COLLECTED WRITINGS OF JOHN MURRAY
Volume one, The Claims of Truth, 1977 Volume two, Select Lectures in Systematic Theology, 1978 Volume three, Life of John Murray, Sermons and Reviews, 1983.
Published by The Banner of Truth Trust, Edinburgh, Scotland, and Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
The labors of some men come to be more widely appreciated after their death than they were during their lifetime. It is possible that this may turn out to be true of John Murray and that these collections of his writings may help to make it so. The professor of Systematic Theology at Philadelphia’s Westminster Theological Seminary from 1937 to 1966 produced a few books during his long teaching career. The foremost among them were Redemption: Accomplished and Applied (1955), Principles of Conduct (1957) and Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (Vol. I, 1959; Vol. 2, 1965). Before he died in 1975 plans were made to publish also a volume of his other writings. When these were examined they were found to contain so much valuable material that the single volume turned out to be four, of which the third has just appeared.
Why should we, in our rapidly changing world, study the writings of one who left the U.S. seventeen-years ago to return to his farm birth–place in the north of Scotland and died in 1975? The preface to the first volume of these collected writings (p. xii) suggests an answer. “Professor Murray was best known in the English-speaking world for the ability and scholarship with which, unmoved by contemporary fashions, he exegeted Scripture and presented Christian doctrine as one who was in spiritual succession to the leading Reformed expositors of earlier generations.”
Many of us in the Christian Reformed ministry studied Christian doctrine under Professor Louis Berkhof. In his presentation there were “proof-texts” in abundance and also plenty of careful scholarship, but the obvious emphasis lay on the systematic organization of the material. It is evident that in Professor Murray’s dealing with the same material, he, rather than stressing the system, tended, like John Calvin, to begin with the relevant Scripture passages and to develop the various doctrines as the result of that exegetical study. As we live in a time when there is widespread questioning of all traditions, and a rather common contempt for systems, we are being compelled to ask, “What has God said?” Few if any can give us as much help in answering that question, as did John Calvin and John Murray.
Volume I of this collection begins with a section on study of the Bible. Professor Murray pointed out the value of study of catechisms and creeds. “We do well to peruse our great catechisms and creeds and textbooks and not be carried away by the pedagogical mush to which we are in these days subjected” (p. 7). Yet he especially urged study of the Bible, for it rather than the creeds is the inspired Word of God. “Our devotion to a tradition is wholesome only when we recognize in that tradition, not the authority of the fathers, but the authority of God’s Word. Apart from the recognition of divine authority, all our religious devotion is abomination in the sight of God” (p. 7).
Successive brief articles deal with the infallability, finality and sufficiency and unity which the Bible teaches us to recognize in itself. A group of articles deal with Christ, another with Westminster Theological Seminary, and the one following that with the gospel and its proclamation. There are series of writings on the Christian life and on the moral law with some special attention given the Lord’s day. Another series deals with the church and the one following that with history since the Reformation. A final set of articles treats issues in the contemporary world such as creation, war, the Christian world order, and Christian education.
The Second Volume, on Systematic Theology, has a section on the doctrine of man, one on common grace and a series on the achievement of salvation and its application to man. One section deals with sanctification, another with the Church and a final section treats the last things.
The Third Volume begins with a 155 page account of the life of John Murray which the editor, lain H. Murray, expanded from his previous biography printed in the summer of 1975 double issue of the Banner of Truth magazine. We are acquainted with John Murray’s boyhood in the north of Scotland, his part in the First World War in which he lost an eye and then his theological training at the old Princeton Seminary.
John had taken his seminary training as a preparation to enter the gospel ministry of his church. Having brilliantly completed the course he looked forward to ordination, only to find that at that point the right to preach in his denomination’s churches was denied to him. A minister had been disciplined because he could not in good conscience deny the Lord’s Supper to members who used public transportation to get to church. When John Murray, whose own strict views of the Lord’s Day were well-known, felt compelled on the basis of Scripture to agree with him, he too was barred from ordination. In the Lord’s Providence this exclusion from the pastorate led to his accepting an invitation to teach systematic theology at Princeton and a year later to begin a career of such teaching at Westminster Theological Seminary which would extend over 35 years. In 1937 be was ordained as an Orthodox Presbyterian minister.
Professor Murray was single through the years of his teaching. Only on his retirement to his birth-place at age sixty-eight, did he marry Dr. Valerie Knowlton, whom he had come to know over a dozen years before, and then become the father of two children. The activities of his last 8 years in Scotland involved him in a good deal of speaking and preaching, including, not least, the beginning of a Christian school movement, with his own son attending such a school at Dornoch. In this connection, his ecumenical convictions are very significant. His loyalty to the Bible as God’s Word forbad him to press for anything less than commitment to the “whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:27). At the same time, he cooperated with others who shared that commitment such as D. M. Lloyd-Jones, in the Intervarsity Fellowship activities, participated from the beginning in the Banner of Truth Trust , and spoke at and led the Leicester Ministers’ Conferences. In his view “the fellowship and co-operation of Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Baptists of reformed persuasion ‘on the basis of a common confession and declared objectives without giving up their differences on such questions as government and baptism,’ was ‘an affiliation in the direction of the unity which is demanded of the body of Christ’” (p. 134). In this connection, he advised inviting AI Martin, a Reformed Baptist, to preach at the conferences.
The remainder of the volume includes 19 sermons, some writings on the Lord’s Supper and 28 selected book reviews. (A number of later reviews which appeared in the Westminster Theological Journals after 1953 are scheduled for inclusion in Volume Four.) The reader should not overlook the value of Murray’s book reviews. I have read some of Murray’s extensive reviews of the books of Dr. C. G. Berkouwer, for example, which appeared to be more perceptive and useful than the massive work of that disappointing Reformed scholar. It would be hard to praise many of these brief and clear writings of Murray too highly . His careful, conscientious discussion and application of the Bible’s teaching to current questions and problems is unsurpassed-just the opposite from some of the 60 or 80-page reports that have helped to confuse our churches. Anyone who is puzzled about the Bible’s teaching regarding “offices” in the church will learn more from Dr. Murray’s careful 8-page treatment of the subject for the Reformed Ecumenical Synod (Volume Two, pp. 357–365) than he will from struggling through the 69-page report in the C.R. Synod’s Acts of 1972 (pp. 419ff) and the enlarged 81-page report in the Acts of 1973 (pp. 635ff.), neither of which the successive–synods of those years could accept as given because of the committee’s stubborn refusal to consider the Bible’s plain teaching about authority. I can think of no writings beside the Bible itself that can be more helpful to the conscientious young preacher groping his way through today’s theological and social jungle than those of John Murray, a humble man of God providentially diverted from becoming a regular preacher into becoming a teacher of preachers.