John Durname

John Harvard and his wife Anne sailed to America in 1637. John was assigned to lead a Boston church but died within the year of tuberculosis at the tender age of 31. He donated his library of four hundred books and half of his considerable estate to New College of Cambridge, later renamed Harvard College in his honor. His entire collection, along with the college’s other acquisitions, were incinerated in a fire that destroyed Old Harvard Hall in 1764. Students couldn’t check out books in those days but were required to read them on library premises, but a student, Ephraim Briggs, had taken a book home to read from John Harvard’s collection, The Christian Warfare Against the Devil, World, and Flesh. Ephraim returned the book after the fire, for which the school was grateful yet promptly expelled him for having borrowed it without permission, proving once again that “no good deed goes unpunished.” The book is now on permanent display at Harvard, which I find ironic, given how predisposed our nation’s intellectual elites are to scoff at the devil and make light of any emphasis on sin. Puritan John Durname (1571-1652), a contemporary of John Harvard, wrote a definitive work on spiritual warfare in intervals from 1604 to 1618. The language of “world, flesh, and the devil” was common in seventeenth century vernacular, as the 1662 Book of Common Prayer attests in the following prayer, “From all the deceits of the world, the flesh and the devil, Good Lord, deliver us.” World refers to any value system that is opposed to God. Flesh doesn’t mean the human body; it refers to anything adverse to God’s Spirit. While the devil in our day is often dismissed as make-believe, he is regarded in Scripture as God’s chief adversary. John Durname insisted that the battle against this unholy trinity must be continuously waged. In the ancient Art of War, Sun Tzu wrote, “There is no greater danger than underestimating your enemy.” Paul writes in Ephesians, “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the power of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Eph. 6.12). Today’s prayer is excerpted from a longer prayer in John Durname’s book, A Guide to Godliness: