The Emergence of Hyper-Calvinism

The Emergence of Hyper-Calvinism 

[Jospeh] Hussey gave three basic reasons for rejecting the usual Reformed and Puritan view of the free offer of Christ to men in the preaching of the Gospel:

1) To preach Christ is thus Scriptural, whilst to offer him is not.

2) To offer grace and salvation to sinners will not help them to become Christians, since it is the irresistible grace of God alone that makes Christians.

3) To offer the gifts of God’s grace to everybody in preaching is wrong for they are only intended for the elect (p.80).

In view of these arguments we may well ask, ‘How then is the Gospel to be preached if the grace of Christ is not to be offered to all, and all are not to be invited to receive Christ as their Lord and Saviour?’ Hussey anticipated this question and gave a detailed reply. He believed that the doctrines of the Gospel were to be preached to all, but the grace of God was not to be offered to all.... This doctrine of no offers of Christ developed quite naturally out of his extreme supralapsarianism. Indeed it was simply a logical deduction from it (p. 82).

To Hussey, any minister who claimed to believe in the sovereign grace of God but yet offered Christ to all was a ‘half- hearted Calvinist’ (p.82).

The doctrines of eternal and virtual justification and the concept of assurance as the voice of the Spirit whispering ‘you are elect’ were for Hussey the necessary corollaries of supralapsarian predestination and irresistible grace in conversion (p.82).

Through his doctrine of God’s operations of grace but no offers of grace; resting firmly on eternal, absolute predestination, he believed that he saved the Gospel from the prevalent Arminianism of his age (p.83).

Thus we see that Hussey’s theology was a system of belief into which the spirit and temper of his age entered. Turning away from the various errors and heresies of his day, he adopted an extreme Reformed position, so extreme that it merits the title of ‘Hyper-Calvinism’, since with its doctrine of no offers of grace and its supralapsarianism it rose well above (or sunk beneath) the theology of Calvin and of the orthodox Reformed Puritan divines (p.83).

[John] Skepp displayed the same frame of mind as Hussey had expressed. He made sure that he completely avoided Arminian tendencies and, in doing so, lost sight of the fact that the Bible provides many examples of prophets and preachers who call men to turn to God without first giving long explanations as to the necessary work of the Spirit in the heart, mind and will (p.87).

Whilst the orthodox Puritans of the seventeenth century would have agreed with most of what Skepp had to say they would have pointed out that as surely as the Bible teaches the sovereignty of God’s grace in conversion it also teaches that the preacher must call his hearers to faith in Christ and that he must not try to reconcile two Biblical doctrines which are portrayed as being ‘in tension’ in the Bible (p.88)

Skepp stands, as it were, in the history of dogma, as the connecting link between Hussey’s theology and the Hyper-Calvinism of many Particular Baptists throughout the eighteenth century (p.89).

We must now turn to the consideration of two doctrines taught by the Hyper-Calvinists, the teaching of which distinguished them from those of their contemporaries who shared their zeal for the doctrines of High Calvinism. The first of these was the doctrine that they learned from Joseph Hussey that no purpose is served in offering the grace of Christ to all in the preaching of the Gospel. The second was the belief that it is not the duty of sinners who hear the Gospel to repent of their sins and believe on Christ for the forgiveness of sins (pp. 128-129).

The Hyper-Calvinists denied the free offer of the Gospel because they did not make a distinction between the eternal, secret will of God and the revealed will of God. (The former is known only to God, whilst the latter is revealed in the Bible.) They deduced the duty of the preacher from their knowledge of God’s decrees rather than from his commands and invitations in Scripture. Calvin and the majority of Reformed divines had refused to take this logical, yet unscriptural, step (p.130).

Excessive emphasis was also placed on the doctrine of irresistible grace with the tendency to state that an elect man is not only passive in regeneration but also in conversion as well. The absorbing interest in the eternal, immanent acts of God and in irresistible grace led to the notion that grace must only be offered to those for whom it was intended (p.145).

Source: Peter Toon, “The Emergence of Hyper-Calvinism is English Nonconformity 1689–1765”

Beginning on page 18 at ‘Three Modification of High Calvinism’

Arminianism
Federal Theology
Amyraldism

The Emergence of Hyper-Calvinism in English Nonconformity 1689-1765 (.pdf) http://quintapress.macmate.me/PDF_Books/Hypercalvinism.pdf 

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