Historical Introduction by Sherman Isbell

In Reformed circles in Scotland today, John Kennedy of Dingwall (1819-1884) is regarded as the greatest champion of the Reformed faith in the Highlands during the latter years of the nineteenth century. If Kennedy was outspoken about the dangers resulting from a superficial presentation of the gospel, he had reason to understand that saving faith can be lacking in a profession of faith made under the most orthodox of ministries. Kennedy himself had only been converted in 1841 while in his second year of academic preparation for the ministry, and after the death of his father, who had exercised a compelling preaching ministry at Killearnan. Licensed to preach soon after the Disruption, Kennedy was settled as pastor of the Free Church of Scotland charge in the county town of Dingwall, in Ross-shire, where he remained for his entire ministry. There he served a congregation of over one thousand, half of whom were Gaelic speaking.

Through the years Kennedy was a stalwart opponent of the drift in Scottish Presbyterianism away from the Westminster Confession, allying himself with Hugh Martin and James Begg to resist erosion of the doctrine of the particular design in Christ's atoning work, and to contend for the propriety of a cooperative association of church and state to promote the true religion.

The essay here reprinted appeared in 1874 in the wake of an evangelistic campaign by Dwight L. Moody and Ira D. Sankey, whose 1873 tour wrought a revolution of sentiment in Scotland. Scottish pastors, wishing to think the best, and inattentive to the new trends of thought and practice, were caught up in the swell of excitement. Though Kennedy was temperamentally disinclined to controversy, he was constrained to raise his voice for a full-orbed proclamation of the biblical gospel.

Kennedy's words of warning have an undiminished relevance in our generation, when constitutionally sound Presbyterian churches hear voices calling them to a presentation of the gospel which abandons the characteristic traits of a biblical and Reformed piety. Methods of church growth and evangelism, and practices of worship which are alien to the historic Reformed faith, are offered as helps to overcome the offense which sinners feel, and the indifference which they display, toward the Scriptures and a godly life.

The features of modern American revivalism brought to Scotland by Moody are traceable to a man whose influence over evangelistic practice in our time has been immense, the Presbyterian minister Charles G. Finney (1792-1875). For an exceptionally fine critique of Finney's message and method, Iain H. Murray's address on Finney at the 1992 Banner of Truth Minister's Conference is available on tape for $6 postpaid, from Sound Word Associates, P.O. Box 2035, Mall Station, Michigan City, IN 46360.

At Kennedy's death, his friend C. H. Spurgeon - who had journeyed to Dingwall in 1870 to preach at the opening of the Free Church's new building - wrote of him as one "whom I venerated as every inch a man of God. His death was a loss to the Highlands greater than could have befallen by the death of any other hundred men. True as steel and firm as a rock, he was also wonderfully tender and sympathetic." Further information about Kennedy can be found in Maurice Roberts' address at the centenary of Kennedy's death: "Dr John Kennedy - A Memorial Sketch," Banner of Truth, Issue 251-252, Aug-Sept 1984. Two books in which Kennedy wrote of the history of the Reformed faith in the Highlands have been reprinted in Scotland in recent years: Days of the Fathers in Ross-shire, and The Apostle of the North.

Hyper-Evangelism: Another Gospel, Though A Mighty Power

When a movement is in progress in our land, during which many are awakened to thought and feeling as to eternal things who were utterly unthinking and insensate before, when thousands think that they have lately believed in Christ, and with the joy of assurance profess that they have found Him, when from the church are seen issuing many who have enlisted as recruits in a crusade against the ungodliness and unbelief of the world, when so many who have a high position and commanding influence in the church declare that it is a gracious work of God by which these results have been produced, and when many more, believing this, are exceeding glad and abound in thanksgiving, sad, yea strained to breaking, must be the heart of one who seeks the glory of God and the salvation of souls, if he cannot share in the prevalent hopefulness and joy. Being one of those to whom the present movement has hitherto yielded more grief than gladness, I feel constrained to tell why I am a mourner and apart.

Preliminary Remarks

1. Those who, ere the movement had been developed into its abiding fruits, hastened to declare it to be a gracious work of God, must have laid claim to inspiration; and only if that claim is good can their judging be allowable. It may be legitimate to form an unfavorable judgment, even at the outset of a religious awakening, if the means employed in producing it are such as the Lord cannot be expected to bless; but a favorable verdict at that stage, no man, not a prophet, has any right to pronounce. Only He who "trieth the hearts and reins" can then judge. He allows His disciples to try to know men only by their fruits (Matt. 7:20). Not at the outset, and not by the immediate results, but by the fruits produced after the trial, does He allow them to form a favorable judgment regarding a religious movement (John 8:31). It is not enough to justify such a verdict, that souls are anxious, that anxious souls attain to a faith that is assured, and to a joy that is exceeding, and that a change of conduct and zealous service are for a season the result. All this was, once and again, under the ministry of Jesus Himself, without any lasting and saving result; and men are sadly forgetful and madly bold, who in the face of such a fact venture to trace similar appearances at once to a gracious work of God (John 6, 8 and 12).

2. One is not compelled to affirm that a religious movement is not a work of grace, if he refrains from saying that it is. This is a position into which some men, more zealous than discerning, seek to drive those who do not share their own blind sanguineness. I am not to judge, at the outset, except of the means employed, and if these are unscriptural, I am forbidden to expect a good result (Isa. 8:20). If the means employed and the agents are unexceptionable, I can legitimately form no decided opinion of the work, till its fruits are in due time developed.

3. There is no necessity for regarding it as the great Deceiver's work, if it is considered not to be a gracious work of God. There are impressions, which are not saving, produced by Divine influence in connection with the gospel (Heb. 6:4-6). The temporary impressions produced by the preaching of Christ are instances of this. But that Satan can produce counterfeit, as surely as the Lord can make real, converts, I firmly believe. And when he is at work as "an angel of light," he best succeeds when men blindly accept, instead of wisely testing the results. There is surely some reason to fear that his hand is on the agents as well as on the subjects of the work, when neither are careful to apply the test of truth (John 3:20, 21; I John 4:1).

4. If I regard with little hopefulness a movement over which so many are chanting songs of joy, till all Christendom bends its ear to the voice of gladness that thrills from our land, my saying so will suffice to make some men decry me as opposed to a revival of the work of the Lord. To this I lay my account. If the Lord knows that I am not, I feel not very anxious as to the judgment of men. But which of us incurs the greatest responsibility - you, who proclaim this movement to be a work of grace, or I, who cannot say that I as yet do so regard it? You commit the credit of true religion to cases which have not been proved - you point the attention of the ungodly to individuals whom you declare to be converts, and you call on them to judge of godliness by these; you tell those, who are suddenly impressed, that they have been born again, when you know not whether they were or not; you tell the Church to count on a great accession to her strength, when, so far as you know, only traitors may be added to her ranks; you say, with the voice of thanksgiving to God, that He has done a work which you cannot know that He will acknowledge to be His. Yours, at any rate, is a tremendous responsibility. And if your estimate is false - and you cannot as yet prove it to be true - how fearful the results must be! You will have hardened in ungodliness an unbelieving world; you will have flattered into delusive security precious perishing souls; you will have cheated the Church by inducing her to form a false estimate of her strength; and you will have dishonored God by ascribing to Him work which His hand had never wrought. I merely refrain from judging anything "before the time." What I judge now, I am required to judge. I form an opinion, as one bound to "try the spirits" of the doctrines and modes of service which are the means of advancing the movement. If I do so fairly, I am so far free from blame. If my estimate is proved to be false as well as unfavorable, I am guilty, and if I formed it under the influence of prejudice, I am very guilty; I suffer in the lack of the hope and gladness by which the hearts of others are so greatly stirred; and I incur a woe, if, under the influence of a biassed opinion of the work, I refuse to take part in it, though called to do so by the Lord (Judges 5:23).

5. Of the means employed in promoting such a work, one is bound to judge. I am not to be blinded by dazzling results. A worthy end does not sanctify all the means that may be used in attaining it, nor does a seemingly good result justify all the means employed in producing it. Many seem to think that if they choose to call a religious movement a work of grace, no fault should be found with any instrumentality employed in advancing it. All must be right, they think, if the result is to be regarded as a revival of the work of God. To censure any doctrine preached or any mode of worship practiced, seems to them to be opposition to the good work, and to tend to mar its progress. They may be of the same opinion, as to the impropriety of some of the means which are employed, with those who do not refrain from condemning them, but for the work's sake they tolerate them. As if the Lord's work could receive aid from ought that was unscriptural! An enemy's hand is surely here. May it not be, that under cover such as this, the deceiver is introducing into the creed and worship of the Church what shall be statedly obstructive to a real work of grace? Some there are who have this fear. It were well if all were careful lest this should be the result of acquiescence in unscriptural teaching and practices.

6. Some ministers, who took part with hesitation in the movement, justify their having done so by declaring their object to have been to check irregular tendencies, and to shape the development of the work. And what has been the issue of their prudence? They merely serve to swell the volume, while utterly powerless to control the force, of the current. Hundreds of ministers have I seen, sitting as disciples at the feet of one, whose teaching only showed his ignorance even of "the principles of the doctrine of Christ"; who, to their face, called the churches, which they represented, "first-class mobs"; was organizing before their eyes an association, for religious objects, outside the churches, which may yet prove as troublesome as the naked forces of the world; was casting ridicule on their old forms of worship, which they were sworn to uphold; and was proposing to convert prayer meetings into occasions of religious amusement, a change he certainly did not ask them to approve, without giving them a specimen, which excited the laughter of thousands, and gave to themselves a sensation of merry making in the house of the Lord.

7. I carefully refrain from forming an estimate of the results of this work, as these are to be found in individual cases. I confine myself to the general character of the movement, in so far as that is determined by the more prominent teaching under which it has advanced, and in connection with its bearing on the religious condition of the country. I most persistently continue to hope that good has been done; for even were I persuaded that Satan was busy in forging counterfeits, I cannot conceive what would induce him to do so, unless he was provoked by a genuine work of grace which he was anxious to discredit and to mar.

There are two reasons why I cannot regard the present religious movement hopefully. 1. Because the doctrine which is the means of impression seems to me to be "another gospel," though a mighty influence. Hyper-Evangelism I call it, because of the loud professions of evangelism made by those who preach it; and because it is just an extreme application of some truths, to the neglect of others which are equally important parts of the great system of evangelic doctrine. 2. Because unscriptural practices are resorted to in order to advance the movement.

Go to the next installment:
Hyper-Evangelism: Another Gospel, Though A Mighty Power: Part II