Until recently, John Gill has been examined almost exclusively through the lens of hyper-Calvinism. However, recent scholarship has awakened interest in Gill’s broader theological project, moving the discussion into new territory beyond whether Gill was a hyper-Calvinist.
First, Richard Muller, both in his monumental work, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, and in a chapter contribution to Michael Haykin’s volume, The Life and Thought of John Gill situated Gill as a Baptist theologian in the Reformed Orthodox tradition. More recently, Colton Strother sought to examine Gill’s theology and methodology, showing that he is indeed an inheritor of Reformed Orthodoxy and should be examined as such, rather than primarily through the lens of hyper-Calvinism.
Picking up on the work of these scholars, this paper will seek to further test their thesis within a focused piece of Gill’s theology: his use of patristic sources in his trinitarian theology. E.P. Meijering argued that the Reformed Orthodox employed the church fathers as testes Veritatis in their doctrine of the trinity. Did Gill inherit this method of employing the tradition of the church fathers in his trinitarian theology from the Reformed Orthodox? Or did he reject this scholastic method in favor of a more biblicist approach? Because of the extensive trinitarian debates of the 17th-18th centuries and Gill’s context as a Baptist dissenter in England, this question has special merit. This paper will argue that Gill did employ the church fathers as testes Veritatis in his trinitarian theology, which also provides further evidence that Gill should be considered an inheritor of Reformed Orthodoxy.