Southern Edwardseans

The Southern Baptist Legacy of Jonathan Edwards

Obbie Tyler Todd, Harry S. Stout, Kenneth P. Minkema, Adriaan C. Neele, Harry S. Stout, Kenneth P. Minkema, Adriaan C. Neele

• Publisher: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9783525560518
• eBook ISBN:
  9783647560519
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The founders and forerunners of the Southern Baptist Convention were fundamentally shaped by the thought of Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards and his theological successors. While Baptists in the antebellum South boasted a different theological pedigree 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. By 1845, at the first Southern Baptist Convention, Southern Edwardseans had laid the groundwork for a convention marked by the theology of Jonathan Edwards.

Table of contents

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