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Some Christians have fallen into the trap of supposing that their salvation
depends on their being sufficiently virtuous, and they need to be reminded
that salvation is the gift of God and cannot be earned or deserved. Other
Christians have fallen into the opposite error of supposing that the
infinite mercy of God means that we are not called on to inconvenience
ourselves. (Martin Luther has said that human nature is like a drunkard
trying to ride a horse. He gets on and falls off on the left side. He
resolves not to make that mistake again, so he remounts, careful to avoid
falling off on the left, and promptly falls off on the right.) Law and
Bonhoeffer both saw this latter error -- that of complacency and presumption
-- as the chief danger in their own times. They undertook to remind their
fellow Christians of the importance of BOTH halves of the saying of Our Lord
to a sinner (John 8:11): "I do not condemn you; go and sin no more." Both
were men whose consciences brought them into conflict with their
governments, and both (though in very unequal degree) paid a price for it.
Some traditions commemorate them jointly. I here follow the custom of giving
each his own day, with Law on 9 April and Bonhoeffer on the day following.
[Note: the Episcopal Calendar does it the other way around.]
William Law, born in 1686, became a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge in
1711, but in 1714, at the death of Queen Anne, he became a non-Juror: that
is to say, he found himself unable to take the required oath of allegiance
to the Hanoverian dynasty (who had replaced the Stuart dynasty) as the
lawful rulers of the United Kingdom, and was accordingly ineligible to serve
as a university teacher or parish minister. He became for ten years a
private tutor in the family of the historian Edward Gibbon (who, despite his
generally cynical attitude toward all things Christian, invariably wrote of
Law with respect and admiration), and then retired to his native King's
Cliffe. Forbidden the use of the pulpit and the lecture-hall, he preached
through his books. These include Christian Perfection, The Spirit of Love,
The Spirit of Prayer, and, best-known of all, A Serious Call to a Devout and
Holy Life, published in 1728. The thesis of this last book is that God does
not merely forgive our disobedience, he calls us to obedience, and to a life
completely centered in Him. He says: "If you will here stop and ask yourself
why you are not as pious as the primitive Christians were, your own heart
will tell you that it is neither through ignorance nor inability, but
because you never thoroughly intended it."
The immediate influence of the book was considerable.
Dr. Samuel Johnson said (Boswell's Life of Johnson, ch. 1): "I became a sort
of lax talker against religion, for I did not think much against it; and
this lasted until I went to Oxford, where it would not be suffered. When at
Oxford, I took up Law's Serious Call, expecting to find it a dull book (as
such books generally are), and perhaps to laugh at it. But I found Law quite
an overmatch for me; and this was the first occasion of my thinking in
earnest of religion after I became capable of rational inquiry."
Gibbon (as mentioned above) said: "If Mr. Law finds a spark of piety in a
reader's mind, he will soon kindle it into a flame."
John Wesley calls it one of three books which accounted for his first
"explicit resolve to be all devoted to God." Later, when denying, in
response to a question, that Methodism was founded on Law's writings, he
added that "Methodists carefully read these books and were greatly profitted
by them." In 1744 he published extracts from the Serious Call, thereby
introducing it to a wider audience than it already had. About eighteen
months before his death, he called it "a treatise which will hardly be
excelled, if it be equalled, either for beauty of expression or for depth of
thought."
Charles Wesley, George Whitefield, Henry Venn, William Wilberforce, and
Thomas Scott each described reading the book as a major turning-point in his
life. All in all, there were few leaders of the English Evangelical movement
on whom it did not have a profound influence.
Some Christians have considered Law's work inadequate, as not sufficiently
concerned with Justification by Faith, to which objection Law would
doubtless have replied: "But I never offered it as a complete presentation
of the Gospel, only as a reminder of the words, 'Go and sin no more,' which
are surely a part of the Gospel."
For surely they mistake the whole nature of religion, who can think any part
of their life is made more easy, for being free from it. They may well be
said to mistake the whole nature of wisdom, who do not think it desirable to
be always wise. -- A Serious Call.
My copy of Serious Call is a paperback from Eerdmans, 309 pages with no
price marked in or on it. The current Books in Print lists an edition from
Westminster Press, 156p, $9. Morehouse Press sells for $3 a 64-page
selection from Serious Call, part of a series of booklets, similarly sized
and priced, with extracts from various Christian classics [note: this is
currently out of print]. Templegate, Bethany House, Pendle Hill
Publications, and the Christian Literature Crusade also publish what I take
to be anthologies from Law's writings.
Law's Serious Call and his The Spirit of Love are currently available for
$10 in a single volume (527 pages) in the series Classics of Western
Spirituality, published by the Paulist Press. (The Paulists are a Roman
Catholic order, and I note with pleasure the increasing willingness of
different branches of Christendom to recognize holiness and the love of God
at work among Christians who disagree with them. In the same way, I note
with pleasure that the Lutheran (ELCA) calendar commemorates Pope John
XXIII.)
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