John Gill

John Gill (1697-1771) was introduced to High Calvinism as a young student in Kettering by John Skepp, whose influence marked the works and ministry of Gill thereafter. In 1719 Gill assumed the pastorate of the Baptist congregation at Horsleydown in Southwark, not far from his High Calvinist friend, John Brine, at Cripplegate. Gill remained with the Southwark congregation until his death in 1771. Like Brine and others who followed the High Calvinist model, Gill was constrained by his theology to refrain from offering any of his hearers an unrestricted invitation to accept Christ. The High Calvinism of some of Gill’s followers was probably greater than his own, but his works abound in close defenses of a system that a later generation of evangelical Calvinists would view as arid, narrow, and stifling in regard to evangelism. Nevertheless, Gill was a profound scholar and voluminous writer and defender of orthodox Calvinism against the early inroads of Socinianism and Antinomianism. Gill’s biblical and doctrinal studies were standards for many students and ministers during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, especially his three-volume A Body of Doctrinal Divinity, which earned him an honorary D.D. from Aberdeen in 1748. See George M. Ella, John Gill and the Cause of God and Truth (Eggleston: Go Publications, 1995); Robert W. Oliver, “John Gill (1697-1771),” ed. Michael A. G. Haykin, 5 vols. (Springfield, MO: Particular Baptist Press, 1998-2019), 1:167-182.