Daniel ALLEN

ALLEN, DANIEL (b. Brundish, Suffolk England, 14 Feb 1824; d. Sydney, NSW, 14 Sept 1891). Strict and Particular Baptist minister and author.

Daniel was the son of Robert and Hannah Allen. His mother died when he was two years of age. Following her death he was cared for by friends and relatives. At the age of seven his father left him and migrated to Tasmania. As a boy he attended an Independent chapel of the 'old Puritan order'. The early Puritan influence seems to have shaped his later ministry.

Allen migrated to Sydney in 1845, then left for Launceston, where he joined the Rev Henry Dowling's (q.v.) church and was baptised by him. He married in 1846. About 1848 he moved to Melbourne where he worked as a stone carter and began preaching. He ministered in many locations and claimed to have been the first person to have held a religious service on the Ballarat goldfields. He returned to Melbourne where he held pastorates at Preston and the Protestant Hall, Market Lane. In 1862, he returned to Launceston. In 1871 he was called to the pastorate of the Castlereagh Street Particular Baptist Church, Sydney, to succeed the Rev John Bunyan McCure (q.v.). It was a position he held until his death. Allen was the Grand Chaplain of the Orange Institution of NSW and also Chaplain of No. 4 Loyal Orange Lodge. He was a member of the Local Option Committee and a prominent member of the Social Purity League. He held the presidential chair of the Particular Baptist Association of Australia and was the leading minister in the colonies of the denomination. For many years he contributed to the English Hyper-Calvinist journals Gospel Standard and Earthen Vessel. From 1884 up until his death he was the editor of the Australian Particular Baptist Magazine.

Allen's preaching and literary career earned him a reputation as a controversialist. He concluded early in his ministry that Arminian theology provided opportunity for the encroachment of Catholicism, and he rebuked the movement both in lectures, tracts, books, and in articles in the Australian Particular Baptist Magazine. He considered the theologies of Roman Catholicism, Evangelical Calvinism, and Arminianism as a threat to Australian society and the church. This brought him into conflict with Roman Catholics, the Baptist Union of NSW and the Methodists.

More than other figures among Australian Baptists, Allen placed an indelible stamp of Hyper-Calvinism on the Strict and Particular Baptists. An heir to the theology of a long line of English Hyper-Calvinists such as John Gill and William Gadsby, Allen preached that redemption is not universal and that the objects of redemption are the elect of God. He rejected the Evangelical Calvinist position of the 'free offer of the gospel'. Only God's elect had the responsibility to repent and believe. He repudiated the notion of 'duty-faith', or universal human responsibility. Allen had a profound impact upon the Australian Strict and Particular Baptist churches in that they became so zealous to maintain the sovereignty of God that they denied that preachers had the right 'to offer Christ' to unregenerate sinners. Noted by the secular press for his 'Calvinistic austerity' Allen's extreme sectarianism and his propagation of Hyper-Calvinism left the Australian denomination a legacy which was the death of the Strict and Particular Baptists as an organised religious force in Australia.

F. Beedel, Letters and Other Writings of the Late Pastor Daniel Allen (Sydney, 1901)

MICHAEL CHAVURA