In Depth:  Iain Murray

The above heading should give no satisfaction to any evangelical Christian. Some of the finest literature in the evangelical heritage comes from gospel ministers of the Church of England, and many evangelicals continue to belong to that denomination today.

The crisis has arisen from more than one direction; one major cause has been that no discipline has been exercised within the Anglican communion (led by the Archbishop of Canterbury) on the Church of Canada and the Episcopal Church USA for their allowance of practising homosexual clergy. This has prompted the withdrawal of some evangelicals and their realignment with the Province of South Cone (which covers six South American countries), whose Primate, Archbishop Gregory Venables, remains in communion with Canterbury. By this means, the disaffected — of whom Dr. Jim Packer is the best known — support their claim to remain Anglican.

If we ask why God was moved to exercise his holiness and justice in such a manner, at such a cost, in the sacrifice of his own beloved Son for our sins, the answer is ‘God so loved the world’.

And it was love that led Jesus first to undertake his sufferings, and then to invite all men to enter into the love which his death proclaims. It is the Puritan Thomas Watson who quotes the words of Augustine: ‘The cross was a pulpit in which Christ preached his love to the world.’ On the same subject John Owen writes: ‘There is no property of the nature of God which he doth so eminently design to glorify in the death of Christ as his love.’

In this tercentenary year of the birth of John Wesley a new book by Iain H. Murray, 'Wesley and Men who Followed', is to be published by the Banner of Truth Trust next month. It deals with the immense gospel work done by Wesley and some of his Methodist preachers.

John Wesley left behind him a family of churches among which his reputation was to be revered across the earth.

An issue raised briefly in my previous article requires fuller comment. It is commonly agreed that Dr. Lloyd-Jones's 1966 address for the Evangelical Alliance (EA) became the occasion of a division among evangelicals; the disagreement concerns what caused that division.

David F. Wright (Professor at New College, Edinburgh, and elder in the Church of Scotland) believes that my presentation of the Lloyd-Jones 1966 address in Evangelicalism Divided 'patently misreads' it (Reformation and Revival, vol. 10, Spring 2001, p.129).

Last year Iain Murray's book, Evangelicalism Divided: A Record of Crucial Change in the Years 1950 to 2000 was published by the Banner of Truth.

This book shows how evangelicalism, once clear on such vital matters as what makes a Christian, the person and work of Christ, and the inerrancy of Scripture, has now become confused and diffuse as it has pursued the quest for Christian unity and winning the world in ways which tend to compromise essential truths.

In the 1920s theological students were commonly told that 'the theory of the verbal inspiration of Scripture was as dead as Queen Anne'. As Oliver Barclay recalls: 'By the 1930s, evangelicals were effectively the only section of the British churches that held to this truth.' (1)

The Intervarsity Fellowship (now UCCF) broke with SCM on this issue in the 1920s (2), and for a time the IVF's testimony to the infallibility of Scripture was unique and alone in the universities.