This is the fifth and final article in the series written by Adam Ramsey of Liberti Church, Gold Coast, Australia, exploring what we can learn from Martyn Lloyd-Jones today in relation to the Reformed faith and a Scriptural understanding of spiritual experience.
The essays need to be taken together. They are taken from original, yet-to-be published research undertaken by Ramsey for his Doctor of Philosophy thesis. They also, we hope, represent something of the generous- hearted, thoughtful, Biblical approach that en was founded 40 years ago in 1986 to embody.
Central to Lloyd-Jones’s hermeneutical framework was his understanding of the book of Acts, its role within the New Testament, and its applicability for the present age.
He did not regard Acts merely as a historical narrative documenting the church’s origins, but as a theological blueprint that was to be interpreted alongside the epistles. While some in evangelical circles have treated the book of Acts as a vital and foundational history of the church, that for the most part remained unrepeatable, Lloyd-Jones rejected all such thinking. As New Testament theologian D.A. Carson points out: “The Spirit does not simply inaugurate the new age and then disappear; rather, He characterizes the new age.”1 Those who confined the supernatural dimensions of the Spirit’s work to the Apostolic era, he accused of “prejudice”, arguing that the repeated outpourings of the Holy Spirit upon the early Christians and the experiences that these created in the Christian life, ought to be regarded as accessible for Christians in all times and in all ages.2 He stated emphatically: “We must take the Scriptures as a whole, and, as I have been trying to remind you, the background to the whole of the New Testament writings is the history of the Acts of the Apostles. You must not found your doctrine on the epistles only. The epistles are to be read in the light of the history that is given us so plainly in Acts.”3
Here is a significant key to understanding not only Lloyd-Jones’ hermeneutic, but the way in which that hermeneutic formed his convictions around supernatural phenomena, revival, and most importantly, his understanding of the baptism of the Holy Spirit (each of which will be explored in-depth in later chapters). He held to a cyclical view of the Spirit’s work in the church, that is revealed in the book of Acts and throughout church history, believing every great work of the Spirit to be a repetition of what happened in Acts 2 and its subsequent chapters. He writes that “every time the church is thus revived … she is going back to something that had happened before, rediscovering it, and finding the ancient supply.”4
For Lloyd-Jones, a correct theological understanding of the New Testament epistles was impossible when the hermeneutic was divorced from the examples given in the book of Acts. Accordingly, the whole New Testament must be taken together, on the grounds of his evangelical commitment to Biblical authority. He concludes: “You really cannot truly interpret nor understand the teaching of the epistles unless you do so in the light of the history of Acts.”5 His conviction on the paradigmatic nature of the book of Acts was solidified well before his controversy with Stott in 1964. Five years earlier, in May of 1959, Lloyd-Jones preached a sermon titled “The Power of Pentecost” that was later published in his book, Revival. In that sermon, he addressed the claim that what happened at Pentecost was “once and for all and never to be repeated,”6 with strong disagreement: “There is only one sense in which what happened on the day of Pentecost cannot be repeated and that is simply that it did happen to be the first of a series. And, of course, you cannot repeat the first. But the fact that you cannot repeat the first does not mean for a moment that what happened on the first occasion cannot happen again.”7
While Lloyd-Jones fully acknowledged the historical uniqueness of the book of Acts and the event of Pentecost, that uniqueness did not equate to non-repeatability. It was instead a divinely ordained paradigm that now characterised the present age, carrying the stamp of Biblical authority for believers’ expectations of the church at its best, all the way until the promised return of Christ. Lloyd-Jones believed that every single revival in church history is simply a repetition of what happened in Acts 2,8 which animated his own yearnings for revival in the church and for spiritual power in the pulpit, both of which he regarded as indispensable to the vitality of the church.
For the Doctor, to dismiss Acts as a closed historical episode was to forfeit the experiential reality to which the New Testament epistles themselves continually pointed. He was fully committed to submitting to the authority of Scripture, out of reverence for its Author, refusing to quench the Spirit by faithfully testing all things, and holding fast to all that is good, as 1 Thessalonians 5v21 demanded of him. Thus, for Lloyd-Jones, as a leading evangelical voice, the matter at hand was not merely preserving the integrity and authority of God’s Word, but a lived encounter with God Himself, of whom the Scripture bore authoritative witness: “Above all, we must apply the Scriptures. We have the Spirit in us … and we have the Scriptures. We must put these things together. Nothing is more dangerous than to put a wedge between the word and the Spirit, to emphasise either one at the expense the other. It is the Spirit and the word, the Spirit upon the word and the Spirit in us as we read the word.”9
The Doctor defies simple categorisation within what was generally considered as a theological binary of being either a Cessationist or a Charismatic. He charted a distinctive path, calling those in the first camp to refuse to settle for less than what the New Testament offered in spiritual experience, and those in the second camp to reject any spiritual experience or phenomena that minimised, undermined, contradicted, or failed to conform to the authority of Scripture. It was for this reason that Lloyd-Jones revered B.B. Warfield’s teachings on Calvinism, the doctrine of Scripture, and other matters, but rejected his doctrine of the Spirit, primarily on the grounds of his views on the cessation of the charismata, that he believed were out of step with both Scripture and church history.10
At every point, Lloyd-Jones’ pneumatology and desire for genuine spiritual experience was governed by his unwavering commitment to the primacy of the Word of God. As Catherwood contends: “You do not have to agree with the Doctor in terms of his conclusions. However, it is wise to employ his method, which is that all doctrine and practice should originate in Scripture.”11 Accordingly, Lloyd-Jones believed in the ongoing operation of the charismata, insofar as they aligned with Scripture, while rejecting the charismatic notion that any such gift could be claimed or exercised on-demand, likewise because of a lack of Biblical warrant. In this way, as Eveson perceptively notes, he managed to avoid both “the excesses of the Pentecostal and charismatic movements,” along with the sterile formalism of “cold non-emotional Calvinism.”12
While he did not endorse the charismatic movement publicly, he nevertheless provided much encouragement to leaders within that movement privately. Terry Virgo, who went on to found the New Frontiers movement of churches – which reflect the Reformed soteriology and continuationist pneumatology of Lloyd-Jones – remembers going to see the Doctor for advice in 1965 as a Bible college student, after having received an experience of speaking in tongues several years earlier. He records that Lloyd-Jones encouraged him, by saying, “the great sin of the evangelical world was to put God in a box and tell Him what he could and could not do,” 13 going on to remind Virgo “that Jesus said ‘Ask, seek and knock,’ and every verb was expressed in the present continuous tense. He went on to urge me to keep on asking, keep on seeking and keep on knocking. He was so positive and encouraging … He was no narrow-minded, safe evangelical, but a man with a big God who was to be sought for all His many blessings.” 14
It was this very posture of Biblically-grounded openness to the Spirit, that resulted in many charismatics becoming theologically Reformed, 15 after discovering the teaching of Lloyd-Jones that refused to create dichotomies where the Bible did not. In his 1963 address to the Annual Meeting of the Evangelical Library, Lloyd-Jones said “that amongst the Pentecostalists there is more definitely an awakening interest in Reformed theology and a great desire and craving for the very books … the only teaching they have found which can satisfy them is the teaching known as the Reformed Theology … The people who have been for years in that movement which placed all the emphasis on experience and who are most thoughtful and intelligent, are very dissatisfied and are looking to us. So in the providence of God who knows how all this may work out?” 16
In this respect, Lloyd-Jones exemplified a theological paradigm of convergence between the Word and the Spirit. Though frequently claimed by representatives of one tradition to the exclusion of the other, he was, paradoxically, the subject of critique from both Cessationists and Charismatics. Yet it was precisely through these mutual criticisms that Lloyd-Jones blazed a distinctive trail for those who would come after him, who likewise discerned the necessity for such a convergence. As he himself acknowledges: “It seems to me that we have a right to be fairly happy about ourselves as long as we have criticism from both sides … For myself, as long as I am charged by certain people with being nothing but a Pentecostalist and on the other hand charged by others with being an intellectual, a man who is always preaching doctrine, as long as the two criticisms come, I am very happy. But if one or the other of the two criticisms should ever cease, then, I say, is the time to be careful and to begin to examine the very foundations.” 17
Bob Horn records the ways in which the Doctor’s “name and authority were invoked for conflicting causes, especially after his death … some erstwhile disciples became a shade condescending.” 18 After his passing in 1981, some of these qualified their endorsement of him with statements like: “Of course, he was a great preacher, but he was rather quiet on Reformed distinctives … had strange views on the Spirit … was obsessed with revival … made the basic mistake of thinking some truth primary…”. Horn, however, disputed all such minimisations of the converging theological tensions that marked Lloyd-Jones’ ministry, countering: “Those are the comments of little men. Many claimed him, none owned him. The Gospel Lion was no one’s pet. He had a far bigger mind and heart than any who played him up or put him down … He was not the captive of any group or ‘ism’ or school or movement. He was bigger than them all. That was his greatness … He was Christ-centred and saw all else from that perspective. He had a sense of proportion, a sense of timing, a sense of history, a sense of God.” 19
FOOTNOTES
1. Carson, Showing the Spirit, 166. 2. Lloyd-Jones, Preaching and Preachers, Kindle Edition, 314-315. 3. Lloyd-Jones, Prove all Things, 41. 4. Lloyd-Jones, Revival, 28. 5. Lloyd-Jones, Joy Unspeakable, 38. 6. Lloyd-Jones, Revival, 199. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid, 199-200. 9. Lloyd-Jones, Prove all Things, 78-79. 10. Eaton, Baptism with the Spirit, 116-117. 11. Catherwood, Martyn Lloyd-Jones: His Life and Relevance for the 21st Century, 39. 12. Philip H. Eveson, Travel with Martyn Lloyd-Jones: In the Footsteps of the Distinguished Welsh Evangelist, Pastor, and Theologian, 86. 13. Terry Virgo, No Well-Worn Paths, 57. 14. Ibid. 15. Catherwood, Martyn Lloyd-Jones: A Family Portrait, 134. 16. Murray, D. Martyn Lloyd Jones: The Fight of Faith 1939-1981, 480-481. 17. D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, The Love of God: Studies in 1 John, 18. 18. Robert Horn, ‘His Place in Evangelicalism’, in Christopher Catherwood (ed.), Martyn Lloyd-Jones: Chosen by God, 30. 18. Ibid, 31
