Deacons Appointed to Care for the Bodies of Men

Jonathan Edwards preached this sermon at Northampton in 1739 at the ordination of deacons, taking Romans 12:4-8 as his text. Reading Paul’s list of church functions, he sorts them into two kinds: prophesying, teaching, exhorting, and ruling, which serve men’s souls and belong to the office of bishop or elder; and ministering, giving, and showing mercy, which serve men’s bodies and belong to the deacon. His doctrine is that the officers Christ has appointed in his church respect either the souls or the bodies of men.

Edwards distinguishes the church’s extraordinary and temporary offices from its two ordinary and perpetual ones, bishops and deacons, and shows that the two agree in being overseers and stewards of God’s household but differ in that the one cares for souls and the other for bodies. The deacon’s essential business, he argues from Acts 6, is the relief of the poor, though it reaches also to the Lord’s Table and the support of ministers.

He grounds the arrangement in five correspondences: man’s twofold nature of body and soul, both redeemed by Christ; the two kinds of human need; the two tables of the law, mercy standing in the Christian church where sacrifice stood in Israel; Christ’s own twin work of teaching souls and healing bodies; and the covenant’s promises for this life and the life to come. In application he marvels at the wisdom and fatherly tenderness of a Savior who, knowing that “a care that lies in everybody’s hands equally is like to be neglected,” appointed officers so that his household would be fed in both body and soul, the minister answering to the eye that guides the body and the deacon to the hand that feeds it.