Faith & Spirit Quote by William Gurnall

Mystery is doing double duty here: it protects faith from the era's rising appetite for tidy proof, and it disciplines the believer’s ego. When William Gurnall says, "Godliness, as well as the doctrine of our faith, is a mystery", he isn’t shrugging off theology as unknowable. He’s arguing that the Christian life is not reducible to a set of propositions any more than it’s reducible to good behavior. The "doctrine" is mysterious because God is not a lab specimen; "godliness" is mysterious because transformation is not a technique.

The intent is pastoral and polemical at once. Gurnall wrote in 17th-century England, a world thick with doctrinal conflict, civil war aftershocks, and a Puritan culture that prized rigorous preaching and self-examination. In that setting, mystery becomes a strategic rebuttal to two temptations: rationalism that treats faith like a courtroom case, and formalism that treats religion like compliance. He’s drawing a line against the idea that correct beliefs automatically produce holy lives, or that visible piety proves spiritual depth.

The subtext is a warning about counterfeit clarity. The more confidently someone claims to have mastered God - to have mapped salvation with clean edges - the more suspect their spirituality may be. For Gurnall, the real mark of "godliness" is not intellectual control but reverent disorientation: a humility that accepts that the deepest realities of faith are experienced, fought for, and lived into, not simply understood.