by Rev. J. M. Brentnall, B.A.
During the winter of 1776-7, John Love, later the eminent minister of Anderson, Glasgow, passed through a deep spiritual crisis, brought on by his reading of four books: Hopkins on Regeneration, Brainerd’s Diary, Edwards on the Religious Affections, and Shepard’s Sincere Convert. The question with which he was brought to grapple concerned the unqualified freeness of Christ in the Gospel. ‘Is Christ freely offered to me as a sinner, or are some prior qualifications required of me before I have a Scripture warrant to take Him?’
Two of the passages which tortured Love’s mind stress the necessity of a deep and crushing work of conviction before saving faith can be produced in the sinner. ‘There are pangs and throes’ writes Hopkins, ‘that do accompany the new birth as well as the natural birth. And these are convictions and humiliations, when the soul is bowed down under the insupportable burden of its own guilt and the sense of God’s wrath . . .
in all that are sanctified and regenerated they do all of them bring forth in sorrow‘ (italics mine). Brainerd’s version of the same teaching is cast in autobiographical form: ‘Being sensible of the necessity of a deep humiliation in order to a saving close with Christ, I used to set myself to work in my own heart those convictions that were requisite in such a humiliation; as, a conviction that God would be just if He cast me off forever; that if God should bestow mercy on me, it would be mere grace, though I should be in distress many years first and be never so much engaged in duty; that God was not in the least obliged to pity me the more for all past duties, cries and tears. I strove to my utmost to bring myself to a firm belief of these things and a hearty assent to them; and hoped that now I was brought off from myself, truly humbled, and that I bowed to the divine sovereignty. I was wont to tell God in my prayers that now I had those very dispositions of soul that He required, and on which he showed mercy to others, and thereupon to beg and plead for mercy to me . . . Thus, scores of times, I vainly imagined myself humbled and prepared for saving mercy’.
The anxiety engendered over Love’s spiritual state by such teaching only increased when he read the following extracts from Edwards and Shepard: ‘The first foundation of a true love to God is that whereby He is in Himself lovely . . . the Saints . . . do not first see that God loves them, and then see that He is lovely, but they first see that God is lovely and that Christ is excellent and glorious . . . and then, consequently, they see God’s love and great favour to them‘ (Edwards). ‘The presumptuous unbeliever . . . seeing what sins he hath committed, and, it may be, having a little touch, and some sorrow for his sins, catcheth at Christ, hoping to be saved by Him, before he come to be loaded with sin as the greatest evil’. What, then, must the unconverted do? ‘Go to Him, and take hold of Him, not with the hand of presumption and love to thyself, to save thyself, but with the hand of faith and love to Him, to honour Him‘ (Shepard). Already afraid that he was nothing but a Gospel hypocrite, Love’s hopes of ever becoming anything else must have been utterly dashed when faced with such counsels of despair. Previously taught to believe that all sinners are invited to come to Christ, sensible or insensible of their sin, with or without disinterested love to God, and that on coming they will find Him an all-sufficient and all-suitable Saviour, Love’s anguish can be imagined. He had already believed on Christ; he had ventured his soul on Christ, for time and eternity. Now, the fear that his experience had come short of the standard set up by Hopkins, Brainerd, Edwards and Shepard, brought him almost to despair. ‘I dreaded’, he wrote, ‘that the experiences therein described, of awakening and comfort, were such as I was wholly a stranger to, and saw no likelihood of my ever attaining to’.
How the young divinity student was mercifully delivered from this condition, and what were his settled views on the Free Offer of the Gospel, are questions answered by subsequent events. Reflecting later on that critical winter, he thanked God for directing him to books which proved instrumental in removing those ‘tormenting scruples’ which had held him in such bondage, mentioning in particular Calvin’s ‘solid and judicious’ commentaries and ‘that blessed man Owen’s book on the Person of Christ’.
Calvin’s remarks on John 3:14-16 doubtless contributed much towards relieving Love of his perplexity. After stating that ‘whosoever looks upon Him by faith receives salvation’, the great Reformer continues: ‘Christ shows the first cause and as it were source of our salvation. And this He does that no doubt may be left. For there is no calm haven where our minds can rest until we come to God’s free love. The whole substance of our salvation is not to be sought anywhere else than in Christ, and so we must see by what means Christ flows to us and why He is offered as our Saviour‘. Commenting on John 6:39, he writes: ‘They had spoken of works; Christ brings them back to one work, that is, faith. By this He means that whatsoever men undertake without faith is useless and vain, but that faith alone is enough, for God requires of us only that we believe . . . This is a remarkable passage and shows that even if men wear themselves out all their lives, they are only playing at work unless faith in Christ is the rule of their lives’.
What Love’s reading of Calvin did to dispel his fears over the question of prior convictions, his study of Owen did to remove his scruples over the question of pure motives. Declaring that ‘Faith in the person of Christ is the spring and fountain of our spiritual life‘, Owen proceeds: ‘A due apprehension of the love of Christ, with the effects of it in His whole mediatory work on our behalf — especially in His giving Himself for us, and our redemption by His blood — is the great motive thereunto . . . The due remembrance of what the blessed Lord Jesus hath done for us, of the ineffable love which was the spring, cause and fountain of what He so did — thoughts of the mercy, grace, peace and glory which He hath procured thereby — are the great and unconquerable motives to fix our faith, hope, trust and confidence in Him’. Thus, it is not a loving view of the loveliness of Christ, but a believing view of the love of Christ, which is saving. ‘We love Him because He first loved us’ (1 John 4:19).
Several lessons of great value emerge from Love’s entanglement in this subtle form of hyper-Calvinism. First, we learn that in the sovereignty of God the experience of conversion differs from one to another. ‘O blessed be the Lord that He thus instructs me’ he wrote soon afterwards, ‘so that I may not provoke Him by limiting Him to deal with me as He did with Mr Brainerd or with any other, but may leave Him to take His own blessed way with me’. We must not live on the experiences of others, but in daily dependence on the Lord Himself for fresh communications of grace.
Second, our experiences, as well as our doctrine and practice, must be brought to the bar of Scripture. Both Brainerd and Edwards, said Love, ‘seem to have been more occupied about their experiences and reasonings upon them, than about the written Word’. But does not Scripture itself teach us to offer Christ only to the weary and heavy-laden? (Matt. 11:28). ‘We are not so to understand this invitation as if none were invited to come to Christ but those who are described in it’ replied Love, ‘for there are other invitations of equal authority with this, because coming from the same Lord. The truth, as drawn from the whole of the Word, is that all sinners of every character are invited, sensible or insensible of their sin . . . Inattention to this has led many godly men into great mistakes concerning the Gospel invitation, for the whole doctrine concerning that invitation is not to be taken from any one text in the Word, but from the sum of the texts in which such invitations are given’.
A third lesson from Love’s experience is that we must seek grace to discern between what is legal and what is evangelical. By urging sinners to come to Christ out of disinterested love to His Person or under harrowing convictions of sin, these writers make a legal demand on the sinner, no less a demand, in fact, than all that the Law requires; for a pure, unselfish love to God is the fulfilling of the Law (Mk. 12:30), and crushing convictions of sin are produced by the Law (Rom. 3:20). But the Gospel never makes such demands on sinners. It invites sinners, just as they are, to come to Christ for salvation. The Gospel is not a new Law which stipulates love and conviction as conditions of salvation; it is a declaration of free mercy, even to the chief of sinners. We must come to Christ as we are, for He alone can give us what we need. Nevertheless, sinners must be convinced of sin before they will come to Christ ‘(i) not in the way of merit; (ii) not in the way of warrant, as if the sinner had not a right to believe till he be humbled . . . but (iii) it is necessary physically — because without it, more or less, he cannot perform that act which he has a right to do — even to take Christ, as He is freely given to him’. But is it honouring to God to come to Christ for salvation, or is it merely an act of self-love? Love to one’s own soul, expressed in coming to Christ for salvation, is what God Himself addresses in the invitations of Isa. 55:2 and Ezek. 33:11; indeed, He refuses to magnify His mercy in any other way than by meeting sinners in the Free Offer of Christ.
No less valuable is the lesson of the unparalleled preciousness of saving faith. ‘The first right step heavenwards’ wrote Love, quoting Robert Traill, ‘is saving faith in Christ. Nothing savingly good can precede it, and all saving good follows it. Faith unites a man to Christ, from whom all holiness springs’. It is not lack of pure love to God, nor lack of deep convictions of sin, which keeps sinners from Christ; it is an evil heart of unbelief. Neither is faith the sinner’s legal response to God’s demands, but an evangelical grace freely bestowed upon the poor and needy. ‘Faith is the tongue that begs pardon, the hand that receives it, the eye that sees it, but it is no price to buy it. That price is the righteousness of Christ. Faith uses that price, but is not itself the price’.
A fifth lesson to learn from Love’s experiences is that in order to counteract the harmful effects of dwelling ‘too long at a time on the searching and terrifying representation of things’, as these authors do, we should read those books ‘wherein the way of access to salvation by Jesus Christ is pointed out in a more simple, direct and healing manner, such as Gray’s sermons, Durham’s Communion Sermons . . . and the like’.
Lastly, we should look to the Spirit alone both to lead us to Christ and to assure us of a saving interest in Him. ‘It is only the Spirit’, he concludes, ‘who can so clear up to us the nature of the offer or gift of Christ in the Gospel, and our warrant as sinners to take Him, as to make us hear the Lord’s own voice . . . so as to be assured that it is no delusion, but that we can confidently rest our eternal well-being upon it’.