Southern Edwardseans

The Southern Baptist Legacy of Jonathan Edwards

by Obbie Tyler Todd

Book cover: Southern Edwardseans

Extent: 209 pages

Publisher: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht

Subjects: American Studies, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Religious Studies

Series: New Directions in Jonathan Edwards Studies

Series volume number: 8

Language: English

Hardback (Published)

(January 2022)

ISBN: 9783525560518

6.06 x 9.06 inches

Price: $138.00

In stock

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.

  • By (author) Obbie Tyler Todd