This evening Michael Haykin (of the Andrew Fuller Centre) gave the Dr Lloyd-Jones Memorial Lecture on "Sweet Sensibility"; Andrew Fuller's defence of religious affections. This is a subject that Dr Lloyd-Jones himself tackled back in 1967. Dr Haykin began by outlining what Sandemanianism was. It was an attempt to reduce faith to mere assent. It took the view that the affections play no role at all in saving faith. Many wrote against it including John Wesley, Thomas Scott, Anne Dutton, William Gadsby, etc, but the best work was that of Fuller, his Strictures on Sandemanianism of 1810.
Fuller was born in Wicken, a small agricultural village in Cambridgeshire. His parents, Robert Fuller (1723-1781) and Philippa Gunton (1726-1816), were farmers who rented a succession of dairy farms. In 1761 his parents moved a short distance to Soham, where he and his family began to attend the local Calvinistic Baptist church, and where Fuller was converted in November 1769. After being baptised the following Spring, he became a member of the Soham church. In 1774 Fuller was called to the pastorate of this work. He stayed until 1782, when he became the pastor of the Calvinistic Baptist congregation at Kettering.
His time as a pastor in Soham was a decisive period for the shaping of Fuller’s theological perspective. It was during this period that he began a lifelong study of the works of the New England divine Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) which, along with his humble submission to the authority of the infallible Scriptures and the fearless exercise of his mind, enabled him to become what his close friend John Ryland Jr (1753-1825) once described as ‘perhaps the most judicious and able theological writer that ever belonged to our [the Calvinistic Baptist] denomination’.
Fuller came into contact with Sandemanianism when he travelled throughout Scotland in the 1790s and 1800s seeking to raise financial support for the Baptist Missionary Society and their mission at Serampore, India.
Fuller was quite willing to admit that there was much in Sandemanianism that he considers ‘worthy of serious attention’. Sandeman’s critique of the undue subjectivism that reigned in certain quarters of eighteenth century Evangelicalism, for instance, was not without merit. As Fuller notes: ‘If the attention of the awakened sinner, instead of being directed to Christ, be turned inward, and his mind be employed in searching for evidences of his conversion, the effect must, to say the least, be uncomfortable, and may be fatal; as it may lead him to make a righteousness of his religious feelings, instead of looking out of himself to the Saviour.’ Fuller shared Sandeman’s concern that some professing believers of their day were more taken with their experiences of Christ than with Christ himself. For them, faith is all but reduced to religious feeling.
Yet, he goes on to argue, the solution to such an unbalanced focus on the subjective elements of Christianity is not to be found by rejecting them out of hand: ‘Subjective religion is as necessary in its place as objective.’ While faith can never be identified simply with feeling, nor can it be ever divorced from the affections of the heart. Genuine faith ‘does not pertain to the understanding only’, Fuller stresses. In elaborating this position, Fuller makes a number of telling points against the Sandemanian system.
First, if faith does concern only the mind, then there would be no way to distinguish genuine Christianity from nominal Christianity. A nominal Christian mentally assents to the truths of Christianity, but those truths do not grip the heart and re-orient his or her affections. The so-called faith of a nominal Christian, Fuller points out, is really little different from that of the fallen angels, whom we are told in James 2:19 ‘believe’ in the existence of one God and ‘tremble’.
Fuller dealt with other issues such as the holy kissing, their obsession with the letter of Scripture, their glorying in the smallness, etc but central was the issue of saving faith.
Dr Haykin closed by pointing out that Sandemanian ideas do recur from time to time. The Campbellites are an obvious example from the 19th Century as is easy believism from the 20th century. He also cited this paper about the relevance of Sandeman in recent years.