Edwardsean Theology in the South
In 1858, Princeton professor Lyman Atwater asked, “What is meant by ‘Edwardsean theology’? Was it the theology of Jonathan Edwards, or Edwards the son and his confederates and successors?” In the case of Southern Baptists, it was both. In fact, so extensively did Jonathan Edwards influence Baptists in the Antebellum South that there were four recognizable schools of Edwardsean thought below the Mason-Dixon line: (1) simple Edwardseanism, (2) New Divinity Edwardseanism, (3) Fullerite Edwardseanism, (4) and implicit Edwardseanism. As diverse as any religious group in America, Baptists needed a broad theological tradition that was practical, revivalistic, and Calvinistic, yet loosely confessional. In Jonathan Edwards and his New England disciples, they found a people after their own hearts.
The primary way that Edwards captured the minds and hearts of Baptists in the early 19th-century South was through his own writings (simple Edwardseanism), particularly his works on revival and Christian spirituality. The architect of the first Baptist association in the South, Oliver Hart, relished Edwards’s A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (1737). The Baptist who established the first state convention in the South, Richard Furman, recommended Edwards’s works as a “means, in the conversion of many.” Another Baptist pastor in Virginia copied nearly every one of Edwards’s resolutions into a small book, “that I may have them always at hand.” Southern Baptists even shared Edwards’s works with their own children. Basil Manly Sr. (1798–1868), one of the cofounders of the SBC, who enjoyed Religious Affections (1746) and Freedom of the Will (1754), wrote to his son Basil Manly Jr. about his reading of The Nature of True Virtue (1765). Edwards didn’t simply shape Baptists; he also produced Baptists. Manly Jr., who would eventually draft the Abstract of Principles at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, was converted as a freshman at the University of Alabama largely by reading Edwards’s Personal Narrative (1740).