Dr. John Kennedy
An excerpt from John MacLeod's Scottish Theology in Relation to Church
History
There was one of Hugh Martin's intimate friends that we
cannot at all pass by without a special notice. He was the great preacher of
his generation in Scotland. This was John Kennedy of Dingwall. He remained to
the end of his ministry in the charge which first called him. This was in the
county town of a Highland shire far from the busy cities of the country. It was
his own choice to stay where he began his work until his sun went down.
He
was repeatedly approached with a view to taking city charges. Though he
laboured in a provincial town his reputation was national. Dr. Kennedy was a
truly great divine. In doctrine he was clear and powerful and at the same time
practical. He was tender and judicious in his application of his message and he
was an experimental divine in the best sense of the word. The great Puritans
had no more eminent successor in the Scottish ministry in the 19th century.
There is a book of his sermons to tell of the quality of his preaching. It
is a massive volume and has been issued more than once, but it is exceedingly
scarce. In it there are over 50 of his discourses. Almost all of these were
written in the last year of his life when he was labouring under the malady
that cut him off. His old hearers as a rule insist that the written sermons
would not compare with his preached ones. Of course, when they were preached
there was to he taken into account the impact upon his hearers of the
preacher's striking personality and style and the reflex impact of his audience
upon the preacher. But the written discourses, set down with the deliberate
judgment of his fine mind, give us the doctrine, practice, and experience that
the preacher meant to lay stress upon. The English style has a decided
distinction of its own. The inversion of sentences and the epigrams that often
occur are marked features of it.
The preacher was a special master in the
realm of delicate spiritual analysis. In this respect he was even more striking
than was his contemporary and friend, Dr. Moody Stuart, who, with Dr. Charles
J. Brown, was looked upon as the most outstanding preacher of the introspective
school in the contemporary Edinburgh pulpit. To say that they belonged to this
school does not at all mean that they were one-sidedly subjective in their
themes. They were eminent Evangelical and exegetical preachers who gave,
however, a considerable place in their preaching not only to the doctrines of
grace, but to the discussion of the inward work of Divine grace; and thus it
fell to them to handle cases of conscience that their hearers might have in
regard to the reality and value of their experience of the Gospel. They were
men sent to bind up the brokenhearted, but they probed the cases with which
they dealt.
The fact that Dr. Kennedy was critical at the same time of the
type of doctrine preached by Mr. Dwight L. Moody and of the enquiry room
methods in dealing with the anxious to which he gave vogue told against his own
popularity. He himself, however, was clear as to his duty to sound a warning
note. For his criticism was aimed at what he felt convinced was an undesirable
novelty in Scottish religious life. Yet, as the time was one of unusual
excitement, this criticism created prejudice and nothing could well be further
from the mark than the counter criticism which it elicited that dared to say
that he himself did not preach the offer of the Gospel. This charge was without
a foundation, for no man in his generation made conscience more than he did of
proclaiming as the Gospel a message that was as full as it was free and as free
as it was full.
It was, however, the day of ebb-tide and the definite
out-and-out Calvinism of another day was going out of fashion and yielding
place to a presentation of the Gospel which, without being pronouncedly
Arminian, avoided the emphasis which the older Evangelicals laid on the New
Birth as a Divine intervention. This modified message put its emphasis on the
need the sinner has of forgiveness to the eclipse of the equally urgent need
that he has of regeneration. It stressed the rectifying of his standing and did
not give sufficient prominence to his need of a change of heart. In this
connection the newer Evangelicalism said less of the Spirit and His work and of
the provision made in Christ for a walk in newness of life than did the fuller
message which brought home as equally urgent the need of having a man's nature
renewed with that of having acceptance for his person.
With this change of
emphasis or balance there came to be an insistent demand for such Conventions
and Conferences as that of Keswick which sometimes wisely and sometimes
unwisely set forth the provision that the Gospel has made for believers in
Christ that they may have needed strength and power for a life and walk
becoming the name that they profess. Like his friend Hugh Martin, Dr. Kennedy
was a man of the Maclaurin type. Only he was much more richly endowed with the
gifts of the orator which enabled him to play upon his audience almost at his
will. He was the greatest of them, yet only one of the succession of the
Evangelical worthies to the north of the Grampians.
In his generation there
was a galaxy of great Evangelists, who were also good divines, in the Highlands
of Scotland. The life of some of these has been sketched by friendly hands, yet
no satisfactory detailed account can now be given of their services in the
Gospel. The men of that generation in the northern region were in the
succession to a series of excellent predecessors who were champions of the
Reformed Faith there during the ascendancy of the Moderates and even before the
time of that regime from the days of the Covenanter, Thomas Hog, downwards.
Sermons and Other Works
The Secret of
the Lord
Things to be Pondered
Lecture on the 4th Commandment
A
Precious Heritage
The White-Robed Multitude
A Precious Heritage
Blessed Are They That Mourn
The Smitten Shepherd and His Flock
Life
of John Kennedy by Alexander Auld
Expository Lectures
The Days of the
Fathers in Ross-shire
Man's Relations to God
The Saviour
The Lord's
Day (combined with Thomas Boston)
The Days of the Fathers in Ross-shire
The Apostle of the North
Man's Relation to God
Expository Lectures
The Saviour
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