Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 66:3 (Sep 2023)
Article: “War With The Hydra Of Antinomianism”: The English Baptist Tradition And The Pursuit Of Holiness, 1630s–1830s
Author: Michael A. G. Haykin

JETS 66:3 (September 2023) p. 539

“War With The Hydra Of Antinomianism”: The English Baptist Tradition And The Pursuit Of Holiness, 1630s–1830s

Michael A. G. Haykin*

^* Michael A. G. Haykin is Professor of Church History and Biblical Spirituality and the Director of the Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2825 Lexington Road, Louisville, KY 40280. He may be contacted at [email protected]. This is an edited version of his plenary address delivered at the ETS Annual Meeting in Denver, Colorado, on Wednesday, November 16, 2022. For help on aspects of this paper, I am indebted to Curt Daniel, Barry Howson, Thomas J. Nettles, and James Renihan.

Abstract: Critics of the Particular Baptist movement in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often cited the potential and actual Antinomianism embedded within this community of churches. However, leaders within this community—men such as Benjamin Keach, Andrew Fuller, and John Ryland Jr.—were not oblivious to this great danger and were wholehearted in their advocacy of Christian holiness. This essay explores the problem—an issue that is far too often ignored in studies of this movement—and the way in which these Baptist leaders successfully addressed it.

Key words: John Eachard, Tobias Crisp, Benjamin Keach, good works, antinomianism, John Gill, John Ryland Jr., Holy Spirit

“The idea of a righteousness of one’s own is the quintessence of sin. Against this, therefore, against every trace of a holiness or righteousness which does not depend simply upon God’s mercy to the sinner, we have to set our faces as relentlessly as Paul did. But equally with Paul we have to recognize that if any man be in Christ there is a new creation, not a fiction but a real supernatural new birth, the life of the risen Christ in the soul. From this life of Christ in us come forth the fruits of his presence—real and recognizable fruits, real holiness of life.”1

In the influential systematic theology of Charles Hodge (1797–1878), which comprised three substantial volumes when originally published in the 1870s, the Princeton theologian made a curious comment about Antinomianism. It “has never had any hold in the churches of the Reformation,” he asserted.2 This remarkable statement appears to ignore the fact that it was within Reformed churches in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that there occurred some of the fiercest contests about doctrinal Antinomianism—namely, that theological vantage-point “in which good works are radically excluded” from the ordo salutis.