Justified Before You Believed? John Gill and Justification from Eternity

Ask most Reformed Christians when a sinner is justified and they will answer without hesitating: when he believes. Justification is by faith. The Reformers staked the Reformation on it.

But in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a number of Reformed and Particular Baptist writers pressed a harder question. If God chose his people before the foundation of the world, and if nothing about his will ever changes, then was there ever a moment when God regarded his elect as anything other than righteous in Christ? Some answered no. The elect, they said, were justified from eternity, and faith only discovers what was already true.

The best-known Baptist to say something like this is John Gill (1697–1771), pastor in Southwark and author of the massive Body of Divinity. Gill has often been filed under "Hyper-Calvinist" for it. This series asks whether that verdict is fair, by reading Gill alongside the confession his own church confessed: the Second London Baptist Confession of 1689. I will argue that Gill emphasizes eternity more than the Confession does, but that he does not finally cross the line the Confession draws.

This first post lays out the terms.

What justification is

Richard Muller's dictionary of Protestant scholastic terms defines the Latin iustificatio as

a counting or reckoning righteousness; specifically that actuality, or act, of grace (actus gratiae) in which God forgives sinful individuals, counts them as righteous on the basis of their faith in Christ, and accepts them as his own reconciled children, apart from all human merit and solely because of the superabundant merit of Christ's work of satisfaction.^*

Notice the word reckoning. Justification is not God making us inwardly righteous (that is sanctification). It is God's verdict: he counts us righteous because of what Christ has done.

John Calvin puts it this way in the Institutes:

On the contrary, justified by faith is he who, excluded from the righteousness of works, grasps the righteousness of Christ through faith, and clothed in it, appears in God's sight not as a sinner but as a righteous man. Therefore, we explain justification simply as the acceptance with which God receives us into his favor as righteous men. And we say that it consists in the remission of sins and the imputation of Christ's righteousness.^†

Calvin gives us three elements:

1. God receives us into his favor as he would receive a righteous man.
2. God forgives our sins.
3. God imputes Christ's righteousness to us, crediting it to our account.

And all three are grasped through faith.

Gill agrees, and then goes further

On those three elements Gill is entirely with Calvin. In the Body of Divinity he writes:

Justification by his righteousness, is really imputed to his people, and by which they truly become righteous; and not in a putative and imaginary sense; pardon by his blood, which is not merely typical, as by the blood of slain beasts, but real; atonement by the sacrifice of himself, which he really and truly offered up to God; and sanctification by the Spirit, which is the new man, created in righteousness and true holiness; and not outward, typical, and ceremonial, nor feigned and hypocritical: and adoption, by which the saints are now really the sons of God; though it does not yet appear what they shall be; and to which the Spirit bears a true and real witness; and which is unto an inheritance, real, solid, and substantial.^‡

Imputed righteousness, pardon, adoption into God's favor: the same three. But Gill adds something Calvin does not say:

Justification is not only before faith, but it is from eternity, being an immanent act in the divine mind, and so an internal and eternal one.^§

An immanent act is one that stays within God, in his own mind and will, as opposed to a transient act that passes out from God and lands on a creature. Gill's claim is that justification, considered as God's own act of accounting his people righteous, never began. It is as old as election.

Gill was not the first

Gill was building on earlier writers. Tobias Crisp (1600–1643), whose sermons Gill himself later edited, said it bluntly:

Nay, I say more, Christ justifies a person before he believes; for, he that believes is justified before he believes.⁵

On this view a person does not believe in order to be justified; he believes because he already is. John Saltmarsh, in Free Grace (1645), followed the same logic. Under the heading "Works done before justification not of grace," he asks whether faith itself must then be counted among the things that come before justification.⁶

Both men were tarred, fairly or not, with the charge of Antinomianism: the fear that if you are justified before you believe, nothing you do (including repenting and believing) really matters.

Hyper-Calvinist or High Calvinist?

So where does that leave Gill? Curt Daniel's doctoral dissertation on Gill offers a careful definition of Hyper-Calvinism:

Hyper-Calvinism is that school of Supralapsarian 'Five Point' Calvinism which so stresses the sovereignty of God by over-emphasizing the secret over the revealed will and eternity over time, that it minimizes the responsibility of Man, notably with respect to the denial of the word 'offer' in relation to the preaching of the Gospel of a finished and limited atonement, thus undermining the universal duty of sinners to believe savingly with the assurance that the Lord Jesus Christ died for them, with the result that presumption is overly warned of, introspection is over-encouraged, and a view of sanctification akin to doctrinal Antinomianism is often approached⁷

That is a mouthful, but the heart of it is simple: Hyper-Calvinism leans so hard on God's eternal decree that it stops telling sinners they ought to believe the gospel offered to them.

Daniel distinguishes this from High Calvinism, which shares the same strong emphasis on eternity over time but still holds that the gospel should be preached to all as a free offer of grace. The difference is not trivial. One tradition plants churches and preaches to the lost; the other tends to wait.

The phrase "eternity over time" is exactly the issue with justification from eternity. (A note on names: "eternal justification" is the common shorthand, but Gill's own phrase, and the more precise one, is justification from eternity. It locates the beginning of justification, not its duration.)

The Baptist backstory

Particular Baptists became associated with justification from eternity largely because of Gill. But the tradition had met the idea long before him. When the churches of London confessed their faith in 1644, and again in 1677/1689, they did so with this very debate in the air. Gill's own congregation confessed the Second London Confession, which says in chapter 11, paragraph 4:

God did from all eternity decree to justify all the elect, and Christ did in the fullness of time die for their sins, and rise again for their justification; nevertheless, they are not justified personally, until the Holy Spirit does in due time actually apply Christ to them.⁸

Here the Particular Baptists draw a careful line between God's decree to justify, which is eternal, and the personal justification of a sinner, which happens when the Spirit unites him to Christ and he believes.

So the question for this series is precise: when Gill says justification is "from eternity," is he contradicting this paragraph, or saying the same thing with a different emphasis?

Next

To answer that we need to see how the Baptists got to paragraph 4 in the first place: what they said in 1644, why they were criticized, and how the 1689 Confession builds its whole account of salvation around God's appointed means. That is the subject of Part 2: The London Confessions Draw a Line.

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