Eighteenth-century High Calvinism—with its denial of the free offer of the Gospel and its affirmation of eternal justification—proved to be devastating for the spiritual health of many Particular, i.e. Calvinistic, Baptist churches in Britain and Ireland. The remedy was a book, namely, Andrew Fuller’s The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation.
A Student of the Word
Fuller (1754‒1815) was the son of a farmer and did not have the benefit of higher education. Converted in 1769, he had to wrestle through the challenges of High Calvinism with little help from other sources, either books or people. In the words of his first biographer, his friend John Ryland, Jr. (1753‒1825), Fuller was “obliged to think, and pray, and study the Scriptures, and thus to make his ground good.” A personal covenant written by Fuller in 1780 speaks of his “determination to take up no principles at second-hand, but to search for everything at the pure fountain of [God’s] word.” This then was the crucible in which The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation was written.
A preliminary draft of the work was written by 1778. In what was roughly its final form it was completed by 1781. Two editions of the work were published in Fuller’s lifetime. The first edition, published in Northampton in 1785, was subtitled The Obligations of Men Fully to Credit, and Cordially to Approve, Whatever God Makes Known, Wherein is Considered the Nature of Faith in Christ, and the Duty of Those where the Gospel Comes in that Matter. The second edition, which appeared in 1801, was more simply subtitled The Duty of Sinners to Believe in Jesus Christ, a subtitle that well expressed the overall theme of the book. There were substantial differences between the two editions, which Fuller freely admitted and which primarily related to the doctrine of particular redemption, but the major theme remained unaltered: “faith in Christ is the duty of all men who hear, or have opportunity to hear, the gospel.” Or as he put it in his preface to the first edition: “God requires the heart, the whole heart, and nothing but the heart; … all the precepts of the Bible are only the different modes in which we are required to express our love to him.”
A Brief Summary
In the first section of the work, Fuller states the theme of the book and spends some time discussing the nature of saving faith. He especially takes to task the popular High Calvinist view of faith as something primarily subjective.
The Scriptures always represent faith as terminating on something without us; namely, on Christ, and the truths concerning him: but if it consist in a persuasion of our being in a state of salvation, it must terminate principally on something within us; namely, the work of grace in our hearts; for to believe myself interested in Christ is the same thing as to believe myself a subject of special grace.
As Fuller goes on to point out, genuine faith is fixed on “the glory of Christ, and not the happy condition we are in.” These are two very different things. The former entails “a persuasion of Christ being both able and willing to save all them that come unto God by him,” while the latter is “a persuasion that we are the children of God.” The High Calvinist schema thus ultimately turns faith into a preoccupation with one’s spiritual state and security and Christ a means to the latter.
In Part II of the work Fuller adduces six arguments in defense of his position. Let us look at one of these arguments, the first, in which Fuller seeks to show from various Biblical passages that “unconverted sinners are commanded, exhorted, and invited to believe in Christ for salvation.” There is, for example, John 12:36, which contains an exhortation of the Lord Jesus to a crowd of men and women to “believe in the light” that they might be the children of light. Working from the context, Fuller argues that Jesus was urging his hearers to put their faith in him. He is the “light” in whom faith is to be placed, that faith which issues in salvation (John 12:46). Those whom Christ commanded to exercise such faith, however, were rank unbelievers, of whom it is said earlier “they believed not on him” (John 12:37).
Fuller also references John 6:29 where Jesus declares to sinners that “this is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent.” Fuller first points out that this statement is made to men who in the context are described as following Christ simply because he gave them food to eat (John 6:26). They are unbelievers (John 6:36). Christ rebukes them for their mercenary motives and urges them to “labour not for the meat which perisheth, but for that meat which endureth unto everlasting life” (John 6:27). Their response (as recorded in John 6:28) is to ask Christ “what shall we do, that we might work the works of God?” His answer is to urge them to put their faith in him (John 6:29). Or, as Fuller puts it, faith in Christ is “the first and greatest of all duties, and without it no other duty can be acceptable.”
One very important question that Fuller had to wrestle with had to do with human inability and the Spirit’s help. High Calvinists argued that sinners are unable to do anything spiritually good, and thus are under no obligation to exercise faith in Christ. They supported their argument by reference to such texts as John 6:44 (“No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him”) and 1 Corinthians 2:14 (“the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned”). The inability of which these passages speak, Fuller contended in response, is a moral inability, which is rooted in the sinful disposition of the heart. Men and women refuse to come to Christ because of their aversion to him. They fail to understand the gospel and the things of the Spirit because they lack the means by which such matters are understood, namely, the presence of the indwelling Spirit. And they lack the Spirit because their hearts are closed to God. These verses are not speaking of a physical inability—such as insanity or mental deficiency—which excuses its subject of blame. In making this distinction between physical and moral inability, which Fuller derived from the American divine Jonathan Edwards (1703‒1758), Fuller was seeking to affirm a scriptural paradox: sinful men and women are utterly powerless to turn to God except through the regenerative work of God’s Holy Spirit, yet this powerlessness is the result of their own sinful hearts.
This led Fuller to address the role of the Spirit’s work in conversion. High Calvinists argued that if repentance and faith are ascribed by the Scriptures to the work of the Spirit, then “they cannot be duties required of sinners.” As Fuller points out, though, the force of this objection is dependent upon the supposition that “we do not stand in need of the Holy Spirit to enable us to comply with our duty.” What is amazing about this High Calvinist supposition is that Arminianism assumes the same. For the Arminian, because faith is commanded of sinners by God, then they must be able to believe without the irresistible drawing of the Spirit. Similarly, the High Calvinist reasons that since faith is wrought by the Spirit, it cannot be an act of obedience. The truth of the matter, however, is that “we need the influence of the Holy Spirit to enable us to do our duty” and that “repentance and faith, therefore, may be duties, notwithstanding their being the gifts of God.”
Practical Concerns
There were two main practical conclusions to Fuller’s arguments. First, sinners have every encouragement to trust in the Lord Jesus for the salvation of their souls. They do not need to spend time dallying to see if they are among God’s elect or if God is at work in their hearts by his Spirit. Moreover, they can no longer sit at ease under the sound of the gospel and excuse their unbelief by asserting that faith is the gift of God.
Second, ministers of the Word must earnestly exhort their hearers to commit themselves to Christ and that without delay. In so doing they will be faithful imitators of Christ and his Apostles, who “warned, admonished, and entreated” sinners to repent, to believe, and to be reconciled to God. Many High Calvinist ministers of Fuller’s day, though, were too much like John Eve, Fuller’s first pastor who had next to nothing to say to the unconverted in his congregation, because he believed that these men and women were “poor, impotent . . . creatures.” Faith was beyond such men and women, and could not be pressed upon them as an immediate, present duty. Fuller was convinced that this way of conducting a pulpit ministry was unbiblical and simply helped the unconverted to remain in their sin.
Conclusion
In many ways, this treatise effected a small revolution in Fuller’s denomination of Particular Baptists. Many who were moving in Fuller’s direction seized upon it as an excellent summation of their convictions. For others, it triggered a complete re-thinking of their view on divine sovereignty and human responsibility. All in all, it was used by the Spirit of God to drive home biblical truth to many and to be a key element in the revival of Fuller’s larger Baptist community. Moreover, it set the stage for the explosion of the modern missionary movement. It would be no exaggeration to say that William Carey (1761−1834), the icon of that movement, would not have gone to India without the publication of this book.
It is fitting to give Fuller the last word⎯an article of the statement of faith he made at his induction into the Kettering pastorate in 1783:
I believe it is the duty of every minister of Christ plainly and faithfully to preach the gospel to all who will hear it; . . . and that it is their [i.e. the hearers’] duty to love the Lord Jesus Christ and trust in him for salvation . . . I therefore believe free and solemn addresses, invitations, calls, and warnings to them to be not only consistent, but directly adapted, as means, in the hand of the Spirit of God, to bring them to Christ. I consider it as a part of my duty which I could not omit without being guilty of the blood of souls.
