7c - Thomas Boston: Repentance
ISBN 978-1-84550-975-0
7c
THOMAS BOSTON
Repentance
I
The Reformation brought to light many biblical realities that had long been overlaid by mistaken ideas and thus effectively hidden from view. The true nature of the Bible’s own authority, for instance, and of justification by faith and salvation by grace and of the church and the sacraments, spring to mind. Repentance also is a case in point.
In the Middle Ages, repentance was equated with ‘penance’—that is, confession of sins to a priest followed by absolution and the imposing of a disciplinary penalty for the sinner to undergo in order to signalise genuine sorrow. Nor was this the end of the matter; for a distinction was drawn between eternal guilt and temporal punishment, and the theory was that while absolution remitted the former, thus saving sinners from hell, they must yet spend time in purgatory after death enduring the latter. Indulgences, however, issued at the Pope’s discretion and underwritten by the treasury of the saints’ superabundant merits, would secure reduction of the purgatorial period, according to the terms in which they were drafted.
It was Luther’s outraged challenge to the sale of a plenary indulgence that would keep the purchaser out of purgatory no matter what his sins were, and that could be bought for persons now in purgatory as their get-out-of-jail-free card, effective immediately, which triggered the Reformation movement across Western Europe. The first two of the ninety-five theses that Luther in his dual role as university professor of Bible and preaching pastor of the Wittenberg Castle Church congregation, posted on the church door on October 31st, 1517, were as follows:
Luther’s positive point, that repentance means whole-hearted turning or returning to God, and that the Christian life is and must be as truly a life of repentance as a life of faith, was to find full expression in Calvin’s Institutes (III.I, ii-iv), in the weekly set services of the Anglican Prayer Book, in a classic sermon by John Bradford the martyr, in a widely read small book by the Elizabethan Reformed and devotional theologian William Perkins, and in many Puritan utterances after that, crowned perhaps by the declaration of Philip Henry, father of Matthew, that he hoped to carry his repentance up to the gates of heaven itself. As, however, Puritan attention focused increasingly on conversion and regeneration, Puritan emphasis was more and more laid on the initial repentance leading to the penitent life, and this is reflected in the Westminster Confession’s chapter XV, ‘Of Repentance unto Life.’
1. Repentance unto life is an evangelical grace, the doctrine whereof is to be preached by every minister of the Gospel, as well as that of faith in Christ.
2. By it, a sinner, out of the sight and sense not only of the danger, but also of the filthiness and odiousness of his sins, as contrary to the holy nature, and righteous law of God; and upon the apprehension of his mercy in Christ to such as are penitent, so grieves for and hates his sins, as to turn from them unto God, purposing and endeavouring to walk with him in all the ways of his commandments.
5. ... Men ought not to content themselves with a general repentance, but it is every man’s duty to endeavour to repent of his particular sins, particularly.
In the book now before us, Thomas Boston (1676–1732), minister of Ettrick in south Scotland, inheritor and champion of Puritan theology and of the Reformational rethinking that preceded it, links together expositions first written for his pulpit on the necessity, nature and urgency of repentance, and the folly of ignoring or postponing this life-and-death issue. The sermons have all the qualities we associate with Boston: a dazzling mastery of the text and teaching of the Bible; a profound knowledge of the human heart; great thoroughness and clarity in exposition; great skill in applicatory searching of the conscience; and a pervasive sense of the wonder and glory of God’s grace in Christ to such perverse sinners as ourselves. Proper appreciation of what we have here requires, however, some preparation of both head and heart, to take us into the world of Boston’s wisdom, and I propose now to say something about that.
II
Flanking a main gate into what you might call Oxford’s Mecca, an area containing the Clarendon Building, the University’s administrative centre; the Sheldonian Theatre, where degrees are conferred; the medieval Divinity School, and the world-famous Bodleian Library; pillars support sculptured heads of some of mankind’s Big Brains. They are restored now, but when I was an undergraduate they had been weathered featureless and all you could tell as you looked at them was that they were meant to be human heads and not anything else. It is like that with the Bible-based, Puritan-ripened convictions about God and ourselves out of which Boston expounds and applies his texts. Modern thought has so weathered this faith that at first it seems to us a far-off and somewhat fuzzy historical oddity, not relevant for us at all.
Thus, Boston believes that the triune God, through whom we exist, in whose hands we are, and who will one day deal out our destiny, is holy in such a sense as to induce a sense of guilt and shame, unrighteousness and uncleanness, perversity and pollution, demerit and defilement, in all who realise His reality; and moreover is sovereign over everything in His world, even the free choices of human beings. But most today, while still acknowledging ‘the one above’ (or perhaps ‘the man upstairs’), assume that God’s nature is simply one of kindness without standards or expectations, and helpfulness that should shield everyone from harm all the time; or else they see him as an impersonal cosmic force, not he but it, making no difference to anyone, so that it is only common sense to live as if God did not exist.
Again, Boston believes that Jesus Christ, divine-human Lord and Mediator, our prophet, priest and king, crucified, risen, reigning and returning, offers Himself in the gospel to everyone, inviting and commanding all who hear to receive and trust Him as their Saviour, Master and Friend, through whom they may find forgiveness, acceptance and adoption into God’s family, there to be transformed into the image of God’s Son. Also, Boston believes that Jesus will one day be everyone’s judge, and that everyone’s destiny is either eternal heaven with Jesus or eternal hell without Him. But most today think of Jesus as one more good man who taught and modelled decent behaviour, and they dismiss whatever most Christians believe about Him as mere superstitious fancy. As for death, they conceive it as leading to either immediate happiness or immediate extinction, without Jesus being involved either way.
Again, Boston believes that the Bible is like a great illuminated circle, at the centre of which we stand with light shining on us from biblical teaching, narratives, biographies and circumstances to show us ourselves as we really are, and as God sees us, here and now; and he further believes that the Holy Spirit of God leads us to pass on ourselves the judgment that God passes, and to labour to change our ways accordingly—which is precisely what in Scripture repentance means. Thus, and only thus, to Boston’s mind, do we learn what Paul meant when he said that all Scripture, being God-breathed, is ‘profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness’ (2 Tim. 3:16). But most today think of the Bible as at best a collection of ancient ideas about religion, some of which can still inspire but most of which are freaky and outdated, and all of which need to be relativised, in our world of multiple cultures, both religious and secular, to whatever the consensus of the culture currently surrounding us happens to be. For reason is in the saddle, shaping religion, which it sees as essentially a human construct, and while reason thus rides and drives, biblical revelation is left behind in the ditch.
And finally, Boston believes that regeneration of heart by the Holy Spirit of God imparts a truly new-created life, of which the exercise of faith in Christ, the practice of repentance toward God, the humbling of one’s heart, the upsurging of joy in the Lord and the overflow of active love to God in worshipful communion and to fellow-humans in self-denying service, along with passion to progress in all of this, are the direct expressions. But most today see religion as simply a crutch and a comfort for the struggling self, something that most of us can get on well without, and so the evangelical existence just described is dismissed as surely self-deceived and hypocritical.
The world of spiritual reality in which Boston’s teaching about repentance is anchored is now before us, in outline at any rate, and it has to be said at once that unless we ourselves are inhabitants of that world, or at least are prepared to discover that we should be, we shall not appreciate him as the perceptive, profound, skilful, Spirit-taught physician of the soul that in fact he is. In his own day he was admired not simply as an accomplished biblical scholar, though he was all of that, but principally as a master pastor, whose Fourfold State circulated throughout Scotland as the ordinary person’s vade-mecum on the path to heaven. Today, three centuries later, this man of God yet speaks to us in print, shining the searchlight of Scripture on our disordered lives and pleading with us to face and listen to God as He speaks to us through His servant on the various matters that Boston dealt with—here, the reality or otherwise of our ‘repentance unto life.’ Too businesslike to aim at elegance, Boston nonetheless achieves eloquence by his down-to-earth clarity of style, expository order and skill in clinching each point by appropriate words from his Bible. And, as with some cheeses, you will find that the more you chew what He gives us, the stronger the flavour you get.
III
What sort of people do these sermons on repentance address? In a broad and basic sense, of course, like all Reformational, Puritan and authentic Evangelical sermons, they are declarations of truth about God that are truly messages for everybody. Everyone needs to be reminded, and believers love to be reminded, over and over again, of the reality of God’s holiness, awesomeness, graciousness, faithfulness, justice, greatness and glory, and these themes must ever be primary and foundational in preaching, as in Boston they invariably are. In all his sermons, God—God omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent; God in Christ exercising both mercy and judgment; God who searches hearts and whose wheels grind slowly but grind exceedingly small—is, so to speak, the subject and human beings the predicate; Boston is God-centred, even, as is said of Jonathan Edwards, God-intoxicated, and his first concern as a preacher is that all of us at the receiving end should be the same. We today are so used to man-centred sermons, in which God appears only as does Jeeves in P.G. Wodehouse’s farcical novels, to get people out of trouble, that for some of us adjusting to Boston’s perspective is a major effort. But sermons, as such, are utterances on God’s behalf to stop people sinning and bring them closer to God, so it is still proper to ask: who in particular are the people whom Boston is addressing?
There is no doubt as to how our question should be answered. Boston is reaching out to impenitent religious people, old and young, high and low, of two kinds: the self-satisfied and presumptuous, and the procrastinators, whom Boston describes as the slothful and pictures as spiritual sleepers. He seeks to explode the pride of the former and the apathy of the latter, and to lead both into the repentance that both need—‘salvation-work’, as he calls it. So first he explains that repentance is a matter of the heart, a lifetime’s task, a gift of God’s Spirit through God’s Word, a change involving conviction, distress, faith in Christ, humiliation of heart, ‘holy shame’ and violent self-dislike, a confessing, renouncing, and turning from all one’s sins as one knows them and a sincere, whole-hearted turning to God in total commitment to obedience henceforth and for ever. Then he deploys as motives to repentance the command and call of God, the killing effect of sin, the prospect of death and judgment, the agony of Christ, and the dishonour that sin does to God. Then he shows at length how delay in repenting, for whatever reason, must ruin the soul. Then he dwells on the condemned state of the impenitent, however friendly the providences surrounding them may seem, and pleads once again for serious personal repentance on the part of everyone. Pursuing this story-line, as we may call it, he scatters incidentally a great deal of wisdom about the ways of God, as he regularly does in all his practical writing. To readers who are on his wavelength, he has much to give. But the wavelength question, I recognise, is a real one. There are many professed believers today whose sincerity and zeal are great but whose Christian reading has so far stopped short at what I would call Christian froth (of which, be it said, there is nowadays no shortage), and if Boston falls into their hands they may well be tempted after the first few pages to give up, feeling that this is tough stuff, old-fashioned and dry, and is doing nothing for them. Granted, Boston, like others of the sermon-publishing Puritan school, is something of an acquired taste; but to any thus stymied who turn back to this Introduction in puzzlement as to why Boston’s book should be rated a classic, I say—keep going, I beg you; and have a ballpoint handy, to jot down Boston’s headings as you come to them; and take note of everything he tells you about God; and when you have struggled to the end, go back and read the book again; and I guarantee that you will realise you have not been wasting your time.
Before me, as I write, is a leaflet announcing a conference retreat under the title: ‘Repentance as the Way to a Blessed Life in the 21st Century.’ The title declares a truth, and Boston can lead us into that blessed life as sure-footedly as anyone. So read well, think and pray about what you read, and God bless you through the perennial wisdom that His servant unfolds.