Some memories of John Codman about Andrew Fuller

By Michael A.G. Haykin

John Codman (1782–1847) was an American Congregationalist minister who graduated from Harvard in 1802. His grandfather, also John Codman (1719–1792), was converted under and nourished by the preaching of George Whitefield and Gilbert Tennent. After his graduation from Harvard, the younger Codman decided to study in Scotland and made the trip across the Atlantic in July and August, 1805—the voyage took a month. While on board ship Codman read what he called “an excellent little pamphlet by Andrew Fuller, on the question, “What shall I do to be saved?” This must have been Fuller’s The Great Question Answered, a 19th century copy of which I have published by the American Tract Society and that was kindly given me in 2008 by Nathan Harmon, when he was studying at SBTS.

Codman later met Fuller with John Ryland at an ordination in the fall of 1805. He described Fuller to a correspondent as “our much admired Andrew Fuller” and observed after this meeting that the English Baptists were “highly intelligent and respectable, and they unite with the most evangelical sentiments the true spirit of charity.” (William Allen, Memoir of John Codman, D.D. [Boston, MA: T.R. Marvin and S.K. Whipple & Co., 1853], 12, 20, 35, 45).

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Michael A.G. Haykin is the director of the Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies. He also serves as Professor of Church History and Biblical Spirituality at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Dr. Haykin and his wife Alison have two grown children, Victoria and Nigel.

When a Friend Dies: A Funeral Sermon for Andrew Fuller

By Dustin Benge

The day before his forty-second birthday, May 21, 1815, Joseph Ivimey, arrived to preach his usual Sunday sermon at the Baptist church at Eagle Street, London. This Lord’s day at Eagle Street stood in marked contrast to all the rest. Ivimey would not deliver his usual exposition, but instead, would reflect on the memory of his dear friend and fellow BMS member, Andrew Fuller. Fuller, pastor of Kettering Baptist Church, Northamptonshire, died at Kettering, about eleven o’clock on the Lord’s day morning, May 7, 1815, at sixty-two years of age. The English Baptist world began to lament his death with several sermons being preached marking the loss of this great stalwart of gospel zeal. Ivimey mounted the pulpit on May 21, no doubt with much heaviness in his heart, to preach a sermon entitled, The Perpetual Intercession of Christ for His Church: A Source of Consolation Under the Loss of Useful Ministers.

Ordained as pastor of Eagle Street in 1805, Ivimey had occupied the same pulpit for 10 years and became one of the leading forces of the English Baptist denomination. Biographer, George Prichard, said of Ivimey in 1835, “he was a warm friend and zealous advocate of missionary enterprise.”[1] It was this zeal for the missionary enterprise that lead him to his first acquaintance with the secretary of the Baptist Missionary Society, Andrew Fuller, while Fuller was visiting London in 1807 on official BMS fund-raising business. The following years would be marked by frequent correspondence and communication between these two growing friends. In 1812, Ivimey would be invited by Fuller to become apart of the executive management of the BMS. On April 19, 1814 the Baptist Society for Promoting the Gospel in Ireland was formed. Ivimey was the first secretary (an honorary office); he visited Ireland in May 1814, and retained the secretaryship till October 3, 1833. Ivimey died on February 8, 1834, and was buried on at Bunhill Fields in London. A little before his departure he was reported to have said, "Not a wave of trouble rolls across my peaceful breast." The legacy of Joseph Ivimey is seen most vividly in his four volume, A History of the English Baptists, for which he is most widely known.

The Perpetual Intercession of Christ for His Church is not ostentatious flattery, but on the contrary, is a humble reflection of an eminent figure of theological and pastoral stature, as well as a dear friend. The sermon climaxes with a careful analysis of the honorable and godly character of Andrew Fuller. Character that was attested to by many. Ivimey describes his personal inadequacy to fully describe such a man’s character. He says, “It may, however, be said of him, as it was of Barnabas: He was a good man.” Regarding Fuller’s view and practice of friendship, Ivimey says, “To those who were indulged with his friendship, he felt and manifested tender affection.”

Ivimey’s words weave a portrait of a man who loved Christ, loved the gospel, and gave his life in the advance of the Kingdom of Christ with the assistance of many dear friends. Ivimey speaks of a man who admits time and time again, that his work could never have been accomplished had it not been for the undergirding of friends. Ivimey says, “Surely, the language of David, concerning Abner, “Know ye not, that a prince, and a great man, is fallen this day in Israel?” May, without any impropriety, be applied to the late Andrew Fuller.”

                [1] George Pritchard, Memoir of the Life and Writings of the Rev. Joseph Ivimey (London: George Wightman, 1835) 82.

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Dustin Benge serves as the senior pastor of First Baptist Church in Jackson, Kentucky. He is also a PhD candidate at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and a junior fellow at The Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies. Dustin and his wife, Molli, live in Jackson.

Free Andrew Fuller Biographies Available Online

By Nathan Finn

For those interested in reading more about the life of Andrew Fuller, numerous biographies are available online for free. Several of these are nineteenth-century works available through Google Books. For example, see the following:

John Ryland Jr., The Work of Faith, the Labour of Love, and the Patience of Hope, illustrated; In the Life and Death of the Rev. Andrew Fuller, Late Pastor of the Baptist Church at Kettering, and Secretary to the Baptist Missionary Society, From its Commencement, in 1792 (Charlestown: Printed by Samuel Etheridge, 1818).

J. W. Morris, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Rev. Andrew Fuller, Late Pastor of the Baptist Church at Kettering, and First Secretary to the Baptist Missionary Society, First American, from the last London edition, ed. Rufus Babcock (Boston: Lincoln and Edmonds, 1830).

Andrew Gunton Fuller, Men Worth Remembering: Andrew Fuller (London: Houghton and Stoddard, 1882).

In addition to these biographies on Google Books, the Baptist History Homepage, maintained by Jim Duvall, includes numerous shorter biographies of Fuller. Most of these sources are nineteenth-century dictionary entries and obituaries. Both Google Books and the Baptist History Homepage also include numerous primary sources written by Fuller.

In terms of more recent electronic biographical resources, last summer Desiring God published John Piper’s Andrew Fuller: I Will Go Down If You Will Hold the Rope! (Desiring God, 2012). The book, based upon Piper’s 2007 biographical address on Fuller at the Desiring God Conference for Pastors, is available for free in EPUB, MOBI, and PDF formats.

On the Andrew Fuller Center website, you can read Michael Haykin’s biographical essay on Fuller, titled “‘A Dull Flint’: Andrew Fuller— Rope-Holder, Critic of Hyper-Calvinism & Missionary Pioneer.” This essay will be published as a chapter in Haykin’s forthcoming book “Ardent Love to Jesus”: English Baptists and the Experience of Revival in the Long Eighteenth Century (Bryntirion Press, 2013).

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Nathan A. Finn is associate professor of historical theology and Baptist Studies at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is also an elder at First Baptist Church of Durham, NC and a senior fellow of the Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies.

One Anglican view of Dissent

The Rev. William Cole, the subject of yesterday’s post, was not too atypical of many Anglican ministers in the eighteenth century: he was not overly interested in his parish, and he had no love for Dissent. As he told Horace Walpole in 1780: “It is a matter of astonishment to me in this enlightened age to observe the intolerant spirit of the Dissenters. I am sure we want no proof that if the Catholics are bigots, the fanatics [i.e. the Dissenters] of this island are on a par with them…”  (Letter to Horace Walpole, July 2, 1780 in Horace Walpole’s Correspondence with The Rev. William Cole, ed. W.S. Lewis and A. Doyle Wallace [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1937], II, 226). He did know some Dissenting ministers first-hand. Robert Robinson (1735–1790), the well-known Baptist minister of Cambridge, called upon him in December 1777. Cole later described Robinson as “an ingenious man, as his publications prove” (Letter to Horace Walpole, March 29, 1778 in Horace Walpole’s Correspondence with The Rev. William Cole, ed. Lewis and Wallace, II, 71–72). Robinson’s ingenuity, however, could not have been striking enough to change Cole’s opinion of Dissenters!

Antiquarian or historian?

The Rev. William Cole (1714–1782), the parish minister of Milton, not far from Cambridge in old England, was deeply interested in the preservation of the past. His passion for transcribing church registers of the Anglican Church, we are told, was “a particular excitement” for him.  Sadly, he was nowhere near as excited about his parishioners. (Horace Walpole’s Correspondence with The Rev. William Cole, ed. W.S. Lewis and A. Doyle Wallace. [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1937], I, xxv–xxvi, xxviii). In sum, he was an antiquarian, for whom the past provided an escape from the present. This is quite different from a true historian, for whom the past, while valued for its own sake, can never be divorced from the present.

The 259th anniversary of Andrew Fuller’s birthday and his place in the dictionaries

After the death of Andrew Fuller in 1815, one of his friends, Robert Hall, Jr., the son of Fuller’s mentor, the elder Robert Hall, was dining with a John Greene not far from the place of Fuller’s birth in the fens of East Anglia. “Do you remember, sir,” Hall asked Greene, “what occurred at his [i.e., Fuller’s] birth?” Greene, who was a lot younger than either Hall or Fuller, had no idea what Hall was referring to. “Why, sir,” Hall told him, “the fen-ditches were all convulsed, the earth shook to its very centre, and the devils ran frightened to one corner of hell”![1] Greene appears to be the only source for these curious remarks, a kind of Gothic description of the impact of Fuller’s thought on his fellow Baptists, and more broadly, on the world of Evangelical thought and action. Such is a right estimate of the impact and importance of Fuller in his day, as a variety of dictionary entries over the past century bear witness. I spent three hours today, from roughly 4:30pm to about 7:30pm, photocopying a variety of dictionary entries on Fuller that bespoke his significance, from the famous eleventh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1910) to a recent piece by Jeffrey Anderson in The Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization (2011).  A couple of entries stood out.

First, that by E.F. Clipsham in the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), in which an early figure in the renaissance of Fuller studies affirmed that Fuller was “unquestionably one of the outstanding evangelical leaders of his day.” The other was by an older Baptist historian, the renowned Albert Henry Newman, who rightly noted in The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia (1908–1914) that Fuller’s impact “on American Baptists has been incalculable.”

Good cause to remember this dear brother and thank God for Andrew Fuller (which a number of us did at the Bristol Grille here in Louisville yesterday afternoon—see previous post).

[1] John Greene, Reminiscences of the Rev. Robert Hall, A.M. in Olinthus Gregory and Joseph Belcher, eds., The Works of the Rev. Robert Hall, A.M. (New York, NY: Harper & Brothers, 1854), 26–27, n.§.

Celebrating Andrew Fuller's 259th Birthday

Today is Andrew Fuller's 259th birthday. Yesterday, a group of Southern Seminary students and alumni associated with the Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies at Southern gathered with the Center's Director, Dr. Michael A.G. Haykin to commemorate Fuller's birthday with a special lunch. We had great food and fellowship. No doubt Fuller and his friends (men such as John Sutcliff, William Carey, Samuel Pearce, John Ryland, Jr., and Robert Hall, Jr.) enjoyed similar fellowship two hundred years ago. The topics of discussion included this year's annual conference (scheduled for September) on Fuller and His Controversies (speakers to include Paul Helm, Mark Jones, Nathan Finn, and Tom Nettles) and the Andrew Fuller Works Project (for which there is exciting progress being made). And, of course, we had cake to celebrate Fuller's birthday!

You can celebrate Fuller's birthday today by familiarizing yourself with the content of this website. You should find plenty to keep you busy today and beyond. Sorry, no cake provided!

Posted by Steve Weaver, Research Assistant to the Director of the Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies, Dr. Michael A.G. Haykin. 

A prosopographical approach to history

In distinction from the reigning paradigms in how to do history—socio-economic and gender—it seems to me that a prosopographical approach to history is the vital element in teaching and writing. I believe this is the approach to history patterned for us in holy Scripture. It is also a way of approach that is perennially fascinating and illuminating. Ten years ago, in an article on English historian Linda Colley, Daniel Snowman put it well when he argued for the use of multiple biography to create a portrait of a bygone era.

On writing history

Trying to write the history of the modern day is extremely difficult: the closeness of the events distorts one’s vision and then there is the overwhelming amount of sources. Robert Louis Stevenson’s observation is surely right: “The obscurest epoch is today” (cited Charles Nicholl, Traces Remain: Essays and Explorations [London: Penguin Books, 2011], xvii). A few years ago, the renowned English historian Linda Colley suggested the best century—she called it “God’s century”—to study was the 18th century (David Snowman, “Linda Colley”, History Today, 53, no.1 [January 2003], 18). The sources for this period are abundant but not so much as to overwhelm the researcher. Of course, anyone who spends an enormous amount of time in Andrew Fuller must be biased and it didn’t take much to convince me Colley was spot-on.

Nathan Finn on Recent Trends in Andrew Fuller Studies

In recent days, Dr. Nathan Finn (Associate Professor of Historical Theology and Baptist Studies at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina) has been blogging at Between the Times about recent trends in Andrew Fuller Studies. The first post covered the twentieth century, while the second post discussed significant writings from the past dozen years. The final post focused upon conferences, primary source reprints, forthcoming collections of essays, and the upcoming critical edition of the Works of Andrew Fuller (for which Dr. Haykin serves as General Editor). If you want to learn more about the growing interest in Andrew Fuller among scholars, pastors, and others, I’d encourage you to head over to Between the Times and read these posts.

Posted by Steve Weaver, Research Assistant to the Director of the Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies, Dr. Michael A.G. Haykin. Slightly modified from this post by Nathan Finn at his personal blog.

Ian Clary on "Church History on the Ground"

Rivers of Living Water: Celebrating 125…Dr. Haykin recently collaborated with Ian Clary on a history of the 125-year-old Hughson Street Baptist Church in Hamilton, Ontario, “Rivers of Living Water”: Celebrating 125 Years of Hughson Street Baptist Church, Hamilton, Ontario, 1887-2012. Ian wrote about his experience working on this project and the value of local church histories here. Be sure to check out his suggestions for both beginning and professional historians, along with his plea to churches, seminaries and other Christian institutions to publish histories regularly.

Posted by Steve Weaver, Research Assistant to the Director of the Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies, Dr. Michael A.G. Haykin.

 

Audio Now Online for "Andrew Fuller & His Friends" Conference

Audio has now been posted for this year's conference which was held in September. All audio is posted on the conference page here. Unfortunately, two of the lectures did not get recorded in Group B of the Parallel Sessions: Paul Brewster's and Jimmy Burchett's. All the rest are available here.

Posted by Steve Weaver, Research Assistant to the Director of the Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies, Dr. Michael A.G. Haykin.

New Book on Heidelberg Catechism Celebrates 450th Anniversary

Next year (2013) marks the 450th anniversary of the Heidelberg Catechism. This Protestant document was written in Heidelberg in 1563 on behalf of Frederick III, Elector Palatine and spread over the world when it was approved by the Synod of Dort in 1619. A new volume is being released next March to commemorate this important event in church history—Power of Faith: 450 Years of the Heidelberg Catechism, edited by Karla Apperloo-Boersma, Herman J. Selderhuis. See flyer from publisher the Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht here. In this 440 page hardcover book, respected specialists in their fields present how the Heidelberg Catechism spread and influenced culture, education and ecclesiastical life. In addition to the text, over 250 pictures illustrate the contributions making an attractive volume for display. This work will include the following contribution from Michael A. G. Haykin and Steve Weaver "To 'concenter with the most orthodox divines': Hercules Collins and his An Orthodox Catechism—a slice of the reception history of the Heidelberg Catechism."

Power of Faith is slated to be released in Dutch, English and German editions. You can preorder the English edition from Amazon.com (German edition).

Posted by Steve Weaver, Research Assistant to the Director of the Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies, Dr. Michael A.G. Haykin.

St. Patrick or Patrick the Christian saint

When judged from the vantage-point of the New Testament, the entire medieval project of elevating some Christians to the status of “saints” is an illegitimate undertaking. In that yardstick of Christianity, all believers are “saints,” set apart for God and declared holy by virtue of union with Christ. A number of these “saints” were, of course, remarkable Christians. Though not worthy of the elite status accorded by the medieval Church, they are still men and women with whom we should be acquainted. Take Patrick of Ireland, for example. A visit to New York City this past winter involved, as it often does when I go to Manhattan, a brief visit to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The Christian after whom this imposing neo-Gothic edifice is named would be amazed at a lot of what goes on in this church: the Mariolatry, the votive candles for the dead, the statues (his own among them!)—how far removed from the Nicene Trinitarianism that Patrick took to Ireland.

While history has been enormously generous to Patrick—a patron saint celebrated by millions every March 17, for instance—it has also obscured the real man, who is found in one place: his two genuine writings, his Confession and his Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus. In these texts we see a man overwhelmed by the grace of his calling to be a minister of the gospel and a missionary to the Irish at the very edge of all the world that Patrick, a Romano-Brit, knew.

Get hold of those texts. Read them and be changed by his passions and his convictions.

Four fourth-century Christians in Roman Britain

Last fall, during a visit with Steve Weaver to the British Museum on September 14, I headed to one of my favorite places in the Museum, the room housing the exhibits of Roman Britain. While there, I was drawn especially to the Water Newton Treasure, a hoard of silver vessels, found in 1974 in the English county of Cambridgeshire. In the fourth century, the locale was known as Durobrivae, a fortified Roman garrison town. A number of the pieces were stamped with the familiar Christian chi-rho symbol, and the names of some of those who associated with the hoard were listed: Publianus, Amcilla, Innocentia and Viventia. I love finding lists like this: Who were these fourth-century believers? How had they come to Christ? What was their witness?

Remembering Baptist pioneers

In Russell Re Manning, ed., 30-Second Religion (New York: Metro Books, 2011)—one of those mass-produced books to be sold at a discount—Manning cites John Smyth, Thomas Helwys, and Roger Williams as the key representatives of “Baptist Christianity” (p.110). It is curious that I came across this today as this past week in our Church History colloquium we discussed John Smyth’s The Character of the Beast, and I noted that it is strange that we as Baptists remember two men—Smyth and Williams—who were Baptists for less than a year. To be sure, they understood certain key principles of Baptist theology, and for that we rejoice. But: we also must prize consistency and perseverance. It strikes me that if we want to remember two pioneers, Thomas Helwys and John Clarke in Rhode Island are much better models.

Samuel Davies on friendship

In his State of Religion among The Protestant Dissenters in Virginia (Boston, 1751), Samuel Davies helps us understand what friendship meant for some eighteenth-century Evangelicals. He is talking about the aim of this tract, and what he will and will not communicate to his readers. He notes: “I have always tho’t it an Instance of Imprudence pregnant with mischievous Consequences, when Persons in such Cases unbosom themselves to Mankind in general, with the unguarded liberties of intimate Friendship.” (p.4). How did Samuel Davies understand friendship? It was a context in which “intimate” friends could share completely and fully with one another—unbosoming themselves to one another with complete liberty. But such was not for public consumption. It occurs to me that, there is wisdom here for how one ought to conduct oneself with regard to social media.

Mark Moss on the visualization of history

Last year I came across a very helpful book by Mark Moss, Toward the Visualization of History: The Past as Image (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008). It helped confirm a number of convictions that I have had for a while. First, “for today’s generation, history comes from images” (p.85), and their reading is like their watching t.v.—it is by “quick looks.”

Then, Moss argues that the print revolution of Johann Gutenberg led to an increase of individualism and a growth in the desire for privacy since reading was a solitary activity (p.71).

Finally, relevant for a Canadian like myself, was the observation that “Canadians think our history [that is, the history of Canada] is a snore” (p.151). Sad, but true!

Coming Soon from Dr. Haykin: Travel With Jonathan Edwards

Coming soon from Dr. Haykin and DayOne Publications is Travel With Jonathan Edwards. This is another in a series of very helpful travel guides related to important figures in church history published by DayOne. Written with Ron Baines, the book will not only include a biographical sketch of Edwards, but it will also include maps, directions, and color photos of many important Edwards' sites. From the Publisher:

In a world wracked by the clash of European powers, Jonathan Edwards, one of the most extraordinary theologian-pastors in the history of Christianity, sought to express by means of the spoken word and printed text his vision of the glory of God, sovereign over this world’s empires, and its practical implications for humanity. The pursuit of this calling was an instrumental factor in the revivals that reshaped the American spiritual landscape. Throughout all the changes of his life was his beautiful relationship with his wife Sarah, a model of Puritan marital piety and the hidden spring of much of his usefulness as a preacher and theologian.

Free Registrations Available for "Andrew Fuller and His Friends"

Currently enrolled, on-campus Southern Seminary students are eligible for free registration to this year's Andrew Fuller Center conference. Due to the generosity of friends, there are a limited number of free registrations available on a first come, first serve basis. To receive this free registration you must sign up for in person at the Events Production office on the campus of Southern Seminary. All you need is your Shield student ID card. For details about the conference or (if you are not a current SBTS student) to register, please visit events.sbts.edu/andrewfuller.