Obbie Tyler Todd is Teaching Pastor and Theologian in Residence at Cross Community Church in Beaufort, South Carolina, Adjunct Professor of Theology at Luther Rice College & Seminary, and Adjunct Professor of Church History at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.
The Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) lived virtually his entire life in New England. Although technically his first church was a Presbyterian congregation in New York City, he eventually took over his grandfather Solomon Stoddard’s Congregationalist church in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he would pastor from 1729 to 1750.[1] The farthest south Edwards ever lived was New Jersey, where he served a very short tenure as president of the College of New Jersey (Princeton) at the end of his life before passing away of a smallpox inoculation. As a son of Puritanism, Edwards had no firsthand knowledge of the American South. And he had no affiliation with (or sympathy for) Baptists. At first glance, Jonathan Edwards and Southern Baptists don’t seem to have much in common. However, amazingly, the only religious group in the entire antebellum South who seemed to collectively embrace Edwards’s theology were Baptists, a people who Edwards himself never envisioned as his spiritual descendants. At the inaugural Southern Baptist Convention in Augusta, Georgia in 1845, there were more than a handful of these Southern Edwardseans: William B. Johnson, Basil Manly Sr., Richard Fuller, John L. Dagg, and others. Forerunners like Richard Furman, W. T. Brantly, and Jonathan Maxcy helped shape these SBC founders in their Edwardsean theology.
Of course, this does not mean that Baptists in the antebellum South were the only group who read the works of Jonathan Edwards. But other evangelical denominations in Dixie had staunch critics of Edwards that Baptists never appeared to have. For example, Robert Lewis Dabney was a Presbyterian from Virginia who served as the chief of staff for Confederate General Stonewall Jackson (who was also a Presbyterian). Dabney had so much disdain for Edwards that, according to a fellow Southerner, “he cuts up Edwardsism by the roots.” According to Dabney, Religious Affections was too “impractical.” Its theology was “too anatomical.”[2] As a whole, Dabney didn’t really concern himself with the religion of the heart or the affections. Instead, he believed in order and tradition, which is why he believed in the Westminster Confession and chattel slavery. And Dabney wasn’t the only Presbyterian to deliver these kinds of critiques against Edwards. James Henley Thornwell was a Presbyterian theologian from South Carolina who is infamous today for his published defense of slavery entitled The Rights and Duties of Masters in 1850. According to Thornwell, Edwards’s view of original sin and continuous creation defied “the plainest intuitions of intelligence.” Thornwell believed that Edwards’s view of sin as the privation of good was “a mere juggle with words.”[3]
In the antebellum South, vehement opposition to Edwards’s theology often overlapped with very strong pro-slavery sentiment. Kentuckian Albert Taylor Bledsoe was the chief of the Confederate War Bureau and the assistant secretary of war. He was also an Episcopal priest who converted to Methodism. In 1845, the very same year of the first Southern Baptist Convention, Bledsoe published the most blistering critique of Edwards that was ever published in the South called An Examination of President Edwards’ Inquiry into the Freedom of the Will.[4]
He essentially disagreed with Edwards’s definition of freedom. It wasn’t free enough. Evidenced by Dabney, Thornwell, and Bledsoe, many of the most pro-slavery voices and Confederate leaders in the South were hostile to Edwards’s ideas. This wasn’t completely shocking considering that Edwards’s disciples, the New Divinity, were some of the most vocal anti-slavery voices in the earliest days of the republic. Although Edwards himself owned slaves, he did reject the international slave trade. And his ideas (love to being in general, disinterested benevolence, freedom of the will, etc.) seemed incompatible with slavery. Therefore, it is no coincidence that, in the Appalachian Mountains of Tennessee, where there were relatively few slaves and almost no plantations, Presbyterians Hezekiah Balch, Isaac Anderson, and Gideon Blackburn were all Edwardsean theologians.[5]
In the South, Edwardsean thought did not thrive in the Presbyterian and Methodist denominations. But it did among the Baptists. Unlike the Methodists, Baptists had just enough Calvinism to appreciate Edwards. Unlike the Presbyterians, Baptists were not strict confessionalists. In many ways, they were “moderate Calvinists” just like the New Divinity in the Northeast. These Baptists appreciated the religion of the heart, and they loved revival. Therefore, quite naturally, they relished Edwards, reading him as much as they could. In almost every corner of the antebellum South, one could find Baptists reading Edwards and the Edwardseans!
Oliver Hart, the architect of the first Baptist association in the South, the Charleston Association, relished Edwards’s A Faithful Narrative, an account of the conversions in Northampton in 1734.[6] Richard Furman, the architect of the first Baptist state convention in South Carolina, actually recommended Edwards’s works as a mean for conversion.[7] In Nashville, Tennessee, the 2nd president of the SBC, R. B. C. Howell, believed that Timothy Dwight’s systematic theology text was one of the best ever written.[8] (Dwight was the grandson of Jonathan Edwards and the president at Yale.) Basil Manly Sr., the president of the University of Alabama, loved Freedom of the Will and actually wrote to his own son, Basil Manly Jr., about The Nature of True Virtue.[9] Basil Manly Jr., the author of the Abstract of Principles at Southern Seminary, was converted by reading Edwards’s Personal Narrative.[10] And Baptists didn’t just like devotional and spiritual and revivalist works. The longest tenured president of the SBC, Patrick Hues Mell, president of the University of Georgia, loved The End for Which God Created the World.[11] Baptists of the South were reading from all corners of the Edwardsean tradition.
This Baptist school of Edwardsean thought, or the “Dixie Divinity” as I’ve called it, was diverse just like the New Divinity movement itself. For example, Patrich Hues Mell, the president of the University of Georgia, despised the New Divinity theologians. He thought they were fake Calvinists![12] On the other hand, Jonathan Maxcy, the first president of South Carolina College, loved the New Divinity. He read from Samuel Hopkins and Jonathan Edwards Jr. and subscribed faithfully to the moral governmental theory of atonement, the signature doctrine of the New Divinity.[13] In a region of the country that Edwards never visited, in a denomination that he did not regard highly during his lifetime, his theology thrived. Even though Edwards never visited the South during his own lifetime, some of his most faithful theological successors were Baptists in the antebellum South! This seeming paradox of American religious history illustrates well the power of ideas.
There were four primary ways that Baptists in the nineteenth century were influenced by Edwards: (1) Simple Edwardseanism, (2) New Divinity Edwardseanism, (3) Fullerite Edwardseanism, and (4) Implicit Edwardseanism. These were not always hard-and-fast categories, sometimes overlapping, but these styles manifested themselves quite clearly in Baptist life. Simple Edwardseanism denotes those Baptists who just read directly from Edwards. For example, Basil Manly Sr., a founder of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1845, did not possess any books by the New Divinity in his library. But he did have a book entitled “Edwards against Chauncy,” one of Edwards’s defenses of the Great Awakening. In his sermons, Manly used concepts that read almost word-for-word from the Freedom of the Will. Occasionally, Baptists even had direct family connections to Edwards. John Mason Peck was not a Southern Baptist, but he was the first home missionary of the Triennial Convention, and he served in Missouri and Southern Illinois for over 40 years. His wife, Sally Paine, was the great granddaughter of Jonathan Edwards.[14] Peck was born and converted in Litchfield County, the so-called “seedbed of the New Divinity.” Edwards didn’t just have a theological influence; he had a hereditary influence!
The second way Edwards influenced Baptists in the South was through New Divinity Edwardseanism. Although there were men like Jonathan Maxcy, who was a dyed-in-the-skin disciple of the New Divinity, New Divinity theology could sometimes get one in trouble. In the 1840s, Furman Academy professor James Mims, who held to the moral governmental theory of atonement, was actually tried for heresy for denying imputation. He was not found guilty, which should tell us something about how Southern Baptists defined the doctrine of atonement in those days.[15] You could be a college professor and keep your job and not hold to the traditional penal substitutionary view. (FBC New York City fired a pastor for holding to New Divinity views.)[16] But he was charged by a man who admired Jonathan Edwards and loathed the New Divinity, James Reynolds. The Edwardsean tradition was so pervasive in the SBC that Edwardseans battled Edwardseans, and sometimes they both invoked Edwards in doing so. Another Edwardsean, Jesse Hartwell, who taught at what is now Samford University in Birmingham, came under suspicion for his views on imputation. He was a New Divinity Baptist.[17]
Other than Andrew Fuller (who we’ll get to in a second), the Edwardsean theologian who was most influential upon Baptists in the South was Timothy Dwight, Edwards’s grandson, president of Yale. In the 1830s, a Baptist church wrote to Luther Rice at the theological seminary in Prince Edward, Virginia. They were in need of a minister, and they wanted a “man of first rate talents” who “could write well” and “who could visit a good deal.” They also “wanted a man of very gentlemanly deportment” but could only pay 350 dollars, maybe 400. Luther Rice responded jokingly, “they ought forthwith to make a call for old Doctor Dwight in heaven; for he did not know any one in this world who answered their description. And as Dr. Dwight had been living so long on spiritual food, he might not need so much for the body, and possibly he might live on four hundred dollars.”[18] In other words, they wanted way too much for way too little! Evidently, the name of Timothy Dwight was held in high regard. Through his writings and systematic theology, he had a huge impact on Baptist life in the South.
The third way that Jonathan Edwards influenced early Southern Baptists was through Andrew Fuller, who corresponded with Timothy Dwight during his lifetime. Andrew Fuller was, of course, an English Baptist and the chief thinker behind the Baptist missions movement. He was a titanic influence upon Southern Baptists. In the 1850s, in Mason County, Kentucky, Baptist William Vaughn was asked by a young pastor which books he should read. His response was: “The Bible first, and then Andrew Fuller.”[19] Fuller’s theology was so missional in tone and put so much emphasis upon both human responsibility and divine sovereignty that Baptists gobbled up his writings. In Missouri, Baptist Alvin Peter Williams was even nicknamed “The Andrew Fuller of America.”[20] In Georgia, Jesse Mercer was a huge advocate for Andrew Fuller, and in 1830, even wrote a book on unlimited atonement that quoted Fuller over a dozen times.[21] Through Andrew Fuller, Jonathan Edwards exerted his strongest influence upon Southern Baptists. Simply put, poorly educated, grassroots Baptists who would never have read from a refined Congregationalist would read from one of their own. James Madison Pendleton, who was actually a Landmark Baptist and pastored churches in Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, once said, “Eternity alone will reveal all the good accomplished, by God’s blessing, from Fuller’s Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation.”[22] During his life, Fuller became so famous in the states that FBC Boston offered him the pulpit (which he declined).
Fuller left his mark upon the Baptist South in more ways than one. William Staughton, who was one of the original signers of the Baptist Missionary Society in Kettering, England and was actually baptized by Samuel Pearce, eventually became one of the founders of the Triennial Convention and influenced the first SBC president William B. Johnson. Among Staughton’s students were Thomas Meredith, one of the co-founders of the North Carolina state convention. There is simply no state and no region of the South where there wasn’t an Edwardsean theologian who was Baptist. Most of them had read Andrew Fuller in some way. Historian A. H. Newman said that Fuller’s reach in the South was “incalculable” and that was certainly a true statement.[23]
The final way that Edwards influenced Southern Baptists was implicitly. For example, revival narratives which were so prominent during that era had been popularized by Edwards, like in Some Thoughts Concerning the Revival (1742). Also, Edwards’s Diary of David Brainerd (1749) was one of his most popular works, immortalizing Brainerd as a Baptist hero.[24] Baptists referenced Brainerd often. Jonathan Edwards left a giant footprint upon Baptist literary culture in ways that Baptists did not always realize.
When many Southern Baptists today think of the early SBC, they may think of James P. Boyce, the first president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Boyce obviously had a tremendous impact upon the theological direction of the Convention. Boyce studied under Charles Hodge at Princeton, who was not an Edwardsean. He was a confessional Calvinist, not a revivalist. But unlike Robert Lewis Dabney, James Henley Thornwell, or Albert Taylor Bledsoe, Boyce never delivered a scathing critique of Edwards. The reason is perhaps that Boyce was raised in an Edwardsean world. Boyce’s mother was converted by Basil Manly Sr., who would eventually become a mentor and father in the faith to Boyce. Boyce himself was converted by the preaching of Richard Fuller, who read Jonathan Edwards and was actually called to the ministry in Northampton, MA while a student at Harvard.[25] The first church Boyce pastored, FBC Columbia, was planted by Jonathan Maxcy and William B. Johnson, both Edwardseans. Boyce’s Sunday School teacher, H. H. Tucker, was given the nickname “the Jonathan Edwards of the South.”[26] And Boyce’s good friend at Southern Seminary, Basil Manly Jr., was converted by reading Jonathan Edwards. The only reason Jr. attended Princeton is because it was more friendly to slave owners than Newton Theological Institute in Massachusetts, near Andover.[27] One of the systematic theology texts Boyce initially used at Southern was John Dagg’s Manual of Theology, which is filled with Edwards’s ideas like love to being in general, love of benevolence and complacence, and true virtue.[28] Almost everywhere Boyce turned, he was reminded of the influence of Jonathan Edwards. Therefore, while he inherited the intellectualist sensibilities of Princeton, he could not deny that Southern Baptists had been shaped by Edwards. After all, the very first president of the Southern Baptist Convention, William B. Johnson, held to the moral governmental theory of atonement. Johnson was one of the biggest proponents of Southern Seminary in its infancy. As a younger man, Johnson was discipled by Jonathan Maxcy at South Carolina College. He became an avid reader of both Edwards and Andrew Fuller. In some ways, Johnson embodied every strain of Edwardsean influence. Edwards’s stamp upon Southern Baptist life was undeniable.
Jonathan Edwards in the 21st Century
After looking at so many strains of Edwardsean thought animating the early Southern Baptist Convention, one obvious question is: how did we get from the Southern Edwardseans of the 19th century to the Young Reformed and Restless movement of the 21st? The latter has been recognized as a resurgence of Edwardsean thought. How did we go from John Dagg to John Piper, you might say? How do we get from 1845 to having a Jonathan Edwards Center at Gateway Seminary? A key in understanding the reason Edwards has made a comeback in Baptist life is first grasping why Edwards faded from the Baptist consciousness in the late 19th century. As Southern Baptists began to write their own systematic theologies and start their own schools and establish their own theological tradition, they appealed less and less to Edwards. The Southern Baptist world at the end of the 20th century was vaguely familiar with Edwards. Instead of the theologian of revival who wrote Religious Affections, he became known as the scary Puritan who preached “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Historian Sydney Ahlstrom had this to say in 1961: “it is an outrage that Edwards should be best known throughout America as a hell-fire revivalist and by a few lines from one imprecatory sermon, delivered outside of his own parish, on ‘Sinners in the hands of an Angry God.’”[29] This was largely true in the Southern Baptist Convention as well. You might say that interest in Edwards re-appeared in the same place that it had originally: New England. When Harvard scholar Perry Miller wrote his intellectual biography of Edwards in 1949, he was kind of resurrecting Edwards studies.[30]And evangelicals were a little slow to the party, especially Southern Baptists. The star-studded editorial committee for The Works of Jonathan Edwards included no Southern Baptists. In the 80s and 90s, Presbyterians John Gerstner and R. C. Sproul began introducing their own people to Edwards. In the Southern Baptist realm, the Founders Ministries began publishing Edwards. But it was not until John Piper that most Baptists re-discovered Jonathan Edwards. The irony is that John Piper, though not a Southern Baptist, was raised in South Carolina, which was the birthplace of Southern Edwardseanism. In their 2017 work, A Reader’s Guide to the Major Writings of Jonathan Edwards, Southern Baptists Nathan Finn and Jeremy Kimble acknowledge their indebtedness to Piper, illustrating Piper’s profound influence upon a generation of Baptists:
Speaking of Piper, we owe him a particular debt. At the time of writing these acknowledgements, we’re both in our mid-thirties. Like so many of our generational peers, our first real introduction to Jonathan Edwards – not counting high school readings of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” – came through Piper’s writings. Over the past generation, no single individual has done more than John Piper to introduce North American pastors, seminarians, and collegians to the life and thought of Jonathan Edwards. Our prayer is that this book will be a key resource that blesses students and pastors, who, like us, first heard about Edwards from Piper or another well-known Christian leader and have decided to learn more about the famed pastor-theologian for themselves. Though neither of us knows him personally, it is our joy to dedicate this book to John Piper as a way to thank him for the influence he had on our lives and ministries by putting Jonathan Edwards on our spiritual radars. Thank you, John. We trust we speak for thousands of others.[31]
As Finn and Kimble demonstrate, Piper put Jonathan Edwards on the Southern Baptist “spiritual radar,” you might say, after almost a century of relative obscurity. But it was not just Piper. So did Tom Nettles and Michael Haykin at Southern Seminary. So did Robert Caldwell at Southwestern, a former student of Doug Sweeney at Trinity. So did Chris Chun, here at Gateway Seminary. The theology of Jonathan Edwards continues to be a powerful force in the Southern Baptist Convention. And it is no coincidence that the SBC is still a denomination of “moderate Calvinists” who lean toward revivalism and emphasize the religion of the heart. These are things that Jonathan Edwards spent his life promoting. The Jonathan Edwards Center at Gateway Seminary is evidence that Edwardsean thought is still welcomed in the Southern Baptist Convention after 178 years.
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[1] Rhys S. Bezzant explains, “The church in New York in which Edwards served as supply preacher was a small house fellowship resulting from a church split (rather than a formally instituted congregation), enabling a particularly intense experience of Christian fellowship.” (Bezzant, Jonathan Edwards and the Church [New York: Oxford University Press, 2014], 36.)
[2] Sean Michael Lucas, “‘He Cuts Up Edwardsism by the Roots’: Robert Lewis Dabney and the Edwardsian Legacy in the Nineteenth-Century Legacy,” in D.G. Hart, Sean Michael Lucas, and Stephen J. Nichols, eds., The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards: American Religion and the Evangelical Tradition (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 200–14.
[3] Cited in Lucas; James Henley Thornwell, The Collected Writings of James Henley Thornwell, ed. J. B. Adger, 4 vols. (1871–73; reprint, Carlisle: Banner of Truth Trust, 1974), 1:350, 381–82.
[4] See Michael O’Brien, Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 269.
[5] E. Brooks Holifield, Gentlemen Theologians: American Theology in Southern Culture, 1795–1860 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1978), 191. Douglas A. Sweeney, “Evangelical Tradition in America,” in The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards, ed. Stephen J. Stein (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 228.
[6] Eric Smith, “Order and Ardor: The Revival Spirituality of Regular Baptist Oliver Hart (1723–1795),” Ph.D. diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2015, 70.
[7] Obbie Tyler Todd, “The Influence of Jonathan Edwards on the Missiology and Conversionism of Richard Furman (1755–1825),” Jonathan Edwards Studies 7, no. 1 (2017): 36–54.
[8] R.B.C. Howell, The Terms of Communion at the Lord’s Table (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1846), 192.
[9] Tom Nettles, The Baptists: Key People Involved in Forming a Baptist Identity, Volume Two: Beginnings in America (Fearn, Ross-shire: Christian Focus Publications, 2005), 275.
[10] Michael A. G. Haykin, “‘Soldiers in Christ, in Truth Arrayed’: The Ministry and Piety of Basil Manly Jr. (1825–1892),” Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 13.1 (2009): 31.
[11] P. H. Mell, Predestination and the Saints’ Perseverance: Stated and Defended from the Objections of the Arminians, in a Review of Two Sermons, Published by Rev. Russell Reneau (Charleston: Southern Baptist Publication Society, 1858), 48.
[12] Mell, Predestination and the Saints’ Perseverance, 27–28.
[13] Jonathan Maxcy, “A Funeral Sermon Occasioned by the Death of the Rev. James Manning, D.D.” in The Literary Remains of Rev. Jonathan Maxcy, D.D., ed. Romeo Elton. (New Haven: 1844), 151.
[14] Life and Times of James B. Taylor, ed. George Boardman Taylor (Philadelphia: The Bible and Publication Society, 1872), 208.
[15] Michael A. G. Haykin, “Great Admirers of the Transatlantic Divinity: Some Chapters in the Story of Baptist Edwardseanism,” After Jonathan Edwards: The Courses of the New England Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 205.
[16] Gabriel Poillon Disosway, The Earliest Churches of New York and it Vicinity (New York: James G. Gregory, 1865), 195.
[17] Greg Wills, “The SBJT Forum: The Overlooked Shapers of Evangelicalism,” The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 3, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 88.
[18] Robert Fleming, Sketch of the Life of Elder Humphrey Posey, First Baptist Missionary to the Cherokee Indians, and Founder of Valley Town School, North Carolina (Western Baptist Association of Georgia, 1852), 96–98.
[19] Thomas M. Vaughn, Memoirs of Rev. William Vaughn, D.D. (Louisville: Caperton & Cates, 1878), 92.
[20] R. S. Duncan, A History of the Baptists in Missouri (St. Louis: Scammell & Company Publishers, 1883), 361.
[21] Peter Beck, “A Southern Exposure: The Theology of Jonathan Edwards in the Writings of Jesse Mercer,” The Journal of Baptist Studies 1 (2007), 21.
[22] J. M. Pendleton, Life and Times of Elder Reuben Ross (Philadelphia: Grant, Faires, & Rodgers, 1882), 281.
[23] Cited in The Baptist Story: From English Sect to Global Movement, ed. Anthony L. Chute, Nathan A. Finn, and Michael A. G. Haykin (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2015), 101.
[24] George M. Marsden notes, “Although it was not as widely read as David Brainerd and not as appealing to as broad a range of evangelicals as Religious Affections, ‘Edwards on the Will’ became a staple of Calvinist theology.” (Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003], 446.)
[25] James Hazzard Cuthbert, Life of Richard Fuller (New York: Sheldon and Company, 1878), 42.
[26] Jeff Robinson, “‘Our great distinguishing characteristic’: H. H. Tucker and the Battle for Church Purity, Part I,” Founders Ministries, June 5, 2015, https://founders.org/2015/06/05/our-great-distinguishing-characteristic-h-h-tucker-and-the-battle-for-church-purity-part-i/.
[27] For this account, see Obbie Tyler Todd, Southern Edwardseans: The Southern Baptist Legacy of Jonathan Edwards (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2022), 159–63.
[28] See Mark E. Dever, “John L. Dagg,” in Baptist Theologians, ed. Timothy George and David S. Dockery (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1990), 178.
[29] Sydney Ahlstrom, “Theology in America: A Historical Survey,” in The Shaping of American Religion, ed. James Ward Smith and A. Leland Jamison (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 247.
[30] According to Michael J. McClymond and Gerald R. McDermott, Miller’s 1949 biography of Edwards “dropped like a bombshell on the playground of the American intellectuals.” (McClymond and McDermott, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards [New York: Oxford University Press, 2012], 641.)
[31] Nathan A. Finn and Jeremy M. Kimble, “Acknowledgements,” in A Reader’s Guide to the Major Writings of Jonathan Edwards, ed. Nathan A. Finn, Jeremy M. Kimble (Wheaton: Crossway, 2017), 14.
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