Jackals Among Ruins

Few would deny that Western secularized Europe, Britain and--sadly we must add--the United States, look like the spiritual ruins of a bygone faith. Today we know of scandals and scandalous spiritual leaders who are jackals among the ruins.

Some of us might call the jackals antinomianism or legalism, or perhaps Mormonism or the new Mysticism, or, following Paul, who named Hymenaeus and Philetus as famous heretics. We might call the jackals by more personal names like Joseph Smith, Mary Baker Eddy, Charles Taze Russell or Jim Jones. And this would be right, I think. But could such religious beasts arise from our kind? Could these roaming hounds of Hell begin to sniff out human souls in evangelical seminaries? If so could they then reproduce their pups and let them lose in our day to bay senseless words in the pulpits of our land, and wander upon the already Babylonian-like spiritual landscape of our nation?

It happened in the Golden age. When was that? Many of us in the Reformed and Presbyterian faith think of 17th century-English Puritanism as the golden age of Christianity. And in many ways it most certainly was! It was the day of the Westminster Assembly of Divines, who produced in their 1163 numbered sessions what are surely the crowning confessional statements of the Word of God since the days of the Apostles: The Westminster Confession of Faith, a Larger Catechism and a Shorter Catechism, a Directory for Public Worship, as well as the lesser studied Form of Government. It was not only their doctrine but also their lives that would cause us to agree with the saintly Robert Murray M’Cheyne (1813-1843): “Oh for the grace of the Westminster divines to be poured out upon this generation of lesser men.”

This was the time of Richard Baxter (1615-1691) at Kidderminster and John Owen (1616-1683) at Oxford. This was the productive time when Emmanuel College at Cambridge was a veritable factory of Puritan divines whose hearts and minds were aflame with the glories of Christ and His Word. The doctrines of grace flowed like the oil over Aaron’s beard and could be heard in the preaching of Scots like Samuel Rutherford (1600-1661), Welshmen like Christopher Love (1618-1651), and Englishmen like John Bunyan (1628-1688), as well as the Anglican rector of Lavenham, William Gurnall (1617-1679).

Great books were written in those days. Great men and women of prayer emerged in those days. But as the barnacles of Hell would attach themselves beneath the great gospel ship that sailed through Northampton in the Great Awakening in New England during Jonathan Edward’s day, so, too, they attached themselves to the edges of the golden 1640s of Puritan ascendancy in Westminster.

We remember the glaring examples of false teachers like the infamous Laud. Archbishop William Laud (1573-1645), in the opinion of Patrick Collinson, was “the greatest calamity ever visited upon the Church of England.” We remember that the Church of England was removed, and while the Presbyterian government that replaced it might be preferable to many of us, the Church of England formed an institution that held together the “center” of Reformed Christianity in that day.