J N Darby

In my last post I mentioned J N Darby. It is hard to describe this immensely influential man adequately. He had great force of personality, a formidable intellect and great stores of biblical and classical and linguistic knowledge and expertise. I would not hesitate to suggest that he was one of the most important persons thrown up by the turbulent history of the nineteenth century church. His influence is still felt today.

He was born in England in 1800, but did his higher education in Dublin. He became a priest in the church of Ireland and led a life of apostolic, one might say exceptional, zeal and devotion. In Lent he would fast till he was feeble and weak in body, would not eat on Wednesday and Friday and Saturday till late in the evening, and then only take a little bread. At one period he lived in a wretched hut on a hill and would wear only the most tattered clothes. His heroic labours caused the local Catholic peasants almost to view him as one of the saints of old. He won many to the Church of Ireland. But when his Archbishop stated that all converts must swear allegiance to the British Crown he resigned and left the church.

The rest of his life was spent spreading a form of what was at that time a radical version of Christianity. He was the spokesman par excellence for what is known as Brethrenism. He looked upon any form of ordained clergy as anathema. Christians were to come together in great simplicity and break bread together and look to those gifted in their midst for guidance and ministry. The assemblies this formed were to have elders, not an ordained minister. He aimed to root out all denominationalism.

His other strongly held view was as follows. He held that all the optimistic high-flown ideas of the post-millennialists, that the gospel would triumph throughout the world and that society would be gradually leavened and improved by the preaching and sacrifices of the saints, were based on a delusion. He held that the dispensation of the church had ended in failure. The Church was now in ruins. All that could be done was for the saints to wait in simplicity for the coming rapture, when the saints would be snatched away to heaven just before the Great Tribulation, when God would deal with his earthly people the Jews. Then Jesus would come a second time to set up the period of the Millennium. In many ways this was a profoundly pessimistic programme.

The other obvious characteristic of Darby was his disputatious nature. He was always convinced he was right. His most famous quarrel occurred in 1848. He was at that time leading the church in Plymouth with another able and learned brother, Benjamin Wills Newton. Newton had printed a sermon which he had published views on the human nature of Christ that offended Darby. Newton apologised, but Darby was not satisfied. He continued his feud with Newton for several years, and when several Christians from Plymouth wanted to join the Bethesda church run by George Muller, and were accepted, Darby effectively excommunicated the whole Church in Bristol and split the Brethren movement down the middle, a separation that exists to this day. The new members from Plymouth were, according to Darby, guilty by association - they were therefore implicated in the original false teaching of Newton. Therefore any church that received them were as guilty as Newton.

As a result. the Brethren movement fractured into many brands. The original design of re-uniting all the true children of God into a non-sectarian whole actually produced the opposite. The redeeming feature in all this was the emergence of the Open Brethren, those like George Muller, who rejected the exclusiveness of those who followed Darby and who have, for the past century, been in the forefront of missionary endeavour.

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