ANDREW FULLER’S RESPONSE TO THE “MODERN QUESTION” — A REAPPRAISALOF THE GOSPEL WORTHY OF ALL ACCEPTATION
by Gerald L. Priest, Ph.D. 2001Can and should the gospel of salvation be offered to sinners without distinction? Is unregenerate man under moral obligation to repent of sin and believe in Christ upon hearing the gospel? Is there any sense in which he is able to do so? And is the minister of the gospel obligated to call upon the unregenerate to exercise faith and repentance? These queries collectively constitute the so-called “modern question” of Andrew Fuller’s day, which we can reduce to simply — is faith a duty?1 The question was first raised by the Congregational minister Joseph Hussey(1660–1726) in 1707 with his publication of God’s Operations of Grace: but No Offers of His Grace,2 in which he took the hyper Calvinist3 position that to offer the gospel indiscriminately would
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Dr. Priest is Professor of Historical Theology at Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary in Allen Park, MI. (Now retired.)1 Those answering these questions in the affirmative would be advocates of what might be called “duty faith,” i.e., the obligation of everyone to believe the gospel of Christ.
2 This was reprinted by Primitive Publications, Elon College, NC, in 1973.
3 Some prefer the less pejorative term “high” Calvinism/Calvinists. I mean to use the terms “hyper” and “high” synonymously. While it is true that hyper-Calvinism has been interpreted in a variety of ways, we should consider how the expression was applied in the 18th century to opponents of Andrew Fuller and his fellow moderate or evangelical Calvinists. The term was directed against those who normally advocated the following positions or variations of them: (1) a supralapsarian decree of election which would include (2) reprobation or what John Gill called “pre-damnation”; (3) eternal justification, the doctrine that God decreed the elect for justification before the fall, a corollary of this logically being (4) passive faith (i.e., God grants his elect faith apart from active human volition); (5) a divine warrant or indication (usually conviction of sin) that an individual was elect prior to conversion; and (6) a distinction between preaching the gospel indiscriminately and offering it to those sensible to it (i.e.
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imply that the natural man had the innate ability to respond to it. Hussey admitted that, as far as he was able to determine, no authorities had raised the question before, but he felt constrained to do so in the face of Arminianism4 and its rationalist counterparts, Deism and Socinianism. All of these humanistic systems, Hussey believed, were a major threat to the doctrines of grace. The following quote from Hussy’s work reflects the high Calvinism that prompted an evangelical response from more moderate Particular Baptists, such as Andrew Fuller (1754–1815):5By offers of grace, tenders and proffers of salvation, it is evident, men do thereby imply that free grace and full salvation is [sic] propounded, tendered, and offered to all sinners within the sound [of the gospel].... Is not this a piece of robbery against the Holy Spirit?...does not the plea confine the operation of the Holy Spirit to common and eternal workings?-------------------------
those who have a warrant that they are elect). Fuller preferred the name pseudo-Calvinist, since he believed that historic Calvinists would have rejected most of these features. No one would have been called hyper-Calvinist who held to the five points of Dort (TULIP). In fact, those who departed from those points usually incurred the charge of Arminianism. Hyper-Calvinists went beyond Dort and made their own tenets the test of Calvinism, so that when Fuller, in agreement with Dort, taught that the atonement was sufficient for all the world, but efficient only for the elect, he was accused of being Arminian. See “Canons of the Synod of Dort,” in vol. 3 of The Creeds of Christendom, ed. Philip Schaff (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1983), p. 586.4 Arminianism was a term that carried a wide variety of meanings in Fuller’s day. At the least, and according to normal historical usage, it applied to those who embraced the teachings of Jacobus Arminius (1560–1609) as expressed in the controversial five points of the Dutch Remonstrance of 1610. The Remonstrants attempted to define predestination in terms of foreknowledge and condition salvation on man’s free will. All men can be saved, grace can be resisted, and those saved may not persevere in the faith but could fall from grace. Because of their emphasis on the unlimited atonement (Christ suffered for all men), they were often accused of teaching universalism. Arminius and true Arminians have taught that all men possess original sin, but that God in the atonement extended an ability by means of a prevenient grace for all men to be saved. Prevenient grace negated the disabling effects of original sin. Those who denied original sin were frequently called Arminian, but in actuality they were Pelagian. Because of its stress on human ability, Arminianism has frequently degenerated into latitudinarianism and liberalism, including Unitarianism. This is why some Unitarians, like John Taylor of Norwich, were referred to as Arminian. The Arminian General Baptists of Great Britain were almost wholly taken over by Socinianism, a form of Unitarianism, by the mid-1700s. One must realize this context when considering why Particular Baptists tended to lump Arminians, Arians, and Socinians together as the common enemy of orthodox Christianity.
5 For an overview of Fuller’s life and a brief evaluation of his theology, see Phil Roberts, “Andrew Fuller,” in Baptist Theologians, ed. Timothy George and David S. Dockery (Nashville: Broadman, 1990), pp. 121–39. Roberts gives a comprehensive bibliography of works by and about Fuller, making it unnecessary to repeat them here.
47Wherein does your plea give Jehovah the Spirit His due honour in the internal and mighty workings of His grace on sinner’s hearts, that sinners may believe, repent, and be saved?6The main problem of the gospel’s indiscriminate offer for Hussey is that it failed to consider the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to the elect, who alone could respond in faith: “The Spirit will not, and cannot honourably work without the imputation of Christ; but offers of Christ... without a due regard of the imputation of his righteousness, or the work of the Spirit, therefore are not fit means to work this ability [i.e., the ability to close with Christ].”7 Hussey said it is all right to preach the gospel, just do not make it an offer, since the non-elect have no ability in them to respond to it; otherwise, you rob the Spirit of his power, degrade the gospel, and flatter men that they have some ability to receive it.7 One can understand why this view was charged with antinomianism when it seems to tell man that he has no duty to respond because he has no ability. Therefore, he has no moral obligation to obey God’s revelation. What Hussey (and most hyper-Calvinists) attempted to do was guard the gospel against the Arminian assertion of human ability and the Socinian view of universalism.The modern question was revisited in 1739 by the posthumous publication of Congregationalist minister Matthias Maurice’s The Modern Question Affirm’d and Proved in which he forsook his earlier high Calvinism to proclaim the duty of all hearers to believe the gospel of Christ. This inaugurated a pamphlet battle between the high and moderate Calvinists in which the Particular Baptists engaged most vociferously. The quarrel really heated up when John Gill (1697–1771) entered the fray with the republication in 1751 of John Skepp’s 1721 work, The Divine Energy: or the efficacious operations of the Spirit of God in the soul of man, in his effectual calling and conversion: stated, proved, and vindicated. Wherein the real weakness and insufficiency of moral persuasion, without the super-addition of the exceeding greatness of God’s
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6 Cited in Alan P. F. Sell, The Great Debate: Calvinism, Arminianism, and Salvation (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1983), p. 53. An avowed Calvinist himself, John Newton cautioned John Ryland, Jr. that Hussey’s high Calvinism had made many “rather wise than warm, rather positive [dogmatic] than humble, rather captious than lively, and more disposed to talk of speculations than experience.” When reading Hussey, Newton found that his writings contained “more bones than meat,” and “are seasoned with much of an angry and self-important spirit” (Newton letter to Ryland, 16 January 1772, cited in Michael A. G. Haykin, One Heart and One Soul: John Sutcliff of Olney, His Friends and His Times [Durham, England: Evangelical Press, 1994], p. 81).7 Sell, The Great Debate, pp. 53–54.
8 Ibid., p. 54
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power for faith and conversion to God, are fully evinced. Being an antidote against the Pelagian plague9 — the title providing a virtual synopsis of the work! Sell states,So persuaded was Skepp that God must have all the glory, and that man could do nothing, that he, like Hussey before him, refused to offer the gospel lest it be thought that any but God’s Holy Spirit could apply it to the heart, or that sinful man had the moral ability to respond. This was the position which Gill and [John] Brine [Gill’s close friend] strenuously defended against the supporters of Mathias Maurice....10AN EVANGELICAL BAPTIST RESPONSE TO HYPER-CALVINISM In reacting to this extreme Calvinist approach, several Particular Baptists of a more evangelistic bent “wished both to resist Arminianism, and to proclaim the gospel more experimentally and generously than the stricter Calvinism seemed to permit.”11 Among these were John Sutcliff, John Ryland, Jr., and Robert Hall, Sr. of Arnesby, whose Northamptonshire Association sermon, Help to Zion’s Travellers, was put into print in 1781. Hall’s comment that “the way to Jesus is graciously open for everyone who chooses to come to him” made a favorable impact on William Carey and Andrew Fuller. What especially aroused Fuller’s attention to the issue was his reading of The Modern Question Concerning Repentance and Faith Examined, first published in 1735 by Particular Baptist and duty faith advocate Abraham Taylor. Fuller, having been reared in a strict Particular Baptist church whose pastor was “noninvitational,” began wrestling with the modern question in earnest. He was not at all satisfied with Gill’s and Brine’s separate rebuttals of Taylor’s work in 1738 and 1743 respectively. Gill was
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9 Skepp was Gill’s close friend and mentor. He had been a member of Gill’s ordination council, and encouraged Gill in his pursuit of Hebrew studies. Sell reminds us that, “above all, Skepp had been a member of Hussey’s church at Cambridge and his own theological stance is adequately described by the title of his book” [cited above] (Sell, The Great Debate, p. 78).
10(Sell, The Great Debate, p. 78). Attempts to make Gill less the hyper-Calvinist than either Skepp or Brine have been unconvincing. The latter two ministers may have been more dogmatic in drawing a contrast between gospel preaching and offer, but as Walter Wilson stated, both Gill and Brine enjoyed “a perfect congeniality of views upon religious subjects. Their common inspirer was John Skepp” (History and Antiquities of Dissenting Churches...in London [1808–14], 2:574–75, cited in Geoffrey F. Nuttall, “Northamptonshire and The Modern Question: A Turning-Point in Eighteenth-Century Dissent,” Journal of Theological Studies 16 [1965]: 117; cf. p. 118 ff).
11 Sell, The Great Debate, pp. 54–55.
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