Who Was Adam Clarke? The Methodist Scholar Behind the Commentary

BiographyTheologyPreachingChurch History

Adam Clarke was an Irish Methodist preacher and Bible scholar who lived from about 1762 to 1832. John Wesley sent him out as a traveling preacher when he was barely twenty, and he preached for fifty years after that. He taught himself Hebrew, Greek and a long list of Eastern languages, and he spent about forty years on a commentary on the whole Bible that Methodists used for generations. He was also the first man chosen three times to lead the Methodist Conference in Britain.

Most readers today know him through that commentary. But he was a preacher first, and his other books show a warm pastor as well as a scholar. Here's his story, and where to start with his books in TheWay Library.

A slow boy from County Londonderry

Clarke was born in the village of Moybeg, near Coleraine, in the north of Ireland. Nobody was sure of the year. His mother said 1760 and his father 1763, and he told his friend Samuel Dunn he never settled it. His father kept a small school and a farm, and the two Clarke boys took turns, one in the classroom and one in the fields.

Adam was a slow learner at first. He was about eight before he could put letters together into words, and a teacher told him he would be a beggar all his days. Something woke up in him after that, and he became a hungry reader.

When he was in his teens, Methodist preachers came through the district. Under their preaching he was brought to see his sin and to trust Christ, and he began to meet in a Methodist class. Dunn's life of Clarke says his mind seemed to open along with his heart: he learned more in a day than he used to in a month. He tried working for a linen merchant in Coleraine, but his heart was in preaching, and he soon preached his first sermon in a nearby village.

Sent out by Wesley

In 1782 Clarke crossed to England to Wesley's school at Kingswood, near Bristol. His welcome there was cold and his stay was short. Wesley met him, put his hands on his head and prayed over him, and that autumn sent him out as a traveling preacher.

For the next years he rode the hard circuits of early Methodism: Wiltshire, Norwich, Cornwall, Plymouth, and three years in the Channel Islands. He often preached outdoors in rain and snow, and on one circuit he was nearly killed by a stone thrown from the dark. In the Channel Islands he used the public library to study the Bible in Hebrew, Samaritan, Syriac and other ancient versions, and he bought a Polyglot Bible of his own.

In 1788 he married Mary Cooke of Trowbridge. Before he proposed, he asked her if she would go with him wherever the Conference sent him. She said she would, and she did, for more than forty years.

Wesley thought highly of him. In his will he named Clarke one of the trustees of his writings. When Wesley died in 1791, Clarke was overcome with grief, and he kept a deep love for Wesley all his life.

Scholar and preacher

Clarke went on to Dublin, Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol and London. In London alone, Dunn says, he walked more than seven thousand miles in three years just doing a preacher's rounds. At the same time he was reading everything. He wrote on the history of the Bible, edited older Christian books, and served the British and Foreign Bible Society. The University of Aberdeen gave him an M.A. and then a doctorate of laws. The government asked him to edit a great collection of state papers for the Record Commission, and he worked on it for years.

The Baptist preacher Robert Hall called him "an ocean of learning." Clarke's own motto was simpler. Asked whether a young preacher should study geology, he said, "Yes; a Methodist preacher should know every thing."

His great work was his Commentary on the Holy Scriptures. The first part came out in 1810, and he finished it in the 1820s. Looking back, he said he had worked alone, with no assistant, and that about forty years of his life had gone into it. It isn't in TheWay Library yet, but his other books carry the same mind and the same heart.

Leading the Methodists

The Methodist Conference chose Clarke as its president in 1806, again in 1814, and a third time in 1822. No one had done that before. He also served several times as president of the Irish Conference. He cared about missions. He chaired the first Wesleyan missionary meeting in London, and in 1822 he pushed for preachers to be sent to the Shetland Islands. He later visited the islands himself and wrote that the work there "far exceeded all that I had even hoped."

He never lost his loyalty to the people who had sent him out. Dunn heard him say, more than once:

I belong to the Methodists, — body and soul, blood and sinews.

Christian Theology, Life of Adam Clarke, by Samuel Dunn

What he taught

Clarke was a Wesleyan Methodist through and through. He believed Christ died for all, and that God sincerely wills every person to be saved. He taught that salvation comes by faith, not by merit, and that it saves from the guilt, the power and the pollution of sin. In one of his sermons he put it like this:

To be saved, therefore, implies the being delivered from all the guilt of all sin or transgression; from all the power or influence of sin, so that it shall have no more dominion over them

A Collection of Discourses on Various Subjects, The Doctrine of Salvation by Faith Proved

Like Wesley, he taught that a believer may know he is forgiven by the witness of the Spirit, and that God can cleanse the heart from all sin and fill it with love in this life. He held the full deity of Christ firmly, though he questioned the older phrase "eternal Sonship," and many Methodists disagreed with him on that point. On faith, love and obedience he wrote one of his best lines:

Christ dwells in the heart only by faith, and faith lives only by love, and love continues only by obedience; he who believes loves, and he who loves obeys.

Christian Theology, Chapter VIII: Faith

For more of his sayings, see our collection of Adam Clarke quotes.

His last years

In 1815 Clarke moved out of London to a small farm in Lancashire, and later to Haydon Hall near Pinner. He still traveled and preached. In 1830 he set up schools for poor children around Coleraine, where he had grown up.

In August 1832 cholera was moving through England. Clarke prayed at family worship that his household might be kept from it "or prepared for sudden death." A few days later he rode into Bayswater, west of London, to preach. The next morning he fell ill with cholera. He had time to say that his trust was in Christ, and he died that night, August 26, 1832. He was buried at City Road Chapel in London, beside John Wesley.

Why he's still read

Clarke's commentary has stayed in print for two hundred years, and preachers still reach for it. But his other books are worth knowing too. They show a man who read widely and believed simply, who could weigh the Church Fathers and then tell a congregation to come to Christ today. He was plain about sin and plain about grace, and he never thought learning and warm-hearted faith were enemies.

Where to start

TheWay Library has four of his books. Start with Christian Theology, a system of doctrine gathered from all his writings by his friend Samuel Dunn, who also wrote the life of Clarke that opens it. For his preaching, read A Collection of Discourses on Various Subjects, six long sermons on salvation, God's love and the Lord's Supper. If you love the Wesleys, try Memoirs of the Wesley Family, his history of John Wesley's parents, brothers and sisters, with a long portrait of Susanna Wesley. Preachers will enjoy A Letter to a Preacher, his practical advice to a young man starting out.

Our guide to Adam Clarke's books says more about each one. For the man who sent Clarke out, see who was John Wesley. You'll find all his books on the Adam Clarke author page.