The founders and forerunners of the Southern Baptist Convention were fundamentally shaped by
the thought of Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards and his theological successors. While
Baptists in the antebellum South boasted a different theological pedigree than Presbyterians or
Congregationalists and while they inhabited a Southern landscape unfamiliar to the bustling
cities and tall forests of New England they believed their similarities with Edwards far
outweighed their differences. Like Edwards these Baptists were revivalistic Calvinistic
loosely confessional and committed to practical divinity. In these four things Southern
Edwardseanism lived moved and had its being. In the nineteenth-century when so many
Presbyterians scoffed at Edwards's innovation and Methodists scorned his Calvinism Baptists
found in Edwards a man after their own heart. By 1845 at the first Southern Baptist Convention
Southern Edwardseans had laid the groundwork for a convention marked by the theology of
Jonathan Edwards.
