Faith & Spirit Quote by Adam Clarke

Clarke is cutting a very specific knot in religious psychology: the instinct to treat Scripture as someone else’s mail. His line targets two opposite evasions at once. One is the modern-sounding dodge of “It’s not about me” when a text presses too close. The other is the older, equally convenient piety of waiting to be personally singled out before feeling obligated, corrected, or comforted. By stressing that God’s word is not “sent to particular persons, as if by name,” Clarke dismantles the loophole of anonymity: you don’t get to hide in the crowd because the page doesn’t call you out.

The subtext is pastoral but also disciplinary. Clarke, a Methodist-era theologian writing in an age of revival preaching and mass literacy, is speaking to congregations learning to read the Bible as public address rather than private horoscope. He’s pushing against a consumer mindset before it had a name: the habit of filtering revelation through personal relevance, as if authority only counts when it flatters your biography.

What makes the sentence work is its double movement: it universalizes the audience (“not… by name”) and then re-personalizes the demand (“do not think you have no part in it”). It’s a rhetorical trapdoor. The text may not name you, but it claims you. Clarke’s aim isn’t mysticism; it’s accountability. Scripture, in his framing, functions less like a personalized letter and more like a law read aloud in the town square: impersonal in form, intimate in consequence.