Order and Ardor

The Revival Spirituality of Oliver Hart and the Regular Baptists in Eighteenth-Century South Carolina

Eric C. Smith

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781611178791
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

The first book-length study of the vital role Regular Baptists played in creating the modern Southern Baptist denomination

The origins of the Southern Baptist Convention, the world's largest Protestant denomination, is most often traced back to the colorful, revivalist Separate Baptist movement that rose out of the Great Awakening in the mid-1700s. During that same period the American South was likewise home to the often-overlooked Regular Baptists, who also experienced a remarkable revitalization and growth. Regular Baptists combined a concern for orderly doctrine and church life with the ardor of George Whitefield's evangelical awakening. In Order and Ardor, Eric C. Smith examines the vital role of Regular Baptists through the life of Oliver Hart, pastor of First Baptist Church in Charleston, South Carolina, a prominent patriot during the American Revolution, and one of the most important pioneers of American Baptists and American evangelicalism.

In this first book-length study of Hart's life and ministry, Smith reframes Regular Baptists as belonging to an influential revival movement that contributed significantly to creating the modern Southern Baptist denomination, challenging the widely held perception that they resisted the Great Awakening. During Hart's thirty-year service as the pastor of First Baptist Church, the Regular Baptists incorporated evangelical and revivalist values into their existing doctrine. Hart encouraged cooperative missions and education across the South, founding the Charleston Baptist Association in 1751 and collaborating with leaders of other denominations to spread evangelical revivalism.

Order and Ardor analyzes the most intense, personal experience of revival in Hart's ministry—an awakening among the youths of his own congregation in 1754 through the emergence of a vibrant thirst for religious guidance and a concern for their own souls. This experience was a testimony to Hart's revival piety—the push for evangelical Calvinism. It reinforced his evangelical activism, hallmarks of the Great Awakening that appear prominently in Hart's diaries, letters, sermon manuscripts, and other remaining documents.

Extensively researched and written with clarity, Order and Ardor offers an enlightened view of eighteenth-century Regular Baptists. Smith contextualizes Hart's life and development as a man of faith, revealing the patterns and priorities of his personal spirituality and pastoral ministry that identify him as a critically important evangelical revivalist leader in the colonial lower South.

CHAPTER 1

Shaped by Revival

Richard Furman stepped into the pulpit of the Charleston Baptist Church on February 7, 1796, to deliver a sermon in honor of Oliver Hart, who had died just a month before. Hart had left an unsurpassed legacy among Baptists in the South. From 1750 to 1780, he had established the Charleston Baptist Church as the “Mother Church” of Southern Baptists. He was the chief architect of the Charleston Association, the first effort to organize Baptist life in the South. He had initiated a fund for the education of the Baptist ministers of the South, the first cooperative effort to fund theological education among Baptists in America. He had also personally mentored such notable leaders as Samuel Stillman, Edmund Botsford, and Furman himself, shaping future generations of Baptists in the process. As Furman recounted Hart’s fruitful life, he drew his listeners’ attention to the formative influence of the Great Awakening. At the time of Hart’s conversion, “the power of religion was greatly displayed in various parts of this continent.” Furman mentioned the revival ministries of George Whitefield, the Tennent family, Jonathan Edwards, and Abel Morgan, most of whom Hart heard in person as a young man. Ever since, Hart had “professed to have received much benefit from their preaching, particularly from Mr. Whitefield’s.” Indeed, Hart’s life and ministry cannot be understood apart from the shaping influence of the eighteenth-century Protestant revival.¹

Oliver Hart’s story begins with the spiritual pilgrimage of his grandfather, John Hart (1651–1714). Born in Whitney, Oxfordshire, England, Hart began his life as a Quaker, and in 1681 he sailed for the New World to join his friend William Penn’s experimental colony, “Pennsylvania.” There at the Poquessing River, Hart farmed, served in the local government, and provided spiritual leadership for the community. He hosted meetings in his home, visited the poor and sick, preached, and even published “An Essay on the Subject of Oaths” (1692). Hart’s religious views began to evolve, however, under the influence of a schoolteacher named George Keith (1638–1716). Keith challenged the Quaker’s foundational “inner light” message, which taught that all people, regardless of conversion experience or faith in Jesus Christ, bore the presence of God within them. Keith instead called the Quakers to look away from themselves for salvation, to the objective work of Jesus Christ. This was a standard evangelical critique of the movement. George Whitefield would one day write after attending a Pennsylvania Quaker meeting, “I heartily wish that [the speaker] would talk of an outward as well as an inward Christ; for otherwise, we may make our own holiness, and not the righteousness of Jesus Christ the cause of our being accepted by God. From such doctrine may I always turn away.” When Keith printed his views in 1691, the Friends excluded him from fellowship. To their dismay, Keith took many out of the Quaker movement with him, including John Hart. Hart resisted the written pleas of William Penn to reconsider his decision and began preaching to a Keithian gathering in his house. Still, he continued to question his beliefs. As he grew dissatisfied with his Keithian position, he found himself increasingly attracted to the doctrinal stability of the local Baptist movement. In 1697, he completed his meandering religious journey by receiving immersion in a local creek. In 1702, the nearby Pennepek Baptist Church invited Hart and his house church to join them. They appointed Hart assistant minister, a position he held until his death twelve years later. His last words were, “Now I know to a demonstration that Christ has saved me.”²

Fewer details are known of Oliver Hart’s father, also named John Hart (1684–1763). John made his home in Warminster Township, Pennsylvania, where he married Eleanor Crispin (1687–1754) in 1708. Together, they had ten children, among whom Oliver was the fifth. John Hart held a number of civil service positions, including sheriff, justice of the peace, and coroner. He was also a devout Christian, following his father to the Keithians and then to the Baptists of Pennepek. In 1746, John Hart led his family, with fifty-six members of Pennepek, to form a new church near their home in the upper Southampton area, where he served for many years as deacon and clerk.³

Both the Pennepek and Southampton churches Hart attended with his family belonged to an important network called the Philadelphia Association, formed by five Baptist churches in the Delaware Valley in 1707. Baptists were committed to local church autonomy, so the association held no actual authority as a governing body. The churches simply chose, “by their voluntary and free consent, to enter into an agreement and confederation … for their mutual strength, counsel, and other valuable advantages.” The Philadelphia Association provided theological accountability for churches, served as an advisory council, promoted cooperation for missions and other benevolent causes, and helped connect churches and ministers. Theologically, the churches of the Philadelphia Association championed the Calvinistic doctrines of the Particular Baptist tradition and formally adopted the Second London Confession in 1742. Hart never departed from the theological heritage he received from his seat in the Pennepek Baptist meetinghouse. Furman remembered Hart as “a fixed Calvinist” to whom “the doctrines of free, efficacious grace, were precious.” William Rogers also called Hart “an uniform advocate, both in public and private, of the doctrines of free and sovereign grace.” Though Hart would blaze new trails for Baptists in the areas of organization and cooperative ministry, theologically he remained content to follow the well-trodden paths of his forefathers.⁴

In addition to his Particular Baptist background, nothing so profoundly shaped Hart’s spirituality as the evangelical revival that swept through Pennsylvania in his adolescence. The American colonies had known revivals in sporadic, localized manifestations from their earliest days, but beginning in 1734, a new “concern about the great things of religion began,” the intensity and scope of which had never been experienced. When Jonathan Edwards (1703–54) published his account of the Northampton, Massachusetts, revival in 1736, it proved to be the catalyst for an awakening that transcended denominational lines and geographical borders, and would completely transform the religious scene in the North Atlantic world. This included the Warminster County of Hart’s youth, which became a hotbed of revival activity. Just a few miles from Hart’s home, the Presbyterian minister William Tennent (1673–1746) trained a generation of revival preachers at his Log College at Neshaminy Creek. Among Tennent’s pupils were his four sons, Gilbert (1703–64), William Jr. (1705–77), John (1707–32), and Charles (1711–71). All four Tennent sons would lead revivals, though Gilbert stole most of the headlines, chiefly through his controversial sermon, The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry (1739). Hart later said that he “frequently heard most of [the Tennents] preach with great pleasure, and, I hope, some profit.” Hart likely heard Tennent through the influence of his childhood pastor at the Pennepek Baptist Church, Jenkin Jones (c.1686–1760). In addition to being a precisionist Baptist, Jones was also an ardent supporter of the Great Awakening. He regularly invited leading, non-Baptist revivalists like Tennet to preach to his Baptist people. Hart considered the Tennents “a race of men, devoted to the service of the sanctuary; who, for their abilities, zeal and usefulness, need not give any place to any family, that ever graced the American continent … the happy instruments of converting thousands of souls.”

Hart also listened to another Log College graduate in these days, John “Hell-Fire” Rowland (d. 1745). Rowland was a powerful preacher, though his lack of restraint opened him to charges of “enthusiasm.” In Rowland’s funeral sermon, Gilbert Tennent admitted that, “Being young in years and of a warm temper, he was thereby led into some indiscretions in his honest and earnest attempts to do good.” One such occasion came at the Baptist meetinghouse in Philadelphia, where Jenkin Jones had invited both Rowland and Tennent to preach. Rowland’s impassioned oratory brought the people to such desperation over the state of sinners that Tennent was compelled to run to the pulpit stairs and cry out, “Oh Brother Rowland, is there no balm in Gilead?” Rowland, “startled by the effect upon his hearers of his fearful words, began to unfold the way of recovery.” The incident, which touched off a considerable controversy in the church (covered in chapter 5), further reveals the charged revival environment in which Hart was spiritually nurtured.⁵

Above all others, George Whitefield left the deepest impression on Hart. Baptist historians never fail to draw attention to Whitefield’s decisive role in the conversions of key Separate Baptist leaders, but Hart stands as an example of the grand itinerant’s influence among the Regular Baptists as well. On his first trip to Philadelphia in 1739, Whitefield befriended Jenkin Jones, and thereafter received the Baptist minister’s support whenever he returned to the area. The following spring, on May 9, 1740, Jones invited Whitefield to preach to over two thousand people at the Pennepek meetinghouse. Hart likely heard Whitefield then, and on many other occasions between 1739–41, when Whitefield preached to crowds in the thousands near Hart’s home. Though he had grown up in a devout Christian home, the teen-aged Hart had never experienced the phenomenon of “the new birth” he heard Whitefield extolling. Hart later lamented that “my youth was spent in vanity and a listlessness to all that was good.” Yet sometime in the years 1740–41, just as the Great Awakening was cresting in Pennsylvania, Hart experienced a profound, evangelical conversion. He submitted to baptism by Jenkin Jones on April 3, 1741.⁶

Hart had received the new birth, but he had not yet sensed the call to preach. As a young adult, he learned a carpenter’s trade and settled into the Warminster community as his father and grandfather had done before him. He also took an active role in the local church, participating in the formation of the Southampton Baptist congregation in 1746. The church soon recognized in Hart a unique earnestness about spiritual things that indicated to them a possible call to gospel ministry. Accordingly, the church licensed both Hart and Isaac Eaton to preach on a trial basis on December 20, 1746. One opportunity to test his calling came on February 21, 1748, when the pastor of the Southampton Baptist Church, Joshua Potts, came down with the measles. The church clerk noted that Hart “performed to satisfaction.” This, along with other satisfactory performances, was enough to convince the church. Two months later, they “gave a full call to Oliver Hart and Isaac Eaton, to preach in any place where Providence might cast their lotts [sic], or need required.” The same year, Hart married Sarah Brees (1729–72).⁷

So it was that Hart arrived at his night of destiny. On September 9, 1749, Hart attended the Philadelphia Association’s annual meeting as a messenger for the Southampton Church. Jenkin Jones stood to read a letter containing a plea from the Baptist church in Charleston, South Carolina. The letter inquired “if there was any minister sound in the faith” who could come settle among them. After the meeting, Jones and other leaders in the association urged Hart to answer the call. He agreed. The members of the Southampton church again gathered for a special meeting on October 18 and ordained Hart for the work in Charleston in a service of solemn prayer and fasting. One month later, he boarded the St. Andrew in Philadelphia, leaving behind Sarah, expecting their second child, and one-year-old Seth. Shaped by the revivalism of the Great Awakening, Hart sailed for Charleston to discern if this was indeed where Providence had “cast his lott.”⁸

The Charleston church was the oldest Baptist congregation in the South. Originally formed in 1682 in Kittery, Maine, the congregation had relocated soon afterward to Charleston under pastor William Screven. There the Kittery group, committed Particular Baptists, combined with a collection of General Baptists already in the area to form the Charleston Baptist Church. Screven was a remarkable leader and kept the two groups united throughout his term of service. Yet for the church to survive beyond his lifetime, Screven knew they must secure a suitable successor. Near the end of his life, Screven urged the church, “You, as speedily as possible, supply yourselves with an able and faithful minister. Be sure you take care that the person be orthodox in faith, and of blameless life, and does own the confession of faith put forth by our brethren in London in 1689, etc.” Screven’s admonition proved to be a mighty challenge for the people. Baptist historian Morgan Edwards later commented, “Had they attended to this counsel, the distractions, and almost destruction of the Church, which happened twenty-six years afterward, would have been prevented.” Screven’s two immediate successors both died shortly into their tenures. Under the next pastor, Thomas Simmons, the doctrinal tensions present in the church from the beginning erupted into open conflict.⁹

The church’s long period of decline began in 1736, when two groups separated from the Charleston Church. The first group, comprised of Particular Baptists, established a new congregation at Ashley Ferry under the leadership of Isaac Chanler. A second group, General Baptists, began a new church at Stono River. Adding to this upheaval, Thomas Simmons shifted theological positions from a Particular Baptist stance to that of a General Baptist, thoroughly frustrating his largely Particular Baptist congregation in the process. He further aggravated the trouble in 1740 by vocally opposing the popular revival efforts of the Calvinistic Whitefield. The church voted to suspend Simmons in 1744 but this decision split the church, which still contained some General Baptist supporters of Simmons. It also launched a legal dispute over the meetinghouse property, which, to the bewilderment of the Particular Baptist majority, resulted in their losing ownership of lot 62. The church’s morale continued to dwindle in 1746, when a group from the Edisto Island area broke away to form the Euhaw Baptist Church. Baptist historian Basil Manly Sr., who succeeded Hart as minister of the First Baptist Church of Charleston, believed that the church was reduced to three communicants at this time.¹⁰

Such was the Charleston church’s condition when they solicited the Philadelphia Association for “any minister sound in the faith.” For two years, they had survived on occasional sermons by Chanler, who lent his services from Ashley Ferry. Yet even this source of nourishment was suddenly cut off when Chanler died unexpectedly on November 30, 1749, at age forty-eight. The church was burying Chanler on December 2, 1749, when the St. Andrew pulled into port, carrying Hart. The Charleston Baptists viewed Hart’s timely arrival as providentially orchestrated, believing Hart to be the leader Screven had prayed for decades before. They officially called Hart as pastor on February 16, 1750. As Manly later interpreted the events, “The Lord had provided an instrument by which he designed greatly to promote the cause of truth and piety in the province, in the person of Rev. Oliver Hart.”¹¹ A glimpse at that unique province will illuminate his thirty-year ministry there.

During 1769, a ship captain visiting colonial Charleston, Captain Martin, was struck by the city’s complexity. He captured his impressions in a composition for the South Carolina Gazette, offering a sense of the unique assignment Hart accepted in moving to Charleston:

Black and white all mixed together

Inconstant, stran...