‘Andrew Fuller’ Category

I was recently asked by a dear Irish brother for a plan of reading when it came to the works of Andrew Fuller. The following is what I suggested.

Without being self-serving, I hope, begin with the Armies of the Lamb. There is nothing like getting into a figure by reading his letters.

Then I would suggest his circular letters, those written for the Northants Association, in chronological order. These give you some idea of Fuller the churchman in the midst of connectional links and associational network of friends and fellow pastors.

Then read some of his sermons, esp. the ones on the ministry, justification, and soteriological issues.

His Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation is his most important controversial work. After it, read his Letters on Sandemanianism.

Finally, read his Memoirs of Pearce. What he includes in that work says so much about his piety.

Historically, one of the key differences between Baptists and Presbyterians—fellow Kingdom-sojourners for much of their respective histories (one thinks of the friendship of Andrew Fuller and Thomas Chalmers, for example)—is an area that is rarely discussed, namely, the concept of a learned ministry.

Far more Baptists than Presbyterians have recognized that God can and does call to pastoral ministry men who have not had formal theological education. In Baptist history, one thinks of John Bunyan, for example, or John Gill, that indefatigable commentator, or Fuller, the theological father of the modern missionary movement, or William Carey or those remarkable preachers C.H. Spurgeon and Martyn Lloyd-Jones (yes, the “Doctor” was a Baptist—read his lecture on baptism in his three-volume study of Christian doctrine). To be sure, these men read and studied and were self-educated, but they lacked formal credentials.

Having spent twenty-seven years in formal theological education, I am more than ever conscious that while such an education is extremely desirable for an effective ministry, it is not indispensable. And I am ever so glad that my Baptist forebears made room for men like those listed above, some of whom are among my theological mentors as a Christian. To think that because a man lacks formal credentials, he cannot reason and write with powerful acumen and insight is simply a species of arrogance.

Andrew Fuller, by trade a farmer, by calling one of the profoundest theologians of the Baptist profession, surely had it right when he said:

As to academical education, the far greater part of our ministers have it not. [William] Carey was a shoemaker years after he engaged in the ministry, and I was a farmer. I have sometimes however regretted my want of learning. On the other hand, brother [John] Sutcliff, and brother [Samuel] Pearce, have both been at Bristol [Baptist Academy]. We all live in love, without any distinction in these matters. We do not consider an academy as any qualification for membership or preaching, any further than as a person may there improve his talents. Those who go to our academics must be members of a church, and recommended to them as possessing gifts adapted to the ministry. They preach about the neighbourhood all the time, and their going is considered in no other light than as a young minister might apply to an aged one for improvement. Since brother [John] Ryland has been at Bristol, I think he has been a great blessing in forming the principles and spirit of the young men. I allow, however, that the contrary is often the case in academies, and that when it is so they prove very injurious to the churches of Christ. [“Discipline of the English and Scottish Baptist Churches”, Works (Sprinkle Publications, 1988), III, 481].

Like many great men—one thinks, for example, of the big name this year, John Calvin—the name of Andrew Fuller has aroused—and still does arouse—deep feelings pro and con.

Reading a new ms on Lemuel Haynes by Thabiti Anyabwile (which we hope to publish in the Reformation Heritage Books’ series on spirituality), I noticed one remark by Haynes in which he said that the “memory of a Patrick, a Beveridge, a Manton, a Flavel, a Watts, a Doddridge, an Edwards, Hopkins, Bellamy, Spencer and Fuller is precious to us.” And in a letter dated October 3, 1802, he told his correspondent Timothy Cooley, “I have this day finished reading a fourth volume of Mr. Fuller, an ingenious European writer. You have doubtless read his “letters to the Calvinists,”—“The Gospel its own Witness,”—“The Gospel a Faithful Saying,” and the “Backslider.” They are admired by the serious; and, I think, are worthy of a place in every minister’s library.”

Yet, a day or so before reading this I read a remark made by the unorthodox Welsh Baptist minister William Richards (1749–1818) that he had been “stigmatized with Fullerism (than which nothing this side [of] hell can be worse in the estimation of some good folks)” [The Writings of the Radical Welsh Baptist Minister William Richards (1749–1818) , selected and edited John Oddy (Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2009), 64]. The charge was not true, but it gives a good insight into the way some viewed Fuller and his theology.

My sympathies are with brother Haynes!

By the way, look for Thabiti’s book, it is a rich feast from an Edwardsean African-American pastor.

In January 1815, only a few months before the death of Andrew Fuller—when Britain was gearing up for its decisive showdown with the French dictator Napoleon—the Baptist leader decided to answer an enquiry about his life, his early religious impressions and conversion, from “a friend in Liverpool.” That was the very way that I described his correspondent in my The Armies of the Lamb: The spirituality of Andrew Fuller (Joshua Press, 2001), p.75. I had no more information, though, about the person in question.

Imagine my delight and amazement when this afternoon—through the help of my good friend Dr Grant Gordon—I was able to identify this correspondent as “Miss Maria Hope” of “Hope Street, Liverpool.” Grant alerted me to a letter of Fuller’s best friend John Ryland Jr., in which Ryland talks about his writing of his friend’s memoir after Fuller’s death. The letter is written to Maria and Ryland talks about the letters that Fuller had written to her.

Wowsers! What a find! I must say: it was incredible to read the letter.

I never cease to be amazed at the animosity that some Christians show to the writings of Andrew Fuller. You would think they were reading the works of one of his arch-opponents, the deist Thomas Paine!

As for me, I must wholeheartedly agree with the recent evaluation of the eighteenth-century Baptist divine by Dr. David Bebbington, who is convinced of Fuller’s “extraordinary importance in the history of theology” (e-mail to the author, March 11, 2009).

Dr. Haykin answers this question in a guest blog post on the blog:  I Will Build My Church . . . In Ireland.  The same article has been posted in pdf format on this site’s “Paper” page.

Posted by Steve Weaver, Research and Administrative Assistant to the Director of the Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies, Dr. Michael A.G. Haykin.

Not everyone in Fuller’s day regarded Andrew Fuller with a favourable eye. There were, of course, theological opponents like John Martin of London. And then there were writers like David Rivers who, in his Literary Memoirs of Living Authors of Great Britain (London: R. Faulder, 1798), I, 201-202, described Fuller as “the author of several Religious Tracts written with all the Vulgarity of a Methodist Teacher. He has written a controversial pamphlet against Socinianism, which displays a very small share, if any, of education or talent.” This blogger begs to differ and sees many of Fuller’s works as sheer brilliance.

I have long suspected that there was another oil painting of Andrew Fuller besides the one hanging in the dining hall of Regent’s Park College, Oxford. Well, such has proven to be the case. Another Fuller painting, a portrait in oils, has recently been sold at auction and is now in the hands of a lover of Fuller’s works in the south of England. This is tremendously exciting news.

The portrait is by Samuel Medley, Jr (1769-1857), who was a Baptist layman and a member of John Rippon’s Church, had a career in the stock exchange and was one of the founders of University College, the University of London. He was also a painter, and exhibited at the Royal Academy. The painting was done in 1802 and was the basis for the frontispiece in John Ryland’s life of the Baptist divine.

The sale was in Northumbria, far from Fuller country, and raises questions naturally about how the painting came to be in that part of England.

I am deeply thankful to the new owner of the painting for contacting me, and hope in the very near future to display a picture of the portrait on this blog.

It is noteworthy that when Andrew Fuller was deeply moved, he would recite out loud lines of poetry that expressed the deep emotions he was feeling.

Poetry, though, has largely fallen out of favour with many Christian thinkers and theologians since then. This is a real shame. There are some things that poetry can better express than theological discourse.

Acquaintances a while ago gave me a Victorian volume that had seen better days. One of the cheap printings that characterized that era, with poor paper and even poorer illustrations, and now with the cover quite dishevelled and the binding coming loose, they could have easily decided to toss the book. But I am glad they did not. Entitled The Four Great Preachers: A Collection of Choice Sermons by Spurgeon, Moody, Talmage and Beecher the book contains a number of sermons by each of these well-known Victorian preachers along with brief biographical sketches of the four. But what I found valuable in the book was not so much the sermons, all of which can be found elsewhere in much sturdier collections. No, what I found quite illuminating was the two-page “Preface,” which was written by an unnamed Canadian editor who lived in Toronto and is dated April 10, 1885. He may well have been J.S. Robertson, the name of the Toronto publisher on the title-page. But whoever he was, his words bear a lesson for contemporary Evangelicalism.

The “Preface” begins by noting that it has been said that ‘nobody reads sermons’ any more. The editor admits that there may be some truth in this statement, but he says, ‘there are sermons and sermons’. Few, he thinks, are interested in the older style of sermons, what he calls ‘the dry type of doctrinal discourses that was once common in the pulpit’. Such sermons have been replaced by ones that are ‘more interesting’ and that contain ‘more enlivening appeals to the human heart and conscience’. There is no doubt that the author of these lines considers himself an Evangelical as the next sentence bears witness. ‘The Church,’ the editor writes, ‘as it has dropped dogma, has in large degree returned to its first work of evangelizing the world by the spirit and power of the Gospel; and in the true missionary spirit, it is going again into the highways and byways to reclaim the world to Christ, and to bring the prodigal back to the Father’.

What should forcefully strike any reader of these lines is that ‘dogma’—Christian doctrine and theology—is set over against evangelism and missions, as if the two were mutually exclusive. That winning the lost can somehow be done without a concern for theology. To be sure, there have been individuals in the history of the church who allowed have themselves to become so wrapped up in theology and its tomes that they gave nary a thought to evangelism. But such are aberrations. More exemplary is Andrew Fuller (1754-1815), the Baptist pastor and theologian, whose wrestling with the theology of the free offer of the gospel was accompanied by a deepening zeal for evangelism. Or, more authoritatively, there is the example of the Apostle Paul. Some of the Apostle’s most powerful statements on evangelism occur in his letter to the Romans (see, e.g. Romans 9:1-3; 10:9-21; 15:18-29) in the midst of some of the richest doctrinal material—‘dogma’—in the New Testament. Theology, if rightly pursued, should issue in a life of concern for the lost.

The dislike for doctrine in this Victorian “Preface” may also help us understand how sectors of late Victorian Evangelicalism helped prepare the way for the coming of Liberalism. The author of this “Preface” is certainly not a liberal. But his easy dismissal of doctrine in favour of evangelism helps explain why certain sectors of Victorian Evangelicalism found themselves without any adequate response in the face of the liberal assault on Christian orthodoxy at the end of nineteenth century and at the start of the twentieth.

One wonders if a copy of the volume was sent to each of the four respective preachers, whose sermons were reprinted in the book. If one did reach the hands of C. H. Spurgeon (1834-1892), and he did happen to read the “Preface,” he would have been surely struck by the folly of trying to separate a passion for theological truth from Christian missions. As he well knew and affirmed, it is only when the coals of Christian orthodoxy are hot and blazing that a zeal for the conversion of others can be properly sustained.