Gill’s recourse to the Puritan and Reformed orthodox writers

“Gill’s recourse to the Puritan and Reformed orthodox writers of the seventeenth century was, in a sense, the alternative to the university. As a Dissenter, Gill had no access to the higher theological education of Oxford and Cambridge. In his search, therefore, not only for theological allies and dialogue partners, specifically of allies and partners who thought and wrote at the highest levels of theological discourse, he made up for his lack of access to the universities of the eighteenth century by close examination of the works of the universities of the seventeenth. And in so doing, he rooted himself in a theology that was far more compatible with his understanding of Scripture and Christian doctrine than the Anglican theology that inhabited the English universities of his time. While he remained in dialogue and debate with his contemporaries, his theology was, in large part, a return of Dissent to its roots in the glorious days, a hundred years past, when a Puritan and Reformed theological sentiment ruled Oxford and Cambridge and when English Puritan theology was in close dialogue with the Reformed thinkers of continental Europe.”

“John Gill and the Reformed Tradition: A Study in the Reception of Protestant Orthodoxy in the Eighteenth Century,” by Richard A. Muller, “Chapter Two” in The Life and Thought of John Gill (1697-1771): A Tercentennial Appreciation, Michael A. G Haykin, Editor. Studies in the History of Christian Traditions Series, Volume 77, 1997.