John Brine

John Brine (1703-1765) was originally from Kettering (he was his close friend and fellow High Calvinist, John Gill). He served as pastor of the Baptist congregation at Curriers’ Hall, Cripplegate, London, 1730-1765. Gill, Brine, and other High Calvinists refrained from offering their hearers an open invitation to accept Christ. Fuller, Ryland, Sutcliff and other Baptist ministers would eventually reject this position in favor of a more moderate, evangelical Calvinism; the writings of Gill and Brine, nevertheless, remained highly influential in their defense of Calvinism and Baptist distinctives. Brine’s major works include A Defence of the Doctrine of Eternal Justification (1732); Remarks upon a Pamphlet, intitled, Some Doctrines in the Superlapsarian Scheme Impartially Examin’d by the Word of God (1736); The Certain Efficacy of the Death of Christ (1743); An Antidote Against a Spreading Antinomian Principle (1750); and A Vindication of Divine Justice (1754). See Roger Hayden, Continuity and Change: Evangelical Calvinism among Eighteenth-Century Baptist Ministers trained at Bristol Academy, 1690–1791 (London: Baptist Historical Society, for Roger Hayden, 2006), 175-194.