Edwards True Religion Summary

In 1844, there was great division over the issue of slavery. The Baptists of the South felt that the Northerners’ position that “‘slaveholding brethren were less than followers of Jesus’ effectively obliged slaveholding Southerners to leave the fellowship” . There was also disagreement between the Northerners and Southerners over the number of missionaries being supported and sent to the South (probably because of

The Sacred Romance Drawing Closer to the Heart of God by Brent Curtis and John Eldredge is an interesting book that’s supposedly filled with useful information about how to live like a Christian and become more like Christ. However, this book has many issues. Brent Curtis and John Eldredge attempt to get us as readers to understand how to live and be more like Christ by comparing the pains and sufferings we all go through in our everyday lives to that of arrows piercing our hearts. As Curtis and Eldredge talked about arrows piercing our hearts I realized there have been times in my life that happened to me. Finally, after reading the book I realized that this book has the potential of being an interesting read but, it’s many errors leave us as readers confused.

Care of Souls provides an account of Christianity's historical practices of soul care through a culmination of his many years of scholarship, teaching and clinical work.

To Stoddard, the idea of “fostering conversions was more important than discovering a perfect church order, and in that attitude he blazed the way for the most influential practice in American religious history: he was the first American to make periodic revivals a centerpiece of his ministry” . Every decade his congregation would experience an “awakening” in which many people were moved spiritually and often lead to conversion. Some of these revivals even made it past Northampton and into the neighboring communities, directly impacting young Edwards and his family, for Edwards’s father rejected the half-way covenant but endorsed revival. These disagreements divided his family and remained unresolved for decades .

I was really interested to know more about chapter two in the book of Dean Brackley, The Call to Discernment in Troubled Times . This chapter talks about the foundation of free love. Brackley talks about how humans are shaped to love God with all their heart and spirit . I wanted to relate this with the presentation that was given by Father Coyne, because he talked about attachments that human beings have that might affect the love of God. Brackley explains how humans should praise God in order to save their souls, so I thought if a person has some life attachments that would affect his or her love or praise for God.

One can hear a sermon any day of the week, because there are many preachers out there in the world. Many sermons are retold Bible stories from the Old and New Testaments that tell how our ancestors lived, and teach us life applications of how to glorify God while we are living our lives. For over a thousand years God’s word has been preached by many faithful men who follow Him. However, there were some of those faithful men who used God’s Word and their own improvisation to convict sinners and to put their trust in God. Those times resulted in an era called the Great Awakening of the 18th century and they also put an end to the segregation era of the 20th century. Two of the faithful men during those eras were

Along with the division between rural and urban plantation missions, in the 1830s and 1840s, concern arose among Southern churchmen after acknowledging that multitudes of districts in the Southwest had churches that could not contain even “one-tenth of the Negro populations; besides others in which there are no churches at all”. The fact that nearly all Southwestern slave states lacked Christian institutions before plantation missions meant that religion played little to no role in the lives of the majority of slaves residing within these boundaries. Even after missionaries brought the gospel to both rural and urban slaves at home, the prevalence of plantations missions varied from state to state. This deviation shaped the role of religion in the lives of black slaves depending on which state they lived and worked in. Although missionaries urged all slaveholders to actively participate in catechizing their slaves, since the plantation mission movement geographically centered in lowland South Carolina and Georgia masters and

Christianity was new to most slaves who had been abducted from their native country and taken to the Americas. Some were hesitant to abandon their old traditions for the Christ their white captors taught of, but after several generations of slavery, most black slaves had succumbed to relentless preaching. However, the Christianity that took hold within the slave community was often interpreted differently, conveying different messages to pockets of slave population. The use of Christianity in slavery was a double edged sword, creating not only a tool for control, but a weapon of discontent in slave communities. Examining the works of Richard Allen and the stories of Nat Turner, create a narrative of how Christianity was applied differently to slaves.

One of the first things that attracted the African American slaves to Christianity was a way of obtaining the salvation of theirs souls based on the Christian’s idea of a future reward in heaven or punishment in hell, which did not exist in their primary religion. The religious principles inherited from Africa sought purely physical salvation and excluded the salvation of the soul. However, they did believe in one supreme God, which made it easier for them to assimilate Christianity.

Particularly captivated by Whitefield's unique preaching strategy were poor whites and enslaved blacks, who were finally beginning to embrace Christianity. Another effect of the great awakening occurred with the African slaves that were forcibly brought to the colonies to work. A great sense of irony, in spite of their disapprovals of the slave trade and the exploitation of slaves, George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards were slave-owners. Edwards had routinely bought household slaves, the first record of which dates to 1731, while Whitefield “came to own a South Carolina plantation worked by slaves” and “pushed for the legalization of slavery in Georgia” in the 1750’s . Clearly, both Whitefield and Edwards saw no flaw between the keeping of their slaves and the freedom in Christ of which they so single-mindedly professed.

During the 1790s, a black evangelist named Harry Hoosier drew thousands of converts across the South with his dramatic retellings of Biblical stories. A black Virginia Baptist preacher named John Jasper became legendary for his ability to string "together picture after picture." Black preachers' use of repetition, humor, striking metaphors, and a stress on the human Jesus transformed American preaching

Faith operates in a unique way by providing the average, the noble, or the distasteful with a means to understand the world we inhabit. However, our worldly experiences also operate as a means to understanding the complexities of our faith. For St. Augustine, faith provides more questions than answers, but consequently leads to his life as a bishop and eventually sainthood. For some, however, the Bible provides the answers to all the questions that go unanswered by common sense. In St. Augustine’s Confessions, Augustine is able to further understand himself and his faith in Christ by reflecting on anecdotes of his past. Conversely, the Bible’s use of etiology provides spiritual justification for physical realities.

Long before their contact with whites, Africans were a strongly religious, and deeply spiritual people. During the early history of slavery, the African American spirituality was often seen by whites as a pagan faith. These rituals and dogmas were seen by whites as Voodoo, Hoodoo, Witchcraft, and superstitions. They often commented on these "pagan practices," and fetishes, and were threatened by them. As a result, great effort was put on eradicating these practices, and many were lost within a generation.# Although tremendous efforts was placed on eradicating the “superstitious” religious beliefs of the African slaves, they were not immediately introduced to the religion of white slave masters, Christianity. Many planters resisted the idea of converting slaves to Christianity out of a fear that baptism would change a slave's legal status. The black population was generally untouched by Christianity until the religious revivals of the 1730s and 1740s. The Bible was manipulated to support the institution of slavery and its inhumane practices. Christianity was used to suppress and conform slaves. Slaveholders, priests, and those tied to the Church undermined the beliefs of the millions of African-Americans converts.# White Christianity was used to justify the enslavement of blacks. By the early nineteenth century, slaveholders had adopted the view that Christianity would make slaves more submissive and orderly.

Malissa, as you pointed out, all men are created equal and reflect God's image. Unfortunately, it seems that majority's knowledge of the gospel did not transfer to their behavior or perspective. Through the hard work of Christian thinkers such as William Wilberforce and John Wesley, the abolition of the slave trade was finally accomplished. However, the imperialistic attitude Europeans had at the moment affected the minority's attitude toward this 'western religion', and limited the spread of the good message that can give hope and breakthrough for the oppressed. Even to these days, the missionaries regardless of their nationalities could be deposing native cultures, and the unconscious arrogance might lead to wrong direction. Therefore, through

“To be fair, it should be admitted, however, that on the ground out of which Christianity grew, the concept of “spiritulization of passion” could have never been formed. After all the first church, as is well known, fought against the intelligent in “favor” of the “poor in spirit””