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In his tribute to Henry Holcombe (“H.H.”) Tucker in a 1902 volume of editorials which the Georgia Baptist Convention published, Henry McDonald, Tucker’s pastor for many years in Atlanta, called his late parishioner the “Jonathan Edwards of the South.”
Indeed, Tucker was Edwardsean in his ability to synthesize theology with crucial worldview-related disciplines such as philosophy, contemporary culture and religious movements of his day. Who was H.H. Tucker? Largely lost to posterity, Tucker was nonetheless a distinguished Baptist and Reformed theologian in the deep South during the Civil War era.
Born in Warren County Georgia in 1819, Tucker bore the namesake of his grandfather, Henry Holcombe, one of the eminent Baptist pastors in Georgia in the early nineteenth century. Holcombe was one of the founders of the Georgia Baptist Convention. Tucker spent his teen years in Philadelphia and received a classical education, graduating from Columbian College in Washington, D. C. in 1838 and for two years he practiced law in Forsyth, Ga.
In 1848 two landmark events occurred in Tucker’s life: he married Mary Catherine West (she died a few months later and he later remarried, having two children) and he abandoned his work as an attorney and surrendered to the high calling of Christian ministry. Soon, Tucker moved to Penfield, Ga., and received private theological instruction from J.L. Dagg, Southern Baptists’ first writing theologian, at Mercer University. Tucker pastored for only one year and served as a Christian educator. He served as president of both Mercer University and the University of Georgia, teaching theology, history, philosophy and the Bible at both schools.
While Tucker was noted as an educator, it is his work as editor of the Christian Index through which he achieved perhaps his greatest notoriety in Georgia and across the Baptist South, a kingdom Tucker tenderly referenced in his editorials as “my Southern Zion.” Tucker spent four separate tenures as editor of the Index from 1866—just a few months after the close of the Civil War—up through 1889. In 1888 Tucker bought the Index and operated it until his death in September of 1889.
Tucker only served as a pastor for a short time, but viewed himself as a shepherd-editor at the helm of the Index, writing often on doctrine and biblical exposition. He sought to teach, rebuke and warn from the editor’s chair. Upon his death on Sept. 9, 1889 by a tragic fall from the second story of his home in Macon, Ga., one longtime friend said of Tucker, “the ink that touched his pen turned to light.”
A staunch Calvinist in the mold of close friends Dagg, J. P. Boyce, Basil Manly, Jr., P. H. Mell and John Albert Broadus, Tucker wrote prolifically on the doctrines of grace and related topics such as divine providence and the covenant of grace. He also fed readers on a steady diet of practical divinity—prayer, family worship, sanctification—demonstrating how doctrines worked out in real life.
Perhaps more than any other topic, three subjects captured the attention of his pen most often, subjects which Tucker saw as intimately interrelated, subjects demanded by Baptists’ commitment to the authority and sufficiency of Scripture: regenerate church membership, the doctrine of regeneration and the pernicious threat to church purity of Finneyite revivalism.
by Jeff Robinson
