Solomon Stoddard
Solomon Stoddard was a prominent early American minister and writer born in 1643, who played a significant role in shaping American religious ideology during the seventeenth century. A Congregationalist theologian, he notably shifted the understanding of Holy Communion away from strict Puritanical traditions, emphasizing personal experience and conversion as central to the church’s mission. Stoddard advocated for a more inclusive approach to sacraments, allowing all upstanding community members to partake, which sparked debates with established church authorities, particularly the Mathers.
Educated at Harvard, Stoddard served as a chaplain in Barbados before taking a ministerial position in Northampton, Massachusetts. He was married to Esther Warham Mather and fathered fourteen children, including the notable Reverend Jonathan Edwards. His theological innovations, particularly in the democratization of church membership and the promotion of personal evangelism, laid groundwork for American evangelicalism. Stoddard's influence persisted beyond his lifetime, impacting the religious fervor of the Great Awakening, and his writings reflect a uniquely American voice that resonated with popular emotions. His legacy is further enriched by connections to notable descendants, including Aaron Burr and Gore Vidal.
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Solomon Stoddard
Theologian
- Born: September 27, 1643
- Birthplace: Boston, Massachusetts
- Died: February 11, 1729
- Place of death: Northampton, Massachusetts
Biography
Early American minister and writer Solomon Stoddard significantly influenced the evolution of American religious ideology, contributing many distinctively American theological ideas. A frontier minister in the western portion of seventeenth century New England, he developed Congregationalist theology regarding Holy Communion in a direction away from Puritanism and was an important advocate for the idea that conversion was an experiential event rather than an intellectual one. Stoddard valued conversion as the most important purpose of the church, and thus made evangelism, ministry, and the qualifications of ministers priorities.
Born to a family of wealthy Boston merchants in 1643, Stoddard is the first significant American-born colonial figure in American literature. He spent his early career at Harvard, studying for the ministry from 1658 to 1665 and receiving an M.A. in 1665. He became a fellow in 1666 and librarian in 1667. He began writing poems and sermons during this period, but they remain to this day in manuscript.
After 1667, Stoddard was chaplain to the governor of Barbados and then minister at Northampton outside Boston, the church that had been headed by Eleazar Mather before Stoddard’s appointment. Stoddard married Mather’s widow, Esther Warham Mather. They had fourteen children, including one daughter who was the mother of Reverend Jonathan Edwards.
During his tenure at Northampton, Stoddard began to articulate his opposition to several key church institutions involving conversion, especially the public profession of faith and the restriction of the sacraments to confirmed believers. He advocated using the Lord’s Supper as a tool for conversion and began to admit all upstanding members of the community to communion. By 1679, he was defending the heretical practice in public and in print, beginning a long-lasting debate with the Mathers, who were infuriated by his challenge to the Congregationalist autocracy.
Stoddard’s initial movement was known as sacramentalism and focused on democratizing access to the sacraments and church membership. His theology was intended to grow the church, to draw people into worship and fellowship by making the church less judgmental and evaluatory, shifting responsibility for determining whether or not conversion had occurred to the individual rather than the clergy. Stoddard’s revisionist theology was popular, and he gave several commencement addresses at the Congregationalist seminary, now Harvard University.
He is also noted as one of the progenitors of American evangelicalism, largely because of his emphasis on personal experience and revelation rather than intellect in both the conversion to and experience of Christian spirituality. Later in his life, the promotion of evangelicalism became a preoccupation, and he advocated a national church largely at odds with his earlier democratic and individualist tendencies. He did maintain his belief in the importance of personal zeal, and his ideas in mutated form were influential—largely directly through his grandson Jonathan Edwards—on the theology of the Great Awakening, which began approximately a decade after his death in 1729.
Stoddard’s writing is noteworthy for his use of frontier idiom and language, even though he was very well educated and versed in both Latin and Greek. His characteristically American ability to appeal to popular emotions made his writing highly successful. By the mid-1720’s, the Congregationalists had widely adopted the practice of offering open communion and were organizing themselves into “national” organizations following his model. In addition to Jonathan Edwards, among his descendants are Aaron Burr and Gore Vidal.