ABSTRACT: The New England successors of Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards were some of the first abolitionist voices in the United States. But the New England Theology did not stay in New England. Nor were Edwards’s ideas always deployed for the abolitionist cause. In the Southern Presbyterian and Southern Methodist churches, Edwards was not regarded highly among the most outspoken advocates of slavery. Southern Baptists, on the other hand, managed to reconcile the New England Theology with a strong commitment to slavery. These Edwardseans were neither New School nor Old School in the purest sense, quickly defending, but not always celebrating, the great Southern evil. While Edwards’s ideas were powerful enough to shape the South and indeed the nation, ideas themselves can be wielded in much different, and even dangerous, directions.

For our ongoing series of feature articles for pastors and Christian leaders, we asked Obbie Tyler Todd (PhD, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary), pastor of Third Baptist Church in Marion, Illinois, to trace the legacy of Jonathan Edwards’s theology in the antebellum South.

When Jonathan Edwards arrived in Princeton in 1758 to become president of the College of New Jersey, it was the farthest south he had ever lived. He died two months later. Indeed, for someone who has been dubbed “America’s theologian,” the fact that Edwards spent virtually his entire (and relatively short) life in New England is a testament to his influence and the power of his ideas.1 For over a century after his death, those ideas were collectively known as the “New England Theology,” becoming the dominant theological tradition in most orthodox churches and seminaries in the land of the Pilgrims.

As the first American-made school of Calvinism in the history of the United States, the New England Theology was as bold as it was innovative, and it produced some of the first abolitionist voices in the new republic. While Edwards himself had owned slaves and had denounced only the Atlantic slave trade, his ideas were developed further by his disciples in order to condemn the very institution he had not condemned. Among these ideas were the freedom of the will, natural and moral ability, disinterested benevolence, religious affections, and the moral government of God.

These so-called “New Divinity” men included black and white preachers alike. In 1776, Samuel Hopkins (1721–1803), one of Edwards’s two chief disciples, addressed his Dialogue Concerning the Slavery of the Africans to the Continental Congress.2 Also in 1776, Revolutionary War veteran and black Congregationalist pastor Lemuel Haynes (1753–1833) penned his essay “Liberty Further Extended: Or Free Thoughts on the Illegality of Slavekeeping.”3 In 1790, Edwards’s own son Jonathan Edwards Jr. helped organize the Connecticut Society for the Promotion of Freedom and the Relief of Persons Unlawfully Holden in Bondage, a group that also included Edwards’s grandsons Timothy and Theodore Dwight. Planted in the soil of revivalism, the Edwardsean tradition bore the fruit of reform.

“Edwards’s ideas were developed further by his disciples in order to condemn the very institution he had not condemned.”

But the New England Theology did not stay in New England. And once it left the Puritan confines of Massachussetts and Connecticut, it evolved in a number of different ways. Just as Edwards’s ideas could be wielded to abolish slavery, they could also be weaponized to defend it. By the antebellum period, Jonathan Edwards had adopted a Southern accent among an unlikely people in an unexpected place. By examining how one school of theology could be applied to radically different moral ends, the reader can better understand the vast American legacy of Jonathan Edwards while also considering how theology itself has never united American Christians without the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace (Ephesians 4:3). With the influence of Jonathan Edwards now growing in contemporary American evangelicalism, may his legacy in the antebellum South provide today’s church with a vivid example of the power of ideas to capture the human mind — and the power of sin to employ those ideas in different, and sometimes dangerous, directions.

Edwards Goes West

Just as Edwards’s ideas transcended race, they also crossed denominational lines and traversed geographical boundaries. The 1820s and 30s featured an explosion of Edwardsean thinking in the American West during the Second Great Awakening. For instance, much to the contempt of Edwards’s New England successors, the controversial revivalist Charles G. Finney claimed that Edwards was the true author of his “New Measures.” The so-called “burned-over district” in western New York, which catapulted Finney to national fame, was itself filled with transplanted New Englanders. In his lectures on revival at Oberlin College in Ohio, where he would eventually serve as president, Finney appealed to Edwards well over a dozen times, even likening himself to the Northampton theologian.4

A month after Lyman Beecher decided to leave New England to rescue the West from Catholicism and infidelity, he wrote to his son at Yale Divinity School and urged, “Next after the Bible, read and study Edwards.” The life and writings of Edwards, he insisted, “stand unrivaled.”5 Beecher eventually became the first president of Lane Seminary in Cincinnati, introducing Edwards’s ideas in the classroom and across the entire Midwest. As his daughter Harriet Beecher Stowe recounted after the war, “Dr. Beecher and his sons, it was soon found could race and chase and ride like born Kentuckians, and that ‘free agency’ on horse-back, would go through mud and fire, and water, as gallantly as ever ‘natural inability’ could.”6 Under the Plan of Union (1801), which united Congregationalist and Presbyterian churches for the sake of western expansion and helped to proliferate Edwardsean ideas along the frontier, Beecher could jump from a Boston Congregationalist church to a Cincinnati Presbyterian church without leaving his New England Theology behind — much to the chagrin of local Old School Presbyterians, who would eventually put Beecher on trial for heresy.7

Both Presbyterians, Finney at Oberlin and Beecher at Lane, were influenced by the New Haven Theology, yet another species of the New England Theology originated by Nathaniel W. Taylor at Yale. Both also supported the anti-slavery cause, albeit in different degrees. In fact, when Beecher reflected on the Old School–New School schism of 1837 in the Presbyterian church, he saw two issues lying underneath: abolition and the New England Theology. “The South finally took the Old School side,” he said years later. “It was a cruel thing — it was a cursed thing, and ’twas slavery that did it.” Beecher then added,

And it was ideas that did it. It was ideas concerning God and man — ideas concerning the divine administration, the government of the universe, the origin of evil — that convulsed the Church and convulsed the nation; and why should they not? Theology and politics are next of kin.8

In short, the Presbyterian church had split over how to integrate modern ideas and moral reform into a confessional faith.9 Ideas like natural ability and human responsibility and moral influence inevitably became bound with the issue of slavery. Historian George Marsden has effectively demonstrated how “the roots of New School Presbyterianism” can be “traced back to none other than Jonathan Edwards.”10 Therefore, in 1837, Northern Presbyterians did not simply choose the side of freedom. In many ways, they also sided with the New England Theology.

Southern ‘Stonewalling’ of Edwards

But were there Edwardseans in Dixieland? Was the South impenetrable to the New England Theology? When Finney hailed “the great revival” in the winter of 1857–1858, which “prevailed throughout all the Northern states,” he bemoaned the fact that “slavery seemed to shut it out from the South.”11 Although his judgment was not entirely accurate, many Edwardseans in the North had long perceived the South as a place where their ideas were not welcomed.12 And for good reason. In the Southern Presbyterian church, among the most outspoken advocates of slavery, Edwards was not regarded highly. At South Carolina College, for example, James Henley Thornwell (1812–1862) defended the idea that Southern slaveholding was a “triumph of Christian benevolence,” even comparing a slaveowner and his slaves to a father and his children in The Rights and Duties of Masters (1850).13 However, Thornwell was not a defender of Jonathan Edwards. In fact, he believed that Edwards’s view of personal identity defied “the plainest intuitions of intelligence,” and he called Edwards’s belief in sin as the privation of good “a mere juggle with words.”14

Thornwell was not alone in his disdain for Edwards. As Sean Michael Lucas has shown, Virginian Presbyterian Robert Lewis Dabney was so hostile to Jonathan Edwards’s works that a fellow Southerner claimed that he “cuts up Edwardsism by the roots.” Dabney dismissed the “intricacy and impractical” theology of Religious Affections as “too anatomical.” Ultimately, what Dabney detested most about Edwards’s theology was that which so many New School Presbyterians appreciated: its attention to the heart. Instead, Dabney believed in order and tradition. Therefore, as one might expect, Dabney supported a rigid interpretation of the Westminster Confession and chattel slavery. In fact, Dabney served as chief of staff for Confederate general and fellow Presbyterian “Stonewall” Jackson.15 While certainly not all Presbyterians in the South resisted the New England Theology, Edwardseans like Hezekiah Balch, Isaac Anderson, and Gideon Blackburn ministered primarily in the Appalachian Mountains, where, interestingly, the plantation system was not as embedded as it was in the deeper South.16

Southern Methodists could sometimes be as scathing in their critiques of Edwards as the Presbyterians. In 1845, Kentuckian Albert Taylor Bledsoe (1809–1877), an Episcopal priest turned itinerant Methodist, published his blistering Examination of President Edwards’ Inquiry into the Freedom of the Will and argued that Edwards’s concept of freedom was not nearly free enough. “For Bledsoe,” says Michael O’Brien, “Edwards was muddled, tautological, and, while asserting freedom of the will, made it too dependent upon the authority of a ‘strongest motive’ to justify the assertion.”17 Not surprisingly, Bledsoe was a staunch supporter of slavery, serving in the Confederacy as chief of the War Bureau and as assistant Secretary of War. After the Civil War, Bledsoe was even a leading voice against Reconstruction. In antebellum America, while adherence to the New England Theology was by no means a sure sign of abolitionism, and although many New England Theologians were rather tepid abolitionists, vehement opposition to Edwards’s theology often overlapped with strong pro-slavery sentiment.18

“Vehement opposition to Edwards’s theology often overlapped with strong pro-slavery sentiment.”

Conversely, some Methodists who opposed slavery digested Edwards — but not completely. As part of his Christian Library, John Wesley edited five of Edwards’s works, but none were published in their entirety. In fact, Wesley’s version of Religious Affections was only a sixth of the original size! In his section “To the Reader,” Wesley called the famous work a “dangerous heap, wherein much wholesome food is mixt with much deadly poison.”19 The result was, in the words of historian Joseph A. Conforti, “an increasingly Methodized Edwards” during the Second Great Awakening.20 In the South, Edwards’s Calvinism did not settle well in the strict stomachs of Presbyterians, nor did it suit the Arminian diet of Methodists.

Dixie Divinity

However, there was one group in the antebellum South that managed to reconcile the New England Theology with a strong commitment to slavery. While these evangelicals inhabited a Southern landscape unfamiliar to the bustling cities of New England, they believed their similarities with Edwards far outweighed their differences. But they were not who many, including Edwards, would have expected to promote his ideas. They were Baptists. And they defended the name of Jonathan Edwards almost as vigorously as they defended the institution of slavery. On the eve of the Civil War, Georgia pastor Charles Dutton Mallary had both on his mind. In 1860, he boasted, “The world has seen the light and felt the power of but few men more remarkably than President Edwards. He was not less distinguished for piety than for gigantic intellect; and it was the meekness and gentleness of his piety that went far to make him, as a Christian, so prosperous and so great.”21 But Mallary was not as welcoming to New Englanders as he was to the New England Theology. During the Civil War, in the very last letter he ever penned, Mallary wrote, “If the Federals should get possession of my poor body, I shall tell them I am a rebel.”22 In one of the great ironies of American religious history, the theology of abolitionists was adopted by those who reviled abolitionists.

The New England Theology crossed the Mason-Dixon line along two primary routes: (1) Northerners who migrated to the South and (2) Southerners who read the works of Jonathan Edwards and his New England disciples. In these two ways, Edwards adopted a Southern accent, one might say. In truth, Northerners had been shaping Southern culture for over a century before the Civil War, bringing their ideas (and their books) with them. Oliver Hart, the chief architect of the first Baptist association in the South, was sent to Charleston by the Philadelphia Association. Having personally listened to George Whitefield during the Great Awakening as a young man, Hart admired Jonathan Edwards as a revivalist and relished A Faithful Narrative (1737), modeling his own ministry after Edwards’s. In February 1830, a set of books from Hart’s library was gifted to a young Baptist preacher named Basil Manly Sr. (1798–1868). One of the books was titled Edwards Against Chauncy.23

But Manly was absorbing more than books. Indeed, he had already been influenced by a New Englander as a student at South Carolina College: Jonathan Maxcy (1768–1820). The former President of Rhode Island College not only venerated Edwards but also adopted the teachings of the New Divinity school, who regarded Maxcy’s doctrine of atonement as one of the finest examples of their own.24 As a result, over the next few decades, Manly became an avid defender of both slavery and Edwards. Owning over forty slaves, Manly was a cofounder of the Southern Baptist Convention. Yet he also became intimately familiar with Edwards’s Freedom of the Will (1754) and even wrote to his son about his reading of The Nature of True Virtue (1765). Although in the wake of the Missouri Compromise (1820) Manly acknowledged that an “inconsistency between slavery and a perfect equality and freedom can never be removed so long as those terms embrace the same ideas they do at present,” he did not see an incompatibility between Edwards’s ideas and the enslavement of human beings.25 Neither, apparently, did his son. “When I contrast the feeling of my heart with the exercises of that blessed man of God, Jon. Edwards,” the younger Manly once recorded in his diary, “I am astonished at the coldness of my own heart.”26 Edwards helped to convict the Manlys of their sinfulness, but not of their slavery.

Through his writings, Jonathan Edwards seemed to convert, call, and commission young Baptists into the South. Where and when they encountered Edwards’s ideas, however, typically determined their eventual position on the so-called “negro question.” In 1816, Richard Furman, pastor of First Baptist Church of Charleston, proposed the works of Edwards as tools for “the conversion of sinners.”27 Years later, Furman’s proposal became prophecy when Basil Manly Jr., who would 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).

Edwards could also exert his influence upon Baptists by calling them away from the South and away from college. When Richard Fuller matriculated at Harvard in 1820, he would be among only 9 percent of students in Cambridge from the South for the next forty years.28 Nevertheless, an illness prompted doctors to transport Fuller, to, of all places, Northampton, Massachusetts. The “impressions” made upon Fuller by Edwards’s life and legacy during his recovery were apparently so strong that he returned to Harvard and to South Carolina with a newfound call to ministry. Although Fuller did not become a Baptist until returning to the South, he confessed years later that it was in Northampton that his mind “awoke from its obvious sleep.”29

Eventually serving as the third president of the Southern Baptist Convention, Fuller also chaired the committee that authored the preamble of the Convention in 1845. In that same year, a series of letters between Fuller and Francis Wayland on the issue of slavery was published, establishing Fuller as one of the leading pro-slavery voices in America. However, according to Mark Noll, the exchange was “one of the United States’ last serious one-on-one debates where advocates for and against slavery engaged each other directly, with reasonable restraint, and with evident intent to hear out the opponent to the extent possible.”30 Like Manly Sr., Fuller conceded certain evils of slavery and was even accused by many Southerners of being “too moderate.”31 Still, Fuller, who once praised missionary David Brainerd for his zeal to save the lost, also contended for the right to enslave the lost.32

As demonstrated by Fuller at Harvard, Southerners who ventured to New England and encountered Edwards’s thought still returned as Southerners at heart. Likewise, when New Englanders traveled South to evangelize Southerners, they usually retained their anti-slavery views, and they were often sent out with Edwards’s ideas. John Mason Peck (1789–1858), the first home missionary of the Triennial Convention, who served in Missouri and Southern Illinois for over forty years, was a former Congregationalist from Litchfield County, Connecticut, the so-called “seedbed of the New Divinity movement.”33 While waiting for a decision by the Triennial Convention in 1815, Peck purchased a copy of The Life of David Brainerd. In his diary he wrote, “Oh, what would I not willingly do or suffer if I could live as devoted as this eminent servant of God! His singular piety and devotedness to the cause of Christ affected me so much that frequently I shut up the book and indulged myself in meditation and prayer.”34 Remarkably, the year after Peck headed southwest, inspired by the example of David Brainerd, a new Presbyterian mission was established in Southern Tennessee for the Cherokee: Brainerd Mission. The Edwardsean legacy of missions in the South was not relegated to Baptists.35

As a Whig who opposed pro-slavery Jacksonian politics, Peck represented many New Englanders who moved to the frontier. In St. Louis, for instance, Peck instituted a day school that taught slave children. Between 1818 and 1822, blacks and whites worshiped together under Peck’s pastoral care. Eventually, Peck’s colleague, freedman John Berry Meachum, assumed leadership of the congregation and helped establish the First African Baptist Church of St. Louis. Peck also supported anti-slavery groups like the Friends of Humanity.

Through his writings and his disciples and even his own stomping grounds, Jonathan Edwards had a profound effect upon Baptists in the antebellum South. (One Baptist was even nicknamed “the Jonathan Edwards of the South.”)36 However, much like the rest of the country, other social and political factors determined one’s exact position on the issue of slavery.

Defending Slavery with Abolitionist Ideas

If anti-Edwardseans were often characterized by a more vehement pro-slavery sentiment, and if New England Theologians like Peck, Finney, and Beecher brought their abolitionism with them to the West and South, were Southern Edwardseans more “moderate” in their defense of slavery? Did abolitionist instincts develop more strongly among Southerners who held to Jonathan Edwards’s ideas? The answer is a bit more complicated in the South than it appeared to be in the North. Although Manly Sr. and Fuller were, at times, more reasoned and restrained in their defenses of slavery, they were slaveowners nonetheless. Moderate Calvinism did not produce moderate slaveholding, if you will. Ultimately, by the 1830s, individual prejudices and regional contexts usually could not be overcome. On one hand, the New England Theology was powerful enough to transcend nearly every racial, economic, and cultural barrier that divided evangelicals in antebellum America. Within the South, for instance, Edwardsean Baptists like James Madison Pendleton and Thomas Meredith voiced their opposition or reluctance to slavery.37 But throughout the majority of the South, Edwards’s ideas were generally not powerful enough to turn evangelism into emancipation. Instead, the same ideas that propelled missions were often weaponized to support slavery.

Richard Furman was the inaugural president of the Triennial Convention,38 established in 1814. Like Adoniram Judson, the first American overseas missionary, and like Andrew Fuller, the founding secretary of the Baptist Missionary Society in England, Furman adhered to an Edwardsean brand of Calvinism that emphasized the freedom of the will, natural ability, and the responsibility of sinners to believe the gospel.39 More than any American Baptist of his generation, Furman was a catalyst for domestic and overseas missions. However, in 1823, when Furman addressed the governor on behalf of the newly formed South Carolina Baptist Convention in the wake of the foiled Denmark Vesey slave revolt, he made an unconventional argument on behalf of slavery. In his Exposition of the Views of the Baptists, Relative to the Coloured Population of the United States (1823), Furman was forced to answer the question of how slaves arrived in America. He contended that “the Africans brought to America were, in general, slaves, by their own consent, before they came from their own country, or fell into the hands of white men.” He concluded, “Consequently, the man made a slave in this manner, might be said to be made so by his own consent, and by the indulgence of barbarous principles.” In other words, by their own free will, slaves chose to become slaves.

In Furman’s view, “the wisest and best policy” for nations is to “consider and acknowledge the government of the Deity, to feel their dependence on him and trust in him, to be thankful for his mercies, and to be humbled under his chastening rod; so, not only moral and religious duty, but also a regard to the best interests of the community appear to require of us.”40 Incredibly, Richard Furman argued that slaves wrenched from their homes in Africa had become slaves by their own free choice, and that South Carolina’s slave-ocracy was established by God for the good of all. The freedom of the will and the moral government of God, two ideas that had supported the abolitionist cause in the North, were employed in the service of slavery in the South. In a terrible contradiction, the very concepts that aided Southerners in converting Africans could also be used to enslave them. Although Furman contended for the theological education of slaves in the treatise, he too was a slaveholder.

In 1845, when Southern Baptists severed ties with the Triennial Convention for the rights of domestic missionaries to own slaves, the resulting denomination stood as a testament to just how inextricable slavery and missions had become in the Southern Baptist mind. The inaugural president of the Southern Baptist Convention, William B. Johnson, was a product of New England Theology. Taught by New Divinity man John Waldo in grade school and influenced by Jonathan Maxcy at South Carolina College, Johnson had once commended a fellow South Carolina Baptist for being “imbued with the Spirit of New England Theology.”41 Like John Mason Peck, Johnson held to the signature doctrine of the New England Theology: the moral governmental theory of atonement.42 Also like Peck, Johnson believed in evangelizing the lost for God’s glory and the good of the moral universe. And yet, just as Peck had wielded the New England Theology to advocate against slavery, Johnson used it to argue for slavery.

In Johnson’s Address, he declared that the aim of the Convention was “the glory of our God” and “the profit of these poor, perishing souls.”43 As the only American to ever preside over two Baptist missionary conventions (he also served as the fourth president of the Triennial Convention), Johnson did more than perhaps any Christian of his era to mobilize missions for the sake of the African people. Yet tragically, few Americans did more than Johnson to baptize the concept of slavery as an evangelistic good. Ultimately, the most enduring legacy of Jonathan Edwards in the South was not abolitionism, but pro-slavery missions, a paradox that appeared, oddly enough, in Edwards himself. On one hand, Edwards handed Southern Baptists the ideological tools to evangelize the lost with a robust doctrine of sovereign grace. On the other hand, the same ideas that were often weaponized to defend the institution of slavery in the South were never employed by Jonathan Edwards for that specific purpose. In some ways, in their zeal for revival and their inveterate belief in a hierarchical society based upon slavery, Southern Edwardseans resembled Edwards more than his own New England successors. In other ways, they bore little resemblance to the Northampton theologian.

Theological Crisis

As E. Brooks Holifield has noted, in the antebellum period, “Southern treatises bristled with allusions to Edwards.”44 In fact, the New England Theology and its conception of freedom had a direct impact upon the events leading to the Civil War. In 1790, an antislavery sermon by Jonathan Edwards Jr., titled “The Injustice and Impolity of the Slave Trade, and of Slavery,” made its way into the hands of one Owen Brown, who would thereafter become an ardent abolitionist.45 Brown made certain to pass on his militant views to his son John, who would eventually lead the infamous raid at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in 1859.46 By innovating further upon Jonathan Edwards’s ideas, the New England Theology shaped the South — and the course of American history.47

“Antebellum Christians could apply the same theological ideas about freedom to vastly different ends.”

But just as Americans divided over the nature of freedom, antebellum Christians could apply the same theological ideas about freedom to vastly different ends. The story of Jonathan Edwards’s abolitionist successors in New England and his slaveholding followers in the South is an important part of what Mark Noll has called the “theological crisis” of the Civil War era.48 In fact, from Southern Edwardseans to “Black Fundamentalists,” American history has been marked by different groups who held to similar doctrines and yet arrived at opposite moral conclusions on racial issues.49 In the antebellum South, Edwards’s ideas did not always find fertile soil in the Presbyterian or Methodist or other evangelical denominations.50 But among Southern Baptists, the New England Theology adopted a Southern accent, one that quickly defended, even if did not always celebrate, the institution of slavery.51 These Edwardseans were neither New School nor Old School in the purest sense. Instead, they often embodied both.52

However, Baptists could sometimes be more Old School than New School. Patrick Hues Mell, who would eventually become the longest tenured president of the Southern Baptist Convention (1863–1871, 1880–1887), was an Edwardsean who once referred his readers to Edwards’s “able treatise” on The End for Which God Created the World.53 Mell seemed to exhibit a higher degree of militancy on the issue of slavery than many of his Southern Edwardsean contemporaries. His pro-slavery work in 1844 was titled Slavery, A Treatise, Showing that Slavery is Neither a Political, Moral, Nor Social Evil. One cannot help but wonder whether Mell had a bit of Old School flavor that influenced his views, as his mother Cynthia was “brought up in the strictest mode of Congregationalism” and raised her son according to the Westminster Shorter Catechism. According to one Presbyterian minister, Mell was a “perfect reproduction of his mother.”54 In the antebellum South, perhaps the best theological indication of one’s degree of support for the institution of slavery was not his opinion of Jonathan Edwards, but rather what he thought of Edwards’s abolitionist disciples. Not surprisingly, Mell repudiated Samuel Hopkins, whom he did not consider “a Calvinist at all.”55 In the antebellum South, a higher Calvinism was often coupled with a higher view of slavery.

Although Jonathan Edwards’s Northern and Southern successors were not united on abolitionism, the nature of freedom, or the natural ability of slaves, most all of them acknowledged with Edwards that “the will always is as the great apparent good is.”56 And this is almost certainly how the very same ideas about God and man and salvation could produce such radically different moral outcomes. On the issue of emancipation, Edwardseans disagreed about what was right because they could not agree about what was best. The so-called “greatest apparent good” was not defined the same in the South as it was in the North. Therefore, groups with the same theological mind did not share the same will, so to speak.

Edwardsean ideas would last well beyond the Civil War in both the North and the South, in both black and white churches. Charles Octavius Boothe (1845–1924) pastored black congregations in Mississippi and Alabama in the postbellum years. In Plain Theology for Plain People, originally published in 1890, Boothe defined theology as “the knowledge of God and of the divine government,” noting “God’s control of men and demons in the interest of his moral government.”57 Indeed, Edwardsean ideas could be employed in a number of different contexts and churches in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and even twentieth centuries. But as the Southern Edwardseans demonstrated in the antebellum period, and as Edwards himself had impressed upon his own generation, while ideas are powerful enough to change a nation, ideas themselves are not enough to change the minds and hearts of sinners.

Ofttimes the primary reason why godly men are called to suffer is for the sake of witness they may give to the sincerity of their love for Christ and the reality of divine grace in them.

There is a deep mystery to suffering. While the Bible makes it plain that we must expect to encounter times of sorrow and loss, of trial and grief, we often don’t know why these times come. Though we know he is weaving together a marvelous tapestry that will wondrously display his glory, we also know it is one whose beauty we will fully appreciate only when faith becomes sight.

It was in the waning weeks of 2020 that my family faced our darkest hour, for it was then that the heart of my 20-year-old son Nick suddenly and unexpectedly stopped, and he went to be with the Lord. One moment he was a seminarian leading some fellow students in a game, and the next he was in heaven. His departure shocked us, devastated us, and left us wondering why. Why would God choose this for us, and why would God choose us for this?

“Why would God choose this for us, and why would God choose us for this?”

In the aftermath of that dreadful evening, I turned to some of my dearest friends, friends who lived and died many years ago, but whom I’ve come to know through the books and sermons they left behind. If a multitude of advisers is necessary for planning well, how much more for grieving well (Proverbs 15:22)? In the most difficult days and darkest hours, they counseled and consoled me.

Suffering as Witness

Theodore Cuyler was a close and steady companion who encouraged me to accept that God always places bright blessings behind the dark clouds of his providence. F.B. Meyer assured me that peace would come through submission to God’s will, and that I should trust him in the taking as much as I had in the giving. But it was in the words of the old preacher J.R. Miller that I found one piece of wisdom that especially helped quiet my heart and direct my path.

Ofttimes the primary reason why godly men are called to suffer is for the sake of witness they may give to the sincerity of their love for Christ and the reality of divine grace in them. The world sneers at religious profession. It refuses to believe that it is genuine. It defiantly asserts that what is called Christian principle is only selfishness, and that it would not stand severe testing. Then, godly men are called to endure loss, suffering or sorrow, not because there is any particular evil in themselves which needs to be eradicated, but because the Master needs their witness to answer the sneers of the world. (“The Ministry of Comfort”)

In every age, we hear of professed believers who abandon the faith as soon as they are called to suffer. They are glad enough to express confidence in God as long as his will seems perfectly aligned with their own, as long as his providence decrees what they would choose anyway. But when they are called to lose instead of gain, to weep instead of laugh, to face poverty instead of prosperity, they quickly turn aside and fall away (Matthew 13:20–21). Like towers built on sand, many who stand strong in days of calm collapse in days of flood (Matthew 7:26–27).

No wonder, then, that many unbelievers become convinced that the Christian faith is unequal to great challenges, that Christians will adhere to Christ only while life is easy and circumstances favorable. No wonder, then, that skeptics scoff since they have observed many whose faith was no stronger than its first great challenge. And no wonder, then, that even many sincere believers wonder whether their faith is sufficient for times of deep sorrow, whether it could withstand a dreadful shock.

It is just here that Miller’s word have been both comforting and challenging.

What the World Needs to See

In times of great sorrow, we naturally long for answers. We long to know why a God who is good and who loves us so dearly has decreed such a painful providence. Miller comforted me with the assurance that we do not need to assume that God is punishing us for sin we have committed or chastising for righteousness we have failed to accomplish. We do not need to believe that these circumstances somehow escaped his notice and darted past his control. We do not need to wonder whether it is all just meaningless and purposeless, as if “all things work together for good” except for grueling losses.

No, we can be confident that God has important purposes for our suffering, and we can be equally confident that one of these purposes is simply for us to stand strong, to continue to profess our allegiance to him. If Paul could say that his imprisonment “has really served to advance the gospel,” why shouldn’t we say the same of our bereavements (Philippians 1:12)?

Unbelievers and Christians alike need the assurance that our faith does not depend upon God delivering only what we ourselves would choose and that our love for God does not depend upon circumstances that never contradict our desires. Unbelievers and Christians alike need to be shown that God’s people will be as true to him with little as with much, with broken hearts as with whole, with empty hands as with full. All need to be shown that those who blessed God in the giving will praise him still in the taking, that those who weep tears of sorrow will still raise hands of worship, that those who trust him in the green pastures will trust him still when he leads through dark valleys. And this is precisely what my dear friend J.R. Miller called me to.

Still Good in the Valley

By God’s grace, I can profess from the valley of the shadow of death that my Shepherd is good. I can attest from a place of deep sorrow that God is providing sweet comfort. I can proclaim that while my heart is broken, my faith is intact. I can affirm that a love for God formed in days of sunshine truly can withstand days of rain. So, too, can my wife and my daughters.

“From the first moment of that first night of our sorrow, God has been present and kind, faithful and good.”

There has not been the smallest bit of coercion or the least measure of performance. There has been no need. For together we have learned that while our strength is small, God’s is great. While our hold on him is weak, his grasp on us is strong. While we would certainly be insufficient to this challenge, God has given what we need. The steadfast love of the Lord has not ceased; his mercies have not come to an end, but have been new every morning. Great has been his faithfulness (Lamentations 3:22–23).

We don’t know all the reasons why God chose to take Nick to himself at such a young age, but neither do we have any right to demand answers from our God or to insist that he account for his providence. Our confidence rests not in his explanation but in his character, not in what he has done but in who he is — the one who knows “the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose’” (Isaiah 46:10).

And from the first moment of that first night of our sorrow, he has been present and kind, faithful and good. He has been true to his every promise. We love him more now than ever.

Audio Transcript

Pastor John, we have talked a lot on this podcast about personal productivity. And that leads to today’s question from a listener named Paul, who lives in Soria, Spain. Paul writes this: “Hello, Pastor John, and thank you for this podcast! Way back in episode 839, you mentioned the importance of writing out a personal mission statement for our lives with the aim of enhancing personal productivity. I agree completely. And I find this task entirely daunting. So how do I, as an average Christian layperson, go about coming up with a personal mission statement? Should we be strengths/talents-oriented about it? Focus on roles? Should we mostly focus on spiritual needs in the church, both locally and globally? And how do we avoid letting this statement grow so broad that we get overwhelmed to the point that such a statement does nothing to actually help focus our energies? Any help would be appreciated.”

When I read the Bible, I cannot escape the relentless teaching that God has purposes. He has goals in everything he does. He’s not a God who is coasting aimlessly. He’s not going in circles. The God of the Bible is pervasively pursuing accomplishments of his own counsel. So Isaiah 46:9–10 says,

     I am God, and there is none like me,declaring the end from the beginning     and from ancient times things not yet done,saying, “My counsel shall stand,     and I will accomplish all my purpose.”

So there it is: “I will accomplish all my purpose.” God has purposes. He has plans.

As I have planned,     so shall it be,and as I have purposed,     so shall it stand. (Isaiah 14:24)

Have you not heard     that I determined it long ago?I planned from days of old     what now I bring to pass. (Isaiah 37:26)

I don’t think there would be any gospel, any salvation, any eternal joy, if God were not a planner — one who lived with purposes and goals. Because Acts 4:27 says that all the enemies of God were gathered together in Jerusalem at the crucifixion of Jesus “to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place.”

God-Sized Goals

Now, when I step back from all of that vision of the planning, purposing God, the effect it has on me is to stir me up to really serious questions like, Well, what is God’s ultimate goal, then? I’m sure he has millions of sub-goals and sub-purposes in everything he does. I like to say that God is doing ten thousand things we don’t know anything about. Most of those goals and purposes are hidden from us. But what has he revealed as his main or his ultimate purpose? Where is everything going? That’s the question that has burned in me ever since I was 22 years old and became a lover of the all-ordaining, all-planning God.

And then the next question becomes, Well, if I could discern what his ultimate goal is, how can I join him in it? I want to fit in to his ultimate purpose. I don’t want to strive against it. I want to be right in sync with what God is pursuing in the world. Nothing seems more obviously reasonable to me or hopeful to me than that God’s creatures should gladly fit into his purposes. So surely that’s his call on us. That’s what he’s beckoning us to do: “Find my purpose and join me in it.” So that’s my second question, then: Is there a way I can join the purpose of God once I have found out what his ultimate purpose is?

And then the question becomes, How do I do everything I am doing so that I help that ultimate goal come about, or so that I can be used by God to make it come about? I want everything — not just a few things, but everything I do — to somehow contribute to that purpose. So, that’s why mission statements seem helpful to me. They keep me focused on the great things of life.

Aim for the Big Picture

But let me caution us here: I think the particularities of life are too variable for our mission statement to be very detailed. I know our friend asked that it not be too general. And yet I might disappoint him because I find big, big, general purposes really helpful, if they’re the right kind.

So the more particularities about yourself and about your circumstances that you include, the more short-term your statement is going to be, because so much changes, right? You change. Your job changes. You have kids. You get sick. You move. Oh, my goodness! Life is just so variable that if you make your mission to include things about yourself, things about your circumstances that are going to change relatively quickly, then you’re going to have to be changing your mission statement all the time. And that’s probably not very helpful.

“What goals can I have that are in sync with God’s goals and are so clearly biblical that they don’t change?”

So, if you want your mission statement to last more than a few years, it will need to be high-level and general. And that’s mainly what I have in mind when I think of my own statements that guide my life. I need to be reminded regularly about the big picture of life: What’s everything about? What goals can I have that are in sync with God’s goals and are so clearly biblical that they don’t change?

So let me give you a whirlwind process of arriving at such a statement, and then you can adapt it to your situation.

Discover Ultimate Aims

In those crucial years of discovery for me — the life-changing years from 22 to 25 — what I saw and could not deny, and have never changed my mind on since, was that God is infinitely full of every perfection, and cannot be improved, and is the sum of all excellence, all beauty, all worth, all greatness, so that his purpose never includes people counseling him or adding to him or improving him or providing for his needs, since he doesn’t have any.

Rather, what I saw was that God is the kind of God whose ultimate aim is that his fullness, his completeness, his perfection, would overflow with the communication of all his satisfying greatness and beauty and worth and excellence to me. In other words, God’s ultimate purpose is to be seen and savored and shown (those are my three favorite words for describing it). God’s ultimate purpose is to be seen and savored and shown as infinitely glorious. That’s his ultimate purpose.

This is not megalomania, by the way, because the communication of himself, in all his glory, is what the human soul was made to be satisfied by. So God is the one being in all the universe — and he is the only one — for whom self-communication and self-exaltation is the highest virtue and the most loving act.

Bring my sons from afar     and my daughters from the end of the earth,everyone who is called by my name,     whom I created for my glory. (Isaiah 43:6–7)

And so, the very first thing that he teaches us to pray over and over is “Hallowed be your name” (Matthew 6:9) — that is, glorified, treasured, loved, honored, praised, admired, enjoyed. Hallowed be your name. That’s the first and foremost cry of every saint every day: “Make me a means, God — please, make me a means of the communication and the display of your beauty and your worth and your greatness.” That is, “May others hallow your name because I exist.” That’s why we come into being. That’s the essence of every biblical personal mission statement, I think, if it ties into God’s ultimate purpose. So that’s where I start.

Join the Chorus

And then the question becomes, How? How can I live that way? How can I join in to that accomplishment of that purpose? And the Bible just seems to offer countless answers:

Whether you eat or drink, do all to the glory of God (1 Corinthians 10:31).
Give thanks to the glory of God (1 Thessalonians 5:18).
Confess Jesus to the glory of God (Romans 10:9).
Do good deeds that God may be glorified (1 Peter 2:12).
Welcome one another for the glory of God (Romans 15:7).
Be generous to the poor for the glory of God (Romans 12:13).

And on and on. I have other texts listed here, but they’re all over the place. Everything we should be doing with our bodies and our minds and our hearts should be something that makes God look glorious, because he really is. We’re helping people see him, savor him, show him for what he’s really like.

Rely on God

So finally, the question becomes, Is there a common denominator that runs through all those deeds, all those attitudes, all those words, that turn them into God-glorifying acts? How does everything I do become worship? How does everything I do become a display of God’s greatness and beauty and worth? And the answer is given, for example (there are other places),

Whoever serves, [let him serve] by the strength that God supplies — in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. (1 Peter 4:11)

So, if everything you do is a service, then, he says, let the service be by relying on the all-sufficiency of God’s grace in your life, so that when you accomplish what you just attempted to do, it’s done in his strength, so that he gets the glory. You get the enablement and the power and the guidance and the strength, and he gets the glory. So when we joyfully rely on God in all we do in the service of others, God looks glorious in our lives.

“When we joyfully rely on God in all we do in the service of others, God looks glorious in our lives.”

We see the same thing in 2 Thessalonians 1:11–12: let every work be a “work of faith by [God’s] power, so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you.” That’s the same point as 1 Peter 4: we do what we do in glad reliance upon God for everything we need, in order to love people. In other words, we live by faith in the promises of God in the service of love.

Fine-Tune for You

So I would say, build your life mission statement by thinking through this much before you get to the details of your own gifting and your own calling.

God is infinitely glorious.
God means to communicate that glory to his people — to see it, savor it, show it.
He means for us to join him in that purpose.
That applies to absolutely everything we do.
And we do it in humble reliance upon his grace and power, which come through Jesus Christ in the service of others.
That will make him look great.

Then, when you have crafted an overarching mission statement built on those purposes of God, then you can make some short-term mission statements, say for a year: you’re going to write a book, or you’re going to change jobs, or you’re going to pursue marriage, or whatever — some short-term goal that then draws particularities up into that mission statement according to the season of your life.