John Brine

Overview

John Brine (1703-1765) was an English Particular Baptist minister, converted under John Gill’s preaching and later Gill’s contemporary and fellow pastor in London.¹ Brine, alongside Joseph Hussey and Lewis Wayman, was one of hyper-Calvinism’s most systematic eighteenth-century defenders, a stricter position than Gill’s own that held ministers should not indiscriminately call the unregenerate to repent and believe.² He also wrote against the Arminian case for universal redemption and against the rationalist theology of James Foster.

Life and Ministry

Brine was born in Kettering, Northamptonshire, in 1703. He was converted under John Gill’s preaching there, early in Gill’s own ministry.¹ After occasionally preaching at Kettering himself, Brine received a call to pastor a Particular Baptist congregation at Coventry. In 1730 he succeeded William Morton as pastor of the Baptist congregation at Curriers’ Hall, Cripplegate, London, a pastorate that continued for the next thirty-five years. He took a leading part in the public affairs of the Particular Baptist denomination during this period. Brine died on February 21, 1765, and was buried in Bunhill Fields. Though he left instructions against any special funeral sermon, John Gill marked the occasion by preaching to his own congregation from 1 Corinthians 15:10, “By the grace of God I am what I am.”

Theological Contribution

Hyper-Calvinism

Brine is known chiefly for hyper-Calvinism, the position that because God has already determined who will be saved, ministers should not call every hearer indiscriminately to repent and believe, since the unregenerate have no duty to do so until God first regenerates them (see Hyper-Calvinism for the position’s full statement and the Reformed confessional response to it).² Barrett names Brine and Wayman, following Joseph Hussey’s foundational 1707 work God’s Operations of Grace but No Offers of His Grace, as the position’s most systematic eighteenth-century defenders.² Nineteenth-century Baptist historian Joseph Ivimey judged that Gill “did not write as ‘strongly’ as John Brine” against what Ivimey called “false Calvinism,” and argued that Gill and Brine together “gave the tone” to a generation of Particular Baptist preaching that lacked direct evangelistic application to unconverted hearers.³ Later historians including J. M. Cramp and H. Leon McBeth likewise held Gill and Brine jointly responsible for spreading hyper-Calvinism among the Particular Baptists and contributing to the denomination’s numerical decline in the period, though McBeth’s own assessment leans substantially on Ivimey’s earlier one.⁴

Written works

Brine’s The Certain Efficacy of the Death of Christ (1743) argued against the Arminian inference from a universal gospel offer to universal redemption. Godet cites the work directly alongside Gill’s parallel argument in The Cause of God and Truth against the same Arminian move, noting both men made the case on similar grounds.⁵ Brine also wrote A Vindication of Some Truths of Natural and Revealed Religion (1746), a polemical response to the Dissenting minister James Foster, and God the Defence and Glory of His Church (1734), an anti-Catholic sermon preached at Devonshire-Square commemorating the Gunpowder Plot, part of a recurring genre of Dissenting November 5th sermons in the period.⁶

Historical Significance

Brine’s hyper-Calvinism was a stricter, more settled position than Gill’s own, more disputed case; historians disagree sharply over whether Gill’s writing actually supports the hyper-Calvinist label (see Hyper-Calvinism’s Historical Origin section), but Brine is consistently classed among the position’s committed defenders. The position he helped establish among Particular Baptists was answered a generation later by Andrew Fuller (1754-1815), whose sustained argument against it helped turn the wider Baptist movement away from hyper-Calvinism and toward what became known as “Fullerism.”⁷

Related Doctrines

• Hyper-Calvinism
• Calvinism
• John Gill
• Andrew Fuller
• Limited Atonement

References

1. Steven Tshombe Godet, “Gill’s Context, Life, and Works,” in “The Trinitarian Theology of John Gill (1697-1771): Context, Sources, and Controversy” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2015), 63-64, citing John Gill, A Collection of Sermons and Tracts, 1:591-92n: “his ministry began to produce fruit so that his first biographer stated that ‘he had been blessed, not only to the comfort, but to the conversion of many,’ of which one of these converts was John Brine.” ↩ ↩²

2. Matthew Michael Barrett, “The Scriptural Affirmation of Effectual Calling,” in “Reclaiming Monergism: The Case for Sovereign Grace in Effectual Calling and Regeneration” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 129. ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. Joseph Ivimey, A History of the English Baptists (London: B. J. Holdsworth, 1823), 3:272-75, quoted and summarized in Swan, “Introduction,” 3n3. ↩

4. H. Leon McBeth, The Baptist Heritage: Four Centuries of Baptist Witness (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1987), 176-77; J. M. Cramp, Baptist History (1869; repr., Paris, AR: Baptist Standard Bearer, 2000), 499-500, 506-12; both quoted and summarized in Swan, “Introduction,” 3. ↩

5. John Brine, The Certain Efficacy of the Death of Christ (London: Aaron Ward, 1743), 88-94, cited in Steven Tshombe Godet, “Gill’s Context, Life, and Works,” in “The Trinitarian Theology of John Gill (1697-1771): Context, Sources, and Controversy” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2015), 57n262. ↩

6. Godet, “Gill’s Context, Life, and Works,” 40n158, and “Bibliography,” 364. ↩

7. Barrett, “Scriptural Affirmation,” 129. ↩