The Christology Of Adolphe Monod

By Antoine Theron

Adolphe Monod is ranked with his brother Frederic and the more famous César Malan as leading figures in the nineteenth century revival of Reformed theology in France and Switzerland, the so-called Réveil. He is also widely regarded as possibly the most accomplished French preacher of the nineteenth century. [1] But it is neither for his role in drawing the Reformed churches of French-speaking Europe back to their Scriptural moorings nor for his preaching that Monod is remembered today. The name Adolphe Monod is today particularly associated with experimental piety and the doctrine of Christian living.

Monod allowed profound and involved doctrines of Scripture to resonate not only in powerful preaching, but also in practical, intelligent godliness. It is Monod’s handling of one such doctrine, the doctrine of the nature and work of Christ, that will be investigated in the course of this short study. Monod seemed always able to translate the somewhat abstract propositions of Christology into simple and urgent truths for Christian piety. This paper will show how this godly preacher of the Réveil perceived the interconnectedness of the doctrines of Christ, of Scripture, and of Christian living.

Due to the dearth of secondary scholarly material on Monod’s theology in English, much reliance was placed on his extensive correspondence and on his most widely known work, Les Adieux. [2] Les Adieux contains the short sermons given by Monod to the circle of believers that assembled around his sickbed on Sundays through 1855 and 1856 while he was dying of liver cancer. [3] The work has been described as “among the most fragrant pages ever recorded by those who have reached the borders of Immanuel’s land and who see the Christian life and its duties in that perspective.” [4]

The Divinity Of Christ

In the early nineteenth century, French-speaking Reformed churches in Europe were in a process of assimilation and compromise with Enlightenment rationalism and, to a lesser extent, nineteenth-century romanticism. [5] Preachers were attempting to reconcile their teachings with the ideas of moral progress and reason current in Enlightenment Europe, even at the price of a wholesale departure from the orthodox teachings of a divine Christ and an inspired Scripture.

Abandoning fundamental theological notions only provided short-term relief from cultural and intellectual pressures. As Kipling warned, “Once you have paid him the Dane-geld, you never get rid of the Dane.” And liberal concessions did not succeed in stabilizing the tottering prestige of Reformed theologians in France and Switzerland. A satire on the sad state of theology and the condition of the Compagnie des Pasteurs of Geneva was written in the latter half of the eighteenth century by Jean Jacques Rousseau: “One asks the preachers of the Genevan church if Jesus Christ is God — and they do not dare to answer. One asks them which miracles they accept — and they do not dare to answer. A philosopher casts a quick glance at them, and looks through them, and recognizes them as Arians and Socinians.”

And then Rousseau addresses the citizens of Geneva: “Behold your distinguished preachers! One knows not what they believe, nor what they do not believe!” [6]

A summary of the state of Reformed theology in early nineteenth century France and Switzerland is given by the French historian Vincent in his Du Protestantisme en France [7]: “The preachers preached; the people listened to them; the consistories met; the worship services maintained their outward form. But for the rest, no one was involved in these matters, nobody was concerned about them; and religion stood outside the life of all.” This description, says Van der Zwaag, was as true of the church in Geneva as of the church in France. [8]

Algra gives a sorrowful diagnosis of the anemic Christology taught by the theological faculty of Geneva in the nineteenth century: “The official theological science denied the Trinity and the Divinity of Christ. By 1820 theological education in the city of Calvin was more extremely leftist than anywhere else in Europe” [9] (my translation).

A climate more favorable to orthodox Christology was brought about largely through the zeal of foreigners. A significant, if remote, influence was the German Moravian leader Count Zinzendorf. Zinzendorf visited Geneva near the middle of the eighteenth century and organized a Pietist group. This circle of devout believers was still active in 1810 and became the backbone of a recovering Pietist movement in Geneva that was joined also by students from the seminary. The Methodist Richard Wilcox, visiting Geneva in 1816, made a more recent impression.

But it was the Scottish lay preacher Robert Haldane who was most directly responsible for rekindling orthodox religion in Geneva. At the time of Haldane’s arrival in 1816, writes Monod’s daughter, “the darkness of Arian and Pelagian error had almost quenched the light of truth.” [10] Haldane befriended some of the students and started a series of orthodox lectures, for example, on Paul’s letter to the Romans, in competition with the seminary, setting forth “the divine truths which their teachers denied.” [11] What the teachers of Geneva held to as careful positions of informed theology, such as the original purity of man and the nature of the Savior as the first of the created beings, Haldane vigorously opposed as “errors and blasphemies.” [12]

The ministry of Haldane not only prodded those already in the ministry like César Malan and Louis Gaussen to a fuller orbed orthodoxy, but shaped students such as Merle d’Aubigné, Adolphe’s brother Frederic Monod, and indirectly Monod himself.

In Geneva the century-old hegemony of rationalist theology would increasingly be challenged by orthodox theologians. Within decades Haldane’s lectures had caused ripples throughout French-speaking Europe.13 This Spirit-wrought assault on the gates of liberal theology was soon reverberating in the mind of Adolphe Monod, who had just completed his theological studies in Geneva and was pastoring a French-speaking congregation in Rome.

By 1825 the young pastor Monod was troubled by what he described as the insufficiency of the religious faculties in Geneva’s teachings regarding sin, Christ, and Scripture. In a letter to a pastor in Paris he complained that the Company of Geneva were “not insisting sufficiently on the corruption of man, on the necessity of an entire change in his nature, and on the divine and infallible authority of Holy Scripture...and finally not dwelling enough upon Jesus Christ, upon the love that we owe to Him, upon His example, upon His work of redemption, so incomprehensible, yet so plainly and frequently set forth in the New Testament.” [14]

Monod insisted that truth, if really believed, had to touch the soul. He was frustrated by the fact that often even when pastors did consent to the vigorous orthodox teachings of the divine nature of Christ and Scripture, it seemed like lip-service rather than transforming truths appropriated in the depths of one’s being. “It is true that the pastors to whom I refer preach sometimes on these subjects; but even then it is more like a sort of concession to orthodoxy than like matters which they apply to themselves and wish to apply to their hearers: and they seem to acknowledge certain doctrines rather than to feel them.” [15]

But Monod’s progress toward embracing the full divinity of Christ was following a winding road. He vacillated between the Christ of Arianism and the divine Christ of orthodoxy. By 1826 he was approaching orthodox theology eclectically, hoping that he could hold to an orthodox view of Scripture without an orthodox view of the divine nature of Christ. “I find orthodoxy in the gospel,” he said, “except as regards the nature of Jesus Christ. On this point the gospel is neither Arian nor orthodox; it decides nothing.” [16]

But within a year Monod saw the root of his own error. “I am in a state of confusion and sin.... One should be dependent; I wished to be independent. I wished to make religion for myself, instead of receiving it from God.” [17] A divine Christ and a divine Scripture, he would increasingly realize, presupposed each other, even as sacrificial redemption by the blood of Christ demanded a divine substitute bearing the wrath of God against the sin of man.

By 1829 Adolphe Monod, since 1828 minister of the Eglise Réformée in Lyons, France, could not downplay the centrality of the teaching of the sacrificial atonement by a divine Christ in either his own thought or his preaching. Such Christology soon met with resistance in the congregation of Lyon: “The 19th of April (Easter-day) I preached a sermon, in which I showed that no one can die in peace, until he believes in free pardon through the blood of Jesus Christ. This sermon gave great offence, especially to the Consistory.... On the 5th of June the Consistory decided that my presence in the Church was doing harm, and that I should be requested to resign.” [18] This sermon was followed by others of similar content, and set in motion a chain of events which swiftly issued in Monod’s removal from office by civil government. [19]

It is noteworthy that in his controversial sermon in Lyons in 1829 Monod was not content to merely speculate upon the nature of Christ and His work in an abstract way. Abstract Christology without direct personal implications would have caused little offence to his post-Enlightenment French church members. But the doctrine of the person and work of Christ had urgent, eternal, personal consequences: No one could die in peace unless he believed it. It was this unavoidable and existential bearing of Christological doctrine which Monod always maintained. He was letting the warm rays of the various truths of Christology fall through the magnifying glass of God’s written and preached Word upon the soul of every listener and reader. For Monod, the focal point of the doctrine of the person and work of Christ was thus a burning issue for every soul on earth. Whereas one could still neglect a non-divine Christ, as all great moral teachers have to suffer some neglect, without incurring damnation, and whereas the doctrine of a non-divine Christ leaves man to approach God on man’s terms rather than strictly God’s, a divine Christ affords no room for comfort. Reconciliation with God through the atoning sacrifice of a divine Christ meant that salvation was entirely on God’s terms. The consequences of believing or rejecting the divine Scriptures’ teaching of the bloody sacrifice of a divine Christ were therefore eternal, and no one could die in peace unless he believed it. Of course it was this acutely personal dimension to such doctrines which Monod’s worldly congregation in Lyons resented.

At the end of his career, when Monod was giving his Sunday Scripture meditations from his sickbed, his conviction in the deity of Christ had solidified into a firm pillar of his faith: “Jesus Christ is God, and yet Jesus Christ is man, really and truly man, truly and fully God.” [20] He maintained that whatever progress he had made in the Christian life had been the result of rejecting his former opinions of the nature of Christ, and of learning to worship Jesus Christ as his Savior and his God. [21] On his sickbed he was careful to stress this fact, adding that “if, in the last moments of my life, my illness should keep me from bearing him this witness, I want it to be known that I bear it to him here.” [22]

Monod contemplated the implication of John 20:28, 1 John 5:20, Romans 9:5, and John 5:23 and remarked “I confess that in Jesus Christ I behold my God. I bow before him with Thomas, saying, “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28).” [23] And therefore he was aware of his duty as a believer toward Christ his God “to live in communion with Jesus Christ and in the peace of Jesus Christ, praying to him, waiting upon him, speaking to him, listening to him...in short, bear constant witness to Him day and night.” To Christ was due the worship that man owed to God alone. So high was the service which Monod rendered to Christ as God that he was very conscious that he would be guilty of “idolatry if he were not God, and God in the highest and most unique meaning.” [24]

Like Calvin, Monod was later in his life eager to push the divine identity of Christ beyond what more hesitant Trinitarian theologians would do. He was outspoken in identifying Christ not only with the New Testament claim “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” but also with the Old Testament names “I am,” “I am that I am,” “Jehovah” and “the Lord God Almighty.” And in a statement demonstrating how he often sought for the glorious truths of the person and work of Christ to enlighten his life of piety, Monod immediately adds: “That is what Jesus Christ is and what he is for me.” [25]

Christ And Scripture

It would be fair to say that development of Monod’s view of the nature of Christ and of the nature of Scripture from beginning to end illustrated his journey from a liberal Reformed position to thorough orthodoxy. From his father he received the liberal religious disposition profoundly influenced by Enlightenment thinking [26] which equipped him to start his studies at Geneva confidently enough. He was soon faced with the struggle between liberal and orthodox theologies, however, and many of his casual liberal assumptions were soon showing cracks under the pressure. [27] For long Monod sought safety in a middle-of-the-road course. [28] But he was undeniably intrigued by the views of orthodox figures such as Thomas Erskine [29] and Louis Gaussen, and as he proceeded towards orthodoxy his contact with them grew into one of friendship and admiration. [30] He later addressed from his deathbed grateful letters to Gaussen and Erskine. [31]

Monod was always impressed by the personal piety of those who held to orthodoxy: “If you did but know how much I am disposed to orthodoxy! There is in these people a seriousness, a zeal, a devotion, a firm conviction, which impresses me, which makes me doubt my own piety, puts to shame my coldness, and makes me fear that I am in error.” [32] At the same time he was reluctant to embrace orthodox viewpoints for any “human considerations” such as the seriousness and conviction of its adherents. Always whatever advances he made was the result of an intense intellectual struggle over matters religious. [33]

A turning point, partly through the influence of Thomas Erskine and Louis Gaussen, came on July 21, 1826. On this day “the sun broke through” for the despondent Monod. [34] He wrote that whereas previously he had been “without God and burdened with my own well being,” now he had “a God who carries the burden for me. That is enough for me.” According to Walker, Monod had now been “born of the Spirit, and a new life began for him.” [35]

The more mature piety of Monod proceeded from an intellectual grasp of the truths taught in Scripture. Increasingly he realized that the only true Christianity was the Christianity based on the system of orthodox beliefs. [36] Most important among these was the divinity of Christ, the inspiration of Scripture, [37] original sin, and total depravity. [38]

In the year preceding his conversion, Monod gave evidence of what might be described as a certain obsession with the Scripture itself, rather than the theological literature which passed as pious knowledge of the liberal age. His conversations with Thomas Erskine convinced him of the importance of diligent study of the Holy Scripture. [39] He called studying the Bible “my first occupation as well as my first duty,” turning to the original Hebrew and Greek whenever possible. [40]

He became convinced that if truth was to be found on this earth, it could only be through God’s revelation, praying: “Therefore, trusting in Thee, and uncertain only as to the time when Thou wilt be pleased to enlighten me, I would hasten that time, by acting henceforth as one sure of finding the truth. I will seek it where I have most reason to believe that I shall find it — in the Bible, and in those who have faithfully explained the Bible.” [41] He specifically identified truth with Christ, asking: “Direct my thoughts, and turn them towards the search of that truth which sanctifies. Sanctify me by thy truth; thy Word is truth.” [42]

Monod was also growing in his conviction that the doctrine of Christ and the doctrine of Scripture were linked. It was because of the total corruption and total inability of fallen man that he needed a divine Redeemer, not simply a great moral teacher. It was because of the total corruption and inability of fallen man that he needed a divine gospel, not simply helpful moral instruction. The divinity of Christ that was illustrated in His lordship over nature in His miracles, was paralleled by the lordship of Christ over the heart of man and in the divine power of the Word. Fallen man required the “operation, real, external, supernatural...exercised by a God who is master of my heart as truly as of nature. Happy is the heart over which He puts forth this ruling power, the more kind in proportion as it is more despotic.” [43] Man was not able to save himself with some help from God, but was utterly dependent upon a divine Redeemer. Likewise man was not able to arrive at truth himself with some help from God, but was entirely dependent upon a divine Scripture and a divine Spirit. And just like the doctrine of the divine nature of Christ, the doctrine of the divine nature of Scripture was a source of encouragement and patience: “I have not attained, either, to a clear knowledge of the truths of the gospel. I am gaining, in proportion as I think more of God and love Him more, an irresistible conviction that the gospel is divine, and therefore true: but I do not yet comprehend it, and I have only a glimpse of its fundamental doctrine, Redemption. But I console myself for knowing nothing, by reflecting that I am taught in the school of God, where everything is taught, to some more slowly, to others more quickly, but to all according as they need it.” [44]

Monod was adamant that even Scripture itself would not avail the reader unless God’s Spirit graciously assisted him to understand it. [45] As he became more firmly established in orthodox Christianity his conviction of the total dependency of the miserable sinner for the assistance of the Spirit to obtain knowledge of the truths of the gospel became settled. [46] And since God promised the Spirit to those who prayed for it, Monod regarded the truth of the Bible as accessible to all who implored God to help them to understand it. “The only commentary, as well as the only preparation, is prayer.” [47] He advised his children, “when you want the explanation of a passage for your Christian instruction, pray, and God himself will explain it, for he has promised and he is faithful.” [48]

Monod followed his own advice and prayed constantly for guidance when preparing a sermon. [49] He sensed that even the sermon, the polished rhetoric of the preacher, should not be allowed to stand in the way of Scripture itself. Monod even expressed his expectation that “the sermon will one day play a less conspicuous part in Protestant worship, and surrender to the exposition of Scripture the place which it has taken or usurped from it.” And certainly in public worship more important than the sermon was prayer.

Christ And Piety

According to Adolphe Monod the person and work of Christ, far from being a speculative doctrine, “is the very basis of Christian life and practice.” [50] In addition to the areas described above this fact is evident in the way our knowledge of Christ impacts and is impacted by our knowledge of sin and in our experience of suffering. In essence, the person and work of Christ are crucial to our life of personal piety, our Christian life, because of the close association of the believer with Christ: “There is no other Christian life than the life of Christ in us.” [51]

Christ And The Knowledge Of Sin

For Monod, our knowledge of Christ is related to our knowledge of sin in its true heinousness and abhorrence to God. “I see here,” he stated early after his conversion as a pastor in 1826, referring to Romans 11:32 (“For God hath concluded them all in unbelief, that he might have mercy upon all”), “the two fundamental points of Christianity, the misery of man, and the mercy of God.” [52] Redemption, misery over sin, and beholding the divine Redeemer, Christ, were involved in one another. This was certainly his own experience when he was converted as a young pastor when he wrote: “It is a godly sorrow, arising from the remembrance of my faults and the sight of my moral misery, which begins for the first time to weigh heavily on my conscience; and the sadness will not pass away till I am fully assured, not only in my mind but in my heart, of God’s unreserved forgiveness and my complete reconciliation with him.” [53]

In his sickbed meditation on “the two natures of Christ,” after dealing with preliminaries, the first subject he turned to was man’s knowledge of sin. We need, he reminded us, to consider what God has given us in his beloved Son. We need to have a clear, deep sense of our condition of sinfulness before God “not only through our present conviction that we have sinned against his holy law, but because we have begun to measure the enormity of sin, the terror of God’s judgments, and the depth of the abyss from which we had to be drawn.” [54] An intense soul-piercing acquaintance with the bitterness of sin is essential to understand how the gospel is contained in the person of Christ, says Monod: “Once we have been pierced by that bitterness of sin that is without decrease, without excuse, and without any explanation, and once we contend ourselves with saying, ‘Against thee, and thee only, have I sinned’ (Ps. 51:4), then the entire gospel is summed up for us in a single word, or rather in a single name: Jesus Christ.... Likewise, Saint Paul says to us, ‘For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified’ (1 Cor. 2:2).”

Our knowledge of the bitterness of sin will be reflected in our answer to the question “Who is Jesus Christ?” Monod prompts his listeners to answer: “How would you reply to the question ‘Who do people say I am?’ (Mark 8:27). That point is the foundation and starting point of our faith.” [55] Tasting the bitterness of our sin would make us thirst after the Christ of holiness, a holiness “without a spot, a holiness which is that of God himself transported to earth,” [56] as well as His goodness, power, truth, and ability to bring “deliverance that no man has ever possessed or even suspected. We find a virtue that draws us to him as to the one whom we instinctively sense can alone bring us all the deliverance we need.” [57]

Christ And Suffering

The deity of Christ should give us hope in suffering, for without the deity of Christ there is no hope in life or in death. Although the fullness of the truth of the deity of Christ would always remain in some sense a mystery, Monod says, the doctrine is nevertheless a mystery of practical godliness. Appealing to 1 Timothy 3:16, he claimed that “apart from this doctrine, there is no Christian life, no Christian holiness, no Christian consolation, no Christian strength, no Christian death. It is the foundation of everything else.” [58]

First, by relying on the sacrifice of Christ, the suffering believer can have peace. This was certainly his own experience as his condition deteriorated. “Ask of God that I may not lose patience,” he requested family in October 1855, some weeks after being diagnosed with cancer and while experiencing great physical discomfort. “Sustain me by your prayers. Seeing how my sufferings increase, I sometimes wonder whether God may not take me away suddenly by a merciful stroke. If he thinks fit to take me, you must regard it as a happy release. I am in peace. Jesus Christ; his sacrifice; the blood of his cross, is my only hope.” [59] Moreover suffering serves to shape us in the likeness of Christ, provided we receive it rightly. “Sufferings, received with a mind like his, are a means of making us like him.” [60]

Second, suffering is a means Christ uses to make us more like Him. For this reason Monod would not pray that God let him die. If God gives us suffering, it is for our own good, however painful. “I would not shorten my sufferings, if it is good for me to suffer yet.... All my desire is to be made like to Christ, and I know that sufferings, received with a mind like his, are a means of making us like him.” [61] Notice once again the unaffected sobriety that Monod displays when dealing with this means of being drawn to Christ: “His cross is my hope, I cannot yet say that it is my joy. I must be sincere. I can hardly say that my acceptance of it is submission. Perhaps God will make me arrive at perfect joy, at that complete triumph of faith over suffering.” [62]

Third, suffering shows us our sin, not only what our sin deserves but what sin remains in us. And because through knowledge of sin we grow in our knowledge of Christ’s holiness and Christ’s redemption (see the discussion above), suffering can drive us to Christ to rest more completely in Him. It is in a time of physical suffering that Monod cried out: “O wonder of grace! sin is abolished: I no longer appear before God as a sinner. Jesus Christ ‘has been made sin for us, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.’ I am clothed with his righteousness, as he clothed himself with my sin. God can no more condemn me than he can condemn his own Son: and I am before him as is his beloved and anointed One. Faith in this sacrifice is my only hope.” [63]

Fourth, suffering brings us to prayer, making our souls more alive in Christ since “prayer is to the soul what breathing is to the body.” [64] This is “fervent, persevering prayer, the prayer of faith, the prayer of a soul which never feels itself alive save in constant communion with God.” [65] As Monod’s daughter afterwards wrote of him: “Above all, he was a man of prayer.”

Conclusion

The significance of the Christology of Adolphe Monod is his grasp of how the doctrine of Christ is linked with practical piety. His own theological and personal life was a journey from a liberal rejection of the deity of Christ and of the inspiration of Scripture to a glory and a relish in Christ’s Godhood and an unflinching defense of the Bible as God’s inspired Word. It was also a journey from spiritual wretchedness and distress, despite having the choice of life’s comforts at his disposal, to an extended sickbed of physical decline but of spiritual soaring in quiet confidence in his Lord and Savior.

Three weeks before his death at the age of fifty-four, when his voice could scarcely be heard by the small group who assembled around the gaunt figure of their beloved pastor, Adolphe Monod was still testifying of the practical comfort that the deity of Christ and the relationship of Son, Father, and Spirit within the Trinity bring to the believer. “The relationship of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit to man corresponds to a relationship in God between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit,” he explained. [66] The astounding implication is that “the love which is poured out to save us is the expression of that love which has dwelt eternally in the bosom of God.” [67] The depth of this inter-Trinitarian love is the glorious foundation of our belief, Monod exclaimed: “Ah! the doctrine then becomes for us so touching and profound! There we find the basis of the Gospel! Therefore those who reject the doctrine of the Trinity as a speculative and purely theological doctrine have never understood the least thing about it.” [68] The doctrine of the Trinity, therefore, is “the strength of our hearts, it is the life of our life, it is the very foundation of revealed truth.” [69]

It was of this divine Christ, and of the doctrine of this divine Christ’s person and work that Monod could testify in his final deathbed meditation one week before his death:

Oh! I give thee thanks that thou hast given me a Savior. Without him, I confess, O my God, I should be irrevocably lost, and today would be in the most frightful despair. But I have a Savior! who has saved me freely by his shed blood, and I want it to be known that I rest wholly upon this shed blood; that all my righteousness, all my works which have been praised, all my preaching which has been appreciated and sought after,— that all this is in my eyes only filthy rags, and that there is nothing in me capable of making me stand for one moment before the brightness of his face and the light of his holiness. But now it is not I who shall be judged: it is Christ in me, and I know, I know certainly that he will enter there, and I with him, and that he and I are so made one, that he could never enter and leave me outside. [70]

It was Adolphe Monod’s increasing devotion to the divine Christ of Scripture, and the divine Scripture of Christ, in his life of godliness, his life of knowing and dying to sin, his life of suffering, and his life of prayer, that gave him the boldness to declare even when death was imminent: “He whom I have preached is near to me.” [71]

Notes

1. See Hendrik Algra, Het wonder van de 19de eeuw: van vrije kerken en kleine luyden (Franeker: Wever, 1965), 83-92. Algra says of Monod: “Hij gold voor de grootste kanselredenaar van zijn eeuw.” (93).
2. His correspondence was published after his death by his sister, Sarah Monod; see Adolphe Monod and Sarah Monod, Life and Letters of Adolphe Monod, Pastor of the Reformed Church of France (London: J. Nisbet & Co, 1885), 25.
3. The full title is Les Adieux d’Alphonse Monod à ses amis et à l’Eglise. It was published in Dutch in 1937 with the title Laatst Vaarwel (Kampen: Kok, 1937), and in English with the title Adolphe Monod’s Farewell to His Friends and to His Church (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1962). It has recently been retranslated by Constance K. Walker as Living in the Hope of Glory: A New Translation of a Spiritual Classic (Phillipsburg, N.J.: P&R, 2002). Monod also published three volumes of sermons in 1830, another volume, La Crédulité de l’incrédule, in 1844, and again two volumes in 1855. Two further volumes appeared posthumously.
4. William J. Grier, The Best Books: A Guide to Christian Literature (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1968),24.
5. James L. Osen, Prophet and Peacemaker: The Life of Adolphe Monod (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1984), iii. For a description about the parallel situation in France, see J. Lynn Osen, “Theological revival in the French Reformed Church, 1830-1852.” Church History 37, no. 1 (1968): 36-49.
6. Quoted in W. van der Zwaag, César Malan (1787-1864): prediker van het Frans-Zwitsers Réveil (Utrecht: De Banier, 1997), 23. (My translation from the Dutch.)
7. 2nd edition, Paris 1859, p. 456, quoted in Van der Zwaag, César Malan, 16-17.
8. Van der Zwaag, César Malan, 17.
9. Algra, Het wonder van de 19de eeuw, 84.
10. Monod, Life and Letters, 25.
11. Ibid., 25.
12. Ibid, 25.
13. Gaussen writes: “The evangelical work at Geneva was the daughter of Haldane; the work of grace in Vaud the daughter of that of Geneva; the work in France to a great extent that of Geneva and in Vaud.” Quoted in Monod, Life and Letters, 25.
14. Monod, Life and Letters, 23.
15. Ibid., 23.
16. Ibid., 38.
17. Ibid., 40.
18. Ibid., 78.
19. As he later reflected on events, Monod was quite willing to find the root of the trouble within himself, but knew that it was really his proclamation of a divine Christ dying on the cross that was stirring opposition: “As for myself, how have I stirred up this opposition? Is there any fault on my part? Perhaps my animation, my energy, which sometimes goes beyond the limits of gentleness in my preaching. especially when preaching extempore, as I almost always do; something of determination, of austerity, in my voice and manner; my miseries in short, have contributed to this irritation. But this part of the cause is very small. And the great and almost only reason of the opposition is the distinctness and boldness with which the Lord enables me to proclaim salvation by the cross: which seems madness to these hearers” (Monod, Life and Letters, 79).
20. Adolphe Monod, Hope of Glory, 22.
21. Ibid., 23.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., 22.
24. Ibid., 23.
25. Italics added. Monod, Hope of Glory, 23.
26. More accurately, often called “pre-liberalism” by church historians, see Osen, Prophet and Peacemaker, 21.
27. Osen, Prophet and Peacemaker, 21.
28. Monod wrote to Pastor Bouvier in 1825: “The fault of orthodoxy seems to me to lie chiefly in forgetting what Christianity has in common with other religious systems, and dwelling exclusively upon those doctrines which distinguish it from them. Malan and Gaussen seem to me as if they were always afraid of not being sufficiently remote from those who are not Christians, or but imperfectly so: the Company seem to me to have fallen precisely into the opposite error. I do not blame either the one or the other, for one extreme begets another; and besides this, both parties contain men for whom I am full of respect and admiration. But I shall bless God if I see established at Geneva a sort of intermediate system” (Monod, Life and Letters, 23-24).
29. In Monod’s first reference to Erskine in a letter his fascination was already evident: “I have made...the acquaintance of Mr. Erskine, a man who interested and impressed me in a singular degree. I saw him again on Saturday, and I had with him a conversation which lasted two hours. I may say that I was pleased with him — much pleased, and that this interview has done me good. He put several things before me in a new light.... There is in him a zeal and a devotion that interests me” (Life and letters, 13). Another letter, also written before what might be described as Monod’s conversion on July 21, 1827, reveals the attraction which Erskine’s piety held for him when compared to his own: “I see in Mr. Erskine and in others a happiness, a peace, an order, a conviction that I totally lack.... The creature’s perfection can consist only in his relationship with the Creator. Yet — and this is my sin — until this very moment, I have been my own center. I wanted to make my own religion, instead of taking it from God.... Only an external influence can save me” (Adolphe Monod and Constance K. Walker, Living in the Hope of Glory: A New Translation of a Spiritual Classic [Phillipsburg, N.J.: P&R Pub, 2002], xvi).
30. Monod, Life and Letters, 19.
31. Ibid., 20.
32. Ibid.,14.
33. He writes of Erskine: “The result of this conversation will be to make me think; that is all I can say; for, on the other hand, it leaves me, or plunges me deeper than before, in the doubt and uncertainty which belong to my religious opinions. Orthodox, Methodist, Arian, I am each of these in turn” (Walker, Living in the Hope of Glory, xvi).
34. Walker, Living in the Hope of Glory, xvi.
35. Ibid.
36. In 1827 he remarked, “If I get so far as to become a Christian, I believe that I shall become an orthodox Christian, first, because the gospel appears to me orthodox; and secondly, because experience has taught me not to rely on my previous Christianity, which did not preserve me either from melancholy or from unbelief” (Monod, Life and Letters, 43).
37. Ibid, 138.
38. Monod defended the orthodox position on original sin and man’s total depravity for the first time in February 1828 in two sermons printed under the titles, Man’s Misery and God’s Mercy. He himself remarks that from that date his preaching and convictions “became more and more clear and decided in its agreement with the Scriptures and with the Confession of Faith” (Monod, Life and Letters, 67– 68).
39. Monod, Life and Letters, 49.
40. Ibid., 28.
41. Ibid., 41, 42.
42. Ibid., 42.
43. Ibid, 54.
44. Ibid., 55.
45. Referring to his discussions with Erskine he remembered his fault of “forgetting, as I read the gospel, that I could neither understand nor receive it, unless God Himself prepared my mind to do so: eager to grasp the whole of it at once, and to be persuaded, at the outset, of those of its doctrines which were most contrary to my natural ideas; not praying with a firm conviction of my own blindness, or of the goodness of God; and lastly, attaching too much importance to the teaching of a human being” (Ibid.).
46. Monod, Life and Letters, 55.
47. Ibid., 64.
48. Ibid., 65.
49. Walker, Living in the Hope of Glory, xx.
50. Adolphe Monod, Hope of Glory, 22.
51. Monod, Life and Letters, 219.
52. Ibid., 56.
53. Ibid., 57.
54. Monod, Hope of Glory, 19-20.
55. Ibid., 20.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid., 22.
59. Monod, Life and Letters, 214-215.
60. Ibid., 214.
61. Ibid, 215.
62. Ibid.
63. Ibid., 218.
64. Ibid., 94.
65. Ibid., 220.
66. Monod, Farewell, 114.
67. Ibid.
68. Ibid.
69. Ibid.
70. Ibid., 120.
71. Monod, Life and Letters, 364.