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The life of Arthur Pink

God's loner

THE LIFE OF ARTHUR PINK
By Iain H. Murray
Banner of Truth. 350 pages. ?13.50
ISBN 0 85151 883 4

How do you evaluate the success of a Christian life? Reading the Bible through more than 50 times, sometimes ten chapters a day?

Writing a total of 20,000 letters (by hand!) to Christian friends and enquirers after the faith? Studying for and writing 2,000 expository articles on biblical topics? Publishing a struggling Bible study magazine for years, with no more than a few hundred worldwide subscribers? Preaching in England, America and Australia until no churches would receive that ministry? Reluctance to become a regular member of any Christian church and observing the Lord's Day for years privately at home? Do you judge this man's Christian life a success?

Or do you judge him by the fact that 'his influence circles the globe and today a mighty host of preachers of various denominations are using his materials and preaching to congregations large and small, the truths he mined from the Word of God' (John Thornbury). Arthur Pink was certainly a complex character, but in this revised and enlarged edition of a previous biography, Iain writes of him with a gentle and sensitive understanding which makes the book a joy to read - one Christian believer writing of another, aware that they both sit at the foot of the same cross.

After his rescue from spiritism and his conversion, many of Pink's difficulties surely arose from the popular theological errors taught in various churches of his time - arminianism, hyper-Calvinism, easy-believism, dispensationalism. He preached with a heart of love that such errors should be exposed and corrected for the spiritual good of those churches. And surely the responsibility for some of the complexity of his character must be borne by their cold rejection of his ministry which clashed with the burning passion of his devotion to Bible truth and led to to the unpopular bluntness of his words.

Was he a candlestick the Lord removed from the unhealthy churches of that time, in divine displeasure? Is it not wonderful that the Lord graciously preserved his ministry in writing for a subsequent time? Was it not the goodness of God that truths Pink loved were to be preserved? The book compels such questions of us, challenging our faithfulness today.

John Appleby,
retired Grace Baptist missionary now worshipping with a group of believers seeking to reach out into a large housing estate in Shrewsbury