Although the name of John Macgowan, a Baptist author of the long eighteenth century, is all but unknown today, many of his books went through numerous editions during his lifetime and in the decades immediately after his death that bespoke a wide popularity amongst a certain class of readers on both sides of the Atlantic. With titles such as Death: A Vision (1766), Priestcraft Defended (1768)—a satirical attack on the University of Oxford for expelling six evangelical students—Infernal Conference: or, Dialogues of Devils (1772)—a definite forerunner of C. S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters—and Socinianism Brought to the Test: or Jesus Christ Proved to be either the Adorable God, or A Notorious Impostor (1773), Macgowan was well-known for his hard-hitting and, at times caustic, defence of orthodox Christianity.
Early years
He had been born in Edinburgh in October of 1726 and was apprenticed to be a weaver. In 1745‒46, though, he joined the ill-fated army of Charles Edward Stuart in the latter’s attempt to seize the throne of England. He fought at Culloden in April of 1746 and was one of the few Sottish soldiers to survive, fleeing for safety to Durham. It was there in the north of England that he was converted after hearing a Methodist preacher, John Unthank, and for a time he was a lay-preacher with the Methodists. Soon, however, he came to embrace Calvinistic convictions, which led him initially to become a Congregationalist and eventually to join himself to the Calvinistic Baptists. From 1751 to 1757 he pastored Hill Cliff Baptist Church in Warrington, where he also married Esther Rigby, his first wife. She died in 1762 after giving birth to their fourth child.
At the time of Esther’s death, Macgowan was pastoring in the market town of Bridgnorth in Shropshire. He married again in 1766, the same year that he accepted a call to pastor Devonshire Square Baptist Church in London—founded in the early 1640s with the justly-famous William Kiffen for its pastor, it was one of the oldest Baptist congregations in the land. He and his second wife, Mary Harper, were married in Bridgnorth’s parish church of St. Mary Magdalene since only Anglican ministers could perform a legal marriage.
A move to London
Macgowan’s ministry at Bridgnorth had been somewhat disappointing, which may have been an inducement to accept an invitation in September of 1766 to become the pastor of the congregation in London. In their call to him, the Devonshire Square congregation had stressed that while they were not a “fashionable people,” they were “tenacious of church order” and loved “to hear the doctrines of the gospel delivered experientially.”
His fourteen-year ministry at Devonshire Square was, it appears, quite a successful one; between 1769 and 1775, there were close to hundred baptisms. And by the 1770s, the church had grown to 150 members, nearly all of whom were tradesmen, artisans, and labourers. And it was in London that Macgowan especially made his mark as a voluminous and best-selling author. A two-volume set of his works, published posthumously in 1825, contains most of these writings.
On the Trinity
One that it does not contain is one of his earliest ventures into the world of print media, a lengthy letter that was published in 1762 as a postscript to a curious defence of the Trinity by John Allen, a prickly Baptist controversialist who ended up in America in the early 1770s where he helped to foment the rising tide of revolution. According to Walter Wilson (c.1781‒1847), the author of a four-volume history of the London Nonconformity, while Macgowan largely adhered to an orthodox view of the Triune God, he did not conceive of the title “the Son of God” to be an appropriate one for the second person of the Godhead in the immanent Trinity. In other words, Wilson maintained that Macgowan did not approve of differentiating between the Father and the Son in terms of the traditional phrase “the eternal generation of the Son”. In his letter on the Trinity, which he wrote in the Spring of 1761, though it was not published till the following year, Macgowan’s reflections on the Trinity described the persons as “first, second, and third” or “Father, Word and Spirit.” Nonetheless, he stressed, “I look on all the three personal subsistences to be absolutely essential to the deity,” co-equal in eminence, and together “one undivided essence.”[1]
However, a close reading of some of Macgowan’s other works does reveal his use of the term “Son” for the second person of the Godhead. In his funeral sermon for his fellow London Baptist minister, Benjamin Messer (d.1772), for example, Macgowan referred to “the Son and Holy Ghost, as distinct persons or subsistencies in the divine essence.”[2] And in his Socinianism Brought to the Test, published the year following his funeral sermon for Messer, Macgowan asserted that orthodox Christians worship the “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,” believing that the Son is “the same in essence with the Father.”[3] In other words, it appears that Wilson’s remark about Macgowan’s understanding of the immanent Trinity, which he claims to have received on the basis of “private information” is simply wrong.
The eighteenth century, with the onset of the so-called Age of Reason, was witness to massive debates about the Trinity and how to properly speak about God. In many ways, the great theological battle of that era was over the received doctrine of there being three co-eternal and co-equal persons in the one Godhead. Macgowan was not ashamed to defend this traditional understanding of God.
His funeral in 1780 was taken by two of the most eminent Baptist leaders in the city, Benjamin Wallin and Samuel Stennett. He was buried in Bunhill Fields, that holy resting place for thousands of Nonconformists.
[1] John Macgowan, “Postscript” to John Allen, A compendious Descant of the Autogeneal, and Theanthropos Glories of Christ: or, The Crown of Crowns Set upon the Head of King Jesus (London: M. Lewis, 1773), 65‒66. Macgowan’s postscript is sometimes called A Letter to an Arian.
[2] John Macgowan, The Sure Foundation (London: G. Keith and J. Johnson, 1772), 7.
[3] John Macgowan, Socinianism Brought to the Test: or Jesus Christ Proved to be either the Adorable God, or A Notorious Impostor (London: G. Keith, J. Johnson, A. Bell, and J. Matthews, 1773), 22.
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Born in England of Irish and Kurdish parents, Michael A.G. Haykin serves as professor of church history & biblical spirituality. Haykin has a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Toronto (1974), a Master of Religion from Wycliffe College, the University of Toronto (1977), and a Th.D. in Church History from Wycliffe College and the University of Toronto (1982). Haykin and his wife, Alison, have two grown children: Victoria and Nigel.
He is the author of a number of books, including The Spirit of God: The Exegesis of 1 and 2 Corinthians in the Pneumatomachian Controversy of the Fourth Century (E. J. Brill, 1994); One heart and one soul: John Sutcliff of Olney, his friends, and his times (Evangelical Press, 1994); Kiffin, Knollys and Keach: Rediscovering Our English Baptist Heritage (Reformation Today Trust, 1996); ‘At the Pure Fountain of Thy Word’: Andrew Fuller as an Apologist (Paternoster Press, 2004); Jonathan Edwards: The Holy Spirit in Revival (Evangelical Press, 2005); The God who draws near: An introduction to biblical spirituality (Evangelical Press, 2007).
Course taught for CBTS: Biblical Spirituality.
