This paper examines pro-revival ordination as a vision for augmenting colonial ecclesiological authority in the contentious environment of New England during the Enlightenment. Congregationalist Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) preached, published, and produced protégés during the transatlantic revivals known as the Great Awakening. His favorite biblical text to use for ordination must have been the Gospel of John, for it is the most visited book for such occasion. Through one paradigmatic ordination sermon for a newly-minted Presbyterian minister, Robert Abercrombie (1712–1780), Edwards preached and published The True Excellency of a Minister of the Gospel to elaborate his mature vision of the ministerial ideal by exegeting John’s Gospel. Within his exegesis, Edwards, perhaps atypically, cast John the Baptizer as an exemplar clerical authority in both doctrinal light and burning passion and applied it to his ministerial context of the long-eighteenth century.
Thus, this paper will (1) examine how the exegesis in the ordination sermon served Edwards’s mentoring relationship with Abercrombie across ecclesiological lines, (2) situate the mentoring relationship between Edwards and Abercrombie in their ecclesiological milieu and its development, (3) and trace how these ministers could affirm the historic mode of ordination and, simultaneously, destabilize the standing authority of the clerical establishment with varying degrees of effectiveness.