The New Hampshire Declaration Of Faith: Reevaluating Its Impact On Baptists In The South During The Nineteenth Century -- By: E. Peter Frank Lumpkins

Journal: Journal for Baptist Theology & Ministry
Volume: JBTM 15:2 (Fall 2018)
Article: The New Hampshire Declaration Of Faith: Reevaluating Its Impact On Baptists In The South During The Nineteenth Century
Author: E. Peter Frank Lumpkins


The New Hampshire Declaration Of Faith: Reevaluating Its Impact On Baptists In The South During The Nineteenth Century

E. Peter Frank Lumpkins

E. Peter Frank Lumpkins is Director of TMU Press at Truett-McConnell University in Cleveland, Georgia. [email protected]

The New Hampshire Declaration of Faith (NHC) remains a confessional milestone within American Baptist life. Composed, adopted, and distributed beginning in 1833 by a small Baptist convention in the northeastern United States, by century’s end, the NHC would rise to confessional prominence as one of the most influential Baptist confessions ever composed. W. W. Barnes concluded the NHC is “probably the most widely used and the most influential of any statement of doctrine among American Baptists.”1 Steve Lemke concurs. “By far the most widely accepted and formative Southern Baptist confession from about the 1840s until today is the New Hampshire Confession of 1833.”2

Just under a century after the NHC debuted, the Southern Baptist Convention chose to adopt, as recommended by the committee it commissioned a year earlier, “the New Hampshire Confession of Faith, revised at certain points, and with some additional articles growing out of present needs.”3 However, the widespread acceptance of the 1833 confession among Baptists had not been the equivalent of a YouTube video gone viral. Rather, according to many, the rise in popularity and influence for New Hampshire’s declaration of faith was more like riding on the slow boat to China. As Edward Hiscox described, “The New Hampshire Confession was of slow growth, as most enduring standard documents have been.”4

Southern Baptist statesman and theologian Edgar Y. Mullins (1860–1928), then president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and chair of the committee that proposed Southern Baptists’ first convention-wide confession in 1925, had concluded just over a decade earlier, by approvingly quoting from William McGlothlin’s classic work on Baptist confessions, “This Declaration [i.e. NHC] has become almost the sole Confession used in the North, East and West, where Calvinism has become most modified by Arminianism.”5 Hence, though the NHC was adopted convention-wide by Southern Baptists in Memphis, Tennessee,6 Mullins seemed to have followed McGlothlin by limiting the influence of New Hampshire’s confession...

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