7b - Thomas Boston: The Crook in the Lot
ISBN 978-1-84550-649-0
7b
THOMAS BOSTON
The Crook in the Lot
I
As an Englishman who has lived in North America for thirty-two years, during an era of rapid cultural change, I know more about how today’s North Americans use words than I do about their British counterparts, so it may be that what I say in my next sentence would not apply so directly on the east side of the Atlantic. It is certain, however, that if a North American man in the street – say, the man on the Vancouver omnibus – heard a reference to the crook in the lot, he would think it must signify a criminal hiding out on a piece of probably undeveloped real estate (what Brits would call, property), and he would not be able to imagine what else it might mean. But in Thomas Boston’s usage the crook is the crooked, that is the uncomfortable, discontenting aspects of a person’s life, the things that the Puritans called losses and crosses, and that we speak of as the stones in our shoe, the thorns in our bed, the burrs under the saddle, and the complaints we have to live with; and the lot is the providentially appointed path that God sets each of His servants to travel. Boston, minister of Ettrick in south Scotland, who with Jonathan Edwards represents most brilliantly the prolonging into the eighteenth century of pure Puritanism, as a Bible-based, church-centred, faith-oriented, prayer-drenched movement of personal spiritual life, left at his death (he died in harness in 1732, aged fifty-six) a little treatise on this theme, which he had already begun to prepare for the press. His friends finished the job, and the work was published in 1737, under the title The Crook in the Lot: The Sovereignty and Wisdom of God in the Afflictions of Men Displayed. That is what is before you now.
The movie Shadowlands represented C. S. Lewis as an inexperienced theorist who pontificated in public regarding pain and grief without knowing anything about it until he lost his wife. This, no doubt, was good Hollywood, but the story of the real C. S. Lewis was very different, and so was the story of Thomas Boston. The Crook in the Lot emerged from what in his autobiography Boston called ‘the groaning part of my life’, the final eight years, during which, in addition to ongoing battles for the gospel against the non-evangelical leadership of the Church of Scotland and the continuance of his wife’s paralyzing depression, he was a martyr to some form of the stone (gravel, he called it) and saw himself become a physical wreck. When he wrote and spoke of life’s troubles he knew what he was talking about, and the sense that this was so comes through strongly, even though there is nothing directly autobiographical in the analysis that the treatise offers.
It began, as the reader can see, as seven sermons: three on Ecclesiastes 7:13, ‘Consider the work of God; for who can make that straight which he hath made crooked?’; one on Proverbs 16:19, ‘Better is it to be of an humble spirit with the lowly, than to divide the spoil with the proud’; and three on 1 Peter 5:6: ‘Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, that he may exalt you in due time’. Boston had an architectural mind (Jonathan Edwards hailed him as ‘a truly great divine’), and he liked preaching series of sermons that illustrated key topics from a number of texts; he wrote out the sermons in his easy, flowing English as part of his preparation for preaching them; and here, as in his better-known Fourfold State, the combination of perfect clarity with biblical light and weight searches the reader’s heart and again and again makes us face ourselves on specific matters, impacting us with the sudden force of a depth-charge that explodes far below the surface level of our being. This is a way of saying that, as with Edwards and many of the Puritans of the previous century, divine unction rests on Boston’s homiletical writing just as once it rested on his actual preaching; and that is a way of saying that the reality of the power of God in his own heart spilled over into his verbal communication. Be prepared, then, to find that God is preaching to you through Boston as you read The Crook in the Lot.
II
Two years before his death Boston wrote: ‘I bless my God in Jesus Christ, that ever he made me a Christian, and took an early dealing with my soul [Boston came to faith at age eleven, under the preaching of Henry Erskine, a minister ejected from the Church of England in 1662], that ever he made me a minister of the gospel, and gave me true insight into the doctrine of his grace.’ That ‘true insight’ which The Crook in the Lot presupposes, can be learned in detail from Boston’s voluminous though very self-consistent output, studied as a whole; or from the Westminster Confession and Catechisms, where it is crystallised; but modern readers may not have time or inclination for this research, and their minds may already be possessed by different notions. So before going further I shall sketch out the frame of doctrine into which this little treatise fits. It is doctrine with a catechetical rather than an academic cast, in other words it is truth as one presents it to persons ignorant of Christianity in order to bring them to know, love, worship and serve God, and thus to make them true disciples of Jesus Christ.
1. The triune God, through whom we exist, in whose hands we always are, and who will in due course judge us and award us our final destiny, is totally sovereign over everything in His world, controlling even the free choices of human beings.
2. The human heart is naturally self-centred, self-deifying, self-serving, and unresponsive and hostile to God’s claims, so that it leads everyone to live in a way which, if not changed, will bring final condemnation, rejection, retribution and separation from God’s fellowship and love.
3. Jesus Christ, the incarnate Lord and Mediator, prophet, priest and king, crucified, risen and reigning, offers Himself to everyone in the gospel, inviting and commanding all who hear to receive and trust Him as the Saviour, Lord and Friend in and through whom they may be forgiven and restored and adopted into the Father’s family for transformation into the image of the Son.
4. Through regeneration of heart by the Holy Spirit persons who seek Christ find Him, and by faith live new lives henceforth as His disciples, empowered by the Spirit who now indwells them.
5. In every disciple’s life there are crooked things, unpleasant and unwelcome, which God uses to test us, strengthen us, humble us, correct us, teach us lessons, further our self-knowledge, repentance, and sanctity, shield us from greater evils, and thus bring us blessing, grievous as at first sight the crooked things seem to be.
6. The knowledge that in every case the crook in our lot belongs to this world only, and that again and again God delivers His people when they pray from particular afflictions that burden them here and now, should sustain believers as they undergo these divine chastenings, helping them to hold fast the certainty that ‘all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose’ (Rom. 8:28, NRSV).
These are the basic truths of which, at least in rough terms, Boston expects his readers to have some awareness. His treatise will remind us of many of them and amplify some of them in detail, but none is presented as a new idea, and evidently Boston sees his role as helping people to know better, and apply to themselves more thoroughly, things that in some sense they know already. Some of Boston’s thoughts may be new to us, but that does not mean they were new to his own first hearers. It is clear that at catechetical level congregations were better taught in Boston’s day than they are in ours – which, when you think of the way catechising has dropped out of church and family life, is hardly matter for surprise.
With these truths clear in our minds, however, we are equipped to tune in to The Crook in the Lot and, if I may put it this way, to suck sweetness out of it.
III
To this end I pose two questions.
First: what did Boston design the Crook to do, originally to his hearers at Ettrick and then to his readers, people such as ourselves? To what end did he select and arrange this material? What, pastorally, was his aim? Long ago I was taught that if you aim at nothing in particular you are sure to achieve it. What did Boston hope to achieve?
A partial answer would be: to teach people. It has been said that the three priorities in pastoral ministry are, first, to teach, second, to teach, and third, to teach, and Boston would have agreed with that. Preaching, as persons like himself in the Puritan tradition understood it, is teaching plus application, and the application is itself a didactic engagement of the mind before it is anything else. The rationale of this position is that all truth enters the heart via the understanding, and that authentic Christianity is essentially belief of and obedience to the revealed truth of God, and that the Bible itself is that truth, presented in a variety of forms – by narrative, by parable, by argumentation, by vision, and so on – but all, as Paul says, ‘profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness’ (2 Tim. 3:16, NASB). Boston’s teaching process enlarges biblical understanding in more than one way; the passages he gathers illuminate the truth they are cited to support, and that truth in turn illuminates the significance of these passages in their own context. The modern way to mark this fact is to applaud Boston for his skill in canonical interpretation, that is, his insight into the whole Bible, all sixty-six books of it in the two testamentary collections, as a theological unity setting forth in a wonderfully consistent and coherent manner the will, work and ways of God the Creator-become-Redeemer, plus the wisdom about God, the world, and life that the godly are called to learn. Like Calvin and the Puritans before him, Boston offers canonical interpretation of the Bible that in both spiritual and intellectual quality far outstrips most ventures in this field today. One supposes that depth of dependence on the Holy Spirit, who as inspirer of the Bible must ever be its ultimate interpreter, has something to do with this fact.
Boston’s basic contention, which all his teaching here is concerned to make good, is that: ‘A just view of afflicting incidents is altogether necessary to a Christian deportment under them; and that view is to be obtained only by faith, not by sense; for it is the ... Word alone that represents them justly, discovering in them the work of God, and consequently, designs becoming the divine perfections.’ Assuming general knowledge of the plan of salvation as laid out above, he first shows us with piercing precision what constitutes a crook in one’s lot (circumstances causing revulsion and complaint, and generating all the temptations of discontent), and he analyses for us what modes of crook there are (defects in our make up; dishonour, sometimes observed, sometimes not; lack of appropriate success in our endeavours; and bad relationships everywhere). Then he tells us how we should seek God’s help to ‘even’ (straighten) the crooks, while humbling ourselves under them and acknowledging that some of them are here to stay while this life lasts. And finally he explains how we should focus our hope on the promised ‘lifting up’ that, here or hereafter, will be our experience. Points recur in different connections as he moves along, in a way that makes one think of the spiral tunnels whereby trains in Switzerland and Western Canada gain height. The trains emerge almost directly above where they went in, but much higher up; and similarly the reappearances of Boston’s points, slightly reangled and newly illustrated as they usually are, raise our understanding of them higher each time we meet them. First to last, Boston gives us masterful teaching, with what Americans describe as ‘review’ and Brits call ‘revision’ built in.
But that is not all that Boston aims to do. Teaching is the means to his end, rather than the end itself. His goal, like that of every other real preacher, is to change those he addresses, or at least to see them changed by the power of God. Here, along with his permanent purpose of leading the unconverted to faith and the new birth, his clear purpose is to discipline Christ’s disciples in reverent, realistic, hope-filled humility, as they face up to the inescapable imperfections of life in general and their own lives in particular. He wants us to be utterly sure of the wisdom and goodness of God’s Providence as we adjust to the disappointments, deprivations and limitations of our lives, and to glorify God by the way we cope with them. He is consciously ministering to the many who he knows are not strong at this point, seeking to establish them in humble, prayerful steadiness. His book is preaching on paper, and if it left its readers unmoved and unchanged he would certainly count it a failure – a crook in his own lot, we might say.
IV
That brings us to my second question. Has this book a message for today? The answer, I believe, is yes, most certainly; but it is a message that moderns are likely to find very hard to hear. Why? Let me explain.
Psychologists and philosophers have noticed that it is common for people to have in their minds incompatible lines of thought, desire, valuation, expectation and purpose, and to be unaware of the incompatibility. They call this condition cognitive dissonance. Pastorally, the insight is important, for the mixture of faith and unbelief, wisdom and foolishness, spiritual discernment and spiritual myopia, that we find in all believers in this world, virtually guarantees that there will be cognitive dissonance in Christian minds – self-contradiction and incoherence, that is – over and over again with regard to the things of God. So it proves to be, and pastors are constantly having to detect and correct mistakes of this kind.
Now, one particular form of cognitive dissonance that is widespread today among evangelical Protestants (interestingly, you do not find it among Roman Catholics and Orthodox) is as follows. Nobody questions that Christ tells His followers to deny themselves – that is, to give to God all the personal hopes and dreams they have cherished, and accept that non-fulfilment of these may be part of His plan – and to take up their cross – that is, be willing to become discredited outcasts, like the condemned men whose ranks Jesus was to join who were made to carry the means of their crucifixion to the place appointed for it. This is a clear, sober warning from our Lord that discipleship will have its downs as well as its ups, its distresses as well as its delights, and no Christian challenges it. But at the same time the comfort-oriented materialism of our age urges that painless, trouble-free living is virtually a human right, and against this background many who believe they believe let themselves think that because they are God’s children they will always be shielded from major troubles, such as strike other people, and will be led through life on a pain-free path, with all pleasant things provided, as would happen on a cruise. The brash and simplistic expression of this syndrome is found in the health and wealth gospel of some televangelists; the more reflective and sophisticated expression of it appears in the pained question, voiced when trauma comes – bereavement, betrayal, incurable disease, business collapse, or whatever – ‘How could God let this happen to me?’ and it further appears in the theological theories that say God would have stopped it if He could, but He couldn’t, because His sovereignty is limited. Here we meet cognitive dissonance, anchored deep in people’s hearts. The fantasy of nasty things kept at bay and only nice things meant for us here and now dies hard, and where it has not yet died Boston’s realism, bracing, clarifying and stabilizing as it is, will not be received.
But be that as it may, the pure biblical wisdom of The Crook in the Lot is badly needed by many of us, and so I am delighted that it is being made available again in this handy form. And I hope that what I have written here will help a new generation to read it with understanding and gratitude to God. For truly, as Americans love to say, this is where it’s at.