John Jones

John Andrews Jones (1779-1868) was a High-Calvinist Particular Baptist preacher and author. He served as pastor for the churches meeting at (1) Stonehouse, Devonshire; (2) Beccles, Suffolk; (3) North Road, Brentford; (4) Brick Lane, Old Street. He is best known for authoring ‘Bunhill Memorials’. It should be noted, Jones stood on the side of those who denied the eternal Sonship of Christ. He affirmed: “I not only maintain the essential Diety of the Father, but equally so of the Son, and Holy Spirit: equal in eternity; equally possessed of Divine attributes; bearing Divine and infinite names; entitled to, receiving, and that justly, Divine honours, adoration, and praise. One in nature as in essence: not existing one from another, such as the Son being in the Divine nature, begotten of the Father; and then the Holy Ghost proceeding (as God) from both.” On the other side of the doctrine, Joseph Philpot affirmed: “We are grieved to see an old error now brought forward and, we fear, spreading, which, however speciously covered up, is really nothing less than denying the Son of God. The error we mean is the denial of the eternal Sonship of the Lord Jesus Christ, as the Only-begotten of the Father before the foundation of the world…The fundamental doctrine of the Trinity [cannot] be maintained except by holding the eternal Sonship of Christ. There are two errors of an opposite nature as regards the doctrine of the Trinity: 1. One is Tritheism, or setting up three distinct Gods; the other, 2. Sabellianism, which holds that there is but one God under three different names. Each of these errors destroys the Trinity in Unity, the first by denying the Unity of the Essence, the second by denying the Trinity of the Persons. There are four leading ways in which erroneous men have, at different periods of the church’s history, sought to nullify the vital doctrine of the eternal Sonship of Jesus:— 1. Some place the Sonship of Christ in His incarnation, as if He was not the Son of God before He assumed our nature in the womb of the Virgin. 2. Another error on this important point is that the Lord Jesus is the Son of God by the resurrection from the dead. 3. Another erroneous view of the Sonship of Christ is that He is so by virtue of His exaltation to the right hand of God. 4. But there is another way in which erroneous men seek to explain, and by explaining deny, the eternal Sonship of the Lord Jesus, and that is, by asserting that He is a Son by office. These points, then, we consider to have been already fully established by us from the Word of truth: 1, that Jesus is the Son of God; 2, that He is not the Son of God by the assumption of human nature, or by the resurrection, or by sitting at God’s right hand, or by virtue of any covenant name, title, or office; 3, that He was the Son of God before He came into the world; and 4, that consequently He is the Son of God in His divine nature. [These erroneous teachers] censure the Arminians for saying that they cannot receive election because it contradicts their first notions, their primary, fundamental principles, both of the justice and love of God; and yet [they], on precisely similar grounds, reject the eternal Sonship of Christ, as contradicting [their] natural views of priority and posteriority. So the Jews rejected and crucified the Lord of life and glory, because His appearance in the flesh as a poor carpenter’s son contradicted all their pre-conceived opinions of the dignity and glory of the promised Messiah; and in a similar way infidels reject miracles as contrary to their fundamental opinions of the laws of nature being unalterable. Thus to reject the eternal Sonship of the blessed Lord merely because it contradicts some of [their] preconceived opinions is most dangerous ground to take, and is to set up [their] authority against that of the Word of truth.”