Introductory: Evangelical
Ge N excellent book was published the other day written by the Rev. Mr. Balleine, vicar of Bermondsey, and entitled The Evangelical Party in the Church of England. As I read that admirable book I resolved to carry out an intention I had often formed, that is to say, to devote a somewhat carefully prepared discourse to the true meaning and the rich contents and the personal applications of that well-known word ‘ Evangelical.’
And how rich are the contents and how manifold are the applications of the word Evangelical you may judge when I tell you that the word under discussion, with all its roots and with all its branches, occupies no less than seven folio columns of small print in Sir James Murray’s great English Dictionary now in course of publication. Though Mr. Balleine confines his history to the Church of England he will have many delighted and thankful readers outside that Church. For the evangelical spirit is the only truly Catholic spirit — that is to say, it is the only spirit that rejoices in the success of the Gospel wheresoever and by whomsoever the Gospel is preached.
The Vicar of Bermondsey begins his book with an absolutely sickening chapter which he has entitled ‘Before the Dawn’ — that is to say, before the work of John Wesley and Charles Wesley and George Whitefield began in England. You would not believe to what a depth of heathenism England had sunk after the evangelical and spiritual life of puritanism had been extinguished in England. ‘ Before the Dawn” is an appalling chapter; but as it stands in Mr. Balleine’s book it only serves the better to bring out the unspeakable blessing that the evangelical revival became to England, and not to England only but to the whole English-speaking world. After a rapid but brilliant sketch of the lives and labours of the two Wesleys and Whitefield the author passes on to give his readers a series of most delightful glimpses of the work of William Romaine, and John Thornton, and William Grimshaw, and Henry Venn, and Joseph Milner, and Thomas: Adam, and Fletcher of Madeley, and Augustus Toplady, and James Hervey, and John Berridge, and John Newton, and William Cowper, and Thomas Scott, and Isaac Milner, and Charles Simeon, winding up with an excellent chapter on ‘The Clapham Sect,’ which ‘sect,’ so to call it, has been immortalised by Sir James Stephen in his fine essay. Altogether, Mr. Balleine’s book is a great refreshment and a great encouragement to read; and it will do much to rehabilitate the evangelical — party in the Church of England if that rehabilitation is anywhere really needed.
The original root of our well-known English word evangelical is laid open in the text. For evangelical is just transliterated Greek for ‘ good tidings of great joy. The best way perhaps to bring out and set forth something of the depth and the riches and the manifold applications of this great word evangelical will be to give you some of the leading combinations into which this great word has entered in religious history and religious literature. To begin then at the very beginning: The word evangelical is as old as Eden itself. ‘This,’ says Coverdale, ‘is the first sure evangel: this is the proto-evangel itself — that the seed of the woman is to come to bruise the serpent’s head.’ And ever since, wherever the seed of the woman is preached and is received and is rested on that is evangelical preaching, and that receiving and that resting on Him is evangelical and soul-saving faith. Without ‘the seed of the woman’ there is nothing that is truly evangelical anywhere. Whereas, on the other hand, with Him and with His redeeming and His sin-bruising work there always comes the good tidings of great joy to all the sad children of Adam and Eve.
The Lord God Himself was the first Evangelical Preacher and He found His first congregation hiding themselves from the presence of the Lord amongst the trees of the garden. And the Lord God having made a beginning He so loved and He so enjoyed, so to say, the evangelical office that He Himself took in hand to evangelise Abel, and Noah, and Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and Joseph, and especially — Moses on the Mount, and still more especially David, as David sings in a hundred psalms. But the first time since Eden when this great name evangelical was given to any merely human preacher was when St. Jerome so designated the prophet Isaiah. As that old Latin Father worked his learned way through Isaiah rendering the ancient Hebrew into Vulgate Latin, he became so impressed with the number and the richness of the evangelical passages in that prophet that at last he said to himself, and actually wrote it down, that this wonderful man Isaiah should be reckoned as a New Testament evangelist rather than an Old Testament prophet. And it has been so ever since till Isaiah has been promoted to stand alongside of Matthew, and Mark, and Luke, and John themselves. Not that Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, and Hosea, and Micah are not evangelical, for they all are. But Isaiah has Jesus Christ so fully set forth in his prophetic pages that he has with universal acclamation received both the glorious name and the glorious place that he alone of all the Hebrew prophets holds. And it is the same when we come down to the Apostle Paul. Not that John, and James, and Peter, and the Epistle to the Hebrews are B not all richly evangelical; but Paul’s own and peculiar evangel, as he so proudly calls it, is the pure and the full and the perfect and the final evangel of them all. It is as an Egyptian Father of the Desert has it: Matthew and Mark and Luke and John supply the wool, but it is the greatest of the apostles who alone weaves the web and puts the dress upon us all so as to cover all our nakedness, till we are able to say with the prophet, ‘I put on His righteousness and it clothed me: it was to me for a robe and for a diadem!’
And then from Paul and after Paul we get what we call evangelical preaching. ‘’The sermon, says an able and clear-sighted writer, “has ever been the great and central feature of primitive and Protestant worship.’ ‘ And, he continues, ‘ the sermon still serves to distinguish the evangelical from the ritualistic type of Christianity.” ‘The system called evangelical,’ says Sir James Stephen, ‘is that system of which, if Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Knox, and the writers of the English Homilies are to be believed, Christ Himself was the Author, and Paul the first and the greatest interpreter.’ And in a truly noble note on Hooker, Coleridge argues thus on this same subject — ‘ Whose parishes were the best disciplined, whose flocks were the best fed, were the soberest livers, and were the most awakened and best-informed Christians — was it not those of the puritan and evangelical preachers? In whose churches and parishes were all the other pastoral duties — catechising, visiting the poor and the sick, and the like, most strictly practised?’ By universal admission Samuel Taylor Coleridge is by far our best writer on Shakespeare; but for myself I like him still better in his ‘ Notes on English Divines,’ and especially on Hooker.
Evangelical theologians is a special and a distinguishing designation that the true successors of the apostle have always borne in the Church of Christ. There was a fine series of Sabbath evening lectures delivered in this pulpit five-and-twenty years ago, and entitled, ‘ The Evangelical Succession.” The special object of the lectures, as the advertisement ran, was to exhibit the true genius of the Evangelical Principle: to trace its manifestation, development, and vicissitudes in various ages of the Church and human history, and to illustrate its ruling and moulding power over diverse types of national, intellectual, and spiritual character. As Dr. Rainy said in opening the series, ‘If there is a type of Christian doctrine and life which can legitimately be distinguished by this name evangelical, then no doubt that type of doctrine and life looks back to the Apostle Paul as among the apostolic circle its very special forerunner. Evangelical doctrine and the evangelical life find, in his epistles and in his spirit, some of their most significant warrants and supports.’ Some of the ablest scholars and preachers of that day followed Dr. Rainy’s introductory lecture on Paul with suck evangelical successors of Paul as Augustine, and Anselm, and Luther, and Calvin, and Knox, and Rutherford, and Baxter, and Owen, and Bunyan, and Edwards, and Chalmers. For those great names unite to form a great evangelical chain which stretches down from apostolic days to our own day, thanks be to God!
After describing the dismal condition of public worship in the pre-Wesley days in England, Mr. Balleine goes on to say that ‘ the greatest change which the evangelicals made in public worship was the introduction of hymn-singing.’ And you know yourselves what a change for the better has come in Scotland also with the spread of evangelical life and feeling in the matter of our public and private praise. Preserving the psalms and the paraphrases in their own proper place, who that has once entered into the evangelical enlargement that has come to our public worship and to our family worship with the great evangelical and experimental hymns would ever consent to forego that liberty and that enlargement and that enriching? How much do we in Scotland owe under God to the psalms and hymns and spiritual songs of Reformation times, and to the successive harvests of spiritual song that have been reaped out of every season of reformation and revival! What a new wealth of worship has come to us out of such evangelical hymns as Wesley’s, and Newton’s, and Cowper’s, and Toplady’s, and Bonar’s, and many suchlike hymns of genius and of grace! Public worship with ourselves in this house is a new thing, never to be enough acknowledged, since the coming of the great evangelical hymns, with those instrumental accompaniments and supports which we so much enjoy, and to which we are so much indebted.
And then, from all that, no one can surely mistake what is meant when evangelical churches are spoken of, and evangelical parties in nonevangelical churches, such as the present Church of England. We come on this ecclesiastical expression in Waverley, where Sir Walter says of one of his characters, ‘I have never been able to discover whether he belonged to the evangelical or to the moderate party in the kirk.’ On which passage it occurs to remark that had Sir Walter belonged to the evangelical party himself, he would then have been in a position to make the discovery that he is here in search of, and to make that discovery infallibly and without any doubt. And more than that, Sir Walter Scott would then have been a perfect portrayer and universally accepted of our best Scottish life, which, as things are, he is not, and never can be accepted as being.
And then, from all that, we have evangelical graces spoken of as belonging to the individual believer — as for instance evangelical humility. In illustration take this classical passage out of Jonathan Edwards, that majestic evangelical himself, a passage which, simply to quote, could I quote it all, would be a sufficient justification of this whole discourse. ‘Evangelical humility,’ says Edwards in his golden Affections, ‘is that sense which a true Christian man has of his own utter insufficiency, despicableness, and, indeed, odiousness, with an answerable frame of heart. Evangelical humiliation comes from the Spirit of God implanting and exercising supernatural and divine principles in the soul; and it comes also from a sight of the transcendent beauty of moral and spiritual things. ‘The essence of evangelical humiliation consists in such humility as becomes a man who is in himself exceeding sinful, but who is at the same time under a dispensation of grace; it consists in a mean esteem of himself, as in himself nothing, and altogether contemptible and odious. This is the greatest and the most essential thing in personal religion. And the whole frame of the Gospel and of all God’s dispensations towards fallen men are calculated, and are intended, to produce this effect in the hearts of such men.’ And so on through a heart-breaking and a heart-searching chapter, such as only a master-hand could write, and such as only an evangelically-taught reader will receive and relish.
And then we have evangelical repentance, and evangelical reformation, and evangelical faith, and evangelical hope, and evangelical love, all of which are summed up in evangelical holiness.
Now, my brethren, what does all that mean to you and to me? After all that has been said — that is the question. Have we any real understanding of all these things? Have we any real stake in all these things? Have we any real delight in all these things? Are all these things “good tidings of great joy’ to us? Has God indeed drawn you and me out of our hiding-place of guilt and fear and shame by means of these things? Has He come Himself to us, as He came to Adam, and to Eve, and to Moses, and to David? Has He evangelised us by His grace and truth as He evangelised them? Is Isaiah our favourite prophet? Is Paul our favourite apostle? And are Paul’s evangelical successors our true Church Fathers? What are our favourite psalms and hymns? Who is our favourite preacher? And what is our favourite doctrine? An intelligent an honest and an evangelical answer to such questions as these would be the very seal of the Spirit set to the present state of our hearts before God, as also to our prospects for eternity.
‘ Of all hypocrites,’ says Thomas Shepard, that pungentest of preachers, ‘take good care that you be not an evangelical hypocrite.’ A hundred times and in a hundred ways Shepard says that. But what does the dreadful man mean? He means this: An evangelical hypocrite is a man who sins the more safely because grace abounds; who says to his lusts, both of mind and body, that the blood of Christ cleanseth from all such sin, and who reasons with himself thus: God cannot, by any possibility, cast any man into hell who loves evangelical preaching as I love it, and who would not sit a day but in an evangelical church. My evangelical brethren, let us take good care! For if evangelical hypocrites are to be found anywhere in our day it is in a church like ours and under a doctrine like ours. At the same time, Dr. John Duncan was wont to say that he had often wished that he was as good as one of Thomas Shepard’s evangelical hypocrites.