The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford

One of the most interesting books I have read is William Hale White’s The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford (1882), which despite its title, is a work of fiction. It describes a young man who enters the Congregational ministry but becomes theologically liberal. He eventually joins the Unitarians until he effectively abandons nominal Christianity altogether. I read it in my third year as a theology student, studying the nineteenth century religious movements. I read it again this summer, amused by some of the comments I wrote back then in its margins. The shift among British Protestant churches to liberalism, of which this little book is a token, and their consequential decline has been well documented.

The text contains a number of gems, including descriptions of mid-Victorian chapel folk. Of Mrs Snale, a deacon’s wife, he writes she ‘was large and full faced…a woman I never saw moved to any generosity, and cruel, not with the ferocity of the tiger, but with the dull insensibility of the cart-wheel, which will roll over a man’s neck as easily as over a flint’.

During his abandonment of scriptural doctrine, Rev Rutherford says how he still used terms like redemption and atonement but watered down their meanings. We are ‘redeemed’ by loving each other; the innocent have always ‘shed their blood’ because of wrong, rather than focussing on Christ’s sacrificial shedding of blood on sinners’ behalf. Mr Snale, the deacon, tires of Rutherford’s heterodoxy and fabrication, endeavouring to relieve him of his ministry at the Congregational chapel.

Upon realising that he could no longer preach about grace and the supernatural, Rutherford moves to the liberal Unitarians, assuring himself thus:

‘There remained morals. I could become an instructor of morality. I could warn tradesmen not to cheat, children to honour their parents and people generally not to lie. The mission was noble, but I could not feel much enthusiasm for it, and more than this, it was fact that reformations in morals have never been achieved by mere directions to be good, but have always been a result of an enthusiasm for some City of God…’

Rutherford asks, as I do, for what purpose do theologically liberal and unbelieving clergy and churches exist? Why bother getting out of bed on a Sunday morning? Why bother turning up? Why be troubled by the expense of keeping them open? Mark Rutherfords can be found in many churches today. Their inoffensive moralising has a form of godliness, but it denies the power thereof.

James 1: 6 But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for he who doubts is like a wave of the sea driven and tossed by the wind. 7 For let not that man suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord; 8 he is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways.

Image by Sbringser from Pixabay