What did Jesus Accomplish on the Cross? A Particular Baptist Reply

John Calvin

We have already noted a significant question for early English Baptists: what did Jesus accomplish by his life, death and resurrection?   John Calvin answered this in a very clear cut, but fundamentally different manner, to that of his successor, Jacob Arminius. 

To understand Calvin’s significance it is important to outline his life and his broad theological principles, before looking at the narrower issue of predestination.  John Calvin [1509-64] a French Roman Catholic, trained as a lawyer at the Sorbonne in Paris, studied the writings of Luther and other theologians, and in 1532, like them underwent a deep evangelical religious experience. ‘God subdued my heart’ he wrote, ‘to docility by a sudden conversion’.

 He was forced to leave France and it was while he was passing through Geneva that he was persuaded to become the city’s ‘reader in Holy Scripture’. Here Calvin published The Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1536, a classic statement of the whole of his reformed theology, which was revised continually throughout his life.  He was persuaded to become the organizer of ‘the reformation’ in Geneva, and in 1541 began his work, remaining there as the ‘unopposed dictator’ of a theocratic regime in the city till 1564. 

The government of this new reformed church was by a consistory church court, which could excommunicate unrepentant church members, and had far reaching authority over the private lives of every citizen. In Geneva people saw a theocratic state in action, and many in England thought it the best model of a reformed church.  English separatists who took refuge there responded warmly to Calvin’s revolutionary proposals for a new church structure, and sought a reformation in England advocating the Geneva model.  However, Queen Elizabeth 1 would not tolerate it.  In Scotland John Knox led the introduction of Calvin’s model for church and state.


English Separatist Christians, meeting outside Church of England structures, began to form ‘gathered churches’, established on Calvin’s principles. Henry Jacob led one such Independent Calvinist congregation as early as 1616.  By 1630, this church was led by John Lathrop, the congregation insisting upon a complete separation of church and state, rejecting the ‘parish’ system of Anglicanism.  Ten years later, in May 1640, Henry Jessey was the pastor.  This Calvinist orientated congregation discussed believers’ baptism in the 1640s, and by 1644 believers’ baptism had become the norm for admission to this congregation.  By 1644 seven other London Baptist congregations signed a common statement of their faith and practice.  Calvinist Baptist congregations grew steadily.

In the time of Oliver Cromwell, Baptist Christians in the Parliamentary army spread Calvinist Baptist churches around the country.  It was the English Civil War that led the Broadmead, Bristol congregation to leave ‘Royalist’ Bristol, and migrate to London where they joined with a Calvinist Baptist congregation under the leadership of William Kiffin.  Once Cromwell was ruling the country, Broadmead Christians returned to Bristol, to be led by Matthew Hazzard, his wife Dorothy, and later Thomas Ewins.

Calvinism maintains that the Bible alone contains all that is necessary to know God and our duties towards God and our neighbour.  Calvinist theology asserted that before the Fall, man was in a state of innocence and could attain to holy living.  But the Fall, which was willed by God, substantially changed human nature, so that man no longer had free will.  All human works outside the Christian faith were sins, and even the good works of Christians were intrinsically evil.  However, the imputed merits of Christ won at Calvary covered humanities intrinsic evil, and they were not counted as such.  Calvin argued that before the Fall, even before the creation of the world, God in his wisdom predestined some of humanity, his elect, to salvation and the rest to damnation.

In a recent Baptist Quarterly [January 2011] an article claims that The True Calvinist is a Baptist.   This may be true but to-day’s English Baptists are certainly not Calvinist, but are more accurately termed Arminian.  When Baptist churches in the mid-eighteenth century awoke to the missionary challenge of Andrew Fuller and William Carey, they modified their Calvinism without becoming fully Arminian, because ‘high Calvinism’ had to all intents and purposes, reduced the missionary task of the Church to helping the elect of God to recognise their calling.  Calvin’s assertion of predestination was meant to maintain the sovereignty God, but it effectively reduced God’s elect to a very small number, when set within the context of the vast populations on earth that Carey discovered, when reading of the voyages of Captain Cook.  Arminius, on the other hand, maintained that God’s sovereignty was compatible with man’s real free-will.  He was clear that Jesus died for all people, not just the elect and rejected predestination as unbiblical.


When the Baptist Union united English General and Particular Baptists into a single group in 1891, it signalled a retreat by the majority of English Baptists from full-bloodied Calvinism, though a small group maintained the original Calvinist position, and are to-day as known as Strict and Particular Baptists.