‘19th Century’ Category

Soldiers of Christ:  Selections from the Writings of Basil Manly, Sr. & Basil Manly, Jr. was edited by Southern Seminary professor Dr. Michael A.G. Haykin, in conjunction with Dr. Roger D. Duke and Dr. A. James Fuller.  Soldiers of Christ focuses on the writings on the father and son duo without whom, as current SBTS President R. Albert Mohler, Jr. notes in his Foreward, Southern Seminary would not exist.  This work was published by Founders Press and is available from order now from Reformation Heritage Books.

FROM THE BACK COVER:

Basil Manly, Sr. and his son Basil Manly, Jr. played vital roles in shaping a number of the central institutions of the Southern Baptist community in its formative years in the nineteenth century, including the influential Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Undergirding their churchmanship was a vigorous Calvinistic Baptist piety that was expressed in sermons and tracts, hymns and confessional statements, letters and diaries, all of which are represented in this timely volume of selections from their writings. Here we have a wonderful window onto the vista of nineteenth-century Southern Baptist life with all of its glorious strengths as well as its clear failings.

COMMENDATIONS:

“The introductory and biographical essays on the lives of Basil Manly, Sr., and Basil Manly, Jr., as well as the carefully selected collections from their writings found in this volume are wonderful and much-welcomed additions to Baptist studies. I am quite pleased to recommend Soldiers of Christ.”
— David S. Dockery, President, Union University

“The publication of these writings is long overdue and is most welcome, and the editors have done their work well.”
— Gregory A. Wills, Professor of Church History, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

“Michael Haykin, James Fuller, and Roger Duke have done us a service by introducing the Manlys to a new generation.”
— Nathan Finn, Assistant Professor of Church History, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary

“A fascinating, moving, and shocking look at piety among Southern Baptists in the middle two-thirds of the nineteenth century.”
—Tom J. Nettles, Professor of Historical Theology, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

“A superb collection of well-edited primary sources by two of the most formative shapers of Southern Baptist life in the nineteenth century.”
—Timothy George, Senior Editor of Christianity Today

FROM THE FOREWARD BY R. ALBERT MOHLER, JR.

“Humanly speaking, the formula is easy: no Manlys, no Southern Seminary. This year, as The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary celebrates its sesquicentennial, our indebtedness to the Manlys of South Carolina is increasingly clear. As an institution, our history is inextricably tied to the lives and ministries of Basil Manly, Sr. and Basil Manly, Jr.”

PUBLICATION DETAILS

Published by Founders Press.  240 pages.  Paperback.  2009.

Order here from RHB for $18.00 $12.00 (34% off)

Posted by Steve Weaver, Research and Administrative Assistant to the Director of the Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies, Dr. Michael A.G. Haykin.

I would venture to assert that the greatest theologian of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is B.B. Warfield. As time goes on, I am more and more impressed by him. Here he is on Darwinian evolution—simply brilliant:

“Aimless movement in time will produce an ordered world! You might as well suppose that if you stir up a mass of type with a stick long enough, the letters will be found to have arranged themselves in the order in which they stand on the printed pages of Dante’s Inferno. It will never happen — though you stir for an eternity. And the reason is that such effects do not happen, but are produced only by a cause adequate to them and directed to the end in view. . . . Assuredly, what chance cannot begin to produce in a moment, chance cannot complete the production of in an eternity. . . . What is needed is not time, but cause.”

HT: Fred Zaspel

Today is the birthday of two key figures: Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865). What follows are some reflections on Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. I have enormous respect for Lincoln and in what follows I reflect on one of his most profound statements, his reflection on the American Civil War. It is a reflection that reveals Lincoln at his very best. For a reflection on Darwin, see Dr. Albert Mohler’s blog for today, “Charles Darwin and the Modern Mind.”

The American Civil War (1861-1865) was the most violent experience in American history. At least 620,000 soldiers were killed in the war—2% of the American population in 1860. If the same percentage of Americans were killed in a war today, the number of American war dead would exceed five million. Moreover, an unknown number of civilians, virtually all of them in the South, died from causes such as disease, hunger or exposure brought about by the war. As a result, more Americans died in the Civil War than in all of America’s other wars combined.

One of the most remarkable statements of what God was doing in the Civil War comes from the pen of Abraham Lincoln, who does not appear to have been a Christian. It was Saturday, March 4, 1865, the day of Lincoln’s second inauguration. Preceding that day there had been weeks of wet weather that had caused Pennsylvania Avenue to become an ocean of mud. So it was that thousands of spectators stood in thick mud at the Capitol grounds to hear the President. In little more than a month, he would be assassinated.

By the date of Lincoln’s second inauguration, the tide of war had turned in favour of the Union, and the end was in sight. “The tone of the address, however, is subdued rather than triumphant, and it rises to a rare pitch of eloquence, marked by a singular combination of tenderness and determination” [“American Historical Documents, 1000–1904. The Harvard Classics. 1909–14. Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address” (http://www.bartleby.com/43/41.html)]. It is a theologically intense speech that has been widely acknowledged as one of the most remarkable documents in American history.

A journalist by the name of Noah Brooks, an eyewitness to the speech, said that as Lincoln advanced from his seat, “a roar of applause shook the air, and, again and again repeated, finally died away on the outer fringe of the throng, like a sweeping wave upon the shore. Just at that moment the sun, which had been obscured all day, burst forth in its unclouded meridian splendor, and flooded the spectacle with glory and with light.” Brooks said Lincoln later told him, ‘Did you notice that sunburst? It made my heart jump.” According to Brooks, the audience received the speech in “profound silence,” although some passages provoked cheers and applause.

In this address Lincoln gives one of profoundest theological interpretations of the Civil War:

“One eighth of the whole population were…slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!” If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.”

“With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”

Notice Lincoln’s conviction about the inscrutability of God’s will, a humble agnosticism about the purposes of God. Lincoln declares this in the form of a thesis: “The Almighty has His own purposes.” He then quotes Matthew 18:7 to suggest the moral character of life under God: “Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!” Then he looks squarely into the abyss that almost none of his contemporaries could bear to contemplate: “If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences…” The abyss is the suggestion that responsibility for the war might be shared.

One sees clearly Lincoln’s anti-slavery position, but his final paragraph is astounding. How different from both the Northern and Southern theologians who were quite certain God was on their respective sides!

As Mark Noll, to whom the above commentary is deeply indebted [ “ ‘Both…Pray to the Same God’: The Singularity of Lincoln’s Faith in the Era of the Civil War”, Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, 18, no.1 (1997).] has rightly said: “The theological puzzle of the Civil War thus reveals a theological tragedy, both for those who retained profundity at the expense of Christianity and those who retained Christianity at the expense of profundity.”

“Insist on yourself; never imitate.” So Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) in 1841. Before now I had read only a sermon of Emerson. But today I bought Barack Obama, The Inaugural Address (Penguin, 2009), a kind of keepsake edition. And combined with it were three addresses by Abraham Lincoln—his two inaugural addresses and The Gettysburg Address—and also Emerson’s Self-Reliance, which has the above quoted statement.

It is so Western, so quintessentially Enlightenment. And in one key sense, so fundamentally non-Christian. It militates against mentoring and advocates individualism to the highest degree. Yet, for me, Christianity increasingly is learning a path from others who have gone before. Hebrews 11 is so central to my vision of what it means to be a Christian. Of course, there is a place for doing what God has called you specifically to do—but Emerson’s thought is a plea for dismantling all the authorities and carving out your own philosophical vision.

To me, the whole project is horrifying and I understand why Emerson’s contemporary John Henry Newman (1801-1890) reacted so strongly against it and ended up embracing the authority of Rome. While I do not think that is the answer, his rejection of such rank exaltation of the individual is instinctually correct.

One of Dr. Haykin’s many responsibilities is to serve as the series editor for a new series “Studies in Baptist Life and Thought” published by B & H Academic.  The first volume of this series was published this past year and it features a collection of essays on the life and legacy of John A. Broadus.  W. Madison Grace II, a PhD student at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, has recently reviewed this volume for their Baptist Theology website.  Be sure and check out the review as well as the many other valuable resources available on this website devoted to the study of issues related to Baptist life.

Posted by Steve Weaver, Research and Administrative Assistant to the Director of the Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies, Dr. Michael A.G. Haykin.

More from Basil Manly, Jr. This time a portion of one of his best sermons, that on what constitutes a call to the ministry:

“Now we need numbers in the Ministry. The plenteous, perishing harvest wails out a despairing cry for more laborers. But we need purity more than numbers; we need intelligence more than numbers; we need zeal more than numbers. Above all, we need consecrated men, men who have stood beneath the Cross, till their very souls are dyed with Jesus’ blood, and a love like his for perishing millions has been kindled within them.”

[A Call to the Ministry (Greenville, South Carolina: G.E. Elford’s Job Press, 1866), 16].

Exactly one hundred and fifty years ago, Basil Manly, Jr (1825-1892), one of the four founding faculty of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, entered upon what he came to consider his life’s great work, namely his teaching and mentoring students at Southern. Manly’s commitment to theological education can be gauged by words he had written in a letter to a leading Baptist layman in South Carolina, John B. O’Neall, in which he stated that the “cause of theological education is one dearer to me than almost any other and I esteem no sacrifice too great for its promotion.”

[Basil Manly, Letter to John B. O’Neall, September 13, 1856 (Manly Collection of Manuscripts, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Archives)].

“No sacrifice too great”: O that I might share this conviction—yes, with due regard to other responsibilities in my life—but for those of us whom God has called to do theology and be involved in the mentoring of aspiring pastors—O may I have a due sense of the weightiness of this calling and its joy and its cost.

I dare not say it is the calling of callings—I only know that it is the path God has laid out for me. And may I be diligent this year in the duty of my calling.

PS My thanks to Dr Greg Wills for drawing my attention to this text.

I have been reading as many of the primary sources from the hand of Basil Manly, Jr. (1825-1892) in recent days as I can, as well as key secondary sources.

Manly was a keen reader, like the other founders of Southern Seminary. At one point, just before the Civil War, he became concerned that the coming war might produce a shortage of new books. Some might think this sounds petty in such circumstances—but not me! I love new books and can fully sympathize.

Manly, though, was able to poke fun at his fears. “What shall we do without new books?” he wrote to his parents (his father, Basil Manly, Sr., one of the most significant ante-bellum Southern Baptist pastors, was also a lover of books), and then answered his own question: “Read those we have, I suppose”!

[Basil Manly, Jr., Letter to Parents, March 8, 1861, cited James M. Manley, “The Southern Baptist Mind in Transition: A Life of Basil Manly, Jr., 1825-1892” (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Florida, 1999), 170].

What kind of historical memory is needed today? Well, we need to know the Fathers, to remind ourselves of the catholicity of our Faith. We cannot forget the great gains made by the Reformers–no, I dare opine, the Reformation is not over. The children of the Reformers, the Puritans, need to be read for their sturdy piety and confessionalism. The eighteenth century–my favourite century, if I were to name one–must be remembered for the Spirit’s great works. And then overlaying these last two our Baptist heritage (we cannot know who we are if we not know whence we came–whence our persons indeed if we forget our spiritual kin?).

Now, in all of this, it would be easy to overlook the Victorians. But there is much to be learned from them. This one thing, for example: the way in which much of late nineteenth-century Evangelicalism traded in its heritage for a mess of liberal stew! The rot, so evident in the twentieth century, has far deeper roots than we imagine.

These words of the Victorian politician Augustine Birrell (1850-1933), an unbeliever though the son of the Evangelical Baptist minister Charles Mitchell Birrell (d.1880), about the impact of the writings of Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)–born in Ecclefechan, what a name that!–and the Roman Catholic John Henry Newman (1801-1890) could have been written today: “these great writers found their most enthusiastic readers among the ranks of youthful Nonconformity” [Things Past Redress (London: Faber and Faber, 1937), 273]. “Youthful Nonconformity”–the heirs of the Puritans and the Evangelicals of the eighteenth century–Birrell continues, found “great solace” in these two authors, one an arch-opponent of all things Evangelical and the other a Roman Catholic author (ibid.).

Little wonder the succeeding weakness of Nonconformity when faced with the behemoth of Liberalism. The abandonment of a rich heritage and for what? And what the end result? Spiritual desolation. 1 Cor 10:6.

Acquaintances a while ago gave me a Victorian volume that had seen better days. One of the cheap printings that characterized that era, with poor paper and even poorer illustrations, and now with the cover quite dishevelled and the binding coming loose, they could have easily decided to toss the book. But I am glad they did not. Entitled The Four Great Preachers: A Collection of Choice Sermons by Spurgeon, Moody, Talmage and Beecher the book contains a number of sermons by each of these well-known Victorian preachers along with brief biographical sketches of the four. But what I found valuable in the book was not so much the sermons, all of which can be found elsewhere in much sturdier collections. No, what I found quite illuminating was the two-page “Preface,” which was written by an unnamed Canadian editor who lived in Toronto and is dated April 10, 1885. He may well have been J.S. Robertson, the name of the Toronto publisher on the title-page. But whoever he was, his words bear a lesson for contemporary Evangelicalism.

The “Preface” begins by noting that it has been said that ‘nobody reads sermons’ any more. The editor admits that there may be some truth in this statement, but he says, ‘there are sermons and sermons’. Few, he thinks, are interested in the older style of sermons, what he calls ‘the dry type of doctrinal discourses that was once common in the pulpit’. Such sermons have been replaced by ones that are ‘more interesting’ and that contain ‘more enlivening appeals to the human heart and conscience’. There is no doubt that the author of these lines considers himself an Evangelical as the next sentence bears witness. ‘The Church,’ the editor writes, ‘as it has dropped dogma, has in large degree returned to its first work of evangelizing the world by the spirit and power of the Gospel; and in the true missionary spirit, it is going again into the highways and byways to reclaim the world to Christ, and to bring the prodigal back to the Father’.

What should forcefully strike any reader of these lines is that ‘dogma’—Christian doctrine and theology—is set over against evangelism and missions, as if the two were mutually exclusive. That winning the lost can somehow be done without a concern for theology. To be sure, there have been individuals in the history of the church who allowed have themselves to become so wrapped up in theology and its tomes that they gave nary a thought to evangelism. But such are aberrations. More exemplary is Andrew Fuller (1754-1815), the Baptist pastor and theologian, whose wrestling with the theology of the free offer of the gospel was accompanied by a deepening zeal for evangelism. Or, more authoritatively, there is the example of the Apostle Paul. Some of the Apostle’s most powerful statements on evangelism occur in his letter to the Romans (see, e.g. Romans 9:1-3; 10:9-21; 15:18-29) in the midst of some of the richest doctrinal material—‘dogma’—in the New Testament. Theology, if rightly pursued, should issue in a life of concern for the lost.

The dislike for doctrine in this Victorian “Preface” may also help us understand how sectors of late Victorian Evangelicalism helped prepare the way for the coming of Liberalism. The author of this “Preface” is certainly not a liberal. But his easy dismissal of doctrine in favour of evangelism helps explain why certain sectors of Victorian Evangelicalism found themselves without any adequate response in the face of the liberal assault on Christian orthodoxy at the end of nineteenth century and at the start of the twentieth.

One wonders if a copy of the volume was sent to each of the four respective preachers, whose sermons were reprinted in the book. If one did reach the hands of C. H. Spurgeon (1834-1892), and he did happen to read the “Preface,” he would have been surely struck by the folly of trying to separate a passion for theological truth from Christian missions. As he well knew and affirmed, it is only when the coals of Christian orthodoxy are hot and blazing that a zeal for the conversion of others can be properly sustained.