Some years back Carl Trueman opined that Thomas Goodwin's works were horribly edited for the 19th century edition that has been in print and that someone needs to go back to the original editions and start again. Congregationalists are not my thing. Anyone know of any plans to actually do that?
Well.... Congregationalists **ARE** my thing, but I have a newspaper to run and am spending far more time on the visible consequences of total depravity -- a real example in our county court is two lesbian mothers who killed their child by starving and suffocation, and just recently were both sentenced to life in prison -- than on the theological works defending that doctrine and explaining and proclaiming it.
(And yes, that story should have gotten national media attention, not just a few small town reporters following it, and I was the only one in the courtroom for sentencing since by the end, everyone else had lost interest in what our 70-year-old circuit judge said it was the worst child murder case he'd seen in his entire judicial career, or before that as a county prosecutor. Any idea why it didn't get more attention? /sarc )
While I think most of us understand why some topics don't get the attention they deserve, it's not necessarily as obvious why needed work doesn't get done on authors like Goodwin.
Here's why. (Or at least part of why.)
Doing the necessary work Carl Trueman said should be done on going back to the earlier editions of Goodwin is a big enough project that it needs a seminary professor with graduate assistants to help. It's not like there are a whole lot of Congregationalists teaching in Reformed seminaries. That's no criticism of Westminster Seminary, etc. -- Presbyterian seminaries **SHOULD** enforce confessional subscription for their professors -- but it leads to Congregationalists who might be interested in an academic career recognizing that unless they have the prestige of someone like David Wells, author of "No Place for Truth: Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology?" there is simply no future for a Reformed Congregationalist in academic life. Even then, they'll be teaching at places like Gordon-Conwell where most students are not Reformed and it's necessary to go over the basics, year after year, over and over again, rather than being able to build on a confessional foundation in which most students were raised in Reformed churches since childhood, or became highly committed to the Reformed faith as young adults.
The result is that people who might have gotten Th.M.s after their M.Div.s never do so, and therefore they don't even consider Ph.D. level work. In the modern world, men without Ph.D.s are not going to be considered at Reformed seminaries that are academically respectable and accredited apart from very unusual circumstances, apart (sometimes) for "practical theology" positions. Even then a D.Min. will usually be expected for a younger man though occasionally an older man with decades of experience in the pastorate might be hired to teach the practical aspects of church ministry.
I realize the Reformed Baptists will say, "Hey, we were in the same boat for at least half a century." Sort of, but not quite. The total number of Baptists is in the millions in North America. Reformed Baptists may not have controlled significant seminaries until Al Mohler and the takeover of Southern Seminary, but Reformed Baptists have always had a much larger number of people interested in their books and magazines simply because there were much larger numbers of Baptists. There was a built-in audience for Spurgeon and the histories of the Particular Baptist movement that just doesn't exist in the same numbers for any other Reformed group outside the Presbyterian and Dutch Reformed world.
A better question is this: There are far more Reformed Congregational churches today in the United States than there were in New England in 1648 when the Cambridge Synod was convened. There are far more Reformed Congregational churches than there were when Harvard was organized, and probably more than when Yale was organized. No, I'm not kidding. The total number of churches in the modern RCUS is about the same as the total number of Congregational churches in New England who drafted one of the two major Congregational confessional documents. Yes, it's true that the New England Congregational churches were much larger in membership than most modern RCUS churches or churches in other NAPARC denominations -- Congregational pastors in Puritan New England were normally preaching to audiences of many hundreds of people, or sometimes over a thousand people, and even rural churches were larger because of the need to have villages with sufficient population to defend themselves by force of arms if attacked -- but the total number of pastors wasn't a lot larger in early-to-mid 1600s Puritan New England.
Why aren't modern Reformed Congregationalists working to create something like the Reformed Baptists did with their Founders Conference? I don't have a good answer to that, but until something like that happens, problems are going to continue in Congregationalism that the Presbyterians, the Dutch Reformed, and the Baptists do not have.
I'm not interested in complaining without getting off my rear end and doing something, though there is not a lot that can be done here in the Ozarks. What I can do is publish and write.
For whatever it may be worth, my next project, which has been in the works for a couple of years, is to get the historic Waldensian Catechism and confessions (both pre-Reformation and post-Reformation) back into print with a historical introduction. To make any sense of the Waldensian catechism and confessions, people need to know who the Waldensians were, how most Waldensians came to accept the Reformed wing of the Reformation (some blended into the Hussites before the Reformation, and after the Reformation some ended up in Lutheranism), and what happened to the Waldensians during the great Réveil of the 1800s when missionaries from the Free Church of Scotland largely succeeded in restoring an emphasis on biblical authority and personal conversion to a group that, thanks largely to the liberalism of the Genevan Academy, was well down the road to the same problems that wrecked the German Reformed and the Swiss Reformed churches of Europe. Sadly, the story from the 1900s is largely the same as the story of the rest of the older mainline churches in Europe. The Waldensians were saved from the liberalism of the 1800s, but largely succumbed to the liberalism of the 1900s, though there are certainly still evangelical Waldensians out there and some are in quite important roles.
I wasn't aware of Dennison's project before Dr. Beeke published Dennison's four-volume work, but a number of key Waldensian documents are not in Dennison's book, and I think there is still value in getting this available in English.
I expect I'll also be reprinting my edition of the Cambridge Platform from the early 1990s since most of the texts currently available are using problematic later printings that introduced errors and don't go back to the original 1648 document, and then doing the same with the Savoy Declaration, which is a project I began in the late 1990s but never finished. Nobody would (or should) tolerate having multiple versions of the Westminster Confession and Catechisms in print that contain differences due to a long history of typographical errors without knowing what the Westminster Assembly actually produced, but that is a problem faced by Congregationalists thanks to a lack of interest in their confessional heritage in the mid-to-late 1800s, the period when the Presbyterians and Dutch Reformed and German Reformed were working to establish accurate texts of what the WCF, WSC, WLC, and Three Forms of Unity actually said, and in the case of the non-English confessions, to establish accurate translations into then-current English since the translations into English from the 1600s sometimes were not very good.
Folks, you all must realize the tension publishers have between books we'd LIKE to publish and books we think people will actually buy (and hopefully read). There are books I've published that are sitting in a storage unit. because they have not sold well. They're good books, but unfortunately didn't catch on with the buying public. And it's hard to have money tied up in project that wasn't one that caught on. All the titles mentioned here are good and worthy ones. Whether or not they will sell well still needs to be seen. It's too bad it comes down to a money issue, eh?
As Don Kistler points out on this thread (quoted above), publishers need to recognize that some good books don't generate a good bottom line. We're mostly if not entirely conservatives here on the Puritan Board, not only in doctrine but also in economics, and that means we understand that businesses, even "nonprofit" organizations, need to make a profit or at least break even.
With very small press runs in the hundreds, not thousands, I frankly don't care because I don't need to care.
But Kistler needs to care, and so do Banner of Truth, Reformation Heritage Books, and others. That's life and I don't blame them at all for doing what makes money and not doing what doesn't (or probably more accurately, using the money from things that sell well to pay for important things that need to be published but won't sell well).
I happen to have a major interest in Congregationalism and in Italian Calvinism -- and before people say there's no connection between the two, go tell that to Oliver Cromwell, who threatened to send the English Army to the gates of Turin and successfully intimidated the Duke of Savoy into stopping his persecution of the Waldensians. Not only that, Cromwell raised what in that era was a massive amount of English money to pay to resettle the Waldensians in their historic valleys after warfare had destroyed virtually all of the towns and fields in those valleys.
(Side point: Memory says it was 16,000 pounds that Cromwell raised, but that may be the amount left in England after the initial distribution to the Waldensians in the last years of Cromwell's reign, so I'd have to check to be sure. In any case, the "leftover" was enough to create an endowment fund for the Waldensians that was used to pay pastors and schoolteachers, and remained important well into the 1700s and still exists today, though today the distributions are only a token amount thanks to runaway inflation of the 1800s and the early 1900s and lack of what we would today call "investment vehicles" for liquid assets, or the cadre of professional asset managers that we now take for granted with endowments. Back then church endowments were usually fixed assets of land. If the assets were in cash, inflation could quickly destroy them, and the same with investments in land that became unprofitable for agriculture. Nothing like the modern stock market and relatively safe long-term investments that can be expected to appreciate over time if managed properly.)
Most people don't have that interest in Italian Calvinism, which today is all but unknown in the English-speaking world, and not much better known in Italy.
I understand that.
If people stop shooting each other in my county for long enough that I can write about something other than crimes, I hope to have the Waldensian work done before the end of the year -- but I have been saying that now for about two years with a draft text sitting on my computer for close to three years, so we'll see what happens, or not.
What I guess I'm really trying to say with all this is simple -- if you are Presbyterian or Dutch Reformed, **DO NOT TAKE THE WORK OF YOUR SEMINARIES AND PUBLISHING HOUSES FOR GRANTED!!!!!!**
Many people in the Reformed world would love to have even a tiny fraction of the support structure that Presbyterians and Dutch Reformed have for what they do. The Reformed Baptists know what it's like to have to start with very little, but they've done great work over the last half-century or so.
As for the rest of us -- well, let's just say a lot of people outside the "big boys" wish there were even one seminary or publishing house serving their denomination or group of churches.
