389 Chris Chun When the 'Good Old Cause' of Puritanism Failed to Reform

book reviews 389 Chris Chun The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards in the Theology of Andrew Fuller [Studies in the History of Christian Traditions 162]. Brill, Leiden/Boston 2012, xx + 242 pp. isbn 9789004227842. €108; us$144. When the ‘good old cause’ of Puritanism failed to reform the established Church of England, it splintered into three major groups in the 1640s and 1650s—Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Particular Baptists—divisions that were all but cemented by the Act of Uniformity in 1662 and then the Act of Toleration in 1689. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, all of these groups produced a number of notable theologians, but strangely those of the Particular Baptist denomination have been largely overlooked. Only in very recent days has there been any real academic attention paid to men like Ben- jamin Keach, John Gill, and Andrew Fuller. With regard to the last of these men, the self-taught Fuller (1754–1815)— acclaimed by C.H. Spurgeon as the greatest theologian of the Baptist denomination in the nineteenth century—this study by Chris Chun of Fuller’s indebtedness to the New England Congregationalist Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) appears to be part of a mini-renaissance of academic and popular interest in the English divine. Since 2000, for example, there have been three other major monographs on Fuller—Peter Morden’s Offering Christ to the World (2003), Michael Haykin’s ‘At the Pure Fountain of Thy Word’ (2004), and Paul Brewster’s Andrew Fuller (2010). These studies, along now with that of Chun, show that Fuller is a central figure in not only Baptist history, but also the broader history of Evangelical Christianity. As E.F. Clipsham, an English historian who has been a key figure in the current renaissance of interest in Andrew Fuller, affirmed: Fuller was “unquestionably one of the outstanding evangelical leaders of his day.” From one perspective, if Fuller’s theological works had not been written, William Carey (1761–1834), the so-called father of the modern missionary movement and a major impetus for Anglophone missions in the nineteenth century, would not have gone to India. Fuller’s theology was the mainspring behind the formation and early development of the Baptist Missionary Society, the first foreign missionary society created by the Evangelical Revival of the last half of the eighteenth century and the missionary society under whose auspices Carey went to India. Very soon, other missionary societies were established, and a new era in missions had begun as the Christian faith was increasingly spread outside of the West, to the regions of Africa and Asia. Carey was most visible at the fountainhead of this movement. Fuller, though not so visible, was utterly vital to its genesis. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi: 10.1163/18712428-09403019 390 book reviews In seeking to “trace the extent of Fuller’s theological indebtedness to Edwards” (p. 1), Chun clearly demonstrates that Fuller’s debt to Edwards as both a missionary statesman and pastor-theologian is enormous. When it comes to the issues of human freedom (a key subject in the eighteenth century), eschatology, the nature of the affections, the atonement (in particular, its nature and extent), and justification, Fuller’s theological reasoning is deeply shaped by his reading of various works of Edwards available in Great Britain at the close of the eighteenth century. This study will be especially valuable for future students of Fuller, for Chun carefully traces Fuller’s mode of argumentation from Edwards and from scripture. There are a number of minor areas, however, that merit more critical comment. Fuller’s thought was developed against the background of hyper-Calvinism, which was one of the causes for the declension of the Particular Baptists for much of the eighteenth century. Chun refers to this, but curiously terms it a “rapid decline” (p. 33), though it took the best part of 60 years, 1690s–1750s, before it reached a critical point. In the discussion of Fuller’s advocacy of the use of means to promote the conversion of sinners, Chun suddenly intro- duces a comparison of Fuller and the nineteenth-century revivalist Charles Finney (p. 63, n. 121). Is he responding to a critique of Fuller that his evange- listic perspective was akin to that of Finney? We are not told. Then, in dealing with the edition of Edwards’s Humble Attempt that was brought out by Fuller’s close friend and confidant John Sutcliff in 1789, Chun appears to misread Sut- cliff’s distancing of himself in his preface from Edwards’s apocalyptic exegesis. Sutcliff notes that there will be some who disagree with Edwards’s postmil- lennial, and at times speculative, eschatology, but nonetheless all can agree with the practical import of Edwards’s book, namely, the necessity to pray for revival (pp. 78–79). Sutcliff says nothing about where he stands on the issue of Edwards’s eschatology. More substantially, given Fuller’s familiarity with Edwards’s life of the missionary David Brainerd it is surprising that Chun does not discuss at all the way that Fuller’s life of his friend Samuel Pearce (1766–1799)—the most reprinted of Fuller’s works in his lifetime and throughout the nineteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic—is clearly modeled after Edwards’s book on Brainerd. To be sure, as Chun rightly notes, Edwards’s missiological legacy is far greater than his Brainerd book (p. 82), but the influence of this book on Fuller’s memoir of Pearce and other areas of his thought begs for discussion. Marring the work to some degree are also far too many grammatical infelic- ities. To give but a few glaring examples: on p. vi and p. 67, the sub-title “Provi- dence of Humble Attempt” should be “Provenance of the Humble Attempt”; on p. 104, the following sentence makes little sense at all: “the Holy Spirit dwells in Church History and Religious Culture 94 (2014) 359–410.

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