Augustus Toplady

Overview

Augustus Montague Toplady (1740-1778) was an Anglican clergyman, hymn writer, and a Calvinist critic of John Wesley within the eighteenth-century Church of England.¹ Converted to Wesley’s Arminian Methodism as a teenager, he adopted Calvinist convictions within a few years and spent much of his ministry defending them in print against Wesley directly.¹ He is best remembered today as the author of the hymn “Rock of Ages.”²

Life and Ministry

Toplady was born at Farnham, Surrey, and educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Dublin.¹ Converted under Methodist preaching, he followed Wesley’s teaching at first, but by 1758 had adopted Calvinist views instead.¹ He was ordained in the Church of England in 1762, became vicar of Harpford with Fenn-Ottery, Devon, in 1766, and moved to the living of Broadhembury, Devon, two years later.¹ He edited the Gospel Magazine, a Calvinist periodical whose existence provoked Wesley’s own side to found a rival, the Arminian Magazine, in response.³ From 1775 until his death in 1778, having obtained leave of non-residence from Broadhembury, he lived in London and ministered at a Calvinist chapel in Orange Street.¹

Theological Contribution

Toplady’s central theological dispute with Wesley concerned the freedom of the will in conversion. Wesley taught that God’s grace enables every person to come to Christ or resist him; Toplady “argued that Wesley seriously erred” in this, publishing A Letter to the Rev. Mr. John Wesley (1770), “The Doctrine of Absolute Predestination Stated and Asserted,” and The Church of England Vindicated from the Charge of Arminianism (1779) against it.³ Loraine Boettner preserves Toplady’s own description of what an Arminian doctrine of resistible grace makes of God’s power:

A doctrine which represents Omnipotence itself as wishing and trying and striving to no purpose. According to this tenet, God, in endeavoring (for it seems that it is only an endeavor) to convert sinners, may, by sinners, be foiled, defeated, and disappointed; he may lay close and long siege to the soul, and that soul can, from the citadel of impregnable free will, hang out a flag of defiance to God Himself… In a word, the Holy Spirit, after having for years perhaps, danced attendance on the free will of man, may at length, like a discomfited general, or an unsuccessful politician, be either put to ignominious flight, or contemptuously dismissed, re infecta, without accomplishing the end for which he was sent.⁴

Toplady also wrote in defense of the Church of England’s own Calvinism. His Historic Proof of the Doctrinal Calvinism of the Church of England (1774) is cited by Archibald Alexander Hodge, alongside Goode and Cunningham, as scholarship establishing that the Thirty-Nine Articles teach unconditional predestination, against Arminian readers such as Lawrence who denied it.⁵

His hymn “Rock of Ages,” collected in Psalms and Hymns for Public and Private Worship (1776), carries the same theology in devotional form. Charles Hodge reads its language, “Other refuge have I none,” “All my trust on Thee is laid,” “Thou, O Christ, art all I need,” as words that only make sense if Christ’s death is a substitutionary satisfaction for guilt, not merely a moral example, contrasting it with the Arminian hymnody of Charles Wesley to make the same point.²

Historical Significance

Barrett’s account of the wider Wesley-Arminian controversy places Toplady alongside George Whitefield among Wesley’s Calvinist opponents on grace and free will, and points to further scholarly treatment of “Toplady’s Calvinism” specifically.³ “Rock of Ages” is still read theologically today: Matthew Barrett opens a chapter on divine immutability by quoting its opening line and applying the hymn’s image of an unshaken rock to that doctrine.⁶

Related Doctrines

References

The Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), s.v. “Toplady, Augustus Montague.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶
Charles Hodge, “Chapter VII. Satisfaction of Christ,” in Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 524-25. ↩ ↩²
Matthew Michael Barrett, “Arminian Synergism in Theological Perspective,” in “Reclaiming Monergism: The Case for Sovereign Grace in Effectual Calling and Regeneration” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 305. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1932), 127. ↩
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), 125. ↩
Matthew Barrett, None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2019), chap. 6, “Does God Change? Immutability.” ↩