Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 25:1 (Spring 2021)
Article: “Conjugal Union”: John Gill On Christian Marriage
Author: Ian Hugh Clary

SBJT 25:1 (Spring 2021) p. 93

“Conjugal Union”: John Gill On Christian Marriage

Ian Hugh Clary

Ian Hugh Clary is Assistant Professor of Historical Theology at Colorado Christian University, Lakewood, Colorado, and lectures at Munster Bible College in Cork, Ireland. He earned his PhD at The University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa. Dr. Clary is the author of God Crowns His Own Gifts: Augustine, Grace, and the Monks of Hadrumetum (H&E, 2021), and Reformed Evangelicalism and the Search for a Usable Past: The Historiography of Arnold Dallimore, Pastor-Historian (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020). He is the co-editor of Pentecostal Outpourings: Revival and the Reformed Tradition (RHB, 2016), and The Pure Flame of Devotion: The History of Christian Spirituality ( Joshua Press, 2013). He is also a review editor for Evangelical Quarterly. Dr. Clary has served as a board member of the Davenant Institute, is a fellow of the Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies, and the Center for Baptist Renewal. Dr. Clary and his family are members at Calvary Redeeming Grace Church in Lakewood.

“The Greatest And Best Of Men”: A Summary Life

John Gill (1697–1771) was a Particular Baptist pastor and theologian who stood in the crosscurrent of the evangelical revivals and the Enlightenment.1 He was born in Kettering on November 23, 1697, to Edward and Elizabeth (née Walker); his father was a wool merchant and deacon in a local Baptist church. The young Gill attended a grammar school in Kettering, but left at the age of eleven due to his parents’ refusal to let him attend Anglican prayer. They could not afford the cost of a Dissenting Academy, so his education concluded and he went to work with his father in the wool trade.2 It is striking that in 1716, at around nineteen years of age, Gill began a preaching career that led to him becoming a key Baptist leader and theologian and a noted expert in biblical languages, particularly Semitics.3 For one with an

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incomplete education, his scholarly accomplishments are a testimony to his intellectual appetite and abilities; and justification for the conferring of a doctor of divinity by the University of Aberdeen in 1747.

Gill was baptized on November 1, 1716, just before his first foray into preaching. In 1718 he served a church in Higham Ferrers, Northamptonshire, where he met his wife Elizabeth Negus (d. 1764). A year later the young couple moved to London where Gill took the pastorate at Goat Yard Chapel in Horselydown, Southwark (later Ca...