In 1806 the Midland Baptist Association held its meetings in Ryeford and Micah Thomas was the moderator. The preachers were a J Rowland, William Belsher (1764-1849) Worcester and Daniel Trotman (1767-1850) Tewkesbury who later moved on to America.
Bebbington on Micah Thomas and the end of the Academy
David Bebbington gave a paper on Edwards and his legacy in Britian, in Australia in 2015. See here.
In it he says
In it he says
The transition from a high Calvinism to the moderate version represented by Edwards
was sharply contested in Wales. The first Baptist academy to be set up in Wales, at
Abergavenny in 1807, had another Bristol graduate trained by John Ryland, Micah Thomas,
as its president. Thomas was a keen advocate of the Edwardsean approach to theology as
embodied in Fuller’s writings. As a result he was charged by the high Calvinists of south
Wales as veering towards Arminianism. In 1811 he published a sermon called Salvation of
Sovereign Grace in order, as he put it, to ‘refute groundless insinuations’.(D. Mervyn Himbury, The South Wales Baptist College (1807-1957) [Cardiff: South Wales Baptist College,
1957], p. 22.) The rumours of
his defection from sound doctrine, however, continued to circulate and in 1834 critics were
given ammunition by five disaffected students. They complained that at worship he used
John Wesley’s notes on scripture, claiming that they were superior to the comments of John
Gill, the doughty eighteenth-century champion of high Calvinist orthodoxy among the
Baptists. The affair was complicated by petty attacks on Thomas for refusing permission for students to attend the local Welsh society and requiring residents to be in their rooms by 8
p.m. The resulting controversy brought down the academy. The local Baptist association
refused further financial support, a rival institution was planned, Thomas resigned, the
academy closed and a new institution had to be created elsewhere, at Pontypool. There,
under a president trained at Stepney and a tutor from Bristol Academy, the position of
Edwards, Fuller and the newer Calvinism was reinstated. (Himbury, South Wales Baptist College, pp. 31-43.) This episode reveals clearly that
contemporaries recognised the sharp difference between the model of theology of Gill and
the type associated with Edwards. Micah Thomas contrasted the two. The point of view
embodied in Gill’s thought was ‘that stringent and exclusive system’ which was designed ‘to
guarantee the orthodoxy of the preacher’, differing from ‘the universally benign atmosphere
of that blessed economy, which is… “good tidings of great joy to all people”’.(Himbury, South Wales Baptist College, p. 36.) In the end
this warm-hearted Edwardseanism triumphed.
Edward Copleston
On December 9, 1836, Edward Copleston (1776-1849), Bishop of Llandaff from 1827, wrote to W Bruce Knight (1786-1845) at the Deanery of St Paul's with an article for the press. From 1825 Knight was Chancellor of Llandaff Cathedral. Copleston says
As your brother is perhaps still from home, I send the enclosed to you, hoping that you will think it worthy of being sent to the Merthyr Guardian for this week. I was so disgusted yesterday with reading the Reverend Micah Thomas's, & other Reverends speeches at Abergavenny, as reported in the Merlin, that I could not forbear concocting a little squib, by way of getting it out of my spleen.
If the Editor will print it a little open, so as to attract notice, & print the proper names in small capitals, I think it may make some of them wince. ...
Knight's brother was Sir James Lewis Knight-Bruce (1791-1866) an English barrister, judge and politician.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)