The Ancient Paths, John Gill’s Four P’s of Masculinity

Editor’s note: The following essay appears in the Fall 2023 issue of Eikon.

A short time before his death, eighteenth-century London Baptist pastor John Gill (1697–1771) put the finishing touches on his monumental Body of Doctrinal and Practical Divinity. Near the end of this work — which comprised a summary of the doctrine he had taught over the course of his fifty-one year ministry to the same congregation — Gill turned his attention to practical theology, the study of theology that concerns itself with the proper worship of God.^[1]

Drawing from Ephesians 5:33, Gill summed up the duties of husbands and wives to one another as love and reverence.^[2] Husbands, he instructed, are called to love their wives while wives are called to revere (that is, respect) their husbands.

Gill then outlined how husbands should love their wives in four points, articulating characteristics of what complementarians have recognized as biblical masculinity. These four points can be summarized in four words: provide, protect, pastor, and please.

According to Gill, the husband has a particular responsibility to provide for his wife. The husband is to “nourish” and “cherish” his wife as his own body (Eph 5:29), which includes “food and raiment, and all the necessaries of life.” Those who do not, Gill noted, are worse than unbelievers (1 Tim. 5:8).^[3]

The husband not only provides, but protects his wife “from all abuses and injuries” as she is the weaker vessel (1 Pet. 3:7). The husband’s responsibility may call him “to expose himself to danger, and even risk his life in her defense, and for her rescue” (1 Sam. 30:5, 18).^[4]

Faithful husbandry also demands that each husband seeks the spiritual welfare of his wife. In other words, he should be the spiritual leader — the pastor — of the marriage. The Christian husband should be active in seeking the salvation of an unconverted wife, and the “spiritual peace, comfort, and edification” of a believing spouse. The Christian husband, according to Gill, should lead his wife as a fellow “heir with him of the grace of life” in all forms of spiritual devotion.^[5]

These three ways of loving one’s wife are commonplace in complementarian parlance, and rightly so. Yet Gill added to these that a husband should be concerned to please his wife. Husbands, Gill contended, should do “every thing that may contribute to her pleasure, peace, comfort, and happiness.” Gill relied upon 1 Corinthians 7:33 to establish this husbandly duty, and made sure to point out that a husband should not be scorned for pleasing his wife, but that he should rather be encouraged to fulfill his responsibility to please his wife.^[6]

The pleasing husband, Gill explained, neither sows strife nor exposes his wife’s sins and failures, but rather lovingly bears with and enshrouds them (Prov. 10:12).

Gill recognized that wives are also called to please their husbands (1 Cor 7:34), teaching that “both parties should consult each other’s pleasure, peace, comfort, and happiness, and especially the glory of God.”^[7] But taking his cues from Scripture, he knew that men are to please their wives as husbands, and that women are to please their husbands as wives. Thus, even though husbands and wives are called to please one another, each pleases the other uniquely through their God-given role as husband and wife.

The godly husband, then, seeks to be a source of pleasure and happiness for his wife by lovingly giving of himself to sacrificially provide for her needs, selflessly protecting her with his very life, and by spiritually leading her into communion with Christ. The husband fulfills this masculine mandate with Christ’s love for the church as his driving motivation and enduring example.^[8]

Gill proved not only a reliable teacher of God’s word, but a living example of godly masculinity. All accounts of Gill’s marriage reveal that he adored and cherished his wife Elizabeth.^[9] Within a year of starting his ministry in London, Elizabeth experienced a miscarriage — one of many pregnancies that ended in miscarriage or stillbirth — that left her bedridden for an extended period of time. During this season of affliction, Gill lavishly attended to her needs, which provoked the criticism of some in the church who believed Elizabeth feigned illness. Over and again, Gill demonstrated his love for Elizabeth in his constant and attentive care to her during many seasons of illness. In this way, Gill proved to be the pleasing husband about whom he taught.^[10]

John Gill’s biblical vision and example of marital masculinity stands as a needed corrective to the disorderly egalitarian, destructively passive, and disastrously macho versions of masculinity that our confused culture has put forth in recent decades. Masculinity does not need to be reimagined, but restored. Rather than paving revolutionary roads, the church ought to trod the ancient paths.

Jonathan E. Swan is Managing Editor of Eikon and Associate Pastor of Education and Discipleship at First Baptist Church O’Fallon, MO.

[1] John Gill, A Complete Body of Doctrinal and Practical Divinity: Or, A System of Evangelical Truths, Deduced from the Sacred Scriptures, 1839 ed.; repr. (Paris, AR: The Baptist Standard Bearer, 1989), 697.

[2] In context, Gill’s use of the term “reverence” indicates a wife’s respect for her husband, out of worship to God, in recognition of his God-given authority in marriage.

[3] Gill, A Body of Doctrinal and Practical Divinity, 975.

[4] Gill, A Body of Doctrinal and Practical Divinity, 975.

[5] Gill, A Body of Doctrinal and Practical Divinity, 975.

[6] Gill, A Body of Doctrinal and Practical Divinity, 975.

[7] Gill, A Body of Doctrinal and Practical Divinity, 976.

[8] Gill, A Body of Doctrinal and Practical Divinity, 975–976.

[9] Representative examples include John Rippon, A Brief Memoir of the Life and Writings of the Late Rev. John Gill, D.D. (1838 repr. Harrisonburg, VA: Sprinkle Publications, 2006), 9–10; Sharon James, “‘The Weaker Vessel’: John Gill’s Reflections on Women, Marriage, and Divorce,” in The Life and Thought of John Gill (1697–1771): A Tercentennial Appreciation, ed. Michael A.G. Haykin, Studies in the History of Christian Thought 77 (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 216–217; and Matthew David Haste, “Marriage in the Life and Theology of John Gill, Samuel Stennett, and Andrew Fuller” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2015), 92–94.

[10] B. R. White, “John Gill in London (1719–1729): A Biographical Fragment,” Baptist Quarterly 22 (1967): 82–84. George M. Ella, John Gill and the Cause of God and Truth (Durham, NC: Go, 1995), 56–58. Sharon James, “‘The Weaker Vessel’: John Gill’s Reflections on Women, Marriage, and Divorce,” in The Life and Thought of John Gill (1697–1771): A Tercentennial Appreciation, ed. Michael A.G. Haykin, Studies in the History of Christian Thought 77 (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 216–217. Matthew David Haste, “Marriage in the Life and Theology of John Gill, Samuel Stennett, and Andrew Fuller” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2015), 93.