If, as Jonathan Edwards maintained in his Religious Affections (1746), “the essence of all true religion lies in holy love,” then Andrew Fuller’s Memoirs of the Rev. Samuel Pearce, A.M. (1800) is a biographical demonstration of this proposition, for, as Fuller asserted, “the governing principle in Mr. Pearce, beyond all doubt, was holy love.”
I love this: “we’re looking for the thick, rich particularity of historic Reformed faith, understood as an expression of catholic Christianity.”
From James K.A. Smith in http://forsclavigera.blogspot.ca/2012/05/confessions-generations-and-future-of.html; HT: Ian Clary.
Two quotes from Oliver Hart (1723–95), the first Baptist theologian of the South, that deeply resonate with me:
“Grant, O Lord!… [w]hen I go to thy house to speak for thee, may I always go full fraught with things divine, and be enabled faithfully and feelingly to dispense the word of life…. Teach me to study thy glory in all I do.” (Oliver Hart, Diary, entry for August 5, 1754)
“If I had not been willing to endure the scoff of the world, I should never have made an open profession of the religion of Jesus; much less should I have become a preacher of his much-despised gospel.” (Oliver Hart, Dancing Exploded [1778])
“Let us cultivate the most cordial esteem for all that love the Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity. …but let us aim, at the same time, to acquire and retain the most accurate conceptions of religious truth.”
Who said this? None other than Robert Hall, Jr., who is sometimes seen as lax in the second of these two admonitions. I am so glad that Pastor Cody McNutt has done a PhD thesis on Hall at Southern, hopefully a progenitor of an intellectual biography of a man who was the first Baptist celebrity of the 19th century (that is, before Spurgeon). He defends it in a few weeks.
For the source of the above quote, see Hall’s “Introductory Preface to the Third London Edition” of his father’s Help to Zion’s Travellers (Boston: Lincoln, Edmands and Co., 1833), xv.
In his book on the Trinity, Hilary of Pictavis (modern Poitiers) has a very telling statement regarding the Patristic understanding of the heart of piety: “in confessione pietas est”—“in confession there is piety” (De Trinitate 10.70). For theologians of the Ancient Church like Hilary, doctrinal confession was essential to true piety.
“The riches of time are the most uncertain, the most fleeting, of all possessions” (Letters on Familiar Matters 17.12). Petrarch knew this most keenly. As he once told Francesco Nelli, while he was being “shaved or having my hair cut I commonly read or write or listen to a reader or dictate to a scribe” (Letters on Familiar Matters 21.12). He would have loved the devices we have today to multitask!
Here is a great quote about hymnody from the master poet, Alfred Lord Tennyson: “A Good hymn is the most difficult thing in the world to write.” [Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1905), 754].
These words of Eberhard Bethge, the biographer of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, are an important reminder of the need to remember the past:
“Commemoration renders life human; forgetfulness makes it inhuman. …even when remembrance carries grief and shame, it fills the future with perspectives. And the denial of the past furthers the affairs of death, precisely because it focuses exclusively on the present.”[1]
Here is a great quote by Free St. George’s on the importance of doctrine: “Monday Quote: James Orr: We all have theology.”
“To see Him, the King, in his beauty, is a ravishing sight, and which fills [the soul] with joy unspeakable and full of glory.” Sounds like Jonathan Edwards, right? Or another one of the divines from his affective stream of piety?
No. It is from the much-maligned John Gill (d.1771). See his Body of Divinity, p.777.
There is much more in Gill than dry-as-dust theology—there is life and power and joy in Christ. While I do not deny there are some theological problems with his Calvinism, at its heart it was drawn from the same well as Edwards’.
Someone needs to compare the theology of Edwards and Gill. I am amazed that no one ever has.