Historical and theological inquiry into the eighteenth-century pastor-theologian John Gill has taken a sharp turn from the critical reproachments of the mid-twentieth century to appreciative assessments with calls for retrieval. Whereas previous interpreters made much of Gill’s Hyper-Calvinism, treating it as an utterly compromising facet of his theology, the newer scholarship has tended to either deny the charge of hyper-Calvinism or focus on the retrieval of other facets of his theology while acknowledging his unhelpfulness in certain nuances of soteriology. Gill’s status as the first Baptist to write a commentary on the entire Bible, as well as the first Baptist to write a complete systematic theology naturally suits him to the renewed interest he has received from contemporary Baptists. While the works of Muller, Park, and Strother have already linked Gill to the catholic orthodoxy he discovered in his Reformed Scholastic sources, more work remains to be done in this era.
Entirely untouched to this point is the philosophy of John Gill. The absence of such a study is understandable; Gill was not a particularly philosophical writer. Nevertheless, attention on this point will strengthen the categorization of Gill as a critical inheritor of the Reformed Orthodox tradition, methodologically indebted to the catholic orthodoxy of his Reformed Scholastic, medieval, and patristic sources. This paper will argue that Gill resisted the novel philosophical systems of his day in favor of the more traditional Thomistic Christian Aristotelianism championed by such theologians as Johannes Maccovius, Girolamo Zanchi, and Petrus Van Mastricht, cited frequently throughout his writings. While Gill never gives us a systematically-presented philosophy per se, a traditional Christian realism forms the philosophical substratum of his theology, establishing him firmly within classical Christian orthodoxy. To make this case, I will first examine Gill’s opinions on the use of reason in theology and his use of the analogia entis, primarily through the lens his hereunto ignored polemical treatise The Moral Nature and Fitness of Things Considered, which is his only work that may justifiably be considered as much a work of philosophy as theology. Next, I will broaden my methodology to include more of his corpus in order to argue that Gill as to his philosophy is best categorized as a Christian Aristotelian. This paper will conclude by briefly considering the implications of this historical research for Baptist systematic theology.