Samuel Rutherford: Letters from Affliction

His Story

There are Christians who seem to grow stronger in suffering rather than weaker. Not because they are immune to pain or loss, but because the suffering drives them more deeply into Christ than comfort ever could. Samuel Rutherford was one of those people, and the evidence is preserved in the letters he wrote from exile, from illness and from the edge of death.

Rutherford was born in Scotland around 1600 and became one of the most able theological minds of his generation. He was appointed Professor of Humanity at Edinburgh and later became minister of Anwoth in Galloway, a rural parish that he served with extraordinary devotion. By all accounts he was a pastor of rare tenderness. He visited the sick. He preached with urgency. He corresponded with parishioners who were struggling. He genuinely cared for the people in his charge.

But Rutherford's life was also marked by deep personal grief. His first wife died after a prolonged and painful illness. Two of his children died in infancy. He had known loss at close quarters before the heavier afflictions came upon him from outside.

Those external afflictions arrived in 1636 when Charles I, seeking to impose episcopal church governance on Scotland, had Rutherford banned from preaching and exiled to Aberdeen. It was a significant punishment. Aberdeen was distant from his beloved Anwoth. He was cut off from his congregation, from his pastoral work and from the pulpit that had been the centre of his life. He was placed under a kind of house arrest, forbidden to preach and watched closely.

It was from that exile that Rutherford began writing the letters for which he is now remembered.

He wrote to former parishioners who were struggling with grief or doubt. He wrote to noblewomen who were navigating sorrow and spiritual dryness. He wrote to ministers facing pressure and persecution. He wrote to ordinary believers who were simply trying to hold on to their faith in difficult times. The letters are warm, direct and sometimes startlingly beautiful. They carry the marks of a man who had himself been to the depths and had found Christ there.

What strikes a reader of those letters most immediately is not their theological precision, though that is present. It is the quality of the affection in them. Rutherford writes about Christ with a love that is almost overwhelming in its intensity. He speaks of Christ as the most precious reality he knows, not as an idea or a doctrine to be defended but as a living person whose company is the greatest good he can imagine.

He wrote in one letter that he had found Christ's cross to be sweet and that he would rather be in exile for Christ's sake than sitting at ease without Him. That is not the language of someone performing faith. It is the language of someone who has actually found in Christ what he said he found, a companion in suffering, a source of joy that circumstances cannot extinguish and a love that does not depend on outward conditions being favourable.

Rutherford was eventually allowed to return to ministry after the political situation in Scotland shifted. He became Principal of St Mary's College in St Andrews and was deeply involved in the Westminster Assembly, which produced the Westminster Confession of Faith and the catechisms that shaped Reformed Christianity for centuries. He wrote extensively in theology, including his famous work Lex Rex, which argued that civil government is subject to the law and not above it. That work was later burned by the government as seditious.

Toward the end of his life, the political winds shifted again. The monarchy was restored and Rutherford was summoned to appear before Parliament on a charge of high treason. It was a charge that could have meant execution. He was old and seriously ill by then. His response to the summons has been remembered ever since. He said that he had received a summons from a higher court and that he must answer it first. He died before Parliament could deal with him, in March 1661, holding to Christ to the end.

The letters he left behind have never gone out of print. They have been read by Christians in every century since his death. Andrew Bonar edited them in the nineteenth century and wrote of them that they were the nearest thing to heaven's gate that he knew of in any human writing. Charles Spurgeon kept them close at hand and read them for nourishment. They have been a resource for pastors, for suffering believers and for anyone who wants to understand what it looks like to love Christ through pain.

Why does his story still matter for ordinary Christians today?

First, Rutherford shows that suffering and joy are not opposites for the Christian. He was genuinely in pain, genuinely separated from what he loved and genuinely under unjust restriction. And yet the letters from that period are not despairing. They are among the most joyful writing he ever produced. The reason is not that he was pretending the difficulty away. It is that he had found in Christ a source of joy that the difficulty could not touch.

Second, his letters are a model of what genuine pastoral care looks like. He did not write to his correspondents with easy reassurances. He wrote with honesty about the difficulty of faith, with genuine warmth for the people he was writing to and with a consistent pointing toward Christ as the answer to whatever they were facing. That kind of care, honest and Christ-centred, is always needed.

Third, his willingness to suffer for his convictions rather than compromise them is a reminder that there are things worth holding to even at great cost. He did not find a way to accommodate the demands being made of him. He accepted the consequences of faithfulness and found that God was sufficient in those consequences.

Fourth, the quality of his love for Christ is itself an invitation. Reading Rutherford's letters, one is confronted with a man who clearly found in Christ something so real and so valuable that no earthly loss could outweigh it. That kind of love is not produced by argument alone. It grows through time spent with Christ, through prayer, through the word and often through the particular pressure of suffering that strips away what is superficial and leaves only what is real.

Rutherford himself might have said that the best thing affliction ever did for him was to drive him to Christ. He found that Christ was enough. Not comfortable, not easy and not without cost, but enough. That discovery is available to every Christian who is willing to be driven by difficulty to the same place he was driven.