Solomon Stoddard (1643-1729)
One
of the most influential leaders in American Protestantism from the settlement
of Massachusetts (1630) to the colonial Great Awakening (ca. 1740). From his
pulpit in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he served from 1672 to 1729,
Stoddard's ideas exerted a powerful influence, not only in the Connecticut
River valley, but in Boston and in New England as a whole.
Stoddard,
was best known for his innovations in church discipline. By his day many New
England Congregational churches had adopted the Halfway Covenant (A covenant
made with the Devil himself!). This allowed baptized members who had not made a
personal profession of faith to bring their infants for baptism even as it kept
all except those who could personally confess their faith from participating in
the Lord's Supper. Stoddard proposed that all who lived outwardly decent lives
should be allowed to take Communion. At the same time he also urged the
churches of Massachusetts to develop a "connectional" or
"presbyterian" plan of oversight in order to ensure the orthodoxy of
local churches and ministers. These different aspects of Stoddard's thought
have led some historians to praise him for his democratic principles (in
opening up the Lord's Supper) and others to condemn him as autocratic (for
proposing tighter outside control of local churches).
In
fact, Stoddard was most interested in revivals and the conversion of the lost.
He regarded the Lord's Supper distributed at an open Communion as a converting
ordinance. He claimed that participation in Communion was an excellent way for
people to "learn the necessity and sufficiency of the Death of Christ in
order to [find] Pardon." Likewise, Stoddard intended tighter control over
the churches to preserve the purity of the gospel. For his labors, Stoddard
experienced five "harvests" of souls in Northampton. In general,
however, those who followed his teachings on church discipline were not as
eager as he was to promote evangelism. Stoddard's concern for revival was
shared by his grandson, Jonathan Edwards, who became his associate minister in
1724 and his successor in 1729. Edwards did eventually repudiate his grandfather's
ideas on church membership, for which he lost the pulpit in Northampton. But
his efforts in the 1730s and 1740s to promote the revival that came to be known
as the Great Awakening would have earned Stoddard's warm commendation.