This post is the first in a new “bicentenary series”, marking 200 years of the Christian Brethren movement. Although several inauguration dates could have been chosen (the subject of a future post in the series), it was in 1825 that a small group of Christians began meeting in a private house in Dublin to study the Bible and break bread together. This gathering grew into the Christian Brethren movement, known for its emphasis on biblical authority and rejection of formal church hierarchies.
We begin with a guest post about John Nelson Darby, one of the movement’s founders, written by Professor Crawford Gribben, the author of J.N. Darby and the roots of dispensationalism. All quoted material is part of the Christian Brethren Archive.
Crawford Gribben writes:
John Nelson Darby (1800-1882) is often regarded as one of the most influential protestant theologians – but, if his life had been happier, he might never have become so widely known. Today, Darby’s reputation depends upon his role in developing a system of theology that is widely shared across much of the global community of 600 million evangelicals. Dispensational premillennialism, as this system of theology is known, proposes a reading of the Bible that divides the history of redemption into multiple stages, arguing that God’s promises to the Jewish people will be fulfilled literally and on earth, while God’s promises to Christians will be fulfilled spiritually and, ultimately, in heaven. Darby pulled these convictions into a narrative of the end times that argued that true Christians would suddenly disappear from the earth in an event that came to be described as “the rapture”; that the rapture would begin a short period in which prophecies relating to the Jewish people would again begin to be fulfilled in a period that came to be known as “the tribulation”; that this re-starting of the prophetic clock would result in the re-establishment of Temple worship in the promised land, followed by a rebellion against God led by the antichrist, and the pouring out of catastrophic divine judgement upon the earth; that this tribulation would end with the return of Jesus Christ, the resurrection of the just, the judgement of the wicked, the binding of Satan and his minions for one thousand years, the millennium, a final rebellion against the Messiah, and the inauguration of the eternal state.
Darby’s role in the development of this narrative is disputed – and, given his disdain for democracy and his opposition to electoral participation, he cannot be associated with the political causes with which a number of his key ideas have been identified. His mind – at least as far as his private writings reveal it – was more often on humbler concerns. “Do you happen to know what became of a very large rough greatcoat I had?” he once asked his friend and patron, the biblical scholar G. V. Wigram; “I want to give it to Reston for his knees in the railway.” [1] Wigram’s reply was telling: “I remember a rough shaggy great coat of yours which hung for a year in the cupboard on the landing place, by our bedroom door, & was then moved to the passage where the wash basin is … & remained there 2 years … you said it might be given to … the one legged man … in Rawston Street.”[2]
The curious case of Darby’s missing greatcoat revealed a great deal about his life in the early 1850s. By this stage, his friends believed, he was a confirmed bachelor. Rumours circulated that he had been engaged to Lady Theodosia Powerscourt, in whose rather stately county Wicklow home in the early 1830s earnest protestants had debated the signs of the times. Darby had been a curate in a Church of Ireland parish that was closely connected to the Powerscourt estate, and there is no doubt that he and Lady Powerscourt had a close friendship, to the extent that Darby preserved manuscript copies of her letters into his later life. Significantly, perhaps, it was only after her very early death, in 1836, that he threw himself into missionary life, initially in France and Switzerland and later in Italy, Germany and the Netherlands, then in Canada and the United States, and, towards the end of his long life, in New Zealand and Australia. As a single man, almost constantly on the move, it was not until his last years that Darby had a home of his own. He stayed with brethren families when he could, and in guesthouses when he could not, while Wigram kept a room for him in London, and looked after his not-very-well-organised library. Darby itinerated on behalf of the religious movement with which he came to be identified – which came to be nicknamed the “Plymouth Brethren.” It was through this missionary work that the brethren moved from being a coterie, to a network, to an international community. He threw his life into this movement, defining many of its key ideas, and defending those ideas when they became the subject of rancorous debate. These debates produced division. Yet it was only after the brethren movement divided, in the late 1840s, that Darby’s capacity as a theological writer became evident. The division allowed him to share fellowship with a smaller but more like-minded religious community. As the weight of debate lifted from his shoulders, he gave himself to more programmatic scholarly ventures – translations of the New Testament or the entire Bible into French, German and English; a full Bible commentary; a sequence of publications defending the Christian faith from contemporary attacks; together with poetry, hymns, and hundreds upon hundreds of letters.
Darby’s search for his missing greatcoat took place as he found himself among the principal leaders of the emerging network of brethren in the years immediately following the movement’s division. The “exclusive” brethren with whom Darby was identified contested the theological breadth of the movement’s earliest phase and organised themselves in defence of catholic orthodoxy. The new community might have benefitted from aristocratic leadership, but it drew into its fellowship many of the less fortunate, including the disabled man who met with the brethren in their meeting room in Rawston Street, London. Yet, for all his stature within this movement, and despite his extremely respectable family background and excellent social connections, Darby was not a wealthy man. His tendency to give away large sums of money saw to that. His attitudes to finance were similar to those of many other brethren. “I know of none now rich among us unless Wakefield and Lord C[ongleton],” Darby noted in 1849. “Sir Ed[ward] Denny is Irish in fortune, which in these times means being pretty much without any.”[3] Like Darby’s greatcoat, brethren fortunes were to be put at the disposal of the poor.
There was a pattern to these events: Darby was made by his misfortunes. The death of Lady Powerscourt may have launched Darby into the missionary career that did so much to turn the brethren into an international movement. So too the division of the brethren may have enabled Darby to develop and more clearly articulate his distinctive ideas. Certainly a number of those who looked to him for leadership believed this to be the case.
Reflecting on the twists and turns of providence, Darby understood that he had benefitted from the challenges of his life: “There is nothing that tends to keep the soul of a saint in such a healthy condition as he ought to be in order to manifest Christ, but trouble of some kind or other.”[4] Everything mattered in the service of Jesus Christ: “Nothing is really degrading which is done for him.”[5] For the meaning of a Christian’s life could be understood only in retrospect. After all, Darby understood, it is only “after He has passed by, [that] one sees all the beauty of His ways.”[6]
[1] J.N. Darby’s letter to G.V. Wigram, 26 January 1852, CBA, GVW/1/212
[2] G.V. Wigram’s letter to J.N. Darby, 28 January 1852, CBA, GVW/1/213
[3] J.N. Darby’s letter to G.V. Wigram, 9 December 1849, CBA, GVW/1/115
[4] [J.N. Darby], “Notes of the meeting of brethren at Guelph, Ontario, Wednesday, September 29, 1869,” Miscellaneous writings of J.N.D. , vol. 5 (Oak Park, IL: Bible Truth Publishers, n.d.), p. 209
[5] “On Christian ministry,” The Christian Witness 1 (1832), p. 3
[6] John Nelson Darby, Synopsis of the Bible, 1: 116.
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I didn’t know the story of the Greatcoat prior to reading this although I was aware of JND’s extraordinary empathy toward the poor, one of the endearing qualities of this many also known for his faults. Thanks for sharing this story.