Southern Edwardseans

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.

Jonathan Edwards (1703-58) is considered one of the greatest theologians and philosophers of evangelicalism, who also served as a pastor, missionary, and revival leader. By underscoring "Regeneration, Revival, and Creation" in Edwards's thought, this volume uniquely captures the need to delve into Edwards's theological and philosophical rationale for the revivals, alongside key questions concerning the historical context and Edwards's standing in his own tradition. This book gathers the work of scholars working in the areas of historical, systematic, and analytic theology, church history, psychology, and biology. It contains papers presented at the inaugural conference of the Jonathan Edwards Center at Gateway Seminary (JEC West). Bringing together some of the leading authorities as well as up-and-coming Edwards scholars working today, this collection advances the questions of regeneration, revival, and creation in fresh new ways. With contributions from: Adriaan Neele, Douglas Sweeney, Chris Woznicki, Obbie Tyler Todd, Peter Jung, Michael Haykin, Ryan J. Martin, Mark Rogers, Allen Yeh, Oliver Crisp, Walter Schultz, John Shouse, Rob Boss, Lisanne Winslow, and Robert Caldwell.

Setting Jonathan Edwards, John Wesley, and George Whitfield into their own contexts, Sean McGever tells the true story of these men's deeply compromised relationship to slavery. More than just a history, this book is an invitation to examine our own legacies and to take ownership of our heritage and our own part in the story.

The American moral governmental theory of the atonement (MGT) was arguably the most contextualized doctrine of atonement in the history of the Protestant tradition. Hewn from the theology of Jonathan Edwards, and engineered to address the theological, political, philosophical, moral, and even economic milieu in the early republic, MGT became the doctrinal centerpiece of "the first indigenous American school of Calvinism." As a result, it stands as a kind of theological time capsule to the people and principles that shaped the tumultuous period between the first Great Awakening and the Civil War when it flourished in America. For over a century in the Anglo-American world, the doctrine of atonement was under heavy construction in the broader Reformed community. By endowing new meaning to old theological terms like imputation, substitution, justice, punishment, and even atonement, MGT represents a theological watermark of sorts in Reformed dogmatics, defining its limits, testing its boundaries, and demanding a level of precision from today's theologians. This book offers a contextualization, distillation, and conversation with this Edwardsean doctrine of atonement.

Evangelicalism, a worldwide interdenominational movement within Protestant Christianity, is one of the most popular and diverse religious movements in the world today. Evangelicals maintain the belief that the essence of the Gospel consists of the doctrine of salvation by grace, through faith in Jesus' atonement. Evangelicals can be found on every continent and among nearly all Christian denominations. The origin of this group of people has been traced to the turn of the eighteenth century, with roots in the Puritan and Pietist movements in England and Germany. The earliest evangelicals could be found among Anglicans, Baptists, Congregationalists, Methodists, Moravians, and Presbyterians throughout North America, Britain, and Western Europe, and included some of the foremost names of the age, such as Jonathan Edwards, John Wesley, and George Whitefield. Early evangelicals were abolitionists, historians, hymn writers, missionaries, philanthropists, poets, preachers, and theologians. They participated in the major cultural and intellectual currents of the day, and founded institutions of higher education not limited to Dartmouth College, Brown University, and Princeton University. The Oxford Handbook of Early Evangelicalism provides the most authoritative and comprehensive overview of the significant figures and religious communities associated with early evangelicalism within the contextual and cultural environment of the long eighteenth century, with essays written by the world's leading experts in the field of eighteenth-century studies.

This study focuses on Protestant philanthropic agencies - Calvinist conservatives and social liberals - as competing colour-conscious clerical classes of charioteers driving chariots of charity... behind the Cotton Curtain.

Includes section "Book reviews."