I spent a wee while this morning, reading in the small chunky maroon buckram volume of The Letters of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, my copy published in a fourth edition, 1884. It’s one of a small collection of ‘devotional books’ I turn to regularly. The inverted commas around devotional is a hat tip to C S Lewis who disliked the marshmallow niceness of devotional writing, and preferred hard books you had to read with a pipe gripped in your teeth. Apart from the pipe, I’m with CSL – his essay ‘On the Reading of Old Books’ is anthologised all over the place; written sixty years ago, it’s still a wise dissuasive from our ‘chronological snobbery’, by which we think the latest, newest, shiniest, easiest is best. The old has lasted till now – the newest still has to be tested – that’s CSL the pragmatist!
Thomas Erskine was one of those Scottish Christian leaders during the first half of the 19th Century, who fell under the criticism and at times manipulative severity of those who saw themselves as defenders and upholders of Westminster orthodox Calvinism. Thomas Erskine, John Macleod Campbell of Rhu, near Helensburgh, and James Morison of Kilmarnock who formed the Evangelical Union of the Congregational Church, were three Scottish theologians who taught that Christ died for all, and not for the elect alone; they challenged particular atonement and proclaimed a universal and free Gospel, to be offfered to all, that all might hear the good news of Christ and respond in repentance and faith.
Morison and Campbell were tried before their church courts and deposed – though before the end of the 19th Century their theology of God’s universal love, Christ dying for all, and of the evangelistic imperative of a free gospel offered to all, had become the dominant position. P T Forsyth (Jason will concur!), described Macleod Campbell’s book, The Nature of the Atonement, as ‘a great, fine, holy book’. His endorsement is for some of us as near an imprimatur as Forsyth himself would allow!
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Now that I think of it, a number of books of letters are important in my own understanding of what it means to follow after Christ – The Selected Letters of Baron Von Hugel, the Letters of Samuel Rutherford, the five volumes of Letters of Thomas Merton, The Spiritual Letters of Fenelon, The two volumes of Letters of Principal James Denney, Collected Letters of Evelyn Underhill, Cardiphonia of John Newton, the Letters of John Wesley (much more interesting than his Journal), William Cowper (one of the best letter writers in the language). (A Roman Catholic intellectual, a Scottish Covenanter, a trappist monk, a French Catholic spiritual director, one of Scotland’s finest biblical theologians, an Anglican laywoman, an ex slaver turned Evangelical leader, the founder of Methodism, and England’s finest rural poet) – quite an impressively varied crowd – and what brings them together in my story, is their careful correspondence, their taking time to ‘connect’ by snail mail, and someone taking time to gather, edit and publish them.
If Baron Von Hugel had lived today, would we have his posthumous Selected E-mails, Blogposts and Text Messages of BFVH’@Typepad.com?? – instead of some of the wisest, most convoluted, but most spiritually patient guidance anywhere. Not only history, but biography and sheer human artefacts, and spiritual theology as lived and written, seem threatened by the transience, occasionality and excess of electronic communication.
For example the above scanned letter is from P T Forsyth about a letter in his coat pocket he’d forgotten to post!
Off to get ready for church………………………….
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