Ralph Robinson
A London Presbyterian minister who preached at St. Mary Woolnoth through the Civil War and Commonwealth, remembered chiefly for Christ All and in All, a posthumous collection of sermons on the scriptural images of Christ.
Biography
Ralph Robinson (1614 to 1655) was an English Presbyterian minister who served the London parish of St. Mary Woolnoth through the years of the Civil War and Commonwealth, and whose sermons were collected after his death as Christ All and in All. He was born at Heswall in Cheshire in 1614.
Robinson was educated at St. Catharine's Hall, Cambridge. He was invited to St. Mary Woolnoth in Lombard Street, in the heart of the City of London, where he received Presbyterian ordination in the early 1640s, and he held that pulpit for the rest of his life.
He was closely tied to the Presbyterian clergy of London during the years the Westminster Assembly was reshaping the national church. In 1647 he served as scribe to the first provincial assembly of ministers held in London, and in 1649 he joined his colleagues in the public protest against the execution of Charles I, which set the City's Presbyterian ministers against the new republican regime.
In 1651 Robinson was arrested for alleged involvement in the plot of Christopher Love, an attempt by London Presbyterians to restore the Stuart monarchy, and was committed to the Tower of London. Love himself was executed; Robinson survived the affair and returned to his ministry.
Robinson died in 1655 and was buried at St. Mary Woolnoth. His sermons were published in 1656 as Christ All and in All, a long series of scriptural similitudes for Christ that described him as the believer's life, robe, physician, light, shepherd, and vine.
Life & Career
Why Robinson Matters
Robinson belonged to the generation of London Presbyterian ministers who ran their parishes during the collapse of the old church settlement and the experiments of the Commonwealth. His career traces that world: Presbyterian ordination without a bishop in the early 1640s, service as scribe to the London provincial assembly in 1647, the protest against the execution of the king in 1649, and imprisonment in the Tower in 1651 for suspected loyalty to the exiled Stuarts. He was a working pastor rather than a controversialist, and his reputation rests on his preaching.
That reputation is fixed by Christ All and in All. Rather than treating a doctrine in the abstract, Robinson built his sermons around the images the Bible uses for Christ, expounding each one in turn: Christ as the believer's life, robe, physician, light, shepherd, and vine. The method let him move through much of Christian teaching by way of concrete pictures, which gave the book its appeal as devotional exposition.
The work kept a place among readers of Puritan divinity after its author's name had faded from general memory, and it has been reprinted as an example of the Christ-centered preaching that marked the London ministers of the 1640s and 1650s.
Robinson's life also documents the position of the Presbyterian clergy during the Interregnum. Caught between a monarchy the London ministers had helped to limit and a republic many of them could not accept, he spent part of his final years under arrest — one strand of the larger conflict between Presbyterian and Independent that ran through the English Revolution.
