Newsgroups: bit.listserv.christia
Date:         Thu, 9 Apr 1992 17:44:06 EDT
From:         JEK@NIHCU.BITNET
Subject:      William Law (09 April)
X-To:         CHRISTIA@ASUACAD.BITNET, BSTUDY-L@UTARLVM1.BITNET,
              IVCF-L@UBVM.BITNET

Today, 9 April, is the commemoration of William Law and of Dietrich
Bonheoffer, theologians and scholars, one Anglican and one Lutheran.

Some Christians have tended to suppose 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 supposed that the mercy of God means that we
are not called on to inconvenience ourselves. Law and Bonhoeffer
both saw this latter error as prevalent in those around them. 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.

WILLIAM LAW (09 APRIL 1761)

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 pius 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."

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 WestminsterPress, 156p, $8.95, and one from Morehouse
Press, 64p, $2.95. (Unless the 64p is a misprint, this must be a
DRASTIC abridgement.) Templegate, Bethany House, Pendle Hill
Publications, and the Christian Literature Crusade also publish what
I take to be anthologies from Law's writings.

   O God, by whose grace thy servant William Law, enkindled with
   the fire of thy love, became a burning and shining light in thy
   Church:  Grant that we also may be aflame with the spirit of
   love and discipline, and may ever walk before thee as children
   of light; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with thee, in the
   unity of the Holy Spirit, liveth and reigneth, one God, now and
   for ever.
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