7a - Thomas Boston: The Art of Man Fishing
ISBN 978-1-78191-108-2
7a
THOMAS BOSTON
The Art of Man-Fishing
I
In January, 1699, twenty-two-year old Thomas Boston, already a licenced preacher in the Church of Scotland though not yet a parish pastor, ‘wrote a soliloquy on the art of man-fishing’. The soliloquy has the form of a sermonic meditation addressed to himself on Christ as his model for his ministry of the Word. In the memoirs which Boston edited for his children in 1730, as his life neared its end, he recalled how it happened.
6th January 1699, reading in secret, my heart was touched with Matt. iv. 19, ‘Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.’ My soul cried out for accomplishing of that to me, and I was very desirous to know how I might follow Christ, so as to become a fisher of men; and for my own instruction in that point, I addressed myself to the consideration of it in that manner.... That scribble gives an idea of the then temper of my spirit...1
The ‘scribble’, so Boston tells us, was never finished (not that it leaves any sense of incompleteness when read today), and no one outside the family saw it till it was published in 1773. Since then, however, it has been constantly hailed by evangelicals as a masterpiece on ministry, worthy to stand on the same shelf as Baxter’s Reformed Pastor, and it is in those terms that I commend it now.
The idea of a beginner preacher of twenty-two producing a spiritual masterpiece is startling, no doubt. But Boston was an unusual man. He had been brought up by godly, conscientious Presbyterian parents (as a child he had on one occasion accompanied his father to jail for the latter’s nonconformity). He had been soundly converted at age eleven, through the ministry of Henry Erskine, a veteran saint in his sixties who had been one of the two thousand Puritan clergy ejected in 1662 and who during the winter of 1687 was minister of a church four miles from Boston’s home. His father took him to hear Erskine, a spiritual impact was made immediately, and then ‘in the winter, sometimes it was my lot to go alone, without so much as the benefit of a horse to carry me through Blackadder water, the wading whereof in sharp frosty weather I very well remember. But such things were then easy, for the benefit of the word, which came with power.’2 ‘Sure I am, I was in good earnest concerned for a saving interest in Jesus Christ; my soul went out after him, and the place of his feet was glorious in my eyes.’3 He and two other Christian boys from his school ‘met frequently in a chamber in my father’s house, for prayer, reading the Scriptures, and spiritual conference; whereby we had some advantage, both in point of knowledge and tenderness.’4 Boston’s lifelong habits of self-scrutiny, prayer, and Bible reading with systematic meditation, were formed at that time.
There is more to be said. As Boston had a sensitive spirit, so he had a first-class mind, a retentive memory, and a way with words. He was always a man who thought best with a pen in his hands, writing out ideas and arguments as they came to him. He had matured early; his theological convictions were clear, his sense of call to a preaching and shepherding ministry was strong, and his insight into the vistas opened by biblical texts was already deep. The qualities that were later to lead Jonathan Edwards to describe him as ‘a truly great divine’ were already in evidence, and the power to speak to the heart that is sustained throughout his later and greater treatise, The Fourfold State (1720), was there too.
Put all of this together, and the star quality of The Art of Man-Fishing, while still breath-taking, becomes at least intelligible.
II
Boston was a mainstream Scottish Puritan (to use the word that fits; ‘Puritan’ was not used in Scotland as a label in the way it was in England). The Puritan type of faith and piety received its classic formulation in the Westminster Confession and Catechisms, which were the authorised standards of the Church of Scotland in Boston’s day. It will help us to appreciate the pastoral theology of the Art if we remind ourselves of the main features of the Puritan outlook, as the Westminster documents display them.
The Westminster standards were drawn up by the veritable cream of English and Scottish clergy. Working in the middle years of the 1640s, they had behind them as resources and models, establishing perimeters, parameters, and trajectories for their thought, the sixteenth century Reformed confessions, including the Anglican 39 Articles which they were charged to supersede; the legacy of theological exposition that began with Calvin and Knox; more than a century of intense international debate, carried on in print, regarding Roman Catholic, Lutheran and Arminian deviations from Reformed views; dozens of catechisms produced by Puritan pastors and a great deal of catechising experience; much published exegetical and expository work on the biblical text, from both Catholic and Protestant scholars; and, last but not least, a mass of ‘practical affectionate’ English Puritan treatises on conversion and the inner devotional realities of the Christian life. Basic to Westminster’s theological method was belief in the divinely inspired truth and coherence of the Bible, and a resolve to affirm only that which could be verified and vindicated from Scripture itself, as a faithful echo of God’s own teaching. Drawing on the resources listed above, and hewing conscientiously at every point to the line of Scripture, Westminster theology was masterful in style as well as masterly in substance, and it is no wonder that it shaped Presbyterian and Reformed theology both sides of the Atlantic so decisively.
Westminster theology is trinitarian, and centres on the way in which mankind’s Creator and Judge became mankind’s Redeemer and Saviour through the outworking of a plan that casts Jesus Christ, the God-man, in the role of Mediator and the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, in the role of the Life-giver. The plan is like an ellipse with two foci: focus one is the covenant of grace whereby, on the basis of Christ’s righteousness and blood-shedding, relations between the Creator and His human creatures are restored; focus two is union with Christ by the Spirit in regeneration whereby fallen human nature is remade. In all of this the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, God incarnate who redeemed, rose, reigns, and will one day return to judgment, becomes the direct object of faith, hope, love and joy. The world-wide church, of which all Christian congregations are members, is the sphere of salvation as it maintains the ministry of the Word and sacraments and worships God according to His command. Christ is the Head of the church and through the Spirit the source of all its spiritual life, and the church must be the Christian’s home as long as he is in this world. Such in a nutshell is the theology of Westminster.
Implicit, and sometimes explicit, in the Confession and Catechisms is the Puritan concept of conversion as a process that begins with awakening from spiritual complacency to spiritual unease as one faces the reality of one’s sin, and leads on through questings for faith, repentance, and a new life with God, to a God-given confidence that one has been divinely enabled to turn from sin to a self-abandoning trust in Christ, the sin-bearer, as one’s Lover, Lord, and Life, and that one’s heart has been renewed in the process. Boston’s idea of the minister as a ‘fisher of men’ is that through his public ministry in the pulpit and his private ministry of one-to-one admonition God will work in people’s hearts to bring them to this place of settled commitment, where they can confirm their assurance of being alive to God by noting the ongoing change in their inner being.
Believing that the fallen human heart is desperately prone to optimistic self-deception, Westminster Puritans stressed the need for constant self-suspicion and self-examination. There was nothing of morbid introspection about this; on the contrary, it was experienced as a bracing and reassuring exercise, as the regenerate discerned within themselves the signs of life from the Holy Spirit. Boston, facing the fact that only those alive in Christ can follow Christ, himself takes time in the early pages of the Art to examine himself in this way.
I think I have Spirit; that is, that I have life... from the following grounds... I have light that before I did not have.... This light lets me see my heart-sins... and is still discovering the baseness of my heart to me.... It makes me see Christ as precious... makes me trust in him... I lean on him for help in his own work... in temptations and trials, I endeavour to lift up my soul to him. I feel help... from the Spirit.... Many times I have gone to prayer very dead, and have come away with life... I find a threefold flame, though weak, in my heart. (a) A flame of love to Christ... I have a love to his truths... I love the promises... I love his threatenings as most just ... I love those in whom the image of God appears... I love his work... I love his ordinances... I love his glory, that he should be glorified, come of me what will. (b) I find in my heart a flame of desires toward the righteousness of Christ... My soul... acquiesces in justification by an imputed righteousness... Sometimes my soul longs... to be dissolved, and to be with Christ... (c) I find in my heart some heat of zeal for God... I move forward towards heaven... I am more acquainted with Christ and his ways than before... there is a growth of love in me... I can, I think, trust God more now than before... my soul is habitually more watchful than before. Nor do I dare give such liberty to my heart as sometimes I gave... I see growth of contempt of the world. And this, blessed be God, is on the increase in me (pp. 50ff.).
Evangelism was not a word that Boston knew, but evangelism, in the sense of awakening the unconverted to their need of Christ, leading them to faith and repentance, and establishing them in the new life to which his own self-analysis testifies, is what ‘man-fishing’ meant to him, and it was this skill that he sought to learn from the example of Jesus’s own soul-winning service.
III
Puritan evangelism, as carried on by preaching and pastoral admonition, took time, and was expected to take time. Strong sudden impressions from God about particular spiritual issues would frequently occur as the Word of God was preached, but ministers in the Westminster tradition were realistic about the likelihood that the conversion process from start to finish would take months, just as the gestation and final birth of a human baby does. In this, men like Boston have an important lesson to teach us today. Since mass evangelism on neutral ground, led by a freelance who specialises in this particular activity, became a regular feature of the Christian scene, the concept of conversion as typically a short, sharp affair that can be precisely narrated and dated has become normative for evangelical minds. Clearly, its source is the evangelistic rally, where, after warming up and softening up preliminaries, the evangelist speaks of human sin and divine grace, appeals for commitment to Christ, and passes on those persuaded to counsellors, who help them to make their commitment firm. Our romantic imaginations are right to recognise receiving Jesus Christ as Saviour from the guilt and power of sin and Lord of one’s life henceforth as the essence of conversion, but wrong to fancy that the whole process ordinarily starts and ends within an hour or two; just as we are wrong to imagine, as we sometimes do, that any happy results from the rally depend in a decisive way on the evangelist’s special gifts and the quality of his performance.
Realism requires us to face the fact that though God may prompt special evangelistic ventures, and use them in a spectacular way to advance or complete the conversion process, that process usually has many other stages, in all of which the decisive factor is the sovereignty of God’s grace. The main way in which God advances conversion, in our day as in Boston’s, is through the sustained faithfulness of parents, friends, and church teachers witnessing, instructing, and encouraging informally, and of preachers expounding the gospel from Scripture in worship contexts. The first requirement, therefore, in the church’s unending work of ‘man-fishing’ is that these activities go on incessantly, shaped by clear and serious purpose and backed by earnest importunity in prayer.
IV
Boston wrote the Art when he was a probationer preacher looking forward to a life of parochial ministry. Naturally, therefore, it was the demands, problems, and pitfalls of his present and future role that concerned him most, and the second half of the work is taken up with exploring what following Christ in faithful ministry involves. From this standpoint, the Art is a classic text which any minister of the word in any age might well use for an annual check-up. Certainly, we who preach will never get beyond its clear-sighted, challenging, searching wisdom, of which the following is a rough summary.
The call of God to shepherd His flock (says Boston) requires us to model ourselves on Jesus Christ, our Lord and Master, in at least the following particulars:
A century and a half after Boston’s time, another Scotsman, Horatius Bonar, wrote a powerful hortatory hymn on Christian ministry which, whether he realised it or not, capsules perfectly the admonitions of Boston’s Art. My guess (which of course I cannot prove) is that he knew his Boston so well that he could not think of ministry save in Bostonian terms. His hymn is certainly another admirable text for the minister’s periodic self-assessment, and the best way to end this introduction will be to quote it in full. This, then, is what Boston’s message to us amounts to.
Go, labour on; spend and be spent;
Thy joy to do the Father’s will;
It is the way the Master went:
Should not the servant tread it still?
Go, labour on while it is day;
The world’s dark night is hastening on;
Speed, speed thy work; cast sloth away;
It is not thus that souls are won.
Be wise the erring soul to win;
Go forth into the world’s highway,
Compel the wanderer to come in.
Toil on, and in thy toil rejoice;
For toil comes rest, for exile home;
Soon shalt thou hear the Bridegroom’s voice,
The midnight cry, ‘Behold, I come!’
1 Memoirs of Thomas Boston (Banner of Truth, 1988), p. 48.
2 p. 10.
3 Ibid.
4 p. 11.