Listening to giants

A CAMARADERIE OF CONFIDENCE:
The fruit of unfailing faith in the lives of Charles Spurgeon, George Muller and Hudson Taylor
By John Piper
IVP. 109 pages. £8.99
ISBN 978 1 783 594 252

The seventh in John Piper’s The Swans are not Silent series sees him looking at the life of faith through the lives of three 19th-century disciples: Charles Spurgeon, George Muller and Hudson Taylor, each of whom exhibited profound faith, worked enormously hard and had a significant impact on others leaving behind lasting legacies.

I know this legacy personally and gratefully because I spent the first three years of my life in one of Spurgeon’s Children’s Homes.

Unusual approach

Piper’s book is an unusual approach to biography, written with a pastor and theologian’s heart. If you like detailed biography then this book is not for you: each man’s life is succinctly portrayed and loosely sketched, leaving lots of questions unanswered and details left blank. I found the broad strokes applied to their 19th-century context frustrating, with statements such as ‘half a century of peace from 1850 onward’ whilst celebrating the British Empire without addressing the modern perspective of imperialism.

Amplified voices

However Piper’s aim was to ‘put a megaphone’ to these men’s lips and get us to hear something of the message that they proclaimed in their day, by looking at what they taught and how they lived. The loudest voice through these pages, however, is inevitably that of Piper as he selectively edits each life in turn. He uses each man to address particular issues: what it means to trust in God’s sovereignty, what it means to live by faith, how to face suffering, and what it means to live joyfully dependent on God in Christ.

Christian biographies can be intimidating (I confess that the description of Spurgeon’s work rate left me exhausted, even though Piper insisted that Spurgeon was disciplined about taking a day a week off!) This book at times falls into the danger of presenting these men as spiritual giants that we can emulate if we only heed what they learnt. It would have helped if Piper explained at the outset the idea that he concludes with: what it means that God supplies all our needs in Christ Jesus.

Too many shorthands

The brevity of this book should not lead you to think that this is a good introduction to Christian biography for new Christians, because it has too many insider theological shorthands. When writing about Hudson Taylor, Piper spends a lot of time referring to ‘Keswick teaching’ without defining it, which could be very confusing. Because of this I wondered who would benefit most from this book: on one level it is a brief introduction to these three figures, but on another it best serves those with prior knowledge. So if you are someone who knows something of these men’s lives already Piper’s book challenges you to listen to their voices in a fresh way so that you walk more in the ways of Christ and glorify God in every way.