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Andrew Fuller
Fuller was born in Soham, Cambridgeshire, England, where in 1775 he was ordained pastor of the Baptist church. Originally schooled in the hyper-Calvinist theology then prevalent in parts of the Particular Baptist denomination, he became convinced in 1775 that the hyper-Calvinist position was not scriptural. In 1785 he published The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation, which did much to prepare his denomination for accepting this missionary obligation. As pastor in Kettering, Northamptonshire, from 1783, Fuller became firm friends with John Sutcliff of Olney, John Ryland of Northampton, and later the young William Carey. The strengthening missionary vision of this group bore fruit on October 2, 1792, when the Particular Baptist Society for Propagating the Gospel among the Heathen (later known as the Baptist Missionary Society) was formed in the home of one of Fuller’s deacons in Kettering. Fuller was appointed secretary. Until his death he combined the demands of a busy pastorate with managing the affairs of the BMS. He traveled extensively to raise funds for the society, especially in Scotland, which he visited five times.
Brian Stanley, “Fuller, Andrew,” in Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions, ed. Gerald H. Anderson (New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 1998), 230-231.
This article is reprinted from Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions, Macmillan Reference USA, copyright © 1998 Gerald H. Anderson, by permission of Macmillan Reference USA, New York, NY. All rights reserved.
Pastor, apologist, and promoter of missions
Though not university trained, Andrew Fuller was recognized by his contemporaries as the preeminent Baptist theologian of their day and was awarded honorary doctor of divinity degrees by both Princeton (1798) and Yale (1805). Fuller’s published works, preaching ministry and churchmanship was, perhaps, the primary mediating agency between the transatlantic evangelical revival and the English Particular (or “Calvinist”) Baptists who had distanced themselves from what was largely at the start an Anglican renewal movement. Fuller was also well known as a co-founder of the Baptist Missionary Society (or, the Particular Baptist Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Amongst the Heathen [est. 1792]), on whose behalf he itinerated regularly in the British Isles, lobbied the East India Company, and wrote numerous letters and magazine articles during his twenty-two year tenure as its first general secretary. He was an opponent of the British slave trade and, though a dissenting non-Anglican, an acquaintance of William Wilberforce and other members of the Clapham sect, who were key allies in Parliament. He was a pastors’ pastor who exerted no small influence for evangelical doctrine and a missionary vision through the many ordination sermons he preached. From 1782 until his death in 1815 he served as pastor of the Kettering Baptist Church and was frequent chairman of the Northamptonshire Association, a consortium which included the likes of William Carey, Samuel Pearce, John Sutcliffe, and John Ryland, Jr.
Fuller was born in 1754 at Wicken, Cambridgeshire, to non-conformist parents who worked a dairy farm. In 1775, six years after his own conversion experience, he was inducted as pastor of the forty-seven member church in Soham, where he had received his baptism and was a member. In 1776 he married his first wife, Sarah Gardiner, with whom he had eleven children, only three surviving beyond early childhood. Sarah would die in 1792, less than two months before the founding of the British Missionary Society (BMS). During this seven year pastorate, Fuller immersed himself in the literary culture of Anglo-American evangelical Calvinism. He cultivated his theological perspective and ministry philosophy by ardently studying the Scriptures alongside the works of the Reformers, seventeenth-century Puritans (especially John Owen), early English Baptists like John Bunyan and John Gill, as well as the writings of American Congregationalist philosopher-theologian and pastor, Jonathan Edwards. Fuller also acknowledged in his most popular book, The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation (1781), the influence of the lives of John Eliot and David Brainerd, both late missionaries to the native Americans. The Gospel Worthy was Fuller’s remonstration against the hyper-Calvinism that negated the propriety of evangelistic appeals. By the 1790s, evangelical (or “strict”) Calvinism was known in England as “Fullerism” (vs. “High” or hyper-Calvinism). The Gospel its Own Witness (1800) was Fuller’s refutation of Deism. Fuller gained a reputation by these two books, especially, for publically, clearly and systematically opposing in print whatever widely held doctrines he believed were undermining the church and its mission.
In the Northamptonshire Assocation Fuller was a member of a thriving intellectual community most influenced by Edwards. In 1784 John Sutcliff initiated a “concerts of prayer” movement similar to the program suggested by Edwards in An Humble Attempt to Promote Explicit Agreement and Visible Union of God’s People in Extraordinary Prayer (1748). Baptist congregations prayed monthly for the spread of the gospel and the kingdom of Christ to the ends of the earth through all denominations. In 1791, Sutcliff, Fuller and Samuel Pearce each preached at significant events (Sutcliff and Fuller at the association meeting of pastors, Pearce at William Carey’s ordination) on the duty of the church to evangelize the whole inhabitable globe. Fuller based his appeal on the eternal truth of the gospel, the eternal relevance of the gospel, the eternal power of the gospel, and the circumstances of the age that made missionary endeavors possible and obligatory.(1) Carey’s much touted association sermon from Isaiah 54:2-3 in May of 1792 did not arise in a vacuum. The influence was mutual between Carey and Fuller, both being influenced by Robert Hall, Sr. and Samuel Pearce (who had been inspired by the Methodist Thomas Coke in Birmingham).
On October 2, 1792, the BMS was formed with Fuller its first secretary and the assumption that its support would come largely from the churches of the Northamptonshire Association. When the society sent Carey and John Thomas to India the following year, Fuller preached their commissioning service from John 20:21 (“As the Father has sent me, even so I [Christ] am sending you.”). Fuller believed the mission’s raison d’être was the uniqueness of Christ and Christian responsibility to proclaim him. Bible translation and evangelism should take priority. Hindus were not desiring or seeking the Christian Scriptures. But to ignore and neglect anyone in an unconverted state is inconsistent with the love of God and man. In addition, God had promised the messiah the inheritance of the nations (An Apology for the Late Christian Missions to India, 1808). The church is obligated to employ means and make an effort as the means God uses to fulfill that promise to Christ. Obstacles are merely a test to sincerity of faith.
Fuller spent up to ten hours per day in correspondence and reporting for the BMS. He contributed articles to Evangelical Magazine, Missionary Magazine, Quarterly Magazine, Protestant Dissenters’ Magazine, Biblical Magazine, and Theological Miscellany. He sought financial support via letters and by an average of three months of vigorous itineration each year among various evangelical churches in Scotland, Ireland, Wales and England. John Ryland, Jr. wrote of Fuller’s style, that he, “…always disliked violent pressing for contributions, and attempting to outvie other societies: he chose rather to tell a plain, unvarnished tale; and he generally told it with good effect.”(2) Through written correspondence he “pastored” the missionaries in the field while maintaining a decentralized approach to mission administration. He believed the missionaries were more capable of governing themselves and that the time required for correspondence made central control impractical anyway.
The security of the unlicensed Baptist missionary society’s place in the British Empire was frequently tenuous up to 1813. Fuller occasionally had to petition Parliament or the Board of Control for continued tolerance of the BMS. Muslim irritation at the Christian missionary presence and the conversion of some Indians from Islam had been blamed for the Vellore Mutiny of 1806. Thomas Twining had openly claimed efforts at conversion were contradictory to “the mild and tolerant spirit of Christianity.” Fuller responded to Twining and other English defenders of Hinduism with his three-part Apology for the Late Christian Missions to India (1808) in which he argued for a toleration of religion that allows all religious views as well as efforts to persuade through reasonable means. He attributed several social ills, like ritual infanticide and sati, to Hinduism, and commended the missionaries for trying to put an end to such practices. Fuller was also a critic of the “detestable traffic” of the African slave trade, asserting it made England deserving of ruin at the hands of the French (from whose invasion he urged prayer that God would mercifully protect England). The prosperity of the empire should not come at the expense of other human beings. Patriotism must “harmonize” with “good will toward [other] men.”(3) On the other hand, Fuller often counseled BMS missionaries not to become “entangled” in political concerns which were “only affairs of this life” and endangered colonial toleration of the mission.(4) Because Jesus accomplished “moral revolution” in the heart, loyalty to the British government, rather than republicanism, should be encouraged as far as it is compatible with Christian commitments.(5)
Fuller, the pastor of families in England and abroad, counseled missionary families to nurture a deep spirituality for the sake of attaining the character commensurate with the nature of the gospel and their mission. Fuller knew the vicissitudes of even the Christian heart, and the “spiritual advantage” of engaging in mission. Reflecting in his diary on July 18, 1794, he wrote:
Within the last year or two, we have formed a missionary society; and have been enabled to send out two of our brethren to the East Indies. My heart has been greatly interested in this work. Surely I never felt more genuine love to God and to his cause in my life. I bless God that his work has been a means of reviving my soul. If nothing comes of it, I and many others have obtained a spiritual advantage.(6)
Fuller died in 1815. The epitaph stone for Fuller in the Kettering meeting house says he devoted his life for the prosperity of the BMS.(7) One biographer has said Fuller “lived and died a martyr to the mission.”(8) After December, 1794, he was assisted in life by his second wife, Ann Coles. Fuller also spent himself itinerating for the British and Foreign Bible Society after it was founded in 1804. His many occasional writings and sermon manuscripts reveal a love for the gospel message itself and the life-orienting impact of Bible texts such as Matthew 28:16-20 and Mark 16:15-16; John 12:36 and 20:21; and Romans 10:9, 14-17. Fuller is noted today for making a significant contribution to the revitalization of Particular (Calvinist) Baptist life in late eighteenth century England as well as for being a key figure in the historic turn toward a proliferation of free Protestant missionary societies at the beginning of the Great Century.
The Martyred Lover - The Story Behind Saint Valentine’s Day
Of the multitude of feasts celebrated in the popular culture of medieval Europe — wherein lie some of the key roots of the modern West — only two remain in popular North American culture today: Saint Patrick’s Day (March 17) and Saint Valentine’s Day (February 14). With Saint Patrick, we have two important texts by Patrick himself that reveal the true man. But who was Saint Valentine? The name was a popular one in the Roman world, for the adjective valens expressed the idea of being vigorous and robust. In fact, we know of about a dozen early Christians who bore this name. Our Saint Valentine was an Italian bishop who was martyred on February 14, 269, after a trial before the Roman emperor Claudius Gothicus (reign 268–270). According to the meager accounts that we have, Valentine’s body was hastily buried, but a few nights later some of his associates retrieved it and returned it to his home town of Terni in central Italy. Other accounts list him as an elder in Rome. One embellishment has him writing a letter before his death and signing it, “your Valentine.” “Saint Valentine was a martyr — yes, a lover, but one who loved the Lord Jesus to the point of giving his life.” What seems clear, though, from all that we can determine, is that Saint Valentine was a martyr — yes, a lover, but one who loved the Lord Jesus to the point of giving his life for his commitment to Christ. For Christians to adequately remember Saint Valentine, then, we would do well to consider what it meant to be a martyr in the early church. Witnesses and Martyrs Our word martyr is derived from the Greek martys, originally a juridical term that was used of a witness in a court of law. Such a person was one “who has direct knowledge or experience of certain persons, events or circumstances and is therefore in a position to speak out and does so.”1 In the New Testament, the term and its cognates are frequently applied to Christians, who bear witness to Christ, often in real courts of law, when his claims are disputed and their fidelity is tested by persecution. The transition of this word within the early Christian communities from witness to what the English term martyr” entails serves as an excellent gauge of what was happening to Christians as they bore witness to Christ. In Acts 1:8, Jesus tells the apostles that they are to be his “witnesses” (martyres) in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the end of the earth. At this point, the word does not have the association of death, although in Acts 22:20 we do read of the “blood of Stephen,” the Lord’s “witness” (Greek martyros), being shed. But it is really not until the end of the writing of the New Testament canon that the term martys acquires the association with death.2 At the very close of the apostolic era, the risen Christ in Revelation 2 commends his servant Antipas, his “faithful witness,” who was slain for his faith at Pergamum, “where Satan dwells” (Revelation 2:12–13). Pergamum, it should be noted, was a key center of emperor worship in Asia Minor, and the first town in that area to build a temple to a Roman emperor, Augustus Caesar. It may well have been Antipas’s refusal to confess Caesar as Lord and worship him that led to his martyrdom.3 It has been estimated that by the mid-first century, eighty or so cities in Asia Minor had erected temples devoted to the cult of the emperor.4 The word martys seems thus to have acquired its future meaning first in the Christian communities in Asia Minor, where the violent encounter between church and empire was particularly intense.5 In this regard, it was certainly not fortuitous that Asia Minor was “unusually fond” of the violent entertainment of the gladiatorial shows. There was, in fact, a training school for gladiators at Pergamum. Along with fascination with such violence, there would have been a demand for victims over and above the requisite gladiators. Thus, recourse was had to Christians, among others.6 And so, the word martys became restricted in its usage to a single signification: bearing witness to the person and work of Christ to the point of death. Stephen and Antipas were the first of many such martyrs in the Roman Empire. Neronian Persecution One of the most memorable clashes between church and empire was what has come to be called the Neronian persecution. In mid-July 64, a fire began in the heart of Rome that raged out of control for nearly a week and gutted most of the city. After it had been extinguished, it was rumored that the emperor Nero (reign 54–68) himself had started it, for it was common knowledge that Nero wanted to level the capital of the empire in order to rebuild the city in a style in keeping with his conception of his own greatness. Conscious that he had to allay suspicions against him, Nero fixed the blame on the Christians. The fullest description that we have of this violence against the church is from the Roman historian Tacitus (about 55–117), who describes the execution of these Christians as follows: To scotch the rumour [that he had started the fire], Nero substituted as culprits, and punished with the utmost refinements of cruelty, a class of men, loathed for their vices, whom the crowd styled Christians. Christus, from whom they got their name, had been executed by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate when Tiberius was emperor; and the pernicious superstition was checked for a short time, only to break out afresh, not only in Judaea, the home of the plague, but in Rome itself, where all the horrible and shameful things in the world collect and find a home. First of all, those who confessed were arrested; then, on their information, a huge multitude was convicted, not so much on the ground of incendiarism as for hatred of the human race. Their execution was made a matter of sport: some were sewn up in the skins of wild beasts and savaged to death by dogs; others were fastened to crosses as living torches, to serve as lights when daylight failed. Nero made his gardens available for the show and held games in the Circus, mingling with the crowd or standing in his chariot in charioteer’s uniform. Hence, although the victims were criminals deserving the severest punishment, pity began to be felt for them because it seemed that they were being sacrificed to gratify one man’s lust for cruelty rather than for the public weal.7 A number of Christians — including the apostle Peter, according to an early Christian tradition that seems to be genuine8 — were arrested and executed. Their crime was ostensibly arson. Tacitus seems to doubt the reality of this accusation, though he does believe that Christians are rightly “loathed for their vices.” Tacitus’s text mentions only one vice explicitly: “hatred of the human race.” Why would Christians, who preached a message of divine love and who were commanded to love even their enemies, be accused of such a vice? Well, if one looks at it through the eyes of Roman paganism, the logic seems irrefutable. It was, after all, the Roman gods who kept the empire secure. But the Christians refused to worship these gods — thus the charge of “atheism” that was sometimes leveled at them.9 Therefore, many of their pagan neighbors reasoned, they cannot love the emperor or the empire’s inhabitants. Christians thus were viewed as fundamentally anti-Roman and so a positive danger to the empire.10 ‘Blood of Christians Is Seed’ This attack on the church was a turning-point in the relationship between the church and the Roman state in these early years. It set an important precedent. Christianity was now considered illegal, and over the next 140 years the Roman state had recourse to sporadic persecution of the church. It is noteworthy, though, that no emperor initiated an empire-wide persecution until the beginning of the third century, and that with Septimius Severus (reign 193–211).11 Nonetheless, martyrdom was a reality that believers had to constantly bear in mind during this period of the ancient church. “Instead of stamping out Christianity, persecution often caused it to flourish.” But persecution did not always have the effect the Romans hoped for. Instead of stamping out Christianity, persecution often caused it to flourish. As Tertullian (born about 155), the first Christian theologian to write in Latin, put it, “The more you mow us down, the more we grow: the blood of Christians is seed.”12 And as he said on another occasion: “whoever beholds such noble endurance [of the martyrs] will first, as though struck by some kind of uneasiness, be driven to enquire what is the matter in question, and, then, when he knows the truth, immediately follow the same way.”13 Surpassing All Earthly Loves It was during the Middle Ages that the various stories of Saint Valentine circulated and were embellished, solidifying the remembrance of him as a martyr. But it was a medieval writer, Geoffrey Chaucer (1340s–1400), who explicitly linked romantic love to Saint Valentine in a poem entitled “Parliament of Fowls” that described the gathering of a group of birds on “seynt valentynes day” to choose their mates. To what degree Chaucer influenced the later link between Saint Valentine’s Day and lovers is not exactly clear, but as early as the fifteenth century lovers were sending each other love notes on Saint Valentine’s Day. Of course, with the rise of the commercial cultures of the West in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this practice was commodified and became an important part of the commercial world we see today. There is nothing inherently wrong with modern commercial traditions, but Saint Valentine’s Day is a good day to also remember that there is a love that surpasses all earthly loves: our love for our great God and our Savior, his dear divine Son, Jesus. Allison A. Trites, The New Testament Concept of Witness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 9. ↩ G.W. Bowersock, Martyrdom and Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1–21. ↩ Paul Keresztes, “The Imperial Roman Government and the Christian Church. I. From Nero to the Severi” in Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt, ed. Hildegard Temporini and Wolfgang Haase (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1979), II.23.1, 272; G.K. Beale, The Book of Revelation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 246. ↩ Christopher A. Frilingos, Spectacles of Empire: Monsters, Martyrs, and the Book of Revelation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 22–23. ↩ Theofried Baumeister, “Martyrdom and Persecution in Early Christianity,” trans. Robert Nowell, in Martyrdom Today, ed. Johannes-Baptist Metz and Edward Schillebeeckx (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1983), 4. ↩ Bowersock, Martyrdom and Rome, 17–18; Keresztes, “Imperial Roman Government and the Christian Church,” 272. ↩ Tacitus, Annals 15.44.3–8, trans. F.F. Bruce, Paul: Apostle of the Heart Set Free (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977), 442. ↩ See Tertullian, Scorpiace 15.3. ↩ See Justin Martyr, 2 Apology 3. ↩ W.H.C. Frend, “Persecutions,” in Encyclopedia of the Early Church, ed. Angelo Di Berardino, trans. Adrian Walford (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), II, 673. Christians were also charged with incest, seemingly a misunderstanding of the common Christian statement about loving their brothers and sisters in Christ, and with cannibalism, a misunderstanding of the Lord’s Table. See, in this regard, Justin Martyr, 2 Apology 12; Theophilus, To Autolycus 3.4, 15; Minucius Felix, Octavius 9.2, 5; 28.2; 30–31. ↩ Some scholars see the first empire-wide persecution initiated by an emperor to be that of Decius (reign 249–251) in the late 240s. ↩ Tertullian, Apology 50.13. ↩ Tertullian, To Scapula 5, in Tertullian: Apologetical Works and Minucius Felix: Octavius, trans. Rudolph Arbesmann, Emily Joseph Daly, and Edwin A. Quain (New York: Fathers of the Church, Inc., 1950), 161. ↩ Article by Michael A.G. Haykin
