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The works of Andrew Fuller

Don’t take this on the train!

THE WORKS OF ANDREW FULLER
Edited by Andrew Gunton Fuller
Banner of Truth. 1,012 pages. £27.00
ISBN 978-0-85151-955-5

This is an enormous tome. When I brought it home from EN my children asked me how much it weighed! My wife chipped in, ‘You couldn’t take it to read on the train; to open it would be to take out the two passengers in the adjacent seats!’

Well, that is a bit of an exaggeration, but not much. However, it does tell you that the Works of Andrew Fuller is a book for dipping into, or for reference. It is unlikely to be a volume to take and read straight through.

Andrew Fuller (1754-1815) was a Cambridgeshire farmer’s son, and following his conversion at the age of 16, he went on to become a great preacher and Baptist theologian. In particular he was the man who backed William Carey, famed as founder of modern missions. While Carey went to India, Fuller took all the responsibility for the home end of things, raising funds, entering into all kinds of necessary correspondence, and travelling the country to promote Carey’s work, while at the same time pastoring a church.

Defending the gospel

The collection of his writings includes his rebuttals of Deism (which denies supernatural revelation) and Socinianism (which denies the Trinity and the deity of Christ). It also contains lots of sermon sketches and Fuller’s expositions of Genesis, the Sermon on the Mount and the book of Revelation (to which he brings an historical interpretation of the text into which he weaves the rise of Islam, Roman Catholicism, the Reformation and perhaps the then recent French Revolution). But most valuable of all in the reviewer’s estimation is Fuller’s The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation. This is a defence of a full-blooded Calvinism which goes hand-in-hand with the free offer of the gospel to all and the duty of all to believe on Christ. Fuller himself had been hindered from faith for some time because he laboured under the misapprehension that the gospel was only for those who somehow made themselves good enough to believe it. ‘This notion was a bar that kept me back for a time,’ wrote Fuller, ‘though through Divine drawings I was enabled to overleap it.’ It was this vision of the gospel for everyone which inspired the overseas mission and led him, Carey and others in 1792 to form ‘The Particular Baptist Society for Propagating the Gospel Among the Heathen’

Trials

Though Andrew Fuller was greatly used of God yet he faced many troubles and trials in life. Not only did he have to fight error in the churches, and raise money for the mission, but he had a number of personal tragedies. He had a young daughter who died. His first wife died as well, and in the closing weeks of her life had something like Alzheimer’s, which meant she often did not recognise her own home or Andrew as her husband. On top of this Fuller had a son who went astray in London, and over whom he greatly worried, who was eventually lost at sea. Then came the time when having provided the money for Carey’s mission, the printing shop in Serampore burnt down, losing the presses and many manuscripts for translating the Scriptures into Indian languages!

So Fuller’s works are not the writings of an armchair theologian or a mere academic. With an acute mind and greatly influenced by Jonathan Edwards, this is the wisdom of a seasoned hands-on fighter for Christ. Though some of the contents might be now dated, much is of profound value. Here is a Baptist worth ‘dipping into’.

John Benton