Sadler on the Gospel

Rich Lusk of the Auburn Avenue Presbyterian Church in Monroe, LA, put me onto the works of M.F. Sadler, a late 19th-century Anglican theologian, and I’ve been very impressed with what I’ve found there. For example: In the first chapter of his Church Doctrine, Bible Truth , Sadler points out that the “gospel” as described in the NT is a set of facts centering on the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus. He then asks how this gospel is best set before the people of God “under the form in which it always appears in Scripture.” The “method,” he suggests is through “embodying [the gospel] in her yearly round of Fast and Festival,” which involves the yearly round of the lectionary. He pointedly argues that “no form of public prayer or liturgy, or any directory of public worship, or any mode of conducting public worship without form or liturgy, can be accounted Scriptural unless it similarly recognizes these days and seasons, for no other way is now possible for setting forth in the public services of the Church the historical aspect of the Gospel which, as we have seen, is the only one maintained in Scripture.” Through a church year and a lectionary, “we soberly and reverently connect the very passage of time with the great facts of Redemption. The year in its silent course preaches the very Gospel of Scripture.”

Reformation “sects” that do not keep a calendar “equally flung to the winds the great outward facts of Redemption as the evidences of God’s good will to the sinner, and substituted for them the evidence of inward personal experience.” While such Protestants have certainly not denied the facts of the gospel, “they substituted other considerations for the evangelical application of these facts.” Thus, instead of inspiring Christian joy by proclaiming the fact of the incarnation, they attempt to bring about joy by “such doctrines as effectual calling, sensible conversion, imputed righteousness, and final perseverance.” Gee, I wonder what “sects” he’s talking about?

He makes a couple of other telling observations: First, “no setting forth of certain abstract doctrines, no matter how true or needful, can if we submit to the guided by Scripture, be substituted for the facts which are set forth in Scripture as the gospel.” We should not treat the narratives of the gospels as if they were some dispensable husk, within which was the nourishing doctrinal grain of Atonement theology. As he points out, the balance in Scripture is on the STORY of Jesus’ sufferings, not on a theology of atonement, and that must be the balance of the church’s life and preaching. Second, contemplation on the doctrines apart from the facts produces “a Christian character very different from that which God desires to see in His children.” Exclusive concentration on doctrine produces evangelical character, but it “is certainly not humble, not for-bearing, not forgiving, not peaceable, not childlike, not unobtrusive.” Finally, “If in the preceding pages I have given a fair representation of what is in the Bible and the Prayer-book, then the Prayer-book is incomparably more Scriptural than such documents as the ‘Westminster Confession,’ or Calvin’s ‘Institutes;’ and this quite apart from the truth or falsehood of any particular doctrinal statements contained in these books, for in these books Christianity is cast into a different form altogether from what we find it in the Bible.”

So again I ask, Gee, what Protestant sects is he referring to?