Dr. Johnson as Apologist

Dr. Samuel Johnson’s character, religious, moral, political, and literary, nay his figure and manner, are, I believe, more generally known than those of almost any man,” wrote Boswell, his inimitable biographer. Since Johnson’s own day—the eighteenth-century England of the Wesleys—his portly frame, brilliant conversation, and acidic wit have continued to be well known. Even those entirely unaware of Johnson’s immortal contributions to English lexicography recall his chauvinistic definition of oats: “a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.” The Yale editions of the works of Johnson and of the private papers of Boswell are currently producing a new flurry of Johnson studies and a correspondingly greater depth of interest in the intimacies of his life and world view.

One consequence of the Johnson revival has been a growing awareness of the importance of religion to him. The deism and shallow skepticism of his age (the misdesignated “Enlightenment”), Boswell’s loose morals, and Johnson’s crusty, non-pietistic life-style have doubtless contributed to the general impression that religion played a very small part in his life. Recent studies, however, have shown that such an impression could not be further from the truth. Whether one reads Maurice Quinlan’s Samuel Johnson: A Layman’s Religion (1964)—the first book-length study of the subject in the twentieth century—or Chester Chapin’s The Religious Thought of Samuel Johnson (1968), or English biographer Peter Quennell’s recent Samuel Johnson: His Friends and Enemies, the same portrait emerges. In Quennell’s words: “Johnson was a Christian Fundamentalist, who admitted no compromise, but asserted the unshakable truth of every major point of Christian doctrine.”

That this is no exaggeration can be seen both from the intimate details of his spiritual life and from his numerous conversational declarations on religion. As a student at Oxford, he was deeply touched by Law’s Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life; Johnson himself would later compose an informal diary of prayers (published posthumously). These Prayers and Meditations show us that Johnson placed all aspects of his existence sub specie aeternitatis. On beginning the second volume of his Dictionary, he prayed, for example: “O God, Who hast hitherto supported me, enable me to proceed in this labour, and in the whole task of my present state; that when I shall render up at the last day an account of the talent committed to me, I may receive pardon for the sake of Jesus Christ.” When he began The Rambler he prayed: “Grant, I beseech Thee, that in this my undertaking, Thy Holy Spirit may not be withheld from me, but that I may promote Thy glory, and the salvation both of myself and others.”

Though temperamentally aligned with seventeeth-century orthodoxy rather than eighteenth-century pietism, Johnson had a “wonderful” religious experience in 1784, the last year of his life. This experience was what we would today call an entry into the “deeper life” or perhaps even a “second blessing,” and Chapin comments on it that “in the last months of his life Johnson adopted a view of conversion not unlike that held by many Evangelicals.”

Conversationally, Johnson’s thoroughgoing Christian orthodoxy was so plain and forthright that it was a constant embarrassment to mediating friends who had absorbed the eighteenth-century Zeitgeist. “What do you mean by damned?” the amiable Dr. Adams asked him. “JOHNSON. (passionately and loudly) ‘Sent to Hell, Sir, and punished everlastingly.’ … MRS. ADAMS. ‘YOU seem, Sir, to forget the merits of our Redeemer.’ JOHNSON. ‘Madam, I do not forget the merits of my Redeemer; but my Redeemer has said that he will set some on his right hand and some on his left.’ ”

Johnson had absolutely no patience with the deists or skeptics of his day. He unmercifully criticized Boswell for having visited Rousseau: “ ‘Rousseau, Sir, is a very bad man. I would sooner sign a sentence for his transportation, than that of any felon who has gone from the Old Bailey these many years. Yes, I should like to have him work in the plantations.’ BOSWELL. ‘Sir, do you think him as bad a man as Voltaire?’ JOHNSON. ‘Why, Sir, it is difficult to settle the proportions of iniquity between them.’ ”

But Johnson not only affirmed an uncompromising biblical orthodoxy; he vigorously defended it in an age when such thinkers as David Hume were eroding confidence in the veracity of Christian faith. Here is a typical example of Johnson’s apologetic method:

For revealed religion (Johnson said), there was such historical evidence, as, upon any subject not religious, would have left no doubt. Had the facts recorded in the New Testament been mere civil occurrences, no one would have called in question the testimony by which they are established; but the importance annexed to them, amounting to nothing less than the salvation of mankind, raised a cloud in their minds, and created doubts unknown upon any other subject. Of proofs to be derived from history, one of the most cogent, he seemed to think, was the opinion so well authenticated, and so long entertained, of a Deliverer that was to appear about that time.… For the immediate life and miracles of Christ, such attestation as that of the apostles, who all, except St. John, confirmed their testimony with their blood; such belief as their witness procured from a people best furnished with the means of judging, and least disposed to judge favourably; such an extension afterwards of that belief over all the nations of the earth, though originating from a nation of all others most despised, would leave no doubt that the things witnessed were true, and were of a nature more than human. With respect to evidence, Dr. Johnson observed that we had not such evidence that Caesar died in the Capitol, as that Christ died in the manner related.

Chapin correctly observes that “bypassing the traditional theistic proofs, Johnson chose to discuss revealed religion only,” and that “Johnson’s own method of ‘establishing’ revelation is the common-sense one of attempting to show that the events narrated in the Bible—at least those important to Christians—are solidly grounded in fact. It is clear that all arguments in favor of theism, or ‘natural religion,’ as the eighteenth century called it, seemed to Johnson less important than those which tended to establish revelation itself as solidly grounded in the facts of history.”

Blessed Johnson! He avoided the twin shoals of scholastic Thomism (thereby giving no ammunition to the deists) and of pietistic presuppositionalism (thereby not leaving Christianity without a witness). When I visited Johnson’s Gough Square house in London—the very house where he prayed his prayers on commencing the Dictionary and The Rambler—I myself had a “wonderful” experience, and I prayed that his like might arise and flourish for Christ’s sake in our day.

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