Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 28:3 (Fall 2024)
Article: Friendship With A Cause: Revival In The Thought Of Isaac Watts And Philip Doddridge
Author: Britt Stokes

Friendship With A Cause: Revival In The Thought Of Isaac Watts And Philip Doddridge

Britt Stokes

Britt Stokes is founder and president of Propago Ministries, an organization that helps local churches navigate leadership transitions. He earned his PhD from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky where he researched the spirituality of hymnwriter, Isaac Watts. He also received a ThM and MDiv from Southern Seminary, and a MBA from Charleston Southern University. He is a pastor residing in Charleston, South Carolina.

Introduction

If the names Isaac Watts (1674–1748) and Philip Doddridge (1702–1751) are remembered in modern times, it is often due to their place as ministers, authors, theologians, educators, or hymnwriters.1 They both advanced the cause of Christ through a profound commitment to the early eighteenth-century dissenting church of England. Forged in the religious upbringings of English Puritanism, Watts and Doddridge understood the “dissenting interest” of their context in a similar vein. They shared many of the same doctrinal commitments, wrote hymns in an effort to reform public worship, and committed a lifetime of resources and vigor toward the formal education of dissenting ministers.2

Perhaps one overlooked aspect of the legacies of Watts and Doddridge is their providential friendship as co-laborers through a uniquely transitional era of church history. The closing of the seventeenth-century and beginning

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years of the eighteenth-century functioned as a time of historic and unexpected change. The English Puritan movement had largely faded, while the rise of science, art, and law from the English Enlightenment began to take root in the spiritual contours of Christianity.3 Even further, Evangelicalism was rapidly developing through the monumental influences of figures such as John Wesley, George Whitefield, and Jonathan Edwards. These factors capture a confluence of adjustment which formed a narrow transitional period between “old Dissent” and Evangelicalism. This transitional period, in which Watts and Doddridge were key leaders, brought about challenges due to the marked decline of the English dissenting church. Watts and Doddridge wrestled intellectually and spiritually with the nature of revival during this time, while simultaneously functioning as enthusiastic bystanders to the sweeping conversions on America shores and in Scotland. For the better part of three decades (from roughly 1720 to 1751), Watts and Doddridge navigated a discouraging, confusing, and often thrilling period in the kingdom of God. Their position as l...