Jonathan Edwards
A Life
by George M. Marsden
Yale University Press, 640 pp., $35 Jonathan Edwards and the Bible
by Robert E. Brown
Indiana University Press, 352 pp., $35
Jonathan Edwards's Philosophy of History
The Re-Enchantment of the World in the Age of Enlightenment
by Avihu Zakai
Princeton University Press, 368 pp., $49.95
"The Miscellanies," 833-1152
Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 20
edited by Amy Plantinga Pauw
Yale University Press, 560 pp., $95
Writings on the Trinity, Grace, and Faith
Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 21
edited by Sang Hyun Lee
Yale University Press, 592 pp., $95
Sermons and Discourses, 1739-1742
Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 22
edited by Harry S. Stout, et al.
Yale University Press, 608 pp., $95
The Supreme Harmony of All
The Trinitarian Theology of Jonathan Edwards
by Amy Plantinga Pauw
Wm. B. Eerdmans, 196 pp., $22
America's God
From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln
by Mark A. Noll
Oxford University Press, 640 pp., $35
ALMOST NO ONE seems to deny that Jonathan Edwards is America's greatest theologian--perhaps the greatest mind America has ever produced, in any field. But that doesn't mean many like him very much. Born three hundred years ago, on October 5, 1703, Edwards has always provoked extreme reactions.
No shrinking lily herself, Harriet Beecher Stowe complained that Edwards's sermons on sin and suffering were "refined poetry of torture." After staying up one night to browse in his works, Mark Twain reported, "Edwards's God shines red and hideous in the glow from the fires of hell, their only right and proper adornment. By God, I was ashamed to be in such company." Generations of American college students have learned similar conclusions about his most famous sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," in the "Puritans" section of their classes on American literature.
Such received opinions and settled readings of particular texts often cry out for a contrarian critic with a lance long enough to deflate them. But, even if it is an accurate reading of such sermons as "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," the notion of a hellfire-obsessed Edwards derives from abstracting a small portion of his works, never set in balance with the rest. And it obscures the fact that both in intellectual creativity and cultural influence, Edwards towers above any other religious thinker to have graced the American scene.
His 1754 "Freedom of the Will" set the agenda for philosophical debates for more than a century by its daring attempt to resolve the antinomy between freedom and determinism. Edwards also challenged Enlightenment presumptions about evil, history, and reason. His theological classic, the 1746 "Religious Affections," may be the most acute work on spiritual discernment in the history of Christian thought. Edwards seems, in fact, far more obsessed with beauty than wrath. In his emphasis on experience and his effort to extract himself from European thinking, he laid the foundation for subsequent American intellectual life. And in his attempts to combine a radical vision of holiness with the most capacious appreciation of beauty in God's creation, he laid the foundation for subsequent American public life. Jonathan Edwards is America.
BORN THE ONLY SON of a Harvard-educated pastor and theologically astute mother, Edwards studied theology at Yale and became its head tutor, the functional equivalent of president. After a year pastoring a Presbyterian congregation in New York City, he preached for twenty-four years as Congregationalist pastor at the First Church in Northampton, Massachusetts, New England's largest church outside Boston.
From 1740 to 1741 Edwards was a leader of, and public apologist for, the Great Awakening, the religious revival that swept up and down the Eastern seaboard. Edwards enjoyed his congregation's favor for fifteen years, but tensions began to mount when Edwards read from the pulpit the names of young men who were accused of reading a midwife's manual and harassing young women. In 1750 the Northampton church dismissed Edwards over the question of communion requirements. Edwards then spent almost seven years as a missionary to Indians in Stockbridge (western Massachusetts), writing there some of his most celebrated treatises: "The Nature of True Virtue," "Concerning the End for Which God Created the World," "Freedom of the Will," and "Original Sin." In 1758 he assumed the presidency of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), but died five weeks later after a smallpox outbreak.
One price of omnipresent success is a kind of disappearance: If your influence extends everywhere, it almost looks as though you are nowhere. Although Edwards was revered for his piety and intellectual prowess in antebellum America, the Unitarians who gained cultural power after the Civil War forgot exactly what it was that Edwards had made possible for them--and consequently dismissed the thinker as an anachronistic symbol of the Puritanism that had allegedly slowed America's advance to modernity. Intellectuals generally did not take Edwards seriously again until 1949, when Harvard historian Perry Miller published his acclaimed biography, suggesting that only Edwards's unshrinking assessment of evil was capable of dispelling modernity's naive utopianism.
Since mid-century Edwards scholarship has exploded, with the number of dissertations on his work doubling every decade. The most prestigious university presses and journals have published hundreds of books and articles on his thought and influence. The critical edition of his works from Yale University Press will shortly reach twenty-seven volumes (although even that is only half of his written oeuvre). Now, in 2003, another spate of books and articles has appeared to mark the three-hundredth anniversary of his birth.
THE MOST IMPORTANT new arrival is "Jonathan Edwards," George Marsden's long-awaited biography. Marsden, one of the premier historians of American religion, has mastered the gargantuan sources, both secondary and primary (which include thousands of pages written in a hand so indecipherable as to drive a man to tears). Marsden's design with his six-hundred-page opus is not "essentially intellectual." Instead, he unveils "Edwards as a person, a public figure, and a thinker in his own time and place." He traces the rise of a child prodigy (who had learned Hebrew, Greek, and Latin by the age of ten) to the man who became "the most acute early American philosopher and the most brilliant of all American theologians."
More than any previous biographer, Marsden portrays a man with clay feet and inner demons. Edwards suffered recurring depressions throughout his life, his grandmother was an adulterer and psychotic, and mental illness ran in the family. He rebelled against his father's rigid Calvinist god of absolute sovereignty, but was converted by an "inward sweet sense" that convinced him that the true God "must be ineffably good, beautiful, and loving beyond human comprehension." The young mystic was a stiff pastor, unable to make small talk, and sometimes tactless in relations to his parishioners--which makes it all the more remarkable that he helped lead the popular religious awakenings which swept up and down the Connecticut River Valley and beyond, reaching as far as Maine in the north and Virginia in the south. Most historians of the American Founding doubt that the revolution could have taken place without these awakenings and the national unity they fostered.
Marsden also helps the reader understand why Edwards has been what Joseph Conforti calls the "white whale" of American religious history--the dazzling mystery that has attracted such scholars as Harvard's atheistic Miller and Berkeley's Henry May. Part of the answer, explains Marsden, is the beauty of his religious vision: For Edwards, "all created reality is like a quintessential explosion of light from the sun of God's intertrinitarian love." Edwards's world is full of beauty, because beauty and light constitute the essence of its Creator. In Edwards's memorable words, "God is the foundation and fountain of all being and all beauty, from whom all is perfectly derived, and on whom all is most absolutely and perfectly dependent; of whom and through whom and to whom is all being and all perfection; and whose being and beauty is as it were the sum and comprehension of all existence and excellence: much more than the sun is the fountain and summary comprehension of all the light and brightness of the day."
Another reason for Edwards's uncanny attractiveness is his eagerness to confront the received Enlightenment thinking that dominated European thought. In "The Nature of True Virtue"--which uses not the Bible but reason alone to press its case--Edwards challenged "the project that dominated Western thought, and eventually much of world thought, for the next two centuries," Marsden notes, "the grand idea . . . that humans would find it possible to establish on scientific principles a universal system of morality that would bring to an end the destructive conflicts that had plagued human history." Because Edwards was nearly the only moral philosopher in the eighteenth century to deny natural human goodness, he was among the few to perceive that this dream was not only empty but could lead to unimagined horrors.
Marsden suggests that it is precisely because of the twentieth century's experience of human horror that Edwards's thinking on hell cannot be so easily dismissed. Edwards believed that each person is "by nature incredibly short-sighted, self-absorbed, and blinded by pride." Only a traumatic jolt could burst the bonds of such self-absorption. Therefore the verbal violence of hellfire and damnation "was a gift of God to awaken people who were blindly sleepwalking to their doom."
IN "JONATHAN EDWARDS AND THE BIBLE," another study timed for the tercentennial, Robert Brown shows how Edwards faced down the deists who sought to discredit the Bible by using early historical criticism to insist that true knowledge is a priori and infallible, as in mathematics. Edwards's response was twofold. First, he charged that the deist definition of rationality was too narrow, excluding the experiential and the spiritual. He claimed that Scripture conveys to the mind not only information but also its beauty, which can be seen only by the spiritually enlightened. Second, he argued that the full truth of Christian faith is known only through historical accounts in the biblical drama of salvation. This understanding then becomes the key to discerning God's activity outside the Bible--an eighteenth-century version of what theologians have lately called narrative theology.
The popular historian Peter Gay once denounced Edwards as a medieval, precritical historian. But Brown contends that the eighteenth century was a period in which hard lines cannot be drawn between "precritical" and "critical" historical methods: Edwards may have been on the conservative end of the historiographical spectrum, but he used the same methods and shared most historiographical presuppositions with those on the other end. Further, Brown maintains, Edwards was a full participant in the early modern science of religion, believing both in the inspiration of some pagan philosophers and the historically conditioned nature of biblical history.
Perhaps the most remarkable contributor to this recent explosion of interest in Edwards is the Israeli historian Avihu Zakai, with "Jonathan Edwards's Philosophy of History: The Re-Enchantment of the World in the Age of Enlightenment." A teacher at Hebrew University--and former Marxist and veteran paratrooper--Zakai sees yet another way in which Edwards beat some Enlightenment thinkers at their own game. Edwards was "a bold and independent philosopher" who showed his "force of mind" by constructing a "plausible alternative" to the eighteenth century's mechanistic interpretation of reality, which stipulated that all natural phenomena can be explained by matter and motion. This new scientific thought not only stripped nature of purpose, but "led to the notion of homogenous, empty time--time deprived of any redemptive significance."
Edwards responded, says Zakai, by appropriating the atomic doctrine of mechanistic philosophy to show the incoherence of mechanism's basic assumption that there exist substances independent of everything else. All being, Edwards argued, is immediately dependent on the great system of being, which is God Himself. The result, according to Zakai, was a reenchantment of history. Indeed, Zakai goes further, claiming that Edwards's new history, based on the notion that religious awakening is the engine of both sacred and secular history, was revolutionary in several respects: It regarded secular history as both progressive and meaningful, it enshrined America's revival tradition, and it helped make God's redemption of the entire world a central theme of American culture.
HARRY STOUT also sees history as central to Edwards's thought in his introduction to "Sermons and Discourses, 1739-1742," one of the latest volumes in the Yale critical edition. Stout suggests that Edwards's new history was a "Descartes-like new method" that substituted history for theology as queen of the sciences. Theology was still the New England thinker's obsession, but his vision of God would be unfolded through story, which is "superior to systematic theology for its drama and to earthbound historiography for its prophetic inspiration." It was therefore no surprise that Edwards's first sketch of theology as history, his "History of the Work of Redemption," was one of America's bestselling books in the nineteenth century.
IF HISTORIANS TIE Edwards's significance to his views of history and science, theologians insist his vision of God is what makes his work uniquely noteworthy. In "Writings on the Trinity, Grace, and Faith," another new volume in the Yale edition, Princeton Seminary's Sang Hyun Lee claims that Edwards marks a stunning departure from the Western theological tradition by the way he repudiated deism. Eighteenth-century deists depicted a watchmaker god who observes from a distance his self-sustaining world, and Western theology in a similar manner has represented God as "externally" but not "internally" related to the world: "What happens in the world does not affect God." According to Lee, Edwards instead portrayed God as creating the world in order to enlarge His own being outside Himself. In theological terms, this means repeating His glory in mundane human life and nature. Thus, by their good works, God's people participate in His life, which makes what people do matter in the most vital ways.
Amy Plantinga Pauw adds--in both "The Supreme Harmony of All: The Trinitarian Theology of Jonathan Edwards" and her introduction to "'The Miscellanies,' 833-1152," yet another volume in the Yale edition of Edwards's works--that Edwards was also innovative in his view of the Trinity. Breaking from a long tradition in philosophical theology that taught that God's goodness was based upon his oneness and simplicity, Edwards instead held that God's goodness is rooted in the loving relation among the three persons of the Trinity. Furthermore, while the tradition had tended to treat the Holy Spirit as an abstract principle, Edwards regarded the third Trinitarian member as a person who "influences the Father and Son in all they do."
IF NOTHING ELSE, these new books help recover what most historians have forgotten: the profound influence of Edwards on American culture. In his retirement correspondence with Thomas Jefferson, John Adams wrote that Aaron Burr (Edwards's grandson), "from the single circumstance of his descent," was always ensured of one hundred thousand votes--enough to account for his election as Jefferson's vice president in 1800. Before the Civil War much collegiate education was shaped by New Englanders whose minds were formed by Edwards's theology. A theme from Edwards's ethics, "disinterested benevolence," became a slogan for evangelists and social reformers. In 1835 the Unitarian John Brazer wrote that Edwards's theological masterpiece, "Religious Affections," was quoted, reprinted, and circulated "with a deference only less than what is paid to the Bible itself." Even as late as 1900 the New York Times editorialized on the need for a new edition of Edwards's works "almost as a matter of patriotism."
Marsden observes that recent American culture has paid more attention to Benjamin Franklin than to Edwards because Franklin represents pragmatic trends that have triumphed in America. But Franklin, he notes, does not explain why religion is so successful in this country, or why "its revivalist style became one of America's leading exports." Franklin's autobiography, "the story of the self-made man, eventually became paradigmatic of the American ideal," but Edwards's biography of the missionary David Brainerd, one of the most influential missionary accounts of all time, presents the "self-renouncing man" as "a major alternative."
ACCORDING TO the historian Mark Noll, however, Edwards's theology undermined later Christian influence on the public square. In his magisterial "America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln," Noll claims it was Edwards who opened American thought to the "subtle, yet powerful, move from theology to politics, and intellectual leadership to a shift from the clergy to men of state." Since other historians have linked this transition to later secularist moves to eliminate religion from the public square altogether, this is a serious charge. It is particularly significant because Noll has persuasively argued in many other writings that American religion in general and evangelicalism in particular often err in substituting activism for theological reflection on politics.
Noll writes that Edwards repudiated "a long history of New England thought by shifting emphasis on covenant away from the complex nexus of person, church, and society to a simpler bond between the converted individual and the church." By this Noll means that Edwards rejected the Half-Way Covenant by which the unregenerate, who were not permitted to partake of the Lord's Supper, were nevertheless allowed to get their children baptized, thus preserving an organic link between society and church. More important, for Noll, Edwards also rejected the national covenant, the notion that God had a conditional relationship with New England in which He would dispense rewards and punishments based on obedience to divine law. According to Noll, for Edwards after 1749 there was no more "external" covenant but only the "internal" covenant--concerned not with society but with the individual's salvation. This "spelled the dissolution of Puritan theology as the all-purpose guardian of thought" and opened the door for generations of republican political theory disconnected from the history of salvation.
Is this true? Three years before his death, Edwards used the language of national covenant to interpret the French and Indian destruction of General Edward Braddock's forces on the Monongahela River in 1755: "If God be pleased to forsake a people & not to go forth with their armies, defeat & confusion is like to be the consequence. . . . Yet if a people repent & put away the cursed things and look to God for help, there is no reason to despair." The "external" covenant Edwards rejected was concerned not with society but with the individual soul, and it referred to the soul that has the outer earmarks but not internal reality of saving grace.
Noll correctly points out that after 1760 there was no new Edwards "to take the measure of republican political ideology." And the editors who published his works posthumously did not include his many fast- and thanksgiving-day sermons, which contained his elaborate reflections on national covenant and the public square. Had he survived the smallpox epidemic of 1758 and lived as long as his more famous contemporary Franklin--and kept his predilection to engage the most compelling issues of the era--Edwards might have integrated his reflections on public virtue from "The Nature of True Virtue" with his conviction that God deals not just with individuals but also whole societies. The result would have been a careful theological analysis of uncoerced religion in a covenanted polis.
JONATHAN EDWARDS has been called the American Augustine, the American Aquinas, the American Dante, and the American Kierkegaard. Insofar as "America" represents a self-conscious refusal to be defined by European sensibilities, these new offerings of scholarly reflection on this great thinker suggests the key word is "American." Edwards had a fierce intellectual independence. He knew that American thought was disparaged for its provincialism, but he was convinced that in God's providence the New World had been settled to help unveil a new understanding of God and providence. Hence "new additions of light ought not to be despised and discouraged" even if they "sprung up" in this "obscure part of the world."
Though Edwards did not regard himself as an innovator and was concerned to be faithful to God's revelation in Scripture, he fearlessly permitted that concern to lead him to new ways of thinking. In a youthful burst of enthusiasm that embarrassed some of his disciples, he boasted, "I am not afraid to say twenty things about the Trinity which the Scripture never said." Nor was he afraid to diverge from the Calvinist tradition in which he had been reared: "I utterly disclaim a dependence on Calvin, or believing the doctrines which I hold, because he believed and taught them; and cannot justly be charged with believing in everything just as he taught." He showed the same boldness in philosophy. Perry Miller called America's attention to Edwards's fascination with John Locke, for example, but recent scholarship has shown the ways in which Edwards emended Locke.
In theology and philosophy, Edwards's greatest work transcends his American location and character. But it is doubtful that America has transcended him. On this three-hundredth anniversary of his birth, the mountains of new writing about the man bid us recognize the extent to which Jonathan Edwards really is America--applying quintessentially American daring to the great questions that bedevil modern minds.
Gerald McDermott, who teaches religion at Roanoke College, has written three books on Jonathan Edwards.