Andrew Jukes

Andrew Jukes (1815–1901)

Andrew John Jukes was born on June 10, 1815, in Hull, in the East Riding of Yorkshire, the son of a family of some standing in that port town. He was educated at Hull Grammar School and went on to Cambridge, matriculating at Trinity College in the early 1830s. His mind was restless and reading-driven from the start, and the Church of England, into which he was ordained, seemed to be the settled shape his life would take: a university man, a clergyman, a curacy to follow.

It did not hold. Jukes came to the conviction that his ordination vows and the established church could not contain what he now believed, and in the 1840s he left the Church of England. He did not drift into obscurity but into one of the more characteristic movements of the age. He associated with the Brethren circles that were then forming in England, and he is remembered as a Brethren-connected teacher, though he never fitted comfortably inside any party. His friendship with Anthony Norris Groves, the pioneer of faith missions, drew him toward the Brethren, and his own evangelistic and teaching energies found room there. He settled in Hull, where he gathered a congregation of his own and preached to it for many years. Later he lived in London, and he died there on April 11, 1901, at the age of eighty-five.

The thread running through the long middle of his life was Scripture read for its inner meaning. Jukes was not content with the plain historical sense alone; he sought the spiritual patterns he believed God had laid beneath the text, especially in the Old Testament. He read the Law, the tabernacle, and the offerings as shadows of Christ and of the believer's progress, and he approached the Bible with a typological imagination that owed more to the early church fathers than to the dry scholasticism of his own century. In this he was a deliberate throwback, and he knew it.

He also took a path that cost him standing. Jukes came to hold, and to teach openly, that all would finally be restored to God, that the purposes of divine love would in the end embrace every creature. This was the doctrine of universal restoration, and it set him apart from most of the evangelical world around him. He argued for it not from sentiment but from what he took to be the logic of Scripture and the character of God, and he never retreated from it. The position cost him the sympathy of many who had once received his teaching gladly, and it left him a somewhat isolated figure, respected by some for his learning and his piety, distrusted by others as an unsound guide.

His life in these decades was quiet in its outward events: preaching, study, writing, the slow accumulation of a body of Biblical exposition. There was no martyrdom, no dramatic crisis recorded in the sources, no public condemnation by a council. What there was instead was the steady pressure of a man following his conclusions out of the institutions that would have preferred him to keep them to himself. He left the established church over conscience, held to an unfashionable doctrine over conviction, and spent his remaining years teaching those who would listen. He remained, to the end, a man who preferred being honest to being comfortable.

His Writing and Its Influence

Jukes began publishing in the 1840s, in the years surrounding his departure from the Church of England, and the books that followed were the written form of what he preached in Hull. His first major work, The Characteristic Differences of the Four Gospels (1853), argued that each Gospel presents Christ under a distinct aspect, an approach that treated the fourfold witness as a designed whole rather than a puzzle of overlapping accounts. The books for which he is best remembered came in the following decades. The Law of the Offerings (1854) read the Levitical sacrifices as an ordered picture of Christ's work and of the believer's entering into it, and The Types of Genesis (1858) traced in the patriarchal narratives a pattern of spiritual development, from the creation through the lives of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The Names of God in Holy Scripture (1888) gathered the divine titles into a study of how God makes himself known by degrees. His book on restoration, The Restitution of All Things, first appeared in 1867, and the fuller argument was later published as The Second Death and the Restitution of All Things.

His method rested on a conviction he shared with the early fathers: that the Old Testament is a book of figures and that its deeper sense is found in Christ. He drew on Origen and the Alexandrian tradition, and his dependence on them, together with his reading of Christian authors across the centuries, gave his work a patristic cast that set it apart from the commentaries of his own day. Critics found the typology strained at points, and the objection has some force. Readers who accept that Scripture carries a layered meaning will find his patterns illuminating; those who suspect the method of reading in what it claims to find will not be persuaded by him on the page.

The restoration doctrine remained the point on which his reception divided. Evangelical opinion largely closed against him, and some of his Brethren friends distanced themselves. Yet he never presented the teaching as a rejection of judgment; he held that God's fires purify and that the penalty of sin is real, even while denying that it is final. This distinction is easily lost in summaries of his views, and it explains why his case has been revisited by later readers who found his argument more careful than his reputation suggested.

His influence ran largely through his books rather than through any institution. The typological volumes, and The Law of the Offerings in particular, continued to be read in Brethren and wider evangelical circles long after his death, and they have remained in print among readers interested in the spiritual interpretation of the Old Testament. His work on restoration was taken up in the twentieth century by writers sympathetic to universalist hope, who found in him a nineteenth-century evangelical precedent. He is not a major figure in the standard histories of Victorian theology, and his reach was modest by the measure of his better-known contemporaries. But within the narrower stream of devotional and typological writing, he has been steadily valued.

Who should read Jukes: Readers who want to see the Old Testament as more than history and law, and who are willing to follow an interpreter who finds Christ in the tabernacle, the offerings and the patriarchs. He suits those drawn to the older, patristic way of reading Scripture and curious about how a devout Victorian reached the hope of universal restoration by way of Scripture rather than sentiment. He is not for readers who require every interpretive step to be anchored in the plain historical sense, nor for those who will close a book at the first sign of a disputed doctrine. He asks for patience, and he rewards it unevenly.