ABSTRACT: In Paul’s list of qualities for older women to teach younger women, he includes oikourgous, which the ESV translates as “working at home” (Titus 2:5). This Greek word appears only here in the New Testament, calling for a careful look at the cultural and biblical contexts. Culturally, the Pastoral Epistles reveal prominent false teachings circulating among the Ephesian and Cretan churches — teachings Paul sought to oppose, in part, with lists of Christian virtues like the one in Titus 2. Biblically, both the Pastoral Epistles and the broader scriptural context give shape and definition to a woman’s “working at home.” While Paul does not limit women to working only at home, he does call wives and mothers to give sufficient attention to their husbands and children, and to beware any teaching or ambition that causes them to follow some first-century women in neglecting their families.

For our ongoing series of feature articles for pastors and Christian leaders, we asked Bill Mounce (PhD, Aberdeen University), founder and president of BiblicalTraining.org, to interpret and apply oikourgous(“working at home”) in Titus 2:5.

One of the challenges of biblical exegesis is transitioning from what a passage meant in its original setting to what it now means in our current cultural context. This is why exegesis is a multistep process. We start with what a passage says, try to determine what it meant then, and then see how that meaning comes into our own context.

No statement is totally cultural. No statement has meaning in one context and no meaning in another. No statement in Scripture can be tossed aside as irrelevant. The eternal meaning may be dressed in cultural garb and therefore difficult to understand, but our task is to find that meaning and bring it faithfully into today.

The Pastoral Epistles — 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus — include several statements that are often passed off as merely cultural and irrelevant for today. “I desire . . . that in every place the men should pray, lifting holy hands” (1 Timothy 2:8) — hands must be lifted. “Women should adorn themselves . . . not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly attire” (1 Timothy 2:9) — women can’t wear jewelry. “[Women] will be saved through childbearing” (1 Timothy 2:15) — all women must have biological children (though this statement is more misunderstood than misapplied). “Let all who are under a yoke as bondservants regard their own masters as worthy of all honor” (1 Timothy 6:1) — Paul condones slavery. “No soldier gets entangled in civilian pursuits” (2 Timothy 2:4) — pastors can’t have second jobs.

In each of these cases, when the original meaning is understood properly, the passage does not come into our context as irrelevant. Men are to pray without anger; the position of their hands is not mandatory. Women are not to dress in a way that brings attention to their social standing but instead are to focus on their character. Women (and men) work out the implications of their salvation not by following the false teachers and their prohibition of procreation (as one example). Paul plants the seeds of what becomes abolition and expressly opposes “enslavers” (1 Timothy 1:10). Pastors are not to be “entangled,” but that is different from having a second job.1

Titus 2:5 and its apparent insistence that women be “working at home” falls into this category of often misunderstood passages. It has been used to teach that women can work only at home and cannot work elsewhere. Let’s look at the Pastoral Epistles to see if this is accurate.

Cultural Background

Paul spent over three years in Ephesus (Acts 20:31). When he traveled back through the area, stopping at Miletus, he told the Ephesian elders, “I know that after my departure fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; and from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things, to draw away the disciples after them” (Acts 20:29–30). Paul’s prophecy came true, and some Ephesian elders turned from the truth and were teaching falsehood.

It is critical to understand how bad the situation in Ephesus, as in Crete, had become.2 Only in seeing this background will we grasp the right interpretation of our passage. Allow me to offer an extended quotation from my commentary.

The opponents are factious (Titus 3:10), advancing into ungodliness (2 Timothy 2:16); they are rebellious, senseless babblers (Titus 1:10) and bring reproach on the church (1 Timothy 3:2, 7, 10; Titus 1:11–14). At one time they were part of the church community but later rejected the truth of the gospel and turned away to the heresy (1 Timothy 1:6, 19; 4:1; 6:10, 21; 2 Timothy 4:4; Titus 1:14; cf. Galatians 2:4; 2 Corinthians 11:4). They were not tricked by the heresy but rather made conscious decisions to turn away (1 Timothy 1:19). They are deceiving the Ephesian and Cretan church (Titus 1:10); they are hypocrites and liars (1 Timothy 4:2), and they profess to know God but deny him by their deeds (Titus 1:16). They are therefore self-condemned (Titus 3:11), and their consciences (1 Timothy 4:2; 6:5; Titus 1:15; cf. 1 Timothy 1:5) and minds (1 Timothy 6:5; 2 Timothy 3:8; Titus 1:15) are corrupted. They have a sickly craving (1 Timothy 6:4) and are robbed of the truth (1 Timothy 6:5). They are ignorant (1 Timothy 1:7), foolish, understanding nothing (1 Timothy 6:4), worthless for any good work (Titus 1:16) or for the gospel (2 Timothy 3:8). The opponents are perverted (Titus 3:11), unholy (2 Timothy 3:2), ungodly (2 Timothy 2:16), and lacking in love (1 Timothy 1:5), and their folly will eventually be evident to all (2 Timothy 3:9). They are dogmatic (1 Timothy 1:7) and devoted to their teachings (1 Timothy 1:4; 4:1). Even their motives are corrupt, wanting prestige (1 Timothy 1:7), money (1 Timothy 6:5–10; Titus 1:11), sex (2 Timothy 3:6), and pleasure (2 Timothy 3:4). As would be expected, they do not accept Paul’s or Timothy’s authority (1 Timothy 1:1–2; 4:12, 14; 6:12).3

In other words, they weren’t godly people! On top of all this, they appeared to focus their attention on the women in the church.

The opponents had significant success among the Ephesian women (2 Timothy 3:6), and some of their ascetic teaching was directed toward them (1 Timothy 4:3; possibly 1 Timothy 2:15). The opponents were actively seducing the women (2 Timothy 3:6), especially the young widows (1 Timothy 5:11–15), which helps explain the repeated call for marital faithfulness among the church leaders (1 Timothy 3:2, 12; Titus 1:6). While it appears that the prominent leaders of the opposition were men, the women were also helping to spread the heresy (1 Timothy 2:12; possibly 5:13). According to one interpretation of 1 Timothy 2:8–15, it is possible that the opponents were teaching the women to rebel openly against their husbands, and perhaps all male authority, and to dress seductively as an expression of that rebellion (see Comment on 1 Timothy 2:9).4

This explains Paul’s later description of some of the false teachers: “Among them are those who creep into households and capture weak women, burdened with sins and led astray by various passions, always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth” (2 Timothy 3:6–7).

The point for our purposes is that the false teachers were aggressively asserting their heretical teaching and were finding fertile ground in the church, especially among the women.

Nature of Paul’s Lists

Another peculiarity of the cultural context and how Paul addresses it is the nature of his lists. Throughout the Pastoral Epistles, we see lists of qualities that true Christians, and especially leaders, are to possess. Significantly, many of the qualities in these lists are the opposite of the characteristics of the false teachers. For example, the false teachers had brought reproach on the church (e.g., Titus 1:16), so church leaders are to be “above reproach” (1 Timothy 3:2; Titus 1:6) and have a good reputation (1 Timothy 3:7). The false teachers were seducing women (2 Timothy 3:6), so church leaders had to be faithful in their marriage (1 Timothy 3:2, 12; Titus 1:6).5

This is a critical point. Paul’s requirements for all people, men and women, young and old, while true in and of themselves, must be understood against the backdrop of the historical setting. Paul is not just listing good virtues; he is listing virtues that would set the true Christians apart from the false teachers. In a sense, he is saying, “Pursue those virtues that are good in and of themselves — and that will also distinguish you from the sinful qualities of the false teachers.”

For example, 1 Timothy 2:15 may seem like one of the strangest verses in all the Bible. “[Women] will be saved through childbearing — if they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self-control.” Why does Paul emphasize having children, as if he were teaching salvation by procreation (an interpretation for which no one would seriously argue)? The answer may lie in the fact that the false teachers were forbidding marriage (1 Timothy 4:3) and therefore, presumably, also forbidding having children. This backdrop also helps to explain Paul’s later admonition when he says, “I would have younger widows marry, bear children, manage their households, and give the adversary no occasion for slander” (1 Timothy 5:14).

The church’s women were to work out the implications of their salvation not by following the false teachers, but, among other things, by accepting the callings for which God had created them.

Paul is saying that a woman’s salvation and the practical outworking of that salvation (cf. Philippians 2:12) do not consist in altering her role in the church. Rather, she is to accept her God-given role, one of the specific functions being the bearing of children (synecdoche). Of course, her salvation — and man’s — ultimately is predicated upon perseverance; she must live out her salvation in all faith and love and holiness, with modesty. This is the standard Pauline thought that salvation requires continual perseverance (cf. 1 Timothy 4:16), and good works, which, far from meriting salvation (cf. 1 Timothy 1:12–17), are evidence of that salvation (cf. Romans 2:6–10, 26–29; 1 Corinthians 6:9–11; Galatians 5:21).6

We come to understand verse 15 as we see it against the cultural backdrop, comparing Paul’s positive instructions with the negative example of the false teachers. The same is true of our passage, to which we now turn.

‘Working at Home’

Titus 2 contains a list of instructions for older men (verse 2), and then older women, including the admonition to “teach what is good” (verse 3). Unfortunately, the NIV translates the first word in verse 4 (Greek hina) as “then,” using it to start a new sentence. The NLT loses the connection between the two verses altogether. But Paul’s point is that their good teaching was to be “so that” (hina, NASB, CSB, NRSV, cf. ESV), “in this way” (NET), they could encourage the younger women “to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home [oikourgous], kind, and submissive to their own husbands” (2:4b–5a).

Both oikourgos and its variant oikouros occur only here in the New Testament and rarely in secular literature. Under these situations, we have to look at the morphology of the word and its biblical context to determine its meaning. Oikourgos is a compound word formed from oikos + ergon, “house/home” + “work.”

The variety of English translations shows the difficulty of defining oikourgos: “workers at home” (NASB, CSB), “working at home” (ESV), “to work in their homes” (NLT), “busy at home” (NIV), “good managers of the household” (NRSV, which does not see hagnas [“pure, chaste”] as its own category but as modifying oikourgous), “fulfilling their duties at home” (NET), and “to be good housewives” (TEV).

Note that there is nothing in the word’s morphology that suggests working only at home, nor does the word define the nature of the work. In fact, due to the rarity of the word, we would be wise not to define it too specifically. This is where the biblical context comes into the discussion.

Titus 2:5 in Biblical Context

Context provides an important clue. As we saw above, Paul is listing the good qualities that contrast with the bad qualities of the false teachers and their adherents. “Working at home” contrasts with the activity of the younger widows, who “learn to be idlers, going about from house to house, and not only idlers, but also gossips and busybodies, saying what they should not” (1 Timothy 5:13). “Working at home” also contrasts with another description of some of the women and the influence of the false teachers, as we’ve already seen (2 Timothy 3:6–7).

Obviously, these passages do not capture Paul’s assessment of all women of all time, but they do offer his description of some of the women in first-century Ephesus and Crete. Paul’s argument is that the older women are to urge the younger women to not be like the seduced younger women.

Another important piece of context is Paul’s instruction that younger widows were to “manage their households” (oikodespotein, 1 Timothy 5:14). There is a vast difference between a domestic slave (as some might understand “working at home”) and a wife who “manages” her household.

Broader biblical context also assures us that godly women can fulfill Titus 2:5 while also working outside the home. The noble (or strong) woman of Proverbs 31 certainly does not work only at home. “She considers a field and buys it; with the fruit of her hands she plants a vineyard” (Proverbs 31:16). It is instructive that the book of Ruth follows Proverbs in Hebrew book order; Ruth is one embodiment of the noble woman of the previous chapter, who did work outside the home.

Titus 2:5 Today

Notice that Paul’s instruction in Titus 2:5 is not grounded in creation, as is 1 Timothy 2:12–13. The reason for the instruction is “that the word of God may not be reviled” (Titus 2:5). Paul uses this argument two other times in the immediate context: “so that an opponent may be put to shame, having nothing evil to say about us” (verse 8); “so that in everything they [the slaves] may adorn the doctrine of God our Savior” (verse 10).

It is fair to say that in all cultures of all times, being “gossips and busybodies, saying what they should not” is always wrong (1 Timothy 5:13). It is always wrong to be “weak . . . burdened with sins and led astray by various passions, always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth” (2 Timothy 3:6–7). Doing anything that genuinely damages the cause of Christ is always wrong. To this point, the eternal truths behind the first-century cultural expressions come straight away into our culture.

Applying Titus 2:5 further requires us to consider what Paul does not say. Paul doesn’t say that women can work only at home. He doesn’t say that the burdens of managing the household don’t also fall on husbands. But what he clearly does say is that women, whether ancient or modern, are not to be like the ancient Ephesian and Cretan women, who were deceived, gullible, and neglecting their homes.

Applying the passage today also calls us to consider the drastic differences between the ancient and modern home, and the division of labor between husband and wife. Crucially, however, the family is not to be neglected, which was the very issue in Ephesus and Crete. I would argue that, today, a woman’s “working at home” calls her to focus on her children and her marriage. These are the biblical priorities that would be neglected with any activity resembling Ephesus and Crete.

Application would also have to take single mothers into account. When there is no husband to primarily shoulder household responsibilities, balancing work and home can be extremely difficult. While some can balance these priorities, many others struggle to do so. This is where the biblical challenge of caring for widows and orphans surfaces. If a single mother is struggling to “work at home,” maybe the church should step in to care for those in need.

When applied to modern culture, where working outside the home would not invite “the word of God [to] be reviled” (Titus 2:5), the cultural expression of Paul’s injunction would not apply.

In my opinion, however, if both parents work outside the home, and if the children are being neglected and the home is not being fruitfully managed, the verse does have something to say. In today’s culture, it is still true that when the focus of a wife (and her husband) are exclusively outside the home, the marriage and the family and the children suffer, which would then invite “the word of God [to] be reviled” (Titus 2:5). This is as wrong now as in ancient Crete.

It certainly is possible for a wife to work full time outside the home and not invite Paul’s critique, but I think it is quite difficult. My wife stayed home with our three energetic, rambunctious children. To make that happen, I committed to work two jobs and to be available evenings and at least one day a week. I hesitate to think of the negative impact a part-time mom or a disconnected dad would have had on our children’s personalities and values and faith, and on our witness in the church and the neighborhood.

Audio Transcript

Good Monday, and thank you for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast. Well, male and female roles in the local church are clearly defined in the Bible. We believe those roles are clearly defined in the Bible. But do these roles hold outside the church, and particularly in a parachurch ministry structure? Increasingly, parachurch organizations are saying no. But that’s the open question for you today, Pastor John, who joins us remotely over Zoom.

The question is from a man inside a parachurch right now. “Pastor John, hello. I work for a global parachurch organization which is well-known. Recently our leadership decided that all positions of leadership within the organization will be opened to women. This includes campus leadership, regional leadership, and national leadership. Women will be permitted to teach men from the Scripture, to be in positions of spiritual authority over men, to shape and correct doctrine within the organization, and to mentor men in their ministry roles. Previously, these positions of spiritual authority over men were reserved for men alone. The reason given for this change is that a parachurch organization is not the church. Therefore the commands addressed to churches about the role of men and women in relationship to one another do not apply in this case. How do you see it?”

Well, that’s sad to hear to me, but it’s not surprising and it’s not new. The position that the teachings of the Bible concerning sexuality have no bearing on human relationships outside the church or the home is naive. Actually, to call it naive is perhaps too gentle because it could also be called culturally compromised. In other words, the pressures of our culture to view maleness and femaleness as having no built-in, natural, God-ordained differences that would shape our different relationships and responsibilities, those pressures — those cultural, societal pressures — are so great that many Christians today surrender to them rather than looking like fools in the eyes of the world.

Rejecting Authority

The world today is in a free fall of denial that nature teaches us anything about what maleness and femaleness are for. And that denial used to be — back when I was in the early days of fighting these battles — that male and female personhood teaches us nothing about what God intended our roles to be. But now the denial is that our bodies, not just our persons, teach us nothing about what life should be as male or female. You can cut off breasts; you can cut off the penis; you can cut out the uterus; you can replace estrogen with testosterone; you can grow facial hair on a female cheek.

“The world today is in a free fall of denial that nature teaches us anything about what maleness and femaleness are for.”

So at the root of the rejection that nature teaches us that men and women should relate in certain ways is the absolute refusal in our culture, by and large, to allow our individual freedom to be limited in any way by an authority outside our desires. Whether tradition or God or Bible or nature or instinct or society, we will not let anything infringe upon our autonomy and the sovereignty of our desires. So if God designs women to be women and men to be men, both in their bodies and in every cell of their bodies, and if his designs are written on their hearts, these God-given designs must be absolutely rejected because they infringe so obviously upon the autonomy of my sovereign self.

So at the root of the rejection that nature teaches us that men and women should relate in certain ways and not other ways is the old reality of Romans 8:7–8: “The mind that is set on the flesh” — that is the natural, fallen human mind — “is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law” — whether that law is in the Bible or written on the heart — “indeed, it cannot [submit]. Those who are in the flesh” — that is, who are merely human, apart from regeneration and the work of the Holy Spirit — “cannot please God.” Or 1 Corinthians 2:14: “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly” — they are foolishness — “to him,” which is why the person who holds my understanding today would be regarded as foolish.

Headed for a Fall

The culture as a whole is in a free fall of denial. Nobody in this free fall has on a parachute. It’s all going to end tragically, the evidences of which are all around us. They make you want to weep when you see what’s happening to young people, what’s happening to relationships, the kind of remorse and regret and carnage that is being unleashed on our culture as a penalty for the free fall denial of God and his ways.

And the gravitational pull of this free fall is in almost every movie, every online drama, every advertisement, every newscast, so that a person who stands up and draws attention to God’s word or the teaching of nature and questions the wisdom of undifferentiated sex roles will not only be thought a fool, but also unjust and, very likely, soft on abuse, even though all the while the sex-leveling egalitarian impulses wreak havoc at every level of our culture, mocking and distorting the very kind of strength and responsibility and leadership that we so need from men.

All of that to say, the argument that the biblical teachings on manhood and womanhood don’t have any bearing on roles outside the home and church is both naive and culturally compromised.

God and Nature Teach

Let me offer two reasons for thinking this way. One is that when the apostle Paul gave his instructions that only spiritually qualified men should teach and exercise authority in the church, his argument was not based on culture or on family or church or structures — ecclesiastical structures or any others. It was based on two things: (1) the order of man and woman in creation and (2) the dynamics between man and woman in the fall.

He said, “I do not permit a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet.” And here comes the argument: “For Adam was formed first, then Eve.” That’s argument number one. And two, “Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor” (1 Timothy 2:12–14).

So Paul saw in the Genesis account of God’s word that built into creation from the beginning, before the fall, was a peculiar responsibility of men to bear the burden of leadership and care. And he saw in the way Adam was present and silent as Satan drew Eve into deceit that the abandonment of this leadership — in that case, Adam’s passivity and silence — bears very bad fruit. So the fact that Paul gave instructions for how this original design relates to the church in no way implies that it is limited to the church or the home. That was one application of many.

And you can see this again in 1 Corinthians 11, where Paul is helping the church preserve the dynamics of manhood and womanhood. He says at one point, “Does not nature itself teach you that if a man wears long hair it is a disgrace for him?” (1 Corinthians 11:14). Now, what I take that to mean is this: “Has not God put in man, by nature, the impulse that to take on culturally feminine symbols is disgraceful?” And we should agree with him. Nature teaches that it is disgraceful. The Bible teaches and nature teaches.

We might say today, “Does not nature teach you that for a man to wear a dress and stockings and high heels and lipstick is a disgrace?” Yes, it is. And nature teaches that. It is written on the heart. Millions are suppressing this truth of nature, but it is there. It is inescapable.

Parachurch Application

With regard to men and women in parachurch organizations, I think Paul would say, “I have taught, Moses has taught, nature teaches that it goes against man’s and woman’s truest, God-given nature to place a woman in a role of regular, direct, personal leadership over men.”

Now if you wonder, “Well, what do you mean, Piper, by ‘regular, direct, personal’?” then since this is a short podcast, I have to refer you to my little booklet What’s the Difference?. You don’t have to buy it. You can download it for free. And on page 58 and following, I define “regular, direct, personal” so that it will, I hope, make sense.

These are days of great shifting in people’s convictions and alignments on this issue of how men and women should relate to each other. So I pray for our brother who sent us this question, and I pray for myself and all of us, that God would guide us into truth and give us the courage to stand for it.

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.