FULLER, Andrew, Sylvester Hassell Mr. Andrew Fuller is claimed to have been the sledge hammer that beat Methodist fervor into the cold Baptists, and roused both Baptists and Protestants to “send the gospel into heathen lands.” Mr. Fuller is described by his adherents as a clear, plain, practical, judicious, powerful, profound theologian— “the Franklin of theology.”
As he is honestly admitted by learned “D.D.’s” and “LL.D’s” among modern Baptists to be their standard, it is eminently proper for us to examine, at least briefly, his life and labors. He was born in 1754 and died in 1815. His parents were poor, and he had only the barest rudiments of an English education; yet the Fullerite or New School Baptists, notwithstanding the case of Mr. Fuller, and the fact that all real scholars admit that every one of the Apostles except Paul was unlearned, consider a fine classical education almost indispensable for a successful preacher, and, in the number of their theological colleges in the United States (21), they surpass all the Protestants, and equal the Roman Catholics.
From his fourteenth to his sixteenth year Mr. F. says that he had two or three spurious conversions, and, in his sixteenth year, a genuine conversion; and this saving conversion of one called “the grandest champion of Christianity,” took place, be it noted, during the universal prevalence of hyper-Calvinistic views among the Baptists—views which he devoted the most of his life to denouncing as not only “false Calvinism,” but false religion, more dangerous than irreligion. But for the hyper-Calvinism in his own heart, making him feel that he needed some previous qualification to come to Christ, he reckons that he might have found rest sooner than he did; but Divine drawings enabled him to overleap this barrier.
He confesses that he was “saved by mere grace, in spite of himself, by free grace from first to last.” He declared that he “never had any predilection for Arminianism, which appeared to him to ascribe the difference between one sinner and another, not to the grace of God, but to the good improvement made of grace given us in common with others, and that his zeal for the doctrine of grace increased with his years;” and his dying declarations are that “all he had done needed forgiveness; that he trusted alone in sovereign grace and mercy; that he was a poor guilty creature, but Christ was an almighty Savior; that the doctrine of grace was all his salvation and all his desire; that he had no other hope than from salvation by mere sovereign efficacious grace, through the atonement of his Lord and Savior; that with this hope he could go into eternity with composure.”
The preacher of his funeral said that “he died a penitent sinner at the foot of the cross.” In his writings, Mr. Fuller admits that “the Scriptures clearly ascribe both repentance and faith to Divine influence;” and he professes himself to be a strict Calvinist or predestinarian.
Notwithstanding this admission and profession, and his attributing, both in conversion and in death, all his salvation to the mere, free, sovereign, efficacious grace of God, he maintains that the prophets, and Christ, and his Apostles, gave the most unlimited invitations to unconverted hearers of the gospel, and so should all gospel ministers do; that the obligations of men to repentance and faith are universal; that man’s inability is not proper or physical, but only figurative or moral; that man is able to comply with all that God requires at his hand; that all his misery arises from his voluntary abuse of mercy, and his wilful rebellion against God; that it is not a want of ability, but of inclination, that proves his ruin; that men have the same power, strictly speaking, before they are wrought upon by the Holy Spirit as after, and before conversion as after; that the work of the work of the Spirit endows us with no new rational powers, nor any powers that are necessary to moral agency.”
He allows that “these principles may be inconsistent with the doctrines of grace,” but he maintains that “both are scriptural and therefore true”—that “we must receive both the general precepts and invitations of Scripture, and the declarations of salvation, as being a fruit of electing love.” Though in one article admitting that the evidence of our interest in the blessings of eternal life must be internal, yet he, in another article, says that “the terms hunger, thirst, labor, heavy laden, etc., do not denote spiritual desires, and do not mark out the persons who are entitled to come to Christ.”
In accordance with this Fullerite principle, I myself heard the most learned Fullerite in North Carolina declare, in preaching upon Isa. 55:1, that the address of the prophet applied to every human being, for that all men thirst after something.
While at times apparently delighting to stigmatize hyper-Calvinism as Antinomianism, and inconsistent with genuine conversion, Mr. Fuller admits that some adherents of this system may have true religion; and, in another article, he declares that all men by nature are real Antinomians, for Paul says that the carnal (or unrenewed) mind is enmity against God, not subject to his law, neither indeed can be.
William Huntington, S.S.(sinner saved), is regarded by many genuine Baptists in England and America as one of the most spiritual writers of the present century; but Mr. F. says that he never saw any marks of genuine religion in his writings.
I am glad to see that, in one place, Mr. Fuller, the standard of the New School Baptists in England and the United States, declares that he never imagined himself infallible. In this candid statement all Bible Baptists will heartily agree with him, especially after having read the perfectly fair exhibition of his inconsistencies just given.
The Bible, however, such Baptists do believe to be infallible, and therefore not to contain any pair of Mr. Fuller’s inconsistencies, as truth cannot be inconsistent with itself.
Many of Mr. Fuller’s expressions, in regard to the ability and power of the unrenewed mind, go far beyond the
Arminianism of James Arminius, John Wesley and Richard Watson, who declare that the unrenewed will, and all the other faculties of the unrenewed mind, are dead in trespasses and sins. Paul declares that “the carnal mind cannot be subject to the law of God;” and Christ declares that “the world cannot receive the Spirit of truth.”
What then shall we think of Mr. Fuller’s fine-spun metaphysics about unrenewed human ability? How can any believer in the Scriptures believe a word of it? It is the superficial declaration of the Roman Catholic Council of Trent that Divine commands necessarily imply human ability—just as though man had never fallen. Though man has fallen and become unable to obey the commandments of God, the nature and law and requirements of God are unchanged and unchangeable.
The gospel addresses of the Scriptures are addressed, we believe, to gospel characters—to those persons who have spiritual life, hearing, needs and appetites. These limitations are either directly expressed or implied by the circumstances. Even the letter of the word, where there is any fullness of narration, and the dictates of common sense teach this important fact.
Inspired men could, far better than we, read the hearts of those whom they addressed; and they addressed hearers of different characters, and therefore used sometimes the imperative and sometimes the indicative mood. God’s under-shepherds are directed, not to create, but to tend the flock. I cannot conceive what benefit can be supposed by a believer in sovereign grace to be derived from universally and untruthfully extending the comforting spiritual addresses of the gospel to those declared in the Scriptures to be dead in trespasses and sins—Christ expressly forbids that pearls should be cast before swine Matt. 7:6.
Unless the Spirit of God first come and impart divine life and light to the hearer, such addresses will be forever and totally vain. The imperative mood has no more power than the indicative mood, in the mouth of a preacher, to awaken the dead to life. No language or labor of man, and no fact in creation or providence, independently of the Divine Spirit, has the slightest efficacy to take away the sinner’s heart of stone and give him a heart of flesh. I do not deny that the minister may at times have a divine persuasion that some of his hearers are spiritually alive, and that he may then properly address them in the imperative mood.
William Cathcart, in his recently published “Baptist Encyclopedia,” says that Mr. John Gill “knew more of the Bible than any one else with whose writings he is acquainted; that he was a man of great humility, and one of the purest men that ever lived; that, in his “Body of Divinity,” the grand old doctrines of grace, taken unadulterated from the Divine fountain, presented in the phraseology and with the illustrations of an intellectual giant, and commended by a wealth of sanctified Biblical learning only once in several ages permitted to mortals, sweep all opposition before them, and leave no place for the blighted harvests, the seed of which was planted by James Arminius in modern times. In this work, eternal and personal election to a holy life, particular redemption from all guilt, resistless grace in regeneration, final preservation from sin and the wicked one, till the believer enters paradise, and the other doctrines of the Christian system, are expounded and defended by one of the greatest teachers in Israel ever called to the work of instruction by the Spirit of Jehovah.” He adds that Mr. Gill’s “commentary is the most valuable exposition of the Old and New Testaments ever published.”
Well, after the bones of this wonderfully gifted servant of God had been laid safely in the grave (in 1771), Mr. Andrew Fuller began to ponder upon the expediency of making a change in Baptist tactics, and offering salvation freely to all sinners without distinction. After four years’ rumination his views on this subject became entirely changed, and he wrote them in an essay entitled “The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation,” which he did not venture to publish, however till 1782, seven years after it had been written.
This publication involved him in a bitter controversy of twenty years with some of his Baptist brethren, including Mr. Abraham Booth, a London Baptist minister, and the learned and able author of that admirable work, “The Reign of Grace;” but it is stated that “the ability and force of Mr. Fuller’s pamphlet ultimately prevailed,” and his views were adopted by the majority of those professing the Baptist name.
These views, Mr. Fuller says, were different from those held by the Baptists during the most of the eighteenth century, but were like those entertained by Bunyan and the other old Baptist writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But it should be remembered that Bunyan, though we cannot doubt a child of God, yet did not have perfect light on all subjects, and was an open communionists, and at times did not seem very well established in doctrine; and, so far as we know, all calling themselves Baptists in the sixteenth and in the early part of the seventeenth century were Arminians, whose example furnishes a poor precedent for the imitation of Bible Baptists.
The actual result of Mr. Fuller’s methods has been, not to effectuate the eternal salvation of a single sinner (for Christ is the only and complete Savior of his people), but to increase largely the number of those professing, while unhappily not possessing, true religion.
In 1784, Mr. Andrew Fuller read a pamphlet on the importance of general union in prayer for the revival of true religion, written by Jonathan Edwards, President of the College of New Jersey; and in the same year he read a poem by John Scott on the cruelties of the English in the East Indies. In this manner he was led to recommend prayer meetings the first Monday evening of every month for the extension of the gospel, and to urge the formation of a moneyed religious society for sending a mission to India.
The first Baptists Missionary Society was thus formed at Kettering, England, Oct. 2, 1792, and the first collection for its treasury, amounting to 13 pounds, 2 shillings, 6 pence was taken up. Mr. Fuller was chosen and remained its secretary till his death, traveling almost continually through the British Isles, and pleading for the mission cause, and charging the society nothing for his services.
He makes the following remarkable statement in his writings, “Our undertaking to India really appeared to me, on its commencement, to be somewhat like a few men who were deliberating about the importance of penetrating into a deep mine which had never before been explored. We had no one to guide us; and, while we were thus deliberating, Carey, as it were, said, ‘Well, I will go down if you will hold the rope.’ But before he went down he, as it seemed to me, took an oath from each of us at the mouth of the pit to this effect, that while we lived we should never let go the rope. You understand me. There was great responsibility attached to us who began the business.”
All this looks far more like faith in men and in money than faith in God. Instead of approving, the Scriptures utterly condemn all confidence in the flesh. Can it be possible that such fleshly confidence as that to which Mr. Fuller makes such full and candid confession was the source of modern Baptist and Protestant missions? If his language has any meaning, it would seem so. Again: Mr. Fuller makes the astonishing statement that his own “church was in a famished condition of spiritual life, and found no salvation except in becoming identified with mission work!” Alas that the mission idol should be substituted for Christ! (Hassell’s History ppg 337-341)