A.W. Pink

Arthur Walkington Pink was born in Nottingham, England, on April 1, 1886, into a corn merchant's family. He was a bright young man who went looking for spiritual reality in the wrong place first: he joined the Theosophical Society and rose far enough in it to be offered a place of leadership.

His conversion came at home, around 1908. By his own account his father's habit of quoting Scripture wore him down, and the verse that broke him was Proverbs 14:12, there is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death. He walked out of Theosophy and into Christian ministry.

In 1910 he sailed to America and enrolled at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. He lasted about two months. He did not need lectures; he needed a library, and he built one.

For the next quarter century he moved constantly and never settled. Pastorates in Silverton, Colorado; Garden Grove, California; Spartanburg, South Carolina; a stretch as an itinerant Bible teacher; then Australia from 1925 to 1928, where he preached in Sydney and Melbourne and was eventually shut out of pulpits for his Calvinism. He came back to America, and in 1934 returned to England for good. He was a difficult man to employ. Congregations found him unbending; he found them shallow.

What carried was the magazine. In 1922, in California, Pink began a monthly called Studies in the Scriptures and wrote it himself, month after month, until he died. It never had much more than a thousand subscribers. He typed it, mailed it, and answered the letters. Nearly everything published under his name, The Sovereignty of God, The Attributes of God, Gleanings in Genesis, the exposition of the Gospel of John, the two-volume commentary on Hebrews, The Holy Spirit, The Life of Elijah, was assembled out of those pages.

In 1940 he and his wife Vera moved to Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides. He stopped attending church. For the last twelve years of his life he lived in near-total obscurity in rented rooms by the harbor, reading, writing, and corresponding with the handful of people who took the magazine. He was working on the Sermon on the Mount when he died on July 15, 1952, at sixty-six.

Almost no one noticed. Then, from the late 1950s, Banner of Truth and other publishers began reprinting the Studies as books, and Pink found the readership he never had while alive. The Sovereignty of God went through edition after edition. A generation of preachers who had been handed a small God read him and did not stay the same.

He remains contested. His later separatism, his refusal to join any church, his sharpness toward other believers, is defended by some and mourned by others, his own biographer included. What is not contested is the effect of the writing.

Sources: Iain Murray, The Life of Arthur W. Pink; A. W. Pink, The Sovereignty of God and The Attributes of God; Studies in the Scriptures (1922–1953); Richard Belcher, Arthur W. Pink: Born to Write.