Matthew Pinson

I was recently reading a book by the seventeenth-century English General Baptist preacher William Jeffery, The Whole Faith of Man. This book is a summary of Christian doctrine published in London in the 1650s that hasn’t been in print since the 1600s.

The book is not without its faults, but reading it reminded me of how industrious these forefathers of our Free Will Baptist Church were in their concern to think through, write, and publish doctrine and theology—and not see doctrine and theology somehow as being something other than, let alone at cross purposes with, the practical, zealous ministry of the Gospel.

Here were men who were mostly bi-vocational—pastors of growing churches (some large, some small) but also farmers and tailors and soapboilers and physicians. Yet somehow many of them still found the time to write full-length books on practical and theological subjects.

It makes me scratch my head that we in evangelicalism today have more M.Divs and D.Mins than you can shake a stick at, most of whom have full-time ministry jobs, but so many have almost no interest doctrine and theology. Indeed there is a tendency to drive a wedge between theology and ministry and think that theology actually detracts from practical ministry and zealous evangelism. We desperately need to take a page from the playbook of our early forefathers, who were very zealous and had growing churches in both rural and urban areas, but saw theology and doctrine as being at the heart of a vibrant ministry—woven into its very fabric.

In addition to those thoughts sticking out in my mind, I came across a few passages from Jeffery’s discussion of Romans 9 that I thought our readers would enjoy. The first one directly addresses the Calvinist interpretation of Romans 9. It touches on a theme that many Arminian interpreters neglect or underemphasize—that Romans 9 is really about the conditional election of unbelievers, and that Paul is arguing against the corporate election views in Jewish theology. This is something that Jacobus Arminius and Leroy Forlines emphasize, but that is neglected in many Arminian treatments.

The second passage, which follows Jeffery’s discussion of Romans 9, is basically saying that the Calvinist doctrine espoused with regard to that text means that God hates the vast majority of his human creatures and created them for the purpose of hating them, even though that flies in the face of the ubiquitous message in Scripture of the love of God for humanity. I love the way Jeffery explains it:

For the better understanding of this point, well consider the principal thing, which Paul treats of in that chapter, Romans 9, which is, that the fleshly seed of Abraham are not the children of promise, or the Elect of God (vv. 7, 8). Wherefore (saith the Apostle) though Esau was the child of Abraham according to the flesh, and that upon Isaac’s side too, yet God hated him: therefore you Jews that stand so much upon your birth privileges, as being the seed of Abraham after the flesh, by this of Esau you may know, that it will not prove you to be the Elect of God, but you may be hated as Esau, he being as truly a child of Abraham as you, but for his wickedness (whether considered as a Person, or as a Nation) God rejected him; I say, for his wickedness as appeareth (Obad. 9.10) “For thy violence, (O Esau) against thy brother Jacob, shame shall cover thee, and thou shalt be cut off forever (Mal. 1.3, 4; Amos 1.11; Heb 12.16, 17). Esau’s wickedness therefore (whether considered a person, or a Nation) I say, with the holy Prophets, was the cause why God hated him; whose wickedness, God that foreknoweth all things, foreknew. . . . (The Whole Faith of Man, 26-27).

But if notwithstanding you shall yet turn the body of these Scriptures [Rom. 9] otherways [than the way he has explained them], then behold its face: namely, That God did (before time) hate the greatest part of the world, without respect unto foreseen wickedness as the cause thereof, and that (in time) he gives them up to hardness of heart (without grace at any time whereby to be saved) and at the day of Judgment will cast them into everlasting torments, because of their wickedness and hardness of heart; and yet declare in his Word, (which you say is a word of truth) that he is good to all, and that his “tender mercies are over all his works”; that he is “slow to anger, and of great mercy,” (Ps. 145.8, 9), “patient, long-suffering, etc. (Ex. 34.6, 7), “not willing that any should perish” (2 Pet. 3.9), swearing by himself, “that he desireth not the death of the wicked” (Ezek. 33:11) but “would have all men saved, and come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2.4), “forty years long grieving for the iniquity of his people” (Heb. 3.17), bemoaning their undone estate (Psal. 81.13), yea, even weeping for them (Luke 19.41), saying, “What could I have done more” (for your good) “that I have not done?” (Isa. 5.4), when as he knew (according to your tenet) that [he] himself had shut them up from all possibilities of believing unto salvation, and that by his own unresistible decree, and purpose of reprobation. Judge ye, friends, in this cause, and judge righteous judgment, and with fear and trembling, weigh these things. (The Whole Faith of Man, 31-32).

These thought-provoking comments come from the heart of a preacher and pastor. He saw them, not as a tack-on to preaching and explaining the Bible for his people, but as integral to his work as a shepherd. May we be inspired by the pastoral theology of our forebears who had a seamless view of the interaction between our minds, hearts, and the way we live our lives. May we return theology to its integral place in the ministry of the Gospel.