The John Gill Project

The Baptist pastor-theologian John Gill (1697-1771) remains a towering figure in Baptist thought and life. In the words of Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Gill was “a man, not only of great importance in his own century, but a man who is still of great importance.” Yet, easy access to his works is limited and he is still written off as a narrow-minded, insular, hyper-Calvinist. The last printing of Gill’s magnum opus, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity and A Body of Practical Divinity, for instance, came out in 2007 with difficult typesetting and over 1,000 pages of text. Interested students of Gill need a text that is both readable and user-friendly.

The John Gill Project, funded by the London Lyceum, the Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies, and H&E Publishing, is designed to provide initially a new abridged version of Gill’s major systematic theological works noted above. Similar to the abridged version of Herman Bavinck’s magisterial Reformed Dogmatics, this version will cover over twenty major sections of Gill’s work with modern typesetting and editing to around 80,000 total words to allow for a wide range of readership. Hopefully, this will be the beginning of the publication of other sections of Gill's voluminous corpus, including his biblical commentaries, sermons, and various tracts.

Those interested in details of this project or helping financially with it, should contact Jordan Steffaniak at jlsteffaniak@gmail.com or Professor Michael Haykin at mhaykin@sbts.edu.