They not only tingle, they soar.....

When J P Struthers, the remarkable minister of Greenock Reformed Presbyterian Church in late 19th Century Scotland, offered to buy James Denney a set of the Standard Puritan Divines as a wedding present, it was a joke between two men who remained very close friends, and went separate ways theologically, at least so far as biblical criticism and modern thought was concerned. Denney's aversion to Seventeenth Century theology can be explained in several ways; his own upbringing in a church tracing its ancestry to the Covenanters and to the turmoil of theological conflict; his openness to new thought and growing resistance to Westminster Calvinism as intellectually stifling and inherently hostile to views of the Bible which allowed a believing criticism; his taste for the 18th century Augustan plain style in language, on which his own lucid, to the point, reasonably argued style was modelled; and his impatience with prolix, argumentative or dissected divinity.

However his contemporary P T Forsyth wasn't as dismissive. The two great Congregationalist Puritans, John Owen and Thomas Goodwin, were honoured conversation partners in Foryth's intellectual drawing room. Here is Forsyth on Goodwin:

Theological truth was not the deposit of a scholl's thought but the register of the Church's experience of eternal things. There is soemthing more than Shakespearian in the dramatic majesty and passionate intimacy of some of Goodwin's pages, because they apply  genius to a region of the soul above any that Shakespeare ever entered. They not only tingle; they soar; and they come home with a beauty and poignancy of spiritual truth which makes them, ever after they are read, ingredients in one's own spiritual life. (Faith Freedom and the Future, pages 116-118).

I've started two books on Puritan Spirituality, one of the research areas I am beginning to explore. I think I am somewhere between Denney and Forsyth as far as reading such people as Owen and Goodwin, Sibbes and Flavel, Baxter and Charnock, are concerned. Prolix yes; over-elaborated divinity - yes at times; scholastic Calvinism as a controlling intellectual grid often a given, yes; but there are times, actually many times, when they are saying important things the church can't afford to forget, neglect or dismiss. One of my other enthusiasms is the theologian often called the last Puritan, Jonathan Edwards. He shares many of the characteristics, less of the faults, and is an important bridge in modern intellectual thought.

Anyway - more of this later. Still not online at home, but there are fingers of light streaking the horizon suggesting a new internet connection maty be about to dawn.

Comments

[Steve H]

Hey Jim,

For all their faults, and there are many, the Puritans remain my standard for theologically informed pastoral ministry and for pastorally sensitive theology. More and more I realise that what I want is to be able to inhabit two worlds, to speak in doctoral seminars with the wisdom, experience, and urgency of the most faithful local pastor, and to pastor and preach with the insight and settled convictions of the best scholastic theologian; Owen, Sibbes, and the rest did that (as did Augustine, to return to an earlier conversation...).

So--go for it!

Steve

[Adrian Salupo]

I have also, recently developed an interest in Scottish Church history of the 19th century, only because of the biblical translation work of Robert Young (1822-88). I have been seeking biographical information concerning this giant of biblical translation and scholarship, but can find few entries in my American sources. Can anyone help?