The Whole Counsel

The premise is simple and old-fashioned: read the primary source, translate it, then ask what it demands. Episodes arrive weekly and usually belong to a series rather than standing alone. One long arc works through the great letter writers of the Christian church. John Newton is the touchstone for personal, pastoral correspondence. Calvin is the contrast — a man who wrote about the state of the church and the politics of religion as much as about private trouble. His farewell letters get their own episode. So does his description of decades in Geneva, where he counted forty or fifty evenings of muskets fired outside his door, was expelled to Strasbourg, and came back to no less trouble than before. Then the show turns to Samuel Rutherford, and stays there. The setting is laid out plainly: pastor at Anworth near the English border, sent north to Aberdeen under house arrest, forbidden to preach, punished for writing against Arminianism and against the monarchy's claimed right to install pastors in churches. The edition on the table is Banner of Truth's, compiled by Andrew Bonar, who also gathered Robert Murray McCheyne's memoir and remains. Three hundred and sixty-five letters, one for each day. The hosts do not oversell it. Rutherford's language is harder than Newton's, and even sympathetic readers admit some of his other writing was savaged by contemporaries. Richard Baxter, a theological opponent, called the letters among the finest things written outside scripture and called Rutherford's other work some of the worst — an assessment the show finds funny and instructive. What holds the episodes together is Rutherford's habit of turning every subject back to Christ. The show follows him into the grief as well: his wife's long illness, the pain he confessed only to certain correspondents, the plain admission that it is hard to keep sight of God in the storm. Alongside the letters runs a series on praying together, featuring a pastor from Crawley, England, and the questions there are practical to the point of discomfort. What does a prayer meeting become when most of it is spent trading news? How does a pastor introduce a real one? How does a church member raise it with a pastor who has not? Application is never left implicit. A recurring move is to take an example — a young couple whose spiritual hunger cools once they have each other, a new mother whose earnestness dims — and use it as a doorway into doctrine. Nothing here is hurried. The register sits between plain speech and theological prose, and the show consistently stops to say the thing again in simpler words.