CONNECTION BETWEEN WHITEFIELD, EDWARDS, HOPKINS AND FULLER

De: Guillermo Santamaria

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

This bookt frames Edwards, Hopkins, and Fuller as one “Edwardsian ecosystem” expressed in different church habitats—Congregational New England (Hopkins) and Particular Baptist England (Fuller)—and it does so explicitly through Old School Baptist eyes, i.e., with the controlling suspicion that this whole line (however brilliant) proved practically corrosive to “sound Baptist doctrine.”

The thesis is clean: Edwards supplies the conceptual machinery, Hopkins systematizes and weaponizes it into an activist ethical program, and Fuller translates Edwards into an anti–Hyper-Calvinist, missionary Baptist key. The “machinery” you highlight in Edwards is (1) natural vs. moral ability/inability—people have the faculties to believe, but their will is morally bound—plus (2) an affectional account of religion and (3) an expansive revival/missions horizon, with “true virtue” ripening into the later watchword “disinterested benevolence.”

Hopkins, in this book,, is where Edwards becomes programmatic: he takes Edwards’s moral vision and turns “disinterested benevolence” from a description of regenerate love into a totalizing ethical principle, then pushes it outward into social reform and organized benevolence, all while leaning on the natural/moral ability distinction to justify immediate calls to repentance and faith (because obligation stands even where moral willingness is absent). In other words, Hopkins doesn’t merely inherit Edwards; he industrializes Edwards—turning theological categories into an activist moral logic.

Fuller enters as the Baptist adaptor. He faces a different enemy—English Hyper-Calvinism that (as you summarize it) denied “duty-faith” and thereby weakened universal gospel pleading and missions—and he deploys Edwards’s same natural/moral framework to argue: sinners are obligated to believe, ministers must command and invite all hearers to faith, and yet only grace overcomes the moral hostility that explains unbelief. That Edwardsian move becomes, in your phrasing, the theological engine of “evangelistic Calvinism,” underwriting Carey and the Baptist Missionary Society.

It repeatedly insists on a crucial distinction: Fuller is Edwardsian more than Hopkinsian. You note documented contact and even tension between Hopkins and Fuller, and then you draw the family resemblance without collapsing them into one person: they share Edwardsian DNA (ability language, experiential piety, missionary horizon), but Hopkins runs the ethical and doctrinal extensions much farther (disinterested benevolence at full blast, reworked emphases in justification/imputation, broader “moral government” tendencies), while Fuller remains more “churchly,” more confessional in tone, and more careful to keep a recognizably Particular Baptist edge (especially around intent in the atonement). The metaphor you use is apt: same engine, different vehicles—Hopkins, the New England activist system-builder, Fuller the Baptist evangelistic mobilizer who trims speculative edges.