Baptist scholars in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have interpreted the 1833 New Hampshire Confession, the most influential Baptist confession of the past two centuries, as a blend of Calvinist and Arminian doctrines. Calvinist Baptists in upper New England, according to the standard interpretation, were losing ground to the Arminian Free Will Baptist movement and found it necessary to adjust their theology in order to compete effectively for converts. William Brackney, for example, argued in 2004 that the New Hampshire Confession’s objective was “to bring closer together the main branches of Baptists in northern New England, the Regular or Calvinistic Baptists and the Freewill Baptists” (Genetic History of Baptist Thought, 40). James Leo Garrett judged in 2009 that the confession was as “moderately Arminian” as it was “moderately Calvinistic” (Baptist Theology, 132).
This paper argues rather that the New Hampshire Confession was designed to bridge the differences among Calvinistic Regular Baptists between “old Calvinism” and Edwardsean Calvinism (also known as Consistent Calvinism, New England Theology, or the New Divinity). The majority of New England Baptists were old Calvinists who affirmed the theology of the Second London, Saybrook, and Westminster confessions. A significant minority of New England Baptists were Edwardsean Calvinists who affirmed the soteriology of such followers of Jonathan Edwards as Joseph Bellamy, Samuel Hopkins, and Timothy Dwight.
At the points where Edwardsean Calvinism differed from the old Calvinism, the 1833 New Hampshire Confession intentionally left room for both views. The two most important differences involved the atonement and imputation. Edwardseans rejected penal substitutionary atonement in favor of the moral government view of the atonement. The New Hampshire Confession affirmed no specific view of atonement, but stated merely that Christ “made atonement for our sins by his death.” Edwardseans also rejected both the imputation of Adam’s sin to his posterity and the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to believers. The confession carefully avoided any affirmation of imputation. At other points also the confession accommodated itself markedly to Edwardsean views.
The writers of the New Hampshire Confession thus designed it not to encompass both Calvinists and Arminians, but rather to encompass both traditional Calvinists and Edwardsean Calvinists.