Loving God and Neighbor with Samuel Pearce E-Book

Michael A. G. Haykin

• Herausgeber: Lexham Press
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Serie: Lived Theology
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 210

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

The love of God and neighbor is the heart of the Christian faith. Forgotten saint Samuel Pearce teaches us how to live a life faithful to the greatest commandment.Pearce was a Baptist pastor known in eighteenth-century England for his moving preaching and strong, pious character. In his short life, he supported believers in his own parish as well as in the many cities where he preached and helped send missionaries. Yet his personal faith, founded on the "holy love" of God, formed his most compelling witness to the world. By getting to know Pearce's story, readers will learn from his example what it looks like to love God and neighborâ€"in good times as well as challenging and seemingly mundane ones.The Lived Theology series explores aspects of Christian doctrine through the eyes of the men and women who practiced it. Interweaving the contributions of notable individuals alongside their overshadowed contemporaries, we gain a much deeper understanding and appreciation of their work and the broad tapestry of Christian history. These books illuminate the vital contributions made by these figures throughout the history of the church.

Leseprobe

LOVING GOD AND NEIGHBOR

WITH

SAMUEL PEARCE

MICHAEL A. G. HAYKIN

&

JERRY SLATE, JR.

Loving God and Neighbor with Samuel Pearce

Lived Theology

Copyright 2019 Michael A. G. Haykin and Jerry Slate, Jr.

Lexham Press, 1313 Commercial St., Bellingham, WA 98225

LexhamPress.com

All rights reserved. You may use brief quotations from this resource in presentations, articles, and books. For all other uses, please write Lexham Press for permission. Email us at [email protected].

The Scripture quotation marked (NLT) is from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2007, 2013 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked (ESV) are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked (KJV) are from the King James Version. Public domain.

Print ISBN 9781683592693

Digital ISBN 9781683592709

Series Editor: Michael A. G. Haykin

Lexham Editorial: Todd Hains, Abigail Stocker, Danielle Thevenaz

Cover Design: Eleazar Ruiz, Micah Ellis

LIVED THEOLOGY

To my father, Simon Haykin:

thank you for being a man of principle, deep courage, and

true faith and for giving your children and their children a

tremendous heritage in England and Canada.

—Michael A. G. Haykin

I dedicate my portion of this work in loving memory of the

man whose name I am honored to share and who led me to

the saving knowledge of my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ:

Jerry Carl Slate, Sr.

AUGUST 28, 1939–SEPTEMBER 10, 2018

“Well done, good and faithful servant.

Enter into the joy of your Lord.”

—Jerry Carl Slate, Jr.

“God is love. That makes me happy.”

—Samuel Pearce

Contents

Series Preface

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1

Introduction

Chapter 2

“Life in a Dear Dying Redeemer”

Chapter 3

“A Zealous Lover of Christ”

Chapter 4

“Labors of Love”

Chapter 5

“My Lovely Sarah”

Chapter 6

“Meddle Not with Political Controversies”

Chapter 7

“Call Forth the Fruitfulness”

Chapter 8

“Salvation Entirely by Grace”

Chapter 9

“The Religion of the Heart”

Chapter 10

“I Ever Wish to Make My Savior’s Will My Own”

Chapter 11

“Surely Irish Zion Demands Our Prayers”

Chapter 12

“The Religion of the Cross”

Appendix

William Jay’s Recollection of Samuel Pearce

Further Reading

Works Cited

Subject Index

Scripture Index

Timeline of Samuel Pearce’s Life

Series Preface

Men and women—not ideas—make history. Ideas have influence only if they grip the minds and energize the wills of flesh-and-blood individuals.

This is no less true in the history of Christianity than it is in other spheres of history. For example, the eventual success of Trinitarianism in the fourth century was not simply the triumph of an idea but of the biblical convictions and piety of believers like Hilary and Athanasius, Basil of Caesarea and Macarius-Symeon. Thirteen hundred years later, men and women like William Carey, William Ward, and Hannah Marshman were propelled onto the mission field of India—their grit and gumption founded on the conviction that the living, risen Lord has given his church an ongoing command: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matt 28:19–20 ESV). These verses had an impact when they found a lodging-place in their hearts.

The Lived Theology series traces the way that biblical concepts and ideas are lived out in the lives of Christians, some well known, some relatively unknown (though we hope that more people will know their stories). These books tell the stories of these men and women and also describe the way in which ideas become clothed in concrete decisions and actions.

The goal for all of the books is the same: to remember what lived theology looks like. And in remembering this, we hope that these Christians’ responses to their historical contexts and cultures will be a source of wisdom for us today.

And these all, having obtained a good report through faith, received not the promise: God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect. Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith. (Hebrews 11:39–12:2 KJV)

Michael A. G. Haykin

Chair and Professor of Church History

The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

Acknowledgments

Books are usually not written without the help of others; this one is no exception.

Michael Haykin wishes to thank:

Susan J. Mills, the former Archivist of Regent’s Park College, the University of Oxford, for enormous help in working with the Pearce manuscripts, and Revd. Emma Walsh, the present librarian of Regent’s Park College; Dr. Grant Gordon, of Aurora, Ontario, for numerous kindnesses; Dr. Ruth E. Mayers Alcalay for research on Pearce and his family in archives in Plymouth and London; Ian Clary, my administrative assistant when I was Principal of Toronto Baptist Seminary and Bible College, and now a professor at Colorado Christian University; my maternal aunt Marie Eyre, for material relating to Birmingham, England; Martha Brown Shepherd, whose husband and children are direct descendants of Samuel and Sarah Pearce through their daughter Anna, for the loan of a book and information regarding the Pearce children; Linda Durkin, who was the Faculty Secretary at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary for many years and who typed the sermons of Pearce; Dr. Peter Morden, the Senior Pastor/Team Leader of South Parade Baptist Church in Leeds, England, for reading through the manuscript; Dr. Jason Dees, one of my doctoral students at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary who wrote his thesis on Pearce; Dr. David Norman; and my doctoral student and research assistant Baiyu Andrew Song.

Jerry Slate, Jr., wishes to thank:

Pastor Kurt Smith of Providence Reformed Baptist Church in Remlap, AL, who first admonished me to pursue a ministry of writing; the saints of Berean Baptist Church in Hiram, Georgia, who have encouraged and supported me in this endeavor; and my soul mate and best friend in the entire world: my wife Angela Slate. Her faith in Christ and her unswerving devotion to me are the wind beneath my wings, and she is the apple of my eye.

Dundas, Ontario, and Powder Springs, Georgia

March 19, 2018

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

In the history of God’s people, there have been a number of individuals who seem to have packed decades of spiritual maturity into a few short years of life. There is a spiritual intensity about such men and women that make them utterly unforgettable to their contemporaries. Such, for example, were David Brainerd (1718–1747), Ann Griffiths (1776–1805), Robert Murray McCheyne (1813–1843), and Jim Elliot (1927–1956); and such was the subject of this biography, Samuel Pearce (1766–1799). The name of Samuel Pearce rarely appears in histories of Christian spirituality, though it most definitely should. His life and thought represent the best of late eighteenth-century Baptist piety. His memoirs, drawn up in 1800 by Andrew Fuller (1754–1815), one of his closest friends, went through a significant number of printings and editions on both sides of the Atlantic in the course of the nineteenth century. Fuller especially focused on Pearce’s piety and concluded that the “governing principle in Mr. Pearce, beyond all doubt, was holy love.” In fact, for some decades after his death it was not uncommon to hear him referred to as the “seraphic Pearce.”

William Jay (1769–1853), who exercised an influential ministry in Bath for the first half of the nineteenth century, has this amazing remark about Pearce’s preaching: “When I have endeavoured to form an image of our Lord as a preacher, Pearce has oftener presented himself to my mind than any other I have been acquainted with.” He had, Jay went on, a “mildness and tenderness” in his style of preaching, and a “peculiar unction.” When Jay wrote these words it was many years after Pearce’s death, but still, he said, he could see his appearance in his mind’s eye and feel the impression that he made upon his hearers as he preached. Ever one to appreciate the importance of having spiritual individuals as one’s friends, Jay has this comment about the last time that he saw Pearce alive: “What a savor does communion with such a man leave upon the spirit.”1 This biography is written on the assumption that if Pearce’s life could be a blessing to Jay as he recalled aspects of that life, such a blessing is equally available to modern readers of Pearce even though they have not had Jay’s privilege in knowing Pearce when he walked this earth. Pearce’s life, shaped as it was by “holy love,” has much to teach modern-day believers in our world today.

This book is a joint effort between a historian and a pastor. Pearce was first and foremost in his service to Christ a pastor, and it is vital that a pastoral element inform any account of his life. But his day is not our day: things have changed. “The past is a foreign country—they do things differently there,” and Pearce’s life needs to be recalled accurately in its historical context. Professor Michael Haykin had been gathering material for a biography of Pearce for over twenty years when Pastor Slate contacted him in April of 2012 about a biography he was contemplating on Pearce. From this initial contact came this volume. The reader needs to know that this is not what is called a definitive life of Pearce; there is more that could be said. But the authors deem his life so important for the modern day, filled as it was with “holy love,” that they felt it needful to get this small study into print.

Chapters 1 through 3, written by Michael Haykin, cover Pearce’s life from his first breath in his native Devon to the pastorate of Cannon Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, England. The remaining chapters cover key elements or themes in his ten-year ministry at Cannon Street, his sole pastorate: his marriage to Sarah Hopkins (chapter 4); his political views (chapter 5); his perspectives on pastoral ministry (chapter 6) and on theology (chapters 7–8); and his passion for missions, illustrated in his desire to go to India as a missionary (chapter 9) and in his preaching trip to Ireland (chapter 10). Of these chapters, Jerry Slate, Jr., wrote the bulk of chapters 5 and 9; Michael wrote chapters 4 and 10; and chapters 6 through 8 were a joint effort. The final chapter, chapter 11, deals with the last three years of Pearce’s life and was mostly written by Jerry.

When Pearce was called to the pastorate at Cannon Street, he asked for an annual vacation leave of six weeks, so that he might visit his father (his mother had died when he was very young) in Plymouth. It is appropriate that both authors have dedicated this book to their respective fathers.

CHAPTER 2

“Life in a Dear Dying Redeemer”

Like the Carthaginians in the ancient world and the Venetians in the Renaissance, the English created a society based on their dominance of “the watery part of the world,” as Herman Melville once described the earth’s oceans. Beginning with Elizabethan naval warriors like Francis Drake (c. 1540–1596)—a deeply committed Protestant—by the eighteenth century the English had become a world power primarily through their control of the seas. And central to this rule were ports like Plymouth in Devon.

The rise of Plymouth, the birthplace of Samuel Pearce, to a position of national prominence paralleled England’s emergence as an imperial maritime power. Occupying a strategic position at the western end of the English Channel and possessing one of the world’s largest natural harbors, Plymouth became a strategic port in England’s commercial ventures with southwest Europe and the new world across the Atlantic. These commercial transactions were also intimately tied to England’s wars with Spain, Holland, and France over maritime hegemony. The British Admiralty invested substantial sums in building new docks and fortifications in Plymouth during the latter half of the eighteenth century, when Britain was almost constantly at war. While ordinary commerce and woolen manufacture remained significant sources of income, naval requirements brought lucrative contracts to Plymouth suppliers. Not surprisingly, eighteenth-century Plymouth saw a fivefold increase in the number of inhabitants. In the same period, the general population of England only doubled. Most of the demographic growth was concentrated in the new suburb of Dock, which attracted thousands of shipyard workers, and by 1801 it was larger than Plymouth proper.

Eighteenth-century visitors to Plymouth expressed a variety of opinions about the city. Stebbing Shaw (1762–1802), a topographer who came in 1788, pronounced it “a most flourishing and able port.” He then contrasted the “vile and almost dangerously narrow” streets and buildings of old Plymouth with Dock, “which surprised us with a very large display of spacious streets, intersecting each other at right angles.” Houses in this suburb, however, were “slightly built, either of plaster or slate stone, abundantly got hereabouts, and will not bear a minute inspection.”1 Robert Southey (1774–1843), celebrated English Romantic poet and biographer of John Bunyan, Oliver Cromwell, and Horatio Nelson, praised the “beautiful country” surrounding Plymouth and Dock, but judged both cities “as ugly as can well be imagined.”2 The physician and botanist William George Maton (1774–1835), visiting in the mid-1790s, found Plymouth “an ill-built, disagreeable place, infested with all the filthiness so frequent in seaports” but admired its size and busyness—“from the bustle and continual passing of people we could fancy ourselves in the outskirts of London.”3

Conditions for people in Plymouth, like everywhere else in eighteenth-century Britain, depended on socioeconomic status. Plymouth’s elite consisted of well-established county, naval, professional, and commercial families. These wealthy residents enjoyed a comfortable—even luxurious—lifestyle, centered around concerts, assemblies, theaters, and literary societies. At lower levels, however, Plymouth was a diverse, cosmopolitan society with a fluctuating population of foreigners, sailors, and other immigrants. Diversity was particularly noticeable during the century’s many wars. Andrew Brice from nearby Exeter described the inhabitants of Plymouth in 1759 in his topographic dictionary, The Grand Gazeteer, “as polite, genteel, religious and worthy a people as those enjoyed by any other place.” However, in wartime, he continued, the town is filled with newcomers from “Ireland, Cornwall and other parts,” men who were “rapacious … [and] lewd,” and they, along with what Brice called “half-mad Jack Addles from the sea,” filled the town with “sharping [swindling], tricking, debauchery, pride, insolence, profaneness, impurity with impudence.”4

Plymouth was initially hostile to gospel preaching during the early days of the Great Awakening. A mob assembled to welcome George Whitefield (1714–1770) in 1744. On this visit there was even an attempt to murder Whitefield, but he was soon preaching to large and attentive congregations. Returning five years later, he remarked on the “strange alteration in the people since I came first here.… Many were then awakened and truly converted.… Plymouth seems to be quite a new place to me.” The Anglican evangelist praised God for the “great increase.”5 John Wesley (1703–1791), who first visited in 1746, also experienced both mob violence and much blessing, but by the 1770s, such disorder had virtually ceased.

THE PLYMOUTH BAPTISTS

Samuel Pearce was born in Plymouth on July 20, 1766, to William (d. 1805) and Lydia Pearce (d. 1766/1767), both devout Baptists. His mother died when Samuel was an infant, so he was raised by his father, a deacon in Plymouth’s Baptist church, and grandparents. Initially, after the death of his mother, he went to live with his paternal grandparents at Tamerton Foliot, a village about five miles north of Plymouth. When he was between eight and ten years old he returned to his father’s care in Plymouth and began attending the town’s grammar school.

As he entered his teen years, he also would have known the nurturing influence of Plymouth’s “sturdy Baptist community,” whose history reached back well into the seventeenth century. The heritage of these Baptists is displayed in the character of one of their early ministers, Abraham Cheare (d. 1668). During the Great Persecution from 1660 to 1688 of Christian communities that did not belong to the Church of England, Cheare was arrested, treated cruelly, and imprisoned on Drake’s Island, a small island in Plymouth Sound. Fearful that his flock might compromise their Baptist convictions to avoid persecution, he wrote many letters to his church during his imprisonment. In one of them he cited a pithy remark from the Irenicum (1646) of Puritan author Jeremiah Burroughs (c. 1599–1646). “I desire to be a faithful minister of Christ and his Church, if I cannot be a prudent one,” Burroughs stated, according to Cheare. “Standing in the gap is more dangerous and troublesome than getting behind the hedge, there you may be more secure and under the wind; but it’s best to be there where God looks for a man.”6 Cheare was one who “stood in the gap”: he died in 1668, while a prisoner for his Baptist convictions.

After Cheare’s death, the church was without a pastor until 1687, when they called Robert Brown, but he died in February 1688—within three months of his arrival in Plymouth. After preaching for two months, a Mr. Warner received a call to be the next pastor, but he declined it. The church then called Robert Holdenby, a pastor from Ireland—but Holdenby sought to leave after only five months with the church, though he did not actually leave until a year later, in the summer of 1690. Finally, Samuel Buttall, who represented the church at the 1689 national gathering of the Particular Baptists in London, was appointed pastor, and he pastored the Plymouth Baptists through 1698.

Over the next five decades, the church struggled to stay afloat. They had at least eight pastors, but none stayed for any length of time. Part of the problem was the church’s failure to provide an adequate salary for their pastor; there was also disunity among the members. Then, in the providence of God, when Whitefield came to preach in Plymouth in 1744, one of those converted through his ministry was thirteen- or fourteen-year-old Philip Gibbs. In time, he began attending the Baptist church in nearby Kingsbridge. He later said that what won him to Baptist principles was not so much the preaching of the Kingsbridge pastor, Crispin Courtice (d. 1768), but the love that he saw in the Baptist congregation.

Baptized as a believer, Gibbs soon began speaking in public and was eventually invited to fill the pulpit at Plymouth, where he was ordained the pastor of the church on September 20, 1749. The church building was full as the congregation listened to the customary ordination sermons—one to the newly ordained pastor and one to the congregation—and Gibbs’s confession of faith, which took twenty-five minutes for him to read. In eighteenth-century Baptist circles, when a pastor was ordained, he was expected to write a personal confession of faith, even though the Second London Confession of Faith (1677/1688) was the denomination’s doctrinal standard.

Within two years of Gibbs’s ordination, the Plymouth Baptists had rebuilt their meetinghouse, and the congregation had increased from a handful of members to five hundred or so. The church faced challenges in the 1760s, however, and Gibbs began to think about finding another pastorate. The Baptist church in Truro, Cornwall, made Gibbs an especially attractive offer. Wisely, though, Gibbs decided to ask the advice of the Western Association, to which the Plymouth congregation belonged. The ministers of this association felt that Gibbs should stay at Plymouth, which he did. In the next thirty years of Gibbs’s ministry—he died in 1800—the church experienced great blessing and numerical growth. In 1773, for example, after a gracious revival, twenty-three people were converted, baptized, and brought into the membership of the church.

Pearce returned to Plymouth from his grandparents’ home about a year after this local revival, and he would have sensed the revived spiritual atmosphere in the church. As Pearce came into his teen years, however, he consciously spurned the rich heritage of both his godly home and the Plymouth Baptist community. According to his own testimony, “several vicious school-fellows” became his closest friends, and he set his heart on what he would later describe as “evil” and “wicked inclinations.”7 Plymouth had many opportunities for evil, and for a period of time Pearce fell prey to it. But God had better plans for his life.

“THE REDEEMER’S BLOOD”

In the summer of 1782, a young preacher, Isaiah Birt (1758–1837), came to preach for a few Sundays in the Plymouth meetinghouse. The Birmingham Congregationalist John Angell James (1785–1859) once said of Birt that he was “no ordinary man. His preaching was richly evangelical … [and his] gift in prayer was extraordinary.”8 The Spirit of God drove home Birt’s words to Pearce’s heart. The change in Pearce from what he later called “a state of death in trespasses and sins” to a “life in a dear dying Redeemer” was sudden but genuine and lasting.9 Following his conversion Pearce was especially conscious of the Holy Spirit’s witness within his heart that he was a child of God and of being “filled with peace and joy unspeakable.”10 A year or so later, on the day when he celebrated his seventeenth birthday, he was baptized as a believer by Philip Gibbs and joined the Plymouth congregation in which he had been raised. As his great-grandson Samuel Pearce Carey remarked in his biography of Pearce, after Pearce’s baptism he “would now glory in Abraham Cheare” and the Plymouth Baptist heritage in which he had been raised and to which he had committed himself.11

One of the first Christian books that Pearce read was the minor spiritual classic The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul by Congregationalist theologian Philip Doddridge (1702–1751), one of the most winsome Christian authors of the eighteenth century. Pearce’s close friend William Steadman (1764–1837), whom Pearce met when he attended the Bristol Baptist Academy, said that if he were “banished to some desolate island with only two books beside the Bible,” this work by Doddridge would be the first he would choose.12

In chapter 17 of the book, Doddridge suggested that believers make a personal commitment or covenant to God in writing, which could serve as “an anchor to [the] soul in every temptation, and a cordial to it in every affliction.”13 Making a personal covenant with God was a common practice in certain eighteenth-century evangelical circles. Extant personal covenants from this period generally fall into three categories: (1) those made at the time of a person’s conversion or those made later to mark this birth into spiritual life; (2) those made on the occurrence of natural birthdays or at the start of a new year; and (3) those made upon the occurrence of an event of special significance, such as ordination or entry into a new sphere of ministry. Evangelicals like Doddridge knew that the Bible does not require Christians to draw up personal written covenants, but they regarded these written covenants as a helpful tool in reminding believers what they had undertaken when they took Christ as their Lord and Savior. These written documents, which were for the writer’s eyes only, could be meditated on at a later point in time and be a spur to personal spiritual renewal, a deeper commitment to God, and a more tender conscience toward God and sin.

Pearce drew up such a covenant shortly after his conversion, presumably committing himself wholly to God but also promising to do certain things for the Lord. To give it added solemnity, he signed it with his very own blood, which, it needs noting, Doddridge did not at all recommend. Not long after this, though, Pearce failed in some way to keep a part of what he had covenanted; he was plunged into deep distress—almost despair—after failing to keep the covenant he had made with God. Realizing the danger of trying to live the Christian life in his own strength, he ripped the covenant he had written into small pieces and, going upstairs in his father’s house, he threw it to the winds. Henceforth, he was determined to place the blood of the cross at the heart and foundation of his Christian life. As he wrote to Isaiah Birt around the time of his conversion, “On Jesus alone I must depend for salvation. Here I rest.… The Redeemer’s blood cleanses from all sin.”14

GOING TO BRISTOL

Not long after Pearce’s baptism, the Plymouth congregation perceived that he had been endowed with definite gifts that marked