Kennedy of Dingwall

The Pastor's Letter (May 1971)

Dear Friends,

There is something about human nature that tends to disown the voice of the prophet and perhaps, that is why "Kennedy of Dingwall" has been left to drift on the sea of Christian forgetfulness. Yet, no man of his time saw half so clearly the issues that were soon to confront the church of Christ and the whole new system of things that was soon to hold the pre-eminence and become the accepted practice of the church in the work of evangelism.

The battlefield on which the issues were fought out, and on which Kennedy of Dingwall stood almost alone against the other evangelicals of his day, was the evangelistic campaigns then being conducted under the leadership of Mr. D. L. Moody.

Kennedy wasn't so much taken up with the "excesses" of this new type of evangelism, although he spoke quite clearly about these excesses; nor was he primarily concerned with what the American evangelist was saying, for much of what he said had a true enough ring about it; what Kennedy was concerned about what was not being said and what was not being told. Moody evangelism, he declared, was deficient in some of the great fundamentals of evangelistic preaching, such as the inability of the sinner dead in trespasses and sins to work any good work unto his own salvation, and the absolute necessity of the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit of God to beget faith in the stoney heart so that it might close with the offer of Christ in the gospel.

These things Kennedy expounds in a booklet entitled, "Hyper-Evangelism," an extract from which appears in article three in this edition of the Wicket Gate and which clearly displays the seeds of that type of gospel preaching which were being sown in Kennedy's day and which have now become full grown in our own day with such devastating results. "No pains are taken to present the character and claims of God as Lawgiver and Judge," in this new kind of evangelism, Kennedy assesses, "and no indication is given of a desire to bring souls in self-condemnation to accept the punishment of their iniquity." Is this not one of the notable lacks in our modern method of preaching to the unconverted where it is simply "Open up your heart and let the Saviour in?" No reference, you see, to the purpose and the glory of God in the salvation of the sinner, but simply a gospel made for man's convenience and under man's manipulation.

Kennedy's views, of course, are not popular today, even though his hundred year old warning should be staring at us out of every vacant pew and a million-and-one meaningless decision cards. But if John Kennedy's views would be unpopular now, even in the light of one hundred years of gospel decline, how much more so, we might well imagine, in those days when they were first uttered in the midst of what the whole evangelical church was hailing as a new visitation of the Spirit of the Lord in revival.

Even his closest friend, the very man who preached at the opening of that church at Dingwall, and the man we would esteem above all others among the sons of men, failed to see the immediate issues as clearly as John Kennedy of Dingwall. This was Charles Haddon Spurgeon, whose large heart at that particular time believed that there would soon be a great return to the old-fashioned Calvinistic gospel preaching of the Puritans and the Reformers, and whose love for Moody's person seems to have dulled his perception with regard to the deficiencies of his gospel. Ten years later on, however, those views had been modified, and, "When Dale, in 1881 repeated his belief that 'Mr Spurgeon stands alone among the modern Leaders of Evangelical Nonconformity in his fidelity to the older Calvinistic creed,' Spurgeon did not attempt to refute it." (Iain Murray, The Forgotten Spurgeon.)

Even in the early days of the fray, however, Spurgeon still stood firmly behind "the Spurgeon of the North," as John Kennedy was very often called, and he continuously defended him as truth's defender in his day. "We are sorry to read every now and then," he wrote in the Sword and Trowel, "the most bitter reflections of Dr. Kennedy, as though he were an enemy of the gospel. He is fearful lest the doctrines of grace should be forgotten, and he is jealous for divine sovereignty. He is also fearful that the work owes more to music than to the force of truth, and is more the work of fleshly excitement than of the Holy Spirit. Is it altogether an unpardonable sin to feel such a sacred anxiety?"

Herein lay the root of the trouble, however, for few shared with Kennedy this "sacred anxiety." "It was the day of ebb-tide," says Professor John MacLeod in his Scottish Theology, "and the definite out and out Calvinism of another day was going out of fashion and yielding place to a presentation of the gospel which, without being pronouncedly Arminian, avoided the emphasis which the older Evangelicals laid on the New Birth as a Divine Intervention." Moodyism could well-accommodate the new liberalism that was abroad in Scotland, even in the ranks of Kennedy's own Free Church denomination, and Moody had no hesitation in lauding the modernist Henry Drummond - one of his greatest supporters - even though his book on the Greatest Gift in the World just about whittled away every fundamental and basic tenet of the evangelical faith.

The whole picture of a popular evangelist who sweeps almost all but a few off their feet - even though he proves to be the ally of almost every shade and shape of theological opinion - is one that should not be difficult for us to appreciate today. The personality of such men is seldom under review, but the message that is preached must always be held up to the closest scrutiny, especially where many are going to be influenced in a future day. This is simply what John Kennedy of Dingwall did. He sounded a warning note of impending desolation that went largely unheard in his day.

May we today hear that same trumpet's certain sound - for certain sound it is– and hear it as a "return to arms" – the arms of the old gospel of the glory of God in the works of redemption.