ANDREW FULLER WORKS ON CD
The one-volume 1845 Bohn edition of Andrew Fuller’s works, The Complete Works of the Rev. Andrew Fuller, has just been released on CD. K. David Oldfield, who is the pastor of Calvary Independent Baptist Church in Post Falls, Idaho, and who has done the scanning of this work via OCR, rightly notes in the “Preface to this Electronic Edition” that “modern Baptists may have heard about this man and his theology, but very few have ever directly read any of his material. In many cases, based upon hearsay, people have formed negative conclusions about him and in the process dismissed the wealth of wisdom and instruction that he has left us.”
Oldfield also believes that a hard copy of Fuller’s works that is available may be too prohibitive cost-wise for wide circulation. Is he referring to the three-volume edition that Sprinkle Publications issued a number of years ago: The Complete Works of the Rev. Andrew Fuller (1845 ed.; repr. Harrisonburg, Virginia: 1988)? If so, it should be mentioned that this three-volume work has certain other inadequacies, including its incompleteness, the small font size of the text, and the lack of both critical annotation and adequate indices.
This electronic edition by Oldfield also suffers from not being complete, for there are two volumes of additional writings of Fuller that it does not contain. These are not included in any of the standard hard-copy editions of his works and neither of them is readily available today: J. W. Morris, collected, Miscellaneous Pieces on Various Religious Subjects, being the last remains of the Rev. Andrew Fuller and Joseph Belcher, ed., The Last Remains of the Re. Andrew Fuller (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, [1856]). Nevertheless, having Fuller’s works in electronic form is fabulous, both in terms of research possibilities and usability.
Oldfield rightly notes that although “most of us would quarrel with Fuller in some areas of theology, in the main, most sovereign grace Baptists would not only agree with him, but would be blessed by reading his expositions and closely thought-out arguments against the heretics of his day.” And as he further notes, modern-day Baptists are deeply indebted to Fuller, for “along with a few others,” Fuller “was instrumental in bringing Baptists back to their “evangelical” and New Testament roots, helping to send William Carey as a missionary to India and imploring the lost of Great Britain to come to Christ.”
The CD can be ordered from kdoidaho@earthlink.net at a very reasonable price. The Works on the CD come in WordPerfect, MS Word and Adobe PDF.
Oldfield also believes that a hard copy of Fuller’s works that is available may be too prohibitive cost-wise for wide circulation. Is he referring to the three-volume edition that Sprinkle Publications issued a number of years ago: The Complete Works of the Rev. Andrew Fuller (1845 ed.; repr. Harrisonburg, Virginia: 1988)? If so, it should be mentioned that this three-volume work has certain other inadequacies, including its incompleteness, the small font size of the text, and the lack of both critical annotation and adequate indices.
This electronic edition by Oldfield also suffers from not being complete, for there are two volumes of additional writings of Fuller that it does not contain. These are not included in any of the standard hard-copy editions of his works and neither of them is readily available today: J. W. Morris, collected, Miscellaneous Pieces on Various Religious Subjects, being the last remains of the Rev. Andrew Fuller and Joseph Belcher, ed., The Last Remains of the Re. Andrew Fuller (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, [1856]). Nevertheless, having Fuller’s works in electronic form is fabulous, both in terms of research possibilities and usability.
Oldfield rightly notes that although “most of us would quarrel with Fuller in some areas of theology, in the main, most sovereign grace Baptists would not only agree with him, but would be blessed by reading his expositions and closely thought-out arguments against the heretics of his day.” And as he further notes, modern-day Baptists are deeply indebted to Fuller, for “along with a few others,” Fuller “was instrumental in bringing Baptists back to their “evangelical” and New Testament roots, helping to send William Carey as a missionary to India and imploring the lost of Great Britain to come to Christ.”
The CD can be ordered from kdoidaho@earthlink.net at a very reasonable price. The Works on the CD come in WordPerfect, MS Word and Adobe PDF.
