had a hold of the promises of God. The result was, when I returned home the first thing that arrested my attention was that the Spirit was working also in the brethren in Anglesey, inducing in them a spirit of prayer especially in two of the deacons who were particularly importunate with God, that God would visit us in mercy and render the Word of His grace effectual amongst us for the conversion of sinners.
That is our only hope: “All coldness from my heart remove.” What do we know about warmth of spirit, warmth of heart, warmth in prayer, warmth in preaching, to be moved to the depth of our being and feel the love of God flowing into us and flowing back out of us to Him? Is Sandemanianism merely a matter of antiquarian or historical interest, or is it our major problem today—Calvinists as well as Arminians?