Southern Edwardseans: The Southern Baptist Legacy of Jonathan Edwards [1 ed.] 9783666560514, 9783525560518

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Obbie Tyler Todd

Southern Edwardseans The Southern Baptist Legacy of Jonathan Edwards

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New Directions in Jonathan Edwards Studies Edited by Harry S. Stout, Kenneth P. Minkema and Adriaan C. Neele

Volume 8

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Obbie Tyler Todd

Southern Edwardseans The Southern Baptist Legacy of Jonathan Edwards

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht

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Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek: The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data available online: https://dnb.de. © 2022 by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Theaterstraße 13, 37073 Göttingen, Germany, an imprint of the Brill-Group (Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands; Brill USA Inc., Boston MA, USA; Brill Asia Pte Ltd, Singapore; Brill Deutschland GmbH, Paderborn, Germany; Brill Österreich GmbH, Vienna, Austria) Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau, Verlag Antike and V&R unipress. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher. Cover design: SchwabScantechnik, Göttingen Typesetting: le-tex publishing services, Leipzig

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5 The theological questions and conversations of nineteenth-century American Evangelicalism were largely shaped by the remarkable thought of one man, namely, Jonathan Edwards, who has been rightly described as ”America’s Augustine.” Past scholarship has focused upon the impress of his thought in the Northern United States, particularly as it relates to what has come to be called the New Divinity. In this ground-breaking work, Dr Obbie Todd convincingly argues that Edwardsean thought was equally determinative for the development of Baptist life and thought in the South. Is there not a sense, then, that most American Evangelicals in the nineteenth century were Edwardseans?  A scholarly tour de force. – Michael A.G. Haykin (Chair & professor of church history, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) Is a prophet loved in his own country? Following his death, the renowned 18th-century New England theologian Jonathan Edwards was widely criticized by northern liberal Congregationalists and Unitarians, and his writings were expunged from the College of New Jersey’s curriculum. It is also assumed that his thought was not well received in the American south, largely because of the growing divide over abolitionism in the antebellum period. However, there were indeed Edwardseans in Dixieland–and not merely a scattered few, but a multi-generational cadre of figures, concentrated among Southern Baptists. This study reveals for the first time the extent and variety of Edwards’ reach among southern theologians, which laid a foundation for modern-day appropriation of the Sage of Stockbridge among adherents of the Southern Baptist Convention and beyond. – Kenneth P. Minkema (Jonathan Edwards Center & Online Archive at Yale University, Research Faculty at Yale Divinity School and as Research Associate at the University of the Free State, South Africa) This book is long overdue. It is a cutting-edge work that I have been waiting for someone to chronicle. Obbie Todd makes a bold and insightful case that Southern Baptists have engineered the moderate Calvinism of Jonathan Edwards and later Edwardsean theology in order to fine-tune their own evangelistic identity. Albeit this investigation challenges traditional baptist historiography, I find his evidence and argumentation compelling. The monograph of the series, New Directions in Jonathan Edwards Studies, is an appropriate title for this creative work. This book presents groundbreaking research that will be consulted, debated, and referenced for many decades to come. – Chris Chun (Director of Jonathan Edwards Center and Professor of Church History at Gateway Seminary) It is not often that a scholar can plow new ground, especially when it comes to the life and legacy of Jonathan Edwards. Yet that is exactly what Obbie Todd has done in Southern Edwardseans. With an eye especially to Southern Baptist reception of the theology of the

6 great New England divine, Todd demonstrates how the Edwardsean intellectual circle included those in a region and a communion with which he had little obvious connection. In so doing, Todd expertly demonstrates the truly national impact of the Edwardsean theology and charts the way forward for future historians to understand the development of Christianity in the American South.  – Sean Michael Lucas (PhD, Chancellor’s Professor of Church History, Reformed Theological Seminary, USA) Obbie Todd has spent several years digging deep into primary sources of Southern preachers and theologians sorting out the influence of Jonathan Edwards’s thought on the culturemakers of the South. This is no easy task for it calls for a deep grasp of Edwards and an accurate analysis of the places that his thought settled in a variety of creative thinkers. He has done this. The book offers a deeper understanding of the roots of southern evangelicalism and will see pivotal ideas in the dynamic theology of Edwards in a new light. He who reads will have a pleasant adventure in the living process of theological influence and interaction. – Tom J. Nettles (Senior Professor of Historical Theology, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) This book traces the enduring influence of Jonathan Edwards, especially within the Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest Protestant denomination. Southern Edwardseans is a major contribution to both Baptist studies and the reception history of America’s most consequential theologian. A historiographical tour de force! – Timothy George (Distinguished Professor of Divinity at Beeson Divinity School of Samford University and the general editor of the 28-volume Reformation Commentary on Scripture) I’ve been waiting for someone to write Southern Edwardseans since 2000, when I first became passingly aware of the influence on Edwards and his successors on Baptists in the South. I’m thankful that Obbie Tyler Todd has taken on this challenge. He offers a compelling narrative, highlights the key figures and movements, and ably demonstrates that Edwardsean thought has a rich (and continuing) legacy among Southern Baptists. Southern Edwardseans makes a signal contribution to both Edwards Studies and Baptist Studies that will open up new avenues for more focused studies that dig deeply into the thought of particular individuals or the legacy of key ideas. Highly recommended. – Nathan A. Finn (Provost and Dean of the University Faculty, North Greenville University)

Table of Contents

Foreward.............................................................................................. 11 Introduction: What is an Edwardsean? ................................................... 13 1. “This Great Man of God”: Jonathan Edwards’s Theology in the Nineteenth-Century Baptist South ............................................... 31 2. What Hath Charleston to do with Northampton?: South Carolina as the Birthplace of Southern Edwardseanism ..................... 71 3. Richard Furman’s Network of Moderate Calvinists: The Four Schools of Southern Edwardseanism ................................................ 95 4. The Two Sides of Honor: New Divinity Abolitionists, Slaveholding Southern Baptists, and the Moral Government of God ............................................................................................. 129 5. An Edwardsean SBC: Jonathan Edwards’s Legacy in the Early Years of the Southern Baptist Convention ................................. 153 6. A Baptist Renaissance: Jonathan Edwards and the SBC Today ........... 177 Appendix: List of Southern Edwardsean Clergy, 1750–1895 ................... 195 Index ................................................................................................... 201

To Grant, My favorite Yale alumnus

Foreward

Not long ago, the Edwardsean tradition was not well-known among American historical theologians and Baptist historians. Jonathan Edwards, of course, was revered, but his “Edwardsean” descendants—known variously as the New Divinity, Hopkinsians, Consistent Calvinists, and the New England theologians in the century after Edwards’s death—had unfortunately been relegated to the sidelines of history. There were numerous reasons for this. In the nineteenth century, great debates between Edwardsean Calvinists and their more-traditional Reformed colleagues at institutions like Princeton Seminary drove a sizable wedge between the two American Calvinist traditions, so much so that once the Edwardseans passed from the scene, the traditionalists were able to shape much of the historical narrative. In the twentieth century, writers like Joseph Haroutunian set the tone for decades by portraying the Edwardseans as overly preoccupied with the metaphysical subtleties related to human willing rather than devoting attention to the robust, gospeloriented faith that Edwards had proclaimed. By the middle of the twentieth century the Edwardseans were largely forgotten, relegated to footnote-status in American historical theology. This all changed toward the end of the twentieth century with the reemergence of interest in Jonathan Edwards both in the academy and in many churches across North America and beyond. Suddenly, Edwards was fashionable again. With much attention turned to the Northampton sage it was only a matter of time before some would begin to reexamine the relationship between Edwards and the forgotten Edwardseans. Scholars like Joseph Conforti, Mark Valeri, David Kling, and Douglas Sweeney have reassessed a host of Edwardsean luminaries like Samuel Hopkins, Joseph Bellamy, and others, concluding that there was more continuity shared between Edwards and the Edwardseans than previously acknowledged. Indeed, when we examine the many leaders of the Second Great Awakening in the northeast we find a host of ministers, professors, and writers who were devoted followers of the Edwardsean tradition. From this ongoing scholarship, American historical theologians have safely concluded that in the decades between the American Revolution and the Civil War there was a coherent, sizable, and vibrant Edwardsean Calvinist tradition in the northeast, touching much of New England Congregationalism as well as significant segments of Presbyterianism. But what about the Baptists? Do we find the influence of Edwards and the Edwardseans among their tribe in antebellum period? This has been a difficult question to answer because, as noted above, the Edwardseans have not been on the radars of many historical theologians until recently. Furthermore, Baptist historians are not

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Foreward

generally that familiar with the Edwardsean tradition, and if they are, their work has usually focused upon the connections between the Edwardseans and English Baptists like William Carey and Andrew Fuller (the outstanding work of Michael A. G. Haykin and Chris Chun comes to mind here). By contrast, the presence of Edwardsean Calvinism among American antebellum Baptists has not been extensively examined. This is why Obbie Tyler Todd’s work is so important. Southern Edwardseans speaks directly to this lacuna in the scholarship by admirably drawing together three academic sub-specialties necessary to explore the topic: Jonathan Edwards studies, the history and theology of the Edwardseans, and Baptist history in the early American Republic. Todd ably demonstrates that Edwardsean influence was indeed extensive among Baptists in the South. Many familiar Baptist leaders from the period—Richard Furman, William B. Johnson, William Staughton, R. B. C. Howell, Basil Manly Sr., and others—imbibed significant doses of Edwardsean theology either directly from Edwards himself or intermediately through the writings of his Edwardsean disciples. Todd does not just identify Edwardsean themes among Baptists, he goes further and suggests that there were multiple ways Baptists appropriated the Edwardsean tradition, yielding at least four different schools of Southern Edwardseanism. This book significantly expands our knowledge of both Baptists and Edwardseans in the first half of the nineteenth century. It will be of great interest to American historical theologians, Baptist historians, as well as Edwardsean scholars. Many thanks to Obbie Tyler Todd for his outstanding study! Robert W. Caldwell III Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary

Introduction: What is an Edwardsean?

What is an Edwardsean? So much ink has been spilled answering this question that Jonathan Edwards’s legacy now seems to garner as much interest as his theology. The question has really existed since 1932, when Joseph Haroutunian dismissed the New Divinity movement in his Piety versus Moralism: The Passing of the New England Theology.1 Since Haroutunian’s scathing critique, a range of scholars have attempted to vindicate Edwards’s New England successors as bona fide Edwardseans, theologians with the spirit, principles, and even the imprimatur of Edwards.2 Douglas Sweeney alone has authored, contributed to, or co-edited enough works on this subject to fill a small library.3 The question of Edwardseanism has been so thoroughly explored that Charles W. Phillips has recently published a work entitled Edwards Amasa Park: The Last Edwardsean.4 Edwards scholars tend to agree with Phillips. Sweeney and Allen Guelzo have equated the Edwardsean tradition with the so-called New England theology, “the tradition beginning with Edwards, running through the New Divinity from Samuel Hopkins and Joseph Bellamy to Nathanael Emmons, and extending to more ambiguous figures who nevertheless claimed a linkage to Edwards, from Nathaniel W. Taylor, Lyman Beecher, and Charles G.

1 Joseph Haroutunian, Piety versus Moralism: The Passing of the New England Theology (New York: Henry Holt, 1932). 2 For an excellent historiography, see Douglas A. Sweeney and Allen C. Guelzo, “Introduction,” in The New England Theology, ed. Douglas A. Sweeney and Allen C. Guelzo (Eugene: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2006), 20–21. 3 Douglas A. Sweeney, Nathaniel Taylor, New Haven Theology, and the Legacy of Jonathan Edwards (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); David W. Kling and Douglas A. Sweeney, ed., Jonathan Edwards at Home and Abroad: Historical Memories, Cultural Movements, Global Horizons, (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2003); Douglas A. Sweeney and Allen C. Guelzo, ed., The New England Theology (Eugene; Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2006); Oliver D. Crisp and Douglas A. Sweeney, ed., After Jonathan Edwards: The Courses of the New England Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Daniel W. Cooley and Douglas A. Sweeney, “The Edwardseans and the Atonement,” in A New Divinity: Transatlantic Reformed Evangelical Debates during the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Mark Jones and Michael A. G. Haykin (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018), 109–25; Douglas A. Sweeney, “Taylorites, Tylerites, and the Dissolution of the New England Theology,” in The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards: American Religion and the Evangelical Tradition, ed. D.G. Hart, Sean Michael Lucas, and Stephen J. Nichols (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 181–99; Douglas A. Sweeney, “Evangelical Tradition in America,” in The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards, ed. Stephen J. Stein [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007], 217–238. 4 Charles W. Phillips, Edwards Amasa Park: The Last Edwardsean (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018).

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Introduction: What is an Edwardsean?

Finney to the last of the school’s stalwarts, Andover’s Edwards Amasa Park.”5 Edwardseanism was indeed a protean theology, adapting with American culture.6 It crossed denominational lines, traversed geographical boundaries, and even transcended the volatile issue of slavery. In some sense, Park was an Edwardsean in the same way Jonathan Edwards was a Puritan. Neither theologian embodied the original meaning of the term, but they identified themselves as members in long, ever-changing traditions which had kept many of their most distinguishable traits. However, the mind of Jonathan Edwards was an ocean, and this is why the question of Edwardseanism is such a vexing one. Few if any American theologians after Edwards’s death have since compared with the sheer scope of his thinking. Perry Miller, the historian largely responsible for resurrecting Edwards studies, once quipped that Edwards was “so much ahead of his time that our own can hardly be said to have caught up with him.”7 From his Trinitarian framework to his doctrine of self-love to his ability to balance seemingly contradictory ideas, there was much that Edwardseans did not share with Edwards. Therefore, in some sense, there were many Edwardseans and yet none at all. But this book is not an attempt to settle the Edwardsean question. Instead these pages only broaden the question. How vast was Jonathan Edwards’s legacy? How pliable was his theology? After decades of Jonathan Edwards studies, Edwardseanism is still deeper and wider than many have ever imagined. David W. Kling and Douglas A. Sweeney admit, “We know a great deal, in other words, about this otherworldly man. But we still know precious little about his roles in shaping this world.”8 Remarkably, we know even less about how Jonathan Edwards molded the American South. For instance, scholars today know more about Edwards’s influence upon the United Kingdom than about his legacy in the state of Georgia.9 Thanks in large part to the labors of Michael A. G. Haykin, Edwards’s impact upon Andrew Fuller and his English Baptist associates has been dissected and researched

5 Douglas A. Sweeney and Allen C. Guelzo, “Introduction,” 15n5. 6 Joseph Conforti posits that “from the Second Great Awakening to the turn of the twentieth century, Edwards’s religious figure and thought were a continual, if changing part of American cultural discourse.” (Joseph A. Conforti, Jonathan Edwards, Religious Tradition, and American Culture (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 3. 7 Perry Miller, Jonathan Edwards (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1949), xvii. 8 David W. Kling and Douglas A. Sweeney, “Introduction,” in Jonathan Edwards at Home and Abroad: Historical Memories, Cultural Movements, Global Horizons, ed. David W. Kling and Douglas A. Sweeney (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), xii. 9 David W. Bebbington, “Remembered Around the World: The International Scope of Edwards’s Legacy,” in Jonathan Edwards at Home and Abroad: Historical Memories, Cultural Movements, Global Horizons, ed. David W. Kling and Douglas A. Sweeney (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 177–200; D. Bruce Hindmarsh, “The Reception of Jonathan Edwards by Early Evangelicals in England,” 201–221; Christopher W. Mitchell, “Jonathan Edwards’s Scottish Connection,” 222–247.

Introduction: What is an Edwardsean?

in a number of ways.10 Haykin has even explored Southern Edwardseanism in small measure, but not with any significant treatment.11 If not for the work of Tom Nettles in the Baptist realm and Sean Michael Lucas in Presbyterianism, the story of Edwards’s Southern legacy would remain largely untold.12 In many ways, this book builds on the work of Nettles and Haykin and engages in conversation with Lucas. Still, Jonathan Edwards did not merely leave behind a Southern disciple or two. The geographical and cultural barriers in the South could not seal off Southerners from the theology of “America’s theologian.”13 There were indeed a group of Southern evangelicals who laid claim to the Edwardsean tradition with nearly as much warrant as Edwards Amasa Park. Their theology, piety, and mission were fundamentally shaped by Jonathan Edwards and his successors. But they were not who many, including Edwards, would have expected. They were Southern Baptists and collectively they were the only Edwardseans in the American South.14 Greg Wills rightly observes, “Historians have noticed the influence of New England Theology on Presbyterians and Congregationalists, but have not attended to its influence on Baptists.”15 While Baptists in the South boasted a different theological pedigree

10 Michael A. G. Haykin, ed., The Armies of the Lamb: The Spirituality of Andrew Fuller (Dundas: Joshua Press, 2001); Michael A. G. Haykin, ed. Joy unspeakable and full of glory (Dunas: Joshua Press, 2012); Michael A. G. Haykin, “A Great Thirst for Reading”: Andrew Fuller the Theological Reader,” in Eusebeia Issue 9, Spring 2008; Michael A. G. Haykin, “‘The Lord is Doing Great Things, and Answering Prayer Everywhere’: The Revival of the Calvinistic Baptists in the Long Eighteenth Century,” in Pentecostal Outpourings: Revival and the Reformed Tradition, ed. Robert Davis Smart, Michael A. G. Haykin, and Ian Hugh Clary (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2016), 77–99; Chris Chun, The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards in the Theology of Andrew Fuller (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Publishing, 2012). 11 Michael A. G. Haykin, “Great Admirers of the Transatlantic Divinity: Some Chapters in the Story of Baptist Edwardsianism,” in After Jonathan Edwards: The Courses of the New England Theology, ed. Oliver D. Crisp and Douglas A. Sweeney (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); 197–207. 12 Thomas J. Nettles, By His Grace and for His Glory: A Historical, Theological, and Practical Study of the Doctrines of Grace in Baptist Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1986), 24, 43, 129; Tom Nettles, The Baptists: Key People Involved in Forming a Baptist Identity, Part Two: Beginnings in America (Fearn: Christian Focus Publications, 2005), 107, 169–171, 191, 274–6, 331; Sean Michael Lucas, “‘He Cuts Up Edwardsism by the Roots’: Robert Lewis Dabney and the Edwardsian Legacy in the Nineteenth-Century South,” in The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards: American Religion and the Evangelical Tradition, ed. D.G. Hart, Sean Michael Lucas, and Stephen J. Nichols (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 200–216. 13 Robert W. Jenson, America’s Theologian: A Recommendation of Jonathan Edwards (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 14 In this work, “Southern Baptists” will simply refer to those Baptists who lived in or ministered in the American South, not necessarily those who constituted the Southern Baptist Convention. 15 Greg Wills, “The SBJT Forum: The Overlooked Shapers of Evangelicalism,” The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 3, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 87.

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than Presbyterians or Congregationalists, and while they inhabited a Southern landscape unfamiliar to the bustling cities and tall forests of New England, they believed their similarities with Edwards far outweighed their differences. Like Edwards, these Baptists were revivalistic, Calvinistic, loosely confessional, and committed to practical divinity. In these four things, Southern Edwardseanism lived, moved, and had its being. In the nineteenth-century, when so many Presbyterians scoffed at Edwards’s “innovation” and Methodists scorned his Calvinism, Baptists found in Edwards a man after their own heart. Directly or indirectly, Jonathan Edwards captured the Southern Baptist denomination. By 1845, at the first Southern Baptist Convention, Southern Edwardseans had laid the groundwork for a convention marked by Edwardsean theology.

The Development of Southern Baptist Theology Jonathan Edwards’s theology was critical in the development of Southern Baptist theology. Although “Baptists have been unified on very little throughout their history,” Baptists in the South were tied by several beliefs and ideas and Jonathan Edwards spoke into almost all of them, most especially evangelism and the salvation experience.16 Edwardseanism was the magnetic force that brought together Baptists of all kinds. For example, ideas like religious affections and moral and natural ability united many Regular and Separate Baptists in a common conversionism.17 The concept of true virtue and love to being in general united anti-creedal and confessional Baptists.18 Moral government tethered those who upheld penal substitution and those who rejected it.19 The freedom of the will was an almost ubiquitous concept

16 Thomas S. Kidd and Barry Hankins, Baptists in America: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 248. The authors later say, “In all of this, Baptists are notorious for two things – evangelism and schism.” (251) 17 Tom Nettles, The Baptists: Key People Involved in Forming a Baptist Identity, Volume Two: Beginnings in America (Fearn, Ross-shire, Scotland: Christian Focus Publications, 2005), 127; Nettles, “Richard Furman,” in Baptist Theologians, ed. Timothy George, David S. Dockery (Nashville, TN: Broadman Press, 1990),140. 18 William B. Johnson, “Love Characteristic of the Deity,” in Southern Baptist Sermons on Sovereignty and Responsibility (Harrisonburg, VA: Sprinkle Publications, 2003), 46; John L. Dagg, A Manual of Theology (Harrisonburg: Gano Books, 1982), 46. 19 Richard Furman, “On the Analogy Between the Dispensations of Grace by the Gospel, and a Royal Marriage Feast” in Life and Works of Dr. Richard Furman, D.D. (Harrisonburg, VA: Sprinkle Publications, 2004), 470–71; William B. Johnson, “Reminiscences,” South Carolina Library, University of South Carolina, 39.

The Development of Southern Baptist Theology

in Southern Baptist life, largely through Edwards’s famous defense.20 From the top of the denomination to the bottom, from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River, Southern Baptists were melded by the influence of Jonathan Edwards. Moreover, Southern Baptists were even produced by the Northampton Sage. The drafter of the Abstract of Principles at Southern Seminary was converted by reading Edwards’s Personal Narrative (1740).21 The architect of the first Baptist state convention in the South even recommended Edwards’s works as a means of salvation.22 However, Southern Edwardseans weren’t just reading Edwards. These Baptists also consumed a steady dose of the Edwardseans. From confessional Calvinists in Charleston to Landmarkists in Tennessee, Baptists throughout the South gladly adopted Andrew Fuller’s moral governmental view.23 Altar-call revivalists in Georgia and teachers in Missouri were drawn to his evangelical brand of Calvinism, even pointing others to Fuller.24 The second president of the Southern Baptist Convention believed that Timothy Dwight’s systematic text was one of the best ever written.25 Southern Edwardseans were indeed an eclectic blend of Edwardsean influences. The president of South Carolina College (1804–1820) was a thoroughgoing Hopkinsian, but the presidents at the University of Alabama (1837–1855) and the University of Georgia (1878–1888) preferred reading Jonathan Edwards instead of his New England successors. Traditionally, Southern Baptist historiography has neglected to account for the subtle evolution that took place within the life of Edwardsean doctrines. As a whole, Southern Baptists resisted the style and scheme of the New Divinity, but not entirely. Much as the New Divinity refashioned Jonathan Edwards’s theology, Southern Baptists modified New England Theology. Baptists could not seem to get enough of Edwardsean thought, and they sought it in all forms, but always on their own terms. For instance, Richard Fuller, the third president of the Southern Baptist Convention, preached a moral governmental atonement as one of his central

20 Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 1: The Freedom of the Will, ed. Paul Ramsey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957). 21 Michael A. G. Haykin, “‘Soldiers of Christ, in Truth Arrayed’: The Ministry and Piety of Basil Manly Jr. (1825–1892),” SBJT 13.1 (2009): 31. 22 Richard Furman, “Conversion Essential to Salvation,” in The Life and Works of Dr. Richard Furman, D. D., ed. G. William Foster (Harrisonburg, VA: Sprinkle Publications, 2004), 438. 23 James Madison Pendleton, The Atonement of Christ (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1885), 88–89. 24 History of the Baptist Denomination of Georgia (Atlanta: Jas. P. Harrison & Co. 1881), 316–17; Jarrett Burch, Adiel Sherwood: Baptist Antebellum Pioneer in Georgia (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2003), 51; Robert Samuel Duncan, A History of the Baptists in Missouri (St. Louis: Scammell & Company Publishers, 1883), 361. 25 R.B.C. Howell, The Terms of Communion at the Lord’s Table (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1846), 192.

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Introduction: What is an Edwardsean?

themes.26 He emphasized the “whole economy of Justice” under the “moral governor of the universe” and “the prerogative and attributes of a Moral Ruler.”27 However, unlike William B. Johnson, the first president of the SBC, Fuller never forfeited the traditional doctrine of imputation. In a sermon on law and gospel, after recalling the example of David Brainerd, Fuller then praised the “innocent and august substitute” who became “the most memorable assertion of the divine holiness and justice which had ever been presented to the contemplation of the moral universe.”28 Fuller’s view was not a pristine, classic understanding of moral governmental theory like that of Johnson, but was rather a hybrid, emphasizing both distributive justice (i.e. imputation of personal righteousness) and general justice (i.e. God’s right governance). Between the moral governmental view of Jonathan Maxcy and the penal substitutionary view of James P. Boyce, the quintessential forms of their respective systems, Southern Baptist theories of the atonement often fell along a spectrum which included distributive, general/public, and commutative justice (i.e. the exchange of goods). Which of these a Southern Baptist affirmed or emphasized in the work of Christ determined his exact view of the atonement.29 John L. Dagg also held to a synthesis of Edwardsean ideas. The author of the first Southern Baptist systematic theology text was fond of the New Divinity concept of public justice. However, since God always works for the “greatest good of the universe,” he believed that the “character” of God’s moral government should be ascribed to His goodness rather than to His justice. In other words, public justice was really just another name for goodness.30 While Dagg rejected the New England version of the atonement in classroom lectures and in theological manuals, moral government was nevertheless a prominent theme in his thinking. Dagg removed the Hopkinsian husk in order to extract what he believed to be the most vital Edwardsean kernel: that the Moral Governor always works for His own glory and the good of His moral universe.31 Moral government and its symbiotic axioms, honor and

26 Fuller declared, “Religion, my brethren, is sympathy with the government of God.” (Richard Fuller, “The Insane Rich Man,” in Sermons by Richard Fuller, D. D. [New York: Sheldon & Company, 1860], 222.) 27 Richard Fuller, Sermons by Richard Fuller (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1877), 316, 91. 28 Ibid., 102–103. 29 For an excellent description of these three kinds of justice as viewed by the Edwardseans, see Daniel W. Cooley and Douglas A. Sweeney, “The Edwardseans and the Atonement,” in A New Divinity: Transatlantic Reformed Evangelical Debates during the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Mark Jones and Michael A. G. Haykin (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018), 121–22. 30 Dagg claims that public justice “may be considered a modification of his goodness.” (John L. Dagg, A Manual of Theology [Harrisonburg: Gano Books, 1982], 85.) 31 In Greg Wills, “The SBJT Forum: The Overlooked Shapers of Evangelicalism,” The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 3, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 89.

The Development of Southern Baptist Theology

happiness, were signature Edwardsean principles which men like Joseph Bellamy and Timothy Dwight had drawn from republicanism and the Real Whig discourse of American public life.32 In the South, celebrating their Jeffersonian government, Baptists gladly welcomed a doctrine that seemed to clothe the principles of Scripture in the best ideals of their fledgling nation. In the early republic, moral government also served as a suitable alternative to the traditional Puritanical idea of a national covenant. Rather than God favoring America on the basis of covenant theology, Southern Baptists believed that covenants were made with individuals believers and that moral law is applied impartially to all nations.33 As a result, Baptist patriotism was more prone to invoke the standards of divine government than the privileges of divine election. Dagg represents perhaps the last stage in the evolution of moral governmental theory in Southern Baptist life, when moral government became more of a doctrine of providence than a robust doctrine of atonement. Despite its changing form, its two central principles – glory and goodness - remained the same.34 Around every turn, Southern Baptists were co-opting Edwardsean ideas to help determine the course of their own theological tradition. To suggest that Southern Baptists either received New Divinity ideas wholesale or rejected them altogether is an oversimplification of something as complex as Southern Baptist theology. Baptists in the South were as diverse as Jonathan Edwards’s theology was malleable. Therefore, Edwardsean concepts were usually drawn out piecemeal rather than formulated in a Hopkinsian, systematic way. As a bricolage of doctrines and ideas, Southern Edwardseanism was yet another chapter in the ever-changing legacy of Jonathan Edwards. E. Brooks Holifield suggests, “it would be no exaggeration to say that Baptist theology in America was, for the most part, an extended discussion – and usually a defense – of Calvinist doctrine.” He continues, “the Baptists gravitated after the mid-eighteenth century toward the Calvinism of the Westminster and Philadelphia confessions or toward Edwardsean variations of it.”35 In the South, they often gravitated toward both. Among early Southern Baptists, the question was not 32 According to Mark Noll, the theme of moral government “began with Bellamy, was developed further by Dwight, and came to prevail everywhere among New Englanders in the generation of Beecher and Taylor.” (Mark Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln [New York: Oxford University Press, 2002], 290–91.) 33 Mark Valeri, “The New Divinity and the American Revolution,” The William and Mary Quarterly Vol. 46, no. 4 (Oct. 1989): 744–45. 34 See Obbie Tyler Todd, “An Edwardsean Evolution: The Rise and Decline of Moral Governmental Theory in the Southern Baptist Convention,” The Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 62.4 (2019): 789–802. 35 E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 278.

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Introduction: What is an Edwardsean?

whether someone did in fact adopt Edwardsean ideas, but rather how many. For example, none held more firmly to the historic Baptist confessions than Richard Furman, John L. Dagg, and Patrick Hues Mell. Yet all three of these Baptist leaders adhered to Jonathan Edwards’s theology in some way, but each to a different degree and each with his own opinion of the New Divinity, ranging from friendly to hostile. Confessional and Edwardsean Calvinism were by no means mutually exclusive in the Baptist South. But how could such a significant influence go unnoticed in Baptist scholarship? Why has Southern Edwardseanism not been identified as a legitimate factor in the development of Southern Baptist theology? To be fair, Baptists like Richard Furman and John L. Dagg have long been recognized as theologians impacted by Edwardsean thought.36 The similarities of Baptist theology with Edwardsean theology have been recorded by several historians. For instance, Greg Wills has uncovered the influence of New England Theology on early Southern Baptists.37 Tom Nettles noted the “Edwardsian Calvinistic orientation” of Richard Furman’s soteriology.38 Nettles even went so far as to observe “the beginnings of Southern Baptists so deeply connected with this Edwardsean understanding of grace in its relation to man’s will and the foundation of all actions being to live to the glory of God.”39 However, Edwardseanism as a formative movement in Southern Baptist theology has never been identified or outlined. The debates between Regulars and Separates, Particulars and Generals, missionary and anti-missionary have rightly called for our attention. Baptist history is indeed a kaleidoscope of different beliefs and styles. All of these played a role in molding the Southern Baptist Convention. Even still, perhaps the reason Southern Edwardseanism has remained hidden from our view is the fact that so little study has been dedicated to the way personal relationships defined the contours of the Southern Baptist world – a relatively small world. Many of these relationships were along Edwardsean lines. At the center of the Southern Baptist world in the nineteenth-century was Richard Furman, the first president of the Triennial Convention. In some sense, Richard Furman is the central figure of this book, not Jonathan Edwards. In the early 1800s, Southern Baptists were shaped more by Furman than by any other Baptist. Just as the New Divinity grew out of the home of Jonathan Edwards, Edwardsean theology in the South seemed to spring from the ministry of the one referred to in this book

36 Tom Nettles, “Edwards and His Impact on Baptists,” Founders Journal Summer 2003, 1–18. 37 Greg Wills, “The SBJT Forum: The Overlooked Shapers of Evangelicalism,” The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 3, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 87–91. 38 Nettles writes, “Furman shows clearly his Edwardsian Calvinistic orientation both in the distinction between natural and moral abilities and in the ordo salutis.” (Thomas J. Nettles, “Richard Furman,” in Baptist Theologians [Nashville: Broadman Press, 1990], 154.) 39 Nettles, “Edwards and His Impact on Baptists,” 10.

The Development of Southern Baptist Theology

as “The Charleston Sage.” In fact, Furman did even more to promote Edwardsean thought in the South by his politics than he did with his pen or his pulpit. While it is too narrow to suggest that credobaptism and Edwardseanism were the two lowest common denominators amongst Southern Baptist leadership in the early nineteenth-century, a discernible Edwardsean strain of thought nonetheless appears wherever Richard Furman begins to spin his web of pastors and presidents. By Furman’s own recommendation, Jonathan Maxcy, the most Hopkinsian Baptist ever to walk the earth, was brought from Union College in New York to become the first president of South Carolina College. Under Maxcy’s leadership, a host of Edwardseans who shaped the Southern Baptist Convention emerged, including Basil Manly Sr. and W. T. Brantly. These men were virtually groomed by Furman. Manly was hand-picked by Furman to succeed him at FBC Charleston and Brantly revered Furman so much that he named his second son Furman Brantly. Both men, along with Baptist leaders like Jesse Mercer, were also products of Furman’s fund for educating Baptist ministers. From a birds-eye view, the greatest preachers and statesmen in the early years of the Southern Baptist Convention were all products of the great Furmanian network of Edwardsean Baptists. Its first president, William B. Johnson, was a Furman disciple. Its second president, R.B.C. Howell, was a student at Columbian College under William Staughton, who ordained him and who also discipled William B. Johnson. Staughton had immigrated to America from England by Furman’s personal request. Furman even married Staughton and his wife. Further still, the third president of the SBC, Richard Fuller, was pastored by W. T. Brantly. The inaugural president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and fifth president of the SBC, James P. Boyce, whose mother had been converted by Basil Manly Sr., was himself converted by Fuller and mentored by Manly. Generation after generation, Richard Furman exerted his vast influence upon the Southern Baptist world. Other than James P. Boyce, who began his teaching career at Furman Academy, all of these men were moderate Calvinists, a trademark of Edwardseanism.40

40 In this book, “moderate Calvinism” will denote any deviation or significant qualification of what is traditionally known as “5-point Calvinism” as codified in the Canons of Dort. These five points are total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and perseverance of the saints. For a defense and outline of 5-point Calvinism from a Baptistic perspective, see David N. Steele, Curtis C. Thomas, S. Lance Quinn, The Five Points of Calvinism: Defined, Defended, and Documented, 2nd ed. (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2004). For a critique of 5-point Calvinism from a Baptistic perspective, see David L. Allen and Steve Lemke, ed., Whosoever Will: A Biblical-Theological Critique of Five-Point Calvinism (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2010).

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Southern Edwardseans If the Edwardsean question is still being answered, Southern Baptists add another layer of complexity to the question: what exactly is a Southern Edwardsean? These Southern epigones were both spiritual imitators and theological imbibers of Edwards, drawing inspiration from his ministry and absorbing his ideas into their own. In their view, Edwards was a brilliant mind as well as a moral exemplar. “When I contrast the feeling of my heart with the exercises of that blessed man of God, Jon. Edwards,” Basil Manly Jr. recorded in his diary, “I am astonished at the coldness of my own heart.”41 According to Georgia pastor Charles Dutton Mallary, “The world has seen the light and felt the power of but few men more remarkable than President Edwards. He was not less distinguished for piety than for gigantic intellect; and it was the meekness and gentleness of his piety that went far to make him, as a Christian, so prosperous and so great.”42 Southern Baptists often spoke of Edwards in such superlative terms. His sterling reputation among Baptists began with his own conversion narrative in Personal Narrative (1739). Former president of Wake Forest College, William Hooper, even placed Edwards’s spiritual journey among the list of greats: “Never have I heard from the lips, never have I read in the secret diary of any penitent prodigal, such deep, heart-touching confessions of inward depravity and self-loathing, as appears in the journals of Edwards and Brainerd and Martyn and Payson, men who were preserved comparatively pure and free of vicious habits from their tender years.”43 With such a lofty view of Edwards and such familiarity with his theological, spiritual, and autobiographical writings, Southern Baptists are worthy of the eponym “Edwardsean,” at least in the broad sense of the term.44 Therefore, in this volume, I will define an Edwardsean in terms of ideas and inspiration. In short, an Edwardsean is someone whose theology and ministry were significantly shaped either by Jonathan Edwards’s ideas or by his example, or by those who mediated his ideas and were themselves inspired by his example. In 1858, Presbyterian Lyman Atwater asked, “What is meant by ‘Edwardsean theology’? Was

41 The younger Manly is quoted and described in Anne C. Loveland, Southern Evangelicals and the Social Order, 1800–1860 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1980), 15. 42 Charles Dutton Mallary, Soul-Prosperity: Its Nature, Its Fruits, and Its Culture (Charleston: Southern Baptist Publication Society, 1860), 51–52. 43 William Hooper, “The Force of Habit,” The Baptist Preacher 11 (November 1852), 202. 44 Conforti insists, “While the label ‘Edwardsian’ is restricted to Congregationalists and Presbyterians, Edwardsianism – that is, Edwards’s authority and the use of his writings – extended to Methodists and Baptists.” (Conforti, Jonathan Edwards, Religious Tradition, and American Culture, 6) However, in this work, I will seek to challenge Conforti’s thesis by contending that Baptists, particularly Southern Baptists, were indeed Edwardseans in their own right.

Southern Edwardseans

it the theology of Jonathan Edwards, or Edwards the son and his confederates and successors?”45 In the case of Southern Baptists, it was both. While certainly not all were familiar with the theology of Jonathan Edwards, scores of Southern Baptists led their churches and their denomination with ideas drawn either directly from Edwards or derived from his thought. For instance, in his Soul-Prosperity: Its Nature, Its Fruits, and Its Culture, published a year before the outbreak of the Civil War, C. D. Mallary quoted from Edwards’s Personal Narrative, Religious Affections, as well as from his Resolutions.46 Mallary also ingested Edwards’s theology secondhand, including as many citations from fellow Baptist Edwardsean Andrew Fuller.47 Southern Baptists demonstrated time and again that Edwardseanism was a large house with many doors and with many rooms. Not all guests entered the same way, but they often dined at the same theological table. Mallary’s Georgia Baptist contemporary Adiel Sherwood was also an admirer of Edwards and Fuller. Sherwood emphasized the distinction between natural and moral ability and appealed directly to Edwards’s teachings on the church, conversion, and the history of redemption.48 But Sherwood also passed through other halls in the great Edwardsean house. As a student at Andover Seminary in 1818, Sherwood was influenced significantly by Moses Stuart, a disciple of Timothy Dwight, Edwards’s grandson.49 Stuart was “widely recognized as the nation’s most learned biblical scholar.”50 During his time at the New Divinity school, Sherwood was exposed to an entire gamut of Edwardsean thinking. While at Andover, Sherwood wrote to his sister Elizabeth and expressed his deep appreciation for the work of Andrew Fuller: Most of the causes for the sickness and darkness among Christians can be traced to omission of duty and corruption of crime, thus producing an alienation in the affections, (though I hope there is no need of the remark) let me advise you to read Fuller’s “Backslider” – Could that book be more universally circulated and read, I have the fullest confidence, that we should not find so many meagre, despairing souls turning back, stopping, lingering along the road to heaven.51

45 Lyman Atwater, “Jonathan Edwards and the Successive Forms of New Divinity,” Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review 30 (1858): 606. 46 Mallary, Soul-Prosperity, 68, 25, 52. 47 Ibid., 68, 106, 142, 33, 193. 48 Adiel Sherwood, The Jewish and Christan Churches; or, The Hebrew Theocracy and Christian Church Distinct Organizations (St. Louis: T. W. Ustick, 1850), 65, 76, 82. 49 Jarrett Burch, Adiel Sherwood: Baptist Antebellum Pioneer in Georgia (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2003), 12. 50 Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 38. 51 Adiel Sherwood to Elizabeth [Fellows], Andover MA, 23 April 1818, Georgia Baptist History Depository, Jack Tarver Library, Mercer University, Macon GA.

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Sherwood would later become a co-founder of the Georgia Baptist Convention (1822) as well as a catalyst for the Great Georgia Revival of 1827. As shown in the writings of Mallary and the leadership of Sherwood, the Southern Baptist Convention was pioneered by Edwardseans and inaugurated on Edwardsean principles. Even those Baptists with seemingly nothing in common with Edwards were affected by him in some way. James Robinson Graves, the chief architect of the Landmark movement, was raised by his widowed mother, Lois, a single parent. Lois Graves, who left a deep impression upon her son, was known to enjoy Edwards’s “metaphysical speculations.”52 Even the less intellectual Separate Baptists celebrated “the great and pious Jonathan Edwards” who “labored to promote” the revival which spawned their churches.53 Southern Edwardseanism also took shape in the American wilderness, but it was much less diverse theologically. Frontier Baptists during the Second Great Awakening were more acquainted with Edwards’s writings on revival than with any of his other works. As a result, they often looked upon the democratized, unorganized religion of the west with a degree of caution.54 Adiel Sherwood, who pioneered sections of Missouri and Illinois, “promoted the same theological emphases as Fuller,” as shown.55 As the first full-time president of Shurtleff College, the school established by John Mason Peck, Sherwood was much more prone to administration and voluntary societies than uneducated, “enthusiastic” revivalism. After relaying an account of outdoor Presbyterian and Methodist preaching to both white and black assemblies at the Cain Ridge revivals in Bourbon County, Kentucky, the editor of the Circular Letter noted, “Oh, that these people had introduced among them PRESIDENT EDWARDS’S Narrative of the work of God in Northampton, N.E. and his After-thoughts on the Revival. The former of these may be had of Messrs. Burton, Paternoster Row, London.”56 In another letter which reported revivals near the Kentucky River that caused many “great bodily agitations,” the editor examined the state of early nineteenth-century frontier revivalism: It would be a more easy than it is welcome task to make remarks on what has been so generally called the great work of God in America; suffice it at present to say, that if,

52 T. (J. Tovell), “Death of Mrs. Lois Graves,” Baptist, November 2, 1867, 4. 53 J. H. Spencer, A History of Kentucky Baptists (Cincinnati: J. R. Baumes, 1885), 105. 54 Nathan O. Hatch has explored this democratization in detail. (Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991]) 55 Burch, Adiel Sherwood, 12. 56 “Extract of a Letter from a Gentleman to his Sister in Philadelphia, dated Lexington, Kentucky, August 10, 1801,” in William Warren Sweet, Religion on the American Frontier: The Baptists, 1783–1830 (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1931), 611; The Cain Ridge revivals of Bourbon County, Kentucky are believed by many to be the birthplace of the Second Great Awakening.

Southern Edwardseans

amidst the disorder and enthusiasm which have remarkably, of late, disgraced many of the Assemblies in Kentucky, the Lord has been really sowing the good seed, nothing is more to be feared than that it will too soon appear to the sorrow of the Church of God, that Satan has been very diligently sowing tares. O that the less informed among the Americans were in possession of President Edwards’s excellent volume on the Affections, and would most seriously read it.57

Southern Edwardseans were applying Edwards’s spiritual rubric for the First Great Awakening in order to evaluate the authenticity of the Second. Similar to what Arthur Thomas has identified as “reasonable revivalism” among Southern Presbyterians in Virginia between 1787 and 1837, many Southern Baptists demonstrated both order and ardor in their outdoor religion.58 Due to the paucity of Baptist literature in comparison with New England Congregationalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is difficult to say just how many pastors, parishioners, professors, and presidents in the South held Edwardsean views. However, the evidence is more than sufficient to indicate that many forms of Edwardseanism flourished in the years between the Great Awakening and the Civil War. For such a fissiparous people as Baptists, Jonathan Edwards’s theology was broad and flexible enough to comply with all kinds of Southern Baptist theology. Furman Academy, for example, was rocked in the 1840s and 50s by controversy over the doctrine of imputation. Amazingly, each side believed their theology to be perfectly consistent with that of Jonathan Edwards and Andrew Fuller.59 Yet another Furman professor left to teach at Howard College in Alabama (1844–1847) where he encountered opposition to his “unfortunate views” on imputation and justification.60 Tellingly, in neither case was disciplinary action ever taken. Southern Edwardseans were a diverse group, and they did not always agree on important doctrines. Although some like Thomas Meredith and James M. Pendleton were staunch abolitionists, Southern Edwardseans in the antebellum period were mostly characterized by an allegiance to slavery.61 Southern evangelicals underwent a transition

57 “To the Rev. Dr. Rippon, Bourbon County, Kentucky, January 7, 1802,” in William Warren Sweet, Religion on the American Frontier: The Baptists, 1783–1830 (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1931), 616. 58 Arthur D. Thomas, “Reasonable Revivalism: Presbyterian Evangelization of Educated Virginians,” Journal of Presbyterian History 61 (1983): 316–34. 59 J. L. Reynolds, “On Imputation,” Southern Baptist, 14 March 1849, 2. 60 Wayne Flynt, Alabama Baptists: Southern Baptists in the Heart of Dixie (Tuscaloosa: University Of Alabama Press, 1998), 59. 61 For a brief account of Pendleton’s abolitionism, see Mark Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 46–7.

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concerning slavery in the pre-war years, from criticism to cooperation to defense.62 Therefore Baptist views on slavery were not monolithic. However, by 1845, when the Triennial Convention was split over the right of missionaries to own slaves, the formation of the Southern Baptist Convention in Augusta was a sharp dividing line, and most Southern Edwardseans chose to join the cause of slavery. In many ways, Southern Baptists had more in common with Edwards than with his New England disciples, who fought to abolish the very thing Edwards endorsed and that which most Southerners held dear. Like Edwards, Southern Baptists were a hierarchical people. The institution of slavery shaped their entire worldview. By participating in the slave trade and establishing their society upon such different strata, Southern Baptists demonstrated a striking degree of similarity with their American Puritan forbears. The question of slavery is arguably the most complex issue in Edwardseanism, because the latter never served as the primary impetus behind one’s views on slavery, but Edwards’s ideas were usually weaponized in order to justify or attack the institution. Consequently, each side of the great moral divide sometimes spoke a similar language, even in their vehement opposition to one another.

A New Chapter in Jonathan Edwards Studies This book represents the confluence of three movements within historical scholarship and contemporary evangelicalism. The first is the resurgence of Jonathan Edwards studies pioneered by Harvard historian Perry Miller, who “reinvigorated the serious intellectual study of Puritanism.”63 The Works of Jonathan Edwards, founded by Miller, has become the catalyst for the Edwards renaissance in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Beginning in 1957 and ending in 2008 with the twenty-sixth and final volume in the series, Miller’s project has “dramatically changed the study of Edwards for a new generation of scholars.”64 From Conrad Cherry’s The Theology of Jonathan Edwards: A Reappraisal (1966) to George Marsden’s authoritative Jonathan Edwards: A Life (2003), Edwardsean scholarship has

62 Marty G. Bell, “The Beginnings of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1845,” Baptist History and Heritage 30 (1995): 18–19. 63 Darren Dochuk, Thomas S. Kidd, and Kurt W. Peterson, “Introduction,” in American Evangelicalism: George Marsden and the State of American Religious History, ed. Darren Dochuk, Thomas S. Kidd, and Kurt. W. Peterson (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 2014), 10. 64 Thomas S. Kidd, “Jonathan Edwards: A Life,” 43.

A New Chapter in Jonathan Edwards Studies

steadily built upon Miller’s work and continues to rise.65 This volume is yet another addition in the resurgence of theological and historical studies on Jonathan Edwards, “a kind of white whale of American religious history.”66 Secondly, due in large part to the efforts of Perry Miller, American and British evangelicals have experienced an Edwards renaissance in recent decades. While Miller, an atheist, was mostly concerned with the intellectual history of Puritanism, an entire generation of “Neo-Calvinists” in the last thirty years have begun to unearth the theological remains of Jonathan Edwards in an effort to return to the faith of their spiritual forbears. Today, Crossway books and issues of Christianity Today attest to “Jonathan Edwards’s legacy as a Reformed folk hero.”67 In the wake of the New Calvinism movement, Southern Baptists are now co-leaders in the Edwardsean recovery effort. In 2018, the Jonathan Edwards Center at Gateway Seminary in Ontario, California became the tenth affiliate worldwide and the first among Baptist institutions. The Southern Baptist seminary is now one of only three centers in the United States, next to Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan and the main center at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.68 Director Chris Chun presented a paper in 2018 at the national meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society entitled “Jonathan Edwards as ProtoBaptist: Interdenominational Dialogue.”69 In retrieving Edwards’s theology, many Baptists now see much of their own reflection in the Northampton Sage. In some ways, this volume is not so much a book about Southern Baptists themselves, but about Jonathan Edwards’s legacy in Southern Baptists through the broader lens of American religious history. The current Neo-Calvinist movement is a reminder that Baptists have long been drawn to the theology of Jonathan Edwards and shaped by other evangelical forces in America. Perhaps, by recovering Edwards’s influence upon the first Southern Baptists, their descendants today can make better sense of their own denomination, their own theology, and their own future. Lastly, this volume builds on the current movement within historical scholarship to recover the mind of the antebellum South. Scholars like Michael O’Brien and Sven Beckert and Matthew Karp have attempted to wipe away the stereotype of 65 Conrad Cherry, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards: A Reappraisal (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966); George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). 66 Conforti, Jonathan Edwards, Religious Tradition, and American Culture, 1. 67 Matthew Everhard, “Jonathan Edwards: Calvinistic Homeboy or Reformed Eccentric?”, in A Collection of Essay of Jonathan Edwards, ed. Matthew V. Everhard and Robert L. Boss (Fort Worth: JESociety Press, 2016), 18. 68 The Puritan Reformed center was established in 2019, replacing the former center at Trinity Evangelical Theological Seminary in Deerfield, Illinois. 69 Chris Chun, “Jonathan Edwards as Proto-Baptist: Interdenominational Dialogue,” Evangelical Theological Society Annual Meeting 2018, Tuesday, November 13, 9:50–10:30am.

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Introduction: What is an Edwardsean?

Southerners as benighted, provincial slaveholders insulated from the rest of the world.70 Despite their barbarism on the issue of slavery, the leaders in the antebellum South were often quite modern and cosmopolitan in their ideas. They were intellectuals and scholars and theologians, and their views cannot simply be relegated to the dust bin of antiquity. Southern Edwardseans were indeed stalwarts of the institution of slavery, and they had well-developed, deeply theological reasons why they would not emancipate their slaves. The same men who wrote treatises on why slavery was a biblical practice were also reading Milton, Addison, Homer, Longinus, and Quintillian.71 They were also reading Jonathan Edwards. Southern Edwardseans were seeking to satisfy their thirst for knowledge and in Edwards they found a theological oasis. So many of these Edwardseans do not fit the traditional caricature of backwoods Baptists and thus they are invaluable in teaching us more about the development of Southern Baptist life. According to George Marsden, Jonathan Edwards was both a medieval and a modern.72 With one foot in the Enlightenment and the other in the religion of his Puritan forbears, Edwards was an intrepid thinker pouring old Calvinistic wine into new American wineskins. Southern Baptists were essentially doing the same thing, but in their own Southern Baptist way. After a Revolution which erected the “wall of separation” between church and state, no denomination more willingly embraced the new American spirit than Baptists.73 Their commitment to moral government in some ways reflected that modern spirit. However, Southern Baptists were also rooted in their confessional past. Oliver Hart even helped produce The Charleston Confession (1767) and Summary of Church Discipline. Even for those few who rejected the authority of creeds, categories like sin and sovereignty did not change significantly. For the sake of converting the lost, Southern Baptists were willing to adopt the latest ideas of their age, but not at the expense of theological

70 Michael O’Brien, Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Vintage Books, 2015); Matthew Karp, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016). 71 Thomas Armitage, A History of the Baptists; Traced by their Vital Principles and Practices, from the Time of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to the Year 1889 (New York: Bryan, Taylor, & Co., 1889), 813. 72 George Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 213. 73 In his canonized letter to the Danbury Baptists in 1802, President Thomas Jefferson famously described the relationship between the church and civil government in the First Amendment as a “wall of separation.” (Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Messrs. Nehemiah Dodge, Ephraim Robbins, and Stephen S. Nelson, a committee of the Danbury Baptist association in the state of Connecticut, 1 January 1802, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress), Series 1, Box 89, December 2, 1801-January 1, 1802.) Also see Daniel L. Dreisbach, Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation Between Church and State (New York: New York University Press, 2002).

A New Chapter in Jonathan Edwards Studies

tradition and social order. Southern Edwardseans were a people both medieval and modern. With the help of Jonathan Edwards and the Edwardseans, they delivered the faith of their Baptist ancestors to a brave new Southern world.

29

1. “This Great Man of God”: Jonathan Edwards’s Theology in the Nineteenth-Century Baptist South

In 1823, shortly after beginning his ministry in Charlotte County, Virginia, Baptist pastor Abner W. Clopton (1784–1833) took to his diary to record a list of resolutions for godly living. To do so was not uncommon or even necessarily Christian in Clopton’s day. Patriots like George Washington (a reticent Episcopalian) and Benjamin Franklin (an outspoken Deist) had kept strict rules for moral improvement during their lifetimes.1 However, Clopton’s sixty-five resolutions were aimed at more than personal virtue. The teacher and clergyman desired to live his life to the glory of God. Therefore, Clopton drew his inspiration from someone who had committed his own life to the same pursuit: Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758).2 For his initial entry, exactly one hundred years after Edwards finished his seventy resolutions, Clopton copied Edwards’s first resolution: “Resolved, that I will do whatsoever I think to be most to God’s glory, and my own good, profit and pleasure, on the whole; without any consideration of the time, whether now or never so many myriads of ages hence; to do whatsoever I think to be my duty, and most for the good and advantage of mankind in general…whatever difficulties I may meet with, how many

1 Of Benjamin Franklin’s list of thirteen virtues, Thomas Kidd observes, “The checklist of thirteen virtues exemplified Franklin’s doctrineless, moralized Christianity.” Kidd later adds, “Franklin was setting foundational precedents for that distinctively American, quasi-religious genre, the self-help movement. Franklin’s “The Way to Wealth” and his Autobiography were ur-texts of that movement.” (Thomas Kidd, Benjamin Franklin: The Religious Life of a Founding Father [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017], 161.); Gordon Wood explains, “In the end there is no substitute for classical republican virtue in the society’s rulers; and everyone on the political spectrum paid at least lip service to the need for it. But no one paid more attention to this need for virtue than did members of that generation of North American colonial leaders who came of age in the middle decades of the eighteenth century.” (Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution [New York: Vintage Books, 1991], 109.) 2 Michael J. McClymond describes Edwards’s theology as “pre-occupied and even God-intoxicated.” (Michael J. McClymond, “Hearing the Symphony: A Critique of Some Critics of Sang Lee’s and Amy Pauw’s Accounts of Jonathan Edwards’s View of God,” in Jonathan Edwards as Contemporary: Essays in Honor of Sang Hyun Lee [New York, Peter Lang Publishing, 2010], 67); In their recent work The Essential Jonathan Edwards, Owen Strachan and Douglas A. Sweeney contend, “Because of His excellent nature, God is wholly justified in seeking glory and honor and praise and worship for Himself. This is the foundation for Edwards’s entire theological system, and it shapes his view of creation, Christ, the church, and heaven.” (Owen Strachan and Douglas A. Sweeney, The Essential Edwards: An Introduction to the Life and Teaching of America’s Greatest Theologian [Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2018], p. 128)

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Jonathan Edwards’s Theology in the Nineteenth-Century Baptist South

and how great soever.”3 But Clopton did not stop there. The Baptist preacher copied nearly all of Edwards’s resolutions for his own personal sanctification. In Jonathan Edwards’s writings, he discovered a treasure trove of Christian piety that seemed to awaken his soul. Edwards’s own life served as a spiritual paradigm for Clopton, who recorded his amazement at Edwards in his diary: The perusal of Edwards’s resolutions and experience, as contained in his diary, has so affected my heart, that I am induced to transcribe the former into this little book: that I may have them always at hand. They are so excellent, that although I shall not pretend, to subscribe my hand to them; yet I will pray for grace to enable me to imitate, while I look after as it were, and aim to follow this great man of God.4

Abner Clopton was a Southern Edwardsean. From Virginia to the Carolinas to Georgia, Clopton’s personal and professional life were shaped profoundly by Jonathan Edwards, the man widely regarded as “America’s theologian.”5 Like scores of other Baptist leaders in the antebellum South, Clopton believed that Edwards and his New England successors, while outside of the Baptist fold, were spiritual kinsmen. With the rise of Methodism and Campbellism in the South, Calvinistic Baptists like Clopton had far more in common theologically with Northern Edwardseans than with many of their fellow Southern evangelicals. Edwards’s “experimental Calvinism” conformed nicely to their revivalistic faith.6 Clopton’s disciples, settling as far as Missouri, were themselves Edwardseans “formed after the pattern of Andrew Fuller.”7 In an article published in the Columbian Star and Christian Index in 1830 (on Baptist identity no less), Clopton explained his admiration for Edwards and his associates:

3 Jeremiah Bell Jeter, A Memoir of Abner W. Clopton, A.M.: Pastor of Baptist Churches in Charlotte County, Virginia (Richmond, VA: Yale & Wyatt, 1837), 90. 4 Abner W. Clopton, in Jeremiah Bell Jeter, A Memoir of Abner W. Clopton, A.M.: Pastor of Baptist Churches in Charlotte County, Virginia (Richmond, VA: Yale & Wyatt, 1837), 89. 5 Robert W. Jenson, America’s Theologian: A Recommendation of Jonathan Edwards (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) 6 D. G. Hart suggests, “Perhaps the best way to characterize Edwards is as an experimental Calvinist.” (D. G. Hart, “Jonathan Edwards and the Origins of Experimental Calvinism,” in The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards: American Religion and the Evangelical Tradition, ed. D. G. Hart, Sean Michael Lucas, Stephen J. Nichols [Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2003], 162.) 7 William Claiborne Ligon was ordained by Clopton and P.P. Smith. In 1837, he moved to Missouri from Virginia. Duncan records, “He was familiar with the Bible, and though a great admirer of the learning of Gill, his theology was formed after the pattern of Andrew Fuller.” (Robert Samuel Duncan, A History of the Baptists in Missouri [St. Louis: Scammell & Company Publishers, 1883], 716–17); Jeremiah Bell Jeter, A Memoir of Abner W. Clopton, 267.

A Theology and a Language of Revival

Dr. John Witherspoon, Jonathan Edwards, Dr. Joseph Bellamy, David Brainerd, and Samuel Davies are gone, as is confidently hoped and believed, to reap a long reward in the kingdom of their Father. While they were here they did not believe that immersion was essential in the ordinance of baptism – or to the forgiveness of sin. Their spirit however characterized their works – their works demonstrated the reality and holiness of their faith, and marked their transit with beams of unfading glory. They have left behind successors, supporters of the same system, as humble, as holy, as devoted as themselves.8

Where many evangelicals made a critical distinction between Edwards and the Edwardseans, Clopton did not. Remarkably, among his eight favorite “uninspired authors,” half were in the Edwardsean tradition: Scott, Edwards, Fuller, Doddridge, Dwight, Bellamy, Newton, and Bunyan. Along with the Bible, Clopton was known to read from Timothy Dwight every morning.9 According to Clopton’s friend Jeremiah Bell Jeter, “He was peculiarly pleased with the lives of Pearce, Brainerd, and Martyn.”10 Clopton read widely from a diverse cast of Edwardseans, embracing both Edwards’s New England disciples and his English Baptist descendants alike. He was no discriminator of Edwardsean thought, regarding Edwards and his epigones as exemplars of practical theology, something which appealed greatly to the Baptists of Clopton’s day. Jonathan Edwards had arrived in the nineteenth century South, incredibly enough, as the champion of Baptists.

A Theology and a Language of Revival Southern Baptists were molded significantly and irrevocably by the theology of Jonathan Edwards, the so-called “theologian of Revival.”11 While they did not participate in Edwards’s theological tradition as faithfully or as consciously as Joseph

8 Abner W. Clopton, “Strictures on the Preface to the ‘Christian Baptist,’” The Columbian Star and Christian Index, Vol. 1 ed. W. T. Brantly (Philadelphia: Martin & Boden, No. 1 South Alley, 1830), 231–32; The inclusion of Witherspoon in Clopton’s list of greats is somewhat strange, considering that Witherspoon’s tenure at Princeton signaled the decline of Edwardsean theology. Witherspoon was not fond of the New Divinity. 9 Jeremiah B. Jeter, “Abner Wentworth Clopton,” in William Buell Sprague, Annals of the American Pulpit: Baptist. 1860 (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1860), 661. 10 Jeremiah Bell Jeter, A Memoir of Abner W. Clopton, A.M.: Pastor of Baptist Churches in Charlotte County, Virginia (Richmond, VA: Yale & Wyatt, 1837), 262. 11 D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, The Puritans: Their Origins and Successors (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1997), 361. Also see Michael A. G. Haykin, “‘The Prayers of His Saints’: Jonathan Edwards and Edwardseans Praying for Revival,” in Regeneration, Revival, and Creation: Religious Experience and the Purposes of God in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards, ed. Chris Chun and Kyle C. Strobel (Eugene: Pickwick, 2020): 103–120.

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Bellamy or Samuel Hopkins, they nevertheless carried a recessive Edwardsean gene.12 As the liberty-loving children of the American Revolution, these Baptists looked like Roger Williams but they spoke like Jonathan Edwards. They happily applied his vocabulary as well as his theology to their own spiritual and evangelistic and often nefarious ends. When President William B. Johnson (1782–1862) addressed the inaugural Southern Baptist Convention in 1845 in Augusta Georgia, his justification for their departure from the Triennial Convention was “the glory of our God.” Committed to slavery and to Baptist missions and to the moral governmental theory of the atonement, Johnson insisted that the reason for separation was “not disunion with any of his people; not the upholding of any form of human policy, or civil right; but God’s glory, and Messiah’s increasing reign; in the promotion of which, we find no necessity for relinquishing any of our civil rights.”13 Southern Edwardseans sounded surprisingly like the New Divinity a generation earlier, but with a Southern accent on their theology.14 Touting the glory of God and the good of mankind, Southern Baptists believed their most ultimate responsibility to the world was not to enslave but to save, “for the profit of these poor, perishing and precious souls.”15 As Thomas. S. Kidd notes, “No evangelical group was more effective at evangelizing the eighteenth-century South than the Baptists.”16 Therefore, like Edwards, and like most evangelicals in the South, Southern Baptists were a people who thought about, prayed for, and anticipated revival.17 As

12 This notion of a recessive Edwardsean gene is from David W. Kling. (Kling, “Edwards in the Second Great Awakening: The New Divinity Contributions of Edwards Dorr Griffin and Asahel Nettleton,” in After Jonathan Edwards: The Courses of the New England Theology [New York: Oxford University Press, 2012], 131.) 13 Hortense C. Woodson, Giant in the Land: The Life of William B. Johnson (Springfield, MO: Particular Baptist Press, 2005), 207. 14 According to Oliver D. Crisp and Douglas A. Sweeney, the New Divinity was the “first phase of the New England Theology,” distinguished primarily (though not exclusively) by its emphasis on law and moral government. The New Divinity was virtually synonymous with the theology of Samuel Hopkins, its chief formulator, and even called “Hopkinsianism” or “Hopkintonianism.” Samuel Bellamy, Edwards’s other primary disciple, served as its other primary architect. Over time, “the New England theology was transformed from the theological predilection of a few disciples clustered around their master into a powerful lobby within New England Congregationalism, and latterly, Baptist and Presbyterian circles that had international ramifications.” (Oliver D. Crisp, Douglas A. Sweeney, “Introduction,” in After Jonathan Edwards: The Courses of the New England Theology, ed. Oliver D. Crisp, Douglas A. Sweeney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 2) 15 Hortense C. Woodson, Giant in the Land: The Life of William B. Johnson (Springfield, MO: Particular Baptist Press, 2005), 207. 16 Thomas S. Kidd, God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 48. 17 Peter Beck frames Edwards’s world in these terms: “Jonathan Edwards lived in a world full of revivalistic expectations.” (Peter Beck, “‘The Glorious Work of God’: Revival Among Congregationalists in

A Theology and a Language of Revival

John B. Boles has demonstrated, the Second Great Awakening was “the first revival common to the whole South,” and in some ways, “the South’s ‘Great Awakening.’”18 Southern Baptist religion was forged in the fires of revival, and its people never lost their revivalist spirit.19 Over a century after the first Great Awakening, the Baptist church in Santee, South Carolina reported to their local association, “Nothing special to write – in full fellowship one with another, and attending to the means of grace. Preaching once a month, by Rev. J. S. C. Huffman, and a prayer meeting once a month. Hope for a revival.”20 As a great outpouring of the Holy Spirit, revival was a miracle to be prayed for, not a scheduled event to be planned.21 It was, in Edwards’s words, a “surprising work.”22 The goal of revival was the conversion of souls, or the turning away from a life of sin and toward the Savior. From the rebirth to the doctrine of atonement, Edwards’s most profound effect upon Southern Baptists was in the realm of redemption, namely the way they interpreted God’s saving work in the conversion experience. In Conversion Essential to Salvation (1816), Richard Furman (1755–1825) recommended the works of Jonathan Edwards as a means of salvation and praised the English Edwardseans in the Baptist Missionary Society.23 The concepts, grammar, and structure of his sermon are nearly identical to those in Edwards’s A Divine and

18 19

20 21

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the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in Pentecostal Outpourings: Revival and the Reformed Tradition, ed. Robert Davis Smart, Michael A. G. Haykin, and Ian Hugh Clary [Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2016], 172.) John B. Boles, The Great Revival: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1972), 70. Tom Nettles has remarked, “Baptists survive only if they live in the mode of revival.” (Tom J. Nettles, “Baptist Revivals in America in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in Pentecostal Outpourings: Revival and the Reformed Tradition, ed. Robert Davis Smart, Michael A. G. Haykin, and Ian Hugh Clary [Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2016], 194.) Minutes of the Charleston Baptist Association at its One Hundredth Anniversary (Charleston: A. J. Burke, 1851), 12. In his work Revival and Revivalism: The Making and Marring of American Evangelicalism 1750–1858, Iain H. Murray draws a hard distinction between “revival” and “revivalism.” The latter, Murray contends, is something engineered in the nineteenth century to produce artificial feelings and emotionalism. Murray opines, “Revivalism aims to produce excitement.” (Iain H. Murray, Revival and Revivalism: The Making and Marring of American Evangelicalism 1750–1858 [Carlisle: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1994], 163–190, 201). Although Murray makes an astute observation, the word “revivalism” in this book is not necessarily used in the same sense. Hereafter, the word “revivalism” will simply denote a preoccupation with and an anticipation for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in revival. Jonathan Edwards, A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in the Conversion of Many Hundred Souls in Northampton, in Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 4, The Great Awakening, ed. C. C. Goen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972). Richard Furman, “Conversion Essential to Salvation,” in The Life and Works of Dr. Richard Furman, D. D., ed. G. William Foster (Harrisonburg, VA: Sprinkle Publications, 2004), 438.

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Supernatural Light (1734), the seminal work to his Religious Affections (1747).24 A spate of Edwardsean ideas are featured in Furman’s message to the Religious Tract Society, including sense, light, affections, natural and moral ability, principles, influences, and faculties.25 In the work, the inaugural president of the Triennial Convention even acknowledged the “refined, metaphysical discussion” of “the best theologians,” almost certainly an allusion to Edwards and his band of “consistent Calvinists.” Unlike so many other evangelicals in the South, Baptists were willing to stomach Edwardsean metaphysics in order to savor his affectionate theology. Jonathan Edwards also bequeathed to Southern Baptists a psychology of conversion with its own revivalistic language.26 In Religious Affections, ultimately Edwards’s most famous work, the affections are defined as “the more vigorous and sensible exercises of the inclination and will of the soul.” The latter is divided into two faculties: the understanding which “discerns and views and judges things,” and the inclination. Edwards believed that this second faculty, “as it has respect to the actions that are determined and governed by it, is called the will: and the mind, with regard to the exercises of this faculty, is often called the heart.”27 Edwards’s meticulous attempt to define “true religion” in the aftermath of the Great Awakening handed Southern Baptists a spiritual terminology and a lens through which to interpret the revivals of their own age. When James B. Taylor extolled the preaching of his fellow Virginian Andrew Broaddus, his description was in unmistakably Edwardsean terms: “Having thus convinced the judgment, he found a ready avenue to the affections, and thus influenced the will.”28 Like the New Light preaching of the Great Awakening, Southern Baptist revivalism was oriented toward the “heart” and not just the mind.29 Just as the will was the seat of the sinful inclinations, conversion was ultimately aimed at a change in the will. Consequently, Baptist homiletics was 24 Obbie Tyler Todd, “The Influence of Jonathan Edwards on the Missiology and Conversionism of Richard Furman (1755–1825),” in Jonathan Edwards Online Journal Vol. 7, No. 1 (2017). 25 According to George Marsden, “the central theme for understanding Edwards – and a theme that raises all the preceding above the merely mundane – is encapsulated in his phrase, ‘the divine and supernatural light.’” (George Marsden, “The Question for the Historical Edwards: The Challenge of Biography,” in Jonathan Edwards at Home and Abroad: Historical Memories, Cultural Movements, Global Horizons, ed. David W. Kling and Douglas A. Sweeney (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 13.) 26 For a history of the reception of Edwards’s language from Religious Affections, see Obbie Tyler Todd, “The Grammar of Revival: The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards’s Teleological Language in Religious Affections (1746),” Calvin Theological Journal 54.1 (2019): 35–56. 27 Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, ed. John E. Smith, vol. 2, Religious Affections (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 96. 28 James B. Taylor, “Andrew Broaddus,” in Virginia Baptist Ministers (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1859), 265. 29 David W. Kling explains, “New England society was reborn through simple, aggressive New Light preaching directed at the wills – “the hearts” – of the people.” (David W. Kling, A Field of Divine

A Theology and a Language of Revival

voluntaristic, often grounded in Edwardsean psychology. With Edwards, Southern Baptists agreed that “our people do not so much need to have their heads stored, as to have their hearts touched; and they stand in the greatest need of that sort of preaching, which has the greatest tendency to do this.”30 Southern Baptist religion was a religion of the heart, centered upon the free movement of the human will. “Above all,” David W. Kling asserts, “Edwards’s views on the will and the nature of revival constituted the New Divinity identity.” In many ways, this was also true of their Southern counterparts.31 Just as Isaac Backus had proudly claimed “our excellent Edwards,” Baptists in the South also lionized the Northampton Sage and identified themselves within the pale of his tradition.32 Similar to American Presbyterians in the early eighteenth century, who were influenced heavily by Edwards and the Edwardseans, Southern Baptists in the early nineteenth century claimed no significant theologians of their own.33 Therefore the established Congregationalist Church, with roots in American soil since the early seventeenth century, naturally supplied them with a wealth of theologians and texts from which they could draw their theology. Across the Atlantic, aside from Edwards’s contemporary John Gill, the ablest English Baptist theologians were Edwardsean revivalists in their own right, also reading from Edwards and his Congregationalist disciples. Southern Baptists were surrounded

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Wonders: The New Divinity and Village Revivals in Northwestern Connecticut, 1792–1822 [University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993], 22–23.) Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, ed. C. C. Goen, vol. 4, The Great Awakening (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 159. Kling, A Field of Divine Wonders, 10. Alvah Hovey, A Memoir of the Life and Times of the Rev. Isaac Backus (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1858), 316; Backus identified himself among the “friends of Edwards’s writings.” (Isaac Backus, A History of New-England, With Particular Reference to the Denomination of Christians Called Baptists, vol. II (Boston: Edward Draper, 1777), 252; For an excellent resource on Jonathan Edwards’s influence upon Isaac Backus, see Brandon J. O’Brien, The Edwardsean Isaac Backus: The Significance of Jonathan Edwards in Backus’s Theology, History, and Defense of Religious Liberty (Dissertation, Trinity Divinity School, 2013). William G. McLoughlin offers a more precise evaluation of Backus’s theology when he avers, “In a sense Backus’ thought lies somewhere between that of Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin, and more than either of these, and certainly more than Thomas Jefferson, he foreshadowed the outlook of the nineteenth century American mind.” (William G. McLoughlin, “Introduction,” in Isaac Backus on Church, State, and Calvinism: Pamphlets, 1754–1789, ed. William G. McLoughlin [Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968], 16.) American Presbyterians formed their first Presbytery around 1706. Robert L. Ferm explains, “During this period Presbyterianism could claim no figures of theological importance. The New Side’s party’s close tie to the Connecticut Congregationalists made it natural that the major theologians of the New England church would exert great influence on the Presbyterians, who had no important theologians of their own.” (Ferm, Jonathan Edwards the Younger, 1745–1801, 173.)

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on seemingly all sides by the theological legacy of Jonathan Edwards, and with time, they would become part of that vast legacy. Southern Baptists even recognized the Baptistic tendencies in Edwards’s theology. In his work on church polity, James L. Reynolds, professor of theology at Furman Academy, took stock of the Lord’s Supper controversy that ultimately claimed Edwards’s Northampton pulpit. For Reynolds, Edwards was on the right track, but he had fallen just short of true Baptist ecclesiology: In the famous controversy between Pres. Edwards, and Solomon Williams, concerning the half-way covenant, the former took the broad scriptural ground, that none but such as gave a credible evidence of their faith in Christ should be admitted to the Lord’s Supper. But, as a pedobaptist, he was obliged to admit that those who had been baptized in infancy were “in some sort members of the Church.” In this they were both agreed. Here Williams erected his strong battery, and managed it with great effect. He proved that the position of his opponent, if maintained, would annihilated infant baptism. Either that ordinance must be given up, or Edwards must surrender. He did not choose to abandon infant baptism, and was vanquished, not by the truth of his opponent, but by his own error.34

For Reynolds, as for other Southern Baptists, Edwards’s principle of separateness only further validated their doctrine of the church.35 Edwards simply hadn’t followed the logical conclusions of his own sublime theology. But where his pedobaptist commitments could not go, Baptists marched boldly forth. Southern Edwardseans were retrieving Edwards’s theology, and in another sense, improving it. Nevertheless, just pages after critiquing Edwards, Reynolds praised his “heavenly spirit.”36 In his Terms of Communion (1844), R. B. C. Howell recounted with dexterity Edwards’s rejection of his grandfather’s policy of using the Lord’s Supper as a converting ordinance (i.e. “Stoddardeanism”). A century after Edwards’s dismissal from Northampton, Baptists in the South were still familiar with the tragic tale

34 James L. Reynolds, Church Polity: The Kingdom of Christ, in its Internal and External Development (Richmond: Harrold & Murray, 1849), 58. 35 In the very first article of the fourth volume of The Christian Index (when the paper was still in Philadelphia), editor W. T. Brantly published an essay by English Particular Baptist Joseph Kinghorn on Jonathan Edwards’s “An Humble Inquiry into the Rules of the Word of God, Concerning the Qualifications Requisite to a Complete Standing and Full Communion in the Christian Church.” In the essay, Kinghorn addresses the Lord’s Supper controversy in Northampton and Edwards’s changes to his grandfather’s policies. (Joseph Kinghorn, “Terms of Communion,” The Christian Index Vol. 4, No. 4 (January 22, 1831), 49–50. 36 Reynolds, Church Polity, 66.

The Only Southern Edwardseans

of America’s greatest theologian.37 However, for Howell, not only was Edwards a kind of quasi-Baptist martyr; his ecclesiology was also the fruit of his revivalism and his proper soteriology. “Mr. Stoddard was a Calvinist, but his system favored Arminianism,” Howell insisted. “Mr. Edwards’ efforts in opposing this error led to a remarkable revival, the results of which tended to convince him so deeply of the mischief and erroneousness of Mr. Stoddard’s system, that he returned to the former practice.”38 In other words, Edwards was Baptistic because he was a good Calvinist. For Southern Baptists, Jonathan Edwards’s loss was their gain, and his achievement was their vindication. Through Southern Edwardsean eyes, the Puritan establishment which Edwards challenged and the Great Awakening which he ignited were testaments to the legitimacy and longevity of Reformed Baptist theology. Despite his theological shortcomings as a Puritan Congregationalist, Edwards offered Southern Baptists all the historical proof they would ever need to preach the doctrines of grace and the church’s visible distinction from the world.

The Only Southern Edwardseans Theologically and culturally speaking, however, Jonathan Edwards and Southern Baptists are perhaps two of the unlikeliest bedfellows in American religion (second of course to Charles Finney’s tenuous claim that Edwards was the founder of his “new measures.”)39 As a New England Puritan, Edwards eschewed disestablishment Baptists. As a Congregationalist who supported the Saybrook Platform (a measure ending local church autonomy), his fondness lay more with his Presbyterian brethren than with any other neighboring denomination. Upon finishing his studies at Yale, Edwards’s very first pastorate was in New York City at a small Presbyterian church (1722–1723). After his painful dismissal from Northampton in 1750, Scottish Presbyterians earnestly (though unsuccessfully) pursued Edwards as a pastoral candidate.40 In 1757, just months before his death as a result of a smallpox vaccination, Edwards was elected the third president of the College of

37 Robert Boyte C. Howell, The Terms of Communion at the Lord’s Table and with the Church of Christ (London: Houlston and Stoneman, 1847), 182, 198–99. 38 Howell, Terms of Communion, 198–99. 39 Finney drew from the Religious Affections as well as from Edwards’s Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New England (1742) to justify his “new measures” of revivalism and to cast himself in the mold of Edwards. (Charles Finney, Lectures on Revival [Ontario: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1993], 293–295); Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, Charles G. Finney and the Spirit of American Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 16–18, 157. 40 Michael J. Crawford, Seasons of Grace: Colonial New England’s Revival Tradition in Its British Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 227.

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New Jersey, later Princeton University. Indeed, Edwards did not seem to pair well with the Baptists of his generation, much less with the Southern Baptists of the next. Furthermore, considering that Presbyterians and Methodists did more to disseminate Edwards’s works in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the fact that Southern Baptists emerged as the true Edwardseans of the South is one of the interesting paradoxes of American religious history.41 Nevertheless, among evangelicals, Baptists were the only Southern Edwardseans in the nineteenth century. Certainly not all Methodists and Presbyterians were opposed to Edwards’s theology (i.e. Presbyterians Hezekiah Balch, Isaac Anderson, and Gideon Blackburn spread his views through North Carolina, Tennessee, and central Kentucky). As Holifield observes, “Southern treatises bristled with allusions to Edwards.”42 Nevertheless, their leadership did not adopt his ideas as eagerly as Baptists and therefore their denominations did not exhibit the same Edwardsean character.43 In fact, many Southern Methodists and Presbyterians vehemently denounced Edwards’s theology. For instance, Abner Clopton’s contemporary and fellow Virginian Robert Lewis Dabney (1820–1898) was a staunchly confessionalist Presbyterian who, according to T. C. Johnson, “cuts up Edwardsism by the roots.” Dabney was a pastor and teacher who also served as chief of staff for Confederate General “Stonewall” Jackson. With a kind of Southern tenacity, he critiqued seemingly every aspect of Edwards’s theology that did not accord with his pristine Westminsterian faith.44 Unlike Furman, Dabney dismissed the “intricacy and impractical” theology of Religious Affections as “too anatomical.”45 In his study of Dabney, and in one of the only studies of Edwards’s theology in the Southern states,

41 See Jonathan M. Yeager, Jonathan Edwards and Transatlantic Print Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016) 42 E. Brooks Holifield, Gentlemen Theologians: American Theology in Southern Culture, 1795–1860 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1978), 191. Holifield provides a short but excellent treatment of Edwardseanism amongst Southern Presbyterians. (191–198) 43 Douglas A. Sweeney explains that Balch and Blackburn ensured that Edwardsean ideas found “institutional homes in the early Synod of Tennessee, the Brainerd Mission to the Cherokees of southern Tennessee, Greeneville College (later Tusculum), Southern and Western Seminary (later Maryville College), East Tennessee College (later the University of Tennessee), and Danville College (later Centre College).” (Sweeney, “Evangelical Tradition in America,” in The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards, ed. Stephen J. Stein [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007], 228.) 44 According to Marco Barone, Edwards and Dabney did share a similar philosophy of free-agency, despite their many theological and philosophical differences. (Barone, “‘Edwards Saw More Perspicaciously’: R. L. Dabney’s Edwardsean Philosophy of Free Agency,” Jonathan Edwards Studies 9 no. 1 (2019): 2–24. 45 Sean Michael Lucas, “’He Cuts Up Edwardsism by the Roots’: Robert Lewis Dabney and the Edwardsian Legacy in the Nineteenth-Century South,” 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, MI: Baker Academic, 2003), 200–214, 206.

The Only Southern Edwardseans

Sean Michael Lucas demonstrates how Edwards did not enjoy a glowing reputation among Presbyterians in the nineteenth-century South. Lucas explains, Few, however, have considered Edwards’s legacy south of the Mason-Dixon line among southern Presbyterians during the nineteenth century…While admitting Edwards’ general reputation as a holy minister of the gospel, southern Presbyterians arraigned Edwards’ developments of divine causation, freedom of the will, personal identity, the imputation of Adam’s sin, and his theory of true virtue as inadequate and ultimately harmful deviations from Reformed orthodoxy. In the end, what distressed southerners like Dabney about Edwards’ theology was its innovation. Because Dabney believed that the Reformed faith was best summarized in the Westminster Standards, his view of the theological task was profoundly conservative.46

Baptists, on the other hand, were a bit more liberal in their interpretation of the Reformed confessions, if in fact they interpreted them at all (William B. Johnson and Jesse Hartwell rejected creeds altogether). As a result, to one degree or another, almost every significant Southern Baptist leader in the early to mid-nineteenth century adopted the “innovative” ideas that Dabney repudiated. Jesse Mercer affirmed Edwards’s view of divine providence, Richard Fuller his view of the freedom of the will, James S. Mims an Edwardsean view of imputation, and John L. Dagg his view of true virtue, just to name a few.47 These Southern Edwardseans were unafraid of Edwards’s “innovation” and did not believe his novel ideas to be incompatible with their Baptist faith. Ironically, whereas Dabney derided Edwards’s theology as impractical and overly complicated, Southern Baptists wielded Edwardseanism as the handmaiden to simple gospel religion. Likewise, Southern Methodists found Edwards’s theology to be unnecessarily abstruse. While sharing the same evangelistic impulse as their Baptist counterparts, Methodists in the South generally did not utilize Edwardsean doctrines in their circuit preaching. Methodism’s relationship to Edwards seemed artificial almost from the beginning. While the legendary evangelist George Whitefield forged a well-known friendship with Edwards during his two tours to America during the

46 Ibid., 201. 47 Charles Dutton Mallary, Memoirs of Elder Jesse Mercer (New York: John Gray, 1844), 423; Richard Fuller, “Predestination,” in Southern Baptist Sermons on Sovereignty and Responsibility, ed. Thomas J. Nettles, 2nd ed. (Harrisburg, VA: Gano Books, 2003), 123; 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; John L. Dagg, A Manual of Theology (Harrisonburg: Gano Books, 1982), 46–47.

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Great Awakening, John Wesley’s abridgements did as much to deter Edwardsean ideas as Whitefield’s voice could ever have done to promote them.48 As part of his Christian Library, Wesley edited five of Edwards’s works: Faithful Narrative (1744), Distinguishing Marks (1744), Some Thoughts (1745), Life of David Brainerd (1768), and Religious Affections (1773). However, none were published in their entirety. Amazingly, Wesley’s version of Religious Affections (first published in London in 1801 and reissued in America several decades later) is only a sixth of the original size, eliminating three of Edwards’s twelve signs of godly affections, including the third sign: “Those affections that are truly holy, are primarily founded on the loveliness of the moral excellency of divine things.”49 In the third section, Edwards expounded upon things like “spiritual sense” and beauty and taste, concepts that appealed to many Southern Baptists. Like Dabney, however, Wesley had no tolerance for Edwards’s sensory and aesthetic language. The result was a particularly “Wesleyan” rendition of Edwards tailored for the lower and middle-class constituents upon which his movement was built.50 Still, the ambivalent Wesley soured on Edwards’s theology as a whole. In his section “To the Reader,” Wesley writes of Edwards, he heaps together so many curious, subtle, metaphysical distinctions, as are sufficient to puzzle the brain, and confound the intellects, of all the plain men and women in the universe; and to make them doubt of, if not wholly deny, all the work which God had wrought in their souls. Out of this dangerous heap, wherein much wholesome food is mixt with much deadly poison, I have selected many remarks and admonitions, which may be of great use to the children of God. May God write them in the hearts of all that desire to walk as Christ also walked!51

48 For the nature of Edwards’s and Whitefield’s friendship, see Thomas S. Kidd, George Whitefield: America’s Spiritual Founding Father (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 128–29, 182–83, 185–86; Harry S. Stout, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 1991), 116–17, 125–26. 49 Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 2, Religious Affections, ed. John E. Smith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959), 253. 50 Christopher Allison asserts, “A notable difference between the two men is that Wesley was committed to being accessible to the point that he was often criticized for pandering for the attention to the masses…Wesley took the plain style farther than what many persons were comfortable with, especially among his more educated followers who yearned for respectability. Wesley, nonetheless, was committed to making religious writing accessible for the common reader.” (Christopher Allison, “The Methodist Edwards: John Wesley’s Abridgement of the Selected Works of Jonathan Edwards,” Methodist History April 2012, 148.) 51 Jonathan Edwards, An Extract from a Treatise Concerning Religious Affections: In Three Parts in The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, M. Volume XXIII (Bristol: William Pine, 1773), 178–179.

The Only Southern Edwardseans

Before Southern Methodists could digest Jonathan Edwards, they were destined to spit him out. His Calvinism did not settle well in the strict stomachs of Presbyterians nor did it suit the Arminian diet of Methodists. Albert Taylor Bledsoe (1809–1877), an Episcopal priest-turned-itinerant Methodist, published his blistering Examination of President Edwards’ Inquiry into the Freedom of the Will in 1845, the same year of the first Southern Baptist Convention. The Kentuckian believed that Edwards’s view of freedom was not nearly autonomous enough. In fact, according to Bledsoe, Edwardsean free will was no freedom at all. “For Bledsoe,” says Michael O’Brien, “Edwards was muddled, tautological, and, while asserting freedom of the will, made it too dependent upon the authority of a ‘strongest motive’ to justify the assertion.”52 Southern Methodists mostly agreed with their progenitor that Edwardsean theology was “deadly poison” if swallowed whole. Consequently, Joseph Conforti has called the Second Great Awakening’s rendition of Edwards “an increasingly Methodized Edwards” crafted for a popular evangelical audience.53 But if Southern Methodists were the illegitimate theological descendants of Edwards and Southern Presbyterians his feuding distant cousins, Southern Baptists established themselves as his adopted theological grandchildren. In fact, Southern Baptists even shared Edwards with their own children. Basil Manly Sr. (1798–1868), one of the co-founders of the Southern Baptist Convention, wrote to his son Basil Manly Jr. about his reading of Edwards’s The Nature of True Virtue.54 The elder Manly also noted his reading of Edwards’s writings on the affections, which as Tom Nettles has observed, “governs the entire structure” of at least one of Manly’s sermons.55 Manly was intimately familiar with Edwards’s Freedom of the Will. He utilized concepts like “the moral freedom of the will” and deployed the distinction between natural and moral ability on multiple occasions.56 As A. James Fuller explains, Manly “believed in an Edwardsean form of Calvinism, in which the sovereignty of God and the free will of humans were reconciled in the revealed plan of God and humanity’s obedience in doing their spiritual duty.”57 Southern Edwardseans, like their theological forbear, were more than willing to take traditional Calvinistic

52 Michael O’Brien, Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 269. 53 Conforti, Jonathan Edwards, Religious Tradition, and American Culture, 34. 54 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. 55 Ibid., 275. 56 Nettles, The Baptists: Key People Involved in Forming a Baptist Identity, Volume Two: Beginnings in America, 275–76. 57 A. James Fuller, Chaplain to the Confederacy: Basil Manly and Baptist Life in the Old South (Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press, 2000), 62.

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doctrines and inject the contemporary ideas of their age for the sake of converting souls. Although even the Restorationist Alexander Campbell praised the “unanswerable octavo of President Edwards” on liberty and necessity, Calvinists like Manly handled Edwards much more naturally than those Arminian credobaptists who wished to somehow return “the apostle to the Enlightenment” to the simplicity of the apostolic church.58 Not surprisingly, Edwards’s theology did not flourish among the Disciples of Christ or the Christian Church. Nevertheless, Edwardseans were sometimes drawn from the Restorationist ranks. Jeremiah Vardeman (1775–1842), one of the most well-known preachers in antebellum Kentucky, was once an adherent of Alexander Campbell’s theology. However, much to Campbell’s chagrin, Vardeman eventually disavowed his former views in favor of a Calvinistic Baptist faith modeled after Andrew Fuller’s Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation.59 Fuller was so influential upon Vardeman that the latter even challenged other Calvinistic Baptists who did not appear to reconcile divine sovereignty and human free agency.60 The combination of these two doctrines was a theological calling card of Southern Edwardseanism.

58 Alexander Campbell, The Christian Baptist, volume 7 (Bethany: A. Campbell, 1829), 19; In the third volume to her biography of Alexander Campbell, Eva Jean Wrather records Campbell’s years as a student in Glasgow, Scotland: “When he turned from men to books, during this pregnant winter at Glasgow, Alexander apparently found a new favorite in Jonathan Edwards and continued his study of two old friends, John Owen and John Newton. Edwards and Owen, he later recorded, he ‘read with rapture,’ convinced that Edwards was ‘the greatest theologian ever produced’ on American soil, and that Owen “was in England what Edwards was in America – the tallest of the giants.’” (Eva Jean Wrather, Alexander Campbell: Adventurer in Faith: A Literary Biography, Vol. 3 [Fort Worth: TCU Press, 2005], 89); Sydney E. Ahlstrom, “Theology in America,” in The Shaping of American Religion, vol. 1: Religion in American Life (ed. James Ward Smith and A. Leland Jamison; Princeton Studies in American Civilization 5; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 245. 59 R.S. Duncan, A History of the Baptists in Missouri (St. Louis: Scammell & Company Publishers, 1883), 224–25. 60 In his history of Missouri Baptists, Duncan records a conversation between Jeremiah Vardeman and William Hurley: “Jeremiah Vardeman, who held views much in accordance with the great Dr. Fuller, after criticizing the Calvinistic views of Hurley, challenged him to reconcile his theory of God’s sovereignty with the free agency of man, &c. Hurley rallied upon Bro. V, and said, ‘Let me ask you Bro. Vardeman, if there are no difficulties or crooks in your theory?’ ‘No, God bless you (a common expression with Bro. V.); my theory is as straight as a gun-barrel.’” (Wm. Carson in Mo. Bapt. Jour., Vol. I, No. 23). (Duncan, A History of Baptists in Missouri, 334)

A Loose Confessionalism

A Loose Confessionalism Jonathan Edwards defied the traditional mold of a theologian. He was a “capacious thinker,” harnessing ideas similar to the way an engineer might construct materials or an artist would paint upon a medium.61 Consequently, as Michael J. McClymond and Gerald R. McDermott maintain, “Edwards left behind a complex theological legacy.”62 One of the most complex aspects of that vast legacy was Edwards’s relationship to confessional Christianity. Years before Federalists and Republicans debated how to properly read and apply the Constitution of the new republic, Jonathan Edwards negotiated the best way to interpret the Reformed Confessions. Compared with inflexible theologians such as Robert Lewis Dabney, Edwards was, one might say, a loose constructionist of the Westminster Confession of Faith (and he almost certainly would have been a Federalist). His brand of Calvinism, deeply rooted in the Reformed tradition, was uniquely his own. Sydney Ahlstrom has even called Edwards a “Dortian philosophe,” committed to maintaining historic 5-point Calvinism in his engagement with modern thought.63 While Edwards affirmed and admired the Westminster Confession and taught his children from the Westminster Shorter Catechism, he believed that Scripture, not dogma itself, should be the ultimate guiding authority.64 In the preface to The Freedom of the Will, Edwards wrote, “I should not take it at all amiss, to be called a Calvinist, for distinctions sake [from Arminian]: though I utterly disclaim a dependence on Calvin, or believing the doctrines which I hold, because he believed and taught them; and cannot justly be charged with believing every thing just as he taught.”65 Edwards was his own Calvinist. Under the banner of sola Scriptura, the

61 Nathan A. Finn, Jeremy M. Kimble, “Introduction,” in A Reader’s Guide to the Major Writings of Jonathan Edwards, ed. Nathan A. Finn and Jeremy M. Kimble (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2017), 19. 62 Michael J. McClymond and Gerald R. McDermott, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 601. 63 Ahlstrom, “Theology in America,” 243–251. 64 In his biography of Edwards (the first such ever written), Samuel Hopkins records the way that Edwards discipled his children: “He took much pains to instruct them in the principles of religion; in which he made us of the Assembly’s Shorter Catechism: not merely taking care that they learned it by heart; but by leading them into an understanding of the Doctrines therein taught, by asking them Questions on each Answer, and explaining it to them.” (Samuel Hopkins, The Life and Character of the Late Reverend Mr. Jonathan Edwards [Boston: S. Kneeland, 1765), 43; In his correspondence with Presbyterian John Erskine of Scotland, Edwards wrote, “As to my subscribing to the substance of the Westminster Confession, there would be no difficulty.” (Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 16: Letters and Personal Writings, ed. George S. Claghorn [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998], 355.) 65 Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 1: Freedom of the Will, ed. Paul Ramsey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 3.

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pastor from Northampton was unafraid to renovate traditional Reformed doctrines with newer concepts borrowed from the Enlightenment in order to reflect and apply the teachings of the Bible. One of the most elaborate examples of Edwards’s loose confessionalism was his distinction between moral and natural ability. To simply affirm the total depravity of man was not sufficient in Edwards’s mind to account for the inherent dignity, complexity, and responsibility of the sinner. Therefore, Edwards distinguished (within the bounds, he believed, of Dortian Calvinism) between man’s natural and moral ability - a distinction that Baptists appreciated more than any other denomination.66 Aligning himself with the classical Augustinian position, Edwards contended that sinners could not live righteously because they would not.67 Sin is spiritual recalcitrance, a moral bondage that does not physically hinder people from coming to Christ on their own. The person is nevertheless “free” to do what he wants to do. The problem of the will is that the person wants the wrong things. For Edwards, “the will always is as the greatest apparent good is.”68 In other words, no obstacle or barrier prevents sinners from believing in the gospel but their own evil desires. They have natural ability but no moral ability. Edwards explained the idea of moral necessity and human responsibility using a prison cell with an open door. A gracious king offers to set the prisoner free if he would only “fall down before him, and humbly beg his pardon.”69 The obstinate captive is “free” to exit the cell but won’t due to his “haughty malignity.” In the end, the captive is still morally responsible for his decision, but “his rooted strong pride and malice have perfect power over him.”70 Edwards illustrated his idea of moral inability with a range of examples: A woman of great honor and chastity may have a moral inability to prostitute herself to her slave. A child of great love and duty to his parents, may be unable to be willing to kill his father. A very lascivious man, in case of certain opportunities and temptations, and in the absence of such and such restraints, may be unable to forbear gratifying his lust. A drunkard, under such and such circumstances, may be unable to forbear taking of strong

66 Citing Freedom of the Will, Isaac Backus claimed that Edwards was “the greatest writer against a self-determining power in man that our age has seen.” (Isaac Backus, Truth is Great and Will Prevail (Boston, 1781), in Isaac Backus on Church, State, and Calvinism: Pamphlets, 1754–1789, ed. William G. McLoughlin [Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Cambridge University Press, 1968]. 404.) 67 In his Life of Jonathan Edwards, Samuel Miller identified Edwards’s “original” arguments with the convictions of Augustine, Luther, and others in the Reformed tradition. (Miller, Life of Jonathan Edwards [New York: Harper, 1837], 191.) 68 Edwards, WJE 1:142. 69 Edwards, WJE 1:362–63. 70 Edwards used this example specifically to demonstrate the distinction between natural and moral necessity.

A Loose Confessionalism

drink. A very malicious man may be unable to exert benevolent acts to an enemy, or to desire his prosperity; yea, some may be so under the power of a vile disposition, that they may be unable to love those who are most worthy of their esteem and affection.71

With a variety of illustrations and the power of his own mind, Edwards strove to bring further nuance and precision to the Reformed doctrines. Edwards’s theological descendants on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line inherited his loosely confessional approach, some looser than others. One scholar has called the New Divinity’s acceptance of Edwards’s moral-natural distinction “the shibboleth of their tribe.”72 While Nathaniel Taylor pushed the boundaries of Edwards’s idea of natural ability in his New Haven theology, Southern Baptists mostly affirmed with the New Divinity Edwards’s notion of complete moral inability. In his defense of Calvinism in 1793, Henry Holcombe summarized the typical Southern Baptist position when he explained, “What God calls us to perform, is but our reasonable service. And yet it must be owned, that duties are required of us, for which we have not, at present, a moral ability.”73 Despite their differences on the nature and the extent of the atonement, Southern Edwardseans generally agreed on the nature of human sinfulness. As E. Brooks Holifield notes, “Generations of Southern Calvinists rehearsed the Edwardean analysis of motivation in order to prove that the will was powerless to choose the good without the special influence of divine grace but that the reprobate were yet responsible for their decision to capitulate to sinfulness.”74 However, even with a similar grasp of total depravity as their progenitor, Southern Edwardseans sometimes utilized Edwards’s ideas in ways the Northampton Sage would never have imagined. For instance, in a circular letter on infant salvation, Richard Furman reminded his readers of their “moral inability to perform truly good actions” and their “willful rebellion.” Just pages later, Furman then contended for the universal salvation of infants using Edwards’s notion of natural ability: By this we see clearly, that repentance and faith, in fact (however they are so in spirit and habit, which we admit,) cannot be the necessary qualifications for admission to the kingdom of God, in persons who have not natural ability, to perform them: And, consequently, we shall see, when it is said, “He that believeth, and is baptized, shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be condemned,” that the whole subject applies,

71 Edwards, WJE 1:160. 72 William Breitenbach, “Unregenerate Doings: Selflessness and Selfishness in New Divinity Theology,” American Quarterly 34 (Winter 1982): 484. 73 Henry Holcombe, A Sermon, Containing a Brief Illustration and Defence of the Doctrines Commonly Called Calvinistic (Charleston: Markland & M’Iver, 1793), 17. 74 E. Brooks Holifield, The Gentlemen Theologians: American Theology in Southern Culture, 1795–1860 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1978), 191.

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exclusively, to those who have the Gospel preached to them, as mentioned in the words preceding; or to persons, who being placed where the light of the Revelation shines, have also a natural capacity to improve it. On such as have not this capacity, the declaration imposes no duty; nor does their non-performance, of what it enjoins on others, throw any obstacle in the way of their salvation.75

Edwardsean ideas were being put to brand new uses.76 For Baptists, the idea of natural ability helped them to rebut pedobaptist accusations that Baptists were callous toward small children who were allegedly left out of the covenant community and thus unqualified for salvation.77 According to Furman, deceased children were worthy of the kingdom because they lacked the natural ability to believe in the gospel. The very Edwardsean concept that helped fuel Baptist evangelism also served as a kind of pastoral comfort to the bereaved. Others seemed to stretch the meaning of Edwardsean terms for more political purposes. In 1827, Baptist missionary Isaac McCoy, who served in Missouri among other states, pleaded for Indian reform by arguing that Native Americans did not have the “moral ability to elevate themselves, nor have they since been put in possession of that ability by their more fortune neighbors.”78 Both the New Divinity and Southern Baptists sought to undertake Edwards’s ambitious renovation project in their own lesser ways, even if the ideas themselves were sometimes only derivative of Edwards and not from him directly. From God’s moral government to “disinterested benevolence” to the religious affections, Southern Edwardseans were remodeling traditional Calvinism, with or without a solid commitment to the Baptist confessions. They were, in some sense, Reformed theological renovators of sorts. Some Baptists even integrated Edwardsean ideas into their articles of faith. In a circular letter adopted in 1836, Kentucky’s Bethel Baptist Association clearly articulated a moral governmental view of the atonement:

75 Richard Furman, “Of Infant Salvation,” 596–8. 76 Catherine A. Brekus has written a chapter on Edwards’s theology of children and the reception of his theology by his disciples and Protestants of later generations. (Catherine A. Brekus, “Remembering Jonathan Edwards’s Ministry to Children,” in Jonathan Edwards at Home and Abroad: Historical Memories, Cultural Movements, Global Horizons, ed. David W. Kling and Douglas A. Sweeney [Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003], 40–60.) 77 According to Richard Fuller, “If any man believes that infants, with or without water, will be damned, I have nothing to say to that man. One of the calumnies clandestinely circulated against the Baptists is, that they hold this horrible doctrine. We are the last denomination that should be suspected of it.” (Richard Fuller, Baptism, and the Terms of Communion: An Argument [Charleston: Southern Baptist Publication Society, 1854], 108.) 78 Isaac McCoy, Remarks on the Practicability of Indian Reform (New York: Gray and Bunce, 1829), 3.

A Loose Confessionalism

Atonement is the satisfaction made to Justice, where the laws of a government have been violated; so that the justice and dignity of the government may be sustained and honored as effectually as though the offender were punished … the atonement is a governmental transaction, rendering full and complete satisfaction to law and justice; so that God, the Ruler of the Universe, can consistently with justice and the honor of his government, pardon and restore to favor all who repent of their sins and submit to the government of Jesus Christ.79

The Deep South also adopted Edwards’s ideas. In 1843, the Mississippi River Baptist Association defined the law of God as “the eternal and unchangeable rule of his moral government.”80 Robert Caldwell explains how even Southern Baptists in the Charleston tradition could see Edwards and the Edwardseans as friends to confessional Calvinism: Here we see the attraction the Edwardsean system had for many early American Baptists. While Separate Baptists might have been guilty in letting revivalism trump theology in such a way that relaxed their Calvinism, Edwardsean Baptists believed they had struck a balance between theology and practice, between predestinarianism and revivalism, by adopting the New Divinity system. God is love and possesses an infinite regard of infinite benevolence toward the entire system of being. Fallen human beings still retain a natural ability to choose God in Christ, and God has made a universal provision for their salvation through Christ’s atoning work that sustains God’s moral government and renders it fit for him to extend pardon to sinners. His ministers can herald the universal benevolence of God, the wonder of Christ’s love, the universal provision of salvation found in his atonement, and the necessity of repentance and belief.81

The Edwardsean tradition had become a powerful ally in the Southern Baptist mission to evangelize the lost. Edwards’s New England successors were as influential upon their Southern counterparts as Edwards himself. Seeking a practical theology, Southern Edwardseans had a strong affinity for New Divinity theologians. As a result, in the nineteenth-century South, New Divinity theology prospered among Baptists.

79 Bethel Baptist Association, Minutes, 1836, 6, 8. 80 William Edward Paxton, A History of the Baptists of Louisiana: from the earliest times to the present (St. Louis: C. R. Barnes Publication Co., 1888), 68. 81 Robert W. Caldwell III, Theologies of the American Revivalists: From Whitefield to Finney (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2017), 258.

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The New Divinity in the Old South82 Although most Southern Baptists today are largely ignorant of the New Divinity movement, nineteenth century Southern Baptists were especially fond of their writings and invoked them frequently in their sermons, letters, and treatises. This was as much due to the scant publishing culture in the South as it was to the intellectual power in the North. As early as 1820, Southern Edwardseans like William Staughton (1770–1829) were calling for the establishment of a Baptist Tract Society, eventually formed in Washington D. C. in 1824 and moved to Philadelphia in 1826.83 However, this did not always translate into mass publications in the Southern states. At the Charleston Baptist Association meeting in 1851, B. C. Pressley gave a “Report on Religious Publications” and lamented, “Until 1847, the Churches of this Association were entirely dependent for their religious books and tracts upon Northern societies and publishing houses.”84 The flow of theological ideas across America was almost completely Southward, and not always from Baptist sources. During this time, according to Nathan O. Hatch, names like Jonathan Edwards and Timothy Dwight soared above the rest.85 In fact, according to one Virginia pastor, Timothy Dwight was a standard work in the Baptist minister’s library at midcentury.86 Dwight’s theology proved that the Edwardsean tradition in the North was likewise a heterogeneous movement. While Dwight did not reject the means of grace quite like the Hopkinsians, he still repudiated Stoddardeanism and adhered to New Divinity doctrines like disinterested benevolence, a moral governmental atonement, Hopkinsian theodicy, natural and moral ability, a soft rejection of imputation, and a hard rejection of limited atonement.87 Even in Dwight’s “broader Edwardsean camp,” Southern Baptists were still imbibing most of the distinctives

82 I am indebted to Nathan Finn for this subtitle. 83 Robert A. Baker, The Southern Baptist Convention and Its People 1607–1972 (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1974), 113. 84 B. C. Pressley, “Report on Religious Publications, Minutes of the Charleston Baptist Association at its One Hundredth Anniversary (Charleston: A. J. Burke, 1851), 23. 85 Speaking of the Second Great Awakening, Nathan O. Hatch insists, “These populist religious leaders were intoxicated with the potential of print. The rise of a democratic religious culture in print after 1800 put obscure prophets such as Elias Smith, Lorenzo Dow, and Theophilus Gates or black preachers such as Richard Allen or Daniel Coker on an equal footing with Jonathan Edwards or Timothy Dwight.” (Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991], 11) 86 Robert Williamson, “The Preacher’s Library, etc.,” Biblical Recorder, 14 March 1888, 1. 87 “Stoddardeanism” is the practice begun by Jonathan Edwards’s grandfather and predecessor Solomon Stoddard of using the Lord’s Supper as an evangelistic tool. This was considered a devolution from the Halfway Covenant (1662), which admitted the children of the unconverted into membership.

The New Divinity in the Old South

of the Edwardsean tradition, but without the kind of rigorous theological precision of the initial New Divinity men.88 In many parts of the South, the theological influence of Timothy Dwight upon Baptists was nearly that or more than Andrew Fuller. Baptist pastors gravitated toward Dwight not simply because he was Jonathan Edwards’s grandson on his maternal side; Dwight also carried a golden reputation as a well-rounded leader, scholar, and Christian.89 In his memoir of William Staughton, R. W. Lynd wished that his readers would follow the example of “the late Dr. Dwight,” who as a boy “listened with the deepest interest” to the great men of his age.90 One Baptist minister told a story of a Baptist church in the 1830s that wrote to Luther Rice at the Theological Seminary in Prince Edward, Virginia requesting a minister. 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 him 350 dollars, perhaps 400. Rice replied jokingly that “they ought forthwith to make a call for old Doctor D[w]ight, 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.”91 Even after his death, the name of Timothy Dwight was held in high esteem. Dwight proved to be the most popular Northern Edwardsean among Southern Baptists while his pupil Nathaniel Taylor one of the least commonly read. The former exhibited a less metaphysical style of theology that Southern Edwardseans sought to imitate while the latter promoted an exceedingly voluntarist, individualized New Haven theology that Baptists like William T. Brantly dismissed.92

88 The first generation Edwardseans were Joseph Bellamy and Samuel Hopkins. One might also consider Jonathan Edwards Jr. in this group, as he was discipled by Samuel Hopkins. Edwards Jr. would mentor Dwight, but the latter would not adopt all of his views. For Timothy Dwight’s brand of Edwardsean theology, see John R. Fitzmier, New England’s Moral Legislator: Timothy Dwight, 1752–1817 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 114–129, 18. 89 E. Brooks Holifield has identified the influence of Scottish “Common Sense” philosophy upon Southern theologians. As “the most important gateway through which Scottish Common Sense Realism entered the New England theological milieu,” Timothy Dwight may have mediated this philosophy to Southern Edwardseans. (Holifield, Gentlemen Theologians, 63–64; Fitzmier, New England’s Moral Legislator, 102) 90 R. W. Lynd, “Preface,” Memoir of the Rev. William Staughton, D.D. (Boston: Lincoln, Edmands, & Co., 1834), iv. 91 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. 92 Robert Arthur Snyder, “William T. Brantly (1787–1845): A Southern Unionist and the Breakup of the Triennial Convention” (Louisville, KY: The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2005), 113;

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As New England Edwardseans were some of the most prolific theologians for their era, they sent a prodigious amount of published material South for their Baptist brethren’s enjoyment. In turn, Southern Edwardseans read from every corner of the Edwardsean tradition. James B. Taylor relished David Brainerd, C. D. Mallary emulated Samuel Pearce, Jonathan Maxcy drew from Samuel Hopkins and Jonathan Edwards Jr., R. B. C. Howell extolled Timothy Dwight, and virtually every Southern Edwardsean read Andrew Fuller.93 William Staughton was even baptized by Samuel Pearce and sent to South Carolina by Fuller himself. Most Baptists in the South viewed the more speculative points of the New Divinity much like Virginian John Leland, who opposed them in his First Rise of Sin. According to Leland, the New Divinity belief that God is the “efficient cause of sin, and that sin, eventually, is the cause of great good, represents Jehovah as a cruel being, and cuts the nerves of repentance.” He opined, “Every honest heart, unbiased by system, upon hearing ‘that God designed men to sin, and that sin will effect great good,’ will confess, that the natural conclusion is, let men sin.”94 Leland delivered heavy critiques of the New Divinity elsewhere in his writings. In his view, “The Hopkinsian school appeared as if it took all the wisdom of God to devise a way for an honorable pretence to damn men.” (Leland also had no room for Fullerism, adding, “Dr. Fuller only cast another bundle of straw on the fire.”)95 While periodicals and other publications occasionally printed Hopkinsian sermons on certain metaphysical topics, Southern Baptist Calvinism was generally incompatible with any doctrine, Edwardsean or non, which seemed to undermine human responsibility.96 However, Leland was not an Edwardsean of any stripe. In his view, “the metaphysical, long-winded Mr. Edwards” was guilty of the same kinds of unbiblical speculations.97

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94 95 96 97

For a thorough examination of Nathaniel Taylor’s views, see Douglas A. Sweeney, Nathaniel Taylor, New Haven Theology, and the Legacy of Jonathan Edwards (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003) George B. Taylor, Life and Times of James B. Taylor (Philadelphia: The Bible and Publication Society, 1872), 60; J. H. Campbell, Georgia Baptists: Historical And Biographical (Macon: J. W. Burke & Co., 1874), 458; Jonathan Maxcy, “A Discourse, Designed to Explain the Doctrine of Atonement. In Two Parts, Part II,” in The Literary Remains of Rev. Jonathan Maxcy, D.D., ed. Romeo Elton (New Haven, CT, 1844) 74, 151; Robert Boyte C. Howell, The Covenants (Charleston: Southern Baptist Publication Society, 1855), 3. John Leland, “The First Rise of Sin,” in the Writings of the Late Elder John Leland, ed. L. F. Greene (New York: G. W. Wood, 1845), 143. John Leland, “Events in the Life of John Leland,” in the Writings of the Late Elder John Leland, ed. L. F. Greene (New York: G. W. Wood, 1845), 33n. The Baptist Preacher: Original Monthly 3 (Richmond: H. K. Ellyson, 1844), 30–32. John Leland, “Part of a Speech, Delivered at Suffield, Connecticut, on the First Jubilee of the United States,” in the Writings of the Late Elder John Leland, ed. L. F. Greene (New York: G. W. Wood, 1845), 524.

The New Divinity in the Old South

Most early Southern Baptist leaders, on the other hand, were receptive to at least some Edwardsean doctrines, including general atonement, moral governmental theory, a rejection of imputation of sin, and disinterested benevolence. Where, how, and to what extent they adopted these principles was determined by their theological, intellectual, and even their social milieu. For instance, in the 1790s, the First Baptist Church of New York City suffered a split when Dr. Benjamin Foster began preaching “in his discourses what was then called ‘New Divinity.’”98 However, in the more rural South, and without the same Hopkinsian rigor as in the North, Edwardseanism was a bit more soft-edged from the pulpit and thus did not attract the same opposition as it did in other areas of the country. Ultimately, Jonathan Edwards’s theological legacy in the Baptist South was secured just as much through his Northern and English successors as it was by his own writings, a fact often overlooked in Baptist history and one explored in this volume. Furthermore, Southern Edwardseanism was an intramural affair. The influence of Edwardseans like Richard Furman and Jonathan Maxcy upon Baptists in the South is incalculable, spanning multiple generations. In a “face-to-face society,” the first president of South Carolina College and the pastor of the Southern Baptist “mother church” personally imprinted Edwardsean theology on the hearts and minds of Southerners in a way that published pages never could.99 Jonathan Edwards’s theological legacy took flight in the South as Baptist numbers proliferated. In the three decades after the American Revolution, Baptist membership multiplied tenfold and Baptist churches swelled from five hundred to twenty-five hundred. In the years between the Revolution and the first Southern Baptist Convention in 1845, the American population grew from two million to twenty million.100 From South Carolina and Virginia down to Georgia across to Alabama and up to Tennessee and Kentucky, Southern Edwardseanism began in the coastal states and then made its way inward as the Baptist denomination increased in size. During this western surge, Edwardseans emerged as some of the major Baptist leaders and voices in the new territory. For instance, one Baptist historian has called Basil Manly Sr. “a bridge between the more settled conditions of Baptist life on the eastern seaboard into what was then the western frontier, that is, the Alabama wilderness.”101 Beyond the Appalachians, Andrew Fuller was a Baptist phenomenon. J. M. Pendleton, who pastored churches in Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, and Pennsylvania,

98 Gabriel Poillon Disosway, The Earliest Churches of New York and its Vicinity (New York: James G. Gregory, 1865), 195. 99 Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 60. 100 Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, 3–4. 101 Timothy George, “The SBJT Forum: The Overlooked Shapers of Evangelicalism,” The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 3, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 76.

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speculated, “Eternity alone will reveal all the good accomplished, by God’s blessing, on Fuller’s Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation.”102 In Mason County, Kentucky, when William Vaughn was “interrogated by a young minister as to what books he ought to read, [Vaughn] told him the Bible first, and then Andrew Fuller.”103 By 1860, Baptists in Missouri were even calling Alvin Peter Williams “the Andrew Fuller of America” for his similar acumen and theology. When told of his nickname, Williams replied, “I have simply tried in my work to show the errors which beset our people in this great valley.”104 By the eve of the Civil War, Southern Edwardseans were traversing the Mississippi River with commanding authority and with different versions of New Divinity theology. More than any other Baptist, Jesse Hartwell Sr. illustrates the western migration of Southern Edwardseanism. Educated at the traditionally Edwardsean Brown University in Rhode Island, the New Englander Hartwell began his teaching career as principal of the University Grammar school in Providence. In 1823, he headed South where he became the director of the school at High Hills, South Carolina, where he also pastored the church once home to Richard Furman. In 1829, Hartwell served as co-principal of the Furman Theological Institution with Furman’s son, Samuel.105 In 1836, he moved to Alabama where he was pastor at Carlowville, president of the Alabama Baptist Convention, Professor of Theology at Howard College, and president of the Domestic Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention. In 1847, he moved further west to Arkansas where he founded Camden Female Institute. Finally, in 1857, he settled in Louisiana, becoming president and Professor of Theology at Mount Lebanon University.106 From the black swamp to the bayou, Edwardseans carried their theology to almost every corner of the American South. In many ways, Southern Baptists were a people primed to welcome New Divinity theology. To start, Edwards’s New England successors conceived of the church in a way similar to Baptists. As Joseph Conforti explains, “Just as New Divinity theology maintained a sharp distinction between saints and sinners, refusing to recognize the moral worth of an intermediate, awakened sinners category, so too New Divinity ecclesiology rejected the idea of a middle way in church membership.”107 Like his

102 J. M. Pendleton, Life and Times of Elder Reuben Ross (Philadelphia: Grant, Faires, & Rodgers, 1882), 281. 103 Thos. M. Vaughn, Memoirs of Rev. William Vaughn, D.D. (Louisville: Caperton & Cates, 1878), 92. 104 Duncan, A History of the Baptists in Missouri, 361. 105 Benjamin Franklin Riley, A History of the Baptists in the Southern States East of the Mississippi (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1898), 140. 106 William Cathcart, The Baptist Encyclopedia, Volume 2 (Philadelphia: Louis H. Everts, 1881), 506. 107 Joseph A. Conforti, Samuel Hopkins and the New Divinity Movement: Calvinism and Reform in New England Between the Great Awakenings (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1981), 76.

The New Divinity in the Old South

Baptist counterparts, Samuel Hopkins held firm to the separateness of the church from the world. In what Douglas Sweeney has called the “Edwardsian ellipse,” the New Divinity centered their message around two theological coordinates: (1) the distinction between natural and moral ability (2) and the doctrine of immediate repentance.108 These were equally important for Southern Baptists, who believed that repentance and faith were necessary prerequisites for baptism into the church.109 (By the middle of the nineteenth century, some Southern Baptists like Nathaniel Macon Crawford were even using the works of textual scholar Moses Stuart to argue for credobaptism!)110 Both groups were intensely revivalistic, crafting their experiential theology to convert the sinner. “The natural state of man is such,” Jonathan Maxcy insisted, “that a moral change in his will and affections is essential to qualify him for the enjoyment of God and heaven. The Scriptures uniformly represent the unregenerate as totally alienated from things spiritual and holy.”111 Maxcy himself represented the natural harmony between Hopkinsian and Baptist theology. Just as Southern Baptists inveighed against the means-oriented theology of Alexander Campbell, so New Divinity men eschewed the preparationism of old school Congregationalists and believed that means of grace actually increased the guilt of the awakened sinner.112 During the Second Great Awakening - a movement which greatly benefited Edwardsean culture - Southern Baptists and the New Divinity each exercised their conversionist theology in full.113 Though they did not with Hopkins urge that sinners should be willing to be damned for the glory of God, Southern Edwardseans too emphasized “disinterested” benevolence and the “chief good” of the believer. According to Richard Fuller, Jesus Christ possessed

108 Sweeney, Nathaniel Taylor, New Haven Theology, and the Legacy of Jonathan Edwards, 33. 109 The First London Confession reads, “Jesus Christ hath here on earth a spiritual kingdom which is his church, whom he hath purchased and redeemed to himself as a peculiar inheritance; which church is a company of visible saints, called and separated from the world by the word and Spirit of God, to the visible profession of faith of the gospel, being baptized into that faith, and joined to the Lord, and each other, by mutual agreement in the practical enjoyment of the ordinances commanded by Christ their head and king.”; In his treatment of church membership, Richard Furman held that “faith, repentance, and evangelical knowledge, should precede a person’s admission to the sealing ordinances of the gospel church, of which description is baptism as much as the Lord’s supper.” (Furman, “On the Relation the Children of Church Members bear to the Church, and the Duties arising from that Relation,” 491.) 110 Nathaniel Macon Crawford, The Baptism of Repentance for the Remission of Sins (Nashville: South Western Publishing House, 1855), 3, 24–25, 58. 111 Maxcy, “A Discourse, Designed to Explain the Doctrine of Atonement. In Two Parts, Part II,” 103. 112 Preparationism is the belief that unregenerate people can take steps to “prepare” for conversion on their own, as opposed to an instantaneous rebirth. 113 Sweeney, Nathaniel Taylor, New Haven Theology, and the Legacy of Jonathan Edwards, 40.

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a “love so disinterested, that he entirely forgets himself when his friends are in sorrow or danger.”114 “To constitute virtue,” John L. Dagg insisted, “there must be an intentional promotion of happiness in others; and this intention must be disinterested.”115 However, Baptists did not always forsake Edwards’s definition of true virtue as the Hopkinsians did. Much like his Edwardsean contemporary Charles G. Finney, William B. Johnson defined love to God as “the exercise of infinite benevolence or good will to being, in general, or in other words, a supreme regard to the highest good of the universe.”116 Edwardseans ethics, whether from Edwards or his disciples, were received well in the Baptist South. Some Baptists even appeared to blend Edwards and the Edwardseans. For instance, in a circular letter on church membership, Richard Furman highlighted the importance of “the love of disinterested virtue.”117 Following the New Divinity, many Southern Edwardseans abandoned the idea that Adam’s sin is imputed to the sinner. Baptists like Maxcy, Johnson, Mims, and Hartwell in South Carolina, and Meredith and White in North Carolina did not believe that guilt or punishment could transfer from one individual to another.118 These Edwardseans did not recognize a fundamental unity between the atonement and the act of salvation. In fact, one of the primary differences between Jonathan Edwards and many of his successors on the doctrine of the atonement was that the latter denied any real connection between these two events. Because the Edwardsean atonement is not a literal payment of a debt or a transfer of righteousness, men like Maxcy and Mims were not interested in the worth or value of Christ’s death. In fact, in their view, the atonement itself had no intrinsic value in any measurable sense. Its ultimate purpose was to uphold the honor of God’s justice in such a way that God’s subsequent pardon of sinners could be completely free. Therefore, they conceived of Christ’s atonement not as the actual punishment under the law, but as an act of public suffering equivalent to the damnation of sinners in Hell whereby God manifested his displeasure with sin, vindicated his moral governance, and made sovereign grace possible. Justice was not distributed, but displayed; sinful offenses

114 Richard Fuller, “The New Commandment,” Sermons by Richard Fuller, D.D. (New York: Sheldon and Company, 1860), 94. 115 John L. Dagg, A Manual of Theology (Harrisonburg: Gano Books, 1982), 46. 116 William B. Johnson, “Love Characteristic of the Deity,” in Southern Baptist Sermons on Sovereignty and Responsibility (Harrisonburg, VA: Sprinkle Publications, 2003), 46; Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, Charles F. Finney and the Spirit of American Evangelicalism, 29. 117 Richard Furman, “On the Relation the Children of Church Members bear to the Church, and the Duties arising from that Relation,” 502. 118 Greg Wills, “The SBJT Forum: The Overlooked Shapers of Evangelicalism,” The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 3, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 88.

Moderate Calvinism

were not commuted, but countervailed with Christ’s God-exalting death.119 In the moral governmental atonement, God is not meriting or imputing or exchanging personal righteousness, but demonstrating the integrity of his law. Nevertheless, most Southern Edwardseans affirmed imputation, and all relentlessly underscored the fact that sin was a personal act that demanded personal repentance. James C. Furman opined, “Sin is a personal thing; repentance, faith, holiness, are personal things; responsibility (in the highest forms of it), is a personal thing, ‘for every one of us shall give account of himself unto God.’ Nothing so emphatically individualizes man as the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”120 Ultimately, the most formative of Jonathan Edwards’s works upon the New Divinity were equally influential upon Southern Edwardseans, who likewise imbibed Edwards’s revivalist works (i.e. Religious Affections) as well as his volumes from the Stockbridge years (Freedom of the Will, The End for Which God Created the World, The Nature of True Virtue, and Original Sin).

Moderate Calvinism The New Divinity’s “Consistent Calvinism” was its strongest link as well as its greatest difference with nineteenth-century Southern Baptists. Each group staunchly defended a moderate form of the Calvinistic system, but with different theological opponents and with different approaches to theology. In a letter to Richard Furman in 1791, the Hopkinsian president of Rhode Island College, James Manning, lamented, I am sorry there is so much occasion to state and defend the great and special doctrines of grace against the insidious attacks of the Methodists and their adherents, more especially in the middle and Southern states – They are scarcely known in New England. With us, the fatal delusion of universal salvation, broached by the infamous John Murray, is the great Engine, which the powers of darkness employ to subvert the truth; and in which

119 See Obbie Tyler Todd, “A Countervailing Atonement: The Meaning of Equivalence in the American Moral Governmental Theory of Atonement,” Scottish Journal of Theology 72, Issue 4 (2019): 375–384. 120 James Clement Furman, “Ministerial Piety: an essay read before the Piedmont Ministers’ Institute held at Greenville February 23 and 24th , 1881,” 2, Richard Furman and James C. Furman Collection, BV4647.P5 F87 1881; James C. Furman, the son of Richard Furman, was also an advocate of a moral governmental understanding of the atonement. In his “Historical Discourse,” Furman insists that the “principles” of the kingdom of God “are the pure, fixed, eternal verities of God’s moral government.” (“Historical Discourse: delivered before the Charleston Baptist Association at its hundredth anniversary, held in Charleston in November, 1851,” BX6331. F875 1852)

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they have been but too successful, throughout the great part of this country for some years past.121

Northern and Southern Edwardseans both felt themselves under siege by liberalizing forces and sought to combat those forces in their respective regions of the country. While Southern Baptists did not encounter Universalism to the extent New England theologians did (although curiously Elhanan Winchester preceded Edmund Botsford in the pulpit at Welsh Neck), their opposition to Arminianism and their commitment to the essentials of Calvinism was the same. Southern Baptists even invoked Edwards in their defense of the doctrines of grace. In a sermon on election, Charles D. Mallary argued, “Modern times cannot boast of a moral holy man than President Edwards, and yet no man more ardently loved, more firmly believed, more profoundly investigated the doctrines of sovereign, distinguishing grace. The sovereignty of God was to him a theme unspeakably sweet and awfully glorious; and no doubt his frequent and profound contemplation of it contributed much to the amazing depth, the delightful symmetry and perfection of his piety.”122 With Edwards as their mutual source of theological inspiration, Northern and Southern Edwardseans promoted a similar doctrine of atonement which emphasized sovereign grace against different theological foes. On one hand, New Divinity men brandished the moral governmental theory of the atonement against the threat of New England Universalists; in the South, however, Baptists wielded moral government as a reasonable response to the overly experiential, anthropocentric theology of Methodists and others.123 In each instance, Edwardseans believed that their theological opponents had severely diminished the grace of God in salvation. In the early 1770s, not long after Murray visited New Haven, Connecticut, Jonathan Edwards Jr. published his “Observations on the Doctrine of Universal Salvation, As Lately Promulgated at New Haven.” In the work, Edwards the younger stated, “it follows from this system, that grace is in a great measure, excluded from the plan of salvation published

121 “James Manning to Richard Furman,” Richard Furman Papers, Acc. 1960–106 (Box 4, Folder 4), Special Collections and Archives, Furman University, Greenville, S.C. 122 Charles Dutton Mallary, “The Doctrine of Election,” in The Georgia Pulpit: Or Ministers’ Yearly Offering, Vol. 1, edited by Robert Fleming (Richmond: H. K. Ellyson, 1847), 199. 123 According to McClymond and McDermott, the threat of Universalism is one of the primary reasons the New Divinity flocked to a moral governmental understanding of the atonement: “Faced by Universalist heresy, New Divinity thinkers shifted their teaching on the atonement away from traditional ideas regarding the payment of a debt or penalty and also shied away from ‘imputation.’” (McClymond and McDermott, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards, 617); This in no way means that the New Divinity did not encounter a wave of Arminianism themselves.

Moderate Calvinism

in the gospel.”124 Holding to the idea that Christ suffered all the punishment due to mankind on the cross, Murray had undersold the evil of sin and neglected God’s role as Moral Governor. Universalists also forced Consistent Calvinists to rethink the atonement and the nature of justice. By utilizing the Calvinistic notion of imputation and viewing the atonement as a payment of a debt, Universalists like John Murray gave the New Divinity fresh motivation to distance themselves from traditional Calvinism.125 Edwardseans in the South were likewise troubled by the Methodist views on sin and grace. “Methodists affirm,” R. B. C. Howell noted, “that by baptism the new birth, the forgiveness of sins, and adoption are all to the child, visibly signed and sealed.” Howell then reasoned, “If you are justified, pardoned, and saved through grace by faith, and not by works, merit, or obedience of any kind, then you cannot be justified, pardoned, and saved by baptism.”126 Salvation of any kind was by God’s grace, not by human merit. Like Jonathan Edwards Jr., who warned his Universalist opponents not to overlook the justice of God in Hell, Howell also addressed God’s eternal damnation of sinners: “God is infinitely good. His benevolence forbids the infliction of unnecessary suffering upon any of his creatures. Misery is never permitted, but when demanded by justice, as either the consequence, or the penalty of sin. The government of God is designed, not only to benefit his creatures, but also to manifest his glory.”127 The concept of God’s moral government equipped Northern and Southern Edwardseans with the theological tools they needed to greet Universalist and Arminian theology with a generalized atonement that stressed human responsibility, but in a way that augmented, not lessened, the sovereign grace of God. Southern Edwardseans were often sparring with different denominational foes than the New Divinity, but they were drawing from a similar theological playbook that accentuated divine glory and grace. Occasionally, Baptist Edwardseans in the North even aided their brethren in the South in combatting Methodist theology by sending them literature filled with Edwards’s ideas. Shortly after a six-month trip through North Carolina and Virginia in the spring of 1789 and witnessing the progress and influence of Methodist preachers, Isaac Backus produced The Doctrine of Particular Election and Final Perseverance Explained and Vindicated. In the tract, he rebuffed the Arminian

124 Quoted in Robert L. Ferm, Jonathan Edwards the Younger, 1745–1801: A Colonial Pastor (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 1976), 107. The essay “Brief Observations” appears to have been published in 1772, however the original is not extant. 125 For a thorough treatment of Jonathan Edwards Jr. and his analysis of Universalism, see Ferm, Jonathan Edwards the Younger, 1745–1801: A Colonial Pastor, 106–113. 126 Robert Boyte C. Howell, The Evils of Infant Baptism (Charleston: Southern Baptist Publication Society, 1854), 110. 127 Ibid., 176,

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theology of John Wesley. Critiquing the doctrine of prevenient grace, Backus took exception with Wesley’s views because they effectively denied man’s natural ability. Backus reasoned, “But if the fall took all natural liberty of choice from man until grace restored it, then the fall released him from the authority of the law of God as it was first given to him, and he never hath been under it since, but under grace.”128 After finishing the pamphlet, Backus quickly sent several dozen copies to his Baptist friends in the South.129 In some sense, Baptists like Richard Furman even believed that the South was to become a spiritual blessing to the North, a veritable light to the nations whereby Southern religion would spread to the rest of the world. In a letter to Oliver Hart, Furman celebrated, “It is a comfortable consideration that the influences of Divine Grace are so abundantly diffused to the Northward. O that the Redeemer’s Kingdom may be extended far and wide, till the whole Earth may own his Government, and the radiant beams of Divine Truth dispel the clouds of moral and spiritual darkness which have so long overspread the face of things.”130 Although Southern Baptists have sometimes been painted as a provincial people, their aspirations and their concerns were no less global than those of their New England counterparts. The Southern Baptist Convention was assembled in part to achieve their universal ends. Edwards’s global concert of prayer even served as a model for Southern Baptists as they pleaded earnestly with the Lord to send His Spirit upon the earth. John Mason Peck, the first home missionary of the Triennial Convention, who served in Missouri and southern Illinois for over forty years, and A. M. Poindexter, who served on the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board, each taught the moral governmental view of the New Divinity.131 Peck was born in Litchfield County, Connecticut, “the seedbed of the New Divinity movement,” and was converted in the Congregationalist church during the New Divinity revivals of Northwestern Connecticut which helped spawn the Second Great Awakening.132 His wife, Sally

128 Isaac Backus, The Doctrine of Particular Election and Final Perseverance (Boston, 1789), in Isaac Backus on Church, State, and Calvinism: Pamphlets, 1754–1789, ed. William G. McLoughlin (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968), 452–53. 129 McLoughlin, “Introduction,” 59–60. 130 “Richard Furman to Oliver Hart,” May 23, 1786. Richard Furman Papers, Acc. 1960–106 (Box 1, Folder 1), Special Collections and Archives, Furman University, Greenville, S.C. 131 Greg Wills, “The SBJT Forum: The Overlooked Shapers of Evangelicalism,” The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 3, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 88. 132 Joseph A. Conforti, Samuel Hopkins and the New Divinity Movement: Calvinism and Reform in New England between the Great Awakenings (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 1981), 16; For an excellent treatment of these revivals, see David W. Kling, A Field of Divine Wonders: The New Divinity and Village Revivals in Northwestern Connecticut, 1792–1822 (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993).

Pastors, Printers, and Presidents

Paine, was the great granddaughter of Jonathan Edwards.133 Peck’s friend James B. Taylor, the first Corresponding Secretary of the Board of Foreign Missions for the SBC, was a deep admirer of Timothy Dwight. Taylor donated Dwight’s systematic theology text to a mission library and encouraged a fellow Baptist, “It will be well for you to read it, as it will furnish you much valuable information on theological subjects.”134 The editor of Georgia’s Christian Index (1842–1848) speculated that the majority of Southern Baptists affirmed a general atonement.135 Still, even amongst those who endorsed a particular redemption, in Edwardsean fashion, Southern Baptists accentuated the universal quality of Christ’s work in order to highlight the importance of faith. Admitting a limited scope to the atonement, Jesse Mercer (1769–1841) explained his exact position: “I admit that the provisions of the general atonement, by which the kindness and love of God to man appeared, through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ…are sufficient for all the purposes of man’s salvation, and all men, wherever they are dispensed, would be saved, were it noted for that alienation of heart, which has everywhere estranged man from God.” For Mercer, limited atonement was the result of God “foreseeing that no man would receive the testimony” given to all, therefore God “determined…to exercise a power sufficient to effect the purposes of his grace in the salvation of his own chosen people.”136 The influence of Andrew Fuller helped Mercer to reconcile a limited atonement with the sufficiency of Christ’s work to save every sinner. The Baptist South was part of a trans-Atlantic triangle of New Divinity theology, absorbing its doctrines either directly from New England or, in the case of Jesse Mercer, migrating from New Haven to Northamptonshire, England then back across the pond into the American South. With the help of Edwardsean theology, Southern Baptists engineered a moderate Calvinism fine-tuned for their evangelistic identity.

Pastors, Printers, and Presidents In their moderate Calvinism, Northern and Southern Edwardseans were asking similar questions and finding similar answers in Edwards. Just as Samuel Hopkins

133 In a letter written to his wife on February 20, 1847 from Boston, James B. Taylor remarks, “Mrs. Peck is a great-granddaughter of Jonathan Edwards.” (Life and Times of James B. Taylor, ed. George Boardman Taylor [Philadelphia: The Bible and Publication Society, 1872], 208.) 134 James B. Taylor, “Letter F. S. James, Monrovia,” in George Boardman Taylor, Life and Times of James B. Taylor (Philadelphia: The Bible and Publication Society, 1872), 191. 135 Ibid., 88–89; A “general atonement” generally refers to the belief that, by his sacrificial death on the cross, Jesus Christ atoned for the sins of the entire world. 136 Jesse Mercer, Memoirs of Elder Jesse Mercer (New York: John Gray, 1844), 302–03.

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had sought to reconcile divine sovereignty with sin and Andrew Fuller the duty of belief with sin, Jesse Mercer asked how divine sovereignty could exist with human decision-making. His “knotty question” was not unlike Fuller’s “modern question”: how can God’s predestination of sinners be compatible with free human agency?137 Looking to Jonathan Edwards, Mercer pushed back against those who believed “that sin has destroyed in man the principle of responsibility; else he could not be free from obligation to obey God in any case; for the want of natural ability alone, destroys moral obligation.”138 Peter Beck explains, In his disputations with various challengers, Mercer echoed the arguments found in Jonathan Edwards’s Freedom of the Will. Mercer sought to define carefully the nature of freedom in relation to the will. Building upon that foundational definition, he maintained that fallen man retained his natural ability to respond to God and was thus responsible for his obedience or lack thereof. The problem, he wrote, lies not in man’s natural ability but in his moral ability, his inclination to obey the rebellious dictates of his fallen and depraved mind rather than the righteous commands of God. In so doing, Mercer successfully defended evangelical Calvinism, encouraged biblical evangelism, and maintained the boundaries of orthodoxy among Georgia Baptists.139

Like the New Divinity in the North, Southern Edwardseans were a thinking people. They grappled with theological questions and they expended great mental energy to find practical solutions. In doing so, they often saw themselves in the mold of Edwards and the Edwardseans. Sometimes almost exclusively so. When professor of rhetoric at Mercer, Rev. Shaler G. Hillyer, preached on the importance of thinking in the Christian ministry, he insisted, “In like manner, Calvin, Edwards, Dwight and

137 Paul Helm explains, “Moral inability, the inability of unbelieving sinners to exercise repentance and faith, for example, does not remove or diminish their moral obligation to the least degree. Fuller was recommended to read Jonathan Edwards by Robert Hall. In doing so, he became strongly convinced that obligation reaches beyond natural ability to matters regarding which people have a ‘moral inability’ a distinction which he finds in Edwards, and also in ‘some other performances.’ The distinction is treated in extenso in Jonathan Edwards’s work on The Freedom of the Will in Part I, Section 4 of the book, entitled “Of the Distinction of Natural and Moral Necessity and Inability,” and in Part IV, Section 4, entitled “It is Agreeable to Common Sense and the Natural Notions of Mankind, to Suppose Moral Necessity to be Consistent with Praise and Blame, Reward and Punishment.” (Paul Helm, “The ‘Modern Question’: Hyper-Calvinism,” in A New Divinity: Transatlantic Reformed Evangelical Debates during the Long Eighteenth Century [Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018], 139–40.) In the chapter, Helm also defines the “Modern Question” and the nature of HyperCalvinism. 138 Jesse Mercer, Memoirs, 293. 139 Peter Beck, “A Southern Exposure: The Theology of Jonathan Edwards in the Writings of Jesse Mercer,” The Journal of Baptist Studies 1 (2007), 23.

Pastors, Printers, and Presidents

Fuller – and our own gifted Mercer – with a host of others, were men habituated to profound meditation. And it is conceded, that that sermon is best, which abounds most with thought. Nay, it is an essential element, without which all is flat and powerless. The preacher then must think.”140 This Edwardsean commitment to intellectualism and theological education even compelled them to erect their own schools. Richard Furman laid the groundwork for Furman academy and theological institution and Jesse Mercer founded Mercer University. James B. Taylor was one of the principal founders of Virginia Baptist Seminary (now the University of Richmond). Luther Rice and Abner Clopton helped raise the necessary funds to establish Columbian College (later George Washington University). Jonathan Maxcy was the very first president of South Carolina College (later the University of South Carolina) and William Staughton the first at Columbian College. Baptists like Richard Fuller even left the South to attend Harvard. Providentially, a severe illness prompted doctors to transport Fuller to, of all places, Northampton, Massachusetts. After being exposed to the aura of Edwards’s life and legacy, Fuller returned to Harvard and to South Carolina with a newfound call to ministry.141 Although Fuller did not become a Baptist until returning to the South, the “seed” had been sown in Northampton.142 By the power of his own legacy, Edwards literally produced Southern Baptist pastors. Southern Edwardseans also utilized the power of print to circulate their views and to publicize the works of Edwards. Despite the relatively small amount of volumes and discourses that emerged from the early Baptist ranks, newspapers proved to be one of the most vital organs for intra-Baptist communication and the distribution of Baptist theology. Several of the earliest Baptist newspapers in the South were created or edited by Southern Edwardseans. The Columbian Star, the first Baptist newspaper in the South, was begun in 1822 in Washington, D. C. by Luther Rice with the assistance of William Staughton. After it was eventually relocated to Philadelphia, W. T. Brantly became its editor, when it was issued as a quarto and called The Columbian Star and Christian Index. Years later, Jesse Mercer moved the newspaper to Georgia and became its editor until 1840, renaming it The Christian Index. In numerous issues, readers were familiarized with Edwards and the Edwardseans.143 In the Latter-Day Luminary, a monthly newspaper edited in

140 Rev. Shaler G. Hillyer, “The Support of the Ministry,” in The Georgia Pulpit Volume 1 (Richmond: H. K. Ellyson, 1847): 421. 141 James Hazzard Cuthbert, Life of Richard Fuller (New York: Sheldon and Company, 1878), 42. 142 Cuthbert, Life of Richard Fuller, 63. 143 For instance, W. T. Brantly listed Jonathan Edwards as required reading and reprinted Edwards’s History of Redemption in the Christian Index. (William T. Brantly, The Saint’s Repose in Death. A Sermon Delivered on the Death of Richard Furman, D. D. Late Pastor of the Baptist Church, Charleston, S. C. [Charleston: W. Riley, 1825], 9.)

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the same Washington office as the Columbian Star, Baptist subscribers encountered Edwards’s thoughts on revival, more than one mention of his personal testimony, multiple accounts of David Brainerd, Edwards’s thoughts on Genesis 5, a recommendation of Edwards’s preaching style, his thoughts on Genesis 14, his missiology, a small portrait of Edwards’s personal devotion, a recommendation of Religious Affections, and several remarks on Edwards’s logic and rhetoric – each in a different article and all in a matter of several volumes.144 With such consistent introductions to the Congregationalist theologian, Edwards’s seemingly mythological status in Southern Baptist life seemed almost inevitable. Two of William Staughton’s Edwardsean protégés would even become editors in other states: R. B. C. Howell at The Baptist in Tennessee and Thomas Meredith at The Biblical Recorder in North Carolina. Southern Edwardseans were also a close-knit community of pastor-theologians. So important was their intellectual vision of Calvinism that some developed a Southern “school of the prophets” similar to the New Divinity model. Just as Samuel Hopkins and Joseph Bellamy had stayed in Jonathan Edwards’s home and the New Divinity movement consisted of young men who studied under experienced clergymen, so Baptist Edwardseans in the South opened their own doors to the next generation. Richard Furman and others received young Baptist ministers in their homes, opened their personal libraries, and discipled them, until which time the students would begin formal theological education or take their first pastorate.145 These kinds of theological communities ensured that Southern Edwardseanism passed from generation to generation.

144 The Latter-Day Luminary Vol. 1 (1818), 14, 40, 333; Vol. 2 (1820), 4, 212, 315, 360, 393; Vol. 5 (1824), 297; Vol. 6 (1825), 321–22. 145 Conforti explains, “Furthermore, the incessant warnings against the danger of an unconverted ministry altered the traditional mode of preparing young men for the profession. Many ministerial candidates felt obliged to study for the ministry under a converted clergyman. It was no longer acceptable to these young men to return home after college and be tutored by a local minister who opposed revivalism. Hence, aspirants to the ministry began to converge on the homes of prominent pro-revival clerics who turned their parsonages into ‘schools of the prophets.’” (Conforti, Samuel Hopkins and the New Divinity Movement: Calvinism and Reform in New England Between the Great Awakenings, 24); According to King, “Richard Furman, and others, served the denomination in this way at considerable cost to themselves, since they received no compensation for this work. The young minister who was fortunate enough to be placed in the home of an able man received a great blessing from the intimate personal contacts. But, at best, it was a temporary educational method which would soon give way to institutions.” (Joe King, A History of South Carolina Baptists [Columbia, SC: The General Board of the South Carolina Baptist Convention, 1964], 162–63.

Friendly Calvinism

Friendly Calvinism Both Northern and Southern Edwardseans were cultural outsiders, or began as such. In the case of the former, New Divinity men were usually young and eager to yoke themselves with older New Light theologians. “Few established or older ministers were won over to Consistent Calvinism,” Joseph Conforti observes, “rather the New Divinity movement captured the minds and hearts of young ministerial candidates from modest to obscure social backgrounds.”146 Only a handful of ministers embraced the New Divinity scheme in the years following the Great Awakening. The name “New Divinity” had begun as a pejorative term in 1765 in response to Samuel Hopkins’s contention that the awakened, unregenerate sinner who used the means of grace was guiltier in the eyes of God. The name they gave themselves, “Consistent Calvinism,” was a reaction against what they perceived as the “conditional” Calvinism of liberal Old Lights in the cultural mainstream.147 Baptists in the nineteenth-century South identified themselves in the same marginal light, but in a different context. As Thomas Kidd and Barry Hankins have concluded, “Baptists were once the ultimate religious outsiders.”148 Depending upon the state, Baptists experienced varying degrees of social respectability. However, in none of them were Baptists ever the established church nor did they ever become a group associated with wealth or influence.149 As a result, Southern Edwardseans were never far removed from their grassroots Baptist identity. In 1811, Edmund Botsford reminded a young William B. Johnson, We need not go to College to learn this religion. It may be learned in the parlour, in the kitchen, in the barn, in the field, on the knees, or in an easy chair. Will it be wrong in me to say, this is the religion I have been these forty years endeavoring to propagate to so little purpose? My education has been very imperfect, and I never studied composition. Could I write as well as some of my younger brethren in the ministry, I should, ere this, have sent out many a small tract against all the rubbish that I have found attached to religion.

146 Joseph A. Conforti, Samuel Hopkins and the New Divinity Movement: Calvinism and Reform in New England Between the Great Awakenings, 24. 147 Ibid., 61. 148 Thomas S. Kidd, Barry Hankins, Baptists in America: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), ix. 149 Wills has also noted the “spiritual exclusivism” of Baptists: “Like the Methodists and Presbyterians, Baptists gained such a reputation for spiritual exclusivism that even religious southerners hesitated to join.” (Gregory A. Wills, Democratic Religion: Freedom, Authority, and Church Discipline in the Baptist South 1785–1900 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1997], 14); This in no way means that certain Baptists were not wealthy. James P. Boyce descended from a well-to-do family. His father, Ker, was a banker in Charleston and considered to be one of the wealthiest men in South Carolina.

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Now this plain, artless, heart-felt religion, my dear friend, I think I have experienced, and do daily experienced the daily effects of. This religion I am not afraid to recommend, because I believe it to be truth.150

Southern Edwardseanism was a paradoxical movement. It was educated yet plain, exact yet ecumenical. In the mold of Edwards, it clung tightly to points of doctrine but never so tightly that it forfeited simple Biblicism. Therefore, if New Divinity men were “consistent” Calvinists who valued metaphysical precision against the casuistry of old school Calvinists, Southern Edwardseans were slightly less “consistent” in their Calvinism. They drew hard lines between right and false teaching, yet they were unwilling to dole out the kind of contentious rebukes New Divinity men delivered against their enemies. They were “friendly” Calvinists. With one hand, they defended the meticulous sovereignty of God against their Arminian and hyper-Calvinist foes. With the other, they offered an ecumenical hand of fellowship. For as many ideas as Southern Edwardseans adopted from their New England counterparts, their theology never lost, so to speak, its Southern hospitality. The friendly, ecumenical nature of Southern Edwardseanism is one of the primary reasons it endured for so long and in so many different contexts in Baptist life. A Richard Furman, who possessed “such progress as would have ranked him among men of the first intelligence in any country,” could become best friends with the likes of a homespun Edmund Botsford.151 Separate Baptists like Joseph Reese could be ordained by Regular Baptists such as Oliver Hart and Evan Pugh.152 Eric Smith has identified the “evangelical catholicity” among Hart and other Regular Baptists, even with a confessionalist theology.153 Edwards’s revivalism was a magnetic force, bringing together Baptists from all walks and able to transcend styles of ministry. In many ways, the Triennial Convention and the Southern Baptist Convention were both institutional landmarks to the Southern Edwardsean tendency toward denominational inclusivism. Their inaugural presidents, Richard Furman and William B. Johnson, were self-consciously Edwardsean and determined to promote Edwards’s theology in their new Baptist communities.

150 Edmund Botsford, Memoirs of Edmund Botsford (Charleston: W. Riley, 1832), 181–82. 151 Thomas Armitage, “Dr. Richard Furman,” in Life and Works of Dr. Richard Furman, D.D. (Harrisonburg: Sprinkle Publications, 2004), 8. 152 Reese was eventually censured by the Sandy Creek Association for his cooperation with Regular Baptists. (Thomas Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007], 363–64) 153 Eric C. Smith, “‘Oh That All Bigotry Was Rooted Out of the Earth!’: The Evangelical Catholicity of Oliver Hart and the Regular Baptists,” Southeastern Theological Review 7, 1 (Summer 2016): 86–107.

The Southern Baptist Edwards

Furthermore, save the issue of slavery, if any group in America seemed to prefer brotherhood with saints from all denominations, it was Jonathan Edwards’s Southern successors. Basil Manly Sr., for example, once recalled a “pious, old Methodist Lady” singing with his mother the hymn, “Come thou fount of every blessing.” After reaching the words “Jesus sought me when a stranger, wandering from the fold of God,” the woman burst into tears and confessed, “Yes, it was so, it was so.” Manly simply stated, “There spoke the true Christian heart.”154 Amazingly, Edmund Botsford even dreamed one night of walking arm in arm with John Wesley!155 In what is certainly one of the few (if not only) instances in Baptist history, Abner Clopton submitted himself to the authority of the local Presbyterian presbytery. In a humorous anecdote, Jeter records, “I confess the above fact appears to me a little singular: an Independent Baptist minister under the care of a Pedobaptist presbytery! I should hardly believe it, if it were not confirmed by unquestionable testimony. It indicates, however, the kind and Christian feelings which adorn and recommend our common Christianity.”156 Southern Edwardseans, the very Baptists who fought so vigorously for their right to own slaves, were in fact some of the most congenial denominations toward theological outsiders.

The Southern Baptist Edwards How could a people who extolled Thomas Jefferson also revere Jonathan Edwards?157 How could a denomination forged under the banner of slavery find inspiration from abolitionists? These are just two of the theological puzzles inside

154 Basil Manly Sr., “Notes of a Sermon on Philippians 2:12,13,” in Southern Baptist Sermons on Sovereignty and Responsibility (Harrisonburg: Gano Books, 2003), 23. 155 Botsford, Memoirs, 224. 156 Clopton, A Memoir, 58–59. 157 Men such as Oliver Hart and Richard Furman were ardent patriots who served the Revolutionary cause. Thomas Kidd explains the plight of Baptists in the North and the South: “Indeed, the Baptists of New England saw Jefferson as something of a political savior. Religious dissenters like the Baptists had long suffered persecution in Congregationalist New England, even after they and their fellow New Englanders had fought for liberty in the Revolution. Jefferson had championed religious freedom in Virginia, where Leland, as a traveling preacher, had come to know and love the future president. Jefferson the skeptical deist and Leland the fervent evangelical both believed that government should afford liberty of conscience to its citizens and should not privilege one Christian denomination over another. Their shared beliefs about the unfettered place of religion in public life made fast friends of men from theologically opposite religious traditions. To modern Americans eyes, this public friendship seems a most improbable alliance.” (Thomas Kidd, God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution [New York: Basic Books, 2010], 5–6)

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Jonathan Edwards’s Theology in the Nineteenth-Century Baptist South

of the larger paradox that, according to George Marsden, typifies American religion and culture.158 If one will permit, the relationship between a New England Puritan and nineteenth-century Southern Baptists is similar to the friendship between George Whitefield and Benjamin Franklin during Edwards’s own day. Just as Whitefield’s celebrity brought Franklin a lucrative printing industry, Jonathan Edwards handed Baptists a wealth of theology that greatly aided their quest to save souls. Southern Baptists had no desire to baptize infants or to engage in speculative metaphysics just as Franklin had no intention of returning to the Calvinism of his youth. However, while Franklin was only a dispassionate observer of the first awakening, Southern Baptists were zealous participants in the second (Oliver Hart even listened to Whitefield as a boy). To Southern Edwardseans, Edwards and his New England diadochi represented the best of practical theology. Southern Baptists adopted Edwardsean principles because they helped to better illuminate and apply the dictates of Scripture, something Edwards himself had labored to achieve. Revivalistic, Calvinistic, loosely confessional, and determined to superimpose the basic truths of the gospel upon their world, Baptists in the South were indeed true “Edwardseans.” Southern Baptist Edwardseanism was not an aberration in Jonathan Edwards’s theological legacy, no more than Samuel Hopkins’s abolitionism or his rejection of self-love disqualified him from the title of “Edwardsean.” Instead, Southern Edwardseanism can rightly be regarded as a later development in the same broad New England tradition. In 1852, Edwards Amasa Park, a devoted follower of Samuel Hopkins and Abbot Professor of Theology at Andover Theological Seminary, attempted to define the New England Theology. According to Park, It signifies the formal creed which a majority of the most eminent theologians in New England have explicitly or implicitly sanctioned, during and since the time of [Jonathan] Edwards [Senior]. It denotes the spirit and genius of the system openly avowed or logically involved in their writings. It includes not the peculiarities in which Edwards differed, as he is known to have differed, from the larger part of his most eminent followers, nor the peculiarities in which any one of his followers differed, as some of them did, from the larger part of the others; but it comprehends the principles, with their logical sequences, which the great number of our most celebrated divines have approved expressly or by implication.159

158 George Marsden, Religion and American Culture: A Brief History, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 2018), 6. 159 Edwards Amasa Park, “New England Theology,” Bibliotheca Sacra 9 (1852), 169–217.

The Southern Baptist Edwards

In this sense, by participating in the “spirit” and “principles” of Jonathan Edwards and his successors, nineteenth-century Southern Baptists were Edwardseans continuing to distill the “logical sequences” of Edwards’s thought as it pertained to the salvation of sinners. Oliver Crisp and Douglas Sweeney have identified the New Divinity as “the first phase” in the development of the New England Theology.160 If indeed the New Divinity was the initial phase of New England theology, Southern Edwardseanism was one of its last, retaining the kernel of Jonathan Edwards’s theology and dispensing with the “peculiarities.” The New England theology began in New England, but it did not remain there. If Edwards Amasa Park is indeed the “last Edwardsean,” as he has been duly named, he was not alone in his nineteenth-century struggle to defend the doctrines of Jonathan Edwards.161 In the case of Southern Baptists, perhaps the most fitting nickname that can be given to Jonathan Edwards is that which George Marsden called him in 1999: “the American Augustine.”162 When Baptists reached back to Fuller or Hopkins or Bellamy or Dwight, they were appealing to the Calvins and Luthers of their era, influential men who were themselves reaching back to the most titanic theologian in American history. Southern Edwardseans may or may not have identified themselves as Edwardseans, but their brand of theology was Edwardsean in the same way that John Owen’s or even Jonathan Edwards’s was Augustinian. Their views on divine glory, grace, anthropology, conversion, and even their eschatology were consistent with Edwards’s in some way. Through the Baptists, Jonathan Edwards’s theological legacy endured in the nineteenth-century American South. As a result, Edwardseanism would become the dominant, overarching theological framework for the founders and forerunners of the Southern Baptist Convention.

160 (Oliver D. Crisp, Douglas A. Sweeney, “Introduction,” in After Jonathan Edwards: The Courses of the New England Theology, ed. Oliver D. Crisp, Douglas A. Sweeney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 2) 161 Charles W. Phillips, Edwards Amasa Park: The Last Edwardsean (Gottingen: Vandenoeck & Ruprecht, 2018) 162 George M. Marsden, “Jonathan Edwards, American Augustine,” Books and Culture: A Christian Review 5, no. 6 (1999): 10–12.

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2. What Hath Charleston to do with Northampton?: South Carolina as the Birthplace of Southern Edwardseanism

In his Abstract of Systematic Theology (1887), the first president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, James Petigru Boyce (1827–1888), endorsed a view of definite atonement that he called the “Calvinistic theory.”1 In his mind, this was the predominant “theory of the Regular Baptists of the past.”2 Nevertheless, Boyce believed that any discussion of this doctrine was deficient unless it accounted for one unavoidable Baptist figure: Andrew Fuller (1754–1815). Speaking of the traditional, limited view of the atonement, Boyce observes, “No other [theory] prevailed among those who have held distinctively Calvinistic Baptist sentiments until the days of Andrew Fuller. He, because of his great ability, contributed greatly to the acceptance of the modification which we have just been considering.”3 Summoning the theology of Jonathan Edwards and the New Divinity, Andrew Fuller’s “modified” view of the atonement and his evangelical brand of Calvinism were sweeping across Baptist America, especially in the South.4 According to Boyce, Fuller’s theology was a tectonic shift among Baptists. D. Benedict captured the essence and potency of “Fullerism” when he wrote of Baptists in 1860, “Forty years ago [1820] large bodies of our people were in a state of ferment and agitation, in consequence of some modifications of their old Calvinistic creed, as displayed in the writings of the late Andrew Fuller of Kettering, England. This famous man maintained that the atonement of Christ was general in its nature, but particular in its application, in opposition to our old divines, who held that Christ died for the elect only. He also made a distinction between the natural and moral inability of man.”5

After absorbing the theology of Charles Hodge at Princeton, Boyce represented something of a shift back to confessionalist Calvinism in his home state of South Carolina, a traditionally fertile seedbed for Edwardsean theology. However, by the 1 Definite, or limited, atonement is conventionally understood as the belief that Christ’s death on the cross atoned only for those whom God elected before the world. 2 James P. Boyce, Abstract of Systematic Theology (1887), 317. 3 Ibid., 317. 4 For the influence of Jonathan Edwards on Andrew Fuller, see Chris Chun, The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards in the Theology of Andrew Fuller (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Publishing, 2012) 5 D. Benedict, Fifty Years among the Baptists (New York: Sheldon & Co.; Boston: Gould & Lincoln, 1860), 135. The distinction between natural and moral inability is one that Fuller discovered in Edwards’s acclaimed Freedom of the Will (1754).

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time that Boyce joined the faculty at Furman University, the seeds of Jonathan Edwards’s theology had been firmly planted both in South Carolina and in the Southern Baptist Convention. James P. Boyce was raised in a Southern Edwardsean world. As Walter Wiley Richards has shown, the men who shaped Boyce as a young man were not strict Dortian Calvinists in the Princetonian sense.6 They were Edwardseans. The conversion of Boyce’s mother came under the preaching of Basil Manly, Sr., a committed Edwardsean and co-founder of the Southern Baptist Convention.7 Manly would eventually become “Boyce’s mentor and father in the ministry.”8 Boyce’s own conversion was prompted by the preaching of Richard Fuller (1804–1876), the third president of the Southern Baptist Convention. Like his predecessor R.B.C. Howell, Fuller preferred the Edwardsean emphasis on “man’s free moral agency” rather than “hyper-Calvinist and fatalist” schemes to which so many were “committed inevitably…by their creed.”9 The first church Boyce pastored, First Baptist Church of Columbia, was planted by Hopkinsians.10 The paragon of Regular Baptists, and the namesake of Boyce’s institution, Richard Furman, was the chief exponent of Edwardsean theology in the nineteenth-century American South. Even Boyce’s Sunday School teacher as a boy, H. H. Tucker, was nicknamed the “Jonathan Edwards

6 Walter Wiley Richards, “A Study of the Influence of Princeton Theology upon the Theology of James Petigru Boyce and His Followers with Special Reference to the Works of Charles Hodge” (Th.D. diss., New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, 1964). 7 Manly was preaching the funeral sermon of Rev. John Waldo (1762–1826), another Edwardsean pastor in South Carolina. 8 Timothy George, “The SBJT Forum: The Overlooked Shapers of Evangelicalism,” The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 3, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 76. 9 Richard Fuller, “Predestination,” in Southern Baptist Sermons on Sovereignty and Responsibility, ed. Thomas J. Nettles, 2nd ed. (Harrisburg, VA: Gano Books, 2003), 114. In his sermon “Predestination,” Richard Fuller strongly mirrors the language of Jonathan Edwards’s Freedom of the Will, paving a via media between what Fuller calls the “Libertarian” and “Necessarian” theories of predestination. The latter Fuller links to confessionalist Calvinism. Fuller even goes so far as to reject “a third and moderate school” wherein certain theologians emphasize that God “appoints also the means.” As Fuller explains, this is not sufficient to account for “man’s free moral agency.” (Nettles, 114) From his insistence that God “never acts immediately” in human affairs except when working miracles, to the fact that “Man is a free responsible agent” whose duty is to believe in the Gospel, Richard Fuller’s doctrine of predestination exhibits a heavy Edwardsean/Fullerite bent; R.B.C. Howell, pastor of First Baptist Church of Nashville, Tennessee and second president of the Southern Baptist Convention (1851–1858) also held to a particularly Fullerite version of the atonement which emphasized a general extent of the atonement. (R.B.C. Howell, The Way of Salvation, 5th ed. (Charleston, SC: Southern Baptist Publication Society), 87, 90–91.) 10 According to Greg Wills, Maxcy “was in large measure the founder of First Baptist Church of Columbia.” (Gregory A. Wills, The First Baptist Church of Columbia, South Carolina 1809 to 2002 [Brentwood, TN: Baptist History and Heritage Society, 2003], 23.) Maxcy’s student, William B. Johnson, became the first pastor of FBC Columbia.

South Carolina as the Birthplace of Southern Edwardseanism

of the South,” although this moniker did not so much reflect Tucker’s theology as it did his intellect.11 Indeed, the majority of prominent Baptist leaders in or near Charleston in the early nineteenth century espoused the theology of Jonathan Edwards in some way. As Robert A. Baker records, “It is difficult to list the principal leaders of South Carolina Baptists during this period [1814–1845], but doubtless the names of Richard Furman, James C. Furman, Richard Fuller, William Bullein Johnson, Basil Manly Sr., and Jesse Hartwell were among the foremost.”12 This network of Southern Edwardseans was the very community that nurtured young Boyce. It originated in South Carolina, but it radiated most powerfully from Boyce’s hometown of Charleston. South Carolina was a fitting birthplace for Southern Edwardseanism. Its citizens were renown (or infamous) for their unyielding ability to stand behind conviction. On the eve of the Civil War, President Lincoln still “questioned whether there is, to-day, a majority of the legally qualified voters of any State, except perhaps South Carolina, in favor of disunion.”13 South Carolinians garnered a reputation as a resolute, even tenacious people with a degree of Southern pride unparalleled in the American South. When the English travel writer George Featherstonhaugh traveled through Boyce’s home state in the early 1840s, he was astonished to hear a South Carolinian declare, “If you ask me if I am an American, my answer is, No, sir, I am a South Carolinian.”14 However, while its low country denizens were fiercely territorial, they were not provincialists. From South Carolina came a number of early America’s most capable politicians and intellectuals. Basil Gildersleeve (1831–1924), perhaps the greatest American classicist of the nineteenth century, described his antebellum identity in three ways: “I was a Charlestonian first, Carolinian next, and then a southerner.”15 Gildersleeve’s sense of self-importance was not uncommon in South Carolina. After all, in the Jacksonian era, South Carolinians were some of the most educated, cosmopolitan, and influential citizens in the young nation. Championing the “South Carolina doctrines” during the Nullification crisis, John

11 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-greatdistinguishing-characteristic-h-h-tucker-and-the-battle-for-church-purity-part-i/ 12 Robert A. Baker, The Southern Baptist Convention and Its People 1607–1972 (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1974), 131. 13 Abraham Lincoln, “Message to Congress in Special Session,” July 4, 1861, in Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy F. Balser (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 4:437. 14 George Featherstonhaugh, Excursion Through the Slave States, from Washington on the Potomac to the Frontier of Mexico (London: John Murray, 1844), 2:341. 15 Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, “Formative Influences,” in Soldier and Scholar: Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve and the Civil War, ed. Ward W. Briggs, Jr. (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 35.

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C. Calhoun proved that many South Carolinians even viewed their state as a tiny nation in itself.16 In such an influential state, Charleston was home to many of the South’s most influential ideas, including Jonathan Edwards’s. While the theology of “America’s theologian” permeated almost all of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century Baptist South in some way, Charleston was the centrifugal force from which Southern Edwardseanism would extend its reach.17 No town or state reverberated Edwards’s theology more consistently and more competently than did “the holy city.” As a result, the Southern legacy of Jonathan Edwards, as well as the future of the Southern Baptist Convention, was tied to the pulpit of First Baptist Charleston.

Ad Fontes: First Baptist Church of Charleston, South Carolina In his magisterial Theology in America (2003), E. Brooks Holifield identifies at least four chief varieties of Calvinistic Baptists in America by the mid-nineteenth century: “Baptist Edwardseanism,” “Fullerite Calvinism,” confessional Calvinism, and “an eclectic populist Calvinism.”18 Although each of these strains certainly existed in some form, and while Holifield includes a host of South Carolina Baptists in his historical tome, a closer look at the diversity of Edwardseans in the palmetto state demonstrates how porous and how complex Holifield’s categories become. While not every Baptist in South Carolina qualified as an “Edwardsean,” Jonathan Edwards’s theological legacy stretched well beyond one or two subgroups. Even Baptists with little knowledge of the Northampton pastor were affected substantially by the tradition and the disciples he left behind. With time, the diversity of Southern Baptist theology partially mirrored the diversity within Edwardsean theology. No church demonstrates the elasticity of the term “Edwardsean” better than the oldest Baptist church in the South. Albert Mohler has called the First Baptist Church of Charleston “the source of a theological river that runs through the center of Southern Baptist life and gave birth to the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.”19 This theological spring was also a well of Edwardsean thinking, beginning with the

16 Michael O’Brien, Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 201–03. 17 Robert W. Jenson, America’s Theologian: a Recommendation of Jonathan Edwards (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) 18 E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 282–287. 19 Albert Mohler, “Foreword,” in Soldiers of Christ: Selections from the Writings of Basily Manly, Sr., and Basil Manly, Jr., ed. Michael A.G. Haykin, Roger D. Duke, A. James Fuller (Cape Coral, FL: Founders Press, 2009), xi.

Ad Fontes: First Baptist Church of Charleston, South Carolina

pulpit of Oliver Hart and extending to the very men who would forge the Southern Baptist Convention. Originally from the Philadelphia Association, Oliver Hart (1723–1795) became the chief architect of the Charleston Association, the first such of Baptist churches in the southern United States (est. 1751).20 Like countless other Baptists during his era, Hart was personally impacted by the sweeping ministry of George Whitefield, the most powerful voice of the Great Awakening. He also deeply admired Jonathan Edwards as a revivalist pastor. He relished Edwards’s A Faithful Narrative, modeling his own ministry after the Northampton Sage. However, Hart was not as fond of the Edwardseans. He favored the theology of his contemporary John Gill over the younger Andrew Fuller. In 1793, he lamented to his protégé Richard Furman that Rhode Island College had become a “headquarters” for disseminating “Hopkinsians” or “New Divinity men” into Baptist churches.21 As Furman pointed out in his mentor’s funeral sermon, Hart’s generation was blessed to experience the Great Awakening firsthand.22 As a result, Hart made a scathing distinction between Edwards and Edwardseans that his successor Furman evidently did not. While Richard Furman was somewhat apprehensive of the wooden “system” of the New Divinity, he was never convinced that they posed a legitimate threat to Baptist orthodoxy in South Carolina as Hart did. In fact, Furman and James Manning (1738–1791), the president of Rhode Island College, were friends and corresponded over the importance of filling Baptist pulpits with able young pastors.23 It was by Furman’s recommendation that Hopkinsian Jonathan Maxcy, Manning’s successor, was brought to South Carolina.24 Furman’s ministry in Charleston would allow New Divinity theology to flourish in the Baptist South for several seasons. As the founder of the first Baptist state convention in the United States and as the

20 In 1767, Hart led the Charleston Association to adopt the Philadelphia Confession of Faith (1742), a slightly expanded version of the Second London Confession (1689). 21 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; Oliver Hart to Richard Furman, May 30, 1793, Furman MSS, JBDML 22 Richard Furman, “Rewards of Grace Conferred on Christ’s Faithful People: A Sermon, Occasioned by the Decease of the Rev. Oliver Hart, A.M. (Charleston, 1796); Furman preached the sermon at First Baptist Church of Charleston on February 7, 1796. Hart “departed this life December 31, 1795, in the seventy-third year of his age.” 23 In his letter to Furman in 1791, James M. Manning wrote, “I hope the people of Georgetown are happy as to get a good minister,” referring to John Waldo’s replacement at Georgetown. Waldo had come from James Manning’s school. (“James Manning to Richard Furman,” Richard Furman Papers, Acc. 1960–106 [Box 4, Folder 4], Special Collections and Archives, Furman University, Greenville, S.C.) 24 James A. Rogers, Richard Furman: Life and Legacy (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2001), 77–78.

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moderator of the Charleston Baptist Association for a quarter of a century, Furman most profoundly shaped the eclectic Edwardseanism that would later define South Carolina Baptists. The theological disparity between Hart and Furman was manifested in the very different ways they viewed Rev. John Waldo (1762–1826), an adherent of the New Divinity.25 Furman was a “father in the gospel” to Waldo and “engaged his strict friendship during life.”26 In sharp contrast, the elder Hart celebrated Waldo’s eventual rejection as a pastoral candidate from Georgetown Baptist Church in 1793, writing to Furman that he was “glad the Georgetown people have been better taught than to embrace such sentiments or to approve of such preaching.”27 But Furman never shared his predecessor’s concern for Waldo’s brand of theology. Although not a New Divinity man himself, Furman was a friend to the Hopkinsians and sympathized with their theology. If Hart tried to bar the New Divinity from coming in the front door at Georgetown, they simply entered through the back when Furman temporarily filled the Georgetown pulpit with another breed of Edwardsean. William Staughton, one of Andrew Fuller’s own circle of friends, came to South Carolina from Birmingham, England where he had been baptized by “the Baptist Brainerd” Samuel Pearce (1766–1799).28 In her history of South Carolina Baptists, Leah Townsend records, Mr. Furman’s labors were so effective as to lead to the constitution of thirty-six members as the Georgetown Church in June 1794, and to its admission into the Charleston Association. William Staughton, a licensed preacher but lately arrived, who assisted Mr. Furman in constituting the church, served as pastoral supply for a year, after which the congregation was without a regular pastor. However, John Waldo, who had come to Georgetown from New York in 1793 as a licentiate and as a teacher in an academy, preached for them until the arrival of Rev. Edmund Botsford in 1797.29

25 Waldo’s career was marked by teaching more so than by preaching. Waldo “failed as preacher: But John Waldo was success as a teacher…Earned $1500 a year by his school.” (Cited in Roy Talbert, Jr., Meggan A. Farish, The Antipedo Baptists of Georgetown County, South Carolina, 1710–2010 [Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2015). 26 Harvey T. Cook, ed., A Biography of Richard Furman (Greenville, SC: Baptist Courier Job Rooms, 1913) in G. William Foster, Jr., Life and Works of Dr. Richard Furman, D.D. (Harrisonburg, VA: Sprinkle Publications, 2004), 96. 27 Gillette, Minutes, 256; Oliver Hart to Richard Furman, May 30, 1793, Furman MSS, JBDML. Although Waldo was rejected as full-time pastor, he did subsequently serve as supply preacher in Georgetown. 28 Samuel Pearce Carey, Samuel Pearce: The Baptist Brainerd (UK: Carey Press, 2nd ed., 1913). 29 Leah Townsend, South Carolina Baptists 1670–1805 (Florence, SC: The Florence Printing Company, 1935), 59.

Ad Fontes: First Baptist Church of Charleston, South Carolina

From Waldo to Staughton to Botsford, Richard Furman left his Edwardsean footprint on Georgetown. Like his predecessor Hart, Furman was a student and scion of the Edwardsean tradition, upholding Edwards as a lodestar of conversionist theology. Amazingly, Furman even recommended Edwards’s works as a means for converting sinners!30 However, unlike Hart, Furman was a friend of the Edwardseans. For example, while utilizing Edwards’s helpful distinction between moral and natural ability, Furman also encouraged his listeners to practice “disinterested benevolence,” a Hopkinsian ideal.31 His Edwardseanism, molded around the theology of his contemporary Andrew Fuller rather than that of John Gill, was a different species than that of Hart. In Furman’s funeral sermon, the Edwardsean William Brantly recounted, “Though in his view of Scripture doctrine he followed no man exclusively, yet he was not unwilling to be found coinciding with such men as Doddridge, Fuller, and Dwight. He thought that many of the advocates of exact system in Theology had not deserved well of the cause, and that it accorded better with Christian wisdom to adopt an unmutilated Revelation, than to press it by forced constructions into the service of a system.”32

Richard Furman was first and foremost a Biblicist. His sermons consistently bear witness to his overarching commitment to the authority of Scripture. Nevertheless, it is no coincidence that, of the three figures who aligned most with Furman’s theology, one was Jonathan Edwards’s chief English disciple and another was Edwards’s own grandson. Like Abner Clopton, Furman was amenable to all forms of Edwardsean thought. Aside from the Charleston Confession, the Edwardsean tradition was the most formative theological influence upon his thinking.33 Like Timothy Dwight (and unlike Samuel Hopkins or Joseph Bellamy), Furman preferred a more practical

30 Richard Furman, “Conversion Essential to Salvation,” in The Life and Works of Dr. Richard Furman, D. D., ed. G. William Foster (Harrisonburg, VA: Sprinkle Publications, 2004), 438. 31 Richard Furman, “Of Infant Salvation,” 596; Furman, “An Oration,” 347. 32 Harvey T. Cook, ed., A Biography of Richard Furman (Greenville, SC: Baptist Courier Job Rooms, 1913) in G. William Foster, Jr., Life and Works of Dr. Richard Furman, D.D. (Harrisonburg, VA: Sprinkle Publications, 2004), 221. 33 W. Wiley Richards explains the prevailing authority by the Baptist confessions which held sway among Baptists of Furman’s era: “Furman, Backus, Gano and a host of others seem to have accepted the authority of the Bible apart from critical evaluation. They believed and preached its contents. Having been reared in a theological world predicated upon the dogmas of the Westminster Confession of a hundred years ago as filtered through Baptist consciousness, they found little fault with the formulations of the Philadelphia-Charleston confessions as they pertain to the Bible.” (W. Wiley Richards, Winds of Doctrines: The Origin and Development of Southern Baptist Theology [Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991], 20.)

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brand of Calvinistic theology removed from complex philosophical discussion.34 Both Furman and Dwight were zealous for revival at their respective institutions: Dwight as the eighth president of Yale and Furman as the inaugural president of the first national Baptist denomination in America, the Triennial Convention. However, neither theologian was afraid to associate himself with the New Divinity, the “first indigenous American school of Calvinism.”35 Furthermore, Furman and Dwight also shared a common bond with Fuller and his Particular Baptist colleagues, grounded in a mutual affection for their theological coryphaeus, Jonathan Edwards.36 John R. Fitzmier’s assertion that Timothy Dwight’s works “place him squarely in the broader Edwardsean camp” could likewise be said of Furman.37 Furman’s successor at First Baptist Church of Charleston was Basil Manly, Sr., the eventual president of the University of Alabama and a co-framer of the Southern Baptist Convention. Handpicked by Furman to succeed him, Manly was a former student under Jonathan Maxcy at South Carolina College who called his predecessor “the wisest man I ever knew” and described his pastorate as “the most important

34 Nevertheless, Furman was au courant with many of the philosophical ideas and authors of his day. In Thomas Armitage’s tribute to Furman, he declared, “In general learning he had made such progress as would have ranked him among men of the first intelligence in any country…His studies were chiefly confined to mathematics, metaphysics, belles-lettres, logic, history and theology. He cultivated also an acquaintance with the ancient classics, particularly Homer, Longinus and Quintillian, with whose beauties and precepts he was familiar…There are few men, it is believed, who had their minds more richly stored with the fine passages of Milton, Young, Pope, Addison, and Butler and other great authors than Dr. Furman.” Thomas Armitage, A History of the Baptists; Traced by their Vital Principles and Practices, from the Time of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ to the Year 1889 (New York: Bryan, Taylor, & Co., 1889), 812–13. 35 Joseph A. Conforti, Samuel Hopkins and the New Divinity Movement: Calvinism and Reform in New England between the Great Awakenings (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1981), vii. 36 In June 1805, Fuller wrote to Jonathan Edwards’s grandson Timothy Dwight, “The writings of your grandfather, President Edwards, and of your uncle, the late Dr. Edwards,” have been food to me and many others.” (“To Timothy Dwight,” in Michael A.G. Haykin, ed., The Armies of the Lamb: The Spirituality of Andrew Fuller (Dundas, Ontario: Joshua Press, 2001), 199–200; Richard Furman himself shared correspondence with Fuller’s Baptist associates John Sutcliff, Samuel Pearce, and John Ryland (Robert Baker and Paul Craven, Adventure in Faith: The First Three Hundred Years of First Baptist Church, Charleston, South Carolina (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1982), 221); In 1816, in his sermon Conversion Essential to Salvation, Furman remarked, “How often in particular, are the writings of Allen, Baxter, Bunyan (unpolished as he was), Boston, Doddridge, Stennett, Edwards, Newton, and many others, now blessed to this great purpose; they themselves having long since left the world! – Delightful thought! Thousands, probably, whom they never knew nor could know on earth, will in the worlds of light greet them as fathers in the gospel.” Richard Furman, Conversion Essential to Salvation (Charleston: J. Hoff Publishing, 1816), 19. 37 John R. Fitzmier, New England’s Moral Legislator: Timothy Dwight, 1752–1817 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 18.

Ad Fontes: First Baptist Church of Charleston, South Carolina

period” in the history of FBC Charleston.38 Timothy George has called Manly “one of the most significant shapers of the Southern Baptist tradition” who served to “pass the torch of Baptist orthodoxy and evangelical Calvinism from the giants of a bygone era, the Furmans, Fullers, and Mercers, to a new rising generation of powerful thinkers and doers, the Boyces, Mells, and Brantley, Jrs.”39 No less confessional than Hart and no less Edwardsean than Furman, Manly was a Jacksonian Democrat who fiercely defended states’ rights with Calhoun and the Nullifiers, embodying at least three out of Holifield’s four Calvinistic Baptist strains: Baptist Edwardsean, confessional Calvinist, and eclectic populist Calvinist.40 Unlike Furman who vaunted Fuller’s Essays to one of his five all-time favorite volumes, Manly seemed to imbibe directly from the well of Edwards himself. According to Tom Nettles, “In Manly’s case his acquaintance with Edwards was direct.”41 In February 1830, Manly was gifted a set of books from Oliver Hart’s library, eventually bequeathing most of the volumes to Furman Academy. However, he kept several to himself, including works by John Owen, Richard Baxter, John Gill, John Brine, Isaac Backus, Abel Morgan, and one he lists simply as “Edwards Against Chauncy.” In his correspondence and in his meditations, Manly noted his reading of Edwards and even his anticipation to read him.42 Hart, Furman, and Manly were Southern Edwardseans, but each in their own way. The third, fourth, and fifth pastors of First Baptist Church of Charleston provide a clear window into the deep, albeit heterogeneous, river of Edwardsean theology that flowed powerfully through the nascent Charleston Association, South Carolina Baptist Convention, and the Southern Baptist Convention itself.43 The confluence of Edwardsean thought in South Carolina was not monolithic; however,

38 James A. Rogers, Richard Furman: Life and Legacy (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2001), 220; Basil Manly, Mercy and Judgment: A Discourse, Containing Some Fragments of the History of the Baptist Church in Charleston, S.C. (Charleston, 1837), 52–54. 39 Timothy George, “The SBJT Forum: The Overlooked Shapers of Evangelicalism,” The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 3, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 76–77. 40 Richard Furman was much more old school in his political theology than Manly. Furman and John Adams’ Federalist running mate Charles Pinckney were good friends, and Furman even supported Pinckney’s eventual candidacy for the presidency. Therefore, Furman was politically opposed to the Jeffersonian John Leland and not as “Jacksonian” as his successor Manly. For Furman’s political theology, see First Freedom: The Beginning and End of Religious Liberty, ed. Jason G. Duesing, Thomas White, Malcolm B. Yarnell III, 2nd ed (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, 2016), 67–75. 41 Tom Nettles, The Baptists: Key People Involved in Forming a Baptist Identity, Vol. 2: Beginnings in America (Scotland, UK: Mentor, 2010), 275 42 Ibid., 275. 43 The first pastor of FBC Charleston was William Screven, the first Baptist pastor in the South. After Screven’s death, a maelstrom of internecine conflict ensued in the church. Thomas Simmons was the second pastor of FBC Charleston, whose tenure was defined by division and separation.

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it was substantial and broad enough to unify the shapers of an entire denomination around a common school of theology. With this river springing from Charleston, its theological tributaries inevitably flowed to the rest of the state and into the Southern Baptist Convention.

Jonathan Maxcy and Theological Education in South Carolina While Baptists were among the “religious outsiders” in early America, in South Carolina, opportunities for education did not necessarily preclude Baptists. Religious dissenters had been tolerated even after the colony established the Church of England as the state church in 1706.44 As a result, whether a Southern Baptist minister held to the theology of Jonathan Edwards was largely determined by which school or schools he attended. Southern Edwardseanism often hinged on formal theological education. For example, among the beneficiaries of the first Baptist educational fund were Edwardseans William T. Brantly, Jesse Mercer, Basil Manly, and John Mitchell Roberts. The latter established a classical school in Furman’s hometown of High Hills of Santee which itself became the site of Edwardsean education financed by the Baptist fund. Many of these same students were funneled to Columbia where, under New Divinity man Jonathan Maxcy (1768–1820), South Carolina College quickly became the academic headquarters for Edwardsean theology. On the other hand, schools grounded in the Westminster Confession stymied any significant inculcation of Edwards’s theology among Presbyterians. As Mark Noll insists, “Among American Presbyterians, instinctive Augustinianism was their strongest link to Edwards.”45 Sean Michael Lucas has demonstrated how Southern Presbyterians (most especially Robert Lewis Dabney) dismissed much of Jonathan Edwards’s thought as lofty, metaphysical speculation.46 Three decades after Maxcy’s tenure at South Carolina College, president James Henley Thornwell could not reconcile his Presbyterianism with several aspects of Edwardsean theology. According

44 In general, most minority denominations were welcome in Charleston society. For instance, in 1820, Charleston boasted the largest community of Jews in North America. (O’Brien, Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860, 278) 45 Mark Noll, “Jonathan Edwards, Edwardsean Theologies, and the Presbyterians,” in After Jonathan Edwards: The Courses of the New England Theology, ed. Oliver D. Crisp, Douglas A. Sweeney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 195–96. 46 Sean Michael Lucas, “’He Cuts Up Edwardsism by the Roots’: Robert Lewis Dabney and the Edwardsian Legacy in the Nineteenth-Century South,” 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, MI: Baker Academic, 2003), 204, 209–211. Dabney and other Southern Presbyterians also expressed frustration toward New Divinity theologians and their doctrine of disinterested benevolence in regard to the abolition of slavery. (212)

Jonathan Maxcy and Theological Education in South Carolina

to Thornwell, Edwards’s idea that personal identity was derived in the “arbitrary constitution of God” defied “the plainest intuitions of intelligence.” Edwards’s belief in sin as the privation of good was “a mere juggle with words” which carried “a strong tendency to dissipate the consciousness of sin.”47 Thornwell’s disdain for the New Divinity was equally severe.48 Consequently, Edwardseanism did not prosper during Thornwell’s presidency as it had under Maxcy. Among Baptists, however, the narrative was much different. Lucas depicts this unlikely Edwardsean legacy in the nineteenth-century South: Though an “Old School” Princeton stream existed in nineteenth-century southern Baptist life as well, particularly through Southern Baptist Theological Seminary founders James P. Boyce and Basil Manly Jr., Edwards’ commitment to revivalism and “moderate” Calvinism made him a beloved southern Baptist hero well into the twentieth century. Edwards may have been chagrined that his best disciples in the nineteenth-century South were Baptists and not Presbyterians. But he probably would have preferred their fellowship to Dabney and his brethren, who sought to “cut up Edwardsism by the roots.”49

Even for those in the Princeton stream, no such anti-Edwardsean spirit existed among Baptists in the South, at least with Dabney’s hostility. Jonathan Edwards was indeed a Southern Baptist “hero,” as Lucas points out. However, Baptist Edwardseanism did have its ebb and flow. Two events in particular – two hires - represent the rise and fall of Edwardsean theology in South Carolina and in the Southern Baptist Convention: (1) the hiring of Jonathan Maxcy as the first president of South Carolina College in 1805 (2) and the hiring of James P. Boyce to replace the deceased James S. Mims on the theological faculty at Furman University in 1855.50 Remarkably, Jonathan Edwards casts his long shadow over each instance. Jonathan Maxcy was just twenty-four years old when he was appointed president of Rhode Island College (later Brown University) in 1791. The precocious yet sickly theologian was to be the youngest college president of his generation. He also influenced Northern and Southern Edwardseanism in a way that few others did or even could. From the beginning, it seemed, Maxcy was destined for pastoral and academic greatness. Just a few months after the surprising death of his pastor

47 Cited in Lucas; James Henley Thornwell, The Collected Writings of James Henley Thornwell, ed. J. B. Adger, 4 vols. (1871–73; reprint, Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth Trust, 1974), 1:350, 381–382. 48 Thornwell excoriated Edwards’s New England successors as those who “made the Bible an appendix to their shallower and more sophistical ethics.” (Thornwell, Collected Writings, 1:582) 49 Lucas, “’He Cuts Up Edwardsism by the Roots’: Robert Lewis Dabney and the Edwardsian Legacy in the Nineteenth-Century South,” 213–14. 50 This is not to say that each event is the sole cause of Edwardsean ascendancy or decline, but rather that each event was a major turning point in the theological trajectory of the state and in the South.

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and predecessor James Manning, Maxcy’s ordination service in 1791 at the First Baptist Church in Providence was a who’s who of American Baptist life: “Rev. Samuel Stillman, D.D., of Boston, Mass. Preached the ordination sermon, Rev. Hezekiah Smith, D.D., of Haverhill, Mass. gave the charge, Rev. Isaac Backus, of Middleborough, Mass. presented the right hand of fellowship, Rev. Benjamin Foster, D.D., of New York, made the introductory prayer, and the consecrating prayer was made by Rev. William Van Horn, of Scotch Plains, N.J.”51 Exactly one year later, Maxcy resigned his pastorate at FBC Providence and assumed the presidency at Rhode Island College as Manning’s successor and as a symbol of the emerging Baptist intellectualism in America. In marked contrast to Oliver Hart and consistent with many other Rhode Island Baptists, Maxcy made almost no distinction between the theology of Jonathan Edwards and his successors when he boasted of the “penetrating sagacity of an Edwards, or Hopkins.”52 In his memoir of Maxcy, Romeo Elton boasted that Maxcy’s “views on the Atonement are in unison with those of President Edwards.”53 In his two-part “A Discourse, Designed to Explain the Doctrine of Atonement” (1796), Maxcy defended a moral governmental view of the atonement, a staple doctrine of the New Divinity.54 His “Discourse” was eventually anthologized in Edwards Amasa Park’s edited volume on the doctrine of atonement, essentially cementing Maxcy in the pantheon of New Divinity theologians.55 Recognized by New Englanders for his New England theology, Maxcy brought Northern Edwardseanism to the Southern classroom. Denying that Christ’s death satisfied either commutative or distributive justice, Maxcy contended that Christ satisfied “public justice,” whereby “the nature of atonement was such, that though it rendered full satisfaction to justice, yet it inferred no obligation on justice for the deliverance of sinners, but left their deliverance

51 Romeo Elton, “Memoir of the Rev. Jonathan Maxcy, D.D., Second President of Brown University,” in The Literary Remains of Rev. Jonathan Maxcy, D.D., ed. Romeo Elton (New Haven, CT, 1844), 12–13. 52 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, CT, 1844), 151. 53 Elton, “Memoir,” 17. 54 Oliver Crisp has described the New Divinity version of the governmental theory of atonement as “penal non-substitution.” (Oliver Crisp, “Non-Penal Substitution,” International Journal of Systematic Theology Vol. 9, no. 4 (October 2007), 415–433. In The Moral Governmental Theory of Atonement: Re-Envisioning Penal Substitution, I contend that moral governmental theory was actually another type of penal substitution. (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2021) 55 Edwards Amasa Park, ed., The Atonement: Discourses and Treatises by Edwards, Smalley, Maxcy, Emmons, Griffin, Burge, and Weeks (Boston: Congregational Board of Publication, 1859).

Jonathan Maxcy and Theological Education in South Carolina

an act of pure grace.”56 In Maxcy’s view, the deity of Christ “made his sufferings answer all the ends of moral government, so as to render the salvation of sinners consistent or possible.”57 According to Maxcy, Christ’s atonement in itself was not the efficient cause of salvation. Instead, as a public satisfaction and a universal atonement, it made salvation “possible” for all to believe in the gospel. In this scheme, faith itself is the efficient cause of salvation, not the work of Christ. The Maxcean atonement has no intrinsic worth or value nor is anything exchanged personally to the sinner. Rather, as a public vindication of God’s justice and moral governance, divine honor is defended in such a way that God can “manifest divine pleasure against sin” and freely pardon those sinners who are predestined to believe. Since nothing is transferred individually to the believer and no righteousness can rightfully be imputed as theirs, the “value” of the atonement is found in its bold expression of God’s character, not in any quantifiable, pecuniary sense.58 Therefore, as Maxcy explains, “The sufferings of Christ appear to have been available to the procurement of salvation, so far as they portrayed God’s displeasure against sin, and evinced the infinite value he set upon his own character and law.”59 Maxcy’s Edwardseanism was characterized by de-commercialized language and an emphasis upon the satisfaction of justice. Christ “paid” the full penalty of the law equivalent to the dishonor incurred by sin, but he did not “pay” a sin debt as if the sinner owed a sum to the Moral Governor. In such a case, grace could be demanded. The atonement was not a literal payment nor is it the actual punishment under the law; it is an exhibition of the divine displeasure against sin equivalent to the damnation of sinners. In this framework, Christ does not substitute himself individually in the place of sinners, but his “atonement is a substitute for punish-

56 Jonathan Maxcy, “A Discourse, Designed to Explain the Doctrine of Atonement. In Two Parts, Part II,” in The Literary Remains of Rev. Jonathan Maxcy, D.D., ed. Romeo Elton (New Haven, CT, 1844), 72. 57 Ibid., 78. 58 In his sermon “Justification Through Christ, An Act of Free Grace,” Jonathan Edwards Jr. avers, “I do not think the merit of Christ is actually transferred to believers, or, that his righteousness is so imputed to them as to become, to all intents and purposes, their own righteousness.” (Jonathan Edwards Jr. “Justification Through Christ, An Act of Free Grace,” in The Atonement: Discourses and Treatises by Edwards, Smalley, Maxcy, Emmons, Griffin, Burge, and Weeks, ed. Edwards Amasa Park (Boston: Congregational Board of Publication, 1859), 55. See Obbie Tyler Todd, “A Public Atonement: The Public Nature of Sin and Salvation in the American Moral Governmental Theory of Atonement,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 21, no. 3 (2019): 251–263. 59 Jonathan Maxcy, “A Discourse, Designed to Explain the Doctrine of Atonement,” in The Atonement: Discourses and Treatises by Edwards, Smalley, Maxcy, Emmons, Griffin, Burge, and Weeks, ed. Edwards Amasa Park (Boston: Congregational Board of Publication, 1859), 89.

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ments.”60 The Maxcean atonement supports Daniel W. Cooley’s and Douglas A. Sweeney’s contention that “the New England theory is a non-distributive form of penal substitution.”61 Maxcy’s view was the moral governmental theology of the New Divinity, and Maxcy’s disciples would transfer his Edwardsean thinking to the Southern Baptist Convention. While Jonathan Edwards never qualified his doctrine of atonement in exactly these terms, according to Oliver Crisp, this new species of atonement theory carried Edwards’s theological DNA: “The evidence suggests that the seeds of the New England governmental view of the atonement were sown by Edwards himself. But he did not have the opportunity, or perhaps the inclination, to develop this in his own work. So the views expressed by Bellamy, Samuel Hopkins, and Jonathan Edwards, Jr., to name the three most important exponents of the doctrine among the theologians of the New Divinity, were, one might think, a doctrine innovation in one respect. But they were building on some ideas latent in the work of Edwards Senior, and they did, it appears, have his sanction for doing so.”62

Via the New Divinity, the atonement theology of Jonathan Edwards found Southern embodiment in Jonathan Maxcy, giving credence to Peter Jauhiainen’s claim that the theme of moral government “became a hallmark of Hopkinsianism.”63 Remarkably, this trope would emerge in the soteriology of almost every Southern Edwardsean thinker in the early nineteenth century South. In his work on the atonement, Maxcy even cites Jonathan Edwards Jr., whom he replaced as president of Union College in 1802 and who made the exact same distinctions between distributive,

60 Jonathan Maxcy, “A Discourse, Designed to Explain the Doctrine of Atonement. In Two Parts, Part II,” 70. 61 Daniel W. Cooley and Douglas A. Sweeney, “The Edwardseans and the Atonement,” in A New Divinity: Transatlantic Reformed Evangelical Debates during the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Mark Jones and Michael A. G. Haykin (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018), 122. Cooley and Sweeney explain, “Instead of Christ being the substitute victim for man, Christ’s sufferings are substituted for man’s punishment. Instead of the atonement being distributed to each one of God’s elect individually, it is construed as a collective satisfaction for all who believe.” (122) 62 Oliver D. Crisp, “The Moral Government of God: Jonathan Edwards and Joseph Bellamy on the Atonement,” in After Jonathan Edwards: The Courses of the New England Theology, ed. Oliver D. Crisp, Douglas A. Sweeney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 78–79. For a helpful dissertation tracing the “genetic link” between Edwards and the Edwardsean view of atonement, see Daniel W. Cooley, “The New England Theology and Atonement: Jonathan Edwards to Edwards Amasa Park,” PhD diss., Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (2014). 63 Peter Jauhiainen, “Samuel Hopkins and Hopkinsianism,” in After Jonathan Edwards: The Courses of the New England Theology, ed. Oliver D. Crisp, Douglas A. Sweeney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 108.

Maxcy and Johnson

commutative, and public justice as Maxcy did.64 Before moving to South Carolina, Maxcy came under attack from a number of Baptists over his rejection of the imputation of Adam’s sin, another characteristic belief of the New Divinity. Along with his defense of a general rather than a limited atonement, Maxcy upheld all three of the chief theological distinctives of the Hopkinsian atonement.65 He imparted these Edwardsean doctrines to the next generation of South Carolina Baptists. Chief among them was the eager William B. Johnson.

Maxcy and Johnson Beyond Charleston, the web of Edwardseanism in South Carolina began to take shape when Richard Furman wielded his political influence in the state to recommend Maxcy (a fellow Federalist) as the first president of South Carolina College in 1804.66 Furman and Maxcy had developed a friendship via letter-writing while Maxcy was president of Rhode Island College.67 After his arrival in Columbia, not only did Maxcy utilize his position to promote Edwardsean theology; according to Greg Wills, Maxcy “was in large measure the founder of First Baptist Church of Columbia.”68 Five years after Maxcy arrived in South Carolina, a young Baptist minister named William B. Johnson moved to Columbia to receive private theological instruction from Maxcy. Years after being appointed the first pastor of First Baptist Church of Columbia, the man who would become the fourth president of

64 Jonathan Maxcy, “A Discourse, Designed to Explain the Doctrine of Atonement. In Two Parts, Part II,” 74; In his sermon “Grace Consistent with Atonement,” Edwards Jr. says, “I find the word justice to be used three distinct senses; sometimes it means commutative justice, sometimes distributive justice, and sometimes what may be called general or public justice.” (Jonathan Edwards Jr., “Sermon II: Grace Consistent with Atonement,” in The Atonement, Discourses and Treatises by Edwards, Smalley, Maxcy, Emmons, Griffin, Burge, and Weeks, ed. Edwards A. Park [Boston: Congregational Board of Publication, 1859], 20.) 65 See Holifield, Theology in America, 283. 66 According to Henry Allen Tupper, “It may not be improper to state here that Dr. Furman suggested to the Board of Trustees of the South Carolina College the name of Dr. Maxcy, its first president, whose magnetic power over students was never surpassed. We have seen tears in the eyes of the late Chief Justice O’Neal, and heard the tones, all tremulous with emotion, of the elder Dr. Manly, as they alluded to the strains of wisdom and eloquence which in the class-room poured from the lips of their singularly gifted instructor.” (H. A. Tupper, Two Centuries of the First Baptist Church of South Carolina 1683–1883 [Baltimore: R. H. Woodward and Company, 1889], 210.) 67 On October 26, 1795, Jonathan Maxcy penned a heartfelt letter to Furman soliciting funds on behalf of Rhode Island College, for which Maxcy was elected president pro tempore on September 7, 1792 and eventually became its second president in 1797. 68 Gregory A. Wills, The First Baptist Church of Columbia, South Carolina 1809 to 2002 (Brentwood, TN: Baptist History and Heritage Society, 2003), 23.

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the Triennial Convention (1814) and the first president of the Southern Baptist Convention (1845) looked back upon the advantages of moving to Columbia in 1809 and considered the “privilege of my intercourse with Rev’d Dr. Jonathan Maxcy the chief.”69 According to Hortense Woodson, Johnson’s biographer, “If the erudite Staughton and the unpretentious Botsford were Johnson’s mentors in his formative years, the accomplished Jonathan Maxcy was the preceptor of his maturity.”70 In this unique Paul-Timothy relationship, Johnson absorbed Maxcy’s New England theology and became an especially staunch defender of the moral governmental view of the atonement.71 It was a view he also shared with Richard Furman, although the latter never espoused his doctrine of atonement in quite such exclusive terms.72 Nevertheless, the fact that the first president of the Southern Baptist Convention held strongly to a moral governmental instead of a penal substitutionary view of the atonement is one of the strongest theological evidences of the enduring legacy of Jonathan Edwards in the nineteenth century Baptist South.73 From the beginning, the theological color of the SBC had a distinctive Edwardsean hue. In 1848, when William B. Johnson wrote to Furman professor of theology James S. Mims (1817–1855) that most South Carolina Baptists were “moderate Calvinists,” he was celebrating the pervasive web of Edwardsean theology in the state.74 For Johnson, “moderate” Calvinism was virtually synonymous with the New Divinity. In fact, Johnson had begun absorbing New Divinity theology from adolescence. In Georgetown, he attended the local Boys’ Academy ran by Rev. John Waldo, a New Divinity man whom Johnson admired as a teacher. Years later, in his own

69 William B. Johnson, “Reminiscences,” South Carolina Library, University of South Carolina, 39. 70 Hortense C. Woodson, Giant in the Land: The Life of William B. Johnson (Springfield, MO: Particular Baptist Press, 2005), 21. 71 An excellent example of Johnson’s moral governmental view of the atonement can be found in his “Love Characteristic of the Deity” (Charleston, SC, 1823), 17. According to Michael Haykin, Johnnson was an “ardent advocate of this governmental view of the atonement, which he appears to have learned from Maxcy when Johnson lived in Columbia between 1809 and 1811.” (“Great Admirers of the Transatlantic Divinity” in After Jonathan Edwards: The Courses of the New England Theology, ed. Oliver D. Crisp, Douglas A. Sweeney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)), 204. 72 Furman frequently used language of “the Moral Government of the deity” and sin having “offended and dishonored the Most High.” However, in the very same sermons, Furman could also speak of the fact that “this righteousness of the Son of God is imputed to those who believe in him.” (“On the Analogy Between the Dispensations of Grace by the Gospel, and a Royal Marriage Feast” in Life and Works of Dr. Richard Furman, D.D. (Harrisonburg, VA: Sprinkle Publications, 2004), 470–71) 73 This is not to say that Jonathan Edwards himself did not hold to a penal substitutionary view as well. His successors, however, such as Joseph Bellamy and Samuel Hopkins, held almost exclusively to a moral governmental view of the atonement. 74 William B. Johnson, letter to James S. Mims, March 25, 1848 (William B. Johnson Papers, James B. Duke Library, Furman University); cited in Gregory A. Wills, “The SBJT Forum: Overlooked Shapers of Evangelicalism,” Southern Baptist Journal of Theology, 3(1) (Spring 1999), 87.

Maxcy and Johnson

schools, Johnson even used Latin and English grammars written by Waldo.75 In his letter to Mims, Johnson commended his fellow Edwardsean for being “imbued with the Spirit of ‘New England Theology.’”76 However, as has been demonstrated, the Edwardseanism of nineteenth century South Carolina was a bricolage of different Calvinistic allegiances, styles, and influences. For instance, while Johnson was opposed to confessions and creeds, most South Carolinians generally accepted their use. Richard Furman, with whom Johnson led the establishment of the South Carolina Convention in 1821, embodied a balance of confessionalist and Edwardsean Calvinism. While Furman favored the theology of Andrew Fuller and modeled his Quarterly Concert of Prayer for World Missions directly from Jonathan Edwards’s 1748 concert of prayer, his protégé Johnson was influenced by American Edwardseans more so than by Fuller or Edwards himself.77 David Allen’s contention that William B. Johnson’s “view on extent is that of Andrew Fuller” requires a degree of qualification.78 While Allen is correct to observe that Johnson “reflected Fuller’s views” in some way, this should not presuppose Fuller as the origin of Johnson’s larger view of the atonement. Through the tutelage of Jonathan Maxcy, Johnson could be more aptly described as an Hopkinsian or Maxcean Baptist. In many respects, Samuel Hopkins and Andrew Fuller represented two different permutations of general atonement.79 For Fuller, the general nature of the atonement was mostly derived in an evangelistic duty to declare the Gospel sincerely to all nations and to fulfill Christ’s Great Commission. As a Particular Baptist, Fuller did not believe the atonement was a real universal provision for sinners; instead the infinite merit of Christ’s work was sufficient to save all and to grant an authentic gospel call. For Hopkins and Maxcy and Johnson, by comparison, the atonement was actually universal, grounded more in the nature of God and the freedom of pardoning grace. As Joseph Conforti explains, “Ultimately, Hopkins’s belief in the benevolence of the Deity led him to adopt a liberal Calvinist interpretation of the atonement. Thus the New Divinity evolved into a novel synthesis of Hyper-Calvinist and liberal Calvinist doctrines.”80 It is no coincidence, therefore, that the sermon in which William B. Johnson expounded most clearly upon his 75 76 77 78

Woodson, Giant in the Land, 4. Wills, “Overlooked Shapers of Evangelicalism,” 87. James A. Rogers, Richard Furman: Life and Legacy, 208 David L. Allen, The Extent of the Atonement: A Historical and Critical Review (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, 2016), 653. 79 Fuller was, of course, an English Particular Baptist and Hopkins an American Congregationalist. Fuller also emphasized the efficient “application” of the atonement in a way that Hopkins did not. Fuller confessed, “I reckon strict Calvinism to be my own system.” (Fuller, Memoir, Works of Andrew Fuller, 1:77) 80 Joseph A. Conforti, Samuel Hopkins and the New Divinity Movement: Calvinism and Reform in New England Between the Great Awakenings (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1981), 118–119.

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moral governmental view of the atonement was entitled “Love Characteristic of the Deity.”81 In this message, Michael Haykin observes, “Johnson spoke of the death of Christ in unmistakable New Divinity terms.”82 Both Johnson and Fuller were influenced by the New Divinity and their doctrines of atonement each exhibited strong governmental tropes. Seeking to mold Fuller into his own image, Johnson even “contradicted the claim that Andrew Fuller believed in imputation; he rather rejected it, Johnson said.”83 Both men also invoked Edwards. Fuller not only praised Edwards to his grandson Timothy Dwight; he also applauded the efforts of Jonathan Edwards Jr. and Samuel Hopkins to his friends in the Baptist Missionary Society.84 However, unlike Fuller, Johnson was not shaped as much by Edwards himself and thus did not, for example, maintain a limited, penal substitution in the way that Fuller did or at least attempted to do. In 1830, fellow Edwardsean Jesse Mercer confirmed that Fuller “contends for the atonement, as made to law and justice, as satisfaction for a crime, and not as payment of a debt,” however, contrary to Johnson’s claim, Fuller “never thought of denying imputation, or even substitution.”85 Ultimately, Johnson denied the traditional doctrine of imputation in a much more outspoken sense.86 When Johnson quoted Fuller and Edwards in order to deny that Christ’s righteousness was imputed as justification, Furman theology professor J. L. Reynolds charged that New Divinity men represented “a new phase of philosophical infidelity…which pretends reverence while it really insults -, which like Judas, betrays the Son of God with a kiss.”87 After quoting Fuller and Edwards in context, Reynolds argued, “This is what Edwards and Fuller mean, when their writings are fully quoted, and not partially for the purpose of recommending, under the sanction of their 81 This sermon was delivered before the Charleston Baptist Association in 1822. 82 Michael A.G. Haykin, “Great Admirers of the Transatlantic Divinity,” in After Jonathan Edwards: The Courses of the New England Theology, ed. Oliver D. Crisp, Douglas A. Sweeney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 204. 83 Wills, The First Baptist Church of Columbia, South Carolina, 50. 84 See footnote 26; Andrew Fuller once wrote to John Ryland, “Dr. Edwards, Dr. Hopkins, and others of their [i.e. American] best divines justly inveigh against human authority in religion.” (Haykin, Michael A.G., ed., The Armies of the Lamb: The Spirituality of Andrew Fuller (Dundas, Ontario: Joshua Press, Inc., 2001), 139); In The Atonement of Christ (1854), Fuller writes, “Redemption by Jesus Christ was accomplished, not by a satisfaction that should preclude the exercise of grace in forgiveness, but in which the displeasure of God against sin being manifested, mercy to the sinner might be exercised without any suspicion of his having relinquished his regards for righteousness.” (Andrew Fuller, The Atonement of Christ: and the Justification of the Sinner (New York, NY: American Tract Society, 1854), 94) 85 Jesse Mercer, “Ten Letters, Addressed to the Rev. Cyrus White, in reference to the Scriptural View of the Atonement” (Washington, GA, 1830), 11 (Letter IV). 86 William B. Johnson, “Reminiscences,” South Carolina Library, University of South Carolina, 39. 87 J. L. Reynolds, “On Imputation,” Southern Baptist, 14 March 1849, 2.

“Traditional” Southern Baptist Theology

names, a portentous error, which they expressly and repeatedly condemned.”88 Reynolds clearly saw Hopkins, not Fuller, in Johnson’s theology. While Fuller made the critical Edwardsean distinction between moral and natural inability, he never defined sin in quite such voluntarist terms as that of the New Divinity, who insisted that sin was found chiefly in the sinner’s sinning, not in being accounted sinful due to Adam’s transgression. Contra David Allen, Johnson’s governmental doctrine of the atonement was, in a real sense, more Hopkinsian than Fullerite. Even in its Southern form, Edwardseanism was a complex organism. Furman, Johnson, and Manly were all Edwardseans, but with theological variations among them.

“Traditional” Southern Baptist Theology The mosaic of Southern Edwardseans in South Carolina calls into question the alleged theological dichotomy between Regular and Separate Baptists in the nineteenth century.89 Former ERLC president Richard Land is typical of many nonCalvinistic Southern Baptists when he avers, “Why delve into Southern Baptists’ history in such detail? First and foremost, the record must be set straight. Ever since the First Great Awakening, the Separate Baptist Sandy Creek Tradition has been the melody for Southern Baptists, with Charleston and other traditions providing harmony. Southern Baptists are immersed in Sandy Creek, If the average Southern Baptist is ‘scratched,’ he or she will bleed Sandy Creek. Separate Baptists are the stock, and the other traditions, the seasoning in the Southern Baptist stew.”90

As has been shown, contrary to Land’s illustrative case for Sandy Creek supremacy in the SBC, the central role of Charleston Baptists in the genesis of the Southern Baptist Convention is indubitable. It would seem that the founders and forerunners of the Southern Baptist Convention were heavily “immersed” in a Charleston stream. Still, through an Edwardsean lens, it seems that the polarity many contemporary Southern Baptists have synthetically engineered between the Charleston and Sandy Creek traditions is a simplistic and overly generalized narrative which sanitizes the finer points of Baptist history. Edmund Botsford (1745–1819), one of Richard 88 Reynolds, Southern Baptist, 21 March 1849, 2–3. 89 Tom Hicks, “Theological Continuity Between Sandy Creek and Charleston,” 6 July 2017, https:// founders.org/2017/07/06/theological-continuity-between-sandy-charleston/ 90 Richard Land, “Congruent Election: Understanding Salvation from an ‘Eternal Now’ Perspective,” in Whosoever Will: A Biblical-Theological Critique of Five-Point Calvinism, ed. David L. Allen, Steve W. Lemke (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, 2010), 50.

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Furman’s most trusted disciples, “contributed, in a considerable degree, especially in the Southern states, to bring about a happy and lasting union of the two orders” of Regular and Separate Baptists.91 Richard Furman himself, for instance, was converted under the preaching of Separate Baptist Edwardsean Joseph Reese (1732–1795) in 1772 in the Carolina hill country where he was raised.92 According to Robert A. Baker, Evan Pugh and Joseph Reese were “a vanguard of a new Breed in South Carolina, uniting the strengths of both the Regulars and the Separates.” Richard Furman was the “finest example of this union.”93 Reese would also ordain Furman, who would thereafter consider Reese his “spiritual father.”94 While the Sandy Creek and Charleston traditions have often been juxtaposed, the pastor of FBC Charleston demonstrates that Regular and Separate streams of Baptists did not necessarily represent diametrical opposites.95 Though not sufficient to explain every jot and tittle of Baptist identity, Edwardseanism was very often the common bond which tethered Baptists of different stripes. Furthermore, perhaps nothing is more revealing of the theological leanings of the men who helped shape the Southern Baptist Convention and the Edwardsean sympathies between Regular and Separate Baptists than the names of their children. Of Richard Furman’s ten sons, two were named John Gano (the first died in infancy), named after the Particular Baptist missionary sent out by the Philadelphia Association in 1755 who contributed significantly to the merging of Regular and Separate Baptist churches.96 Interestingly, another of Furman’s sons was named

91 Charles D. Mallary, Memoirs of Elder Edmund Botsford (Charleston: W. Riley, 1832), 43. 92 Nettles describes the scene in the South Carolina upcountry: “Revival of the Separate Baptist variety had just begun in the High Hills under the preaching of an Elijah named Joseph Reese. The Furman attended services under Reese late in 1771. After having heard Reese preach the Edwardsian conversionism of the Separate Baptists and the believer’s baptism of the Baptists, the sixteen-year-old Furman set out to study these issues for himself.” (Tom Nettles, The Baptists: Key People Involved in Forming a Baptist Identity, Volume Two: Beginnings in America [Fearn, Ross-shire, Scotland: Christian Focus Publications, 2005], 127.) 93 Robert A. Baker and Paul J. Craven, Jr., Adventure in Faith: The First Three Hundred Years of First Baptist Church, Charleston, South Carolina (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1982), 189. 94 James A. Rogers, Richard Furman: Life and Legacy (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2001), 18. 95 David Allen concurs with Richard Land and insists, “Founders Ministries has chiefly erred in assigning the melody to the Charleston tradition in Southern Baptist life.” (David L. Allen, Steve W. Lemke, ed. Whosoever Will (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, 2010), 105); While Rick Patrick has made the helpful distinction between “traditionalist” and “originalist,” he also states, “we trace our theological stream from the General Baptists in England in the 17th century to the Sandy Creek tradition in the American South in the 18th and 19th centuries.” (Rick Patrick, “The Rise of Soteriological Traditionalism,” 6 September 2016, https://theologicalmatters.com/2016/09/06/therise-of-soteriological-traditionalism/) 96 W. Wiley Richards, Winds of Doctrines: The Origin and Development of Southern Baptist Theology (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991), 12–13.

“Traditional” Southern Baptist Theology

Henry Hart and another Thomas Fuller. Basil Manly, Sr. named one of his sons John Waldo, after the Hopkinsian Baptist.97 Indeed the network of Edwardseanism in the Baptist South was a diverse brotherhood of mutual theology and respect.98 Any attempt to reduce Baptist history into a kind of binary theology divided among high Calvinists and evangelistic non-Calvinists is a tendentious retelling of Southern history that ignores the kaleidoscope of South Carolinians who helped establish the Southern Baptist Convention. The legacy of Jonathan Edwards was vast and dynamic enough to provide for Calvinistic Baptists who were both confessional and revivalistic, Puritanical and Fullerite, Hopkinsian and evangelistic, Regular and Separate. From its inception, the Southern Baptist Convention was not chiefly an amalgam of Calvinists and non-Calvinists, but was rather a mixture of confessionalist and Edwardsean Calvinism, sometimes in the very same theologian!99 While ideas such as the nature and extent of the atonement were by no means held uniformly among Baptists in South Carolina, doctrines such as unconditional election were generally assumed and vigorously defended. In Oliver Hart’s funeral sermon, Richard Furman described his pastoral predecessor as a “fixed Calvinist, and a consistent, liberal Baptist.”100 Two generations after Hart, Richard Fuller remarked bluntly, “None but an idiot can reject the doctrine of predestination.”101 William B. Johnson even told a brief story about a gentlemen who attended his church in Savannah: “Being informed of my weekly discourses, and that I held the doctrine of election, he conceived a violent opposition to me, and endeavored to enlist a party to assist him in doing me some personal injury, but he could find no congenial spirits to unite with him in his design against me.”102 Southern Edwardseanism took many forms in the nineteenth century, but the sovereignty of God was rarely in question. In fact, divine sovereignty was a point of unity

97 Albert Mohler, “Foreword,” in Soldiers of Christ: Selections from the Writings of Basily Manly, Sr., and Basil Manly, Jr., ed. Michael A.G. Haykin, Roger D. Duke, A. James Fuller (Cape Coral, FL: Founders Press, 2009), xi. 98 Typical of the respect between Baptist Edwardseans is William B. Johnson’s observation in Richard Furman’s funeral sermon: “It was no unfrequent remark that, if good works could save a man, the good works of Dr. Furman would assuredly secure him admission into Heaven.” Johnson, William B., “Richard Furman, D.D.” in Religion in America, Annals of the American Pulpit, 163–165. 99 As was shown in chapter one, even this can prove to be a false theological dichotomy. Edwards confessed, “As to my subscribing to the substance of the Westminster Confession, there would be no difficulty.” (Edwards to John Erskine, July 5, 1750, in WJE 16:355) 100 Richard Furman, Rewards of Grace Conferred on Christ’s Faithful People (Charleston, 1796) 101 Richard Fuller, “Predestination,” in Southern Baptist Sermons on Sovereignty and Responsibility, ed. Thomas J. Nettles (Harrisonburg, VA: Sprinkle Publications, 2003), 113. 102 Hortense C. Woodson, Giant in the Land: The Life of William B. Johnson (Springfield, MO: Particular Baptist Press, 2005), 25–26.

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between Southern and Northern Edwardseans. It shaped their entire theological system, especially their views on the moral governmental theory of atonement and the idea of God’s free pardon of sinners.103 Nothing could stand in the way of the absolute freedom of God, and ideas like distributive and commutative justice were often rejected primarily on the basis that they implied salvation could be “owed” to sinners. In his collection of works by Edwardseans, Edwards Amasa Park suggests that “the most distinguishing feature of the ‘new divinity’ is, that is gives a prominence to God as a Sovereign in applying and conducting, as well as originating, the redemptive work.”104 Generally speaking, Southern Baptists shared this emphasis on divine sovereignty. God’s sovereign grace was a touchstone of the Edwardsean system in both the North and the South. William B. Johnson is a sobering reminder to contemporary non-Calvinists that the Southern Baptist Convention was inaugurated under a Calvinist umbrella. However, to modern Calvinists of the 1689 tradition who would tout a confessionalist legacy in the SBC, the governmental, creed-rejecting, imputation-denying Johnson is likewise an enigmatic stumbling block. At times, Edwardsean Calvinism can appear Janus-faced to those who would seek to claim Southern Baptist forbears as their own. This is due in large part to the diversity of South Carolina’s Edwardseans. In many respects, “traditional” Southern Baptist theology was a broadly Edwardsean Baptist tradition.

South Carolina Edwardseanism When the trustees at Furman University appointed James Petigru Boyce in 1855 to replace the deceased James S. Mims as professor of theology, it signaled a turning point in the Edwardseanism that had previously dominated Baptist life in the South. Mims had been a follower of the New Divinity, and his rejection of imputation had evoked charges of heresy by fellow professor of theology James L. Reynolds (1812–1877), no friend of the New Divinity. William B. Johnson, who also rejected the imputation of Adam’s sin, had come vigorously to Mims’s defense. Johnson even cited a letter from Jesse Hartwell, a former professor at Furman who had moved to Alabama and led their state convention. Hartwell wrote Johnson that he believed

103 Speaking of the New Divinity, Robert L. Ferm explains, “The most marked feature of the sermons and publications of this group was the doctrine of the utter sovereignty of God over all aspects of creation.” (Robert L. Ferm, Jonathan Edwards the Younger: 1745–1801 [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 1976], 61.) 104 Edwards A. Park, “Introductory Essay,” in The Atonement, Discourses and Treatises by Edwards, Smalley, Maxcy, Emmons, Griffin, Burge, and Weeks (Boston: Congregational Board of Publication, 1859), xii.

South Carolina Edwardseanism

the “views on ‘Imputation’ presented by Prof. Mims to be scriptural and correct” and that he had taught the same views openly at Furman.105 While Mims was eventually able to keep his job, the controversy left many South Carolinians with a jaundiced view of the New Divinity.106 Nevertheless, the simple fact that Reynolds and Johnson both appealed to English Baptist Andrew Fuller during the ordeal, combined with the fact that Mims was allowed to continue teaching at Furman, are both testaments to the authority of Edwardsean theology in the middle of the nineteenth century. James P. Boyce was right to observe that Andrew Fuller’s modified Calvinism represented a sea change in Baptist theology. But Boyce himself introduced an equally significant chapter in Baptist history, bringing to Furman and to the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary a traditional form of Calvinism that more closely aligned with the Second London Confession (1689) than with anything resembling Edwardsean thought. What Jonathan Maxcy did to migrate the theology of Hopkins into South Carolina, Boyce did the same with Hodge.107 Still, while representing a new theological trajectory for the Southern Baptist Convention, Boyce’s hire at Furman hardly spelled the end of Jonathan Edwards’s theology in the South. Southern Edwardseans of all kinds left their mark upon the future theological education in the SBC and upon the seminary itself. Building on the work of R. B. C. Howell in Nashville, William B. Johnson in the South Carolina Baptist Convention took the greatest political step toward the establishment of the flagship seminary, even serving on its original board of trustees. Students at the seminary in Greenville used as their text John Dagg’s Manual of Theology, a work that in many ways codified Southern Edwardsean thought. Basil Manly, Jr., the namesake of the Edwardsean co-founder of the Convention, was the first president of the Southern Baptist Sunday School Board and one of Boyce’s three original professors at Southern Seminary when it opened its doors in 1859. Like Boyce, Manly Jr. was a graduate of Princeton (1847); however, he owed his conversion largely to the reading of Jonathan Edwards’s Personal Narrative (1740).108 Like his father, Manly Jr.’s life was shaped directly by the writings of Edwards. The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary carried lasting marks of Jonathan Edwards’s influence. From one generation to the next, a network of Baptist pastors,

105 In Baptist Identities: International Studies from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Centuries, ed. Ian M. Randall, Toivo Pilli, and Anthony R. Cross (Eugene: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2006), 149. 106 Michael A.G. Haykin. After Jonathan Edwards, The Courses of the New England Theology, 205. 107 This in no way suggests that Hodge converted Boyce from New Divinity views. Boyce exhibited a traditional style of Calvinism early on, defending the distributive idea of imputation during the Mims controversy at Furman Academy. 108 Michael A. G. Haykin, “‘Soldiers of Christ, in Truth Arrayed’: The Ministry and Piety of Basil Manly Jr. (1825–1892),” SBJT 13.1 (2009): 31.

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theologians, and statesmen in South Carolina were united in a common Edwardsean theology. This system of thought formed the dominant, overarching theological context for the emergence and development of the Southern Baptist Convention. Directly through his writings and indirectly through his disciples, Jonathan Edwards’s theological legacy profoundly shaped the lives and the ministries of those who would forge the largest Protestant denomination in the world.

3. Richard Furman’s Network of Moderate Calvinists: The Four Schools of Southern Edwardseanism

Even in the social and ecclesial maelstrom of the Second Great Awakening, Southern Edwardseans still assigned unmeasured authority to the pulpit. Relative to their brethren in other states, Baptists in South Carolina enjoyed a degree of cultural dignity, and no Baptist in America commanded more honor and reverence than Richard Furman.1 Among all the Southern Edwardseans, and in all of American Baptist history for that matter, no level of honor was paid to any pastor like the kind William B. Johnson ascribed to Furman.2 When welcomed to the floor as the fourth president of the Triennial Convention, Johnson paid homage to his predecessor and boyhood hero, “the sainted Furman.”3 In his tribute to his mentor, Johnson recalled, “It was no unfrequent remark that, if good works could save a man, the good works of Dr. Furman would assuredly secure him admission into Heaven.”4 Moreover, Furman’s 6-foot stature seemed to match his social standing. “Indeed,” Johnson remembered of the Charleston Sage, “his very appearance preserved order.”5 Never had an American Baptist stood taller in the public mind.6 Johnson’s veneration of Furman lends credence to G. William Foster Jr.’s suggestion that Furman was “America’s most influential Baptist.”7 The man who enjoyed the friendship of Revolutionary war hero Patrick Henry, the admiration of President

1 Speaking of Furman’s arrival in Charleston, King notes, “For the next forty-five years he would be the acknowledged leader of the South Carolina Baptists, and largely of the Baptists of the South.” (King, History of South Carolina Baptists, 159) 2 According to Tupper, “In the community no minister ever enjoyed so large a share of general confidence and reverence.” (Cited in King, A History of South Carolina Baptists, 24); In his “Reminiscences,” Johnson recalls, “My acquaintance with this man of God began when I was a boy, and I well remember the deep and solemn impression which his grave and ministerial appearance made upon my mind, young as I then was; an impression which was deepened by a more familiar knowledge of his character.” (Cited in King, A History of South Carolina Baptists, 212) 3 Hortense C. Woodson, Giant in the Land: The Life of William B. Johnson (Springfield, MO: Particular Baptist Press, 2005), 98. 4 William B. Johnson, “Richard Furman, D.D.,” in Life and Works of Dr. Richard Furman, D.D. (Harrisonburg, VA: Sprinkle Publications, 2004), 13. 5 Ibid., 14; Johnson also said, “Indeed, so eminent was [Furman] for exemplary piety and holy living, that the whole city held him in veneration. The ungodly stood abashed in his sight, and the profligate carefully hid his iniquities from his view.” (13) 6 See Obbie Tyler Todd, “‘The Sainted Furman’: Richard Furman as America’s Most Influential Baptist,” Southern Reformed Theological Journal (2020): 99–118. 7 G. William Foster, Jr., “Preface,” xviii.

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James Monroe, and the audience of a young Andrew Jackson was also the leading exponent of Edwardsean theology in the Baptist South. In fact, it is no exaggeration to consider that nearly every meaningful connection between Southern Edwardseans in the early nineteenth century was forged by Furman, through Furman, or in relation to Furman in some way. Similar to Joseph Bellamy in Leitchfield County, Connecticut, Furman flexed his influence in the local Charleston Association to fill pulpits with Edwardseans. However, Furman’s seemingly unquestioned authority extended to the corners of South Carolina and even beyond. The architect for the first state Baptist convention in America was in many ways the central nervous system of Southern Edwardseanism, and the watchword to this Southern fraternity was “moderate.” Time and again, Furman’s Edwardsean society identified their school of thought using this term, or by defining themselves against what they perceived to be the two theological extremes burgeoning in the American South: man-centered, means-oriented Arminianism and intellectualist, Antinomian Calvinism.

“Moderate” Calvinists At first glance, W. Wiley Richards’s description of the confessionalist Richard Furman as a “moderate” Calvinist seems a bit left of the mark.8 After all, it was Furman who hailed his predecessor Oliver Hart as a “fixed Calvinist.”9 However, in the very same breath he also commemorated Hart as a “consistent, liberal Baptist” for his mentor’s friendly, ecumenical spirit. Like Hart, the substance of Furman’s faith was Calvinistic, but the ethos of his faith was considerably less rigid. Despite the fact that Richards almost completely dismisses the influence of Edwards upon the development of Southern Baptist theology, only acknowledging Edwards as a catalyst for the Great Awakening, his description of Furman is fitting. Ironically, during the course of his fifty-one-year ministry, the man who led the first national Baptist denomination in America and subscribed faithfully to the Charleston Confession eschewed two things more than most: systems and sectarianism. The system-averse Furman often warned that obedience to Holy Scripture required more than a Procrustean adherence to confessional Calvinism. The preacher from High Hills “thought that many of the advocates of exact system in Theology had not deserved well of the cause, and that it accorded better with Christian wisdom to adopt an unmutilated Revelation, than to press it by forced constructions

8 W. Wiley Richards, Winds of Doctrines: The Origin and Development of Southern Baptist Theology (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991), 18. 9 Richard Furman, “Rewards of Grace Conferred on Christ’s Faithful People,” 337.

“Moderate” Calvinists

into the service of a system.”10 In this sense, Furman was indeed a “moderate” Calvinist: unrelenting in the essentials of Calvinism yet unwilling to allow any human framework to have the final say. More importantly for the future of Southern Baptists, this became the predominant brand of Calvinism among Furman’s successors, even among their various differences. It was also one of their primary theological links to the New Divinity, who were likewise characterized by moderate Calvinism. Similar to their Northern counterparts, Southern Edwardseans almost never relinquished the doctrines of unconditional election and total depravity; however, the rest of their Calvinism was a veritable hodge-podge of doctrines, some less confessional than others. In his funeral sermon for the modest Edmund Botsford, Furman characterized his dear friend and protégé much as he might have described a number of his closest associates: “He was, in a word, what has been called a moderate Calvinist: yet his sentiments were not formed by any human system, but by what he considered the true meaning of the word of God.”11 While Furman clearly saw the value and expediency of a Baptist denomination, he was by no means a denominationalist. His anti-sectarianism was an extension of his suspicion of systems. For instance, in his eulogy of John Gano, Furman emphasized a similar aversion to dogmatic Calvinism: The doctrines he embraced were those which are contained in the Baptist Confession of Faith, and are commonly styled Calvinistick. But he was of a liberal mind, and esteemed pious men of every denomination. While he maintained with consistent firmness, the doctrines which he believed to be the truths of God, he was modest in the judgment which he formed of his own opinion, and careful to avoid giving offense, or grieving any good man, who differed from him in sentiment.12

Furman’s Baptist paeans indicate that he esteemed those Edwardseans who prized “consistent firmness” of Calvinist doctrines, but without the kind of hostile sectarianism he felt posed a danger to Baptists in the South. Consequently, like Jonathan Edwards before him, and unlike the High Calvinist James P Boyce or the Hopkinsian William B. Johnson a generation later, Furman did not believe that a penal substitutionary theory of the atonement necessarily precluded a moral governmental view.13 On one hand, Furman preached that the “righteousness of the Son of God

10 W. T. Brantly, “Extracts from Dr. W. T. Brantly’s Sermon Delivered in 1825,” in Life and Works of Dr. Richard Furman, D. D., ed. G. William Foster (Harrisonburg, VA: Sprinkle Publications, 2004), 221. 11 Furman, “Sketch of the Life of the Rev. Edm’d Botsford, A. M.,” 462. 12 Terry Wolever, The Life of John Gano, 1727–1804 (Springfield, MO: Particular Baptist Press, 1998), 569–70. 13 In his Abstract of Systematic Theology, James P. Boyce describes the moral governmental view of the atonement in this way: “Those who hold this theory maintain that God cannot consistently forgive

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is imputed to those who believe in him.” On the other hand, he spoke the unmistakable language of the New Divinity when he asserted that to break a law “is, in effect, to charge the Great Moral Governor with having delivered a defective system.”14 In a 1798 circular letter entitled “On the Use of Reason in Religion,” Furman insists, “For the incarnation, obedience, and sufferings of the Son of God; man’s depravity and guilt, God’s strict justice on the one hand, and his design of showing mercy, in a manner consistent with his glorious perfections and righteous government, on the other, are assigned as reasons.”15 Doctrines which many believed were mutually exclusive, Richard Furman brought together, though not always explaining how.16 In one form or another, this was the synthetic type of “moderate” Calvinism that prevailed under the auspices of Richard Furman and the same kind that Southern Edwardseans would bequeath to the Southern Baptist Convention. Although Furman defended the authority of the confessions more than most, his indefatigable commitment to the priority of Scripture combined with his ability to adapt New Divinity concepts to Baptist orthodoxy had the gradual effect of making the confessions less determinative, paving the way for a Southern Baptist Convention still defined by confessional Calvinism, but less so. For the most part, Northern Baptists pursued a similar theological direction. Brown President Francis Wayland, a fellow Edwardsean, also identified himself as a “moderate Calvinist.”17 In many ways, Richard Furman’s most Edwardsean characteristic was his willingness to renovate Reformed doctrines with modern concepts that best reflected and applied the plain teachings of Scripture. It was Jonathan Edwards, one of America’s most creative theologians, who instructed his children in the Westminster Shorter Catechism every Saturday evening.18 In the context of the Baptist confessions,

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sin upon mere repentance and faith; but that the necessity for its punishment does not arise from the nature of God, and his abhorrence of sin; wherefore there is no principle in him which requires all sin to be punished for itself alone; but from the necessity which exists for maintaining his moral government in the universe.” (James P. Boyce, Abstract of Systematic Theology [Charleston, SC: den Dulk Christian Foundation, 1887), 309.) Richard Furman, “On the Analogy Between the Dispensations of Grace by the Gospel, and a Royal Marriage Feast,” 471; Furman, Richard Furman Papers, Box 1, Folder 11, Richard Furman to Gabriel Gerald. Furman, “On the Use of Reason in Religion,” 529. The paucity of Furman’s extant works relative to, for instance, Andrew Fuller, combined with the fact that Furman never authored a systematic theology have contributed to some questions regarding how exactly Furman integrated multiple views of the atonement. My forthcoming dissertation on Furman’s doctrine of atonement addresses this issue. For Wayland’s definition of “moderate Calvinism,” see A Memoir of the Life and Labors of Francis Wayland, Volume I, ed. Francis Wayland and H. L. Wayland (New York: Sheldon and Company, 1868), 124–25. Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 16: Letters and Personal Writings, ed. George S. Claghorn (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 280.

“Moderate” Calvinists

Furman shared the very same theological ethos. On one hand, Furman taught quarterly sessions at his church to teach and quiz children over the material in Benjamin Keach’s well-known Baptist Catechism.19 On the other hand, Furman happily employed the Edwardsean ideas of natural and moral ability, disinterested benevolence, moral government, his psychology of conversion, and even hints of Edwards’s postmillennialism.20 Although Furman’s unwavering loyalty to the Baptist confessions was not always passed down to his successors, and while different species of Edwardseanism flourished in the Baptist South, Furman’s moderate Calvinism endured as one of the distinguishing traits of Southern Edwardseanism. Just three years after the birth of the Southern Baptist Convention, William B. Johnson boasted to fellow Hopkinsian James S. Mims that most Baptists in South Carolina were “moderate Calvinists,” an epithet synonymous with Edwardsean Calvinism.21 Theologically speaking, as South Carolina went, so did neighboring Georgia. In his memoir of Jesse Mercer, the Edwardsean Charles Dutton Mallary framed Mercer’s Calvinism in terms similar to other Southern Edwardseans: He is rather of the old than of the new school; and inclines to the old fashioned doctrine of free grace, as preached among the Baptists near half a century ago. Though he does not mean to quibble or criticize on mere modes of expression or shades of difference, where the truth is not compromitted. He does not fully receive all Mr. Fuller’s views of the methods of divine mercy; yet is satisfied with his scheme (as now generally preached, when kept within its own bounds,) as leading to, and finally securing the same great and glorious results, as those of the most approved and (to use a common epithet,) Calvinistic writers of his age.22

Mercer was likewise a friendly Calvinist, choosing not to “quibble” over minor distinctions. While adhering to “schemes,” he was by no means a systematician. Shaped significantly by the thought of Andrew Fuller, Mercer shared Fuller’s emphasis upon the free agency and duty of man to believe in the Gospel as well as to Fuller’s

19 Robert Andrew Baker, Paul J. Craven, Adventure in Faith: The First 300 Years of First Baptist Church, Charleston, South Carolina (Nashville, TN: Broadman Press, 1982), 212. 20 Furman, “Of Infant Salvation,” 592, 593, 596, 598; Furman, “Conversion Essential to Salvation,” 421–442; Obbie Tyler Todd, “The Influence of Jonathan Edwards on the Missiology and Conversionism of Richard Furman (1755–1825),” in Jonathan Edwards Online Journal Vol. 7, No. 1 (2017). 21 Letter to James S. Mims, March 25, 1848 (William B. Johnson Papers, James B. Duke Library, Furman University); cited in Gregory A. Wills, “The SBJT Forum: Overlooked Shapers of Evangelicalism,” Southern Baptist Journal of Theology, 3(1) (Spring 1999), 87. 22 Charles Dutton Mallary, Memoirs of Elder Jesse Mercer (New York: John Gray, 1844), 423.

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moral governmental view of the atonement. Mercer seemed not to adhere to all of Fuller’s views, but nevertheless invoked him countless times, especially regarding the atonement and the moral responsibility of the sinner. In his analysis of the two theological “extremes” of Calvinism, Mercer deployed Fuller’s Edwardsean idea of moral inability. In his mind, the doctrines of grace, when made a party question, and run out into extremes, (to which controversy leads,) it becomes a snare to many souls – a nurse of inaction, and a conductor to the ruins of Antinomianism. The opposite extreme should as assiduously be guarded against. Dwelling on practice religion, and insisting on the duties and obligations of men, without keeping in constant view their moral and guilty disability, and the sovereignty of God in affording salvation to them, as unworthy, helpless sinners, as directly tends to the bogs of Arminianism. The truth of the gospel, rightly held and taught, is that which turns men from darkness to light, and the power of sin to serve the living God, by faith which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.23

For Mercer, as for all of Furman’s network of moderate Calvinists, the via media between Antinomianism and Arminianism was paved with “the truth of the gospel,” a single allegiance to sola Scriptura to navigate between the Scylla of licentious, Calvinistic rationalism and the Charybdis of legalistic Arminianism. This brand of Calvinism was also abundant in Virginia, and it was usually associated with that of Jonathan Edwards. One example is Elder Lewis Conner (1745–1832), the most wellknown preacher in the Predestinarian Baptist Salem Association. After describing Conner as a “moderate Calvinist” who resisted preaching the “five points” of traditional Calvinism, James B. Taylor concluded, “Next to the bible, he preferred the writings of President Edwards; and with such light as Edwards supplied him, he was in no danger of Antinomian distractions.”24 Moderate Calvinists were characterized by a strong tendency toward practical preaching. While Southern Edwardseans inherited much of their New England theology either directly or indirectly, their species of Calvinism was not as inflexible as the “consistent Calvinism” of their Hopkinsian counterparts. As a result, Southern Edwardseanism was a protean theology home to different schools of thinking and capable of adapting to different milieus and church settings.

23 Jesse Mercer, Memoirs of Elder Jesse Mercer, 322. 24 James B. Taylor, Lives of Virginia Baptist Ministers (Richmond: Yale & Wyatt, 1838), 186.

A Baptist at the Crossroads

A Baptist at the Crossroads In a number of ways, Richard Furman stood at the crossroads of America. As a young preacher, he partnered with those who had attended the fabled revivals of the Great Awakening. In his funeral sermon for Oliver Hart, Furman recalled that his mentor was eighteen years old when he sat “under the ministry of that eminent servant of Christ, Rev. George Whitefield, of the Episcopal Church; of Rev. Messrs. The Tennents, Edwards, and their associates, of the Presbyterian and Congregational Churches; and of the Rev. Abel Morgan, and others, of the Baptist Church.”25 Further still, Furman was shaped profoundly by the American Revolution, an event he also interpreted as divine intervention. On the other hand, his disciples would live to see his hard-fought union torn asunder in civil war. Furman’s life and ministry were epochal, straddling the most important ages in American history. Furman also stood at a Baptist crossroads. Generationally, he was the spiritual child of Separate Baptist revivalism spawned from the Great Awakening. However, as the first president of the Triennial Convention, he was also at the forefront of a new era of Baptist institutionalism.26 Intellectually, Furman was himself an educated Baptist, an oxymoronic label in some ways. As Alvin Reynolds notes, “He was fortunate to have had enlightened, well-to-do parents, while the majority of the Baptists of his day came from homes of the poor and unlearned.”27 Furman acknowledged the fruits of the Second Great Awakening amongst the “incidental evils” of the emotionalist camp meetings, even reading the Edwardsean style “Surprising Accounts” from Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina. Nevertheless, in the state of South Carolina, “No man except Furman himself had done more for the cause of education.”28 Furman’s own educational vision forged the beginnings of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, which grew out of the theological faculty

25 Furman, “Rewards of Grace Conferred on Christ’s Faithful People,” 334–35. 26 Tom Nettles explains, “After having heard Reese preach the Edwardsian conversionism of the Separate Baptists and the believer’s baptism of the Baptists, Richard Furman set out to study these issue for himself. Other theological matters also gained his attention as he studied sin, justification, atonement, and grace. He became convinced that the system taught by Reese was the system taught in the Bible.” (Nettles, “Richard Furman,” in Baptist Theologians, ed. Timothy George, David S. Dockery [Nashville, TN: Broadman Press, 1990],140; On May 16, 1774, when he was eighteen years old, Furman was also ordained by Reese and Evan Pugh to be pastor at High Hills. 27 Alvin J. Reynolds, “The Life and Work of Richard Furman,” (New Orleans, LA: New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, 1962), 115. 28 Furman, “A Letter From Dr. Furman of Charleston, to Dr. Rippon of London,” 416–17; Joe King, A History of South Carolina Baptists (Columbia, SC: The General Board of the South Carolina Baptist Convention, 1964), 172.

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at Furman University.29 In his “Three Changes in Theological Institutions,” James P. Boyce identified his own approach with that of Richard Furman: “From the very beginning of Baptist efforts for education in this State to the present moment, this has always been the mainspring of our movements.” Boyce implored his readers in “looking back upon that band of worthies of whom but a few remain to counsel us by their wisdom, and to move us to self-abasement by their piety and zeal, in whose minds first originated the idea of Furman Academy.”30 The life of Richard Furman was indeed a linchpin in American Baptist history. The peacemaking Furman was well-suited to lead the first nationwide Baptist convention in America. He served as a Baptist portal of sorts from New England to the South, conversant with Northern theologians and able to draw New Divinity men like Jonathan Maxcy from Rhode Island to Columbia, South Carolina as the first president of South Carolina College. Internationally, Furman served as the Baptist link between English and American Edwardseanism. Under his leadership, the Triennial Convention supported Adoniram Judson (1788–1850), the first American Baptist missionary and adherent of the New Divinity stationed in Burma.31 Furman also corresponded with members of the Baptist Missionary Society and lauded the efforts of those “whose missionaries have fixed the principal seat of their mission at Serampore.”32 Furman’s works even enjoyed a place in the library of Andrew Fuller.33 According to James A. Rogers, Furman fulfilled “the role of a leading American Baptist identified with the work of William Carey and the English Baptist missionary initiative.”34 But Furman also stood at the crossroads of Baptist theology. He was a Regular Baptist in the mold of the Charleston Confession, however, he was also influenced by the theology of Timothy Dwight, Andrew Fuller, and even Edwards himself. Furman embodied an eclectic Baptist Edwardseanism, and under his leadership four different schools of Southern Edwardseans would develop in close partnership with one another.

29 According to King, both Furman University and the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary “became eventual products of the keen educational concern of Richard Furman.” (King, A History of South Carolina Baptists, 23–24) 30 James Petigru Boyce, Three Changes in Theological Institutions (Greenville, SC: C. J. Elford’s Book and Job Press, 1856), 8–9. 31 The Triennial Convention also sent out Luther Rice, its very first missionary. 32 Furman, “Conversion Essential to Salvation,” 437–38. 33 In Andrew Fuller’s diary, he recorded his reading of Furman’s A Sermon, on the Constitution and Order of the Christian Church, preached before the Charleston Association of Baptist Churches (Charleston, SC, 1791). This is included in the appendix of The Complete Works of Andrew Fuller, vol. 1, edited by Michael D. McMullen and Timothy D. Whelan. 34 James A. Rogers, Richard Furman: Life and Legacy (Macon, GA; Mercer University Press, 2001), 210.

New Divinity Edwardseanism

In many ways, Southern Edwardseanism was a theological reflection of Northern Edwardseanism, exhibiting similar distinctions and complexities that made New England theology a diverse organism.35 However, without works comparable to Samuel Hopkins’s System of Doctrines (1793), Southern Edwardseanism in the early nineteenth century was never codified as was Hopkinsianism (eventually equated with the New Divinity). Most Southern Baptists were occasional, not systematic, thinkers. As a result, Southern Edwardseans were often distinguished by their teachers and theological influences, and less by any formal affiliation. In discerning the four distinct yet sometimes overlapping schools of Southern Edwardseanism, three of Richard Furman’s initiatives come to the fore: (1) his recommendation of Jonathan Maxcy as the first president of South Carolina College, (2) his request to the Baptist Missionary Society to help fill the pulpit at Georgetown, SC, (3) and his leading role in establishing the Charleston Association’s permanent education fund for the training of Baptist ministers. More than any of Furman’s orchestrations, these three served to give Southern Baptist theology a distinctive Edwardsean texture and to promulgate the four Edwardsean schools that characterized the Baptist South: New Divinity Edwardseanism, Fullerite Edwardseanism, simple Edwardseanism, and implicit Edwardseanism.

New Divinity Edwardseanism If the legendary Richard Furman was the chief exponent of Edwardsean theology in the Baptist South, the sophisticated Jonathan Maxcy was its purest embodiment. With Furman as the social and political nucleus in Charleston, Maxcy served as the primary artery through which Furman’s intellectual and theological vision was implemented. Columbia and Charleston were, in O’Brien’s words, “conjoined worlds.”36 As a result, “moderate” Calvinism flourished in both. Years later, when

35 Joseph Conforti describes the primary division in the New Divinity between Hopkins and Bellamy: “These followers of Edwards wished to remain within established churches and to concentrate on developing the theological implications of the Awakening. Within the New Divinity school itself two identifiable groups emerged – those who accepted the major innovations that Samuel Hopkins made in Edwards’s theology, and those who followed more closely the neo-Edwardseanism of another leading New Divinity theologian, Joseph Bellamy.” (Conforti, Samuel Hopkins and the New Divinity Movement: Calvinism and Reform in New England between the Great Awakening [Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 1981], 3.) 36 South Carolina College and the city of Columbia became reputable centers of learning during and after Maxcy’s lifetime. According to Michael O’Brien, “Columbia, South Carolina, was the richest place in the South to be placed for books. Nowhere else were there other than isolated collections, good, bad, or indifferent. In Columbia by 1860 the college library, the legislative library, and the theological seminary had accessions amounting to about 60,000 volumes. If to Columbia one adds

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James S. Mims was allowed to keep his position on the theological faculty at Furman University after openly denying the imputation of Adam’s sin, his tenure was emblematic of the acceptance of Maxcy’s New Divinity theology in Columbia and beyond. The inaugural president of South Carolina College was a thoroughgoing New Divinity man, drawing his theological inspiration from Edwards, Hopkins, and even Jonathan Edwards Jr. The New Englander was, perhaps, more Edwardsean than Baptist. Citing the younger Edwards, Maxcy taught in his “Discourse on the Atonement” that there were indeed three kinds of justice – commutative, distributive, and public – and that Christ’s death only satisfied the third. “The death of Christ therefore is to be considered as a great, important, and public transaction, respecting God and the whole system of rational beings.”37 Rather than a penal exchange for individuals, Maxcy believed that Christ’s death was a penal exhibition of the consequences of sin whereby God vindicated His moral governance and freely pardoned sinners. Characterized by a universal, moral governmental view of the atonement and a rejection of penal substitution (at least in the distributive sense), Maxcy’s New Divinity Edwardseanism was adopted by many Southern Baptists, and none more notably than the first president of the Southern Baptist Convention: William B. Johnson.38 Discipled closely by Maxcy in Columbia, Johnson ensured that the synthesis of Baptist and New Divinity theology would endure for the first generation in the Southern Baptist Convention. Like his mentor, Johnson held to a universal atonement and believed that the grand plan of “the great moral Governor of the universe” is to display “his natural and moral attributes” to the world.39 In this New Charleston – the cities were conjoined worlds – the region furnished libraries which held about 90,000 volumes, perhaps more.” (O’Brien, Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860, 123) 37 Jonathan Maxcy, “Discourse on the Atonement, Part II,” in The Literary Remains of Rev. Jonathan Maxcy, D. D. [New York: A. V. Blake, 1844], 74–76. 38 Describing Samuel Hopkins’s view of general atonement, D.P. Rudisill explains, “Bellamy’s influence upon Hopkins’s doctrine of the Atonement is considerable. Hopkins follows Bellamy in adopting the governmental view and in espousing General Atonement. He remains true to Edwards about Christ’s satisfaction through suffering. Thus we have in Hopkins a combination of Edwards’ and Bellamy’s views on the Atonement. It would seem incorrect to call this a synthesis because of Hopkins’ failure to dovetail these respective views at the most vital point…Hopkins combines Edwards’ idea of Christ’s satisfaction through suffering with Bellamy’s idea of rectoral framework and of General Atonement. It is not maintained that this was a conscious attempt to synthesize these views. It is maintained that Hopkins was influenced by both Edwards and Bellamy and that their influence is marked and at the same time that Hopkins was an independent thinker. That he did not concur wholly in the views of Edwards and Bellamy is a mark of his independence.” (D.P. Rudisill, The Doctrine of the Atonement in Jonathan Edwards and his Successors [New York: Poseidon Books, 1971], 51.) 39 William B. Johnson, “Love Characteristic of the Deity,” in Southern Baptist Sermons on Sovereignty and Responsibility (Harrisonburg, VA: Sprinkle Publications, 2003), 49.

New Divinity Edwardseanism

Divinity framework, “ample provision was made for the pardon of sin.”40 Christ’s atonement is a legal pardon of a crime which honors divine justice rather than a commercial payment of a debt. His death does not secure a pecuniary, tit-for-tat purchase in the place of sinners, but is rather “a medium through which [love] might be manifested consistently with justice, his injured law, and the dignity of his throne.”41 In other words, the work of Christ satisfies divine justice so that God might pardon those sinners He unconditionally elects. In contrast with the traditional penal substitutionary view, the moral governmental atonement is not a forgiving act in itself, but a “medium” or means to do so. Therefore, Johnson boldly contended that “the atonement of Christ does not deliver any soul from condemnation.”42 Johnson’s view of the atonement as simply a medium for salvation is another point of departure from Andrew Fuller. While granting a universal quality to the atonement, Fuller believed that the atonement itself as well as the application of the atonement were both grounded in the unconditional election of God. In Fuller’s scheme, rather than simply choosing those who would believe in a universal atonement, a sovereign God actually makes the atonement effectual for the elect, thus maintaining a particular redemption. Although Maxcy and Johnson affirmed unconditional election, they rejected this real connection between atonement and salvation. Instead they believed that the distinction between the atonement and the act of pardon emphasized the importance of faith and protected the freedom of God’s grace from a kind of merited rewarded that could be demanded of God, the sovereign Creator and Moral Governor.43 “In true Edwardsean fashion,” observes Robert Caldwell, “both Maxcy and Johnson are very clear that the solution to this problem does not lie in understanding the atonement as the payment of a debt, as in the substitutionary model of the atonement.”44 Still, Johnson was not the only Edwardsean to tinker with penal substitution, nor was he the only one of Maxcy’s Edwardsean disciples to impact the theological trajectory of the Southern Baptist Convention. As one of the most acclaimed preachers of his era, as editor of Georgia’s Christian Index, as Manly’s successor at FBC Charleston, and as president of two different colleges in South Carolina, W. T.

40 41 42 43

Ibid., 65. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 56. Caldwell observes, “Thus love (divine benevolence), law, and the display of God’s internal fullness to the entire created order ground Maxcy’s and Johnson’s theological vision in ways reminiscent of Bellamy’s and Hopkins’s New Divinity project.” (Robert W. Caldwell III, Theologies of the American Revivalists: From Whitefield to Finney [Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2017], 156.) 44 Ibid., 157.

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Brantly (1787–1845) articulated and promoted a form of New Divinity Edwardseanism in a way that arguably no other Southern Baptist could. He was also the founder of FBC Augusta, Georgia, the later site of the very first Southern Baptist Convention. Brantly’s views were not identical to those in the New Divinity and were certainly less contentious. Unlike Maxcy, Brantly was not a New Divinity man. His views certainly resembled those of Andrew Fuller; however, they mirrored New England theology more closely than any other tradition. True to their moderate form of Calvinism, Southern Edwardseans like W. T. Brantly took the edge off of the New Divinity’s “consistent Calvinism” and injected a bit more Baptist temper.45 Brantly was the beneficiary of the Charleston Association’s program for higher education among Baptist ministers, of which Richard Furman was the chairman for almost thirty-five years. He was also a zealous student under both Furman’s protégé John Roberts at High Hills and Maxcy at South Carolina College. Hence Brantly was a direct product of Furman’s Southern Edwardsean network.46 Furman “filled so large a scope” in Brantly’s mind that in 1819 he even named his second son Furman Brantly.47 As Bob Snyder notes, “Like most American pastor-theologians, W. T. Brantly lived in the shadow of Jonathan Edwards.”48 Brantly listed Jonathan Edwards as required reading and reprinted Edwards’s History of Redemption in the Christian Index.49 However, Brantly’s most powerful theological influence came from his mentor, Jonathan Maxcy. The two shared an “intimacy far stronger than is ordinarily found between those sustaining such a relationship.” While the refined young president engaged most of his students with “distant respect,” to Brantly he was “peculiarly kind and accessible.”50 Owing largely to Maxcy’s instruction, Brantly would go on to preach a derivative form of New England theology in multiple states, both

45 For instance, Brantly once asked, “Shall we bite and devour one another for differences on the sentiment respecting the extent of the atonement, whilst we all agree that salvation is only by grace?” (Brantly, “Hints to Baptists,” 194). 46 Brantly studied under Furman’s educational protégé John Roberts at High Hills. According to James A. Rogers, “More than any other man of his time, Roberts had imbibed the spirit of Richard Furman in his concern for education generally, and ministerial education in particular. Through Roberts, Furman’s work in establishing the incorporated General Committee bore special fruit. A product of the Committee’s educational assistance, he, the educated, became, in turn, the educator, and his institution became an instrument of the General Committee in the performance of its mission.” (Rogers, Richard Furman 127) 47 William T. Brantly, The Saint’s Repose in Death. A Sermon Delivered on the Death of Richard Furman, D. D. Late Pastor of the Baptist Church, Charleston, S. C. (Charleston: W. Riley, 1825), 23. 48 Robert Arthur Snyder, “William T. Brantly (1787–1845): A Southern Unionist and the Breakup of the Triennial Convention” (Louisville, KY: The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2005), 188. 49 Ibid., 9. 50 William T. Brantly, “Intrepid Faith,” 595.

New Divinity Edwardseanism

North and South.51 Although he did not “fully adopt” Maxcy’s exact position on the atonement, adding distributive justice to Maxcy’s public justice, Brantly held firm to a Furmanian moral governmental view which stressed the idea of penalty.52 Brantly showed his New Divinity style most in his view of the extent of the atonement and in his rejection of the traditional idea of substitution. Unlike the Particular Baptist Andrew Fuller who merely affirmed the sufficient value of the atonement to legitimize the Gospel call, Brantly believed in an applied general provision whereby all who hear the Gospel are actually “included in the atonement.”53 Such a view was more akin to the position of New Divinity theologian Joseph Bellamy, who insisted similarly that “All [of mankind] were purchased by him.”54 In addition to his use of the natural-moral ability distinction, Brantly also advocated an indirect substitution view because, in his words, “if…the Substitute, endured all that they were liable to endure, how can they be liable, even anterior to faith and repentance? Here is a difficulty which we confess ourselves unable to dispose of, without modifying the idea of substitution.”55 In other words, substitution undermined Christian responsibility. Brantly seemed to share his mentor Maxcy’s view of substitution as one for punishments and not for actual people. Piecing apart one or both halves of penal substitution became a common trademark of New Divinity Edwardseanism because of a strong emphasis upon personal merit and striving endemic to the New Divinity. As Robert Caldwell explains, While New Divinity leaders freely borrowed much from their mentor, the voluntarist accent in Edwards’s thought had the most profound impact on the New Divinity…the New Divinity took this Edwardsean thought and developed it into a powerful principle that

51 According to Snyder, “First, Brantly’s ministry was (1809–1844) was nearly coterminous with the Triennial Convention (1814–1845). Second, Brantly’s national leadership spanned the years of growing disunion, from the initial sectionalism of 1826 to the Bible Convention of 1837, when South Carolina boycotted the meeting. Third, Brantly personally faced the sectional differences, for he was a Southerner who spent eleven years of his mature ministry in the North (in Philadelphia) before returning to the South as pastor of the historic First Baptist Church of Charleston, South Carolina. Finally, Brantly influenced several key leaders, some of whom precipitated the 1845 split in the Triennial Convention and established the Southern Baptist Convention.” (Snyder, “William T. Brantly (1787–1845),” 1–2). 52 W. T. Brantly, “Solitary Hours,” CI, 19 February 1831, p. 113; Brantly, Themes, 159; Speaking of the law, Furman preached that Christ “has rendered to its penal demands, by suffering the punishment due to sin, whereby he has made a complete atonement for his redeemed.” (Furman, “On Growth in Grace,” 553) 53 W. T. Brantly, “Original Anecdotes of Dr. Rush,” CI, 6 October 1832, p. 216. 54 Joseph Bellamy, True Religion Delineated (Morris-Town: Henry P. Russell, 1804 [1750]), 352. 55 W. T. Brantly, “Difficulties Attending the Discussion of the Doctrine of the Atonement,” CI, 1 December 1832, p. 338.

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saturated their thought. We can term this the principle of personal merit, which states that ethical merits (and, by contrast, demerits) are personal, individual things that cannot be shared between persons. If this concept is true, then it calls the traditional understanding of imputation into question: sinners cannot be held responsible for the sins of another person (like Adam’s) antecedent to their own actual participation. Likewise saints, cannot claim an alien righteousness from Christ apart from their own personal participation in holy affections and acts.56

Brantly was so committed to the idea of man’s free moral agency and the responsibility of the sinner that he even pushed back against the traditional Calvinistic notion of irresistible grace. He plainly asserted that “the grace of God as put forth and exerted in the in the salvation of sinners, is not irresistible.”57 Brantly’s views were apparently so provocative that his successor at The Christian Index and fellow Edwardsean Jesse Mercer was forced to come to Brantly’s defense and clarify his position.58 Through the voice and pen of W. T. Brantly, New Divinity Edwardseanism found public expression in a number of ways. Brantly helped organize the Georgia Baptist Convention in 1822 and played a significant role in the controversy that precipitated the Southern Baptist Convention. Perhaps his most lasting impact upon the future of the Southern Baptist Convention came in the form of his influence on Basily Manly Sr., a founder of the SBC, and Richard Fuller, its third president, who referred to Brantly as “my loved pastor.”59 Both men sat under Brantly during his ministry at Beaufort and, as will be shown, both absorbed Edwardsean theology directly or indirectly. Richard Fuller would eventually preach the saving gospel to James P. Boyce, who sat under Brantly as a boy in Charleston. Indeed, Edwardseans in the Baptist South cast a wide ministerial net that influenced Southern Baptists for generations.

Andrew Fuller, the New Divinity, and Southern Baptists In some sense, to distinguish Andrew Fuller’s school of Edwardseanism from that of the New Divinity is to make a distinction without a very large difference. After all, Fuller himself was influenced heavily by Edwards’s successors and seems to

56 Robert Caldwell, Theologies of the American Revivalists: From Whitefield to Finney (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2017), 88. 57 W. T. Brantly, Themes for Meditation, Enlarged in Several Sermons, Doctrinal and Practical (Philadelphia: C. Sherman and Co., Printers, 1837), p. 59. 58 Jesse Mercer, Memoirs of Elder Jesse Mercer, 123–125. 59 James Hazzard Cuthbert, Life of Richard Fuller (New York: Sheldon and Company, 1878), 318.

Andrew Fuller, the New Divinity, and Southern Baptists

have corresponded often with them, sometimes about his affection for Edwards.60 “In particular,” Morden says, “it is almost impossible to believe that Fuller would have started using the language of ‘moral government’ without the New England writers. Edwards’ followers were probably more significant for Fuller here than at any other point in his theology.”61 Although Fuller did not completely forsake the penal substitutionary view, ultimately maintaining the limited extent of the atonement, his overall theory of the atonement was imbued with New Divinity theology. For instance, by soft-pedaling the traditional idea of imputation, Fuller aligned himself with Edwards’s successors. As Daniel W. Cooley and Douglas A. Sweeney carefully explain, certain members of the New Divinity did not necessarily abandon imputation wholesale, but instead reconfigured the idea to align with their overall view of the atonement: These New Divinity theologians shifted away from the view that God immediately imputes Adam’s sin. They disagreed with Augustine when he taught that all humanity participated in the fall. To be sure Samuel Hopkins and Joseph Bellamy were not prepared to abandon immediate imputation of Adam’s sin. Even so, like their New Divinity brethren, Hopkins and Bellamy did not share Edwards’s commitment to Augustine’s metaphysic and so set the stage for the New England moral governmental theory. The adoption of this theory hinged in large ways upon their belief that all guilt comes from personal sin. Guilt is not transferrable in any sense. Since the penal substitutionary theory depended upon the transfer of a moral debt from the elect to Christ, they pursued a different path.62

Andrew Fuller pursued this same path, but in an eclectic style that blended models of the atonement. In this way, he had more in common with Southern Edwardseans than Northern. Like W. T. Brantly, Fuller also attempted to modify the traditional idea of substitution in his own way: “The sufferings of Christ in our stead, therefore, are not a punishment inflicted in the ordinary course of distributive justice, but an extraordinary interposition of infinite wisdom and love; not contrary to, but 60 Andrew Fuller wrote to Edwards’s grandson Timothy Dwight, “The writings of your grandfather, President Edwards, and of your uncle, the late Dr. Edwards, have been food to me and many others.” He emphasized, “The President’s sermons on justification have afforded me more satisfaction on that important doctrine than any human performance which I have read.” (Andrew Fuller, “To Timothy Dwight,” in Michael A. G. Haykin, ed., The Armies of the Lamb: The Spirituality of Andrew Fuller [Dundas: Ontario: Joshua Press, 2001], 199, 200). 61 Peter J. Morden, Offering Christ to the World: Andrew Fuller (1754–1815) and the Revival of EighteenthCentury Particular Baptist Life, Studies in Baptist History and Thought (Waynesboro, GA: Paternoster, 2005), 91–92. 62 Daniel W. Cooley and Douglas A. Sweeney, “The Edwardseans and the Atonement,” in A New Divinity: Transatlantic Reformed Evangelical Debates during the Long Eighteenth Century (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018), 114.

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rather above the law – deviating from the letter, but more than preserving the spirit of it. Such, as well as I am able to explain them, are my views of the substitution of Christ.”63 Once again, Fuller retained many penal substitutionary themes but redefined them for his own Edwardsean purposes. Thus, he did not adopt the moral governmental theory so much as adapt it for his own evangelistic focus. As a result, Southern Baptists who molded their theology around Fuller’s were characterized by a strong evangelical Calvinism, a theology well-suited for their cultural and ecclesial context. Often times this was accompanied by a softened stance on limited atonement. Until the days of James P. Boyce, largely due to the influence of Andrew Fuller, very few Southern Baptists approached a “High” Calvinism of the Princetonian degree. Moderate Calvinism ruled the day. In the state of Florida, for example, most Baptists “shared the evangelical Calvinist theological convictions of Carey, Fuller, Adoniram Judson, and Luther Rice.”64 Nevertheless, Andrew Fuller has come under criticism for his fusion of moral government and penal satisfaction, even from his own ranks. For example, in 1803 Particular Baptist Abraham Booth wrote Divine Justice Essential to the Divine Nature to counter Fuller’s position, which Booth considered to be Arminian in nature. According to Booth (himself a supporter of the Baptist Missionary Society), Fuller had unwisely adopted New Divinity views and his governmentalism was in danger of denying a “real” imputation. Did Fuller maintain a historical Reformed position? Was his version of vicarious satisfaction a substitution equivalent to the penalty incurred by human sin? Was Fuller’s brand of justice merely symbolic or real? To ask these questions of Fuller is to ask them of Southern Baptists as well. In order to understand the position of many Southern Baptists on the atonement, Fuller’s exact view must be distilled because his influence and reach into the Baptist world was, in the words of A. H. Newman, “incalculable.”65 To begin, scholars tend to agree that Fuller’s language obscured his true position. According to Gerald Priest, “Fuller seems to be expressing a penal satisfaction, but he uses non-penal language, overcompensating for his opposition to a pecuniary sacrifice. He uses, instead governmental, moral expressions which give the overtone of a Grotian atonement.”66 Tom Nettles concurs, “Fuller’s use of governmental language did not involve him in the mistakes of governmentalists; the atonement

63 Andrew Fuller, The Atonement of Christ, and the Justification of the Sinner, ed. Joseph Belcher (New York: American Tract Society, n. d.), 71. 64 Mark Rathel, “Civil War, Foreign Missions Board, and Florida Baptists,” The Journal of Florida Baptist Heritage Vol. 16 (2014): 108. 65 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. 66 Gerald Priest, “Fuller on the Atonement,” The Elephant of Kettering. www.andrewfuller.blogspot. com/search?q=atonement (Posted on January 5, 2007)

Andrew Fuller, the New Divinity, and Southern Baptists

never became merely symbolic justice, but maintained its character as an act of actual justice.”67 Michael Haykin has also noted how Fuller’s “fondness for the governmental language about the atonement hampered, rather than helped, a clear expression of this conviction.”68 Priest, Nettles, and Haykin are correct in their assessment of Fuller’s use of language. Still, Fuller’s moral governmental commitments were not merely semantic. Fuller was not simply clothing the doctrine of penal satisfaction with the language of his day. He was in fact blending theories. By distancing himself from commercial and pecuniary themes in the atonement and the idea of commutative justice, Fuller was establishing himself in the New Divinity tradition, with one foot in the Edwardsean camp and the other in the English Baptist pool. In some sense, he was standing in neither. In his The Deity of Christ Essential to Atonement, Fuller wrote, If God requires less than the real demerit of sin for an atonement, then there could be no satisfaction made to Divine justice by such an atonement and though it would be improper to represent the great work of redemption as a kind of commercial transaction betwixt a creditor and his debtor, yet the satisfaction of justice in all cases of offence requires that there be an expression of the displeasure of the offended, against the conduct of the offender, equal to what the nature of the offence is in reality.69

Fuller’s governmental scheme had no place for a commercial equivalence, and this impacted his view of justice. In his work The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards in the Theology of Andrew Fuller, Chris Chun provides the most substantive analysis of Fuller’s view. According to Chun, “Fuller is clearly of a higher Calvinist order than his New England friends” when he emphasizes the necessity of satisfaction and the specific canceling of a debt. Chun then adds, “Although Fuller may not be as rigid a literalist as Booth, he is still working within the general boundaries of both commutative and distributive framework in that Christ’s satisfaction which is equal payment of a debt (commutative), and the basis for the classical forensic justification (distributive).”70 In other words, Fuller was denying a “strict equivalence” between the atonement and a commercial transaction, but still operating according to commercial rules. This is, in essence, the Southern Baptist version of moral governmental theory outside of the Maxcean (Hopkinsian) stream: an un-commercialized (as opposed to a de-commercialized) atonement. The various disagreements over the extent 67 68 69 70

Nettles, By His Grace, 128. Haykin, “Particular Redemption,” in The Gospel, 128. Andrew Fuller, Deity of Christ, 3:693. Chris Chun, The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards in the Theology of Andrew Fuller (Boston: Brill, 2012), 166.

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of moral governmental theory in the nineteenth century were largely an issue of the commerciality of the atonement and the nature of commutative and distributive justice. Although Jonathan Maxcy rejected the latter two, not every Southern Edwardsean did, at least not in principle. By 1857, John Dagg conceded, Though justice in government, and justice in commerce, may be distinguished from each other, it does not follow, that whatever may be affirmed of the one, must necessarily be denied of the other. Distributive justice is not that which determines the equality of value, in commodities which are exchanged for one another: but it does not therefore exclude all regard to magnitudes and proportions. In the language of Scripture, sins are debts, the blood of Christ is a price, and his people are bought. This language is doubtless figurative: the figures would not be appropriate, if commercial justice, to which the terms debt, price, bought, appertain, did not bear an analogy to the distributive justice which required the sacrifice of Christ.71

Early Southern Baptists slowly commercialized the doctrine of atonement as it lost its Hopkinsian flavor. Still, while pecuniary images (debt, worth, value, exchange) were not outright rejected, they were clearly overshadowed in favor of governmental themes such as satisfaction, justice, pardon, and honor. Richard Furman, for instance, almost never described the atonement in commercial terms, preferring instead to describe Christ’s work as a divine pardon. According to Furman, Christ’s mediation consisted of “pardon by his blood, justification by his righteousness, and access to God through his intercession.”72 Like Fuller, Furman believed that the atonement was not primarily about commutative justice, wherein Christ exchanges a good quid pro quo with an offended God. Instead, Christ makes satisfaction to distributive and general justice by bearing the full penalty of the law, imputing his righteousness to the believer, and restoring honor to the Moral Governor. Furman did not outright deny the commercial nature of the atonement, but subordinated this theme to that of satisfaction of a crime, like Fuller. He upheld both real and symbolic justice. The cross, Furman wrote, is a “satisfaction he has rendered to its penal demands, by suffering the punishment due to sin, whereby he had made a complete atonement for his redeemed.”73 Nevertheless, in the mold of Fuller, Furman did occasionally abide by commercial “boundaries.” In a letter to a friend explaining the heresy of Socinianism, Furman explains, “But certain it is, though Christ wrought out the work of redemption alone, he, representatively and virtually, comprehended his people therein, and they

71 Ibid., 328–29. 72 Furman, “On Growth in Grace,” 554. 73 Ibid., 553.

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may be said to have given satisfaction to justice by the obedience and sufferings he rendered as their surety.”74 Furman was willing to concede a sin debt of some kind. While Furman’s moral governmental scheme did not allow him to draw a “strict equivalence” between the atonement and a commercial transaction, this does not mean it did not satisfy commutative justice in some way. Richard Furman’s doctrine of atonement was one of the nearest American counterparts to Andrew Fuller’s. While both men downplayed the concept of substitution, the main point of departure between the two would certainly be the doctrine of imputation, as Furman did not shy away from teaching the idea around every turn. According to Furman, “the whole tenor of Gospel doctrine” was that sinners “are accepted of God through the beloved Redeemer, and through the Imputation of his righteousness and atonement.”75 The forensic nature of justification and the distributive brand of imputation were regular themes in Furman’s preaching and writing, as they were for many Southern Baptists. Fuller’s moral governmental atonement reached even to the periphery of the Baptist South, both geographically and theologically. While James Madison Pendleton by no means exhibited the kind of ecumenical, “friendly Calvinism” as his other Baptist brethren, the Landmarkist from Kentucky and Tennessee was fundamentally shaped by Andrew Fuller’s doctrine of atonement. In his The Atonement of Christ, Pendleton exhibited the same suspicion of commercial tropes as Fuller. Pendleton writes, “The atonement has been often represented as a commercial transaction, proceeding on the principle of creditor and debtor, requiring so much suffering on the part of the Atoner for the salvation of so many.” Representing well the views of many Southern Edwardseans on the atonement, Pendleton then warns, Thus a great moral transaction, worthy of God and in the highest sense, illustrative of his glory, is looked upon as the literal payment of a debt. Analogies, like figures of speech, must not be pressed too far. Sin can be regarded as a debt in a metaphorical sense only. A debt is something which one person owes to another; something due from one to another. It is plain in this sense sin is not a debt; for it is not what the creature owes the Creator, but the very opposite. Sin, however, exposes the sinner to the penalty of the divine law, of which it is the transgression. This exposure involves obligation to suffer the penalty. The endurance of the penalty is due from the transgressor. Sin, therefore, can only be termed a debt by that figure of speech which puts the cause for the effect, and the effect for the

74 “Richard Furman to Gabriel Gerald,” Richard Furman Papers, Acc. 1960–016 [Box 1, Folder 11], Special Collections and Archives, Furman University, Greenville, S.C. 75 “Manuscript, ‘Saints in Heavenly Rest’ on death of Mrs. Esther Smith d. 1801, sermon preached in 1802 by Richard Furman D.D.”, Richard Furman Papers, Acc. 1960–016 [Box 3, #2] Special Collections and Archives, Furman University, Greenville, S.C.

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cause. As the effect of sin, the sinner may be said to owe a debt to the violated justice of God; but sin itself cannot be a literal debt. It is a crime.76

Pendleton, one of the leading voices of Landmark Baptists in the nineteenth-century, espoused a moral governmental, un-commercialized theory of the atonement. Although leaving to the North in the wake of the Civil War, his views do not appear to have changed significantly on the work of Christ. The fact that Pendleton’s work was published in 1885 is yet another example of the longevity of Edwardsean theology in Baptist life, even if Baptists were no longer appealing to Edwards directly for their views. In the case of Pendleton, his views came directly from Andrew Fuller: “But let the atonement of Christ be considered a great moral governmental measure proceeding on the principle of ‘public justice’ – to borrow a phrase from Andrew Fuller – and supplying an honorable basis for the consistent exercise of mercy, and all is plain.”77 Once again, the New Divinity emphasis upon public justice is evident, this time through the theology of Andrew Fuller and not through Jonathan Maxcy. Pendleton drew from the theology of Andrew Fuller on multiple occasions, especially concerning the extent of the atonement.78 Pendleton was a Fullerite Edwardsean, the most predominant kind in the nineteenth century South.79 Baptists of all kinds flocked to Fuller’s theology, especially in the west. As a fellow Baptist, Andrew Fuller was able to reach into the farthest corners of Southern Baptist life, speaking authoritatively to those who would never have studied theology from a New England Congregationalist. Through Andrew Fuller, Jonathan Edwards left his most lasting Southern Baptist legacy.

Fullerite Edwardseanism As the founding secretary of the Baptist Missionary Society and the theological heartbeat of the Modern Missions Movement, Fuller tailored Edwards’s theology in order to emphasize the responsibility of Christians to preach the gospel to all people and the duty of sinners to believe it. Baptists on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line

76 James Madison Pendleton, The Atonement of Christ (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1885), 88–89. This work was published when Pendleton was a pastor in Pennsylvania, but Pendleton’s views do not suggest a significant change over time. 77 Ibid., 90. 78 Ibid., 7, 90, 95, 97, 104. 79 Baptists on their deathbed were comforted by Fuller’s Life of Samuel Pearce. In his final days in 1828, Stephen Gano, the son of John Gano, counted this book among his favorite works. (Terry Wolever, ed., The Life and Ministry of John Gano, 1727–1804, Vol. 1 [Springfield: Particular Baptist Press, 1998], 404.)

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were attracted to this energetic brand of Calvinism. In the North, there was so much admiration for Fuller that his name was passed around as a potential candidate for the pulpit at First Baptist Church of Boston.80 In the South, during the so-called “democratization of American Christianity,” Fuller’s conversionism appealed greatly to the revivalistic Baptists of the post-revolutionary era.81 As “moderate Calvinists,” Southern Edwardseans were naturally drawn to Fuller’s scheme of thought. In Virginia, Andrew Broaddus’s views were described as “moderately Calvinistic, agreeing, in the main, with those of Andrew Fuller.”82 Fuller’s theology was so well-known in the South that Georgia Baptist S. Landrum was simply described as “a theologian of the Andrew Fuller type.”83 Jesse Campbell, another Georgia Baptist, was “in accord with the views of Andrew Fuller, holding to a general atonement, with a special application of its benefits.”84 In both instances, Fuller’s theology is juxtaposed with that of John Gill or Hyper-Calvinism, although Gill’s association with Hyper-Calvinism and his theological dichotomy with Fuller have since been challenged.85 In Virginia, an entire sect of Baptists known as the “Johnsonians” were named after a man who became a “warm friend and great admirer of Andrew Fuller” but who remained a “high-toned Calvinist.”86 In the South, Fullerite Calvinism was not at odds with High Calvinism. Conversely, admirers of Andrew Fuller did not necessarily view the theology of John Gill as less evangelistic. William Staughton, a 80 Francis Wayland writes, “I have been told that there was some thought of sending for Andrew Fuller; but he was the main support of the Baptists of England, the Secretary of the Foreign Missionary Society, and could not be spared from the church at Kittering.” (Francis Wayland, in A Memoir of the Life and Labors of Francis Wayland, Volume I, ed. Francis Wayland and H. L. Wayland [New York: Sheldon and Company, 1868], 115.) 81 Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); In 1831, for instance, an eclipse precipitated a tide of South Carolina awakenings, including the so-called Sun Spot Revival, “which, for extent and duration, has hardly a parallel in the history of revivals.” Fuller’s evangelical Calvinism was more than welcome during these seasons of grace. (Deacon John R. Logan, Sketches, Historical and Biographical, of the Braod River and King’s Mountain Baptist Associations [Shelby, NC: Babington, Robert, 1887], 451.) 82 J. B. Jeter, The Sermons and Other Writings of Andrew Broaddus (New York: Lewis Colby, 1852), 49. 83 History of the Baptist Denomination of Georgia (Atlanta: Jas. P. Harrison & Co. 1881), 316–17. 84 Ibid., 98. 85 Tom Nettles has pushed back against the assertion by some that John Gill was a Hyper-Calvinist and that his theology was categorically different from Andrew Fuller’s. “Gill does not pretend that grace is something that is offered to all men. This belief, in particular, labels him in the eyes of Curt Daniel as a hyper-Calvinist. Whether that item should be the strategic element of the definition of hyper-Calvinism can well be called into question. This becomes especially debatable when we observe that Gill did not reject the reality of duty-faith and duty-repentance.” (Thomas J. Nettles, By His Grace and for His Glory: A Historical, Theological, and Practical Study of the Doctrines of Grace in Baptist Life [Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1986], 79–80.) 86 James B. Taylor, “J.S. Reynoldson,” in Virginia Baptist Ministers (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1859), 401–02.

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founding member of the Baptist Missionary Society, actually edited an abridged version of Gill’s Body of Divinity which, along with Fuller’s works, greatly influenced the first Southern Baptist missionary to the Cherokee Indians.87 In The Identity of Primitive and Modern Missions (1840), a work that largely compared the labors of David Brainerd and William Carey to that of the Apostles, Adiel Sherwood quotes from John Gill on several occasions. For Sherwood, Gill was a trusted authority on the theology of missions: “Dr. Gill has been quoted largely in proof that the churches sustained their missionaries in primitive times, because he has not, as most modern missionaries and their friends have, been charged with heresy; nor can he be considered as being carried away with ‘new notions.’”88 Nevertheless, in the same work, Sherwood vaunted the labors of David Brainerd, William Carey, and Adoniram Judson to near-mythical status. An episode at Powelton Baptist Church in Georgia illustrates just how receptive many Baptists became to Fuller’s views. In 1791, four members walked out and formed their own church, protesting that other members had not been charged with heresy for espousing Fuller’s general atonement view. Pastor Silas Mercer put the matter before the church, asking them whether they should “excommunicate a member, for holding what is call a general provision?”89 Whether the church firmly understood Fuller’s exact view is difficult to tell. Nevertheless, the majority at Powelton declined to excommunicate the Fullerites, electing instead to expel the four separating members for causing schism. The controversy illustrates the sea change that took place in Southern Baptist theology in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As an evangelistic people, Baptists were tolerant of a moderate Calvinism and especially prone to receive Fuller’s brand of New Divinity theology. In Kentucky, as in almost every other Southern (and Northern) state, Andrew Fuller’s theology attached itself to the cause of the Great Commission. In his history of Kentucky Baptists, J.H. Spencer describes the factions that mutually touted Fuller between 1830 and 1837: The two parties that arrayed against each other at this period were known as Missionaries and Anti-missionaries. The former, which embraced the main body of the denomination,

87 Humphrey Posey was a “great admirer of the late Dr. Wm. Staughton” and profited from his abridged volume of Gill’s works. (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], 69, 101. 88 Adiel Sherwood, The Identity of Primitive and Modern Missions: A Discourse (Washington: M. J. Kappel, 1840), 62. 89 Gregory A. Wills, Democratic Religion: Freedom, Authority, and Church Discipline in the Baptist South 1785–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 86–87.

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held the doctrinal sentiments of Andrew Fuller, from which circumstance they were, by way of reproach called Fullerites, both by the Campbellites, whom they had excluded, and the Antinomians, who were still among them. They were in favor of missionary operations, Bible distribution and theological education, but were not united as to the proper methods of carrying out their benevolent enterprises. The Anti-missionary party was divided into two factions. One of these, represented by Licking and Red River, and, at a later period, by several other small associations, was decidedly Antinomian, in its doctrines; the other agreed with Fuller on the doctrines of grace, but “opposed all human societies” as mediums for spreading the gospel.90

Andrew Fuller’s name had become synonymous with those churches which zealously pursued the lost. Even Primitive Baptists as far South as Mississippi, despite their opposition to missionary societies like that in Kettering, still recognized Fuller as “the great head” and “the father of modern missions.”91 And throughout the nation Fuller’s theology was closely linked to the ideas of Edwards. In an 1833 issue of the New York anti-mission newspaper Signs of the Times, a Primitive Baptist remarked, “If what Mr. Fuller says, of man’s power or natural ability be true, the Spirit’s work is needless.”92 However, despite the fact that Edwards’s New England successors garnered the reputation for metaphysical speculation and relentless theological precision, in no way does this mean that they weren’t also concerned for evangelism. Their own roots were firmly planted in the soil of revivalism. As Joseph Conforti observes, the “New Divinity was a movement of a particular group of pious, young New England men, students from small settlements in rural Connecticut who were converted either in the mid-century revival, in subsequent local revivals, or in the Second Great Awakening.”93 Nevertheless, if the New Divinity was a revivalistic enterprise, Fullerite Edwardseanism was a high-performance missionary machine, including the likes of another Baptist Edwardsean, William Carey (1761–1834).94 With a disdain for “false Calvinism,” Fuller utilized Edwards’s distinction between natural and moral ability to answer the “Modern Question”: are sinners under an obligation to repent and believe in the Gospel despite their sinful inability to believe? In The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation, Fuller answered with a resounding yes. He cited

90 J. H. Spencer, A History of Kentucky Baptists (Cincinnati: J. R. Baumes, 1885), 645. 91 Benjamin Griffin, A History of the Primitive Baptists of Mississippi (Jackson: Barksdale and Jones, 1853), 34, 50. 92 “The Gospel Spiritually Discerned,” Signs of the Times Vol. I, No. 6 (February 13, 1833): 86. 93 Conforti, Samuel Hopkins and the New Divinity Movement, 24. 94 David W. Bebbington, “Remembered Around the World: The International Scope of Edwards’s Legacy,” in Jonathan Edwards at Home and Abroad: Historical Memories, Cultural Movements, Global Horizons (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 186.

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the labors of David Brainerd and drew from “President Edwards’s Inquiry into the Freedom of the Will, with some other performances on the difference between natural and moral inability.”95 According to Brewster, Fuller’s Edwardseanism also underwent a shift of its own: Between the first and second editions of The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation, Fuller’s views of the atonement changed significantly. In the second edition, Fuller discussed this important doctrine in language that reflected a governmental understanding of the cross; that is, in punishing Christ, God was displaying His justice against sin as a moral governor of the universe. During the interval between the editions, Fuller had read considerably from the New Divinity School of theologians who came to prominence following the death of President Jonathan Edwards. He seized upon their governmental view of the atonement and began using such language himself.96

Fuller also advocated the idea that, while Christ’s work was only applied to the elect, Christ’s death possessed infinite merit in itself. Therefore, according to Fuller, there was an infinite quality to the atonement that was sufficient to save the entire world (but was not purposed to do so by God). This he also drew from Edwards.97 Fuller thought this view was perfectly consistent with most “Calvinists in general.” He believed that most Calvinists “suppose the sufferings of Christ, in themselves considered, are of infinite value, sufficient to have saved all the world, and a thousand worlds, if it had pleased God to have constituted them the price of their redemption, and to have made them effectual to that end.”98 Therefore, in addition to their moral governmental emphasis, Fullerite Edwardseans were characterized both by the distinctions they made (like natural and moral ability and the sufficiency and efficiency of the atonement) and by their zealous evangelical tendency. In addition to Richard Furman, who counted Fuller’s Essays among his five favorite volumes to read (including the Bible), perhaps none invoked Fuller more than Jesse Mercer. Like his predecessor at the Christian Index W. T. Brantly, Jesse Mercer was also a direct product of Richard Furman’s Edwardsean network. Mercer too was a recipient of Furman’s program to educate Baptist ministers, the committee of which included Jesse’s father Silas.99 His Georgia Baptist roots were even extensions of the

95 Andrew Fuller, The Complete Works of the Rev. Andrew Fuller, Vol. II (Harrisonburg, VA: Sprinkle Publications, 1988), 329–330. 96 Paul Brewster, Andrew Fuller: Model Pastor-Theologian (Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing Group, 2010), 87. 97 Jeremy Pittsley, “Christ’s Absolute Determination to Save: Andrew Fuller and Particular Redemption,” Eusebeia Issue 9, Spring 2008, 142–43. 98 Andrew Fuller, The Complete Works of the Rev. Andrew Fuller, Vol. II, 488–89. 99 Joe King, A History of South Carolina Baptists, 158–59.

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Furman network. Edmund Botsford, Furman’s protégé, “might justly be regarded (if we except the indefatigable Marshall), as the principal founder of the Baptist interest in Georgia.”100 Mercer also conversed with Southern Edwardseans in the Furman circle. He often corresponded with Basil Manly Sr. about life, preaching and theology.101 Not only was Mercer’s ministry in Georgia made possible by Southern Edwardseans; it would blaze a trail for future Edwardseans like John L. Dagg, president of Mercer University (1844–1854), the institution born out of Mercer’s vision. As a result, according to Peter Beck, “The impact of Edwards’s colossal legacy can be felt both immediately and mediately in Mercer’s work.”102 In 1837, Mercer published in the Christian Index a lengthy excerpt from Edwards’s Religious Affections. Years later, he ran a thirteen-week series of proposed Sunday School lessons pulled from Edwards’s A History of the Work of Redemption. Like Brantly before him, Mercer propagated Edwardsean theology in its most effective form: print.103 More specifically, however, Mercer was a Fullerite. As president of the Baptists’ foreign mission board from 1830 to 1841, Mercer was especially fond of Fuller’s evangelical Calvinism.104 The president of the Georgia Baptist Convention (1822–1840) even carried Fuller’s works with him on his preaching tours.105 Nowhere is Fuller’s influence on Mercer more blatantly obvious than in Mercer’s Letters Addressed to the Rev. Cyrus White; In Reference to His Scriptural Views of the Atonement. By His Friend and Fellow Labourer in the Gospel of Christ, published in the Christian Index in 1830. Meant to exonerate Mercer from the charge of Arminianism and to clarify his conspicuously silent views on the atonement, these letters were a collective rebuttal to the publication of Cyrus White’s A Scriptural View of the Atonement. White had invoked Fuller to promote his Arminian views. Mercer’s detailed response might be considered one of the opening salvos in the Southern Baptist fight to rightfully claim Fuller’s theology as its own. Amazingly, in the letters, Mercer cites Fuller from nearly a dozen different places in his works, filling almost half of the entire book with quotations from the English Baptist. While Mercer distanced himself a bit from Fuller’s governmental theory, the former was still very committed to a moral governmental framework, rejecting with Fuller a commercial payment theory and insisting that the “very design” of

100 Charles D. Mallary, Memoirs of Elder Edmund Botsford, 51. 101 Charles D. Mallary, Memoirs of Elder Jesse Mercer, 56, 76. 102 Peter Beck, “A Southern Exposure: The Theology of Jonathan Edwards in the Writings of Jesse Mercer,” The Journal of Baptist Studies 1 (2007), 21. 103 Mercer succeeded Brantly at The Christian Index. 104 Mercer was most known for his preaching. William B. Johnson once said that Mercer was “the most interesting man that I have ever heard without exception.” (Wills, Democratic Religion, 26–27) 105 Mallary, Memoirs of Elder Jesse Mercer, 85.

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the atonement with respect to the law is to “repair its honor.”106 Although, like Fuller, Mercer affirmed a particular application to the elect only, he demonstrated his moderate Calvinism in his rejection of the phrase “limited atonement,” instead preferring that of “full atonement.” “The fullness of the atonement,” Mercer said, “is not to be measured by the number saved; but by its competency to save one sinner…So that to talk of a ‘limited atonement’ is to talk of an atonement short of the requisitions of justice,…or it is to suppose it is administered by drops and that the merits of Christ can be exhausted; which I will presume none will admit.”107 In addition to the infinite merit of Christ’s atonement, Mercer also promoted Edwardsean anthropology. Similar to Fuller’s “modern question,” Mercer likewise sought to answer “the knotty question,” namely, how to reconcile divine sovereignty with human free will. He too found his answer in Edwards. Also like Fuller, Mercer drew upon concepts from Edwards’s Freedom of the Will in order to demonstrate the inviolability of the will and the natural ability of the free human agent, two axioms of Fullerite Edwardseanism.108 Consequently, according to Brewster, “The immersion of Mercer in Fuller’s theology and the weight he gave to Fuller in developing his argument against White reveal the considerable impact Fuller had on American Baptists in the early South.”109 Evidenced by his ten letters, Jesse Mercer became a bulwark for Andrew Fuller’s theology in Georgia, proving that Southern Edwardseanism could not be contained merely to South Carolina. Georgia Baptists like Adiel Sherwood sparked revivals across the state and helped forge the Georgia Baptist Convention on the very same Edwardsean principles from Fuller.110 However, Richard Furman’s network of moderate Calvinism transcended more than state lines; it also crossed oceans.

106 Mallary, Memoirs of Elder Jesse Mercer, 288; Mercer writes, “I do not mean to contend for the atonement, as a commercial transaction: but I mean to oppose the idea of a vague atonement. I must contend with Fuller that though we cannot view the great work of redemption as a commercial transaction betwixt a debtor and his creditor: yet the satisfaction of justice, in all cases, requires to be equal to what the nature of the offense is in reality – and to answer the same end as if the guilty party had actually suffered. And for Christ, as our substitute, to have suffered less for us than we should if the law had taken its course, would be no atonement at all, and leave us in our sins.” (Memoirs, 290–91) 107 Snyder, “William T. Brantly (1787–1845),” 131. 108 Beck, “A Southern Exposure,” 22–23. 109 Brewster, Andrew Fuller, 104. 110 According to Jarrett Burch, “Influenced by the evangelical thrust of Andrew Fuller, Sherwood’s earliest letters and newspaper articles accentuated the theme of duty faith. Sherwood believed, like Fuller, that faith was a moral duty. Mirroring a similar transition Fuller made in England, Sherwood took the revivalist theology of Jonathan Edwards, which claimed that unconverted people lacked the moral ability to exercise faith.” (Jarrett Burch, Adiel Sherwood: Baptist Antebellum Pioneer in Georgia [Macon: Mercer University Press, 2003], 51.)

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Furman’s influence was powerful enough to marshal English Fullerite Baptists from across the Atlantic to come and fill Southern pulpits. In 1793, writing to “his ministering brethren in England,” Furman called “for a young man of promise and character, to supply the church in Georgetown, S.C. The letter was read at a meeting of ministers, and all, with one voice, exclaimed, ‘Staughton is the man.’”111 In the end, perhaps no other Baptist would epitomize the global Baptist network of Edwards’s theological descendants and the ability of Southern Edwardseans to mobilize like-minded pastors than William Staughton. Staughton had been baptized under the ministry of Samuel Pearce in Birmingham, the pastor lauded as the “Baptist Brainerd” and the subject of Andrew Fuller’s biographical Memoirs of the Rev. Samuel Pearce.112 Staughton’s link to “the seraphic Pearce” was a direct connection from South Carolina to the inner circle of Fuller and the theology of the Baptist Missionary Society, so much that Samuel Lynd could even boast that Staughton “was to the Baptist mission cause in this country, what Fuller was among his brethren in England.”113 In the preface to Staughton’s memoir, Lynd expressed his hope that Baptists would read the life of Staughton just as John Chamberlain, Baptist missionary to India, read “the life of the pious Mr. Edwards.”114 As one of the original twelve signers of the Baptist Missionary Society, Staughton brought the evangelical Calvinism of Andrew Fuller to America. Having been present at the very first missionary society meeting in Fuller’s Kettering in 1792, Staughton was eventually married by Furman, becoming one of the founders of the Triennial Convention in 1814 (as well as its corresponding secretary until 1826). With Furman at the helm and the Englishman Staughton in support, America’s first national Baptist denomination was, in some sense, doubly Edwardsean, representing at least two strains of Edwards’s thought. Writing of the students at Columbian College (later George Washington University), of which Staughton was the president from 1821–1827, the transatlantic Baptist spoke of the “sense I possess of the rectitude and excellency of the Divine Government.”115 Staughton was an Edwardsean in word and deed. Among his students were men who helped shape North Carolina Baptists: Thomas Meredith, co-founder of the North Carolina state convention, and Samuel Wait, the first president at Wake Forest College. Each of

111 Samuel W. Lynd, Memoir of the Rev. William Staughton, D. D. (Boston: Lincoln, Edmands, & Co., 1834), 27. 112 Obbie Tyler Todd, “Did Jonathan Edwards Help Inspire the Modern Missionary Movement?,” in A Collection of Essays on Jonathan Edwards (Fort Worth: JESociety Press, 2016), 33–47. 113 Samuel W. Lynd, Memoir of the Rev. William Staughton, D. D., 170. 114 Lynd, “Preface,” iv. 115 William Staughton, Memoir, 231; According to James Rogers, “The origin of Columbian College can be traced to Furman’s educational emphasis as president of the Triennial Convention.” (Rogers, Richard Furman, 179)

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these men reflected Staughton’s theology to varying degrees.116 Ultimately, in both Jesse Mercer and William Staughton, Richard Furman helped secure the endurance of Fullerite Edwardseanism in the Triennial Convention and in the South at large.

Simple and Implicit Edwardseanism Jonathan Edwards’s legacy among Southern Baptists was inextricably linked to the power of revival. Whether by his doctrines or by his own example, this is the frame in which most Baptists conceived of Edwards in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.117 Before Baptists knew Edwards the theologian, they were familiar with Edwards the hero of the Awakening. As Mark Noll explains, “It is significant that the first contentions about Edwards in nineteenth-century American Calvinist history concerned revival. Edwards’s relationships to the colonial awakenings was a key to much of the controversy over his legacy.”118 Although much attention has been paid to the artificial use of Edwards by such figures as John Wesley and Charles Finney, Baptists too laid claim to the revivalist legacy of Edwards, but in a much less controversial way.119 Like the Congregationalist-

116 Due to his views against slavery, the Northerner Wait chose not to join the administration of the Southern Baptist Convention and resigned his post at Wake Forest College in 1845. Although Wait published no literary writings, he was influenced heavily by Edwardseans William Staughton and Francis Wayland. In his vignette of Wait, John R. Shook notes, “The philosophical and theological views of Staughton and Francis Wayland were dominant.” (Dictionary of Early American Philosophers, ed. John R. Shook [New York: Bloomsburg Publishing, 2012], 1075.) 117 Robert Caldwell explains, “Edwardsean revival theology was found among Baptists of the Second Great Awakening. Edwards’s writings on spiritual theology, revival, and the will were prized among Baptists of the late eighteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic, who, like the Northampton sage, sought to wed a strong predestinarian theology with a vigorous commitment to revival.” (Caldwell, Theologies of the American Revivalists, 154–55) 118 Mark Noll, “Jonathan Edwards, Edwardsian Theologies, and the Presbyterians,” in After Jonathan Edwards: The Courses of the New England Theology (ed. Oliver D. Crisp, Douglas A. Sweeney; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 182. 119 In the preface to his abridged version of Religious Affections, Wesley said, “he [Edwards] heaps together so many curious, subtle, metaphysical distinctions, as are sufficient to puzzle the brain, and confound the intellects, of all the plain men and women in the universe; and to make them doubt of, if not wholly deny, all the work which God had wrought in their souls. Out of this dangerous heap, wherein much wholesome food is mixt with much deadly poison, I have selected many remarks and admonitions, which may be of great use to the children of God. May God write them in the hearts of all that desire to walk as Christ also walked!” (Wesley, An Extract from a Treatise Concerning Religious Affections: In Three Parts in The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, M. Volume XXIII [Bristol: William Pine, 1773], 178–179); Charles Finney also drew from the Religious Affections as well as from Edwards’s Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New England (1742) to justify his “new measures” of revivalism and to cast himself in the mold of Edwards. (Charles

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turned-Baptist Isaac Backus in the North, many Southern Baptists adopted the Northampton Sage as “our excellent Edwards,” believing that Edwardsean theology was best hardwired for Baptist pursuits.120 The third and fourth schools of Southern Edwardseanism, simple and implicit Edwardseans, were mostly concerned with appropriating Edwards’s revivalism for their own Baptist context, whether consciously or not. As David Bebbington explains, Andrew Fuller and other British evangelicals “accepted the governmental theory of the atonement, drawing on Joseph Bellamy as their source rather than on Bellamy’s master, Edwards. It would be fairer to claim them as exponents of the New England theology than of simple Edwardseanism.”121 In other words, although Fuller “drank deeply” from Edwards, his theology was sometimes hewn to the New Divinity more so than to Edwards himself.122 For instance, Fuller and his small circle of Baptists were also aided in their answer to the “Modern Question” by John Smalley, a disciple of Edwards and Bellamy.123 In

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Finney, Lectures on Revival (Ontario: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1993), 293–295); Finney took the pieces of Edwards he liked and discarded others: “Every one knows with intuitive certainty that he has no ability to do what he unable to will to do…therefore, the natural ability of the Edwardsean school is no ability at all…nothing but an empty name, a metaphysico-theological fiction.” He added, “Edwards I revere; his blunders I deplore.” (Cited in Allen C. Guelzo, “An Heir or a Rebel? Charles Grandison Finney and the New England Theology,” Journal of the Early Republic 17 (1997): 87) Michael A. G. Haykin, “Great Admirers of the Transatlantic Divinity: Some Chapters in the Story of Baptist Edwardsianism,” in After Jonathan Edwards: The Courses of the New England Theology, ed. Oliver D. Crisp and Douglas A. Sweeney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 204. David W. Bebbington, “Remembered Around the World: The International Scope of Edwards’s Legacy,” in Jonathan Edwards at Home and Abroad: Historical Memories, Cultural Movements, Global Horizons, ed. David W. Kling and Douglas A. Sweeney (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 186–87. Speaking of John Sutcliff at his funeral sermon, Fuller remarked, “I cannot say when he first became acquainted with the writings of President Edwards, and other New England Divines; but, having read them, he drank deeply into them…The consequence was that while he increased in his attachment to the Calvinistic doctrines of human depravity, and of salvation by sovereign and efficacious grace, he rejected, as unscriptural, the high, or rather hyper, Calvinistic notions of the Gospel, which went to set aside the obligations of sinners to every thing spiritually good, and the invitations of the Gospel as being addressed to them.” (Andrew Fuller, The principles and prospect of a servant of Christ: a funeral sermon for the Rev. J. Sutcliff with a memoir [Kettering, 1814], 46, quoted in Hayden, “Evangelical Calvinism,” 348). Chris Chun, however, has contended that Fuller was far more influenced by Edwards than by his New England successors. For instance, Chun insists, “when Fuller felt that the metaphysics of his New England friends went beyond the scriptural boundary, he was never afraid to diverge from them. It is apparent that Fuller and Hopkins also had run-ins concerning the doctrine of disinterested love…” (Chun, The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards in the Theology of Andrew Fuller, 159). John Ryland wrote, “In 1776, I borrowed of Mr. Newton, of Olney, two sermons on this subject [i.e., the distinction between moral and natural inability], by Mr. Smalley, which Brother Sutcliff

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contrast, simple Edwardseans were those Baptists who received Edwards’s theology in an unmediated way, typically pulling their ideas directly from Edwards’s own works and not from figures such as Dwight, Bellamy, Hopkins, or Fuller. They were molded around Edwards’s Northampton works (A Faithful Narrative, Religious Affections, Life of David Brainerd) and less so by those penned during his Stockbridge years (Original Sin, Freedom of the Will, End of Creation, True Virtue). As a result, these Edwardseans thought less in terms of God’s moral government or divine metaphysics and instead exhibited more sensible, affectionate theology conducive to their revivalistic style. This was the style of men such as Oliver Hart and John Gano, Furman’s mentors who lived during the Awakening and established a firm distinction between Edwards and his imitators. However, simple Edwardseanism was not simply generational. In contrast with his predecessor Furman and his colleague in Alabama Horace Southworth Pratt, Basil Manly Sr. did not draw much of his theology from Timothy Dwight.124 While the elder Manly was influenced by Andrew Fuller, his primary source of Edwardseanism was in fact the Northampton theologian himself.125 According to A. James Fuller, “Manly could, as a General Baptist, be loosely considered a strict Calvinist, and the works of Jonathan Edwards constituted a touchstone for his sermons throughout his career.”126 Much of his exposure to Edwards, fittingly, came from Oliver Hart’s library. As a result, Manly Sr. even wrote to his son and namesake, Basil Manly Jr., about his reading of Edwards. The elder Manly consumed Edwards’s works on revival.127 If any Baptist was groomed theologically and professionally by Richard Furman and his Edwardsean network, it was indeed Basil Manly Sr. In his writings, the South Carolinian echoed the language and rhetoric of Edwards’s Freedom of the Will almost exactly: What is moral freedom of will? We can give no better definition, than that a man is always at liberty to do that which he thinks, on the whole, to be best. That a man should be just as capable of doing, and as free to do, what he thinks not best, is no notion of freedom at

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afterwards reprinted from the copy which I transcribed. I well remember lending them to Mr. Hall of Arnsby, to whom I remarked, that I was ready to suspect that this distinction, well considered, would lead us to see, that the affirmative side of the Modern Question was fully consistent with the strictest Calvinism.” (John Ryland Jr., The Life and Death of the Reverend Andrew Fuller (London: Button and Son, 1816), 9 n). A. James Fuller, Chaplain to the Confederacy: Basil Manly and Baptist Life in the Old South (Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press, 2000), 177. Tom Nettles, The Baptists: Key People Involved in Forming a Baptist Identity, Volume Two: Beginnings in America (Fearn, Ross-shire: Christian Focus Publications, 2005), 271. A. James Fuller, Chaplain to the Confederacy: Basil Manly and Baptist Life in the Old South (Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press, 2000), 62–63. Ibid., 275.

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all. It is an absurdity. It is necessary that he should be inclined, by his constitution, to do that which, (all things taken together,) seems to him, at the moment of choice, best; and, if not,–he would not be a free moral agent. He may differ from all others in his estimates of what is best, and even from his own estimates of what is best, and even from his own estimates at other times; - but to be influenced by the highest motive in the mind, at the moment, - this is the precise nature of moral freedom.128

The elder Manly typified “moderate” Calvinists in his insistence upon divine providence with “necessity, but no compulsion.”129 His views were not unlike those of his predecessors and mentors in the Baptist faith. Manly was shaped by the preaching of W. T. Brantly as a boy and even attended Beaufort College, where Brantly was president. In 1819, after eighteen months at Beaufort, Manly then attended South Carolina College under Jonathan Maxcy and was class valedictorian. After graduation, Maxcy encouraged Manly in his earliest days of supply preaching. Eventually, Manly played a key role in the establishment of Furman Academy and the promotion of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. While president of the University of Alabama, he influenced a young Jonathan Haralson, who would later become the first lay president of the Southern Baptist Convention. Most importantly, the elder Richard Furman himself chose Manly as his pastoral replacement at First Baptist Church of Charleston. Exposed to an entire gamut of Edwardsean influences, Manly’s career was shaped almost exclusively by the world of Richard Furman. In turn, as a co-founder of the Southern Baptist Convention, Manly became yet another Edwardsean addition to the denomination. Implicit Edwardeanism, on the other hand, is an ostensibly nebulous thing. Without any concrete link to Jonathan Edwards, these Baptists seem to stretch the bounds of the eponym “Edwardsean.” However, Jonathan Edwards’s American legacy was so extensive that Edwardsean theology, practice, and language could often be adopted unknowingly. More than any denomination in America, Baptists illustrated this time and again. For instance, Baptist associations throughout the South often participated in “concerts of prayer” in order to promote revival, perpetuating an evangelical tradition begun by Edwards during the Awakening.130 This model came directly from Edwards’s An Humble Attempt to Promote Explicit Agreement and Visible Union of God’s People in Extraordinary Prayer, For the Revival and Religion and the Advancement of Christ’s Kingdom on Earth. In the work, published

128 Basil Manly, Sr. Divine Efficiency Consistent with Human Activity (Tuscaloosa: M. D. J. Slade, 1849, 17. 129 Basil Manly Sr., “A Sermon Delivered by Rev. Basil Manly, D. D.,” Southern Baptist Sermons on Sovereignty and Responsibility (Harrisonburg, VA: Sprinkle Publications, 2003), 27. 130 Thomas S. Kidd, Barry Hankins, Baptists in America: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 78.

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in 1746, Edwards implored all believers to conduct monthly “concerts of prayer” for global revival. Inspired by Scottish evangelicals, Humble Attempt was a practical outworking of Edwards’s postmillennialism and a work that profoundly influenced Baptists in the South in the realm of corporate prayer. Likewise, Edwards’s A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in the Conversion of Many Souls had a similar impact on the Baptist tradition of reporting revivals. In the work, Edwards documented the unprecedented awakening in Northampton during the years 1734–1735. According to Joseph Conforti, A Faithful Narrative “was canonized as the prototype of a more recent evangelical religious genre: the revival narrative.” While Edwards was by no means the first Puritan to document revivals, he did so in a way that appealed greatly to evangelicals. A Faithful Narrative became “an American archetype of the conversion narrative, an established and familiar evangelical religious genre.”131 Edwards’s work was a global sensation, providing the framework for Baptist revival narratives printed and distributed among churches in the South.132 Especially during the Second Great Awakening, many Baptists unknowingly reaped the fruits of Edwards’s labors by enjoying updates on the recent revivals. “Surprising Accounts” from across the South and the West were circulated.133 Whether the name of Jonathan Edwards was a familiar one or not, his revivalist legacy was particularly strong in the early nineteenth century. Edwards’s The Life of David Brainerd, first published in 1749, was still in print and extraordinarily popular well into the nineteenth century. Brainerd “became a virtual patron saint for America’s (as well as Great Britain’s) emergent Protestant missions movement.”134 Even for those vaguely familiar with Edwards, Brainerd’s account “became archetypal” for evangelicals who pushed west during the early 1800s.135 Jeremiah Bell Jeter (1802–1880), one of the founders of the Baptist General Association of Virginia and its first missionary, compared the life of Brainerd to that of the Apostle Paul!136 While waiting for a decision by the Triennial Convention in 1815 to be sent as a domestic missionary to the Missouri and Illinois territories, John Mason Peck purchased a copy of The Life of 131 Joseph A. Conforti, Jonathan Edwards, Religious Tradition, and American Culture (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 44. 132 Edwards’s grandfather and predecessor Solomon Stoddard experienced several small awakenings in Northampton during his nearly six decades of pastoral ministry. 133 Richard Furman, “A Letter from Dr. Furman of Charleston, to Dr. Rippon of London,” in Life and Works of Dr. Richard Furman, D. D., ed. G. William Foster Jr. (Harrisonburg: Sprinkle Publications, 2004), 416. 134 Douglas A. Sweeney, Nathaniel Taylor, New Haven Theology, and the Legacy of Jonathan Edwards (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 41. 135 Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, Charles G. Finney and the Spirit of American Evangelicalism, 16. 136 “Letter from J. B. Jeter to James B. Taylor” (March 30, 1827), in George B. Taylor, Life and Times of James B. Taylor (Philadelphia: The Bible and Publication Society, 1872), 60.

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David Brainerd. In his diary he wrote, “Oh, what would I not willingly do or suffer if I could live as devoted as this eminent servant of God! His singular piety and devotedness to the cause of Christ affected me so much that frequently I shut up the book and indulged myself in meditation and prayer.”137 Edmund Botsford was an evangelistic Baptist who embodied the revivalistic spirit and even the grammar of Jonathan Edwards without absorbing his theology directly. He was baptized and ordained by Oliver Hart. Although a product of Richard Furman’s educational fund, Botsford was characterized by a very simple, practical faith concerned less with higher learning and more with the saving of souls.138 Botsford’s Calvinism was so “moderate” that he even dreamed one night of walking arm-in-arm with John Wesley.139 As an Englishman, Botsford much preferred the works of fellow Baptist and countryman John Bunyan to those of Jonathan Edwards. Bunyan’s simple style appealed greatly to Botsford and aided in his spiritual development. In a letter to William B. Johnson in 1812, Botsford expressed his desire to “act the father again; I mean giving advice.” He then recommended that Johnson “read Bunyan’s Pilgrim Progress with Scott’s Notes,” encouraging him to, “with Whitefield, use plain market language; so you reach the heart, and touch all the springs of the soul.”140 With such an emphasis upon a modest, vernacularized ministry, it is little wonder that Edwards was of minimal use to Botsford. Never are Edwards’s works or the works of his successors mentioned among Botsford’s favorites.141 However, in the same breath, he also charged young Johnson to “be sure to consult Dr. Furman on every occasion.”142 Botsford’s chief theological influence was almost certainly Richard Furman, who was his mentor and one of his closest friends.143 So dear were the two Baptists to one another that their relationship was a “friendship of kindred hearts. It was like that of David and Jonathan.”144 Furman himself once wrote, “But if I should say, that, amongst my numerous correspondents, there is one whose correspondence affords me the greatest satisfaction,

137 John Mason Peck, in Rufus Babcock, Forty Years of Pioneer Life: Memoir of John Mason Peck, D.D. (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1864), 51–52. 138 Botsford wrote in 1811, “We need not go to College to learn this religion.” (Botsford, Memoirs, 181) 139 Ibid., 224. 140 Ibid., 184. 141 Botsford insisted, “The Task and old Bunyan are, with me, next to the Bible.” (Memoirs, 218) 142 Ibid., 188. 143 Writing to Johnson on a separate matter, Botsford confessed, “I consider Dr. Furman a great man of God. I really think he has the cause of God at heart above most men; I esteem him as a truly gracious person, of great experience, a man of very great prudence, and of a sound judgment, and consequently, a proper person to advise with on a matter of such importance.” (Memoirs, 149–150) 144 Ibid., 216.

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and that this correspondent is Mr. Botsford, I should not err from the truth.”145 Furman and Botsford corresponded often and intimately. Despite Botsford’s relative ignorance of Edwards, his ministry was not without traces of Edwardsean influence. Counseling the younger Johnson on another instance, Botsford warned of a hardened heart which “sees no beauty in spiritual and divine things; so hard, that no lasting impressions are made on it.”146 Such language is almost scripted from Jonathan Edwards’s third religious affection, which includes, “love to divine things for the beauty and sweetness of their moral excellency.”147 Exactly how much influence “America’s Augustine” exerted over prosaic Baptists like Botsford cannot be known.148 Nevertheless, implicit Edwardseans were those who pursued Edwardsean revival, engaged in Edwardsean friendships, and spoke Edwardsean language, whether they ever read from Edwards directly or not. Richard Furman’s legacy as a denominational leader, a stalwart for Baptist missions, and a crusader for Christian education should not eclipse his work as a master networker of Edwardsean theology in the Baptist South.149 From Birmingham, England to Providence, Rhode Island to the upcountry of South Carolina, Furman’s network of moderate Calvinists was an Edwardsean fraternity of pastors, teachers, presidents, secretaries, missionaries, and editors. Like a theological symphony, Furman orchestrated which seats were filled, which notes were played, and how they came together. While not every Baptist pulpit or position was subject to his influence, and while Baptists like Oliver Hart laid a firm evangelical foundation, Furman’s magnetic ability to bring together Baptists of a similar theological persuasion was unparalleled in his day and perhaps even since. As a result of Furman’s work, the theological sinews and ligaments of the Southern Baptist Convention were distinctly Edwardsean. The moderate Calvinism that flourished under his watch would inevitably define Southern Baptists for the next two hundred years.

145 Ibid., 217. 146 Ibid., 140. 147 Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 2: Religious Affections, ed. John E. Smith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959), 253. 148 George M. Marsden, “Jonathan Edwards, American Augustine,” Books and Culture: A Christian Review 5, no. 6 (1999): 10–12. 149 Richard Furman’s gravestone at First Baptist Church of Charleston describes him as a “Leader in the Twin Causes of Missions and Christian Education.”

4. The Two Sides of Honor: New Divinity Abolitionists, Slaveholding Southern Baptists, and the Moral Government of God

As the “first indigenous American school of Calvinism,” the New Divinity were the direct theological descendants of Jonathan Edwards.1 But they were not blind imitators. Sydney Ahlstrom has suggested that “no ‘school’ of American thought, in fact, has been graded by so many men of originality and intellectual power as the New England theology founded or set in motion by Jonathan Edwards.”2 Refashioning themes from The Nature of True Virtue and Original Sin, the New Divinity eventually challenged certain aspects of Edwards’s thinking. Crafting a more socially-conscious Calvinism, Edwards’s New England successors would also become some of the most potent abolitionist voices in the new republic. In 1776, Samuel Hopkins (1721–1803) addressed his Dialogue Concerning the Slavery of the Africans to the Continental Congress. In the same year, Revolutionary War veteran Lemuel Haynes (1753–1833) penned his essay “Liberty Further Extended: Or Free thoughts on the illegality of Slavekeeping.”3 According to Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, “No New Divinity preacher ever attacked the power of sin with greater prophetic force.”4 These Edwardseans were also organized. In 1790, Jonathan Edwards Jr. helped create the Connecticut Society for the Promotion of Freedom and the Relief of Persons Unlawfully Holden in Bondage, a group which also included brothers Timothy and Theodore Dwight. The younger Edwards left perhaps his most dramatic impression upon the South in the events leading to the Civil War. In 1790, his antislavery sermon made its way into the hands of one Owen Brown, who would thereafter become an ardent abolitionist. Brown made certain to pass on his anti-slavery views to his son John, who would eventually lead the infamous raid at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia.5 The Edwardsean tradition not

1 Joseph A. Conforti, Samuel Hopkins and the New Divinity Movement: Calvinism and Reform in New England between the Great Awakenings (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1981), vii. 2 Sydney Ahlstrom, “Theology in America,” The Shaping of American Religion, 255. 3 Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, “All Things Were New and Astonishing: Edwardsian Piety, The New Divinity, and Race,” in Jonathan Edwards at Home and Abroad: Historical Memories, Cultural Movements, Global Horizons (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 128. For an interesting look into Haynes’s thought, see John Saillant, Black Puritan, Black Republican: The Life and Thought of Lemuel Haynes, 1753–1833 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 4 Ibid., 129. 5 Edwards Jr. delivered the Society’s opening address, eventually published as The Injustice and Impolity of the Slave Trade, and of Slavery. For the account of Owen and John Brown, see James P. Byrd, “We

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only shaped American religion; it also influenced the course of American history itself. By refining Edwards’s idea of “benevolence to Being in general” into a more pragmatic “disinterested benevolence,” Hopkinsians traded a metaphysical love of God for a more personalized love of neighbor.6 Consequently, more than any other issue or idea, the evil of slavery exposed the greatest moral and theological divide between Edwards and the Edwardseans. While Jonathan Edwards opposed the Atlantic slave trade, he accepted the practice of slavery as a legitimate status quo in America.7 He purchased several slaves during the course of his lifetime, ironically from the same Newport, Rhode Island slave market that would incite such fervent activism in his disciple Hopkins. Thus, between Edwards’s support for slavery and New Divinity abolitionism, Southern Edwardseans seem to give surprisingly new meaning to the term “Edwardsean.” The founders and forerunners of the Southern Baptist Convention adopted New Divinity doctrines like moral governmental atonement, disinterested benevolence, and the distinction between moral and natural ability; yet, regrettably, they deployed none of these doctrines toward the goal of emancipation as did their New England counterparts. Outsiders and opponents of slavery were often struck by the spiritual negligence given to blacks in the South in the early nineteenth century. When Methodist Bishop Francis Asbury (1745–1816) passed through Georgetown, South Carolina in 1804 and surveyed the fruit of the Edwardseans’ labors, he was unimpressed. “The Baptists have built an elegant church,” he scoffed, “planned for a steeple and organ; they take the rich; and the commonality and the slaves fall to us.”8 Asbury called Charleston “the seat of Satan” for its mix of ostentatious wealth and cruelty toward slaves.9 In 1823, when Dartmouth and Andover graduate Nathan W.

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Can If We Will: Regeneration and Benevolence,” After Jonathan Edwards: The Courses of the New England Theology, ed. Oliver D. Crisp and Douglas A. Sweeney [New York: Oxford University Press, 2012], 63.) Edwards himself employed the concept of disinterested love. However, it was distinct from Hopkins’s idea. John Piper provides a short explanation of Edwards’s use of the word “disinterested”: “When Edwards speaks of disinterested love to God he means a love that is grounded not in a desire for God’s gifts, but in a desire for God himself.” (John Piper, Future Grace [Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 1995], 392.) In 1741, Edwards penned this thoughts on slavery, drawing a moral distinction between the African slave trade and the owning of slaves already in America. For Edwards, those who actually condoned the slave trade partook “of a far more cruel slavery than that which they object against in those that have slaves here.” (Kenneth P. Minkema, “Jonathan Edwards on Slavery and the Slave Trade,” William and Mary Quarterly, 54 [Oct. 1997], 823–834.) Cited in Leah Townsend, South Carolina Baptists 1670–1805 (Florence, SC: The Florence Printing Company, 1935), 60. Francis Asbury, The Journal and Letters of Francis Asbury, ed. Elmer T. Clark, J. Manning Potts, and Jacob S. Payton (London: Epworth Press; Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1958), 2:78. Referenced in John

New Divinity Abolitionists, Slaveholding Southern Baptists, and the Moral Government of God

Fiske (1798–1847) visited Savannah, Georgia on a mission trip, African slaves were some of his primary subjects of evangelistic conversation. Having been converted largely by the reading of Jonathan Edwards’s Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God and awakened to his own spiritual state, Fiske was astonished at so many blacks and poor whites who were “extremely ignorant and stupid” in the things of God.10 When revivalist and self-professing Edwardsean Charles Grandison Finney (1792–1875) denounced slavery from the pulpit and disseminated anti-slavery pamphlets throughout the South, Baptists made short shrift of his ministry.11 In his Memoirs, Finney hailed “the great revival” in the winter of 1857–58 which “prevailed throughout all the Northern states.” But he lamented, “Slavery seemed to shut it out from the South…the Spirit of God seemed to be grieved away from them. There seemed to be no place for him in the hearts of the Southern people at that time.”12 While Finney’s assessment of Southern revivalism was a bit misinformed, slavery indeed had a profound effect upon the religion of the South. Moderate Calvinistic Baptists defended the practice of slavery vehemently, often times by coopting the very same Edwardsean doctrines used to attack the institution of slavery. In his response to New Divinity man Francis Wayland’s assertion that the gospel commands masters to free their slaves (though Wayland did not believe in immediate emancipation), William B. Johnson’s warning sounded both Edwardsean and Lockean: “Immediate abolition would result in the greatest possible injury to slaves who are not competent of self-government.”13 For the Edwardseans, the issue of slavery hinged on three chief principles: glory, goodness, and government. Whether for or against emancipation, these axioms — the honor of God, the happiness of all, and the order of society — featured most prominently in their arguments. However, this Edwardsean civil war was not merely between North and South. As Kenneth Minkema and Harry Stout have shown, post-revolutionary Edwardseans in the North did not necessarily share the abolitionist views of the New Divinity:

Wigger, American Saint: Francis Asbury and the Methodists (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 243. 10 Nathan Welby Fiske, Memoir of Nathan W. Fiske…Together with Selections from His Sermons and Other Writings (Amherst: J.S. and C. Adams, 1850), 25; Fiske records the beginnings of his conversion experience in 1815 at Dartmouth College: “I felt as though the gates of heaven were shut against me. I returned home deeply concerned for my situation. I read the sermon of President Edwards on Deut. 32:35, and found my state exactly described – that I was in the hands of an angry God who would take vengeance.” (16) 11 Frances Fitzgerald, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (New York: Simon & Shuster, 2017), 51. 12 Charles G. Finney, Memoirs, 442, 444. 13 In Giant in the Land, 104–105.

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If New Divinity antislavery preachers, white, native, and black, represented a crucial link in the ongoing campaign against slavery, they would not be able to sustain that link within their own tradition. Other voices would pick up the struggle, while new generations of Edwardseans distanced themselves from the fire of Hopkins, the younger Edwards, and Haynes. Many diffused the potency of Edwards’s formulation of benevolence and retreated from Hopkins’s revolutionary rhetoric. Those strict Edwardseans who gave serious consideration to disinterested benevolence were minor figures who largely restricted themselves to using that concept in definitions of Christian ministry.14

During this time, “most of the white Edwardseans were racists,” including those in the South.15 Like the majority of post-revolutionary Edwardseans in the North, most Southern Edwardseans preferred Edwards’s revivalism to the New Divinity social agenda.16 Likewise, they did not typically cite republican principles like inalienable rights in their discussion of slavery. Despite their similarities, Southern Edwardseans were a much different breed than their pro-slavery counterparts in the North. Their views on slavery did not exhibit as wide a spectrum. They were unapologetic of slavery, and they generally rejected solutions like gradual emancipation or colonization.17 Basil Manly Sr., one of the most reasoned Edwardseans on the subject, owned over forty slaves.18 The elder Manly was “passionately committed to his religion and his South, not always distinguishable to him.”19 Conceding that slavery is “utterly repugnant to the spirit of our republican institutions,” Manly

14 Kenneth P. Minkema, Harry S. Stout, “The Edwardsean Tradition and the Antislavery Debate, 1740–1865,” The Journal of American History Vol. 92, No. 1 (Jun. 2005), 61. 15 Ibid., 62. 16 Not all Southern Baptists were necessarily pro-slavery during this time. J. B. Grambrell (1841–1921), who served four terms as president of the Southern Baptist Convention, wrote that there “were thousands of men in the South who were abolitionists. They would have challenged the situation if it could have been done, or if they could have seen any way of doing it without imperiling the social order of the South. I am speaking from what I know by contact with the common people. I myself, was an Abolitionist by instinct, not by birth. It came to me as an original intuition, that everybody out to have an even chance in this world and I wanted everybody to have an even chance.” (E. C. Routh, The Life Story of Dr. J. B. Grambrell [Oklahoma City: E. C. Routh, 1929], 5.) 17 For a small list (though not comprehensive) of Baptists in the North and South who supported colonization, see Aaron Menikoff, Politics and Piety: Baptist Social Reform in America, 1770–1860 (Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2014), 73. 18 Manly Sr. admitted, “the inconsistency between slavery and a perfect equality and freedom can never be removed so long as those terms embrace the same ideas they do at present.” (“On the emancipation of slaves,” in Soldiers of Christ: Selections from the Writings of Basil Manly Sr., & Basil Manly Jr., ed. Michael A. G. Haykin, Roger D. Duke, and A. James Fuller [Cape Coral: Founders Press, 2009], 63.) 19 O’Brien, Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860, 108.

New Divinity Abolitionists, Slaveholding Southern Baptists, and the Moral Government of God

believed that emancipation was too dangerous and colonization too costly to be viable options.20 Revolutionary Southerners like Richard Furman were contemporaries of Hopkins and the younger Edwards and yet did not apply Jeffersonian ideas like freedom and equality to the plight of their African American brethren. In fact, Furman proved that the concept of freedom could even be used to justify rather than to repudiate slavery. The pastor of FBC Charleston defended the practice by strangely contending that slaves desired to be held in bondage. In his Exposition of the Views of the Baptists, Relative to the Coloured Population of the United States (1823), Furman was forced to answer the question of how slaves arrived in America. Furman argued that “the Africans brought to America were, in general, slaves, by their own consent, before they came from their own country, or fell into the hands of white men.” He concluded, “Consequently, the man made a slave in this manner, might be said to be made so by his own consent, and by the indulgence of barbarous principles.”21 In other words, by their own free will, slaves choose to become slaves – both legally and spiritually. Although, relatively speaking, Southern Baptists did not always resort to such Lockean ideas as “consent” to make their case for slavery, they were certainly willing to bend the principles of the Enlightenment to their own nefarious purposes. The freedom of the will, the concept that helped early Southern Baptists to rationalize how God’s sovereignty was compatible with human responsibility, was, at times, the very same idea that helped them to justify holding other human beings in bondage. Sadly, that which fueled evangelism could also be used as a barrier to emancipation. Unlike Leonard Woods at Andover Seminary (whose Baptist nephew Alva Woods became the first president of the University of Alabama), Southern Baptists did not typically invoke disinterested benevolence in their defense of slavery.22 Instead, they preferred the Edwardsean theme of moral government as the primary theological basis for their views. Even more than social conservatives in the North, Southern Edwardseans demonstrated the potential for tragic moral contradictions within Edwardsean theology. But how could such similar theological commitments generate such opposing moral outcomes? In what way did Jonathan Edwards’s theological legacy allow for both slaveholders and abolitionists? In attempting to answer such questions, the concept of honor becomes a theological touchstone. While sharing a theory of divine moral government with a profound emphasis upon the character

20 Manly Sr., Soldiers of Christ, 64–66; For an illustration of Manly’s views of slaves as his property, see Fuller, Chaplain of the Confederacy, 222–223. 21 Richard Furman, Exposition of the Views of the Baptists, Relative to the Coloured Population of the United States, in Communication to the Governor of South Carolina (Charleston: A. E. Miller, 1823), 11. 22 Manly Sr., Soldiers of Christ, 64–65.

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of God, Northern and Southern Edwardseans did not define ethical concepts in quite the same way.23

Glory, Goodness, and Government To Northern and Southern Edwardseans alike, true justice was best defined as Godhonoring, good-promoting public order, or as they called it, “moral government.”24 In other words, justice was more than simply returning to each man his due, but about maintaining the most good for the most people. Whereas the New Divinity utilized this idea to argue for abolition, Southern Baptists wielded it in a much different way.25 Especially after Nat Turner’s slave revolt in Virginia in 1831 (who was himself a lay Baptist preacher) or the one conspired by Denmark Vesey in Charleston in 1822, Southern Baptists viewed Christian slavery as a just institution because it preserved public safety and, in their view, better ensured the salvation of “our beloved colored people.”26 Both of these things honored the Southern Baptist deity. Southern Baptists did not dispense with the Edwardsean notions of public justice; instead, they insisted that Christian slavery upheld public justice by bringing stability to the world, the gospel to the heathen, and honor to God. Not surprisingly, in his address at the Southern Baptist Convention, William B. Johnson appealed to glory, goodness, and government: “Our objects, then, are the extension of the Messiah’s kingdom, and the glory of our God. Not disunion with any of his people; not the upholding of any form of human policy, or civil rights; but God’s glory, and Messiah’s increasing reign; in the promotion of which, we find no necessity for relinquishing any of our civil rights.” Likening their cause to the Apostle Paul’s Macedonian call in Acts 16:6–10, Johnson insisted that slavery was “for the profit of these poor, perishing and precious souls.”27 These three pillars

23 This paper is not contending that the meaning attached to honor solely determined one’s position on slavery. Rather, honor was a prominent theme in theological and social discourse in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it was often used to support one’s individual beliefs on the issue of slavery. As such, it is a reliable indication of one’s theological justification for, or condemnation of, slavery. 24 Portions of this chapter have been drawn from a forthcoming chapter in Baptist History and Heritage Journal entitled “‘Forbidding us to Speak unto the Gentiles’: The First Southern Baptist Convention (1845) in its Moral and Theological Context.” 25 According to Holifield, “By the 1840s it was a standard practice of Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian theologians to affirm a notion of penal satisfaction but then to expound on the idea that the atonement was also necessary to preserve the ‘moral government’ of the cosmos.” (Holifield, Gentlemen Theologians, 195.) 26 Johnson, “Address of the Convention,” 19. 27 Johnson, “Address of the Convention,” 19.

Glory, Goodness, and Government

— honor, happiness, and order — formed the ethical backbone for the Southern Edwardsean case for slaveholding.28 By the time they convened in Augusta to secede from their Northern brethren, Southern Baptists preferred disunion to disorder. As long as they continued their “conquest of the world to God” and prevented social instability, they were able to justify holding an entire people in bondage and severing their ties with their Northern Baptist counterparts.29 1845 was also the year that a series of letters between Richard Fuller and Francis Wayland on the issue of slavery was published. Eventually serving as the third president of the SBC, Fuller chaired the committee which authored the preamble of the Southern Baptist Convention. In 1841, the Triennial Convention had voted Richard Fuller as vice president of the Board of Foreign Missions to replace Elon Galusha, whom they voted out for his strong antislavery positions.30 Although Fuller himself owned slaves, he was one of the few Baptists who was willing and able to conduct civilized discourse on the issue. According to Mark Noll, his exchange with Wayland “was one of the United States’ last serious one-on-one debates where advocates for and against slavery engaged each other directly, with reasonable restraint, and with evident intent to hear out the opponent to the extent possible.”31 The bulk of Fuller’s case for slavery hinged on glory, goodness and government. Fuller, who referred to the “economy of justice” in his sermons, conceived of order — specifically white order — as something next to godliness.32 In his letter to Wayland, he reasoned, “in these States it is believed by men of the most beloved piety, and exalted philanthropy, and after patient and prayerful survey of the whole ground, that immediate and unconditional abolition would be a revolution involving the entire South in ruin; breaking up all social order and peace and safety; and, in fact, inflicting on the slaves themselves the most irreparable mischief.”33 Although Southern Edwardseans did not exhibit the same kind of social consciousness as the New Divinity, they were nonetheless sensitive to certain societal ills and the honor of God. Just as Samuel Hopkins had identified the “open, public 28 In this sense, utilitarianism is not meant with a direct connection to John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), one of the fathers of the philosophical school known as Utilitarianism. What is meant is merely the idea that whatever achieves the most good for the most people is necessarily right. 29 Johnson, “Address of the Convention,” 17. 30 Kidd and Hankins, Baptists in America: A History, 127. 31 Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 36–37. 32 Richard Fuller, “Lord, To Whom Shall We Go?”, Sermons by Richard Fuller (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1877), 316. 33 Richard Fuller, “Letter I,” in Domestic Slavery Considered as a Biblical Institution: In a Correspondence Between the Rev. Richard Fuller of Beaufort, S.C., and the Rev. Francis Wayland, of Providence, R.I. (New York: Lewis Colby, 1845), 136.

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sins” of a slaveholding society, Richard Furman warned his congregation against bribery and other injustices “in public life.”34 Southern Baptists like Abner Clopton and Adiel Sherwood, for example, were some of the leading advocates for temperance during their lifetimes. Even the unlearned Edmund Botsford managed to publish a pro-slavery tract that influenced other ministers in the South, including Episcopalian bishop William Meade.35 While not in agreement on every social issue, most especially slavery, Northern and Southern Edwardseans were perceptive to the effects of sin upon their communities. As patriots, they saw themselves as public theologians shepherding a modern American people. Tom Nettles has identified three prominent ideas that flourished among Southern Baptists “in a distinctive Edwardsean style”: (1) the definition of freedom in relation to the will, (2) the necessary distinction between natural and moral ability, (3) and religious affections as the essence of person religion.36 In addition to these three coordinates, a fourth also emerges: God’s moral government as the primary way of explaining God’s kingdom.37 Perhaps more than any other single doctrine, the idea of God’s moral government, or the principles within this idea, was the most lasting mark the New Divinity left upon Southern Baptist theology because it subsumed and breathed life into almost every other Edwardsean idea.38 Southerners mirrored the theology of their Northern counterparts in emphasizing the glory, goodness, and government of God. However, they inherited these concepts on their own terms.

34 Samuel Hopkins, “A Dialogue Concerning the Slavery of the Africans, Showing it to be the Duty and Interest of the American Colonies to Emancipate all their African Slaves,” in The New England Theology: From Jonathan Edwards to Edwards Amasa Park, ed. Douglas A. Sweeney, Allen C. Guelzo (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2006), 154. Richard Furman, “On Covetousness,” in Life and Works of Dr. Richard Furman, D.D. (Harrisonburg: Sprinkle Publications, 2004), 578. 35 Jeffrey Robert Young, ed., Proslavery and Sectional Thought in the Early South, 1740–1829 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006), 198. 36 Tom Nettles, The Baptists: Key People Involved in Forming a Baptist Identity, Volume Two: Beginnings in America (Fearn, Ross-shire: Christian Focus Publications, 2005), 274. 37 Robert Caldwell explains the New Divinity view of moral government: “As God’s moral attributes are discerned, known, and loved in creation, the universe increasingly shines with the reflected glory of God. Today evangelicals might call this manifestation of God in history the ‘kingdom of God’; the New Divinity preferred to call it God’s ‘moral government.’” (Caldwell, Theologies of the American Revivalists, 94) 38 In a circular letter distributed at the Charleston Baptist Association meeting in Camden in 1820, justice was described as “the guardian of God’s moral government.” (“The Circular Letter. The Charleston Baptist Association, to the Churches they represent, send Christian salutation,” in Minutes of the Charleston Baptist Association: convened in the town of Camden, S.C. 4th November 1820 [Charleston, SC: T. B. Stephens, 1820], 8.)

Richard Furman and Timothy Dwight

Richard Furman and Timothy Dwight The paternalistic history of honor in America dates back far before the issue of emancipation or even Edwards. Striving to become “a city upon a hill,” the Puritan fathers consigned a great deal of importance to honor in their quest to become “visible saints” and to evangelize the heathen natives of New England. In 1710, the urbane Cotton Mather could boast, “It is very sure the best thing we can do for our Indians is to Anglicize them in all agreeable instances; and in that of languages, as well as others. They can scarce retain their language, without a tincture of other savage inclinations which do but ill suit, either with honor, or with the design of Christianity.”39 In this sense, honor was integral to the Puritan “errand.”40 With the redemptive message of the gospel came another kind of redemption, a cultural and intellectual salvation of a poor, benighted people. Honor was a two-sided coin, both moral and authoritative in nature. In the early republic, honor remained a powerful concept, especially in the South. Recalling his mother’s ill-fated departure for Charleston when he was a boy, the fatherless Andrew Jackson remembered her last words to him: “Sustain your manhood always.”41 Such was the world of male honor that dominated the American South. In his standard work Southern Honor, Bertram Wyatt-Brown demonstrates the pivotal significance of honor in Southern behavior and society.42 He explains, Apart from a few lonely dissenters, Southern whites believed (as most people do) that they conducted their lives by the highest ethical standards. They thought that they had made peace with God’s natural order. Above all else, white Southerners adhered to a moral code that may be summarized as the rule of honor. Today we would not define as an ethical scheme a code of morality that could legitimate injustice – racial or class. Yet so it was defined in the Old South. The sources of that ethic lay deep in mythology, literature, history, and civilization. It long preceded the slave system in America. Since the earliest

39 Quoted in Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York NY: Vintage Books, 1998), 44. 40 See Perry Miller, “Errand into the Wilderness,” in Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, MA, 1958), 8, 15. 41 In Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 176. 42 Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982)

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times, honor was inseparable from hierarchy and entitlement, defense of family blood and community needs.43

Baptists were no exception to this moral code of honor. In The Sacred Mirror: Evangelicalism, Honor, and Identity in the Deep South, 1790–1860, Robert Elder notes the way that Southern Baptists like W. T. Brantly were able to Christianize the concept of honor by appealing to Holy Scripture.44 In its recent “Report on Slavery and Racism in the History of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary,” the flagship seminary concluded, “Although most Northern Baptist leaders were willing to maintain fellowship with both abolitionist Baptist and slaveholding Baptists, white Southern Baptist leaders declared that honor, self-respect, and efficiency in cooperative missionary operations required them to form a convention for the Baptist churches of the slaveholding states.”45 Although both Edwardsean groups, Hopkinsians and Southern Baptists, viewed divine honor as an expression of God’s moral probity, the latter tended to punctuate divine authority in a way that the former did not.46 As a result, under the very same banner of divine honor, one group fought to defend the heart of God and the other His rule. Ultimately, in their defense of both natural and social hierarchies, Southern Edwardseans proved to be the true successors of Jonathan Edwards in the sociopolitical sense.47 This “rule v. rectitude” principle in the theme of divine honor allowed for slavery advocates and abolitionists to invoke the same Edwardsean doctrines and employ the same theological language, but with drastically different conclusions regarding the manumission of slaves.

43 Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 3–4. 44 Robert Elder, The Sacred Mirror: Evangelicalism, Honor, and Identity in the Deep South, 1790–1860 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016). 45 “Report on Slavery and Racism in the History of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary,” (Louisville, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2018), 9. 46 After Jonathan Edwards’s disciple and biographer Samuel Hopkins codified New Divinity theology in his System of Doctrines (1793), their brand of theology was often pejoratively referred to as “Hopkinsianism” or “Hopkintonianism.” Like the name “Puritan” centuries earlier in England, “Hopkinsian” was originally a term of opprobrium. 47 Unlike his abolitionist epigones, Edwards appears to have usually owned at least one slave. According to George Marsden, “Despite his interest in defending ministerial authority and in protecting his fellow slaveholders, Edwards’ arguments revealed his deep ambivalence toward the institution of African slavery. His main argument was that using one’s ‘neighbor’s work without wages’ was not itself sinful, since the Bible expressly allowed slavery and it would not contradict itself.” (Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003], 257). Richard Furman employed this exact same argumentation in his published defense of slavery. In some sense, Edwards’s “ambivalence” toward slavery unraveled into two different strains of Edwardseanism, one abolitionist and the other slaveholding.

Richard Furman and Timothy Dwight

Richard Furman personified the Puritan ideal in Baptist form. Tom Nettles has even described Furman as “a Southern embodiment of the best of Puritanism.”48 As the pastor of FBC Charleston and the first president of the Triennial Convention, Furman was a picture of authority and piety. “Indeed,” William B. Johnson recalled, “so eminent was he for exemplary piety and holy living, that the whole city held him in veneration. The ungodly stood abashed in his sight, and the profligate carefully hid his iniquities from his view.”49 Furman was a man of honor, elevated for his social position as well as for his godliness. With such a Puritanical persona, it is little surprise that Furman frequently aligned with the thought of Edwards’s grandson Timothy Dwight (1752–1817).50 According to W.T. Brantly, Dwight was, quite possibly, Furman’s favorite American-born theologian.51 At first glance, a Baptist pastor in South Carolina and the eighth president of Yale College would not appear to share much in common. However, the two contemporaries paralleled one another in virtually every aspect of their lives. Spiritually, Dwight was also a deeply pious individual, such that John R. Fitzmier has called Dwight “New England’s consummate moralist.”52 He defined true piety as that which “produces that obedience to the divine government.”53 Theologically, as the grandson of Jonathan Edwards, Dwight also lionized “that moral Newton” and “that second Paul.”54 Like Furman, he associated with the New Divinity in some way, but not in an outspoken sense.55 Professionally, both Dwight and Furman were

48 Thomas J. Nettles, “Richard Furman,” in Baptist Theologians, ed. David Dockery and Timothy George (Nashville, TN: Broadman Press, 1990), 140. 49 William B. Johnson, “Richard Furman, D.D.,” 13. 50 According to John R. Fitzmier, Dwight “celebrated the halcyon days of the Puritan era and yearned for its reestablishment.” (Fitzmier, New England’s Moral Legislator: Timothy Dwight, 1752–1817 [Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998], 20.) 51 Brantly, “Sermon,” 221. 52 Ibid., 158. 53 Timothy Dwight, The True Means of Establishing Public Happiness (New Haven: Connecticut Society of Cincinnati, 1795), 19. 54 In a poem entitled “Triumph of Infidelity,” Dwight referred to his grandfather as “That moral Newton, that second Paul.” (Timothy Dwight, The Triumph of Infidelity: A Poem [“Printed in the World,” 1788], 22) 55 According to Douglas A. Sweeney, “True, Dwight’s Edwardsean credentials have been contested by more scholars than Sidney Mead. He was, after all, a privileged member of Connecticut’s standing order and not a sharp-edged critic (like the most radical Edwardsians) of New England’s religious establishment. Nevertheless, he remained strongly devoted throughout his life to the theology of his grandfather Edwards, as well as to that of his uncle – and New Divinity mentor – Jonathan Edwards, Jr.” (Sweeney, Nathaniel Taylor, New Haven Theology, and the Legacy of Jonathan Edwards [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003], 24); Fitzmier likewise depicted Richard Furman when he described Timothy Dwight as a theologian who “can be properly identified as an Edwardsean and at times as a

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highly-educated, revival-seeking presidents with patrician sensibilities.56 Politically, each was a Federalist who combined a refined social conservatism with ardent patriotism. Dwight was a military chaplain during the Revolution.57 Conversely, while General Cornwallis placed a bounty on the head of Furman during the war, “so notorious a rebel,” the latter cultivated friendships with Federalists such as Senator Charles Pinckney, a signer of the United States Constitution, and chancellor Henry W. DeSaussure, whose Phocion letters defined South Carolina Federalism.58 After fighting for freedom, Dwight and Furman both turned their attention to social stability and honor in the new republic. Both men were also committed moral governmentalists who believed that divine honor was supreme above all things. Dwight referred to God’s holiness as his “self-government” and insisted that the atonement “must leave the Divine government as firm, as honorable, as efficacious in its operations, after the atonement is made, as it was before the crime was committed.”59 Although firmly ensconced in the Charleston tradition, Richard Furman’s theology was remarkably similar to Dwight’s. For Furman, himself a close friend of Patrick Henry, the American Revolution was a “cause which is intimately connected with the honor of God, and the interests of the Redeemer’s kingdom.”60 In his funeral sermon for Alexander Hamilton, who was killed in a duel at the hands of Aaron Burr (the grandson of

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hesitant advocate of the New Divinity theology.” (John R. Fitzmier, New England’s Moral Legislator: Timothy Dwight, 1752–1817 [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998], 119.) During Dwight’s tenure as president, Yale experienced a series of student-led revivals. Conversely, the official name of the Triennial Convention of which Furman was the first president was the General Missionary Convention of the Baptist Denomination in the United States of America for Foreign Missions (1814). Dwight’s defense of establishment and his fear of “Jacobinism” contributed to what Jonathan J. Den Hartog has called the “Federalization of American Christianity” in the post-revolutionary era. In an Independence Day sermon delivered on the twenty-second anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Dwight asked, “Is it, that we may change our holy worship into a dance of Jacobin phrenzy?” (Timothy Dwight, The Duty of Americans, at the Present Crisis, Illustrated in a Discourse, Preached on the Fourth of July, 1798 [New Haven, CT: Thomas and Samuel Green, 1798], 20–21); Hartog’s thesis is a revision of Nathan Hatch’s “democratization of American Christianity.” (Jonathan J. Den Hartog, Patriotism and Piety: Federalist Politics and Religious Struggle in the New American Nation [Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015], 7, 17); Dwight has even been labeled the “architect of Godly Federalism.” (Fitzmier, New England’s Moral Legislator, 182.) For the details of this account, see James A. Rogers, Richard Furman: Life and Legacy (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2001), 39; “Letter by Charles C. Pinckney to Richard Furman, 14 Feb. 1793,” Richard Furman Papers, Acc. 1960–016 [Box 1, Folder 5], Special Collections and Archives, Furman University, Greenville, S.C.; Henry William DeSaussure worked with Furman in the South Carolina legislature, particularly regarding the right of ministers to hold seats on the legislature. Timothy Dwight, Theology; Explained and Defended in a Series of Sermons, Vol. II (New Haven, CT: T. Dwight & Son, 1839), 162, 196. Furman, “Humble Submission to Divine Sovereignty. The Duty of a Bereaved Nation,” 382.

Richard Furman and Timothy Dwight

Jonathan Edwards and Dwight’s cousin), Furman distinguished between “false honor” and “virtuous honor.”61 But how could Richard Furman make such a qualification for dueling and yet not apply it to slavery? Why did he see revolution as honorable and revolt as dishonorable? With so many theological, political, and social similarities, how could Timothy Dwight and Richard Furman differ on the issue of slavery even when boasting the same tagline of honor? To be sure, Furman’s position on slavery underwent a transition from the early nineteenth century when he affirmed that slavery was “undoubtedly an evil.”62 But like most Southern Baptists, Furman’s view soon changed. Although both Dwight and Furman touted God’s moral government, Northern and Southern Edwardseans did not define honor in exactly the same way, and no single issue distilled the true meaning of honor more than the evil of slavery. Despite a similar vocabulary and a common theological tradition that viewed honor as both moral and authoritative in nature, Southern Edwardseans approached the issue of slavery in a way that tended to favor the authority of honor before its morality, while Northern Edwardseans clearly favored the ethics of honor over its authority. For instance, in his sermon on “establishing public happiness,” Dwight equated honor with benevolence.63 “Thus they will secure the peace of an approving conscience, enjoy the transports of an expanded benevolence, and commence a career of honour which will know no end.” For this reason, Dwight extended little empathy to men (like Basily Manly Sr.) who “professedly acknowledge the wickedness of slavery, and still, on the pretence of political expediency use every artifice of ingenuity and fraud, to rivet the fetters, which bind their fellow creatures in bondage.”64 In a sermon to his Connecticut abolitionist group, Dwight contended that “freedom and independence” were “to the honour of Americans” and should be extended to their African American brethren.65 Timothy Dwight’s logic was very simple: the principles of the American Revolution must be applied to slaves. If freedom is honorable, it is honorable for all. However, honor was a semantic spectrum. Richard Furman was no less a patriot than Dwight, but he defined honor much differently. Or he emphasized another side of the coin. Two decades before the birth of the Southern Baptist Convention

61 Furman, “Death’s Dominion Over Man Considered,” 245–46. 62 Loulie Latimer Owens, Saints of Clay: The Shaping of South Carolina Baptists (Columbia: SC: Bryan, 1971), 70–71. 63 According to Fitzmier, “disinterested benevolence became the primary chief virtue of Dwight’s ethical system.” (Fitzmier, New England’s Moral Legislator, 166) 64 Dwight, The True Means of Establishing Public Happiness (New Haven: Connecticut Society of Cincinnati, 1795), 21. 65 Ibid., 19.

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(1845), the chief religious apologist for slavery in the South was Richard Furman. Yet his defense, strangely enough, was delivered in the grammar of the New Divinity. With ruthless logic, Furman spoke the language of Timothy Dwight to argue for slavery, not against it. Contending for public order in the wake of the Denmark Vesey slave revolt plot, Furman’s Exposition of the Views of the Baptists, Relative to the Coloured Population of the United States is a showcase of Edwardsean ideas put to a nefarious use.66 According to Furman, “the wisest and best policy” for nations is “to consider and acknowledge the government of the Deity, to feel their dependence on him and trust in him, to be thankful for his mercies, and to be humbled under his chastening rod; so, not only moral and religious duty, but also a regard to the best interests of the community appear to require of us.”67 With an Edwardssounding rationale, Furman continues, “For a sense of the Divine Government has a meliorating influence on the minds of men, restraining them from crime, and disposing them to virtuous action. To those also, who are humbled before the Heavenly Majesty for their sins, and learn to be thankful for his mercies, the Divine Favour is manifested.”68 Interestingly, Furman begins his now-infamous defense of slavery with an emphatic appeal to the divine government and the “moral and religious duty” incumbent upon its subjects. Couched in themes like humiliation, dependence, and majesty, Furman clearly associated the divine government with unparalleled authority that should be respected and feared. In turn, in Furman’s mind, this produces “virtuous action.” Any attempt to contradict the established moral government of God would promote false honor. Later in the treatise, against the argument that slavery violates the golden rule, Furman replies to his interlocutor with another governmental appeal: “But surely this rule is never to be urged against that order of things, which the Divine government has established; nor do our desires become a standard to us, under this rule, unless they have a due regard to justice, propriety and the general good.”69 For Furman, the divine government is first and foremost an established authority of which the social order itself is an earthly reflection. (This is one reason why he would not tolerate the anarchy of dueling.) Therefore, to question the institution of

66 The alarm in the state of South Carolina among whites after the slave revolt plot cannot be overstated. Moreover, for the first time since the Revolution, the census of 1820 had revealed that whites were outnumbered by their slaves in the state. By invoking the authority of the newly formed South Carolina Baptist Convention and by appealing to the divine government, Richard Furman was warning slaves and anti-slavery whites against another potential rebellion and seeking to establish slavery as the God-ordained means by which public peace could be maintained. 67 Richard Furman, Exposition of the Views of the Baptists, Relative to the Coloured Population of the United States (Charleston: A. E. Miller, 1823), 4. 68 Ibid., 4. 69 Ibid., 9.

Revolution v. Rebellion

slavery is to question God’s justice as well as his goodness. God’s moral government always seeks to promote His justice and the “general good” of his subjects. Instead of appealing to honor on the basis of morality or benevolence, Furman invokes the locus classicus for the pro-slavery position, 1 Timothy 6:1: “account their masters worthy of all honor.”70 Furman interprets this passage as a clear admonition that slaves “are not authorized by him to demand of them emancipation, or to employ violent means to obtain it.”71 In the Furmanian view, honor is a matter of unquestioned authority and rule, regardless of one’s moral integrity. Amazingly, Richard Furman and Timothy Dwight both appealed to honor to make their respective cases for and against the institution of slavery. They did so on moral governmental grounds. However, their arguments were oppositely constructed. Arguing deductively from God’s moral government, Dwight conceived of honor as an ethical ideal. Conversely, Richard Furman reasoned inductively that God’s moral government was a permanent social fixture and that honor was therefore a reverence for that authority. Here the “rule vs. rectitude” principle in the concept of honor is illustrated clearly in theologians of similar social standing and education. Between the Connecticut Congregationalist and the Southern Baptist, ironically it was the anti-establishment Baptist who contended prima facie that God’s moral government was composed of inviolable societal structures. For Dwight, on the other hand, the character of God was inviolable. Although paralleling one another personally, professionally and politically, Dwight and Furman did not interpret Edwardsean ideas in the same light.

Revolution v. Rebellion If Timothy Dwight could use the logic of the Revolution to argue for abolition, Southern Baptists could do the same to argue for a new convention and even secession. According to Allen Guelzo, “The church separations provided an illusory guarantee to Southerners that, if matters warranted, secession from the Union was an easy, profitable, and moral way of putting an end to the strife over slavery.”72 As C. C. Goen has shown, denominational splits were not simply precursors to the Civil War; they also provided further moral justification for secession.73 Years

70 Furman, Exposition of the Views of the Baptists, Relative to the Coloured Population of the United States, 8. 71 Ibid., 8. 72 Allen Guelzo, Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 87. 73 The American Methodists split into Northern and Southern sects in 1844, just one year before the Baptists. In 1857, the Southern Presbyterians did much the same, leaving the Presbyterian General

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after the New Divinity defended the idea that freedom was about honor, so too did Southern Edwardseans when they threatened to leave the Triennial Convention and the Union.74 Two decades after Furman’s death, his protégé William B. Johnson led an entirely new denomination of Baptists whose raison d’etre was the freedom of Baptist missionaries to own slaves. Not surprisingly, when Southern Baptists justified their departure, honor was the word of the hour. As a result, the formation of the Southern Baptist Convention wasn’t simply a political maneuver by provincial Southerners fleeing the moral high ground of the North; it was a theological salvo waged over the honor of God. Before becoming the first president of the SBC, Johnson followed in the footsteps of “the sainted Furman” as the fourth president of the Triennial Convention. Not surprisingly, Johnson began his address with a call to honor: “The fear of God, a singleness of eye to his honor, a regard for the spiritual and eternal welfare of man must predominate and guide the counsels, and form the decisions of its members.”75 As a Southern Edwardsean, Johnson considered fear and honor as related terms, both indicative of the authority of God. In Johnson’s words one could still hear echoes of Furman, who frequently pleaded that “a strict and sacred regard be preserved to the authority and honour of Christ.”76 Like Furman, Johnson’s definition of honor was as theological as it was social. There is no more striking picture of the contrasting definitions of honor among second generation Edwardseans than the moral disparity between William B. Johnson’s introduction to the Southern Baptist Convention in 1845 and Jonathan Edwards Jr.’s conclusion to his case for abolitionism in 1791. While Johnson begins his defense of the origin of the SBC by appealing to the “honored dead” of the Triennial Convention who tolerated slavery, the younger Edwards envisaged a promising future, “when slavery shall be no more; it will be an honor to be recorded in history as a society which was formed, and which exerted itself with vigor and fidelity, to bring about an event so necessary and conducive to the interests of humanity and virtue to the support of the rights, and to the advancement of the happiness of mankind.”77 William B. Johnson’s opening justification for the formation of the

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Assembly with some 15,000 Southern members. See C. C. Goen, Broken Churches, Broken Nation: Denominational Schisms and the Coming of the Civil War (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1985). For an examination of the events leading to the first Southern Baptist Convention, see Robert G. Gardner, A Decade of Debate and Division: Georgia Baptists and the Formation of the Southern Baptist Convention (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1995). Woodson, Giant in the Land, 98. Furman, “On the Communion of Saints,” 571. William B. Johnson, “Address on the Origin of the Southern Baptist Convention” (Augusta, GA, 1845), 1; Jonathan Edwards the Younger, “The Injustice and Impolicy of the Slave Trade and of Slavery (1791),” in The New England Theology: From Jonathan Edwards to Edwards Amasa Park (Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2006), 163–64.

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Southern Baptist Convention was filiopietistic, resting his case unashamedly on the authority of the “honored” past. On the other hand, Edwards appealed to the honor of virtue and the advancement of happiness in the world.78 One looked to the past, the other to the future. Puritanism and Enlightenment thought, held in tension in Jonathan Edwards’s theology, eventually unravel and find their most natural social conclusions in these two instances. For Johnson, as for Furman, honor was an abiding social authority. For Edwards Jr., as for Dwight, honor was a moral ideal. Edwardseanism endured through discipleship. Therefore, just as Johnson was cast in the mold of Furman, so Jonathan Edwards Jr.’s plea for abolitionism sounded remarkably like that of his mentor, Samuel Hopkins. When Samuel Hopkins addressed the Continental Congress with his Dialogue Concerning the Slavery of the Africans, his notion of honor was likewise moral in nature: “And the members of the continental congress have done themselves much honor in advising the American colonies to drop this trade entirely, and resolving not to buy another slave that shall be imported from Africa.”79 The idea of honor was indeed the moral center of the slavery issue. For the New Divinity in the North, the concept of honor was consistent with abolitionism because it was primarily an expression of one’s benevolence and moral probity. For Southern Baptists, emancipation and honor were incompatible because the latter was rooted in the acknowledgement of established authority before anything else. These views were also reflected in the kinds of disciples they left behind. Among those of the New Divinity were women like Sarah Osborn and African Americans like Lemuel Haynes. Conversely, the more traditionally-minded Southern Baptists generally reserved their legacy for white males. African American Baptists in the antebellum South generally did not utilize Edwardsean themes in their preaching nor were they exposed to the works of Edwards, although many by the Reconstruction era were familiar with names like Andrew Fuller and William Carey.80

78 This is consistent with Johnson’s tombstone in Anderson, South Carolina which concludes with the words, “Honored By His Brethren, Loved By His Friends.” 79 Samuel Hopkins, “A Dialogue Concerning the Slavery of the Africans, Showing it to be the Duty and Interest of the American Colonies to Emancipate all their African Slaves,” in The New England Theology: From Jonathan Edwards to Edwards Amasa Park (Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2006),153. 80 In his sermon on Matthew 28, African American Baptist pastor P. H. A. Braxton outlined the efforts of Baptist missionaries. After introducing Andrew Fuller and William Carey, Braxton explains, “Here is the beginning of modern missions. It only needs a small coal to set the whole world ablaze with the spirit of missions, and Carey was that coal; and the great Andrew Fuller was the tongs to take it from God’s altar.” (P. H. A. Braxton, “Baptists and Foreign Missions,” in The Negro Baptist Pulpit: A Collection of Sermons and Papers on Baptist Doctrine and Missionary and Educational Work [Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1890], 257.) Braxton preached to African American congregations in both Virginia and Maryland during the Reconstruction era.

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Is Jonathan Edwards’s theology responsible for the moral disparity that emerged within the Edwardsean tradition? Did his thought somehow lend itself to theological and ethical dichotomies? Edwards’s slaveholding should certainly cast light on the limits of his genius and attest to the sinfulness of even the greatest of theological heroes. However, to insist that Edwardsean theology caused this theological and moral chasm has no more validity than to blame Christopher Columbus for the devastation of the American native population. Edwards’s legacy was broad and diverse enough to account for much of American religious history. As such, Edwardseanism inevitably became the theological arena in which many of the ideological battles over slavery took place. Edwards’s successors in both the North and the South exemplify the social breadth of such a tradition, and how the concept of honor could be transformed according to different milieus and eras. In his work American Honor: The Creation of the Nation’s Ideals during the Revolutionary Era, Craig Bruce Smith identifies honor as a dominant moral theme in the early republic. According to Smith, honor did not exist “with standardized, black-and-white definitions.” Nevertheless, Smith insists, “early Americans came to understand honor and virtue as akin to, and often indistinguishable from, morality and ethics.”81 Northern and Southern Edwardseans demonstrated this as conspicuously as any other theological tradition in America. Although split over slavery, men like Richard Furman and Samuel Hopkins did agree upon the distinction between “false honor” and “virtuous honor.”82 Their division over the nature of honor was not between absolute extremes, but rather how to balance morality and authority. More so than Southern Edwardseans, the New Divinity truly embodied the revolutionary principles of their age, and they were unafraid to extend those very principles into other realms of society. Inside of the same theological tradition, Southern and Northern Edwardseans wielded the same doctrines and concepts for contradictory moral ends. The result was devastating not only for humanity as a whole and America itself, but also for the unity of Edwardsean theology and the common revivalistic mission they allegedly shared.

The Advancement of Human Happiness According to Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, New Divinity abolitionism was the product of “the devotionalism of Edwardsians, those who carried the essence of [Edwards’s] evangelical Calvinist Christianity into the very different social setting of 81 Craig Bruce Smith, American Honor: The Creation of the Nation’s Ideals during the Revolutionary Era (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 2. 82 Samuel Hopkins, “A Dialogue Concerning the Slavery of the Africans, Showing it to be the Duty and Interest of the American Colonies to Emancipate all their African Slaves,” 154.

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the Revolutionary and Early National periods in the new United States.”83 The New Divinity weaponized Edwards’s theology in order to champion human freedom and prosperity against the forces of paternalism and prejudice. However, Edwardseanism was an elastic theology, and it could be harnessed in a number of ways. As moral governmentalists, Southern Edwardseans were equally concerned with the advancement of human happiness. Due to their commitment to the integrity of God’s moral universe, they believed that God worked all things for the supreme good of mankind. Their defense of slavery adopted the same benevolent principle, but in a much more utilitarian and exclusive sense. Like Edwards, when faced with ethical questions in a moral universe, Edwardseans did not simply inquire what was right; they asked what was best. Their ethics were aesthetic and teleological, seeking the most good for the most people. “Hopkins’s theology,” explains Peter Jauhiainen, “centered on a benevolent sovereign deity who promoted the highest good by upholding the rule of law and moral government.”84 In principle, both Hopkinsians and Southern Baptists affirmed the necessity of “the highest good.” But neither side could agree on what was best in a land of full of slaves. Southern Baptists rarely denied slaves’ right to happiness because their mission to evangelize the world was in fact grounded in that very idea. In their view, salvation was the ultimate good for the slave. As previously shown, in the Southern Edwardsean mind, true justice was best defined as God-honoring, good-promoting public order. In other words, justice was more than simply returning to each man his due (distributive), but about maintaining the greatest good for the greatest portion of society. However, whereas the New Divinity utilized this idea to argue for abolition, Southern Edwardseans wielded it in order to argue against abolition. By claiming along with the New Divinity that what was best was necessarily right, but by insisting that slavery accomplished the most good for the most people, the Southern Edwardseans not only redefined right and wrong, but they also relativized so-called public justice. When two halves of the country could not agree upon whether something as ultimate as slavery was a public good, the idea of public good – an idea which had garnered a consensus among Americans during the Revolution - began to lose its preeminence in defining what was just. The debate over the nature of the public good in the years leading to the Civil War, and the ensuing lack of confidence in the objectivity of general justice, is almost

83 Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, “All Things Were New and Astonishing: Edwardsian Piety, the New Divinity, and Race,” in Jonathan Edwards at Home and Abroad: Historical Memories, Cultural Movements, Global Horizons, ed. David W. Kling and Douglas A. Sweeney (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 121. 84 Peter Jauhiainen, “Samuel Hopkins and Hopkinsianism,” in After Jonathan Edwards: The Courses of the New England Theology, ed. Oliver D. Crisp, Dougals A. Sweeney (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 117.

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certainly one of the many reasons Edwardsean theology declined in the Gilded Age, overshadowed by concepts of theological justice that emphasized individual merit.85 Nevertheless, Southern Edwardseans used the idea of general justice to their advantage. In The Elements of Moral Science, a work he intended as a pro-slavery alternative to Francis Wayland’s well-known book on ethics by the same name, John L. Dagg argued that “a state, consisting of persons qualified for a high degree of civil liberty, if it has in its midst an alien people who are not thus qualified, and whose unrestricted freedom would be injurious to the peace and happiness of the community, has a right to hold them in bondage by military force.”86 Not only were slaves not “qualified” to enjoy the same freedoms as their masters; according to Dagg, their liberty spelled the destruction of peace and happiness in the white community. However, Dagg went one step further in his insistence that slavery was the best possible situation for the Africans. Identifying “the enslaved negroes in our midst” as the descendants of Ham who were cursed in Genesis 9, Dagg reasoned, So the bondage which Ham’s descendants endure in our land is overruled by the wisdom and benevolence of Providence for their good. An alleviation of the curse which has fallen on them consists in the adaptedness of their mental constitution to endure the degradation of slavery; and they have, therefore, been preserved from the waste and prospective annihilation to which the Indian tribes of America have been subjected. The Africans have multiplied in their slavery; have been better provided for than they would have been in the land of their forefathers; have been protected from the tyranny of oppressive kings, and the miseries of desolating wars; and, above all, have been brought under the influence of the gospel, in circumstances far more favorable to their civilization and evangelization than heathen nations generally enjoy.87

In other words, slavery fulfilled public justice by increasing the public good, the glory of God, and the order of society. Moreover, aesthetic concepts like “good” and “glory” were much more pliable and conducive to the slavery cause than that of “rights” because they came with a degree of subjectivity. For Richard Furman, in a moral universe, “the best interests of the community” simply dictated that a minority be enslaved for the corporate good. In one sense, Furman had established this principle long before John C. Calhoun’s infamous 85 Joseph Conforti clarifies, “Even with the theological collapse of Edwardsianism and Calvinism after the Civil War, Edwards endured as a cultural figure who was central to newly constructed narratives about America’s religious past.” (Conforti, Jonathan Edwards, Religious Tradition, and American Culture, 4) 86 J. L. Dagg, The Elements of Moral Science (New York: Sheldon & Company, 1860), 343. 87 Dagg, The Elements of Moral Science, 345.

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“positive good” speech in 1837.88 In his famous discourse with New Divinity man Francis Wayland over the Scriptural basis for slavery in the 1840s, Richard Fuller appealed to the very same Furmanian logic in order to defend human bondage. After establishing that “government is the ordinance of God,” Fuller contended that the government has the right “to establish those regulations which shall best promote the good of the whole population.” It does this, said Fuller, with the “greatest good” in view.89 This was Edwardsean utilitarianism constructed upon the edifice of God’s moral government. In order to achieve human happiness on the largest scale and thus honor God, a smaller group must sacrifice its happiness. The benevolent and honorable ends justify the malevolent and dishonorable means. Abraham Lincoln, the son of a Calvinistic Baptist, would assail this line of reasoning in 1858 in his famous “House Divided” speech when he concluded, “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.”90 While Southern Edwardseans were by no means the first theologians to speak of “the greatest good for the greatest number,” they were certainly some of the first to do so under the banner of God’s moral government.91 Such darkened logic was antithetical to the New Divinity rationalization for abolition. Appealing to the “inalienable rights” of man and the benevolence of God, Francis Wayland (1796–1865) reasoned that the dignity of slaves was “so important that the happiness of millions, for time and eternity, both free and enslaved, seems to me to be most vitally involved in it.” According to Wayland, “the system is the result of the action of the whole community. The whole community therefore is responsible for it.”92 In other words, the supreme happiness of the entire community is contingent upon the freedom of every member. Therefore to abolish slavery, Wayland believed, is to “do honor to human nature.”93 Jonathan Edwards Jr. reasoned similarly. The younger Edwards defended the idea that the good of the moral universe proscribed enslavement of any of its members. His vision of divine goodness was much more comprehensive than his Southern counterparts, extending to the “interests of humanity and virtue to the support of the rights, and to the advancement of the happiness of mankind.” In this sense, the difference

88 See Robert Elder, Calhoun: American Heretic (New York: Basic Books, 2021), 337–41. 89 Richard Fuller, Domestic Slavery Considered as a Biblical Institution: In a Correspondence Between the Rev. Richard Fuller of Beaufort, S.C., and the Rev. Francis Wayland, of Providence, R.I. (New York: Lewis Colby, 1845), 147–148. 90 Abraham Lincoln, “‘A House Divided’: Speech at Springfield, Illinois,” in Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy F. Balser (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 2:461–462. 91 O’Brien, Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860, 225. 92 Francis Wayland, Domestic Slavery Considered as a Biblical Institution: In a Correspondence Between the Rev. Richard Fuller of Beaufort, S.C., and the Rev. Francis Wayland, of Providence, R.I., 119. 93 Ibid., 44.

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between Northern and Southern Edwardseanism did not lie simply in the definition of God’s moral government, but in its extent. In 1932, Joseph Haroutunian delivered a scathing critique of the New Divinity and remarked that “the profound tragedy of Edwards’s theology was transformed into a farce by his would-be disciples, who used his language and ignored his piety.”94 His thesis has since been challenged by the likes of Douglas Sweeney, Joseph Conforti and others, who have contended that Edwardseans were much more faithful to their leader’s theology than some have speculated.95 The theology of Southern Edwardseans inevitably casts further doubt upon Haroutunian’s thesis and begs the question: if the abolitionist New Divinity used Edwards’s language and sacrificed his piety, what can be said of his slaveholding epigones in the South? Against the hypocrisy of the great Southern evil, it appears that the New Divinity activists were perhaps not as mocking and “moralistic” as Haroutunian suggests. Their pursuit of disinterested benevolence was less utilitarian and more concerned with the maximum glory of God in the world, much like their theological coryphaeus. The moral government of God was the doctrine that tied Northern and Southern Edwardsean together in a common theological framework. Yet, inside that very framework, concepts such as honor and human happiness were on a continuum. While Southern Edwardseans never negated the moral nature of honor nor the right of slaves to some measure of happiness, they chose to emphasize other ideals in their defense of the sacrosanct institution of slavery. To these Baptists, the logic of the Revolution did not necessitate abolitionism, but instead demanded slavery and eventually secession. In his funeral sermon for George Washington, Richard Furman boasted that the “liberty, both civil and religious, brought about by the revolution, and in connection with law and justice, constitutionally established in these United States, are important objects in God’s moral government.”96 Unfortunately, Furman and his Southern patriots did not view emancipation as one of those “important objects.” Their vision of liberty under God’s moral government did not extend to everyone inside the moral universe. Well did Thomas Jefferson paint his fellow Southerners in 1785 when he described them as “independent, zealous for their own liberties but trampling on those of others.”97 Southern Edwardseans were willing to

94 Joseph Haroutunian, Piety Versus Moralism: The Passing of the New England Theology (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1932), 96. 95 Joseph Conforti’s Samuel Hopkins and the New Divinity Movement is itself a challenge to the Haroutunian thesis.; Douglas A. Sweeney, Nathaniel Taylor, New Haven Theology, and the Legacy of Jonathan Edwards, 8. 96 Furman, “Humble Submission to Divine Sovereignty,” 379. 97 Thomas Jefferson to Marquis de Chastellux, 2 Sept. 1785, Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 826–28. Jefferson described the sectional differences between Northerners and Southerners.

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receive liberty for themselves but not for their African brothers and sisters. Strangely enough, despite their polar views on religious liberty, the paternalistic Southern Edwardseans proved themselves to be the true sociopolitical successors of Jonathan Edwards. Southern Baptists believed in natural and social hierarchies, much like Edwards. Despite his fierce opposition to slavery and his inability to concede any form of it “in honor or with a good conscience,” Francis Wayland comprehended slaveholding ideology better than most of his Northern associates. “I have always remarked that our Southern brethren are specially opposed to immediate abolition. They consider it absurd, ruinous, inhuman, and destructive to society itself. They also declare that if abolition is ever to be accomplished, it must be accomplished by means of the inculcation of principles which naturally lead to it; and not by force of arms, or by the passage of arbitrary acts.”98 Wayland, whose Elements of Moral Science proved to be the most popular ethics textbook of his generation, understood the Southern mind and the Southern conscience. Men like Richard Furman and William B. Johnson and Richard Fuller were willing to defend their honor and the Southern way of life at all costs because, for these men, the order of society was more than a social construct; it was a microcosmic picture of God’s moral universe. Therefore, any attack upon the long-standing mores of their community was necessarily an attack upon the Creator of that community. Nevertheless, after the carnage of the Civil War, Southern Edwardseans preached unity to their congregations using many of the same concepts they’d used to justify secession. Just a month after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox Courthouse, Richard Fuller appealed to the divine government, but this time he urged against the division that had laid waste to the country. In a discourse entitled A City or House Divided Against Itself, Fuller reasoned, “No government can be either permanent or beneficial, while the people and those in authority over them are living in rebellion against the Moral Governor of the universe.”99 Ironically, the very idea which had fomented rebellion was now being waved as a banner of peace. Like Edwards himself, Southern Edwardseans did not theologize in a vacuum; they were subject to their own time and place. Their stance on slavery was not motivated by doctrine alone. But their theology shaped their Southern identity. In defending Southern society from what they perceived as chaotic and “arbitrary” aggression, Southern Edwardseans were not simply defending their own honor; they were vying for the honor of the Moral Governor. While such a gross misinterpretation of honor does not nullify their moral turpitude, the moral governmental 98 Francis Wayland, Domestic Slavery Considered as a Biblical Institution: In a Correspondence Between the Rev. Richard Fuller of Beaufort, S.C., and the Rev. Francis Wayland, of Providence, R.I., 103. 99 Richard Fuller, A City or House Divided Against Itself: A Discourse (Baltimore: J. F. Weishampel, Jr. Bookseller and Stationer, 1865), 11.

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worldview of many Southern Baptists should lend greater perspective into their theological justification for slavery and the vociferous defense they made in the name of Christ.

5. An Edwardsean SBC: Jonathan Edwards’s Legacy in the Early Years of the Southern Baptist Convention

“The New Divinity did not come out of the blue,” William Breitenbach insists. “It came out of Edwards.”1 Despite their moral and theological differences, Edwardseans wielded considerable influence in American theology and culture because they enjoyed the intellectual fruits of America’s theologian. But nothing culturally gold can stay. Scholars have generally agreed that the New England Theology (including its later phases like the New Haven Theology) flourished for nearly a century. Its dominance as a movement waned toward the close of the 1800s (Although Charles W. Phillips has identified Edwardsean thinking at least to the First World War).2 Southern Edwardseans were no exception. As Michael Haykin has noted, “Many of the major Southern Baptist theologians of the latter half of the nineteenth century preferred to find their theological moorings in an older expression of Calvinism, one more tied to the confessional heritage of the seventeenth century than to the revivals of the eighteenth.”3 For the next twenty-five years after the end of Richard Fuller’s presidency in 1863, the Southern Baptist Convention was led by only two men: Patrick Hues Mell (1814–1888) and James P. Boyce.4 Both were more familiar with the Westminster

1 William Breitenbach, “Piety and Moralism: Edwards and the New Divinity,” in Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience, ed. Nathan O. Hatch and Harry S. Stout (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 195. 2 According to Crisp and Sweeney, “This New England theology was a force to be reckoned with for almost a hundred years, finally passing from the American scene as the sun began to set on the nineteenth century.” (Oliver D. Crisp and Douglas A. Sweeney, “Introduction,” in After Jonathan Edwards: The Courses of the New England Theology, ed. Oliver D. Crisp and Douglas A. Sweeney [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012], 3); Mark Noll insists, “No serious defense of Edwards appeared after 1865.” (Mark A. Noll, “Jonathan Edwards and Nineteenth-Century Theology,” in Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience, ed. Nathan O. Hatch and Harry S. Stout (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 275. Charles W. Phillips proposes, “The extension of the Edwardsean line at least to the First World War in the careers of Park’s many students is striking: it may well be that the Civil War has been the wrong war to use in delimiting the influence of Edwardsean culture.” (Phillips, Edwards Amasa Park: The Last Edwardsean [Gottingen: Vanedenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018], 214.) 3 Michael A. G. Haykin, “Great Admirers of the Transatlantic Divinity: Some Chapters in the Story of Baptist Edwardseanism,” 206. 4 P. H. Mell was to become the longest tenured president in the history of the Southern Baptist Convention, from 1863–1871 and from 1880–1887. Boyce presided in the years between Mell’s terms and one year afterward (1872–1879, 1888).

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Confession than with Edwards’s works or the works of his disciples.5 Whereas Boyce was shaped by the thought of Charles Hodge at Princeton, Mell was catechized with the Westminster Shorter Catechism by his mother, incredibly enough, an old school Congregationalist. Nevertheless, Jonathan Edwards’s works had a noticeable effect upon Mell, who also served as professor at Mercer University and as the chancellor of the University of Georgia. Mell was a Southern Edwardsean only in the strictest confessional sense, proving that Boyce’s and Edwards’s theology could truly co-exist, but without an ounce of Hopkinsianism. Mell considered Edwards one of “a host of other worthies” whose writings and example still speak to the church.6 When faced with Arminian objections to the sovereignty of God, Mell made sure to “refer the reader…to an able treatise on this subject by President Edwards, entitled, ‘God’s ultimate end in the creation.’”7 Unlike most Southern Baptists, Mell was apparently willing to explore the metaphysical side of Edwards. However, like most other Westminsterian Calvinists, Mell made a sharp distinction between Edwards and the Edwardseans. In his treatment of two sermons by Rev. Russell Reneau, Mell was troubled to see that Reneau had cited Samuel Hopkins as representative of Calvinism: Again, he professes to treat of Calvinistic doctrines; but in his statement of them, he quotes from the writings of Dr. Hopkins! Now, every polemic theologian ought to know that the Doctor was the founder of a distinct school and is not acknowledged as a Calvinist at all. Many of his sentiments doubtless, as well as those of James Arminius, conform to our system; but this makes the one, not more than the other, a disciple of John Calvin. Why, then, is Dr. Hopkins cited in this connection? If he meant not to violate the common principles of fairness, he furnishes us with another instance of his inability to pursue steadily the object before him. Having a grudge against the Calvinists, he belabors the Hopkinsians!8

5 Mell frequently referenced “the Confession of Faith” in his writings (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, SC: Southern Baptist Publication Society, 1858], 31–32, 61). Remarkably, Boyce even wrote, “Our Confession (The Westminster)” in his Abstract of Systematic Theology to denote the WCF. (Boyce, Abstract of Systematic Theology [Charleston: den Dulk Christian Foundation, 1887], 339. 6 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, SC: Southern Baptist Publication Society, 1858), 24. 7 Ibid., 48. 8 Ibid., 27–28.

Jonathan Edwards’s Legacy in the Early Years of the Southern Baptist Convention

In Mell’s view, Hopkins was a “heterodox” theologian.9 Patrick Mell’s simple Edwardseanism was similar to that of Oliver Hart roughly a century before him, venerating Jonathan Edwards but scorning his New England disciples. With time, this became the lens through which most late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Southern Baptists viewed the Edwardsean tradition, until eventually Edwards’s successors faded into the realm of New England Puritanism and Jonathan Edwards became merely a leader of the colonial revival known as the Great Awakening. However, the impact and longevity of Edwards’s ideas may never be fully known. While James P. Boyce did not study Edwards as closely as Mell, he nevertheless employed several “Edwardsean” ideas in his own ministry. For instance, in his chapter on the atonement in Abstract of Systematic Theology, Boyce posited, “The gift of the Spirit was purchased by Christ’s death,” a concept that Jonathan Edwards had frequently impressed upon his own generation.10 Further still, Mell and Boyce both kept close association with men who were either converted or prepared for conversion by the works of Edwards. James Gazaway Ryals, one of the first Baptist preachers in Georgia, received theological instruction under Mell as a teenager. Mell even raised funds for Ryals to attend Mercer University when Ryals’s father could no longer support him due to the financial crisis of 1840. Ryals’s experience at Mercer was a spiritual wilderness followed by an oasis. The young theologian became so enamored with Edwards’s theology in college that it uprooted his heterodoxy and planted him firmly in Calvinistic soil: From childhood Mr. Ryals had strong religious impressions. But in early manhood he became tinctured with Universalist sentiments; nor was it until, while in college, where he became fascinated with the works of Jonathan Edwards, that these sentiments were obliterated from his mind by the writings of that great and extraordinary man. Even though he was then without a hope in Christ, the perusal of Jonathan Edwards’ works gave him a fondness for theology, and imbued him thoroughly with Calvinistic sentiments.11

Indeed, Jonathan Edwards continued to speak powerfully to Baptists in the Deep South. Mell even received letters from fellow Georgia Baptists seeking clarification in their reading of Edwards.12

9 Ibid., 58. 10 James P. Boyce, Abstract of Systematic Theology (Charleston: den Dulk Christian Foundation, 1887), 335; Obbie Tyler Todd, “Purchasing the Spirit: A Trinitarian Hermeneutic for Jonathan Edwards’s Doctrine of Atonement,” in Puritan Reformed Journal Vol. 10, No. 2 (2018), 148–167. 11 History of the Baptist Denomination in Georgia (Atlanta: Jas. P. Harrison & Co., 1881), 457. 12 In January 1875, Mell received a letter from R.H. Strickland asking him to explain Edwards’ writing “Work of Redemption”, specifically in relation to their worship of God by prayer before the Fall.

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Boyce also had Southern Edwardsean friends. Basil Manly Jr. (1825–1892), a fellow Princetonian with whom Boyce founded the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, consumed Edwards’s works and was even converted by reading Edwards’s Personal Narrative.13 Well did Richard Furman predict that by reading Edwards’s writings, “Thousands, probably, whom [he] never knew nor could know on earth, will in the worlds of light greet [Edwards] as their [father] in the gospel.”14 Like so many others of his generation, Manly Jr. formed a set of resolutions for godly living “as a result of the influence of Edwards.”15 Although Southern Edwardseans did not always command the same level of authority in the Southern Baptist Convention, Jonathan Edwards’s theological legacy yet remained among the pioneers of Southern Baptist life.

The Princeton Way Illustrated in the ministries of Basil Manly Jr. and James P. Boyce, Princetonian Calvinism proved to be the antidote to Southern Edwardseanism. With no small measure of irony, the very institution at which Edwards was president and the very school from which his own son graduated was the same establishment that would become a bulwark against much (though certainly not all) of his own theology.16 As far west as Missouri, the cold war between the Edwardseans and their more traditionally Calvinist brethren in the North reverberated throughout the Southern Baptist ranks. When Baptist missionary Timothy Flint journeyed down the Mississippi River in the 1820s, he lamented, “The Baptists are as exclusive as in the older regions. Even among our own brethren, it is well known, that there is some feeling of a questionable nature, some rivalry between the pupils, the doctors, and schools,

13 Basil Manly to Charles Manly, October 8, 1869, Southern Collection, Folder 2: 1860–1869; Cox, “Life and Work of Basil Manly,” 36–37. 14 Furman, “Conversion Essential to Salvation,” 438. 15 William Edward Smallwood, May 2015, “‘The Most Versatile Man’: The Life, Ministry, and Piety of Basil Manly Jr.” Dissertation, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 22. 16 Ironically still, James Boyce’s systematic theology volume at Princeton and one he would use with his own Southern Baptist students was Francis Turretin’s Institutes of Elenctic Theology, the very text enjoyed by the Northampton Sage.

The Princeton Way

of Andover and Princeton.”17 The two opposing schools of Calvinism in the North also took shape in the South and on the Western frontier.18 Despite a common commitment to certain doctrines of grace, Princeton promoted a more intellectualist brand of Calvinism than did Edwards and his disciples.19 Charles Hodge (1797–1878), “the Pride of Princeton,” reserved his most biting critique of Edwards for the very thing most Southern Baptists loved in the Northampton theologian: revivalism. Hodge believed that Edwards had unwisely interpreted bodily agitations and emotional outbursts as genuine responses to the work of the Holy Spirit during the Great Awakening. “That a large part of these results was to be attributed to natural causes,” Hodge contended, “can hardly be doubted; yet who could discriminate between what was the work of the orator, and what was the work of the Spirit of God?”20 Interestingly, Hodge did not acknowledge Edwards’s Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit, wherein he made just such a discrimination and cautioned against carnal emotionalism.21 Nevertheless, some Southern Presbyterians often found common cause with Southern Baptists in their mutual admiration for Edwards. When “uncompromising Baptist” and “moderate Calvinist” Rev. Daniel Witt was praised by fellow Virginian Archibald Alexander (1772–1851) for his sharp mind, Alexander conjectured that “he had never seen a man who intellect so strongly resembled that of Jonathan Edwards as did that of Mr. Witt, and that it was very little inferior to the mind of the great metaphysician.”22

17 Timothy Flint, Recollections of the last ten years, passed in occasional residences and journeyings in the valley of the Mississippi, from Pittsburg and the Missouri to the Gulf of Mexico, and from Florida to the Spanish frontier; in a series of letters to the Rev. James Flint, of Salem, Massachussetts (Boston: Cummings, Hilliard, and Company, 1826), 114. 18 Edwardsean theology no doubt spread to the American West through Congregationalists migrating to the frontier. James R. Rohrer observes, “Between 1790 and 1830 more than eight hundred thousand Yankees moved to frontier regions in the West, stamping an indelible New England mindset upon hundreds of communities between the Hudson River and the Mississippi.” (James R. Rohrer, Keepers of the Covenant: Frontier Missions and the Declines of Congregationalism, 1774–1818 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1995], 10.) 19 This should not overlook the fact that Princeton College and Seminary both shared a “New Side heritage,” or roots from the pro-revival tradition in the Great Awakening. (W. Andrew Hoffecker, Charles Hodge: The Pride of Princeton [Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2011], 53.) See Mark A. Noll, “The Contested Legacy of Jonathan Edwards in Antebellum Calvinism: Theological Conflict and the Evolution of Thought in America,” Canadian Review of American Studies Vol. 19, No. 2 (1988): 149–64. 20 See Hoffecker, Charles Hodge, 402 n22. 21 This observation is made in Hoffecker, 206, 402. 22 J. B. Jeter, The Life of Rev. Daniel Witt, D.D. of Prince Edward County, Virginia (Richmond: J. T. Ellyson, 1875), 96, 254.

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Princeton’s relationship with the New Divinity, however, was another matter entirely. Archibald Alexander, having admired Edwards as a young man, traveled to New England in 1801 only to discover that Edwardsean theology had become a dangerous deviation from Presbyterian orthodoxy.23 Likewise, while admiring Edwards’s genius, Charles Hodge did not think so highly of Edwards’s successors. Hodge castigated the moral governmental theory of the atonement, a model he believed “was elaborated by the younger President Edwards, presented in full in Dr. Beman’s work on the Atonement, and adopted by that numerous and highly influential class of American theologians who embraced the principle on which the theory, as held in this country, is founded.”24 Hodge also went on to identify this model with Andover professor Edwards Amasa Park, the so-called “Last Edwardsean” and someone in whom Hodge saw the inevitable conclusions of New England Theology.25 A glimpse of Hodge’s and perhaps Boyce’s contempt for the New Divinity, as well their respect for Edwards, can be seen in the native Kentuckian Benjamin Breckenridge Warfield’s appraisal of the New England Theology years later. “It was Edwards’ misfortune,” Warfield lamented, “that he gave his name to a party; and to a party which, never in perfect agreement with him in its doctrinal ideas, finished by becoming the earnest advocate of (as it has been sharply expressed) ‘a set of opinions which he gained his chief celebrity in demolishing.’”26 From Princeton’s vantage point, such was the relationship between Edwards and the Edwardseans. For Southern Baptists in particular, the connection with Princeton was forged in many ways by forces beyond their immediate control. Their adamant stand against abolition led them inevitably to New Jersey, to one of the only Northern schools which would receive their proslavery kind. As Mark Noll has shown, the Civil War was not a political and social dilemma waged independent of theological debate; it was instead a “theological crisis” that impacted the trajectory of America’s churches.27 No group in the South was affected more by the Civil War than the Baptists, a denomination that established its flagship seminary just two years before the first shots rang out in Charleston Harbor. Among Southern Baptists, the

23 Sean Michael Lucas, “‘He Cuts Up Edwardsism By The Roots’: Robert Lewis Dabney and the Edwardsian Legacy in the Nineteenth-Century South,” 202. 24 Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, Volume 2 (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2008), 578. 25 Charles W. Phillips, Edwards Amasa Park: The Last Edwardsean (Gottingen: Vandenoeck & Ruprecht, 2018); Charles Hodge characterized New England theology as “anti-Augustinian,” an appellation which Edwards Amasa Park refuted. (Edwards Amasa Park, “New England Theology,” Bibliotheca Sacra 9 [January 1852]: 170–220.) 26 In Douglas A. Sweeney, “Evangelical tradition in America,” The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards, ed. Stephen J. Stein (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 229. 27 Mark Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006)

Basil Manly Jr.’s Transfer of Schools

stalemate between North and South was especially injurious to the ascendancy of Jonathan Edwards’s theology.

Basil Manly Jr.’s Transfer of Schools More than sermons or treatises, the correspondence between a father and son can reveal much about the way that Southerners viewed themselves in the antebellum years and the state of Southern Edwardseanism. Basil Manly Sr. and Jr. communicated often about life, ministry, theology, and even Edwards.28 Not surprisingly, they also conversed about the state of the Union. In 1845, Basil Manly Sr., the graduate of South Carolina College and former student under Jonathan Maxcy, wrote to his son, an undergraduate at Newton Theological Institute in Massachusetts, about the regrettable state of education in the South. The elder Manly bemoaned “the inferiority of our [educational] Institutions” in comparison with the North.29 John Dagg (1794–1884) had told the younger Manly much the same. When the latter graduated from the University of Alabama and wished to study under Dagg at Mercer, the newly appointed Edwardsean president (Manly’s father had passed on the job) encouraged him instead to travel north to Newton so that he might have “the best advantages and the fullest course” at his disposal.30 The young Edwardsean heeded Dagg’s advice, but he didn’t stay long. Manly Jr.’s experience in Massachusetts epitomizes the social and theological crisis in Edwardsean theology in the middle of the nineteenth century. It also explains why the flagship seminary of the Southern Baptist Convention did not necessarily promulgate Edwardsean theology in precisely the way that Richard Furman may have wished had the Charleston Sage lived to see his own vision of Baptist education realized.31 Manly’s first school, Newton Theological Institute, was the product of Edwardsean thought. When the Baptist school was established in 1825, it drew its model and much of its Edwardsean theology from neighboring Andover Theological Seminary, the first graduate school of any kind in North America (est. 1807).32 As Matthew Shrader notes, “Newton was only a matter of miles from the campus

28 See Tom Nettles, The Baptists: Key People Involved in Forming a Baptist Identity, Volume Two: Beginnings in America, 253–284. 29 Basil Manly to Basily Manly Jr., 10 March 1845, Manly Family Papers, UA. 30 Gregory A. Wills, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary 1859–2009 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 6. 31 See Wills, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary 1859–2009, 8–9. 32 See Matthew C. Shrader, “New England Baptist Alvah Hovey: A Later Chapter in Baptist Edwardseanism,” Jonathan Edwards Studies Vol. 10, No. 1 (2020): 48–64.

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of Andover. Newton was modeled after Andover in several ways.”33 Andover was not only Edwardsean; it had been founded by New Divinity Congregationalists in response to the Unitarianism at Harvard. In conjunction with Old School Calvinists, Andover was “the combination of an intellectual agenda set by Hopkins and a social agenda set by Dwight.”34 Soon after its opening, the Congregationalist school developed a reputation for New England theology. The “Andover Creed” was conspicuously more Hopkinsian than the Westminster Confession of Faith. According to Douglas A. Sweeney, it signaled “another Edwardsean triumph at America’s first modern seminary.”35 Moderate Calvinism was the signature theology at both Newton schools. At Andover, the leading faculty featured Edwardsean names such as Leonard Woods, Edward Dorr Griffin, Moses Stuart, Ebenezer Porter, and Edwards Amasa Park. Students included Adiel Sherwood and soon-to-be-Baptist Adoniram Judson, whose father was a pupil of Joseph Bellamy and considered Samuel Hopkins a spiritual mentor.36 At Andover’s Baptist sister school, Francis Wayland was among the founders who helped establish Newton’s Edwardsean character. Such was the reason that John Dagg strongly recommended Manly attend Newton Theological Institute instead of Hamilton Theological Seminary (later Colgate) in New York, the other Northern Baptist seminary in 1845. However, Manly Jr. would not add his name to the list of Newton graduates. Just a month before receiving his father’s letter, Manly Jr. had written senior about a conversation with one of his professors at the seminary. After being told of the refusal of Northern Baptists to allow slaveholders to serve on foreign missions, the younger Manly became conflicted over the fact that he could enjoy the “conveniences, advantages, and privileges” of an institution led by “men who cast out as evil my name, and the names of all I love and hold dear.”37 Southern Edwardseans were apparently not welcome among their Northern Edwardsean brothers. The

33 Matthew C. Shrader, Thoughtful Christianity: Alvah Hovey and the Problem of Authority within the Context of Nineteenth-Century Northern Baptists (Eugene: Pickwick, 2021), 34. 34 Mark Noll explains, “A second indication of New Divinity and Old Calvinist influence came in the founding of Andover Seminary in 1808. While cooperation between the two factions were never entirely harmonious, [Timothy] Dwight’s wholehearted assistance with the project expressed a general feeling among the Congregational trinitarians that, whatever their differences with each other, they were far less important than the need to present a common front against the Unitarians. In a word, the combination of an intellectual agenda set by Hopkins and a social agenda set by Dwight was a natural coalition, and it was critical for almost all theological development in New England for more than half a century.” (Noll, America’s God, 270) 35 Sweeney, Nathaniel Taylor, New Haven Theology, and the Legacy of Jonathan Edwards, 43. 36 Courtney Anderson, To the Golden Shore: The Life of Adoniram Judson (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 1987), 5, 9–10, 53. 37 Basil Manly Jr. to Basil Manly, 24 February 1845, Manly Family Papers, UA.

Basil Manly Jr.’s Transfer of Schools

cold shoulder and the sense of moral superiority in the North would alter the theological trajectory of Baptist theology in the South. Ultimately, it was old-fashioned Southern honor that compelled Basil Manly Jr. to leave Newton. Without a seminary of his own, the young Southern Baptist could not go South nor could he go Baptist. Basil Manly Jr.’s subsequent move to Princeton represents a seismic shift in the balance of Baptist theology in the North and the South. By transferring from Newton to New Jersey, Manly was not simply moving denominations; he was traversing schools of Calvinism. However, that Manly landed in Princeton is perhaps not as striking as it appears. To begin, Edwardseans both Northern and Southern suggested the move to Princeton. Manly Jr. records, When the disruption of 1845 occurred between Northern and Southern Baptists, in their voluntary missionary organization, - for the division extended only to these, and never to the actual relations of the churches, - it led to the withdrawal from Newton of the four Southern students who were there – S.C. Clopton, E.T. Winkler, J.W.M. Williams, and myself. The other three went directly into ministerial work, while I determined, as I was younger, to prosecute further preparatory study, and went, under the advice of my father, of Dr. Dagg, of Dr. Francis Wayland, and other friends, to Princeton Theological Seminary. On the same grounds a few years after, my early friend, and later colleague, James. P. Boyce, went to Princeton also.38

Although divided over slavery, Edwardseans were apparently of one mind in Manly’s seminary choice. Princetonian Calvinism was preferable to little or no Calvinism at all. Nevertheless, Manly’s decision to attend Princeton was not a strictly theological one. In reality, it was also born out of a degree of convenience. In the antebellum years, Newton Theological Institute was not the only school in the North inimical to slaveholding Southerners. As Michael O’Brien has shown, “With the exception of Princeton, few Northern colleges were hospitable to hiring Southern teachers.”39 Compared with 36 percent at Princeton, only 11 percent of Yale students in the antebellum period were Southerners. Some colleges admitted even less. When the South Carolinian Richard Fuller matriculated at Harvard in 1820, he would be among only 9 percent of students in Cambridge from the South for the next forty years.40 Students like Manly and Boyce were limited in their educational options. Moreover, if Northern academicians looked with antipathy upon the slaveholding

38 Basil Manly Jr., “The Beginnings of the History of the Seminary,” The Seminary Magazine, December 1891, 114. 39 O’Brien, Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860, 19. 40 Ibid., 19.

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South, they perceived Boyce’s hometown of Charleston as “the capital of southern separatism.”41 Under such social and theological conditions, it is little wonder that Baptists like Boyce and Manly eventually arrived in the land of Alexander and Hodge. Just as importantly, Archibald Alexander personally welcomed Southern students when many professors at Northern institutions would not.42 Despite his anti-slavery views, Charles Hodge was also hospitable to slaveholders. However, as Mark Noll explains, Hodge’s views were a bit more complicated than most, and this contributed to his somewhat complicated legacy: In a series of learned works also dating back to the 1830s, he conceded the biblical grounding for slavery as an institution but argued that a proper understanding of Scripture, as well as a right judgment on American circumstances, should move toward the amelioration of slavery and then its effacement. Unfortunately for Hodge’s later reputation, his attack on the biblical exegesis of abolitionists has been remembered more closely than his defense of gradual emancipation. This attack on the abolitionist effort simply to define slavery as a sinful institution, as well as Hodge’s defense of fugitive slave laws, was so effective that two of his earliest essays were incorporated in the compendium Cotton Is King, which was published in the South as a major defense of slavery on the eve of the Civil War. What the editor left out of the reprinting from 1860, however, was Hodge’s predictions from 1835: “The South, therefore, has to choose between emancipation by the silent and holy influence of the gospel, securing the elevation of the slaves to the stature and character of freemen, or to abide the issue of a long continued conflict against the laws of God. That the issue will be disastrous there can be no doubt.”43

In some sense, with one foot in biblical justification and the other in moral responsibility, Hodge’s views on slavery had just as much in common with Basil Manly Jr. as they did with Samuel Hopkins or Jonathan Edwards Jr. The younger Manly obviously found no offense with Hodge’s gradual emancipation views, if indeed he was aware of them at all. Princeton would suffice well for the young Southern Baptist. Consequently, as the son of an Edwardsean and as someone who had been converted by reading Edwards, Basil Manly Jr. would not continue in quite the same theological direction as his father. When Manly and then Boyce chose the Princeton way, they took another road than the one paved from New Haven. With Basil Manly Jr. drafting the seminary’s Abstract of Principles and James P. Boyce

41 Matthew Karp, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), 24. 42 Nettles, James Petigru Boyce, 78. 43 Noll, America’s God, 515–516.

The 2nd President of the SBC: R. B. C. Howell

leading its faculty, the strenuously confessional Calvinism of the first Southern Baptist seminary would spell the decline of Jonathan Edwards’s powerful legacy in the Southern Baptist Convention. But it would not be its end.44

The 2nd President of the SBC: R. B. C. Howell Due to the events that linked the Southern Baptist Convention with the Civil War, it would be easy to overlook the years between 1845 and 1861. But between the end of William B. Johnson’s inaugural presidency in 1851 and the beginning of P. H. Mell’s first term in 1863, the two men who led the SBC were not only shaped by Southern Edwardseans; they helped secure Edwardsean thought for years to come in the Southern Baptist Convention. In fact, without the labors of R.B.C. Howell (1801–1868) and Richard Fuller (1804–1876), the intellectual and theological vision of James P. Boyce would hardly have been possible. The second and third presidents of the Southern Baptist Convention were cast in the mold of Richard Furman, beginning with R. B. C. Howell. As “one of the ablest and most learned men in the South,” Howell brought the gravitas of the Charleston Sage north to Virginia and west to Tennessee.45 Like Furman, Howell’s life was defined by two overarching goals: Baptist missions and education.46 As Greg Wills has shown, in the struggle to establish a Southern Baptist seminary, “R. B. C. Howell and William B. Johnson had exercised the chief leadership.”47 In addition to fundraising, overcoming state rivalries proved to be one of the main obstacles to establishing a flagship seminary. Howell’s vision paved the way around these obstacles by calling an 1847 meeting in Nashville in order to renew fresh conversation about a denominational school. John A. Broadus captured Howell’s vision for Southern Baptists well: He [Howell] recognizes that many men have been, and many will be, very useful in the ministry, without formal education at college or seminary. But he argues that the progress of general knowledge, the necessity of encountering trained ministers of other denominations, the demand of many of our churches for better-prepared pastors, all combine to require a larger proportion of thoroughly educated Baptist ministers.48

44 The Abstract of Principles, the statement of faith of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, was drawn up by Basil Manly Jr. in March and April of 1858. 45 William Cathcart, The Baptist Encyclopedia (Philadelphia: Everts, 1881), 250. 46 Howell’s ministry was also marked by a theological battle with Landmarkists led by J. R. Graves. 47 Wills, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary 1859–2009, 13. 48 John A. Broadus, Memoir of James P. Boyce (New York: A. C. Armstrong and Son, 1893), 115.

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When William B. Johnson called a special session of the South Carolina Baptist Convention two years later to establish a Southern Baptist seminary, the first point of business concerned Howell’s 1847 Nashville meeting. James Boyce would throw his support behind the movement that Howell helped revive. Howell’s conflict with anti-missionary leaders in Tennessee and Alabama also testified to the bitter sectionalism in the nineteenth century Baptist South as well as to Howell’s moderate brand of Calvinism. Like Furman, the pastor of FBC Nashville spurned licentious, intellectualist Calvinists derelict of their duty to mobilize for the nations. In an article called “The Duty of Faith,” Howell demonstrated Andrew Fuller’s influence upon his theology by once again raising and then answering the Modern Question: If unbelief is a sin, seated, as we have seen it is in depravity of heart, it follows that faith is a duty. As the opposite of every duty is sin, and of every sin duty, so if believing were not a duty, unbelief would be no sin, because sin is to transgress the rule of duty, or is a want of conformity to that rule. If men cannot believe it is not their duty. To maintain this is to contend, that men cannot help their unbelief, and that, therefore, it is not their sin! The truth is, all the inability in the case arises from disinclination, and this being the essence of depravity, but aggravates our criminality.49

In a bit of reductio ad absurdum, Howell argued in Edwardsean fashion that it is the moral responsibility of the sinner to believe in the gospel because human “inability” is a moral “disinclination,” otherwise sin would not be sin. It is therefore incumbent upon all sinners to turn away from their recalcitrant unbelief and toward the risen Christ. Howell’s rhetorical style indicates he was shaped not only by Fuller but by Baptist Fullerites as well. As a student, Howell attended Columbian College in Washington D. C. where Southern Edwardsean William Staughton was president. Staughton was also among those who ordained Howell into the Baptist ministry. Indeed, Furman’s network of moderate Calvinists reached even to Howell, the second president of the Southern Baptist Convention. The spirit of the Triennial Convention seemed to endure in Howell when he came to the defense of Luther Rice, advocate for the General Missionary Convention, during the anti-missionary episode. Theologically, R. B. C. Howell resembled Richard Furman most in his connection to Edwards’s grandson Timothy Dwight. The pastor of FBC Nashville read and quoted Dwight extensively.50 On the subject of covenants, Howell believed

49 R. B. C. Howell, “Duty of Faith,” The Baptist (Nashville, 1844), 38–40. 50 R.B.C. Howell, The Covenants (Charleston: Southern Baptist Publication Society, 1855), 9; R.B.C. The Deaconship: Its Nature, Qualifications, Relations, and Duties (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1846), 3.

The 2nd President of the SBC: R. B. C. Howell

that Dwight had “written profoundly.”51 He even lauded the former Yale president, “whose System of Theology, in many respects so excellent, is adopted as a standard work by the several branches of the church, of which he was a distinguished member.”52 That a Tennessee pastor in the mid-nineteenth century West was shaped by the Connecticut Congregationalist is one of the most visible examples of the generational and geographical impact of the New Divinity upon Southern Baptists. As the chief intellectual among Tennessee Baptists and the editor of The Baptist, Howell was well-placed to disseminate Edwards’s spirit and ideas beyond the Appalachian Mountains. In his Terms of Communion, Howell contended for strict communion by appealing to Edwards himself. In Howell’s mind, Edwards’s requirement of a credible profession of faith in order to permit someone to the Lord’s Table, combined with the fate of the Congregationalist church, both supported the Baptist doctrine of regenerate church membership: President Edwards, after the powerful revival which occurred under his ministry, became convinced that [Solomon Stoddard’s] system was wrong, renounced it, and had to resign his charge in consequence. He maintained that none ought to be admitted to the Lord’s Supper who cannot give evidence from the exercises of their own minds, that they are regenerate persons; an opinion now held by all the Congregationalist churches of New England which have not become Unitarian.53

Howell’s moderate Calvinism was apparent when he addressed the issue of Christian living. He was careful to delineate that “perseverance in grace is never accomplished without the divinely appointed instrumentalities. The means, and the ends, are invariably associated. And will believers in Christ always employ those means? If they do, the result can never be doubtful.”54 In an era when Alexander Campbell and the Restorationists brought many Calvinistic Baptists to de-emphasize the use of means in salvation, Howell carefully plotted a course between means-oriented Arminianism and hyper-Calvinism. Remarkably, Howell was even conversant with the writings of other New Divinity men like Samuel Hopkins, Leonard Woods, and Moses Stuart.55 In addition to citing both Jonathan Edwards and Andrew Fuller,

51 Howell, The Covenants, 3. 52 R.B.C. Howell, The Terms of Communion at the Lord’s Table (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1846), 192. 53 Robert Boyte C. Howell, The Terms of Communion at the Lord’s Table and with the Church of Christ (London: Houlston and Stoneman, 1847), 182. 54 In Southern Baptist Sermons on Sovereignty and Responsibility, 81. 55 R.B.C. Howell, The Evils of Infant Baptism (Charleston: Southern Baptist Publication Society, 1854), 93, 3, 21, 37.

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Howell was an intellectual panorama of Edwardsean thought.56 His theology was therefore imbued with Edwardsean doctrines of various kinds. Howell wrote of “the government of God,” even calling the biblical narrative “the history of the divine government.”57 He believed that obedience to the biblical covenants produced the “uninterrupted happiness” of his people and that this axiom was “true throughout the moral universe of God.” Howell then added, “I have before intimated that man is not the only being under its government. It is the law of angels themselves.”58 The theme of honor was also pervasive in Howell’s theology, who insisted “the purpose of the covenant” is to “glorify the purity and justice, and honor alike, of all the persons of the adorable Trinity.”59 From Nashville, R. B. C. Howell represented the Western migration of South Baptist theology and the expansion of Edwards’s ideas into new territory.

The 3rd President of the SBC: Richard Fuller Long before R. B. C. Howell aided James P. Boyce in his quest to establish a Southern Baptist seminary, it was Richard Fuller who preached the saving gospel to Boyce as a young man. Boyce was converted under Fuller’s pulpit at Beaufort Baptist Church in South Carolina, where Fuller served for fifteen years. Remarkably, in one of the most peculiar happenstances of Southern Baptist history, Fuller actually owed his call to ministry to Jonathan Edwards himself. In the winter of 1823, while a student at Harvard, Fuller was stricken with such an “alarming” illness that doctors in Cambridge whisked him away to a place they believed was more conducive for his rehabilitation: Northampton. There in the Connecticut Valley, Fuller not only recovered physically; he was also swept away into a higher spiritual realm. The coincidence was not lost upon Fuller’s biographer, James Hazzard Cuthbert, who described the significance and power of Fuller’s sanctuary: Here is the interruption of his brilliant college-career by that “wound in the breast;” but here, too, was the touch of a Father’s hand, calling him off from mere literary ambition to a more excellent way. In Northampton, the scene of the life and labors of Jonathan Edwards, the impressions of a better life began to dawn in the soul of the invalid student, which, by the grace of God, were to result in a life and ministry of equal value to the Church.60

56 57 58 59 60

Howell, The Terms of Communion at the Lord’s Table, 257; Howell, The Covenants, 22. Howell, The Covenants, 16, 101. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 33–34. James Hazzard Cuthbert, Life of Richard Fuller (New York: Sheldon and Company, 1878), 42.

The 3rd President of the SBC: Richard Fuller

While Cuthbert’s approximation of Fuller’s ministry in comparison to Edwards’s could certainly be challenged, the historical power of Northampton upon Fuller is undeniable. Exactly one hundred years after finishing his first pastorate in New York and meeting Sarah Pierpont in New Haven, (and the same year that Abner Clopton was copying Edwards’s resolutions), Edwards’s effect upon Fuller was seemingly magnetic. In Northampton in 1823, the twenty-five-year ministry of Jonathan Edwards made its most direct, tangible connection with the future of the Southern Baptist Convention. Edwards’s life and ministry left such a profound, mesmerizing effect upon Fuller that it catapulted the young Harvard student into a life of Edwardsean ministry. Years later, Fuller chaired the committee which authored the preamble of the Southern Baptist Convention. Not surprisingly, its resolution began with a goal that Jonathan Edwards himself would have appreciated: “Resolved…for peace and harmony, and in order to accomplish the greatest amount of good[…]”.61 Taught by W. T. Brantly as a child, the third president of the Southern Baptist Convention was a third-generation Southern Edwardsean who embodied Richard Furman’s catholic spirit more than any other Baptist of his age. According to Cathcart’s Baptist Encyclopedia, “No pastor in the denomination was more highly esteemed by the representative men of other churches than he, and none was more frequently urged to lend the influence of his name and counsel to those larger and more comprehensive benevolent organizations which embraced within their scope great communities and groups of churches.”62 Like Furman, Fuller was skeptical of systems and sectarianism, preferring not “to leave the paths of pure, undefiled, simple piety, for the mysteries of tangled metaphysical polemics.”63 The Holy Scriptures were best left “unmutilated” and unencumbered by human wisdom. While his theology may have been similar to the New Divinity at several points, including attention to the “disinterested and devoted love” of Christ, the tenor of Fuller’s theology was certainly more akin to Southern Edwardseans than Northern.64 Fuller was a practical preacher, consistently reminding his people to “rivet our affections upon this disinterested, magnanimous Redeemer.”65 Moderate Calvinism was one of the distinguishing features of Richard Fuller’s ministry. In a sermon entitled “Predestination,” Fuller defined himself against two theological extremes in true Edwardsean fashion: “The problem to which I refer is that of God’s decrees and man’s moral agency, to solve which two systems have been

61 Robert A. Baker, The Southern Baptist Convention and Its People 1607–1972 (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1974), 166–67. 62 Richard Fuller, “Predestination,” in Southern Baptist Sermons on Sovereignty and Responsibility, 97. 63 Ibid., 106 64 Richard Fuller, Sermons by Richard Fuller, D.D., 70. 65 Ibid., 160.

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advocated, two parties have been formed. Let us examine each of these systems, let us hear each of these parties, whom – that I may avoid the shibboleths of hostile religious prejudices and factions – I will designate as the Libertarians and the Necessarians.”66 Fuller’s exact position can best be described as a via media between fatalism and open theism. In his mind, both were “parties” which forfeited the plainness of Scripture for man-made “systems.” But biblical faithfulness demanded a balance of doctrines. On one hand, Fuller defended “man’s free moral agency.” On the other, he asserted quite boldly, “None but an idiot can reject the doctrine of predestination.”67 Fuller even rejected a seeming third option similar to R. B. C. Howell’s position wherein God appoints the ends as well as the means. In Fuller’s view, this “moderate school” was actually veiled Necessarian Calvinism. Instead, similar to Charles Haddon Spurgeon years later, Fuller believed that biblical Calvinism simply consisted of submitting to both biblical truths without attempting to meticulously reconcile two things which only God could bring together: As to the abstruse topics upon which we have been meditating, we may, therefore, rest from all speculations with perfect confidence. If we attempt to explain and reconcile the doctrines of predestination and free agency, we find impassible barriers hemming us in, and sharp adamant striking us back. But the proofs of these doctrines are irrefragable. Their harmony we must leave with God; it is an ultimate fact transcending our thoughts; but clear to that Intellect which is the supreme fountain of all light and love.68

Advocating a moderate Calvinism, Richard Fuller also represented the continued willingness of nineteenth-century Southern Baptists to integrate modes of Edwardsean thought with orthodox Reformed theology. Whereas Edwardseans such as Jonathan Maxcy and William B. Johnson had adopted moral governmental views more in line with the New Divinity, rejecting the distributive understanding of penal substitution for a more general view, Baptists like Fuller did not seem to treat the two as mutually exclusive. Like Richard Furman and Andrew Fuller before him, Richard Fuller continued to promote a moral governmental model inside of a penal substitutionary frame: “For in his substitute the sinner now renders to the law an obedience beyond the reach of unfallen man or unfallen angel – an obedience which magnifies the law and makes it honorable.”69 Fuller retained the moral governmental language of honor, but in a way that emphasized the personal imputation of

66 67 68 69

Fuller, “Predestination,” 107. Ibid., 114, 113. Ibid., 123. Richard Fuller, Sermons by Richard Fuller, D.D., 342.

John L. Dagg and the Codification of Southern Edwardseanism

righteousness. As evidenced in Fuller’s ministry, for Southern Baptists, moral governmental theology gradually became less of a developed soteriological system and more of a supplement to the dominant themes of the traditional Calvinist doctrine of the atonement such as penalty, substitution, imputation, and others. For several seasons, Southern Edwardseanism was evergreen in Southern Baptist life due to its theological elasticity. Its doctrines endured decades and generations precisely because they could be conformed to a number of theological commitments. When John Dagg sat down in Madison, Georgia in 1856 to write his Manual of Theology, he was not only producing the very first systematic theology by a Southern Baptist; he was finally giving structure to a protean Southern Baptist theology.

John L. Dagg and the Codification of Southern Edwardseanism If Richard Furman was the principal founder of Southern Edwardseanism, John Leadley Dagg was its apotheosis.70 Ironically, no Southern Baptist ever expounded Edwardsean theology more clearly and more capably than the man who, in 1834, left his Philadelphia pastorate due to a failing voice. For Dagg, the pen was mightier. His Manual of Theology, the first of its kind among Southern Baptists, left an indelible mark upon the theology of the Southern Baptist Convention. What the great Baptist orators of the South like Richard Furman and W. T. Brantly could only achieve with sermons, letters, and articles, Dagg cemented in an 8-part book. For John Broadus (1827–1895), one of the four inaugural professors at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Dagg’s systematic theology wasn’t just a landmark among Baptists; it also stood among the great works in evangelicalism. In his Memoir of James P. Boyce, Broadus notes, Dr. Dagg was a man of great ability and lovable character. His works are worthy of thorough study, especially his small volume, “A Manual of Theology.” (Amer. Bap. Pub. Soc.), which is remarkable for clear statement of the profoundest truths, and for devotional sweetness. The writer of this Memoir may be pardoned for bearing witness that after toiling much, in his early years, as a pastor, over Knapp and Turretin, Dwight and Andrew Fuller, and other elaborate theologians, he found this manual a delight, and has felt through life the pleasing impulse it gave to theological inquiry and reflection.71

70 Perry Miller asserted that Jonathan Edwards was the “apotheosis of Puritanism.” (Perry Miller, Jonathan Edwards (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1949), 45. 71 John L. Dagg, A Manual of Theology (Harrisonburg: Gano Books, 1982), 2.

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In the Baptist realm, Dagg’s work could not have received higher praise. Broadus’s brief account of his pastoral learning is further evidence to just how dominant the Edwardsean tradition was in the middle of the nineteenth century. Broadus was familiar with the works of Northern, English, and even Southern Edwardseans. Published just two years before the establishment of the Southern Baptists’ flagship seminary, Dagg’s Manual was well-timed and well-written for a denomination that prized both theological precision and practical divinity. The unpretentious volume opens with a simple aim: “The study of religious truth ought to be undertaken and prosecuted from a sense of duty, and with a view to the improvement of the heart.” He continued, “When learned, it ought not to be laid on the shelf, as an object of speculation; but it should be deposited deep in the heart, where its sanctifying power ought to be felt.”72 Like the Southern Edwardseans before him, Dagg’s Calvinism was not so intellectualist as to forget the heartfelt purpose of theology. As Mark Dever has observed, Dagg’s Manual of Theology is substantially different from James P. Boyce’s Abstract of Systematic Theology, published thirty years later.73 Whereas the latter is much more apologetical in nature, engaging other thinkers in theological conversation, Manual lacks a prolegomenon or a scholastic context of any kind. It is written strictly for the church. “John L. Dagg’s Manual of Theology,” insists Dever, “reveals a theology both simple and profound.”74 Conspicuously absent from the work are any names whatsoever outside of Holy Scripture. Dagg shied away from controversy at nearly all costs. Nevertheless, despite its simple, straightforward approach, Dagg’s systematic theology is far from original. In fact, Manual of Theology features an array of Edwardsean ideas and doctrines to an extent never before seen in Southern Baptist life (and perhaps since). From ethics to metaphysics to attributes to divine providence to aesthetics to conversion, nearly every prominent Edwardsean theme in the nineteenth century is featured in some way in the work. Even though Dagg distanced himself from the New England theology, his Manual of Theology is a Baptist showcase of the breadth of the Edwardsean tradition and the tension that resided within it. Southern Edwardseanism, a traditionally system-averse phenomenon, reached its cultural and pedagogical zenith in the systematic theology of John Dagg. The Southern Baptist borrowed from Edwards and seemingly all vectors of Edwardseanism. For instance, in his autobiography, Dagg demonstrated his familiarity with Timothy Dwight. He mentioned the unfortunate similarity between he and Edwards’s grandson, both college presidents afflicted with partial blindness.75 72 Dagg, A Manual of Theology, 13. 73 Mark E. Dever, “John L. Dagg,” in Baptist Theologians, ed. Timothy George, David S. Dockery (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1990), 178. 74 Dever, “John L. Dagg,” 168. 75 Dagg, A Manual of Theology, 26;

John L. Dagg and the Codification of Southern Edwardseanism

In describing virtue, Samuel Hopkins had preferred the language of “disinterested benevolence” over Edwards’s metaphysics of love. Dagg, however, did not believe one was contrary to the other. He employed both. As a result, Dagg’s ethics were a theological blend of Edwardsean thought, including Hopkinsianism.76 On one hand, Dagg sounded remarkably Hopkinsian in his theology of love: “To constitute virtue, there must be an intentional promotion of happiness in others; and this intention must be disinterested. Natural religion does not deny that a higher standard of morality may exist; but it holds that disinterested benevolence is virtue, and it determines the morality of actions by the interested benevolence which they exhibit.” Dagg even seemed to critique Edwards’s notion of self-love in a very Hopkinsian way: Some have maintained that self-love is the first principle of virtue, its central affection, which, spreading first to those most nearly related to us, extends gradually to others more remote, and widens at length into universal benevolence. This system of morality is selfcontradictory. While it claims to aim at universal happiness, it makes it the duty of each individual to aim, not at this public good, but at his own private benefit. Whenever the interest of another comes in conflict with his own, it is made his duty to aim at the latter, and to promote that of his neighbor only so far as it may conduct to his own. It is true, that the advocates of this system bring in reason as a restraining influence, and suppose that it will so regulate the exercise of self-love as to result in the general good. According to this system, if we, in aiming at our own happiness, practice fraud and falsehood with a view to promote it, and find ourselves defeated in the attainment of our object, we may charge our failure, not on the virtuous principle by which it is assumed that we have been moved, but on the failure of our reason to restrain and regulate it so as to attain its end.77

Yet, in addition to his implicit critique of Edwards (who did in fact make a distinction between self-love and selfishness), Dagg may have had others in mind when he inveighed against the idea of self-love. The market revolution between the 1750s and the 1850s did much to expose the potential for human greed.78 As 76 According to Daniel W. Cooley and Douglas A. Sweeney, “Samuel Hopkins described… spiritual transformation in terms of ‘disinterested benevolence.’ The converted sinner possessed a new disposition characterized by a love for God that was not dependent upon a sense of gratitude to God. This love was completely dependent upon the sinner rightly beholding the character of God.” (Daniel W. Cooley and Douglas A. Sweeney, “The Edwardseans and the Atonement,” 112). 77 Dagg, A Manual of Theology, 46–47. 78 Charles Sellers’s The Market Revolution is a well-known work depicting the rise of a “market” economy and mentality in Jacksonian America. (Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991]); In his telling of the story of the Anderson family in antebellum Kentucky, Harry Stout explains the sinful motives that partially fueled the insatiable quest for Western land: “Providence no longer governed human destiny in the American

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James D. German has shown, Edwards inadvertently opened the door to a naturalistic political economy when he promoted the virtue of self-interested actions. The result, as German points out, was “the emergence of an Edwardsian political economy premised on the reality of natural self-love rather than on the possibility of true virtue.”79 This naturalistic ethic, shared by Adam Smith’s economic theory and James Madison’s political philosophy, is almost certainly the kind of avarice and selfish ambition that Dagg had in mind when he critiqued the notion of selflove. Southern Edwardseans, like their Northern counterparts, lived in much more market-driven society than their Puritan forbear. Consequently, as inhabitants of an incipient laissez-faire culture, they were naturally more suspicious of any form of self-love. Nevertheless, Dagg retained much of Jonathan Edwards’s system of ethics in The Nature of True Virtue. “We love God supremely,” he insisted, “because he is the greatest and best of beings; and we love other beings, according to the importance of each in the universal system of being.” Dagg’s words were nearly identical to the language of Edwards, who taught that “true virtue must chiefly consist in love to God; the Being of beings, infinitely the greatest and best of beings.”80 Dagg’s ontology was thoroughly Edwardsean. In his Beauty and Sensibility in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards, Roland Andre Delattre explains, “Being is the highest metaphysical concept for [Edwards]. Nothing has a prior or higher ontological status. Even God is not beyond being.”81 John Dagg thought in similar terms. In Dagg’s “universal system of being,” God, the greatest of all beings, occupies the greatest share of existence and is therefore worthy of the most love and praise. Conversely, to love thy neighbor is simply a command to love lesser shareholders of being. If benevolence is love to being in general, and all partake of that being, none can be excluded from the second commandment. Dagg even adopted Edwards’s distinction between love of benevolence and love of complacence, adding a third kind – love of beneficence – to account for “love in action.”82 Other themes from The

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economy. Risk and chance were the new ‘freaks of fortune,’ and neither provided any guarantees or peace of mind. American capitalism feasted on fear and greed.” (Stout, American Aristocrats: A Family, a Fortune, and the Making of American Capitalism [New York, NY: Basic Books, 2017], 96.) James D. German, “The Political Economy of Depravity: The Irrelevance (And Relevance) of Jonathan Edwards,” in Jonathan Edwards at Home and Abroad: Historical Memories, Cultural Movements, Global Horizons, ed. David W. Kling, Douglas A. Sweeney (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 103. Jonathan Edwards, “The Nature of True Virtue,” A Jonathan Edwards Reader, ed. John E. Smith, Harry S. Stout, and Kenneth P. Minkema (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 252. Roland Andre Delattre, Beauty and Sensibility in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards: An Essay in Aesthetics and Theological Ethics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 28. Dagg, A Manual of Theology, 76.

John L. Dagg and the Codification of Southern Edwardseanism

Nature of True Virtue such as consent, beauty, and fitness all appear repeatedly in Dagg’s presentation of divine grace.83 In his Manual of Theology, Dagg also reformulated or re-categorized several traditional Edwardsean doctrines. For instance, while God’s moral government is a dominant theme in the text, it is expounded most in the attributes of God and less under the work of Christ: As God’s moral perfections are the glory of his character, so his moral government is the glory of his universal scheme; and it may, therefore, have been pleasing to his infinite mind to permit the entrance of sin, because it gave occasion for the display of his justice and moral government. It may accord best with his infinite wisdom, to conform his obedient subjects in holiness, not by physical necessity, but by moral influence; and the display of his justice and moral government must be a most important means for the accomplishment of this end. How could the intelligences that are to expand for ever in the presence of his throne, have those moral impressions which are necessary to the perfection of their holiness, if they should for ever remain ignorant of his justice, and hatred of sin?84

This was Hopkinsian theodicy from the pen of a Southern Baptist. Although Dagg was far less concerned with divine moral government as a doctrine of atonement, he nevertheless preserved the same Edwardsean idea of displaying the justice and moral perfections of God. The essence of New Divinity theology remained intact. Interestingly, Dagg was even willing to entertain the idea of public justice, a signature part of moral governmental theory, but only as an expression of God’s goodness. In what is almost certainly an allusion to Jonathan Maxcy and/or Andrew Fuller, Dagg addresses the attribute of justice: Some have admitted another distinction, to which the name Public Justice has been given. This determines the character of God’s moral government, and the rules according to which it proceeds. It may be regarded as a question of definition, whether the existence and character of God’s moral government shall be ascribed to his justice or his goodness. As this government tends to the greatest good of the universe, there appears to be no reason to deny that it originates in the goodness of God; and if it be ascribed to his Public Justice, that justice may be considered a modification of his goodness.85

Because Dagg affirmed the age-old Edwardsean idea of God’s glory effecting the greatest good, he was therefore convinced that moral government was more about

83 Ibid., 267, 270–71, 84 Ibid., 89. 85 Ibid., 85.

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God’s goodness than it was about divine justice. Whereas Jonathan Maxcy denied the distributive and commutative justice of the atonement in favor of public (or general) justice, John Dagg permitted all three, but on his own terms. Like Andrew Fuller, John Dagg labored to show that divine sovereignty was indeed compatible with the sinner’s duty to believe in the gospel. So prominent was this theme in his thinking that, of Dagg’s eight books in his Manual of Theology, the last seven begin with an introduction on duty: “Duty of love to God,” “Duty of Delighting in the Will and Works of God,” “Duty of Repentance,” “Duty of Believing in Jesus Christ,” “Duty of Living and Walking in the Holy Spirit,” “Duty of Gratitude for Divine Grace,” and “Duty of Preparing for the Future World.” As a Southern Edwardsean, Dagg exhibited a strong voluntarist emphasis in his theology. Also like Fuller, Dagg drew heavily from Jonathan Edwards’s Freedom of the Will. In fact, the latter proved to be one of Dagg’s most invaluable resources.86 The Southern Baptist preacher, teacher, and administrator insisted on multiple occasions that it “was God’s purpose to govern man as a free-agent.”87 As a result, Dagg reasoned, the “doctrine of moral necessity is not inconsistent with the free-agency and accountability of man.”88 Through such statements, the spirit of Edwards hovers conspicuously over the pages of Dagg’s Manual of Theology. Pulling from Edwards’s use of Lockean epistemology, Dagg also rejected the self-determination of the will: “It is inconsistent with philosophical accuracy to speak of the will as determining or deciding. The faculties of the mind are not distinct agents, possessing a separate existence from the mind itself. We may say that a man understands or wills, or that his mind understands or wills; but to say that his understanding understands, or his will wills, is bad philosophy.”89 Armed with a theology of “new affections” and willing to make the careful distinction between moral inability and physical inability, Dagg further demonstrated Edwards’s dominating influence upon his anthropology and his soteriology.90 In a denomination inaugurated under Edwardsean leadership, it was fitting that its first systematic theology exhibited such a diversity of Edwardsean doctrines. Manual of Theology was, in many ways, the codification of Southern Edwardseanism. What Samuel Hopkins did to define the New Divinity in his System of Doctrines, John L. Dagg achieved for Southern Edwardseans in his Manual of Theology, but in

86 Baptists in the North also relished Jonathan Edwards’s The Freedom of the Will. In the late 1770s, between frequent preaching and chaplain duties, Hezekiah Smith found time to read Edwards’s treatise “to improve his mind.” (Hezekiah Smith, “Journal,” VIII, 5; see John David Broome, ed., The Life, Ministry, and Journals of Hezekiah Smith [Springfield: Particular Baptist Press, 2004], 136.) 87 Ibid., 104. 88 Ibid., 128. 89 Ibid., 122. 90 Dagg, A Manual of Theology, 170, 278, 285, 49.

John L. Dagg and the Codification of Southern Edwardseanism

a less official way. Dagg was not invoking Edwards explicitly nor did he have the imprimatur of Edwards as Hopkins supposedly did, but his systematic theology bore the unmistakable marks of Jonathan Edwards nonetheless.91 John Dagg’s Edwardsean theology was not merely recognized in the Southern Baptist Convention. It was celebrated. In the mold of Richard Furman, the former president of Mercer commanded such honor among his peers that in 1879 the octogenarian Dagg was asked to write a catechism for children and servants. According to Tom Nettles, “This action stands as a firm testimony to the confidence Southern Baptists had in the theological position of Dagg, in that they were willing to submit the religious impressions of their children to his hands.”92 The motion by W. H. Whitsitt at the Southern Baptist Convention in Atlanta was a plain reminder that Edwardseanism was part of the lingua franca of Southern Baptists, and they wanted their disciples to speak the language. Although Manual of Theology did not approach System of Doctrines in terms of molding an entire tradition, it did perhaps surpass Hopkins’s work in cultural staying power. In 1903, the fourth president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, E. Y. Mullins (1860–1928), boasted that Dagg “was one of the most conspicuous figures among Baptists in the South during the nineteenth century…His work on theology has exerted a widespread and powerful influence throughout the South as well as elsewhere. Truly his was a life rich in influence for good and these influences continue in power to the present hour.”93 Despite its waning influence, the theological legacy of Jonathan Edwards endured in the Southern Baptist Convention into the twentieth century. From the pulpits of Charleston to the classrooms of Louisville, Kentucky, Southern Edwardseanism would endure for yet another generation.

91 Samuel Hopkins wrote the very first biography of Jonathan Edwards. (Samuel Hopkins, The Life and Character of the Late Reverend Mr. Jonathan Edwards [Boston: S. Kneeland, 1765]) 92 Thomas J. Nettles, By His Grace and for His Glory: A Historical, Theological, and Practical Study of the Doctrines of Grace in Baptist Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1986), 168. 93 Mark Dever, “John L. Dagg,” 165.

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6. A Baptist Renaissance: Jonathan Edwards and the SBC Today

On August 31, 1993, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary was embroiled in controversy. When its ninth president, R. Albert Mohler, Jr. (b. 1959), ascended the pulpit to deliver his first opening convocation, the tension in Alumni Memorial Chapel was palpable. After decades of theological liberalism at the seminary and a tumultuous attempt by conservatives to reclaim the leadership of the denomination, the trustees had elected a 33-year-old confessional Calvinist. Mohler was the former editor of the Christian Index, the same position held by the likes of W. T. Brantly and Jesse Mercer a century and a half before. His brand of theology was a blast from the Baptist past, resembling that of Brantly and Mercer far more than most of his listeners in the audience that day. His now-famous address, entitled “Don’t Just Do Something: Stand There!”, was a clarion call that the seminary was returning to its theological roots in Greenville. By recovering James P. Boyce’s “Three Changes in Theological Institutions,” Mohler was reaching back to the days at Furman Academy. For the first time in nearly a century, the faint echoes of Southern Edwardseanism could be heard in the halls of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He warned, As Southern Baptists, we are in danger of becoming God’s most unembarrassed pragmatists, much more enamored with statistics than invested in theological substance. The Abstract is a reminder that we bear responsibility to this great denomination whose name we so proudly bear. We bear the collective responsibility to call this denomination back, back first of all to itself, and to its doctrinal inheritance. This is a true reformation and revival only the sovereign God of the universe can bring.1

In the face of theological liberalism, the Southern Baptist Convention was once again summoning the theological and educational vision of Richard Furman. As a result, the movement to take back the doctrine of inerrancy and the denomination would ultimately spell the return of Jonathan Edwards’s theology in the Southern Baptist Convention, but not immediately. Just as Southern Baptists had been some of the last to encounter Edwards’s theology in early modern America, they were also late to the Edwards renaissance.

1 R. Albert Mohler, “Don’t Just Do Something: Stand There!” Convocation Address at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, August 31, 1993.

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An Age Without Edwards Even in the midst of the “conservative resurgence,” the Southern Baptist world at the end of the twentieth century was vaguely familiar with Jonathan Edwards. After all, Southern Baptists now boasted their own proud history. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, as Southern Baptists began to emerge from the margins of American culture, establishing their own institutions and developing their own systematic texts, their need to invoke Edwards and the Edwardseans grew less and less. Although Southern Baptists in the postbellum period still alluded to Edwards as the doyen of American revivalism, his works were not as well-known as they had been during the Second Great Awakening.2 A century after the Civil War era, Southern Baptists were still a revivalistic people, but the name of Billy Graham (1918–2018) had eclipsed Edwards’s and others as the par excellence of American revivalism. In Charles Stanley’s The Wonderful Spirit-Filled Life, published during the resurgence, Graham is quoted in four chapters.3 Interestingly, among Stanley’s list of extra-biblical citations in the book, none are drawn from the previous century, much less from the “long” eighteenth. Decades before Stanley’s volume, in his Why I Preach That the Bible Is Literally True, another SBC president, W. A. Criswell (1909–2002), praised the revivals of D. L. Moody along with Baptists like Charles Spurgeon and John Bunyan. However, in his list of legendary Christian conversions, Edwards and others are conspicuously absent: “The testimony of transformed lives to the literal truths of the living Word spans centuries. From Saul of Tarsus to Justin Martyr to Augustine to John Bunyan to John Newton to John Wesley to B. H. Carroll to Jerry McCauley – to the host of God’s glorious witnesses today, the testimony is ever the same. There is power in the Word of God to convert.”4 By no means did Criswell intend to include every changed life in the history of the church. Still, perhaps the best indication of the Baptist zeitgeist in the twentieth century is not Criswell’s omission of Jonathan Edwards nor his inclusion of John Wesley, but rather the noticeable chasm between Augustine and John Bunyan. For Criswell, the Reformation seemed to begin in earnest with Baptists, not with Martin Luther or John Calvin or the Puritans. In some sense, the Southern Baptist neglect of Edwards wasn’t personal; they were apparently overlooking much of Protestant history.

2 Speaking of the conversion of Thomas Fuller, in 1878 James Hazzard Cuthbert insisted, “If Edwards had seen it in his day, he would have set it down as the most remarkable of all his ‘remarkable conversions.’” (Cuthbert, Life of Richard Fuller, 18) 3 Charles Stanley, The Wonderful Spirit-Filled Life (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1992), 52, 138, 162, 219. 4 W. A. Criswell, Why I Preach That the Bible is Literally True (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1969), 13, 14, 17, 84.

An Age Without Edwards

Progressives and conservatives alike had little use for “America’s theologian.” On one hand, theological liberals like Dale Moody (1915–92) relegated Edwards to the doctrine of postmillennialism, a type of eschatology Moody believed Edwards simply borrowed from Franciscans.5 On the other hand, premillennialist fundamentalists sealing themselves off from a world in decline could make little sense of a postmillennialist theologian who spent his life engaging modernism rather than hiding from it. After one Civil War and two world wars, most conservative Christians did not share Edwards’s optimistic view of the future. In 1959, C. C. Goen was even willing to call Edwards “America’s first major postmillennial thinker,” a label that was anything but a compliment.6 Instead, Southern Baptists traded Edwards’s postmillennialism for an apocalyptic eschatology, replacing the idea of a golden age with a rapture event whereby the elect would leave the world behind instead of advancing mankind in love and holiness. Nevertheless, Greg Wills has suggested that New Divinity views in the nineteenth century may have actually prepared many Southern Baptists for modernism in the twentieth.7 Michael McClymond’s speculation that Edwards’s unfinished work on the history of redemption might have helped to obviate the fundamentalist-modernist controversy is an interesting one for Southern Baptists, who were not as entrenched in the controversy as their Northern counterparts but who clearly ignored Edwards on seemingly both sides of the aisle.8 Even the way that Baptists in the South engaged American culture had changed. Baptists were no longer religious outsiders adopting modern ideas as they were in the nineteenth century. Instead they were culture warriors, enjoying untold influence as presidents, politicians, presidential chaplains, and as lobbyists for con-

5 Dale Moody, The Word of Truth: A Summary of Christian Doctrine Based on Biblical Revelation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 1981), 553. 6 C. C. Goen, “Jonathan Edwards: A New Departure in Eschatology,” Church History 28 (1959), 25–40. 7 Greg Wills, “The SBJT Forum: The Overlooked Shapers of Evangelicalism,” The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 3, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 90. 8 Michael J. McClymond, “A Different Legacy? The Cultural Turn in Edwards’s Later Notebooks and the Unwritten History of the Work of Redemption, ed. David W. Kling and Douglas A. Sweeney (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 16–39; As a whole, Southern Baptists were not engaged in the fundamentalist-modernist controversy like their Northern counterparts. However, Southern Baptist pastors such as J. Frank Norris in Texas were especially militant in their fundamentalism. According to George Marsden, “The activities of some of its established national leaders did not help the fundamentalist image either. J. Frank Norris, the leading fundamentalist organizer in Texas, had already won such notoriety among his fellow Southern Baptists that he had been successively banned from local, county, and state organizations. He kept up an ongoing warfare with the Southern Baptist Convention, which he openly despised. Accusing the conservative body of tolerating modernists and evolutionists, Norris consistently referred to the Southern Baptist leadership as ‘the Sanhedrin.’” (Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture [New York: Oxford University Press, 2006], 190).

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servative candidates.9 As a result, Southern Baptists interacted with the world much differently than their disestablished forbears. In her work on American evangelicals, Frances Fitzgerald observes the transformation of the American jeremiad from the time of Edwards to the days of Baptist fundamentalist Jerry Falwell (1933–2007): The classic jeremiad is this: The people have fallen away into evil ways and committed sins that jeopardize their covenant with God and risk His judgment upon them. But His wrath may be stayed if there is a spiritual revival and the people repent and return to God. When Jonathan Edwards and subsequent revivalists used the form, they were speaking to the people in front of them about their individual sins. [Jerry] Falwell, however, adopted the Old Testament version in which whole nations sin and are judged by God.10

While Falwell had a spotty relationship with the Southern Baptist Convention, he nevertheless represented a significant number of Southern Baptists as “the spokesman of what was then commonly called the ‘Religious New Right.’” Following Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory in 1980, many evangelicals viewed “Falwell as the new political kingmaker.”11 Although Richard Furman had once lobbied for the right of ministers to serve in public office, his message was never as entitled or as authoritarian as Falwell envisioned. Falwell’s ambitious “Moral Majority” of the 1980s had little in common with the worldview of William B. Johnson, who believed that God planted Baptist churches to “dot the world as oases in a desert.”12 The personal, introspective religion of Edwards which had once appealed to Baptists had given way to a culture war in which battles were waged more upon the enemies of society and less upon the flesh. Southern Baptists, a denomination which originally relished the theology of Jonathan Edwards, had steadily distanced themselves from the Northampton Sage until Edwards had become little more than Puritan folklore.13 By 1961, Sydney

9 Grant Wacker, America’s Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014); Steven P. Miller, The Age of Evangelicalism: America’s Born-Again Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 10 Frances Fitzgerald, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (New York: Simon & Shuster, 2017), 307. 11 Miller, The Age of Evangelicalism, 61, 63. 12 Hortense C. Woodson, Giant in the Land: The Life of William B. Johnson (Springfield: Particular Baptist Press, 2005), 131. 13 This opposition to Edwards was a long and complex process. Mark Noll observes, “The persistence of Edwards’s nineteenth-century opponents in responding to his major works testified once again to his prominence in the theological arena. A consensus seemed to be growing, however, that reason, Scripture, and consciousness had finally dealt with Edwards, especially his arguments in Freedom of the Will. Yet whether because of doubts about these modern certainties, uneasiness about the security of their refutations, or respect for Edwards himself, theologians until the last third of the

Jonathan Edwards Redivivus

Ahlstrom lamented, “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.’”14 Strangely, Edwards’s most famous (or infamous) sermon in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries was virtually never listed among those Southern Baptists enjoyed from Edwards in the nineteenth century. Contemporary Christianity had a much different take on Jonathan Edwards. Basil Manly Sr. had once recommended Edwards’s spiritual and ethical writings to his own son. Now at the close of the twentieth century, Edwards was instead a specter from the ominous Puritan past.

Jonathan Edwards Redivivus American Edwardseanism in the twentieth century began in the same place it had in the eighteenth: New England. In 1949, Harvard scholar Perry Miller (1905–1963) published an intellectual biography of Edwards which, according to McClymond and McDermott, “dropped like a bombshell on the playground of the American intellectuals.”15 As an atheist, Miller was less interested in Edwards as an evangelical, but he was resurrecting Edwards studies from a century in which the Northampton theologian had been labeled everything from an “anachronism” to a “fiery Puritan.”16 However, Miller’s most lasting impact came not at Harvard, but at Yale, when in 1957 he launched the modern critical edition of Edwards’s works published by Yale University Press. After a slow start in the 1950s and 60s, the primary sources available from Edwards eventually rivaled any thinker in the history of the world. In many ways, this sea of Edwardsean literature (of which there are now 26 volumes) became the springboard for the evangelical renaissance of Edwards studies. Although the star-studded editorial committee for The Works of Jonathan Edwards included no Southern Baptists, the Northampton theologian was now accessible to

century could not leave him alone.” (Mark A. Noll, “Jonathan Edwards and Nineteenth-Century Theology,” in Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience, ed. Nathan O. Hatch and Harry S. Stout [New York: Oxford University Press, 1988], 271.) 14 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. 15 Perry Miller, Jonathan Edwards (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1949); Michael J. McClymond and Gerald R. McDermott, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 641. 16 Vernon Louis Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought (2 vols. New York: Harcourt, Brace), I:148–63; Henry Bamford Parkes, Jonathan Edwards: The Fiery Puritan (New York: Minton, Balch, 1930).

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all.17 Jonathan Edwards had become a worldwide phenomenon, as conferences on Edwards abounded around the globe. Over time, Jonathan Edwards study centers were established in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Germany, Japan, Poland, and South Africa in addition to the main center at Yale and an additional American center at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois. Nevertheless, Mark Noll observes, “twentieth-century evangelical Protestants came late to the recovery of Edwards.” But as Noll also explains, “[a]t the start of the twenty-first century, evangelical Protestants, who in many ways are the modern constituency closest to Edwards’s own religious concerns, have at last begun to learn from him themselves.”18 In this sense, it was fitting that Southern Baptists stumbled upon Edwards. Unlike Miller, the emerging Neo-Calvinist movement in the SBC saw Edwards as more than simply a topic for historical study. However, it wasn’t directly from Yale that they initially came to read him. Before Southern Baptists were re-introduced to the Northampton Sage, other evangelicals met him first. Around the same time that Albert Mohler was delivering his historic convocation at Southern Seminary, John H. Gerstner (1914–96) was publishing the last volume in his 3-part The Rational Biblical Theology of Jonathan Edwards.19 Gerstner, a Presbyterian theologian from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, was the “leading pioneer” of the evangelical Edwards renaissance.20 Like Samuel Davies or John Erskine many moons ago, Presbyterians were once again consuming Edwardsean theology. Unlike Robert Lewis Dabney, Gerstner did not see Edwards as a dangerous innovator. Instead, like the Welsh Presbyterian Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Gerstner plumbed Edwards as a source of evangelical piety and a gold mine of “rational” theology.21 Ligonier Ministries, founded by Gerstner’s disciple R. C. Sproul (1939–2017), became a “deeply Edwardsean institution,” producing magazines and radio programs which promoted Edwards’s theology.22 Eventually, American Presbyterian scholars like Stephen J. Nichols, D.G. Hart, Samuel T. Logan,

17 The roster for the editorial committee for The Works of Jonathan Edwards included Sydney Ahlstrom, Roland Bainton, Jon Butler, John Demos, David D. Hall, Sidney Earl Mead, Perry Miller, Edmund S. Morgan, H. Richard Niebuhr, Richard R. Niebuhr, Mark A. Noll, Paul Ramsey, John E. Smith, Stephen J. Stein, Harry S. Stout, Amos Wilder, John F. Wilson, and others. 18 Mark A. Noll, “Edwards’s Theology after Edwards,” in Sang Hyun Lee, ed., The Princeton Companion to Jonathan Edwards (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 305. 19 John H. Gerstner, The Rational Biblical Theology of Jonathan Edwards (3 vols. Orlando: Ligonier, 1991–93). 20 Douglas A. Sweeney, “Evangelical Tradition in America,” in The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards, ed. Stephen J. Stein (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 230. 21 Iain H. Murray, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (2 vols. Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1982–90), 1:253–4. 22 Ibid., 230.

Jonathan Edwards Redivivus

Jr., K. Scott Oliphint, and Sean Michael Lucas all joined the Edwards harvest.23 British evangelical Iain Murray’s 1987 hagiographic biography of Edwards was yet another sign that the trans-Atlantic evangelical world had rekindled its fascination for America’s theologian.24 Still, the greatest Edwardsean of the twentieth century was neither Presbyterian nor Southern Baptist (although, ironically, he was raised as a child in Greenville, South Carolina). When D.G. Hart speculated which denomination Jonathan Edwards would claim today if he were alive, his thoughts immediately went to John Piper (b. 1946): If [Edwards] were alive today, with which school would he identify? To give the question bite, let me raise the stakes by asking whether Edwards would be teaching at Westminster Seminary, Calvin Seminary, or Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. No fair avoiding an answer by responding that Edwards would not be teaching but instead would be the pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota.25

Behind Hart’s light-hearted hypothetical is a general consensus over the past thirty years among evangelicals: John Piper is today’s leading proponent of Jonathan Edwards’s theology. He is, as Doug Sweeney has named him, “now America’s most famous Edwardsean minister.”26 For Piper, Edwards’s life, ministry, and thought are windows into the divine world. “The pastoral testimony of Jonathan Edwards,” Piper reflected, “has therefore always seemed to me inescapably biblical.”27 Modeling his own ministry after Edwards’s, Piper popularized the Northampton theologian for the American church by publishing wave after wave of hugely successful books repackaging or simply restating Edwards’s theology. In fact, it is not an embellishment to suggest that every one of Piper’s books is a showcase of Edwardsean ideas.28

23 Each of these scholars contribute chapters in The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards: American Religion and the Evangelical Tradition, ed. D.G. Hart, Sean Michael Lucas, Stephen J. Nichols (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003). 24 Iain H. Murray, Jonathan Edwards: A New Biography (Carlisle: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1987). 25 D.G. Hart, “Jonathan Edwards and the Origins of Experimental Calvinism,” in The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards, ed. D.G. Hart, Sean Michael Lucas, Stephen J. Nichols (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 162. 26 Douglas A. Sweeney, “Evangelical Tradition in America,” 230. 27 John Piper, Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist (Colorado Springs: Multnomah Books, 2003), 102. 28 John Piper’s most popular publications include Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist (Sisters, OR: Multnomah, 1986); The Supremacy of God in Preaching (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1990); The Pleasures of God (Sisters, OR: Multnomah, 1991); God’s Passion for His Glory: Living the Vision

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In contrast to John L. Dagg who simply promoted Edwards’s doctrines without explicit reference to the Northampton Sage, Piper mentioned Edwards seemingly around every turn. In his book on missions Let the Nations Be Glad!: The Supremacy of God in Missions, Piper summarizes the ultimate goal of the church and then adds, “The person most responsible for my views and for my articulation of those views (under God and after the Bible) is Jonathan Edwards, the eighteenth-century pastor and theologian whose God-entranced worldview sheds its light across all the pages of this book. The impact that Edwards has had on my thinking as it relates to worship and missions (and almost everything else) is incalculable.”29 Evangelicals were once again harnessing Edwards’s practical theology. Even Piper’s defining idea, “Christian Hedonism,” he attributed largely to Edwards’s powerful influence.30 In the 1986 classic Desiring God, J.I. Packer endorsed the book by noting, “Jonathan Edwards, whose ghost walks through most of Piper’s pages, would be delighted with his disciple.”31 Piper’s simple Edwardseanism rejected the Hopkinsian doctrine of disinterested benevolence, an idea he believed to be inherently “evil” for its lack of joy-filled worship.32 The Minnesota theologian also took an interest in Andrew Fuller, of whom Piper authored a book in 2016 entitled Andrew Fuller: Holy Faith, Worthy Gospel, World Mission.33 Countless evangelicals were being introduced to the Edwardsean tradition through the works of John Piper, including Southern Baptists. Before long, with the help of Albert Mohler and others in the Southern Baptist Convention, an entirely new generation of Southern Edwardseans would emerge.

A Southern Baptist Renaissance Like Richard Furman in the antebellum South, John Piper had become the primary exponent of Edwardsean theology in twentieth-century America, casting a wide net that shaped multiple generations. Southern Baptists were reading Piper and others voraciously, and they were absorbing Jonathan Edwards. In A Reader’s Guide to the Major Writings of Jonathan Edwards, editors Nathan A. Finn and Jeremy M.

29 30 31 32 33

of Jonathan Edwards (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1998); Piper and Justin Taylor, eds., A God Entranced Vision of All Things: The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2004). John Piper, Let the Nations Be Glad!: The Supremacy of God in Missions (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 203. John Piper, Desiring God, 22. John Piper, Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist (Colorado Springs: Multnomah Books, 2003), endorsement on the back cover. Piper, Desiring God, 111. John Piper, Andrew Fuller: Holy Faith, Worthy Gospel, World Mission (Wheaton: Crossway, 2016).

A Southern Baptist Renaissance

Kimble acknowledged their indebtedness to Piper by dedicating the book to the Bethlehem theologian. In the acknowledgements, the Southern Baptists thanked Piper for introducing them to Jonathan Edwards as young men: 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 has 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.34

Like generations before, Southern Edwardseans were reading from their fellow Northern Edwardseans. In fact, in the spirit of Richard Furman, many Northern and Southern Edwardseans were even teaming up to spread Edwards’s theology. Owen Strachan, former associate professor of Christian theology at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, co-authored a 5-volume series called The Essential Edwards Collection (EEC) with his former teacher and Lutheran Douglas A. Sweeney, the former director of the Jonathan Edwards Center at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. The work was a “distillation” of different Edwardsean ideas.35 Years later, Sweeney and Strachan even co-wrote an edited version of EEC entitled The Essential Jonathan Edwards: An Introduction to the Life and Teaching of America’s Greatest Theologian, with a foreword by, who else, John Piper. After acknowledging the work of Gerstner, Sproul, Stout, and others, Sweeney and Strachan insist, “It’s no musty or gloomy thing to participate in this ongoing renaissance in some small way. We both – Owen and Doug – love entering the vast, sprawling world we could call Edwardseana, a land of colonial intrigue, snow-cloaked New England forests, and

34 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. 35 Douglas Sweeney has since become the dean of Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, Alabama. The Edwards Center at Trinity has since been moved to Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary.

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theistic delights. We plan to do it for the rest of our careers, in fact.”36 With the help of their Northern counterparts, the Southern Baptist renaissance of Jonathan Edwards had begun. In truth, however, the groundswell of Edwardsean theology in the SBC had also come from within. Even before Mohler’s dramatic course correction in the early 90s and Piper’s publications, a group of confessional Calvinists had striven to return the denomination and the seminary to its theological commitments in South Carolina. Their name, “Founders,” was a clear indication of their mission. While James P. Boyce was by no means an Edwardsean, like Ligonier Ministries, the Founders movement did not view Jonathan Edwards’s theology as antithetical to confessional Calvinism. Men like Thomas Nettles and Tom Ascol were recovering a Baptist identity in the mold of a Richard Furman or a Patrick Mell, treating Edwards as a friend of 5-point Calvinism, not a foe. As Douglas A. Sweeney explains, The Southern Baptist Convention is now the single largest Protestant denomination in America. Not surprisingly, then, its doctrine has diversified significantly, allowing for Calvinist, Arminian, and Anabaptist views. However, since 1982, a group of pastors and theologians has worked to revive and strengthen Calvinism in Southern Baptist churches. They have done so, moreover, with frequent claims to Edwards’s legacy. Led by Tom Ascol (b.1957), their Southern Baptist “Founders Movement” has grown rapidly during the past two decades. Today it organizes several conferences per year, sponsors outreach on the Web, and print a journal (Founders Journal) and other items through its publishing division (Founders Press). The Founders Movement has also created a sizable market for Edwards’s writings, especially among pastors. Thus in recent years a growing number of Southern Baptist scholars have published editions of Edwards’s sermon manuscripts.37

Southern Baptists were now armed with their own presses and publications. In 2003, Founders Journal explored the impact of Jonathan Edwards on Baptists. In 2015, they devoted an entire issue to the theology of Andrew Fuller.38 Tom Nettles (b. 1946), professor of historical theology at Southern Seminary and one of the foremost Baptist historians of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, was conducting what James Leo Garrett has called the “repristination of biblical inerrancy

36 Owen Strachan and Douglas A. Sweeney, “Preface,” in The Essential Jonathan Edwards: An Introduction to the Life and Teaching of America’s Greatest Theologian (Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2018), 10. 37 Douglas A. Sweeney, “Evangelical Tradition in America,” 230. 38 Tom Nettles, “Edwards and His Impact on Baptists,” Founders Journal Summer 2003, 1–18; Founders Journal Issue 101, Summer 2015.

A Southern Baptist Renaissance

and Dortian Calvinism” in Baptist life.39 During his tenure at Southern, Nettles routinely wrote and taught courses on the theology and spirituality of Jonathan Edwards, even occasionally reciting Edwards’s sermons in full Puritan garb for his students. Under the teaching of Nettles and others, entire classes of Southern Edwardseans now studied a full array of Edwards’s works. With the recent controversy over Edwards’s position on slavery and the suitableness of studying the life and thought of slave-owners, Nettles became one of the leading defenders of continued Edwards scholarship, recognizing the vital link between Baptist history and Edwards himself. “Without the influence of Edwards,” Nettles notes, “the American evangelical theology of revival would have had to find another thinker for its most profound development. But that would be unlikely, for the most profound and analytical observer as well as participant of that phenomenon known as the Great Awakening was Jonathan Edwards.”40 However, Nettles was not the only Edwardsean professor at Southern Seminary. In the mold of William Staughton two centuries earlier, Southern Edwardseans were even arriving from overseas to promote the theology of Jonathan Edwards and Andrew Fuller. The son of a Kurdish father and an Irish mother, Azad Hakim (b. 1953) was born and raised in England before moving to Canada, where he eventually anglicized his name: Michael Anthony George Haykin. Before becoming a full-time professor at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 2007, Haykin was the principal of Toronto Baptist Seminary, where in 2003 he established the Jonathan Edwards Centre for Reformed Spirituality. At Toronto and at Southern, Haykin “emerged as arguably the key scholar associated with the renaissance in Andrew Fuller…studies over the past thirty years.”41 Haykin became the director of the Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies at Southern Seminary and eventually served as the general editor for the critical edition, The Works of Andrew Fuller. With an unmatched knowledge of English Baptist primary sources, Haykin refamiliarized Southern Baptists not only with Andrew Fuller, but with others in the Baptist Missionary Society as well. He edited The Armies of the Lamb: The Spirituality of Andrew Fuller and other works like Joy Unspeakable and Full of Glory: The Piety of Samuel and Sarah Pearce. From coast to coast, almost every major Southern Baptist seminary was participating in the Edwardsean recovery effort. With Richard A. Bailey in 2002, Gregory

39 James Leo Garrett, Jr., Baptist Theology: A Four-Century Study (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2009), 666. 40 Tom Nettles, “Edwards in the Hands of Social Justice,” Founders https://founders.org/2020/08/21/ edwards-in-the-hands-of-social-justice/ 41 Nathan A. Finn, “Andrew Fuller’s Edwardsean Spirituality,” in The Pure Flame of Devotion: The History of Christian Spirituality, ed. G. Stephen Weaver Jr. and Ian Hugh Clary (Ontario: Joshua Press, 2013), 383.

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A. Wills of Southern Seminary co-edited The Salvation of Souls: Nine Previously Unpublished Sermons on the Call to Ministry and the Gospel by Jonathan Edwards with a foreword by George Marsden.42 At Southwestern Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, Robert Caldwell III was integral in retrieving Edwards’s Trinitarianism. In 2006, Caldwell authored Communion in the Spirit: The Holy Spirit as the Bond of Union in the Theology of Jonathan Edwards as well as another in 2012 with Steven M. Studebaker entitled The Trinitarian Theology of Jonathan Edwards: Text, Context, and Application.43 At Midwestern, Christian George authored Jonathan Edwards: America’s Genius (2008) and Owen Strachan a devotional called Always in God’s Hands: Day by Day in the Company of Jonathan Edwards (2018). In Texas, Southern Baptists were leading the effort to systematize and formulate Edwards’s Miscellanies, discovering new ways of understanding the Northampton theologian’s deepest and sometimes most controversial thoughts.44 Southern Baptists were also editing volumes to retrieve the New England pedagogy that had shaped Edwards and his disciples as students.45 Jonathan Edwards had even reached Southern California. At Gateway Seminary, the Jonathan Edwards Center opened in 2018 as the tenth international research center and the West Coast hub for Edwards studies. Its director, Chris Chun, was a well-versed student of the Edwardsean tradition, having previously published The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards in the Theology of Andrew Fuller (2012). Chun explains, You could say the Gateway Center is modeled after the Center at Trinity mostly, yet I do have a personal interest in researching Edwards’ influence on Baptist figures such as Andrew Fuller, William Carey, Isaac Backus, Richard Furman, Charles Spurgeon, Adoniram and Ann Judson and others. However, the goal is to serve as a research, education and publication hub for Edwards studies on the West Coast in general. The center will seek to strengthen existing doctoral and visiting scholar programs and build a network with

42 Richard A. Bailey and Gregory A. Wills, eds., The Salvation of Souls: Nine Previously Unpublished Sermons on the Call to Ministry and the Gospel by Jonathan Edwards (Wheaton: Crossway, 2002). 43 Robert W. Caldwell, Communion in the Spirit: The Holy Spirit as the Bond of Union in the Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Eugene: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2006); Robert W. Caldwell III and Steven M. Studebaker, The Trinitarian Theology of Jonathan Edwards: Text, Context, and Application (New York: Ashgate Publishing, 2012). 44 Robert L. Boss and Sarah B. Boss, ed., The Miscellanies Companion (Charleston, SC: JESoceity Press, 2018). 45 New England Dogmatics: A Systematic Collection of Questions and Answers in Divinity by Maltby Gelston (1766–1865), ed. Robert L. Boss, Joshua R. Farris, and S. Mark Hamilton (Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2019).

The SBC in the 21st Century

international scholarly communities as well as local churches in the Inland Empire and Los Angeles basin of California.46

Southern Baptists were now organizing their efforts to recover their Edwardsean heritage. Hosting its inaugural conference in 2019, the Jonathan Edwards Center at Gateway Seminary was the very first center at a Baptist institution. The Center represented both the theological marriage between Southern Baptists and Jonathan Edwards in the twenty-first century as well as the geographical scope of Edwards’s influence upon the Convention itself.47 Southern Edwardseanism had now reached the Pacific. Indeed, many Southern Edwardseans hardly even qualified as “Southern.” A theology that germinated in the pulpits of Charleston, South Carolina was now flowering in the classrooms of Ontario, California.

The SBC in the 21st Century Two hundred years after Richard Furman passed from his earthly labors, Southern Baptists were still coming to terms with what it means to be “moderate” Calvinists. Although Albert Mohler held to a traditional, 5-point Calvinism in the mold of James P. Boyce, his Vice President, Russell D. Moore, seemed to embody the true spirit of Southern Edwardseanism when he described his position as a “weird hybrid” of Calvinism and Arminianism, melding unconditional election with a general atonement.48 The synthetic form of Calvinism that had flourished during the days of Richard Furman and Jonathan Maxcy still defined much of the Southern Baptist Convention in the twenty-first century. Between the continued Arminianism of many evangelical denominations and the inveterate confessionalism of Presbyterians, Southern Baptists remained a people in the middle. In fact, the Southern Baptist Convention was proving just how “moderate” moderate Calvinism could be, pushing the limits of their Calvinistic system until their own beliefs hardly qualified as Calvinist at all. In 2016, during his bid for the presidency of the Southern Baptist Convention, Memphis pastor Steven Gaines was labeled a

46 Excerpt by Chris Chun in Joey Cochran, “JEC Gateway: Edwards Centers Add 10th Location,” in Edwardseana Issue 4 Fall 2018, 16. 47 The inaugural board members for the Jonathan Edwards Center at Gateway Seminary included Chris Chun, John Shouse, Oliver Crisp, Kenneth Minkema, Robert Caldwell, Mark Rogers, and Kyle Strobel. 48 David W. Bebbington, Baptists through the Centuries: A History of a Global People (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2010), 269.

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“more moderate Calvinist.” His emphatic rebuttal was telling of the new Baptist self-consciousness: “I’m a Baptist, not a Calvinist or Arminian.”49 By the time of the Baptist Faith and Message 2000, Southern Baptists seemed to share just as much in common with Arminians as they did with Calvinists. While retaining the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints, they refused to stand (at least explicitly) on any of the other four points of Dortian Calvinism (total depravity, irresistible grace, unconditional election, limited atonement).50 Somewhat ambiguously, the conciliatory BFM 2000 states, “Election is the gracious purpose of God, according to which He regenerates, justifies, sanctifies, and glorifies sinners.” It then adds in Edwardsean fashion, “It is consistent with the free agency of man, and comprehends all the means in connection with the end. It is the glorious display of God’s sovereign goodness, and is infinitely wise, holy, and unchangeable.”51 Boasting the freedom of the will and the glory of God, Southern Edwardseanism was still part of the Southern Baptist DNA, but in a much different form. Without a commitment to the historic Baptist confessions, the Southern Edwardsean moderation of Calvinism had reached its seemingly inevitable theological conclusion. Ever the revivalists, Southern Baptists had jettisoned the points of Calvinism they felt inhibited a completely free decision to believe in the gospel while guarding the single doctrine that maintained their assurance after their free decision. In some sense, the doctrine of “eternal security” had become a vestigial organ left over from the days of Southern Baptist Calvinism, a reminder that Southern Baptists had once been devoted to some version of Reformed theology, but no longer. Southern Edwardseans like William B. Johnson, Jesse Mercer, William T. Brantly, and Richard Fuller would have repudiated any system of faith which did not uphold the doctrines of unconditional election and total depravity. However, they had all contributed to twenty-first century Southern Baptist theology. In one way or another, by slightly adapting confessional Calvinism, Southern Baptists had always been a “moderate” Calvinistic denomination. More than any other group, Southern Edwardseans were responsible for establishing this theological trajectory in Southern Baptist life. While Separate and Regular Baptists together bequeathed an eclectic mixture of theological styles, it was Edwardseanism that cemented the moderate Calvinism of the Southern Baptist Convention. Whether by moral governmental atonement, the freedom of the will, natural ability, love to “being

49 Twitter post by Steve Gaines, 2 July 2016, 6:56am. 50 In the fifth section of the Baptist Faith and Message 2000, entitled “God’s Purpose of Grace,” it reads, “All true believers endure to the end. Those whom God has accepted in Christ, and sanctified by His Spirit, will never fall away from the state of grace, but shall persevere to the end.” (Baptist Faith and Message 2000, “God’s Purpose of Grace.”) 51 Baptist Faith and Message 2000, “God’s Purpose of Grace.”

The SBC in the 21st Century

in general,” disinterested benevolence, or by a host of other concepts, Southern Baptists were long willing to negotiate the circumference of Calvinism. Remarkably, in 2017, at the Southern Baptist Convention in Phoenix, they were still defining their own soteriological boundaries. When messengers passed a resolution affirming “the truthfulness, the efficacy and beauty of the biblical doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement as the burning core of the Gospel message and the only hope of a fallen race,” Southern Baptists were once again facing the implications of their own “moderate” past. Against a resurgent anti-Trinitarianism, the same denomination whose first president denied penal substitution was now forced to call William B. Johnson’s view “false teaching that leads the flock away.”52 One of the two authors of the resolution, Owen Strachan, was an Edwardsean in his own right. After two hundred years, Southern Edwardseanism was still an ever-changing theology. In 1907, in A Genetic History of the New England Theology, Frank Foster concluded that the theology of Edwardseans like Edwards Amasa Park, if “consistently carried out, must in the end disrupt the system of Calvinism.”53 For some, it appeared that the denouement of moderate Calvinism was something other than Calvinism. In some sense, the Southern Baptist story experienced the same declension. Many of the defining theological controversies of the twenty-first century in the SBC were part of a larger conversation in the denomination over the nature of moderate Calvinism. In response to the rise of “New Calvinism” in the SBC, non-Calvinist pastors and theologians authored the ironically-named “Traditionalist Statement” in 2012 in order to voice their belief that the “vast majority” of Southern Baptists were not Calvinists at all. According to the traditionalists, “it is no longer helpful to identify ourselves by how many points of convergence we have with Calvinism.” While conceding that most Southern Baptist Calvinists had not demanded their view become the new SBC standard, they concluded, “We believe it is time to move beyond Calvinism as a reference point for Baptist soteriology.”54 The elastic moderation of Calvinism had now evolved into a question of Calvinism itself. However, many in the Southern Baptist Convention were not willing to “move beyond Calvinism.” Instead, the New Calvinists had largely adopted Jonathan Edwards as a kind of unofficial mascot, a theological titan from the past who helped lend authority and tradition to a theological movement seeking to break away from the generation before it.

52 The evangelical world had changed much since 1845. The voices challenging penal substitution were no longer Hopkinsian; they were anti-Trinitarian figures like Christian contemporary musician Michael Gungor and William Paul Young, author of the New York Times bestseller The Shack (2007). 53 Frank Foster, A Genetic History of the New England Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1907), 452. 54 “Preamble,” Traditionalist Statement.

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The Edwards renaissance was concomitant with a growing fissure in the Southern Baptist Convention between those who wanted to do away with the language of Calvinism completely and those who wished to reaffirm the Calvinistic doctrines they believed had once defined their theological heroes, most especially Edwards. Former SBC president Jerry Vines articulated what many “traditional” Baptists believed when he told journalist Collin Hansen, “We’re having a problem today because there’s a small group of hostile, aggressive, militant Calvinists. They kill evangelism, and they kill churches. And they do it without integrity when they come in under the radar and the people don’t know up front where they are theologically.”55 Calvinism, not inerrancy, was now the great theological divide in the SBC. Hansen’s book Young, Restless, Reformed: A Journalist’s Journey with the New Calvinists (2008) is nothing short of a virtual tour of Jonathan Edwards’s influence upon the New Calvinism movement, recording the growing antipathy of many Southern Baptists leaders toward Calvinism and the rallying cry of (mostly) younger Southern Baptists to return to the theology of Edwards. The cover of Hansen’s book is indicative of a new evangelical attitude in the twenty-first century: a t-shirt with a picture of Edwards and the words “Jonathan Edwards is my Homeboy.” After years of Puritan stereotypes and nightmares of sinners dangling over the pit of Hell, NeoCalvinism was unashamedly and emphatically pro-Edwards. From Edwardsean charismatics in Gaithersburg, Maryland to Edwards-loving high school students in Bakersfield, California to campers in South Dakota reading The Life of David Brainerd, Hansen’s portrait of New Calvinism is a testament to the wide reach of Edwards in American evangelicalism.56 However, for Baptists, the ascendancy of Calvinism and Edwardseanism was especially seismic. In a quarter of a century, the Southern Baptist Convention, a predominantly a-Calvinist denomination boasting no Calvinists over its respective entities, had come to elect Calvinistic presidents to lead its International Mission Board, the Ethics and Religious Liberties Commission, the majority of its major seminaries, and the denomination itself in SBC president J. D. Greear.57 Like the New Divinity movement centuries before, Neo-Calvinism was conspicuously younger and more Edwardsean than their traditional brothers and sisters. (Yet like the Edwardseans of old, Neo-Calvinists have not always agreed upon the social and

55 In Colin Hansen, Young, Restless, Reformed: A Journalist’s Journey with the New Calvinists (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2008), 84. 56 Ibid., 102, 136, 156. 57 In 1993, Albert Mohler was elected president of Southern Seminary. In 2004, Daniel Akin was elected president at Southeastern Seminary. In 2012, Jason Allen was elected president at Midwestern Seminary. In 2013, Russell D. Moore was elected president of the Ethics and Religious Liberties Commission. In 2014, David Platt was elected president of the IMB. In 2018, J. D. Greear was elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention.

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racial issues of the day.) Like their Southern Edwardsean ancestors, many of these Calvinists felt they had more in common theologically with Jonathan Edwards than with many of their fellow Southern evangelicals. Jonathan Edwards’s theology had indeed returned to a new Baptist South. In the early twenty-first century, Southern Baptists appear to be trending theologically in much the way Richard Furman envisioned. As public theologians, Calvinists have led their denomination in theological education, in domestic and foreign missions, and at the very top of the convention. They are admirers of Edwards, conversant with Edwardseans from all denominations, but their friendly Calvinism is not so wooden as to diminish the authority of the Bible or to ostracize those who differed with them on non-essential matters. Although the issue of race continues to divide Edwardseans much as it did their theological forbears, the spirit of Southern Edwardseanism remains alive and well in the Baptist South, adaptable and amicable toward other traditions. In the largest Protestant denomination in the world, and in one of the most diverse communities of faith in America, the theology of “America’s theologian” is still one of its greatest unifying forces.

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Appendix: List of Southern Edwardsean Clergy, 1750–1895

The following list of Southern Edwardsean clergy includes Baptists that fall into one of the four schools outlined in this volume: (1) New Divinity Edwardseanism, (2) Fullerite Edwardseanism, (3) simple Edwardseanism, (4) and implicit Edwardseanism. Therefore, while Jonathan Edwards influenced these clergymen in varying degrees, and a few did not qualify as “moderate Calvinists” (i.e. Henry Holcombe and Patrick Hues Mell), they can each be identified within the Edwardsean tradition in some way. For instance, some left behind sermons and treatises that clearly demonstrate Edwards’s ideas or those of his New Divinity followers. Others simply attested to the influence of Edwards and the Edwardseans. For lesser known Baptists, they could still be identified as Southern Edwardseans because friends and acquaintances testified to their love of Edwards’s works. In a couple cases, Baptists associated themselves so closely with and spoke so highly of other Southern Edwardseans that it can reasonably be concluded that Edwards exercised some influence upon their thinking, albeit indirectly. As shown in this work, Southern Edwardseanism was an intramural affair, and Baptists often imbibed their theology from other Baptists. In many cases, even though I may have suspected Edwardseanism on the part of a particular Baptist figure, I did not have sufficient evidence to label them an “Edwardsean” as I have defined the concept in this book. Unlike, for example, the tight-knit New Divinity circles in Litchfield, Connecticut, Edwardsean lineages in the South cannot always be traced in a theological family tree of sorts. Therefore, the following is an attempt to catalogue who was an Edwardsean, not necessarily to explain how they became an Edwardsean (although this can usually be ascertained and was attempted in this book). Each of these clergymen can be found in this book and can be appropriately labeled a “Southern Edwardsean.” I have designated 1750–1895 as the lifespan of the movement because Oliver Hart, the second pastor of First Baptist Church of Charleston, filled the pulpit at the Southern Baptist “mother church” in 1750 from the Philadelphia Association, and some of the last Southern Edwardseans, Patrick Hues Mell and Basil Manly Jr., men who were significantly influenced by Edwards’s writings, died in 1888 and 1892, respectively. Landmarkist James Madison Pendleton, who imbibed deeply from Andrew Fuller, died in 1891. As a result, it can be established that Southern Edwardseanism as a movement was birthed at the end of the First Great Awakening and came to a close sometime around the turn of the twentieth century. This is obviously not an

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Appendix: List of Southern Edwardsean Clergy, 1750–1895

exhaustive list, but provides a directory in alphabetical order of the major figures who promoted the theology of Jonathan Edwards in the Baptist South: Botsford, Edmund (1745–1819). Pastor and pioneer evangelist in South Carolina and Georgia, published a defense of slavery. Brantly, W. T. (1787–1845). Co-founder of First Baptist Church of Columbia, South Carolina, rector of Richmond Academy in Augusta, Georgia, president of Beaufort College, president of College of Charleston, pastor at First Baptist Church of Charleston (1837–1844), preacher at what would become First Baptist Church of Augusta (future site of the first Southern Baptist Convention), editor of the Columbian Star (1826–1837). Broaddus, Andrew (1770–1848). Pastor, school administrator, and Baptist Association moderator in Virginia. Campbell, Jesse H. (1807–1888). Pastor, evangelist, and historian in Georgia, authored Georgia Baptists: Historical and Biographical (1874). Clopton, Abner W. (1784–1833). Pastor of several churches in Virginia and North Carolina, organizer in the causes of education and temperance. Conner, Lewis (1781–1858). Predestinarian Baptist who pastored several churches in Kentucky, primarily in Boone County. Dagg, John L. (1794–1884). First Southern Baptist to author a systematic theology text, attended the inaugural Southern Baptist Convention, president of Mercer University (1844–1854), professor of theology at Mercer University (1844–1855), pastor and school administrator in both Northern and Southern states. Fuller, Richard (1804–1876). Co-founder of the Southern Baptist Convention (est. 1845), leading religious apologist for slavery in the 1840s, third president of the Southern Baptist Convention (1859–1863), pastor of Seventh Baptist Church in Baltimore (1846–1876). Furman, Richard (1755–1825). Regular Baptist leader in missions and education initiatives, published a defense of slavery (1823), first president of the Triennial Convention (1814, 1817), chief architect of the South Carolina Baptist Convention (est. 1821), pastor of First Baptist Church of Charleston, South Carolina (1787–1825), eponym of Furman University. Hart, Oliver (1723–1795). Regular Baptist licensed to preach by the Philadelphia Baptist Association in 1746, founder of the Charleston Baptist Association (est. 1751), pastor of First Baptist Church of Charleston, South Carolina (1750–1780). Hartwell Sr., Jesse (1795–1865). Pastor of churches in South Carolina and Alabama, coprincipal of Furman Theological Institution (1829–1836), professor of theology at Howard College (1836–1847), president of Domestic Mission Board of Southern Baptist Convention, founder of Camden Female Institute in Arkansas (1847), president and professor of theology at Mount Lebanon University in Louisiana (1857–1859). Hillyer, Shaler G. (1809–1900). Baptist minister for 68 years, professor of Belles Lettres at Mercer University.

Appendix: List of Southern Edwardsean Clergy, 1750–1895

Holcombe, Henry (1762–1824). Former calvaryman during the Revolutionary War, delegate to the South Carolina ratifying convention (1788), founder of the Savannah River Baptist Association (1802), pastor of First Baptist Church of Savannah, Georgia (1799–1812), editor of Analytical Repository, pastor of First Baptist Church of Philadelphia (1812–1824). Hooper, William (1792–1876). Professor and/or President at nearly a dozen colleges and seminaries in the South, including the University of North Carolina (1818–1837), Furman Theological Institute (1838–1839), South Carolina College (1840–1846), Wake Forest College (1845–1848), Chowan Female Institute (1854–1862), and Wilson Collegiate Seminary (1867–1875). Howell, R. B. C. (1801–1868). Second president of the Southern Baptist Convention (1851–1859), pastored First Baptist Church of Nashville, Tennessee (1835–1850, 1857–1867) and Second Baptist Church of Richmond, Virginia (1850–1857), leading opponent of Landmarkism, editor of Tennessee’s The Baptist (1835–1846). Jeter, Jeremiah Bell (1802–1880). Pastor of First Baptist Church of Richmond, Virginia (1836–1849), attended the first Southern Baptist Convention in Augusta, Georgia (1845), pastor of Second Baptist Church of St. Louis, Missouri (1849–1852), pastor of Grace Street Baptist Church in Richmond, Virginia (1852–1870), editor, evangelist, moral reformer, missions advocate. Johnson, William B. (1782–1862). One of the founders of the South Carolina Baptist Convention (est. 1821), fourth president of the Triennial Convention (1841–1845), first president of the Southern Baptist Convention (1845–1851), founder of Johnson Female Seminary in 1848 (later Johnson University and eventually Anderson University), pastored several churches in South Carolina and Georgia. Ligon, William Claiborne (1796–1877). Pastor of several churches in Virginia and Missouri, evangelist, co-founder of William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri (1849). Mallary, Charles Dutton (1801–1864). Pastored nearly a dozen churches in Georgia, cofounder of Mercer University (1833), contributor to the Christian Index and author of multiple published works. Manly Jr., Basil (1825–1892). Co-founder and one of four initial faculty members at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (1859–1871, 1879–1892), president of Georgetown College in Kentucky (1871–1879). Manly Sr., Basil (1798–1868). Pastor of First Baptist Church of Charleston (1826–1837), Co-founder of Furman University (est. 1826), president of the University of Alabama (1837–1855), co-founder of Judson Female Institute (est. 1838), co-founder of the Southern Baptist Convention (est. 1845), author of the “Alabama Resolutions,” pastored several churches in South Carolina and Alabama. Maxcy, Jonathan (1768–1820). Second president of Rhode Island College (1792–1802), third president of Union College (1802–1804), first president of South Carolina College (1804–1820), co-founder of First Baptist Church of Columbia.

197

198

Appendix: List of Southern Edwardsean Clergy, 1750–1895

Mell, Patrick Hues (1814–1888). Professor of ancient languages at Mercer and University of Georgia, (1841–1888), president of the Southern Baptist Convention (1863–1871, 1880–1887), chancellor of the University of Georgia (1878–1888). Mercer, Jesse (1769–1841). Leader among Georgia Baptists, wrote the article of the Georgia constitution securing religious liberty (1798), president of the Georgia Baptist Convention (1822–1841), pastored several churches in Georgia, owner and editor of the Christian Index (1833–1840), eponym of Mercer University. Meredith, Thomas (1795–1850). Founder and editor of North Carolina’s Biblical Recorder, one of the founders of the North Carolina Baptist State Convention (1830), first president of the board of trustees for Wake Forest Institute (1834), pastored churches in North Carolina and Georgia. Mims, James S. (1817–1855). Professor of theology at Furman University Peck, John Mason (1789–1858). Missionary from Triennial Convention to the new Missouri territory (1817), organizer of the first missionary society in the West (1818), founder of Shurtleff College (1827), organizer of American Baptist Home Missionary Society, co-founder of the Illinois State Baptist Convention (1834), helped establish churches, Bible societies, and educational agencies in Illinois and Missouri, including the Illinois Baptist Education Society. Pendleton, James Madison (1811–1891). One of the principal leaders in the Landmark movement, outspoken critic of slavery during the antebellum period, pastored churches in Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Poindexter, A. M. (1809–1872). Preacher in Virginia, debater of religious and political issues of his day, agent for Columbia and Richmond Colleges, co-secretary of the Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, secretary of the Southern Baptist Publication Society. Reese, Joseph (1732–1795). Separate Baptist, chaplain during the Revolutionary war, pastor of the Congaree church in South Carolina (1768–1795), evangelist, peacemaker between Regular and Separate Baptists, representative in the South Carolina General Assembly (1776–1778). Reynolds, James L. (1812–1877). Professor of theology at Mercer University and Furman University and occasional teacher at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Rice, Luther (1783–1836). Brief missionary to India with Adoniram Judson before returning to the United States, missions advocate and fund-raiser for the Triennial Convention, raised funds and helped establish Columbian College in Washington, D.C. Ryals, James Gazaway (1824–1878). Pastor of multiple churches in Georgia, evangelized to rural Georgia communities during the Civil War. Sherwood, Adiel (1791–1879). Baptist missionary to Georgia after graduating from Andover Seminary in 1818, co-founder of the Georgia Baptist Convention (1822), promoter of manual labor schools and temperance in the state of Georgia, president of Shurtleff College in Alton, Illinois and Marshall College in Georgia.

Appendix: List of Southern Edwardsean Clergy, 1750–1895

Staughton, William (1770–1829). Founding member of the Baptist Missionary Society in Kettering, England (est. 1792), pastored in South Carolina, New Jersey, and Philadelphia, one of the principal organizers of the Triennial Convention (est. 1814), first president of Columbian College in Washington D. C. (1822–1829), chaplain of Congress (two sessions), and president of Georgetown College (although he died while making the westward journey to Kentucky). Taylor, James B. (1804–1871). Secretary for the Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention for 26 years, pastor of multiple churches in Virginia, organizer of Virginia Baptist Seminary (1830), chaplain of the University of Virginia (1839). Vardeman, Jeremiah (1775–1842). Pastor and evangelist in Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, and the Ohio River Valley, organizer of churches in Missouri. Vaughn, William (1785–1877). Pastor of several churches in Kentucky, agent for the American Bible Society and the American Sunday School Union, defender of Baptist principles against Campbellism. Waldo, John (1762–1826). Minister and educator in South Carolina, published several textbooks. White, John B. (1810–1887). Professor of theology (1838–1848) and President (1848–1853) of Wake Forest College, educator and school administrator at various institutions in New Hampshire, Tennessee, and Illinois, chaplain of the 117th Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment. Williams, Alvin Peter (1813–1868). Pastor of several churches in Missouri, published three works in defense of Baptist principles: baptism, communion, and the dangers of Campbellite theology. Witt, Daniel (1801–1871). Pastor in Virginia, one of the first state missionaries for Virginia Baptists, agent of the Baptist General Association of Virginia and its Board of Managers.

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Index

Index of Persons

A Abraham Lincoln 73 Ahlstrom, Sydney 129, 181 Alexander, Archibald 157, 162 Allen, David 87, 89 Anderson, Isaac 40 Asbury, Francis 130 Ascol, Tom 186 Atwater, Lyman 22 Augustine 109, 178 B Backus, Isaac 37, 46, 59, 82, 123 Bailey, Richard A. 187 Balch, Hezekiah 40 Bebbington, David 123 Beckert, Sven 27 Beecher, Lyman 13 Bellamy, Joseph 13, 19, 33, 51, 64, 84, 96, 107, 109, 123, 160 Blackburn, Gideon 40 Bledsoe, Albert Taylor 43 Boles, John B. 35 Booth, Abraham 110 Botsford, Edmund 58, 65–67, 86, 89, 97, 119, 127, 136 Boyce, James P. 18, 21, 71–73, 81, 92, 93, 97, 102, 108, 110, 153, 155, 156, 158, 161, 164, 166, 170, 177, 189 Brainerd, David 18, 22, 33, 42, 52, 64, 116, 118, 126, 127, 192 Brantly, W. T. 21, 51 Brantly, W.T. 63, 77, 80, 106–109, 118, 125, 138, 139, 167, 177

Breitenbach, William 153 Brekus, Catherine A. 48 Broaddus, Andrew 36, 115 Broadus, John A. 163, 169 Brown, John 129 Bunyan, John 33, 127, 178 C Caldwell III, Robert W. 49, 105, 107, 188 Calhoun, John C. 74, 79, 148 Calvin, John 45, 62, 178 Campbell, Alexander 44, 55, 165 Campbell, Jesse 115 Carey, William 102, 110, 116, 117, 145 Carroll, B.H. 178 Cherry, Conrad 26 Chun, Chris 27, 111, 188 Clopton, Abner 63, 67, 77, 136, 167 Clopton, Abner W. 31 Conforti, Joseph 43, 54, 65, 87, 117, 126, 150 Conner, Lewis 100 Cooley, Daniel W. 84, 109 Crawford, Nathaniel Macon 55 Crisp, Oliver 69, 84 Criswell, W.A. 178 D Dabney, Robert Lewis 40–42, 45, 182 Dagg, John L. 18, 20, 41, 56, 93, 112, 119, 148, 159, 160, 169–172, 174, 175, 184 Davies, Samuel 33, 182

202

Index

Dever, Mark 170 Dwight, Timothy 17, 19, 23, 33, 50–52, 61, 62, 77, 78, 88, 102, 124, 129, 139–141, 143, 160, 164, 169, 170 E Edwards Jr., Jonathan 23, 51, 52, 58, 84, 88, 129, 133, 144, 149, 162 Edwards, Jonathan 25, 27, 28, 31, 36, 50, 56, 62, 64, 84, 88, 97, 98, 102, 118, 129, 139, 154, 155, 165, 172, 175, 178, 179, 181, 183, 184, 186–188 – as a revivalist 132, 155, 157, 178 – as America’s theologian 32, 74, 193 – as example of piety 24, 32 – as revivalist 75, 122 – as Southern Baptist hero 81 – ideas 74 – journal of 22 – legacy 13–15, 27, 38, 53, 63, 68, 74, 86, 91, 93, 106, 122, 125, 126, 138, 146, 166, 177, 192 – mind of 22 – on slavery 26, 130 – piety of 58, 60, 121 – psychology of conversion 99 – Puritan 14, 26, 28, 39, 68, 126, 180 – revivalism 33 – theology 16, 19, 44, 64, 71, 72, 82, 93, 146, 159, 196 Elder, Robert 138 Emmons, Nathanael 13 Erskine, John 182 F Falwell, Jerry 180 Featherstonhaugh, George 73 Finn, Nathan A. 184 Finney, Charles G. 14, 39, 56, 122, 131 Fiske, Nathan W. 131 Fitzgerald, Frances 180

Fitzmier, John R. 139 Flint, Timothy 156 Foster, Benjamin 53, 82 Foster, Frank 191 Franklin, Benjamin 31, 68 Fuller, Andrew 14, 17, 23–25, 32, 44, 51–53, 61–63, 71, 75, 76, 87–89, 93, 99, 102, 105, 107–111, 113–116, 119, 121, 123, 145, 164, 165, 169, 173, 174, 184, 186–188, 195 Fuller, Richard 17, 41, 55, 63, 72, 73, 91, 108, 135, 149, 151, 153, 161, 166–168 Furman, James C. 57, 73 Furman, Richard 20, 21, 35, 47, 53, 54, 57, 60, 63, 64, 66, 72, 73, 75–77, 85, 86, 89–91, 95–99, 101–103, 106, 112, 113, 118, 121, 122, 124, 125, 127, 128, 133, 136, 139–141, 143, 144, 146, 148, 150, 156, 159, 164, 167, 169, 177, 180, 193 G Gaines, Steven 189 Galusha, Elon 135 Gano, John 90, 97 Garrett, James Leo 186 George Timothy 79 George, Christian 188 German, James D. 172 Gerstner, John H. 182 Gildersleeve, Basil 73 Gill, John 37, 75, 77, 115 Goen, C.C. 143, 179 Graham, Billy 178 Graves, James Robinson 24 Graves, Lois 24 Greear, J.D. 192 Griffin, Edward Dorr 160 Guelzo, Allen 13, 143

Index of Persons

H Hall, Robert 62 Hambrick-Stowe, Charles E. 129, 146 Hamilton, Alexander 140 Hankins, Barry 65 Hansen, Collin 192 Haroutunian, Joseph 13, 150 Hart, D.G. 182 Hart, Oliver 28, 60, 66, 68, 75, 76, 79, 82, 91, 96, 101, 124, 127, 155, 195 Hartwell, Jesse 41, 54, 56, 73, 92 Hatch, Nathan O. 50 Haykin, Michael A. G. 14, 88, 153 Haykin, Michael A.G. 111, 187 Haynes, Lemuel 129, 132, 145 Henry, Patrick 95, 140 Hillyer, Shaler G. 62 Hodge, Charles 71, 93, 154, 157, 158, 162 Holcombe, Henry 47, 195 Holifield, E. Brooks 19, 40, 47, 51, 74 Hooper, William 22 Hopkins, Samuel 13, 34, 51, 52, 55, 61, 64, 65, 68, 82, 84, 87, 89, 93, 103, 109, 129, 130, 133, 135, 145, 146, 154, 160, 162, 165, 171, 174 Howell, R.B.C. 21, 38, 52, 59, 64, 72, 93, 163–166 J Jackson, Andrew 96, 137 Jackson, Stonewall 40 Jauhiainen, Peter 84, 147 Jefferson, Thomas 67, 150 Jeter, Jeremiah Bell 33, 67, 126 Johnson, William B. 18, 21, 34, 41, 56, 65, 66, 73, 85–89, 91–93, 95, 97, 99, 104, 105, 127, 131, 134, 139, 144, 163, 180 Judson, Adoniram 102, 110, 116, 160

K Karp, Matthew 27 Kidd, Thomas S. 34, 65 Kimble, Jeremy M. 185 Kling, David W. 14, 37 L Land, Richard 89 Landrum, Sylvanus 115 Leland, John 52 Lincoln, Abraham 149 Lloyd-Jones, Martyn 182 Logan Jr., Samuel T. 183 Lucas, Sean Michael 15, 41, 80, 81, 183 Luther, Martin 178 Lynd, R. W. 51 M Madison, James 172 Mallary, Charles Dutton 22–24, 52, 58, 99 Manly Jr., Basil 22, 43, 81, 93, 124, 156, 159–162, 195 Manly Sr., Basil 21, 43, 53, 67, 72, 73, 78–80, 89, 91, 108, 119, 124, 132, 159, 181 Manning, James 57, 75, 82 Marsden, George 26, 28, 68, 69, 188 Martyr, Justin 178 Mather, Cotton 137 Maxcy, Jonathan 18, 21, 52, 53, 55, 56, 63, 75, 78, 80, 81, 83–87, 93, 102–106, 112, 114, 125, 159, 173, 174 McClymond, Michael 179 McClymond, Michael J. 45 McCoy, Isaac 48 McDermott, Gerald R. 45 Meade, William 136 Mell, Patrick Hues 20, 153–155, 195 Mercer, Jesse 21, 41, 61–63, 80, 88, 99, 108, 118, 120, 122, 177 Mercer, Silas 116

203

204

Index

Meredith, Thomas 25, 56, 64, 121 Miller, Perry 14, 26, 27, 181, 182 Miller, Samuel 46 Mims, James S. 41, 56, 81, 86, 92, 99, 104 Minkema, Kenneth 131 Mohler, Albert 74, 177, 182, 184, 189 Monroe, James 96 Moody, Dale 179 Moody, D.L. 178 Moore, Russell D. 189 Morgan, Abel 101 Mullins, E.Y. 175 Murray, Iain 183 Murray, John 57, 58 N Nettles, Tom 15, 20, 43, 79, 101, 110, 136, 139, 175, 186 Newton, John 33, 178 Nichols, Stephen J. 182 Noll, Mark 80, 122, 135, 158, 162, 182 O O’Brien, Michael 43 Oliphint, K. Scott 183 Osborn, Sarah 145 O’Brien, Michael 27, 161 Owen, John 69 P Packer, J.I. 184 Paine, Sally 61 Park, Edwards Amasa 14, 15, 68, 69, 82, 92, 158, 160, 191 Pearce, Samuel 52, 76, 121 Peck, John Mason 24, 60, 126 Pendleton, James M. 25, 53, 113 Pendleton, James Madison 195 Phillips, Charles W. 13, 153 Pierpont, Sarah 167 Piper, John 183–185 Poindexter, A.M. 60

Porter, Ebenezer 160 Pugh, Evan 66, 90 R Reagan, Ronald 180 Reese, Joseph 66, 90 Reynolds, James L. 38, 88, 92 Rice, Luther 51, 63, 110 Roberts, John Mitchell 80, 106 Rogers, James A. 102 Rudisill, D.P. 104 Ryals, James Gazaway 155 S Sellers, Charles 171 Sherwood, Adiel 23, 24, 116, 120, 136, 160 Shrader, Matthew 159 Smalley, John 123 Smith, Adam 172 Smith, Craig Bruce 146 Smith, Eric 66 Smith, Hezekiah 82, 174 Sproul, R.C. 182 Spurgeon, Charles 178 Stanley, Charles 178 Staughton, William 21, 50, 52, 63, 64, 76, 86, 115, 121, 122, 164 Stillman, Samuel 82 Stout, Harry 131 Strachan, Owen 185, 188 Stuart, Moses 23, 55, 160, 165 Studebaker, Steven M. 188 Sweeney, Douglas A. 13, 14, 55, 69, 84, 109, 150, 160, 183, 185, 186 T Taylor, James B. 36, 52, 61, 63 Taylor, James P. 100 Taylor, Nathaniel W. 13, 47, 51 Thornwell, James Henley 80 Tucker, H.H. 72

Index of Persons

Turner, Nat 134 Turretin, Francis 169 V Van Horn, William 82 Vardeman, Jeremiah 44 Vaughn, William 54 Vesey, Denmark 134 Vines, Jerry 192 W Wait, Samuel 121 Waldo, John 76, 86, 87, 91 Warfield, Benjamin Breckenridge Washington, George 31, 150

158

Wayland, Francis 98, 131, 135, 149, 151, 160 Wesley, John 42, 60, 67, 122, 127, 178 White, Cyrus 119 White, John B. 56 Whitefield, George 41, 68, 75, 101, 127 Whitsitt, W.H. 175 Williams, Alvin Peter 54 Williams, Roger 34 Wills, Greg 15, 20, 85, 163, 179, 188 Winchester, Elhanan 58 Witherspoon, John 33 Witt, Daniel 157 Woods, Alva 133 Woods, Leonard 133, 160, 165 Wyatt-Brown, Bertram 137

205

206

Index

Index of Subjects

A A Divine and Supernatural Light 36 A Faithful Narrative 75 A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God 24 abolitionism 25, 68, 129–132, 134, 135, 138, 141, 143, 145–147, 149, 150, 158 American Revolution 28, 34, 53, 101, 140, 141, 150 Andover Seminary 23, 68, 133, 157, 159, 160 Arminianism 59, 100, 119, 154, 165, 189, 190 atonement 56, 58, 59, 82, 86, 87, 91, 104, 107, 109, 111, 113, 114, 120, 155, 158, 189 – general 53, 61, 71, 85, 87, 104, 115, 118 – limited 50, 61, 71, 105, 109 B Baptist Missionary Society 35, 88, 102, 103, 110, 114, 116, 121, 187 Baptists – Calvinistic 32, 44, 149 – confessional 16, 28 – Frontier 24 – General 20 – missionary and anti-missionary 20, 116, 164 – Northern 98, 135, 138, 160, 179 – Particular 20, 78, 87, 90, 107, 110 – Primitive 117 – Regular 16, 20, 66, 71, 72, 89–91, 102, 190

– Separate 16, 20, 66, 89–91, 101, 190 – Southern 15–17, 20, 23, 25, 27, 35, 37, 40, 41, 43, 48, 55, 58, 69, 92, 116, 133, 138, 145, 147, 158, 177–180, 188 Brown University 54 C Cain Ridge revivals 24 Calvinism 16, 17, 19, 58, 78, 157, 161, 170, 192 – 5-point 45, 189 – confessional 20, 49, 71, 91, 93, 96, 98, 154, 163, 177, 186 – Consistent 36, 57, 59, 65, 100 – Dortian 46, 187 – Edwardsean 20, 43, 91, 92, 99 – evangelical 71, 79, 110, 119, 146 – experimental 32 – Four kinds of Calvinistic Baptists 74 – friendly 66 – Fullerite 115 – Hyper- 115, 165 – loosely confessional 46–48 – Moderate 21 – moderate 61, 86, 96–100, 103, 106, 110, 115, 116, 120, 125, 131, 157, 160, 164, 165, 167, 168, 189–191, 195 – New 182, 191, 192 – New Calvinism 27 Campbellism 32 Charleston Association 75, 79, 96, 103, 106 Charleston Baptist Association 50 Charleston Confession 77, 96, 102 Christian Index 106, 108, 118, 177 Civil War 25, 54, 73, 101, 114, 129, 143, 147, 151, 158, 163 colonization 132

Index of Subjects

Columbian College 63, 121, 164 Congregationalism 15, 25, 37, 39, 60, 154, 160, 165 D disinterested benevolence 48, 50, 53, 55, 77, 99, 130, 132, 133, 171, 184, 191 Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God 42, 157 E Edwardeanism – implicit 125 Edwardseanism 25, 76, 79, 83, 87, 89, 130, 146, 147, 181 – anti- 52, 81 – as a large house 23 – as a movement 20, 66 – Baptist 102 – definition 68 – definition of 22 – English 33, 35, 37, 53, 102 – Fullerite 114, 117, 118 – ideas 18, 26, 36, 47, 183 – New Divinity 104, 106–108 – New England 33, 52 – Northern 32, 53, 58, 59, 82, 92, 97, 103, 109, 131, 141 – principles 24 – psychology of conversion 36, 37 – simple 123, 124, 155, 184 – Southern 16, 17, 20, 22, 24, 28, 41, 47, 52–54, 58, 59, 62–64, 80, 91, 93, 96, 97, 99, 103, 109, 120, 123, 132, 133, 141, 147, 151, 170, 190 Enlightenment 28, 44, 133, 145 F Faithful Narrative 42, 126 First Baptist Church of Charleston, SC 21, 74, 78, 125, 195

First Great Awakening 25, 36, 39, 75, 96, 125, 155, 157, 195 Founders Ministries 186 freedom of the will 16, 37, 43, 45, 57, 62, 118, 120, 124, 133, 136, 190 Fuller, Andrew 78 Fullerism 71, 89 fundamentalism 179, 180 Furman Academy 21, 25, 38, 54, 63, 72, 79, 81, 92, 104, 125 G Gateway Seminary 27 Georgia Baptist Convention

24, 119, 120

H Hamilton Theological Seminary 160 Harvard University 63, 161, 166, 181 History of Redemption 106 History of the Work of Redemption 119 honor 83, 133, 135, 137, 138, 140–146, 168 Hopkinsianism 17–19, 21, 50, 52, 53, 56, 72, 75, 76, 84, 87, 89, 97, 99, 103, 111, 112, 138, 147, 154, 171, 173 Howard College 25, 54 I imputation 25, 50, 53, 56, 57, 59, 83, 88, 92, 98, 109, 110, 113, 168 J Jonathan Edwards Center 27, 188 justice 18, 59, 82, 83, 92, 104, 107, 111, 112, 114, 134, 147, 148, 173 L Landmarkism 17, 113, 114, 195 Ligonier Ministries 182 love to being in general 16

207

208

Index

M Methodism 16, 24, 32, 40, 41, 43, 57–59, 67 moral and natural ability 16, 130 moral government 16, 18, 34, 48–50, 53, 56, 58–60, 82, 84, 86, 97, 99, 104, 105, 107, 110, 112, 113, 118, 119, 121, 124, 130, 133, 134, 136, 140–142, 147, 149, 150, 166, 168, 173, 190 N natural and moral ability 23, 46–48, 50, 55, 99, 100, 117, 118, 120, 136, 164, 174, 190 New Divinity 13, 20, 23, 34, 37, 47–55, 57–61, 64, 65, 69, 71, 75, 76, 78, 81, 82, 84, 86, 88, 89, 92, 97, 98, 102, 104, 107, 108, 111, 114, 116, 117, 123, 129, 131, 134, 139, 145, 147, 149, 153, 158, 165, 174, 179, 192, 195 New England Theology 17, 20, 87, 103, 106, 153, 158, 160, 170 New England theology 69 New Haven Theology 47, 51, 153 New Lights 36, 65 Newton Theological Institute 159–161 O original sin

57

P patriotism 19, 136, 150 penal substitution 16, 86, 88, 97, 104, 105, 107, 109, 110, 168 Personal Narrative 17, 22, 23, 93, 156 Philadelphia Association 75, 90 postmillennialism 99, 179 Presbyterianism 15, 24, 25, 37, 39, 40, 43, 80, 81, 182, 189 Princeton Theological Seminary 93, 157, 158, 161

Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary 27 Puritanism 26, 27, 39, 137, 139, 145, 155, 178, 192 R religious affections 16, 23, 36, 40, 42, 48, 57, 64, 119, 136 republicanism 19, 132 Resolutions 23, 31, 32 revival 34–36 revivalism 122, 124, 126, 131, 140, 157, 178, 190 Rhode Island College 57, 75, 81, 85 S Sandy Creek Tradition 89 secession 143, 150, 151 Second Great Awakening 25, 35, 55, 60, 95, 117, 178 Second Great Awakening’s 43 Shurtleff College 24 Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God 131 Sinners in the hands of an Angry God 181 slavery 25, 26, 34, 67, 129–133, 138, 141, 142, 145–150, 158, 160–162 Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion 24, 42 South Carolina College 53, 78, 80, 81, 85, 102–104, 125, 159 Southern Baptist Convention 17, 20, 24, 26, 34, 53, 54, 60, 66, 72, 74, 78, 79, 84, 86, 91, 93, 94, 99, 106, 108, 130, 134, 144, 153, 163, 167, 177, 180, 184, 189, 191, 192 Southern Baptist Theological Seminary 17, 71, 81, 93, 101, 125, 156, 159, 169, 175, 177, 187 Stoddardeanism 38, 50

Index of Subjects

T temperance 136 The End for which God Created the World 57 Triennial Convention 26, 34, 36, 60, 66, 78, 86, 95, 101, 102, 121, 126, 135, 144, 164 true virtue 16, 43, 57, 172, 173 U Unitarianism 160 Universalism 58, 59, 155

V Virginia Baptist Seminary

63

W Westminster Confession 154 Westminster Confession of Faith 160 Y Yale University

27, 78, 139, 181

45, 80,

209