Theopedia

John Gill

John Gill (1697-1771) was an English Particular Baptist pastor, biblical commentator, and theologian whose fifty-one-year ministry in Southwark, London, made him the chief dogmatic defender of Calvinistic orthodoxy among Particular Baptists in the eighteenth century.1 Entirely self-taught in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and rabbinic literature, he produced a verse-by-verse exposition of the whole Bible and one of the few complete systematic theologies written in the eighteenth century, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity and A Body of Practical Divinity (1769-1770).2 His Southwark congregation later grew into the Metropolitan Tabernacle, later pastored by Charles Spurgeon.2

Life and Ministry

Gill was born November 23, 1697 (old style), in Kettering, Northamptonshire, to Dissenting parents.3 His parents withdrew him from the local grammar school at age twelve because their Nonconformity barred him from finishing it, but his intellectual gifts had already become a byword in the town: a local proverb held that something was as certain as “John Gill is in the bookseller’s.”3 Left to his own devices, he kept up his Latin and Greek by wide reading and taught himself logic, rhetoric, and natural philosophy, then Hebrew from Buxtorf’s grammar and lexicon, until he could read the Hebrew Bible “with great ease and pleasure.”4

Around age twelve, Gill heard William Wallis, pastor of the Baptist church in Kettering, preach on Genesis 3:9, “Where art thou?” The sermon began his conversion, though out of caution about his age he did not make a public profession of faith until he was nineteen. He was baptized by immersion on November 1, 1716, by Thomas Wallis, William’s son, composing a hymn on Christ’s own baptism for the occasion.5 Soon after, friends arranged for him to move to Higham Ferrers to study under John Davis, a learned local pastor, ostensibly to continue his education, though Gill later judged that God’s real purpose in the move was his meeting there of Elizabeth Negus, whom he married in 1718 and to whom he remained married for forty-six years.6 Returning to Kettering, his preaching bore fruit; among his converts in this period was John Brine, who would later share Gill’s reputation as a defender of high Calvinism.6

In 1719 Gill accepted a call to the Horsleydown (Goat Yard) church in Southwark, London, left vacant by the death of Benjamin Stinton, who had himself succeeded his father-in-law Benjamin Keach. A majority of the congregation approved Gill as pastor on September 13, 1719, but opposition from a determined minority delayed his ordination until March 22, 1720.7 He remained the church’s pastor, at Horsleydown and later at its Carter Lane building, for the rest of his life. Early in his London ministry he came under the influence of the Hebraist John Skepp, and on Skepp’s death in 1721 bought his library of rabbinic texts. He read the Targums, Mishnah, Talmud, and Zohar throughout his life and drew on them in his later commentaries.8

In 1729, the year Samuel Clarke’s death closed the second phase of England’s own Trinitarian controversy, Gill began a lectureship at Great Eastcheap; his lectures there culminated in The Doctrine of the Trinity Stated and Vindicated (1731), written, by his own account, against a Sabellianism he saw spreading among the Baptists.9 Between 1735 and 1738 he issued The Cause of God and Truth in four parts, answering the Arminian case made in Daniel Whitby’s Discourse on the Five Points.10 His Exposition of the New Testament (1746-1748) and subsequent Exposition of the Old Testament were commended by a professor of divinity at the University of Aberdeen for their display of scriptural, linguistic, and rabbinic learning; on that basis Marischal College, Aberdeen, conferred on him, unsolicited, the degree of Doctor of Divinity.11 Later in his career he defended believer’s baptism in print against the New England paedobaptist Jonathan Dickinson, answering a subsequent reply by Peter Clark.12 He also drew up additions to his own congregation’s confession of faith addressing eternal Sonship and the person of Christ, to guard his church against the anti-Trinitarian currents of the age, and left behind a further treatise on the subject, A Dissertation Concerning the Eternal Sonship of Christ, published after his death.2 Gill died on October 14, 1771; his last recorded words were “O my Father, my Father.”13

Theological Contribution

Gill’s defense of the Trinity ran through his career, from the 1731 treatise to the church-confession additions near its end. He engaged the church fathers directly and at length, a habit one recent study of his Trinitarian sources describes as “comprehensive in reading, critical in appropriation, and accurate in translation and interpretation.”14 On the Son’s eternal generation, he weighed even long-favored proof texts critically rather than simply inherited them: in his Body of Doctrinal Divinity he set aside Micah 5:2 as a text he no longer thought proved the point, since its plural “goings forth” seemed to him to describe the Son’s acts rather than a single begetting, while retaining Psalm 2:7, “The Lord hath said unto me, Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee,” as sound proof of the doctrine.15

His systematic theology organized the doctrines of grace around a single, eternal covenant of grace rather than around two distinct covenants, an eternal pactum salutis between the Father and the Son and a separate temporal covenant of grace with the elect. Gill treated the covenant as one covenant, made in eternity between the divine persons and historically manifested beginning at Genesis 3:15, following the same structure earlier argued by Benjamin Keach; later Reformed and Baptist writers including John Brown of Haddington, Thomas Boston, and A. A. Hodge would take the same singular-covenant approach, so the position was not peculiar to Gill.16 Alongside this systematic and Trinitarian work, his commentaries drew steadily on Targumic, Mishnaic, Talmudic, and Zoharic material, an engagement with rabbinic sources unusual in depth among English theologians of his time.8

Historical Significance

Gill’s own century regarded him as Particular Baptist orthodoxy’s foremost defender against Arminianism, Unitarianism, and rationalism.1 Later Baptist historians remembered him very differently. Joseph Ivimey, J. M. Cramp, and, in the twentieth century, Leon McBeth all treated Gill as the chief exemplar of English “hyper-Calvinism,” the view that preaching should not press the unconverted with a duty to repent and believe; McBeth called him the “leading Hyper-Calvinist,” writing that Gill “perhaps did more than both of them [John Skepp and John Brine] to spread hyper-Calvinism among the Particular Baptists.”17 Ivimey’s own account was more qualified: he acknowledged that Gill “never professedly wrote against the affirmative side of the Modern Question,” the era’s debate over whether sinners have a duty to believe the gospel, while still judging that Gill’s preaching lacked evangelistic application.17 Andrew Fuller’s The Gospel of Christ Worthy of All Acceptation (1785), which argued for duty-faith and the free offer of the gospel,18 is traditionally read as a response to this hyper-Calvinist tendency in Gill and Brine’s preaching.17

More recent scholarship has questioned whether “hyper-Calvinist” is the right label at all. Richard Muller judges that “the frequent identification of Gill’s thought as ‘Hyper-Calvinist’ [is], at best, less than helpful,” arguing that Gill worked largely within the broader Reformed tradition rather than as a deviation from it.19 David Rathel’s 2017 article “Was John Gill a Hyper-Calvinist? Determining Gill’s Theological Identity” takes up the same question directly.19 Swan’s own dissertation makes a related argument: that the long focus on Gill’s alleged hyper-Calvinism has crowded out serious study of his Trinitarian theology, a gap Swan’s work on Gill’s doctrine of Christ’s eternal Sonship sets out to fill.2

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Daniel David Scheiderer, “John Gill: Continuing Baptist Affirmation of the Eternal Covenant,” in “Eternal Covenant: The Trinitarian Shape of an Historic Baptist Doctrine” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2022), 55. ↩ ↩2

  2. Jonathan Elliot Swan, “Introduction,” in “‘The Fountain of Life’: John Gill’s Doctrine of Christ’s Eternal Sonship” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2021), 1-2. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  3. Scheiderer, “John Gill,” 54. ↩ ↩2

  4. Steven Tshombe Godet, “Gill’s Context, Life, and Works,” in “The Trinitarian Theology of John Gill (1697-1771): Context, Sources, and Controversy” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2015), 62. ↩

  5. Godet, “Gill’s Context, Life, and Works,” 62-63. ↩

  6. Godet, “Gill’s Context, Life, and Works,” 63-64. ↩ ↩2

  7. Godet, “Gill’s Context, Life, and Works,” 64. ↩

  8. Godet, “Gill’s Context, Life, and Works,” 65. ↩ ↩2

  9. Godet, “Gill’s Context, Life, and Works,” 69; Godet, “The Trinitarian Crisis of the Long Eighteenth Century,” in “The Trinitarian Theology of John Gill,” 121. ↩

  10. Godet, “Gill’s Context, Life, and Works,” 69. ↩

  11. Godet, “Gill’s Context, Life, and Works,” 71. ↩

  12. Godet, “Gill’s Context, Life, and Works,” 71-72. ↩

  13. Godet, “Gill’s Context, Life, and Works,” 81. ↩

  14. Godet, “John Gill, Patristic Scholar,” in “The Trinitarian Theology of John Gill,” 160. ↩

  15. John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity; or, A System of Evangelical Truths, Deduced from the Sacred Scriptures, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book I, chap. 28, “Of the Personal Relations, or Relative Properties, Which Distinguish the Three Persons in the Godhead.” ↩

  16. Scheiderer, “John Gill,” 53, 56. ↩

  17. Swan, “Introduction,” 3. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  18. Andrew Fuller, The Gospel of Christ Worthy of All Acceptation: Or, the Obligations of Men Fully to Credit, and Cordially to Approve, Whatever God Makes Known (Northampton, England: T. Dicey, 1785), cited in Scheiderer, “John Gill,” 78. ↩

  19. Scheiderer, “John Gill,” 84. ↩ ↩2