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.
