One of the key marks of Evangelicalism is a focus on the crucifixion of the Lord Jesus Christ. This Christian tradition has emphasized that Christ’s saving work on the cross is one of the great essentials of Christianity. Here, I think, Evangelicals faithfully reflect Paul’s words to the church at Corinth: “I passed on to you as most important what I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:3). For me, one of the great Evangelical exponents of this cross-centredness—what is technically known as crucicentrism—is an English pastor-theologian by the name of Andrew Fuller (1754‒1815), who pastored a Baptist congregation in the West Midlands for thirty-three years from 1782 to 1815. When Fuller is remembered today, usually it is in relationship to his close friend of William Carey (1761‒1834), the iconic missionary of the nineteenth century. Fuller was “the unsung hero” behind Carey’s “pioneering missionary career in Asia.”[1] But Fuller’s importance is much more than his lifelong support and facilitation of Carey’s missionary labours in the Indian subcontinent. In the words of Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834–1892), no mean judge of Christian writers and theologians, Fuller was “the greatest theologian” of his century.[2]
The Importance of the Cross
Fuller’s Evangelical theology, true to the defining characteristics of eighteenth-century Evangelicalism, was profoundly shaped by the conviction that the cross lay at the very heart of Christianity.[3] The cross is, he maintained in 1802, “the central point in which all the lines of evangelical truth meet and are united.” Just as the sun is absolutely vital for the maintenance of the solar system, so “the doctrine of the cross is to the system of the gospel; it is the life of it.”[4] Similar remarks appear in a number of Fuller’s works. In a sermon entitled God’s Approbation of our Labours Necessary to the Hope of Success (1801), Fuller reminded his hearers: “Christ crucified is the central point, in which all the lines of evangelical truth meet and are united. There is not a doctrine in the Scriptures but what bears an important relation to it.”[5]
The atoning death of Christ, Fuller forthrightly declared twelve years later in the year before his death, is nothing less than “the life-blood of the gospel system.”[6] In sum, the cross is “the grand peculiarity and the principal glory of Christianity” and all but equivalent to the gospel itself: “the doctrine of salvation through the blood of Christ … is, by way of eminency, called the gospel.”[7]
The Preaching of the Cross
Given this view of Christ’s death, it is no surprise to find Fuller asserting that it has been the doctrine of the cross that “God, in all ages, has delighted to honour.”[8] Wherever times of spiritual vitality and vigour have been enjoyed by the church—“times of great revival,” as Fuller termed them[9]—there the atoning work of Christ has held an exalted place. Fuller noted that the preaching of the cross was, among other central doctrines, key to the Reformation. It was the leading theme of the Puritans and Fuller’s spiritual forebears, the Nonconformists of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.[10] And as Fuller looked beyond the realm of history to that of eternity and heaven, he was convinced that there too the cross was “the darling theme” of its inhabitants.[11]
Thus, if a church or denomination rejects the doctrine of the cross, it is little better than what Fuller bluntly called “a dead, putrid mass.”[12] Do away with the atoning work of Christ, and
the whole ceremonial of the Old Testament appears to us little more than a dead mass of uninteresting matter: prophecy loses all that is interesting and endearing; the gospel is annihilated, or ceases to be that good news to lost sinners which it professes to be; practical religion is divested of its most powerful motives, the evangelical dispensation of its peculiar glory, and heaven itself of its most transporting joys.[13]
Why was it, for instance, that so many Anglican parish churches of Fuller’s day were so poorly attended? To Fuller, the answer was obvious. Because, he averred, “the generality of the clergy do not preach the doctrine of the cross… There is nothing in their preaching that interests the hearts, or reaches the consciences of the people.”[14] The perspective taken on the cross was, therefore, a major dividing line between a Christianity that was genuinely biblical and one that was merely nominal.
We may be Christians by education, may be well versed in Christianity as a science, may be able to converse, and preach, and write, in defence of it; but if Christ crucified be not that to us which food is to the hungry, and drink to the thirsty, we are dead while we live. We may err on other subjects and survive, though it be in a maimed state; but to err in this is to contract a disease in the vitals, the ordinary effect of which is death.[15]
Consequently, in a letter that Fuller wrote in 1796, when Unitarian thinking was posing a great threat to the ranks of English churches, Fuller declared that he could not acknowledge as a fellow believer anyone who did not “rely upon his [i.e. Christ’s] atoning sacrifice for acceptance with God.”[16]
The Blessings of Being Cross-Centred
Even where the atoning work of Christ is believed and embraced, Fuller was convinced that the failure to be cross-centred will have its baneful effects. If believers or their pastors “prefer the study of other things to the doctrine of the cross, even of those things which in subserviency to this are lawful,” they will ultimately find that they are following “a barren track.” It is in “the study of Christ crucified that our souls are enriched; for this is the medium through which God delights to communicate of his fulness.”[17]
Taking his own advice, Fuller’s writings are replete with reflection on the blessings wrought by Christ’s death. When Fuller was asked in 1798 to draw up a brief account of his early spiritual pilgrimage, Fuller noted that at the time of his conversion, he was brought to the conviction that “God would be perfectly just in sending me to hell, and that to hell I must go unless I were saved of mere grace.” “Mere grace,” he went on to explain, entailed the relinquishing of “every false confidence” and trusting solely in the death of Christ for one’s salvation.[18] The laying down of Jesus’ life on the cross, as he wrote on another occasion, is “the only hope of a lost world, the only medium of acceptance with God, and the only admissible plea in our approaches before him.”[19]
The Baptist pastor never tired of emphasizing, moreover, that inner peace and heart-purification from the stain of indwelling sin is to be found only in the experiential knowledge of Christ crucified. “The blood of Jesus,” Fuller observed in remarks on the incident of Christ washing his disciples’ feet, is “a fountain set open for sin and uncleanness.”[20] The indwelling of the Spirit of God in the believer is also given solely on the basis of the death of Christ.[21] Furthermore, it is at the cross that “the powers of darkness [are] stripped naked,” Satan “foiled by the woman’s Seed, and his schemes exposed to the derision of the universe.”[22]
Then, in the church, “all our peace with one another is the price of his blood.”[23] Where there is agreement about the doctrine of the cross, “there will be great bearing & forbearing with each other in things of less moment.”[24] Finally, as Fuller pointed out in a sermon first given in 1799 to the Baptist congregation pastored by James Alexander Haldane (1768‒1851) in Edinburgh, by means of Christ’s death, “we receive the promise of ‘eternal inheritance’.”[25]
Cross-Centred to the End
It also needs to be noted that on a number of occasions when Fuller was quite ill and thought himself to be on the brink of death, he reminded his friends that the only ground of hope which he had was the death of Jesus on his behalf. In the autumn of 1801, when he was ill with what he called an “almost continual cough” and “an almost continual fever,” he wrote to a good friend, John Sutcliff (1752‒1814), the pastor of Olney Baptist Church, that he was calm in the face of his possible demise:
My mind is calm and tolerably happy. I know whom I have believed [cf. 2 Timothy 1:12]. I have no misgivings as to the ground on which I stand: all the misgivings I have regard myself. I am a poor, polluted creature, and have been but an unprofitable servant. I could have no hope but in a Saviour, who came to save the chief of sinners.[26]
Eleven years later, when he was once again very ill, he told Sutcliff: “I have no transports, but a steady hope of eternal life on the ground of my Saviour’s death.”[27]
When he did come to die in 1815, the last letter that he sent to another close friend, the younger John Ryland (1753‒1825), who was the principal of Bristol Baptist Academy and who was his first biographer, contained similar sentiments as these two to Sutcliff. After quoting a portion of 2 Timothy 1:12, Fuller went on to say:
I am a poor guilty creature; but Christ is an almighty Saviour. I have preached and written much against the abuse of the doctrine of grace; but that doctrine is all my salvation and all my desire. I have no other hope than from salvation by mere sovereign, efficacious grace, through the atonement of my Lord and Saviour. With this hope, I can go into eternity with composure.[28]
[1] Bruce Shelley, “Where Would We Be Without Staupitz?,” Christianity Today 35, no.15 (December 16, 1991): 31.
[2] Cited Gilbert Laws, Andrew Fuller: Pastor, Theologian, Ropeholder (London: Carey Press, 1942), 127.
[3] On the crucicentrism of eighteenth-century Evangelicalism, see David W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain. A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 14‒17.
[4] Andrew Fuller, The Calvinistic and Socinian Systems Examined and Compared, As to Their Moral Tendency in The Complete Works of the Rev. Andrew Fuller, ed. Joseph Belcher (1845, Harrisonburg, Virginia: Sprinkle Publications, 1988), II, 182.
[5] Andrew Fuller, God’s Approbation of our Labours in Complete Works of the Rev. Andrew Fuller, I, 190.
[6] Andrew Fuller, Letters on Systematic Divinity in Complete Works of the Rev. Andrew Fuller, I, 687.
[7] Fuller, Calvinistic and Socinian Systems in Complete Works of the Rev. Andrew Fuller, II, 181; idem, The Believer’s Review of His State in Complete Works of the Rev. Andrew Fuller, I, 303.
[8] Fuller, God’s Approbation of our Labours in Complete Works of the Rev. Andrew Fuller, I, 190.
[9] Andrew Fuller, The Common Salvation in Complete Works of the Rev. Andrew Fuller, I, 412.
[10] Fuller, Calvinistic and Socinian Systems in Complete Works of the Rev. Andrew Fuller, II, 121; idem, Decline of the Dissenting Interest in Complete Works of the Rev. Andrew Fuller, III, 486.
[11] Fuller, The Common Salvation in Complete Works of the Rev. Andrew Fuller, 413.
[12] Andrew Fuller, Christian Stedfastness in Complete Works of the Rev. Andrew Fuller, I, 527.
[13] Fuller, Calvinistic and Socinian Systems in Complete Works of the Rev. Andrew Fuller, II, 191‒192.
[14] Fuller, Decline of the Dissenting Interest in Complete Works of the Rev. Andrew Fuller, III, 487.
[15] Fuller, Letters on Systematic Divinity in Complete Works of the Rev. Andrew Fuller, I, 691.
[16] Andrew Fuller, Agreement in Sentiment the Bond of Christian Union in Complete Works of the Rev. Andrew Fuller, III, 490.
[17] Andrew Fuller, The Heavenly Glory in Complete Works of the Rev. Andrew Fuller, III, 732.
[18] Cited Andrew Gunton Fuller, “Memoir” in Complete Works of the Rev. Andrew Fuller, I, 5‒6.
[19] Andrew Fuller, Truth the Object of Angelical Research in Complete Works of the Rev. Andrew Fuller, I, 665.
[20] Andrew Fuller, Christ Washing the Disciples’ Feet in Complete Works of the Rev. Andrew Fuller, I, 657.
[21] Andrew Fuller, The Future Perfection of the Church in Complete Works of the Rev. Andrew Fuller, I, 251‒252; idem, The Gospel Its Own Witness in Complete Works of the Rev. Andrew Fuller, II, 82‒83, footnote.
[22] Andrew Fuller, Truth the Object of Angelical Research in Complete Works of the Rev. Andrew Fuller, I, 665.
[23] Andrew Fuller, A Peaceful Disposition in Complete Works of the Rev. Andrew Fuller, I, 538.
[24] Andrew Fuller, Letter to Christopher Anderson, March 26, 1805 (Baptist Missionary Society Archives, Angus Library, Regent’s Park College, University of Oxford).
[25] Andrew Fuller, The Christian Doctrine of Rewards in Complete Works of the Rev. Andrew Fuller, I, 178.
[26] Andrew Fuller, Letter to John Sutcliff, September 1, 1801 (Letters of Andrew Fuller, typescript transcript, Angus Library, Regent’s Park College, University of Oxford).
[27] Andrew Fuller, Letter to John Sutcliff, May 31, 1812 (Letters of Andrew Fuller).
[28] Cited John Ryland, The Work of Faith, the Labour of Love, and the Patience of Hope, illustrated; in the Life and Death of the Rev. Andrew Fuller (London: Button & Son, 1818), 355.
