Spiritual Declension: Lessons From Early 18th Century Particular Baptists, Part 4-Negative Attitudes toward the Evangelical Revival: Reason #1

Posted by jsmitheasley on January 20, 2009
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In the late 1730’s, in connection with the ministries of men like George Whitefield, John Wesley, Howell Harris, Daniel Rowland and others, Great Britain became the scene of one of the greatest spiritual awakenings that has ever occurred in the history of the church. The same thing happened in America. Thousands gathered sometimes in the open air to hear men like George Whitefield and others preach the gospel. Multitudes were converted and brought to Christ and the whole fabric of English society was transformed.

What effect did this great awakening have upon the Particular Baptists? It basically passed by many of them. According to Mark Reid, “The Baptists seem to have largely passed the first Evangelical Revival by with very few records of positive responses to it in the peak years”.[1] Naylor describes the attitude of Particular Baptists as stubbornly negative towards the evangelical revival.[2] In the words of Haykin, “up till the death of Whitefield in 1770 the majority of Calvinistic Baptists in England stood aloof from this great work of God, the Holy Spirit, and were largely untouched by it.”[3] There were exceptions but this is the general picture that we are given. The awakening did begin to have a more substantial effect upon them by the last quarter of the century but when George Whitefield died in 1770, over thirty years after the awakening began, Particular Baptists were still basically untouched on a large scale. Why is that? What accounts for their negative attitude toward the revival?

First of all, they were suspicious of the revival because many of its leaders were members of the Church of England. They had a hard time accepting that anything good could come out of a denomination they refused to consider as a true church. This was partly related to what was a commendable and faithful commitment of the Baptists to the importance of biblical church order. In some instances, however, this commitment went wrong by swinging over to the extreme of failing to have a proper spirit of catholicity toward all true Christians. Many of the Baptists were aware that their churches were in a state of decline and some of the leaders, like John Gill and Benjamin Wallin, had strong opinions as to how this decline was to be remedied. Haykin writes, “For them the pathway to church renewal lay first and foremost in an earnest commitment to upholding the distinctives of Calvinistic Baptist church order and discipline.”[4] For example, Benjamin Wallin, pastor of the Maze Pond congregation, argued that “as long as there was a neglect of believer’s baptism and the principles of congregational church government, any attempt to revive the churches of Christ was ‘essentially deficient.’”[5]

Well it’s not surprising that men like Wallin criticized the revival. The emphasis of the preaching was not upon biblical church order and the proper subjects of baptism. It was upon those great central and essential gospel doctrines of salvation by grace alone, justification by faith and the necessity of the new birth. In addition, most of the great preachers who were leaders of this revival were members of the Church of England. For example, George Whitefield, Daniel Rowland, Howell Harris, William Grimshaw and William Romaine were all members of the Church of England. So were John and Charles Wesley. Worse than that the Wesley’s were also Arminian. Harris was too at the beginning, though he early on became a Calvinist.

These realities caused the Particular Baptists in general to view the whole revival with suspicion and to stay aloof from it. William Herbert, a Welsh Baptist pastor, was a friend of Howell Harris. He protested to Harris about his staying in the Church of England, which we can perhaps sympathize with. But one may question the attitude that seems to be revealed in the manner in which he did so. “In a letter he wrote to Harris in January of 1737, he compared the Church of England to a pub, ‘which is open to all comers’, and to a ‘common field where every noisome beast may come.’”[6] Then he appealed to one of the favorite texts of Particular Baptist’s at that time, Song of Solomon 4:12. Don’t you realize, he asked Harris, that the scripture describes the church as “a garden enclosed, a spring shut up, a fountain sealed. Separate from ye profane world.” Arnesby Baptist Church in Leicestershire excommunicated members in the first half of the 18th century “for going to Babylon to be joined together according to the wicked way of the Church of England.”[7]

Their dislike for the Wesley’s is more understandable in light of the Arminianism of the Wesley’s. But most of the great leaders of the revival were Calvinists like George Whitefield and Howell Harris and many others. These were men who were willing to establish friendships with the Baptists. Some Calvinistic Baptists (particularly those influenced by Hyper-Calvinism), however, complained of what they called the “Arminian dialect” and “semi-Pelagian addresses” of men like Whitefield because they preached for conversions and exhorted the lost to flee to Christ for salvation.[8]

What is the lesson for us as Reformed Baptists as we enter into the 21st century? Well here we are reminded of how important it is to have a catholic spirit toward all true Christians, though they may not be part of our circle of churches. Though some may have difficulty accepting this, God in his sovereignty sometimes greatly blesses and uses men who are not Reformed Baptists; men who don’t have everything right in their ecclesiology, or even men who are wrong in other areas of their theology. They have the gospel and they preach the gospel, but they are lacking in some areas. May I dare to say it, they may even be confused Arminians. Yet God uses them, and He may even use them in ways He’s not using any of us. We need to be able to rejoice in that. We need to ask ourselves, if God raised up some men in our day full of the Holy Spirit; men who are preaching the gospel and whose preaching God is mightily blessing with every biblical evidence of true conversions (not merely decisions, but real conversions), and those men are Methodists or Episcopalians, or Assembly of God or some other denomination, or some other kind of Baptist, other than Reformed Baptist, could we rejoice in that and be thankful for it? Could we even consider those men as our friends and brothers and even work together with them insofar far as we can? Or is our almost immediate knee jerk reaction to be critical and to pick at any and every fault we can find to try to discredit any one God is using who is not one of us?

Let us not be guilty of the sectarian spirit John manifested when he said to Jesus, “Master, we saw someone casting out demons in Your name and we forbade him, because he does not follow with us.” Jesus rebuked John for that spirit. (Mk. 9:39). Rather let us have the spirit of Aquilla and Priscilla. Near the end of Acts 18 we are introduced to a fervent preacher by the name of Apollos. He was an eloquent man and mighty in the scriptures. However we’re told that there were certain deficiencies in his understanding of the truth; “That he knew only the baptism of John.” When Aquila and Priscilla heard him, what did they do? They didn’t write him off and have nothing to do with him and tell people to stay away from him. No, they sought to befriend him, took him aside and explained to him the way of God more perfectly. So let us not have the spirit of John in Mk. 9, but the spirit of Aquila and Priscilla in Acts 18. And even when deficiencies remain, if the gospel is being preached, let us rejoice. Let us have the spirit of Paul writing from a Roman prison in Pp. 1:15-16 when he said, “Some preach Christ of envy and strife, and some also from good will…what then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is preached; and in this I rejoice, yes, and will rejoice.”

Related to this, there’s a common mistake we need to be aware of. It’s the error of thinking that there can be no revival without thorough reformation first. It’s true that reformation sometimes precedes revival. Likewise it’s true that we must always be pursuing more and more thorough reformation. If we are not seeking to reform our lives and our churches by the scriptures, it is presumption to expect revival. But in God’s sovereignty it is simply a fact of history that sometimes revival precedes reformation. Some of the Particular Baptists thought there could be no church renewal if there was a neglect of believer’s baptism and the principles of Baptist church government. They were wrong, and because they felt that way, they renounced the revival when it came. But consider, for example, what happened in the reformation of the 16th century; both in Europe and in England? It was first a spiritual awakening before it became a reformation. Men like Luther and others first came to understand the gospel and were converted and they started preaching the gospel. In England there were men like Hugh Latimer who got converted and began preaching the gospel. At first they were still in the Roman church but reformation followed after, not before. What about the revival in England that we’ve been considering? Listen to Lloyd-Jones making this same point that I’m making,

There are people who say, ‘You have no right to talk about revival, you have no right to expect revival until people become Reformed in their doctrine’. The simple answer to that is that George Whitefield received his baptism of power in 1737, but did not become a Calvinist in his theology until about 1739. Revival had come to him and through him to many others, before his doctrine became right. Exactly the same thing happened to Howell Harris.[9]

Many Particular Baptists missed it because they weren’t willing to even allow for that possibility in their ecclesiology. Perhaps they could have been the Priscilla’s and Aquila’s of that generation; from a posture of support, friendship and participation helping these men to understand the way of God more perfectly, instead of renouncing what God was doing through them. Perhaps they could have learned a few things from Whitefield, Harris and Rowland as well and maybe even from John Wesley.[10]

Jeffery Smith
Covenant Reformed Baptist Church
Easley SC

[1] Mark Reid, “Religious Revival and English Baptists in Eighteenth Century England,” 2001. Internet article at www.webministries.co.uk/papers/c18baps.html (accessed January 2009).
[2] Quoted by Reid.
[3] Haykin, One Heart and One Soul: John Sutcliffe of Olney, his Friends and his Times (Durham, U.K.: Evangelical Press, 1994), 27.
[4] Ibid. 26.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid. 27
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid. 28.
[9] D.M. Lloyd-Jones, “Revival: An Historical and Theological Survey”, in The Puritans: Their Origins and Successors (Carlisle PA: Banner of Truth Trust, 1987), 14-15.
[10] On this point see Ian Murray, The Old Evangelicalism: Old Truths For A New Awakening (Carlisle, PA: The Banner of Truth Trust, 2005). Chapter five is entitled, “What Can We Learn From John Wesley?”