Proclaimer Blog
Review: Engaging with Martyn Lloyd Jones
Engaging with Martyn Lloyd Jones: the life and legacy of the "Doctor"
Edited by Andrew Atherstone and David Ceri Jones, £16.99, Apollos, 365pp
I guess this is a book that is going to grab people in different ways. There will be those who are looking for critique, hoping it will supply and those who are likewise looking for commendation. As with many accounts of great men of God, the choice is often an either/or. To its great credit this book does both, nicely together. Perhaps that is the wisdom of leaving some time before analysing a man's life?
Thirty to fifty years usually proves to be the first really adequate viewing distance for looking at persons and events of the recent past.. (JI Packer, from the foreword) [Perhaps this is also the answer to Trueman's gripe that our response to Stott has been over-adulatory? – i.e. more time required?]
To its credit, though, and perhaps with the value of time, this book neither demonises nor makes a virtue out of Lloyd-Jones, but rather seeks to generously, but critically, assess his impact on evangelicalism. It is a series of papers given at a symposium which gives the book a wide ranging flavour. So, there are chapters on Lloyd-Jones and Calvinism, Wales, revival, charismatic issues, preaching (or rather, its demise), education, Barth and so on.
The strongest chapters are those where there is new material, or at least, the present material is only obscure. Robert Striven's chapter on the Doctor and Karl Barth is based almost entirely on an annotated Barth book found in MLJ's library. It reveals the mind of the man as well as his deep pastoral intent. The chapter on the Anglican secession crisis draws on many letters in the published press – all in the public domain but not necessarily brought together in one place like this before.
That particular chapter may well be the one most people read. Like the ‘steamy’ pages of a teenage book on relationships, it will almost certainly be the one that folk turn to first. It tries to set the whole 1966 issue in the context of what was happening at the time. But, ironically, this interesting and insightful chapter reveals one of the weaknesses of the book for a reader like me. Events like those of 1966 (and the same could be applied to the chapter on Lloyd-Jones and the charismatic issue) have been so widely written about and commented on that's it difficult to know whom to believe. Little ol' me, being young as I am, is interested in these events which have shaped evangelicalism in the UK, I'm sure it is right to be so. But it's not straightforward to assess the validity of the different arguments. I simply cannot say whether any particular author’s view is right or not.
In this particular case, I had the benefit of being mentored by someone who was both there and involved in the discussions (and he gets a few mentions in the book) which helps of course. Please hear what I am saying, this is not a weakness in the book – rather it is a weakness in how we think about and assess history. The same can be applied to the chapter on MLJ and charismatic issues. Everyone, I’ve noticed, wants to claim him as their hero and forerunner. They can’t all be right. I was certainly helped by reading this thoughtful book – I’m just not sure how much. As I’ve said, that’s in the nature of these things.
The weaker chapters are those which largely repeat material found elsewhere. I say ‘weaker’ but none of the chapters is really weak, they all seem rigorous and all are well written and accessible. For example, the chapter on the demise of preaching largely picks out information you may well have already read. But seeing it together and analysed was very helpful still. And by the way, I'm fully with the Doctor here:
Lloyd-Jones believed that the trouble with so many pulpits of his day was that they had forgotten [the] apostolic method and pattern….they had become too concerned with style and literary form. He argued that 'there must be form, but we must never give inordinate attention to it.' (p163)
and
The church must never forget her first principles: 'man's real trouble is that he is a rebel against God and consequently under the wrath of God.' It was the church alone, and preaching the gospel in particular, that was designed to meet this need. The church, as a specialist institution, alone was called and equipped to deal with humanity's most basic and fundamental need: one's relationship with God. The tragedy of the modern church was that it had abandoned this primary purpose for the sake of lesser causes. (p172)
Overall, we’ve got an excellent analysis. My reservations are two-fold:
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First, as mentioned above, my ability as a reader to determine the voracity of the assumptions
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Second, the paucity of the conclusions. Maybe this is a feature of books put together from symposia, but it feels like the conclusions are those of someone who has realised he only has a minute left to wrap up. I would have liked some more interaction or analysis of deeper implications.