The Oxford Handbook of Jonathan Edwards 9780198754060, 019875406X

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T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

JONAT H A N E DWA R DS

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The Oxford Handbook of

JONATHAN EDWARDS Edited by

DOUGLAS A. SWEENEY and

JAN STIEVERMANN

1

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1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2021 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2021 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2020945731 ISBN 978–0–19–875406–0 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, cr0 4yy Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank the authors of these chapters for their painstaking labours on behalf of this volume. They would also like to extend a very special word of thanks to David Meinberg, Samuel Hagos, Colby Brandt, and Luke Miller, their research assistants, for help with countless tasks in support of this project.

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Table of Contents

List of Contributorsxi The Works of Jonathan Edwardsxiii

Introductionxv Douglas A. Sweeney and Jan Stievermann

PA RT   I .   E DWA R D S’ S BAC KG ROU N D S , S O U RC E S , A N D C ON T E X T S 1. Family Life

3

Ava Chamberlain

2. Parish Ministry

17

Harry S. Stout

3. Historical and Ecclesiastical Contexts

33

George Marsden

4. Edwards in the Context of International Revivals and Missions

51

David W. Kling

5. Sources of Edwards’s Thought

69

Peter J. Thuesen

PA RT I I .   E DWA R D S’ S I N T E L L E C T UA L L A B OU R S 6. Ontology

91

† William J. Wainwright

7. Epistemology

104

Paul Helm

8. The Nature of God and the Trinity Kyle C. Strobel

118

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viii   table of contents

9. The Person of Christ

135

S. Mark Hamilton

10. Pneumatology

151

Robert W. Caldwell III

11. Revelation

165

Stephen R. C. Nichols

12. Federalism and Reformed Scholasticism

183

Willem van Vlastuin

13. Creation and Predestination

199

Phillip Hussey and Michael McClymond

14. History, Providence, and Eschatology

215

Jan Stievermann

15. Sin and Evil

235

David P. Barshinger

16. Anthropology, Affections, and Free Will

250

Seng-Kong Tan

17. Ecclesiology and Sacraments

267

Rhys Bezzant

18. Ethics

281

Elizabeth Agnew Cochran

19. Aesthetics

296

William Dyrness and Christi Wells

20. Imagination and Hermeneutics

309

Kathryn Reklis

21. The Natural Sciences and Philosophy of Nature

324

Avihu Zakai

22. Idealism and Aetiology Sebastian Rehnman

337

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table of contents   ix

PA RT I I I .   E DWA R D S’ S R E L IG IOU S A N D S O C IA L P R AC T IC E S 23. Spirituality and Devotion

353

Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe

24. Biblical Exegesis

370

Robert E. Brown

25. Writing and Preaching Sermons

387

Kenneth P. Minkema

26. Education

404

Esmari Potgieter

27. Missions

416

John A. Grigg

28. Ministry to the Bound and Enslaved

431

John Saillant

29. Politics and Economics

446

Mark Valeri

PA RT I V.   E DWA R D S’ S G L OBA L R E C E P T ION 30. North America

463

James P. Byrd

31. Britain and Europe

479

Jonathan Yeager

32. Edwards’s Place and Importance in Anglo-American Literature

495

Sandra M. Gustafson

33. Asia

514

Dongsoo Han

34. Australia Stuart Piggin

528

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x   table of contents

35. Africa

542

Adriaan C. Neele

36. Latin America

555

Heber Carlos de Campos, Jr.

37. Edwards Studies Today

568

Douglas A. Sweeney

Index

583

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List of Contributors

David P. Barshinger  is an independent scholar based in Lombard, Illinois. Rhys Bezzant  is Dean of Missional Leadership and Lecturer in Christian Thought at Ridley College, Melbourne, Australia. Robert E. Brown  is Associate Professor of Religion at James Madison University. James P. Byrd  is Professor of American Religious History at Vanderbilt University. Robert  W.  Caldwell III is Professor of Church History at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Heber Carlos de Campos, Jr. is Professor of Historical Theology at Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie. Ava Chamberlain  is Chair and Professor at Wright State University. Elizabeth Agnew Cochran  is Associate Professor of Theology at Duquesne University. William Dyrness  is Dean Emeritus and Senior Professor of Theology and Culture at Fuller Theological Seminary. John  A.  Grigg  is Professor and Department Chair at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Sandra M. Gustafson  is Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe  is a retired scholar based in Dover, Delaware. S. Mark Hamilton  is a research associate with JESociety.org. Dongsoo Han  is an independent scholar based in Busan, South Korea. Paul Helm  is Professor at Highland Theological College. Phillip Hussey  is a doctoral candidate in theology at St. Louis University. David W. Kling  is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Miami. George Marsden  is Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at the University of Notre Dame. Michael McClymond  is Professor of Modern Christianity at St Louis University.

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xii   list of contributors Kenneth P. Minkema  is the Executive Editor of The Works of Jonathan Edwards and of the Jonathan Edwards Center & Online Archive at Yale University. Adriaan C. Neele  is Professor of Historical Theology at Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary. Stephen R. C. Nichols  is an independent scholar based in London, UK. Stuart Piggin  is Director of the Centre for the History of Christian Thought and Experience at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. Esmari Potgieter  is an independent scholar based in Potchefstroom, South Africa. Sebastian Rehnman  is Professor of Philosophy at Universitetet i Stavanger. Kathryn Reklis  is Associate Professor of Theology at Fordham University. John Saillant  is Professor of English and History at Western Michigan University. Jan Stievermann  is Professor of the History of Christianity in the U.S. at RuprechtKarls-Universität Heidelberg. Harry S. Stout  is the Jonathan Edwards Professor of American Religious History at Yale University. Kyle C. Strobel  is Associate Professor of Spiritual Theology at Biola University. Douglas  A.  Sweeney  is Dean and Professor of Divinity at Beeson Divinity School, Samford University. Seng-Kong Tan  is Lecturer in Systematic and Spiritual Theology at Biblical Graduate School of Theology in Singapore. Peter  J.  Thuesen  is Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis. Mark Valeri is the Reverend Priscilla Wood Neaves Distinguished Professor of Religion and Politics in the John  C.  Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. Willem van Vlastuin is Professor of Theology and Spirituality of Reformed Protestantism at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. † William  J.  Wainwright was formerly Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Christi Wells  is Adjunct Professor of Theology, Lincoln Christian University. Jonathan Yeager  is UC Foundation Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga. Avihu Zakai  is Professor of Early Modern History and Early American History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

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The Works of Jonathan Edwards

All citations from Edwards’s writings will refer to the Yale edition of The Works of Jonathan Edwards (letterpress volumes by Yale University Press, 1957–2008; online ­edition ongoing at Yale University) and use the abbreviation WJE. Vol. 1 Freedom of the Will, Paul Ramsey, ed. Vol. 2 Religious Affections, John E. Smith, ed. Vol. 3 Original Sin, Clyde A. Holbrook, ed. Vol. 4 The Great Awakening, C. C. Goen, ed. A Faithful Narrative The Distinguishing Marks Some Thoughts Concerning the Revival Preface to True Religion by Joseph Bellamy Vol. 5 Apocalyptic Writings, Stephen J. Stein, ed. Notes on the Apocalypse An Humble Attempt Vol. 6 Scientific and Philosophical Writings, Wallace E. Anderson, ed. The ‘Spider’ Papers Natural Philosophy The Mind Short Scientific and Philosophical Papers Vol. 7 The Life of David Brainerd, Norman Pettit, ed. Vol. 8 Ethical Writings, Paul Ramsey, ed. Charity and Its Fruits Concerning the End for Which God Created the World The Nature of True Virtue Vol. 9 A History of the Work of Redemption, John F. Wilson, ed. Vol. 10 Sermons and Discourses, 1720–1723, Wilson H. Kimnach, ed. Vol. 11 Typological Writings, Wallace E. Anderson and Mason I. Lowance, eds. Images of Divine Things Types Types of the Messiah Vol. 12 Ecclesiastical Writings, David D. Hall, ed. A Letter to the Author of an Answer to the Hampshire Narrative An Humble Inquiry

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xiv   the works of jonathan edwards Misrepresentations Corrected Narrative of Communion Controversy Vol. 13 The ‘Miscellanies’, a-500, Thomas A. Schafer, ed. Vol. 14 Sermons and Discourses, 1723–1729, Kenneth P. Minkema, ed. Vol. 15 Notes on Scripture, Stephen J. Stein, ed. Vol. 16 Letters and Personal Writings, George S. Claghorn, ed. Letters Resolutions Diary On Sarah Pierpont Personal Narrative Vol. 17 Sermons and Discourses, 1730–1733, Mark Valeri, ed. Vol. 18 The ‘Miscellanies’, 501–832, Ava Chamberlain, ed. Vol. 19 Sermons and Discourses, 1734–1738, M. X. Lesser, ed. Vol. 20 The ‘Miscellanies’, 833–1152, Amy Plantinga Pauw, ed. Vol. 21 Writings on the Trinity, Grace and Faith, Sang Hyun Lee, ed. Discourse on the Trinity On the Equality of the Persons of the Trinity Treatise on Grace Efficacious Grace ‘Controversies’ Notebook Faith Signs of Godliness Christ’s Example Directions for Judging of Persons’ Experiences Vol. 22 Sermons and Discourses, 1739–1742, Harry S. Stout and Nathan O. Hatch, eds. Vol. 23 The ‘Miscellanies’, 1153–1360, Douglas A. Sweeney, ed. Vol. 24 The ‘Blank Bible’, Stephen J. Stein, ed. (Parts 1 and 2 in two vols.) Vol. 25 Sermons and Discourses, 1743–1758, Wilson H. Kimnach, ed. Vol. 26 Catalogues of Reading, Peter J. Thuesen, ed. Catalogue Account Book The Hampshire Association of Ministers’ Library Books Recommended to Sir William Pepperrell Multiple Bibliographical Appendices Vols. 27–73  Online Only Volumes (further manuscript notebooks, sermons, cor­res­ pond­ence, etc., available online: http://edwards.yale.edu/research/browse)

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Introduction

While the mid-twentieth century witnessed the beginning of what is often called the Jonathan Edwards Renaissance, mainly in the US, the last thirty years have seen an explosion of first-rate scholarship on Edwards in North America and abroad. The 2010s have been particularly fecund. Edwards-related monographs have appeared every year, as have dozens of journal articles, book chapters, and essays. This proliferation of Edwards studies has much to do with the 2008 completion of the Yale edition of The Works of Jonathan Edwards (begun in 1957) that makes available in twenty-six volumes the full canon of Edwards’s published works together with a large corpus of his unpublished and private writings. The letter press Works of Jonathan Edwards is complemented by an ongoing online edition of the remaining holograph manuscripts, hosted by the Edwards Center at Yale. These texts are revealing new aspects of Edwards’s life and work and continue to invite revisionary studies of well-worn topics. The Center’s inter­nation­al activities and satellites—more fully described in the final chapter—have further contributed to keeping the Edwards industry busy. They also reveal a significant trend toward the globalization of that industry. Edwards might have gained much of his iconic status as ‘America’s theologian’ through the labours of scholars invested in the project of establishing a national tradition of theology and philosophical thought. But if put in his wider contexts, the colonial divine always challenged the premises of that project, and in recent years the study of his works has been more and more de-nationalized. The great diversity and internationality of the current state of Edwards studies is not covered in any of the existing, otherwise commendable handbooks and compendia (the most important of which are Lee 2005; Stein 2007; and Stout, Minkema, and Maskell 2005). This Oxford Handbook of Jonathan Edwards surveys the full breadth of the present spectrum of scholarship on Edwards across different disciplines and regions of the world. On the one hand, the ongoing interest in Edwards pertains to the historical figure and what his life, writings, and socio-cultural practices can tell us about various dimensions of early American and transatlantic history. Through a great variety of methodological lenses, Edwards is being studied by general historians as well as scholars in the fields of church and religious history, history of theology, intellectual and literary history, history of theology, and, more recently, book history. Also, the reception histories of Edwards’s works and of the larger Edwardsean tradition has received considerable attention. On the other hand, Edwards continues to be of interest as a resource for contemporary academic theology and philosophy as well as for many lay believers and more popular religious authors. Edwards is a particularly important conversation partner for theologians and ordinary Christians from around the world who identify with evangelical and

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xvi   introduction cha­ris­mat­ic traditions. Indeed, it is these traditions and their mission histories that are largely responsible for spreading his name into regions beyond North America and Europe. The chapters of this handbook have been written by an international consortium of experts and speak clearly and compellingly to all these interest groups. They will orient readers in current debates about the various facets of Edwardsean theology and philosophy, giving detailed attention to the different areas of divinity. And they offer guidance through the complex scholarship on the historical Edwards as well as the histories of how he has been interpreted in the US and abroad. At the same time, the chapters make original contributions to the study of Edwards and open new avenues for future research. The essays in this volume fall into four sections, which reflect the diversity of Edwards studies today. The first section (Edwards’s Backgrounds, Sources, and Contexts) turns to the historical Edwards and seeks to ground him in his period and the relevant contexts that shaped his life and work. It follows a series of widening circles from the familial and local to the wider Atlantic world. The chapters by Chamberlain and Stout introduce Edwards as a family man and parish minister at Northampton and Stockbridge. In so doing, they engage with larger questions regarding the transformation of the New England tradition in the age of revivals and its social and gender history. Marsden and Kling then situate the provincial clergyman in the broader political and ecclesial history of his period, giving special attention to recent literature on British Protestantism after the Glorious Revolution, the transatlantic awakenings, and early mission movement. How Edwards responded to changing intellectual currents in the eighteenth-century republic of letters is treated by Thuesen, who in particular demonstrates the formative influence of philosophical, religious, and historical authors associated with a moderate Enlightenment. The second section (Edwards’s Intellectual Labours) balances the historical reconstruction of Edwards as a theological and philosophical thinker with explorations of his usefulness for constructive theology and the church today. Most of the traditional topoi of systematic theology are covered by these essays. However, we deliberately chose to pair some of these in unusual ways to gain new perspectives on how the great questions of divinity were related in Edwards’s mind and how he responded to them. Together the chapters in this section paint a dual portrait. They show us Edwards as a child of his period and conventional representative of early modern Protestantism—at least much of the time—who was also keenly aware of new intellectual trends often associated with the age of Enlightenment. Yet they also show us Edwards as an extraordinary and cre­ ative—even idiosyncratic—thinker who, within a thoroughly traditional framework of theology, formulated innovative and synthetic answers to great questions that continue to interest many people all around the world. Wainwright and Helm discuss the ontological and epistemological foundations of Edwards’s theology. This gets them into one of the most hotly contested sub-fields of Edwards studies today: what to make of his radical idealism and occasionalism. The essays by Strobel and Hamilton then address the three core areas of theology, the doctrine of God, Christology and soteriology. Among other things they grapple with

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introduction   xvii c­ ompeting interpretations of Edwards’s Trinitarianism and his unusual view of the atonement that have so preoccupied the field in recent decades. Caldwell helpfully reminds us that the Holy Spirit was equally important to Edwards, who practiced an intensely pneumatological brand of evangelical faith. Nichols’s chapter outlines Edwards’s understanding of revelation and his defence of the supernatural authority of the canonical Bible, and van Vlastuin’s shows how central the inherited tradition of ­federalism was to Edwards’s reading of Scripture. The unexpected interconnections that Edwards drew between the doctrines of cre­ ation and predestination are explored by Hussey and McClymond, while Stievermann engages with Edwards as a historical thinker, focusing in particular on his providentialism and millennialist eschatology. With Barshinger and Tan we get to the areas of hamartiology and anthropology. Here Edwards made some unusual interventions in response to contemporary challenges, modifying the traditional understanding of original sin and its imputation and redrawing the Augustinian–Calvinist view of humanity in the context of eighteenth-century theories of affections. No less influenced by the philosophical ideas of the Enlightenment were Edwards’s hermeneutics and his aesthetic sens­ibil­ities. Dyrness and Reklis make it clear how much these informed Edwards’s entire theological project and how they found expression in some of its most striking in­nov­ ations such as natural typology. More conventionally Reformed were Edwards’s notions of the church and the sacraments, as Bezzant notes. The essay by Cochrane examines Edwards’s theological ethics and especially his conceptualization of true Christian ­virtue, which, through his New Divinity disciples, would become so influential in nineteenth-century American Protestantism. Albeit in very different ways, the last two chapters of the section both deal with Edwards’s reaction to the period’s rise of new forms of scientific empiricism and a natural philosophy dominated by Cartesianism. Zakai sees Edwards as a reactionary thinker who, in a rear-guard action, selectively appropriated aspects of empiricism and natural philosophy for apologetic purposes, while ignoring or rejecting their problematic implications for traditional theology. And for Rehmann Edwards’s version of philosophical idealism, reserving causal agency to God alone, is an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to come to terms with the rise of mechanistic philosophy. With section three (Edwards’s Religious and Social Practices) the focus shifts to the different ways and contexts in which Edwards attempted to realize his ideas and ideals in his personal life, scholarship, and ministry, but also to the ways in which these historical realities stood in tension with, limited, or resisted his aspirations. At the same time, some of the chapters in this section explore how Edwards’s concrete practices, as well as the socio-cultural structures in which they were embedded, shaped or redirected his thinking and also made him complicit in the injustice, exploitation, oppression, and violence in which his native New England was entangled. Hambrick-Stowe situates Edwards’s intense devotional practices in the tradition of Puritan piety but also points out how the new spiritual currents of the eighteenth century influenced him. Recent scholarship has demonstrated the enormous time and energy Edwards gave to biblical exegesis. Brown’s chapter surveys the large body of Edwards’s scriptural interpretations,

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xviii   introduction their main sources and tendencies. The essay also discusses their c­ onflicted, sometimes contra­dict­ory, nature, as Edwards was attempting to reconcile innovative forms of ­historical-contextual criticism with a traditional understanding of the Bible’s supernatural authority. Closely connected to his exegetical practices was, of course, Edwards’s ceaseless production of sermons, the full corpus of which is only now becoming available. Drawing on these new materials, Minkema examines Edwards’s changing routines of writing sermons and styles of homiletic performance, but also embeds his sermon manu­scripts in the material context of Edwards’s household economy. The different spheres and forms (the household, the church, the mission school, the college) in which Edwards was engaged as an educator are the subjects of Potgieter’s chapter. Grigg and Saillant then look at Edwards’s involvement in colonial efforts to evangelize enslaved Africans in his home and church as well as Native Americans during the Stockbridge years. Both chapters reveal the tensions between Edwards’s missionary idealism and commitment to Christian notions of spiritual equality on the one hand, and his endorsement of racial ideologies and active participation in the systems of slavery and native dispossession on the other. Similarly, Valeri demonstrates that Edwards critiqued certain commercial and social practices on religious grounds. Overall, however, he tended to embrace, and theologically legitimize, the political and economic order of the British Empire, seeing himself as a loyal provincial subject of the Hanoverian monarchy. The fourth and final section on Edwards’ Global Reception proceeds from Edwards’s own time and North-Atlantic culture to the present period and various regions of the southern hemisphere. Together the chapters tell a story of widening renown and influence as well as diverse appropriations. Byrd and Yeager follow the trajectories through the worlds of North American and European Protestantism by which Edwards developed from celebrated revivalist to one of the great systematic theologians of the English language. While Yeager gives special attention to the transatlantic print networks that enabled Edwards’s rise to fame, Byrd highlights the important role Edwards played in the formation of a specifically American evangelical identity and New England schools of theology. These reconstructions in the field of religious history are complemented by Gustafson’s chapter on Edwards’s reception in Anglo-American literature that looks at fascinating examples from Harriet Beecher Stowe, Robert Lowell, and Marilynne Robinson, illustrating the dramatically changing and tension-filled perceptions of Edwards and New England Puritanism more generally. Han, Piggin, Neele, and Campos trace the hitherto mostly hidden reception histories of Edwards in Asia, Australia, Africa, and Latin America, respectively. The reception involves two basic dimensions: first, the use of Edwards in the contexts of church life, popular religion, and revivals, and, second, the scholarly study of his works. Each of these histories is distinct and ­connected with different Protestant churches and missions, ranging from the Dutch Reformed in eighteenth-century South Africa and Presbyterianism in South Korea to Pentecostalism in contemporary Brazil. But all of them show the astonishing adaptability of Edwards’s works to local contexts. And they evince Edwards’s great usefulness to revival-oriented varieties of Protestantism that sought to ground an affective,

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introduction   xix c­ onversionist spirituality in a robustly biblical and intellectually substantial theology. Notably, many of these regions have also developed their own strands of Edwards ­scholarship, with numerous studies being produced especially in Korea and Japan but also Australia. The section closes with Sweeney’s chapter on recent trends in Edwards studies, including its globalization. We hope this handbook does justice to the richness and complexity of the field of Edwards studies and helps readers seeking a state-of-the-art summary of and critical reflection on that field. We are confident that this volume has advanced our understanding and appreciation of Edwards and his varied global legacies. And we invite you, the reader, to make good use of this volume by contributing to the future of the study of Jonathan Edwards. As the chapters herein demonstrate, much remains to be done.

Works Cited Lee, Sang Hyun (ed.) (2005). The Princeton Companion to Jonathan Edwards. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Stein, Stephen J. (ed.) (2007). The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Stout, Harry S., Kenneth P. Minkema, and Caleb J. D. Maskell (eds) (2005). Jonathan Edwards at 300: Essays on the Tercentenary of His Birth. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.

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PA RT I

E DWA R DS ’ S BAC KGROU N DS , S OU RC E S , A N D C ON T E X T S

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chapter 1

Fa mily Life Ava Chamberlain

This chapter will focuses on Jonathan Edwards’s family life. Its primary aim is not to explore the connections between his family life and his theological thought, although these connections exist. Rather, it will view Edwards and his close kin in their domestic setting as members of a family. Edwards was the patriarchal head of a flourishing Puritan family. During their thirty-year marriage, he and his wife Sarah Pierpont, who acted as his helpmeet and co-head, skilfully managed their large domestic enterprise. Scholars often overlook this record of success, focusing instead on the moment of patriarchal failure that forced Edwards from his Northampton pulpit. However, in colonial New England successful family government was a man’s most important accomplishment. ‘The manly Puritan’, notes Anne Lombard, ‘was a sober, conservative father, responsible for a household full of dependents’ (Lombard 2003, 9). In this role Edwards’s authority was secure. Modelling the traditional Puritan ideal of domestic order, his family publicly displayed his mastery of the habits and virtues that defined adult manhood.

Preparation for Manhood Jonathan Edwards was the fifth child and only son of Timothy Edwards, pastor of the Congregational church in East Windsor, Connecticut, and his wife, Esther Stoddard. Like all Anglo-American boys in colonial New England, he was raised with the expectation that he would as an adult become the head of his own household. Colonial law required all persons to live in families, either as dependents subject to family government or as household heads (Morgan 1966, 27). In his early years Edwards was a dependent in his parents’ household, and he remained subject to their government until he formed a family of his own. Throughout this period of adolescence, he strove to acquire the character an adult man required to perform the duties of household head.

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4   Ava Chamberlain In his preparation for manhood, Edwards was assisted by two powerful male role models, his father and his maternal grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, pastor of the church in Northampton, Massachusetts. Both of these older authority figures were successful patriarchs who governed their families and their congregations with a strong hand. The son of a wealth Boston merchant, Stoddard had settled in Northampton when it was a small western Massachusetts outpost, far from the more cosmopolitan life along the coast. Well-suited to the challenges of the frontier, he was a physically imposing man, as much at home in his fields as in his pulpit. During his sixty-year pastorate he raised a large family and established himself as one of New England’s most influential theological polemicists, the ‘pope’ of the Connecticut River Valley (Lucas 1976, 146–9; Marsden 2003, 11). Although his mentorship of Edwards was short lived, his influence was long lasting. Drawn into Stoddard’s orbit as a young man, Edwards struggled throughout his own Northampton pastorate to escape the force of his personality and establish his own independent authority. By contrast, Timothy Edwards was a durable presence his son’s life. Outliving his father by only two months, Jonathan regularly turned to him for advice and support, and over time they developed a relationship more of companionable friendship than filial deference. He never, however, forgot his place in the family hierarchy. In letters written as an adult Edwards always addressed his father as ‘Honored Sir’ and closed as ‘your dutiful son’, the same greeting and salutation he had used as a boy (WJE 16: 32–3, 37–8, 420–1, 702). These tokens of respect reflected the orderly East Windsor household in which he had been raised. Timothy Edwards was a demanding governor of his large family and an uncompromising pastor of his congregation, who was so self-conscious of his prerogatives that he ‘would never be seen in public without his full clerical garb’ (Marsden  2003, 34). Although reflecting the patriarchal order of colonial society, Timothy’s need for control was likely also rooted in his own personal experience. The eldest son of Richard Edwards and his first wife, Elizabeth Tuttle, he had grown up in a disorderly household that had scandalized its Hartford community by allegations of adultery and repeated petitions for divorce (Chamberlain  2012, 146). His father had worked hard to overcome this legacy of family failure by remarrying and establishing himself as a successful household head. Timothy’s Harvard education, elite profession, and flourishing family represented the culmination of this intergenerational effort, but this child of divorce knew all too well the dangers of disorder. As family head, he was determined to establish a record of patriarchal success. Evidence suggests that Timothy and Esther kept a tight rein on their son. Having deep family connections to the Boston elite, they sent all of their daughters but one to the colonial capital for finishing school (Minkema 1992, 41). Nevertheless, Timothy ensured young Jonathan received his education closer to home. He trained for the ministry at the Collegiate School, later Yale College, which the Connecticut legislature had established in 1701 as an alternative to Harvard, and following graduation, he remained in New Haven to continue his studies and complete his ministerial training. Timothy also influenced his son’s search for a permanent ministerial post. Jonathan’s first posting was in New York City, where he briefly served as a supply preacher to a small Presbyterian

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Family Life   5 congregation. All the while his father was working to secure him the pulpit in Bolton, Connecticut, a small village located near the family parsonage (Marsden  2003, 55). Returning home in 1723 to defend his Master’s degree, Jonathan was poised to take this modest position when he received a better offer to return to his alma mater as a tutor. This extended period of ministerial preparation came to an end when he accepted a post as his grandfather Stoddard’s pastoral assistant in Northampton. A prestigious pulpit firmly in the family’s orbit, this position was a fortuitous combination of his own career ambitions and his father’s patriarchal desires. In his character the young Edwards was also eager to live up to his parents’ expectations. As a boy he strove to embody the religious sentiments and moral values his father declaimed from his pulpit. Distancing himself from his peers, he did not join in such youthful acts of rebellion as ‘night-walking’ and ‘company-keeping’. The only known group activity he organized as a boy was building ‘a booth in a swamp’ for a secret place of prayer (WJE 16: 791). Similarly, as a student at Yale Edwards strove to adopt the demeanour of a mature adult man. Writing home to his father, he censured his fellow students for their youthful indiscretions. ‘[S]ome monstrous impieties, and acts of immorality’ were ‘lately committed in the College’, he reports, and he notes with satisfaction that ‘I am perfectly free of all their janglings.’ He likewise informed his father that he had refrained from joining in the student boycott of the college commons, and that he had reprimanded another student for his participation, telling him that ‘I thought he had done exceeding unadvisedly, and . . . what I thought the ill consequences of it would be’ (WJE 16: 38, 37). Jonathan was also ‘astonished’ when his roommate refused to draw cider for him, and he reported this act of disobedience to the boy’s father, observing that it was ‘the first instance I have known of a freshman’s absolutely refusing his senior’ (WJE 16: 35). Because Yale was a training ground for future leaders, elder boys were expected to practice the art of government in their relations with the younger students. Edwards, however, described in detail his attempts to exercise manly rule hoping to receive the approbation of these male authority figures. He was determined from a young age to merit acceptance by the community of adult Christian men. To earn a place in this community, Edwards had to prepare himself to head his own household. Early modern domestic theory positioned the family as the foundational form of human association that equipped children to join the higher associations of church and state. As William Gouge notes in Of Domesticall Duties, one of the most prominent domestic conduct texts, ‘the family is a seminary of the Church and commonwealth. It is . . . a little Church, and a little commonwealth, at least a lively representation thereof ’ (Gouge 1622, 17, 18). As a young man, Edwards embraced this representation of the family, which by the mid-eighteenth century was commonplace. He echoed Gouge in a sermon to his New York congregation: ‘A Christian family is as it were a little church and commonwealth by itself ’ (WJE 10: 577). These analogies defined proper domestic order and the relative duties of each household member. When Edwards directed the parents in his New York congregation to govern their own families according to these models, he had not yet reached full manhood, but he was working to acquire the interior moral virtues that would ready him for headship.

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6   Ava Chamberlain Glimpses of this effort may be seen in Edwards’s ‘Resolutions’ and ‘Diary’. Both texts date from his late adolescence, during his New York pastorate and subsequent return to East Windsor, when he had completed his education but had not yet assumed the adult responsibilities that marked the achievement of full manhood. Commonly interpreted as mapping his spiritual quest for personal salvation, the introspective labour he recorded in these sources also corresponds to the maturation process that transformed Edwards into an adult man capable of governing his own family. The foundational manly virtue was Christian faith. Household heads should be men of faith, for they were responsible for the spiritual nurture of all the members of their little church. The first duty of parents, notes Robert Cleaver, another important domestic conduct author, is to ‘instruct & bring up their children even from the cradle, in the feare and nurture of the Lord’ (Cleaver 1600, 246). Ministers, as the patriarchal heads of a parish church, also had the duty to instruct members of their congregations in the Christian faith. To prepare, therefore, to lead both a church and a family, Edwards strove for conversion and genuine submission to God’s will. These writings also trace Edwards’s efforts to cultivate the character a man required to govern wisely his little commonwealth. Of particular importance were such traits as ‘maturity, rationality, responsibility, self-control, and courage’. According to the patriarchal ideal of manhood, adult men exhibited strength and maturity most fundamentally by their ability to control themselves. As Lombard argues, ‘claims to manhood in early New England were based . . . on having attained rationality, self-control, and mastery over whatever was passionate, sensual, and natural in the male self ’ (Lombard 2003, 8, 9). Only a man who had tamed his own passions had the temper necessary to maintain an orderly household. Because women, children, and other dependents were thought incapable of complete self-mastery, family order depended upon his ability to govern them. If he could not control himself, he would be incapable of ordering their unruly natures or teaching them self-control. Edwards worked to master his passions, or, to use the language he would later appropriate theologically, transform his passions into rational affections, first, by identifying in his ‘Resolutions’ areas of particular concern, and then by reflecting in his ‘Diary’ on his efforts to apply these resolutions to daily life. He struggled with many of the same immaturities that afflict all young people on the cusp of adulthood. That he resolved ‘never to allow the least measure of any fretting uneasiness at my father or mother’ or express it ‘in the least alteration of speech, or motion of eye’ indicates he did on occasion sigh and roll his eyes at their counsel. That he was ‘[m]uch concerned about the improvement of precious time’ and worried about ‘listlessness and sloth’ suggests he lazed about the parsonage from time to time. And that he resolved ‘never to do anything that I so much question the lawfulness of ’ reflects his temptation to participate in the youth culture that in colonial New England valorized lawlessness and rebellion against authority (WJE 16: 756, 761, 760). He also recorded being troubled by feelings of anger, pride, envy, and revenge, but his struggle for self-mastery is best represented by his approach to food. Multiple entries in the ‘Diary’ record his failure ‘to maintain the strictest temperance in eating and drinking’.

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Family Life   7 He observes how self-deception fostered his desire to overeat ‘at a feast’ or ‘when there is a great variety of dishes’. He notes that ‘sparingness in diet’ will allow him ‘to think clearer’ and vows never to permit his ‘study of divine subjects’ to ‘be interrupted by going to dinner’ (WJE 16: 754, 785, 786, 789). In these reflections, hunger acts as a proxy for all the natural appetites. The adult man displayed his rationality and strength of will by controlling his sensuous pleasures and subordinating them to the pursuit of higher joys. An even greater challenge for the young Edwards was his unruly tongue. Approximately 14 per cent of the ‘Resolutions’ record his effort to talk like an adult Christian man.1 The social order in colonial New England required all persons to govern their speech according to their station. Youths were expected to speak to their parents and other superiors with deference, when they spoke at all. However, as Jane Kamensky notes, ‘For boys, mute deference was but a temporary stopping point on the road to a full adult voice.’ A man spoke with governed liberty, thereby signally his ability to lead his household, his community, and, in Edwards’s case, his future congregation (Kamensky  1997, 25, 6). To acquire this voice of authority, he had to restrain heated speech and promote godly speech. Cautioning himself against angry, fretful, and ‘ridiculous’ speech, he strove to be cheerful, loving, and truthful in his conversation. Above all, his tongue should display his self-mastery, for bad speech was defined not so much by its content as by its lack of regulation. He was particularly concerned to control what he called ‘evil’ speech.2 Perhaps reflecting on his juvenile efforts to discipline his college classmates, he resolved ‘never to speak evil of any, except I have some particular good call for it’ (WJE 16: 757, 756, 755). He understood that as family head and church pastor, he would be required to reprove others, but he recognized that this responsibility should be exercised with restraint. To govern wisely adult men should choose their words carefully.

The Edwards Household Edwards’s move to Northampton in 1726 marked his entrance into the community of adult Christian men. Every colonial man needed a calling that gave him economic selfsufficiency and the ability to provide for a family without dependency or debt. Although most men obtained a ‘competence’ through agriculture or trade, Edwards trained for the ministry and had a bright future in Northampton (Lombard 2003, 4). Stoddard was aging and as his chosen successor, Edwards was poised to become full pastor of this prestigious pulpit upon his death. He was now prepared to acquire the additional indicia of manhood. It was time for him to marry and form a household, a step he had been

1  See ‘Resolutions’, nos. 8, 16, 31, 34, 36, 38, 46, 58, 66, 70 (WJE 16: 753–59). 2  In the only ‘Diary’ entry containing an extended extract, Edwards quotes from a sermon by Thomas Manton on the subject of ‘evil-speaking’ (WJE 16: 774–75).

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8   Ava Chamberlain preparing to take in the manly way, with rationality, deliberation, and undoubtedly in consultation with his parents. As a young man Edwards selected Sarah Pierpont to be his future wife and courted her for several years. She was the daughter of James Pierpont, long-serving pastor of the Congregational church in New Haven and founding trustee of Yale College, and his third spouse, Mary Hooker, the granddaughter of Thomas Hooker, founder of Connecticut Colony. When Edwards was first smitten by this eligible young girl, neither he nor Sarah were ready to wed. He was finishing up his studies at Yale and she was much too young by colonial standards to wed (Ulrich 1991, 6). It appears, however, that the two families had an informal understanding that the couple would marry at the appropriate time. One year after he had settled in Northampton, when he was 23 years old and she was 17, they tied the knot. Their union joined the Edwards family with one of the most prestigious lineages in the colonies. Sarah Pierpont was well-suited to be the wife of an aspiring young minister. Born into an elite ministerial family, she had grown up in a parsonage and understood the duties required of a pastor’s wife. Equally important, she had cultivated the inner moral virtues necessary in a companionable spouse and co-head of household. These virtues attracted the young Jonathan as much as her social status. His youthful musings on the object of his affection highlight these virtues. ‘On Sarah Pierpont’ is a lyrical description of her spiritual beauty, or to use Edwards’s own theological language, her affectionate perception of the loveliness and excellency of divine things.3 This sign of grace was itself an important qualification for marriage. As her husband’s subordinate partner in headship, a wife was also responsible for governing their little church and nurturing Christian faith in their children. While he taught their offspring the doctrines and principles of Christianity, she cultivated faith by example (Masson 1976, 306–7). For a minister’s wife, who served as a model of faith for her husband’s congregation, this qualification was even more important. It is therefore not surprising that Edwards was drawn to a girl who ‘is beloved of that almighty Being, who made and rules the world’ and who ‘hardly cares for anything, except to meditate on him’ (WJE 16: 789). But he also intimates in this paean to Sarah’s early piety that she possessed other qualities young men looked for in choosing a mate. The most important quality was passivity. Throughout this text, written when Sarah was about thirteen years old, Jonathan praises her passive, submissive nature. She was not a wilful girl. This tractable character was primarily visible in her relation to God. The ‘great Being’, he notes, ‘in some way or other invisible, comes to her and fills her mind with exceeding sweet delight.’ She will ‘go about, singing sweetly’, and ‘wander in the fields and on the mountains’ conversing with this invisible being. She even anticipates being ‘raised out of the world and caught up into heaven’ and ‘received up where he is’. In these observations, Jonathan depicts Sarah as will-less and weight-less, or effortlessly willing to be led by a superior, more powerful authority. This mortification of the will 3  The date of Edwards’s composition of the text titled ‘On Sarah Pierpont’ is uncertain, but generally identified as 1723 (WJE 16: 745).

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Family Life   9 was a certain sign of grace, but it was also the fundamental attribute of a good wife. As Laurel Thatcher Ulrich explains, ‘Submission to God and submission to one’s husband were part of the same religious duty’ (Ulrich 1991, 6). Edwards emphasizes this female virtue by repeated use of the word ‘sweet’ to describe facets of Sarah’s character. Not only does she sing sweetly and take sweet delight in God, but she also has a ‘sweetness of temper’, a ‘strange sweetness in her mind’, a ‘wonderful sweetness, calmness and universal benevolence of mind’ (WJE 16: 789–90). To possess an amiable, pleasing, good-natured, that is, sweet, disposition, a woman had to know her place. She had to have acquired the habits of obedience, silence, and self-denial that made for an orderly household. But as her husband’s subordinate partner in headship, she also had to have learned to assert her will in appropriate contexts. In her suitor’s estimation, Sarah also had perfected such discretion. A good wife should be moral, capable of discerning right from wrong and exercising sufficient self-control to choose the virtuous path. Even in her youth Sarah already displayed this mature moral character. She was a well-behaved girl, who, like her future husband, refrained from the youthful follies that amused her peers. She is ‘just and praiseworthy in all her actions’, he effuses, and ‘pur[e] in her affections’. To emphasize her purity, he magnifies her strength of will, implicitly comparing her ability to resist temptation to that of Jesus in the wilderness. She is so detached from worldly things, he declares, that ‘if you present all the world before her, with the richest of its treasures, she disregards it and cares not for it’ (WJE 16: 790). This admirable character made Sarah a desirable mate, for a virtuous woman would be faithful to her husband. Equally important, she would model virtue to her children and instil in them the habit of right action. Her capacity for self-government equipped her to govern a household, while her submissive nature gave highest authority to her husband. This combination of selfcontrol and deference ensured the orderly operation of their little commonwealth. Physical beauty and sexual attractiveness were, of course, not unimportant. Edwards does not explicitly reference Sarah’s appearance in his encomium, focusing instead on her spiritual beauty. But in a ‘Miscellanies’ entry written around the same time, he directly links the physical with the spiritual.4 With Sarah likely in mind, he recalls ‘behold[ing] a beautiful body, a lovely proportion, a beautiful harmony of features of face, delightful airs of countenance and voice, and sweet motion and gesture’. He observes that he is ‘charmed’ by ‘this agreeableness, these airs’ because they are ‘emanations of perfections of the mind, and immediate effects of internal purity and sweetness’ (WJE 13: 278). However, he makes this connection between the physical and the spiritual not to diminish, but to enhance the perception of feminine beauty. Despite stereotypes to the contrary, Puritans enjoyed physical pleasures. ‘The truth is’, notes Richard Godbeer, ‘Puritans celebrated sexual passion’; they ‘sought not to repress their sexual instincts but to keep them within ordained borders’ (Godbeer 2002, 54, 55). Within marriage, sex was extolled not simply as a means of procreation, but more importantly 4  Thomas Schafer estimates that ‘Miscellanies’, 108 was written in between Sept. 1723 and May 1724, approximately the same time as ‘On Sarah Pierpont’ (WJE 13: 156).

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10   Ava Chamberlain as an expression of mutual love. Husbands and wives should, counselled Gouge, ‘mutually delight each in other’ and render ‘due benevolence one to another . . . with good will and delight’ (Gouge 1622, 221–2). In Edwards’s estimation, this physical union was, like physical beauty, an intimation of a higher spiritual reality, which in turn he portrayed using the language of sexual pleasure. For example, in describing Sarah’s longing for spiritual union, he observes that she will ‘dwell’ with Christ in heaven, where she will ‘be ravished with his love, favor and delight, forever’. And he is confident of this coming consummation because Christ ‘loves her too well to let her remain at a distance from him always’ (WJE 16: 790, 789). This vision of heavenly union has an unmistakable sexual resonance. Edwards knew that his beloved would not always be distant from him, and when penning these words, he likely anticipated his passionate union with her. Jonathan and Sarah’s first child was born a year after the wedding. With little Sarah’s arrival the Edwards household was complete. In early America, a complete household comprised three classes of dependents—wife, children, and servants—ordered hierarchically with the husband as the head. Assembling such a household conferred upon Edwards full manhood status and a place as an adult man in his community (Morgan 1966, 150; Lombard 2003, 19, 59). Over the next two decades, he exhibited his manliness by fathering a regular succession of children, one every two or three years until 1750 when their eleventh and last child was born. In this large and flourishing household, he displayed his mastery of the manly virtues by maintaining order and wisely managing the family economy. Biographers tend to disembody Edwards, portraying him as a fragile otherworldly man, painfully thin and sickly (Dwight 1830, 599). But according to the markers of manhood that mattered most in colonial New England he was a potent and successful family patriarch. The Edwards household was a busy place. Having not yet developed a modern conception of personal privacy, colonial New Englanders were constantly in and out of their neighbour’s houses (Demos 1970, 46–7; Ulrich 1991, 51–2). As the Northampton parsonage, the Edwards home was the locus of even more activity. On any given day, along with the ever-increasing brood of children, it would have teamed with a variety of people. Divinity students, who were ‘rusticating’ with Edwards as they prepared for the ministry, routinely boarded with the family. Both Joseph Bellamy and Samuel Hopkins began their careers as his disciples, and the missionary David Brainerd was nursed in the household during his final illness. Itinerant ministers also sheltered with the family on their travels, as did a steady stream of relatives and friends. Townsfolk regularly consulted their minister about spiritual and pastoral matters; local matrons attended the prayer meeting Sarah organized for ladies of the parish, and children came to be catechized. Even a woman fleeing an abusive spouse once was given refuge while petitioning for divorce (Carpenter 2011, 36). Like most successful household heads, Edwards’s life was embedded in the thick web of activity that occupied his large and sociable family. Samuel Hopkins included detailed descriptions of this family life in his biographical memoir, The Life and Character of the Late Rev. Mr Jonathan Edwards, which was published less than a decade after its subject’s death. As was common in biographical literature from the period, Hopkins idealized his subject. Understanding the character of both

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Family Life   11 male and female virtue in eighteenth-century New England, he portrayed Jonathan and Sarah Edwards as model family governors. Nevertheless, this portrayal was drawn from Hopkins’s intimate acquaintance with the family. Although more work needs to be done to judge the accuracy of his representation, it remains an important source of information about the operation of the Edwards family and the dynamic among its members. Running this household required constant labour. As its female head, Sarah ensured that all the activities that contributed to its economy—such as cooking, cleaning, spinning, and gardening—were performed properly. This female labour was integral to successful housekeeping, and Hopkins indicates that Sarah skilfully performed these multifaceted duties. ‘She took almost the whole care of the temporal affairs of the family’, Hopkins observes, ‘without doors and within.’ This domestic space was the ‘housewife’s domain’. As Ulrich explains, ‘a woman’s environment was the family dwelling and the yard or yards surrounding it’, which typically housed a variety of livestock as well as a substantial vegetable garden (Ulrich  1991, 13). Sarah was an efficient manager of her domestic realm. ‘She was a good œconomist,’ Hopkins reports. ‘She was laborious and diligent’ and ‘very careful that nothing should be wasted and lost’. He also praises her cheerful disposition, observing that she would not ‘put on a dejected or sour countenance’ as she laboured, even when suffering ‘under bodily disorders and pains’ (Hopkins 1765, 95). Sarah’s ‘meek and quiet Spirit’ likewise impressed George Whitefield when he visited Northampton during the Awakening. Seeing her to be ‘such a Help meet for her Husband’, he renewed his prayers that God would ‘send me a Daughter of Abraham to be my wife’ (Whitefield 1741, 46). Of course, Sarah did not run the household without assistance. Families of the Edwardses’ status routinely employed servants to assist the mistress in her household chores, and at times owned slaves. Edwards owned a series of enslaved persons over the course of his lifetime. He supported the institution of slavery as ordained by the Bible, although, as Kenneth  P.  Minkema has argued, he condemned the slave trade (Minkema 1997, 824; 2002, 38). Only a few years after setting up his household, he travelled to Newport, Rhode Island, the centre of the New England slave trade, to purchase a woman who had been given the name ‘Venus’. And evidence indicates that one or two Africans routinely resided in the household to perform the heavy labour necessary to supply the family with their basic needs (Minkema 2002, 26; 1997, 825). Sarah took an active interest in the purchase of these domestic workers. Minkema observes that she ‘aggressively searched out potential slaves’, for example, directing her husband on one occasion to obtain ‘one that is a good Hand at spinning fine Linnen; for she shall have occasion to employ her in that Business, part of the Time’ (Minkema 2002, 43; WJE Online 32: A65a). These enslaved persons lightened Sarah’s daily burden and enhanced her status as the household’s female head. By governing not only children but also slaves, who occupied the lowest and most vulnerable position in the family hierarchy, she displayed her skilful ordering of the domestic economy. As male household head, however, Edwards was ultimately responsible for regulating its operations and controlling its members. To emphasize his manly virtue, Hopkins praised his mentor for maintaining proper domestic order. ‘In his Conduct in his Family’,

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12   Ava Chamberlain Hopkins observes, ‘he practiced that conscientious exactness which was perspicuous in all his Ways.’ First, Edwards was master of himself. He ‘lived by Rule’, notes Hopkins, ‘and herein constantly practiced great Self-denial’. Following the resolutions made in his youth, he strictly regulated his time, his diet, and his tongue. He started his day early, well before sunrise, ‘to redeem Time in his Study’, and as Hopkins famously reports, ‘commonly spent thirteen Hours every Day in his Study’. He also ‘was very careful and abstemious in eating and drinking’ and kept tight reins on his speech, striving ‘never to sin with his Tongue; or to improve it in idle, trivial and impertinent Talk’ (Hopkins 1765, 42, 40, 41). Such rigorous self-control was necessary for effective family government. Edwards displayed his domestic mastery in his relation with each class of dependents comprising his household. Because the spousal relation formed the foundation of an orderly household, Edwards first demonstrated manliness by his comportment toward his wife. ‘He maintained a great esteem and regard for his amiable and excellent Consort,’ Hopkins writes. ‘Much of the tender and kind was expressed in his Conversation with her and conduct towards her.’ In turn, she ‘paid proper deference to [him], and treated him with decency and respect at all times’ (Hopkins 1765, 42–3, 94). This companionate union modelled the Puritan ideal that ‘expected marriage to be simultaneously hierarchical and affectionate’ (Porterfield 1992, 20). The husband was his wife’s governor, but a mature adult man exercised his rule with love. Love was the expression of his ability to govern with rationality and self-control. Loveless headship, on the other hand, betrayed an incapacity for government and led to abuse of power. Husbands are ‘bound to love their wives most of all,’ counsels Gouge, for authority without ‘love will soone turne into tyrannie’. By treating his wife with tenderness and kindness, therefore, Edwards demonstrated his manly virtue and fitness for headship. Likewise, Sarah’s affectionate submission to her husband conformed to the role of the virtuous goodwife. However, as the husband’s authority was not tyranny, the wife’s subjection was not servility, ‘for of all degrees wherein there is any difference betwixt person and person, there is the least disparitie betwixt man and wife (Gouge 1622, 351, 271). This near equality positioned Sarah as co-head of the household, commanding her own authority. Having mastered the art of female deference, she earned the right to govern her subordinates in the domestic domain. The upbringing of the children also exemplified Jonathan and Sarah’s domestic partnership. In an orderly Puritan household the father and mother both had a duty to provide what Gouge calls ‘provident care’ of their children (Gouge 1622, 498). In the Edwards household, the routine nurture of the children was Sarah’s responsibility. ‘[S]he was sensible’, notes Hopkins, that ‘the chief care of forming children by government and instruction, naturally lies on mothers’. But as was fitting for the family’s female head, she ‘was wont to apply to Mr. Edwards for advice and assistance’ when the children required a firm male hand. Edwards exercised parental authority in the manly way. According to Hopkins, ‘[h]e was careful and thorough in the Government of his Children’, expressing self-control and affection in his application of discipline. His approach to childrearing supports the claim that Puritans focused on ‘breaking the will’ of their offspring (Greven 1977, 35). ‘When they first discovered any considerable degree of Will and Stubbornness’, Hopkins observes, ‘he would attend to them till he had thoroughly subdued them and

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Family Life   13 brought them to submit.’ Such strict discipline, however, should not require the regular whipping of children. According to early modern childrearing theory, parental disciple ultimately aimed to teach children how to control their own passions. To achieve this goal parents should exercise restraint and love, using corporal punishment only as a last resort. ‘Though it was better to be whipped than damned’, writes Edmund Morgan, ‘it was still better to be persuaded than whipped’ (Morgan 1966, 105). Edwards, who wrote extensively on the nature of genuine submission, knew better than most parents that its source was not fear but right affection. Accordingly, he disciplined his children ‘with the greatest Calmness, and commonly without striking a Blow’. By controlling his own wilful passions, he ‘effectually established his parental Authority, and produced a cheerful Obedience ever after’ (Hopkins 1765, 96, 43). Education of the children was likewise shared jointly. As might be expected, Edwards took the lead in the religious education of his offspring. Hopkins commends Sarah for ‘constantly and earnestly’ praying for her children, ‘even before they were born’. However, as the head of their little church Edwards ensured that all his dependents engaged daily in activities to cultivate their faith and train them in Christian doctrine. He set aside time for family prayers, Bible-reading, and religious instruction in the early morning, before everyone ‘entered on the Business of the Day’, and ended each day with family prayer. He required the household to maintain strict Sabbath discipline and reserved Saturday evenings for intensive religious instruction, when he would listen to his children recite the Westminster Catechism and question them about the meaning of each doctrine. ‘He took much Pains to instruct them in the Principles of Religion’, Hopkins notes, ‘not meerly by taking care that they learned it by Heart; but by leading them into an understanding of the Doctrines therein Taught’ (Hopkins 1765, 96, 43–44). Edwards’s regular presence in the home facilitated his role as household head. Although spending long days in his study, he was not an absent patriarch. This study itself expressed the integration of male workspace and female domestic space common in pre-industrial America (Ulrich 1991, 38–9). Some of Edwards’s most important work of family government took place in this room. He frequently admitted Sarah into the study to ‘converse freely with her on Matters of Religion. And he used commonly to pray with her in his Study, at least once a Day’, typically right before bed. He also held individual conferences with his children in the study, whose book-lined walls and imposing desk surely impressed upon the little ones a seriousness of purpose. Moreover, he performed important pastoral work in the study. In times of revival, it ‘was throng’d with Persons to lay open their spiritual Concerns to him, and seek his Advice and Direction’. Young people also visited the study, where he would ‘pray with them & treat with them in a manner suited to their Years & Circumstances’ (Hopkins 1765, 43, 50, 49). Far from being an exclusively male domain, whose door was shut to all but an elite few, this room was the beating heart of his family and his parish. Edwards was a man of society. His habitual reserve and reluctance to call on his parishioners led some to judge him ‘stiff & unsociable’, a reputation he had carried since his youth (Hopkins 1765, 49, 41). Attention to his family life, however, reveals a man whose habitat was his home. A model Puritan patriarch, he skilfully governed this little

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14   Ava Chamberlain commonwealth, which buzzed with all the noise and motion of a thriving household enterprise. This domestic space was the environment in which his intellect flourished; it was the ground on which his pastoral ministry was built and from which his theological creativity grew. Sarah and the children, together with an assortment of servants, African slaves, ministerial students, parishioners, itinerant revivalists, and missionaries, formed the external physical reality that embodied his internal mental life.

An Uncommon Union In 1758, just as the family was making a fresh start in a new location, a rapid series of events brought their life together to a tragic end. At the beginning of the year Edwards had moved to Princeton as the newly appointed president of the College of New Jersey. Coming after his humiliating dismissal from the Northampton pulpit and his selfimposed exile in the Stockbridge wilderness, this new post was welcome recognition of his many accomplishments as a revivalist and theologian. The first shock came soon after his arrival with word that Edwards’s 89-year-old father had died (Dwight 1830, 577). This not unexpected event was soon followed by two more grievous losses. In February both Edwards and his daughter Esther, who had moved to New Jersey some years earlier, received smallpox inoculations in an effort to avoid contracting a lifethreatening case of the disease. About a month later, on the 22nd of March, Edwards died from a secondary infection that set in following the treatment, and soon thereafter his daughter died from a similar cause. Sarah was not at her husband’s bedside when he died, for she had remained in Stockbridge to prepare the family for the move to New Jersey, but she did not long outlive him. Traveling to Philadelphia in September of that year to care for Esther’s two children, she contracted a fatal case of dysentery and died three days short of her late husband’s 55th birthday (Hopkins 1765, 80, 88, 93). This rapid decline is a poignant reminder of the fragility of family life in colonial New England. Although the Edwardses had mostly been spared the losses that commonly afflicted families in this time period, they were well prepared when death struck. Their Christian faith counselled all believers to live their lives in preparation for death. Recognizing his time was near, Edwards conveyed to his family the appropriate spiritual directions. He asks his daughter to ‘give my kindest love to my dear wife’, and to encourage her to ‘submit cheerfully to the will of God’. Addressing his children who, he bluntly observes, ‘are now like to be left fatherless’, he instructs them ‘to seek a Father, who will never fail you’ (quoted in Hopkins 1765, 81). Sarah, who had cultivated over a lifetime a habit of submission to her husband and her God, responded in kind to this difficult blow. ‘O’, she exclaims, ‘what a legacy my husband, and your father, has left us! We are all given to God; and there I am, and love to be.’ Daughter Susannah similarly embraced her father’s counsel, praying ‘that we, who are young in this family, may be awakened and excited to call more earnestly on God, that he would be our Father and friend forever’ (quoted in Dwight 1830, 581). This unsentimental approach to death was a hallmark of the traditional religious worldview that had guided the Edwards family since its inception.

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Family Life   15 Love, another hallmark of this faith, tempered these stern last words. On his deathbed, Edwards also conveyed a message of comfort and hope to his wife. ‘[I]t seems to me to be the will of God, that I must shortly leave you,’ he observes, but just as Jesus promised not to leave his disciples comfortless, he reminded Sarah that their separation will not be long lasting: ‘[T]he uncommon union, which has so long subsisted between us, has been of such a nature, as I trust is spiritual, and therefore will continue forever,’ he assures her (quoted in Hopkins  1765, 81). The phrase ‘uncommon union’ referenced more than the exceptional nature of their domestic partnership. Edwards had regularly used the term ‘common’ in his theological writings as a synonym for ‘natural’ and to describe a quality lacking the redemptive influences of supernatural grace. Accordingly, his uncommon union with Sarah was one formed by more than the natural love between husband and wife; it was also spiritual, an image of the eternal union between Christ and his church. As he lay dying Edwards undoubtedly contemplated the consummation of this heavenly union with Christ, which he hoped soon to experience. This was the union that he trusted would last forever, and that he longed to share once his wife was glorified by Christ in heaven. In these final moments Edwards may also have sensed that this union was uncommon in a more ordinary sense of the word. The dynamics of family life in colonial New England were changing in the mid-eighteenth century. During this period, a family structure based on passion and sentiment began to supplant the traditional structure based on headship and mutual duty. Although Jonathan and Sarah formed their household during this transitional moment, their mutual commitment to the traditional Puritan worldview anchored it firmly in the older hierarchical model of family relations. Nevertheless, the emerging model influenced their domestic life in decisive ways. New ideas about gender roles created conflicts over family government that contributed to Edwards’s dismissal from Northampton. In addition, evangelical idealization of female piety hastened the reconstruction of gender relations and the transformation of family life. Edwards’s depiction of his wife’s religious transports as a ‘pure and unmixed’ exemplar of genuine religious affections represented the leading edge of this change (WJE 4: 341). Her extraordinary piety likely enhanced the uncommon nature of their domestic union, but it also signalled the coming demise of the very social location in which it had flourished.

Works Cited Carpenter, Roy (2011). ‘Sexual Politics in Eighteenth-Century Pelham, Massachusetts: The Jonathan Edwards Clan, Divorce Law, and the Eleanor Gray Case,’ Jonathan Edwards Studies 1.1: 22–44. Chamberlain, Ava (2012). The Notorious Elizabeth Tuttle: Marriage, Murder, and Madness in the Family of Jonathan Edwards. New York: New York University Press. Cleaver, Robert (1600). A Godlie Forme of Householde Government: For the Ordering of Private Families, According to the Direction of God’s Word. London: Felix Kingston. Demos, John (1970). A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony. New York: Oxford University Press. Dwight, Sereno Edwards (1830). The Life of President Edwards. New York: Carvill.

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16   Ava Chamberlain Godbeer, Richard (2002). Sexual Revolution in Early America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Gouge, William (1622). Of Domesticall Duties, Eight Treatises. London: John Haviland. Greven, Philip (1977). The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hopkins, Samuel (1765). The Life and Character of the Late Reverend Mr. Jonathan Edwards, President of the College at New-Jersey. Together with a Number of his Sermons on Various Important Subjects. Boston: S. Kneeland. Kamensky, Jane (1997). Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England. New York: Oxford University Press. Lombard, Anne  S. (2003). Making Manhood: Growing Up Male in Colonial New England. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Lucas, Paul R. (1976). Valley of Discord: Church and Society Along the Connecticut River, 1636–1725. Hanover: University Press of New England. Marsden, George M. (2003). Jonathan Edwards: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press. Masson, Margaret  W. (1976). ‘The Typology of the Female as a Model for the Regenerate: Puritan Preaching, 1690–1730.’ Signs 2.2 (Winter): 304–15. Minkema, Kenneth P. (1992). ‘Hannah and Her Sisters: Sisterhood, Courtship, and Marriage in the Edwards Family in the Early Eighteenth Century.’ New England Historical and Genealogical Register 146 (January): 35–56. Minkema, Kenneth P. (2002). ‘Jonathan Edwards’s Defense of Slavery.’ Massachusetts Historical Review 4: 23–59. Minkema, Kenneth P. (1997). ‘Jonathan Edwards on Slavery and the Slave Trade.’ William and Mary Quarterly 14.4 (October): 823–34. Morgan, Edmund  S. (1966). The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England. New York: Harper & Row. Porterfield, Amanda (1992). Female Piety in Puritan New England: The Emergence of Religious Humanism. New York: Oxford University Press. Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher (1991). Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650–1750. Originally published 1980. New York: Vintage Books. Whitefield, George (1741). A Continuation of the Reverend Mr. Whitefield’s Journal, From a Few Days After his Return to Georgia to his Arrival at Falmouth, on the 11th of March 1741. Containing an Account of the Work of God at Georgia, Rhode-Island, New-England, New-York, Pennsylvania and South-Carolina. London: W. Strahan.

Author Bio Ava Chamberlain (PhD, Columbia University) is a Professor at Wright State University and Chair of the Departments of Religion, Philosophy, and Classics. Her research focuses on religion in colonial America, particularly the life and thought of the New England Puritan theologians Jonathan Edwards and Cotton Mather. She is the author of The Notorious Elizabeth Tuttle: Marriage, Murder, and Madness in the Family of Jonathan Edwards and the editor of The Miscellanies, Nos. 501–832, vol. 18 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards. She has published articles in several prestigious journals and has written numerous chapters for edited volumes. She is a member of the editorial board of Jonathan Edwards Studies.

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chapter 2

Pa r ish Mi n istry Harry S. Stout

For decades scholars of Jonathan Edwards have concentrated on his theological and philosophical writings. But for his contemporaries and followers such as Samuel Hopkins and Joseph Bellamy his most enduring qualities were as a biblical exegete and pastor. Philosophy was central to Edwards to be sure but only insofar as it stood in service to his vocational identification as a pastor whose chief concern was the saving of souls. To this end he would bend and shape his inherited Puritan dogma to speak to a radically different eighteenth-century audience. This essay will be particularly concerned with Edwards the pastor to four congregations in New York, Bolton, Connecticut, Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and, especially, Northampton, Massachusetts.

Background and Early Years: New York and Connecticut In exploring Edwards’s career as a pastor, it is clear that he came with some deep-set emotional and personal problems. Some of these he inherited from his father, Timothy, the long-standing pastor of East Windsor, Connecticut. While growing up in his father’s parish Edwards observed the trials and tribulations of a colonial pastor first-hand. Timothy was ordained in 1694 as East Windsor’s first minister (Minkema  1988, 6, 15–147). He would arrive with his precocious wife Esther Stoddard (daughter of Solomon) and remain there for the rest of his long life. He enjoyed some success as a preacher, delivering accomplished, if not inspiring, sermons to his congregation. But in his personal relations with his congregation his life descended into frequent and acrimonious conflicts, most often over his salary. As a pastor he assumed aristocratic authority over his listeners. He was, in the famous words of the Rev. Samuel Stone, ‘a speaking aristocracy in the face of a silent democracy’. But his congregation thought otherwise and held the purse strings to leverage their own authority, thus setting the

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18   Harry S. Stout stage for unending confrontation and resentment. Timothy often complained of low salary, ‘country pay’ in green corn, and bad bills of credit leaving him perpetually in need. Besides his salary issues, Timothy also fought with his congregation over his endorsement of the Saybrook Platform of 1708, which created a Presbyterian form of church government aimed at tilting authority in the direction of the minister rather than the congregation. Powerful regional synods and councils could override local autonomy, which previously governed the ‘Congregational Way’, whereby no outside authority was superior to the local, sovereign congregation. Perhaps unwisely, Timothy chose to take the new powers created in the Saybrook Platform as a rationale for granting himself an absolute veto over church admission and discipline and sole authority to determine the agenda of congregational meetings. Predictably his congregation bitterly resented what they perceived as a raw power grab in violation of Congregational privileges leading to a standoff in which Timothy denied the Lord’s Supper to his congregation for three years. Jonathan grew up in the midst of all this and it would shape his understanding of the ministry in colonial New England. At the same time, there was never a doubt that he would follow his father’s steps into the ministry. Congregational strife together with his own prodigious intellect led him to avoid socializing and to prefer the abstract engagement with scripture, doctrine, and philosophy to interpersonal relationships with his congregations. Had there been a profession of ‘public intellectual’, Edwards might well have chosen that path, concentrating his efforts on theological and philosophical pursuits. But such a profession would not emerge until the nineteenth century, leaving ministry as the closest approximation to a life of the mind. He was a British colonist his entire life and absorbed the conservative and aristocratic bearing of a social superior. Despite the advantages of education and powerful family connections, Edwards periodically suffered bouts of depression and ‘melancholy,’ that rendered his pastoral ministry all the more difficult. Prior to his return to Yale as a tutor in 1724, his ‘Diary’ and ‘Resolutions’ reveal recurrent depression and efforts to overcome it through sheer will power—efforts that would prove unequal to the challenge (WJE 16: 753–86). Part of his problem was certainly dispositional and would follow him at points through his life, but part of it was also spiritual, driven by uncertainty about his conversion experience. As late as 1725 and September 1726 he reported a ‘low, sunk estate’ that had persisted for almost three years (Tracy 1980, 60; Marsden 2003, 101–13). Edwards would find some relief in preaching. While witnessing to members of his congregation he was, in a sense, preaching to himself and finding some solace in the process. Only after his role in ministry became formalized would his efforts move from preoccupation with himself to a more outer-directed concentration on his congregation. Before he arrived in Northampton in 1726, Edwards enjoyed some experience as a pastor with brief sojourns in New York City and Bolton, Connecticut. In New York, Edwards preached to a small congregation that had split from a larger Presbyterian church in the city. Little is known about the circumstances of his ministry there where he preached from September 1722 to April 1723, though he registered no unhappiness

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Parish Ministry   19 and appeared to have a good relationship with the people. The circumstances of his leaving remain largely hidden, though the shadow of his overly protective father loomed large. From New York, Timothy arranged for his son to come closer to home (and supervision) in late 1722 with a pulpit in Bolton, Connecticut, a small town close to East Windsor. From his ‘Diary’, it is clear that Edwards’s departure from New York was unhappy on two counts—leaving New York behind, and arriving in Bolton, where he was painfully close to his father’s oversight. Whatever his misgivings, Edwards agreed to preach in Bolton ‘on trial’ and soon signed a settlement agreement on November 11. His unhappiness with the appointment is clearly evident in the fact that he did not even mention it in his ‘Diary’. Edwards apparently appreciated Bolton less than his father (or perhaps because of his father) and his ministry there was also short-lived. He returned to Yale as a tutor for two years before his call to Northampton. Those years too were darkened by the responsibilities he assumed and the lack of a rector, leaving many of the administrative responsibilities to Jonathan. The appointment of his former mentor Elisha Williams as rector did little to ease the anomie Edwards endured. While at Yale he became gravely ill and never really resumed his duties as tutor. By the time he was invited to Northampton, doubts plagued him, after such a lacklustre series of pastoral experiences, with little resolution in sight.

Early Northampton Years When Edwards arrived in Northampton, he found himself junior colleague to a legend, the 83-year-old Solomon Stoddard. It is impossible to understand Edwards’s complicated relationship with his Northampton congregation without understanding his relationship with Grandfather Stoddard (Marsden  2003, 114–32; Gura  2005, 47–69). Outside of Boston, Stoddard was probably the best-known pastor and revivalist in New England. He was also a skilled polemicist who battled with Boston’s esteemed preacher Increase Mather and his son Cotton. Stoddard redefined cardinal principles of ministerial authority, church membership, and the Lord’s Supper that had prevailed for two generations in colonial New England. On the question of ministerial authority Stoddard questioned the traditional power of church members and set himself as sovereign of equal status with clerical synods. In her classic biography, Jonathan Edwards, Pastor, Patricia Tracy recognized that twenty-one years after Stoddard’s death, when Jonathan was locked in battle with his congregation, Stoddard ‘and not his grandson Edwards, was still the Patriarch. Edwards’s [pastoral] career was a drama played out—in his own mind and that of his congregation—on the stage of Solomon Stoddard’s Northampton’ (Tracy 1980, 11). For example, Edwards followed his grandfather’s advice about encouraging revivals, but he also was criticized by old Stoddardean converts for trying to change the terms of church admission. Northampton did not meet the model of the typical seventeenth-century ‘New England Town’ described by historian Kenneth Lockridge as a ‘Christian Utopian Closed Corporate

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20   Harry S. Stout Community’ (Lockridge 1970, 16). It was settled in 1654 above the rich meadowlands of the Connecticut River adjoining present day Hadley in western Massachusetts. The founders, though nominally ‘Puritan’, were drawn to the area less by any religious consideration of forming a Puritan congregation than by travellers’ accounts of abundant tillable land and (for a time) ease of trade with local Indian tribes. The town rapidly grew as a trade and marketing centre for the Connecticut River Valley and soon produced wealthy merchants known as the ‘river gods’ of the Valley. The settlers of Northampton did not hire their first minister, Eleazar Mather (son of the esteemed patriarch Richard Mather of Dorchester) until 1658, and the church was not formally ‘covenanted’ until June 1661. Mather had little success with his congregants and fought openly with them over the Half-Way Covenant established by the Synod of 1662 whereby the children of second generation parents who were not formal church members could be baptized and placed under the discipline of the congregation. Despite Mather’s opposition, Northampton became one of the first churches in Massachusetts Bay to adopt the new, more liberal polity. When Mather died in 1669 the congregation hired a new minister, Solomon Stoddard who, after a three-year trial, was ordained in September 1672. Stoddard was an enthusiastic supporter of the Half-Way Covenant and soon endorsed even more radical views on the Lord’s Supper. After 1677 Stoddard stopped distinguishing between full and half-way members and listed all members ‘in full communion’ without any vote by the congregation. All he required as a ‘historical faith’ constituted by ‘a knowledge of Principles of Religion and not scandalous by open sinful living’ (Taylor). In his first major treatise on The Safety of Appearing at the Day of Judgment in the Righteousness of Christ, published in 1687, Stoddard questioned whether any human could look into another’s soul for evidence of saving grace. Without any possibility of certainty regarding another’s saving faith there was no reason why anyone living a scandal free life couldn’t participate in the Lord’s Supper. As a consequence, the requirement of conversion for participation in the Lord’s Supper made no sense. Instead of limiting participation to the ‘visible saints’ (an impossible judgment), Stoddard shifted the meaning of the Lord’s Supper from a sacrament limited or ‘fenced’ around the saints to a ‘converting ordinance’ that proved to be the means of salvation rather than the consequence. In yet another power grab, Stoddard exercised a veto on church admissions, while at the same time listing virtually every inhabitant over fourteen as a church member. By bringing virtually every adult into the church membership (and discipline), Stoddard effectively enhanced his own power as pastor. To complete his assault on traditional New England Way, Stoddard argued in The Doctrine of Instituted Churches that the church was not circumscribed by individual church covenants that limited membership within communities. Instead, he argued, the true basis of any church was defined by geography—a proposition more akin to the parish system in the Church of England where everyone within a specific border was part of a ‘society of saints’ joined together by geography for purposes of worship and sacrament, akin to the original Congregationalist blueprint. The effect of these revisions

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Parish Ministry   21 was virtually to scuttle the whole idea of Congregational polity as defined in the Cambridge Platform of 1648. Instead of church membership depending on the judgment of the members it was left solely to the pastor alone. Overseeing the local congregations would be a Presbyterian-like synod of regional ministers empowered to rule over individual congregations. Alongside Stoddard’s authoritarianism was another, more pastoral, side that emphasized highly emotional preaching and evangelism. With one hand Stoddard could insist on the aristocratic prerogatives of the minister, while with the other issue impassioned sermons that combined terrifying descriptions of the eternity of hell’s torments with emotional appeals to the hearts and affections of his listeners as they ‘closed with Christ’ in saving faith. For Stoddard, as later for Edwards, experience became the ultimate criterion of true spirituality. Stoddard’s highly emotional preaching became paradigmatic for other preachers. He codified his homiletics in his 1714 Guide to Christ, a manual really for other preachers to master the art of guiding souls through the process of conversion. In all, Stoddard presided over five ‘harvests’ in which large numbers of souls were brought into the church (WJE 4: 146). Stoddard’s innovations in church membership and sacraments were resisted by the older generation of church members in his congregation until their deaths in the 1680s. Thereafter his innovations won widespread approval among the rising generation and youth who relished challenging their elders. The young people coming of age in the early eighteenth century faced serious challenges not encountered by their parents. Most notable was the scarcity of land and lack of unallocated land good for farming. Young people could no longer be certain of a living off the soil or land ownership. The rising generation had only two options for land of their own: inheritance or purchase. With some of the longest life expectancies on the face of the earth, colonial children faced long waits before their parents would pass an inheritance on to them. The lack of currency meant many lacked any means to purchase lands of their own, transforming the face of families and dependencies. Many of them delayed marriage and remained ‘adolescent’ dependents well into adulthood. Without land they were forced to remain in their parents’ home and under parental direction well into their twenties and early thirties. It was in this environment that Stoddard’s policy of open communion and expanded church membership allowed young people to have some measure of autonomy in lives that were otherwise dominated by authoritarian, long-lived parents. By the time that Stoddard died in February 1729 the small village of Northampton had grown from fifty-five families in 1661 to two hundred families. Social stratification grew rapidly as well so that by 1700, the richest ten per cent of male inhabitants owned a quarter of all the land, while the poorest ten per cent held less than two per cent of the land. (Tracy 1980, 38, 46). Increasingly the distance between rich and poor widened, creating greater inequality, and with it, greater psychological tension and conflict between the haves and the have nots. Stoddard was clearly among the haves and stood as the thirteenth largest landowner with an estate of 78 acres plus £1126 in personal property.

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22   Harry S. Stout With Edwards’s appointment as successor to the much-loved patriarch Stoddard he entered a vocation fraught with opportunity and danger. At that time he was undoubtedly in awe of his grandfather and a relative stranger to him. There is no evidence of a close relationship before his ordination. Clearly the town appointed him for his abilities and not primarily for his connections. He was, as his later biographer Sereno Dwight Edwards noted, ‘a young man of uncommon promise’ (Tracy 1980, 51). By 1727, Edwards had already demonstrated the awe-inspiring intellectual acuity of a rising star who had mastered the physics of Isaac Newton and the epistemology of John Locke in advance of many of his senior peers who were unfamiliar with the ‘New Learning’ of the Enlightenment (Marsden 2003, 59–81; Zakai 2010; Goodman 2015, 8–47). Upon succeeding Stoddard as the pastor of Northampton, Edwards’s life fell into a familiar pattern common to eighteenth-century New England clergy. By 1729, Edwards knew the town well and knew the challenges he faced succeeding ‘Pope’ Stoddard at the relatively young age of 26. In his treatise Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God, published in late 1735, he provided a rosy—perhaps overly rosy—description of the town of Northampton in ways that would further the mystique of his grandfather. The town, he observed, was filled with people who were ‘sober, and orderly’, and largely spared the theological heterodoxy that plagued many other New England towns. This he attributed both to Northampton’s remove from corrupting seaports and to Stoddard’s strict enforcement of orthodox doctrine. Both of these factors contributed to a state of relative harmony without the divisions that overtook other communities like Dedham or Salem. In fact, Northampton was not spared divisions and quarrels, but for the young pastor eager to engraft himself onto the legendary persona of Stoddard, Edwards chose to see Northampton in its best light. Years later, bitter disputes with his congregation would cause him to change this bright portrait, but in the beginning he was eager to create a harmonious picture that he hoped would come to define social and ecclesiastical realities in the larger community (WJE 4: 144–5). Several paragraphs into the Faithful Narrative, Edwards abruptly shifted keys and moved from the town’s ideal harmony under Stoddard to a denunciation of the defects he found upon his arrival. Despite its lofty origins, Northampton was lapsing into a state of moral and spiritual degeneracy just as he inherited the pulpit. Instead of spiritual zeal and saving faith, Edwards found ‘extraordinary dullness’, social conflict, a ‘licentiousness’ ‘among the youth of the town’. In particular, he complained, ‘Many of them very much addicted to night-walking, and frequenting the tavern, and lewd practices, wherein some, by their example exceedingly corrupted others.’ During evening ‘frolics’, he continued, the youth ‘would often spend the greater part of the night in them, without regard to any order in the families they belonged to: and indeed family government did too much fail in the town’ (WJE 4: 146). Edwards would make it his mission to bring the young people into conformity with the rule of godliness. The sources of this misbehaviour were located in a clear lack of piety. Though loathe to criticize his grandfather in the early years, Edwards implied that declension had set in among the young people as Stoddard grew old and disengaged from the day-to-day habits of the youth, thereby

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Parish Ministry   23 becoming ‘not so able to observe them’ (WJE 4: 146). Having firmly surmounted his bout with melancholy and a physical breakdown in 1729, Edwards dedicated the years 1730–5 to evangelism, in particular of the youth. Beyond misbehaviour, Edwards was committed to continuing his grandfather’s crusade to battle the ‘liberalism’ of many clergy who were departing from the strict orthodoxy of the ‘New England Way’. In his early ministry Edwards followed his grandfather’s strategy of open communion to turn the sacrament into a ‘converting ordinance’. The intent was to bring as many inhabitants into the church and then, through evangelistic preaching and proper doctrinal instruction, to bring them to a conversion experience and saving faith. In the meantime, he urged his listeners to act as if they had had a conversion experience and to control the sinful impulses of their hearts. But the results were disappointing and Edwards could not help admonishing his congregation for ignoring Christ’s invitation to the communion table. Throughout Edwards scrupulously followed traditional Reformed assertions that faith and not meritorious works was the only true road to salvation. In the end, Edwards even more than his predecessors would stress the fallen nature of humankind and their absolute dependence on a sovereign God. In a 1734 published sermon entitled A Divine and Supernatural Light, Edwards insisted that saving faith was imparted to sinful humanity through the supernatural activity of the Holy Spirit, without which there was no possibility of salvation. The sermon is notable on many accounts, not least for its lyrical qualities that characterized so much of Edwards’s preaching. Edwards was particularly taken with the sensational psychology of Locke’s epistemology and the word ‘sense’ overwhelmed his pulpit language. As represented in A Divine and Supernatural Light, conversion entailed a new and ‘true sense of the divine excellency of the things revealed in the Word of God’. The truly converted, he asserted, ‘don’t merely rationally believe that God is glorious, but he has a sense of the gloriousness of God in his heart’ (WJE 17: 413). To judge from church membership lists in the early 1730s, Edwards’s preaching met with little success. Casting about for the causes of his failure, Edwards began to rethink his grandfather’s policies and consider introducing more exclusive requirements that would make them more sensible of their fallen estate and their dependence on the Word (and authority) of God’s messenger. Fifteen years would pass before Edwards translated these thoughts into firm policies, but the seeds of uncertainty were planted in the early resistance of his congregation to his conversionist preaching. Stoddard’s innovations were only part of the problem Edwards faced. Like Stoddard, Edwards was alarmed by the steady progress of ‘Arminianism’ in the ‘land of light’. A new generation of liberally trained clergy were rejecting the strict doctrines of Calvinism in favour of a softer theological reality premised on human ability and the essential goodness of humankind. Arminians rejected the strict doctrine of predestination and affirmed the possibility of universal salvation. They believed that in order for God rightly to condemn sinners for their unbelief they had to be free to unbelieve without any determining action on God’s part. In other words, Arminianism affirmed the liberty of humankind while delimiting the sovereignty of God.

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24   Harry S. Stout

The Revival Years To combat Arminianism and spiritual dullness, Edwards preached a sermon series on Justification by Faith Alone in the winter of 1734/5. The effect of these sermons led many in his congregation to take a more critical censure of Arminianism because of ‘fear that God was about to withdraw from the land, and that we should be given up to heterodoxy and corrupt principles’—corrupt principles that challenged the sovereignty of God (WJE 4: 148). Those sermons together with his strictures against godless living and ­affirmation of a ‘new sense of the heart’ led to the most surprising consequence of his young ministry: a full-fledged revival that would bring hundreds into church membership. By spring 1735 the stark fears and bright hopes that Edwards forcefully brought home in his preaching led to a fever of enthusiasm, especially among the youth. All were asking with fear and trepidation: What must I do to be saved? The answer: justification by faith in God’s sovereign grace alone. Edwards’s earnest preaching reached receptive ears who found Arminianism unsatisfying. For Edwards human ability was of no use. Only when sinners confronted their own complete inability to save themselves would God’s grace reach through their sinful souls and draw them to Himself. Within six months, 160 new communicants were added to the membership roster. Once drawn into the church, baptisms occurred with regularity. In contrast with other parishes, the new members in Northampton were significantly younger than other congregations, reflecting Edwards’s strategy of focusing on the youth (Winiarski 2017, 73, 110). Soon passions inflamed by Edwards’s preaching and his local clerical imitators spread throughout the Connecticut Valley. A new generation of inhabitants uprooted from traditional habits and norms found in the highly individualistic and emotional imprecations of the revivalists, led by Edwards, a new register that spoke to their social and spiritual alienation. Not surprisingly the hearers most affected by the gospel calls were the ones most threatened by the changing world they inhabited. Patricia Tracy has demonstrated that the most responsive to revival preaching were young men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six—a phenomenon that she plausibly attributes to a crisis of adolescence brought on by socioeconomic changes literally reshaping the eighteenth-century landscape and cutting young people off from traditional vocations and community life. Conversion offered a familiar solution to unfamiliar problems previous generations had not encountered (Tracy 1980, 91–3). The hidden drivers of heightened anxiety among the rising generation were explosive population growth and acute land shortage. The eighteenth century witnessed the beginnings of striking population growth. Historical demographers working from painstaking examinations of vital records in villages and towns throughout Europe and America have documented a demographic revolution. Simple replacement of the population from generation to generation gave way to sustained, geometric expansion in population size. Improved nutrition and more effective control of diseases and plagues were part of it. But the chief cause was a drastic reduction in child mortality. In North America the population doubled every generation through natural increase

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Parish Ministry   25 alone. The economic consequences proved stunning, as the sheer number of producers and consumers, buyers and sellers exploded across western society. This demographic transition produced mixed results. Along with greater wealth and material amenities came the displacement of populations. As more children survived to create more families of comparably surviving children, the pressures on land availability grew inexorably. The demand for land triggered unprecedented geographic mobility when children and grandchildren struck out from their natal villages in search of new spaces. Often they moved to cities, so that mobility and urbanization marched hand in hand. But the emotional cost was great. Migrants—pioneers all—left behind the multiple generations of family and friends that had sustained and bounded life since the beginning of colonization. The net result of this demographic upheaval was that in the spring of 1735 Edwards could take pride in the revivals he did so much to promote without a sure sense of their origins. By his estimate three hundred converts were added to church rolls in only six months. If numbers spelled success, he had truly proven himself to be a worthy successor to his grandfather, and his reputation was spreading well beyond the immediate environs of Northampton. Yet as his Faithful Narrative reveals, the revivals did not accomplish what he clearly desired, namely, a re-affirmation of clerical authority. Besides a decline in clerical authority and the role of pastor, parental authority was also declining and here, Edwards’s strategy of by-passing the parents and concentrating on the youth fanned the flames of disrespect. Unlike Stoddard who seldom entertained parishioners in his home, Jonathan and Sarah welcomed young people into their home rather than encourage them to return home to parental direction. Compounding his mistakes, Edwards failed to visit the parents in their homes except in emergency (Tracy  1980, 112). Wittingly or not, Edwards set a course of action that encouraged parents to imitate the piety and ‘social religion’ of their children rather than the other way around. Nowhere was the mixed quality of the revival demonstrated more dramatically than in the suicide of Edwards’s uncle by marriage, Joseph Hawley. According to Edwards: In the latter part of May, it began to be very sensible that the Spirit of God was gradually withdrawing from us, and after this time Satan seemed to be more let loose, and raged in a dreadful manner. The first instance wherein it appeared was a person’s putting an end to his own life, by cutting his throat . . . Towards the latter part of his time, he grew much discouraged, and melancholy grew amain upon him, till he was wholly overpowered by it, and was in great measure past a capacity of receiving advice, or being reasoned with to any purpose . . . After these things the instances of conversion were rare here in comparison of what they had before been. (WJE 4: 206)

That shocking act was a tragic coda to the revivals and the town soon returned to the conflicts and factional bickering that characterized their pre-revival days. Nor was clerical prestige and authority enhanced by the revival as illustrated by the controversy over the

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26   Harry S. Stout Arminian, Robert Breck’s, ordination. Clearly pitted against Springfield’s First Church, which favoured ordaining Breck as their pastor, was the Hampshire Association of ministers, of which Edwards was a guiding presence and articulate defender. The issue was simple. Did ministerial associations have the authority to control the affairs of an individual congregation or did congregational autonomy supersede clerical authority? The ensuing debate was harsh and unforgiving on both sides. As well, it brought Edwards into direct conflict with the eastern Boston clergy who supported Breck’s Springfield congregation over the Hampshire Association. In defending the Association Edwards underscored both his theological orthodoxy and his conservative, anti-democratic inclinations. In biographer George Marsden’s words, ‘All his instincts were hierarchical. As long as he was sure their cause was just, he had no hesitation about wielding oligarchical power’ (Marsden 2003, 182). Embittered contests over ministerial authority continued to fester after the revivals. Another flashpoint was the building of a new meetinghouse in Northampton between 1736 and 1738. Unlike the old meetinghouse, the new meetinghouse did not serve simultaneously as the site for worship and for town meetings, effectively creating a new wedge between the town’s politics and religion. Among the church members, conflicts also emerged over the issue of ‘seating’ the meetinghouse. In the past, meetinghouse seats were assigned on the basis of age and ‘usefulness’. A committee consisting of lay leaders and the pastor (in Northampton’s case, Solomon Stoddard) was appointed to apportion the seats. But in 1737, Edwards was not included on the committee and the decisions were based on a new criterion that privileged wealth over age and allowed townspeople to have a major input whether they were members or not. Where age had once taken priority over wealth, the criterion was now reversed and the wealthiest were given the best seats (near the front of the meetinghouse) in preference to the elderly and the ‘useful’. Despite preaching sermons that condemned the reorganization of the meetinghouse, Edwards was unable to change the criterion or even participate in it. In one highly critical sermon preached after seating the new meetinghouse, Edwards looked over his congregation and admonished the wealthy assembled before him: ‘You that are pleased with your seats in this house because you are seated high in a place that is looked upon hungrily by those that sit round about . . . consider it is but a very little while before it will [be] all one to you whether you have sat high or low here’ (WJE 19: 746; Tracy 1980, 129). At the same time that Edwards attacked the new meetinghouse he also levelled charges against the youth about whom he had been so hopeful, accusing them of promoting immorality through the practice of ‘bundling’ or sleeping together before marriage. He also accused the parents of abandoning their responsibilities and permitting open immorality to flourish. When not preaching against the meetinghouse and parental permissiveness Edwards continued his assault on liberalism. Along the way he took preaching lessons from the famous Anglican revivalist, George Whitefield, who captivated audiences on both sides of the Atlantic and became known as the ‘Grand Itinerant’. Whitefield preached more like an actor than a professor and perfected the homiletics of extemporaneous preaching to electrifying effect (Stout  1991; Kidd  2014). After Whitefield visited Edwards’s

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Parish Ministry   27 Northampton congregation, leaving Edwards in tears, Edwards transformed his sermon preparation and delivery. From then on, his sermon notes became notably briefer— really outlines—to force him to extemporize. He minimized doctrinal openings in favour of emotional levers, most notably fear and dread. By the summer of 1741, Edwards had mastered the art of encouraging bodily motions and physical agitations into his preaching. So successful was he at inciting somatic responses that congregations were overcome by faintings, convulsions, and outcries which, in the beginning, Edwards praised as ‘visible conversions’. He would later reverse himself, but in the beginning, influenced greatly by his wife Sarah Pierpont Edwards, he interpreted bodily exertions as a sign of God’s presence. On July 5, 1741, three days before preaching his most famous sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, in Enfield, he preached a sacrament sermon in Suffield that added ninety-seven souls to the membership rolls including three slaves—a relative rarity in New England parish preaching (Winiarski 2017, 180, 222, 226; Stout 2007). In many ways, the ‘Great Awakening’ of 1740–2 was a logical successor to Edwards’s Valley revivals of 1735 and the levels of ‘enthusiasm’ were comparable. There were also major differences. One was scale. The Great Awakening was not only an intercolonial phenomenon, it was also an international phenomenon promoted in no small measure by the sensational preaching of George Whitefield (Bebbington 1989; Ward 1992; Noll 2003; Kidd 2007). Another difference, closer to home, was that neither the town of Northampton nor Edwards were at the forefront of the Great Awakening. A revived spirit was slow to come to Northampton and it largely by-passed Edwards, depending instead on Whitefield, who came at Edwards’s invitation. In fact, preachers who were strangers to Northampton proved far more effective in arousing the congregation than Edwards himself. Samuel Buell preached in Edwards’s pulpit when the latter was away and won the affection of all, including Sarah. She was so moved by his preaching that she reached heights of piety and enthusiasm not previously engaged. Her spiritual agitations and bodily responses lasted day and night for the entire two-week period that Edwards was absent and preaching elsewhere. By the fall of 1742 the combined effects of touring—or ‘riding’—itinerants, extreme enthusiasm, and immoderate zealotry had assumed centre stage, dividing the clergy into rival camps of supporters (‘New Lights’) and opponents (‘Old Lights’). Whatever slim unanimity the clergy had previously enjoyed was permanently ruptured amidst controversy over the Awakening; in effect, ministers were forced to take sides. As a promoter of revival, Edwards was a New Light, but a chastened and conservative New Light, wary of the heights that audiences could ascend and the dangers to established authority they could wield. In response to the clerical divisions Edwards published several statements affirming the divine origins of the Awakening, but also cautioning against its excesses. His first treatise, The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God, originated as a sermon he delivered at Yale’s Commencement in September 1741. In it he cautioned that bodily motions and excessive bouts of imagination were not necessarily corrupt or sinful, but neither were they reliable indexes of a work of God.

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28   Harry S. Stout A second treatise, Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New England, written in late 1742, defended the revivals (though not the itinerant extremists) and went so far as to suggest that the revival might be ‘the dawning, or at least a prelude’ to the millennium (WJE 4: 353). Given the discord in his midst these were strange ­projections, but in the height of excitement all things seemed possible. In this treatise Edwards promoted a doctrine that would become a hallmark of his theology, namely that ‘true virtue or holiness has its seat chiefly in the heart, rather than in the head: it therefore follows that it consists chiefly in holy affections’ (WJE 4: 297–8). Edwards would follow this radical reordering of the religious psychology to the heart rather than the head with his third and most thorough definition in his 1746 Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. Here Edwards separated affections from animal passions and emotions arguing that true affections united the will with the understanding in pointing the soul to love of God rather than love of self. This ‘inclination of the will’ would characterize Edwards’s most mature theology in ways that upheld the legitimacy of heightened emotions of the sort registered in Sarah’s transports without making them a prerequisite to salvation. Ministerial prerogatives were never far away from theology in Edwards’s thinking and in Some Thoughts he curbed his enthusiasm for revivals as harbingers of millennium with frank warnings designed to underscore ministerial authority. In identifying threats to future glory he singled out several sins of particular connection to the established ministers. Above all else Edwards was concerned with ‘lay exhorters’ who censured and condemned ministers who were, in fact, men of faith. When Gilbert Tennent preached an incendiary anti-clerical sermon on The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry, Edwards was quick to come to the defence of orthodox ministers. He made plain his conviction that targeting ‘professing Christians’ in the pulpit was an abomination and unjust censure. Equally pernicious was the tolerance and even encouragement of uneducated and unordained individuals from masquerading as respectable ministers. This was aimed at ‘Separate Baptists’ like Isaac Backus, Baptist pastor of the Baptist Church in Middleborough, Massachusetts, who assumed the authority to preach without the requisite credentials as established by the college-educated established ministers. For the revivals to realize their millennial dream, anti-clericalism had to be eliminated and the way paved for a renewal of ministerial respect and deference.

The Later Northampton and Stockbridge Years The Great Awakening did not last. Another war with France in Louisburg in 1745 shifted colonial passions from revival to war. As enthusiasm waned, Edwards faced challenges on many fronts that threatened his pastoral role in Northampton. Compounding these challenges was the death of his champion Colonel John Stoddard (second son of Solomon Stoddard) in 1748. Edwards, like Stoddard, was a social conservative who believed in a hierarchy of superiors and inferiors in which it was the duty of inferiors to

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Parish Ministry   29 defer to their superiors. This aristocratic strain in his thinking co-existed in uneasy tension with the democratic implications of his defence of popular emotions and revivals. As Edwards had begun rethinking his theology of the sacraments in ways that threatened Stoddard’s open communion, he had consulted frequently with Colonel Stoddard and enjoyed his support. With Stoddard’s death in 1748 he lost his most powerful ally at the very time that Edwards’s critics and Stoddard’s friends were preparing to mount a hostile takeover of the pulpit. Stoddard’s death was a major loss. Still Edwards could continue to count on some supporters, including most notably, Timothy Dwight of Northampton. The clearest indication that all was not well in the Edwards congregation appeared in Sarah Pierpont Edwards’s narrative of her religious experience in 1742. The original transcript of her experience (written in Jonathan’s hand) has only recently been discovered but it reveals in stark terms her fears of ‘enemies’ in the congregation who threatened her and her husband. Sarah spent much of her narrative glorying in the ecstasies she experienced, but at the same time she registered the hostility of the town, which she contrasted with her internal spiritual joy: There was then a deep snow on the ground, and I could think of being driven from my home into the cold and snow, of being chased from the town with the utmost contempt and malice, and of being left to perish with the cold, as cast out by all the world, with perfect calmness and serenity. It appeared to me, that it would not move me, or in the least disturb the inexpressible happiness and peace of my soul. My mind seemed as much above all such things, as the sun is above the earth. (MS, ‘Mrs. Edwards’ Experiences’)

To add to tensions, money was never far from Edwards’s mind. Despite having one of the highest clerical salaries outside of Boston he, like his father, continually faced resistance and opposition from his congregation. Matters came to a head in 1744 when Edwards sought to deflect embarrassing annual bouts over his salary with a request for a fixed salary so that disputes ‘won’t come over every year’. Edwards’s letter was never recorded in the town records and went unaddressed. When he repeated his request in 1746 and 1747 he met with the same resistance. Only in 1748 after prolonged debates did the town agree to a base of £700 but retained the right to revise the sum when measured against an index of prices. This limited victory did not eliminate ongoing debates, but it did put a hold on the annual acrimony (Tracy 1980, 158–9). Spring 1744 also brought the notorious ‘Bad Book’ affair and the effective end of Edwards’s bond with his congregation. When several of the Northampton ‘boys’ (actually young men in their twenties) happened upon a mid-wife’s manual, they began teasing the local girls in public settings, leading Edwards to call them out by name. Compounding the problem, most of the boys were church members who had earlier experienced conversion in the 1735 revivals. Some, like Oliver Warner and Timothy Root, were openly contemptuous of Edwards and seemingly enjoyed their parents’

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30   Harry S. Stout support. The parents complained that Edwards should not have accused the boys publicly and resisted the charge of ‘public lewdness’ that Edwards levelled against them. At the same time that Edwards condemned the young men he defended the aggrieved girls, which did not endear in a male-dominated patriarchal society. Clearly there was a breakdown in parental and clerical authority, which townspeople blamed on Edwards. At a church hearing, Edwards was disappointed not to receive the support of his clerical brethren. By failing to inspire loyalty by inculcating independent piety, and then compounding that by failing to impose discipline, Edwards left himself isolated, with few supporters. At the very time that affairs seemed their darkest, Edwards chose to announce that he had rethought his sacramental doctrine and would abandon his grandfather’s ­policy of open communion. Henceforth full church membership would require a more sincere and less formulaic profession of saving faith. The abrupt turnaround represented Edwards’s recognition that Stoddard’s methods were not working with his congregation. The problem, it soon became clear, was that his congregation did not agree, and in fact vocally sided with Stoddard’s open communion. When faced with the question of who would judge whether an aspiring member was converted, the congregation did not agree that judgment should be rendered by the minister. And no matter what method might be chosen, many agreed with Stoddard’s and Edwards’s earlier judgment that no human being could look into another’s soul and judge if they were converted or not. Only God could know with finality who was saved and who was not. Edwards’s pastorate had reached its nadir, the point of no return. Now his congregation not only questioned his doctrines, but his motives as well. Was he really interested in saving souls or was he engaged in a power play asserting his own authority to rule over his congregation? By late 1749 the verdict was in: Edwards was wrong and he would have to leave. In a hearing before a church council, the attendant ministers determined in a vote of 10 to 1 that the gulf between pastor and congregation was insurmountable, and Edwards was terminated (Winiarski  2017, 457–8). Edwards’s dismissal officially took place on June 22, 1750, and with that his pastorate effectively ended. Edwards would eventually resettle in Stockbridge as missionary to the native inhabitants. He preached simple sermons to address their status as relative newcomers to Christianity, even while claiming that they evidenced more piety than their Anglo neighbours in Northampton and Stockbridge (Wheeler 2008, 175–222). But mostly Edwards dedicated his time and energy to completing his philosophical and theological treatises, which would come to define his fame, both then and to posterity. Having lost his pastorate to the ghost of Solomon Stoddard, he was left with his powerful intellect and polemical skills to battle Arminianism and defend his ­ Calvinist heritage. A call to the presidency of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton) afforded Edwards the opportunity to leave Stockbridge without a pulpit. Within months of his

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Parish Ministry   31 appointment, he and his family were inoculated for smallpox. Others in his family recovered, but Edwards contracted smallpox on his mouth and throat, and he died on March 22, 1758. With his demise, colonial America lost its greatest pastor and theologian.

Works Cited Bebbington, D. W. (1989). Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s. New York: Routledge. Edwards, Sarah Pierpont. (1742). ‘Mrs. Edwards’ Experiences, Jan. 19, &c.’ Special Collections, Yale Divinity School Library. Goodman, Russell  B. (2015). American Philosophy Before Pragmatism. New York: Oxford University Press. Gura, Philip F. (2005). Jonathan Edwards: America’s Evangelical. New York: Hill and Wang. Kidd, Thomas S. (2014). George Whitefield: America’s Spiritual Founding Father. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Kidd, Thomas S. (2007). The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Lockridge, Kenneth  A. (1970). A New England Town: The First Hundred Years. New York: W. W. Norton. Marsden, George M. (2003). Jonathan Edwards: A Life. New Haven. Minkema, Kenneth P. (1988). ‘The Edwardses: A Ministerial Family in Eighteenth-Century New England.’ Ph.D. diss., University of Connecticut. Noll, Mark  A. (2003). The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield and the Wesleys. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity. Stout, Harry S. (2007). ‘Edwards as Revivalist.’ In The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards, edited by Stephen  J.  Stein, 125–43. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Stout, Harry  S. (1991). The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Taylor, Edward. (1986). ‘Edward Taylor’s Notebook.’ Massachusetts Historical Society, unpaginated. Tracy, Patricia J. (1980). Jonathan Edwards, Pastor: Society in Eighteenth-Century Northampton. New York: Hill and Wang. Ward, W.  R. (1992). The Protestant Evangelical Awakening. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Wheeler, Rachel. (2008). To Live Upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the EighteenthCentury Northeast. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Winiarski, Douglas  L. (2017). Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings in Eighteenth-Century New England. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Zakai, Avihu (2010). Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of Nature: The Re-enchantment of the World in the Age of Scientific Reasoning. London: T & T Clark.

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32   Harry S. Stout

Author Bio Harry Stout (PhD, Kent State University) is the Jonathan Edwards Professor of American Religious History at Yale University. He is the author of The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (Oxford University Press, 2012) and the general editor of The Works of Jonathan Edwards (Yale University Press, 1997–2009) and The Jonathan Edwards Encyclopedia (Eerdmans, 2017). His courses include seminars in American Religious and Cultural History, Jonathan Edwards, and the American Civil War.

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chapter 3

Histor ica l a n d Eccl esi astica l Con texts George Marsden

Edwards’s life and work took shape in the midst of a web of interwoven contexts. In retrospect we can sort out some of the most influential of these, recognizing that they are all interrelated. First we shall sketch very broadly some of the major background historical and ecclesiastical factors that had helped shape the world Edwards was born into in New England of 1703. Then, turning primarily to the eighteenth century itself, we shall consider in more detail some of the most significant political, social, and economic, and familial contexts that shaped Edwards’s world. Finally, we shall consider the more strictly ecclesiastical contexts of his day, taking into account that these were intertwined with all the other contexts.

Formative Background Contexts Keeping in mind the much longer history of Christendom, the Reformation is a good place to start. That is particularly so since the Reformation played such a large role in Edwards’s own perceptions of his historical context. Edwards saw the ongoing postReformation political and ecclesiastical conflicts of his era as parts of a cosmic conflict that would lead to the defeat of the Antichrist (The Church of Rome) and eventually to the establishment of Christ’s kingdom on earth. Without adopting Edwards’s theological understandings of this history, it is helpful to be reminded of the centrality of the Reformation heritage in shaping his world (Eire 2016, Cameron 2012). The goal of the Reformers, of course, was not to divide Western Christendom but to reform it on a basis consistent with the Scriptures. But medieval

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34   George Marsden Christendom itself had been an immensely complex tapestry of political, social, ­economic, and other factors interwoven with ecclesiastical concerns. One of its central assumptions that most of the reformers preserved was that the realm of Christianity should extend well beyond just the church to building and maintaining of a Christian civilization. That meant that Protestant efforts to reform Western Christendom led not only to ecclesiastical divisions but also to political divisions. Western European Christendom was already divided into many political units, each with its sovereign prince. Whether the spread of reforming Protestant ideals would be accepted in any territory depended largely on the disposition of rulers. Almost immediately that helped fuel warfare among competing principalities. The ensuing long era of European warfare, often with religious dimensions, culminated in the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 ending the Thirty Years War in central Europe, and the rise and fall of the Puritan Commonwealth in England in the 1640s and 1650s. Much of this warfare involved the strengthening of national identities in monarchies such as France, Spain, and England. Many of these competitive conflicts were also driven by the rapid economic and commercial expansion of the era, fostered by rapid technological advances. Especially important in those economic advances and political conflicts was the competitive European imperial conquest in the Western Hemisphere (Elliott 2006). At the same time part of the legacy of the action was that these political and economic competitions and conflicts often involved, at least secondarily, partisan religious dimensions involving the ongoing struggles of Protestant and Catholics to establish their churches by winning rulers to their cause. In those political–ecclesiastical contests the most aggressive of the Protestants were Calvinist or Reformed. Ever since the mid-sixteenth century the Calvinists had been an international revolutionary movement including efforts to the overthrow Roman Catholic regimes. Their methods included evangelistic and ecclesiastical efforts to convert populations, but also political alliances and intrigue. Another important dimension of this Calvinist international movement was that it included not only a strong doctrinal dimension but also an aggressive educational program designed for cultural transformation. That included what became in the sixteenth and seventeenth century a formidable international network of university scholars and institutions of which Harvard College (f. 1636) was an outpost. Yale (f. 1701) and the College of New Jersey (f. 1746) were later outgrowths of this same intellectual emphasis. The Reformed educational program also promoted universal literacy so that its constituents could read the Scriptures themselves. That would help shape a very important aspect of Edwards’s most immediate context. Growing up in a home with a highly intelligent mother and ten sisters, even if there were still strict gender inequalities, Edwards was from his time in the cradle surrounded by persons of Biblical literacy and theological sophistication in addition to personal piety. This Reformed ecclesiastical, political, cultural, and educational context was for Edwards refracted through the specific history of the English and American Puritan movements (Winship  2018, Hall  2019). As is well known, the English Reformation beginning under Henry VIII (1509–47) was long an unsteady affair, due to the mixes of

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Historical and Ecclesiastical Contexts   35 political and ecclesiastical loyalties. After a time when England reverted to Catholicism under Queen Mary (1553–8), Protestantism was restored under Elizabeth I (1558–1603). Under what is known as the ‘Elizabethan Compromise’, the Church of England became broadly Protestant in doctrine, as defined in the Thirty-Nine Articles, but also preserved significant continuities with its Catholic past. It retained governance by bishops, preserved of much of traditional liturgy, clerical vestments, and church statuary and ornaments. The Puritan party was led by those who had been exiles in John Calvin’s Geneva during Mary’s reign and brought back to Elizabethan England not only Reformed doctrine, but also stricter Biblicist views of the nature of the church. Their core distinctive principle was that ‘the Bible alone’ should be their guide. So if a church practice was not prescribed in Scripture it was not to be observed. During the subsequent decades Puritans grew as a minority party within the Church of England, trying to purify the state church according to such principles. In the late 1620s, as England was under the rule of Charles I (1625–49) of the House of Stuart, and Puritan prospects seeming to be dimming, an impressive contingent of their number migrated to Massachusetts. There they would be free to practice according to their Biblicist principles. In that setting they encountered an unresolved tension among those principles, a tension that would persist even in Edwards’s day. The early New England Puritan leaders looked to the New Testament for their view of the church. Using that model, the church was to be a called-out assembly of true believers, so full membership was limited to those who gave credible profession of their personal faith. Only such could participate in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. Further, the other sacrament, Baptism, was reserved for such professed believers and their children, including infants. The unresolved tension was that while church membership was thus defined in an exclusive way, the Puritans had also aspired to build a model Christian society that was inclusive of virtually all residents. This latter aspiration was shaped by their experience in England as part of Christendom and by a heritage, going back to Emperor Constantine in the fourth century, of trying to establish a Christian society. But if ‘the Bible alone’ was to be their guide, the only Biblical precedent for such a society was ancient Israel. The Puritans accordingly viewed their state and society as being like Israel in that it was under covenant with God. God’s law provided the terms of the covenant. And, as in ancient Israel, their society would be blessed for its righteousness and punished for its sins. One important implication of this Old Testament model was that, even though most of the inhabitants were not communicant members of the church, all were to live under strict Christian moral standards derived from Biblical precedents. They were also expected to participate in church services, excepting in the sacraments. As under the Old Testament covenant, the Puritans believed that the whole community might be punished by God because of the sins of one of its members. Or if the community suffered a tragedy or a loss, as in a battle, the leaders looked for some lax practices among the populace that might account for God’s displeasure. The whole community was, then, under what was in effect like church discipline.

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36   George Marsden This early Puritan experiment in building a model Christian church and society in New England was soon superseded by events in England. A Reformed coalition of Puritans and Scottish Presbyterians allied with the parliamentary party in the English Civil Wars. The triumph of that alliance led to the trial and execution of King Charles I in 1649. That brought the establishment of the Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell, a Puritan general. The upheaval of the wars and revolution unleashed new and more radical religious movements that made it impossible to establish Reformed religious uniformity, such as found in New England. Furthermore, after the death of Cromwell in 1657 and the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II in 1660, Puritans in England suffered repression and New England came to be a haven for political refugees. Only its great distance from England preserved New England’s virtual independence from an unfriendly monarchy. That relative autonomy was threatened after the Restoration by new English imperial interests in the New World. That threat became particularly alarming under the rule of James II from 1685–8. As the former Duke of York (for whom New York was named), he had interests in the colonies. He was also a Roman Catholic. The events that followed directly shaped the world that Edwards was born into in 1703. So we now turn to those more specific contexts. Even though during his lifetime the specifically ecclesiastical and religious context would continue to be intertwined with all the other contexts, it will be helpful to look first at those other contexts that provided the specific settings in which the ecclesiastical and religious would operate.

Eighteenth-Century Political and Social Contexts New England’s political situation was stabilized after the revolution of 1688/9 that displaced James II and brought Protestant rulers, William of Orange (1689–1702) and his wife Mary (1689–94) to the English throne (Spurr 2006). The Act of Toleration of 1689 guaranteed freedom of worship for dissenting groups even while the Church of England remained as England’s official and privileged church. Subsequently, England and Scotland were officially joined along with Ireland in the United Kingdom and the British monarchy was declared to be officially Protestant. Nevertheless, efforts by Catholic heirs to James II to retake England in 1715 (James Francis Edward Stewart, ‘the Old Pretender’) and in 1745–6 (Charles Edward Stuart, ‘the Young Pretender’ or ‘Bonnie Prince Charles’) helped keep very much alive during Edwards’s lifetime the high political stakes of ongoing Protestant vs. Catholic rivalries. The revolution of 1688 had a number of practical implications that would be reshaping New England. The first was that its colonies were now royal colonies, meaning that their governors would be appointed by the crown. They also became integrated into the rising British Atlantic market economy. Throughout Edwards’s lifetime the New England

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Historical and Ecclesiastical Contexts   37 economy was part of triangular trade involving Great Britain, its possessions in North America, and its possessions in the Caribbean. That meant that eighteenth-century New Englanders had access to sophisticated British commodities, such as tea or chocolate. It also brought numerous African slaves to New England, mostly to be household servants for the more well-to-do inhabitants, including clergy. It also connected New England closely to the burgeoning British intellectual and publishing world. New Englanders could keep up with the latest intellectual and scientific fashions and had access to the rapidly expanding print culture of newspapers and magazines. This meant that religious life also became more closely connected with British networks. So, for instance, Edwards would become closely tied to English and Scottish correspondents and would publicize through their auspices (Landsman 2000). Great Britain’s closer ties to the New World in the eighteenth century also meant that the New Englanders would become involved in colonial versions of a series of British wars during the era. During Edwards’s lifetime, New Englanders participated in Queen Anne’s War (1702–13), Father Rale’s War (1722–5), King George’s War (1744–8), and the French and Indian War (1756–63). These wars against Catholic powers, especially France and secondarily Spain, reinforced most New Englanders’ sense of identity as Protestants and as loyal to the British crown. British military power and protection seemed essential to their survival as Protestants in a hemisphere largely dominated by Catholics. And the British monarchy, whatever its faults, was revered as the best protector of ‘the Protestant interest’ (Kidd 2004). For those concerned for missions to the Indians, the British were the only hope for keeping the natives from falling into the hands and the delusions of Rome. Even while the colonies were under royal governors, Great Britain remained a rather distant political influence so that New England continued to be governed largely by local gentry. In Massachusetts during Edwards’s day, the governor and lieutenant governor were appointed by the crown, but the General Court remained as an elected body as the chief sources of legislation. The General Court also appointed the Governor’s Council, subject to his approval, with which he was to consult. Practically speaking, especially in the Connecticut River Valley, which was two days journey from Boston, governance was overseen mostly by local aristocrats. In a land that lacked hereditary nobility, these leaders emerged as what John Adams would later call a ‘natural aristocracy’. They typically came from talented families that had accumulated some wealth and had sent sons to Harvard or Yale and who then became clergy or local judges and magistrates. These leading families intermarried with each other so as to form some powerful regional networks of leadership. Nowhere was this local political reality better illustrated than in Northampton, Massachusetts itself (Marsden). Solomon Stoddard had become pastor there in 1672 and within a couple of decades he had consolidated his influence in the whole region so that he was sometimes referred to as ‘the Pope of the Connecticut Valley’. The Stoddards were intermarried with what would become a highly influential Williams clan. Edwards was part of this network since his mother, Esther, was the daughter of Solomon Stoddard. Jonathan’s uncle, John Stoddard, son of Solomon, was in Edwards’s day

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38   George Marsden Northampton’s leading citizen, being most often elected to the General Court, sometimes a member of the Governor’s Council, the local judge, the leading local military officer, and the pre-eminently influential church elder. Much of Edwards’s career was shaped in the context of being subject to the approval or disapproval of the larger Williams clan of which he was a part. His first college tutor was a Williams (Elisha). After Solomon Stoddard died in 1729, Edwards’s uncle William Williams of Hatfield, Massachusetts became the reigning patriarch in the family network. When in the 1740s Edwards changed the rules for participating in the Lord’s Supper in Northampton, Williams family opposition was one of his major concerns. When he moved to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, it was to a mission in which the William played a leading role. Williams family members, including Ephraim Williams Sr., and his children, Abigail (Sergeant, Dwight), and Ephraim Williams Jr, controlled the town affairs. Within the context of his extended family, Edwards’s immediate family also remained an immensely important context for almost everything he did throughout his life. His father Timothy’s family, unlike his mother’s, was not distinguished. Particularly his fraternal grandmother, Elizabeth Tuttle Edwards, appears to have been mentally unstable and also unfaithful, so much so that Richard Edwards, Timothy’s father, was granted a rare divorce. By Jonathan’s time, Richard Edwards had re-established himself admirably in nearby Hartford as a successful cooper and sometimes attorney, church member, and as husband and father of a second family. Timothy Edwards attended Harvard but dropped out for unnamed reasons and concluded his collegiate education in 1694 with Pelatiah Glover, a pastor in Springfield. Serving briefly as a schoolteacher in Northampton, he met and married Esther Stoddard. They moved to E. Windsor where he would serve as pastor until his death in 1758 (just prior to Jonathan’s). Esther survived until her one-hundredth year in 1771.They reared eleven children, ten daughters, five older than Jonathan and five younger. The family seems to have had remarkably healthy genes. While one of the contextual realities of eighteenth-century life was that life expectancy was low and deaths of children were common, all the Edwards children grew to maturity, the one exception being Jonathan’s younger sister Jerusha who died in 1729 at age 19. Timothy Edwards seems to have been an intelligent, rather inflexible, highly principled, controlling, but also loving person who closely oversaw even many of the small details of family affairs. He apparently lavished attention on educating and overseeing the spiritual life of his only son. While the long-term impact on shaping Jonathan is hard to measure, Jonathan never seems to have strayed far from his father’s positions. While Jonathan was often innovative and creative, it was innovation and creativity like that of a musician who elaborates brilliantly on themes that have been set for him. Just as important as a context in shaping Jonathan is that for most of his life he lived in households in which he was surrounded by women. Not only was he brought up and educated in part by his older sisters, in later life he and his wife Sarah also had eleven children including eight girls. Due to the male biases of the times, we have relatively little information on most of these women. Edwards’s mother Esther had attended

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Historical and Ecclesiastical Contexts   39 finishing school in Boston, as did at least some of the sisters. Edwards’s daughter, Esther Edwards Burr, in whose Princeton home Jonathan died, is the only one of the twenty women about whom (thanks to her own diary-correspondence) we know much detail. We do know, though, that some of these women were spiritual models for Jonathan and it has often been suggested that they helped shape his sensibilities about the primacy of religious affections. His wife, Sarah Pierpont Edwards, is the one he speaks of very directly as a spiritual model for himself. His younger sister, Jerusha, the same age as Sarah Pierpont, seems to have been a similar model. So was his daughter Jerusha, the only one Jonathan’s and Sarah’s children to die young (at age 18 in 1748). This Jerusha was, like Jonathan, deeply affected by the spiritual zeal of the missionary David Brainerd who died in their home in late 1747. The subordination of women to men was one pillar in a much larger structure of hierarchical relationships that provided the context of assumptions shaping ideas of proper social relationships. Hierarchy and patriarchy seemed matters of common sense as they had been since ancient times. They were regarded, like other aspects of the human condition, as God ordained. Through the first two-thirds of the eighteenth century such assumptions were questioned by few people excepting some Quakers, and occasional philosopher, and some other radicals. As Massachusetts’s first governor, John Winthrop had put it in his famous sermon, ‘A Model of Christian Charity’, in 1630, ‘God Almighty, in his most holy and wise providence, hath so disposed of the condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity, others mean and in subjection’ (Winthrop 1630). According to this principle of charity, those who were blessed by higher status and authority were to care for those in lesser positions, whether women, children, servants, the poor, or the infirm. Men of power were to be patriarchal and fatherly in caring for those in subordinate or weaker positions. In Winthrop’s view, which was still the ideal for his spiritual descendants in Edwards’s day, the community was to be a ‘commonwealth’ knit together by the bonds of charity or mutual love, guided best by the principles revealed in those of God’s laws that were summarized as ‘to love your neighbour as yourself ’. Edwards himself emphasized that individuals, church communities, and governments should do their duties in caring for the unfortunate, the weak and the poor (McDermott and Story 2015). Nonetheless, within this ideal of a mutually caring community, eighteenth-century New Englanders took for granted the importance of rank and status in society almost as much as rank is taken for granted in the military today. Even church seating in Edwards’s Northampton congregation was assigned according to social position. In the New World with its economic opportunities, social status for men and their families was becoming more fluid than in England and that would contribute eventually to undermining some of the status assumptions. So would some of the changing religious context, as discussed below. By the early eighteenth century African slaves had become part of the New England economy and the Edwards families usually included a household slave or two (Minkema 1997). Owning slaves was a symbol of status and the practice was common in

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40   George Marsden ministerial as well as other relatively well-to-do families. Slavery had been practiced ever since ancient times, including in Israel in the Old Testament era. It was taken for granted and apparently condoned in the New Testament. It also fit easily within the framework of the hierarchical and patriarchal assumptions about human social relationships. It could be seen as simply the lowest status in the economic system. Slaves were to be cared for along with other dependent members of a household. They were also to be evangelized, could become church members, and might be regarded as spiritually equal or superior to their owners. Some male slaves who were church members could vote in church meetings. Even within the contexts of historical and Biblical precedents and strong assumptions regarding hierarchy and patriarchy, the rationales for the enslavement of Africans involved some serious flaws that were occasionally noticed. The principal flaw was that, unlike in Biblical times, slavery in New England was entirely race based, principally involving the enslavement of Africans by white people. Also, unlike the closest analogy of indentured servants, the ownership was normally permanent. Yet in the early eighteenth century few white people seemed concerned with the extreme injustices involved. In Boston, Judge Samuel Sewall, a friend of Solomon Stoddard, spoke to these in a pamphlet published in 1700, The Selling of Joseph. But hardly anyone paid attention. The more common view was that expressed by Cotton Mather. He argued that the enslavement of Africans provided opportunities for evangelism. Mather also campaigned for better treatment of slaves as fellow human beings. Mather had been an influence on Timothy Edwards and the Edwardses likely followed his views. In Jonathan’s only surviving comment on the subject, he noted that the Bible did not justify the enslavement of one race by another. Nonetheless, he passed over this observation on the grounds that the slave trade was so integral to the economic system that even those who did not own slaves would still be implicated in the system by buying products produced by slaves. Though racism was common at the time, Edwards explicitly resisted it, remarking in another context that a day was coming when there would be African and American Indian theologians. Only a few years after Edwards’s death, the social– intellectual context of prevailing enlightened and Christian positions on human rights began to change, and by the 1770s some of Edwards’s immediate followers, notably Samuel Hopkins and Jonathan Edwards, Jr, had taken up the anti-slavery cause (Minkema and Stout 2005). The other non-Europeans who always shaped part of the context for Edwards’s life, and for a time were a leading part, were the Indians. Europeans had typically justified their conquests in the New World on the grounds that it would be an opportunity to bring the Gospel to the Native Americans. For the early Puritan settlers of New England, that was a genuine motive. Despite efforts to befriend and evangelize the Indians, language and cultural differences often defeated understanding. Furthermore, the fact that the New Englanders were steadily settling the territory meant that they were infringing on lands previously used by the Indians. There were always vastly more settlers who had primary interests for themselves and their family in acquiring and developing the land than there were missionaries. Further, Puritan high educational

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Historical and Ecclesiastical Contexts   41 demands for the ministry and expectations that pastors should be attached to a single local church limited the number of missionaries. During the mid-seventeenth century, John Eliot was the major missionary figure to make some headway in Indian missions and to set some precedents. Eliot worked with the Algonquians in Eastern Massachusetts. He translated the Bible into their language and eventually established a number of towns of ‘praying Indians’ (Cogley 1999). Much of Eliot’s accomplishment was undone by the disruption of King Philip’s War for 1675–8. Although the conflict involved mostly other Indians than the Algonquians, it was the bloodiest war in American history in terms of the percentages of causalities on both sides. It also left a heritage of mutual distrust throughout the region. That antagonism was accentuated by some Indian tribes that had been displaced from New England and become allied with the French to the North. The French were relatively more successful that the English in missions, largely because their missionaries were itinerants, such as Jesuits, who were not immediate parts of larger communities of settlers eager dispossess the natives and liable to stumble into bloody and recriminatory conflicts. The French military, at the same time, allied with the Indians and supported their hostilities against the British. During Edwards’s early years, an aura of uneasy peace punctuated by occasional hostilities continued and New England missionary hopes remained stymied. Among Jonathan’s earliest memories about the Indians must have been tales of the Indian raid on Deerfield of February 1703/4. The raid, aided by the French, resulted in the deaths of 39 of Deerfield’s some 300 residents and carrying off more than a hundred others into captivity. Among the deaths were Eunice Stoddard Williams, wife of the Rev. John Williams, and sister of Jonathan’s mother. Two of the Williams children, Jonathan’s first cousins, were also killed. John Williams and his four surviving children were taken into captivity. These would have been regularly in the Edwards’s family prayers. Further, in 1706, when John Williams and three of his children were freed, one daughter, Eunice, chose to remain with the Indians, who were, to make matters worse, Roman Catholic (Demos  1994). Further solidifying these events as pivotal in shaping Edwards’s relationship to the Indians was that his Uncle John Stoddard had been a young soldier at Deerfield who escaped the slaughter. Stoddard later became the region’s chief military officer in charge of defences against Indians on the western frontier. He also would be a promoter of renewed Indian missions. This latter had become a major family concern. Solomon Stoddard, still with his painful family bereavements in mind, in 1723 published an influential treatise on the question Whether God is not Angry with the Country for Doing So Little Toward the Conversion of the Indians? Despite ongoing conflicts with the Indians and French, and the observation that the Indians could be of ‘a very brutish and sottish spirit’, Stoddard emphasized that ‘they are still of mankind, and so subjects of compassion’. Further, he reminded the colonists that they should recall that the British themselves had once been ‘as brutish a service to the Devil, as any nation under the sun’ until missionaries had ‘pitied them and brought the Gospel to them’. Another Deerfield survivor, Stephen Williams, one of the captured and eventually freed children, further strengthened these strong concerns for Indian mission of the extended Stoddard, Williams, and Edwards families. Stephen became a clergyman and a

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42   George Marsden close associate with his younger cousin Jonathan in the awakenings. His time in captivity also gave him expertise in Indian matters and language. He along with John Stoddard, and others of the Williams families were among those who, with the support of the Massachusetts governor, Jonathan Belcher, managed between 1739 and 1742 to establish the town of Stockbridge as a settlement for Mahican Indians A missionary, John Sergeant, and some other English, headed by Ephraim Williams, would oversee the town. Jonathan Edwards’s zeal for Indian missions was doubtless also inspired by the example of David Brainerd, who sacrificed his health in largely one-man efforts to evangelize Indians in the middle colonies. Edwards and Brainerd were soul mates in their spiritual intensity. Brainerd’s last visit and death at the Edwards’s home, under the care of Jerusha Edwards, doubtless sealed that bond and heightened Edwards’s readiness to risk the safety of his large family in taking the assignment Stockbridge. But all those developments took place in the prior context of intense and close extended family concerns to bring the Gospel to the natives. The Mahican Indians (or Mohican) were an Algonquian tribe who had been part of a once powerful confederacy but were by the eighteenth century beleaguered and willing to be under English protection. The English saw settling them as the majority residents in a village in which English were present as way of teaching more European-like habits that would be more conducive to Christian living. They could also provide schools for literacy. In the early 1750s, during the time the Edwardses were in the village, the English also worked with mixed success to bring some of the Mohawks to Stockbridge. The Mohawks, as a tribe in the Iroquois Confederacy, were a much more powerful group and pivotal to English in enlisting Indian allies against the French. Though their languages differed, the Mohawks and Mahicans were on friendly terms (Wheeler 2007). As was repeatedly true of English missions to the Indians, the Stockbridge mission was undermined by the realities of European conquest and settlement of the continent. The best of intentions and efforts of missionaries to cultivate goodwill were frequently damaged by being in a context where other English settlers were concerned to acquire land for economic opportunity and for their safety and that of their families. English settlers often misled and cheated Indians in acquiring property. And there inevitably were misunderstandings and acts of violence that would spiral into hostilities which some on both sides would fail to make distinctions between those on the other side who were friendly or hostile. Further, the frequent spasms of warfare between the England and French and their various Indian allies often cast a shadow over the missions.

Ecclesiastical–Religious Contexts We can return now to the ecclesiastical–religious contexts that in Edwards’s day were interacting with the contexts of these many-sided eighteenth-century social and political frameworks, practices, and assumptions.

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Historical and Ecclesiastical Contexts   43 Eighteenth-century New England Congregationalists had inherited from their seventeenth-century Puritan predecessors a number of unresolved ecclesiastical issues. In local church life they would have to continue to wrestle with the issue of the tension in early New England Puritanism between the exclusivist conversionist standards for formal communicant church membership and their efforts to build a Christian society that included virtually every resident. While under royal governance, the eighteenthcentury New England colonies were allowed to maintain their established Congregational churches supported by taxes. However, they lost their monopoly privileges of the earlier era and had to tolerate Anglicans and various dissenters. Even so, particularly in local community such as Northampton where there was only one church, the tensions persisted between birth right membership in a Christian society and church membership. For Edwards this still-contested issue would provide one of the most troublesome challenges for his ministry. The matter had to do with the sacraments, the Lord’s Supper and Baptism. While the Puritans are sometimes thought to have had a low view of the sacraments because they were spare in their administration, the opposite was the case. They were particularly concerned that people not participate in the Lord’s Supper ‘unworthily’ or without proper faith and moral sanctity. I Corinthians 11:29 warned that those who partook unworthily ‘eat and drink damnation’ to themselves. And though the Puritans included infants among those to be baptized, it would not be as in England where baptism was a routine rite of community membership. In New England it was to be conditioned on the faith of the parents. Since the early Puritans demanded firm evidence of conversion for communicant membership, the problem had become acute as the second generation matured. What about the baptism of the children or grandchildren of communicants whose parents were apparently unconverted? In 1662 a synod of clergy affirmed, in what became known as the ‘Halfway Covenant’, that, since God’s covenant extended from generation to generation, the grandchildren of communicant members could be baptized. The Halfway Covenant, while becoming the most common practice for subsequent ­generations, proved to be a long way from settling the issue. That lack of resolution was due to a number of other factors that would still be operative in Edwards’s time. Perhaps the greatest of those factors was that the strict Biblicism of the early Puritans left them without clear principles regarding the structures of church government. They sought to guide their church practice strictly on New Testament precedents, but in fact the New Testament did not provide clear guidance regarding church authority. Perhaps in reaction to their experience in England of having been beleaguered congregations who regarded the authority claimed by Anglican bishops as extra-Biblical, the early American Puritans came to see congregations of believers as the basic unit of church authority. Congregations by vote of their male members could call ministers and elect their ruling elders to act as a representative council governing the congregation. They also chose deacons to be in charge of the church’s works of charity and mercy. As with most aspects of their governance, given Scripture’s exact prescription on the matters, the extent of the authority of the elders and of the congregation as a whole in church

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44   George Marsden governance tended to vary locally. Often the pastor, normally settled for life, exercised substantial executive control. The New England churches also called occasional synods to speak on various issues, as had been done in New Testament times. But the problem was that it was not clear exactly what authority synods had over local congregations and their clergy. Altogether the Congregational polity left a situation that was, as Edwards himself described it, ‘our unsettled, independent, confused, way of church government’ (WJE 16: 355). The troubling practical effect of this confusing legacy was that in eighteenth-century Congregational New England practices regarding the sacraments varied from church to church and region to region. One dimension of the problem was the scrupulousness of the people regarding partaking in the Lord’s Supper. That was a reason why many in the second generation declined to become communicant members in the first place. Furthermore, in the churches where the Halfway Covenant was the rule, most adult regular church attenders remained halfway members. In 1708 Solomon Stoddard estimated that the ratio was about four halfway members to each full member (Hall 2007, 57). The lack of resolution regarding sacramental practice was an especially important dimension of the ecclesiastical contexts shaping Edwards’s ministry because it was deeply intertwined with his family context, particularly with the two men who were most influential in his life and work, his grandfather Solomon Stoddard whom he would assist and then succeed in Northampton, and his father, Timothy Edwards. Early in his pastoral career, Solomon Stoddard offered an influential innovation regarding sacramental practices in New England. He opened up the Lord’s Supper to those who made a basic profession of faith and were not living scandalously. That was the practice of many of the Presbyterian churches in Great Britain who were often allied with the Congregationalists. Stoddard believed that such participation could be a means of grace and might help lead to conversion. In the course of Stoddard’s long and influential career, many other churches in the Connecticut River Valley followed Stoddard’s practice regarding more open attitudes toward the admission to the Lord’s Supper. Even so, scrupulousness regarding partaking of the sacrament remained strong even there. In Stoddard’s own church at the end of his ministry hardly more than half of the adults were partaking of the Lord’s Supper (Hall 2007, 71). Meanwhile, Stoddard’s son-in-law, Timothy Edwards, pastor of the church in East Windsor, Connecticut, had been influenced by Stoddard’s Boston rivals, Increase and Cotton Mather, and insisted on a credible profession of faith for communicant membership. Jonathan always remained close to his father’s viewpoints on most subjects so that even while he was serving as pastor in Northampton the tensions between the two inherited views remained strong. That context is particularly important, of course, for understanding Edwards’s calamitous effort in the 1740s to change the practice in Northampton. One thing that Solomon Stoddard and Timothy Edwards strongly agreed on was the importance of a genuine conversion experience. Even though Stoddard did not make that a condition for church membership, part of his rationale was that partaking in the

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Historical and Ecclesiastical Contexts   45 Lord’s Supper might be ‘a converting ordinance’. In both Stoddard’s Northampton and Timothy Edwards’s East Windsor there were, furthermore, periodic seasons of awakening in which many towns people would be especially concerned about the state of their eternal souls. While under royal governance, the eighteenth-century New England colonies were allowed to maintain their established Congregational churches. However, they lost their exclusive privileges of the earlier era and had to tolerate Anglicans and various dissenters. Doctrinally New England Congregationalists were broadly united with most other British Reformed groups in expressing accord to the Westminster Confession of Faith, in their case as slightly modified in the English Congregationalist, ‘Savoy Confession’ of 1658. That was adopted, again with minor alterations, by a Massachusetts Synod of 1680 and as part the Saybrook Platform of the Connecticut churches, including Timothy Edwards’s, in 1708. The Saybrook Platform also instituted more centralized church government for Connecticut, so that it was closer to a Presbyterian form, and would sometimes be referred to as such. Jonathan Edwards always saw himself as in close fellowship with most sorts of Presbyterians, serving a Presbyterian church in New York City as a young man, corresponding with Scottish Presbyterians for whom he eventually received a call, attending a couple of New Side Presbyterian Synods in the middle colonies, and concluding his career as in Princeton as president of the College of New Jersey. New Englanders seldom engaged in the confessional precisionism found among some Scottish and Scotch–Irish Presbyterians (such as the Old Side Presbyterians in the middle colonies). However, conservatives in their midst, of whom Timothy Edwards was one, worried about doctrinal erosion. When Harvard College fell out of the control of Increase and Cotton Mather into the hands of slightly more progressive leadership, Connecticut clergy in 1701, encouraged by the Mathers, founded what became Yale College. At first, the fledgling school did not require confessional subscription. But when in 1722 the talented rector, Timothy Cutler, shocked the colony by declaring himself an Anglican, that changed. The Yale trustees fired Cutler and declared that all officers of the college would henceforth have to subscribe to the Westminster Confession of Faith, as stated in the Saybrook Platform. They associated Anglicanism broadly with openness to ‘Arminianism’, which meant any departure from strict Calvinism. The clergy of Connecticut and of Western Massachusetts tended to be more strictly conservative than those of Boston where there was a broader range of opinions. In 1734, when Edwards was in Northampton, there was a blow-up over an alleged Arminian clergyman, Robert Breck, in that region. Edwards had already established himself as a champion of the anti-Arminian party and had supported a new requirement of confessional subscription in the local Hampshire Association. He would continue to write against ‘Arminianism’, a term he used broadly to include much of the progressive tendencies in eighteenth-century churches, in New England and elsewhere. In fact, by the mid-eighteenth century mainstream British Protestantism was divided into a wide range of parties, from broadly latitudinarian to ultra-orthodox. There were also sects of various varieties. The spectrum of positions in New England, even in

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46   George Marsden Eastern Massachusetts was considerable, but far less developed than in England. And even the more progressive Congregationalist typically still claimed continuity with their Calvinist heritage. At the same time and just as momentous as the burgeoning of Enlightenment-based liberalism, the ecclesiastical context was being transformed by the awakenings and new styles of piety that eventually would become known as ‘evangelical’. For New England these were anticipated by many elements in Puritanism, including practices of piety, small-group meetings or ‘conventicles’, and emphases on conversion. Further, the early awakenings in New England’s churches, such as those of Solomon Stoddard and Timothy Edwards, paralleled the contemporary ‘pietist’ religious renewal movements in Continental Europe (Ward 1992). Pietism arose first in the late seventeenth century as a revitalization movement within Lutheranism. Its best-known early leader in the late seventeenth century was theologian Philipp Spener who emphasized spiritual rebirth and practices of personal renewal and devotion. Similarly influential in the early 1700s was August Hermann Francke who established the Francke Foundations including an orphanage, schools, hospital, print shops, and missionary centres, that became influential models for pietist charitable practice and outreach. Also a theologian, Francke taught at the University of Halle, which became a pietist centre. Cotton Mather corresponded with Francke and helped bring to New England an awareness of the Pietist model for renewal (Lovelace 1979). A further, slightly less orthodox, expression of pietism that would touch the eighteenthcentury American colonies and in New England particularly in Indian missions was the Moravian movement, led by Count Nikolaus Zinzendorf. Pietism helped inspire a British renewal movement that would become a central force in what eventually became the revivalist evangelicalism that would provide much of the international context for Edwards’s ministry (Noll). Anglicans John Wesley, Charles Wesley, and George Whitefield would be the leading figures in shaping this movement. They were all associated with the ‘Holy Club’ practicing spiritual disciplines for renewal at Oxford University in the 1730s. A pivotal turning point was John Wesley’s ‘Aldersgate experience’ at Moravian meeting in 1738 in which his ‘heart was strangely warmed’. During the same year George Whitefield carried his ministry to open air preaching in which he proved remarkably successful as a revival preacher. Whitefield was Calvinist in his theology and would break with the Wesleys over theological differences. But Whitefield’s Calvinism also suited him particularly well for preaching in the American colonies, especially New England. His immensely influential revivalist preaching tour in those regions in 1739–40 would bring with it evangelical religious styles that would fit with some precedents that had already been developing in Reformed New England, but also go beyond them in establishing a new religious ethos (Kidd 2007). The new religious styles associated with revivalist evangelicalism were first of all distinctly Protestant, reflecting their origins as renewal movements in Protestant regions. So the new religious styles of pietists and revivalists remained strongly Biblicist, emphasizing the authority of the Bible alone. That made their outlooks compatible with

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Historical and Ecclesiastical Contexts   47 varieties of Protestant traditions each of which had their own particular interpretations of specifics of Biblical teaching. At the same time, the movement remained characteristically Protestant in its emphasis on individual conversion based on the atoning work of Christ on the cross. One implication of that emphasis was that it accentuated the contrast to Catholic or other churchly teachings that the church plays a major mediating role in the transaction of salvation. In fact, the emerging religious ethos of evangelicalism tended to downgrade the roles of the institutional churches. Though the renewal movements took place mostly within existing church bodies, the roles of those institutions sometimes tended to become ad hoc and secondary. And if existing institutions were not cooperative, the ethos invited forming new churches and societies that would more effectively advance the cause. In Edwards’s New England, one example of the impact of such innovative emphases was that revivals were now typically led by itinerant preachers, rather than as previously by local pastors. Another was the founding of New Light congregations in towns where the existing ‘Old Light’ body was not cooperative with the movement. The rise of New Light Baptists further reflected the emphasis on the crucial role of conversion in that they held that Baptism should be administered only to those who were of age to make a responsible individual choice. Evangelicalism, as Bruce Hindmarsh (2018) has emphasized, shared with earlier Puritanism and Pietism a dynamic driven by the energy of evangelical devotion. That was nothing new, of course, for Edwards and his immediate circle, but it was new as a contagious international attitude that was bringing many people into active fellowship. It was a major force in the promotion of international evangelism, as in motivating Whitefield on multiple occasions to make the formidable Atlantic crossings to the New World. And concerts of such piety were also a force in the renewal of missions to the Indians. They also provided motivation for evangelical works of charity, of which Whitefield’s orphanage in Georgia is just one of many examples. Edwards himself was especially conscious of this international spiritual force, as in his efforts in the early 1740s to promote an international ‘Concert of Prayer’. The intensity of devotion also came to be expressed in a new style of singing that changed the nature of worship and charged it with deeper emotion. Puritan Biblicism had limited singing to the Psalms, and even in Edwards’s time Congregational churches did without music instruments. Edwards was active in promoting harmonious singing in parts. Meanwhile in England the polymath the Rev. Isaac Watts was an early promoter of emerging evangelical piety and the writer of paraphrases of psalms and also hymns that expanded the repertoire in New England. Often these were used in family devotions or in neighbourhood social meetings. Watts was also the author of a Guide to Prayer (1715) that was widely used in New England and is another example of how the rapidly expanding print culture helped cultivate essential dimensions of emerging evangelical devotion that dovetailed with the latter-day Puritan heritage. Watts also played an important transatlantic role in the informal network of emerging evangelicals. Further illustrating the importance of the network connections is that

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48   George Marsden when Boston pastor, Benjamin Colman, sent to Watts Edwards’s account of the 1734–45 awakening, A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God, Watts saw to it that it would be published there. The spiritual intensity and devotion generated by awakenings often was contagious. So the publication of Edwards’s narrative would help inspire British, particularly Scottish counterparts. Furthermore, both Whitefield and the Wesleys read Edwards. These emerging evangelical trends reflected the context of broader European cultural trends. One way that can be seen is that not only in Protestantism, but also in a number of other European religious movements one can find common impulses in this era that have been collectively characterized as ‘religion of the heart’. Movements as diverse as the Catholic Jansenists of Port Royal, Orthodox ‘Old Believers’ and some others in Russia, and the rise of Hasidic Judaism, offer parallels to the various Protestant renewal movements. These groups all put new emphases on the godly life, devotional piety, and building spiritual community, grounded in the shared experiences of ordinary people (Noll 2003, Campbell 1991, 52). The emphases on personal experience of ordinary people in these religious movements, in turn, reflected broader European cultural impulses of the era. One can see, for instance, characteristics of these religious movements that parallel the secular trends of the era that have come to be known as the ‘enlightenment’. Comparable to ways that enlightenment thinking emphasized experimental and experiential evidences of the truth, so did these late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century religious styles in their own ways emphasized the importance of authenticating belief through direct experience. If the enlightenment might be seen as a reaction to the competing authoritarianisms of the era of the wars of religion, the emphasis on personal experiential confirmation of religious claims might be seen not so much as a rejection of dogmatic authority but as a way of inviting individual testing of authoritarian claims of established communities and their leaders. The late seventeenth century has been seen in philosophy as an important era of the emergence of ‘the self ’ in the modern sense (Taylor 1989). Or perhaps a closer parallel is found in what historian Wayne TeBrake (TeBrake 1998) shows in the European political order, that by 1700 ordinary people were beginning to undermine the barriers between themselves and elite culture. So rulers were having to take more into their subjects’ interests and desires. Nowhere were such tendencies to appeal to ordinary people versus hierarchical authority more developed by the mid-eighteenth century than in the emerging evangelical movement itself. It was, after all, an essentially popular movement. Despite Edwards’s involvement in that movement and deep sympathies for it, its antiauthoritarian aspects clashed with his inherited and deeply engrained hierarchical instincts. So, for instance, it was sometimes to Edwards’s chagrin when Whitefield or other itinerants might openly question whether a local clergyman was converted and to directly appeal to the people to challenge such a pastor’s teaching. He was also uneasy with New Light tendencies to encourage breakaway congregations. And likewise the popular movements’ tendencies to encourage poorly trained laypeople or even women

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Historical and Ecclesiastical Contexts   49 to preach went against his male-elitist patriarchal heritage that had been the social context of his formative years. It has often been observed that the new populist democratic tendencies of the evangelical awakening anticipated those of the American Revolution a few decades later. Sometimes it has been argued that the awakenings thus played a causal role in fomenting the political revolution. No doubt it did prepare the way in some degree, but not likely in any decisive way. The better explanation is that both these revolutionary developments were reflections of the context of the larger eighteenth-century European impulses to emphasize individual experience and autonomy and so to undermine some of the longstanding hierarchical authorities. A further and closely related eighteenth-century contextual cultural development manifested in the evangelical movement (and the subsequent political revolution for that matter) was that it was an expression of a rising spirit of free enterprise, social mobility, and ‘the self-made man’. New technologies and techniques associated with the rising market economy, made it possible for talented and enterprising men to rise quickly in economic and social status. That was especially true in the British colonies where there was not hereditary nobility. George Whitefield, immensely popular on both sides of the Atlantic, was the classic example of a person who used innovative techniques to break traditionalist barriers. His rise has often been compared to that of Benjamin Franklin. Despite their differences regarding evangelical religion, the two men became good friends, each embodying the ‘can do’ enterprising spirit of the age. Unlike Edwards, neither man was shaped much by his local context. Also unlike Edwards, neither one was much concerned with the contexts of family loyalties. They presaged the rise of a new era.

Works Cited Cameron, Euan. (2012). The European Reformation. 2nd. ed. New York: Oxford University Press. Campbell, Ted  A. (1991). Religion of the Heart: A Study of European Religious Life in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Cogley, Richard  W. (1999). John Eliot`s Mission to the Indians before King Philip’s War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Demos, John. (1994). The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America. New York: Knopf. Eire, Carlos. (2016). Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450–1650. New Haven: Yale University Press. Elliott, J.H. (2006). Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hall, David  D. (2007). ‘The New England Background,’ In The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards. Ed. Stephen J. Stein. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hall, David D. (2019). The Puritans: A Transatlantic History. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hindmarsh, Bruce  D. (2018). The Spirit of Early Evangelicalism: True Religion in a Modern World. New York: Oxford University Press.

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50   George Marsden Kidd, Thomas S. (2007). The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Kidd, Thomas S. (2004). The Protestant Interest: New England After Puritanism. New Haven: Yale University Press. Landsman, Ned  C. (2000). From Colonials to Provincials: Thought and Culture in America 1680–1760. 2nd. ed. Cornell: Cornell University Press. Lovelace, Richard (1979). The American Pietism of Cotton Mather: Origins of American Evangelicalism. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans. McDermott, Gerald and Ronald Story, ed. (2015). The Other Jonathan Edwards: Selected Writings on Society, Love, and Justice. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Minkema, Kenneth P. (1997). ‘Jonathan Edwards on Slavery and the Slave Trade.’ William and Mary Quarterly. Third Series. 54.1: 823–34. Minkema, Kenneth  P. and Harry  S.  Stout (2005). ‘The Edwardsean Tradition and the Antislavery Debate, 1740–1865.’ Journal of American History 92.1: 47–75. Noll, Mark (2003). The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield, and the Wesleys. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. Spurr, John. (2006). The Post-Reformation: Religion, Politics and Society in Britain, 1603–1714. London: Routledge. Taylor, Charles (1989). Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. TeBrake, Wayne (1998). Shaping History, Ordinary People in European Politics, 1500–1700. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ward, W. R. (1992). The Protestant Evangelical Awakening. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wheeler, Rachel M. (2007). ‘Edwards as Missionary.’ In The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards. Ed. Stephen J. Stein. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 196–17. Winship, Michael P. (2018). Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America. New Haven: Yale University Press. Winthrop, John (1630). ‘A Model of Christian Charity,’ http://sageamericanhistory.net/ colonial/docs/winthrop.htm

Author Bio George Marsden is the author of Jonathan Edwards: A Life and of A Short Life of Jonathan Edwards and of many other books and publications on American religion and culture. He has taught history at Calvin College, Duke Divinity School, and the University of Notre Dame, where he is a professor emeritus.

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chapter 4

Edwa r ds i n th e Con text of I n ter nationa l R ev i va l s a n d Missions David W. Kling

Have not in time past in my prayers, enough insisted upon the glorifying God in the world, and the advancement of the kingdom of Christ. —Jonathan Edwards, Diary, 5 February 1723–4 (WJE 16: 784) My heart has been much on the advancement of Christ’s kingdom in the world. The histories of the past advancement of Christ’s kingdom, have been sweet to me. When I have read histories of past ages, the pleasantest thing in all my reading has been, to read of the kingdom of Christ being promoted. —Jonathan Edwards, Personal Narrative, c.1740 (WJE 16: 800) It is evident from the Scripture, that there is yet remaining a great advancement in the interest of religion and the kingdom of Christ in this world. —Jonathan Edwards, Humble Attempt, 1747 (WJE 5: 329)

From the beginning to the end of his pastoral career, Jonathan Edwards was consumed with the mission of God in the redemption of humankind. In private written entries, correspondence, sermons, occasional writings, miscellanies, and theological treatises, Edwards repeatedly focused on what he termed ‘the advancement of the kingdom of Christ’ or ‘the propagation of the gospel’. In the aftermath of the ‘little awakening’ in Northampton (1734–5), Edwards increasingly insisted that revivals of religion were the primary means by which the Gospel would spread to the ends of the earth. Following the Great Awakening in New England (1740–42), and after reading accounts of divine renewal in parts of Britain and Europe, he wrote in An Humble Attempt (1747), ‘The late remarkable religious awakenings, that have been in many parts of the Christian world, are another thing that may justly encourage us in prayer for the promised glorious and

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52   David W. Kling universal outpouring of the Spirit of God’ (WJE 5: 363). For Edwards, revival, with its accompanying conversions, was the engine that drove redemptive history and prayer was the fuel that ignited it. Edwards came on the scene during the early stages of a transatlantic evangelical awakening. On the Continent and in Britain, Halle Pietists and mission-minded Moravians had been actively spreading the Gospel before the turn of the eighteenth century. The conversions and early Gospel ministries of renowned evangelicals such as George Whitefield and John and Charles Wesley in England, Howell Harris, Griffith Jones, and Daniel Rowland in Wales, and Ebenezer Erskine and William McCulloch in Scotland preceded Edwards’s wide-ranging literary impact. In North America, the Middle Colonies experienced revivals beginning in the 1720s under the preaching of the East Frisian Pietist Theodore Frelinghuysen and the Scots–Irish Presbyterians William and Gilbert Tennent. In Edwards’s own Puritan New England backyard, perhaps as many as twenty religious stirrings occurred between 1712 and 1732, including spiritual ‘harvests’ led by his grandfather Solomon Stoddard, and his father, Timothy. Revival, as Harry Stout has noted, was in Edwards’s genes (Stout 2007, 125). And, of course, Whitefield epitomized the Anglo-American make-up of the Great Awakening by traversing the Atlantic seven times. Thousands responded to his message of the New Birth, including Edwards’s Northampton parishioners when the ‘Grand Itinerant’ toured New England in the fall of 1740. Within this context of transatlantic evangelicalism, Edwards’s efforts to advance the  Gospel were both immediate and delayed: immediate, insofar as his writings, ­particularly the Faithful Narrative, inspired Scottish Presbyterian and German and Dutch Pietist evangelical contemporaries to promote revival; delayed, insofar as his impact on foreign missions was not felt until the end of the eighteenth and well into the nineteenth century. Of the latter, Edwards is best understood as a transitional figure in international missions. He lived during an interlude after the establishment of Roman Catholic, Anglican, Pietist, and Moravian missions in the sixteenth through mideighteenth centuries, and before the beginnings of the modern Anglo-American Protestant missionary movement in the late eighteenth century. As Andrew Walls observed, Edwards ‘operated before the movement emerged in the English-speaking world as a distinct element of Protestant consciousness’ (Walls 2003, 257). Edwards awakened that consciousness by providing the theological and inspirational motivation for the possibility of foreign missions. He fulfilled a critical, intermediate role. Genealogically speaking, if William Carey is recognized as the father of modern Protestant missions, then Edwards may be rightly acknowledged as its grandfather (Davies 1997). Edwards’s international influence in revivals and missions is entirely dependent on the reception of his writings. The key to this reception was an already well-established transatlantic network of correspondence, shared literature, and printed sermons. On both sides of the Atlantic, pastors and theologians had exchanged writings since the early seventeenth century. During the first decades of the eighteenth century, however, a more integrated market enhanced the continuous transatlantic flow of letters and printed material (O’Brien 1994), especially among evangelically minded Protestants in

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Edwards in International Revivals and Missions   53 the British world and continental Europe. Edwards’s own aspirations to communicate to a wider audience beyond the provincial world of New England would also help to boost his reputation among the Reformed and Lutheran communities across the Atlantic. During the Great Awakening the Anglophone, German, and Dutch evangelical network expanded. News of revivals in America, England, Scotland, Wales, and on the Continent convinced the evangelical community that the scattered local revivals were greater than the sum of their parts. An international movement, to be crowned in millennial glory, materialized. Edwards, ever eager to receive the news of revival, conveyed a vision that encompassed the world. In a 1739 sermon, ‘God’s Grace Carried on in Other Places’, he referenced the work of revival in parts of the British dominion and the raising up of young ministers such as John Wesley, George Whitefield, and Howell Harris. The news of revivals in Britain and in other places, claimed Edwards, ‘should stir all up’ with ‘thoughts of the near approach of the day of Christ’s coming in his kingdom’ (WJE 22: 109). In spring 1743, six years after his own account of the Northampton awakening had exerted a guiding influence in the Scottish revival, Edwards joined an epistolary exchange initiated by his Scottish brethren that persisted for nearly fifteen years. In his first letter, written to the Rev. William McCulloch, Edwards extolled the revivals as a ‘forerunner of something vastly greater . . . and more extensive’ (WJE 16: 106). Two years later he wrote to one of these correspondents, ‘the church of God, in all parts of the world, is but one; the distant members are closely united in one glorious head. This union is very much her beauty’ (WJE 16: 180). Edwards consistently expressed ‘great interest of religion in the world’, citing revivals at home and abroad as heightened motivation to pray for the coming of Christ’s kingdom (WJE 16: 272). Even as Edwards served as a critical exchange point for information among evangelicals in America and abroad, the transmission of news was serialized in periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic. Anglo-American evangelicals and European Pietists participated enthusiastically in a multifaceted network of reading communities. For example, New Englanders read The [Glasgow] Weekly History (Apr. 1741) and its successor, The Christian Monthly History (Nov. 1743–Jan. 1746); the Scots read the works of Edwards and the broader coverage contained in Thomas Prince, Jr’s weekly pro-revivalist periodical, Christian History (Mar. 1743–Feb. 1745); and Germans read about the Great Awakening in America and missionary activities from around the world in the journals (Sammlung or ‘Collection’ in various titles, 1735–61) of the Magdeburg Pietist, Johann Adam Steinmetz, who translated pieces from the Weekly History and Christian History.

International Revivals: Edwards’s Immediate Impact The earliest of Edwards’s writings to gain international popularity and contribute directly to spiritual awakening was his A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God

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54   David W. Kling (1737), an account of revival in Edwards’s Northampton village and the surrounding area. As the first text of a genre of revival narratives, it became the most significant book to precede the transatlantic evangelical awakenings of the 1740s, as well as Edwards’s most widely read book throughout the eighteenth century. What was truly ‘surprising’ about Edwards’s account was that its impact occurred outside of the colonies themselves and became a catalyst for awakenings in other places. The work proved to be a publishing blockbuster, printed in at least sixty editions—ten in five countries including Britain and in three languages (Simonson 1987, 366). Its widespread popularity and acceptance as a benchmark of authentic awakenings prompted the historian W. R. Ward to comment, ‘If ever revival seemed to flag, someone somewhere would reprint Faithful Narrative’ (Ward 2006, 140). In their preface to the first London edition (1737), the Dissenting ministers John Guyse and Isaac Watts took inspiration from Edwards’s narrative, noting, ‘it gives us further encouragement to pray, and wait, and hope for the like display of his power in the midst of us’ (WJE 4: 132). The revival, unprecedented ‘since the first ages of Christianity . . . ought not to be concealed from the world. . . . May a plentiful effusion of the blessed Spirit also descend on the British Isles and all their American plantations, to renew the face of religion there!’ (WJE 4: 130, 137). A year later, while reading the Faithful Narrative as he walked from London to Oxford, John Wesley confided in his journal (quoting Ps. 118:23), ‘Surely, “this is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes.” ’ Edwards’s account may have opened the eyes of Wesley and other evangelicals in the Church of England to the possibility of mass conversions. Subsequently, Wesley provided his preachers and members of his societies with his own abridged version of Edwards’s narrative (as he did with Edwards’s four other writings about revival and their implications). In Wales, the Methodist revivalists Howell Harris and Daniel Rowland discussed Faithful Narrative in 1738, eighteen months after the Welsh revival began. Rowland was so taken by Edwards’s treatise that he declared, ‘Sure the time here now is like New England.’ Edwards’s description and analysis of the colonial awakening confirmed in Rowland’s mind that the Welsh revival was indeed a work of the Spirit. According to a historian of the Welsh revival, the Faithful Narrative had ‘a disproportionately significant impact on the development of the revival in Wales’ (Jones 2004, 137). News of the revival in Northampton and the publication of the Faithful Narrative soon spread to the Continent where revival-minded German and Dutch Pietists released translations of Edwards’s account as early as 1738. In his lengthy preface to the German translation (1739), Johann Steinmetz downplayed the confessional differences between Lutherans and Calvinists, and expressed an ecumenical hope that the narrative would spark conversions and revive the Protestant churches from their spiritual slumber (Stievermann 2014, 339). A few years after the Dutch translation (1740), revival broke out in the town of Nijkerk in the Dutch Republic. From there revival spread to the surrounding areas in the Netherlands and German border countries. In 1750, one of the promoters of revival, Gerardus Kuypers, published his own ‘Faithful Narrative’, linking the religious stir in Nijkerk to the broader transatlantic movement in play since the mid-1730s. Thanks to Edwards’s Faithful Narrative, the English, the Germans, the Dutch,

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Edwards in International Revivals and Missions   55 and the Americans shared in the work of the Holy Spirit on both sides of the Atlantic (Yeager 2016, 88–91). Unlike in Wales, where it is difficult to trace the exact ways in which Edwards’s extensive influence was felt (Jones 2004, 291–4), the revival in Scotland unmistakably owed its genesis to Edwards’s works. In Wales, the Faithful Narrative authenticated what had already taken place; in Scotland, Edwards’s work facilitated the revival to come. Indeed, the most direct and profound impact of the Faithful Narrative was felt in Scotland, where a spiritual stir broke out in Kilsyth in 1740, and then a ‘plentiful effusion’ descended on Cambuslang (a suburb of Glasgow) and the surrounding area, including Kilsyth again, in 1742. The Faithful Narrative became a veritable handbook—an urtext— for Scottish evangelicals. Inspired by the possibility of replicating the American awakening, they adopted Edwards’s vision of the pivotal role of revivals in God’s grand scheme of salvation and assiduously followed Edwards’s account in conducting, documenting, and interpreting the revival. According to Michael Crawford, ‘The character and timing of the Scottish religious revivals of 1742 . . . were all influenced in a high degree by events external to Scotland, especially the Great Awakening in New England’ (Crawford 1991, 23). In his earliest communication with Scotland’s ministers (12 May 1743), Edwards rejoiced at the news of the Cambuslang revival and its ‘glorious work’ (WJE 16: 105). William McCulloch, one of Edwards’s primary Scottish correspondents, modelled his preaching after Edwards, going so far in one sermon as to describe the plight of the sinner in words strikingly similar to Edwards’s ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’: ‘how can ye allow yourselves quietly to eat or sleep when ye know Nothing of the new birth, and where there is nothing but the frail thread of life between you and everlasting burnings? Should it snap, ‘it may be this night you instantly drop down into the pit of hell’ (Crawford 1991, 26). As was common among Anglo-American evangelicals, printed reports of revival were often read by ministers to their congregants as a primary means of promoting the work of the Spirit. After a worship service, McCulloch’s reading from Edwards’s Narrative so inspired one woman that she considered moving to America! Another woman remarked that she ‘was very glad to hear that there was such a work of conversion in those far distant places’ (Fawcett 1971, 92). Such preparatory work by McCulloch and other ministers including James Robe in nearby Kilsyth, heightened spiritual expectations among the people. Robe was so taken with the Faithful Narrative that, following the 1740 revival in Kilsyth, he published his own Faithful Narrative of the Extraordinary Work of the Spirit of God (1742), whose contents and organization mirrored Edwards’s work. Edwards’s Faithful Narrative was not only a catalyst that prepared the way for the Scottish revivals; it also introduced a new genre of revival literature replicated by Scottish revivalists and others. As in the American revival, controversy erupted in Scotland over the heightened religious emotions and disregard for social conventions. In answering their critics, the Scottish evangelicals once again had recourse to Edwards, relying upon the Distinguishing Marks (1741) to defend the scriptural basis of experimental religion. (We should note as

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56   David W. Kling well that William Williams, the leader of the Welsh Methodist movement in the 1750s, relied upon the criteria set forth in Distinguishing Marks to judge the bizarre somatic manifestations during an outbreak of revival in 1762 [Jones 2011, 55].) Edwards was not only the architect of revival but also its defender. In his analysis of religious conversion in Distinguishing Marks, Edwards proposed authentic signs of true conversion that offered a sense of assurance of one’s salvation through empirical tests. By melding Enlightenment rationality with religious experience, Edwards shifted the previous Puritan emphasis on continual introspection and soul-searching to a new confidence, security, and outward-looking evangelistic concern that spurred Christians to proclaim the message of the Gospel to others. An outward focused, missionary-mindedness was thus one of the major consequences of the revival. Although there had been mounting interest in missionary activity in Scotland before the actual awakenings of 1742, the revivals accelerated overseas missionary outreach. The Scottish Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (org. 1709) became the sending organization of evangelistic outreach, and in appointing David Brainerd as one of its missionaries, the society lay claim to the most famous Protestant missionary as its own. In sum, by his exemplary writings, Edwards inspired and emboldened the Scots to preach the message of the new birth, to defend the revivals as a genuine work of God’s Spirit, and to declare that the revivals heralded the great advance of religion around the world.

International Missions: Edwards’s Later Impact Edwards’s most important contributions to international missions are derived from his conception of cosmic redemption (An Humble Attempt, A History of the Work of Redemption), his distinction between moral and natural ability (Freedom of the Will), and his presentation of an archetypical missionary model (Life of Brainerd). In examining Edwards’s works, we will treat each separately but their impact on international missions should be seen as mutually reinforcing. Some works had a greater influence than others and certain works attracted different audiences. Some works had an immediate effect, others a long-term impact. Taken together they constitute a major force in advancing the modern Protestant missionary movement. Edwards, observed David Bebbington, ‘created an intellectual framework within which his successors in the English-speaking (and Welch-speaking) world did their thinking and their mission’ (Bebbington 2003, 187). Although Edwards was at the vanguard of global missiological thinking in his own day, the full impact of his writings did not come to fruition until well after his death, at the end of the eighteenth century. Since the Reformation, Protestants had made only a few concerted efforts to engage in worldwide evangelization, and certainly nothing on

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Edwards in International Revivals and Missions   57 the scale of Catholic missions. There were a number of reasons for this neglect, but one of the main theological reasons was the widespread view that the Great Commission of Matt. 28:19–20 was restricted to the apostles who fulfilled Jesus’ command to ‘go and make disciples’ when they took the Gospel to the then circumscribed known world. The task of successive generations of Christians was to maintain the purity of the Gospel witness. Mainline reformers such as Calvin contended that ‘the pastor does not have the mandate to preach the Gospel all the world over, but to look after the church, that has been committed to his charge’ (Davies 1996, 44). To be sure, there were exceptions to the general consensus. Anabaptists (influenced by Erasmus) affirmed the present-day applicability of the text, as did Richard Baxter (1615–91) a century later. Within a decade on either side of 1700, three new missionary societies were created whose focus was primarily on colonists in America: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (1698), Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (1701), and the aforementioned Scottish Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Successive generations of New England Puritans engaged in outreach to the Native Americans (including Edwards), and the Halle–Danish–English Mission in Tranquebar, India, and Moravian Brethren Pietist efforts were notable in extending the Gospel to the ‘uttermost parts of the earth’. A nascent global consciousness among Anglo-American and Continental Protestants was emerging, yet there was little in the way of large-scale evangelistic efforts. Edwards’s interest in international missions and his enlarged view of the Great Commission were influenced by a variety of sources. There was first, his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard who, in a published report, argued that Christ commanded that the Gospel should be preached to the Indians. He cited Matt. 28:19 and commented, ‘This Command was not given to the Apostles alone, but to their Successors also throughout all generations’ (Stoddard 1723, 7). Once Edwards became Stoddard’s assistant, he no doubt had access to this work (Davies 1997, 60). Perhaps a more significant influence on Edwards was Robert Millar’s two-volume History of the Propagation of Christianity (1731), which Edwards owned (WJEO 26: 71). In a letter (1 June 1740) to Josiah Willard, the Secretary of the Province, Edwards referenced Millar’s work. After expressing hope that Willard’s extensive knowledge of European affairs could provide more details about Lutheran Pietist revivals in Prussia, he cited an account in Millar’s History of the spiritual stir in the East Indies led by Danish missionaries. In reading this work, Edwards would have encountered not only a history of missionary expansion but a rationale for its continuance. The Scottish Presbyterian minister from Paisley cited Matt. 28:19–20 as a proof text for the duty of pastors to convert nations: ‘We are obliged to propagate the saving knowledge of Christ among all men so far as we can, and as orderly called by the very words of that commission from which we derive our office.’ He further declared that every Christian ‘should act with zeal in this manner’ (Millar 1731, 2: 394, 395). Millar’s history (as well as a host of other authors writing on the apocalypse) shaped Edwards’s perspective on the timing of the expansion of the Gospel. In A History of the Work of Redemption Edwards cited Christ’s commission to his disciples as a critical component to the redemptive process in proclaiming the Gospel to the world (WJE 9: 363–4). Unlike Calvin, he mentioned nothing about what a post-apostolic pastor may or

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58   David W. Kling may not do in this regard. In The ‘Blank Bible’ commentary Edwards took a somewhat different tack. Here he connected Jesus’ words to his disciples with the worldwide expansion of the Gospel preceding the millennium. Edwards averred that when Jesus commissioned his disciples, his intention was to bring ‘all nations into his kingdom’. But since ‘this has never been accomplished, we may suppose that there is a day remaining in which it will be accomplished’ (WJE 24: 878; see also WJE 18: 366). Although Edwards’s brief exposition never appeared in print, his mindset demonstrated an enlarged vision of the scope and timing of God’s work of redemption, as well as an understanding that advancing the kingdom of Christ required that all Christians play their part. He explicitly transmitted this vision in his published works, An Humble Attempt and A History of the Work of Redemption.

The Great Designs of God in the World The half century from the 1740s to the 1790s, Stuart Piggin writes, ‘is threaded through with many cords connecting Edwards with the founders of modern Protestant missions’ (Piggin 2003, 269). To unravel these cords is to trace the profound influence of Edwards’s writings upon the awakening of the missionary spirit in Britain and America. In A History of the Work of Redemption (originally a sermon series in 1739; published ­posthumously in 1774) and An Humble Attempt, Edwards proposed that the eighteenthcentury revivals in Europe, England, Scotland, Wales, America, and elsewhere signalled the dawn of the millennium. Beginning in the late 1730s and extending through the Great Awakening, Edwards predicted that the world was on the cusp of a massive religious revival. According to Edwards, this new age would not come through cataclysmic means (as earlier interpreters had suggested), but through natural means, through the ­outpouring of God’s Spirit manifested in Christian teaching, preaching, praying, and other religious activity. Because the world was gradually improving in anticipation of Christ’s return, a guarded optimism attended this view. Christian activity was a precondition of the coming new age, for Christians who engaged in benevolent activities, prayer, and missionary outreach actually played a divinely ordained role in ushering in the kingdom of Christ. Edwards’s millennialism thus joined revivalism and missions in a redemptive scheme.

Prayer: An Humble Attempt Edwards enjoined all Christians, whatever their age or status, to engage in constant prayer for promoting revival. He urged fellow ministers to ‘imitate their great Master in his fervent prayers for the good of the souls of men’ (WJE 25: 337). During times of ­spiritual awakening he recommended praying societies, where men, women, young men and young women, and boys and girls organized themselves in separate groups ‘to promote the work of God, and advance the kingdom of Christ’ (WJE 4: 519). Entreating God in prayer was the highest of Christian priorities: ‘Pray for the time when the light

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Edwards in International Revivals and Missions   59 will enlighten the whole world’ (WJE 19: 722). ‘The prayers of the saints’, he wrote in Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New England, ‘should be one great and principle means of carrying on the designs of Christ’s kingdom in the world. When God has something very great to accomplish for his church, ’tis his will that there should precede it the extraordinary prayers of his people’ (WJE 4: 516). In 1745, Edwards’s pleas for united prayer were taken up on the other side of the Atlantic when Scottish and English ministers, inspired by Some Thoughts and already cognizant of existing praying societies in Britain, organized their own concert of prayer. Writing to a correspondent in Scotland later in the year, Edwards enthusiastically endorsed the praying societies. He called them ‘exceeding beautiful’ and expressed hope that a concert would spread throughout America, extend into other British dominions, and ‘all over the visible church of Christ’ (WJE 16: 181, 183). Edwards was at once thrilled at the initiative taken overseas and yet troubled at the waning of spiritual interest at home in the aftermath of the Great Awakening. Compounding the ‘withdrawal of God’s Spirit’ in New England was an unstable international political climate created by European wars that spread to America. Yet all was not spiritually lost. Edwards, ever alert to the news, tracked signs of renewal elsewhere—reports of revivals in Maryland and Virginia, Brainerd’s success among the Indians, Britain’s miraculous defeat of the (Catholic) French at Cape Breton, and showers of divine blessing in parts of Europe. In Humble Attempt Edwards proposed a concert of prayer as a remedy for the spiritual ills in the evangelical world, the disquieting international situation, and the hastening of the millennium. His larger objective was to place past and present events within a biblical apocalyptic timetable. Edwards sought, as the lengthy title attests, ‘to promote explicit agreement and visible union of God’s people in extraordinary prayer for the revival of religion and the advancement of Christ’s kingdom on earth’, but also, as the subtitle clarified, ‘pursuant to Scripture-promises and prophecies concerning the last time’ (my emphasis). According to Edwards’s prophetic scheme, constant, united prayer was a primary means that God gave to his people to prepare the way for revival, the spread of the Gospel worldwide, and the coming millennium. The revivals in New England and Europe were a foretaste of what was to come. ‘There is yet remaining’, Edwards wrote, ‘a great advancement of the interest of religion and the kingdom of Christ in this world, by an abundant outpouring of the Spirit of God, far greater and more extensive than ever yet has been’ (WJE 5: 329). Humble Attempt offered a grand vision of the progressive unfolding of the plan of redemption in history, with united prayer and revival at its centrepiece. During Edwards’s lifetime, his treatise and efforts to promote the concert of prayer were integral to the rise of the Scottish overseas missionary movement. But beyond Scotland and until the end of the eighteenth century, Humble Attempt generally lay dormant. How this work became one of the most important sources in awakening AngloAmerican evangelicals to their missionary calling is the stuff of legend. It begins with John Erskine, one of Edwards’s frequent Scottish Presbyterian correspondents and a key transmitter of Edwards’s evangelical Calvinism. In 1784 Erskine sent a parcel of books, including Humble Attempt, to the Northampton Baptist leader John Ryland, Jr—already a devotee of Edwards (Yeager 2016, 124). Reading Edwards’s treatises had convinced Ryland that the Gospel was to be preached to all people, and not, as other Particular

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60   David W. Kling Baptist theologians argued, to the elect only. After reading Humble Attempt, Ryland passed it on John Sutcliff in Olney, who then shared it with Andrew Fuller in Kettering. Deeply affected by Edwards’s treatise, the trio agreed to meet with others on a monthly basis ‘to seek the revival of religion, and the extension of Christ’s kingdom in the world’. Soon thereafter, at the annual meeting of the (Baptist) Northamptonshire Association, Humble Attempt became the focus of attention. At Sutcliff ’s recommendation, the association issued a Prayer Call: One hour on the first Monday of each month was to be set aside for corporate prayer. The concert of prayer continued through the 1780s, and soon spread to other countries, including to the United States. As the number of praying societies grew, Sutcliff reissued Humble Attempt in 1789. In his preface, he enjoined all Christians, regardless of denominational affiliation or however slight the theological differences, to gather for united prayer. This edition influenced William Carey who, three years later published his clarion call to missionary service, An Inquiry into Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens. Carey, an active participant in the concert of prayer since the 1780s, claimed that the Great Commission was as binding in the present day as in apostolic times. Christians were responsible to use the means at their disposal (e.g., preaching, prayer) and go to the unreached ‘heathen’. Moreover, he relied on Humble Attempt to discount the contention that certain prophecies had yet to be fulfilled before the heathen could be converted. Humble Attempt injected eschatological optimism, calling upon all Christians to pray for revival and assuring them that they could play an active part in advancing the kingdom of Christ. With Carey’s manifesto and the English publication of many of Edwards’s works, the modern Protestant missionary movement was ‘born in a world awash with Edwards’ (Piggin  2003, 274). The Baptist Missionary Society was formed in 1792, the London Missionary Society in 1795, the Scottish Missionary Society in 1796, the Glasgow Missionary Society in 1798, the Church Missionary Society in 1799, and others followed, including in the United States. What also followed was a cascade of reprints of Humble Attempt well into the second half of the nineteenth century. As Protestant missionaries travelled to foreign counties, so did Humble Attempt. The treatise continued to be published in English; translations were issued in French, German, and Arabic; and in 1859 Humble Attempt was printed in Calcutta. Andrew Walls deftly summarized the connective links from Edwards’s Humble Attempt to the modern Protestant missionary movement: ‘The chain that led to William Carey’s pioneering missionary initiative of 1792 was forged by a gift from a Scottish Presbyterian to an English Baptist of a book by a New England Congregationalist’ (Walls 1994, 310).

History: The Work of Redemption In the annals of missionary history, Edwards’s A History of the Work of Redemption cannot claim the same pedigree as An Humble Attempt, and yet throughout the nineteenth century the treatise was one of the most popular missionary reference books, attracting

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Edwards in International Revivals and Missions   61 a wide readership on both sides of the Atlantic. Preached originally as a sermon series with the aim of awakening his Northampton congregation, Edwards’s History of Redemption awaited publication in Edinburgh thirty-five years later in 1774. The impact of the sermon series cum treatise can be charted by its publication history, as reviewed in part IV of this volume. Relevant here is that throughout the nineteenth century its major disseminators were evangelical and missionary-focused organizations. For example, between 1838 and 1875 the American Tract Society distributed over 60,000 copies. The British-based Religious Tract Society reprinted History of Redemption four times in the 1830s alone. A French copy made its way to Basutoland (now Lesotho) Africa via the Paris Evangelical Mission Society. Edwards’s historical dispensations in History of Redemption became the organizational structure for the French missionary Adolph Mabille’s systematic theology, Dogmatique (1856) and for his catechism in the vernacular Basuto language (Neele 2015, 78–82). The reception and especially translations of A History of the Work of Redemption ‘were intimately connected to the rise of the worldwide Protestant evangelical mission movement of the early nineteenth century’ (Neele 2015, 71–2). Whereas Humble Attempt cleared away scriptural and theological objections to human participation in the advancement of the kingdom of Christ, A History of the Work of Redemption offered historical ‘proof ’ of its advance, placing revivals at the centre of redemptive history. In his treatise, Edwards divided history into three distinct eras—the third being the period from Christ’s death until his millennial return or the ‘last days’ which appeared ostensibly on the horizon. To nineteenth century missionaryminded evangelicals in America, Europe, and beyond, A History of Redemption reinforced their convictions that the revivals they witnessed and promoted were a part of the grand divine scheme of redemptive history. This reading of history sustained them in dark days of resistance to the Gospel and inspired them to extend the Gospel throughout the world. ‘[God’s] Spirit shall be gloriously poured out’, wrote Edwards, ‘for the wonderful revival and propagation of religion.’ God’s Spirit will enable ‘men to be glorious instruments of carrying on his work’, filling them ‘with knowledge and wisdom and a fervent zeal for promoting the kingdom of Christ’ (WJE 9: 460). Edwards’s bold historical optimism, fervent expectation of imminent revival, and global interest in the progress of the Gospel (he referenced China, the East Indies, South America, and Africa in History of Redemption) inspired generations of missionaries. Previously neglected or undervalued by scholars of missions, A History of the Work of Redemption may rightly claim the status of primus inter pares with Humble Attempt and Life of Brainerd among Edwards’s most important works on international missions.

The Human Condition: Freedom of the Will and Original Sin Two of Edwards’s works written during his Stockbridge years (1751–8) had implications for the international spread of the Gospel. The Freedom of the Will (1754) and Original

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62   David W. Kling Sin (1758, published posthumously), penned while Edwards served as missionary to the Native Americans, made possible the offer of salvation to all peoples, whatever their status, race, or ethnicity. Freedom of the Will was aimed primarily at defending Calvinist views of the will against the Arminian threat but its argument enabled the Kettering Baptist Andrew Fuller (1754–1815) and his Particular Baptist brethren to liberate themselves from the constricting views of divine election that removed any responsibility for preaching the Gospel to the non-elect. According to some HyperCalvinist Baptist theologians, no ministers had a warrant to call on the unregenerate to repent and believe the Gospel. They needed to first identify those who had an inner warrant (a text of Scripture in their minds) as confirmation of their elect status. Fuller and others, in wrestling with the implications of this theological fatalism, discovered in Freedom of the Will a way out of this quandary. Edwards distinguished between nonelect sinners’ natural inability to repent and their moral inability to do so. There were no natural, physical, external factors that hindered unbelievers from choosing or rejecting the Gospel. In this sense, they were ‘free’ to accept the Gospel (even though that freedom always led to wrong choices and sinful behaviour) and were thus morally responsible for their choices. If they rejected the Gospel, they did so according to their desires. God’s sovereign election and the obligation to accept the Gospel were consistent. Not until he encountered Edwards’s Freedom of the Will in 1775 did Andrew Fuller find a way to reconcile his High Calvinism with the offer of salvation to all people. In 1785 he published The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation, citing the Great Commission in Mark (16:15–16) as his text. In his preface, he named those sources that convinced him to  alter his views. First, people: John Elliot and David Brainerd, missionaries to the Native Americans, appeared ‘to have none of the shackles with which I felt myself encumbered’ (iii). Second, and more important, ideas: Fuller read Edwards’s Freedom of the Will ‘on the distinction of natural and moral ability, and inability’. He concluded that men’s inability to come to Christ ‘was of a voluntary kind—that they will not come to Christ that they may have life—will not hearken to the voice of the charmer, charm he never so wisely—will not seek after God’ (v–vi). Edwards gave Fuller and the Baptists theological permission to preach revival and evangelize beyond their own churches. The Gospel of All Acceptation enabled Baptists to become evangelical Calvinists. ‘This evangelical development,’ writes Chris Chun, ‘then became an important source for revival among English Baptists, which ultimately gave birth to the Modern Missionary Movement’ (Chun  2012, 32). Fuller’s Edwardsean theological reconstructions so enlightened William Carey that in his Inquiry Carey urged Christians to abandon fatalistic notions of God’s sovereignty and use the means at their disposal to preach the Gospel to all ­people. Taking the lead in the formation of the Baptist Missionary Society, Fuller became its first secretary and the society’s greatest promoter of missions. The publishing history of Freedom of the Will indicates that its popularity and stimulus to missions was not restricted to Baptists. From 1774 to 1830, the work was printed in Utrecht (1774), Glasgow (1790), Edinburgh (1818, 1830), and London (seven times from 1762–1816) (Lesser 2003, 304–5).

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Edwards in International Revivals and Missions   63 Although Original Sin, another work of Edwards’s written during his Stockbridge years, did not have the kind of game-changing impact on international missions as did Freedom of the Will, it nevertheless created (to extend the analogy) a level playing field in affirming the depraved common constitution of all humanity, be they the heathen, backward Native American or the presumed morally upright, civilized European. Edwards ‘found the unity of the human race in the depths of sin’ (WJE 3: 101). If not for the grace of God, all would perish. Challenging prevailing views about the moral superiority of Europeans, Edwards maintained that the fall had rendered all humanity equally helpless and in need of God’s regenerating grace. Although Edwards made no direct connection between original sin and the need for missions, Rachel Wheeler has drawn out the implications of Edwards’s emphasis on the universal human condition: ‘In the Calvinist doctrine of human depravity, Edwards found grounds to affirm the equality of Indian and English. It was the related doctrine of the necessity of divine grace through Christ’s salvific work that fostered the missionary impulse in Edwards and other Christians’ (Wheeler 2007, 207; but see also Van Andel 2011).

Spirituality: The Life of Brainerd Edwards’s Life of the Late Reverend Mr David Brainerd (1749) is treated in a separate chapter in this volume, so we will be brief but no less emphatic in identifying this biography as Edwards’s most influential writing that touched the personal and spiritual lives of laity, clergy, revivalists, and missionaries. The Life of Brainerd was to the spiritual lives of missionaries what the Faithful Narrative was to the implementation of revival—a paradigmatic text. What Edwards analyzed as true religion in the Religious Affections, the companion text of the Life of Brainerd authenticated. More editions and reprints of the Life have been issued than any of Edwards’s other books. The Life was the first of Edwards’s works to reach a foreign audience and, as with his other works, the initial impact of the Life was stronger abroad than in America. Multiple editions were issued by English Baptists and Methodists, Scottish Presbyterians, and German Pietists. Evangelical leaders urged every preacher to model his life after Brainerd, emphasizing the necessity of converted and committed pastors. The Life succeeded in raising the missionary consciousness among Anglo-American and German evangelicals and shaping their views of spirituality. Every Protestantspeaking mission library featured a copy of the Life of Brainerd. The abstemious, devout missionary to the Native Americans was a personal inspiration and subject of study in missionary training schools. Brainerd reached a heroic, saintly status, becoming ‘the principal model of early British missionary spirituality’ (Walls  1994, 310). The first generation of modern missionaries (and successive ones beyond the scope of this chapter) who testified to the inspiration of the Life of Brainerd represents a veritable hall of fame of renowned evangelists. In his Inquiry, Carey cited Brainerd three times; he

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64   David W. Kling urged his missionary band, ‘Let us often look at Brainerd’; and he so treasured the Life that, according to John Ryland, Jr, it became ‘a second Bible to him’. Henry Martyn, chaplain for the East India Company, after reading the Life testified, ‘No uninspired writer ever did me so much good. . . . Let me burn out for God’ (Grigg 2009, 165). Others attesting to the influence of Brainerd included Melville Horne, English missionary to Africa; Robert Morrison, Scottish missionary to China; Christian Frederick Schwartz, German missionary to India; Samuel Marsden, English missionary to New Zealand; and Adoniram Judson and his wife, Ann ‘Nancy’ Judson, American missionaries to Burma.

Redux: American International Missions In a letter to Andrew Fuller in 1799, Samuel Hopkins wrote, ‘I am pleased to hear that Edwardean principles are gaining ground and spreading . . . and that all or most of the late remarkable exertions to send missionaries among the heathen, and propagate the gospel among others in Europe and America, have originated in a poor shoemaker [i.e., William Carey], from having imbibed these principles.’ He then recognized that the recent missionary societies formed in America owed ‘their rise to those formed in England’, and that four out of five of these American societies embraced Edwardsean theology (Hopkins 1852, 1: 236). Hopkins’s letter encapsulates the organizational and theological progression of Anglo-American missions. In its theology of missions, England owed a debt to Edwards; in its organizational structure of missions, America owed a debt to England. As we have noted above, Edwards’s Life of Brainerd, Humble Attempt, History of Redemption, and other writings inspired England’s and Scotland’s foray into overseas missions. For their part, American evangelicals adopted British organizational models, borrowed freely and extensively from their missionary publications, incorporated British eschatological speculations into their writings, and circulated sermons of their British counterparts. Although Hopkins never lived to see the reality of the missionary movement in America, a succeeding generation of Edwardseans (called the New Divinity) extended and applied the implicit missionary theology of Edwards (and as we will see, Hopkins modifications) into an explicit theological justification for missionary endeavour. Following the British example, in 1810 Edwards’s New Divinity heirs created the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), the great sponsoring body for hundreds of Edwardsean missionaries around the world. The ABCFM would soon outdistance all other evangelical foreign missionary organizations in its numbers of missionaries and geographical scope. Complementing the ABCFM and Andover Seminary—its educational feeder and a virtual New Divinity missionary training school—was Mary Lyon’s Mt. Holyoke Seminary, whose Edwardsean religious culture supplied nearly forty female students and missionaries to foreign missions by the middle of the nineteenth century (Conforti 1995, 105).

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Edwards in International Revivals and Missions   65 While inspired by the British example of foreign missions, America’s first foray into overseas missions must be seen as a continuation and extension of New Divinity revivals (the Second Great Awakening) and frontier missions. Amid religious stirs at home, the New Divinity clergy advanced the missionary cause under the Edwardsean banner, though not without their own theological modifications (Kling 2003, 801–07). Of these revisions, perhaps the most distinctive American contribution to missionary motivation was the refinement of Edwards’s notion of ‘disinterested benevolence’. The phrase was not unique to Edwards but in currency among British moral philosophers and employed in a wider discussion of the nature of ‘true virtue’. Edwards equated true virtue with the condition of the regenerate and defined it as a love or ‘benevolence to Being in general’. True Christians are given a new disposition (or ‘taste’ or ‘relish’) for God and all things that he has brought into existence, and consequently, they have a love of ‘being in general’ (WJE 8: 540). There is no private or selfish interest involved; rather, God is loved, adored, and worshipped for who and what God is. Edwards proposed this concept as an aesthetic, beatific vision; his followers, especially Samuel Hopkins, transposed the concept into an ethic. Whereas Edwards saw true virtue culminating in holy consciousness, Hopkins viewed it as culminating in holy action. True Christians, such as a David Brainerd, expressed themselves in unselfish acts of love and mercy in order to bring glory to God and further his kingdom. And what could be more unselfish than leaving the comforts of civilization for the hardships of missionary service? Whether expressed as duty, benevolence, or a ‘pure and holy love’, the concept of disinterested benevolence acted as a motivational missionary detonator. When wired to the dynamite of revival, it set off an explosion of vast human energy, both at home and abroad. Thus, the Life of Brainerd coupled with the concept of disinterested benevolence inspired the first generation of American Protestant missionaries. Personalizing the Life of Brainerd, Levi Parsons, the ABCFM’s first missionary to Palestine, epitomized the Hopkinsian model of disinterested benevolence. Prior to his departure, he declared, ‘Every devoted Christian will enquire, not where he can enjoy the most ease, . . . but where he can most successfully labour in the cause of Christ & promote the salvation of men.’ It was far better to ‘wear out and die in three years, than live forty years in slothfulness’ (Kling 2003, 806).

Conclusion Historians have long recognized Edwards’s writings as a major stimulus to the beginnings of the modern missionary movement. Recent scholarship has made an even more convincing case, highlighting not only the dissemination of Edwards’s works that inspired missionary outreach but also those that had a direct bearing on international revivals. To be sure, as crucial a figure as Edwards was in these developments, he was never directly involved in orchestrating international revivals or promoting missionary outreach. He lived as a provincial colonial in the backwoods of the British Empire, far removed from the centre of the Protestant world. Yet, as has been made clear throughout

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66   David W. Kling this chapter, his reach was global. Indeed, in the half century following his death, Edwards’s publications were by far more influential abroad than at home. American evangelicals eventually reclaimed Edwards as their own and, due in no small part to Edwards’s New Divinity heirs, their contributions to international revivals and missions would far exceed those of their peers in England and Europe. Had he lived to witness the ‘great century’ of missionary expansion and the continued global growth of Christianity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Edwards no doubt would have enlarged and revised what he called ‘a great work’—his History of Redemption. What he saw only through a glass dimly but envisioned expectantly—the spread of the Gospel around the world—was fulfilled in his hope for the advancement of the kingdom of Christ.

Works Cited Bebbington, David W. (2003). ‘Remembered Around the World: The International Scope of Edwards’s Legacy.’ Edwards at Home and Abroad: Historical Memories, Cultural Movements, Global Horizons. Ed. David  W.  Kling and Douglas  A.  Sweeney. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. 177–200. Chun, Chris (2012). The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards in the Theology of Andrew Fuller. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Conforti, Joseph  A. (1995). Jonathan Edwards, Religious Tradition, and American Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Crawford, Michael  J. (1991). ‘New England and the Scottish Revivals of 1742.’ American Presbyterians 69.1 (Spring): 23–32. Davies, Ronald E. (1997). ‘Jonathan Edwards: Missionary Biographer, Theologian, Strategist, Administrator, Advocate—and Missionary.’ International Bulletin of Missionary Research 21.2 (Apr.): 60–6. Davies, R.  E. (1996). ‘The Great Commission from Calvin to Carey.’ Evangel 14 (Summer): 44–9. Fawcett, Arthur (1971). The Cambuslang Revival: The Scottish Evangelical Revival of the Eighteenth Century. London: Banner of Truth Trust. Fuller, Andrew (1785). The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation. Northampton: T. Dicey and Co. Grigg, John A. (2009). The Lives of David Brainerd: The Making of an American Evangelical Icon. New York: Oxford University Press. Hopkins, Samuel (1852). The Works of Samuel Hopkins, D.D. 3 vols. Boston: Doctrinal Tract and Book Society. Jones, David Ceri (2004). ‘A Glorious Work in the World’: Welsh Methodism and the International Evangelical Revival, 1735–1750. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Jones, David Ceri (2011). ‘ “Sure the time here now is like New England:”: What happened when Welsh Calvinistic Methodists read Jonathan Edwards?’ Jonathan Edwards and Scotland. Ed Kelly Van Andel, Adriaan  C.  Neele, and Kenneth  P.  Minkema. Edinburgh: Dunedin Academic Press. 49–62. Kling, David  W. (2003). ‘The New Divinity and the Origins of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.’ Church History 72.4 (Dec.): 791–819. Lesser, M. X. (2003). ‘An Honor Too Great: Jonathan Edwards in Print Abroad.’ Edwards at Home and Abroad: Historical Memories, Cultural Movements, Global Horizons. Ed.

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Edwards in International Revivals and Missions   67 David W. Kling and Douglas A. Sweeney. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. 297–319. Millar, Robert. (1731). A History of the Propagation of Christianity and the Overthrow of Paganism, 2 vols., 3rd ed. London. Neele, Adriaan C. (2015). ‘The Reception of Edward’s A History of the Work of Redemption in Nineteenth-century Basutoland.’ Journal of Religion in Africa 45: 68–93. O’Brien, Susan (1994). ‘Eighteenth-Century Publishing Networks in the First Years of Transatlantic Evangelicalism.’ Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and Beyond, 1700–1990. Ed. Mark  A.  Noll, David W. Bebbington, George A. Rawlyk. New York: Oxford University Press. 38–57. Piggin, Stuart (2003). ‘The Expanding Knowledge of God: Jonathan Edwards’s Influence on Missionary Thinking and Promotion.’ Edwards at Home and Abroad: Historical Memories, Cultural Movements, Global Horizons. Ed. David  W.  Kling and Douglas  A.  Sweeney. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. 266–96. Simonson, Harold  P. (1987). ‘Jonathan Edwards and His Scottish Connections.’ Journal of American Studies 21.3 (Dec.): 353–76. Stievermann, Jan (2014). ‘Faithful Translations: New Discoveries on the German Pietist Reception of Jonathan Edwards.’ Church History 83.2 (June): 324–66. Stoddard, Solomon (1723). ‘Question: Whether God is not angry with the Country for doing so little towards the Conversion of the Indians?’ Boston: B. Green. Stout, Harry S. (2007). ‘Edwards as Revivalist.’ Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards. Ed. Stephen J. Stein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 125–43. Van Andel, Kelly (2011). ‘The Geography of Sinfulness: Mapping Subjectivity on the Mission Frontier.’ Jonathan Edwards and Scotland. Ed. Kelly Van Andel, Adriaan  C.  Neele, Kenneth P. Minkema. Edinburgh: Dunedin Academic Press. 89–99. Walls, Andrew  F. (2003). ‘Missions and Historical Memory: Jonathan Edwards and David Brainerd.’ Edwards at Home and Abroad: Historical Memories, Cultural Movements, Global Horizons. Ed. David  W.  Kling and Douglas  A.  Sweeney. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. 248–65. Walls, Andrew  F. (1994). ‘The Evangelical Revival, the Missionary Movement, and Africa.’ Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and Beyond, 1700–1990. Ed. Mark A. Noll, David W. Bebbington, George A. Rawlyk. New York: Oxford University Press. 310–30. Ward, W. R. (2006). Early Evangelicalism: A Global Intellectual History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wheeler, Rachel  M. (2007). ‘Edwards as Missionary.’ Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards. Ed. Stephen J. Stein. New York: Cambridge University Press. 196–214. Yeager, Jonathan  M. (2016). Jonathan Edwards and Transatlantic Print Culture. New York: Oxford University Press.

Suggested Reading Conforti, Joseph  A. (1995). Jonathan Edwards, Religious Tradition, and American Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Crawford, Michael J. (1991). Seasons of Grace: Colonial New England’s Revival Tradition in Its British Context New York: Oxford University Press.

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68   David W. Kling Davies, Ronald E. (1997). ‘Jonathan Edwards: Missionary Biographer, Theologian, Strategist, Administrator, Advocate—and Missionary.’ International Bulletin of Missionary Research 21.2 (Apr.): 60–6. Kling, David W. and Douglas A. Sweeney, eds. (2003). Edwards at Home and Abroad: Historical Memories, Cultural Movements, Global Horizons. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Kling, David  W. (2003). ‘The New Divinity and the Origins of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.’ Church History 72.4 (Dec.): 791–19. Mitchell, Christopher W. (1997). ‘Jonathan Edwards's Scottish Connection and the EighteenthCentury Scottish Evangelical Revival, 1735–1750.’ Ph.D. thesis, University of St. Andrews. Stievermann, Jan. (2014). ‘Faithful Translations: New Discoveries on the German Pietist Reception of Jonathan Edwards.’ Church History 83.2 (June): 324–66.

Author Bio David W. Kling is professor and chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Miami. He has written on Jonathan Edwards and his legacy in A History of Christian Conversion (2020); ‘Edwards in the Second Great Awakening: The New Divinity Contributions of Edward Dorr Griffin and Asahel Nettleton’, in After Jonathan Edwards: The Courses of the New England Theology, ed. Oliver  D.  Crisp and Douglas  A.  Sweeney (2012); ‘Jonathan Edwards, the Bible, and Conversion’, in Jonathan Edwards and Scripture: Biblical Exegesis in British North America, ed. David P. Barshinger and Douglas A. Sweeney (2018); and ‘Jonathan Edwards, Petitionary Prayer, and the Cognitive Science of Religion,’ Theology and Science 17.3 (Aug. 2019).

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chapter 5

Sou rces of Edwa r ds’s Thought Peter J. Thuesen

A favourite pastime of intellectual historians is to trace the antecedents of a great mind. Serious modern dissection of the mind of Jonathan Edwards began with Harvard’s Perry Miller, whose 1949 intellectual biography highlighted Edwards’s precocious mastery of Enlightenment philosophy and likened him to a ‘master of relativity’ speaking to ‘a convention of Newtonians who had not yet heard of Einstein’ (Miller 1981, 63). This preternaturally modern Edwards differed from the portrait painted by Miller’s friend and sometime collaborator Thomas H. Johnson. In examining Edwards’s ‘Catalogue’ (his book wish-list), Johnson concluded that Edwards never fully escaped his provincial location but remained ‘tightly bound by theological dogma’ (Johnson 1930–3, 222). Both Miller and Johnson were literature scholars attracted to Edwards because, as Miller put it, ‘no American succeeded better . . . in generalizing his experience into the meaning of America’ (Miller  1981, xxxiii). But whereas Miller’s Edwards exemplified the nation’s endless capacity to create itself anew through prophetic judgment, Johnson’s Edwards was a tragic figure who failed to use his full powers of mind to reach truly original conclusions (Miller 1981, 329–30; Johnson 1930–3, 221). In the decades since Miller and Johnson’s pioneering scholarship, intellectual history has moved beyond viewing figures like Edwards as disembodied Great Minds. Against Miller’s assertion that ‘the real life of Jonathan Edwards was the life of his mind’ (Miller 1981, xxx), scholars today are more inclined to see Edwards and other canonical thinkers as fully embedded in mundane economic, political, and bodily realities. There is also renewed appreciation for Emerson’s dictum, from ‘Self-Reliance’ (1841), that ‘a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds’. Rather than focusing on the either/ or of traditional versus modern, or provincial versus cosmopolitan, recent interpreters have more often seen both/and. Any quest for the ‘system’ of Edwards is liable to be frustrated by his inescapably human dissonances and discrepancies. Moreover, new manuscript discoveries, as well as the careful analysis of Edwards’s entire corpus by the volume editors in The Works of Jonathan Edwards (the critical edition founded by Miller

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70   Peter J. Thuesen in 1953), have revealed as never before the myriad influences on his thought. Not all of his sources were ‘high’ intellectual tomes. We now see more clearly how Edwards drew inspiration from popular periodicals and other polite literature in what scholars have dubbed the transatlantic ‘republic of letters’. In the first part of this essay, I will trace the chronology of Edwards’s engagement with print culture, from his boyhood to his final appointment as president of Princeton. In the second half of the essay, I will draw some general conclusions about the principal influences on Edwards’s thought.

The Young Edwards: East Windsor and New Haven As the son and grandson of pastors, and the only boy in a family of ten girls, Edwards was groomed from an early age for a ministerial vocation. Candidates for admission to the Collegiate School (later renamed Yale) had to know Latin, and by age seven Edwards was already learning this language and other subjects from his parents and siblings. Like other children of clergy, he grew up in a home full of books. The library of his father, Timothy, was heavy on Puritan titles, including works by such seventeenth-century Nonconformists as Richard Baxter, John Goodwin, John Flavel, John Owen, and William Twisse. Timothy’s collection also included books by prominent New Englanders, including Thomas Hooker, Increase Mather, Cotton Mather, and Samuel Willard (WJE 26: 363–415). Timothy was an original subscriber to the posthumous printing of Willard’s Compleat Body of Divinity (1726), the first systematic theology published in America, modelled after the earlier manuscript ‘Whole Body of Divinity’ by Samuel Stone (1602–1663) (Tipson 2015, 52–3). Throughout his life, Edwards would continue to exchange theological books with his father, who died the same year as his son. The young Edwards also had access to the library of his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, whose interests included philosophy (Aristotle, Descartes) and even Catholic scholasticism (Aquinas, and the later Thomist Francisco Suárez) (Fiering 1972). Despite their frequent condemnations of the Schoolmen, Puritan ministers such as Stoddard were steeped in medieval scholastic thought. (The English Puritan John Preston reputedly liked to read Aquinas’s Summa while the barber cut his hair!) (Miller  1939, 104). Stoddard was Edwards’s primary link to this earlier mode of learning. Edwards was not quite thirteen years old when he entered the Collegiate School (then located in Wethersfield, Connecticut) in autumn 1716. Logic was the first subject in the curriculum, which meant at that time the Port-Royal logic of Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, authors of La Logique, ou L’art de Penser (1662). This influential Cartesian text was still being consulted in English translation during Edwards’s senior year in New Haven, and a copy with his signature survives in Yale’s Beinecke Library. Arnauld and Nicole were part of a longer school of thought, beginning with the sixteenth-century French humanist Petrus Ramus and also including the seventeenth-century Dutch

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Sources of Edwards’s Thought   71 logicians Franco Burgersdijck and Adrianus Heereboord, that Stoddard had read at Harvard and Edwards likely read at Yale. Ever since Ramus and especially Descartes, this trad­ition had been differentiating itself from the Aristotelianism of the medieval past and moving away, as Norman Fiering has noted, ‘from preoccupation with forms of reasoning for their own sake and more toward the problem of how useful knowledge and factual truth could be attained’ (Fiering 1981, 26). In the fields of metaphysics and ethics, the Cambridge Platonist Henry More was then the standard, despite his rejection of Calvinist orthodoxy in favour of a more benevolent view of God and humans (Fiering 1981, 16, 21, 207–8). In science and mathematics, Edwards probably studied Jacques Rohault’s Cartesian physics, Johann Heinrich Alsted’s geometry, and Pierre Gassendi’s astronomy (WJE 26: 7–8). In divinity, Edwards likely engaged that old Puritan favourite, William Ames’s Medulla Sacrae Theologiae (1627; English translation, The Marrow of Sacred Divinity, 1642); the Yale Library owns a copy used by his college roommate and cousin Elisha Mix. Ames was eventually superseded by the Compendium Theologiae Christianae (1626; English translation, The Abridgment of Christian Divinitie, 1650) of the Swiss Calvinist Johannes Wollebius. Another widely circulating Continental systematic theology was Petrus van Mastricht’s Theoretico-Practica Theologia (1699), a work that would later loom large as a source for Edwards. But weighty tomes of Reformed divinity soon faced competition from more ­modish literature when Jeremiah Dummer, London agent for the Massachusetts and Connecticut colonies, gave the college a collection of more than eight hundred volumes covering every major branch of learning (Bryant and Patterson  1938). Edwards had access to this trove during his years a master’s degree candidate (1720–2) and especially as a tutor (1724–6), when he and the other tutors received a special stipend for sorting the books. Particularly notable was the number of latitudinarian titles or works reflecting the spirit of moderation and tolerance that had come to dominate the Church of England since the Restoration. Latitudinarianism tended toward an Arminian confidence in human ability and also entailed a strong interest in natural religion, or the knowledge of God revealed through nature and human reason. Latitudinarian authors represented in the collection included the late archbishop of Canterbury John Tillotson; the Anglican bishops Edward Stillingfleet and Benjamin Hoadly; the philosopher Samuel Clarke; and the politicians and essayists Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steele, and Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury. The library also featured Robert Boyle’s scientific works, John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Nicolas Malebranche’s Search after Truth, Pierre Bayle’s four-volume Historical and Critical Dictionary, and even an English translation of the Qur’an. The danger of the Dummer books to Congregational orthodoxy became dramatically apparent at Yale’s commencement ceremony on September 12, 1722, when college rector Timothy Cutler, former tutor Samuel Johnson, and five other local ministers declared their Congregational or­din­ations invalid and announced their intention of seeking Anglican reordination. Many observers blamed the group’s dabbling in the Dummer books, which included such fateful titles as Bishop Hoadly’s Reasonableness of Conformity to the Church of England (1703).

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72   Peter J. Thuesen For Edwards, the encounter with the Dummer collection established a lifelong pattern of serious wrestling with European Enlightenment sources. Indeed, the tensions between the older Reformed orthodoxy and the newer rationalism and latitudinarianism of the Enlightenment proved the intellectual catalyst for much of his work as a theologian. Unlike some of his evangelical contemporaries who saw Reformed orthodoxy and Enlightenment rationalism as irreconcilable, Edwards hoped to synthesize them, or at least take them both seriously. Toward this end, he envisioned a treatise, A Rational Account of the Main Doctrines of the Christian Religion Attempted, which he apparently began planning in the late 1720s (McClymond and McDermott 2012, 164–6). Though he never finished the project, he spent the rest of his career reaching across the Atlantic for the latest in European Enlightenment thought.

Bibliographical Aspirations: The ‘Catalogue’ The 1720s were also formative for Edwards’s bibliographical habits. Soon after his nineteenth birthday, while he was serving a brief stint as the pastor of an English Presbyterian congregation in New York City, he began recording his reading interests— his book ‘wish list’ of sorts—in a notebook he titled his ‘Catalogue’. The practice of keeping a cata­logue was not uncommon among eighteenth-century scholars and persons of leis­ure; Edwards may have gotten the idea from former Yale tutor Samuel Johnson, who began his own in 1719. Edwards’s manuscript, which he maintained for the rest of his life, eventually grew to 720 entries, many of them containing multiple book references. (The entry numbers are not original to Edwards but are a later editorial addition.) Many of the titles listed are books Edwards would eventually acquire, though the mere mention of a volume—or the crossing out of the title, as Edwards did in some cases—does not prove he read it. Edwards’s ongoing desire to obtain certain books, in fact, is evident from his recording of some titles more than once. Early on, he twice listed Milton’s Paradise Lost (nos. 20, 225), a work that was only then gaining canonical status America. Similarly, he twice entered Johann Arndt’s True Christianity (nos. 7, 184) and Joseph Addison’s Freeholder (nos. 25, 243), and three times Herman Moll’s Atlas Geographus (nos. 145, 185, 250). In some cases, the last mention of a book indicates that Edwards had finally obtained it. Thus, he listed Richard Baxter’s Practical Works twice (nos. 134, 297) before quoting a book recommendation from it in no. 349. He recorded the Presbyterian Robert Fleming’s Fulfilling of the Scripture (1669) four times over almost two decades: twice around 1724 (nos. 60, 278); a third time around 1731 (no. 340), when he cited the Church of Scotland minister Thomas Halyburton’s recommendation of the book; and a fourth time around 1742 (no. 442), when he cited an advertisement for the fifth corrected edition of Fleming’s text. Edwards finally obtained Fleming soon thereafter, citing the fifth edition two times in his Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival (1743).

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Sources of Edwards’s Thought   73 Edwards learned about new books primarily from four main sources. The first were periodicals, which he scoured for book reviews, notices, and advertisements. Periodicals used by Edwards included monthly general-interest magazines such as the London Magazine, founded in 1732, which featured a ‘Monthly Catalogue’ of books at the end of every issue. Edwards cited this magazine’s book recommendations sixteen times in his ‘Catalogue’. Even more useful were learned journals devoted to bibliographical culture. Edwards’s favourite was The Present State of the Republick of Letters, published monthly in London from 1728 to 1736, which billed itself as ‘a general view of the state of learning throughout Europe’. Edwards cited it sixteen times in the ‘Catalogue’. Personal cor­res­ pond­ents were the second source of book recommendations. Edwards’s most significant overseas contact was the Scottish divine John Erskine, seventeen years his junior, who was influenced by Edwards’s writings and became for him a regular conduit not only of bibliographical tips but also of actual books and pamphlets. Extant letters between the two men reveal that between 1746 and 1757, Edwards received dozens of books from Erskine, including two anti-Calvinist works by the English dissenter John Taylor, who would become Edwards’s chief Arminian target in Original Sin (1758) (WJE 16: 248). The third source of book references was that time-honoured method among scholars: mining other scholars’ footnotes. An example of such a gold mine was James Hervey’s two-volume Meditations and Contemplations (1746–8), another work Edwards first learned about from Erskine; Edwards cited bibliographical leads from Hervey eight times in the ‘Catalogue’. Finally, advice manuals on study were Edwards’s fourth way of learning about books. The most notable of these was Cotton Mather’s Manuductio ad Ministerium: Directions for a Candidate of the Ministry (1726), which Edwards cited ten times in the ‘Catalogue’ and likely consulted in other instances not noted. With his occasionally caustic wit, Mather passed judgment on a host of works, lauding Pierre Bayle’s Dictionary, for example, as ‘a Work to be wondred at’, provided the reader ‘guard against the Manichaean Sophistry, sometimes appearing in it’ (Mather 1726, 70). Like Edwards himself, Mather straddled the worlds of Enlightenment learning and pious traditionalism. The latter was evident when he enjoined ministers to beware of ‘a Boundless and Sickly Appetite, for the Reading of Poems,’ or, alternatively, when he urged the reading of William Perkins and similar authors of ‘Good old Puritan Divinity’, adding: ‘No Man having drunk that old Wine . . . will much desire the new, but he will say, The old is Better’ (Mather 1726, 42, 100).

Northampton, Stockbridge, and Princeton Mather’s nod to tradition notwithstanding, clergy of Edwards’s generation were increasingly pushing aside old-time Puritans like Perkins in favour of more up-to-date fare. We see evidence of this from the records of the ministerial association of Hampshire County, Massachusetts, of which Edwards was a member after he succeeded his

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74   Peter J. Thuesen grandfather as pastor in Northampton (WJE 26: 36–43, 357–60). In 1732, Edwards and the other ministers agreed on a minimum subscription fee of ten pounds per person to establish a social library for their own use. Edwards donated twenty pounds, which gave him higher priority for borrowing. The library’s first recorded book reveals the clergy’s aspirations to inform themselves on subjects besides theology. Miscellanea Curiosa (1705–7) was a two-volume compilation of scientific treatises, many of them originally published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, along with a third volume of travel accounts. With contributions by Isaac Newton and Edmond Halley, among others, the set covered such topics as acoustics, gravitation, logarithms, optics, probability, and, thanks to Halley, comets. Newton appeared again in another compilation acquired by the library, Joseph Addison’s Evidences of the Christian Religion (1730), which exemplified the latitudinarian, Lockean project of demonstrating the rational credibility of Christianity. The ministers’ taste for historical works was evident in several choices: Paul de Rapin de Thoyras’s History of England (1726–31) and the Daniel Neal’s History of the Puritans (1732–8), both of which typified the Whig view of dissenting Protestantism as key to the growth of political liberty; the British spy and historian David Jones’s History of France (1702) and Compleat History of the Turks (1701); the Whig journalist Henry Care’s History of Popery, published as a two-volume set in 1735–6; and the buccaneer William Dampier’s New Voyage Round the World (1697). Finally, there were books of unquestionably evangelical character, including Isaac Watts’s The World to Come (1739) and Elizabeth Singer Rowe’s Miscellaneous Works (1739). Watts and Rowe, who were close friends (Watts is said to have courted her), were among the most frequently reprinted evangelical writers of the era (Amory and Hall 2000, 517–18, 520; Rivers 2018, 13–14, 251–3). In 1733, a year after the Hampshire Association formed its library, Edwards began jotting notes in his small, leather-bound ‘Account Book’ (WJE 26: 28–36, 319–56). Among the transactions recorded are books lent to fellow clergy and parishioners, which makes the document second only to the ‘Catalogue’ as a window into his bibliographical universe. Clergy are the most frequent borrowers, with Edwards’s protégés Samuel Hopkins and Joseph Bellamy topping the list with thirty and twenty-one transactions, re­spect­ ive­ly. The first recorded transaction is to another minister, Edward Billing, to whom Edwards lent Andrew Le Mercier’s Church History of Geneva (1732). The prevalence of clergy among the borrowers accounts for the number of books on local theological controversies. The numerous relevant titles include Experience Mayhew’s A Right to the Lord’s Supper Considered (1741), Andrew Croswell’s What Is Christ to Me, if He Is Not Mine? (1745), and Moses Dickinson’s Inquiry into the Consequences Both of Calvinistic and Arminian Principles (1750), all published at Boston. There is also a bit of Mather’s ‘Good old Puritan Divinity’ (a volume of the collected works of William Perkins and a commentary on the book of Hebrews by John Owen) and two weighty Latin tomes of Reformed scholasticism (Petrus van Mastricht’s Theoretico-Practica Theologia and Francis Turretin’s Institutio Theologiae Elencticae). As in the Hampshire Association records, however, we see the clergy’s participation in two republics of letters—one evangelical and the other more ‘polite’ and secular. Of the 194 book-lending transactions in the ‘Account Book’, nearly 20 per cent are what

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Sources of Edwards’s Thought   75 might be classified as polite literature, or written in the various emerging genres of the eighteenth century, including literary periodicals, conduct books, epistolary novels, news­papers, and encyclopaedic works or other compilations. In fact, four of the eight most frequently lent volumes in the ‘Account Book’ are polite titles. Topping the list is The Ladies Library (1714), a three-volume compilation of advice on relationships, religion, and other subjects. It was the most popular conduct book of the first half of the eighteenth century, and Edwards lent it eight times—to four women, two laymen, and two clergymen (Bellamy and Hopkins). The other polite titles among Edwards’s most lent are Samuel Richardson’s four-volume novel Pamela (1742), a tale of female virtue in the face of male infidelity; the Scots Magazine, an Edinburgh-based periodical that imitated the polite style of Addison and Steele’s Spectator; and Religious Courtship (1722), Daniel Defoe’s polite advice book for young couples (WJE 26: 33–4). Other works of this kind appearing in the ‘Account Book’ include Addison and Steele’s periodical the Guardian, issued as a two-volume set in 1714; the Family Instructor (1715–18), another conduct book by Daniel Defoe; the Monthly Review, a literary periodical begun in 1749 and continued into the nineteenth century; and Samuel Richardson’s eight-volume novel Clarissa (third expanded edition, 1751). Edwards’s familiarity with such polite literature would stand him in good stead when, after his dismissal from Northampton, he was invited in February of 1751 to settle as minister in Stockbridge. Abigail Williams Sergeant, Edwards’s cousin and young widow of the town’s previous pastor, was something of a theological liberal who enjoyed intellectual conversation and outfitted the Stockbridge mission house with the latest in elegant furnishings. Not predisposed in favour of Edwards, she was pleasantly surprised after conversing with him: ‘He is learned, polite, and free in conversation, and more catholic than I had supposed.’ Her brother, Captain Ephraim Williams, Jr, was far less sanguine, finding Edwards unsociable and ‘a very great bigot, for he would not admit any person into heaven, but those that agreed fully to his sentiments’ (Marsden 2003, 376–7, 380). Had Williams examined Edwards’s ‘Catalogue’ and ‘Account Book’, however, he would have found that the two men shared many book interests. An inventory of Williams’s estate after he was killed in 1755 at the Battle of Lake George reveals that of the thirty-six books recorded, slightly more than half (nineteen) were also listed by Edwards in the ‘Catalogue’ or ‘Account Book’. Many of these titles are polite, whiggish, latitudinarian, or ‘catholic’ in the broadest sense: Addison’s Freeholder, Addison and Steele’s Guardian and Spectator, Bishop Gilbert Burnet’s History of the Reformation, Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia, James Harrington’s Oceana, Locke’s Works, Alexander Pope’s Works, Rapin de Thoyras’s History of England, and John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon’s Independent Whig (WJE 26: 35–6). Still, Captain Williams was right to a point: Edwards’s immersion in polite literature did not always signify agreement with that culture. Edwards spent much of his time on the frontier in Stockbridge assiduously gathering ammunition for his greatest treatises. For Freedom of the Will (published in December 1754), he mined three Arminian foils: A Collection of Tracts (1730) by the deist and onetime glover and candle-maker Thomas Chubb; the ‘Discourse on the Five Points’ (1710, 1735), as it was sometimes known, by the Anglican divine Daniel Whitby; and An Essay on Freedom of Will in God and in Creatures

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76   Peter J. Thuesen (1732) by Isaac Watts. For The Nature of True Virtue (completed in early 1755), he reckoned with Francis Hutcheson’s Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), William Wollaston’s Religion of Nature Delineated (1722), and David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40). Regarding his reading of the sceptical Hume, Edwards commented to Erskine that ‘I am glad of an opportunity to read such corrupt books; especially when written by men of considerable genius; that I may have an idea of the notions that prevail in our nation’ (WJE 16: 679). Edwards also sought evidence for more positive purposes. While at Stockbridge, he copied long extracts in his notebooks from several works that supported the idea of the prisca theologia, or an ancient core of true religion that was said to be present in Greek and other non-Christian traditions in anticipation of the Christian revelation (McDermott 2000, 93–5; WJE 23: 13–16). Nearly 20 per cent of the material in Edwards’s ‘Miscellanies’ notebooks from the Stockbridge period is excerpted from three such works: Andrew Michael Ramsay’s Philosophical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion (1748–9) and Travels of Cyrus (1727), and Ralph Cudworth’s True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678). Edwards intended to integrate historical material from these sources into two major treatises he was planning, A History of the Work of Redemption and The Harmony of the Old and New Testament (Minkema 1996). His vor­ acious notetaking was aided by a revolving book table, acquired in Northampton, which allowed him to have several books or notebooks open at one time. This piece of furniture was a metaphor for the acquisitive nature of his mind (Kimnach and Minkema 2012). With his move to Princeton in February 1758 to assume the presidency of the College of New Jersey, Edwards again had access to a larger library, something he had not enjoyed since the 1720s. We can only imagine what he might have done with this windfall, for he died from a failed smallpox inoculation after only five weeks as president. Fortunately for historians, Edwards’s diligent notebook-keeping—some 5,000 pages of manuscript text, not including 1,200 manuscript sermons—provides a detailed record of his intellectual evolution from his Yale days until his death at age fifty-four. Book cit­ations in this larger manuscript corpus expand the already fulsome picture evident from the ‘Catalogue’ and ‘Account Book’. Moreover, with the advent of online databases linking libraries worldwide, reliable annotation of the sometimes-cryptic notations in the manuscripts has become possible in a way unimaginable to earlier generations of s­ cholars. What, then, can we say about the types of sources that most influenced Edwards?

Edwards’s Thought: Four Major Sources Mapping Edwards’s mental universe requires categorizing his sources, for which there is no perfect system. Colonial libraries had no standard cataloguing scheme but reflected instead the predilections of the collector. The wealthy Virginia planter William Byrd II,

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Sources of Edwards’s Thought   77 for example, shelved his large library of over three thousand volumes according to eight categories, including ‘History, Voyages, Travels’, ‘Entertainment, Poetry, Translations’, ‘Divinity’, ‘French Books, Chiefly Entertainment’, and ‘Classicks, & Other Latin & Greek Authors’. Like other urbane Anglican aristocrats, he shared none of the early Puritans’ wariness of belletrist literature, which accounts for his large number of ‘Entertainment’ titles, particularly drama. By contrast, a catalogue of the Yale College library printed in 1743 included just a half page of ‘Plays and Books of Diversion’ but nearly twenty pages of divinity books, arranged under fourteen subheads, including ‘Natural Religion’, ‘The Truth of the Scriptures’, and ‘Treatises on Particular Subjects’. The treatise category was further divided into twenty-two subheads (Hayes 1997, Mooney 2001). Edwards’s library of 301 bound volumes and 536 pamphlets was considerably smaller than Byrd’s (WJE 26: 46), and undoubtedly resembled Yale’s more in its partiality for divinity. A full inventory does not survive, nor do we know how Edwards organized his books. Nevertheless, as we have seen, his interests ranged widely, and any accounting of the most important influences on his thought must reckon with this fact as well as with the depth of actual book engagement in his manuscripts. Based on this assessment, four broad categories of sources stand out: (1) the Bible, commentaries, and histories; (2) Reformed scholasticism and doctrinal disputes; (3) Enlightenment ‘new learning’ and rationalist apologetics; and (4) other subjects and genres. These categories sometimes overlap, and narrower classifications are elsewhere proposed (WJE 26: 50–107). But these four encompass the majority of Edwards’s reading and are key to understanding the background of his thinking.

The Bible, Commentaries, and Histories Edwards recorded many of the earliest ‘Catalogue’ entries (296, or 41 per cent of the total) in tiny handwriting on an envelope addressed to him by his father. The first entry on this letter leaf—simply ‘Bible’—has an almost talismanic quality, testifying to his obeisance to the Puritan principle that Scripture must be the judge of all things. Years later, in his ‘Personal Narrative’ (circa 1740), he recalled those days in the early 1720s: ‘I had then, and at other times, the greatest delight in the holy Scriptures, of any book whatsoever. Oftentimes in reading it, every word seemed to touch my heart’ (WJE 16: 797). His comment is a useful reminder that the biblical narrative is the cantus firmus that persists through all of his thought, even amid the polyphonic complexity of his appropriation of other sources. Like other sons and daughters of New England, Edwards learned Bible stories in childhood, first from primers and then from the Bible itself (the King James Version was by then the standard). He heard the Bible preached every Sunday by his father, Timothy. Later, in Edwards’s own career as a pastor, the weekly task of distilling text, doctrine, and application (the conventional, threefold sermon structure) kept him constantly engaged with Scripture. The Bible was also the hub of Edwards’s notebook-keeping. Around 1730, he acquired a thick quarto volume of blank pages interleaved with the disbound pages from a small

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78   Peter J. Thuesen octavo King James Bible. Calling it his ‘Blank Bible’, he began writing commentary around each biblical page. The workbook became the ‘logistical center of Edwards’s recorded speculations and of his mental life, and as such it became the center of his cross-references, an index of indexes in his study’ (Kimnach and Minkema 2012, 713). Not only did Edwards cross-reference biblical passages to each other, but he also collected the opinions of other exegetes. As Stephen J. Stein has shown, Edwards relied principally on three commentaries by Nonconformist divines: Matthew Poole’s Synopsis Criticorum (five volumes, 1669–76), Matthew Henry’s Exposition of the Old and New Testaments (six volumes, 1707–21), and Philip Doddridge’s Family Expositor (six volumes, 1739–56). Of the three, Poole’s, written in Latin, was the most scholarly and often excerpted prior commentators, though all three drew extensively on the earlier commentarial tradition. Edwards cited Poole 792 times, more than any other source in the ‘Blank Bible’ (WJE 24: 21, 61; Neele 2018). Henry and Doddridge’s commentaries were evangelical favourites; the latter included extensive book references, which Edwards mined for his ‘Catalogue’ (WJE 26: 84). Edwards shared with these evangelical commentators the precritical assumption that the Bible is unified narratively and theologically and does not contradict itself. Any apparent contradictions must have an explanation. Thus, when Paul asserts that justification is by faith, not works (Rom. 3:28) and James insists that justification is by works, not by faith only (Jas. 2:24), the tension must be resolved by looking at the larger context. If all of Scripture is inspired (2 Tim. 3:16), Edwards believed, then both authors must somehow be correct (Sweeney 2016, 217–18). But critical biblical interpreters in Europe no longer took for granted the Bible’s unity and consistency. Figures such as Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), Benedict de Spinoza (1632–1677), and Richard Simon (1638–1712) had raised direct or implicit questions about the text’s authorship, authenticity, in­spir­ ation, and correspondence with historical and scientific fact. Hobbes, for example, concluded on the basis of internal evidence that Moses could not have authored the Pentateuch, as had been traditionally assumed. Edwards was aware of these critical challenges, which he learned about through deist popularizers such as Matthew Tindal (1657–1733), John Toland (1670–1722), Thomas Morgan (1672?–1743), and Anthony Collins (1676–1729), mainly insofar as they themselves were excerpted in compilations such as Philip Skelton’s Deism Revealed (1751) and John Leland’s View of the Principal Deistical Writers (1754–6). Robert  E.  Brown has docu­ment­ed Edwards’s extensive engagement with critical thought, showing how it set much of his scholarly agenda (Brown 2002, 5–13). The longest entry in his ‘Notes on Scripture’ (another manuscript commentary on the Bible, not to be confused with the ‘Blank Bible’), no. 416, defends the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch (WJE 15: 14–15, 423–69). Fully a fourth of the entries in the ‘Miscellanies’ deal directly or indirectly with deism, and orthodox confutations of the deists abound in the ‘Catalogue’ (WJE 26: 71–2). Deist critiques also fuelled Edwards’s intense interest in biblical chronology, including such works as William Whiston’s New Theory of the Earth (1696), Isaac Newton’s Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended (1728), Arthur Bedford’s Scripture Chronology Demonstrated by Astronomical Calculations (1730), and Henry Winder’s Critical and Chronological History (1745–6).

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Sources of Edwards’s Thought   79 Many modern people would assume a clear distinction between sacred history (as recorded in the Bible and dated by chronologists) and secular history (as recorded by post-biblical historians). But because there was no ‘secular’ history for Edwards, he consumed works on post-biblical history in the same spirit as he read the Bible itself: to discern the hand of providence. We have already seen the prominence of historical titles in the Hampshire Association records, the ‘Account Book’, and the ‘Catalogue’. Throughout his career, Edwards also followed ongoing political developments—especially the ­spectre of political Catholicism—with an eye toward God’s working in the world. In 1724, for example, he made four cryptic notations that reveal the political intrigue of the time: ‘Against Captain Kelly’, ‘penalties Commons Against Roches[ter]’, ‘Bp. of Rochester a double Guard’, and ‘Dr friend Committed to tower’ (WJE 26: 150–2). All are references to publications stemming from the Atterbury Plot, an abortive Jacobite military scheme in 1722 to replace George I with the Old Pretender (the son of James II). Among the conspirators were Francis Atterbury (the bishop of Rochester), George Kelly (an agent for the exiled Stuarts), and John Freind (a physician and chemist); all three were arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London. The Atterbury Plot was  one of no fewer than five Jacobite plots during Edwards’s lifetime to reinstall a Stuart monarch on the English throne (WJE 26: 19–20, 87–9; Kidd 2004, 115–35). The most famous of the attempts was the so-called ‘Forty-Five’—the Jacobite Rising of 1745—which resulted in the massacre of more than 1,000 Jacobites at Culloden Moor in Scotland. The ‘Account Book’ reveals that Edwards circulated four different publications associated with this event. After learning of the defeat of the Young Pretender (‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’), Edwards wrote to his Scottish correspondent John MacLaurin: ‘[W]e, and all Protestants, have great cause of thankfulness; especially all within the British dominions’ (WJE 16: 204). Surely, Edwards reasoned, the suppression of the rebellion was a sign that God, in his good providence, would ultimately defeat the forces of popery. All told, biblical commentaries and books about biblical and post-biblical history and politics make up at least 20 per cent of the titles in the ‘Catalogue’ and ‘Account Book’ (WJE 26: 83). When deist and anti-deist titles are included, the total is closer to a third (Brown 2002, 8–9). And just as Edwards began the ‘Catalogue’ letter leaf by listing the Bible, his unfinished treatises at the end of his life, A History of the Work of Redemption and The Harmony of the Old and New Testament, show his enduring focus on Scripture and history. After the trustees of the College of New Jersey offered him the position of president, he described these two works in a letter of reply. His selfdeprecation elsewhere in the letter—confessing his weak physical constitution, ‘much unfitting me for conversation’—belies the grand ambition of the History of the Work of Redemption, which was to be ‘a body of divinity in an entire new method, being thrown into the form of an history’. Likewise, the Harmony was to establish Christian doctrines by demonstrating the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecies (against deist denials) in New Testament events. ‘In the course of this work’, he explained, ‘I find there will be occasion for an explanation of a very great part of the holy Scripture’ (WJE 16: 726–9).

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80   Peter J. Thuesen

Reformed Scholasticism and Doctrinal Disputes In a 1747 letter to Joseph Bellamy, Edwards offered this advice: ‘[T]ake Mastricht for divinity in general, doctrine, practice, and controversy; or as an universal system of divinity; and it is much better than Turretin or any other book in the world, excepting the Bible, in my opinion’ (WJE 16: 217). This striking praise for the Dutch theologian Petrus van Mastricht (1630–1706) reveals the importance of Reformed scholasticism as a source for Edwards. Like its medieval Catholic precursor, Protestant scholasticism was the university-based, Latinate, confessional theology dominant among Calvinists and Lutherans in Europe from the last half of the sixteenth century to the first half of the eighteenth century. Richard Muller has identified three phases of the movement in Europe: early orthodoxy (from 1565 to 1640), when the great post-Reformation Protestant confessions were written; high orthodoxy (from 1640 to 1725), when the theo­lo­gians further defined their positions against a series of adversaries; and late orthodoxy (the period after 1725), when Enlightenment thought led to new ways of reasoning and ultimately to the disintegration of Protestant orthodoxy as a recognizable theological method (Muller  2003, 30–2). Theologians from all three periods appear in Edwards’s reading: early orthodox figures such as William Ames, William Perkins, and the divines who gathered at Dort and Westminster; high orthodox figures such as Stephen Charnock, John Edwards, Petrus van Mastricht, John Owen, Matthew Poole, Thomas Ridgley, Francis Turretin, and Hermann Witsius; and late orthodox figures such as John Gill and Johann Friedrich Stapfer. The evolution of orthodoxy coincided with three regional expressions of post-Reformation Protestantism—English Puritanism, the Dutch Nadere Reformatie (Further Reformation), and German Pietism—and many of the orthodox figures read by Edwards were participants in these movements. Edwards’s special regard for Mastricht, who spent the longest phase of his academic career at Utrecht, was shared by others in New England. Of Mastricht’s magnum opus, Theoretico-Practica Theologia (1699), Cotton Mather told young ministers that ‘I know not that the Sun has ever shone upon an Humane Composure that is equal to it’. He added that it is a ‘Store-house to which you may resort continually’ (Mather  1726, 85). The appeal of Mastricht’s system was its practical orientation, designed to help clergy preach on key doctrines (Neele 2019, 100). For more technical questions such as the perennial Reformed debate about the logical order of God’s decrees in the plan of salvation, Edwards preferred the Geneva professor Francis Turretin’s Institutio Theologiae Elencticae (1679–85). To Bellamy, Edwards wrote that Turretin was superior to Mastricht on ‘polemical divinity’ and ‘better for one that desires only to be thoroughly versed in controversies’ (WJE 16: 217). For example, Edwards agreed with Turretin’s infralapsarianism (from the Latin, ‘below the Fall’), according to which God decreed unconditionally (1) to create humans in his image, (2) to permit the Fall (lapsus), and (3) to elect certain fallen people to salvation in Christ while passing over the rest and leaving them in their lapsed state to suffer eternal damnation (Thuesen 2009, 52, 223). (Some New Englanders, such as Samuel Willard,

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Sources of Edwards’s Thought   81 defended the opposing supralapsarian position, which placed the decree of election before creation and the Fall.) Given his immersion in this scholastic world of learning, there is some justification for seeing Edwards himself as a fellow member of this transatlantic fraternity of theo­lo­gians, though as Adriaan Neele has pointed out, Edwards did not produce a systematic theology as did the earlier New Englanders Samuel Stone and Samuel Willard. And unlike the systematicians across the Atlantic, Edwards wrote almost exclusively in English, save for his master’s degree Quaestio (Neele 2019, 66–7). Still, Edwards consulted the Latin tomes of the Reformed scholastics frequently, and in the last decade of his life was especially interested in the Institutiones Theologiae Polemicae Universae (1743–7) by the Swiss Calvinist Johann Friedrich Stapfer, a transitional figure from an older mode of argumentation to a more modern rationalism (Neele 2019, 207). In his ‘Controversies’ notebook, Edwards copied long extracts from Stapfer, including second-hand quotations from the Theodicy (1710) of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (Fisk 2016, 250–2). Had Edwards lived into his appointment at Princeton, he might have built on his late engagement with Stapfer to contribute to Reformed orthodoxy in a new mode. Yet the scholastic project was already waning, diminished by the decline of the common currency of Latinate scholarship and the corresponding rise of more national theological traditions. We see this trend elsewhere in Edwards’s reading, with the large number of English-language titles by Nonconformist divines. In Britain, the Act of Uniformity (1662) produced a whole generation of Calvinist clergy—Independents, Presbyterians, and Particular Baptists—united by their ejection from the Church of England. Even after the dissenters regained freedom of worship in the Act of Toleration (1689), other disabilities continued, causing the memory of the ejections to fester for generations. When sermons, occasional treatises, and biblical commentaries by these clergy are included as part of the larger body of Reformed divinity consulted by Edwards, the cat­ egory accounts for about 20 per cent of the titles in the ‘Catalogue’ and around 40 per cent of the titles in the ‘Account Book’ (WJE 26: 52–3). Edwards’s friendliness toward the Scottish Presbyterians who founded Princeton was due in part to his sense of membership in this British fraternity of Reformed divines and to his broader identity of provincial Britishness. After Edwards’s death, that tradition took distinctively American shape in the New England Theology, which looked to Edwards himself as its touchstone.

Enlightenment ‘New Learning’ and Rationalist Apologetics The older Reformed scholasticism, which took for granted the authority of biblical reve­ la­tion, had been less geared toward proving than explicating Christianity. Reason was valuable only insofar as it conformed to revelation, for as Mastricht claimed, ‘Christ’s theology does not originate from reason, which is blind’ (Mastricht  2018, 74). But Edwards lived in a more modern context, born of the Enlightenment, in which trad­ ition­al Christian claims were up for grabs and theologians were at pains to demonstrate Christianity’s consonance with natural reason. A significant portion of Edwards’s

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82   Peter J. Thuesen reading concerned either the ‘new learning’ of Enlightenment thought or the new apologetics dedicated to rational proof of Christian doctrines. Among Enlightenment philosophers, Locke was long assumed to be the decisive influence on Edwards, thanks to Samuel Hopkins’s claim in his 1765 biography that a precocious Edwards read Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) at age thirteen, in his second year of college. More recently, scholars have suggested that Edwards may have first read Locke’s Essay as a graduate student or even as a tutor, after the Dummer collection brought the book to New Haven (Fiering 1981, 33–40; WJE 6: 15–18, 25–6). The ‘Catalogue’ letter leaf seems to support this revised hypothesis. In entry no. 15, likely penned in 1724, Edwards lists ‘Lock of human understanding’. Sometime later, Edwards acquired his own copy of the Essay, lending it to his son Timothy in 1754, as the ‘Account Book’ reveals. By that point, Edwards had recorded in the ‘Catalogue’ his interest in other philosophical works by Locke, including Some Thoughts Concerning Education (no. 209), A Letter Concerning Toleration (no. 219), the one-volume Posthumous Works (no. 353), and the three-volume Works (no. 363). More significantly, Edwards appealed to Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity as Delivered in the Scriptures (1696) in his Justification by Faith Alone (1738), quoting several lengthy extracts in his footnotes (WJE 19: 189, 197). Yet much of Edwards’s familiarity with the Enlightenment cult of ‘reasonableness’ derived not from direct engagement with Locke but from other Christian authors who wrote in the new apologetic mode. Among them were latitudinarian figures such as Archbishop Tillotson, whose sermons were highly popular on both sides of the Atlantic (WJE 26: 59–61). Though Edwards disagreed with Tillotson’s latitudinarianism and Arminian moralism, he cited him for support in Justification by Faith Alone and penned references to him in the ‘Miscellanies’, ‘Notes on Scripture’, and the ‘Blank Bible’. Other major sources on reasonable Christianity were the cadre of writers associated with Robert Boyle (1627–91). Regarded as the father of modern chemistry, Boyle was a deeply religious scientist who sought throughout his career to demonstrate the intelligent design of the universe with evidence from the book of nature. In his will, Boyle provided for the establishment of an annual series of eight sermons ‘for proving the Christian religion against notorious infidels’. The inaugural Boyle lecturer in 1692 was the young Richard Bentley (1662–1742), a priest who would later gain his greatest fame as a classicist. In sermon seven of his series, Bentley drew on personal correspondence with Isaac Newton to defend a Christianized atomism—a world held together by divinely superintended gravity—against Epicurean philosophy. The ‘Account Book’ reveals that Edwards owned the published edition of Bentley’s lectures, The Folly and Unreasonableness of Atheism (1693), lending it once to his father and once to another minister. He likely also had Bentley’s work at hand when, during his graduate studies in New Haven, he noted in his ‘Natural Philosophy’ papers that ‘it is universally allowed that gravity depends immediately on the divine influence’ (WJE 6: 234). Striking evidence of Edwards’s interest in the other Boyle lecturers appears in ‘Catalogue’, no. 402, in which he copied an advertisement for an abridged, four-volume edition of the lectures, A Defence of Natural and Revealed Religion (1737). Edwards wrote

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Sources of Edwards’s Thought   83 in double columns the names of all twenty-one of the lecturers appearing in the abridged edition. Elsewhere in either the ‘Catalogue’ or ‘Account Book’ he listed editions of the individual lecturers: Richard Kidder’s Demonstration of the Messias (1684–1700), Francis Gastrell’s Certainty and Necessity of Religion in General (1697); Ofspring Blackall’s Sufficiency of a Standing Revelation (1700); Samuel Clarke’s Discourse Concerning the Being and Attributes of God, the Obligations of Natural Religion, and the Truth and Certainty of the Christian Revelation (1725); and John Clarke’s Enquiry into the Cause and Origin of Evil (1720). Edwards also likely used William Derham’s PhysicoTheology (1713) in his ‘Natural Philosophy’ papers (WJE 6: 220–1, 256). The Boyle lectures overlapped with a much wider literature on ‘natural religion’, which in Edwards’s day was a catchphrase for the myriad attempts to marshal the resources of the ‘new learning’—Newtonian physics, cosmology, comparative religion—to demonstrate God’s existence through sheer weight of scholarly evidence. Most of the proponents of natural religion believed that it could be reconciled perfectly with revealed religion (the Bible). The titles of the works speak for themselves. Among the more important examples appearing in the ‘Catalogue’ (and in some cases in Edwards’s other manuscripts) are Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed (1736); Andrew Michael Ramsay’s Philosophical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion (1748–9); John Ray’s Three Physico-Theological Discourses (1693); Arthur Ashley Sykes’s Principles and Connexion of Natural and Revealed Religion (1740); William Warburton’s Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion (1753–4); and William Whiston’s Astronomical Principles of Religion, Natural and Reveal’d (1717). Indeed, roughly 10 per cent of the titles in the ‘Catalogue’ and ‘Account Book’ are works on natural religion or rationalist defences of doctrines such as the Trinity against deists and other sceptics. The  paradox of such literature was that in rushing to the defence of Christianity, Enlightenment authors raised the profile of the sceptics’ critiques. As the deist Anthony Collins reputedly quipped in reference to Samuel Clarke’s Boyle Lectures, nobody doubted the existence of God until Dr Clarke sought to prove it (Stromberg 1954, 10). This was the predicament of the self-conscious Christianity of Edwards’s age.

Other Subjects and Genres Another difference between Edwards’s age and the more scholastic world of his forebears was the diversity of print culture. For the earliest Puritan migrants to America, printed materials usually had an explicitly religious purpose. But by Edwards’s time, increasingly more literature was ‘secular,’ meaning not that it was anti-religious but that its chief end was education, entertainment, or polite edification. As noted earlier, about 20 per cent of the titles cited in the ‘Account Book’ are polite works associated with what scholars today call the transatlantic ‘republic of letters’. The term first gained currency from Pierre Bayle’s journal Nouvelles de la République des Lettres, launched in 1684. Bayle, a Huguenot refugee of Louis XIV’s persecution of Protestants, studiously avoided religious divisiveness in his journal and urged his readers to unite behind a common

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84   Peter J. Thuesen pursuit of knowledge. While this outlook inspired many of the Enlightenment treatises described above, the republic of letters popularized genres such as encyclopaedias that were specifically fitted for the compilation of any useful information. A key example is Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopedia; or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1728), a set of two large folio volumes that Edwards acquired in 1737. He soon began combing Chambers for references to other books he might acquire (WJE 26: 77). Other genres in the republic of letters included periodicals and conduct books. We already inventoried Edwards’s use of these: literary periodicals such as the Guardian, the Monthly Review, and The Present State of the Republick of Letters; and conduct books such The Ladies Library and Defoe’s Family Instructor and Religious Courtship. Edwards’s manuscripts also highlight the rising importance of secular newspapers such as the Boston News-Letter, the Boston Gazette, the Boston Evening-Post, and the New-York Gazette. At first filled mostly with reports reprinted from London, American news­ papers helped anglicize readers in the polite culture of the mother country. Edwards searched them for ‘signs of the times’, or evidence of God’s millennial designs in world events. The republic of letters was an avenue by which women influenced Edwards’s thought. At least seven women appear among the hundreds of authors listed in the ‘Catalogue’ and ‘Account Book’, though because female writers in the eighteenth century often published anonymously or pseudonymously, their full contributions to Edwards’s reading world may never be known. Perhaps the most formative for Edwards was Mary Astell (1666–1731), who, unbeknownst to him, was the original source of the rules for writing that he as a young man had resolved to follow (WJE 26: 99–100). The rules appeared without attribution in the most popular of early-eighteenth-century conduct books, The Ladies Library, which scholars have shown was compiled by the philosopher and Anglican bishop George Berkeley (Hayes  1996, 65). Among the rules was this Enlightenment dictum: ‘Judge no farther than you perceive, and take not any thing for Truth, which you do not evidently know to be so’ (WJE 10, 184). The other works by female writers appearing in Edwards’s ‘Catalogue’ include Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectator (1744–6); Hannah Housman’s Power and Pleasure of the Divine Life (1744), also listed in the ‘Account Book’; Margaret de la Musse’s Triumphs of Grace (1687); Susanna Newcome’s Enquiry into the Evidence of the Christian Religion (1728); Gilberte Pascal Périer’s Life of the Celebrated Monsieur Pascal (1723); and three works by Elizabeth Singer Rowe: Poems (1696), Devout Exercises of the Heart (1737), and Miscellaneous Works (1739), the last of which, as we saw earlier, was circulated by the Hampshire Association ministers. The devotional character of several of these works places their authors squarely in the evangelical wing of the republic of letters, which was Edwards’s own literary network. But he also showed an interest in more secular literary genres. Belles lettres appearing in his manuscripts include the aforementioned novels Pamela and Clarissa by Richardson, as well as Alexander Pope’s Miscellaneous Poems and Translations (1712), which marked the first publication of the famous mock-heroic poem ‘The Rape of the Lock’. The ‘Catalogue’ also cites Pope’s translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and Nicholas

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Sources of Edwards’s Thought   85 Brady’s translation of the Aeneid. One dramatic work appears: Addison’s Cato, a Tragedy (1713), which recounted the famous Roman statesman’s suicide to avoid submitting to Julius Caesar’s tyranny; it would eventually become the favourite of such revolutionaries as Benjamin Franklin and George Washington. Subjects appearing in Edwards’s reading include anatomy, astronomy, mathematics, electricity, grammar, lexicography, rhetoric, and stenography. Non-Christian religious texts are present too. The ‘Catalogue’ lists George Sale’s 1734 edition of the Qur’an, as well as Jewish texts (the Talmud, Philo, and Maimonides). Then there are quasi-medical texts, including Aristotle’s Master-Piece; or, The Secrets of Generation Displayed in All the Parts Thereof (1684) and Thomas Dawkes’s Midwife Rightly Instructed (1736)—the in­fam­ous ‘bad books’ circulated by several boys in Edwards’s Northampton congregation (Chamberlain 2002). Another medical text of sorts is Onania; or, The Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution, which recalls the fate of the biblical Onan, whom God smote for spilling his ‘seed’ on the ground (Gen. 38:9–10). This anti-masturbation treatise appeared in at least nineteen editions, including one printed at Boston in 1724, around the time Edwards listed the book in the ‘Catalogue’. It detailed the afflictions allegedly caused by masturbation, from back pain and red spots on the skin to mental impairment and wholesale bodily decline. Whereas Onania prescribed repentance as the only antidote for masturbation, a variety of non-sexual maladies found cures in a different handbook listed in the ‘Account Book’, Thomas Prior’s Authentic Narrative of the Success of TarWater (1746), which urged the medicinal benefits of cold water infused with tar. Prior was a friend of another tar-water advocate, the philosopher George Berkeley. The polymathic Berkeley—we saw his anonymous role in The Ladies Library, and the ‘Catalogue’ lists his New Theory of Vision (1709) and two other works—illustrates the interdisciplinary, interconnected world of knowledge of the eighteenth century. Tracing all the connections, including unattributed ones, was once a daunting task for scholars, who had to rely on visits to rare book libraries. Digital scholarship has now opened a world of new possibilities for investigating lines of intellectual influence. Our recognition of the sources of Edwards’s thought will undoubtedly expand considerably as digital analysis of texts becomes ever more refined. Yet even apart from any digital dissection of Edwards’s sources, a mere glance through the ‘Catalogue’ shows that hardly a subject or genre of eighteenth-century print culture escaped his notice. Historian Sydney Ahlstrom once dubbed Edwards a ‘Dordtian Philosophe’, or one who combined the Reformed orthodoxy of the Synod of Dort (1618–19) with the wide-ranging learning of the Enlightenment (Minkema  2011). Another way to view him is as an eclectic, a label associated in the seventeenth century with such figures as the Dutch humanist Gerardus Vossius, the German mathematician Johann Christoph Sturm, and, in Britain, especially with Robert Boyle (Kelley 2001, 582–4; Whitmer 2009, 549–50). To these thinkers, eclecticism meant refusal to be bound by any one method or school of thought in the pursuit of truth, and Edwards was similarly catholic in deploying sources for his own religious purposes. One scholar who recognized Edwards’s eclectic affinities as a thinker was William Sparkes Morris. In his 688-page, posthumously published dissertation, The Young

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86   Peter J. Thuesen Jonathan Edwards, Morris noted that Edwards’s reading ‘included much more in it than the names of John Locke and Isaac Newton, or Thomas Shepard and Richard Sibbes’ (Morris 1991, 219–20). Such openness to knowledge from any quarter was part of the advice imparted in the Guardian, which Edwards lent to his son Timothy, a student at the College of New Jersey, in spring 1754. ‘There are few, if any Books’, noted Addison and Steele’s periodical, ‘out of which a Man of Learning may not extract something for his use’ (WJE 26: 1). This adage might well summarize Edwards’s lifelong career as a reader.

Works Cited Amory, Hugh, and David D. Hall, eds. (2000). A History of the Book in America, Vol. 1: The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Brown, Robert E. (2002). Jonathan Edwards and the Bible. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bryant, Louise May, and Mary Patterson (1938). ‘The List of Books Sent by Jeremiah Dummer.’ Papers in Honor of Andrew Keogh, Librarian of Yale University. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Library. Chamberlain, Ava (2002). ‘Bad Books and Bad Boys: The Transformation of Gender in Eighteenth-Century Northampton, Massachusetts.’ New England Quarterly 75: 179–03. Fiering, Norman (1981). Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and Its British Context. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Fiering, Norman (1972). ‘Solomon Stoddard’s Library at Harvard in 1664.’ Harvard Library Bulletin 20: 255–69. Fisk, Philip J. (2016). Jonathan Edwards’s Turn from the Classic-Reformed Tradition of Freedom of the Will. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Johnson, Thomas H. (1930–3). ‘Jonathan Edwards’ Background of Reading,’ Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 28 (Transactions): 193–22. Hayes, Kevin  J. (1996). A Colonial Woman’s Bookshelf. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Hayes, Kevin  J. (1997). The Library of William Byrd of Westover. Madison, Wis.: Madison House, Library Company of Philadelphia. Kelley, Donald R. (2001). ‘Eclecticism and the History of Ideas.’ Journal of the History of Ideas 62: 577–92. Kidd, Thomas S. (2004). The Protestant Interest: New England after Puritanism. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Kimnach, Wilson H., and Kenneth P. Minkema (2012). ‘The Material and Social Practices of Intellectual Work: Jonathan Edwards’s Study.’ William and Mary Quarterly 69: 683–30. Marsden, George M. (2003). Jonathan Edwards: A Life. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Mastricht, Petrus van (2018). Theoretical-Practical Theology, Vol. 1: Prolegomena. Translated by Todd M. Rester and edited by Joel R. Beeke. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Reformation Heritage Books. Mather, Cotton (1726). Manuductio ad Ministerium: Directions for a Candidate of the Ministry. Boston: Thomas Hancock. McClymond, Michael J., and Gerald R. McDermott (2012). The Theology of Jonathan Edwards. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Sources of Edwards’s Thought   87 McDermott, Gerald  R. (2000). Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods: Christian Theology, Enlightenment Religion, and Non-Christian Faiths. New York: Oxford University Press. Miller, Perry (1981). Jonathan Edwards. 1949. Reprint, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Miller, Perry (1939). The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press. Minkema, Kenneth  P. (2011). ‘A “Dordtian Philosophe”: Jonathan Edwards, Calvin, and Reformed Orthodoxy.’ Church History and Religious Culture 91, no. 1/2: 241–53. Minkema, Kenneth  P. (1996). ‘The Other Unfinished “Great Work”: Jonathan Edwards, Messianic Prophecy, and “The Harmony of the Old and New Testament.” ’ Jonathan Edwards’s Writings: Text, Context, Interpretation. Ed. Stephen J. Stein. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 52–65. Mooney, James E., ed. (2001). Eighteenth-Century Catalogues of the Yale College Library. New Haven, Conn.: Beinecke Library, Yale University. Morris, William Sparkes (1991). The Young Jonathan Edwards: A Reconstruction. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Carlson Publishing. Muller, Richard A. (2003). Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520 to ca. 1725, Vol. 1, Prolegomena to Theology. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic. Neele, Adriaan C. (2019). Before Jonathan Edwards: Sources of New England Theology. New York: Oxford University Press. Neele, Adriaan  C. (2018). ‘Early Modern Biblical Commentary and Jonathan Edwards.’ Jonathan Edwards and Scripture: Biblical Exegesis in British North America. Ed. David P. Barshinger and Douglas A. Sweeney. New York: Oxford University Press. 51–67. Rivers, Isabel (2018). Vanity Fair and the Celestial City: Dissenting, Methodist, and Evangelical Literary Culture in England, 1720–1800. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stromberg, Ronald  N. (1954). Religious Liberalism in Eighteenth-Century England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sweeney, Douglas A. (2016). Edwards the Exegete: Biblical Interpretation and Anglo-Protestant Culture on the Edge of the Enlightenment. New York: Oxford University Press. Thuesen, Peter  J. (2009). Predestination: The American Career of a Contentious Doctrine. New York: Oxford University Press. Tipson, Baird (2015). Hartford Puritanism: Thomas Hooker, Samuel Stone, and Their Terrifying God. New York: Oxford University Press. Whitmer, Kelly  J. (2009). ‘Eclecticism and the Technologies of Discernment in Pietist Pedagogy.’ Journal of the History of Ideas 70: 545–67.

Suggested Reading Brown, Robert E. (2002). Jonathan Edwards and the Bible. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. McClymond, Michael J., and Gerald R. McDermott (2012). The Theology of Jonathan Edwards. New York: Oxford University Press. Morris, William Sparkes (1991). The Young Jonathan Edwards: A Reconstruction. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Carlson Publishing. Neele, Adriaan C. (2019). Before Jonathan Edwards: Sources of New England Theology. New York: Oxford University Press.

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88   Peter J. Thuesen Thuesen, Peter J. (2008). ‘Editor’s Introduction.’ Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 26, Catalogues of Books. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. 1–113. Thuesen, Peter J. (2013). ‘Jonathan Edwards and the Transatlantic World of Books.’ Jonathan Edwards Studies 3: 43–54.

Author Bio Peter J. Thuesen is Professor of Religious Studies and Co-Editor of Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. He is editor of The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 26, Catalogues of Books (Yale, 2008). His other books include Tornado God: American Religion and Violent Weather (Oxford, 2020), Predestination: The American Career of a Contentious Doctrine (Oxford, 2009), and In Discordance with the Scriptures: American Protestant Battles over Translating the Bible (Oxford, 1999).

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pa rt I I

E DWA R DS ’ S I N T E L L E C T UA L L A BOU R S

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CHAPTER 6

On tol ogy † William J. Wainwright

God God is ‘being in general’ according to Edwards. ‘He is the sum of all being, and there is no being without his being: all things are in him and he is in all’ (WJE 20: 122). Edwards appears to have borrowed the term ‘being in general’ from Malebranche. What does he mean by it? He does not mean that God is the power of being or being as such, as earlier commentators like Clyde Holbrook (Holbrook 1973) and Douglas Elwood (Elwood 1960) have suggested. God is neither a power nor a universal but a concrete entity or s­ ubstance, a necessarily existing ‘intelligent agent such as our souls, only without our imperfections, and not some inconceivable, unintelligent necessary agent’ (WJE 13: 452). True Virtue associates being with capacity or power and asserts that ‘degree of existence is a function of greater capacity or power’, of having ‘every faculty and positive quality in an higher degree. An archangel must be supposed to have more substance, and to be in every way further removed from nonentity than a worm or flea’ (WJE 8: 546). ‘Miscellany’ 94 identifies perfect entity and perfect activity. ‘God is pure act . . . because that which acts perfectly is all act, and nothing but act. There is an image of this in ­created beings that approach to perfect action . . . [Thus] the saints in heaven are all transfigured into love, dissolved into joy, become activity itself, changed into mere ecstasy’ (WJE 13: 260f.). An Essay on the Trinity argues that God’s essence is a love which subsists ‘in pure act and perfect energy’, his holy will or activity (WJE 21: 122). ‘Of Being’ and ‘The Mind’, no. 45 identify being with consciousness. ‘Perceiving being only is properly being’ (WJE 6: 363). Although Edwards never systematically developed or integrated these scattered observations their drift is toward the identification of being with mind in act, and of degree of being with degree of mind or consciousness and the comparative perfection of the activity in which it is engaged. God’s consciousness and power are unlimited, and his activity is perfect. His being is therefore unlimited.

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92   William J. Wainwright Why, though, is God being in general? Because finite beings are absolutely and immediately dependent on him for both their being and their properties. Indeed, as the only true substance and the only true cause, created beings are no more than God’s ‘shadows’ or ‘images’. Edwards consistently distinguished between a real or true cause and a cause in the ordinary or ‘vulgar’ sense. The latter is ‘that, after or upon the existence of which or the existence of it after such a manner, the existence of another thing follows’ (WJE 6: 350). Vulgar causes are not real causes, however. In the first place, so-called second causes are spatially or temporally distinct from their effects and ‘no [real] cause can produce effects in a time and place on which itself is not’ (WJE 3: 400). In the second, real causes necessitate their effects and second causes do not. ‘It don’t at all necessarily follow’, for example, ‘that because there was . . . color or resistance . . . or thought, or any other dependent thing at the last moment, that therefore there shall be the like at the next’ (WJE 3: 404). Finally, if second causes were real causes, they would be sufficient to produce their effects. If they were sufficient, however, then God’s activity would be redundant, and it is not. Unlike second causes, God’s causal activity meets all three conditions. Since God is not in time or space, there is no temporal or spatial separation between his activity and its effects. Since God is essentially omnipotent, his will is necessarily effective; it is logic­ al­ly impossible for him to will something and that thing not to take place. And because sovereignty belongs to him alone, he does not share his causal powers with others. God’s decrees are thus fully sufficient for their effects. God, then, is the only real cause. Vulgar causes (e.g. heating water) are simply the occasions upon which God produces effects (e.g. the water’s boiling) according to ‘methods and laws’ which express his ordinary manner of acting. Moreover, Edwards is a theological determinist. While his ontology is similar to Berkeley’s in a number of respects it is radically unlike his on one important point. For Berkeley (Berkeley 1901) believed in the existence of finite mental substances which, while created by God, were partially independent of him and Edwards did not. One factor underlying this difference is likely to have been their differing views on free agency. Edwards, like Calvin and other Reformed theologians, was a theological determinist. Because Anglicans like Berkeley were not, the latter may have assumed that humanity’s contra-causal freedom required the existence of relatively independent and autonomous choosing substances. And this difference matters. For if Edwards’s theological determinism is true, then while God causes everything else, nothing else causally affects him. As a consequence, created minds can only affect or influence God in a Pickwickian sense. While God may, for example, choose to forgive the sins of a person who has prayed for forgiveness both the latter’s prayer and it antecedents is wholly God’s work. God is the only real agent in the transaction. But what precisely is God himself like? It is highly significant that God’s essence and attributes are described traditionally. Thus, in several places Edwards refers to God’s simplicity and immutability, and in the Freedom of the Will asserts that—unlike created beings—‘the first being is self-existent, independent, of perfect and absolute simplicity and immutable. And the first cause of all things’ (WJE 1: 377). Amy Plantinga Pauw has

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Ontology   93 argued that passages like these are outweighed by many more passages which interpret God as a plurality of persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (Pauw 2003, 115–25). But this seems to me mistaken. In the first place the fact that the passages from Freedom of the Will occur in a late and published work suggests that they express Edwards’s official pos­ ition. And in the second, the fact that similar claims continued to be made in late portions of Edwards’s private notebooks show that he retained this position until the end of his life. A prime example is his discussion of divine immutability on pages 371–2 of ‘Miscellany’ 1340 (which was written no earlier than 1756, i.e. no more than two years before his death). The distinction between Edwards’s ‘official position’ and Pauw’s may not be quite as sharp as I have suggested in the preceding paragraph, however, since there is at least some reason to believe that he identified the immutable, simple, and timeless God that I have so far described with the first member of the Trinity. He says, for example, that the Father is ‘first in the order of subsisting’ and ‘head of the whole family’, and is therefore ‘higher in authority’ than the other persons. Their offices derive from him, so that he is God ‘in some peculiar sense that the other persons of the Trinity are not’ (WJE 25: 147, 148, 150). Again, ‘The Father is the Deity subsisting in the prime, unoriginated and most absolute manner, or the Deity in its direct existence’ (WJE 21: 131). And once again: ‘How many respects the Father first in order, fountain of Godhead, sustains the dignity of deity, sends forth the other two. All is from him, and all is in him originally’ (WJE 21: 143). Yet whether the Godhead is identified with the Father or not, the fact remains that both appear to not only exhibit aseity but the metaphysical properties that Edwards ascribed to God in the Freedom of the Will and elsewhere. As a consequence, both are incompatible with a number of currently popular interpretations of Edwards’s ontology. For in the first place, God’s simplicity, timelessness and immutability are in­com­pat­ ible with the view that God ‘grows’ as Hegel (Hegel  1977,  2007–8), Whiteheadians (Whitehead  1929), Hartshorne (Hartshorne  1948), and other process theologians think—that at the end of the history of creation God is somehow greater or more perfect than he was at the beginning. For these claims imply that God is in time and changes, whereas Edwards explicitly asserts that God is both timeless and immutable.1 Furthermore, if, as most of its modern defenders assert, panentheism entails that God ‘grows’ or adds to his being over time then, for the same reason God cannot be a panentheist. Panentheism need not imply this, however. For panentheism is the view that God includes the world and the world includes God. But if ‘inclusion’ is interpreted as an entailment relation, then Edwards’s God is clearly panentheistic. For, on his view God necessarily creates the world and it is logically or metaphysically impossible for the world to exist if God does not. 1  For a similar reason Sang Hyun Lee (2008)’s widely influential ascription of a so-called dispositional ontology to Edwards cannot be correct since he too thinks that Edwards’s God grows in time. But that aside, Lee’s claim that Edwards believed that reality essentially consists in a set of dispositions which retain their reality even if or when they are not exercised, and that God not only creates dispositions but is himself composed of them has been plausibly criticized by (e.g.) Steven R. Holmes (2003) and Oliver Crisp (2010).

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94   William J. Wainwright Because minds and other elements constituting the world are emanations of God, God can plausibly be said to include them. God is not an emanation of the world, however. Nor does the world literally include him in the way that my body includes my hand, or my mind includes thoughts, intentions, and feelings, or the 13th volume of the Yale edition of The Works of Jonathan Edwards contains ‘Miscellanies’ a to 500. With an important exception to be discussed in Section 2, neither finite minds in general nor any other created element are literally parts of God or include him. Only the saints do so.

‘Particular Minds’ In an early paper ‘Of Atoms’ Edwards pointed out that the concept of a material substance is the concept of something subsisting by itself, standing ‘underneath’, and keeping ‘up solidity and all other [physical] properties’ (WJE 6: 215). He then argued that God alone meets these conditions and concluded that if the concept of material substance refers to anything, it refers to God’s casual activity. By parity of reasoning Edwards should (and indeed does) conclude that the concept of a mental or ‘spiritual’ substance, too, is either nonsense or denotes God, that is the ‘establishment’ by which he freely determines that thoughts will come into being and pass away in a manner of his own choosing. ‘Particular minds’, then, are nothing more than a co-existing set or succession of ‘thoughts’ caused by God.2 Edwards is thus a mental phenomenalist like Hume. That Edwards retained his mental phenomenalism is settled by a note he made toward the end of his life in which he says ‘what we call [mind or] spirit is nothing but a composition or series of perceptions, or an universe of coexisting and successive perceptions connected by wonderful methods and laws’ (WJE 6: 398). While bodies on Edwards’s view are simply collections of sensible ideas (colour, shapes and the like), minds are something more. For as Joshua Ferris has pointed out (Ferris  2016), minds are not only collections of perceptions or thoughts, they are Aristotelian substances if only in the weak sense of being bearers of properties. That is, minds are not simply composed of properties or sets of properties, they have properties. (Being sinful or irascible or loving are examples). Yet minds are more real than bodies in an even deeper sense because they are like God in a way in which bodies are not. For even though finite minds lack real power, they deliberate and choose and so possess a kind of agency. As a consequence, they are more like God than bodies which not only lack real power but also consciousness and will. But while all minds are included in God’s emanation of himself ad extra, the relation between God and the saints is especially intimate. Thus, in the End of Creation, Edwards argues that the elect and/or their qualifications (their knowledge and love of God, and their happiness in him) are in some sense one with him. In the course of eternity, the 2  ‘Thoughts’ is used in Descartes’ wide sense. The category includes feelings, sensations, volitions, and the like as well as ideas and perceptions.

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Ontology   95 saints move progressively closer to union with God and an identification of their interests with his. And this has an important consequence. ‘As creatures’ good was viewed . . . when God created the world . . . with respect to the whole of the eternal duration of it, and the eternally progressive union and communion with him, so the creature must be viewed in infinite strict union with himself. In this view it appears that ‘God’s respect to the creature, in the whole, unites with his respect to himself ’ (WJE 8: 459). An obvious objection to this argument, though, is that there is no point in time at which God and the elect are one or their interests identical. The creature and its good are never, that is at no time, identical with God and his good. The identity in question is fictitious. In an apparent anticipation of this objection, Edwards points out that God can said to really (and not fictitiously) inflict an infinite punishment on the damned and bestow an infinite good on the elect even though there is no point in time at which the punishment will have been completed or the gift fully bestowed. This does not resolve the difficulty, however. The punishment and gifts are infinite in the sense that they are everlasting. The whole punishment will actually be inflicted and the whole gift will actually be bestowed since each part of the punishment or gift will actually occur. Union or identity with God, on the other hand, will never be actual. What corresponds to an in­fin­ite reward is not identity or union with God (which is a fiction) but an endless process of approximation to him. The saints, in other words, get asymptotically closer and closer to God but never achieve identity or perfect oneness with him. Another argument is potentially stronger, however. Edwards’s theology, like Malebranche’s, is Christocentric. God’s glory is most fully manifest in Christ’s victory over the powers of darkness. Christ’s triumph is the Church’s triumph, however, for ‘the [true] church [that is, the elect] is the completeness of Christ’. It can thus be said that ‘heaven and earth were created that the Son of God might be complete in a spouse’ (WJE 13: 172, 171). And because the true church is comprised of the elect who constitute the Body of Christ, being included in the true church entails being included in Christ and thus in God. The saints’ relation to God is even more intimate than that, however. For the Holy Spirit ‘dwells’ in the saints ‘as a vital principle in their soul [and] there produces those effects wherein he exerts and communicates himself in his own proper nature’ (WJE 2: 201, my emphasis). ‘True saving grace is no other than the love of God, that is, God in one of the persons of the Trinity, uniting himself to the soul of a creature as a vital principle, dwelling there and exerting himself by faculties of the soul of man, after the manner of a principle of nature. The saints are thus not only partakers of a nature that may, in some sense be called divine, because ’tis conformed to the nature of God, but the very Deity does in some manner dwell in them.’ And in the‘Discourse on the Trinity’ Edwards says that in communicating ‘divine love to the creature . . . God’s spirit or love doth but communicate itself. ’Tis the same love so far as a creature is capable of being made partaker of it’ (WJE 21: 194f, 124. My emphases). Edwards is making two claims. First, the new spiritual dispositions and tastes which God bestows on the souls of the elect are divine. The difference between God’s love and joy, and the love and joy he bestows on the saints is a difference of degree, not of nature or kind. Second, God does not act on the soul from without but dwells within it, as a

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96   William J. Wainwright ‘principle of new nature’, living and acting, and exerting itself in the exercise of the soul’s faculties. What, though, is a principle of nature? Edwards sometimes describes it as a kind of ‘habit’, a settled character or disposition leading a person to exercise her faculties in a certain manner (WJE 2: 206). The self-love of fallen humanity, for example is a ‘habit’ or ‘second nature’, a disposition to think, feel, and act in sinful ways. By analogy, the new divine principle would be a habit inherent in sanctified souls disposing them to holy actions, thoughts, and feelings. But even though Edward’s language often suggests this, the Treatise on Grace asserts that it is misleading to speak of a ‘habit of grace’ if by that we mean that, once redeemed, the soul is itself capable of bringing forth holy thoughts, feelings, and actions. For ‘the giving of one gracious discovery or act of grace or a thousand, has no proper natural tendency to cause an abiding habit of grace for the future; nor any otherwise than by divine constitution and covenant’ (that is by God’s graciously promising to do so). Rather ‘all succeeding acts of grace must be as immediately and to all intents and purposes, as much from the immediate action of the Spirit of God on the soul as the first; and if God should take away his Spirit out of the soul, all habits and acts of grace would of themselves cease as immediately as light ceases in a room when a candle is carried out’ (WJE 21: 196). We saw earlier that God is the only real or true cause of ordinary material and mental phenomena. We now see that God is also the only real or true cause of all spiritual and holy motions. In the same way that his determinations to produce physical or mental effects in a certain order just are the natures of physical and mental phenomena, so too God’s settled determinations to produce holy thoughts, feelings, and intentions in a certain order in the redeemed just are the divine principles in the heart of the saints. Edwards’s theological determinism and occasionalism thus illuminates the doctrine of the Holy Spirit’s indwelling. But it also creates a problem. If God is the direct and only cause of everything, then how does his gracious indwelling in the saints differ from his direct and continuous creation of the thoughts, feelings, and intentions of the ungodly? The effects are different of course, but Edwards clearly wants to say more, namely, that the manner of God’s op­er­ ation differs in the two cases. How does it do so? Miracles, ‘gracious operations on the mind’, and other things of that sort are ‘done in the most general proportion [or “harmony”], not tied to any particular proportion, to this or that created being, but the proportion [or “harmony”] is’ instead ‘with the whole series of [God’s] acts and designs from eternity to eternity’ (WJE 13: 235). Ordinary physical and mental events stand in ‘rule bound connections’ to immediately surrounding events. Miracles like the Resurrection do not. All works of God are done with fitness and propriety and are ultimately part of his grand design—the history of humankind’s redemption from its beginnings in eternity to its final consummation. The harmonies into which natural events immediately fit are local, however, whereas the harmony into which the Resurrection and bestowal of the Holy Spirit belong is ‘creation’s total history’ (Jenson 1998, 69). ‘Common benefits’ as well as other ordinary objects and occurrences, ‘are as much immediately from God as man’s highest perfection and happiness: i.e. one

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Ontology   97 is as much by the direct present exercise of the power of God as the other. But there is this difference: common benefits are statedly connected with previous things in the creature, so that they are in a sense dependent on the creature’ (that is, are uniformly or regularly connected with it in law-like ways). But ‘the excellence and blessedness of the soul is connected only with the will of God, and is dependent on nothing else’; it is not a term in a natural regularity (WJE 13: 523–4). It is doubtful that this fully disposes of the problem, however. On Edwards’s view God is the immediate and only true cause of the thoughts, feelings, and intentions of the ungodly as well as those of the saints. To differentiate the latter from the former in the manner suggested, Edwards must show that the mental acts of the ungodly ‘are statedly connected with previous things in the creature’ in a way in which those of the saints are not. It is not clear how Edwards could do this, though, since on the face of it the mental acts of the ungodly seem no more tightly bound with local regularities than the acts of the saints. The problem is solved, however, if the ‘Spirit of God . . . communicates and exerts itself in the soul [of the saint] in those acts which are its proper, natural, and essential acts in itself ad intra, or within the Deity from all eternity’, and if ‘the act which is its nature, and wherein its being consists is . . . divine love’ (WJE 13: 513). There is therefore this difference between God’s relation to the thoughts, feelings, and intentions of the ungodly and his relation to those of the saints. While God causes the former they are not his acts. The latter, on the other hand, are not only caused by God they are acts of God. All this works, however, only if the saints’ acts (or love) are literally God’s acts (or love), and Edwards himself seems to sometimes express doubts on the matter. Thus, shortly after claiming that in communicating ‘divine love to the creature . . . God’s spirit or love doth communicate of itself; ’tis the same love, so far as a creature is capable of being made partaker of it’, he appears to qualify what he has said by adding: ‘The scripture seems in many places to speak of love in Christians as if it were the same with the Spirit of God in them,3 or at least as the prime and most natural breathing and acting of the Spirit in the soul’ (WJE 21: 123f, 125, my emphasis). But be this as it may the soteriological relation is arguably necessary. Edwards shared the traditional view that some humans do not participate in humanity’s final good (an everlasting loving union with God). Nor does he clearly believe that it is necessarily true that all humans are potential participants in this good since, on his view, our very ability to participate in God’s life is a free gift.4 On the other hand, the story of the world in Edwards’s view is the story of God’s redemption of fallen humanity through Jesus Christ and, as beneficiaries of that redemption, that God has freely restored the capacity to participate in God’s life that Adam lost, is now essential to us, 3  Note the qualifier (‘as if it were’). 4  Traditional discussions of Adam’s fall are instructive in this regard since they often suggest that the ability to share in the supreme good which Adam possessed in his unfallen state had be added to the human nature. It was not originally included in it. See for example Edwards’s discussion in Original Sin (WJE 3, 380–88)

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98   William J. Wainwright that is, a capacity that humans now possess in every metaphysically possible world in which they exist. But the ontological connection with God may be even tighter than I have so far suggested. I have argued elsewhere that Edwards’s metaphysical premises implicitly commit him to the claim that God necessarily creates this world rather than others he might have created instead (Wainwright 1996, 126–8, 266). If they do then Edwards is also committed to the view that everything that occurs in this world is metaphysically necessary. Edward’s view in this respect is like Leibniz’s (Leibniz  1951). Because this world can be exhaustively described by the conjunction of all true propositions, God’s creation of this world is logically equivalent to his instantiation of this conjunction. Since Edward’s metaphysical premises entail that he must instantiate this conjunction, its instantiation is metaphysically necessary. But if the instantiation of a conjunction is metaphysically necessary, then so too is the instantiation of each of its conjuncts. It follows that if (e.g.) Peter is saved, it is necessarily true that Peter is saved. But if it is, then being saved is part of Peter’s essence (that is a property he has in every metaphysically possible world in which he exists) and so too, then, is his membership in the Body of Christ, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and everything else that is essentially included in his everlasting participation in the Supreme Good. So even though salvation is not in included in humanity’s essence, it is (on Edwards’s view) implicitly included in the individual essences of each member of the elect.5

The Ontological Implications of God’s Emanation Ad Extra Edwards defines God’s glory ad extra as ‘the emanation and true external expression of God’s internal goodness and fullness’. It includes (1) ‘the exercise of God’s perfections to produce a proper effect’, (2) ‘the manifestation of his internal glory to created understandings’, (3) ‘the communication of the infinite fullness of God to the creature’. And (4) ‘The creatures high esteem of God, love of God, complacence and joy in God, and the proper exercise and expression of these’ affections (WJE 8: 527). Items 1 and 3 are not ontologically distinct. For the principal effect produced by the exercise of God’s perfections is ‘his fullness communicated’. Furthermore, since God’s internal fullness is the ‘fullness of his understanding’, consisting in his knowledge of himself, and ‘the fullness of his will’, consisting in ‘holiness and happiness’, his ‘external glory . . . consists in the communication of these’, that is in causing or bringing it about that ‘particular minds’ know God, love God, and delight in him. Hence 3 includes 2 and 4;

5  By parity of reasoning, damnation is part of the essence of the damned. (Whether Edwards would or would not have accepted this isn’t clear to me.)

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Ontology   99 and thus 2 and 4 are parts of 3 which is ontologically identical with 1. They are therefore ‘one thing in a variety of views and relations’ (WJE 8: 527–8). It is important to be clear in precisely what senses God’s overflowing is and is not necessary, however. God’s emanation ad extra is an end he consciously and willingly pursues. God’s self-communication is thus voluntary, an expression of his reason and will. It is not a non-voluntary consequence of his nature. God does not emanate his internal glory in the way the sun spontaneously emanates light and heat or Plotinus’s One emanates Nous and Soul. It is true that God could not have voluntarily pursued any other end (or no end at all) for his nature is such that he could not have willed otherwise. But that is no more inconsistent with God’s freedom than the fact that we ca not help but will our own happiness be inconsistent with ours. In the End of Creation Edwards says that ‘if the fullness of the Good that is the fountain is . . . excellent and worthy to exist, then the emanation, or that which is, as it were an increase, repetition, or multiplication of it is excellent and worthy to exist’ (WJE 8: 433). Yet precisely how is God’s world ‘an increase, repetition, or multiplication’ of him? Note that what is created or emanated is the history of redemption, and that some parts of that history are more central or immediately salient than others. The material world, for example, is essentially nothing more than a platform on which the drama of redemption is enacted. The central or most immediately salient, on the other hand, are the lives of the saints. God’s ‘acts’ of emanation are properly regarded as part of him and what he does (that is, what he emanates) is literally part of that action. (Just as the coming into being of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, for instance, is a literal part of his painting it so the coming into being of cows is a literal part of God’s creating them). The more salient parts of the history of redemption, however, are more properly regarded as increases, or repetitions, or multiplications of God than the less salient ones. Some of God’s creatures (the saints) or more accurately their holy qualifications (that is, their knowledge and love of God, and joy in him) are literally himself defused if ‘self ’ is construed in an extended but not unreasonable sense. That is, if self is thought of as including not only the agent and the agent’s activity but also any effects or products of her activity that are both inseparable from it, and reflect, or provide images of the agent’s character. The elect and their holy qualifications are thus parts of God in the real but attenuated sense in which a daydream, or a spontaneous dance or song that is (1) absolutely dependent upon, and inseparable from the activity that produces it, and that (2) expresses the character or inner being of the producer is part of her. It may therefore be significant that Edwards frequently compares the end state of God’s creation to music. (See Jenson 1998, 19–20). In placing part of his happiness in the saints, God therefore places it in something that is other than himself in the strict sense but part of himself in a literal but more extended one. If panentheism is true, then God not only includes the world, the world includes God. Does it? The answer I believe is this. As we saw in Section 2, the saints on Edward’s view literally include the Holy Spirit and therefore literally include God. But they alone do so. So, with that important but unique exception, the inclusion relation essentially runs in only one direction.

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100   William J. Wainwright

Edwards and the Ontological Status of Necessary Truths Edwards clearly thought that there were ‘philosophically’ or ‘metaphysically’ necessary truths and cited the following examples among others: ‘that two and two should be four, and that it is necessary that all right lines drawn from the center of a circle to the circumference should be equal, . . . [that] it is necessary fit and suitable that men should do to others as they would that they should do to them’, that God is infinite, and the like (WJE 1: 152–3). Yet precisely how did Edwards understand their ontological status? He clearly believed that without God there would be no necessary truths. For in the first place, Edwards thought that: necessarily, if anything exists, it is either God or derived from God, and this entails that without God there would be nothing. But Edwards also thought that if there were nothing, there would be no necessary truths. The existence of necessary truths therefore depends upon the existence of God. Yet why did Edwards think that if there were nothing there would be no necessary truths, or insist that nothing is the ‘aggregate of all contradictions’ (WJE 6: 203)? There are at least two possible ways of supporting the claim. The first is this. Anything real or existent must have some properties, but nothingness has none. For let P be any predicate. Neither P nor P’s contrary nor P’s complement applies to it.6 It thus has no properties at all. A second reason for thinking that ‘absolute nothing is the aggregate of all the contradictions in the world’ is this. Nothingness (the sheer absence of everything) is the state of affairs in which no state of affairs obtains (or ‘exists’). But if no state of affairs obtains, then no necessary state of affairs obtains. Nothingness is thus ‘a state of affairs in which every proposition in Euclid is not true, nor any of those self-evident maxims by which they are demonstrated; and all other eternal truths are neither true nor false’ (WJE 6: 206). Since necessarily true propositions are propositions which are true in all states of affairs, nothing is not a possible state of affairs. Edwards clearly thinks that without God there would be no necessary truths. It does not follow, though, that God causes them or wills them into being. He is not, in other words, a theological voluntarist like Luther or Jean Gerson who exclaimed that ‘nothing is evil except because prohibited by God and nothing is good except because accepted by God’ (quoted in Idziak 1979, 66). Nor does he share the views of Descartes who thought that God’s will determines which truths are necessary and which are not (Descartes 1955).

6  Complements must be distinguished from contraries. Unwise, is the contrary of wise, for example, but non-wise (or not wise) is its complement. Stones, for instance are non-wise but they are not unwise. Roughly speaking, a property and its contrary are predicated of things of the same logical type whereas a property’s complement is predicated of everything which lacks that property irrespective of logical type.

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Ontology   101 Although there is no evidence that he was familiar with it I would suggest that Edwards’s views on the ontological status of necessary truths were likely to have been similar to those expressed in Ralph Cudworth’s A Treatise Concerning True and Immutable Morality published around 50 years after the latter’s death.7 In Cudworth’s opinion, such things as triangles or promise breaking, or contempt of God have fixed ‘natures’ or ‘essences’. As a consequence, it is logically impossible ‘to make a body tri­ angu­lar . . . without having three angles equal to two right ones’, for instance, or to permit or bring about an act of promising breaking which is not morally wrong, or for contempt of God to be faultless. And ‘the reason . . . is plain, because’ things like these ‘imply a manifest contradiction’ (Cudworth 1731, 14–15). In other words, moral truths, truths of logic and mathematics, and the like are necessarily true, and their denials are logically impossible. To suppose that God could make necessary truths false is to suppose that he has the power to alter the essence of things, making it true that the angles of a triangle are not equal to two right angles, or that human beings are not animals, or that promise breaking is not wrong. And this has two absurd consequences. First, if ‘the essences of things [are] dependent upon an arbitrary will in God’, then God’s essence is dependent on an arbitrary will in God. But in that case, God could have willed that ‘there . . . be no such thing as knowledge in God himself ’, or that his know­ ledge or power are limited, or that there are logically possible worlds in which he has no power or knows nothing at all (Cudworth 33–4). Second, the view in question ‘destroys all knowledge’ (Cudworth 32). Why? Perhaps because a logically impossible proposition entails all propositions.8 So in making a logic­al­ly impossible proposition true, God makes all propositions true. If all propos­ itions are true, however, then for any proposition p, both p and its denial are true, and the distinction between true and false beliefs collapses. And this undermines the very notion of knowledge. For ‘A knows that p’ entails ‘A knows that not-p is false’. And ‘A knows that not-p is false’ entails that ‘not-p is false’. Yet if all propositions are true, ‘not-p isn’t false’. And so knowledge, as Cudworth says, is ‘destroyed’. That essences and necessary truths do not depend on God’s will does not imply that they do not depend on God, however. ‘The essences and verities of things’ are included in God’s ‘eternal and immutable wisdom’ which is, in turn, an expression of his ‘essential goodness’ (Cudworth 34–7). Necessary and eternal truths, including moral truths, are not independent of God because they are part of God’s nature. Other Cambridge Platonists such as Henry More and John Smith—whose works Edwards also admired— expressed similar views. It would therefore be surprising if he did not share them.

7  Like many Puritan intellectuals, Edwards greatly admired Cudworth’s True Intellectual System of the Universe. Although Cudworth intended to include his Treatise on True and Immutable Morality in it, it was not in fact published until 1731. 8  On what is currently the standard view a proposition q is entailed by a proposition p if and only if it is logically impossible for p to be true and q to be false. But if it is impossible for p to be true, then for any proposition q, it is impossible for p to be true and q to be false. So p entails q. To suppose that Edwards had anything precisely like this in mind, however, is obviously anachronistic.

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102   William J. Wainwright

Works Cited Berkeley, George (1901). The Works of George Berkeley, Ed. A. C. Fraser. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Crisp, Oliver  D. (2010). ‘Jonathan Edwards’s Ontology: a Critique of Sang Hyun Lee’s Dispositional Account of Edwardsian Metaphysics’, Religious Studies 46, no. 1 (March): 1–20. Cudworth, Ralph (1731, Reprint New York: Garland 1976). A Treatise Concerning True and Immutable Morality. London: J & J Knapton. Descartes, Rene (1955). ‘Reply to the Sixth Set of Objections’, nos. 6 and 8. Objections and Replies, Trans Elizabeth  S.  Haldane and G.  R.  T.  Ross. In: The Philosophical Works of Descartes, vol. 2. New York: Dover Publications. 248, 250–1. Elwood, Douglas  J. (1960). The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards. New York: Columbia University Press. Ferris, Joshua R. (2016). ‘Edwardsian Idealism, Imago Dei, and Contemporary Theology.’ In: Idealism and Christian Theology, vol. 1. Ed. Joshua R. Farris and S. Mark Hamilton. New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic. 83–105. Hartshorne, Charles (1948). The Divine Relativity. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (2007–8). Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 3 vols. Ed. Peter C. Hodgson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (1977). Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford University Press. Holbrook, Clyde  A. (1973). The Ethics of Jonathan Edwards: Morality and Aesthetics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Holmes, Stephen R. (2003). ‘Does Jonathan Edwards Use a Dispositional Ontology? A Response to Sang Hyun Lee.’ In: Jonathan Edwards: Philosophical Theologian, Ed. Paul Helm and Oliver D. Crisp. Aldershot Hants and Burlington VT: Ashgate, 99–114. Idziak, Janine Marie (ed.) (1979). Divine Command Morality: Historical and Contemporary Readings. New York and Toronto: Edwin Mellon Press. Jenson, Robert, W. (1988). America’s Theologian. New York: Oxford University Press. Lee, Sang Hyun (1988). The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards. Princeton, N.  J.: Princeton University Press. Leibniz, G. W. (1951). Theodicy. Trans. E. M. Huggard, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, nos. 7, 8, & 9. Pauw, Amy Plantinga (2003). ‘One Alone Cannot be Excellent’: Edwards on Divine Simplicity.’ In: Jonathan Edwards: Philosophical Theologian. Ed. Paul Helm and Oliver  D.  Crisp. Aldershot Hants and Burlington VT: Ashgate, 115–25. Wainwright, William  J. (1996). ‘Jonathan Edwards, William Rowe, and the Necessity of Creation’. In: Faith, Freedom, and Responsibility. Ed. Jeff Jordan and Daniel Howard-Snyder. Lanham Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 119–33 & 262–9. Whitehead, A. N. (1929). Process and Reality (Gifford Lectures 1927–28). New York: Macmillan.

Suggested Reading Crisp, Oliver D. (2003). ‘Jonathan Edwards on Divine Simplicity’, Religious Studies 39, no. 1 (March): 23–41. Crisp, Oliver D. (2015). Jonathan Edwards Among the Theologians. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans.

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Ontology   103 Hamilton, S.  Mark (2017). A Treatise on Jonathan Edwards Continuous Creation and Christology. Jonathan Edwards Society Press. McClymond, Michael J. and Gerald R. McDermott (2012). The Theology of Jonathan Edwards. New York: Oxford University Press. Pauw, Amy Plantinga (2002). The Supreme Harmony of All: The Trinitarian Theology of Jonathan Edwards. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans. Wainwright, William  J. (1982). ‘Jonathan Edwards, Atoms, and Immaterialism,’ Idealistic Studies, 12 (1): 79–89. Wainwright, William J. (2010). ‘Jonathan Edwards, God, and “Particular Minds”,’ International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 68: 201–13.

Author Bio William J. Wainwright was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He served as the Editor of Faith and Philosophy and President of both the Society for Philosophy of Religion and the Society of Christian Philosophers. Major publications include Mysticism (1981), Philosophy of Religion (second edition 1999), Reason and the Heart (1995), Religion and Morality (2005), and Reason Revelation, and Devotion: Inference and Argument in Religion(2016), as well as over eighty articles and book chapters.

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chapter 7

Epistemol ogy Paul Helm

Preamble Edwards’s epistemology, what he can know, is influenced by his metaphysics, what is true at the most basic level. As is often the case, the view of how truth can be known, and made clear to others, depends on what is assumed to be knowable, and what the obs­ tacles to knowledge are. All seem to be agreed, however, that he was strongly influenced by John Locke from his days as a Yale student. There is a difference between those who limit the influence of Locke to Edwards explicit references to him, in The Freedom of the Will (1754) and The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin (1758). But his Religious Affections (1746), the earliest book of the three, shows the pervasive influence of Locke, his relation between faith and reason, and his view of the place of the affections in mo­tiv­ation, which overturned the intellectualism of the Reformed Orthodox which Edwards inherited. His also personal penchant for subjective idealism was strengthened by the influence of Berkeley. The degree of this influence is debated, between those who think his idealism was fully paid up, including the self as well as its ideas, and those who restrict it to the mind’s contents only.

Early Influences Jonathan Edwards (1703–58) in effect lived his life at two intellectual levels. One was as the pastor of churches in New England, preaching the faith to his people. The other level was lived as a theorist of God’s relation to his universe. These two roles need to be borne in mind in what follows. The first is closely connected with doctrinal and practical themes of the Christian faith, the second with the meaning and truth of philosophical matters at their most fundamental level. To have a rounded view of Edwards’s philosophy

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Epistemology   105 and perhaps especially his epistemology, it is necessary to appreciate these two l­ evels. He appropriated this view philosophers who in his youth were regarded as modern, arising from the philosophy of George Berkeley and those influenced by him. Berkeley’s Principles of Human Knowledge, published in 1710, developed his counter-intuitive subjective idealism, that to be is to be perceived or a perceiver, and hence that ‘particular bodies, of what kind so ever do none of them exist whilst they are not perceived’. This view eliminated matter in all its forms. To this he considers the objection. ‘Would not a man be deservedly laughed at, who should talk after this manner? I answer, he would so; in such things we ought to think with the learned and speak with the vulgar’ (Berkeley 1710, LI). In Edwards’s later years, before his sudden death, his first biographer Ezekiel Hopkins, wrote this: Taking that book [Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding] in his Hand upon some occasion, not long before his death, he and some of his select Friends who were there with him, That he was beyond Expression entertain’d and pleas’d with it, when he read it in his Youth at College; that he was as much engaged, and had more Satisfaction and Pleasure in studying it, than the most greedy Miser in gathering up handfuls of Silver and Gold from some new discovered treasure. (Hopkins 1760, 3–4)

It is not clear that Edwards read Berkeley during his education, or subsequently, but his readiness to talk of two levels suggested contact with Berkeley, if not directly, then from others influenced by him. In Edwards’s early writing, written in the 1720 and unpub­ lished by him, there is clear evidence of the influence of Berkeley’s idealism. It is evident in expressions ‘as if the material world were existent in the same manner as is vulgarly thought’ (WJE 6: 354). He carried this outlook into his activities as a minister and author. Edwards did not express all his philosophy in the language of the learned, however. In the start of his great work The Freedom of the Will (1754) he expressed a determination to discuss the topic in everyday speech. (WJE 1: 150, 155, 346, 348, 363). Nevertheless, in matters to do with perception he heeded Berkeley’s advice. It seems that this contrast between the level of the learned and that of the vulgar (i.e. having to do with ordinary affairs of life) became something of a mantra among philosophers in the early eighteenth century (WJE 6: 354, 193, 195). An essay ‘Of Being’, written about 1723, distinguished between the existence of the material world ‘existent in the same manner as is vulgarly thought’ (WJE 6: 354) and accounts of it as it contains things ‘exceedingly beside the ordinary way of thinking’ (WJE 6: 193), ‘strange things’ (WJE 6: 195). The Cartesian Nicholas Malebranche (1638–1715) was an influence on Edwards through his occasionalism, the view that there is no interaction between substantives, particularly between the soul and body. Rather, events in the soul ‘occasion’ events in the body and vice versa; that is, whenever events of one type occur events in the other type frequently also occur. Causation was thus not efficient but occasional. In the universe there is only one efficient cause, God himself, the Creator. This occasionalism was a

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106   Paul Helm further counter-intuitive position, one a consequence of the other. Edwards energetically embraced both, and together with his idea of divine immediacy occasionalism became one important weapon in his armoury in his lifelong antipathy to deism. For Edwards, God did not create the universe as a machine, and let it run down as its original impetus wore out. Rather, God was immediately present to his creation, upholding it by his mind and will. Edwards abhorred the idea that human beings could keep God at length. Rather his influence was immediate. This is a doctrine that gained notoriety in his sermon ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’ (WJE 22: 404), but his dislike of deism shows itself through his writings more generally. In Edwards view it was religious poison. There is a strong air of paradox about how Edwards fell under the influence of these thinkers in his early life. Berkeley was an Anglican bishop, Locke an English gentleman of Arminian views who corresponded with the leading Arminians on the continent of Europe, while Malebranche (and behind him Descartes) were Roman Catholics. These facts had a twofold influence. In his works in the vulgar idiom such as The Religious Affections (WJE 2), important for his religious epistemology, showed Locke’s influence but was written without Locke being named. The nearest he gets to disclosing his source was in the remark there is what ‘some metaphysicians call a new simple idea’ (WJE 2: 205). Simple (and complex) ideas were a key Lockean term. But in fact, the entire work is undertaken within the parameters of Locke’s views in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, of reason and revelation, and of enthusiasm, and the importance of the ideas of pleasure and pain, as we shall shortly see. Edwards was understandably cautious not to let it be known to his New England readership that he was beholden to a leading Arminian, and so he anonymized his sources. Were the impressions and ideas of the senses the only sources of knowledge for Edwards? There is reason to doubt this. His natural theology favoured the innateness of the sensus divinitatis, a feature of mankind’s creation in the image of God. Specific sup­ port for this is to be found in his modified Lockean view of personal Identity in the Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin. It needs to be borne in mind that Edwards by this time was a budding clergyman in the congregationalist ‘establishment’ of New England. His grandfather Solomon Stoddard had been a minister, as was his father Timothy Edwards. These were members of a set who sought to keep up with the new European ideas. Solomon Stoddard pos­ sessed a set of Descartes’ works while a student at Harvard in the middle of the previous century, and such thinkers figured in the Harvard and Yale curriculums (Marsden 2009, ch.4). Another possible source is the Dutch Cartesian Reformed theologian Adriaan Heereboord (1614–1661) whom Edwards studied as a Yale graduate student. It was perhaps from these sources, Cartesian in character, that Edwards drew his strong view of the distinction between body and mind, as here, Man is perfectly, and unspeakably different from a mere a mere machine, in that he has reasoning and understanding, and has a faculty of will, and so is capable of vol­ ition and choice; and that his will is guided by the dictates or views of his under­ standing. In that his actions and behavior, and in many respects also his thoughts,

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Epistemology   107 and the exercises of his mind, are subject to his will; so that he has liberty to act, and do what he pleases; and by means of these things, is capable of moral habits and moral acts, such as inclinations and actions, as, according to the common sense of mankind, are worthy of praise, esteem, love, and regard; or, on the contrary of dis­ esteem, detestation, indignation, and punishment.  (WJE 1: 370)

Perhaps we see here distinct of his own religious and theological tradition, the Reformed and Puritan theology of the Puritanism of old and New England. While a ready partici­ pant in the ferment of new ideas, he was also a loyal product of this culture. Evidence for his independence of Locke, even while using his terminology, was his reference in The Religious Affections of ‘a new simple idea’ to refer to the epistemology of regeneration (The Religious Affections, WJE 2: 205). His modification of Lockean ideas was due to his Calvinism. We shall take this up later on. However the term “Calvinist” is in these days, among most, a term of greater reproach than the tern “Arminian;” yet I should not take it at all amiss, to be called a Calvinist, for distinction’s sake; though 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 everything just as he taught.  (WJE 1: 131)

A follower of Calvin, yet not a slavish one. There is also this, part of a letter to Joseph Bellamy, as student of his and later a fellow minister, giving him advice on what to read. ‘But take Mastricht for divinity in general, doctrine, practice and controversy; or as an universal system of divinity; and it is much better than Turretin or any other book in the world, excepting the Bible, in my opinion’ (Helm 2012, 92). ‘Mastricht’ is Petrus van Mastricht (1630–1706) whose Theologia Practica Edwards reputedly read seven times. So in Edwards’s outlook, his philosophy is undertaken to provide an intellectual basis of his theology. So here there is the further paradox, that of his reliance on novel, con­ tem­por­ary thinkers to be the scaffolding for his theological conservatism and the defence of his ancient faith and its attendant religion.

God’s Sovereignty Besides the early writings ‘Of Being’ and ‘The Mind’ that we have noted, Edwards kept a diary from early on, of the states of his own soul, his ‘Personal Narrative’. Early on it con­ tained this: From my childhood up, my mind had been wont to be full of objections against the doctrine of God’s sovereignty, in choosing whom he would to eternal life, and rejecting whom he please. d; leaving them eternally to perish, and be everlastingly tormented in hell. It used to appear like a horrible doctrine to me. But I remember the time very well, when I seemed to be convinced, and fully satisfied, as to this sovereignty

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108   Paul Helm of God, and his justice in thus eternally disposing of men, according to his sovereign pleasure. But never could give an account, how, or by what means, I was thus con­ vinced; not in the least imagining, in the time of it, nor a long time after, that there was any extraordinary influence of God’s Spirit in it: but only that now I saw further, and my reason apprehended the justice and reasonableness of it. However, my mind rested in it; and it put an end to all those cavils and objections, that had till then abode with me, all the preceding part of my life. And there has been a wonderful alteration in my mind, with respect to the doctrine of God’s sovereignty, from that day to this; so that I scarce ever have found so much as the rising of an objection against God’s sovereignty, in the most absolute sense, in showing mercy on whom he will show mercy, and hardening and eternally damning whom he will. God’s absolute sovereignty, and justice, with respect to salvation and damnation, is what my mind seems to rest assured of, as much as of anything that I see with my eyes; at least it is so at times. But I have oftentimes since that first conviction, had quite another kind of sense of God’s sovereignty, than I had then. I have often since, not only had a conviction, but a delightful conviction. The doctrine of God’s sovereignty has very often appeared, an exceeding pleasant, bright and sweet doctrine to me: and absolute sovereignty is what I love to ascribe to God. But my first conviction was not with this.  (WJE 16: 791–2)

This is a statement of what may be called Edwards’s religious norms, which so strongly colour both his religious and theological output, in his works on revival as well as his polemical theological output. What we shall find in his epistemology to come that though its direction and character were often those of Locke and Berkeley, Edwards stretches their boundaries as he utilizes them as a pastor and theologian.

Idealism and Divine Immediacy Having identified the influence of the empiricism of Locke and the subjective idealism of Berkeley, we shall here look at Edwards’s the influences of these on Edwards. First, his idealism which we have identified, and the theological immediacy which it generated, to determine its exact character. This was Berkeleianism in the context, of the strong, central belief in divine sovereignty just noticed. This idealism had a theological and human scope. God created the world, which are his actual ideas. But besides these ideas, there are besides himself, human perceivers. An austere ontology of ideas and their possessors. Or is it even more austere for Edwards, simply a divine percipient and his ideas? It is in The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin, (WJE 3) published in 1758, that sets forth the influences of this lifelong idealism, that it is set in the context of divine immediacy. That God does, by his immediate power, uphold every created substance in being, will be manifest, if we consider, that their present existence is a dependent existence, and therefore is an effect, and must have some cause: and the cause must be one of

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Epistemology   109 these two: either the antecedent existence of the same substance, or else the power of the Creator. But it cannot be the antecedent existence of the same substance. For instance, the existence of the body of the moon at this present moment, cannot be the effect of its existence at the last foregoing moment. For not only was what existed the last moment, no active cause, but wholly a passive thing; but this also is to be considered, that no cause can produce effects in a time and place in which itself is not. (WJE 3: 400–1)

Idealism and the Soul There is debate amongst Edwards’s scholars as to the extent of his empiricism and ideal­ ism. Berkeley was clear that both God and human beings were perceivers of ideas. This is fundamental to his subjective idealism. In ‘Berkeley, Edwards, Idealism and the Knowledge of God’, A. W. Wainwright refers to Edwards as a ‘mental phenomenalist’ (Wainwright 2016, 40). Physical objects are nothing in us but the possession of certain ideas, in God the Creator, and in ourselves as his receptive creatures. In Edwards case the idealism is a general phenomenon, that is divine and human agents and their phys­ ic­al environments are nothing but ideas. Due to this immediacy, ‘[W]hat we call spirit is nothing but a composition and series of perceptions [thoughts], or an universe of coex­ isting and successive perceptions connected by . . . wonderful methods and laws’ (WJE 6: 395, 399). Wainwright holds that in his later work Siris (1744) Berkeley’s position was more like Edwards’s (Wainwright 2016, 45–7). Wainwright suggests that this is due to an anthropological difference between Berkeley, who held to human indeterministic free­ dom, as against the determinism of Edwards, who would no doubt hold that God’s rela­ tion to creation, was immediate, not mediated by any agency such as the actions of indeterminate human free will which in any case Edwards held to be logically incoherent. Mental data are as immediately created by God just as truly are physical data. That is one line of evidence. However Edwards also speaks positively of a man’s ‘substance’, using a term that was a bête noire to Locke, ‘a supposed I know not what’ (Locke 1961, II. XXIII. 15). In the same place, Edwards also considers Locke’s account of personal iden­ tity, which is a vital ingredient in his argument for the conclusion that by the sovereign ‘arbitrary’ decree of God, Adam and his progeny form one person. And so what he has to say about personal identity is very pertinent to what he claims by that argument. From these things it will clearly follow, that identity of consciousness depends wholly on a law of nature; and so, on the sovereign will and agency of God; and therefore, that personal identity, and so the derivation of the pollution and guilt of past sins in the same person, depends on an arbitrary divine constitution: and this, even though we should allow the same consciousness not to be the only thing which constitutes oneness of person, but should, besides that, suppose sameness of substance

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110   Paul Helm requisite. For if same consciousness be one thing necessary to personal identity, and this depends on God’s sovereign constitution, it will still follow, that personal identity depends on God’s sovereign constitution.  (WJE 6: 402–3 italicized for emphasis)

The argument here appears to be that personal identity depends on both unity of con­ sciousness and the identity of individual substance, and if only one of these depends for its identity ‘on the sovereign will and agency of God’, then personal identity over time depends on nothing but consciousness. This is a considerable concession in the direction of Berkeley’s position, though it is clearly different. But still, if for Edwards a substance is a substratum, that in which the properties of a thing inhere, there is no discernible difference between one and many substances, and the operational consequences of asserting this difference would appear to be nil. We see here that on certain matters he did not see his idealism as affording exclusive limits to his epistemology.

The Parameters of Edwards’s Epistemology Edwards depended on Berkeleian and Cartesian influences for his metaphysics and was a follower of Locke’s empiricism, though not a consistent follower of these. While appro­ priating significant elements of Locke’s ‘new way of ideas’, there are equally features that Edwards was silent on. For example, as we saw earlier, Locke is known as a sceptic over innate ideas. His Essay commences with an attack on them. But Edwards seems to be silent on this matter, and what he elsewhere writes about mankind’s creation in the image of God with a sensus divinitatis, or about conscience, for example, strongly sug­ gest that he retained innateness in some form. A glance at Edwards’s writings reveals that he was not a scholastic in character. (See quote on language) Gone is most of the characteristic conceptual apparatus of the scho­ lastics, the relative sparseness of their epistemology and the proliferation of logical distinctions. In The Freedom of the Will there is a passage that echoes his view as a student that the idea of there being no God is an absurd intuition. I do suppose that there is a great absurdity, in the nature of things simply con­ sidered, in supposing that there should be no God, or denying being, in supposing an eternal, absolute universal nothing: and therefore that there would be founda­ tions of intuitive evidence that it cannot be, and that eternal infinite most Perfect being must be: if we had strength and comprehension of mind sufficient, to have a clear idea of general and universal being, or, which is the same thing, of the infinite, eternal, most perfect divine Nature and Essence.  (WJE 1: 182)

We would assert the existence of God a priori. But we do not possess such strength and we must look elsewhere. And so:

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Epistemology   111 [T]he way that mankind come to the knowledge of the being of God, is that which the Apostle speaks of (Rom.1.20) . . . We first ascend, and prove a posteriori, or from effects, that there must be an eternal cause; and then secondly, prove by argumenta­ tion, not intuition that this being must be necessarily existent; and the thirdly, from the proved necessity of existence of his existence, we may descend, and prove many of his perfections a priori.  (WJE 1: 182. Also 424–3)

First there are ontological intuitions, musings and longings, and then, cosmological arguments based on our knowledge of states of affairs a posteriori. We see here how firmly Edwards some use scholastic distinctions, necessarily being, infinite, and that between natural and moral ability, for example, and other scholastic anthropological terms such as ‘indifference’ and ‘habit’. And ‘last dictate of the under­ standing’ (WJE 1: 141, 148). To a degree, Edwards appeals to the language of ‘the vulgar’ and writes in the manner of contemporary writers, disregarding the scholastics use of various logical distinctions. He gives importance to definition. He shows great care in his use of language, but also notes what he regards as its limitations. Language is indeed very deficient, in regard of terms to express precise truth concern­ ing our own minds, and their faculties and operations. Words were first formed to express external things; and those that are applied to express things internal and spiritual, are almost all borrowed, and used in sort of figurative sense. Whence there are most of ’em attended with a great deal of ambiguity and unfixedness in their signification, occasioning innumerable doubts, disturbancies and controversies in inquiries and about things of this nature. But language is much less adapted to express things in the mind of the incomprehensible Deity, precisely as they are.  (WJE 1: 376)

It must be said that these reservations do not stop Edwards in making confident judg­ ments about ‘internal and spiritual things’, and about the divine mind. He was working in the midst of cultural change. His influences besides various con­ tem­por­ary philosophers included Sir Isaac Newton. He repeatedly refers to the motives or preferences of the mind (efficient causes); what the preferences are for, say for taking the right-hand rather than the left-hand turn in the road (corresponding to the scholas­ tics’ material causes); and the ends or purposes of action (corresponding to their final causes); and to apprehensions, a way of referring to formal causes. But the compatibilism of The Freedom of the Will was an exercise of the efficient causation of human actions. Edwards’s choice of terms may signal his preference for less formal language, while his neglect of other terms may signal his dissatisfaction with the language of scholasticism and with all terms that are as ‘void of distinct and consistent meaning [as found] in the writings of Duns Scotus, or Thomas Aquinas’ (WJE 1: 228). But what we find is that Edwards’s epistemology was not simply based on con­tem­por­ ary sources and his general religious outlook. He had a high estimate of the Bible’s in­spir­ation and authority and found in its pages a warrant for considering physical nature as a factor of types of the divine activity. This is seen in his ‘Images of Divine Things’ (WJE 11) This combined his love of nature with his emphasis on the beauty and wisdom of God’s works displayed in it.

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112   Paul Helm But other matters more peculiar to Edwards were also consciously integrated into this eclectic philosophical and theological mix. As regards moral and spiritual knowledge, The Religious Affections is central, Edwards is also influenced in this work by Locke’s Essay in various important ways. The editor of the Yale edition of The Religious Affections, the late John E. Smith, in his lengthy introduction to the work, only briefly refers to Locke. But Edwards’s indebtedness to Locke in this book is pervasive. Why did Edwards avoid making explicit reference to his mentor?

The Affections The Affections was written within the parameters of the Lockean view of the relation between reason and revelation. But Locke’s influence went much farther than this, even never uses his name. On a key theme, the character and influence of the affections, Edwards paraphrases Locke extensively, and Locke’s influence is certainly as great here as in the better-known references in Edwards’s book on the will. Edwards, to use a phrase of David Hume’s, thought ‘moral distinctions [were] not derived from reason’ (unlike the intellectualism of his scholastic forbears) but were a matter of affection or inclination, not of reason. We can note some of these influences. When Edwards is characterizing the supernat­ ural character of the Holy Spirit’s regenerating work on the soul, he describes it as imparting ‘what some metaphysicians call a new simple idea’ in the mind of the recipi­ ent (WJE 2: 305). ‘Simple idea’ was Locke’s term of art for ‘the materials of all our knowl­ edge’ (Locke 1961, II. II. ‘Of Simple Ideas’). Uninterpreted touches and tastes, sights and sounds, for example, are instances of simple ideas. Some have embellished this connection between Locke and Edwards, myself included (Helm 1969). According to Edwards, regeneration is the imparting of a new spiritual or supernatural sense, receiving a new simple idea, exercising a sixth sense; and the terminology is clearly Locke’s, though very similar language can be found in a Puritan such as John Owen (1616–83), John Locke’s Oxford tutor. Further, Edwards ratifies Locke’s outlook as expressed in the latter’s chapter ‘Of Enthusiasm’, added by Locke in a later edition, which Edwards had access to. This chapter is situated toward the end of book IV of the Essay, entitled ‘Of Knowledge and Opinion’, coming immediately after chapter 18, ‘Of Faith and Reason, and Their Distinct Provinces’. It supplements Locke’s views in that chapter. His general position on faith and reason is that faith must be ‘reasonable’, that is, it must pass the tests of ‘reasonableness’. For example, Scripture is authoritative because the words of prophets, Christ, and His apostles were validated by miracles; and Locke is generally suspicious of claims to have ‘immediate revelation’ from God and advises against placing one’s faith in such ‘enthusiasm’. This idea of epistemic tests is prominent in Locke’s account of the authority of Scripture. Nonetheless, in the course of opposing enthusiasm in these ways Locke (surprisingly) makes comments in the direction of endorsing the idea of an immediate

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Epistemology   113 work of the Spirit, which Edwards appropriated, while keeping within the broad boundaries of what Locke regarded as reasonable. According to Locke, the ‘enthusiasts’ behave as follows: ‘Whatsoever odd action they find in themselves a strong inclination to do, that impulse is concluded to be a call or direction from heaven and must be obeyed’ (Locke 1961, IV.XIX.6). Enthusiasm lays both reason and revelation to one side, and ‘substitutes in the room of them the ungrounded fancies of a man’s own brain, and assumes them for a foundation both of opinion and conduct’ (Locke 1961, IV.XIX.3). By contrast, Locke writes, ‘Revelation, is natural reason enlarged by a new set of discoveries communicated by GOD immedi­ ately, which reason vouches for the truth of, by the testimony and proofs it gives that they come from God.’ And further: ‘So that he that takes away reason, to make way for revelation, puts out the light of both’ (Locke 1981, IV.XIX.4). Here’s how he develops the argument: The question then here is: How do I know that GOD is the revealer of this to me, that this impression is made upon my mind by the Holy Spirit, and therefore I ought to obey it? If they say that they know it to be true because it is a revelation from God, the reason is good; but then it will be demanded how they know it to be a revelation from God. If they say by the light it brings with it, which shines bright in their minds and they cannot resist, I beseech them to consider whether this be any more than what we have taken notice of already, viz. that it is a revelation because they strongly believe it to be true.  (Locke 1961, IV.XIX.11) The strength of our persuasions are no evidence at all of their own rectitude: crooked things may be as stiff and inflexible as straight, and men may be as positive and peremptory in error as in truth.  (Locke 1961, IV.XIX.11) Light, true light, in the mind is, or can be, nothing else but the evidence of the truth of any proposition; and if it be not a self-evident proposition, all the light it has or can have is from the clearness and validity of those proofs upon which it is received . . . For if strength of persuasion be the light which must guide us, I ask how shall anyone distinguish between the delusions of Satan and the inspirations of the Holy Ghost? He can transform himself into an angel of light.  (Locke 1961, IV.XIX.13)

By contrast to the enthusiasts, holy prophets of old were in a better position. Locke writes, ‘Thus we see the holy men of old, who had revelations from GOD, had something else besides that internal light of assurance in their own minds to testify to them that it was from GOD. They were not left to their own persuasions alone that those persuasions were from GOD, but had outward signs to convince them of the author of those revela­ tions’ (Locke 1961, IV.XIX.15). Locke continues: ‘In what I have said I am far from deny­ ing that GOD can or doth sometimes enlighten men’s minds in the apprehending of certain truths, or excite them to good actions by the immediate influence and assistance of the Holy Spirit, without any extraordinary signs accompanying it. But in such cases too we have reason and the Scripture, unerring rules to know whether it be from GOD or no’ (Locke 1961, IV.XIX.16).

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114   Paul Helm Note the framework of reason and revelation; the opposition to ‘enthusiasm’; the references to the terminology of ‘internal light’ and ‘supernatural light’, familiar to readers of Religious Affections—at least by the time they reach Part III; above all the method of testing claims to be imbued with the Spirit of God in the light of certain criteria, those provided by reason and revelation. And, somewhat more surprisingly, Locke had the idea of the immediate influence of the Sprit. To the modern reader, Locke is a much more secular philosopher than the religious thinker that Edwards understood him to be. The idea of tests or signs for genuine religion is central to Religious Affections.

Moral Epistemology So to a large extent Edwards agrees with Locke on reason and revelation, even though sometimes their particular judgments about what is reasonable or unreasonable in reli­ gion may differ. And Edwards broadens Locke’s tests to include moral and spiritual fruit. No doubt theologically speaking Edwards offered a ‘puritanized’ version of Locke by his more developed appreciation of the connectedness of word and Spirit, which is such a feature of Religious Affections. Edwards’s doctrine of the ‘new sense’ as given to us in The Religious Affections delib­ erately meets the Lockean standards of a ‘simple idea’. Yet it is an immediate, super­ natural intuition from God, not generated by the five senses, but validated by the reason as such. Locke thinks that such experiences are legitimate, provided that they are subordinated to and informed by revelation. Edwards provides the tests, appealing to reason (WJE: 2.132) and revelation to do so, in (as we have seen) a broadly Lockean fashion. For Edwards, what Locke regarded as ‘enthusiasm’ is not ‘spiritual’. He dis­ misses the idea of new revelations and the acquisition of new faculties (WJE: 2.210). No doubt Locke would have regarded the various agitations of the body that Edwards condoned as rather unbecoming and even somewhat embarrassing; but he could hardly have argued that in and of themselves they sometimes had significant negative epistemological value. Edwards in the main thought that such agitations were border­ ing on enthusiasm and were neither here nor there as far as providing evidence of a genuine work of the Holy Spirit. But there is evidence of significant influence of Locke via the controlling force of two simple ideas. 1. Amongst the simple ideas which we receive both from sensation and reflection, pain and pleasure are two very considerable ones. For as in the body there is sen­ sation barely in itself, or accompanied by pain or pleasure, so the thought or per­ ception of the mind is simply so, or else accompanied also with pleasure and pain, delight or trouble, call it how you please. These, like other simple ideas, cannot be described, nor their names defined; the way of knowing them is, as of the simple ideas of the senses, only by experience . . .

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Epistemology   115 2. Things then are good and evil, only in reference to pleasure or pain. That we call good, which is apt to cause or increase pleasure, or diminish pain in us; or else to procure or preserve us the possession of any other good or absence of any evil. And, on the contrary, we name that evil which is apt to produce or increase any pain or diminish any pleasure in us: or else to procure us any evil, or deprive us of any good. By pleasure and pain, I must be understood to mean of body or mind, as they are commonly distinguished; though in truth they be only different constitutions of the mind, sometimes occasioned by disorder in the body, sometimes by thoughts in the mind. 3. Pleasure and pain and that which causes them, good and evil, are the hinges on which our passions turn. (Locke  1961, II.XX.0 All the italicizations are in the original.) Locke then proceeds to illustrate this by reference to the affections of love, hatred, and so on. To complete the picture, toward the end of the chapter, Locke makes some remarks on the effects that pleasure and pain may have on the body. ‘The passions too have most of them, in most persons, operations on the body, and cause various changes in it; which, not being always sensible, do not make a necessary part of the idea of each passion. For shame, which is an uneasiness of the mind upon the thought of having done something which is indecent or will lessen the valued esteem which others have for us, has not always blushing accompanying it’ (Locke  1961, II.XX.17). The bodily effects of God’s operations on the soul were a distinct feature in the revivals, and for Edwards a source of controversy. In this chapter Locke is making a series of claims about the philosophical psychology of human action, that we call that ‘good’ which is apt to cause pleasure, and we call that ‘evil’ which is apt to diminish pleasure or to directly cause pain. Pleasures or pains embrace both bodily and mental states of affairs and, are they ‘hinges’, motivations, of our action. Thirdly, the prospect of such pains and pleasures are what produce passions such as love and hatred, including both our love of both inanimate and animate things. So, pleasure and pain are the motivators of our actions. Finally, Locke argues that passions may have effects on the body, and usually do, though not necessarily. Compare these positions with the following statements in Edwards’s Religious Affections: There are some exercises of pleasedness or displeasedness, inclination and dis­in­clin­ ation, wherein the soul is carried but a little beyond a state of perfect indifference. And there are other degrees above this, wherein the approbation or dislike, pleased­ ness or aversion, are stronger; wherein we may rise higher and higher, till the soul comes to act vigorously and sensibly, and the actings of the soul are with that strength that (through the laws of the union which the Creator has fixed between soul and body) the motion of the blood and animal spirits begins to be sensibly altered; whence oftentimes arises some bodily sensation, especially about the heart and vitals, that are the fountain of the fluids of the body: from whence it comes to

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116   Paul Helm pass, that the mind, with regard to the exercises of this faculty, perhaps in all nations and ages, is called the heart. And it is to be noted, that they are these more vigorous and sensible exercises of this factor, that are called the affections. (WJE 2: 96–7)

Edwards puts essentially this same point in terms of degrees of pleasedness or displeas­ edness and notes that these positive and negative qualities have degrees and that the ‘more vigorous and sensible exercises of this faculty . . . are called the affections’. (WJE 2: 97) And these affections might be so strong as to affect our bodies. Finally, these mechanisms, ‘hinges’ as Locke calls them, which Edwards refers to as the ‘springs’, are motivations to action. ‘The uneasiness a man finds in himself upon the absence of anything whose present enjoyment carries the idea of delight with it is that we call desire; which is greater or less, as that uneasiness is more or less vehement. Where, by the by, it may perhaps be of some use to remark that the chief, if not only, spur to human industry and action is uneasiness’ (Locke 1961, II.XX.6). These words of Locke are taken up by Edwards: Such is man’s nature, that he is very inactive, any otherwise than he is influenced by some affections, either love or hatred, desire, hope, fear or some other. These affec­ tions we see to be the springs that set men agoing, in all the affairs of life, and engage them in all their pursuits; these are the things that put men forward, and carry ’em along, in all their worldly business, and especially are men excited and animated by these, in all affairs, wherein they are earnestly engaged, and which they pursue with vigor  (WJE 2: 101).

So not surprisingly Edwards says that such affections are the ‘springs’ of our actions, as Locke had called them ‘hinges’ (WJE 2: 100–1). So the prospect of pleasure and of pain, simple ideas, is at the heart of Edwards’s account of action, as they were also for Locke. In discussions such as those of Locke and Edwards, we see the beginnings of modern utilitarianism, as in Jeremy Bentham, ‘Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure.’ The opening words of his Introduction to Principles of Morals and Legislation (Bentham 1789). But while pleasure of a certain kind might be signs of the moral good­ ness or badness of an action, Edwards no more than Locke claims that moral goodness consists in having sensations of pleasure, or in the maximizing of them.

Images and Shadows of Divine Things To close this rapid survey of Edwards’s epistemology, I should like to say something about a type of epistemological thinking that may seem strange to many readers, even bizarre. This is in effect an extension of Edwards’s natural theology, mentioned earlier. Edwards does not restrict typology to the type–antitype contrast that is found in

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Epistemology   117 Scripture, in Rom. 5:14, Heb. 9:9, 11:19, but had the conviction that the natural world is not only a general testimony to God’s purposes and wisdom, which was a commonplace in the era of ‘physico-theology’, but that the details of nature are types suggesting God’s supernatural work in the redemption of the elect. Individual features of say flowers and trees serve as types of aspects of redemption (Wainwright 2016, 42–4, 51) (WJE 11: 67). Edwards takes literally the Psalmist’s assertion that night and day speak to us of the divine wisdom and power. But he extends it to cover very many more cases. They all have form and that is part of the divine revelation, and so is not knowable. Not only the natural world, but the incidents of human life and of history, are freighted with an eter­ nal significance; the ephemeral bears witness to the abiding truth of God. (WJE 11) By a kind of Platonic move, these features are also shadows of eternal realities. This is epis­ tem­ol­ogy which merges the sources of both general and special revelation, triggered by Jonathan Edwards’s intellect, piety and imagination, as well as his scientist’s eye for the detail of the living world.

Works Cited Bentham, Jeremy (1789). Introduction to Principles of Morals and Legislation. London: T.Payne. Berkeley, George (1710). Principles of Human Knowledge. Dublin. Fennema, Scott (2017). ‘George Berkeley and Jonathan Edwards on idealism: considering an old question in light of new evidence.’ Intellectual History Review, 8, Nov. 2017. Helm, Paul (2012). ‘A Different Kind of Calvinism?’, in After Jonathan Edwards. eds. Oliver D. Crisp and Douglas A. Sweeney, New York: Oxford University Press. Helm, Paul (1969). ‘John Locke and Jonathan Edwards, a Reconsideration,’ Journal of the History of Philosophy 7 (1): 51–61. Hopkins, Samuel (1760). The Life and Character of the Late reverend, learned and pious Mr Jonathan Edwards, Boston: S. Kneeland, 3–4. Locke, John (1961). Essay Concerning Human Knowledge, 5th Edition, Edited by John Yolton, 2 volumes, London: Dent and Co. Marsden, George (2009). Jonathan Edwards, A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press. Wainwright, A. W. (2016). ‘Berkeley, Edwards, Idealism and the Knowledge of God’, Idealism and Christian Theology, eds. Joshua R. Farris and S. Mark Hamilton. London: Bloomsbury.

Author Bio Paul Helm was educated at Worcester College, Oxford, and taught philosophy at the University of Liverpool from 1964 to 1993. This was followed by a period at King’s College, London, where he held the Chair of the History and Philosophy of Religion, 1993–2000. He has written a number of books, including Eternal God and Belief Policies, and others on the interface of philosophy and Christian theology, including John Calvin’s Ideas, Faith, Form and Fashion, and Human Nature from Calvin to Edwards.

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chapter 8

The Natu r e of G od a n d th e Tr i n it y Kyle C. Strobel

I used to think sometimes with myself, if such doctrines as those of the Trinity and decrees are true, yet what need was there of revealing of them in the gospel? what good do they do towards the advancing [of] holiness? But now I don’t wonder at all at their being revealed, for such doctrines as these are glorious inlets into the knowledge and view of the spiritual world, and the contemplation of supreme things; the knowledge of which I have experienced how much it contributes to the betterment of the heart. If such doctrines as these had not been revealed, the church would never have been let half so far into the view of the spiritual world, as God intends it shall be before the world is at an end. I know by experience, how useful these doctrines be to lead to this knowledge. (WJE 13: 328)

To advance an account of Edwards’s understanding of God, it proves helpful to begin by narrating key approaches taken to this topic in the secondary literature. Using that as a backdrop, I give an account of Edwards’s doctrine of God and how that ­functions in his thought as a whole. To do so, I employ the notion of ‘personalism’ to  make sense of Edwards’s account, raising questions concerning his use of a ­psychological analogy, then turning to the blessedness, beauty, and affection of God. Turning to evaluation, I assess this initial focal point (i.e. Edwards’s personalism) to attend to how this categorization provides helpful interpretive ballast to make sense of his unusual discussion of the divine attributes. Throughout the essay, I  consider Edwards’s account as a traditional, yet idiosyncratic approach, to the ­doctrine of God.

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The Nature of God and the Trinity   119

The State of the Question After the ground-breaking work of Sang Hyun Lee, which I will address below, it was not until the early 2000s that the secondary literature became enamoured with Edwards’s doctrine of the Trinity, a focus and emphasis that remains to this day. While the Trinity has been hotly debated, there are, importantly, several points of agreement. First, everyone writing in this area seems to agree that Edwards’s theology as a whole is founded upon his doctrine of the Trinity. In a more Edwardsean idiom, the Trinity is the fount of the whole theological enterprise. Second, Edwards’s doctrine of the Trinity has within it a peculiar notion of how God is three persons through his use of perichoresis. Third, Edwards’s view does not fit neatly into modern categories (although this was less appreciated in earlier treatments in the secondary literature). This leads, fourth, to an  unstated, and admittedly more provocative, claim concerning Edwards’s specific articulation of God in se: that Edwards provides a unique account of God’s triune life that establishes what might be called an ‘Edwardsean model of the Trinity’. Alongside this broad agreement, however, there is much more disagreement. To help navigate the secondary literature in this area, it proves helpful to provide a taxonomy of the various approaches. While a taxonomy of this sort can be reductionistic, the goal is to chart three distinct instincts of interpretation. Therefore, the goal is not to give an account of each view, but to highlight the unique angle of each approach. I will then build on this in my constructive account developed in the latter half of this essay. First, I turn to Sang Lee’s ‘Radicalizing’ approach, and then second, Amy Plantinga Pauw and Steven Studebaker’s ‘Historical Modelling’, before turning to the current d ­ iscussion in the secondary literature, which is what I call the ‘Reforming’ approach.

Instinct 1: Radicalizing In Sang Lee’s book The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards (2000), the author argues for a view of Edwards’s theology that replaces a traditional Aristotelian–Scholastic metaphysics with a dispositional ontology (i.e. rethinking reality ‘no longer in terms of substance and form but rather in terms of disposition and habit’ (Lee 2000, 170)). This has, according to Lee, radical implications for the doctrine of God: ‘God, therefore, is inherently inclined to enlarge or repeat his primordial actuality through further ­exercises of his dispositional essence’ (Lee 2000, 8). Leaving aside for the moment the truthfulness of this claim, it is important to note a key feature of Lee’s approach to the doctrine of God. Even while affirming that Edwards’s doctrine of God is the fount of his thought, Lee constructed what is now seen as a radical reinterpretation of Edwards’s philosophy and then in the last two chapters of his book applied that to Edwards’s

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120   Kyle C. Strobel doctrine of God. In Lee’s words, ‘The bold reshaping that Edwards gave to traditional Western conceptions of reality and knowledge presuppose an equally bold reconception of the very nature of God’ (Lee 2000, 170). This radical reconception, for Lee, means that God is a tendency toward an increase, or in other words, God’s being is a tendency to ­self-enlargement (Lee 2000, 184). Although Lee’s dispositional ontology has been rejected by the bulk of contemporary Edwards scholars and is not currently being defended, it would be a mistake to write off the importance and depth of Lee’s work. Lee is certainly right about the essential actuality of God’s life and the radical nature of Edwardsean metaphysics. That much is accepted. But by preferencing Edwards’s metaphysical speculations to his doctrine of God, Lee ends up radicalizing Edwards’s doctrine in a way that does not seem true to Edwards’s own development. For instance, Lee seems to conflate Edwards’s talk of God’s nature with his essence and therefore assumes that God is communicating and enlarging his own being, when Edwards’s notion of enlargement does not function in that register. Edwards’s use of dispositions, in his doctrine of God at least, addresses who God is as a personal being, which is why the notion of ‘enlargement’ appears in his theological anthropology just as it does in his theology proper (see Strobel  2017). While Lee’s overarching view continued, up until recently, to hold considerable sway in the guild, it has been called into question by several works on the issue (Bombaro 2012; Crisp 2012, Holmes 2003, Strobel 2013).

Instinct 2: Historical Modelling In the wake of Lee’s work was the rise of two competing positions that, despite their contrast, follow the same overall approach and build upon the same basic foundation. These are referred to here as ‘Historical Models’ because their primary reference for Edwards’s approach is to assume certain historical constructs from the tradition. On the continuum of historical models, the two major poles are, on one side, that Edwards was Augustinian (in utilizing a psychological analogy and/or the mutual-love model) and, on the other, that alongside Edwards’s Augustinianism he also utilizes a kind of social trinitarianism (notice that both views agree that Edwards does follow, at least in part, an Augustinian ‘model’). Steven Studebaker argues for the former, whereas Amy Plantinga Pauw (2002) and William J. Danaher (2004) affirm the latter (Michael McClymond and Gerald McDermott would fall under this latter view as well, and, to a lesser degree, Sang Lee, in his later work; see Lee’s ‘Introduction’ in WJE 21: 12–13). As an approach to Edwards, this overall instinct has been seen to have two downsides. First, Studebaker is forced to downplay differences between Edwards’s thought and Augustine, as well as to broaden the notion of what an ‘Augustinian’ account of the Trinity would entail. This leads him to try to fit Edwards into an Augustinian framework, and, at times, he fails to recognize how Edwards’s view evolves (see Strobel  2013, 41 fn.52). This, furthermore, raises the question of the meaningfulness of the claim that Edwards is Augustinian, instead of simply affirming that Edwards, like many others,

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The Nature of God and the Trinity   121 utilized psychological imagery in his doctrine of God. Second, on the other end of the spectrum of ‘Historical Models’, are those who want to affirm a social trinitarianism in Edwards’s thought. Studebaker rightly criticizes this position for accepting an outmoded ‘Threeness-oneness’ paradigm, which assumes two models of the Trinity in the tradition. On this kind of formulation, one must accept the view that the tradition has competing doctrines of the Trinity, one starting with ‘threeness’ and the other with ‘oneness’, positing Edwards as uniquely holding these in tension. Those who articulate this position seem to have a particular preference on the social dimension of ‘Threeness’, and question whether the ‘Oneness’ or ‘Western’ tradition is able to be truly trinitarian. Studebaker is right to note that this modelling of trinitarian thought is not accurate, and it is no longer an accepted framework to understand the tradition. For both views, there is a reduction of Edwards’s thought into a presupposed framework that muddies rather than clarifies Edwards’s doctrine of the Trinity (for a more robust critique, see Strobel 2013, 65–71).

Instinct 3: Reforming In a short span of time, these views have been displaced by a good deal of activity on the subject, including the view that will be articulated in this essay. Beside my own articulation, the substantial contributions of Oliver Crisp (Crisp 2012) and Seng-Kong Tan’s (Tan 2014) work affirm this overall approach to Edwards’s doctrine of the Trinity. In short, this approach seeks to let Edwards’s traditional instincts and constructive idiosyncrasies speak for themselves concerning his doctrine of the Trinity. In doing so, it accepts that Edwards believed himself to be offering a traditional account of the Trinity (while also recognizing his distinct development). Instead of finding an historical model to locate Edwards within, the ‘Reforming’ approach seeks to take seriously how unique Edwards’s approach was, while also attending to the reality that he believed his view was in line with Reformed and broader catholic impulses. He was reforming within the tradition and not seeking to undermine it. Those holding to this instinct are not in complete agreement concerning Edwards’s doctrine of God, and so this instinct represents an approach to Edwards rather than a school of thought. Nonetheless, these views seem to be coming closer to agreement on Edwards’s doctrine than previous discussions.

God as Trinity When considering Edwards’s doctrine of the Trinity, it is important to briefly mention the context in which he was working. Edwards developed his account against the backdrop of over a century of polemics. There was a growing pressure, leading up to Edwards’s day, through the work of folks like John Biddle and, closer to Edwards’s own context, Samuel Clarke, that signalled the continued influence of trinitarian heresy.

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122   Kyle C. Strobel These scholars were denying the full deity of the Son and, at times, the personhood and deity of the Spirit (see Biddle 1653; Clarke 1712; Dixon 2003, 49–53; Pfizenmaier 1997). Philip Dixon, in his study of seventeenth-century trinitarianism, claims that Biddle’s view had three emphases: 1. that the Trinity was unscriptural; 2. that reason alone could navigate the trinitarian question; and 3. that it is not possible for the word ‘person’ to be used as a real but not absolute distinction, so that if there is one essence there has to be one person, because three persons necessarily entails three separate gods (Dixon 2003, 53). Samuel Clarke’s critiques of traditional trinitarianism trade in similar concerns. What should be clear below is that Edwards’s view challenges each of these assumptions specifically, and Edwards’s own idiosyncrasies target these critiques (see Strobel 2013, 23–71). Starting with the singular divine essence and the singular personhood of the Father, Edwards constructs an account that confirms that ‘reason is sufficient to tell us that there must be these distinctions in God’ (his understanding and will). He then moves to biblical material to show how the understanding and will of God show up in redemptive history, and how, through his use of perichoresis, the term ‘person’ can be used of the Father, Son, and Spirit from within the one essence of God. With this background in mind, and keeping with the desire to let Edwards’s view speak for itself, I develop Edwards’s doctrine of God as ‘religious affection in pure act’. This kind of characterization is true to Edwards’s own language as well as the key focal points of his doctrine. Furthermore, it gestures toward his preference for personal rather than metaphysical judgments in his doctrine of God, and it highlights his emphasis on beauty, affection, happiness and the visual. Put otherwise, we can say that Edwards employed the doctrine of the beatific vision to God’s life in se, utilizing the renewed focus on the blessedness of God in post-Reformed dogmatics to give an account of a God who gazes upon himself in love, beauty, and delight. This description seeks to take Edwards’s starting point seriously when he begins his work on the Trinity, known as the ‘Discourse on the Trinity’ (hereafter ‘Discourse’): When we speak of God’s happiness, the account that we are wont to give of it is that God is infinitely happy in the enjoyment of himself, in perfectly beholding and infinitely loving, and rejoicing in, his own essence and perfections. And accordingly it must be supposed that God perpetually and eternally has a most perfect idea of himself, as it were an exact image and representation of himself ever before him and in actual view. And from hence arises a most pure and perfect energy in the Godhead, which is the divine love, complacence and joy.  (WJE 21: 113)

Besides some idiosyncratic terminology, this initial paragraph reveals Edwards’s traditional instincts, and throughout his corpus this desire to maintain classical ­ ­trinitarianism is clear. For instance, he writes that God ‘is self-existent, independent, of perfect and absolute simplicity and immutability, and the first cause of all things’ (WJE 1: 377). Likewise, in his early sermons, Edwards claims that God is not made up of parts, but is simple pure act (WJE 42, sermon no. 44). What we find here makes sense of Edwards’s belief that his doctrine was following the overall impulse of the tradition

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The Nature of God and the Trinity   123 before him. Along these same lines, at the beginning of the ‘Discourse’, Edwards argues that ‘there are no distinctions to be admitted of faculty, habit and act, between will, inclination and love: but that it is all one simple act’ (WJE 21: 113). Furthermore, God’s simplicity is not contrary to his fullness or actuality but is descriptive of it. God’s life is the pure actuality of Father, Son and Spirit, and as the wholly other God of Scripture, God is infinite, eternal, and immutable. Contrary to instincts among the ‘radicalizing’ and those advocating for a ‘social model’, Edwards clearly moors his account to ­traditional Western psychological models of God and accepts standard attributes of classical trinitarianism. On the other hand, if one were to assume, as with Studebaker, that Edwards is simply reasserting Augustine (a view that often fails to see the progression from his earlier work on the Trinity through to his mature thought in the ‘Discourse’; see Strobel 2013, 23–71), the tendency is to focus on his use of psychological terminology and mute the idiosyncratic emphases in his doctrine (e.g. his focus on beauty). For instance, in his work Religious Affections, Edwards claims that ‘God is God, and distinguished from all other beings, and exalted above ’em, chiefly by his divine beauty, which is infinitely diverse from all other beauty’ (WJE 2: 298). God is beautiful as he is personal and as he partakes in the ‘consent, agreement and union of being to being’ within his own life (WJE 8: 561). ‘Primary beauty’, what Edwards will also call ‘spiritual beauty’, is persons uniting in love. In his ‘Discourse’, this focus is highlighted through his emphasis on God as love: ‘That in John, ‘God is love’ [I John 4:8, 16], shows that there are more persons than one in the Deity: for it shows love to be essential and necessary to the Deity, so that his nature consists in it; and this supposes that there is an eternal and necessary object, because all love respects another, that is, the beloved’ (WJE 21: 113–14). This focus on beauty, happiness, and the personal dimension of these realities are all emphases in Edwards’s account, and are all funded by his exegesis. This is simply the God that Edwards is confronted with in Scripture, and therefore these emphases will be given preference in my own account developed here.

Edwards’s Personalism While it is anachronistic to use the term ‘personalism’ in relation to Edwards, I think it is a helpful categorization of his view. By ‘personalism’, I mean only that the notion of personhood is fundamental for Edwards, and that this reality drives a good deal of his theological reflection concerning the nature of God. In this sense, rather than starting his doctrine with the singularity of the divine essence and attributes, Edwards starts with the singularity of the divine personhood. This instinct drives him to speak in terms of personhood rather than abstract discussions of the divine essence (without losing an account of the divine essence). I want to offer the term ‘personalism’ as an alternative to the standard understanding of Edwards’s view, which sees it as a form of the psychological analogy (found throughout the tradition). Technically, Edwards does not employ a psychological analogy in his account of God. Rather, for Edwards, God is

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124   Kyle C. Strobel personal, and he uses his understanding of personhood to make sense of the triune processions. This proves a more adequate categorization because it can attend more meaningfully to Edwards’s development as well as to how he focuses on the singular psychology, and yet triune personhood and sociality, of God. Two key features of his work highlight this. First, Edwards’s notion of personhood and the psychology of persons (i.e. faculties) is not used analogically but univocally. When Edwards says that God has an understanding and a will, that is not an analogy for him, but is simply a true description of God’s life. There is one definition of personhood, divine and human, and Edwards understands this univocally. What protects the Creator/creature distinction is his use of infinity, but it also leads Edwards to make the odd claim that ‘Though the divine nature be vastly different from that of created spirits, yet our souls are made in the image of God: we have understanding and will, idea and love, as God hath, and the difference is only in the perfection of degree and manner’ (WJE 21: 113—emphasis mine). Second, and perhaps more obviously, toward the end of the ‘Discourse’ Edwards names two other ‘eminent and remarkable images of the Trinity among the creature’: the first being the psychological analogy and the second being the sun. On the former he states, ‘The one is in the spiritual creation, [the] soul of man. There is the mind, and the understanding or idea, and the spirit of the mind, as it is called in Scripture, i.e. the ­disposition, the will or affection’ (WJE 21: 113). This sounds remarkably close to the view most ascribe to Edwards, and yet he claims that this is not what he was advancing in his argument in the ‘Discourse’. Edwards’s polemical partners, who no doubt shaped his emphases in the ‘Discourse’, argued that a singular divine essence entails a singular divine person. Taking this as common ground, Edwards starts with the singular personhood of God, and given that persons are certain kinds of things (beings with understanding and will), Edwards articulates the inner psychology of God’s perfect life, accepting a univocal relation between human and divine psychology. The personhood of God, as an overarching category, moors to itself the perfection, not simply of divine mind, but the perfection of personness, which, for Edwards, includes affection, blessedness, beauty, and sociality. At this point, I turn more explicitly to his development of the inner personhood of God, before turning back to some of these broader features of his account.

The Triune Processions Following much of the tradition, Edwards makes use of psychological imagery to articulate the triune processions (however idiosyncratic his univocal turn was, the overall language is quite traditional). In his usage, God is a singular person whose psychological functioning mirrors our own. As an account of God’s infinite happiness, beauty, and love, there has to be some kind of real relation in the Godhead. Utilizing the aesthetic term, ‘excellency’, Edwards describes this reality: ‘One alone, without any reference to any more, cannot be excellent; for in such a case there can be no manner of relation no way, and therefore, no such thing as consent’ (WJE 6: 337). Consent is ­fundamental for beauty, because true beauty requires willing subjects,

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The Nature of God and the Trinity   125 and God is the pure act of consent in himself. As Edwards states, early in his reflections on the Trinity: [T]here must have been an object from all eternity which God infinitely loves. But we have showed that all love arises from the perception, either of consent to being in general, or consent to that being that perceives. Infinite loveliness, to God, therefore, must consist either in infinite consent to entity in general, or infinite consent to God. But we have shown that consent to entity and consent to God are the same, because God is the general and only proper entity of all things. So that ’tis necessary that that object which God infinitely loves must be infinitely and perfectly consenting and agreeable to him; but that which infinitely and perfectly agrees is the very same essence, for if it be different it don’t infinitely consent. Again, we have shown that one alone cannot be excellent, inasmuch as, in such case, there can be no consent. Therefore, if God is excellent, there must be a plurality in God; otherwise, there can be no consent in him.  (WJE 13: 283–4)

God is beautiful, and God is beautiful because he is a being whose existence is the ­infinite consent of love. Because God is simple and infinite, his self-knowledge is a ­repetition of the Godhead, leading him to claim, ‘I do suppose the Deity to be truly and properly repeated by God’s thus having an idea of himself; and that this idea of God is a substantial idea and has the very essence of God, is truly God, to all intents and purposes, and that by this means the Godhead is really generated and repeated’ (WJE 21: 114). The Father generates the divine understanding through his self-reflection: ‘God’s idea of himself is absolutely perfect, and therefore is an express and perfect image of him, exactly like him in every respect’ (WJE 21: 114). Edwards, revealing his univocal understanding of personhood, claims, ‘if a man had a perfect reflex or contemplative idea of every thought at the same moment or moments that that thought was, and of every exercise at and during the same time that that exercise was, and so through a whole hour: a man would really be two’ (WJE 21: 116). As a spiritual, infinite, and eternal being, this reflex idea generates a procession of the divine essence, such that ‘there is another person begotten; there is another infinite, eternal, almighty, and most holy and the same God, the very same divine nature’ (WJE 21: 116). Turning away from the procession of the divine understanding, Edwards avers, ‘there proceeds a most pure act, and an infinitely holy and sweet energy arises between the Father and Son: for their love and joy is mutual, in mutually loving and delighting in each other’ (WJE 21: 121). Building on this feature of the divine blessedness, Edwards continues, ‘This is the eternal and most perfect and essential act of the divine nature, wherein the Godhead acts to an infinite degree and in the most perfect manner possible. The Deity becomes all act; the divine essence itself flows out and is as it were breathed forth in love and joy’ (WJE 21: 121) The pure actuality of God’s life is the procession of the Spirit as the divine will, love, holiness and beauty, and the Spirit’s procession helps establish the relations within the Godhead: though the Holy Ghost proceeds both from the Father and the Son, yet he proceeds from the Father mediately by the Son, viz. by the Father’s beholding himself in the

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126   Kyle C. Strobel Son. But he proceeds from the Son immediately by himself by beholding the Father in himself. The beauty and excellency and loveliness of the divine nature, though from the Father first and originally, yet is by the Son and nextly from him. The joy and delight of the divine nature is in the Father by the Son, but nextly and immediately in the Son.  (WJE 21: 143)

Edwards upholds the Western emphasis on the Spirit’s procession by the Father and the Son (filioque), and does so for its original reasons—to protect against subordinating the Son to a lesser divine status than the Father (contra Arianism). But Edwards goes farther than protecting the Son’s full deity, wanting to articulate a vision of the Trinity where all three persons of God are honoured according to their specific ‘dignity’. For instance, the Father, being the ‘fountain of the Godhead, sustains dignity of deity’, and yet the Son has ‘a peculiar honor’ because everything is ‘immediately from the Son’ (WJE 21: 143). Likewise, Edwards argues in his work, ‘On the Equality of the Persons of the Trinity’, ‘the Holy Ghost has this peculiar dignity: that he is as it were the end of the other two, the good that they enjoy, the end of all procession’ (WJE 21: 146). Edwards shows how he is attempting to articulate an account of equality among the persons when he states, In one respect the Father has the superiority: he is the fountain of Deity, and he begets the beloved Son. In another respect the Son has the superiority, as he is the great and first object of divine love . . . In another respect the Holy Ghost, that is, divine love, has the superiority, as that is the principle that as it were reigns over the Godhead and governs his heart, and wholly influences both the Father and the Son in all they do.  (WJE 21: 147)

Edwards develops the processions of the understanding and will with an eye to ­exegesis, showing that the divine understanding (Logos) and the divine willing (Spirit) show up in redemption history as the Son and Spirit respectively (Scripture bearing ­witness to this history). The strength and weakness of psychological imagery are its clear biblical grounding and yet speculative tendencies, respectively. In Edwards one discovers both. In agreement with his polemical partners, who are all biblicists, and many of whom are anti-trinitarian, Edwards can begin on common ground by asserting that God is a person, and as such, he understands and wills. From that point he turns to his biblical work, one of the under-appreciated strengths of his account, to show how his own depiction of the divine understanding and willing makes sense of how Scripture unveils the divine economy. For Edwards, Christ is the understanding of God, therefore it is fitting that Scripture would speak of Jesus as the image of God, the face of God, and the brightness, effulgence, and shining forth of God’s glory, as well as the wisdom of God (WJE 21: 117–19). Likewise, with the Spirit, Edwards finds in Scripture an articulation of the Spirit as the love of God, and he sees in the name of the Spirit ‘the divine nature as subsisting in pure act and perfect energy, and as flowing out and breathing forth in infinitely sweet and vigorous affection’ (WJE 21: 122). The Spirit, for Edwards, as the Holy Spirit, is the spirit of God’s holiness, and as such, the holiness of God himself.

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The Nature of God and the Trinity   127 In considering this, Edwards claims, ‘God’s holiness is the infinite beauty and excellency of his  nature,’ showing how the Spirit simply is the beauty and excellency of God (WJE 21: 123). The downside of beginning an account with the singular personhood of God, and one of the major critiques of modern ‘social trinitarians’ against the use of psychological ‘analogies is that this kind of modelling does not give us one God as three persons, but rather one God with two faculties. Edwards himself recognizes that he has not really argued for a three-personed God, at least not in the initial phase of his argument in  the ‘Discourse’. Up until this point, Edwards has argued for a God whose perfect understanding and will appear in the biblical narrative as God’s self-giving in redemption. It is here where the truly unique feature of Edwards’s account comes to the fore. Edwards turns to perichoresis, asserting, ‘the whole divine essence is supposed truly and properly to subsist in each of these three—viz. God, and his understanding and love— and that there is such a wonderful union between them that they are after an ineffable and inconceivable manner one in another; so that one hath another, and they have communion in one another, and are as it were predicable of one another’ (WJE 21: 133). Edwards does not use the term ‘perichoresis’, but his focus on interpenetration has been taken as a form of perichoresis. If a person is a being with understanding and will, then there are three persons in God if they interpenetrate each other and share each aspect of personhood. He explains this by stating, ‘the Father understands because the Son, who is the divine understanding, is in him. The Father loves because the Holy Ghost is in him. So the Son loves because the Holy Spirit is in him and proceeds from him. So the Holy Ghost, or the divine essence subsisting in divine love, understands because the Son, the divine idea, is in him’ (WJE 21: 133). On this account, perichoresis establishes the triune personhood of God, showing how understanding and willing can be persons through mutual interpenetration, each offering and sharing in the fullness of what personhood entails. The advantage of this kind of construction is that it avoids the error of reading the term ‘person’ as ‘individual’, showing instead that a person can be a person through participation; individuality is not at the core of what personhood entails. ‘What insight I have of the nature of minds,’ Edwards claims. ‘I am convinced that there is no guessing what kind of union and mixtion, by consciousness or otherwise, there may be between them’ (WJE 13: 330). Furthermore, this explains Jesus’ claim that he is in the Father, and that the Father is in him: ‘so may it be said concerning all the persons of the Trinity: the Father is in the Son, and the Son is in the Father; the Holy Ghost is in the Father, and the Father in the Holy Ghost; the Holy Ghost is in the Son, and the Son in the Holy Ghost’ (WJE 21: 133).

The Blessedness and Affection of God As an account of God focused on the personhood of God, the themes of love, beauty, affection, and blessedness are central features of this account. Richard Muller, in his vast

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128   Kyle C. Strobel exposition of Reformed Orthodoxy (2003), notes the retrieval of blessedness in Reformed dogmatic systems, stating, In the era of orthodoxy, however, the topic of divine beatitude and felicity returns to the theological systems. . . . The concept of divine blessedness is, moreover, conveyed, not through a single term, but through several predicates that are used almost interchangeably by the Reformed orthodox: blessedness or beatitude (beatitudo), joy or happiness (felicitas), delight (delectatio), and contentment or self-fulfillment (complacentia).  (Muller 2003, 381)

Edwards’s sermon on 1 Timothy 6:15 exposits the key biblical and theoretical ­material  for this impulse in Edwards’s thought, and yet remains unpublished and under-appreciated in the secondary literature. Yet this sermon is the most important articulation of Edwards’s notion of the divine blessedness outside of the ‘Discourse’, expositing the doctrine: ‘God is a Being possessed of the most absolutely perfect ­happiness’ (WJE 53, sermon no. 494). Edwards is picking up on themes found in the ‘Discourse’, where he begins his account of God’s life in se with the notion of happiness, and where the Spirit is seen as the happiness of God itself pouring forth between the Father and Son. There, in his account of perichoresis broadly, Edwards states, ‘Understanding may be predicated of this love, because it is the love of the understanding both objectively and subjectively’ (WJE 21: 133). This notion of the objective and ­subjective poles of happiness plays an important role in his development of the divine blessedness. In his sermon in 1 Tim 6:15, Edwards states: In order to [have] happiness two things are requisite: viz. an objective and a ­subjective good. The objective good is the object that is enjoyed—that in the beholding, possessing, and enjoying of which the being that enjoys is happy. The subjective good is the excellency and pleasure of the being himself, who enjoys the object, for if there be never so excellent an object possessed, yet there can be no happiness unless the being that possesses be in a state of such perfection as to be in the best capacity to enjoy that good. ’Tis from the union of the subject and object and their agreeing together that happiness arises, but unless the subject be fitted there will be no harmony and so no happiness will arise from the union of the subject and object.  (WJE 53, sermon no. 494)

Here, Edwards advances a description of happiness in general, and then continues with a specific focus on happiness within God: ‘Both the objective and subjective good wherein the happiness of God consists is within himself. The object that is the good that he enjoys is himself. The beauty and loveliness of this object, in beholding which he is happy [in] is of himself. The beauty is not received from any other.’ Following Edwards’s desire to work faithfully but constructively within the tradition, this focus on happiness does not somehow undermine God’s simplicity and immutability, but these serve to name the wholly other reality of this happiness. Therefore, Edwards summarizes, ‘It must follow that he has this infinite happiness in an absolute independence, eternity,

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The Nature of God and the Trinity   129 and immutability, and so that his happiness is in all respects absolutely perfect’ (WJE 53, sermon no. 494). This reveals how happiness, beauty, and affection are all intertwined in Edwards’s account. God is infinite happiness as he is the archetype of beauty, love, holiness and affection. He is the perfect union of love and the pure act of affection pouring forth with such vigour and perfection that it can be called, simultaneously, ecstasy and rest. Edwards’s characteristic focus on the visual is once again highlighted here, since God ‘has infinite objective good as he has infinite beauty to behold’ (WJE 53, sermon no. 494). God beholds his own perfection in the bond of love, and that perfection is the Son and that love is the Spirit. God’s self-contemplation is never mere speculation on this account, however, because ‘he has infinite subjective good as he has infinite holiness to love and delight in his own beauty and excellency’ (WJE 53, sermon no. 494). The focus on happiness requires an objective and subjective dimension, the Son and the Spirit respectively, that establishes an object to behold and delight pouring forth. The same is true for religious affection. Religious affection necessitates a capacity to see and behold God in Christ (objective) and to have a vigorous inclination of the will towards God through the Spirit (subjective). This reality is established first and foremost in God’s life in se, but it is this life that is given over to the creature in salvation. God’s life is the beatific vision in pure act, made visible in Christ through the Spirit’s illumination.

The Social and Personal Reality of God Now that I have canvassed the broad features, both traditional and idiosyncratic, in Edwards’s doctrine of God, it proves helpful to reflect on what interpretive value my description has. As already seen, personhood was primarily emphasized concerning the Father, with the Son as the understanding and the Spirit as the willing of the Father. One might get the impression, regardless of Edwards’s use and emphasis on perichoresis, that it undermines the genuine personhood of either the Son or the Spirit. Although it would not be accurate to say that this critique is true of Edwards’s account, he did worry about it and advance his argument along just these lines (with particular emphasis on the personhood of the Spirit, a contested issue among anti-trinitarians of his day). In his ‘Treatise on Grace’, written after his ‘Discourse’, Edwards’s personalism shines forth: I think the Scripture does sufficiently reveal the Holy Spirit as a proper divine person; and thus we ought to look upon him as a distinct personal agent. He is often spoken of as a person, revealed under personal characteristics and in personal acts, and it speaks of his being acted on as a person; and the Scripture plainly ascribes everything to him that properly denotes a distinct person. And though the word “person” be rarely used in the Scriptures, yet I believe that we have no word in the English language that does so naturally represent what the Scripture reveals of the distinction of the eternal three—Father, Son and Holy Ghost—as to say they are one God but three persons.  (WJE 21: 181)

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130   Kyle C. Strobel Along with his emphasis on personhood, Edwards also believes his account can ­adequately speak to the ‘society’ of God, both concerning God in se and God in relation to believers. Furthermore, Edwards does this within his description of the singular ­personal psychology of God and not as a replacement for it. While Edwards can use social metaphors to talk about God in himself, he does so to describe the nature of God as the fullness of love and the fullness of love overflowing. ‘The happiness of the Deity’, Edwards proclaims, ‘as all other true happiness, consists in love and society’ (WJE 21: 187). Likewise, ‘this Spirit of love is the “bond of perfectness” (Col. 3:14) throughout the whole blessed society or family in heaven and earth, consisting of the Father, the head of the family, and the Son, and all his saints that are the disciples, seed and spouse of the Son’ (WJE 21: 186). On this scheme, God’s life of love, understood through a description of the processions and perichoresis, is the good available to the creature. There is no other true good. To know this good, the creature must come to partake in the fullness of God, which Edwards claims consists in the holiness and happiness of God (WJE 21: 187). In his sermon, ‘True Grace is Divine’, Edwards claims that ‘Grace is a communication or a participation of God’s own fullness or of his good, a partaking of his riches, his own treasure, a partaking in some sort of his own bounty and happiness’ (Minkema, Neele, Strobel 2019, 354). This is the nature of the ‘society’ Edwards is talking about. It is not funded by individuation but by union and communion in the good of God. So what one discovers in Edwards is a vision of God’s perfection that is the ground and depth of his ‘enlargement’ to the creature. With Lee, there is truly an ‘enlargement’ of God’s glory, but this is just a description of God’s ad extra communication of his fullness (WJE 8: 527–8). Contrary to Lee, there is no ‘further actualization of God’s own being’ (Lee 2000, 201). In Edwards’s thought, there is no need to set God’s perfection against his communication; the pure act simplicity of God found in classical theism is not somehow antagonistic to the trinitarianism and economic activity of the God it was aimed at defending. Rather, the immutability, simplicity, and eternality of God are the ground by which God freely gives himself. Furthermore, in this free gift of himself, God does not have to diminish the society of his perfect being to seek the creature’s good. Rather than setting God and his interest against each other, ‘God’s acting for himself, or making himself his last end, and his acting for their sake’, Edwards claims, ‘are not to be set in opposition; or to be considered as the opposite parts of a disjunction: they are rather to be considered as coinciding one with the other, and implied one in the other’ (WJE 8: 440). Notice the non-contrastive nature of Edwards’s account. God’s enlargement does not minimize, nor does it define, God’s perfection. God enlarges his life, which is the infinite, complete, and wholly actual holiness and goodness of God. The creature does not partake in God’s essence, but in his fullness, and as such, God is not diminished nor develops, but opens his life to the creature that they may embrace their true end. By focusing on the nature of divine personhood, and even making his account an explicit defence of the triune personhood of God, Edwards refuses to pit God’s perfection and communication against each other, just as he refuses to set in contrast God’s being-for-himself and his being-for-the creature. God’s fullness, immutability, and simplicity are not realities needing to be emptied to make sense of God’s self-giving, but serve as the fountain by which that self-giving is possible. As Edwards explains in his

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The Nature of God and the Trinity   131 missive to a grieving mother, ‘The eternal and immutable happiness of the Deity himself is represented in Scripture as a kind of social happiness, in the society of the persons of the Trinity’ (WJE 16: 415). The social dimension of God’s triune life is not to be set against his immutable and eternal nature. Because of this, it is hopefully apparent how attempts to see a social trinitarianism in Edwards’s doctrine of God, as a model of the Trinity separate from, and in contrast to, his use of psychological imagery, is simply a reduction of his personalism. Edwards does not recognize a problem of constructing a robust notion of triune personhood upon personalism and perichoresis.

Personalism and the Divine Attributes By addressing Edwards’s view as he presents it, from within his own idiom and construction, we can see how his personalism helps to explain some of his more idiosyncratic theological decisions. For instance, we can see how this illumines Edwards’s understanding of the divine attributes. It is helpful to attend to a confusing claim Edwards made about the attributes in the ‘Discourse’: ‘It is a maxim amongst the divines that everything that is in God is God, which must be understood of real attributes and not mere modalities. . . . But if it be meant that real attributes of God, viz. his understanding and love, are God, then what we have said may in some measure explain how it is so: for Deity subsists in them distinctly, so they are distinct divine ­persons’ (WJE 21: 132). This quote, in particular, has raised some key questions about how Edwards understood the divine attributes, and how he developed the ‘real’ versus ‘relational’ distinction (see Strobel 2013, 234–42 for an overview of three views, and, in response, Crisp 2015, 36–59). In setting up the real and relational distinction, Edwards claims, ‘there must be these distinctions in the Deity, viz. of God (absolutely considered), and the idea of God, and, love and delight; and there are no other real distinctions in God that can be thought [of]’ (WJE 21: 131). Here we see Edwards rehashing his main argument throughout the ‘Discourse’, that what is real in the divine Being names a person of the Triune God (even if they appear, at first, as mere faculties of the divine Being). Continuing, he states, ‘There are but these three distinct real things in God [i.e., God (absolutely considered), and the idea of God, and love and delight]; whatsoever else can be mentioned in God are nothing but mere modes or relations of existence. There are his attributes of infinity, eternity and immutability: they are mere modes of existence’ (WJE 21: 131). While this is odd ­language, the overall tenor seems clear: when something describes the extent of ­existence, it is not a ‘real’ thing in God. Take immutability as the clearest example. Edwards claims that everything that is in God is God, but thinks it incoherent to claim that immutability is somehow God (WJE 21: 132). What would it mean to say that ‘being without change’ is God? It is important to note, with Oliver Crisp, that Edwards’s notion of ‘relative attributes’ name traditional accounts of God’s incommunicable attributes that cannot be predicated of creaturely realities (e.g. infinity) (see Crisp 2014, 38). But, contra Crisp, Edwards is saying more than that these are attributes of the divine essence that are shared among the persons (although this is true) (see Crisp 2014, 38). Rather,

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132   Kyle C. Strobel Edwards is claiming that it does not make sense to say that these are ‘in’ God (how is ‘without change’ in God?). Edwards argues that these are descriptive of the attributes in God, but because they are naming what he calls degrees, circumstances, and relations, then they cannot be considered ‘in’ God (however true they are) (WJE 8: 528). To say that God is infinite, Edwards claims, ‘is not so properly a distinct kind of good in God, but only expresses the degree of the good there is in him’ (WJE 8: 528—emphasis original). Put more simply, these relational attributes are second order descriptions of the ‘quantity’ and mode of existence of God’s real attributes (this is a progression from my earlier view seeing these as nothing more than Cambridge Properties; see Strobel 2013, 234–42). For my purposes here, what is particularly interesting about Edwards’s description is how he relates it to creaturely existence. Edwards states, ‘But as for all those other things [here he is talking about relative attributes]—of extent, duration, being with or without change, ability to do—they are not distinct real things, even in created spirits, but only mere modes and relations’ (WJE 21: 132—my emphasis). When we consider Edwards’s personalism, we once again see that Edwards is less interested in abstract metaphysical claims about the divine essence. This is not what God-talk is for Edwards. Rather, to talk about God is to talk about who God is; or, maybe better, to talk about God’s being simply is to talk about who God is as Father, Son, and Spirit. This is not to say that Edwards stopped speaking about the divine essence, he certainly didn’t, but his focus on the divine essence is to talk about the personhood of God. To describe God is to describe his personhood and his triune personalism, which means addressing ‘real attributes’ and not ‘mere modes of existence’ (which relate to the quantity or the effect of the attributes [WJE 21: 131]). The reason why Edwards makes this claim has to do with his understanding of what constitutes personal existence—divine or human. This personalism leads Edwards to reconstruct how one speaks of God around the nature of personhood, which is why he claims that his real/relative distinction is true ‘even in ­created spirits’. When speaking of persons, their temporality or changeability do not define their being. Rather, the nature of personhood requires that one speaks of the true glory of a person—the true good of their being—and for Edwards, as we have seen, this is a discussion of the understanding and willing of God, the only real attributes of God’s life.

Conclusion By focusing my account on Edwards’s personalism and his emphasis on the beauty, blessedness, and pure actuality of God’s life, we have seen a position with traditional instincts woven into an idiosyncratic tapestry. If we consider an ‘Edwardsean model’ of the Trinity, therefore, several key emphases come to mind: personhood, perichoresis, happiness, and vision. None of these are unique to him, and yet, as far as I can tell, no one has pulled these various facets together into this kind of account. Furthermore, Edwards’s emphasis on beauty and affection, in line with the previous discussion, give his account its characteristic depth, highlighting the integration of his whole theological system into a harmony that exudes that beauty. Because of this, Edwards believed his argument to be

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The Nature of God and the Trinity   133 an adequate explication of ‘that blessed Trinity that we read of in the holy Scriptures’ (WJE 21: 131), and faithful to what the tradition had passed on to him. But his overarching instinct that drives the truly idiosyncratic moves he makes, is clearly his personalism. Starting with the singular personhood of God and then advancing an emphasis on the personhood of the three, drives the key features of his doctrine. In light of his personalism, I recall three of these emphases by way of conclusion. These moves are how Edwards makes his distinctive personalism, in his mind, accord with traditional instincts. The first move Edwards makes that governs what follows is his decision to employ a univocal account in his understanding of personhood. Formally, personhood is the same, human or divine. This leads to Edwards’s second emphasis, deriving from the first, which is to employ the psychological imagery to understand the Son as God’s understanding and the Spirit the love/will of the Father. While this sounds like typical trinitarian appropriation, it isn’t. While someone like Augustine was happy to see the Son as the understanding of God, he made it clear that he did not mean this beyond appropriation. In fact, Augustine names Edwards’s view specifically in order to reject it, making clear that the Son and Spirit were not God’s actual understanding and loving. (Augustine 1991, 419). On Edwards’s view, contrary to Augustine, the Son is the Father’s understanding and the Spirit is the will, love, and holiness of the Father. Last, in order to articulate an account of the Trinity, and not an account of a singular God with perfect understanding and willing, Edwards advances perichoresis. There is such a tight interconnection and perfection in God’s life that threeness is predicated of God from within his oneness, and not in spite of it, even though his use of the singular personhood of God makes God’s singularity primary. This is contrary to McDermott and McClymond when they claim that, ‘Edwards usually started his doctrine of God with the divine Three rather than the divine essence’ (McClymond and McDermott 198). As we have seen, the opposite is true. Edwards starts with the singular divine essence  and the singular ­personhood of God as the primal and necessary feature of God’s life that helps to establish triunity rather than tritheism. Importantly, particularly for those interpreters who want to see Edwards’s social imagery as necessitating a ­different model of the Trinity than one predicated on a singular psychology, it is within his use of the psychological/personalist imagery, with his doctrine of perichoresis, that Edwards states, ‘Hereby we may more clearly understand the equality of the persons among themselves, and that they are every way equal in the society or family of the three’ (WJE 21: 135). Edwards does not see social metaphors to be antagonistic to his account as developed through his personalism and perichoresis. Rather, in his mind, his account allows him to speak of the plurality and sociality of the Father, Son, and Spirit because of their essential unity and oneness.

Works Cited Augustine (1991). The Trinity. Ed. John E. Rotelle, O.S.A.; trans. Edmund Hill, O.P. The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century. New York: New City Press. Bombaro, John J. (2012). Jonathan Edwards’s Vision of Reality: The Relationship of God to the World, Redemption History, and the Reprobate. Princeton Theological Monograph Series. Eugene, OR: Wiph & Stock.

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134   Kyle C. Strobel Biddle, John (1653). XII Arguments Drawn out of the Scripture in The Apostolical and True Opinion Concerning the Holy Trinity. London. Clarke, Samuel (1712). The Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity: In Three Parts. London: Printed for James Knapton. Crisp, Oliver (2012). Jonathan Edwards on God and Creation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crisp, Oliver (2014). ‘Jonathan Edwards on the Trinity.’ Jonathan Edwards Studies. 4 (1): 21–41. Crisp, Oliver (2015). Jonathan Edwards Among the Theologians. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Danaher, William J. (2004). The Trinitarian Ethics of Jonathan Edwards. Columbia Series in Reformed Theology. Louisville: Westminster John Knox. Dixon, Philip (2003). Nice and Hot Disputes: The Doctrine of the Trinity in the Seventeenth Century. London: T&T Clark. Holmes, Stephen (2003). ‘Does Jonathan Edwards Use a Dispositional Ontology? A Response to Sang Hyun Lee.’ Jonathan Edwards: Philosophical Theologian. Ed. Oliver Crisp and Paul Helm. Aldershot: Ashgate. 99–114. Lee, Sang Hyun (2000). The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Minkema, Kenneth; Neele, Adriaan; and Strobel, Kyle (2019). Jonathan Edwards: Spiritual Writings. Classics of Western Spirituality. Mahway, NJ: Paulist Press. Muller, Richard  A. (2003). The Divine Essence and Attributes Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics. Vol. 3. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. Pauw, Amy Plantinga (2002). The Supreme Harmony of All: The Trinitarian Theology of Jonathan Edwards. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Pfizenmaier, Thomas  C. (1997). The Trinitarian Theology of Dr Samuel Clarke (1675–1729): Context, Sources, and Controversy. New York: Brill. Strobel, Kyle (2013). Jonathan Edwards’s Theology: A Reinterpretation. London: T&T Clark. Strobel, Kyle (2017). ‘Being Seen and Being Known: Jonathan Edwards’s Theological Anthropology.’ The Global Edwards. Ed. Rhys Bezzant. Eugene, OR: Wiph & Stock. 158–78. Tan, Seng-Kong (2014). Fullness Received and Returned: Trinity and Participation in Jonathan Edwards. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press.

Suggested Reading Crisp, Oliver (2012). Jonathan Edwards on God and Creation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Strobel, Kyle (2013). Jonathan Edwards’s Theology: A Reinterpretation. London: T&T Clark. Tan, Seng-Kong (2014). Fullness Received and Returned: Trinity and Participation in Jonathan Edwards. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press.

Author Bio Kyle Strobel (PhD, University of Aberdeen) is the associate professor of spiritual theology at Talbot School of Theology, Biola University. He has written Jonathan Edwards’s Theology: A Reinterpretation (T&T Clark) and Jonathan Edwards: An Introduction to His Thought (Eerdmans) (co-written with Oliver Crisp) and has edited several other works on Edwards’s thought.

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chapter 9

The Person of Chr ist S. Mark Hamilton

Introduction Jonathan Edwards’s doctrine of the person of Christ is one of, if not, the most fertile and still largely under-researched areas in all of Edwards studies.1 His Christology is a matrix of various theological and philosophical complexities. This may well account for the lack of attention paid to his Christology in the literature to this point. It may also account for the lack of consensus among interpreters on where to most accurately locate his doctrine within the larger picture of catholic Christology. For example, there are those interpreters who depict Edwards’s Christology as Antiochene—a logos–anthropos or word–human being Christology—and are quick to point out his potential lapse into Nestorianism (Jenson  2005, 79–81). There are others who categorize Edwards’s Christology in more Alexandrian terms—a logos–sarx or word-flesh Christology—and are quick to raise the warning flag of Apollinarianism (Tan 2014, 143). Looking beyond these historic attributions, and any fear of heresy to which they might give way, there are still others who see Edwards’s Christology as potentially fatally flawed for reason of his more exotic philosophical commitments (Crisp 2016). Disparities among interpreters notwithstanding, the number of serious, literatureshaping, inquiries into Edwards’s Christology makes for a rather short list. The most serious studies are, in my opinion, the three I have just listed (Jenson 2005; Tan 2010; Crisp 2016). What makes these works so uncommonly profitable, among their many other respective virtues, is their common assumption that understanding Edwards’s Christology requires an understanding of both the theological and philosophical axes of 1  I am grateful to Oliver Crisp, Richard Cross, Josh Farris, Paul Helm, and Tim Pawl for their comments on previous iterations of this chapter.

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136   S. Mark Hamilton his thinking as well as the history in which his thinking developed. In keeping with this common assumption, it is the chief aim of this chapter to locate Edwards’s two-natures doctrine within the scope of some more traditional theological distinctions, albeit along the lines of the unique philosophical system that Edwards employed. But before we start chopping our way through the jungle of those ideas that make up Edwards’s Christology, there are a couple of things worth mentioning. First, whatever classification or category seems most befitting to describe Edwards’s two-natures doctrine and the potential worries it faces (i.e. heresy or ­heterodoxy), the reader should have little doubt that Edwards’s own self-conscious Christological commitment is to orthodoxy. According to Jenson, ‘there is no doubt  that [Edwards] intended to be thoroughly orthodox in the matter [of his Christology], but he arrived at orthodoxy—if he did—on anything but usual paths’ (Jenson  2005, 72). Where explorations of Edwards’s Christology get a bit more ­technical or exotic, as will undoubtedly be the case here, keeping one eye on Edwards’s intent to be orthodox will keep us back from erring too close to a number of Christological perils. Second, the reader will find (as the writer has) that Edwards’s two-natures doctrine is not so easily forced into a conversation where such classical distinctions as concretenature and abstract-nature Christology have been used as categories of trade. And yet, making Edwards conversant with such historically important distinctions as those employed by interpreters of Christological heavyweight like John Duns Scotus or Thomas Aquinas is the next and necessary step toward enriching our understanding of Edwards’s contribution to catholic Christology. To this end, I shall attempt to make one of Jenson’s so-called ‘unusual paths’ in Edwards’s Christology more navigable, making use of the aforementioned historic distinctions of concrete and abstract-nature Christology, in order to demonstrate that what Edwards says about the person of Christ is far more significant, original, and profitable for contemporary Christologists than has been believed to this point. Thus the argument proceeds in two stages to a conclusion. In the first stage, I briefly lay out some of the grammar of the concrete and abstract-nature Christology distinctions. I show that while at first glance Edwards’s two-natures doctrine appears to fall in line with the concrete-nature Christology that marks so much of the Reformed theological tradition, when considered in light of his immaterialist metaphysics—in particular, his denial of Reformed assumptions about the material nature of the body of Christ—his two-natures doctrine is perhaps better understood as a unique version of the abstract-nature view. In the second stage, I lay the groundwork for developing what I will refer to as Edwards’s immaterialist abstractism. Here, I examine what it means for Edwards to be an immaterialist (of a realist sort), after which, I engage in a bit of constructive work to show how his immaterial realism informs his Christology. I conclude with some suggestions for further research in this still very fertile area of Edwards studies.

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The Person of Christ   137

On Two Natures: Concrete or Abstract? According to orthodox Christian theologians, the incarnate Son of God assumed what the ecumenical symbols—Chalcedon, in particular—refer to as ‘a rational soul and body’ (Bettenson  1947). For theologians of Edwards’s own Reformed tradition, the rational soul and body of Christ’s human nature is commonly worked out in terms of God the Son being united (by the Spirit of God) to a human nature, consisting of an immaterial part (a soul) that is rightly related to material part (a body). The precise details of how this is worked out falls into two distinct categories: concrete-nature Christology on the one hand and abstract-nature Christology on the other. Before diving headlong into a discussion of how Edwards’s Christology might best be understood relative to these two categories, it is important to note that the Chalcedonian distinction of ‘a rational soul and body’ is often taken to be, anthropologically speaking, straightforwardly dualist—Hylomorphic, Substance, Cartesian dualist or otherwise— thereby requiring interpreters believe that human nature (Christ’s included) consists of an immaterial and a material composite of some sort (Hamilton 2016). This is quite important. For, the power of this assumption will undoubtedly shape the theological and philosophical hospitality of interpreters who might look on Edwards’s Christology as it is depicted here in immaterialist terms as simply untenable. And yet, unless one has a principled reason for thinking that Chalcedon dictates these dualist anthropological assumptions, we need not take dualism as the blueprint, so to speak, for either an abstractist or concretist Christology. We do well to keep this in mind as we move on to consider the concrete-nature view.

Concretism For the Son to assume a human soul and body as a concrete-nature, he assumes a concrete particular, that is, a concrete part. By concrete part, I mean (roughly), a fleshy, meaty, bony thing that is (somehow) informed by a soul. This is why concrete-nature accounts of the hypostatic union are sometimes called ‘parts Christologies’ and fall into either two-part or three-part Christologies (Crisp 2007, 41–42; Pawl 2016, 56ff). So, for example, some take it that the Son assumes a human body, where the Son occupies the human soul part of the soul–body relation. This is an example of a two-part Christology (Part 1—the Son + Part 2—human body), one that is often, notably associated with the Apollinarian heresy (assuming, of course, that human nature is a soul–body compound). This version of a two-part Christology is deemed heretical because, given Chalcedonian orthodoxy, Christ must have a human body and a human soul, not just a human body

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138   S. Mark Hamilton (Loke 2012)! Technically speaking, what is required for a concrete-nature view is that the relatum assumed is a concrete (i.e. non-abstract, non-shareable) thing.2 Others take it that the Son assumes a concrete particular, consisting of some sort of soul–body composite. This is an example of a three-part concrete-nature view (Part 1—the Son + Part 2—human soul + Part 3—human body). In a similar way that a two-part view might open the door to the Apollinarian heresy, a three-part view might open the door to the Nestorian heresy, according to which, Christ’s human nature is actually a human person (Crisp 2017). This is because to possess a human soul (at least on some readings of a substance dualist ontology) is to be a human person (Chan 2015), and for orthodox theologians anyway, Christ was certainly not two persons! He was a divine person with two natures, one divine and one human. So, how well does this distinction describe Edwards’s thinking about the God-man?

Prima Facie: Concretism in Edwards If you examine the plain or straightforward evidence that is scattered throughout Edwards’s works—evidence such as repeated references to bodies, souls, and spirits, and to his faculty psychology—then you might think Edwards obviously articulates a concrete-nature account of a specifically three-part compositional Christology. This, together with the reliable attestations of Edwards’s recent interpreters who claim that he ‘adopts a pronounced dualism’ (Helm 2018, 214), seems to obviously point to Edwards’s view being more closely tied to a form of concrete-nature Christology. Consider, for instance, Edwards’s assertion in ‘Miscellany’ 738 that, The divine Logos is so united to the humanity of Christ that it spake and acted by it, and made use of it as its organ, as is evident by the history of Christ's life, and as it is evident he will do at the day of judgment. And this he does not occasionally once in a while, as he may in the prophets, but constantly, not by an occasional communication, but a constant and everlasting union. Now 'tis manifest that the Logos, in thus acting by the humanity of Christ, did not merely make use of his body as its organ, but his soul, not only the members of his body, but the faculties of his soul; which can be no otherwise than by such a communication with his understanding as we call identity of consciousness. If the divine Logos speaks in and by the man Christ Jesus, so that the man Christ Jesus in his speaking should say, I say thus or thus, and his human understanding is made use of by the Logos, and it be the speech of his human understanding, it must be by such a communication between the Logos and the human nature as to communicate consciousness. (WJE 2000: 364)

Or take, ‘Miscellanies’ 513, in which, similar to the previous statement, Edwards claims that, ‘It seems to me reasonable to suppose, that that which the man Christ Jesus 2  I am grateful to Tim Pawl for pointing out this technical distinction to me.

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The Person of Christ   139 had his divine knowledge by, that he had his union with the divine Logos by. For ­doubtless, this union was some union of the faculties of his soul; but Christ had his divine knowledge by the Holy Ghost’ (WJE 2000: 57). Christological assertions such as these appear repeatedly throughout Edwards’s works; so many in fact, that it is sometimes seems hard to conceive of Edwards’s account of the two-natures doctrine as anything other than a clear formula for concretism and a reflection of the mind–body dualism of so many of his theological benefactors. Where Edwards’s benefactors are concerned, Helm points out that there is ‘by no means a monotonous uniformity’ to either the theological or Christological anthropology of the Reformed tradition (Helm  2018). And yet, there is undoubtedly an underlying and unifying ontological thread woven throughout Edwards’s theological tradition that is tied tightly around the idea that human nature—Christ’s included—consists of some sort of mind–body dualism, where the soul is an immaterial thing that is somehow rightly related to a body that is made of matter (Hamilton 2016). For many Reformed sponsors of mind–body dualism, concretism is often explained in terms of the imago dei. Once again—this time speaking of the Aristotelian influences on Reformed formulations of the imago—Helm’s recent work rightly points out that in, the understanding of the imago, there are various ways of identifying and enumerating the powers of the soul, some more expansive and detailed than others. We have already seen that there is a difference in whether the soul is thought of in Platonic or Aristotelian ways. But in the case of the faculties of the human soul, the mainstream Reformed orthodox and Puritan thinkers never stray very far from the outlook of Aquinas and through him to Aristotle. All refer to the understanding and give it primacy, but details differ.  (Helm 2018, 80)

Following Helm’s assertion—some clear differences as to the notion of how the soul and body are rightly related notwithstanding—consider, for example, the English Puritan divine (and one of Edwards’s principal theological influences), William Ames (1576–1633), who when proffering his account of the imago, argues that, Man as the last of the creatures is also the summary of all, being both absolutely and contingently perfect—in the former way in his soul and in the latter way in his body. The body was first prepared and afterwards the soul was breathed in, Gen 2:7. The body was made of elementary matter, but the soul was produced not out of matter existing before, but rather by the immediate power of God. The creation of man was male and female, both of them out of nothing as far as the soul is concerned. The body of the male was made out of the earth mixed with other elements and that of the woman out of the man and for the man so that nothing would be missing for his well-being.  (Ames 1968, 105–6)

While it would no doubt be interesting to tease out all the subtly different accounts of the imago adapted among theologians of the Reformed tradition, Ames makes a few things that are common to these accounts quite clear, namely, that human souls are

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140   S. Mark Hamilton immaterial, property-bearing substances, whose bodies are a material, property-bearing substance that is necessary to the proper function of normal human life in a material world. Whether Ames’s thinking about human nature falls more in line with the idea that a soul and a body are mereological fusions that together make up a single substance (i.e. Hylomorphic dualism) or whether he thinks that a soul and body are separate substances united by virtue of some direct, two-way causation (i.e. Cartesian Dualism) need not detain us here. However the metaphysics might be carved up, the take away here is that Ames’s mind–body dualism is archetypical or representative of many Reformed thinkers of both that period and the period thereafter, including Edwards’s (Hamilton 2016; Helm 2018). More to the point, all this mind–body dualism talk sounds quite similar to the straightforward evidence about human nature that litters Edwards’s works. However, as we shall see in a moment, the trouble of ascribing to Edwards a concretist view of Christ’s human nature simply because he talks of the Son + a human soul + a human body is that the straightforward evidence is not the only evidence in Edwards’s works relative to human nature.

Abstractism As far as the abstract-nature account of the hypostatic union goes, it often (though perhaps not exclusively) follows a storyline similar to a two-part concrete-nature view, but with some important differences (Crisp  2007, 44). Instead of assuming a concrete human nature where the Son stands in relation to human body like an Appollinarian says the soul might stand, on an abstract-nature view of Christ’s humanity, the Son assumes a human nature as a property (or set of properties) that is a necessary and sufficient condition for being human (Crisp 2007, 41). By properties, I mean (roughly) predicable qualities or attributes of a substance that are kind specific. James Arcadi puts it this way. He says, At bottom, when deciding what view of [human] nature one wishes to adopt, one can ask a fundamental distinguishing question of an entity: does it have properties that entail membership in a kind or is it a member of a kind that then entails certain properties? If one affirms the former one is working with an abstract-nature conceptual infrastructure, if the latter then one endorses the concrete-nature ­perspective.  (Arcadi 2016, 234)

So, take Deity, for example. Deity is the abstract nature of God if (and only if) Deity is a property or bundle of properties the instantiation of which is necessary and ­sufficient to being God. Deity as a property of the divine nature—to put it rather crudely—allows the Son to count, as it were, as being God. Similarly, humanity is the abstract nature of humans if (and only if) humanity is a property or bundle or set of properties the ­instantiation of which is necessary and sufficient to being a human being. So, when the

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The Person of Christ   141 Son assumes a human nature, on the abstract view, he is not assuming a concrete ­particular. He is exemplifying a property (or set of properties); properties that are accidental to those that he possesses essentially according to his divine nature. Joseph Jedwab aptly explains that, ‘[o]n the view known as Abstractism, the Son comes to have an abstract human nature by becoming a concrete human nature, but not by assuming a distinct concrete human being. On the view known as Concretism, by contrast, the Son comes to have an abstract human nature by assuming a distinct concrete human nature’ (Jedwab 2011, 45–56). So, once again, how well does this abstract-nature Christology distinction describe Edwards’s thinking about the God-man?

In a Unique Coetus: Abstractism in Edwards Not so straightforward (and all-told, not quite so pervasive) is the evidence that Edwards’s various philosophically sophisticated assertions about human nature at large (and about Christ in particular) seem to me more hospitable to an abstract-nature view; evidence like his discussion of minds, ideas, union, personal identity, temporal persistence, et cetera. Thus, labelling Edwards as an abstractist is not like trying to fix a square peg in a round hole so much as it is like trying to fix an a oval peg in a round hole—it has the same basic shape (i.e. orthodoxy), just with an odd radius, as it were. Drawn largely from his private philosophical notebooks, statements like the one that follows indicate that, contra the evidence of his supposed concretism, Edwards appears to have also conceived of human nature along the lines of some sort of immaterialism, according to which humans are essentially minds—minds that have ideas, together which compose all a mind’s perceptions of self and the world around them. Where this starts to sound more like abstractism is where Edwards makes comments about the relationship that ideas have to minds, and more specifically, about the relationship that created minds have to the uncreated mind of God (see, e.g., ‘The Mind’, WJE 6: 364; ‘Of Atoms’, WJE 6: 214; ‘Miscellany’ no. 108, WJE 13: 279). We will fill out a bit more detail relative to Edwards’s metaphysical claims about human nature in general and how good Edwardsean sense is made of the ‘rational soul and body’ of Christ in the next section. First, consider that from a brief survey of Edwards’s discussion of the two-natures doctrine he emphasizes, almost exclusively at times, the noetic (i.e. mind or consciousness) relationship that is forged between the divine and human natures of Christ. The consistent use of such terms in this particular context is quite important. For it is statements like these that emphasize how Edwards conceives of how the human nature that the Son of God assumes has knowledge of divine things, including his own divinity. Quoting him at length, in ‘Miscellany’ 205, Edwards asserts, Now when he remembered those things, he could not remember [them] as they were in the infinite mind, for the idea of the Creator cannot be communicated to the creature as it is in God; but the remembrance, as it was in his mind, was the same

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142   S. Mark Hamilton after a different manner: the things which he remembered were from all eternity in the Logos after the manner of God; and the man Christ Jesus was conscious to himself of them as if they had been after the manner of a creature. Those transactions which Christ speaks of in the covenant of redemption was [in] the Deity no other than the eternal and immutable gracious design, both of the Father and Son, of what was to be done by the Son and what was to be the fruit of it. ’Twas impossible that the man Christ Jesus should remember this as it was in the Deity, for then an idea of the eternal mind could be communicated to a finite mind even as it is in the infinite mind; but he remembered it as if it had been really such a transaction, before the world was, between him and the Father.  (WJE 1994: 340)

There is a lot in this statement that is quite telling about what Edwards truly thinks. So that we do not get side-tracked, let us consider just two observations. First, notice Edwards’s distinction between divine ideas that are, as he says, ‘the same after a different manner’ with those ‘after the manner of a creature’. Accordingly, it seems that Edwards thinks that the Spirit provides the humanity of Christ with finitely accommodated ideas (whatever those might be) of infinite ones—perhaps like seeing a colour-photographic-image through a black and white photo-filter; the filter thereby governing the perception of the actual idea in its raw form, so to speak. Thus he continues, in ‘Miscellany’ 205, saying, Not that he was deceived, for he knew how it was; but as the consciousness of it was communicated to him, it must of necessity seem thus. So he prays in the aforementioned place [John 17:5] that God would glorify him with the glory he had with him before the world was. ’Tis very manifest that he speaks as remembering, but ’twas impossible that he should remember infinite glory and happiness; but he remembered and was conscious [of it] to himself. His idea was finite, otherwise he could not pray that he might have the same glory again; for the man did not desire infinite glory, but he desired such glory as he remembered, that was the same as God the Son had, as near as the same could be communicated, either in conception or enjoyment, to Christ the creature.  (WJE 1994: 340–1)

Somehow, it seems from this statement that Edwards thinks that Christ’s human nature had ideas about God (and about being God) that were his own and were yet mediated to him and accommodated for him by God from among those ideas that God has of himself. That Edwards thinks that the humanity of Jesus had first-person ­knowledge (i.e. memories) of ‘the glory he had with him before the world was’ certainly recommends this interpretation, particularly in light of Edwards’s emphasis on the nature of minds and ideas. And this brings us to our second observation. Notice that Edwards’s view edges close to the subject of the pre-existence of Jesus when he says that ‘we often find Christ speaking as being very well acquainted with the Father before he came into the world’. Now, I do not think that a pre-existent Jesus is what Edwards has in mind. Rather, I think what he has in mind is that the humanity of the God-man possessed some sort of Spirit-mediated deposit of ideas about such things as the ‘agreement about the work of redemption, what he should teach, what he should

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The Person of Christ   143 do and who should be his’. Perhaps Edwards thinks that the hypostatic union is like what Joseph Jedwab describes as a ‘two-spheres’ view of consciousness, according to which the divine and human consciousnesses overlap, as it were, like a pair of overlapping mathematical sets (Jedwab 2011). However you carve it up, it is clear from the preceding passages, amongst others, that Edwards places a premium on discussing the relationship of minds—divine and human alike—when discussing the two-natures doctrine. This, I maintain, is a unique consequence of Edwards’s underlying immaterialist metaphysics. In light of this, let us now move on and consider, beginning with some of the rudiments of immaterialism, what an Edwardsean version of abstractism might look like in greater detail.

Edwardsean Abstractism Edwards’s commitment to immaterialism does not require that we conceive of his Christology along an abstract-nature view of the hypostatic union (Crisp 2016; Tan 2016; Hamilton 2017). And yet, the abstract-nature view is that which I think best explains the most important parts of the more philosophically sophisticated evidence about the twonatures doctrine derived from Edwards’s works. Recall that abstractism tries to make sense of claims about Christ’s ‘rational soul and body’ by arguing that the precise meaning of terms like soul, being, and nature that are ensconced in the Chalcedonian symbol are naturally made sense of by describing human nature as a property or set of properties. The signal difference between this view—what we might call a standard abstract-nature view of Christ’s humanity—and the version that describes Edwards’s view is a difference rooted, in part, in the sorts of properties that the Son exemplifies. Before we get into the weeds, as it were, of Edwards’s metaphysics, let me first say that those familiar with historic discussions of ‘parts Christologies’ may think that Edwards’s denial of material substance has little to nothing to do with how the human nature of the God-man is understood, particularly where categorical distinctions of concrete and abstract-natures are applied. This is likely because what is most commonly at stake in debates about the human nature of Christ orbits around the issue of the particularity versus universality of that nature. Where Edwards’s Christology is concerned, though, what is also at stake is the materiality versus immateriality of Christ’s human nature; more specifically, whether his human nature exists dependent or independent of mind and whether denying the material substance of the body puts him outside of the bounds of Christological orthodoxy. What is so interesting about this is that debates about the former (i.e. particulars and universals) have what Christopher Insole argues, is something of an ancestral quality that ‘maps onto’ modern debates about idealism (and immaterialism) and what is classified as real versus anti-real (Insole 2017, 276). What this means for us, leveraging Insole’s assertion, is that however initially awkward it may be to contemporary Christologists, it seems there is at least some justification for thinking that Edwards’s immaterialism puts him out of step with the more commonly

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144   S. Mark Hamilton held concretist views. So, while certainly in the minority report among contemporary philosophical theologians, and lesser so among historic ones, (a version of) the abstractnature view of the hypostatic union is that which, I think, most closely represents Edwards’s view. If I am correct, and this is the way we ought to understand what Edwards really thinks of human nature, the next, most important Christological question is this: How do we go from immaterialism to an abstract-nature Christology?

Edwards’s Immaterialism All perils to heresy aside, there is one assumption among concrete-nature theorists that is chiefly important to our working out the Christological puzzle that makes up—more accurately, does not make up—Edwards’s thinking about two-natures doctrine. And the assumption is simply this: bodies are material substances. On Edwards’s two-natures doctrine, I take it that the Son is a divine person and an immaterial substance (what Edwards calls an ‘uncreated mind’) who assumes an immaterial human soul or mind as an idea (or set of ideas) of human nature in the visible form of the man Jesus of Nazareth (whom Edwards describes like all other humans, namely, as a ‘created mind’). In this way, the created mind that he refers to as Jesus of Nazareth names the very same thing as the Son of God; nothing all that unusual here. And yet, most will find it quite unusual that Edwards thinks that human bodies, including the human body assumed by the Son, are not material substances. For Edwards, Christ’s human nature is immaterial all the way down, so to speak. The uncreated mind of the Son is, of course, immaterial and so is the created human mind of the man (i.e. Jesus of Nazareth) that the Son names. Interestingly, so also is his body immaterial. In fact, no one, on Edwards’s view, has material body because matter, we recall from our previous discussion, is a fiction. Bodies, says Edwards, are merely ideal. That is, they exist by the mind’s perception alone. Like all other things that are not mind, on Edwards’s view, bodies are just ideas or collections or bundles of ideas that God communicates to human minds immediately, at every moment. Bodies are to ideas as ideas are to minds and as created minds are to the uncreated (divine) mind. This might seem to be a rather bizarre way of carving up reality, particularly to modern readers, many of whom tend to resolve most things into what is often taken as an obviously material world. And yet, in his notebook ‘Notes on Knowledge and Existence,’ for example, Edwards did not recoil from asserting that, ‘All existence is ­perception,’ and ‘what we call body is nothing but a particular mode of perception; and what we call spirit is nothing but a composition and series of perceptions, or a universe of coexisting and successive perceptions connected by such wonderful methods and laws’ (WJE 1980: 398). Elsewhere, in ‘Of Being’, he similarly asserts that, ‘nothing has any existence anywhere else but in consciousness,’ and ‘those beings which have knowledge and consciousness are the only proper and real and substantial beings, inasmuch as the being of other things is only by these. From hence we may see the gross mistake of those who think material things the most substantial beings, and spirits more like a shadow’ (WJE 1980: 204).

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The Person of Christ   145 The debate about Edwards’s immaterialism and its particular impact on his Christology hinges on how we make sense of the way that he works out the relationship of created minds (as opposed to the divine mind) to ideas or perceptions and to what degree, if any, either these minds or ideas are created to exist independent of the divine mind. This is a philosophical rabbit hole of no mean depth. It is, however, necessary to our understanding Edwards’s two-natures doctrine that we have at least some grasp of his meaning and the crux of his meaning has to do with whether Edwards is a realist or an anti-realist. Until recently, the literature has made anti-realism to be the intimate bedfellow of Edwards’s immaterialism (Crisp 2016). And despite some continued and recent support of this anti-realist interpretation of Edwards’s immaterialism (Woznicki 2019), there are some, including myself, who are persuaded that Edwards is more likely a realist. With that in mind, let us take a brief look at the impact that these two distinctions have for making sense of Edwards’s immaterialist Christology. Let us begin with anti-realism. The anti-realist view of Edwards’s immaterialism says that minds and their ideas exist only by virtue of there being ideas in the divine mind. According to this view, human minds (i.e. ‘created minds’) have no ideas that are not in some sense ideas of the divine mind. Edwards seems to suggest as much when he argues that, ‘God supposes its existence; that is, he causes all changes to arise as if all these things had actually existed in such a series in some created mind, and as if created minds had comprehended all things perfectly. And although created minds do not, yet the divine mind doth, and he orders all things according to his mind, and his ideas’ (WJE 1980: 354). The second part of the anti-realist reading of Edwards’s immaterialism is that human minds themselves are nothing more than divine ideas and are as transient—from this moment to that—as are the ideas that the divine mind supplies them with. In other words, on this view, created minds and ideas exist in the same radically dependent way on the divine mind. Advocates of this view appeal to such entries in Edwards’s notebook, ‘The Mind’, which states, The secret lies here: that which is truly the substance of all bodies is the infinitely exact and precise and perfectly stable idea in God’s mind, together with his stable will that the same shall be gradually communicated to us, and to other minds, according to certain fixed and exact established methods and laws. The infinitely exact and precise divine idea, together with an answerable, perfectly exact, precise and stable will with respect to correspondent communications to created minds, and effects on their minds.  (WJE 1980: 344 [emphasis added])

Opposite the anti-realist view is the realist view. For Edwards to be a realist could mean  a  number of things for his immaterialism, particularly in contemporary ­philosophical terms. Christologically speaking, being a realist has to do with the ­ontological status of created minds; whether and how they exist independent of other minds (particularly, the divine mind). It also has to do with whether or not Edwards thinks of created minds in any sense as substances in their own right. Regarding the ­latter claim, I think that Edwards believed created minds were indeed substances,

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146   S. Mark Hamilton s­ ubstantialized, as I have argued elsewhere, by virtue of their peculiar relationship and union to the Son’s human nature (Hamilton 2013). As to the former claim, I maintain that the created mind of the human nature that the Son assumes at the incarnation is as all other created minds: at one level, no less dependent on the divine mind for its  existence and still not contingent for its existence upon the perception of any other created mind. This is what I have elsewhere referred to as Relative Realism (Hamilton 2017). By relative realism, I mean the difference between created-mind independence and uncreated-mind independence. Something is most often regarded as real if that something has mind-independent existence. Relative realism goes one more refined step further by describing something that has created-mind independence. What this means, in short, is that a thing’s reality as a substance is not contingent upon the perception of another created mind. Just because something may be radically dependent for its existence on the uncreated (divine) mind, does not necessarily mean that it has no independent existence from other created minds. This is a subtle, but crucial refinement for our making sense of Edwards’s Christology as it relates to the human nature of Christ. For, I take it that all things are for Edwards, in some sense, mind-dependent insofar as those things are dependent upon the uncreated mind of God, who is mind or is a mind or has a mind. Relative realism helps us understand how things might exist (including other minds) in created minds alone. By this point, you should be asking: What does this have to do with Edwards being an abstractist about Christ’s human nature?

Immaterialist Abstractism One way to construe the abstract-nature view—a view that has gained some recent and somewhat controversial ground—explains the incarnation of the Son of God in terms of the Son’s eternally bearing a property of human nature (Chan 2015). This is sometimes referred to as neo-Apollinarian Christology. On this view, the Son does not so much take the place of the human soul of the human nature of Jesus, as Apollinarians are condemned by the ecumenical council for believing. For the neo-Apollinarian, the Son already (eternally) possesses (as a property or properties of his divinity) that which is necessary to affirm the Chalcedonian claim that Christ assumed a ‘rational [human] soul’. Christ does not, therefore, require a human soul. All that the Son requires is material embodiment. Doubts about the orthodoxy of a neo-Apollinarian Christology aside, this is at least one novel way to work out an abstract-nature view that I think actually helps shed some interesting light on how we might work out Edwards’s version of abstractism. For, while I by no means think that Edwards’s view is neo-Apollinarian, it is a curious thing that on Edwards’s immaterialism, the relationship that the uncreated (i.e. the Son) and the created (i.e. human) minds have to their respective ideas is so similar to the way that some abstractist’s talk about how the human soul of Jesus of Nazareth is reducible to properties that the Son eternally exemplifies. Where an

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The Person of Christ   147 abstractist reduces the human soul to properties, Edwards simply reduces it to divine ideas. Here is where the novelty of Edwards’s view comes in. Consider that both concrete-nature and abstract-nature Christologies still assume that the incarnation of the Son requires material embodiment. According to the neoApollinarian expression of abstractism, the Son is said to exemplify only those properties of the human soul of Jesus, not the body. Material embodiment is simply anticipated by this view. For Edwards though, the properties that the Son instantiates that are necessary and sufficient for him to ‘take on’ a human soul/mind are not limited to the soul. They also include the body. So, on Edwards’s construal of the hypostatic union, then, the Son—the uncreated mind of God—assumes a created mind whose body—like his soul—is composed of perceptions that are together simply made visible to other ­created minds, and that, by God’s immediately presenting the various simple and complex ideas of Jesus to those he encountered. This is where Edwards’s realism comes in. Speaking of the circumstances of the Son’s visible (i.e. incarnate) appearance, Edwards says in ‘Miscellany’ 958 that: The things that are here spoken of Christ are spoken of him as God-man, either so actually, or so by constitution or immutable undertaking and appointment. All things are from him as God-man, but he him[self] as God-man is from the Father. He is here spoken of as the image of the invisible God, i.e. the image of the Father. The Father is the author of his own image, as in Hebrews 1:3 he is called “the brightness or the shining forth of the Father's glory, and the express image of his person”, which shows that the glory of this image, as it exists in the view of the creature, comes immediately from the Father, as light does from the sun, or as effulgence does from a luminary. (WJE 2002: 238–9)

Now, consider what it would mean for Edwards to say that the created mind of Jesus of Nazareth, to which the Son is hypostatically united, exists in the divine mind of the Son as an idea or complex of ideas. This is where the metaphysical waters get even more murky. For, Edwards conceives of created minds as existing in a sort of shadowy sense as the mental projections of the divine mind. He says as much in several places, like ‘Miscellanies’ 738, that ‘all being is, in strictness only a shadow of [God’s]’ (WJE 1980: 364). In other words, at times, it seems as though Edwards appears to think that created minds somehow exist within and are at the same time products of the divine mind. It is almost as if created minds are not simply property-bearers of those ideas that are ­communicated to them by God, but are themselves (somehow) idea-like properties of the divine mind—like I said, these are some murky metaphysics. What I think we can say with increasing confidence, based upon the evidence marshalled here is that if all is immaterial and therefore perception-based for Edwards, including the human nature of Christ, the abstract-nature view gets us at least a step closer to accurately describing Edwards’s Christological position. By reducing the human soul’s relationship to the Son to mere (divine) ideas is ever so close to what an abstractist refers to as properties. The fact that he does the same with Christ’s human

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148   S. Mark Hamilton body as he does with the human soul makes the road from immaterialism to an abstract-nature view of human nature even shorter and more direct than it does from a concrete-nature view. This is why I think Edwards’s view of Christ’s human nature is perhaps more accurately defined in terms of an Immaterialist Abstractism. For immaterialists like Edwards, the Son’s assumption of a human nature, at least where the body is concerned, amounts to his human mind simply having the idea of embodiment as well as other human minds having the idea of his embodiment. No one to my knowledge in all of Edwards’s theological tradition—concretist or abstractist—denies the material existence of the body of the God-man. In this, Edwards was quite an original! Insofar as the conventions of contemporary philosophical theology help us make sense of Edwards’s view, can we thus regard his Christology as unfolding along an abstractist line? Only further research will tell. And whether an abstract-nature Christology is the fruit of Edwards’s immaterialism we can only speculate at this point, however much the evidence strongly suggests that it is at least one theologically orthodox and conceptually consistent way to work it out. At the very least, I think we do well to use Edwards’s immaterialism as a starting point and back our way into his Christology. Having covered a lot of hard ground in this chapter, let us now sum up.

Conclusion This chapter is a modest attempt to put some of Edwards’s philosophical ideas about the two-natures doctrine of Christ into orbit, as it were, around a pair of classical Christological distinctions. To claim with certainty that such ideas are best characterized as orthodox, immaterialist, and realist is to take a speculative risk for which there is some not inconsiderable evidence. To then claim that these ideas have their most stable orbit around an abstract-nature rather than a concrete-nature Christology is a speculative risk of a different class altogether. No doubt, this claim will provoke some debate. If it does, then this chapter will have accomplished its chief underlying end. However much debate about Edwards’s Christology ensues as a result of reading this chapter, I am certain of two things. First, measuring the appreciable significance of Edwards’s Christology to the development of the Christian tradition will not happen without some speculative risk-taking, even risks as bold as the one’s taken here. Second, and consequentially, the reward of understanding Edwards’s Christology may turn out to be greatest where the speculations are the most risky. Now, by risky, I do not mean coming up with the most exotic or wild explanation of the evidence. What I mean by risky is something far more exegetically founded, more theologically systematic, and more philosophically conscientious. And risks abound where lacunas are so vast. Risks aside, this Christological lacuna is an invitation to Edwards scholarship. For, no one has yet prosecuted the impact that Deism had on American Christology and Edwards’s response to it, for example. Neither has anyone interrogated the full scope of Christological developments in American theology and Edwards’s contribution to it. So

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The Person of Christ   149 must provision be made for a more refined understanding of matters like the mind–idea and divine–human relation that Edwards’s idealism and immaterialism promote. So too is more clarity required in order to understand Edwards’s curious claims about the noetic constitution of Christ’s divine and human minds. This is merely scratching the surface of what seem to be depthless possibilities for research into Edwards’s Christology.

Works Cited Ames, William (1968). The Marrow of Theology. John Dykstra Eusden (ed.). Grand Rapids: Baker. Arcadi, James (2016). ‘Kryptic or cryptic? The Divine Preconscious Model of the Incarnation as a concrete-nature Christology’, Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 58 (2): 229–43. Bettenson, Henry (1947). Documents of the Christian Church. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chan, J.  H.  W. (2015). ‘A Cartesian Approach to the Incarnation’, in Joshua  R.  Farris and Charles Taliaferro (eds.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Theological Anthropology Aldershot: Ashgate. 355–8. Crisp, Oliver  D. (2017). ‘Compositional Christology without Nestorianism’, in Anna Marmodoro and Jonathan Hill (eds.), The Metaphysics of the Incarnation Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crisp, Oliver D. (2007). Divinity and Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crisp, Oliver D. (2016). ‘Jonathan Edwards, Idealism and Christology’, in Joshua R. Farris and S. Mark Hamilton (eds.), Idealism and Christianity, Vol. 1: Idealism and Christian Theology. New York: Bloomsbury, 145–76. Hamilton, S.  Mark (2017). A Treatise on Jonathan Edwards, Continuous Creation, and Christology. Fort Worth, TX: JESociety Press. Hamilton, S.  Mark (2013). ‘Jonathan Edwards on the Atonement’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 15.4 (October): 394–415. Hamilton, S.  Mark (2016). ‘On the Corruption of the Body: A Theological Argument for Metaphysical Idealism’, in Joshua  R.  Farris, S.  Mark Hamilton (eds.), Idealism and Christianity, Vol. 1: Idealism and Christian Theology. New York: Bloomsbury, 107–28. Helm, Paul (2018). Human Nature From Calvin to Edwards. Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books. Insole, Christopher  J. (2017). ‘Realism and Anti-realism’, in William  J.  Abraham and Prederick D. Aquino (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Epistemology of Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 274–89. Jedwab, Joseph (2011). ‘The Incarnation and Unity of Consciousness’, in Anna Marmodoro and Jonathan Hill (eds.), The Metaphysics of the Incarnation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 45–66. Jenson, Robert W. (2005). ‘Christology’, in Sang Hyun Lee (ed.), The Princeton Companion to Jonathan Edwards. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 79–81. Loke, Andrew (2012). ‘Immaterialist, materialist, and substance dualist accounts of Incarnation’, Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 54 (4): 414–23. Pawl, Tim (2016). In Defense of Conciliar Christology: A Philosophical Essay. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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150   S. Mark Hamilton Tan, Seng Kong (2014). Fullness Received and Returned: Trinity and Participation in Jonathan Edwards. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress. Tan, Seng Kong (2016). ‘Jonathan Edwards’s Dynamic Idealism and Cosmic Christology’, in Joshua R. Farris and S. Mark Hamilton (eds.), Idealism and Christianity, Vol. 1: Idealism and Christian Theology. New York: Bloomsbury, 145–76. Tan, Seng Kong (2010). ‘Trinitarian Action in the Incarnation’, in Don Schweitzer (ed.), Jonathan Edwards as Contemporary: Essays in Honor of Sang Hyun Lee. New York: Peter Lang, 127–50. Woznicki, Chris (2019). ‘The Metaphysics of Jonathan Edwards’s “Personal Narrative”: Continuous Creation, Personal Identity, and Spiritual Development’, Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 61 (2): 184–6.

Author Bio S. Mark Hamilton (PhD, Free University of Amsterdam) has published a variety of works on Jonathan Edwards, including two recent (forthcoming) essays entitled: ‘Confessionalism and Causation in Jonathan Edwards (1703–58)’, co-authored with C.  Layne Hancock, in Joshua R. Farris and Benedikt Paul Göcke, eds., Routledge Handbook on Idealism and Immaterialism (Abingdon: Taylor and Francis, forthcoming 2021) and ‘Jonathan Edwards on Atonement Redux’, in Kyle C. Strobel, Philip Hussey, Christina Larsen, eds., Jonathan Edwards and the Reformed High Orthodox (T&T Clark, forthcoming 2022), and the forthcoming monograph: Jonathan Edwards on Spirit Christology (New York: Routledge, forthcoming, 2021).

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chapter 10

Pn eum atol ogy Robert W. Caldwell III

Introduction While John Calvin has been called ‘the theologian of the Holy Spirit’, a good case can be made that Jonathan Edwards could be awarded this honourable distinction. He believed that his interpretation of the Holy Spirit corrected a significant pneu­mato­logic­al neglect resident in the Reformed tradition. His reflections on the immanent Trinity highlight the Spirit as the culminating telos of the divine disposition to infinite innertrinitarian self-communication. And through his numerous works on grace and religious experience, we find that the Spirit is always close by, often submerged under discussions of faith, religious affection, or sanctification. In short, while Edwards never wrote a major treatise on the Spirit after the manner of John Owen’s Pneumatologia, large swaths of his corpus contribute to and support a mature pneumatology. This essay canvasses the major themes that appear in Jonathan Edwards’s pneuma­tol­ ogy. It will demonstrate that one central theme predominates throughout his thought: the concept that the Holy Spirit is the ‘bond of union’ or the communion of love who subsists among diverse personal agents. Edwards understands the Spirit to be the personal love of the immanent Trinity, the one who unites Father and Son in a supreme, harmonious excellency. This uniting activity, he argues, serves as the archetype for all the Spirit’s economic work. ‘All divine communion, or communion of the creatures with God or with one another in God,’ he wrote in ‘Miscellanies’ No. 487, ‘seems to be by the Holy Ghost. ’Tis by this that believers have communion with Christ, and I suppose ’tis by this that the man Christ Jesus has communion with the eternal Logos. The Spirit of God is the bond of perfectness by which God, Jesus Christ, and the church are united together’ (WJE 13: 529–30; all Miscellanies entries will be referenced by ‘M’ followed by the entry number). Thus, the central framework of Edwards’s pneumatology envisions

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152   Robert W. Caldwell III the Spirit as the bond of union of three fundamental unions in Christian theology: 1.) the immanent trinitarian union, 2.) the hypostatic union of the divine and human natures in the person of Christ, and 3.) the mystical union Christians share with God and with each other. These loci will frame the following essay and serve as departure points for addressing technical issues that emerge in his pneumatology. Overall, whether we agree with his construal or not, the numerous ways Edwards highlights the Spirit throughout his writings should inspire theologians by his fresh insight and boldness at testing out new approaches to articulating classic, orthodox doctrine.

The Holy Spirit and the Trinity Edwards’s pneumatology is deeply situated in his trinitarianism. Consequently, it is ne­ces­sary to begin with a brief overview of his doctrine of the Trinity, a topic that is as vast as it is controversial. Readers would thus benefit by consulting the essay on the Trinity in this volume to help further contextualize the issues covered here in this chapter.

Trinitarian Backgrounds Edwards’s trinitarianism represents his quest to discover what some have called his ‘ontological argument’ for the Trinity (Helm 1971, 20–1). In other words, he sought to find a way in which the very thought of God necessarily entails his triunity. He believed that such a strategy, if successful, would go a long way in opposing both rationalist thinkers of the early Enlightenment and semi-Arians who were questioning the reasonableness of the doctrine of the Trinity and its central place in Christian theology. Edwards was aware that a major trinitarian controversy rocked the Anglican world in the in 1710s in the wake of the publication of Samuel Clarke’s Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity (1712). Clarke did not explicitly deny the Trinity but he did portray the deity of the Son in subordinationist overtones which scholars with Arian tendencies, like William Whiston, found appealing (Studebaker  2013, 242–54, Wiles  1996, 93–134). Edwards was also disturbed by similar trends among English nonconformists, those he considered closer to his denominational home. In 1719 Presbyterian and Congregationalist leaders had met at Salter’s Hall, London to determine if explicit adherence to the doctrine of the Trinity should be required for ordination. In a narrow vote (57–53), they agreed that it should not, a point that ultimately opened the door to further anti-trinitarian influence among nonconformists throughout the eighteenth century (Watts 1986, 372–5). Edwards’s ‘ontological argument’ for the Trinity, thus, was not just an exercise in theological creativity; he saw it as a way to counter trinitarian critics on the very ground they used to discard it, that of natural reason.

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Pneumatology   153 Edwards’s trinitarianism began with two complementary principles he discerned in the divine nature: 1.) the dynamic fact that the divine being is infinitely joyous and selfcommunicative, and 2.) the structural fact that God is a divine mind who, like all personal minds, possesses two modes of activity: understanding and will. From this starting point Edwards’s trinitarianism emerges. ‘When we speak of God’s happiness’, he wrote in the opening of his ‘Discourse on the Trinity’, ‘the account that we are wont to give of it is that God is infinitely happy in the enjoyment of himself, in perfectly beholding and in­fin­ite­ly loving, and rejoicing in, his own essence and perfections’ (WJE 21: 113; here­ after Discourse). Notice here how Edwards begins with God’s happiness experienced in a two-fold manner: through the divine understanding (‘beholding his perfections’) and in the divine will (‘infinitely loving and rejoicing’). From here he unpacks the concept of divine happiness by means of the psychological analogy (i.e. God as mind–understanding–will) to arrive at the hypostatization of the divine understanding in the person of the Son, and the hypostatization of the divine will in the person of the Holy Spirit (Strobel 2013, 35–40; Crisp 2015, 36–52). First, the Son is the result of God the Father’s perfect and infinite idea of his own essence as he lovingly gazes upon his perfections. The Son is ‘the Deity generated by God’s understanding, or having an idea of himself, and subsisting in that idea’ (Discourse WJE 21: 131). Edwards observes how the language of Scripture fittingly captures this point: Jesus Christ is termed the ‘Word’, ‘image’, and ‘wisdom’ of God, all concepts which correspond to the Son’s nature as the divine understanding (Discourse WJE 21: 117–21). Second, the Holy Spirit is the hypostatization of the divine will who is eternally ac­tual­ ized as the infinite love subsisting between Father and Son. This point led Edwards to describe the Spirit in richly vivid and dynamic terms. ‘The Holy Spirit’ he wrote in Treatise on Grace, ‘is breathed forth both from the Father and Son by the divine essence being wholly poured and flowing out in that infinitely intense, holy and pure love and delight that continually and unchangeably breathes forth from the Father and the Son’ (WJE 21: 185–6; hereafter Treatise). This phrasing he notes basically reflects the language the Bible employs to describe the Holy Spirit: he is the ‘river of [God’s] pleasures’ (Ps. 36:8), the ‘river of [the] water of life’ (Rev. 22:1), and is portrayed elsewhere in Scripture by other ‘similitudes and metaphors . . . such as water, fire, breath, wind, oil, wine, [and] a spring’ (Discourse WJE 21: 128–9).

Edwards’s Immanent Pneumatology By identifying the Holy Spirit as the divine love of the immanent Trinity, Edwards creates several interesting dynamics in his theology. For one thing, he modulates between speaking about the Holy Spirit from the perspective of his person (the Spirit as ‘he’) and speaking about the Spirit in the abstract as the divine affection of the Deity (the Spirit as ‘it’). Writing on the nature of grace in the soul, Edwards writes, ‘Rightly to understand

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154   Robert W. Caldwell III the nature of the habit of grace, it must be observed that the Spirit of God in the heart of a saint acts both as a natural vital principle, and also as a voluntary agent manifesting care of that heart it is in’ (M818 WJE 18: 529). This modulation naturally arises out of Edwards’s identification of the Spirit with love. Similarly, Edwards often expresses his pneumatology from two different vantage points: an objective perspective where he analyzes the being and actions of the Spirit from the outside, and a subjective perspective, where he is speaking, as it were, from ‘inside’ the subjectivity of the Spirit as the affection of God. The combined effect of these dynamics allows him to expand his pneuma­tol­ogy far and wide throughout his thought, especially as he moves through various theological concepts—such as holiness, excellency, fullness, grace, faith, and communion—and identifies them with the person of the Holy Spirit (Caldwell 2006, 49–55). The Spirit thus is hidden in plain sight throughout Edwards’s theology, submerged under the concepts of divine love, joy, and happiness enjoyed ad intra between the Father and Son, and communicated ad extra to the redeemed under the guise of religious affection, love to Christ, joy in God, grace, and participation in the divine nature. Considered this way Edwards’s pneumatology saturates his writings. Edwards derives several conclusions from the way he articulates the Spirit as the personal divine love of the Godhead. First, he speaks of the Spirit as the bond of union who unites the Deity into a fellowship of love. Writing on the covenant of redemption, Edwards notes that ‘[as the Holy Spirit’s] nature is the divine love that is between the Father and the Son, he is the bond of union between the two covenanting persons, whereby they with infinite sweetness agree, and are infinitely strongly united as parties joined into covenant’ (M1062 WJE 20: 443). In this role the Spirit is the agent who unites diverse persons into an intimate union of joy and happiness, a point that obtains both within the Trinity and ad extra with the redeemed. ‘[T]he Spirit that proceeds from the Father and the Son is the bond of this union [of intimate love in the Godhead], as it is of all holy union between the Father and the Son, and between God and the creature, and between the creatures among themselves’ (Treatise WJE 21: 186). Second and relatedly, Edwards affirms that the Spirit is the mutual love of the Father and the Son. With this language, he emphasizes not so much the personal agency of the Spirit in uniting persons, but the principle of divine affection in the Godhead. From this vantage point, the Spirit is described more as an ‘it’ rather than a ‘he’, where he is seen specifically as the holy temper and subjective affection of God arising between Father and Son. ‘The infinite essential love of God is, as it were, an infinite and eternal mutual holy energy between the Father and the Son, a pure, holy act whereby the Deity becomes nothing but an infinite and unchangeable act of love, which proceeds from both the Father and the Son’ (WJE 8: 373). As divine love, the Spirit possesses a mutual directionality, proceeding mediately from the Father towards the Son, since the Father beholds himself in the Son, and proceeding immediately from the Son towards the Father, as the Son beholds the Father in himself (Discourse WJE 21: 143). Lastly, we see in the preceding quotes Edwards’s clear affirmation of the Western doctrine of the filioque which denotes the Spirit’s immanent procession from both the Father ‘and the Son’. This point Edwards routinely made whenever he wrote on the Holy Spirit (M143 WJE 13: 298–9; Discourse WJE 21: 121, 135; Treatise WJE 21: 185–6).

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Pneumatology   155 The ­combination of these observations—the Spirit as the bond of union of the Trinity and Edwards’s affirmation of the filioque—together with the way he consistently employs the psychological triad when articulating the Trinity, supports the conclusion that Edwards’s trintiarianism is of the Western, Augustinian variety (Studebaker 2013, 135–206). In general, this is correct, but Edwards proceeds to do something very un-Augustinian when articulating the nature of the Spirit’s personhood. Edwards’s reliance on the psychological triad has raised the question as to how ‘divine love’ can be a person. He addresses this question in a rather novel way. First, he employs the definition of personhood noted earlier: a person is a mind which both understands and wills (Discourse WJE 21: 133). This definition he notes obtains for both divine and human persons. Second, when he applies this definition to divine personhood, he observes that the Son and the Spirit do not possess understanding and will from the divine essence per the traditional scholastic rendering. Rather, Son and Spirit literally are the hypostases of the divine understanding and divine will respectively. Since Father, Son, and Spirit (understood as the divine mind–understanding–will) share life in union together in the immanent Trinity, and literally are in each other via perichoresis, then it is legitimate to affirm that each person of the Godhead possesses understanding and will because the three persons all share in one another. Augustine, by contrast, explicitly states that this cannot be the way to articulate divine personhood (Augustine 1990, 419). Edwards, however, disagrees. ‘[T]he Father understands because the Son, who is the divine understanding, is in him. The Father loves because the Holy Ghost is in him. So the Son loves because the Holy Spirit is in him and proceeds from him. So the Holy Ghost, or the divine essence subsisting in divine love, understands because the Son, the divine idea, is in him’ (Discourse WJE 21: 133). In short, the doctrine of perichoresis in Edwards’s rendering yields divine personhood. Specifically, the Spirit is a person because he proceeds from Father and Son as the divine will, possessing understanding through the Son’s indwelling, and possessing the divine will because he is the divine will. His personhood is necessarily bound up in the perichoretic relations with the other divine persons; trinitarian personhood for Edwards is thus necessarily communal. In sum, Edwards’s pneumatology begins with a firm commitment to the identification of the third person of the Trinity with divine love. As the mutual love who proceeds from both Father and Son, the Holy Spirit unites the divine society into a fellowship which features the Son as the object of God’s beatific vision. As will be seen in subsequent sections, Edwards maintains that these same pneumatological patterns are repeated ad extra because he firmly believes the immanent processions shape the economic mission of the triune God in creation and redemption.

The Holy Spirit and Jesus Christ As Edwards shifts his attention to the incarnation, he articulates a Spirit Christology which prominently features the work of the Holy Spirit. Specifically, the Spirit is the direct agent responsible for the personal union of Christ’s two natures. Although this

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156   Robert W. Caldwell III union is the most intimate possible, Edwards appears to affirm Reformed Christological conclusions. This section will examine these two issues in Edwards’s Christology. As we turn here, it is important to observe that Edwards’s Christological views were partially a response to the rise of a semi-Arian Christology which was finding circulation during his time, not only among several high-profile Anglicans like Clarke and Whiston noted earlier but also within English nonconformity. Isaac Watts, for instance, was no Arian but he found their argumentation compelling enough to modify his Christology in his 1746 treatise The Glory of Christ as God-Man Displayed. In that work he argued that prior to creation the divine Logos united to the human soul of Jesus, and from there this God‘man’ subsequently created the rest of the universe. Only at a much later date did this entity unite with Jesus’ human flesh in Mary’s womb (Watts 1746, 146–76). Watts’s pos­ ition is reminiscent of Arianism since it features a partial creature (the human soul of Jesus united to the Logos) creating the rest of the world. Edwards was troubled by this view and constructed a lengthy ‘Miscellanies’ entry against it (M1174 WJE 23: 89–92). In short, his Spirit Christology was part of a robust defence of the deity of Christ which sought to resist any subtle movement toward Arianism.

Edwards’s Spirit Christology Edwards specifically delineates the Spirit’s activity in the incarnation in several Miscellanies entries written over a period of a decade (entries 487, 513, 624, 709, 738, 764b, 766, and 1043). In these entries we find him intent on the developing two interrelated points which serve as the core of his Spirit Christology. First, Edwards maintains that the Holy Spirit is the immediate agent responsible for the union of the divine and human natures in Jesus Christ. This position is the minority view in the Christian trad­ ition, which has normally viewed the person of the Son as the immediate agent involved in the personal union. Edwards most likely learned of it from John Owen’s Pneumatologia which he read (M1047 WJE 20: 389), though he developed it in his own unique way (for backgrounds, see Owen 1965, 159–87; Spence 1991). Since the Spirit is the agent of union ad intra, Edwards argues that it is fitting that his economic activities reflect a similar pattern, a point that he saw confirmed in Scripture which portrays similarities between Christ’s union with the Church and the p ­ ersonal union between Christ’s divine and human natures. Christ dwells in believers as his temple and body (1 Cor. 3:16; 2 Cor. 6:16); so too does the Logos dwell in the human nature of Christ as a temple and as a body. God’s fullness dwells in his Church (John 1:16; 2 Pet. 1:4), so too does his fullness dwell completely in the person of Jesus Christ (Col. 2:9, John 3:34). ‘Perhaps there is no other way of God’s dwelling in a creature but by his Spirit,’ he ponders (M487 WJE 13: 528). From these observations Edwards concludes that ‘the Holy Spirit is the bond of union by which the human nature of Christ is united to the divine [nature], so as to be one person’ (M764b WJE 18: 411). Second, Edwards develops this view further by addressing the mechanism of the personal union. He essentially maintains that the Holy Spirit communicates the

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Pneumatology   157 c­ onsciousness of the divine Logos to the human nature of the man Jesus. Recall that for Edwards a person is a mind who possesses understanding and will. For there to be a ­personal union of human and divine natures in Jesus Christ, the human nature must ­possess the Logos’s consciousness ‘by a communion of knowledge and will’ (M487 WJE 13: 530). Edwards’s reading of Scripture, which showcases the joint work of the Spirit and Christ in Jesus’ ministry, led him to this conclusion. When Jesus teaches, he speaks God’s words (Mark 1:14–15) yet he does so by the Holy Spirit whom he has ‘without measure’ (John 3:34). He performs miracles by his own will (‘I will; be thou clean’; Matt. 8:3) yet also by the Spirit (Luke 4:18–21). Edwards concludes ‘Now this can’t be, . . . any otherwise than as the Spirit of God directed the human understanding, and moved the human will, as a bond of union between the understanding and the will of the divine Logos, and the understanding and will of the human nature of Christ’ (M766 WJE 18: 412). Consequently, there are in Jesus Christ two understandings and wills (both divine and human) but one person, a union of natures effected by the Holy Spirit spe­cif­ ic­al­ly through the ‘identity of consciousness’ shared between the Logos and the man Jesus Christ (M738 WJE 18: 364).

The Sanctified Christ and Fallen Humanity There is no doubt that Edwards presents a pneumatologically charged Christology. Several scholars have concluded from this that Edwards’s Christ is so overshadowed by the Spirit that it is difficult to see how he could truly represent fallen humanity (Hastings 2015, 226–46; Plantinga Pauw 2002, 147–9). This argument is made along two lines. First, Edwards’s Christology mandates that the Logos assume an unfallen human nature, created ex nihilo by the Spirit in a way reminiscent of the celestial flesh Christology of the radical reformers. Second, Edwards’s statements about Christ’s Spiritmediated knowledge—that he has the ‘same consciousness’ with the Logos, and that his divine knowledge prevented him from comprehending the gravity of God’s wrath on the cross (M321b WJE 13: 402)—indicate that his participation in human frailty and limitation is only partial. Other scholars have observed that Edwards’s Jesus is not that discontinuous with fallen humanity (Holmes  2001, 134–142; Caldwell  2006, 74–97). In a 1757 sermon Edwards does explicitly state that the human nature God assumed in the incarnation was not ‘the human nature in its first most perfect and vigorous state but in that Poor feeble broken state it is in since the fall . . .’ (Sermon 521. Luke 22:44, WJE Online 54). This is corroborated by statements in Miscellanies entries 767 and 769 where Edwards emphasizes how Christ emerges in human history just like the rest of humanity, amidst fallenness, meanness, and impurity. Christ was ‘wrought in the midst of pollution and brought out of it’ (M767 WJE 18: 414). He is ‘of the seed of fallen creatures’, and a descendent of David, ‘a mean person originally and the youngest of the family’. He is also a descendent of Leah, Tamar, and Rahab, women who are not exactly known for their virtue (M769 WJE 18: 416). Furthermore, when Edwards examines the specific ‘seed’ in

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158   Robert W. Caldwell III Mary that would become the man Jesus Christ, he stresses how much it shares in common with the rest of humankind. ‘They are all in like circumstances’ he writes; ‘they all are alike seeds of the woman, . . . are all alike liable to the guilt and pollution, and so to the misery and damnation, that comes by the fall’ (M769 WJE 18: 416–17). Taken together, this evidence appears to suggest that Edwards understood the Logos to assume a fallen human nature—prevented from sin of course through the Spirit’s efficacy—but fallen nonetheless, in full solidarity with the rest of humankind. As for Christ’s Spirit-mediated knowledge, Edwards does understand it to be accommodated to the intrinsic limitations of the human nature (Withrow 2011, 190–1). When he writes that Jesus recalls aspects of his preincarnate existence (John 17:5) he qualifies this by stating that ‘he could not remember [these ideas] as they were in the infinite mind’ but only ‘after a different manner’ (M205 WJE 13: 340). Here Edwards appears to affirm the Reformed principle of finitum non capax infiniti, the ‘finite is incapable of comprehending the infinite’. While the Logos is eternally omniscient, the human nature of Christ cannot possess infinite knowledge; he knows truly yet finitely ‘after the manner of a creature’ (M205 WJE 13: 340; Tan 2014, 198). In a later entry, Edwards infers something very similar when he asks whether Christ’s governance of the world was somehow temporarily transferred to the Father during the period of his infancy ‘when he had less knowledge than afterwards’ (M1358 WJE 23: 609). His answer is no—‘Have we any hint of such a thing [in Scripture]?’—not because Christ somehow retained infinite divine knowledge in the cradle, for indeed ‘he had less knowledge than afterwards’. Rather Edwards is probably mindful of the Reformed Christological position known as the extra Calvinisticum which recognizes a distinction between the infinite capacities of the divine nature outside of (extra) the human nature on the one hand, and the finite capacities of the local human nature on the other. Applied here, Edwards basically affirms that the finite infant Jesus does not and cannot govern the world, but the ­infinite Word outside of the human nature (though united to that nature) continues to govern all things, and therefore has no need for the Father to temporarily govern the world in Christ’s place. To summarize, Edwards affirmed that the Spirit’s work in the incarnation is patterned after his work as the bond of union of the immanent Trinity. In Christ, the Spirit is the immediate agent who unites the divine and human natures in Christ by effecting a communication of consciousness between the Logos and Jesus, uniting the divine understanding and will with Jesus’ human understanding and will. Edwards appears to flesh out this model conscious of Reformed Christological boundaries, including an af­fi rm­ation that the Logos assumed a fallen human nature, and the belief in the finitum non capax infiniti and the extra Calvinisticum. Whether he was successful in this endeavour or not, what is certain is that Edwards saw many parallels between the Spirit’s work in Christ and his work in the lives of the saints. While believers do not share in divinity as Christ does, they do participate in the divine nature through the Spirit and enjoy union with Christ by him, points to which we now turn our attention.

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Pneumatology   159

The Holy Spirit and Christian Salvation In a fascinating group of Miscellanies entries on God’s glory (entries 1082, 1084, 1142) Edwards argues that the eternal movement of the Son and the Spirit in the immanent trinitarian life and the economic sending of the Son and Spirit into the world are parallel movements, the latter patterned after the former. In salvation, the Son makes known the knowledge of God to the world, while the Spirit communicates divine love for the Son to the world. This two-fold movement ‘indeed is only a kind of second proceeding of the same persons, their going forth ad extra, as before they proceeded ad intra’ (M1082 WJE 20: 466). Consequently, in Christian salvation Christ ‘objectifies’ God to the saints, manifesting the knowledge of God to their understandings, while the Spirit ‘subjectifies’ God to them, filling their wills with divine love. The Spirit’s role in this equation will be the subject of this section. This topic is immense so we will have to confine the discussion to a broad sketch of Edwards’s project by examining three topics: the Spirit ob­ject­ ive­ly considered as grace and faith in the saint; the Spirit subjectively considered as the ground of Christian spirituality; and the Spirit enjoyed by the ecclesial community both here and in heaven.

Grace and Faith: The Spirit Objectively Considered in Christians Like most Christian theologians, Edwards views God’s grace as the foundation of human salvation. When he closely examines the concept, however, he concludes that grace is essentially the Holy Spirit’s salvific presence in the soul of the saint. ‘[T]rue saving grace is no other than that very love of God; that is, God, in one of the persons of the Trinity, uniting himself to the soul of a creature as a vital principle, dwelling there and exerting himself by the faculties of the soul of man, in his own proper nature, after the manner of a principle of nature’ (Treatise WJE 21: 194). Edwards often uses the phrase ‘after a principle of nature’ to refer to the steady, constant impulse in the believer to love God, pursue holiness, and resist sin. In these contexts, Edwards speaks of the Spirit as a principle in the heart, enflaming the believer’s will with holy breathings, love to Christ, and a yearning for more holiness, actions that reflect his immanent trinitarian being. ‘[T]he Spirit of God in the souls of his saints exerts its own proper nature; that is to say, it communicates and exerts itself in the soul in those acts which are its proper, natural and essential acts in itself ad intra, or within the Deity from all eternity’ (M471 WJE 13: 513). Thus, when Christians act by the Holy Spirit to love Christ and display the Christian virtues, it is correct to ascribe agency to both the believer and the Spirit. ‘We are not merely passive in [saving grace],’ Edwards writes in ‘Efficacious Grace’, ‘nor yet does God do

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160   Robert W. Caldwell III some, and we do the rest, but God does all and we do all. God produces all and we act all. For that is what he produces, our own acts. God is the only proper author and fountain; we only are the proper actors’ (WJE 21: 251). By uniting to the soul of a believer, the Spirit engenders both divine love to God and faith in Jesus Christ. Edwards indicates that these two are the same: divine love is faith. ‘[L]ove is the essence of faith, yea, [it] is the very life and soul of it, and the most essential thing in it’ (M820 WJE 18: 531). Indeed, he maintains that all the Christian virtues are merely facets of the one grand virtue of love, God’s love, in the soul (Treatise WJE 21: 166; M218 WJE 13: 344–5). Though faith and love signify the same reality, faith is singled out as meriting a special name because it is the leading expression of divine love in a sinful, fallen soul (M1156 WJE 23: 70). While angelic love draws elect angels (who never sinned) to harmonize their wills with God’s holy nature, that same love in the soul of a human being engenders a much different spiritual posture, one that regards Christ as saviour who freely offers himself to sinners in the Gospel (M507 WJE 18: 53–4). Faith thus is uniquely suited among the fruits of the Spirit as the spiritual virtue that is featured so prominently in justification. Faith also unites the believer to Christ because it essentially is divine love which unites persons into fellowship around the knowledge of God displayed in Christ: ‘faith is the proper active union of the soul with Christ as our Savior, as revealed to us in the gospel’ he writes in his ‘Faith’ notebook (WJE 21: 446). Furthermore, this love is mutual as Christ actively joins himself to the saint in love rendering the two one (M568 WJE 18: 105). Amidst this language of faith, love, and union with Christ, one does not need to dig too far into these concepts to find that Edwards is really speaking about the Holy Spirit who works in the soul after a ‘principle of nature’.

Spiritual Sight: The Spirit Subjectively Considered in Christians The Spirit does not just engender love and faith in the saint, his work transforms the process of human knowing by enabling the saint to ‘see’ God. For Edwards seeing God is ‘to have an immediate and certain understanding of God’s glorious excellency and love’ (WJE 17: 64). As such, when Christians contemplate God or ‘divine things’, they are not merely entertaining intellectual concepts of a religious nature, they truly sense a beaut­eous harmony in the things they ponder, and their souls are drawn out in love towards them. In trying to describe this, Edwards often resorts to aesthetic and musical language to convey his point. The Christian ‘sees the wonderfulness of God’s designs and a harmony in all his ways, a harmony, excellency and wondrousness in his Word; he sees these things by an eye of faith, and by a new light that was never before let into his mind’ (WJE 14: 79). Such seeing beautifies the soul as the Christian partakes of ‘God’s beauty and Christ’s joy, so that the saint has truly fellowship with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ, in thus having the communion or participation of the Holy Ghost’ (WJE 2: 201). In many ways these passages on the nature of spiritual sight and

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Pneumatology   161 Christian experience are basically Edwards’s way of portraying the subjective side of his pneuma­tol­ogy, a description of the Holy Spirit from ‘within’ his affectivity as it is communicated in the saint’s spiritual perception. Edwards’s rich language he uses to portray the life of the Spirit has led several to argue that his soteriology is reminiscent of the patristic doctrine of theosis (McClymond 2003, Hastings 2015, 266–8, Strobel 2012). This concept, which Crisp and Strobel succinctly define as ‘sharing by grace what is Christ’s by nature’ (Crisp and Strobel 2018, 149), has generated confusion for a variety of reasons: the mistaken notion that it is exclusively an Eastern theological construct, the erroneous belief that it confuses the divine and human essences, and the exotic language associated with the term (‘divinization’, ‘deification’). Yet when we consider the historical origins of the doctrine which is grounded in the scriptural concepts of participating in the divine nature (2 Pet. 1:4) and living by Christ’s life (Gal. 2:20, John 14:19), then it is not a stretch to say that Edwards affirmed a Reformed version of theosis, one that articulates the concept under the guise of other terms such as ‘union with Christ’.

The Spirit, the Church, and Glorification Edwards strove to anchor his ecclesiology in both his trinitarianism and his pneuma­tol­ ogy. The Church, he notes, is the bride of Christ given by the Father to the Son to be for him what he is to the Father, an image of himself in whom he can delight (M104 WJE 13: 272–4). The Spirit is given to the Church to beautify it by a communication of divine love so that it might be united with itself and one with Christ. Consequently, the Church loves as God loves, through the Spirit’s activity of uniting persons lovingly around Christ. These relationships are played out in various corners of Edwards’s ecclesiology. For instance, in his effort to encourage concerts of prayer, Edwards observes that the Spirit inspires his Church across the globe to pray for revival, a work that engenders charity, hope, and union among church members around the world. ‘Union in religious duties, especially in the common welfare, above almost all other things, tends to promote mutual affection and endearment’ (WJE 5: 366). Similarly, in the Lord’s Supper the Church and Christ together partake of one common goodness, namely, the Holy Spirit who is signified by the feast they share. ‘And by this sacrament is well signified the union, love and communion of the saints. They feast together, friends and brethren, members of the same Lord, and those that drink of the same Spirit. They are of the same family and eat of the same spiritual meat and drink’ (WJE 14: 289). In these ecclesial contexts we find the Spirit replicating the immanent trinitarian harmonies ad extra in the Church. Finally, Edwards gave significant thought to the way the Spirit transforms the glorified Church in heaven. In his sermon ‘Heaven is a World of Love’ Edwards portrays heaven as a giant Elysium saturated in divine love. There the Spirit is the ‘eternal, mutual holy energy between the Father and the Son’ who floods the inhabitants of heaven with the wondrous knowledge of God displayed in the Son (WJE 8: 373). There we also find a

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162   Robert W. Caldwell III hierarchy of enjoyment in heaven discerned primarily in the diverse ways the angelic and human communities experience God’s love. Though the angels drink deeply of God’s love as creatures who never knew sin, the Church, by contrast, experiences these divine riches in far greater degrees by virtue of the fact that it is a community redeemed by grace, a state that the angelic community can never participate in. In addition, God the Son did not assume angelic nature through the incarnation, but human nature, forever bridging the chasm between God and humankind. Thus, through union with Christ the Church partakes of ‘Christ’s sonship’ and is admitted into the ‘inmost fellowship with the deity’, a status which the elect angels never attain to (M741 WJE 18: 367). Furthermore, this union between the Church and God is ever increasing throughout eternity. As the Spirit is eternally the divine being-in-act, his work of communicating God’s fullness to the finite Church is never completed, ever approaching that perfect union enjoyed by Father and Son. ‘The more happiness the greater union: when the happiness is perfect, the union is perfect. And as the happiness will be increasing to eternity, the union will become more and more strict and perfect; nearer and more like to that between God the Father and the Son; who are so united, that their interest is perfectly one’ (WJE 8: 533–4). Such is, in Edwards’s mind, the wonderful destiny of the Church of God.

Conclusion Part of Edwards’s genius lay in the way he could distil a simple idea out of great complexity and apply it consistently to many contexts. His pneumatology follows this very pattern. Out of Scripture’s multiple representations of the Spirit, Edwards identifies one basic concept—namely, the Holy Spirit as the personal divine affection of the Godhead who unites persons in a fellowship of love—and reproduces this theme throughout his theology. As the bond of union, the Holy Spirit is the great unifier, the divine person whom Edwards prominently features in the three great unions of Christian theology: the immanent trinitarian union of the Godhead, the personal union of the incarnate Christ, and the mystical union shared by the Church and Christ. Edwards knew there were risks to pursuing this theological agenda, the largest being the threat of depersonalizing the Spirit by losing him in the ‘it’ of divine affection. But he took this risk because he believed the payoff was immense. By it, he was able to spread the influence of the Spirit throughout his theology, where many topics—grace, faith, affection—are infused with a hidden yet vibrant pneumatology. He also believed it restored equal h ­ onour to the Holy Spirit because, he argued, to be the essential love of God given to the world equals the greatness of the Father’s gift of his Son to the world and the Son’s sacrificial gift of his life for the world (WJE 21: 137–8). And finally, he believed his pneuma­tol­ogy fuelled a vibrant spirituality of an intense and intimate communion shared between

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Pneumatology   163 the Church and God. Thus, despite its possible drawbacks, Edwards remained cap­tiv­ated and deeply convinced by the powerful vision his pneumatology offered to the theology, spirituality, and doxology of the Church.

Works Cited Augustine (1990). The Trinity. Trans. Edmund Hill, ed. John E. Rotelle. Brooklyn: New City Press. Caldwell, Robert W. III. (2006). Communion in the Spirit: The Holy Spirit as the Bond of Union in the Theology of Jonathan Edwards. Waynesboro, GA: Paternoster. Crisp, Oliver D. (2015). Jonathan Edwards Among the Theologians. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Crisp, Oliver D. and Kyle C. Strobel (2018). Jonathan Edwards: An Introduction to his Thought. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Hastings, W.  Ross (2015). Jonathan Edwards and the Life of God: Toward an Evangelical Theology of Participation. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Helm, Paul (1971). ‘Introduction.’ Treatise on Grace and Other Posthumously Published Writings. Ed. Paul Helm. Cambridge/London: James Clarke. 1–23. Holmes, Stephen R. (2001). God of Grace and God of Glory: An Account of the Theology of Jonathan Edwards. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. McClymond, Michael  J. (2003). ‘Salvation as Divinization: Jonathan Edwards, Gregory Palamas and the Theological Uses of Neoplatonism.’ Jonathan Edwards: Philosophical Theologian. Ed. Paul Helm and Oliver Crisp. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. 139–60. Owen, John (1965). Pneumatologia or Discourse concerning the Holy Spirit. Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth. Pauw, Amy Plantinga (2002). The Supreme Harmony of All: The Trinitarian Theology of Jonathan Edwards. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Spence, Alan (1991). ‘Christ’s Humanity and Ours: John Owen.’ Persons Divine and Human. Ed. Christoph Schwoebel and Colin E. Gunton. Edinburgh: T & T Clark. 74–97. Strobel, Kyle C. (2012). ‘Jonathan Edwards and the Polemics of Theosis.’ Harvard Theological Review 105 (3) (July): 259–79. Strobel, Kyle  C. (2013). Jonathan Edwards’s Theology: A Reinterpretation. New York: Bloomsbury. Studebaker, Steven  M. (2013). Jonathan Edwards’ Social Augustinian Trinitarianism in Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press. Tan, Seng-Kong (2014). Fullness Received and Returned: Trinity and Participation in Jonathan Edwards. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Watts, Isaac (1746). The Glory of Christ as God-Man Display’d, in Three Discourses. London: J. Oswald and J. Buckland. Watts, Michael (1986). The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press. Wiles, Maurice (1996). Archetypal Heresy: Arianism through the Centuries. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Withrow, Brandon G. (2011). Becoming Divine: Jonathan Edwards’s Incarnational Spirituality within the Christian Tradition. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books.

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164   Robert W. Caldwell III

Suggested Reading McClymond, Michael J. and Gerald R. McDermott (2012). The Theology of Jonathan Edwards. New York: Oxford University Press. McDermott, Gerald  R., ed. (2009). Understanding Jonathan Edwards: An Introduction to America’s Theologian. New York: Oxford University Press. Schweitzer, William M. (2012). God is a Communicative Being: Divine Communicativeness and Harmony in the Theology of Jonathan Edwards. New York: T & T Clark.

Author Bio Robert  W.  Caldwell III (Ph.D., historical theology, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) is Professor of Church History at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. He specializes in Jonathan Edwards, the First and Second Great Awakenings, and North American historical theology. He is the author of Communion in the Spirit: the Holy Spirit as the Bond of Union in the Theology of Jonathan Edwards (2006), co-author (with Steven M. Studebaker) of The Trinitarian Theology of Jonathan Edwards: Text, Context, and Application (2012), and author of Theologies of the American Revivalists: from Whitefield to Finney (2017).

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chapter 11

R ev el ation Stephen R. C. Nichols

Reformed Commitments in an Age of Reason A comprehensive account of the doctrine of revelation in the Reformed tradition to which Jonathan Edwards was heir is beyond the scope of the present enquiry and may be found elsewhere (Muller 2003). However, by way of providing context for what follows (and with the qualification that the Reformed did not speak as one) it might be helpful to sketch out the broadest of commitments shared by the orthodox, highlighting Edwards’s favoured sources, Peter van Mastricht and Francis Turretin. Calvin took it to be beyond controversy that ‘there is within the human mind, and indeed by natural instinct, an awareness of divinity’ (Calvin 1960, 43–4). Furthermore, creation was the continual ‘spectacle [or theatre] of God’s glory’ (Calvin  1960, 58; Schreiner  1995). Natural reason and conscience acted upon the sensus divinitatis and creation to give rise to a natural theology (Turretin 1992, 6). Although at creation natural theology had been ‘sufficient for the attainment of eternal life by the covenant of nature’, the orthodox asserted that after the fall it was insufficient for salvation, though it left humanity without excuse (Mastricht 2018, 84). Further knowledge was needed: that of redemption. ‘[T]he orthodox maintain that the theology or true religion by which salvation can come to man after the fall is only one (i.e. that revealed in the word of the law and gospel), and that all other religions except this one are either impious and idolatrous or false and erroneous’ (Turretin 1992, 10; Mastricht 2018, 80–4). Therefore, in addition to the revelatio generalis and the theologia naturalis arising from it, was needed ‘another and better help . . . to direct us aright to the very Creator of the universe’ (Calvin 1960, 69). Many Christians from the twelfth century onwards spoke of the books of nature and of Scripture and delineated carefully their relationship. Turretin noted, ‘The special know­ledge of

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166   Stephen R. C. Nichols true faith (by which believers please God and have access to him, of which Paul speaks) does not exclude, but supposes the general knowledge from nature’ (Turretin 1992, 8). And in Calvin’s famous illustration, like spectacles enabling the bleary-eyed to read a beautiful volume distinctly, Scripture gathers up the otherwise confused knowledge of God in our minds and clearly shows us the true God (Calvin 1960, 70; Mastricht 2018, 77–8). As the Westminster divines concluded: ‘The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man’s salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added . . .’ (Westminster Confession, 4). Necessarily a caricature of the Reformed trad­ition of revelation, these commitments set the scene for the discussion that follows. But of equal import is to understand the challenges posed to the tradition by English deism. The label ‘deism’ is a necessary historiographical shorthand. Rather than signifying an intellectual movement unified by a common set of teachings, the term more properly describes a spectrum of thought that emerged in late-seventeenth-century England. At one end of the continuum and growing out of an Anglican rationalism, were those whose self-confessed goal was the reform of Christian thought and ecclesiastical hegemony. At the other end were a radical number who sought to replace orthodox ‘superstition’ with a natural religion (Holifield  2003, 159–72; McDermott  2000, 19–33). The origins and intellectual contours of these convictions exceed the scope of the present enquiry and can be found elsewhere. (See, for example, Cragg 1962; Harrison 1990; 1998; Neil 1963, 238–93; Porter 1981, 1–18; Champion 1992; Wigelsworth 2009; Young 1998; Zakai 2007) But by way of brief introduction, from the tumult of the religious upheavals of Europe’s sixteenth and seventeenth centuries emerged the confidence in a religion of universal reason and nature which was sufficient to maintain peace and regulate moral life. Among those responsible for laying the intellectual foundations on which deism arose was John Locke (1632–1704). Towards the end of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding he counters the religious enthusiasm that laid aside reason in the name of revelation, noting: Reason is natural revelation, whereby the eternal Father of light and fountain of all knowledge communicates to mankind that portion of truth which he has laid within the reach of their natural faculties; revelation is natural reason enlarged by a new set of discoveries communicated by God immediately, which reason vouches the truth of, by the testimony and proofs it gives, that they come from God. (Locke 1716, Bk. 4, 318)

By way of some representative soundings of English deism, Edward, Lord Cherbury (1583–1648) contended that there were universally accessible notions common to all religions in all time and places (Cherbury 1705). Matthew Tindal (1655–1733), whose Christianity as Old as the Creation (Tindal 1730) earned the moniker, ‘the deists’ Bible’, likewise asserted that an immutable and benevolent God must have revealed his will at creation. Later revelation could be no different from the natural religion found in the

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Revelation   167 law of nature; the subtitle of his work asserted it: the Gospel, a Republication of the Religion of Nature. God would not give a special revelation to a chosen people, condemning the rest of humanity to eternal punishment, a monstrous and unreasonable notion that to many constituted a ‘scandal of particularity’. Turning to the Bible itself, proof from prophecy was criticized by Anthony Collins (1676–1729) for violating the rules of common human language (Collins 1724). Claiming to write ‘to the honour of our Messiah, and the defence of Christianity’, Thomas Woolston (1669–1733) praised Collins and in the name of naked reason rejected the miraculous as violating the laws of nature (Woolston 1727, 4). By arguing that the same epistemological rules should be applied to the Bible as to any other text, Benedict Spinoza (1632–1677) had laid a foundation for the higher criticism of Scripture in which numbers of English deists engaged (Reventlow 1984; Lucci 2008). John Toland (1670–1722) summarized much of the deists’ confidence in reason as the foundation of all truth in the title of his work, Christianity not mysterious: or a treatise shewing that there is nothing in the gospel contrary to reason, nor above it: and that no Christian doctrine can be properly call’d a mystery (Toland  1696). Locke repudiated Toland’s claims, but as Kenneth Minkema summarizes, ‘To eighteenth-century thinkers caught up in the Enlightenment, reason was the measure to which everything, including revelation, was to be subjected’ (Minkema 1997, 22). Edwards’s access to the thought of these leading deists was largely a mediated one: both through compilations of their writings and through the orthodox responses they provoked (WJE 26: 71–2). Deist popularizer Thomas Chubb (1679–1747) appears as an Arminian foil in Freedom of the Will (WJE 1), while Edwards’s longest interaction with deist thought is in his private notes: an engagement with the argument of Matthew Tindal (see ‘Miscellanies’ nos. 1337, 1340, WJE 23: 342–5, 359–76); Gerald McDermott estimates that at least a quarter of Edwards’s ‘Miscellanies’ deals directly with the deist threats to orthodoxy (McDermott 2000, 39). By way of laying a foundation for what ­follows, a number of general observations may be made on Edwards’s convictions ­concerning revelation in the context of deist thought. First, Edwards stood in a line stretching back through Calvin to Augustine in affirming the necessity of what both reason and revelation taught. (Among many examples see, WJE 17: 415, 422–3; 19: 710; 8: 419–20.) Furthermore, to Edwards the very notion of revelation was an entirely reasonable one. Surely the Creator would want to communicate to his intelligent creatures. Even supposing man’s reason was perfect and he had no need of special revelation to enlighten his darkness and correct his errors, ‘it would be most unreasonable to suppose that there never should be any revelation made to man’ (WJE 13: 339). As I will argue below, in Edwards’s thought God was a communicative being and it was reasonable that he would wish to communicate with his creatures. Yet given that the human race is fallen and its reason flawed and darkened, it also seemed to Edwards entirely reasonable that a merciful and benevolent God, to whose character deist arguments frequently appealed, would not leave the human race to the guidance of its ‘very much corrupted’ reason in the issues of our eternal welfare, but would ‘consider our great need of a better rule’ (WJE 13: 361–2).

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168   Stephen R. C. Nichols Not only was the notion of revelation a reasonable thing, so too was its content. The truths of Christianity were ‘most rational, exceeding congruous to natural reason’ (WJE 13: 231–2) and yet above its discovery. It was entirely reasonable that God should reveal doctrines that are above human reason, and it would be strange otherwise (WJE 14: 232). God has reason that human reason cannot know (WJE 14: 165–97). Whether mysterious or not, ‘God always deals with men as reasonable creatures, and every word in the Scriptures speaks to us as such’ (WJE 10: 296). To Edwards, human nature only realized the full potential of its rationality in accepting God’s revelation in Scripture. (On the faculty psychology that prevailed until the eighteenth century, and Edwards’s place in it see Willey 1940, 34–42; Helm 2018.) To set reason against revelation was entirely wrong-headed. Second and related, Edwards critiqued the freethinkers’ frequent appeal to reason as the highest rule by which to judge revelation. In a lengthy note in his ‘Controversies’ notebook he argued with characteristic precision that many of the deists ‘deceive themselves through the ambiguity or equivocal use of the word REASON’. This was because they used it in two senses: as both a faculty and as a standard or rule. These two senses must be distinguished, Edwards argued, because the faculty of reason does not and cannot tell us what is true; that is the function of a rule (‘Controversies’ notebook, WJE Online Vol. 27). Edwards illustrated this by discussing the oft-used deist slogan, ‘One must doubt revelation because it does not agree with reason’ The deists, he argued, failed to realize that the faculty of reason is a faculty of judgement, yet it cannot be our rule of judgement, in the same way that the eye is the faculty of seeing, but not the rule of seeing. If reason were taken as a rule (as deists took it) then, Edwards concluded, we cannot believe anything that we do not already know. (For discussion of this and other instances the deists’ semantic illogicality see McDermott 1999b, 213–14.) Going further, Edwards responded to the deists’ appeal to ‘naked reason’ with the argument that reason itself is dependent on revelation. Revelation provided the foundations without which later phil­ oso­phy would be impossible. ‘The increase of learning and philosophy in the Christian world is owing to revelation: the doctrines of the Word of God are the foundations of all useful and excellent knowledge,’ providing the tools of reflection and abstract reasoning, delivering humanity from uncertainty in first principles which are ‘the basis of all true philosophy’ (WJE 13: 421–6). Third, in similar vein, notions that many took to be clear dictates of natural religion— such as principles of justice, morality and civil behaviour—Edwards claimed were dependent on revelation (WJE 19: 720). ‘Knowledge is easy to us that understand by reve­la­tion; but we don’t know what brutes we should have been, if there never had been any’ (WJE 13: 426). Not only was morality dependent on revelation, but according to Edwards, underlying all religion was revelation. This notion of a universal revelation was a bulwark of Edwards’s response to the so-called ‘scandal of particularity’, namely that ‘… the far greatest part of Mankind must be inevitably sentenced to Eternal punishment,’ a view ‘too rigid and severe to be consistent with the Attributes of the Most Great and Good God’ (Cherbury 1705, 2). Matthew Tindal similarly argued that God must have at all times given the whole world sufficient means of knowing what he required, or

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Revelation   169 he would be unjust in his condemnation of it. Christianity must be as old as the creation. Furthermore, ‘God . . . has continued to give all mankind sufficient means to know [the Christian religion] . . . so that Christianity, tho’ the name is of a later date, must be as old, and as extensive, as human nature; and, as the law of our creation, must have been then implanted in us by God himself ’ (Tindal  1730, 4). To Edwards, in a qualified sense, Christianity was as old as the creation. There were in fact two occasions in the history of the world when the entire human race possessed knowledge of the true God: at creation and in Noah’s Ark. The transmission of this knowledge through human history saw twin processes at work, memorably described by Gerald McDermott as ‘trickle-down reve­la­ tion’ and ‘religious entropy’ (McDermott 2000, 87ff). The prisca theologia (ancient theology), an important tradition in apologetic theology, associated with Clement of Alexandria and revived during the Renaissance, explained why vestiges of gospel truth could be found throughout the religions and cultures of the world. Edwards eagerly devoured examples of this, filling his later ‘Miscellanies’ with subjects such as the notion of the Trinity in Chinese religion and Plato’s reliance on Moses (WJE 23: 96–104, 543–75). The sources he turned to for this ancient and universal revelation were varied, among them English Nonconformist, Theophilus Gale (Gale 1672), Cambridge Platonist, Ralph Cudworth (Cudworth  1678) and Jacobite, ‘Chevalier’ Andrew Michael Ramsay (Ramsay 1748–9, 1752). Where the ‘heathen philosophers’ did not evidence dependence on the prisca theologia for their knowledge of the Trinity or the Messiah, rather than conceding the possibility that bare reason had led them to their conclusions, Edwards was prepared to consider privately whether these pagans had been the recipients of divine inspiration (WJE 23: 84–5). More often, however, in his rejection of the light of natural reason as an explanation of true religion found among the pagans, Edwards found recourse to ancient revelation. In the words of Cudworth’s Cambridge con­tem­ por­ary, Nathaniel Culverwel, ‘the whole generality of the Heathen went a gleaning in Jewish fields’ (Culverwel 1652, 67). Fourth, an oft-repeated theme by Edwards: God’s revelation in Scripture was necessary. Edwards displayed a remarkable confidence in unaided human reason: [I]t is within the reach of naked reason to perceive certainly that there are three distinct in God, each of which is the same [God], three that must be distinct . . . and that of these three one is . . . begotten of the other, and that the third proceeds alike from both, and that the first neither is begotten nor proceeds.  (WJE 13: 257)

Nevertheless Edwards claimed that natural reason had limits, encountering paradoxes it could not unravel, for example, the existence of suffering and injustice in a world ordered by an infinitely holy and good God (WJE 23: 359–76). Of greater significance, however, was the fact that while natural reason could grasp much, according to Edwards it could not do so in the manner in which it is necessary for us to know those truths, namely in relation to the gospel and to Christ. Therefore, in contrast to the confidence of Lord Herbert of Cherbury in the ability of human reason to grasp all that man needed to know about the divine nature and purposes, Edwards argued that without divine reve­la­tion

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170   Stephen R. C. Nichols ‘there is no one doctrine of that we call natural religion [but] would, notwithstanding all philosophy and learning, forever be involved in darkness, doubts, endless disputes and dreadful confusion’ (WJE 13: 421–3). The nature of God’s being and character would remain forever hidden without revelation, resulting in the kind of foolishness exemplified by Hobbes and Spinoza (WJE 23: 347). ‘Only through the Christian reve­ la­tion the world has come to the knowledge of the only one true God’ (WJE 18: 64). Only revelation could provide true knowledge of God’s nature and unity, his words, creation, government, designs, his will, the origin of sin, the nature and end of human happiness, morality, the future state and the way of redemption (WJE 13: 291–2; 18: 118). All pointed to the fact that ‘we stand in the greatest necessity of a divine revelation’ (WJE 20: 52–3). To summarize thus far, faced with the peculiar radical objections of English deism, Edwards defended a recognisably Reformed doctrine of revelation. In the remainder of the chapter I will argue that Edwards’s doctrine of God, coupled with certain meta­phys­ ic­al commitments, gave to the book of nature a far more expansive role in the life of the regenerate than was normal within the Reformed tradition.

‘God is a Communicative Being’ (WJE 13: 410) Edwards’s theology proper has an Augustinian shape. He explains the begetting of the Son in terms of God’s self-regard, and the proceeding of the Spirit as ‘the act of God between Father and Son, infinitely loving and delighting in each other’. In this, his earliest account of the Trinity, Edwards describes how this mutual rejoicing by the Father and the Son ‘is distinct from each of the other two, and yet it is God; for the pure and prefect act of God is God, because God is a pure act. It appears that this is God, because that which acts perfectly is all act, and nothing but act’ (WJE 13: 260). God’s being is one of eternal self-regard and self-love. The question of why God created consumed Edwards from the days of his teenage ‘Miscellanies’ and found fullest expression in his dissertation, The End for Which God Created the World, completed ca. 1755, though published posthumously (WJE 13: 185; 8: 405–536). Rooted in the divine goodness, God’s perfections included ‘a propensity of nature to diffuse of his own fullness’—a fullness consisting of his understanding and happiness, his self-knowledge and self-love (WJE 8: 447). God created in order to glorify himself through the communication of himself to his intelligent creatures and this communication was an activity agreeable to the ‘twofold subsistences which proceed from him ad intra, which is the Son and the Holy Spirit’ (WJE 23: 153; 8: 528–9). According to Edwards, ‘The great and universal end of God’s creating the world was to communicate himself. God is a communicative being’ (WJE 13: 410). History and the natural world were therefore significant as media of God’s reve­la­tion

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Revelation   171 within this teleology aimed at God’s glorification through self-communication. ‘[I]t was not that some formal knowledge of the Deity was the by-product of the Clockmaker’s world machine; it was rather that the universe was designed expressly to be the vehicle of God’s personal communication to men and angels’ (Schweitzer 2012, 13). Controversially, Sang Hyun Lee has suggested that Edwards departed from a classical account of God’s being as actus purus and adopted instead one that saw God as ­essentially dispositional (Lee 1988; 2003). Lee identifies in Edwards a revolutionary move away from an Aristotelean metaphysic of substance and accidents, to one of habit and disposition. In his account of Edwards’s theology the divine nature is essentially dispositional; God’s being is one of eternal becoming and creation is in some sense a f­ urther expression of God’s inclination to extend himself. Holmes and Crisp argue that Lee’s ‘Edwards’ is anachronistic, that Edwards’s ontology can more adequately be explained as a form of immaterialism and that he subscribed to a version of ­occasionalism (Holmes  2003; Crisp  2010;  2012, 14–56. For a summary see Crisp & Strobel 2018, 90–120). To Edwards, God was essentially a communicative being. History was divinely directed to his glorification through his self-communication. I turn now to the implications of this for the book of nature.

‘A Certain Sort of Language in which God is Wont to Speak to us’ (WJE 11: 150) Discussion of the role of natural revelation in Edwards’s tradition is reserved for later. Of concern at present is that there was already in Edwards’s day what might be termed an ‘imagistic consciousness’ distinct from, though informed by, the biblical types that in the Puritan manuals linked Old and New Testament (Mather 1705; Nichols 2013, 58–107). Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana (Mather 1702) expressed the parallel between the New England drama and the experience of the Israelites, while in the natural world among many examples are John Flavel’s popular Husbandry Spiritualized (Flavel 1669) and Mather’s Agricola (Mather 1727). To Edwards, however, neither history nor the natural world merely illustrated spiritual truths. By divine design the universe was created with the express purpose of communicating those spiritual truths to the understanding and affections of intelligent creatures. Within a divinely conceived scheme of God-glorifying redemption history ‘. . . the whole universe, heaven and earth, air and sees, and the divine constitution and history of the holy Scriptures, be full of images of divine things, as full as a language is of words’ (WJE 11: 152). Edwards’s typ­ ology not only defined the very purpose of creation in terms of revelation, it multiplied infinitely the pathways of God’s self-communication. In contrast to his immediate heri­tage, Edwards found both types and antitypes present in Old and New Testament; Christ’s

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172   Stephen R. C. Nichols miracles were ‘images of the great work he came to work on man’s heart’; Constantine’s revolution and ‘the destruction of the heathen Roman empire’ was ‘a lively image and type of . . . Christ’s coming to the final judgment [sic]’; and in the natural world, ‘[t]he rising and setting of the sun is a type of the death and resurrection of Christ’ (WJE 9: 317, 351; 11: 64). Two metaphysical commitments underlay Edwards’s novel typology: a version of ideal­ism; and his notion of being as relational and communicative. Wallace Anderson charts the development in the philosopher’s thought from an early concern with the nature of being to his assertion of idealistic phenomenalism (Anderson 1980, 52–136). Whatever the sources of his idealism, Edwards was convinced that the universe existed in the mind of God (WJE 6: 76 and n.; 351). In his notebook, ‘The Mind’ the young Edwards also explored the nature of excellence and beauty, finding them constituted by levels of harmony and proportion (WJE 6: 336–7). Every created object was related to every other created object, but every created thing also imaged spiritual reality, so that creation comprised a network of images of divine things (WJE 6: 305; 13: 434–5). Through the material image the spiritual substance—in some sense more real than the image itself—was communicated (WJE 6: 344). While Locke considered figurative language to be an ambiguous method of instruction, aimed at moving the passions and thereby misleading judgement (Locke  1716, Bk. 3, 106), in Edwards’s mind the figurative language of types was entirely fitting, tending to ‘enlighten and illustrate, and to convey instruction with impression, conviction and pleasure, and to help the memory’ (WJE 11: 191). At creation the Son endued humanity with understanding, while the Spirit endued human beings with a holy will and in­clin­ ation (WJE 24: 126). Therefore, to bearers of the divine image, a ‘rhetoric of sensation’ that was directed to both the understanding and inclination of the saint was not an in­ad­ equate mode of instruction but was perfectly fitting. Anticipating the discussion below on the relationship in Edwards’s thought between the books or nature and Scripture, the New England divine argued that the Bible itself expected the saint to go beyond its own finite worked examples. In his notebook, ‘Images of Divine Things’ (late 1720s–1757) Edwards stated that ‘the book of Scripture is the interpreter of the book of nature’ in two ways. First, Scripture declares the ‘spiritual mysteries’ that are typified in nature. Despite the infinite ­number of natural types that present themselves for comparison and reflection, access to the significance of the types is found only in the Bible. Second, Scripture ‘in many instances’ makes applications of those natural types of spiritual mysteries (WJE 11: 106). Though the conclusions Edwards reached sometimes appear strange to modern sensibilities, his was not an unprincipled typology. The ‘Images’ notebook is full of worked examples richly permeated with bib­lical references and subtle allusions betraying Edwards’s sophisticated biblical literacy. Guided by the grammar book of Scripture, Edwards laboured to acquire fluency in God’s language of types taught in the Bible and expressed throughout creation and history. I turn now to Scripture itself.

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Revelation   173

‘Light in our Hands . . . a Precious Treasure . . . this very Revelation’ (WJE Online Vol. 19, 722) To Edwards the Bible was the very ‘Word of God’, ‘that Holy Book’, ‘the epistle of Christ that he has written to us’, and the ‘Book of God’ (Bailey & Wills 2002, 128, 129; WJE 10: 477, 366). Following Calvin, Edwards offered proofs of Scripture’s credibility, but subordinated these to Scripture’s self-authentication (WJE 13: 410; 2:3 07; 14: 233). In line with his tradition Edwards believed that Scripture shared the attributes of its divine author, chief among which was its harmony. Edwards had a high view of the Bible’s inspiration; it was ‘indited’ by God, its human authors (or ‘penmen’) were under divine direction when they wrote (e.g. WJE 13: 427–8). He was even prepared to speculate on the psychological state of those under inspiration (WJE 13: 389–90; 6: 346) and in his ‘Blank Bible’ quoted the English Puritan, John Owen (1616–1683), that the Holy Spirit ‘acted and guided the prophets ‘as to the very organs of their bodies, whereby they expressed the revelation which they had received by inspiration from him. . . . [H]e gave [the pattern of the Temple to David] so plainly and evidently, as if every particular had been expressed in writing by the finger of God’ (WJE 24: 410). Consequently, the Bible was ‘an infallible guide, a sure rule which if we follow we cannot err’ (sermon no. 84 on Matthew 13:23, WJE Online Vol. 43). In a tradition traceable to Augustine, Edwards also subscribed to a form of accommodatio or condescensio, the notion that an infinite God must in some way condescend or accommodate himself to human ways of knowing in order to reveal himself. Preaching on Rev 21:18 in 1723 Edwards noted: ‘Although things on earth are insufficient to represent to us these glories [of heaven], nor are we capable of conceiving of it, yet God condescends, when he speaks of these things, to our way of apprehension, and because we are most apt to [be] affected by those things which we have seen with our eyes, and heard with our ears and had experience of ’ (WJE 14: 139–40). Edwards’s confidence that the Spirit-given ‘new sense’ could grasp the meaning of divine communication through Scripture and types did not negate his commitment to accommodatio since the doctrine refers to the manner or mode of revelation, not to the quality of revelation or to the matter revealed. (Muller 2003, 262). Yet even as Edwards voiced familiar convictions about the nature of the Bible and its inspiration, he was all too aware of the questions posed by an emerging higher criticism. His writings demonstrate his extensive engagement with many of these questions. Indeed, Brown describes it as ‘a ubiquitous feature of [his] work, an aspect absent of which the nature and genesis of his entire theological career cannot be adequately understood, or can hardly be made intelligible at all’ (Brown 2002, xv). An account of this is beyond the present enquiry. But of relevance to his doctrine of revelation is Edwards’s engagement with questions raised by Locke’s disciple, Anthony Collins.

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174   Stephen R. C. Nichols Collins’ debt to John Locke’s epistemology of sensation is apparent. Locke had argued that we cannot know an object itself, only our sensation of it. Simple ideas, sensibly related to external objects, have relation only to those objects. Our words are signs of our experienced ideas, so that in the communication of those ideas words are significant and meaningful only to the extent that they can be understood as referring to those intended ideas (Locke 1716, Bk. 3, 76–7). Turning to the Bible, prophets as the recipients of the ‘original revelation’, as Locke termed it, signified their new simple ideas by their words. To everyone else access to this revelation was through the reading of Scripture and was therefore one stage removed from ‘original revelation’; Locke termed this in­dir­ ect communication, ‘traditional revelation’. The inadequacy of words to communicate simple ideas led Locke to the conclusion that there was unavoidable obscurity surrounding the ancient authors, which should lead to caution in reading them and charity in consideration of the interpretations offered by others (Locke 1716, Bk 3, 81, 88–9). I will return below to the nature of the reader’s relationship with the biblical text as I discuss Edwards’s doctrine of the ‘new sense’. But suffice it at present to note that he believed that the Spirit who inspired the prophets was the same Spirit who illumined the minds of the saint, creating a harmonious relationship between text and reader. Locke noted a further limitation of traditional revelation: ‘. . . Whatsoever Truth we come to the clear discovery of, from the Knowledge and Contemplation of our own Ideas, will always be certainer to us, than those which are conveyed to us by Traditional Revelation’ because we can never be as sure that this revelation originated from God as we can be of the agreement or disagreement of our own ideas (Locke 1716, Bk. 4, 310–11). In the activity of reading Scripture, as with any indirect communication, meaning could not be understood except by ideas derived from the stock of ideas the reader already possessed. Whatever the ‘original revelation’ may have been, the reader of Scripture only had access to it through the propositions of ‘traditional revelation’ and these propositions must comply with the normal rules for the meaningful use of language (Locke 1716, Bk. 4, 309–10). If language were to be used in a ruled and rational way, propositions could not refer to more than one thing at the same time (Locke 1716, Bk. 3, 89–120). On this ground Anthony Collins launched his attack. Sharing Locke’s assumptions (and claiming also to follow Hugo Grotius), Collins drew radical conclusions from them, attacking what he adjudged to be the New Testament’s violation of the ‘common rules of grammar and logick [sic]’ through its alleged misappropriation of Old Testament prophecies (Collins 1724, 51). At the heart of Collins’ challenge was his insistence on a ruled use of language appropriate to the human author. Though he did not name Collins, Edwards engaged with the latter’s claims, conceding that the New Testament writers sometimes applied Old Testament texts in ways not envisaged by their human authors. In contrast to Locke and Collins, Edwards admitted that a single text might have more than one referent (WJE 15: 104–5). He agreed too that Scripture’s language, like all language, must obey certain rules if it is to be meaningful, and like Locke and Collins, he rooted the ruled use of language in the intention of a rational author. But for Edwards the rational author primarily in view was the divine one. (For a fuller treatment of Edwards’s ‘response’ to Collins, see Nichols 2013, 17–57.)

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Revelation   175 The univocity Collins demanded of the text (by his equation of the literal sense with the intention of the rational human author) was rejected by Edwards, whose primary concern with the intention of the rational and harmonious divine author delivered a literal sense that was polyvalent. Edwards was heir to a Reformed and Puritan interpretive tradition, yet within it expressed a significant degree of innovation. (Fuller treatments may be found in Sweeney 2016; Nichols 2013; 2018; Barshinger 2014; Minkema 2018.) Familiar to his heri­ tage was his notion that the true scope and sense of every part of the Bible concerned the Messiah, his redemption and kingdom. In this way alone the Scriptures were coherent, displaying the divine author’s property of harmony. To Edwards, the Bible was a selfreferential, self-interpreting world (WJE 25: 512), but the analogy of Scripture, however, was closed to mere ‘principles of nature’, the reader requiring a new ‘spiritual principle’ that created a harmony between his heart and the text; only in this way could he move beyond speculative knowledge to spiritual knowledge. Humility and study were necessary, but ‘Ratiocination, without this spiritual light, never will give one such an advantage to see things in their true relations and respects to other things and to things in general’ (WJE 13: 469–70; 14: 79; 16: 728, 797; 2: 278). Edwards studied and preached the Bible in the context of twin challenges. On the one hand was a rationalism that at in its extreme form denied the necessity of special reve­la­ tion altogether. On the other hand, arising from the religious awakenings he himself witnessed were the claims of ‘enthusiasts’ to new revelation. In his sermon, ‘False Light and True’, Edwards declared that divine light ‘don’t reveal any new truths not contained in the word of God’ (WJE 19: 134). There was for Edwards, as Sweeney notes, ‘a world of difference . . . between illumination and immediate revelation’ (Sweeney 2016, 41). New ‘immediate revelation’ (which Edwards described as, ‘God’s making known some truth by immediate suggestion of it to the mind, without its being made known by sense or reason, or by any former revelation’) ended with the closure of the canon of Scripture. The canon complete, the church now enjoyed a ‘perfect and complete standing rule, sufficient to guide her in all things’. Nevertheless, in Edwards’s thought the Church experienced a degree of epistemic progress in understanding God’s revelation. Edwards, the optimistic post-millenialist, believed that the Church, for whom the Scriptures were written, would continue to grow in her understanding of the Bible and in God’s time would come to ‘a very glorious state here in this world and to a very great degree of perfection in knowledge and resemblance of an heavenly state of perfect light and know­ledge’ (WJE 13: 426; 21: 232; 25: 281). I have outlined briefly Edwards’s basic convictions regarding divine revelation in the books of nature and Scripture. But what was the relationship between the two? Did he, as Perry Miller claimed, exalt nature to ‘a level of authority co-equal with [special] reve­ la­tion?’ (Miller 1948, 28). In approaching the question I consider now how his doctrine of illumination sheds light on his relationship to natural revelation and natural theology, mindful that he did not leave a definition of either term. (For further discussion see Gerstner 1991, 107–13; Holmes 2000, 104ff; Moody 2005, 119–54; Nichols 2003, 21–45; Schweitzer 2012, 31–80.)

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176   Stephen R. C. Nichols

The Relationship of the Books of Nature and Scripture Issues of natural revelation and natural religion were brought sharply into focus in Edwards’s own day by Tindal’s Christianity as Old as the Creation (Tindal 1730). Tindal argued that . . . too great a stress can’t be laid on Natural Religion; which, as I take it, differs not from Reveal’d, but in the manner of its being communicated: The one being the Internal, as the other the External Revelation of the same unchangeable Will of a Being, who is alike at all times infinitely wise and good.

Since, according to Tindal, natural religion was delivered perfect, revealed religion could add nothing to it: ‘Can Revelation, I say, add any thing [sic] to a Religion thus absolutely perfect, universal and immutable?’ The answer in the deist’s mind was a firm negative (Tindal 1730, 3–4). Tindal envisaged early mankind living in a Golden Age whose natural religion was clear, simple and universally accessible. ‘[There is a] religion of nature and reason which God has written in the hearts of every one of us from the first creation’ (Tindal 1730, 59–60). Further revelation was both unnecessary and claims to it, therefore, were fraudulent. Edwards criticized Tindal’s logic, namely that the fact that the law of nature is perfect means that the light of nature is also sufficient: ‘What according to the nature of things is fittest and best may be most perfect, and yet our natural discerning and knowledge of this may be most imperfect’ (WJE 23: 342). The law of nature may be perfect, but the noetic effect of sin is such that fallen humanity is unable to benefit from the revelation that nature provides. Preaching in 1741, Edwards urged that ‘all that is visible to the eye is unintelligible and vain, without the Word of God to instruct and guide the mind’ (WJE 4: 240). Edwards did not exalt nature to a level co-equal with [special] revelation. In a quarterly lecture of 1737 entitled ‘Light in a Dark World, a Dark Heart’, Edwards described a ‘two-fold light’ that God gave to his creatures to reveal to them things concerning ‘their true interest and happiness’. The first was ‘the light of nature’, given to men’s natural reason from God’s works of creation and his common grace. (In this cat­ egory comes conscience, which Edwards described in ‘The Mind’ as an assent of the mind arising from a general sense of the beauty and harmony of things (WJE 6: 356, 365).) The second light he described in his lecture was ‘the light of revelation, which is ­something above the light of nature’ and was that by which God manifested himself to the world by his written word and was essential for understanding reality (WJE Online Vol. 19,710). Spiritual knowledge or a ‘true sense’ of things was the product of the new disposition, being entirely and immediately dependent on the indwelling Holy Spirit (WJE 17: 413–14; see also WJE 17: 408–26; 14: 70–96). As Douglas A. Sweeney explains, ‘It was not that the world could not be known without the Bible, or that Scripture was a

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Revelation   177 textbook in history or natural science. Rather, for Edwards, Word and Spirit shone a light on worldly wisdom, rendering knowledge more real, sure, even beautiful than before’ (Sweeney 2016, 35). A metaphor that all but defined the age in which he lived, Edwards made frequent use of the image of light. This, combined with his language of ‘sense’ in his accounts of experimental religious knowledge, suggested to Perry Miller that Edwards’s encounter with Locke’s Essay while at Yale was an intellectual epiphany and foundational to the development of his epistemology. Recent scholarship, however, has recognized that Miller both misdated the encounter and overestimated its significance on shaping Edwards’s metaphysics (Helm 1969; Anderson 1980, 15–18, 25–6; Fiering 1981, 33–40; Morris 2005, 129–286; Thuesen 2008, 89–93; Strobel 2013; Stoever 2014). It is sufficient at present to note with Brown that Edwards’s epistemology contained rationalist elements, yet he found in Locke both the resources he sought to give philosophical expression to experiential knowledge and the affective language that was familiar to the religious psych­ology of his own Reformed and Puritan heritage (Brown  1999;  2002, 39–40). Edwards insisted that, ‘A spiritual understanding of divine things [was] denied to the unregenerate’ because they did not experience them; they have ‘no principle of nature within them from whence this spiritual knowledge can be elicited’ (WJE 14: 83). To them the things of the gospel were but ‘a parcel of words to which they in their own minds have no correspondent ideas; ’tis like a strange language or a dead letter, that is sounds and letters without any signification’ (WJE 13: 287). As Douglas Sweeney concludes, Edwards ‘made use of idealist understandings of the way we come to know things and combined them with the language of sensationalist psychology’. And though he rarely cited Locke’s Essay, it is clear that he ‘gleaned’ from it (Sweeney 2016, 39). Crucial to understanding the relationship between natural and supernatural reve­la­ tion is the distinction Edwards made between the benefits of natural revelation for the unregenerate and for the regenerate. While Edwards affirmed the common grace that the unregenerate enjoyed, he maintained that the man not spiritually enlightened [by means of the Bible and God’s Spirit], who ‘sets himself to reason without divine light’ is like a man walking in a beautiful garden at night, measuring and feeling the plants around him. However, he that sees by divine light is like a man that views the garden in sunlight. ‘There is . . . a light cast upon the ideas of spiritual things in the mind of the believer, which makes them appear clear and real, which before were but faint, obscure representations’ (WJE 13: 469–70). As noted earlier, while natural revelation taught many truths concerning God it did not do so in the (Christological) manner necessary for salvation (WJE 20: 52–3). Edwards followed Calvin and a mainstream Reformed trad­ition in believing that while natural revelation is insufficient to save humanity, it is nevertheless sufficient to condemn it: ‘They have light sufficient for that judgment [sic] and condemnation which they shall be the subjects of. For their condemnation shall proceed no further than so far as to be proportioned to their light’ (WJE 23: 355; Turretin 1992, 9–11; Mastricht 2018, 78, 83–6). The orthodox taught that natural reve­la­ tion not only deprived mankind of an excuse, but because of it the one who sought peace with God through natural religion would more joyfully receive the revelation of God’s

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178   Stephen R. C. Nichols grace when it was imparted to him (see for example, Turretin 1992, 8), but neither the tradition nor Edwards claimed that natural revelation was salvific. (For the controversial claim that Edwards’s doctrine of natural types, his use of the prisca theologia and adoption of a ‘dispositional soteriology’ combined to offer the possibility of the salvation without the means of supernatural revelation see Morimoto 1995; McDermott 1999a, 173–202; 2000, 130–45; and a response: Nichols 2013, 142–88.) Edwards similarly followed a mainstream Reformed tradition in affirming the benefit of natural revelation for the regenerate. Under the illumination of the Spirit and guidance of the book of Scripture the saint could read the book of nature. Edwards did not exalt nature to a level of authority co-equal with Scripture; Scripture always had the priority. In the context of the multifarious challenges of English deism that privileged human reason over divine revelation, Edwards advanced a position recognizably Reformed in its basic convictions. Yet he was creative within his tradition. His theology proper ­coupled with his metaphysical commitments meant that he was far more generous than his heritage in the revelatory role nature could play for the saint. God, who was essentially a communicative being, had created in order to communicate himself to his intelligent creatures. On Edwards’s scheme creation comprised a nexus of images designed to communicate spiritual substance to man and angel. And although Edwards insisted that only through Scripture could the saint’s acquire fluency in the divine language of types and interpret rightly God’s revelation in Scripture, history and the natural world, in practice by its very conception as a language there was inherent in it considerable fluidity. Images were not related to a single immovable referent. Coupled with a remarkable confidence in the Spirit-given ‘new sense’ to guide the saint, Edwards’s conviction regarding the polyvalence of the divine language in both the natural world and Scripture meant that his doctrine of revelation, though recognizably within a mainstream Reformed tradition, had innovative and unique features (Nichols 2013, 188–95).

Works Cited Jonathan Edwards Bailey, Richard  A. and Gregory Wills, eds (2002). The Salvation of Souls: Nine Previously Unpublished Sermons on the Call of Ministry and the Gospel by Jonathan Edwards, Wheaton IL: Crossway.

Other Works Anderson, Wallace E. (1980). ‘Editor’s Introduction’. In The Works of Jonathan Edwards Vol. 6 Scientific and Philosophical Writings, edited by Wallace  E.  Anderson. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1–143. Barshinger, David P. (2014). Jonathan Edwards and the Psalms: A Redemptive-Historical Vision of Scripture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brown, Robert E. (1999). ‘Edwards, Locke and the Bible.’ Journal of Religion 79.3: 361.

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Revelation   179 Brown, Robert E. (2002). Jonathan Edwards and the Bible, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Calvin, John (1960). Institutes of the Christian Religion, The Library of Christian Classics 20–1, trans. by Ford Lewis Battles, ed. by John T. McNeill, London: SCM. Champion, J.  A.  I. (1992). The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and its Enemies, 1660–1730, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cherbury, Edward Herbert (1705). The Antient Religion of the Gentiles, London. Collins, Anthony (1724). A Discourse on the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion. London. Cragg, Gerald R. (1962). The Church and the Age of Reason: 1648–1789. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Crisp, Oliver  D. (2010). ‘Jonathan Edwards’s Ontology: A Critique of Sang Hyun Lee’s Dispositional Accounts of Edwardsean Metaphysics.’ Religious Studies 46: 1. Crisp, Oliver D. (2012). Jonathan Edwards on God and Creation, New York: Oxford University Press. Crisp, Oliver D. & Kyle C. Strobel (2018). Jonathan Edwards: An Introduction to his Thought, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Cudworth, Ralph (1678). True Intellectual System of the Universe, London. Culverwel, Nathaniel (1652). An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature, London. Fiering, Norman (1981). Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and Its British Context, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Flavel, John (1669). Husbandry Spiritualized. London. Gale, Theophilus (1672). The Court of the Gentiles; or, A discourse touching the original of human literature, both philology and philosophie, from the Scriptures & Jewish church. . . 4 vols. Oxford. Gerstner, John H. (1991). The Rational Biblical Theology of Jonathan Edwards, In Three Volumes. Vol. 1, Powhatan, VA: Berea Publications. Harrison, Peter (1998). The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harrison, Peter (1990). ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Helm, Paul (1969). ‘John Locke and Jonathan Edwards: A Reconsideration.’ Journal of the History of Philosophy 7.1: 51. Helm Paul (2018). Human Nature from Calvin to Edwards. Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books. Holifield, E.  Brooks (2003). Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War. New Haven: Yale University Press. Holmes, Stephen R. (2000). God of Grace and God of Glory: An Account of the Theology of Jonathan Edwards. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Holmes, Stephen  R. (2003). ‘Does Jonathan Edwards Use a Dispositional Ontology? A Response to Sang Hyun Lee.’ In Jonathan Edwards: Philosophical Theologian, edited by Paul Helm and Oliver D. Crisp. Aldershot: Ashgate. 99–114. Lee, Sang Hyun (1988). The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lee, Sang Hyun (2003). ‘Editor’s Introduction’. In The Works of Jonathan Edwards Vol. 21 Writings on the Trinity, Grace and Faith, edited by Sang Hyun Lee. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1–108.

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180   Stephen R. C. Nichols Locke, John (1716). An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. 3rd edn. London. Lucci, Diego (2008). Scripture and Deism: The Biblical Criticism of the Eighteenth-Century British Deists. Studies in Early Modern European Culture, Bern: Peter Lang. Mastricht, Petrus van (2018). Theoretical-Practical Theology. Vol. 1 Prolegomena trans. by Todd M Rester, ed. by Joel R. Beeke, Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books. Mather, Cotton (1702). Magnalia Christi Americana. London. Mather, Cotton (1727). Agricola. Boston. Mather, Samuel (1705). The Figures or Types of the Old Testament. 2nd edn. London. McDermott, Gerald  R. (1999a). ‘A Possibility of Reconciliation: Jonathan Edwards and the Salvation of Non-Christians.’ In Edwards in our Time: Jonathan Edwards and the Shaping of American Religion, edited by Sang Hyun Lee and Allen  C.  Guelzo. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. 173–202. McDermott, Gerald R. (1999b). ‘Jonathan Edwards, Deism and the Mystery of Revelation.’ The Journal of Presbyterian History 77.4: 211. McDermott, Gerald  R. (2000). Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods: Christian Theology, Enlightenment Religion and Non-Christian Faiths. New York: Oxford University Press. Miller, Perry (1948). ‘Introduction’. In Images or Shadows of Divine Things. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1–41. Minkema, Kenneth P. (1997). ‘Preface to the Period.’ In The Works of Jonathan Edwards Vol. 14 Sermons and Discourses 1723–29, edited by Kenneth P. Minkema, 3–44. New Haven: Yale University Press. Minkema, Kenneth P. (2018). ‘Jonathan Edwards’s Scriptural Practices.’ In Jonathan Edwards & Scripture: Biblical Exegesis in British North America, edited by David  P.  Barshinger & Douglas A. Sweeney, 14–31. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moody, Josh (2005). Jonathan Edwards and the Enlightenment: Knowing the Presence of God. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Morimoto, Anri (1995). Jonathan Edwards and the Catholic Vision of Salvation. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Morris, William S. (2005). The Young Jonathan Edwards: A Reconstruction. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock. Muller, Richard A. (2003). Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520–ca. 1725. Vol. 1 Prolegomena to Theology, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker. Neil, W. (1963). ‘The Criticism and Theological Use of the Bible, 1700–1950.’ In The Cambridge History of the Bible: The West from the Reformation to the Present Day, edited by S. L. Greenslade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 238–93. Nichols, Stephen R. C. (2013). Jonathan Edwards’s Bible: The Relationship of the Old and New Testaments. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications. Nichols, Stephen  R.  C. (2018). ‘Jonathan Edwards’ Principles of Interpreting Scripture.’ In Jonathan Edwards & Scripture: Biblical Exegesis in British North America, edited by David P. Barshinger & Douglas A. Sweeney. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 32–50. Nichols, Stephen J. (2003). An Absolute Sort of Certainty: The Holy Spirit and the Apologetics of Jonathan Edwards, Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing. Porter, Roy (1981). ‘The Enlightenment in England.’ In The Enlightenment in National Context, edited by Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1–18.

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Revelation   181 Ramsay, Chevalier [Andrew Michael] (1748–49). Philosophical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion, Glasgow. Ramsay, Chevalier [Andrew Michael] (1752). Travels of Cyrus. To Which is Annexed, a Discourse upon the Theology and Mythology of the Pagans, 8th edn. London. Reventlow, Henning Graf (1984). The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World, trans. by John Bowden, Philadelphia: Fortress Press. Schreiner, Susan  E. (1995). The Theater of His Glory: Nature and the Natural Order in the Thought of John Calvin. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books. Schweitzer, William M. (2012). God is a Communicative Being: Divine Communicativeness and Harmony in the Theology of Jonathan Edwards. T&T Clark Studies in Systematic Theology, London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark. Stoever, William K. B. (2014). ‘Godly Mind: Puritan Reformed Orthodoxy and John Lock in Jonathan Edwards’s Conception of Gracious Cognition and Conviction.’ Jonathan Edwards Studies 4.3: 327. Strobel, Kyle C. (2013). Jonathan Edwards’s Theology: a Reinterpretation. T&T Clark Studies in Systematic Theology, London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark. Sweeney, Douglas A. (2016). Edwards the Exegete: Biblical Interpretation and Anglo-Protestant Culture on the Edge of the Enlightenment. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thuesen, Peter  J. (2008). ‘Editor’s Introduction’. In The Works of Jonathan Edwards Vol. 26 Catalogues of Books. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1–113. Tindal, Matthew (1730). Christianity as Old as the Creation: or the Gospel, a Republication of the Religion of Nature. London. Toland, John (1696). Christianity not mysterious: or a treatise shewing that there is nothing in the gospel contrary to reason, nor above it: and that no Christian doctrine can be properly call’d a mystery. London. Turretin, Frances (1992). Institutes of Elenctic Theology. Vol. 1 trans. by George Musgrave Giger, ed. by James T. Dennison, Jr. Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing. Westminster Confession of Faith (2006). Glasgow: Free Presbyterian Publications. Wigelsworth, Jeffrey  R. (2009). Deism in Enlightenment England: Theology, Politics and Newtonian Public Science. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Willey, Basil (1940). The Eighteenth-Century Background: Studies on the Idea of Nature in the Thought of the Period. New York: Columbia University Press. Woolston, Thomas (1727). A Discourse on the Miracles of our Saviour, in view of the present controversy between infidels and apostates, 2nd edn. London. Young, Brian W. (1998). Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England: Theological Debate Between Locke and Burke. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Zakai, Avihu (2007). ‘The Age of Enlightenment.’ In The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards, edited by Stephen J. Stein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 80–99.

Suggested Reading Crisp, Oliver D. (2012). Jonathan Edwards on God and Creation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McDermott, Gerald  R. (2000). Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods: Christian Theology, Enlightenment Religion, and Non-Christian Faiths. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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182   Stephen R. C. Nichols Nichols, Stephen  R.  C. (2013). Jonathan Edwards’s Bible: The Relationship of the Old and New Testaments. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications. Schweitzer, William M. (2012). God is a Communicative Being: Divine Communicativeness and Harmony in the Theology of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 14 of T&T Clark Studies in Systematic Theology, London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark. Sweeney, Douglas A. (2016). Edwards the Exegete: Biblical Interpretation and Anglo-Protestant Culture on the Edge of the Enlightenment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Author Bio Stephen R. C. Nichols read history at Christ’s College, Cambridge, theology at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford and wrote his Ph.D. dissertation under Oliver D. Crisp at the University of Bristol. He is author of Jonathan Edwards’s Bible: The Relationship of the Old and New Testaments (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2013) and is an ordained minister in the Church of England, serving as Associate Rector of All Souls, Langham Place, London.

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chapter 12

Feder a lism a n d R efor m ed Schol asticism Willem van Vlastuin

Introduction In every age Christian theologians have reflected on the enduring theological meaning of the covenant in the Bible, examining how it might inform their own understanding of the church and her practice. Even theologians of the early church discussed the covenant and theorized about its meaning (Duncan 1995) and, from the time of the Reformation, in particular, it became a substantial theme in theology. In this chapter some contours and pivotal points in the history of the doctrine of the covenant in the Reformed tradition are outlined. Against this background, the doctrine of the covenant in Jonathan Edwards’s theology is contextualized and explained so that his specific interpretation and position might be fully appreciated. Of course, this research of Edwards’s covenant theology is done in the context of the status quaestionis.1 Edwards’s views on the covenant of redemption, the covenant of grace, the national covenant, the marriage covenant, the Spirit as fulfilment of the covenant and its developments are treated in particular depth.

Reformed Context Ulrich Zwingli used the concept of the covenant to support his argument for the Paedobaptism. His successor Heinrich Bullinger published the first monograph about the covenant, calling it A Brief Exposition of the One and Eternal Testament or Covenant 1  For recent research on Edwards’s covenant theology, see Knijff and Vlastuin (2013), McClymond and McDermott (2012, 321–38).

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184   Willem van Vlastuin of God (1534). In John Calvin’s theology, the concept of the covenant is important in clarifying the unity of the Old and the New Testament. The baptism of children was implied in this unity of both parts of the Bible. This meant that the starting point for the reformer was the administration of the covenant rather than its application. According to Calvin’s understanding of the relationship between Word and Spirit, the preaching of the gospel of God’s promises was paramount and the Spirit’s work in effecting God’s promises followed. In this context, Calvin is also known for distinguishing two sorts of children of the covenant, namely the real Christians and the nominal ones.2 Reflection on the covenant continued after the Reformation.3 It was an important issue in the theology of Heidelberg (Bierma 2013, 90–100). The doctrine of the covenant was also an important reality in the Puritan tradition. The Puritan Richard Sibbes wrote The Faithful Covenanter. In Scotland, consciousness of the covenant was deeply interwoven with spiritual life and, in 1638, the Scottish people drew up national covenant which had several theocratic implications. The personal covenant was well known in the Puritan tradition too and the church covenant in congregationalism. The Westminster Confession made the covenant its ‘architectonic principle’ (Warfield 2003, 6: 56). The several chapters of this confession can be divided in subthemes which can be characterized as the entrance in the covenant, the benefits of the covenant and covenantal life. It is apparent from the confession that the anthropological aspect of the covenantal life is taken seriously, being clearly illustrated in the ethical dimension of this confession and its praecisitas (preciseness). The issues concerning free will, effectual calling and personal assurance were also implied in this anthropological interest. The basic covenant structure in the Westminster Confession is an interpretation of the covenant of works in paradise which means that human beings in Adam could earn salvation by obedience (Kevan 1993, 167–95; Rohr 1986, 76). The covenant of grace did not imply any abrogation of the covenant of works, its replacement or its renewal, but the fulfilment of the original covenant with human beings by Christ. This meant that the obligations of the law remained under the dispensation of grace, and that the covenant had to be interpreted in the framework of the law. On the other hand the legal framework in which the covenant of grace was sited pleads for a two-covenant structure parallel to that of the Adam–Christ duality. Thomas Boston is an example of this approach (Knijff and Vlastuin 2015). A special issue regarding the covenant of grace concerns the issue of the extension of the covenant. Did all people in church belong to the covenant or only the elect? Could the promises of the covenant be applied to everyone or only to the elect? Are members of the congregation in the covenant, was the covenant offered to all, or could it only be offered to spiritually qualified people? The Westminster Confession tried to deal with all 2  Most characteristic is Calvin’s comment on Genesis 17:7 in which he writes about ‘a twofold class of sons’ https://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/calcom01.xxiii.i.html (accessed August 20, 2019). 3  Compare Lillback 2001. The first part of his work treats the early history of covenant theology and the second part Calvin’s contribution. Woolsey (2012) treated the traces of the covenant before the Reformation, the covenant theology in Calvin, Beza, Heidelberg theology, Puritanism and Scottish theology.

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Federalism and Reformed Scholasticism   185 these sensitive issues by stating that God in the covenant of grace ‘freely offereth unto sinners life and salvation by Jesus Christ, requiring of them faith in Him that they may be saved, and promising to give unto all those that are ordained unto life His Holy Spirit, to make them willing and able to believe’ (Westminster 7.3). In the movement of Reformed Orthodoxy, there were also two other developments.4 First, some theologians distinguished the covenant of grace from the covenant of redemption. In this approach the covenant of grace referred to the relationship between God in Christ with believers in time, while the covenant of redemption referred to the covenant between the Father and the Son in eternity. In this covenant the Father and the Son agreed to save sinners in the way of the covenant of grace. The eternal covenant of redemption underlined the aspect of grace, because this covenant was made without any contribution by human beings. There is some irony to be found here because Arminius was first to introduce the term ‘covenant of redemption’, only to be followed by William Ames who used this same concept to oppose Arminius’ theory of unlimited atonement (Trueman 2010, 199–200). In time the distinction between the eternal covenant of redemption and the covenant of grace also led—secondly—to deeper reflection on the historical character of the covenant of grace. In his Theologia Pandata (Biblical Theology) John Owen (1616–1683) distinguished four dispensations of this covenant. We find the same attention given to the progress of the historical covenant of grace in Witsius’ (1636–1708) The Economy of the Covenants between God and Man, and Peter van Mastricht (1630–1706) went one step further by treating the book of Revelation in Theoretico-practica Theologia through the lens of federal theology. The long title of Van Mastricht’s magnum opus (1724) includes the phrase Historia Ecclesiastica plena fere (…)5, which means that this author also includes the history of the church in his federal theology. Wilhelmus à Brakel (1635–1711) gave a similar amount of attention to the history of the church in The Christian’s Reasonable Service (À Brakel 1992). From the complete title of his work, it is clear that he understood the history of church to be part of the covenant: THE CHRISTIAN’S REASONABLE SERVICE in which Divine Truths concerning the COVENANT OF GRACE are Expounded, Defended against Opposing Parties, and their Practice Advocated as well as The Administration of this Covenant in the Old and New Testaments. The redemptive-historical approach can be found in the third book in which À Brakel treats the history of the church from Adam to the end of the world. Besides this three-covenant structure, we can also find a fourfold structure of the covenant in John Owen’s interpretation of the covenant at Sinai as a special phase of the covenant (Beeke and Jones 2012). Owen is also known for putting great emphasis on

4  Usually the era of Reformed Orthodoxy is divided into three periods: early (1565–1640), high (1640–1725), and late orthodoxy (from 1725). Willem  J.  van Asselt (2011) and Richard  A.  Muller (2003, 2017) have raised a new interest in Reformed Orthodoxy by removing prejudices, clarifying its catholic character and promoting the precise methodology which theologians in this movement used. See also Selderhuis (2013) and Wisse, Sarot, and Otte (2010). 5  Compare the complete title in the bibliography.

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186   Willem van Vlastuin the new covenant under Christ and on the shadow character of the covenant under the dispensation of the Old Testament (Renihan 2017). The last observation concerning Edwards’s theological and spiritual background in reflecting on the covenant is related to the concept of the covenanted church in New England. The traces of this concept can be found in the Pilgrim Fathers, while John Cotton can be honoured as the architect of ‘the way of the New England churches’, which he called congregationalism. ‘The New England Way’ meant that membership of the church was limited to saved believers and that each church had its own governance. The limited membership of the church caused tensions in the later generations in New England. These tensions led to the Half-Way Covenant. The concept implied that regenerate church members were acknowledged as covenant children and the non-regenerate parents as ‘half-way’ members of the covenant. Their moral life was not enough to share the Lord’s Supper, but it was sufficient to request that their children be baptized. Solomon Stoddard concluded that the Lord’s Supper was also a converting ordinance. In fact he widened the covenant and made a sharp distinction between being a covenant member and being converted, hoping to keep the theocratic claim of God’s covenant on the people of New England. After describing these various interpretations of the covenant in the Reformed tradition, we come to Jonathan Edwards’s interpretation of the covenant and his place in the greater tradition of Reformed and Puritan theology.

Edwards’s Early View on the Covenant of Grace How did Jonathan Edwards understand the covenant of grace and how did he develop its understanding? An important and early reflection in Edwards’s miscellanies of 1723 on the covenant of grace (WJE 13: 198–9) states: It is very improper to say that a covenant is made with men any otherwise than in Christ, for there is vast difference between a free offer and a covenant. The covenant was made with Christ, and in him with his mystical body; and the condition of this covenant is Christ’s perfect obedience and sufferings.

As opposed to Calvin, Edwards’s interpretation of the covenant of grace did not start from the covenant position of the members of the church who could by the Spirit become converted church members, because for Edwards the union with Christ is the same as the real belonging to the covenant. The covenant of grace is offered freely to the unconverted people in the church, but these people have no spiritual rights to the covenant of grace. Only converted church members participate in the benefits of the covenant of grace. Perhaps this approach, which dates back to 1723, reflected Edwards’s critical

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Federalism and Reformed Scholasticism   187 attitude towards the Half-Way Covenant, because according to Edwards the covenant was identical with the spiritual union with Christ; this had not yet, however, been made explicit. So how does this relate to the Westminster Confession? In accordance with the Westminster Confession, Edwards took as his fundamental starting point the description of the covenant of grace in the covenant of works. The covenant with Adam remains the unabrogated covenant of God with mankind (WJE 13: 362). Edwards was convinced that the human break with God did not imply that the covenant with its promises and requirements had been terminated. God holds us to this original covenant. This original covenant has to be fulfilled, by ourselves, or by a representative. Christ appears to be the fulfilment of Adam as the federal head of the new humanity. Real believers are in Christ and other people are still in Adam under the requirements of the broken covenant of works. This interpretation makes clear that the duality of Adam and Christ cohered with the duality of the covenant of works and the covenant of grace, in which the covenant of works is expressed in the law and the covenant of grace in the gospel. There is also a difference with the Westminster Confession because Edwards is less focused on giving attention to, and the importance of, faith: This making faith a condition of life fills the mind with innumerable difficulties about faith and works and how to distinguish them, tends to make us apt to depend on our own righteousness, tends to lead men into neonomianism, and gives the principal force to their arguments. Whereas, if we would leave off distinguishing the covenant of grace and the covenant of redemption, we should leave all these matters plain and unperplexed.  (WJE 13: 199)

These thoughts reveal the motives behind Edwards’s reluctance to focus on faith. He is afraid of mingling works and faith, or interpreting faith as a work, which is characteristic of neonomianism and Arminianism. Edwards here shows himself a convinced professor of sola gratia. His foregrounding of God’s grace also led Edwards to identify the covenant of grace and the covenant of redemption. While the distinction between the covenant of redemption and the covenant of grace implied a greater emphasis on human involvement in the covenant of grace, Edwards was eager to apply these two covenants to the same reality.

The Covenant of Grace in Relation to the National Covenant Not only in Scotland, but in New England too, believers understood that there was a special relationship between God and the people of New England. Historically, this covenant idea can easily be understood, because the first generation of New England

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188   Willem van Vlastuin Puritans understood themselves to be building a pure New Testament church and a godly society for the honour of God. They cherished theocratic ideals; as a society they intended to be ‘A City upon a Hill’ for the entire world and, as a special group, they entered into a special covenant with God. When, in later generations, these high spiritual ideals waned, the leaders in the church castigated this decline in the forms of ‘jeremiads’. They designated fast days for humiliation about sins and lukewarmness while insisting on reformation. In this context, the reforming synod of 1679–80 spoke about ‘covenant renewal’ (Stout 1986, 96–9). While Edwards was critical of how people understood the national covenant as a guarantee of their good standing with God, he did not reject the notion as such. It has been shown that the national covenant was not absent in Edwards’s thought (Stout 1986, 1988; McDermott 1992, 11–36). During his lifetime he used this concept, especially in meetings during the week and on fast days. This means that Edwards believed that God had a special relationship with the people of New England as a whole (without excluding such a relationship with other nations). This raises the question: how did Edwards relate the national covenant to the covenant of grace? How could all the people of New England share in the covenant, when the covenant of grace is defined by the personal spiritual union with Christ? Is there any relationship between these two covenants? Do both covenants have a scriptural foundation? If we begin by looking at Edwards’s interpretation of the covenant under the dispensation of the Old Testament, we can recognize different interpretations. He could speak about the Sinai covenant as an expression of the covenant of grace, but then qualified it as its national and external form (WJE 23, 492–506). He could also write that the Ten Commandments belonged both to the covenant of works and the covenant of grace (WJE 20: 368); at other times we read that, at Sinai, the covenant of works was sealed (WJE 13: 362, 364, 403, 487–8; 23: 511, 516). So, what can be concluded from this seemingly inconsistent approach? The key is that, according to Edwards, the covenant of Sinai was ‘diverse from the covenant that is established between God, and the mystical church’ (WJE 23: 499). One of these differences is that the covenant with Israel could be broken, but the new covenant with the spiritual Israel could not (WJE 15: 104). In a number of ways this interpretation is similar to John Owen’s approach—that the covenant in the Old Testament is a shadow of the real covenant in Christ. Although Edwards can acknowledge a church in the Old Testament (WJE 9: 120), he qualified it as a type of Christian church (WJE 20: 204). We can conclude that, for Edwards, the essence of the covenant of grace was based on the spiritual union with Christ. This covenant was not a general one, made with the church or society, but a particular one that comprised only the regenerated believers. Edwards did not limit the concept of the covenant to the covenant of grace, but he saw a more general and external covenant with nations such as New England, analogous to God’s covenant with Israel in the Old Testament. Here another difference with the Westminster tradition becomes apparent. While the Westminster Confession expressed the presence of the covenant of grace during the

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Federalism and Reformed Scholasticism   189 dispensation of the Old Testament, Edwards did not understand the covenant of the Old Testament as the full and real covenant of grace, but as a shadow of it. Westminster accepted the unity between Old and New Testament. Edwards, on the other hand, accentuated the difference in dispensation.

From Two to Three Covenants Understanding Edwards’s desire for the identification of the covenant of grace and the covenant of redemption, makes the opening sentence of ‘Miscellany’ 617 (WJE 18: 148) quite remarkable: It seems to me there arises considerable confusion from not rightly distinguishing between the covenant that God makes with Christ and with his church or believers in him, and the covenant between Christ and his church or between Christ and men. There is doubtless a difference between the covenant that God makes with Christ and his people, considered as one, and the covenant of Christ and his people between themselves.

It seems that Edwards was not a consistent thinker. While the paragraph cited in the ­previous section connects the covenant of grace and the covenant of redemption, ‘Miscellany’ 617 appears to disconnect both covenants. McClymond and McDermott provide a convincing argument for harmonizing both of Edwards’s views (McClymond and McDermott 2012, 324–6). They explain that Edwards is not inconsistent, but that his understanding of the covenant went through a number of developments. Before 1723, it appears that Edwards wrote consistently about the connectedness and unity of the covenant of grace and the covenant of redemption. But, in 1733, we see the first indication of a change in interpreting both covenants. This altered view of the covenant, however, would remain fairly consistent after 1733.6 The development in Edwards’s conception of the covenant raises the question: what brought him to this new approach? The context of Edwards’s theologizing is an important factor in any understanding of Edwards’s development in his covenant view. Edwards underlined the unity of both covenants in 1723 in the context of his engagement with Arminianism. By 1733 it became necessary to have a theological concept to fend against Antinomian laxity. Given this context, it is understandable that Edwards uses the theology of the personal covenant of grace between Christ and believers to underline human responsibility. From this point of view, it is also understandable that Edwards, in ‘Miscellany’ 617, wrote explicitly about faith being the prerequisite condition for entering into the 6  Knijff and Vlastuin (2013) have argued against McClymond and McDermott (2012) stating that there is no reason to see a second change in Edwards’s understanding of the covenant.

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190   Willem van Vlastuin c­ ovenant. It ‘seems an absurdity and contradiction’ to suppose that promises are unconditional. In the Arminian context it was necessary to minimize the role of human beings and their faith, so that the conditions of the covenant could not be interpreted as depending on human initiative or works. The Antinomian context, on the other hand, made it necessary to accentuate human responsibility and involvement. In the Arminian context, the monopleuric (one-sided) dimension of the covenant was accentuated, while in the Antinomian context it has to be made clear that the covenant has a dipleuric (double-sided, or reciprocal) character and that there is reciprocity between the two partners in it. By distinguishing between the covenant of redemption in eternity and the covenant of grace in time Edwards achieved both aims. The eternal character of the covenant of redemption made honouring free grace possible, because it was clear that God redeemed the elect in Christ without them making any contribution. Because the covenant of grace was under the control of the covenant of redemption (Cherry 1966, 121), it was completely clear that human redemption is outside ourselves (extra nos). Thus, the doctrine of the covenant of redemption was a protection against Arminian interpretations of God’s covenant. At the same time, the concept of the covenant of redemption made it also possible to honour human involvement in the covenant of grace. The human factor originated from the effective grace of the Holy Spirit in the soul. The Spirit effects a gracious regeneration and human beings exercise grace. It is not the Holy Spirit who believes, who repents, who experiences sorrow for sin and loves God, but human beings. Placing the covenant of grace under the control of the covenant of redemption made it possible to clarify that grace is also in us (in nobis). The distinction between the two covenants and the order of the covenants enabled Edwards to do justice to both God and to human beings. God’s primary grace did not destroy human agency, but restored it. Edwards also used the distinction between the covenant of grace and the covenant of redemption to account for the historical dimension of God’s covenant. Edwards’s attention to history cohered with a broader reformed interest in the meaning of history as expressed in Van Mastricht (Neele  2019, 181–205) and À Brakel (1992). In 1739 Edwards preached his famous series on the history of redemption; later he should even express an intention to develop an entirely new theological method from an historical perspective.

The Covenant of Redemption To understand Edwards’s concept of the covenant of redemption, ‘Miscellany’ 1062 (WJE 20: 430–5), entitled ‘Economy of the Trinity and Covenant of Redemption’ is important. The title itself is telling, as Edwards distinguishes between the economy of the Trinity and the covenant of redemption. According to Edwards’s understanding

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Federalism and Reformed Scholasticism   191 there is subordination between the persons of the Trinity with respect to their acts towards created beings by mutual free agreement and prior to the covenant of redemption (Pauw 2002, 91–118). The Father is the primary author of the covenant of redemption. He chooses the person of the Son as the Redeemer, ‘offers him authority for the office, proposes precisely what he should do as the terms of man’s redemption, and all the work that he should perform in this affair, and the reward he should receive, and the success he should have’ (WJE 20: 435–6). The Son could have rejected this proposal, but he agreed willingly. So, the covenant of redemption can be defined as ‘the covenant of God the Father with the Son, and with all the elect in him, whereby things are said to be given in Christ before the world began, and to be promised before the world began’ (WJE 18: 536). Another feature of this covenant is the absence of the Holy Spirit, which creates a tension with the classic theologoumenon of the unity of the Trinity in the outward works (opera ad extra indivisa sunt). In the formal sense the covenant of redemption is made between the Father and the Son, but in reality the Holy Spirit is also involved in the redemption of human beings. The Spirit is the bond of union between the Father and the Son, the spring of love from which all that the other persons do flow and He is the end of the covenant (WJE 20: 443). This approach clarifies that the covenant of grace is ultimately based on the covenant of redemption, or deeper, in the will of the Triune God. This offers a nuanced approach. Salvation is not rooted in the essence of God, but in the will of the three persons of the Trinity. The rooting of salvation in the will of the three persons of the Trinity makes salvation firm, because these three persons have a personal interest in the redemption of lost people. Thus, this redemption is as close to God as is possible. This is how we should understand Edwards’s words: This Work of Redemption is so much the greatest of all the works of God, that all other works are to be looked upon either as part of it, or appendages to it, or are some way reducible to it. And so all the decrees of God do some way or other belong to that eternal covenant of redemption that was between the Father and the Son before the foundation of the world; every decree of God is some way or other reducible to that covenant.  (WJE 9: 513)

From this description of the covenant of redemption it appears that the covenant of grace is deeply rooted in and an outgrowth of the covenant of redemption, because all God’s decrees and acts are governed by his aim to redeem the elect. Christ is the connecting person between the triune God and the individual believers, because he is, on the one hand, as the second person of the Trinity, involved in God’s eternal covenant to redeem lost sinners, while, on the other hand, he is the head of the body of believers. The believers are included in Christ as his ‘mystical body’ (Bogue 1975, 104) which means that they are not only represented by Christ, but in a mystical sense they are also present in him. So, in the union with Christ, believers share in the eternal covenant of redemption and in the economic household of the Trinity.

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192   Willem van Vlastuin This implies that the covenant of redemption and the covenant of grace have to be distinguished from one another, but cannot be separated. Although the two covenants have to be distinguished from the human perspective, from the divine perspective the covenants form a unity (Bogue 1975, 96). Gerstner articulated the relationship between the two covenants in this way: ‘For Edwards, the covenant of Redemption was the covenant wherein it was agreed that the Son would become the mediator of the elect, and the Covenant of Grace was the way in which He would carry out his mediation for the elect’ (Gerstner 1992, 112).

The Covenant of Marriage Edwards used the biblical metaphor of marriage to explain the character of the covenant of grace (WJE 18: 148): The covenant that the father makes between a son and his son’s wife, considered as one, must be looked upon as different from the marriage covenant or the ­covenant which the son and the wife make between themselves. The father is concerned in this covenant only—as a parent in a child’s marriage—directing, consenting and ratifying (…) The things concerned in both covenants being some of them the same and to the same persons, don’t cause but that the covenants are not entirely different: as if a father gives an estate to his son and his future wife, the son in his marriage covenant gives himself and his estate to her that he takes to wife; yet the covenants are entirely different and not at all to be confounded.

This citation of Edwards confirms the distinction between the covenant of redemption and the covenant of grace. The heavenly Father as the primary actor initiates a covenant of redemption with his Son. His Son agrees to become man and to redeem his ‘mystical body’, i.e. the members of his church. Unlike the eternal covenant of redemption between the Father and the Son, the Son here is united with the sinners. The union of Christ with sinners is unique to the Son. God’s Son united himself with human nature, so that human beings could be united with Christ. Neither the Father, nor the Holy Spirit was incarnated, so the union with human beings is exclusively that of the Son. Believers are the body of Christ, but they are not the body of the Father or of the Spirit. In a certain sense Christ is the covenant of grace, because the covenant of grace is determined by Christ (Gerstner 1992, 102), and believers participate in God’s promises by their union with Christ. Because of the union with Christ, believers have God as their God. For Edwards this is the main promise of the covenant of grace (WJE 12: 210). This main promise contains the totality of all promises. In union with Christ, believers share the promises of justification, adoption, sanctification, perseverance of saints and eternal life.

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Federalism and Reformed Scholasticism   193 As evinced by his extensive commentaries on Canticles, Edwards had a particular l­ iking for the marriage analogy as an expression of the covenant of grace. Christ gave up himself to his bride unconditionally. He marries sinners, they give themselves up to Him and are in spiritual union and communion with Him. This means that believers do not only share the riches of the Bridegroom, but they participate in himself: ‘The sum of what is promised in Christ’s marriage covenant with his people, is the enjoyment of himself and communion with him in the benefits he himself has obtained of the Father by what he has done and suffered’ (WJE 18: 148). This approach offers the theological opportunity to give special attention to the person of the Son and the communion with him. The Christ-centred spirituality which is implied in this theology prevents a spirituality that is only focused on the benefits for human beings or a spirituality that deals with the benefits of Christ in an impersonal way. If God’s grace is reduced to justification one can imagine grace being displayed as an impersonal transaction on a spiritual bank account with which the debt of sinners is paid. Edwards’s spirituality is structured in another way, because Christ as a person is the offer of the gospel. While Christ is primary, it is through Christ that believers gain the secondary profit of his benefits. The marriage relationship with Christ as the Bridegroom was, for Edwards, also a way to relate believers to the Trinity. As the bride of the Son, the church participates in the inner-Trinitarian community between the Father, the Son and the Spirit. Edwards spoke about the believers as ‘God’s family’.

The Spirit as the Sum of the Covenant The focus on Christ as the Bridegroom is balanced by the focus on the Holy Spirit. Edwards could write: The sum of the blessings Christ sought, by what he did and suffered in the work of redemption, was the Holy Spirit (…) The Holy Spirit is that great benefit, that is the subject matter of the promises, both of the eternal covenant of redemption, and also of the covenant of grace.  (WJE 5: 341)

Like John Owen, Edwards understood the (indwelling of the) Holy Spirit to be the great promise of the covenant of grace (Vlastuin 2019). Edwards developed this approach in the context of the Arminian threat (Lee, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, WJE 21: 21, 41), implying a certain immediacy in his theology (Lee, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, WJE 21: 57–62). While the Reformed tradition interpreted the warnings and promises of the covenant as instruments to bring people to conversion, Edwards narrowed the scope of the Puritan covenant idea (Cherry 1966, 109) by his emphasis on the content of, and the power in, the covenant of grace. Edwards did not understand the Spirit only as the Agent by which

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194   Willem van Vlastuin Christ’s gifts were applied, but as the gift itself. For the theologian of Northampton the Spirit was the great purpose of Christ’s work; Adam lost the Spirit but through Christ sinners get the Spirit back, richer and irremovable. This approach differs from the Westminster Confession which lacks any special paragraph on the Spirit at all. This is consistent with its concentration on the ordo salutis. While the Spirit could be made functional in this tradition, Edwards understood the indwelling of the Spirit to be an aim in itself. In the Reformed tradition the doctrine of the Holy Spirit can—with some exaggeration—be characterized as a Christ-centred functional Pneumatology; and, in the Westminster tradition, as a benefit-centred functional Pneumatology. In Edwards, however, we find a Spirit-centred Christology (Vlastuin 2016 and 2019). In Edwards’s Spirit-structured theology, the juridical interpretation of God’s grace in the Reformed tradition changed. This does not mean that Edwards abandoned the doctrine of justification by faith and the forensic imputation of Christ’s righteousness, but the emphases changed and the indwelling of the Spirit of love became the centre of gravity in his theology and spirituality. Edwards also reinterpreted his understanding of the functioning of the law in the life of believers. He agreed with the Westminster Confession that the covenant of works was the framework for any understanding of the covenant of grace. The implication of this framework was that the commandments of the law were still valid (WJE 13: 362). For Edwards, this did not mean, however, that he preached the law to believers, because believers would be discouraged from serving God if they were confronted by the law (WJE 15: 198–9; Beck and Vlastuin 2012, 15–17). Believers must not be guided by the law, but by the Spirit. Because the law is written in the hearts of believers, believers should not be directed to an outer version of the law to live the Christian life, but to love as the fulfilment of the law. This explanation put Edwards at odds with his tradition, a tradition in which the preaching of the law as a means of achieving obedience to the covenant was common. Edwards’s explanation cohered with his exegesis of Romans 7:14–25, which he did not apply to the converted believer, but to the unconverted sinner in Adam (WJE 2: 298; 17: 125, 345).

The Revival of the Church Given the fact that the theology of the covenant can be seen as the hidden framework supporting the building of the dogmatic structures of one’s theology, it is no surprise that Edwards’s doctrine of the covenant influenced his complete theology. This is especially true with regard to his ecclesiology that can be seen as a clear application of his covenant theology. Although Edwards accepted the external and general national covenant, in his ecclesiology he understood the covenant in a limited and spiritual way. During his ministry in Northampton, the general principles of the Half-Way Covenant in the church caused him greater and greater concern. Edwards’s starting point for his

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Federalism and Reformed Scholasticism   195 ecclesiology was not the external instrument of the covenant, but the internal indwelling of the Spirit and the spiritual union in the marriage covenant with Christ. We can interpret Edwards’s ecclesiology as a return to the vision of the founders of ‘The New England Way’ as expressed by John Cotton in which only ‘visible saints’ get full church membership and access to the Lord’s Table, and in which also a strong emphasis is put on the indwelling of the Spirit. Instead of a broad nationwide church he preferred a pure church which he saw as a visible expression of the invisible union with the heavenly Bridegroom. This approach, minimizing external covenant structures, had at least two consequences. The first was Edwards’s remedy for the spiritual decay of the church. While his forefathers appealed to God’s covenant with Christians, calling for humiliation and new covenant obedience, Edwards’s emphasis was on the immediate work of the Spirit, interpreting the revival in Northampton as an ‘outpouring of the Spirit of God’ (WJE 4: 154). This does not mean that Edwards rejected church covenants completely. The local covenant of 1742 is proof enough of this. But we can say that Edwards’s emphasis was not on the duties of believers, but on the possibilities of the Holy Spirit. The second consequence of Edwards’s church covenant was his public break with the Half-Way Covenant in An Humble Inquiry into the Rules of the Word of God, concerning the Qualifications requisite to a complete standing and full Communion in the visible Christian Church (1749). In this treatment Edwards clarified his view that the church is not an instrument to mediate redemption, but is the beginning of redemption itself. Full members of the church are not only invited to Christ, but they participate in Christ through his Spirit. While the Half-Way Covenant accepted that there was a great distance between the visible and the invisible church, Edwards tried to connect them. It was Edwards’s grandfather, Stoddard, who was especially active in widening the distance between the covenant and conversion, while his grandson pleaded for a union between covenant and conversion, losing the theocratic claim of the church.

Conclusions and Considerations In the broader Reformed and Puritan tradition Edwards has his own place. We see a consistent uniting of the covenant of grace and the indwelling of the Spirit, with the larger emphasis placed on the Spirit. This emphasis, on the one hand, leads to the understanding of the covenant in the Old Testament as a shadow of the real covenant of grace in Christ. On the other hand, in accordance with the vision of the founders, notably John Cotton, it implies a narrowing of the covenant to the converted members in the church so that the mediating function of the covenant was minimized. Jonathan Edwards’s approach differs from the understanding of the covenant in the Reformation and in the Westminster Confession. With all the nuanced differences within these movements, in general it can be stated that the mediating function of the covenant was more highly valued in these movements than it was in Edwards.

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196   Willem van Vlastuin Edwards’s focus on the immediate work and indwelling of the Spirit led ultimately to a public ­rejection of the Half-Way Covenant and to a stricter ecclesiology. At the same time, Edwards’s estimation of the value of the reciprocity of human responsibility in the covenant and the historical manifestation of the covenant developed over time, finally enabling him to draw a distinction between the eternal covenant of redemption and the covenant of grace which was mainly manifested in time; the seeds of a theology of history eventually becomes present in Edwards. These two lines in Edwards’s theological developments create a paradox: his ­interpretation of the covenant was narrowed and widened at the same time. His interpretation of the covenant was narrowed in the sense that he applied the covenant only to the real converted members of the church, but his interpretation was also ­widened in the sense that he became more and more sensitive to the manifestations of the Holy Spirit in human beings and human history.

Works Cited Asselt, Willem J. (2011). Introduction to Reformed Scholasticism. Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books. Beck, Andreas J. and Vlastuin, Willem van (2012). ‘Sanctification between Westminster and Northampton.’ Jonathan Edwards Studies vol. 2, no. 2: 3–27. Beeke, Joel R. and Jones, Mark (2012). ‘The Minority Report: John Owen on Sinai.’ A Puritan Theology. Doctrine for Life. Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books. 293–03. Bierma, Lyle  D. (2013). The Theology of the Heidelberg Catechism. A Reformation Synthesis. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. Brakel, Wilhelmus à (1992). The Christian’s Reasonable Service. Ed. J.R. Beeke, transl. B. Elshout (Redelijke Godsdienst (Rotterdam: Reinier van Doesburgh, 1700). Grand Rapids: Reformed Heritage Books. Bogue, Carl W. (1975). Jonathan Edwards and the Covenant of Grace. Cherry Hill: Mack,. Cherry, Conrad (1966). The Theology of Jonathan Edwards. A Reappraisal. New York: Anchor Books. Duncan, J.  Ligon (1995). ‘The Covenant Idea in Ante-Nicene Theology.’ Edinburgh: Dissertation, University of Edinburgh. Gerstner, John H. (1992). The Rational Biblical Theology of Jonathan Edwards. 3 vols. vol. 2, Powhatan: Berea Publications. Kevan, Ernest F. (1993). The Grace of Law. A Study in Puritan Theology. Ligonier: Soli Deo Gloria Publications. Knijff, Cornelis van der and Vlastuin, Willem van (2013). ‘The development in Jonathan Edwards’s covenant view.’ Jonathan Edwards Studies, vol. 3, no. 2: 269–81. Knijff, C. van der and Vlastuin, Willem van (2015). ‘Why Edwards did not understand Thomas Boston: A Comparison of their Views on the Covenants.’ Jonathan Edwards Studies 5.1: 44–57. Lillback, Peter A. (2001). The Binding of God: Clavin’s Role in the Development of Covenant Theology, Texts and Studies in Reformation and Post-Reformation Thought, ed. Richard A. Muller. Grand Rapids: Baker. Mastricht, Petro van (1724). Theoretico-practica Theologia qua, Per singula capita Theologica, pars exegetica, dogmatica, elenchtica & practica, perpetua successione conjugantur. Editione

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Federalism and Reformed Scholasticism   197 Nova accedunt: Historia Ecclesiastica plena fere, quanquam compendiosa: Idea Theologiae Moralis: Hypotyposis Theologiae Asceticae &c. Trajecti ad Rhenum: W. van de Water, J. v. Poolsum, J. Wagens, G. v. Paddenburg. McClymond, Michael J. and McDermott, Gerald R. (2012). The Theology of Jonathan Edwards. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McDermott, Gerald R. (1992). One Holy and Happy Society. The Public Theology of Jonathan Edwards. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Muller, Richard A. (2003). Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics. The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520 to ca. 1725. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic. Muller, Richard A. (2017). Divine Will and Human Choice: Freedom, Contingency, and Necessity in Early Modern Reformed Thought. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic. Neele, Adriaan C. (2019). Before Jonathan Edwards. Sources of New England Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pauw, Amy  P. (2002). The Supreme Harmony of All. The Trinitarian Theology of Jonathan Edwards. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Renihan, Samuel D. (2017). ‘From Shadow to Substance: The Federal Theology of the English Particular Baptists (1642–1704).’ Amsterdam: PhD diss. VU, Chapter 5. Rohr, Jan von (1986). The Covenant of Grace in Puritan Thought. Atlanta: Scholar Press,. Stout, Harry S. (1986). The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England. New York: Oxford University Press. Selderhuis, Herman J. (ed.) (2013). A Companion to Reformed Orthodoxy. Leiden: Brill. Stout, Harry S. (1988). ‘The Puritans and Edwards.’ In: Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience. Ed. N.O. Hatch and H.S. Stout. New York: Oxford University Press. 142–59. Trueman, Carl R. (2010). ‘The Harvest of Reformation Mythology? Patrick Gillespie, and the Covenant of Redemption.’ In: Scholasticism Reformed. Essays in Honour of Willem J. van Asselt Ed. M. Wisse, M. Sarot and W. Otte. Brill: Leiden. 196–14. Vlastuin, Willem van (2016). ‘Jonathan Edwards spiritualis. Towards a reconstruction of his theology of spirituality.’ Journal for the History of Reformed Pietism 2.1: 23–47. Vlastuin, Willem van (2019). ‘Retrieving Jonathan Edwards’s doctrine of the indwelling of the Spirit.’ The Spirit is Moving: New Pathways in Pneumatology. Studies Presented to Professor Cornelius van der Kooi on the Occasion of his Retirement. Ed. Gijsbert van den Brink, Eveline van Staalduine-Sulman and Maarten Wisse. Leiden: Brill. 235–50. Warfield, Benjamin B. (2003). The Works of Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House. Wisse, Maarten, Marcel Sarot, and Willemien Otte (eds.) (2010). Scholasticism Reformed. Essays in Honour of Willem J. van Asselt. Brill: Leiden. Woolsey, Andrew (2012). Unity and Continuity in Covenantal Thought: A Study in the Reformed Tradition to the Westminster Assembly. Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books.

Suggested Reading Beck, Andreas J. and Vlastuin, Willem van (2012). ‘Sanctification between Westminster and Northampton.’ Jonathan Edwards Studies vol. 2, no. 2: 3–27. Knijff, Cornelis van der and Vlastuin, Willem van (2013). ‘The development in Jonathan Edwards’s covenant view.’ Jonathan Edwards Studies, vol. 3, no. 2: 269–81.

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198   Willem van Vlastuin Neele, Adriaan C. (2019). Before Jonathan Edwards. Sources of New England Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 181–5. Pauw, Amy  P. (2002). The Supreme Harmony of All. The Trinitarian Theology of Jonathan Edwards. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. 91–118. Stout, Harry  S. (1988). ‘The Puritans and Edwards.’ Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience. Ed. N.O. Hatch and H.S. Stout. New York: Oxford University Press. 142–59.

Author Bio Willem van Vlastuin (1963) is a professor of theology and spirituality of reformed Protestantism at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Dean of the Hersteld Hervormd Seminarium, Co-director of the Jonathan Edwards Center Benelux, editor of Jonathan Edwards Studies, and a research associate at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein. After his dissertation on Edwards’s doctrine of the Spirit in revivals (Theological University Apeldoorn, 2002) he wrote several articles about Edwards’s theology and spirituality. He has also ­published Be Renewed. A Theology of Personal Renewal (2014) and Catholic Today. A Reformed Conversation about Catholicity (2017). He is married to Wilma Wiersma with whom he has three daughters and three sons.

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chapter 13

Cr eation a n d Pr edesti nation Phillip Hussey and Michael Mc Clymond

Early in his ‘Miscellanies’ Jonathan Edwards mused that doctrines such as the Trinity and the divine decrees serve as ‘glorious inlets into the knowledge and view of the spiritual world, and the contemplation of supreme things’ (WJE 13: 328). In Edwards’s theology, the doctrines of creation and predestination exemplify the ‘contemplation of supreme things’, often pressing the boundaries of Reformed and catholic orthodoxy. A case in point is Edwards’s construal of the relation between God and the world. Edwards sometimes seemed to suggest the necessity of God’s creating the world (McClymond and McDermott 2011, 207–23). Not as well known—and underdeveloped in the secondary literature—is the link between the election and predestination of Jesus Christ and the act of creation (Schafer 1955, 52–4; Bush 2003, 54–82; Lee 2003, 223–31). The election of Jesus Christ—articulated unsystematically across Edwards’s vast corpus—conditions Edwards’s doctrine of creation. Any discussion of Edwards’s doctrine of creation apart from his doctrine of election will be incomplete. Apart from election, a controversial area in recent discussion is Edwards’s assertion of God’s continuous creation of the world, which leads some to characterize Edwards as an ‘occasionalist’ who denied creaturely agency altogether and affirmed that God is the sole cause of all actions and events (Crisp 2012, 23–36; Crisp 2018). Edwards’s views on creation and predestination are rooted in a robust, trinitarian conception of God. Creation followed as a consequence of the Father’s election of the Son of God, the ‘one grand medium’ of God’s self-communication and self-glorification. Thus ‘that grand decree of predestination, or that sum of God’s decrees, called the purpose which God purposed in Christ Jesus, the appointment of Christ, or the decree respecting his person (in the order wherein we must consider these things), must be considered first’ (WJE 23: 180). Here predestination does not first and foremost refer to the election or rejection of individual human beings, or of an elect covenant people, but rather to the christological conditioning of creation as such. For ‘God’s design in the creation of all

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200   Phillip Hussey and Michael McClymond things is to glorify his Son, and through him to glorify himself ’ (WJE 25: 117). Edwards’s most vivid phrasing derives from marriage: ‘God created the world for his Son, that he might prepare a spouse or bride for him to bestow his love upon; so that the mutual joys between this bride and bridegroom are the end of creation’ (WJE 13: 374; cf. WJE 8: 808, 13: 271). The sphere of created things exists to communicate the glories of the Son of God through an affective union—or ‘union of hearts’—with human beings in the one mystical body or ‘spouse’ of Christ (WJE 25: 585). To unpack these claims, attention will first be given to the relation between God and the world in Edwards’s theology. The discussion will then turn to Edwards’s overarching commitment to the election of Jesus Christ as the driving force in God’s creating, to the question of reprobation or the divine rejection of the wicked, and finally to the related issues of continuous creation and occasionalism.

God’s Relation to the World Jonathan Edwards wrote in End of Creation that ‘we may suppose that a disposition in God, as an original property of his nature, to an emanation of his own infinite fullness, was what excited him to create the world; and so that the emanation itself was aimed at by him as a last end of the creation’ (WJE 8: 435, orig. ital.). For Edwards, this disposition in God to see his internal glory or fullness diffused ‘must be prior to the existence of the creature, even in intention and foresight’ (WJE 8: 438). Yet more provocatively, Edwards states that God ‘looks on the communication of himself, and the emanation of the infinite glory and good that are in himself to belong to the fullness and completeness of himself, as though he were not in his most complete and glorious state without it’ (WJE 8: 439). The ‘as though’ in Edwards’s statement triggered a cascade of interpretations, ranging from pantheism to normative Reformed orthodox views of God (Hodge 1977, 2: 220; Strobel 2014, 75–104). Two interpretations with staying power thus far have been those of Sang Hyun Lee and Oliver Crisp. These competing accounts construe the God–world relation in dispositional terms (Lee) or in moral–deterministic fashion (Crisp). According to Lee, Edwards’s understanding of the God–world relations follows from Edwards’s own reconceptualization of the divine essence as a disposition to actuality (Lee 2003, 170–256). Lee maintains that, for Edwards, disposition and actuality perfectly coincide in the beauty of consenting relations among the triune persons, thereby preserving God’s self-sufficiency and aseity: ‘God’s motive in creating the world is the further exertion of his original dispositional essence, which is already fully exercised within God’s internal being’ (Lee 2003, 199). God’s creating involves a ‘self-enlargement of God’, so that ‘the world is internally related to the triune God in the sense that the world repeats God’s internal prior actuality through God’s external exercise of his original dispositional essence’ (Lee  2003, 203). This divine self-enlargement is God’s infinite and temporal self-repetition, and not God’s process of self-realization—as in Hegelian idealism or in process theism. God’s aseity is preserved, though redefined by a

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Creation and Predestination   201 dynamic construal of God’s being. Time and space gain significance by ‘adding to’ the divine being: ‘Although God does not need temporality for his internal actuality and perfection, God needs or uses the world in space and time to exercise his dispositional essence outside of his own internal being’ (Lee 2005, 68). By an ‘external extension of God’s internal fullness’, God’s fullness ‘becomes fuller’ (Lee 2003, 209–10). God’s increasing reality applies to God’s Son, who creates the world because the Son as God possesses a primordial disposition toward actuality. The world, in this way, is created ‘to become a perfect image of the perfect image of God’. The incarnate Jesus Christ—visible in time and space—is the ‘one event or life in which God’s exertion of the divine disposition ad extra is accomplished “without measure”—that is, to a full degree’ (Lee 2003, 226–7). Crisp contests Lee’s interpretation of Edwards’s dispositional language, arguing that ‘Edwards constructs a version of panentheism that includes a doctrine of continuous creation, and occasionalism, with the creation as the necessary output of the divine nature’ (Crisp 2018, 12). Edwards’s God, according to Crisp, is ‘necessarily, eternally creative’, insofar as God’s disposition corresponds to divine attributes that cannot remain eternally dormant but require an act of creating to be exercised and manifested (Crisp and Strobel 2018, 95; cf. Crisp 2012, 50). Lee’s interpretation is incorrect insofar as God’s dispositions need not entail a reconceptualization of divine being as such. The language of disposition should instead be construed as a perfection of God’s essence—a perfection that is morally determinative for God and that dictates that God must create a world. This divine determination to create does not vitiate divine freedom because freedom for Edwards, whether divine or human, does not hinge on any liberty of indifference. God’s freedom is thus commensurate with moral determinism. God can be both free and morally constrained by God’s nature to create a world in order to express God’s glory, or fullness, through a necessary display of all of God’s attributes. Crisp sees God’s self-glorification and God’s creating as equivalent: a moral determination of the divine being for self-communication to and through creatures who are able to comprehend and appreciate that divine communication. ‘In Edwards’s hands, the creation is the mechanism by which God comes to gaze on himself reflected in the image of his creatures, who he then draws to himself in an everlasting process of divinization, whereby creatures are made ever more like the Creator—yet never becoming identical’ (Crisp  2012, 86). Divinization, according to Crisp, is christological, insofar as God communicates himself through the creatures’ union with Jesus Christ.

The Election of the Son of God Ad Intra: The Father’s Election of the Son In ‘Miscellany’ 769, Edwards argued, ‘Christ is chosen of God [the Father] as to his divine and human nature.’ Here the doctrine of election has a twofold referent: (1) God ad intra, as to the Son’s divinity; and (2) God ad extra, as to the God-man, Jesus Christ. The former

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202   Phillip Hussey and Michael McClymond is God’s ‘necessary’ election, and the latter a ‘free and sovereign’ election. The Father’s choosing of the Son qua the Son’s divine nature has nothing to do with producing or adding to the ‘essential glory’ of the Son or the Son’s ‘real happiness which is infinite’. Neither does the Son’s election indicate an eternal subordination of the Son to the Father. Instead, the Son is the chosen of God as to ‘[his] great declarative glory’, and ‘his election as it respects his divine nature, was for his worthiness . . . and perfect fitness for that which God chose him to his worthiness’ (WJE 18: 415). The election of the Son qua divine rests on the Son’s worth, in contrast to the ‘free and sovereign’ election of the Son qua human. As Edwards explained in a 1734 sermon, this should not be taken to mean that the Father and the Son are distinguished from each other in terms of their ‘excellency of nature’. Each divine person possesses ‘numerically the same individual glory’ (McMullen 2004, 227–8). What distinguishes the Son from the Father is the mode of subsistence: the Son proceeds from the Father. The Son of God is ‘in himself by virtue of his personal properties’ the shining forth of the Father’s glory. ‘This is not merely an honor conferred upon him by the good pleasure of God,’ states Edwards, ‘but ’tis what he himself necessarily is’ (McMullen 2004, 226). In Edwards’s trinitarianism, the Father’s happiness consists in beholding his own divine glory as it is necessarily declared in the Son: ‘The infinite happiness of God the Father is in beholding this his own perfect image’ (McMullen 2004, 230). Yet the Holy Spirit is not absent. In ‘The Equality of the Persons of the Trinity’ Edwards commented: ‘The Father has good, and though the Son receives the infinite good, the Holy Spirit, from the Father, the Father enjoys the infinite good through the Son. He is the end of the other two in their acting ad intra, and also in his acting ad extra, in all they do in redemption and their distinct economical concerns. The end of the Father in electing is the Spirit. He elects to a possession of this benefit’ (WJE 21: 146–7). Edwards conceived of election as a multidirectional, communicative, and trinitarian event ad intra, so that the Spirit closes the loop without collapsing it. This, though, is still not the whole story. Edwards also believed that God the Son, possessing the fullness of divinity in se, is inclined to communicate further the fullness of divine life. The doctrine of election not only specifies the Father’s election of the Son ad intra, but also the election of the Son ad extra. For Edwards, the communication of the glory of God’s life to creatures is the completion of Christ’s own election.

The Election of the Son of God Ad Extra: Election as Creative Communication In a notebook entry Edwards mused: ‘Why, then, did God incline further to communicate himself, seeing he had done [so] infinitely and completely [in begetting the Son]?…To this I say, that the Son . . . has also an inclination to communicate himself,

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Creation and Predestination   203 in an image of his person that may partake of his happiness: and this was the end of the creation . . . [and] the only motive hereto . . . And man, the consciousness or perception of the creation, is the immediate subject of this’ (WJE 13: 272). Because of their order of subsistence, the Father cannot be the object of the Son’s communicative goodness as the Son is the object of the Father’s communicative goodness. This is indicative of a larger theological reality: God’s triune relationality determines the contours of God’s decrees. In God’s decree for creation, the hypostatic differentiation of the Father and Son, as well as the necessary delight of each in the other, is the foundation for God’s creative movement ad extra. As Edwards writes in the End of Creation: For though these communications of God, these exercises, operations, effects and expressions of his glorious perfections, which God rejoices in, are in time; yet his joy in them is without beginning or change. They were always equally present in the divine mind. He beheld them with equal clearness, certainty and fullness in every respect, as he doth now . . . He ever beheld and enjoyed them perfectly in his own independent and immutable power and will. And his view of, and joy in them is eternally, absolutely perfect, unchangeable and independent. It can’t be added to or diminished by the power or will of any creature; nor is in the least dependent on anything mutable or contingent.  (WJE 8: 448)

All divine perfections, and their operations or effects, are contained in the divine mind. Yet the Son’s hypostasis contains God’s ideas regarding God’s perfections (Hamilton 2017). More precisely, the Son is the idea (or wisdom or understanding) of God in subsistence (WJE 21: 121). The Father perfectly beholds in the Son—the perfect, independent, and necessary communication of the divine essence—all divine perfections in affective delight (i.e., in the Holy Spirit). God’s ‘exercises, operations, effects and expressions of his glorious perfections’ present themselves in the divine mind ‘without beginning or end’ because they are ‘declared’, or manifest, in the Son. What, then, of the ‘necessity’ of God creating a world? As Lee acknowledged, God’s disposition to create the world is bound up with the ‘communicative inclination’ inherent in the elect Son of God. The Son conditions God’s inclination toward creating. This articulation of the doctrine of creation is an innovation from the perspective of the earlier Reformed dogmatics. In Thomas Aquinas and in most Reformed orthodox theologians, God’s will ad extra extends first to all things known by God as possible ‘participations’ or ‘imitations’ of the divine essence, and then terminates on actual created things by the ordering of divine wisdom and power, moving creatures from potentiality (non-existence) to actuality (existence). In this way, there is no new ‘motion’ in God with regard to creation; no new will enters God, only a new external work proceeds from God’s eternal and efficacious will. This is in keeping with a classical understanding of God as perfect actuality (actus purus) with no passive potency (Duby 2016; Duby 2017). But it is not so in Edwards, for whom the divine will extends first to all things known by God as possible ‘participations’ in the Son of God as God’s eternal wisdom and then terminates on actual created things, as ordered by the Son and effectuated by Spirit.

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204   Phillip Hussey and Michael McClymond The Son’s mediation in creation is not simply that of a structural principle of rationality— through divine ideas united in and mediated by the Logos—but that of a ground of non-divine reality, whereby creaturely realities participate in and reflect the image of the Son. Lee’s account may therefore be contested at this point: the Son’s disposition to communicate his glory and goodness is not the result of a reconceptualization of God’s essence as a dynamic disposition toward actuality. Instead it follows from the differentiation of Father and Son disclosed in the divine act of creating. Edwards articulates the point as follows in his ‘Discourse on the Trinity’: The love of God as it flows forth ad extra is wholly determined and directed by divine wisdom, so that those only are the objects of it that divine wisdom chooses. So that the creation of the world is to gratify divine love as that is exercised by divine wisdom. But Christ is divine wisdom, so that the world is made to gratify divine love as exercised by Christ, or to gratify the love that is in Christ’s heart, or to provide a spouse for Christ—those creatures which wisdom chooses for the object of divine love as Christ’s elect spouse, and especially those elect creatures that wisdom chiefly pitches upon and makes the end of the rest.  (WJE 21: 142)

Summarily stated, God’s decree to create and to communicate God’s self to a created other coincides with the necessary existence of the Son of God ad intra, as well as the necessary communal and communicative relationship between Father and Son as ordered by the Spirit. The divine will and love, therefore, terminate on possible ‘participations’ in the person of the Son because the Son, as God’s declarative glory ad intra, mediates the communication of divine goodness and love ad extra. God’s hypostatic self-differentiation is the interpretive key for understanding Edwards’s claim that God’s communication of the divine perfections ad extra is a ‘necessary consequence of his delighting in the glory of his own nature’ (WJE 8: 447). God delights in the glory of his own nature in self-distinction as Father, Son, and Spirit. This means that God’s will for creation cannot be construed in an abstract, deterministic fashion, but must be interpreted in keeping with a trinitarian logic. Creation derives from the Son’s election ad intra—an outworking of the glory of God’s own nature as manifest in the Son. ‘It is condecent that, correspondent to these proceedings of the divinity ad intra, God should also flow forth ad extra’ (WJE 20: 525). Within the order of subsistent relations, the Father’s communicative movement—as the fount of deity—terminates perfectly on the Son as the Father beholds the perfections of the divine essence and the image of his person in the Son, and as the Father is present to the Son in loving delight. Because the communication of God’s fullness is perfectly given and returned, not as a willed decision in God nor as a coming-to-be of God, but necessarily as the one divine triune life, Edwards is able to attribute God’s act of creating to the Son’s loving and communicative perfection without compromising divine aseity or unity. In biblical idiom, the Father in electing the Son has ‘given all things to the Son’—i.e. given freedom to the Son to communicate the fullness of the triune-life. ‘For the Father is not a communication of the Son’, writes Edwards, ‘and therefore not an object of the Son’s goodness’ (WJE 13: 282). The communicative movement must therefore not be internal but external, bestow-

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Creation and Predestination   205 ing being and bringing creatures to existence: ‘The decree of God’s communicating his goodness to such a subject don’t so much as presuppose the being of the subject, because it gives being’ (WJE 18: 321). The relation of creation to predestination might be stated thus: the election of Jesus Christ gives being to creatures. The impression may have been given—in utilizing the categories of ad intra and ad extra—that Edwards made a hard separation between the election of Christ as God and the election of Christ as creature. Yet this is not so. Edwards consistently refers to the one election of Jesus Christ in a twofold sense: ‘Christ is chosen of God as to his divine and human nature’ (WJE 18: 415). Jesus Christ’s election is a single theological package. Edwards’s overall reasoning suggests that the election of the Son as to his divine nature includes the election of the Son to a creaturely nature. The former is an absolute, or natural, necessity ad intra; the latter is a fitting, or communicative, movement ad extra. According to Edwards, God the Son exists ‘necessarily’, while creation is ‘arbitrary’: ‘Creation is an arbitrary production. They are the effects of the mere good will and pleasure of God. God when he creates anything he doesn’t create it by necessity of nature, but voluntarily. But the Son of God proceeds from the Father naturally and necessarily’ (McMullen  2004, 228). By ‘arbitrary’ Edwards means something akin to a movement of the will that is free from external compulsion (i.e., liberty of spontaneity). God is an ‘arbitrary’ being in the sense that God acts as ‘being limited and directed in nothing but his own wisdom, tied to no other rules and laws but the direction of his own infinite understanding’ (WJE 23: 202–3). The implication is that creation can be an arbitrary act and yet be fully in accord with God’s own wisdom. To return then to the question of the ‘necessity’ of creation, God’s act of creating is not ‘necessary’ in the same way that the Son’s eternal existence—or the Father’s or Spirit’s eternal existence—is ‘ne­ces­sary’. Edwards calls God’s act of creating ‘arbitrary’, which is a term-of-art that he never applies to the origination or existence of any of the three persons of the Trinity. ‘Arbitrary’ does not mean capricious, but refers to the wise ordering of God’s will. In distinction from ‘natural necessity’ and the ‘arbitrary’, one might speak of God’s creating using a third and intermediate term: ‘fitting’ (Lat. conveniens).1 That God’s creating is ‘fitting’, we believe, best represents the tension latent in Edwards’s construal of God’s relation to the world—a tension signalled in the phrase, ‘as it were’, that Edwards used to qualify his apparent assertions of the necessity of God’s creating.

Incarnation Anyway The logic of Edwards’s treatment of the election of Jesus Christ and creation indicates that the Son of God is eternally oriented toward incarnation apart from any consideration 1  One helpful definition of ‘fittingness’ is drawn out of Thomas Aquinas by Fellipe Do Valle: ‘So, by definition, x is fitting if (a) it proceeds from or belongs to y by reason of y’s nature and/or (b) is the means to achieving some end that brings together the most goods and avoids the greatest evils’ (Do Valle 2019, 157).

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206   Phillip Hussey and Michael McClymond of the fall of humankind (Hamilton 2016; Hussey 2016).2 Christ is the ‘head of all elect’ creatures in protological and eschatological frames of reference, and not merely with respect to soteriology narrowly considered, or the historical process of redemption.3 For Edwards, the election of the Son of God includes the elective elevation of human nature to union with God in Christ. This is why human beings are ‘elected in [Christ’s] election’ (WJE 18: 418). The election of Christ determines ‘the race of mankind to be that species of creatures out of which he would take a number to constitute one created, dear child and one body of his Son’ (WJE 18: 418). Christ’s election vis-à-vis his human nature was not based on any ‘works or worthiness’ of human nature, but strictly on a ‘free determination’. On the other hand, this ‘free determination’ is a fitting decision on God’s part, since creative communication involves affectionate (relative and vital) union, and such union could not exist without the Son’s incarnation. Yet, counterfactually speaking, the Son could have assumed an angelic nature, although the Son did not so choose: [Christ’s] election as he was man was a manifestation of God’s sovereignty and grace. God had determined to exalt one of the creatures so high that he should be one person with God, and should have communion with God, and glory in all respects answerable, and so should be the head of all other elect creatures, that they might be united to God and glorified in him. And his sovereignty appears in the election of the man Jesus various ways. It appears in choosing the species of creatures of which he should be, viz. the race of mankind, and not the angels, the superior species. (WJE 18: 416)

Elect angels, nonetheless, benefit from Christ’s election as the God-man. All creatures have this benefit by Christ’s incarnation, that God thereby is as it were come down to them from his infinite height above them, and is become a fellow creature, and all elect creatures hereby have opportunity for a more free and intimate converse with God, and full enjoyment of him than otherwise could be; and though Christ is not the Mediator of the angels in the same sense that he is of men, yet he is a middle person between God and them, through whom is all their intercourse with God and derivations from him.  (WJE 18: 389)

For Edwards, angelic and human creatures both benefit from Christ’s communicative and elected office, even though the human relation to God is superior. Simply put, the human relation is superior because it is beatific, and it is beatific because humans are ‘elected in Christ’s election’. The full possession and enjoyment of Christ implies a

2 The subject of ‘incarnation anyway’ is discussed in several recent studies: Van Driel  2008, Hunter 2015, Crisp 2016. 3  In contrast, Francis Turretin stated that ‘no other end of the advent of Christ and of his incarnation is ever proposed (whether in the Old or in the New Testament) than that he might save his people from sin’ (Turretin 1992–4, 300).

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Creation and Predestination   207 beatific fellowship of human beings with the Son in a manner analogous to the fellowship between the triune persons: Again it shows how much God designed to communicate himself to men, that he so communicated himself to the first and chief of elect men, the elder brother and the head and representative of the rest, even so that this man should be the same person with one of the persons of the Trinity. It seems by this to have been God’s design to admit man as it were to the inmost fellowship with the deity . . . The saints’ enjoyment of Christ shall be like the Son’s intimate enjoyment of the Father.  (WJE 18: 367)

To summarize: the election of Jesus Christ determines not only the why of creation (it is fitting in terms of trinitarian logic), but also the end of creation (the communication of the fullness of the triune relations and perfections as beheld in the Son of God) and the means for attaining the end therein (the union of human beings with the Son in the Holy Spirit). The election of Jesus Christ, therefore, serves as the internal basis for creation, with protology and eschatology converging in Jesus Christ.4 Edwards refers to this as that ‘grand decree of predestination’, or the ‘sum of God’s decrees’ (WJE 23: 180).

Reprobation, Conditionality, and Evil There is an ancient but still perplexing question: Unde malum? ‘Whence does evil arise?’ If the end of God’s creating of the world was God’s self-communication of goodness and happiness to creatures—and especially to human creatures, who are elevated in the election of Jesus Christ—then why or how could any human beings fall short of the eternal beatitude that God had always intended? For a century prior to Edwards’s birth, Arminians had complained that Calvinist notions of election made God appear capricious and unjust. To some critics, the worst aspect of Calvinist theology was the doctrine of reprobation, which suggested that God had created some human beings for the sole purpose of damnation. Though Edwards did not hold to a universal election of all human beings in Christ—as Karl Barth did in Church Dogmatics II/2 (Barth 1957)—it is noteworthy that Edwards like Barth held that God’s gracious election holds priority over God’s wrathful rejection or reprobation. In large part this conclusion followed from Edwards’s exegesis. He cited biblical texts to show that ‘punishing men’s sin . . . is spoken of [in scripture] as what God proceeds to with backwardness and reluctance, the misery of the creature being not agreeable to him on its own account’ (WJE 8: 503–4; cf. WJE 8: 506–8 n.6). He quoted the verse: ‘For I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth, saith the Lord God: wherefore 4  Edwards’s reasoning here bears resemblance to Karl Barth’s understanding of creation as the formal presupposition of the covenant, and covenant as the material presupposition of creation. See Karl Barth 1958, 42–329.

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208   Phillip Hussey and Michael McClymond turn yourselves, and live ye’ (Ezk. 18:32; cf. Ezk. 33:11), and others saying that God is ‘slow to anger’ (Neh. 9:17; Ps. 103:8, 145:8; Jon. 4:2), ‘doth not afflict willingly’ (Lam 3:33), and is ‘not willing that any should perish’ (2 Pet. 3:9). From such passages Edwards affirmed that salvation rather than damnation resonated with God’s fundamental purpose in creating. In ‘Miscellany’ 704, explaining the logic of the decrees and individual predestination, Edwards wrote that God’s decrees are from eternity and therefore are outside time. Since they are decided in eternity but executed in time, in history there are no new acts of God’s will. Though they did not have any original sequence in time, some were nevertheless dependent on others, and one decree might be the end or purpose of another. A first could be the ground on which a second was used by God to secure a further end. Hence, wrote Edwards, ‘the sinfulness of the reprobate is the ground on which God goes in determining to glorify his justice in the punishment of his sinfulness’. In the sinner’s sufferings, God’s first intention is the glory of his justice, not the sinner’s punishment. Edwards cited the example of Adonizebek, whose punishment God decreed only because of Adonizebek’s ‘cruelty in cutting off the thumbs and great toes of threescore kings’ (Judges 1:6–7). Therefore the logic of the decree of reprobation ‘clears God of any injustice in such a decree’, because ‘both the sin of the reprobate, and also the glory of the divine justice, may properly be said to be before the decree of damning the reprobate’ (WJE 18: 314–15; emphasis mine). The decree of reprobation comes always as a divine response to human sin and culpability. Prior to any other decree, Edwards argued, was God’s determination to communicate his goodness. Those Reformed divines were thus mistaken who claimed that God’s vindictive justice is an ultimate end. God’s punishment of sinners is merely a means of obtaining an end, the glorification of his justice. Rather than damnation being the purpose of his creating the reprobate, it was the goodness of God that gave them their being. Therefore the ‘decrees of evil’ to the damned were ‘consequent’ on the decrees to create them and to allow or give them permission to sin. God would not have decreed some things [i.e., reprobation] had he not decreed others [i.e., creation and permission to sin] (cf. WJE 18: 317; WJE 18: 321). In fact, God’s beneficent desire transcends the imperfect desire humans have ‘for the conversion and salvation of wicked men’, and he loves the happiness of the creature ‘infinitely’ more than we do. Their wickedness and misery, ‘absolutely considered’, are disagreeable to the nature of God. ‘Jesus Christ . . . really desires the conversion and salvation of reprobates, and laments their obstinacy and misery; as when he beheld the city Jerusalem and wept over it, saying, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not” [Matt. 23:37]’ (WJE 18: 409–10). To rebut accusations that the Calvinist God is irrational, Edwards asserted that God has reasons of his own for choosing some and not others. As the Apostle Paul wrote, the decrees of individual election are ‘according to God’s good pleasure’ (Eph. 1:5), and this ‘good pleasure’ must be rational rather than irrational. ‘All God’s methods of dealing with men are most reasonable,’ Edwards preached in 1727. ‘When God makes a man a vessel of mercy and not another, he don’t [sic] do it without a wise end.’ God’s reasons for

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Creation and Predestination   209 choosing some and not others ‘are above our reach and are known only to him’, but this did not mean that there were no reasons at all (WJE 14: 167; WJE 54, serm. on Acts 9:13–15; cf. WJE 23: 181).5 Arminians believed that if God decrees evil events, then God is responsible for evil. Edwards disagreed with that inference, and he pointed out that a plain reading of scripture shows that God does decree evil things. The Bible states that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, turned the Egyptians’ hearts to hate Israel, led Absalom to lie with David’s wives, determined that Jeroboam and the ten tribes would rebel, decided that Judas Iscariot would be unfaithful, and determined that Christ would be killed (WJE 13: 203–4, 243). Yet God decrees evil always ‘for the sake of the good that he causes to arise from the sinfulness thereof ’. God may hate a thing ‘as it is simply’, but he ‘may will to permit it for the greater promotion of holiness in this universality [of things], including all things and at all times’. God ‘inclines to excellency, which is harmony; but yet he may incline to suffer that which is unharmonious in itself, for the promotion of universal harmony . . . and making it shine the brighter’ (WJE 13: 250, 323). Sin brings humanity to an awareness of God’s ‘awful majesty, his authority and dreadful greatness, and justice and holiness’. Besides, ‘we little consider how much the sense of good is heightened by the sense of evil, both moral and natural’. For the creature’s happiness, evil might seem necessary ‘because the creature’s happiness consists in the knowledge of God and the sense of his love’ (WJE 13: 419–21). The aesthetic conclusion is difficult to avoid: the disharmony of sin and evil corresponds to (and heightens) the harmony of love, goodness, and holiness. ‘The sense of the good is comparatively dull and flat without knowledge of evil’ (WJE 13: 421). In Edwards’s metaphysical vocabulary, a being’s dissent from God or Being in general—if that is a being’s fixed nature—evokes the ‘beauty of vindictive justice’ (WJE 6: 363–5).

Conditionality and Culpability in Adam’s Fall In Original Sin, Edwards sought to justify the condemnation of all humanity in and through Adam’s sin by means of a novel argument. He began from the premise that, moment by moment, ‘God does, by his immediate power, uphold every created substance in being.’ Edwards derived this not only from biblical texts but also from his philosophical contention that ‘what existed the last moment’ cannot cause anything because it is ‘wholly passive’. Its existence at the present moment lies in a different place and time from the previous moment, and so could not have been caused by what existed at that previous moment. ‘Therefore the existence of created substances, in each 5  On the epistemic limits to human knowledge of the divine will, Edwards uses a standard Reformed distinction between God’s ‘secret’ (or ‘disposing’) and ‘revealed’ (or ‘preceptive’) will (WJE 1: 406-12).

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210   Phillip Hussey and Michael McClymond successive moment, must be the effect of the immediate agency, will and power of God.’ Edwards also called this a ‘continued creation’ whereby God creates ‘things out of nothing at each moment of their existence’. So if there is identity between myself as a baby and myself as a grown person—despite the fact that in the meantime every cell has been replaced and my consciousness is wholly different—it ‘depends on the arbitrary constitution of the Creator; who by his wise sovereign establishment so unites these successive new effects, that he treats them as one’. All depends on the divine will, and that in turn ‘depends on nothing but the divine wisdom’. Thus humanity’s oneness or solidarity in guilt ‘by virtue whereof pollution and guilt from past wickedness are derived, depends entirely on a divine establishment’ (WJE 3: 400–5). To rebut further any charge of injustice in God, Edwards added that God foresaw that Adam’s descendants fully ‘consented’ to and ‘concurred’ with Adam’s sin, and only then imputed Adam’s sin to them. ‘Therefore the sin of the apostacy [sic] is not theirs, merely because God imputes it to them; but it is truly and properly theirs, and on that ground, God imputes it to them.’ Wicked men go to hell ‘not according to the behavior of their . . . ancestors; but every one is dealt with according to the sin of his own wicked heart, or sinful nature and practice’ (WJE 3: 408–9). John Gerstner says that Edwards proves ‘not only that we had a hand in Adam’s sin but that it was our sin; we committed it’ (Gerstner 1991, 2: 237). How, we might ask, could a perfect man with no sinful inclinations and every motivation to obey, be deceived? Edwards recognized the difficulty, and suggested that while Adam was given ‘sufficient grace’ to keep his rational will in control, he was not given ‘efficacious grace’ to ‘certainly uphold him in all temptations’. Edwards called this ‘confirming grace’, that is, the kind of grace that confirmed the elect angels so that they would never sin after their first obedience (WJE 13: 485; WJE 14: 168).6 In Original Sin he emphasized that Adam did not sin because of ‘any settled disposition, or fixed cause at all’, but rather from a ‘transient cause’ (WJE 3: 193). What was the transient cause? Edwards says little more than that God withheld ‘further assistance and divine influence’, of the kind that he gave to elect angels. Yet he also said that because of this withholding, ‘sin would infallibly follow’ because of ‘the imperfection which properly belongs to a creature’ (WJE 1: 413). Like us, Adam had a rational will and a set of inclinations called appetites that were opposed to the rational will. Yet, unlike us, he had ‘superior divine principles’ intended to ‘maintain an absolute dominion’ for his rational will over those appetites. Adam fell because the serpent ‘deceived’ him and his rational will was thereby ‘perverted’ (WJE 3: 381–2; WJE 13: 484–5). Edwards’s Original Sin has elicited criticism, including rebuttals from scholars who are generally favourable toward his theology. Sam Storms observed that despite wanting to clear God of being the author of sin, he failed to do so. ‘If by creation [Adam] is in 6  Edwards here followed the earlier Reformed thinkers William Ames, Francis Turretin, and Petrus van Mastricht, attributing Adam’s fall to the absence of ‘confirming grace’ (Ames  1997, 114; Turretin 1992–4, 1: 610; WJE 13: 382 for Edwards’s quotation of van Mastricht). John Calvin preferred to let the reason for Adam’s sin remain ‘hidden’ (Calvin 1960, 1: 195–6).

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Creation and Predestination   211 such a condition that, antecedent to God’s withdrawal of divine influence, he necessarily sins, then God is most certainly the efficient and morally responsible cause of the transgression’ (Storms  2004, 217; cf. Storms  1985). John Gerstner complained that ‘sufficient grace’ in this situation is a contradiction in terms, and Edwards’s attempt to resolve the difficulty represents ‘the nadir of Edwardsian theology’ (Gerstner 1991, 2: 318). If a good man did evil, then how was he good? And if Adam was not good, then how are we to interpret the biblical claim (Gen. 1:31) that the creation of humanity was ‘very good’? Gerstner judged that Edwards’s position on this question represented ‘a total abandonment of the Christian religion, as understood by almost the entire catholic tradition’ (Gerstner  1991, 2: 322). Oliver Crisp launched an extensive critique of Edwards’s metaphysics and his doctrine of sin, and charged that while the doctrine of Adam’s fall is ‘notoriously troublesome’, Edwards’s occasionalism made God not only the ultimate but also the proximate cause of sin. Therefore, he avers, it is unjust for God to condemn people for sins that he has ordained by direct decree. This occasionalist picture means ‘any distinction between permission and positive agency is undermined’ (Crisp 2005, 25, 64, 68). By way of response, Edwards’s arguments in Original Sin regarding the ‘arbitrary constitution’ of God’s will, uniting Adam with all his posterity, are uncharacteristic of his writings as a whole, which—notwithstanding the passages cited—leave ample room for creaturely and moral agency in reciprocal interaction with divine agency. The publication of Original Sin may not have been Edwards’s finest hour as a theologian, yet his other writings show that he acknowledged Crisp’s ‘distinction between permission and positive agency.’ In Freedom of the Will he asserted that God has only a privative and permissive relation to evil, and never the full and active relation that he has to goodness: ‘There is a great difference between God’s being concerned thus, by his permission, in an event and act, which in the inherent subject and agent of it, is sin (though the event will certainly follow on his permission), and his being concerned in it by producing it and exerting the act of sin’ (WJE 1: 403). To use Edwards’s analogy, when the light goes out, then the room is dark, but one cannot infer from this that darkness is caused by the light. Instead, darkness is what happens when light does not shine (WJE 1: 404). Just so, evil arises on account of divine withdrawal, and not from God’s active presence or volition.

Conclusions This essay approached Edwards’s ideas of creation and predestination with a brief account of Sang Hyun Lee’s and Oliver Crisp’s construals of Edwards’s doctrine of God. Although Lee and Crisp have both made substantial contributions to the contemporary discussion of Edwards’s view of God, we have found cause to qualify their claims at certain points. Contesting Lee’s account, we have argued that the Son’s disposition to communicate his glory and goodness is not purely the result of a reconceptualization of God’s essence as a dynamic disposition toward actuality, but instead follows from the

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212   Phillip Hussey and Michael McClymond differentiation of Father and Son in the act of creation. An explicitly trinitarian account of God is needed to grasp the full dimensions of Edwards’s account of creation. Regarding Crisp’s views, we take issue with the unqualified assertion that the creating of the world (or of any world) by Edwards’s God is ‘necessary’. Edwards often referred to creating as an ‘arbitrary’ act, and as ‘Miscellany’ 1263 indicates, he distinguished ‘natural operations’ that were characterized by necessity from ‘arbitrary operations’ that depended solely on the divine will or wisdom (WJE 23: 201–12). Rather than calling God’s act of creation ‘necessary’, it might be better to call it ‘fitting’. Furthermore, it is not clear that Edwards endorsed the unqualified occasionalism attributed to him by Crisp. Mark Hamilton suggests that Edwards holds to a ‘species of occasional causation that is limited to God’s causing perceptions rather than the intentions (i.e., the volition) of created minds’ (Hamilton 2017, 92). Such a metaphysical picture might be more congruent with the moral culpability of the creaturely agent than a strictly occasionalist position would be. Edwards said that, at one point in his life, predestination ‘used to appear like a ­horrible doctrine to me’ (WJE 16: 792), and yet he nonetheless went on to become the most famous Reformed predestinarian in American history, offering a nuanced understanding of predestination. So far as the practical effects of Edwards’s predestinarian theology are concerned, his writings on divine sovereignty and human will assisted some of the so-called hyper-Calvinists in Britain—including William Carey—to overcome a one-sided emphasis on God, and to develop a clearer and better conception of human agency and responsibility. Carey’s modern missionary project was in part a fruit of his theological tutelage under Edwards (Haykin 1994). This trans-Atlantic theological influence might suggest that Edwards’s delight in God’s ‘absolute sovereignty’ (WJE 16: 792) did not undermine his understanding of the human role and responsibility in salvation.

Works Cited Ames, William (1997). The Marrow of Theology. Trans. John D. Eusden. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books. Barth, Karl (1957). Church Dogmatics, Volume II, Part 2: The Doctrine of God. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. Barth, Karl (1958). Church Dogmatics, Volume III, Part 1: The Doctrine of Creation. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. Bush, Michael (2003). ‘Jesus Christ in the Theology of Jonathan Edwards,’ PhD diss., Princeton Theological Seminary. Calvin, John (1960). Institutes of the Christian Religion. 2 vols. Ed John T. McNeill. Trans. Ford Lewis Battles. Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press. Crisp, Oliver (2016). ‘Incarnation without the Fall,’ Journal of Reformed Theology 10: 215–33. Crisp, Oliver (2005). Jonathan Edwards and the Metaphysics of Sin. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Crisp, Oliver (2012). Jonathan Edwards on God and Creation. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Creation and Predestination   213 Crisp, Oliver (2018). ‘Jonathan Edwards on God’s Relation to Creation,’ Jonathan Edwards Studies 8: 2–16. Crisp, Oliver, and Kyle Strobel (2018). Jonathan Edwards: An Introduction to His Thought. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Do Valle, Fellipe (2019). ‘On Thomas Aquinas’s Rejection of an ‘Incarnation Anyway’,’ TheoLogica: An International Journal for Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology 3: 144–64. Duby, Steven (2017). ‘Divine Immutability, Divine Action and the God–World Relation,’ International Journal of Systematic Theology 19: 144–62. Duby, Steven (2016). ‘Election, Actuality, and Divine Freedom: Thomas Aquinas, Bruce McCormack, and Reformed Orthodoxy in Dialogue,’ Modern Theology 32: 325–40. Gerstner, John H. (1991). The Rational Biblical Theology of Jonathan Edwards. 3 vols. Powhatan, VA: Berea Publications/Orlando, FL: Ligonier Ministries. Hamilton, S. Mark. (2016). ‘Jonathan Edwards on the Election of Christ,’ Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 58: 525–48. Hamilton, S.  Mark (2017). A Treatise on Jonathan Edwards: Continuous Creation and Christology. n.p.: JESociety Press. Haykin, Michael A. G. (1994). One Heart and One Soul: John Sutcliff of Olney, His Friends and His Times. Darlington, UK: Evangelical Press. Hussey, Phillip (2016). ‘Jesus Christ as the “Sum of God’s Decrees”: Christological Supralapsarianism in the Theology of Jonathan Edwards,’ Jonathan Edwards Studies 6: 107–19. Hodge, Charles (1977 [1871] ). Systematic Theology. 3 vols. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Hunter, Justus H. (2015). ‘The Motive for the Incarnation from Anselm of Canterbury to John Duns Scotus,’ PhD diss., Southern Methodist University. Lee, Sang Hyun (2005). ‘God’s Relation to the World.’ The Princeton Companion to Jonathan Edwards. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,. Ed. Sang Hyun Lee. 1–13. Lee, Sang Hyun (2003). The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. McClymond, Michael J., and Gerald R. McDermott (2011). The Theology of Jonathan Edwards. New York: Oxford University Press. McMullen, Michael D. ed. (2004). ‘Jesus Christ as the Shining Forth of the Father’s Glory.’ The Glory and Honor of God: Previously Unpublished Sermons of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 2. Nashville, TN: Broadman and Holman. 223–44. Schafer, Thomas (1955). ‘Jonathan Edwards’s Conception of the Church,’ Church History 24: 51–66. Storms, Sam (1985). Tragedy in Eden: Original Sin in the Theology of Jonathan Edwards. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Storms, Sam (2004). ‘The Will: Fettered Yet Free.’ In: A God Entranced Vision of All Things: The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards. Eds. John Piper and Justin Taylor. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books. 201–20. Strobel, Kyle (2014). Jonathan Edwards’s Theology: A Reinterpretation. London: Bloomsbury T. & T. Clark. Turretin, Francis (1992–4). Institutes of Elenctic Theology. 3 vols. Trans. George Musgrave Giger. Ed. James T. Dennison, Jr. Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing. Van Driel, Edwin Chr. (2008). Incarnation Anyway: Arguments for a Supralapsarian Christology. New York: Oxford University Press.

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214   Phillip Hussey and Michael McClymond

Author Bios Michael McClymond (Ph.D.  University of Chicago) is professor of modern Christianity at Saint Louis University and author of The Devil’s Redemption: A New History and Interpretation of Christian Universalism. Phillip Hussey (Ph.D. Candidate Saint Louis University) is visiting instructor in Church History at Covenant Theological Seminary.

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chapter 14

History, Prov idence , a n d Esch atol ogy Jan Stievermann

Students of Jonathan Edwards have always known him to be a deeply historical thinker. He searched out the mysteries of God’s counsel and the end times not just in the Bible but all the monuments of the past. Many admired, and continue to admire, Edwards’s grand vision of the history of the work of redemption, as attested by the popularity of the work by that name (Wilson, ‘Editors Introduction’, WJE 9: 26–8; Conforti 1995, 47–9). But what kind of a historical thinker was Edwards exactly? Earlier generations of interpreters have often regarded him as a radical innovator in this department. Following the lead of evangelical theologians in the context of the Second Great Awakening, not a few scholars understood Edwards’s works as a turning point toward the rise of a postmillennialist theology of historical progress that infused Calvinism with proto-nationalist and Enlightenment ideas, thereby contributing to later ideologies of American optimism and exceptionalism (Goen 1959; Tuveson 1968, 27–9, 99–102; Heimert 1966, 59–94; Bercovitch 1978, 105–18; Cherry 1998, 55–9). Some even saw him anticipating nineteenth-century idealist philosophies of history (Miller 1949, 307–30). Others, however, have characterized Edwards’s readings of history as an essentially reactionary (Gay 1966, 105–16) or at least highly conservative project that, despite some rhet­oric­al concessions to Enlightenment discourses, was pushing back against the new concepts of human agency and perfectibility (Zakai 2003). In conversation with the most broad-based and nuanced studies on the subject (especially McDermott 1992; Stein 2005; Sweeney 2016; Wilson 2005; Zakai 2003), this chapter seeks to offer a balanced portrayal of Edwards as a historical thinker. It does so by examining four interlocking frameworks of interpretation that Edwards inherited from early-modern Reformed Protestantism and, in particular, his Puritan-Dissenting trad­ition: first, a general approach to relating the Bible and history; second, an intense kind of providentialism; third, specific forms of biblical theology aiming toward an integrated salvation history; and fourth, a futurist type of millennialist eschatology.

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216   Jan Stievermann What emerges from this is the picture of an Edwards who, when seen in his religious context, appears as neither particularly reactionary nor innovative. Instead he was, for the most part, a traditionalist, in the sense that he usually employed these frameworks in continuity with a broad mainstream of his Protestant predecessors and peers. While committed to a received orthodoxy in many regards, Edwards’s immediate ­tradition of British Dissent also intersected with the intellectual discourses and modalities of the Enlightenment, both by partaking in them and criticizing their perceived excesses. This version of a moderate Protestant Enlightenment was bringing forth a deepened, eschatologically inflected interest in and progressive understanding of redemption history—both of which Edwards shared. To this understanding of history Edwards added his own exegetical nuances and emphases, notably the special ­significance of revivals.

Edwards’s View of History and Providence Edwards lived amidst an ongoing revolution of historical thinking in the transatlantic republic of letters, which toward the end of the century would produce progressivist models of universal history a là Condorcet, but also full-blown historicism in the works of scholars such as Herder. These outcomes were far from inevitable, however, and many, especially in the world of Anglo-American theology, never arrived at them. Yet few intellectuals in Edwards’s day remained unaffected by the massive expansion of historical knowledge that had been going on since the early Renaissance but was accelerating since the second half of the seventeenth century. This knowledge concerned the history of Scripture itself, the events and people mentioned by the Bible, the history of the Christian church, as well as extra-biblical and secular history from the most ancient times to the near present. With scholars continuing to recover and study new source texts, the latter kind of information in particular grew exponentially and well beyond the confines of what was explicitly narrated in the Bible. As a result, there was growing pressure on the belief that the Bible comprised all the essential events in the world’s history and, concomitantly, on an older type of biblical realism that assumed that the histories recorded in Scripture—if correctly interpreted— not so much mirrored as contained the truth. Under this older type of realism, the past, present, and future of humankind from its creation to the final consummation of things had been circumscribed by the arc of Scripture, stretching from Genesis to Revelations. Together the biblical narratives constituted ‘the real’. Now, three closely interlocking intellectual developments, often identified with the early Enlightenment, began to strain this traditional form of realism, at least among the intellectual elites, and were chal­len­ ging the very basis of biblical authority: empiricism, rationalism, and, maybe most importantly, the new historical-contextual methods in biblical exegesis. All three forces

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History, Providence, and Eschatology   217 worked towards a growing intellectual detachment of historical reality from the biblical narratives. Together they gave birth, in the long run, to a new model of biblical realism in Protestant theology that was representational rather than absolute and self-contained. While most remained convinced that the Bible was historically accurate and comprehensive, theologians increasingly felt the burden to demonstrate the veracity of scriptural texts by reference to outside sources (Stievermann 2016, 42–56). For a small group of critics, however, history and the tools of historical exegesis, together with the insights of ‘natural philosophy’, became weapons in their fight against the perceived errors of theology and the church. In Edwards’s intellectual universe, English Deists in particular were notorious for highlighting contradictions between the established laws of nature and the biblical narratives. They were also pointing out historical errors in these stories that became apparent when comparing them to other, extra-scriptural accounts. In such criticism, a new and all-encompassing concept of natural and human history was made the standard against which the truth of the Bible was measured and often found wanting. Even more radically, Deism called into question the historical exclusivity of the Bible and Christianity. How reasonable and moral was it, they charged, to assume that God had revealed Himself and the one path to salvation exclusively to, as James Turner puts it, ‘a small tribe in a backward corner of West Asia and then spread it only to Christians, leaving the rest of humanity to roast in hell? Would not a just God have revealed saving truth to all peoples?’ (Turner 2011, 18). Some Deists, such as Matthew Tindal, thus historically relativized Christianity as just one (although most still regarded it as the highest developed one) ‘religion’ to be critically compared to other ‘religions’, which over the course of human history had more or less perfectly embodied a universal religion of reason grounded on the laws of nature (Harrison 1990). Edwards’s basic view of and approach to history was at once broadly traditionalist, notably Reformed, and marked by an awareness of these transformations and challenges. On the one hand, the Bible still served as Edwards’s general framework of world history from the creation of the cosmos to the final consummation of things. All of history unfolded according to ‘the grand design of God’, to achieve the salvation of the elect and the building of Christ’s kingdom. As Edwards put it in a sermon titled ‘Approaching the End of God’s Grand Design’ (December 1744) on Rev. 21:6 (‘I am Alpha and Omega’), God let history unfold in order to present to his Son a spouse in perfect purity, beauty and glory from amongst [mankind], blessing all [the elect] and destroying those [that oppose], and so to glorify himself through is Jesus Christ, God-man; or in one word, the work of redemption is the grand design of [history], this the chief work of [God], [the] end of all other works, so that the design of God is one.  (WJE 25: 119)

Characteristic of the strongly theocentric emphasis of Reformed divinity, Edwards thus taught that God had brought forth the cosmos to serve as a kind of stage on which the drama of salvation was to be acted out. Humans were involved, but the real action took

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218   Jan Stievermann place between the three persons of the Trinity. And the final purpose of it all was God’s self-glorification through the manifestation of divine attributes. In his famous essay Concerning the End for which God Created the World, Edwards employed the language of Neoplatonic idealism to describe this circular telos of the universe as an ‘em­an­ation’ from God and a ‘remanation’, back to Him (WJE 8: 531). Whatever occurred in time and space was, in Edwards’s view, driven forward by divine purpose through supernatural powers according to the providence of God. The belief in God’s providentia was, of course, as old as the Judeo-Christian tradition. In Edwards’s Dissenting culture, however, providentialism was particularly intense. Puritans had developed a habit of looking for God’s hand in the most minute details of life (Walsham 1999). At the same time, Puritan providentialism had been inflected by the new empiricism and rationalism. As Douglas Sweeney has shown, Edwards very much continued in this line of thinking (2016, 156–9). Edwards took for granted the distinction between general and special providence that many in his tradition had made before him. In one of his ‘Miscellanies’ on the topic, he agreed that God’s design usually played out by His general providence and thus ‘according to certain, fixed, invariable laws’, or what ‘we call LAWS OF NATURE’. It would be wrongheaded and impious, however, to believe that God could not ‘act any otherwise than limiting himself by such invariable laws’ (‘Miscellanies’ # 1263; WJE 23: 201–2). As the sovereign ruler of the universe, Edwards insisted, God was by no means bound by the laws of nature. At every turn, God was free to arbitrarily change the course of events and redirect the chains of secondary causation through special providences. Or, he could suspend these laws al­together, as in some of the miracles recorded in the Bible. Most importantly, Christians should never forget that God had supernaturally created the laws of nature and that the nexus of events they were driving forward was over-determined by His will. One of Edwards’s favourite biblical images for God’s providence was that of a heavenly chariot. In his Blank Bible, Edwards glossed on Deut. 33:26 (‘There is none like unto the god of Jeshurun who rideth upon the heaven in thy help, and in his excellency on the sky’), a verse which he later selected as a motto for his planned magnum opus on the History of the Work of Redemption (see below): [T]he universe is the chariot in which God rides, and makes progress towards the last end of all things on the wheels of his providence. . . . Therefor this verse signifies as much as that God governs the whole world for the good of his church; the wheels of the chariot of the universe move for them; and the progress that God makes therein in his throne above the firmament, the pavement of his chariot, is for them; and every event in the universe is in subserviency to their help and benefit. (WJE 24: 315)

Stephen Stein has observed on this annotation that the image of the wheel illustrates how God’s providential plan of salvation, for Edwards, was progressive and ‘advancing through time’ but not in a linear way. For the goal of history was the restoration of His

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History, Providence, and Eschatology   219 fallen creation soli Deo gloria, ‘bringing all things back to God, the initial point of departure’ (Stein, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, WJE 5: 53–4). Since everything is part of God’s determining disposal, all of history serves as a means to communicate with His people. If we compare Edwards to his New England predecessors like Cotton Mather, the general commitment to defend biblical miracles and also the possibility of special providences in modern history appears largely unchanged. True, there was, as Winship (2000) and Zakai (2003) argue, a notably reduced interest and investment in certain kinds of prodigies and supernatural wonders. While ­seventeenth-century Puritans had frequently observed phenomena such as omens in the sky, sea monsters, demonic onslaughts, or ghostly apparitions, they were falling into disrepute among polite theologians of Edwards’s generation. Yet Edwards was never one to rule out the possibility of miraculous interventions, and his ancestors’ propensity to interpret wars or natural disasters in providential terms continued undiminished with him. In his Humble Attempt (1747), for instance, he interpreted numerous events in recent history that strengthened the Protestant cause by hurting the Catholic interests of Spain, France, or Austria in Europe and the Americas to have been directed ‘by a most visible hand of God against them’ (WJE 5: 421–3). Edwards called upon faithful Protestants to take courage at such signs, delight in them, and pray for further divine interventions. Although Edwards acknowledged that it was often difficult to make out God’s precise intent, he was not shy about applying providential readings to occurrences in his own life and that of his parish. In the preface to his Faithful Narrative, he would talk about the collapse of the gallery in the old Northampton meetinghouse during service as a ‘remarkable’ ‘work of divine grace’ and signal ‘providence’ which, however, was administered completely through secondary causation according to the laws of nature. (WJE 4: 135). From the grand events in the history of redemption to everyday affairs, the cogs in the wheels of providence interlocked. Following a long line of Christian ‘universal chronicles’, but specifically a Protestant historiography in the tradition of James Ussher’s Annals of the World (Latin original 1650), Edwards used a biblical framework to chart the basic course of world history between the Alpha of creation and the Omega of the apocalypse. This course he understood to run for about 7,000 years in total. ‘By Edwards’s estimation’, as Sweeney puts it, ‘Christ arrived four millennia after Adam’s fall from grace, another two before the dawning of the golden age to come, and a third before He comes again to judge and rule the world, putting an end to mundane history’ (Sweeney 2016, 146). If this was entirely conventional, Edwards, characteristically for many Protestant theologians of his age, went to enormous lengths to fill in the details of this chronological framework and, in the process, corroborate its soundness. For that purpose, he mined studies blending scriptural chronology and natural philosophy such as William Whiston’s Short View of the Chronology of the Old Testament (1702) or Arthur Bedford’s Scripture Chronology Demonstrated by Astronomical Calculation (1730); as well as works seeking to har­mon­ ize Old and New Testament histories with the help of extra-biblical sources, notably John Lightfoot’s The Harmony of the four Evangelists, among themselves, and with the Old

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220   Jan Stievermann Testament (1650), Humphrey Prideaux’s The Old and New Testament connected in the History of the Jews and neighbouring Nations, from the Declension of the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah to the time of Christ (2 vols. 1715–17), and Samuel Shuckford’s The Sacred and Profane History of the World, Connected from the Creation of the World to . . . the Reigns of Ahaz and Pekah (2 vols. 1728). Edwards also owned and used a specimen of a new kind of universal history building on a biblical foundation, such as William Howell’s Institution of General History (1661) and the seven-volume An Universal History: From the Earliest Account of Time to the Present (1736–44), a collection of historical extracts on every known country of the world. As his book catalogues reveal, Edwards furthermore ploughed through all kinds of more specialized historical and scientific scholarship, ranging from natural histories of the creation and flood, to diverse works on pre-Christian and post-biblical history. Among these, Peter Thuessen has noted a special predilection for often polemical his­tor­ies of the Jews, Muslims, as well as Protestant church histories with a strongly anti-Catholic bent (WJE 26: ‘Editor’s Introduction’, 71–3). In short, Edwards was a historical omnivore, who spent a great deal of time and energy studying natural history and especially the mounting monuments of the human past. This does not contradict his reputation as a man who, in the end, was devoted to just the one book of the Bible. But it suggests a sense, even a growing conviction, that the truth of the Holy Scriptures could only be fully understood and defended by embedding them in a larger historical context. This reflects a significant trend. Seeking to come to terms with the revolution of historical knowledge and thinking, to which they themselves substantially contributed, Protestant exegetes of the period engaged in innovative forms of evidentialist apologetics drawn from history. They aimed to prove the his­tor­ icity and thereby defend the authority of the Bible through demonstrating, by extensive contextualizations and historical explanations, how the scriptural texts corresponded down to the last detail with extra-biblical sources and scientifically established facts. Robert Brown (2002) has shown how deeply Edwards’s exegetical writings were invested in this project. During the 1730s, as Ava Chamberlain demonstrates, the focus of Edwards’s apologetics, too, shifted from primarily rationalistic to historical arguments (WJE 18: ‘Editor’s Introduction’, 29–34). Edwards never expressed any doubt as to the truth and salvific exclusivity of the Christian faith. Still, he felt the need to defend Christianity on historical grounds. As Gerald McDermott (2000) has shown, Edwards even saw himself obliged to engage with those Deist critics who placed Christianity in a larger history of religion(s). In line with many other scholars of his period (including New Englanders such as Cotton Mather), Edwards responded by reinterpreting the patristic theory of a prisca theologia in the light of the new learning. According to this theory that he sketched out in his notebooks, an aboriginal Noahite religion, which prefigured the key elements of Christianity, stood at the fountainhead of all later religions. Through the ancient Hebrew patriarchs and prophets, the church received the saving truth of this ‘ancient theology’ undiluted and had it completed in Christ and the gospel. In the religions of other ancient peoples, such as Egyptian and Greco-Roman polytheism but also Chinese Confucianism, fragments of the Noahite religion (sometimes along with bits and pieces of the Hebrew Scriptures then

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History, Providence, and Eschatology   221 widely considered to be the oldest monuments of human history) were thought to have survived in greatly corrupted forms. Even in what Edwards contemptuously regarded as the diabolically distorted beliefs and practices of Native American and the false revelations of Islam, some faint traces of the aboriginal divine revelation could be found. Edwards thus attempted to fold the growing knowledge about the plurality of religions back into a biblical framework in a way that accentuated both the salvific exclusivity of Christianity and the total inclusivity of its redemptive promise over the course of human history. Not just doctrinally, but also in a historical-genetic way Christianity was the one true religion that theoretically was available to everyone from the beginning, if they had not twisted it so badly out of shape on account of their own depravity. On many different levels, Edwards’s work therefore exhibits a common desire among the period’s exegetes to connect ‘The Sacred and Profane History of the World’, to cite the title of Shuckford’s work. In so doing, they were, in the final analysis, giving up the inherited bifurcation of sacred and profane history altogether. The dominant Christian view of history, as paradigmatically developed in Augustine’s De Civitate Dei, had made a categorical distinction between those events that directly concerned God’s relationship with mankind and were recorded or foretold by the Bible (historia sacra), and the vain affairs of the world (historia profana). After Christ’s ascension and the beginning of his spiritual reign through the church (the founding of which marked the beginning of the millennial age for Augustine), sacred history would ‘no longer contain decisive turning-points’ (Markus 1970, 20–1) until the Saviour’s second coming for the last judgment. Whatever profectus (spiritual betterment) would happen before that day by God’s grace in Christ, would occur only inside and through the civitas dei or ‘invisible church’ of true Christians. By contrast, events in the profane world and its political institutions (civitas terrana), were seen as lacking deeper meaning and as ultimately inconsequential. When Edwards arrived on the scene, many Protestant, especially Reformed, theologians had already abandoned this view in favour of a larger, integrated understanding of ‘salvation history’. Edwards’s work continued to move in that direction. He also employed modes of biblical theology that had developed in the Reformed camp that were conducive to such an integrated vision. Edwards’s famous and influential History of the Work of Redemption (first ed. Edinburgh, 1774)—posthumously published in a heavily redacted form by his friend John Erskine—can be fruitfully interpreted as a hybrid mixture of these genres. This becomes even more apparent by looking at the 1739 sermon series on which this work is based.

Edwards and the Reformed SalvationHistory Approach to the Bible Blending biblical exegesis and systematics, the ur-form of the salvation-history approach was embodied in the federal theologies developed by Dutch and English theologians such as William Ames, John Owen, Johannes Cocceius, and Hermann Witsius over the

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222   Jan Stievermann course of the seventeenth century. These theologies were based on the assumption that God had encoded in the scriptural revelations His plan for the whole of history, including the future. The key to cracking this code was to understand the covenant as the organizing principle of all history, which unfolded as a sequence of interlocking covenantal relations between the persons of the Trinity and God’s people. Adrian Neele (2018) has recently drawn attention to how deeply Edwards was immersed in this trad­ition (especially 181–205). Although Edwards did not strictly adhere to one particular school of federalism, the basic structure of a covenantal model of salvation history appears in countless homilies and miscellaneous notes on Scripture. It also provides the deep grammar of the thirty sermons that Edwards preached on Isa. 51:8 and that he called his ‘Redemption Discourse’. The basic burden of the series was to affirm the unity of history as salvation history on all three levels of traditional Christian cosmology (heaven, earth, and hell) by demonstrating that, as the first sermon explicates, ‘The Work of Redemption is a work that God carries on from the fall of man to the end of the world.’ This continuity, Edwards teaches, is rooted in God’s ‘righteousness’ and ‘covenant faithfulness’ toward those He would redeem, i.e. His church: ‘God’s righteousness or covenant mercy is the root of which his salvation is the fruit. Both of them relate to the covenant of grace.’ ‘For salvation’, as Edwards continues, ‘is the sum of all those works of God by which the benefits that are by the covenant of grace are procured and bestowed’ (WJE 9: 115–16). The distinctions between the ‘covenant of mercy’ (or redemption), the ‘covenant of works’, and the ‘covenant of grace’, also informed the tripartite division of the ‘Discourse’—the first reaching from the divine decrees before the beginning of time, Satan’s rebellion, cre­ation, and the fall to the coming of Christ; the second covering His incarnation, ministry and redemptive work; and the third comprising the history of the church under grace and, finally, its glorious state in heaven, as well as the defeat and eternal damnation of its enemies in hell. Moreover, the six historical dispensations that the sermons delineate owe much to how federalist theologians had interpreted history as the sequence of these covenants being entered into, broken, promised, prefigured, and fulfilled. As is true for his European predecessors, federalism provided Edwards with a very flexible, Scripture-derived framework that could accommodate all kinds of extra-bib­lical knowledge about the past and incorporate the entire run of post-canonical history. Edwards fills out his sketches of the six dispensations with a great diversity of historical sources, including some of the above-named. Once he gets past the apostolic age, he increasingly draws on works of ecclesial and political history as well as general descriptions of the Old World and its nations. Edwards uses these sources in order to develop his Protestant vision of the church under grace, as it suffers through the rise and oppressions of the papal Antichrist and, after the great turning point of the Reformation, progresses towards millennial perfection (see below). Besides federalism, typology was the second mode of theology that Edwards brought in to impose a biblical superstructure on his variegated materials and hold together his edifice of salvation history. Edwards is often noted for his creative, exuberant use of natural types. However, in his ‘Redemption Discourse’ as well as other writings, historical

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History, Providence, and Eschatology   223 typology is much more central. It is also more traditionalist, in that it follows the renewed and, at the same time, very historically oriented interest in typology among Reformed theologians since the mid-seventeenth century (Stievermann 2016, 193–241). Although always wary of the danger of arbitrary allegorizations and more careful to ground their interpretations in the literal sense, these Reformed theologians before Edwards had—compared to the sixteenth-century Reformers—dramatically expanded the use of typology to demonstrate the progressive revelation of God in history. Often as part of their federal theologies, they had traced typological relations not only between all the persons, events, laws, ceremonies, and institutions of Old Testament history and the coming of Christ and the gospel dispensation under the New. Events and ­figures of post-apostolic church history, too, were read as antitypes that fulfilled the things foreshadowed about the church in Old Testament types. While Edwards might have been more daring in his interpretation of types than most among his immediate New England predecessors, there is nothing really unusual when compared to other historical typologists in the Reformed tradition such as Cocceius. Like them, Edwards was convinced, as he wrote in his notebook ‘Types of the Messiah’, ‘that it has ever been God’s manner from the beginning of the world to exhibit and reveal future things by symbolical representations, which were no other than types of the future things revealed’ (WJE 11: 192). Edwards also applied typology to post-apostolic church history, to the Reformation and its pre-history, and expanded it into the es­ch­aton. For instance, Edwards read the ‘monstrous births’ mentioned in Gen. 6:4 as a typ­ical prefiguration of the rise of the Church of Rome, ‘that monstrous beast’ (WJE 15: 50). Or, the victory of Mordecai and Esther over Haman and his ilk, were ‘figures of the glory, peace, and prosperity of the church after the final overthrow of Antichrist’ (WJE 15: 63). Accordingly, Edwards’s ‘Redemption Discourse’, as is true for so many of his other sermons, is shot through with innumerable typological cross-references, weaving a tight network of prefigurations and fulfilments that gives both a sense of Christocentric unity and progress to his historical outlook. A third, partly overlapping, mode that grew from the Reformed salvation-history approach and had a profound influence on Edwards was what Ernestine van der Wall (1994) has called theologia prophetica. Its basic assumption was succinctly expressed in 1698 by New England pastor Nicholas Noyes when he wrote in his New-Englands Duty and Interest that ‘Prophesie is History antedated; and History is Postdated Prophesie: the same thing is told in both’ (Noyes 43). More than that, Reformed theologians were convinced that all biblical prophecies together formed one large encoded system of history. The theologia prophetica arose in part out of a defensive impulse against a group of bib­ lical critics following in the footsteps of Hugo Grotius. These critics had employed a historical-contextual hermeneutic to reign in what appeared to them as excessive and unwarranted Christian interpretations of certain Old Testament prophecies. When read according to their literal-historical sense, these prophecies referred to and had been completely fulfilled in the history of Israel. English Deists, notably Anthony Collins, subsequently weaponized this hermeneutic to argue that Christ and the gospel were nowhere predicted in the Old Testament. Legitimately, prophecies could only be said to

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224   Jan Stievermann have one factual fulfilment to be determined by their sensus literalis, historical context, and the author’s intention—everything else was random retrospective allegorization. Striking at the very heart of Christian theology and its claim on the Hebrew Bible, this criticism triggered a deluge of apologetics and apologetically oriented Bible commentaries that defended Christian interpretations of the Hebrew prophets and amassed prophetic evidence against modern infidels. Massive new works of exegesis were produced on the major and minor prophets. However, exegetes also applied a prophetico-historical lens to those parts of the Hebrew Bible that were not obviously or explicitly pre­dict­ive in nature. For instance, Reformed exegetes penned numerous readings of the Psalms, Song of Songs, or Proverbs as comprehensive prophetic histories of the Messiah and the church. Soon there also appeared works by major exegetes such as Campegius Vitringa and Hermann Witsius that developed this mode into a more synthetic ‘theology of prophecy’, attempting to systematize all the biblical prophecies into one coherent narrative of God’s work of redemption (Stievermann 2016, 259–81). Edwards read widely in this literature and put its approach to good use in numerous sermons and scriptural annotations. Prophetic evidence to him was absolutely central for asserting the unity and harmony of the Old and New Testaments, but also for supporting the basic truth-claims of Christianity. A special concern was proving that the Old Testament prophets really—that is in a literal-historical and not just a spiritualallegorical sense—predicted the birth, life, and death of Jesus. But Edwards did not confine himself to Daniel, Jeremiah, Isaiah, and other explicitly prophetic books. Potentially, all parts of the Bible were prophetic in nature. David Barshinger’s study (2014) has made it clear, for example, how consistently Edwards interpreted the Psalms in a propheticohistorical manner. Although Edwards insisted that many of David’s songs were literally predictive of the history of the Messiah, he did not deny that they also prophetically foretold God’s dealing with the people of Israel long before the birth of Christ. This points to a general tendency in Edwards’s prophetical exegesis to deploy a scheme of multiple fulfilments—something that others in his theological traditions had proposed before him. Doing so allowed for a heightened concern for the original context and intentions as well as the primary historical accomplishment of Old Testament prophetic texts. Edwards was very much concerned with these issues and with marshalling proof from extra-biblical sources to demonstrate the historical accuracy of scriptural prophecies. This shows how he and the whole apologetic literature based on prophetic evidence was caught up in the new representational paradigm of biblical realism. At the same time, arguing, as Edwards frequently did, that the Holy Spirit could have inspired the utterance of prophecies with a view to several distinct accomplishments, all literally and factually true, preserved the possibility of asserting a higher fulfilment in Christian history (Nichols 2013, 33). And it equipped Edwards with another, indeed his most important, means to buttress the concept of an integrated ­salvation history. Like many of his fellow exegetes, Edwards believed that everything that had befallen and would befall Christ’s church after the apostolic age was also predicted in the Bible. In his view, a number of New Testament prophecies (from the Book of Revelation in

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History, Providence, and Eschatology   225 particular) and even some Old Testament prophecies, especially from Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel, still remained to be accomplished. These tendencies and convictions also inform the ‘Redemption Discourse’ that has much in common with other then popular theologia prophetica works. Throughout the sermons, Edwards maps a complex web of multiple prediction and fulfilment onto the three parts and six dispensations of his history. Edwards was thus deeply conversant with the various modes of biblical theology that the Reformed salvation-history approach had brought forth. It is remarkable that the two future projects he sketched in his often cited ‘Letter to the Trustees of the College of New Jersey’ (1757) shortly before his death, both fall into that category. He was already making copious notes for a work tentatively titled ‘Harmony of the Old and New Testament’ that would have combined elements of these different modes. In it, Edwards intended to demonstrate, according to Kenneth Minkema, ‘the authenticity and unity of the Scriptures’ and ‘that biblical prophecies, types, and harmonies find their ultimate meaning in the person of the incarnate Logos as Messiah’ (Minkema 1996, 53). Edwards had already filled hundreds of manuscript pages with notes for this project (WJEO 29). As Edwards wrote in the letter, he was particularly attentive to ‘the true scope and sense’ of the prophecies, ‘considering all the various particulars wherein these prophecies have their exact fulfilment; showing the universal, precise, and admirable correspondence between predictions and events’ (WJE 16: 728). Furthermore, Edwards was planning to revise the sermons of the ‘Redemption Discourse’ into a major book to be called History of the Work of Redemption. Of course, we have no way of knowing what this book would have looked like exactly. However, Edwards describes it as a ‘body of divinity in an entire new method, being thrown into the form of an history’ that was to arrange ‘all parts of the grand scheme [of salvation] in their historical order’, ‘which we have an account of in history or prophecy’ (WJE 16: 727–8). Presumably, Edwards was hoping to accomplish a kind of systematic salvationhistory theology that would creatively amalgamate federal theology, t­ ypo­logic­al interpretation, and theologia prophetica. Edwards’s notebooks also suggest that the project would have significantly broadened the prisca theologia approach. McDermott and McClymond perceive a marked ‘cultural-historical turn’ in Edwards’s surviving notes on non-Christian religions and developments in human civilization outside the church. Reflected in these notes they see Edwards’s desire to expand a ‘traditional Christian understanding of history with a full-scale consideration and critique of global religions and cultures in theological perspective’, thereby incorporating ‘all aspects of human culture in relation to a divine redemptive plan’ (McDermott and McClymond 2011, 181, 186, 188). Edwards’s emphasis on the newness of his method in the anticipated project might also point to what is in fact already a distinctive feature of the ‘Redemption Discourse’, but which he possibly intended to enhance as well. In the third section of the original sermon series, Edwards treated the whole course of post-apostolic church history as a succession of periods of decline and ‘periods of decisive revivals’ ‘based on the effusion of the [Holy] Spirit’ (Zakai 2003, 91). Fueled by the power of the Spirit, revivals, and missions became, as it were, the engine of church history that drove it forward in a way

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226   Jan Stievermann that was progressive, if not in a linear way. Rather, the cycles of decline and renewal described a kind of upward spiraling movement leading toward the perfections of the millennial church. The basic assumptions behind this outlook on church history was anything but new. Edwards inherited them from a host of Protestant theologians, who had interpreted the Reformation as being at once the successor to a series of previous renewal movements in the medieval church (such as the Waldenses and Hussites) and as the decisive turning point in ecclesial history. The work of the Reformers marked the beginning of the end for the antichristian Church of Rome and ushered in the eschatological restoration of Christ’s true church to be completed by committed Protestants. Reformed federal and prophetic theologies routinely embodied such a view. What can be regarded as innovative about Edwards’s ‘Redemption Discourse’ was the way in which it interprets church renewal before and after the Reformation in explicitly revivalistic terms. Moreover, Edwards boldly fit his own present period into that scheme, interpreting diverse Protestant renewal movements and awakenings of the eighteenth century as signs of another—possibly the decisive—outpouring of the Holy Spirit. While he gave special attention and significance to the Anglo-American ‘evangelical’ revivals, including those in his own native New England, he also incorporated contemporary church history from other parts of the world, such as the Pietist movement in Germany (WJE 9: 436). Here were encouraging signs that the kingdom of God was advancing across the globe and that the latter-day restoration of the church was drawing near. Based on Rev. 20 and its vision of Satan’s binding for a thousand years, the final sermon of the ‘Redemption Discourse’ describes the triumph of the church in a final, millennial age of ‘vital religion’, peace, and harmony (WJE 9: 481–6). After the closing of this age would follow the general resurrection, the last judgment, and the allocation of the elect and the reprobate to their eternal abodes in heaven and hell respectively. The thirtieth sermon concludes with words from the Book of Revelation expressing the desire for Christ’s imminent return. This points to the special significance that Revelation and its prophecy of a thousand-year reign of Christ held for Edwards. Edwards was an ardent millennialist, whose work as a pastor and missionary was very much driven by eschatological hopes. He spent a great deal of intellectual labor on issues surrounding the latter-day events foreseen in Revelation. Edwards believed that the final book of the canon was not to be viewed with suspicion but rather held special value. If put into conversation with other prophetic parts of Scripture, Revelation could be read as a symbolic abridgment of the history of the church and its enemies from the apostolic period to the return of Christ.

Edwards’s Millennialism Edwards’s obsession with the end times began early and lasted through his entire career. Most of his more daring speculations Edwards kept private. In 1723 he started a separate pocket book for ‘Notes on the Apocalypse’, to which he would add for the rest of his life.

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History, Providence, and Eschatology   227 In addition, he penned numerous miscellaneous remarks on the topic that survived in manuscript. He also delivered a total of sixty-three sermons just on Revelation, which are more guarded and focused on practical applications. It is important to emphasize, however, that Edwards’s fascination with the apocalypse and his millennialism were not unusual in his milieu. Nor did his redemptive-historical readings of Revelation and his interpretations of the latter-day prophecies mark a new departure, as earlier scholarship suggested. In fact, much of them are derived from other exegetes, mostly in the PuritanDissenting tradition (McDermott 1992, 37–92; Stein 2005; Sweeney 2016, 160–83). Edwards was the heir of a remarkable revival of ‘chiliasm’ among early seventeenthcentury Reformed exegetes on the Continent and especially in England (Hotson 2000; Jue  2006). Important pioneers were Thomas Brightman, John Cotton, and especially Johann Heinrich Alsted with his The Beloved City (1643; Latin original 1627) and Joseph Mede with his Key to the Revelation (1650; Latin original 1627). They and their followers turned away from the still dominant Augustinian a-millennialism that understood the thousand-year respite of Rev. 20 in spiritual and preterist terms, identifying it with the church age. Instead, they, as it were, put the millennium back into the future as an actual reign of Christ on earth, and read the rest of Revelation as a prophetic history of the postapostolic period. The book’s mysterious cycles of visions prefigured a chrono­logic­al sequence describing the rise, reign, decline, and ultimate fall of the Antichrist, the great antagonist of the true church. The church’s regeneration and triumph was foretold in the final chapters (Rev. 18–20). Being the militant Protestant he was, Edwards primarily identified the Antichrist with Rome and ‘Popery’, supported by Catholic powers, as well as ‘Mahometans’, especially the Ottoman Turks occupying the Holy Land. Still very influential in Edwards’s day, Mede had developed a basic schematization of these vision cycles (the two books, the seals, trumpets, vials, and woes) as well as detailed ‘synchronisms’ between the different symbols and specific historical events. Mede concluded that the end of the reign of the Antichrist—which Rev. 11 foretold to last for 1,260 days or years—had been ushered in by the Reformation and would come to an end soon. The Antichrist’s rise had started with the ascend of the papacy after Genseric’s destruction of Rome in 456 and the deposing of Romulus Augustulus in 476; his downfall might therefore occur as early as 1716 or 1736. Such redemptive-historical readings of Revelation thus provided an ‘afflictive model of progress’ (Davidson 1977, 260) through which the history of the church appeared as a series of struggles toward victory. They allowed the hotter sorts of Protestants, notably the Puritans during the Civil War period, to interpret their own afflictions and victories as part of a latter-day scenario before the dawning of the millennial age. The present moment was pregnant with sacred significance. Millennialism by no means disappeared from English Puritanism after the Restoration, although it was frowned upon by parts of the Anglican establishment (Johnston 2011). In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries it thrived especially among politically whiggish Dissenters and ‘low-church theologians and lesser Newtonian scientists who sought to synchronize sacred and natural history according to the principles of the new science’ (Bloch  1985, 9). Important to mention here are

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228   Jan Stievermann Daniel Whitby’s Treatise of the True Millennium (1703); William Whiston’s An Essay on the Revelation of Saint John (1706), and especially Moses Lowman’s Paraphrase and Notes upon the Revelation (1737). New England theology, before and during Edwards’s time, was very much tied into this millennialist tradition and contributed to its ongoing discussions (Smolinski 2003). Numerous colonial divines from John Cotton to Increase and Cotton Mather had published on the subject. Millennialism also had popular res­on­ ance. However, it was far from uncontroversial, and some proponents of Enlightenment rationalism and moderation, notably Edwards’s arch-nemesis Charles Chauncy, denounced it as conducive to dangerous enthusiasm. And even among those who in principle shared a millennialist outlook, debates were raging how precisely the proph­ ecies of Revelation ought to be expounded. These discussions were about dates and adjusting the synchronisms of prophetic visions and historical dates. Expectations about the downfall of the Antichrist in the early eighteenth century had obviously been premature. But the debates were also, and more fundamentally, about how to understand the promises of the millennium and the surrounding latter-day events. Modern historians have often made the question of when Christ’s physical return was expected the one decisive criterion to divide theologians into pre-and postmillennialist camps, with Edwards being routinely sorted into the latter. But this distinction is far too simple. What we now call premillennialism envisions ‘the relation between this age and the millennium as a radical disjunction’. Exegetes associated with the label postmillennialism, on the other hand, ‘generally argued for continuity between this age and the next . . . and that Christ’s coming would succeed the millennium’ (Gribben  2008, 27). These differences, however, emerge from opposing tendencies to read a number of key prophecies in either literalist-factualist or in allegorical-spiritual terms: How to understand the slaying of the witnesses? What would be the nature of the apocalyptic tribulations and the resurrection of the saints before the millennium? Would there occur an eschatological restoration and conversion of the Jews? In what ways exactly would Christ rule on earth, and how was one to imagine the millennial earth? While exegetes leaned in one direction or the other, they often varied on specific issues. Edwards was no exception. Labelling him a postmillennialist is therefore not wrong but obscures the complicated mixture of positions to be found in his musings on Revelation. Generally speaking, Edwards turned away from the hyperliteralism and expectations of Christ’s immediate physical return that had characterized the millennialist publications of some of the leading New England divines of the previous generation, ­notably the Mathers. Although he continued to draw on seventeenth-century works, in particular Mede’s, Edwards gravitated toward a new generation of English exegetes such as Whitby and Lowman, who favoured an allegorical-spiritual approach and pushed back the anticipated commencement of the last age. Lowman’s Paraphrase and Notes has been identified as the single most important influence on Edwards’s millennialism (e.g. WJE 5: 219–50; 9: 422–3), but he didn’t follow Lowman unquestioningly. For Lowman, the present age correlated with the sixth of the seven vials (Rev. 16:10–11) to be poured out on the Antichrist, whose 1,260-year reign would come to an end in about 2016.

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History, Providence, and Eschatology   229 Before reading Lowman, Edwards had toyed with earlier dates (WJE 5: 127–30). And in his Humble Attempt (1747) he chafed at the discouraging effect of such a late dating (a full three hundred years after what Mede had predicted!), but neither here nor in his other published work did he dismiss Lowman or definitively propose an alternative scheme. Instead, he reached for a gradualist reading of the outpouring of the sixth vial on the river Euphrates, which he took to signify the drying up of the Antichrist’s resources, accomplished in the defeats and disasters visited upon the Catholic and Muslim powers that, directly or indirectly, supported the Roman beast (WJE 5: 421–3). If the Antichrist’s decline was gradual and well underway before his final fall, so might be the rise of Christ’s millennial reign. Moreover, Edwards parted ways with Lowman on the ‘slaying of the witnesses’ (Rev. 11:7–10), which the English exegete thought to still lie in the future. Edwards came to prefer a preterist but nevertheless literal explication, according to which this much-debated prophecy had been fulfilled in the slaughter of pre-Protestant and Protestant witnesses of the true faith (WJE 5: 378–94; WJE 9: 456–7). The worst parts of history were over. No major apocalyptic tribulations were to be expected before the dawning of the millennium. On the key issues of the first resurrection (Rev. 20:5), the overthrow and binding of Satan and Christ’s rule, Edwards found himself in complete agreement with his main sources, however. The first resurrection was to be understood allegorically as a spiritual conversion of individual Christians and the regeneration of the church (WJE 5: 144–5, 151). Edwards did not expect the beginning of the millennium to be marked by a dramatic supernatural interruption of history, even a complete overthrow of the existing order of things. It would rather be an extension of the progress of true religion in the context of spirit-filled revivals that was also going to lead to the ultimate destruction of the forces of the Antichrist. Around the same time Edwards expected the eschatological gathering and conversion of the Jews (WJE 24: 917). Christ would not return in the body but He and His saints in heaven would reign spiritually through his triumphant church. As Edwards said in The Distinguishing Marks (1741), Christians ought to hope for Christ’s parousia as a ‘spiritual coming, to set up his kingdom in the world’ (WJE 4: 271). Edwards expected this millennial age to remain an inchoate state of affairs. The prophecy of a ‘new heaven and new earth’ (Rev. 21:1–2) was not to be accomplished literally but spiritually and gradually during this final stage of history. While the church was to recover its ancient purity and spread its influence over the globe, imperfections would remain. Put more positively, even during the millennium there would be room for further improvements. As Edwards envisioned it in his ‘Redemption Discourse’, the thousand years would see constant progress toward universal peace and brotherhood among Christian nations ruled in harmonious cooperation between church and state. It was to be an age of genuine enlightenment, as knowledge and especially godly learning would constantly increase (WJE 9: 481–6). But individual Christians living then would still be subject to sin, human limitations, and death, even though the power of these forces would be diminishing. What has often been overlooked, however, is that Edwards applied his model of multiple fulfilments also to some of the central end-time prophecies that would find a literal

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230   Jan Stievermann but nevertheless higher accomplishment after the end of history (Smolinski 2003, 457–9). Once the thousand years had passed, Christ would literally return for the last judgment preceded by a general physical resurrection, in which the souls would be united with their new, immortal bodies. Then, Edwards speculated, the old earth would be scorched by a global conflagration (based on 2 Peter 3:7, 12), literally turning it into a living hell, the place where the damned would be tormented forever and with ever-growing intensity (see ‘Miscellanies’, # 275, WJE 13: 376). At the same time, God would create an actual new heaven for the church, likely in ‘some glorious place in the universe prepared for this end by God, removed at an immense distance from the solar system’ (WJE 5: 140–1). In this eternal abode, the union of Christ and the church was to be consummated. The elect were to ‘reign for ever and ever’ (Rev. 22:5), enjoying their deathless and sinless existence. But even here progress would continue, as ‘the glorified saints shall grow in holiness and happiness’ (1 ‘Miscellanies’, # 5; WJE 13: 275). We finally turn to the question of whether Edwards assigned any special role to America in this scenario. A nuanced answer has to take note of different phases in Edwards’s thinking on this subject. When he preached his ‘Redemption Discourse’ in 1739, Edwards expressed cautious optimism that the Northampton revival was amongst the signs of time, pointing to what he would call two years later in The Distinguishing Marks, the ‘last and greatest outpouring of the Spirit of God . . . in the latter ages’ (WJE 4: 230). At the same time, he still felt the need—like many a colonial exegete before him—to disprove old speculations by Mede and others that America might be the home of the eschatological enemies of the church, Gog and Magog, and thus excluded from the latter-day glories (WJE 9: 434–5). During the height of the Great Awakening, Edwards grew bolder in his hope. In his apologetic Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New-England (1742), he declared it ‘not unlikely that this work of God’s Spirit . . . is the dawning, or at least a prelude, of that glorious work of God, so often foretold in Scripture, which in the progress and issue of it, shall renew the world of mankind’ (WJE 4: 353). Edwards even thought ‘it probable that this work will begin in America’ and that New England was called to do ‘some great thing to make way for the introduction of the church’s latter-day glory’ (WJE 4: 353, 356). Partly as a reaction to the sharp criticism he received, partly in response to his own growing disappointment with the revivals, Edwards never repeated such claims in print. They also faded from his private ruminations on the subject. But even Some Thoughts, it should be emphasized, does not engage in anything like an Americanization of the millennial promise. At no point did Edwards ever suggest that America would be the center of the ­millennial reign, or that New World Christians would hold an elevated role in the Church triumphant, perhaps even superseding God’s erstwhile ‘peculiar people’ as an American New Israel. Edwards rather predicted that during the millennium all people and nations of the earth would be, as he put it in one of his ‘Notes on the Apocalypse’, united in ‘sweet harmony’ as the saints from across the globe would gather around a renovated Judea which, after the conversion of Israel, would be ‘at the center of the kingdom of Christ, communicating influences to all other parts’ (WJE 5: 134).

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History, Providence, and Eschatology   231

Conclusion Even in his most enthusiastic moment, Edwards himself did not anticipate later nationalist ideologies of the ‘redeemer nation’, as scholars once suggested. This is not to deny, however, that the Edwardsean tradition of millennialism would soon prove fertile ground for the kind of apocalyptical whiggism or civil millennialism that fired up supporters of the American Revolution. And the heirs of Edwards, notably his grandson Timothy Dwight, unabashedly assigned a special role to America in the millennial age (Hatch 1977; Bloch 1985). It is easy to see how nineteenth-century evangelicals could interpret a text such as Some Thoughts as expressive of this kind of religious nationalism—a reading which was then often mistaken for the author’s own intentions. The same can be said of Edwards’s spiritualist and gradualist understanding of the millennium, pushed to an extreme in the works of his disciples, notably Samuel Hopkin’s Treatise on the Millennium (1793) with its elaborate panorama of religious and scientific advancements. New Divinity eschatology proved to be quite adaptable to theologies emphasizing historical progress. It could easily appear to be in full harmony with Enlightenment philosophies of history and human perfectibility. Edwards’s own view of history, however, contains at least as much that is resistant to such developments as elem­ents conducive to them. On the one hand, Edwards can be said to have furthered the historicization of Christian theology, in the sense that he ‘identified God’s work of redemption with the whole span of history. As he came to believe, there is no history without redemption, no redemption without history’ (Zakai 2003, 186). Such a theology undoubtedly partook in the rise of a new historical consciousness in the eighteenth century that viewed the entire continuum of the human past as meaningful and teleologically leading toward an immanentist fulfilment. But we should not assume a monodirectional response to Enlightenment ideas here. As Karl Löwith observed in his classic work Meaning in History (1949), the rise of a new philosophy of history in the second half of the eighteenth century that revolved around the notion of innerworldly progress had itself deep roots in ‘the Hebrew and Christian faith’, specifically Christian millennialism, and must in part be seen as ‘the secularization of its eschatological pattern’ (Löwith  1949, 2). Edwards, we might say, made a contribution—although a wholly unintended one—to the emergence of the notion of historical progress and, more generally, an integrated and increasingly autonomous concept of ‘History’. On the other hand, Edwards’s thinking remains resolutely biblio- and theocentric. Although some of his later readers chose to ignore this, he in the strongest possible terms denied that history progresses through human agency or as the unfolding of human rationality. Edwards did not recognize history as a sphere that had an independent causality and existence, or meaning in itself. Temporal events carried transcendent significance only as a medium of divine activity, which, however, as John Wilson has pointed out, was ‘ultimately self-referential rather than responsive to or directed at

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232   Jan Stievermann human action’ (Wilson 2005, 216). Maybe Edwards’s drift toward occasionalism and an anti-realist ontology that ultimately makes the world a kind of ‘magic lantern show’, a projection of divine ideas from God, can also be understood as a reaction to the ­perceived danger of a secularism that he feared to be inherent in the period’s turn to history. Seeking to counter his own historicizing tendencies, he emphasized even more strongly the ‘immediate influence of God’ (‘Miscellanies’, # 177, WJE 13: 326) at every moment, and portrayed creation as a ‘present, remaining, continual act’ (‘Miscellanies’, # 346, WJE 13: 418).

Works Cited Barshinger, David P. (2014). Jonathan Edwards and the Psalms: A Redemptive-Historical Vision of Scripture. New York: Oxford University Press. Bercovitch, Sacvan (1978). The American Jeremiad. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bloch, Ruth H. (1985). Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, Robert E. (2002). Jonathan Edwards and the Bible. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cherry, Conrad, ed. (1998). God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny. Rev. ed. 1971. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Conforti, Joseph A. (1995). Jonathan Edwards, Religious Tradition & American Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Davidson, James West (1977). The Logic of Millennial Thought: Eighteenth-Century New England. New Haven: Yale University Press. Gay, Peter (1966). A Loss of Mastery: Puritan Historians in Colonial America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Goen, C.C. (1959). ‘Jonathan Edwards: A New Departure in Eschatology,’ Church History 28: 25–40. Gribben, Crawford (2008). The Puritan Millennium: Literature and Theology, 1550–1682. Rev. ed. Milton Keynes: Paternoster. Harrison, Peter (1990). ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hatch, Nathan O. (1977). The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England. New Haven: Yale University Press. Heimert, Alan (1966). Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hotson, Howard (2000). Paradise Postponed: Johann Heinrich Alsted and the Birth of Calvinist Millenarianism. Dordrecht: Kluver. Johnston, Warren (2011). Revelation Restored: The Apocalypse in Later Seventeenth-Century England. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer. Jue, Jeffrey  K. (2006). Heaven Upon Earth: Joseph Mede (1586–1638) and the Legacy of Millennarianism. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Löwith, Karl (1949). Meaning in History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Markus, R. A. (1970). Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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History, Providence, and Eschatology   233 McClymond, Michael J. and Gerald R. McDermott (2011). The Theology of Jonathan Edwards. New York: Oxford University Press. McDermott, Gerald R. (1992). One Holy and Happy Society: The Public Theology of Jonathan Edwards. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. McDermott, Gerald  R. (2000). Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods: Christian Theology, Enlightenment Religion, and Non-Christian Faiths. New York: Oxford University Press. Miller, Perry (1949). Jonathan Edwards. New York: William Sloane Associates. Minkema, Kenneth  P. (1996). ‘The Other Unfinished “Great Work”: Jonathan Edwards, Messianic Prophecy, and “The Harmony of the Old and New Testament”. ’ In: Jonathan Edwards’s Writings: Text, Context, and Interpretation. Ed. Stephen  J.  Stein. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 52–65. Neele, Adriaan C. (2018). Before Jonathan Edwards: Sources of New England Theology. New York: Oxford University Press. Nichols, Stephen  R.  C. (2013). Jonathan Edwards’s Bible: The Relationship of the Old and New Testaments in the Theology of Jonathan Edwards. Eugene: Pickwick. Smolinski, Reiner (2003). ‘Apocalypticism in Colonial North America.’ In: The Continuum History of Apocalypticism. Ed. Bernard McGinn, John J. Collins and Stephen J. Stein. New York: Continuum. 441–67. Stein, Stephen J. (2005). ‘Eschatology.’ In: The Princeton Companion to Jonathan Edwards. Ed. Sang Hyun Lee. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 226–42. Stievermann, Jan (2016). Prophecy, Piety and the Problem of Historicity: Interpreting the Hebrew Scriptures in Cotton Mather’s Biblia Americana. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Sweeney, Douglas A. (2016). Edwards the Exegete: Biblical Interpretation and Anglo-Protestant Culture on the Edge of the Enlightenment. New York: Oxford University Press. Turner, James (2011). Religion Enters the Academy: The Origins of the Scholarly Study of Religion in America. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Tuveson, Ernest Lee (1968). Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Van der Wall, Ernestine (1994). ‘Between Grotius and Cocceius: The ‘Theologia Prophetica’ of Campegius Vitringa (1659–1722).’ In: Hugo Grotius—Theologian: Essays in Honour of G.H.M. Posthumus Meyjes. Edited by Henk J. M. Nellen and Edwin Rabbie. Leiden: Brill. 195–215. Walsham, Alexandra (1999). Providence in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilson, John H. (2005). ‘History.’ In: The Princeton Companion to Jonathan Edwards. Ed. Sang Hyun Lee. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 210–25. Winship, Michael P. (2000). Seers of God: Puritan Providentialism in the Restoration and Early Enlightenment. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Zakai, Avihu (2003). Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of History: The Reenchantment of the World in the Age of Enlightenment. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Author Bio Jan Stievermann is Professor of the History of Christianity in the U.S. at Heidelberg University, and director of the Jonathan Edwards Center Germany. He has written and edited books and essays on a broad range of topics in the fields of American religious history and American

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234   Jan Stievermann literature. His most recent publications are the edition of vol. 5 of Cotton Mather’s Biblia Americana (Mohr Siebeck, 2015) and a book-length study of this hitherto unexplored source entitled Prophecy, Piety, and the Problem of Historicity: Interpreting the Hebrew Scriptures in Cotton Mather’s Biblia Americana (Mohr Siebeck, 2016). For the Biblia-project as a whole (10 vols.) he also serves as the executive editor.

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chapter 15

Si n a n d Ev il David P. Barshinger

‘There is nothing that keeps wicked men, at any one moment, out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God’ (WJE 22: 405). This sermon doctrine comes from Jonathan Edwards’s (1703–1758) most famous sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. With its intense, frightening imagery of the moment before an individual enters into eternity, this sermon captures many key themes in Edwards’s doctrine on sin and evil—God’s just wrath against sin, God’s sovereignty over all creatures, the precarious state of sinners in their sin, the dread of punishment that awaits unrepentant sinners, and the hope of new life in Christ. Sinners also highlights one of the main contexts in which Edwards declared his doctrine: from the pulpit. This New England preacher developed his doctrine of sin and evil in his theological and exegetical notebooks, with entries on original sin as early as 1729 (Guelzo 2012, 54). His decades of reflecting on sin and evil culminated in his treatise Original Sin, which he completed before his death in March 1758 and which was published later that year. These varying contexts—from the study to the pulpit to eighteenth-century transatlantic discourse—illuminate Edwards’s world and the people he engaged with on the topic of sin and evil. Edwards was a preacher who proclaimed this doctrine for the eternal benefit and spiritual arousal of his people. He was a pastor who sought to encourage and counsel troubled parishioners. He was a philosopher who wrestled with exegetical knots and theological conundrums as he engaged in the eighteenth century’s intellectual shifts. This essay seeks to understand what Edwards believed about sin and evil, why he held to these convictions, and how his context shaped this doctrine in his mind.

Sin, Evil, and the Bible The Bible is prominent in Edwards’s discussions of sin and evil. This should come as no surprise since Scripture provided the basis of this doctrine, such as the fall of Adam and Eve, a divine standard of righteousness, punishment and sacrifices for sin, sinners’

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236   David P. Barshinger pleas for forgiveness, the atoning work of Christ, and the hope of reconciliation with God. But what may surprise some is the way Edwards kept going back to the Bible to understand what it said about sin and evil. While his philosophical commitments certainly shaped his doctrine of sin and evil, Scripture was foundational to his beliefs. Edwards kept a series of exegetical and theological notebooks to think through various intellectual and biblical questions, especially his ‘Miscellanies’, ‘Notes on Scripture’, and ‘Blank Bible’ (a King James Version of the Bible interleaved with blank pages for taking notes). A few examples of Edwards’s exegetical ruminations will suffice to exhibit how he wrestled with Scripture in his understanding of sin and evil. Edwards deduced that self-love is the foundation of all sin from John 7:18, which reads, ‘He that speaketh of himself, seeketh his own glory; but he that seeketh his glory that sent him, the same is true, and no unrighteousness is in him.’ Based on this passage (and John 5:30–1), Edwards concluded, ‘The predominancy of self-love is the foundation of all sin’, and ‘love to God . . . is the ground or principle of all righteousness or holiness’ (WJE 20: 342). In his ‘Blank Bible’ entry on Romans 5:12, Edwards considered how all humanity succumbed to self-love and fell in Adam: ‘All, both Jews and Gentiles, are the posterity of one first father, and all fell in him, and came under condemnation alike by Adam’s transgression.’ And from this original sin ‘all are alike saved by Christ, and equally partake of the benefit of the righteousness of the Second Adam’ (WJE 24: 998). For Edwards, there is a relation of typological fulfilment between the first Adam and the second. The doctrine of sin and redemption are inextricably linked. From Matthew 5:26, Edwards reasoned that God will insist on ‘a full atonement’ and ‘a complete punishment’ of the sinner (WJE 20: 460). God can do so because—and here Edwards drew from James 1:17—‘evil is not from God’, but rather, ‘all good is from him’ (WJE 24: 1167). In his goodness God also offers repentant sinners hope through the headship of Christ. Discussing Romans 5:18, Edwards noted, ‘As Adam’s sin descends to all that are of him, . . . so Christ’s righteousness goes to all that are of him’ (WJE 24: 999). Exegetical and theological reflections like these formed the building blocks of Edwards’s broader writings on sin and evil. They also highlight how interested Edwards was in understanding what Scripture had to say about God and the sin and evil that has broken humanity’s relationship with him.

Context and Conversation Living in the era of the Enlightenment, Edwards sought to show that Christianity was a reasonable religion in the face of new historical discoveries and philosophical conundrums. The doctrine of original sin was a favourite target of deists and radical Enlightenment proponents. The idea of a human race enslaved to sin because of a sin committed by one

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Sin and Evil   237 man millennia earlier was outrageous. Such ideas struck at the heart of their sense of justice but also contradicted deeply held beliefs about the virtuousness of humanity, the possibility to improve the human race, and the ability of humans to progress on their own. The force of Enlightenment-era concerns is perhaps most evidenced in a cluster of works from Edwards’s final years, including Freedom of the Will (1754) and The Nature of True Virtue (1765). Edwards’s aim of defending the reasonableness of Christianity is pronounced in his book ‘Original Sin’ (1758), the full title of which is The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended. The book specifically responds to John Taylor (1694–1761), who wrote The Scripture-Doctrine of Original Sin, Proposed to Free and Candid Examination (1740). Taylor, a Hebrew scholar, attacked the notion that God would hold one’s sin against another and argued that the Reformed doctrine of original sin stood on shaky biblical foundations. Taylor held that we sin not by receiving Adam’s guilt but only by actively sinning ourselves, that infants who die are not damned, and that death is a mercy that weans people off the world. In Original Sin Edwards also targeted George Turnbull (1698–1748), a Scottish moral philosopher who represents well the positive view of human nature in eighteenth-century Britain. Edwards, who procured a copy of Taylor’s book in 1748, saw Taylor as perhaps the most effective representative of the new thinking, and so in Original Sin he focused on responding to Taylor’s arguments. Edwards also saw himself in continuity with the Christian theological tradition that affirmed original sin, especially evident in the line from Augustine (354–430) through Calvin (1509–1564) to the Reformed Church. Edwards worried about the inroads of ‘Arminianism’—a term he used as a catchall for eighteenth-century movements (such as deism) that elevated human nature, human ability, freedom of choice, and moralism at the expense of divine sovereignty and human dependence on God. Edwards was one of many evangelicals, including Isaac Watts (1674–1748) and John Wesley (1703–1791), who responded to Taylor’s book, which was widely perceived to have done much damage to the cause of true Christianity. Not surprisingly, Edwards relied on the work of several theologians and biblical scholars in defending original sin, including especially Hebraist Johannes Buxtorf (1599–1664), theologian Johann Friedrich Stapfer (1708–1775), and biblical scholar Matthew Poole (1624–1679). Edwards’s concern to make his doctrine of sin and evil reasonable also led him to discuss heathen philosophers in relation to original sin. Drawing from theologians such as Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), Theophilus Gale (1628–1678), Stapfer, and Watts, Edwards affirmed the prisca theologia (or ‘ancient theology’), which taught that God delivered to the Jews wisdom that was then passed down through various channels to ancient philo­ sophers. Edwards argued that ‘the Christian doctrine of original sin, or the corruption of nature,’ was ‘agreeable to’ the ‘traditions of the heathen’, including Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Seneca, Juvenal, and Manilius (WJE 20: 456–8), as well as Plato, Socrates, and Pliny (WJE 20: 241, 250–2, 459; 24: 132–3). The congruency of the biblical account with ancient beliefs supported the reasonableness of the doctrine of original sin.

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238   David P. Barshinger

The Problem of Evil In seeking to make a reasonable defence of Christianity, Edwards addressed the problem of evil. He maintained that sin is, by nature, an infinite evil. He distinguished between an offense against a finite being (other humans) and an offense against an in­fin­ite being (God). Because God is infinite in holiness, power, excellency, and so forth, an injury against him is ‘an injury of [an] infinite degree of badness, that  is, of infinite demerit’ (WJE 13: 187). Edwards held that all sins are infinitely ­heinous because they have the infinite God as the object of offense (WJE 13: 187–8; cf  3: 128; 18: 343). Edwards followed Augustine in defining moral evil as ‘consisting in something negative’; he observed that Scripture often calls evil ‘vanity or emptiness’ and good ‘fullness’ (WJE 20: 518). Reflecting on Genesis 1:2, Edwards noted that the phrase ‘without form and void’ underscores that from the beginning of creation, humans have no good in themselves but only from the Spirit. Edwards concluded, ‘If God withdraws from the  creature, it immediately becomes empty and void of all good’ (WJE 15: 530; cf. WJE 24: 1101–2). This understanding of evil was important to Edwards in defending both God’s holiness and God’s sovereignty in the face of evil. Edwards was committed to God’s sovereignty over all things, which included God making decrees about the fall and redemption in eternity before time began. But if God ordained the fall, how could he avoid the charge of being the author of sin? While many used the term author as a synonym for perpetrator, Edwards proposed finer nuances of the term. Writing at length in Freedom of the Will, he argued that authoring, or ordering, events that will bring about certain consequences is not the same as authoring, or committing, those consequences oneself (WJE 1: 398). If by ‘author of sin’ one means ‘the sinner, the agent, or actor of sin, or the doer of a wicked thing’, then it would be ‘blasphemy to suppose God to be the author of sin’. At the same time, if the phrase means ‘the permitter, or not a hinderer of sin; and at the same time, a disposer of the state of events, in such a manner, for wise, holy and most excellent ends and purposes, that sin, if it be permitted or not hindered, will most certainly and infallibly follow’, then Edwards said that he did not deny that God is the author of sin—though he also admitted, ‘I dislike and reject the phrase,’ since it typically carries another sense (WJE 1: 399; all italics within quotations are original). For Edwards, this conclusion was inescapable, and he laid out several passages in Scripture that he believed present God as the one who orders all things, even evil things, though for his own good purposes (e.g., Gen. 45:5, 7–8; Ex. 4:21; Deut. 2:30; Josh. 11:20; Jer. 51:20). The most significant example Edwards gave was Christ, whom God sent into the world for the express purpose that he be crucified. From the view of the perpetrators of the crucifixion, it was ‘in many respects the most horrid of all acts’, yet from the view

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Sin and Evil   239 of God, it was ‘the most admirable and glorious of all events; and God’s willing the event was the most holy volition of God’ (WJE 1: 406). From a different angle, Edwards distinguished between ‘permission’ and ‘production’. God may permit an event or act that is sin ‘by not hindering it’, but that is not the same as producing it ‘by a positive agency or efficiency’ (WJE 1: 403). Edwards compared it to the sun. When the sun goes down, it is not ‘the proper cause of cold and darkness’, because it is not ‘the fountain of these things’. That cold and darkness follow from the absence of the sun does not argue that the sun causes cold and darkness. In the same way, ‘sin is not the fruit of any positive agency or influence of the most High, but on the contrary, arises from the withholding of his action and energy’ (WJE 1: 404). Edwards also distinguished between God’s revealed and secret will. For example, the crucifixion of Christ was contrary to God’s revealed will because people were murdering an innocent man, but it was in keeping with God’s secret will because he accomplished redemption through it. Edwards denied that this distinction made God’s will inconsistent; God could hate a thing as evil in itself and yet will that it should come to pass, when ‘considering all circumstances and consequences’ (WJE 1: 409; cf. 1: 407). Here Edwards offered a ‘great good’ thesis. Unlike humans, ‘God don’t will sin as sin, or for the sake of anything evil; though it be his pleasure so to order things, that he permitting, sin will come to pass; for the sake of the great good that by his disposal shall be the consequence’ (WJE 1: 408–9). Many scholars find Edwards’s theodicy inconsistent or unpersuasive. Daniel Gullotta argues that ‘Edwards’s belief in the absolute sovereignty of God can only create a space in which he must admit (despite his best attempts to avoid doing so) that God is indeed “the author of sin.” Darkness and light, good and evil—all come from God’ (Gullotta 2017, 563). Oliver Crisp similarly holds that Edwards has a ‘monomania about preserving the absolute sovereignty of God from any encroachment by creatures’, but in this attempt, Edwards sacrifices ‘created agency’ and ‘implicat[es] the Deity as the author of sin and evil’ (Crisp 2017, 418). While many scholars remain unconvinced, Edwards believed his view held up under the weight of logic and the testimony of Scripture. From his perspective, Scripture asserted the absolute sovereignty of God. Yet he also affirmed ‘the infinite evil of sin’ and believed that God, as good in his nature, was unable to commit evil. His defence of God’s sovereignty and goodness in the face of evil could best be explained by the distinctions he made between permission and production, allowance and agency, secret and revealed will, the giving and the withdrawing of grace. For Edwards, as B. Hoon Woo observes, all these mind-boggling elements ultimately come into focus in the crucifixion of Christ. Woo concludes, Edwards’s strongest point in his theodicy is his emphasis on the cross of Christ. . . . Where God permitted sin, He permitted grace all the more. Edwards’s theodicy accents the grace of Christ’s cross as the final cause rather than God’s deterministic will as the first cause. Any who explore the cause of Adam’s sin are turned to the cross of Christ.  (Woo 2014, 123)

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Evil Spiritual Beings For Edwards, recognizing the existence of evil also entailed acknowledging the ­existence of evil spiritual beings. Again, his belief in the Bible’s truthfulness led him to affirm that the devil and his demons are real (e.g., WJE 23: 190–2). In the eighteenth century, such beliefs were increasingly becoming the object of ridicule. But Edwards all the more saw the need to defend such traditional views in the face of scepticism toward Christian orthodoxy. Edwards believed that the devil, or Satan, was a real being who was originally ‘the brightest of all the stars’, or angels, and was ‘set at the head of the universe, in greatest authority, as God’s prime minister of state’ (WJE 23: 212). But pride and jealousy led to his fall: When it was revealed to him, that as high and as glorious as he was, that he must be a ministering spirit to the race of mankind . . . that appeared so feeble, mean and despicable, so vastly inferior . . . to him, the prince of the angels, . . . and that he must be subject to one of that race that should hereafter be born, he could not bear it. This occasioned his fall, and now he with the other angels he drew away with him are fallen.  (WJE 23: 191)

After their fall, Satan and his demons turned to menace God’s creation, particularly the human race. The devil manifested himself as a serpent in the garden of Eden, where he  deceived Adam and Eve, whose sin plunged humanity into perpetual sinfulness. Edwards argued that Satan has power over unrepentant sinners, enslaving them as his captives (sermon on 2 Tim. 2:26, WJEO 48). The relationship between humanity and the devil is ominous: ‘Wicked men are the children of the devil.’ They are called ‘the children of the devil’ because ‘they Proceed from him’ and ‘are like him’. Satan was the one who ‘Poisoned mankind’ and ‘made them of the same venomous nature with himself ’. Edwards recognized the need for some nuance here. On the one hand, ‘man alone was the author of his own sin & not the devil’, for man ‘by his own free and voluntary act Committed the first [sin] and therefore destroyed the Image of God and wholly Corrupted his own nature’. On the other hand, Satan was ‘the Contriver of the Business’, and ‘he by his own devilish subtility so ordered the temptation as to deceive man’ (sermon on John 8:44[a], WJEO 44). Edwards also spoke about the ‘man of sin’, a title drawn from 2 Thessalonians 2:3. Edwards described this ‘man of sin’ as ‘that first-born of pride, among the children of men’, who ‘exalts himself above all that is called God or is worshiped’ (WJE 2: 319). This was another name for ‘the antichrist’, a title drawn from scriptures like 1 John 2:18. Surveying the Bible, Edwards concluded that the best candidate for fulfilling the prophe­ cies about the antichrist was the church of Rome (WJE 9: 450–3), which he sometimes particularized as the pope (WJE 23: 217). Some might object that the Roman Catholic Church cannot be the antichrist because it professes Christ. But Edwards argued that it

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Sin and Evil   241 is precisely its association with Christ that makes its subtle opposition to Christ all the worse (WJE 13: 186; cf. 13: 414–15). (For more on the antichrist, see WJE 5.) Edwards took great comfort from the belief that Christ had overcome the devil and his demons through the cross and resurrection and that ‘the devils’ would receive their due on judgment day (WJE 13: 165–6, 304–7, 385–6, 391–2, 403–4, 417–18). One reason why God allowed Satan to have influence in the world was that it brings great glory to Christ in his work of redemption. As Edwards put it, ‘God suffered Satan to do what he has done in the world, on purpose that his Son might have his glory, to obtain a complete victory over the devil and his armies’ (WJE 13: 418–19). Similarly, God also purposely raised up the empires of the antichrist and Islam because God sought to show ‘the glory of the power and dominion of Jesus’ in overcoming these two mighty empires, thus making Christ’s ‘superiority . . . the more visible’ (WJE 18: 67–8).

Original Sin and Human Depravity Explaining the rise of sin in humanity required more than simply blaming Satan, and traditional explanations of sin’s origin came under increasing attack in the eighteenth century—a threat Edwards felt sharply. In June 1752, Edwards wrote a letter to his former church in Northampton warning them about the theological danger they were in if they drifted from the solid doctrines of the Christian faith. He was particularly concerned about the thought coming from Britain, notably that of John Taylor, who, Edwards complained, ‘has so corrupted multitudes in New England’ and whose ‘scheme of religion . . . utterly explodes the doctrines you have been formerly taught concerning eternal election, conversion, justification; and so, of a natural state of death in sin; and the whole doctrine of original sin, and of the mighty change made in the soul by the redemption of Christ applied to it’. He worried that if Taylor’s views got a foothold among them, they would ‘doubtless by degrees put an end to what used to be called saving religion’ (WJE 16: 483–4). In a letter to the Reverend Thomas Foxcroft, 11 February 1757, Edwards expressed his ongoing frustrations about Taylor’s Scripture-Doctrine of Original Sin, ‘a book that has done more to root out the gospel, in all this western part of New England, than any other book’ (WJE 16: 696; cf. WJE 3: 102). As these letters attest, Edwards considered the doctrine of original sin so important because it was intertwined with doctrines of saving faith and divine sovereignty. Attacks on this doctrine amounted to attacks on the Gospel itself. Edwards believed that the teaching on sin was a doctrine ‘of great importance’, for if it be true that the whole of humanity is in a state of utter ruin, then salvation for the entire race hinges on a right understanding of this doctrine (WJE 3: 103). Edwards also detected in this new thinking an attack on Calvinism. So Edwards’s defence of original sin was as much a defence of God’s sovereign grace as it was of humanity’s universal depravity. Edwards’s most expansive treatment of sin and evil was his treatise Original Sin. Long before he wrote this volume, however, Edwards was working out his understanding of

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242   David P. Barshinger original sin in his notebooks, especially his ‘Miscellanies’ (e.g., WJE 13: 218–19, 387–9, 446–7, 452–3, 500–1; 18: 143; 20: 146, 325–6; 23: 171–2). It was in these notebooks that Edwards described the doctrine of original sin as both ‘mysterious’ and yet given to us in ‘such plain revelations’ (WJE 20: 241). Despite original sin’s ‘plain’ attestation in Scripture, Edwards was not above metaphysical gymnastics to show the reasonableness of the doctrine in the Age of Lights. Edwards appealed to Scripture at length—indeed, the first three parts of Original Sin deal extensively with Scripture, and part 2 is wholly devoted to discussing key biblical texts, such as Genesis 1–3; John 3:6; Romans 3:9–24; and Romans 5. Yet Edwards also appealed to experience, reason, and his opponents’ statements in defending the doctrine. He stitched elements from his sermons and notebooks into his treatise on sin, which represents the culmination of a lifetime of reflecting on the nature of sin. When Edwards wrote Original Sin, he was building on the foundation he laid in Freedom of the Will about the nature of freedom. In Freedom of the Will, Edwards defined total depravity as that corruption ‘whereby his heart is wholly under the power of sin, and he is utterly unable, without the interposition of sovereign grace, savingly to love God, believe in Christ, or do anything that is truly good and acceptable in God’s sight’. Edwards observed that the ‘main objection’ to this doctrine was that it is ‘inconsistent’ with the freedom of the will, when that freedom is defined as ‘indifference and selfdetermining power’. In response, Edwards argued that people are under ‘no other necessity of sinning, than a moral necessity’—thus, they are under no natural necessity to sin (WJE 1: 432). Edwards also noted that humans are hindered not by a complete inability to obey but only by a moral inability. Because they retain the natural ability to obey, they are not excused for sin, even if they have no moral ability to obey. As Edwards explained further in Original Sin, humanity lost the moral ability to keep God’s law when Adam sinned in the fall. Edwards defined original sin in its basic accepted understanding as ‘the innate sinful depravity of the heart’ (WJE 3: 107). To establish this point, Edwards sought to prove the universality of sin, the burden of part 1 of Original Sin. While his opponents held that ‘good preponderates’ (WJE 3: 108), Edwards held that such a view fails in the face of experiential and biblical evidence. He pointed to a ‘natural tendency’ as the cause of humanity’s universal experience of sin (WJE 3: 120). That such a propensity obtains in humanity is supported by its appearance in humanity ‘under all varieties of circumstances’ and across all kinds of differences: in both sexes and ‘through all countries, nations and ages, and in all conditions’ (WJE 3: 124, 125). The universality of sin, Edwards argued, is also evidenced by the universality of death, including even some infants. Because God is by nature just, he would not condemn millions to death who were unworthy of punishment. Since, then, death comes even to infants, Edwards noted ‘that infants are not looked upon by God as sinless, but that they are by nature children of wrath’ (WJE 3: 215). Perhaps the most controversial point in the doctrine of original sin was the im­put­a­ tion of Adam’s sin to his progeny. In what sense is it just for God to impute Adam’s sin to the rest of the human race? Edwards felt that Scripture constrained him to affirm the

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Sin and Evil   243 imputation of Adam’s sin. To explain how this was possible and how God could remain good and just in the process, Edwards developed a complex description of Adam’s sin and his relationship to his descendants. Edwards first defended the doctrine of ‘original righteousness’, by which he meant ‘the creation of our first parents with holy principles and dispositions’ (WJE 3: 223). God’s creation of humanity was good, because God himself is good and cannot create evil—evil being the absence of God’s goodness. In Edwards’s view of disposition, Adam ‘could not do right, without an inclination to right action’ (WJE 3: 229). Thus, because Adam did uphold God’s law fully until the first sin, he had to have a supernatural prin­ciple or inclination—namely, a ‘principle of divine love’ (WJE 3: 230). So how could Adam go from being good to plunging the human race into depravity? Edwards explained that God created humans originally with two kinds of principles: inferior (or natural, fleshly) principles and superior (or spiritual, holy, divine) ­prin­ciples. The inferior principles were meant to be subservient to the superior principles, but when man sinned, the Holy Spirit left the human race, and thus, the superior prin­ ciples ceased. The inferior principles—such as self-love and natural appetite—thus ascended to rule over human nature, though they were intended only to serve the su­per­ior principles. The withdrawing of grace was what led to the predominance of evil—another nod to an Augustinian understanding of evil. As Douglas Sweeney puts it, ‘Deprived of God’s Spirit, Adam’s passions ran amuck. His natural appetites consumed him. And the race became depraved’ (2009, 157). This plunging of humanity into depravity had far-reaching effects. People act out of their natural dispositions, and with the loss of the superior principles, the human dis­ pos­ition now tends toward serving the inferior principles and thus toward sinfulness. The will is bound in service to sin: ‘Sinners are entirely enslaved to this cruel tyrant, have their souls and bodies given up to him,’ and ‘they are blindfolded, cheated and deluded, unmercifully used by sin, and yet willingly and foolishly submit to all this cruel usage and are very good servants to sin notwithstanding.’ Here Edwards highlighted both the bondage of the will and the nature of the sinful disposition, for the sinner loves his sin. As Edwards described it, the person bound by sin is stuck in ‘a stinking, dark dungeon’, and yet, ‘he loved his dungeon while he was in it because he knew not there was any better place in the world’ (WJE 10: 623). No one can free herself from the dungeon of sin; only through Christ can one find true liberty. The fallen human thus lives with dis­ ordered affections—loving that which is evil rather than that which is good. And sin’s power still reaches to the regenerate; even those who repent struggle with remaining sin, and complete sanctification eludes them in this life. Such are the heavy, long-lasting effects of sin on the human race. But many scholars wonder, ‘How could this depressing legacy come about if God gave Adam the Holy Spirit in the garden? Why did Adam sin in the first place?’ In a sermon on Genesis 3:11 (Feb. 1738), Edwards explained that God created Adam not with the aid that would make him impeccable, ‘as to Render it Impossible for him to sin’, but with sufficient assistance ‘forever to prevent his sinning’, assuming ‘proper Care & watchfulness’. But when Adam sinned, ‘as soon as the H[oly] sp[irit] was gone out of his H[eart] the

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244   David P. Barshinger necessary & unavoidable Conseq[uence] was the Total Corruption of his nature’ (sermon on Gen. 3:11, WJEO 54; cf. Sweeney 2009, 157–8n24). But why does Adam’s sin condemn the rest of humanity? Edwards explained that Adam was a ‘Cov[enant] head’ of the human race (sermon on Gen. 3:11, WJEO 54). He described both Adam and Christ as ‘federal heads’. God dealt with Adam ‘as a public person, and as the head of the human species, and had respect to his posterity as included in him’ (WJE 3: 260). The parallels between Adam and Christ underscore that each is the head of his collective posterity (WJE 3: 346). Some scholars have questioned whether Edwards really held to federal headship. They suggest that he broke with seventeenth-century covenant theologians to develop his own ‘original metaphysics’ in response to deist arguments of his day (McClymond and McDermott 2011, 351; cf. Everhard 2017, 426; Helm 2004, 193). Sweeney, however, shows how Edwards could be a federalist, though in a unique way, because he was also ‘an ontological realist’, meaning that he believed that ‘Adam was a real federal head, the father of the race in whom all people are united, not a distant representative like federal politicians’ (Sweeney 2009, 158–9). We are truly united to Adam and one with him ontologically and seminally, not bodily. Edwards articulated this thinking on sin through his doctrines of occasionalism and continuous creation. As an occasionalist, Edwards held, in Oliver Crisp’s words, ‘that God is the sole cause of all that obtains in the world, and that the world (i.e., the whole cosmos existing across time) is actually a series of numerically distinct world stages God segues together’ (2017, 417). From this thinking Edwards established his theory of continuous creation. At stake was the question of what makes a unity. In his theocentric theology, Edwards pointed to God as the source of union for both individuals and humanity as a whole: ‘’Tis evident, that the communication or continuation of the same consciousness and memory to any subject, through successive parts of duration, depend wholly on a divine establishment’ (WJE 3: 398). It is all due to ‘an arbitrary constitution of the Creator’—‘arbitrary’ meaning not random but the unconditional exercise of the divine will (WJE 3: 399). By continuous creation, Edwards meant that ‘God does con­ tinu­al­ly, by his immediate power, uphold every created substance in being’ (WJE 3: 400). Edwards went as far as to assert that God creates ex nihilo each moment (WJE 3: 402). This is true of individuals, who change from moment to moment and from year to year and yet are constituted a unity. But it also applies to the unity of Adam and his posterity. Edwards held that ‘there is no such thing as any identity or oneness in created objects, existing at different times, but what depends on God’s sovereign constitution’ (WJE 3: 404). God constituted Adam and all his progeny as one, which explains why Adam’s posterity may be held guilty of Adam’s sin. In light of this constitution, Adam’s posterity show ‘full consent’ in their hearts to the first apostasy; thus, that sin ‘is not theirs, merely because God imputes it to them; but it is truly and properly theirs, and on that ground, God imputes it to them’ (WJE 3: 408). Recent responses to Edwards’s doctrine of original sin have been mixed. Criticism focuses on Edwards’s account of the transmission of Adam’s sin to his progeny and on his use of occasionalism and continuous creation to defend his views. Clyde Holbrook,

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Sin and Evil   245 for example, argues that Edwards backed himself into a corner: ‘Once having established Adam’s original righteousness, how could he explain the take-over of the lower faculties?’ (in WJE 3: 51; cf. McClymond and McDermott 2011, 355). Paul Helm similarly asks how Adam’s supernatural principles could not keep him from falling. He finds Edwards’s innovative response to the charge that God is the author of sin weak and unconvincing (Helm 2004, 190). William Wainwright also rejects the idea that guilt can be transferred from one person to another (Wainwright 1988, 47). And Sam Storms believes Edwards’s attempt to establish an identity between Adam and his progeny fails, as does his the­odicy (Storms 1995, 258; cf. 109). Crisp offers several detailed criticisms of Edwards’s doctrine of original sin. He points to Edwards’s occasionalism as ‘the single greatest flaw in his doctrine of sin’, because it leaves God as ‘an absolute sovereign’, which makes him ‘directly responsible for all sin that takes place’ (Crisp 2005, 103, 131). God is left as ‘the sole moral agent’, and thus, ‘Adam is not responsible for his own primal sin, nor is anyone else. God is’ (Crisp 2005, 131, 132). Interestingly, many of these same critics nonetheless laud Edwards’s efforts. Though he believes Edwards only partly succeeds, Wainwright considers Edwards’s defence of original sin ‘one of the most plausible’ (Wainwright  1988, 35). Crisp recognizes that ‘Edwards does offer a carefully nuanced account of how Adam first sinned,’ which is his ‘most important contribution’ to this doctrine (Crisp 2005, 50, 111). Storms even argues that Edwards has given ‘the most lucid and convincing defense of these fundamental biblical truths [of sin and the fall] since Paul penned Romans’ (Storms 1995, xii). Another question scholars debate is whether Edwards stayed within his theological tradition or departed from it. His resemblance to the Augustinian–Calvinist stream is undeniable (Helm 2004, 185; Caldwell 2017, 172). Edwards explicitly sought to defend the Reformed tradition, yet he also did so in an undeniably creative way (Caldwell 2017, 172; cf. Holbrook, in WJE 3: 55). Matthew Everhard suggests that Edwards defended an ‘orthodox’ Calvinism but used an ‘innovative’ methodology, avoiding the Augustinian ‘inherited guilt’ position and the Calvinist ‘federal headship’ view with ‘his unique conception of “continuous creation,” ironically putting him at odds with many in the broader Reformed community’ (Everhard 2017, 426; cf. Guelzo 2012, 60). Perhaps Helm hits the right note by placing Edwards in ‘the faith seeking understanding tradition’ in his outworking of the doctrine of original sin (Helm 1997, 153). Edwards is clearly to be viewed as functioning from a position of faith as he used all the philosophical tools available to him to make sense of the doctrine. Michael McClymond and Gerald McDermott observe that ‘few areas of Edwards’s theology have provoked more criticism than his account of the Fall’ (McClymond and McDermott 2011, 353). They suggest, however, that ‘perhaps Edwards should be faulted less for making God the author of evil than for speculating on deep and perhaps un­answer­able questions’ (McClymond and McDermott 2011, 355–6). Ultimately, Edwards’s doctrine of original sin was ‘another example of the manifold ways in which Edwards put his own creative spin on a host of problems he had inherited from his tradition’ (McClymond and McDermott 2011, 356).

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246   David P. Barshinger Edwards himself recognized that some may not like his ‘metaphysics’ on sin. Even so, he believed they should at least acknowledge that in matters of mystery concerning God’s ways, which are ‘past finding out’, his argument makes it at least reasonable to see how God’s revelation concerning the passing of Adam’s guilt to his posterity is possible, for this is ‘a thing so abundantly confirmed by what is found in the experience of all mankind in all ages’ (WJE 3: 409), and indeed, he said, ‘I think, there are few, if any, ­doctrines of revelation, taught more plainly and expressly’ (WJE 3: 427).

Punishment, Repentance, and Redemption Sin loomed large in Edwards’s preaching. In many ways, it was the reason for his preaching. Human fallenness and alienation from God demanded either the proclamation of hope or the dead end of despair. Edwards preached often on sin and its effects, warning people of punishment, calling them to repentance, and pointing them to redemption. In his sermons, Edwards emphasized punishment for sin. As an example, in 1729 Edwards preached on Deuteronomy 7:10, proclaiming, ‘God Will not be slack in punishing wicked men.’ God’s punishment of sin is wrapped up with his glory: ‘The severity of G[od] as well his Goodness is a part of his Glory and his severity Consists in that . . . he will punish sin fully up to its desert.’ Because God’s glory is ‘of vastly the Greatest importance’, God ‘will not Suffer it to be Injured’. And God has too great a concern for the world than to let it degenerate into complete chaos. God’s punishment of sin is his upholding of cosmic and individual justice (WJEO 44). Edwards preached straightforwardly on sin and evil to call sinners to repentance, so that they might avoid punishment in hell and partake of heaven. Edwards warned ­sinners that God will not be slack in punishing sins; thus, he said, ‘Let us not be slack in turning from sin to G[od].’ Those who repented could take comfort in the fact that God would not be slack in fulfilling his promises of grace and mercy (WJEO 44). Elsewhere, in a sermon on Luke 13:5, Edwards described how those who truly repent ‘are happy they are free from the reigning power of sin, from the power of hell. They have reason to rejoice that they are got rid of the guilt of their sin, rid of the slavish fears of death’ (WJE 10: 517). For Edwards, the doctrine of sin could not be separated from Christ the sin bearer and his work of redemption. In a sermon on Psalm 25:11, Edwards proclaimed, ‘If we truly come to God for mercy, the greatness of our sin will be no impediment to pardon.’ Edwards pointed to both God’s mercy and Christ’s sufficiency: ‘The mercy of God is as sufficient for the pardon of the greatest sins, as for the least; and that because his mercy is infinite’, and ‘the satisfaction of Christ is as sufficient for the removal of the greatest guilt, as the least’ (WJEO 47). Great sins could never overcome the greatness of the infinite God and his redemptive work. And the reason why, Edwards explained in a sermon on

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Sin and Evil   247 Hebrews 9:13–14, was that ‘the Blood of [Christ] is sufficient for the Perfect taking away the guilt of sin’ (WJEO 53). As Edwards preached in a sermon on Psalm 89:15, the message of hope embodied in Christ’s redemptive work is captured in the Gospel: The gospel of Christ contains joyful tidings to men of deliverance from evil. It is a proclamation of deliverance to the children of men from evils that are by far the greatest that ever mankind are exposed to: evils that are truly infinitely dreadful, such as the guilt of sin, captivity and bondage to Satan, the wrath of God and perfect and everlasting ruin and misery.  (WJE 25: 702)

For Edwards, the Gospel links together the great doctrines of the Christian faith. It does not wink at the seriousness of sin but rather paints it in all its ugliness. And that reality sets in relief the glory of salvation, the forgiveness of sin, and an inheritance of new life in Christ and with God for eternity. Any reckoning of Edwards’s treatment of sin must recognize the doctrine’s essential corollary of redemption.

Legacy Edwards’s legacy on sin and evil is largely wrapped up with the reception of his treatise Original Sin. Edwards died a few months before Original Sin was published. Immediately after it was published, Edwards’s disciples lauded the treatise, with Joseph Bellamy (1719–1790) declaring it the final word on the subject. The familiar antagonists, including antirevivalist Charles Chauncy (1705–1787), voiced their disapproval, particularly decrying its speculative nature (Holbrook, in WJE 3: 97, 99). This mixed response has continued to mark reactions to Edwards’s doctrine of sin to the present. The nineteenth century leaned more heavily against this work. Those who complained about Original Sin, such as Southern Presbyterian James Henley Thornwell (1812–1862), generally took the approach of Chauncy, targeting Edwards’s occasionalism and continuous creationism—metaphysical moves that they found unconvincing. Critics also lambasted his defence of the imputation of Adam’s sin to his progeny. Even some in the New Divinity—the theological camp that took up Edwards’s mantle—believed his arguments needed to be modified. For example, Nathaniel William Taylor (1786–1858) and Edwards Amasa Park (1808–1900) redefined original sin as actual sin to keep the blame on the individual, not on Adam. And Nathanael Emmons (1745–1840) called original sin a lie, denied the transmission of Adam’s guilt to humanity, and flat out identified God as the author of sin (Noll 2012, 190–1; Sweeney 2012, 144; Noll 2005, 299–300; McDermott 2012, 120). The twentieth century saw revived appreciation for Edwards’s writings on sin among Edwards scholars. More recently, scholars have tended both to deconstruct Edwards’s arguments as philosophically inadequate and to defend his approach as a biblically

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248   David P. Barshinger driven impulse in line with his Reformation forebears. More often than not, scholars see elements in Edwards’s doctrine of sin that fascinate them, even as they find his argument as a whole wanting. Crisp is a good example: he concludes that although Edwards failed in developing a view of sin in ‘one coherent whole’, he nonetheless did ‘raise the standard of discussion’ about the issues surrounding sin and evil ‘to a new level of limpidity and philosophical acuity’ (Crisp 2005, 1). In his doctrine of sin and evil, Edwards did not merely repeat theological tropes but creatively defended old doctrines. He was aiming to align himself with traditional Christian theology, even as he sought to use new philosophical thinking in developing those doctrines. Whether he was successful or not will likely continue to be debated. But to ignore his devotion to orthodoxy and Scripture and his fervour for the salvation of sinners, even as he creatively employed the philosophical tools of his day, is to misunderstand Jonathan Edwards’s whole foundation and motivation for addressing theo­logic­al conundrums like sin and evil. Interpreters would do well to widen the lens in thinking about Edwards on sin and evil to incorporate the most common way he engaged with these topics—in his sermons and pastoral ministry.

Works Cited Caldwell, Robert  W., III (2017). ‘Original Sin.’ A Reader’s Guide to the Major Writings of Jonathan Edwards. Ed. Nathan  A.  Finn and Jeremy  M.  Kimble. Wheaton, IL: Crossway. 153–74. Crisp, Oliver D. (2005). Jonathan Edwards and the Metaphysics of Sin. New York: Routledge. Crisp, Oliver D. (2017). ‘Occasionalism.’ The Jonathan Edwards Encyclopedia. Ed. Harry S. Stout, Kenneth P. Minkema, and Adriaan C. Neele. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. 415–19. Everhard, Matthew (2017). ‘Original Sin.’ The Jonathan Edwards Encyclopedia. Ed. Harry S. Stout, Kenneth P. Minkema, and Adriaan C. Neele. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. 424–7. Guelzo, Allen (2012). ‘After Edwards: Original Sin and Freedom of the Will.’ After Jonathan Edwards: The Courses of the New England Theology. Ed. Oliver  D.  Crisp and Douglas A. Sweeney. New York: Oxford University Press. 51–62. Gullotta, Daniel N. (2017). ‘Theodicy.’ The Jonathan Edwards Encyclopedia. Ed. Harry S. Stout, Kenneth P. Minkema, and Adriaan C. Neele. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. 561–3. Helm, Paul (2004). ‘The Great Christian Doctrine (Original Sin).’ A God-Entranced Vision of All Things: The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards. Ed. John Piper and Justin Taylor. Wheaton, IL: Crossway. 175–200. Helm, Paul (1997). ‘Jonathan Edwards on Original Sin.’ Faith and Understanding. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. 152–76. McClymond, Michael J., and Gerald R. McDermott (2011).‘Free Will and Original Sin.’ The Theology of Jonathan Edwards. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 339–56. McDermott, Gerald R. (2012). ‘Nathanael Emmons and the Decline of Edwardsian Theology.’ After Jonathan Edwards: The Courses of the New England Theology. Ed. Oliver D. Crisp and Douglas A. Sweeney. New York: Oxford University Press. 118–29. Noll, Mark A. (2005). ‘Edwards’ Theology after Edwards.’ The Princeton Companion to Jonathan Edwards. Ed. Sang Hyun Lee. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 292–308.

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Sin and Evil   249 Noll, Mark A. (2012). ‘Jonathan Edwards, Edwardsian Theologies, and the Presbyterians.’ After Jonathan Edwards: The Courses of the New England Theology. Ed. Oliver  D.  Crisp and Douglas A. Sweeney. New York: Oxford University Press. 178–96. Storms, C. Samuel (1995). Tragedy in Eden: Original Sin in the Theology of Jonathan Edwards. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Sweeney, Douglas A. (2009). Jonathan Edwards and the Ministry of the Word: A Model of Faith and Thought. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic. Sweeney, Douglas A. (2012). ‘Taylorites and Tylerites.’ After Jonathan Edwards: The Courses of the New England Theology. Ed. Oliver D. Crisp and Douglas A. Sweeney. New York: Oxford University Press. 142–50. Wainwright, William  J. (1988). ‘Original Sin.’ Philosophy and the Christian Faith. Ed. Thomas V. Morris. University of Notre Dame Studies in the Philosophy of Religion 5. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. 31–60. Woo, B.  Hoon (2014). ‘Is God the Author of Sin?—Jonathan Edwards’s Theodicy.’ Puritan Reformed Journal 6, no. 1: 98–123.

Author Bio David P. Barshinger (Ph.D., Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) is the author of Jonathan Edwards and the Psalms: A Redemptive-Historical Vision of Scripture (Oxford University Press, 2014) and the coeditor, with Douglas A. Sweeney, of Jonathan Edwards and Scripture: Biblical Exegesis in British North America (Oxford University Press, 2018). He has taught church history and theology as an adjunct professor at institutions including Trinity International University and Wheaton College. He currently serves as an editor in the Book Division at Crossway.

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chapter 16

A n thropol ogy, A ffections, a n d Fr ee W il l Seng-Kong Tan

It has been long recognized that a psychology of the mind colours Edwards’s theological anthropology, with an ongoing debate as to whether the intellect or will commands the greater attention. Others regard it as unhelpful to categorize Edwards either as an intellectualist or a voluntarist since he saw the will and intellect as unified powers of the soul (Waddington 2015, 176–80). A useful hermeneutic to frame Edwards’s understanding of the human person, freedom, and the affections is the mutuality of Word and Spirit (Stein 1988; Strobel 2012). The powers of the human mind were created to mirror and share in the unity, distinction, and asymmetry of knowledge and love found in God—a motif we will now examine.

Human Mind as Image and Participant in the Divine Mind In his ‘Discourse on the Trinity’, Edwards defines ‘a person [as] that which hath understanding and will’ (WJE 21: 133). This immediately applies to God the Father who is the personal locus of the divine intellect and divine will. Through an eternal operation of self-knowledge, the Father generates the Son as self-perception (WJE 21: 143). In the mutual gaze of Father and Son, the Holy Spirit proceeds as personal will-in-act or love. As the divine will in perfect operation or the ‘affection of the divine mind’, the Spirit enables the Father and Son to have an eternal, beatific vision (WJE 21: 122). By virtue of their mutual indwelling (or perichoresis), the Son and Spirit are inseparable from the other two, and so are distinct divine persons. The Son as divine intellect not

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Anthropology, Affections, and Free Will   251 only understands but ‘loves because the Holy Spirit is in him and proceeds from him’ as ‘intelligent love’ (WJE 21: 133, 186). Similarly, the Holy Spirit ‘understands because the Son, the divine idea, is in him’ (WJE 21: 133). Notwithstanding this mutuality, there is an eternal ordering where ‘the understanding must be considered as prior in the order of nature to the will or love or act’ (WJE 21: 134). Since Edwards’s definition of person includes humankind, he goes on to say that ‘our souls are made in the image of God: we have understanding and will, idea and love . . .’ (WJE 21: 113). Like God, there are two distinct faculties in the human person, each functioning distinctly but not autonomously. The intellect includes the passive and active powers for perception and speculation. Having the power ‘of viewing what is in themselves contemplatively’, humans are capable of spiritual perception and religiosity (WJE 6: 374). The will is the soul’s capacity to be attracted or repulsed by that which the intellect perceives. Although Word and Spirit are distinct persons due to perichoresis, the powers of the human soul cannot be reified. Rather, as the mind is the placeholder of the intellect and will, one can only speak of the ‘will of the soul’ and ‘affections of the mind’ (WJE 2: 96). Since the human mind is ‘the proper seat of the affections’, it is the human person who has ideas, choices, and loves (WJE 2: 98). That is why only ‘intelligent voluntary agents’ properly relate to God—the great Mind—and constitute part of the moral universe (‘Miscellanies’, 864; WJE 20: 104). If Edwards’s epistemology includes both the ‘Worded Spirit’ and ‘Spirited Word’, the corresponding psychology would mean a seeing will and an affective intellect (Cherry 1990, 45). ‘Even in creatures’, Edwards insisted, ‘there is consciousness included in the very nature of the will or act of the soul’ (WJE 21: 133). In regeneration, the will is the ‘seat’ of grace while the intellect is the ‘foundation’ of spiritual perception (WJE 1: 133; 8: 296). The intellect and will are not only distinct and equal powers of the soul, they are also ordered. Since the intellect is prior to the will ‘both in creature and in the Creator’, a person chooses only that which is perceived by the intellect (WJE 21: 134). Moral good in God, and as imaged in human beings, is always ‘choice guided by understanding’ (WJE 1: 166). In the same order, the religious affections ‘arise from the mind’s being enlightened’ (WJE 2: 266). All human beings have this natural image of God—the capacity for intellection and volition. However, only prelapsarian persons had the spiritual image of God, which is a participation in God’s nature and glory. Through the Spirit’s indwelling, human beings were able to exercise their natural faculties to know and love God. Due to original sin, humankind has entirely lost the spiritual image and its natural powers are marred. Without the spiritual dimension, the soul’s ability to love God and others has shrunk into a narrow self-love (WJE 8: 262–4). With this loss of spiritual vision and desire, human beings are incapable of religious affections and unable to do good. Due to the disintegration of intellect and will, understanding tends toward speculative knowledge. Human beings not only image God as persons who possess intellect and will but also (in a dim way) reflect the way Word and Spirit proceed from the Father. An interrogation

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252   Seng-Kong Tan into Edwards’s anthropology must probe both the continuity and discontinuity with his theology. In one sense, this radical manner in which human beings exist as communications of God have bearings on human freedom. In the next two sections, we will examine Edwards’s ontology of creation and its purported occasionalism.

Human Beings Proceeding from the First Cause As both a biblical and philosophical theologian, Edwards’s trinitarian anthropology cannot be read apart from his ontology, in particular, of God as the first cause and pure act of the creation. His theocentricity means that ‘there is no proper substance but God himself ’ and all creatures are radically dependent on God for their being (WJE 6: 215). The God–world relation, for Edwards, is established through continuous creation out of nothing, by which the universe receives being moment by moment. This doctrine of creatio continua must be parsed alongside his ontological idealism or immaterialism. Edwards began thinking about created minds as a sort of spiritual substance, which perceives bodies as ideas or mental phenomena. From these early texts, he could be interpreted as imparting some degree of realism to created reality. One reading is to posit an immaterialism with respect to the source (where created reality is only ideal in the divine mind) to avoid the notion that the universe is communicated as mental percepts (W. Schultz 2016). The charge that such a world would be illusory and God guilty of deception is unfounded. For sentient beings participate temporally in an ideal world that is eternally ideal to God and, therefore, just as real. Another interpretation proposes a partial immaterialism, where spirits are not continuously created ex nihilo but enduring substances, which receive percepts of immaterial reality (bodies) continuously (Hamilton 2017). However, such readings that defend the semi-independence of created reality would have to account for a very late fragment (c.1756–7) where Edwards declares that ‘all existence is perception. What we call body is nothing but a particular mode of perception; and what we call spirit is nothing but a composition and series of perceptions . . .’ (WJE 6: 398). This mature position seems to echo Hume’s scepticism regarding substances underlying all created reality, without drawing an agnostic conclusion, thus venturing beyond Berkeley’s immaterialism of minds and ideas (Reid 2006). For Edwards, then, only God is the true substance who produces a universe of ­created percepts. On this idealistic framework, God continually communicates timeslices of the physical world as ideas into a community of created minds, which are themselves active ideas. Edwards’s ontology of creation is similar to stage-theory (or exdurantism), where things are made up of four-dimensional (temporal and spatial) slices, each existing for a moment but contiguously connected like a holographic image through time.

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Anthropology, Affections, and Free Will   253 As Word and Spirit proceed necessarily and eternally from God, the created universe proceeds freely, and continuously ex nihilo into time from the trinitarian God. ‘All dependent existence whatsoever is . . . renewed every moment . . . and all is constantly proceeding from God, as light from the sun’ (WJE 3: 404). While there is robust debate regarding Edwards’s ontology of creation, there is scholarly consensus that it is dynamic and relational (Lee 1988; Crisp and Strobel 2018; Cortez 2015, 139–50). If pneumatology is critical to Edwards’s idealism, then human minds are not merely created ideas but active ideas, just as the Spirit is God’s perfect activity. In an act of continual creation, God as pure act simultaneously communicates and composes a series of active percepts (minds) with their passive percepts (bodies). While ‘theocentric idealism’ is a fairly accurate descriptor of Edwards’s metaphysics, a pneumatic modifier is crucial (McClymond  1998, 33). Just as Edwards cannot be unequivocally categorized as a voluntarist or rationalist, his ontology—for both Creator and creature—is not an unqualified idealism. From the divine perspective, God both thinks and wills creation into existence continually (Tan  2016). Since human beings mirror a personal God, Edwards appropriates the creation of the human intellect and will to the Son and Spirit respectively: ‘The Son endued man with understanding and reason. The Holy Ghost endued him with a holy will and inclination, with original righteousness’ (WJE 24: 126). There is an aesthetic consonance between understanding and will in God and human beings. With this combination of continuous creation and idealism just outlined, Edwards has shattered the idolatry of semi-independent created substances. There can only be one first cause of all existence, ‘either the antecedent existence of the same substance, or else the power of the Creator’ (WJE 3: 400). While he sometimes referred to created spirits as ‘substances’ in a common-sense way, Edwards rejected the philosophical def­in­ ition of an ‘unknown substance’, which ‘subsisted by itself, and stood underneath and kept up’ entities and their properties (WJE 6: 215). Human beings exist as persons because God is their ‘substance’, not in a pantheistic sense (because they are not God’s substance), but as the immediate cause of their being. Edwards repurposed philosophical substance as an apophatic category in anthropology because self-endurance is solely a divine prerogative. Otherwise, human beings would be ‘like that absolute independent identity of the First Being, whereby “he is the same yesterday, today, and forever” ’ (WJE 3: 400). Edwards would have us use the theological category of persons as intelligent, voluntary beings to explain our similarity with the divine being. For even the true substance is personal: ‘How God is as it were the only substance, or rather, the perfection and steadfastness of his knowledge, wisdom, power and will’ (WJE 6: 398).

Occasionalism and Human Freedom If human beings are not substances that endure but are continually communicated as discrete idea-events by divine fiat, how can a person be a cause—even a secondary one— of her own decisions? Stated differently, human persons only appear free since it is God

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254   Seng-Kong Tan who directly produces their being and modes continuously. Would Edwards’s ontology tip him toward a hard determinism and make God the sole causal principle? What could we say in defence of Edwards? The first thing to acknowledge is that continuous creation does not necessarily entail occasionalism (Pessin 2000). Even if one conceded that Edwards was an occasionalist, it does not follow that his was a hard occasionalism, where even human acts of willing are God’s action without remainder (Plantinga 2016). Otherwise, this would render human culpability illusory and make God the author of sin. While efficient causation is God’s alone, human beings as occasional causes mirror God ‘in the manner of their acting’ in at least two ways: direct agency and final causality (Helm 2014). First, just as God acts ‘from him [self], so [human beings] act more from themselves’ (‘Miscellanies’, 749; WJE 18: 396). Though lacking the efficient causality of the first cause, human beings are nevertheless direct agents of their own acts. In contrast to the passivity of animals, they are active and passive in their relation to God (WJE 6: 374; WJE 1: 186). Even in positive, efficient, divine acts in salvation, Edwards wrote, ‘God produces all and we act all. For that is what he produces, our own acts. God is the only proper author and fountain; we only are the proper actors’ (WJE 21: 251). Though divine efficiency is restrained in our evil acts, God may still be deemed a ‘determiner and disposer of an event’ by permission (WJE 21: 247). Here, God is not the direct agent and is not liable for our acts of sin: we are properly sinners (WJE 1: 311). Put differently, ‘action’—divine and human—is not used univocally by Edwards. Second, as God acts ‘for final causes, so do these his [intelligent and voluntary] creatures’ (‘Miscellanies’, 749; WJE 18: 396). Because God is the most excellent being, divine constitution of the universe is not capricious but is beautifully purposed (WJE 1: 387–93). Although there is only one Creator, human beings ‘are next to the First Cause’ and as images of this God, they do ‘things for final causes’ (‘Miscellanies’, 896: WJE 20:155). Human beings contemplate the future in order to act: ‘So man has power to do this or that, that is, if he exists after such a manner there follows the existence of another thing; if he wills this or that, it will be so. God has power to do all things, because there is nothing but what follows upon his willing of it’ (‘The Mind’, no. 29; WJE 6: 352). Even though Edwards thought of human identity as discrete stages, where the ­present person-stage (P1) lacks efficient power to determine a future person-stage (P2), nonetheless P1 has her future action ‘in idea’ and aims toward it (‘Miscellanies’, 749; WJE 18: 396). God accounts for the agency and intentionality of P1 and efficiently causes P2 to act as P1 purposed. It is in this sense that all reality is dispositional insofar as persons— divine and human—have an active capacity for final causality and non-sentient beings a passive one (Lee 1988). This assumes, of course, that each person-stage cannot be of zero duration since time-slices—no matter how thin—must be discretely staged. One might still object that P1 could make an instantaneous decision to go outside her house but does not persist long enough to walk through the front door. This objection would stand if P1 and P2 were instantaneous and isolated stages. But they are not (Hawley 2002, 54–5).

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Anthropology, Affections, and Free Will   255 Edwards’s God makes these discrete stages counterparts with each other by constituting them a single entity. By a sovereign divine act, God ‘unites these successive effects’ through a communication or ‘continuation of qualities, properties, or relations, natural or moral, from what is past’ (WJE 3: 403, 405). This makes the created spirit a singular series of interconnected perceptions through time. Just like the act of creation, God ­continuously constructs the self-identity of the human being through a Word-Spirit act of free ‘constitution which depends on nothing but the divine will; which divine will depends on nothing but the divine wisdom’ (WJE 3: 403, italics original). As we have seen, whereas only divine action involves efficient causation, yet this does not obviate second, human causes that plan and act. Critical to personal action, whether human or divine, is direct action and final causality. One would not deem an author morally responsible for the murderous act of a vicious character in her novel. Or, in Oliver Crisp’s more contemporary analogy: a computer-generated imagery producer is not morally culpable for his animated character’s evil acts even though he generated as it were each pixel and frame (Crisp 2016). In all the good we do, then, divine action is efficacious without denying human agency. It is precisely because a human person receives her power to exist, think, and will that she can actively choose and so act.

Can a Human Being be Both Free and Determined? In the historiography of human freedom, Edwards was a compatibilist who affirmed that a determined will is not contrary to human freedom—the ability to do as one pleases. He wrote the Freedom of the Will (1754) against the denial of the Calvinistic doctrine of total depravity, where under the power of sin, a person is unable to do good without special grace. This necessity of sinning, according to his interlocutors, contradicts human freedom because without an indifferent and self-determining will, there can be no culpability. In response, Edwards defended a free and determined will, refuting the idea that volition is a neutral power of choice separate from desire. He went on to argue that moral inability is consistent with blameworthiness. Moreover, he contended against the idea that moral necessity undermines freedom. We shall deal with these in turn. First, Edwards remarks that an indifferent will that could elect between two equal choices cannot explain how a person prefers one thing over another when choosing. A neutral will would need a prior cause that inclines it toward a particular course of action, which requires yet another behind it, and so on. Without causality that terminates in a first cause, one would fall into the problem of turtles all the way down—or infinite regress. Next, just as the will cannot be undetermined, Edwards also objected to a selfdetermined will. That is why he denied Locke’s separation and opposition of desire and will as if a person could act against what she is inclined to do (WJE 1: 137–40). The will

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256   Seng-Kong Tan just is desire when it is directed toward an object that is not present. To assert otherwise does not make sense experientially since it does not reflect the way we make decisions. Having argued negatively against an undetermined and self-determined will, Edwards mounts a positive case for a determined will. Based on the principle of ­sufficient reason—that all things must have a reason or ground—he contends the will cannot act without a cause (WJE 1: 141, 181). Only the self-existent God is uncaused and every created entity and its modes must have a cause (WJE 1: 181). If the will is determined, then there must be ‘a determiner’ (WJE 1: 141). And what is this determiner besides God, the ultimate cause? These moral causes include one’s ‘habits and dispositions of the heart, and moral motives and inducements’ that must be connected to one’s choices and acts (WJE 1: 156–7). There are two things here—motive and disposition—which we will address in that order. What is motive? For Edwards ‘the will always is as the greatest apparent good is’ (WJE 1: 142). ‘Apparent good’ here does not necessarily mean moral good, but that which the mind finds most appealing. Hence, murdering an innocent victim, though morally abhorrent, may be most agreeable to a serial killer. The motive of one’s decision is that which is considered most desirable (Guelzo  1995). Edwards likely adopted Hobbes’s position, mediated through his reading of Locke (Muller 2014). Moral motivation also includes the strength of the motive—the ‘greatest apparent good’. The strongest motive lies in an object or a combination of things which ‘moves, excites or invites the mind to volition’ (WJE 1: 141). The confluence of a person’s temperament, taste, history, personality, and character determine one’s choices and actions, namely, a prior inclination. Otherwise, our acts would be random and void of any moral accountability. In our fallen state, moral inability cannot excuse us from moral responsibility. Moral inability is the absence or want of motives, inclinations, and desires that would enable a person to choose the good. In short, we are unable to act against our own wishes. An alcoholic, a lecher, or sinner cannot stay sober, chaste, or benevolent respectively not because they lack power but willingness to do so. A person is most free when acting according to her disposition. That is why the idea of moral indifference was reprehensible to Edwards. Having an ‘indifferent and lukewarm spirit’ is opposed to liberty and religious affections, which are characterized by life and ‘vigor’ (WJE 22: 145; WJE 2: 100). That a wicked disposition causes one to sin is no excuse from culpability. Even on common-sense grounds, Edwards reminds us that a person with a settled character of malice is more guilty than one who commits a single wicked act (WJE 1: 360). The idea of moral necessity is not only compatible with but founds the notion of human freedom. Moral necessity, then, is the infallible link between moral causes—motives and inclination—and their effects or choices. For Edwards, freedom is opposed to compulsion or coercion, not moral necessity. When a person is externally compelled into doing something against her will—natural necessity—she is truly unfree; for example, a person who wants but is unable to leave his jail cell while incarcerated, or one who signs a false statement of guilt under the threat of death.

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Anthropology, Affections, and Free Will   257 Edwards argued for a non-libertarian will, even in God (Fisk 2016). It is to the glory of God to be morally determined by goodness, that is, a good nature necessarily inclines the divine being toward the good. God freely decides by Word and Spirit since ‘God’s will is determined by his own infinite all-sufficient wisdom in everything’ (WJE 1: 380). Just so, human beings reflect God and are most free when they have a clear moral vision by which the good is inevitably chosen. It is to see and act as God would, by Word and Spirit. None would consider a person morally upright who is fickle minded with regard to the good. Up to this point, we have seen how human beings, who are wholly dependent upon the first cause for their existence, image the great mind as persons who think and will. In light of Edwards’s immaterialism and the soul as the imago Dei, however, one might expect a denigration of the body. But if God’s very own action is the unseen cause of the world’s being, then all created existence is good (Cortez 2015). In fact, Edwards’s immaterialism seems to be a more elegant explanation of the body–soul union. The fusion of two species of percepts—active and passive—is much more metaphysically compatible than two different genera of interacting substances— spiritual and material. It is in Edwards’s writings on the affections, where we see his descriptions of the psychosomatic unity of the human being, which we will examine in the following sections.

Human Affections and the Body–Soul Unity As embodied beings, Edwards granted that soul and body mutually affect each other. With the theological tradition, he also upheld an asymmetrical soul–body relation insisting that ‘the mind only . . . is the proper seat of the affections’ (WJE 2: 98). Due to this personal unity, Edwards had no doubt that strong affections of the mind will affect the body. Affections, however, should be distinguished from passions, which are instinctual, less rational and active, and more sudden and violent in nature (WJE 2: 98). The language of affections and passions is found in Augustine and Aquinas, which Edwards received through the Puritans and Cambridge Platonists (Aquinas  1947; Martin 2019). It is not helpful to conflate affections with a largely nineteenth-century psychological understanding of the emotions as non- or anti-cognitive, corporeal feelings which we share with other animals (Dixon 2003). This identification would not only be anachronistic but also confuses affection with passion. There is a dimension of stability to the affections that is absent in the passions. During Edwards’s time, enthusiasm was a derogatory term indicating the volatility of soul and body ascribed to religious experience (Martin 2019). His Treatise on the Religious Affections (1746) may be regarded as a Protestant handbook on spiritual discernment, where enthusiasm is distinguished from true religious affections.

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258   Seng-Kong Tan Enthusiasm is marked by either a predominating presence of secondary effects or an overwrought imagination. Of the first kind, it ranges from the intensity of an affection or a conjunction of them, confidence in such experiences, its effects on the body, or external expressions of religious conversation, activity, or worship. ‘Great effects on the body’, Edwards asserts, ‘certainly are no sure evidences that affections are spiritual,’ as these could arise from a natural, diabolical, or divine source (WJE 2: 132). These are unreliable marks that may or may not indicate the presence of grace. Where external epiphenomena do not indicate true religious affections, and even affections per se, a second kind of enthusiasm could be due to the intellect’s imagination. Edwards was suspicious of ‘enthusiastical impressions’, like apparently divine visions, voices or prophecy, biblical verses coming to mind, and other immediate revelations (WJE 2: 286). Such impressions could be generative of affections and even religious practice but in all likelihood they are deceptive in nature. What, then, is the nature of the affections? According to Edwards, they are ‘the more vigorous and sensible exercises of the inclination and will of the soul’ (WJE 2: 96). The first thing to note are the volitional (and pneumatic) words, with ‘inclination’ and ‘will’ as important cognate terms. Inclination is one’s desire for or against things, whereas the will determines one’s actions and exercises (WJE 2: 96). Here we observe Edwards’s indebtedness to the Augustinian voluntarist tradition, though the intellect is not excluded as we shall see (N. S. Fiering 1972; Townsend 1947). Two other words worth examining in greater depth are ‘vigorous’ and ‘sensible’, since they are liable to be read in a purely corporeal sense. ‘Vigorous’ might be taken to mean bodily effusion of a high register, manifested through overt and public expressions (WJE 2: 100). For Edwards, the vigorous nature of affections includes dimensions of interiority and restraint. Affections are certainly active, but that which funds its outward, corporeal expressions is firstly a ‘secret solidity, life and strength’ coming from a person’s ‘very inmost springs of life and activity’ (WJE 2: 393). In fact, spiritual affections are undoubtedly characterized by a ‘vigor of a lowly spirit’ or humility, quite contrary to exhibitionism (WJE 2: 316, 487). Similarly, Edwards’s characterization of the affections as ‘sensible’ must be carefully parsed to avoid limiting them to the physical senses. This is case-specific for ‘some’ high affections where ‘some bodily sensation’ are eventuated and ‘the motion of the blood and animal spirits begins to be sensibly altered’ (WJE 2: 96). More critical is the fact that physical affect and bodily sensation overflow from the ‘affections of the soul’ and ‘sensation of the mind’ (WJE 2: 113). That is why divine love and joy exist par excellence in the disembodied, intermediate state as they are not qualitatively different from earthly, holy affections (WJE 2: 113). With the religious affections, Edwards states plainly that ‘the power of godliness is exerted in the first place within the soul, in the sensible, lively exercise of gracious affections there’ (WJE 2: 393). The sensible nature of human affections indicates the key importance of the intellect vis-à-vis the will. All human beings in the fallen state are capable of discerning natural good and evil due to the Spirit’s common illumination (‘Miscellanies’, 732; WJE 18: 357–9).

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Anthropology, Affections, and Free Will   259 This natural sense of the heart enables a person to discern natural evil, like sufferings or natural defects, in contrast to a spiritual sense of evil, namely sin (WJE 2: 255). It may even induce despair of one’s sins or ‘legal humiliation’, in cases where the Spirit assists nature (WJE 2: 312). This could involve a recognition of theological truth solely directed toward one’s ‘natural good’, and even appearances of love to God founded on selfishness (WJE 2: 254–5, 277). In sum, to be truly human is to be an affective being. Human affections, even though marred, denote the interconnectedness of the soul and body, interiority and exteriority, will and intellect. The asymmetrical soul–body relation, as has been noted, might give the impression of a hidden dualism in Edwards’s anthropology despite his idealistic ontology. Yet, it is the Pauline duality between the natural and spiritual (already alluded to) that will give us a better appreciation of the affections in their religious aspect (WJE 2: 198).

Spiritual Re-Creation and the Religious Affections If nature’s ‘substance’ is divine action, then special grace—though qualitatively different from common grace—is not differently sourced. Where human beings are communications of divine ideas in time, the saints are similarly and continually regenerated moment by moment as they alone properly receive the emanation of God’s Spirit. As Edwards put it, ‘the work of sanctification, in the whole progress of it, is a work of creation. In every step and degree of that restoration, something is brought out of nothing . . .’ (WJE 22: 190). Human beings are not only ontologically and morally, but also soteriologically, dependent on God (Wainwright 2010). If creation is re-creation of being ex nihilo, salvation as regeneration is another form of re-creation ex nihilo. From the divine side, then, spiritual freedom and religious affections could be termed ‘receptive human virtues’, where new spiritual principles are continually communicated (Cochran  2011). Viewed from the human side, the regenerate exercises religious affections in faith, obedience, and practice. ‘But when such actings are renewed again and again, [the regenerate] grows more settled and established about his good estate’ (WJE 2: 453). For Edwards, all is pure gift for there is nothing we have that is not continuously received from God, just as Christ has ‘all endowments of both grace and nature . . . of the Father’ (‘Miscellanies’, 958; WJE 20: 235). Human capacity for the affections, both natural and spiritual, is theocentric and orient­ed toward human integrity. Just as being human is to be affective, a great part of Christian spirituality has to do with religious affections, which are directed toward divine realities. And like the sensible nature of human affections, a new sense of the heart accompanies the religious affections. Edwards’s use of the new sense of the heart could be traced to various theological influences, for example, Calvin’s notion of sweetness (suavitas), the Cambridge Platonists’

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260   Seng-Kong Tan feelings, and philosophical influences, like John Locke’s ‘simple sense’ (Erdt  1980; N. Fiering 1981, 123–8). Where the nomenclature of ‘a new simple idea’ approximates Locke’s, Edwards’s idealism would deny that matter generates ideas and perceptions. Rather, it is ‘God [who] produces something thus new in a mind’ (WJE 6: 215; WJE 2: 205). While all these may factor into the reception history of Edwards’s use of the new sense, it is also important to note that this idea is rooted in his early understanding of the biblical sources corroborated by personal experience (Stetina 2011; Simonson 1974). It is from this scriptural sense and experiential knowledge that Edwards insisted on a  discontinuity between natural and spiritual perception. Building on that, he also inherited a twofold distinction from his theological tradition, ‘viz. speculative and practical, or in other terms, natural and spiritual’ (WJE 22: 87). Speculative knowledge could involve either ‘mere cogitation’ or poor conceptual grasp of things through ‘signs’, or a fuller understanding of a thing’s reality by ‘contemplation’ (‘Miscellanies’, 782; WJE 18: 458–9). In either case, unlike sensible knowledge, speculative knowledge is purely intellectual excluding volition (‘Miscellanies’, 782; WJE 18: 452–66). Edwards gives the famous example of two men: the one devoid of gustatory perception whose knowledge of honey is only by sight and sound; and, the other who can actually taste and relish honey. The first merely knows about sweetness while the latter truly knows what sweetness is (WJE 2: 208–9, 272). While spiritual perception is immediate but not irrational, Edwards warns us that it neither rests on ‘ratiocination’ or imagination, unlike natural knowledge. In other words, there is no path from inference to spiritual perception. In spiritual perception, the saints have an immediate apprehension of divine truth ‘because they see divinity in them’ (WJE 17: 415). It also enlarges perceptual vision as they come to see the complex web of relational connections in reality (Kimnach 1988, 106). With this new spiritual perception, the saint’s volition is redirected to the ultimate, moral good. God ‘has appeared to us the greatest good’ in our apprehension of the divine ‘majesty and beauty’ (WJE 14: 262). Together with this new sensibility of divine things, a certainty regarding Christ’s work and the gospel is also produced. Without the moral inability that prevents the sighting of true good, religious affections is genuine human freedom. While this crucial gap between spiritual and natural perception is fundamental, there is also a continuity between them. The new spiritual perception given to the regenerate, though qualitatively different from the natural, nonetheless functions through the natural human faculties (Lee 1988, 153–4; Cherry 1990, 30; Yeo 2016, 43). It is thus a misnomer to term this new sense of the heart a ‘sixth sense’ as no new faculty is engendered (Helm 1969; Hoopes 1983). Here, Edwards would affirm the Thomistic axiom: ‘Grace does not destroy nature but perfects it’ (gratia non tollit naturam, sed perficit) (Aquinas  1947, I.1.8). While ‘not altering the nature of things, as they are in themselves’, grace ‘destroys the power of sin’ (WJE 3: 113; WJE 24: 1010). Since ‘all mankind are by nature in a state of total ruin’, this destructive effect of grace removes sin, which is an accidental quality. With that Reformed caveat, Edwards affirmed the second part of Aquinas’s axiom by stating

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Anthropology, Affections, and Free Will   261 that grace ‘enlightens [the] understanding and renovates the will, elevates and purifies the affections’ (WJE 14: 435). How is the understanding enlightened? The post-Reformation Reformed scholastics defined knowledge of God as a theoretical–practical exercise following the medieval debate between theology as a science (scientia) or wisdom (sapientia) (Neele 2019, 152–77). Both scientia and sapientia are interdependent since, on the one hand, ‘speculative knowledge . . . without a spiritual knowledge, is in vain and to no purpose’ and, on the other hand, without speculative knowledge ‘we can have no spiritual or practical knowledge’ (WJE 22: 87). Special grace not only restores humankind’s original capacity for spiritual knowledge, the indwelling Spirit also assists natural principles, as in common grace, ‘to do their work more freely and fully’ (WJE 17: 411). With the presence of spiritual illumination, our intellectual biases against divine truth are not only set aside, the new sense positively enhances our speculative capacity (‘Miscellanies,’ 628; WJE 18: 156–7). Furthermore, natural virtues or ‘instincts,’ like gratitude in human relationships, may be embraced by divine love, redirected to virtuous ends, and thus elevated (WJE 8: 616–18). Where intellect and will were divided turning a person inward, regeneration begins restoring the faculties into proper union and order. This reintegration of the human person and the conferral of a ‘new kind of perception’ comes about because of ‘a new kind of principle’ or disposition, which is neither innate nor acquired, but infused in regeneration (WJE 2: 205). In Reformed theological grammar, this is a work of special grace, where the Holy Spirit operates on a person not as an external, occasional, efficient cause but an abiding, indwelling principle. Since the Spirit of God acts in the saint as the Spirit does in the divine being, the reordering of the human intellect and will find a trinitarian resonance. The critical characteristic of Edwards’s twelve reliable signs in the Religious Affections is its theocentric emphasis. Unlike the non-reliable signs which might be symptomatic of multiple sources, the distinguishing marks of true religious affections count as criteria of the Spirit’s work in the regenerate (Proudfoot 1989). Instead of focusing on epiphenomena, Edwards directs us to first examine the nature of religious affections before its fruits, which may be summarized under three concepts: reorientation, transformation, and participation. First, the gift of special grace reorients a person upwards. Beginning with a subjective theocentricity, the continual reception of the Spirit causes an objective theocentricity, where the saint actively and affectively perceives God and Christ. As we have previously examined, this objective perception is inextricably linked to a subjective sense. A spiritually affected person not only recognizes God as the object of beauty but she loves this lovely God. Together with this vertical orientation, a horizontal trajectory comes into the life of the saint. Religious affections necessarily overflow into vigorous exercises of obedience and good works since they issue from the ‘power of godliness’ (WJE 2: 100). This outward and active focus of the affections is founded on a theological ontology, namely that the ‘divine nature that is pure act [is] not an unfruitful thing’ (723. Sermon on Deut.

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262   Seng-Kong Tan 5:27–9 [Nov 1743]; WJE 61). And for Edwards, this pure act ontology is specified pneumatologically. In human beings, the affections are the ‘spring of their actions’ just as the Holy Spirit is the ‘internal spring’ in God’s being (WJE 2: 101; ‘Miscellanies’, 1062; WJE 20: 443). As divine love is ‘chief of the affections’, it is most discernible by its ‘chief sign of grace’, which is Christian practice (WJE 2: 108, 407, 450). True love for God is indissolubly connected to love for others. ‘A true knowledge of God and divine things’, as Edwards reiterates an insight from the Reformed-Puritan tradition, ‘is a practical knowledge’ (WJE 8: 296). The exteriorization of the religious affections as Christian practice involves a corresponding interior transformation. The affected saint is lively in both her immanent and transitive actions, in faith and practice. The one who beholds the beauty of God’s Son will reflect the Word made flesh, who is Spirit-filled in eternity and time. Since ‘God the Son from all eternity was Christ, or anointed with the Holy Spirit . . . or with the in­fin­ite love of the Father towards him’, Jesus Christ is naturally ‘the perfect example of true religion and virtue . . . expressed very much in the exercise of holy affections’ (‘Miscellanies’, 225; WJE 13: 346; WJE 2: 111). The life of a Spirit-indwelled person will evidence the desires, evangelical humility, the ‘lamblike, dovelike spirit and temper’, and a beautiful proportion that characterizes Christ their Messiah (WJE 2: 344). Finally, religious affections are a human participation in the distinct, integral, and ordered operations of divine intellect and will. There is no desire, intention, and action without the interposition of the will. At the same time, the intellect is ineffectual as a neutral observer, without the will intervening. Because of this mutual indwelling of the soul and God, the mind relishes divine things because it is not merely an observer but a participant. Genuine religious affections issue in true freedom because they are a participation in God’s affections. The liberty and end of the Christian is a life of continuously preferring God’s interests instead of purely selfish ones (WJE 8: 535). Christian practice consists ‘in making a full choice of God . . . and in a full determination of the will for God and Christ’, which involves obedience and self-denial (WJE 2: 397). Just as the Spirit is the active principle of knowledge and love between Father and Son, the regenerate is introduced into this eternal divine communion in a refracted way.

Human Destiny as Participation in the Son’s Love to the Father This exercise in mapping Edwards’s psychological analogy of the Trinity onto his anthropology has given us some insights into the distinction, unity, and ordering of the soul’s powers. As with all heuristic devices, the analogy is handicapped by an individualism with respect to his anthropology. But seen in the context of the Religious Affections and Freedom of the Will, it is a useful tool for analysing the integral psychology of the

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Anthropology, Affections, and Free Will   263 human person. It would be remiss of us, then, if the interpersonal facet of Edwards’s trinitarian anthropology is left out (Studebaker and Caldwell  2012), which we will address in this concluding section. As the trinitarian persons mutually indwell one another, there is an image of this between the regenerate and God. In regeneration, the Spirit is united to the human faculties as a new foundation, by which the person participates in the divine operations of perception and love. This is because God ‘infinitely values his own glory, consisting in the knowledge of himself, love to himself, and complacence and joy in himself; he therefore valued the image, communication or participation of these, in the creature’ (WJE 8: 532). This Spirit-indwelling is Christ’s downward movement of union with the saint, which enables her response of faith that completes our union with Christ (Tan 2014). Through this union, the regenerate comes to experience not only a renewal of the ­faculties, but also a participation in the Father–Son relation. Through the union of the Spirit with the human spirit, there comes about the eschatological integration of body and soul, personal and social, as well as intellect and will—three motifs we shall look at by way of closing. First, human beings will be fully integrated in body and soul. In glory, they will experience a beatific vision of God and a bodily vision of Christ. Sanctification (and glorification) is not only about imitating Christ; it is a participation in the being of the incarnate Christ—the truly free and affective human being. The Son, who is the incarnated intellect and idea of God, will forever be the ‘grand medium’ of the corporeal vision (Boersma 2017). With this bodily vision, the resurrected saints shall literally see God incarnate and shine like Christ’s transfigured body (373. Sermon on Rom. 2:10; WJE 50). In continuity with our experience here, the natural–spiritual asymmetry remains as the spiritual vision will far transcend the corporeal sight of Christ. Like spiritual perception, the beatific vision will be granted through insight from the Spirit and in the Son’s affective perception of the Father (373. Sermon on Rom 2:10 [Dec 1735]; WJE 50; Strobel 2013, 142). It is to share in Christ’s eternal, beatific vision of the greatest apparent good—the Father. Second, partaking in the Spirit erases the individual and social divide. As the Spirit is the ‘end of all procession’ (WJE 21: 146), the mission of the Spirit into the world is God’s self-emanation ad extra. In regeneration, the Creator brings about the beginning of the end for which God created the world. This is possible because participation in the Spirit re-establishes the spiritual image and repairs our natural image so that we are reconfigured for eternal communion between Father and Son. Edwards’s Concerning the End for which God Created the World and Heaven is a World of Love must be read together, since our human destiny to know, love, and enjoy God is none other than to love God, and in so doing, love others. This communion is fundamentally trinitarian, for in the divine processions there is both mutual perception and love between Father and Son in eternity. In the breathing forth of the Spirit, there is ‘an infinite and eternal mutual holy energy between the Father

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264   Seng-Kong Tan and the Son’ (WJE 8: 373). As a result of the saints’ participation in the Father–Son ­relation, the ‘love of the saints to one another will always be mutual and answerable’ in glory (WJE 8: 377). Human beings are not just psychological individuals but also relational beings ‘made to subsist by society and union, one with another’ (WJE 17: 376). The Christian practice of love towards the other will be in full expression arising from the new, spiritual disposition. ‘Love naturally desires to express itself,’ Edwards continues, ‘and in heaven the love of the saints shall be at liberty to express itself as it desires, either towards God or one another’ (WJE 8: 379). That is why the religious affections re-orientate a person to God and others, as well as transform her from the inside out. In heaven, this is particularly evident in expressions of humility, where one values the other more than one’s own interests (WJE 8: 375). Christian liberty is a freedom for others because it is a freedom from self-centredness. Finally, when volition and intellection are wholly integrated, both motive and inclination reach their highest pitch in the glorified person. In heaven, the greatest apparent good is God—‘our highest end, and highest good’ (WJE 17: 437). But God is not just the highest objective good since the new subjective disposition is also God: ‘All spiritual good consists in the communion of the Holy Ghost’ (WJE 10: 149). If, following Kyle Strobel, ‘the Trinity is religious affection in pure act,’ we could understand religious affections as God perfecting our human powers by Word and Spirit (Strobel 2013, 70). In glory, the human ‘understanding will be in its most perfect act of beholding and the will will be in its most perfect act in loving’ (373. Sermon on Rom. 2:10; WJE 50). Although this is the end of humankind, there is no end to this end. For the saints’ desire, knowledge, love, and delight of God increase with a corresponding growth in their intellectual and volitional capacities. In glory, the human inclination to love God maximalizes since the saints have communications of the Spirit ‘commensurate with the capacities of their natures’ (WJE 8: 374). Echoing Gregory of Nyssa, Edwards independently affirmed the idea of an everlasting progress (epektasis), where human desire and capacity for God increase without prejudice to rest and satiety (283. Sermon on Cant. 2:3(a); WJE 48; Wilson-Kastner 1978). As sentient, conative beings in the here and now, however, human beings differ from God because ‘the habit or principle differs from the act’ in their intellectual and volitional acts (528. Sermon on Rom. 8: 29–30; WJE 54). In the glorified state, they come nearer to be like the pure act who is Trinity, whose being and act are perfectly synchronized: ‘There is an image of this in created beings that approach to perfect action: how frequently do we say that the saints of heaven are all transformed into love, dissolved into joy, become activity itself, changed into mere ecstasy’ (‘Miscellanies’, 94; WJE 13:260–1). The destiny of human freedom and affections is to be godlike.

Works Cited Aquinas, Thomas (1947). Summa Theologica. New York: Benziger. Boersma, Hans (2017). ‘ “The “ ‘Grand Medium” ’: An Edwardsean Modification of Thomas Aquinas on the Beatific Vision.’ Modern Theology 33 (2): 187–12.

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Anthropology, Affections, and Free Will   265 Cherry, Conrad (1990). The Theology of Jonathan Edwards: A Reappraisal. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Cochran, Elizabeth Agnew (2011). Receptive Human Virtues: A New Reading of Jonathan Edwards’s Ethics. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Cortez, Marc (2015). ‘ “The Human Person as Communicative Event: Jonathan Edwards on the Mind/Body Relationship.’ In The Ashgate Research Companion to Theological Anthropology. Ed. Joshua Ryan Farris and Charles Taliaferro, 139–50. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Crisp, Oliver  D. (2016). ‘Jonathan Edwards and Occasionalism.’ In Abraham’s Dice: Chance and Providence in the Monotheistic Traditions. Ed. Karl Giberson and Oliver Crisp. New York: Oxford University Press. Crisp, Oliver, and Kyle Strobel (2018). Jonathan Edwards: An Introduction to His Thought. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans. Dixon, Thomas (2003). From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Erdt, Terrence (1980). Jonathan Edwards, Art and the Sense of the Heart. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Fiering, Norman (1981). Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and Its British Context. Williamsburg, VA: University of North Carolina Press. Fiering, Norman S. (1972). ‘ “Will and Intellect in the New England Mind.’ The William and Mary Quarterly 29 (4): 516–58. Fisk, Philip J. (2016). Jonathan Edwards’s Turn from the Classic-Reformed Tradition of Freedom of the Will. Bristol, CT: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Gm. Guelzo, Allen  C. (1995). ‘ “From Calvinist Metaphysics to Republican Theory: Jonathan Edwards and James Dana on Freedom of the Will.’ Journal of the History of Ideas 56 (3): 399. Hamilton, S.M. (2017). A Treatise on Jonathan Edwards: Continuous Creation and Christology. N.p.: JE Society Press. Hawley, Katherine (2002). How Things Persist. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Helm, Paul. (1969). ‘ “John Locke and Jonathan Edwards: A Reconsideration.’ Journal of the History of Philosophy 7 (1): 51–61. Helm, Paul (2014). ‘ “Jonathan Edwards and the Parting of the Ways?’ Jonathan Edwards Studies 4 (1): 42–60. Hoopes, James (1983). ‘ “Jonathan Edwards’s Religious Psychology.’ The Journal of American History 69 (4): 849–65. Kimnach, Wilson H. (1988). ‘ “Jonathan Edwards’s Pursuit of Reality.’ In Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience. Ed. Nathan  O.  Hatch and Harry  S.  Stout. New York: Oxford University Press. Lee, Sang Hyun (1988). The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Martin, Ryan (2019). Understanding Affections in the Theology of Jonathan Edwards: ‘The High Exercises of Divine Love.’ London: T & T Clark. McClymond, Michael James (1998). Encounters with God: An Approach to the Theology of Jonathan Edwards. New York: Oxford University Press. Muller, Richard A. (2014). ‘Jonathan Edwards and Francis Turretin on Necessity, Contingency, and Freedom of Will: In Response to Paul Helm.’ Jonathan Edwards Studies 4 (3): 266–85. Neele, Adriaan Cornelis (2019). Before Jonathan Edwards: Sources of New England Theology. New York: Oxford University Press. Pessin, Andrew (2000). ‘ “Does Continuous Creation Entail Occasionalism? Malebranche (And Descartes).’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy 30 (3): 413–39.

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266   Seng-Kong Tan Plantinga, Alvin (2016). ‘Law, Cause, and Occasionalism.’ In Reason and Faith. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Proudfoot, Wayne (1989). ‘From Theology to a Science of Religions: Jonathan Edwards and William James on Religious Affections.’ The Harvard Theological Review 82 (2): 149–68. Reid, Jasper (2006). ‘The Metaphysics of Jonathan Edwards and David Hume.’ Hume Studies 32 (1): 53–82. Schultz, Walter (2016). ‘The Metaphysics of Jonathan Edwards’s End of Creation.’ Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 59 (2): 339–59. Simonson, Harold Peter (1974). Jonathan Edwards: Theologian of the Heart. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans. Stein, Stephen J. (1988). ‘The Spirit and the Word: Jonathan Edwards and Scriptural Exegesis.’ In Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience. Ed. Nathan O. Hatch and Harry S. Stout, 118–30. New York: Oxford University Press. Stetina, Karin Spiecker (2011). Jonathan Edwards’ Early Understanding of Religious Experience: His New York Sermons, 1720–1723. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. Strobel, Kyle (2012). ‘By Word and Spirit: Jonathan Edwards on Redemption, Justification, and Regeneration.’ In Jonathan Edwards and Justification by Faith. Ed. Michael McClenahan, 29–44. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Strobel, Kyle (2013). Jonathan Edwards’s Theology: A Reinterpretation. London; New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark. Studebaker, Steven M., and Robert W. Caldwell (2012). The Trinitarian Theology of Jonathan Edwards: Text, Context, and Application. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Tan, Seng-Kong (2014). Fullness Received and Returned: Trinity and Participation in Jonathan Edwards. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Tan, Seng-Kong (2016). ‘Jonathan Edwards’s Dynamic Idealism and Cosmic Christology.’ In Idealism and Christian Theology: Idealism and Christianity. Ed. S. Mark Hamilton and Joshua R. Farris, 177–96. New York: Bloomsbury. Townsend, H.  G. (1947). ‘The Will and the Understanding in the Philosophy of Jonathan Edwards.’ Church History 16 (4): 210–20. Waddington, Jeffrey C. (2015). The Unified Operations of the Human Soul: Jonathan Edwards’s Theological Anthropology and Apologetic. Eugene, OR: Resource Publications. Wainwright, William J. (2010). ‘Jonathan Edwards, God, and “Particular Minds.” ’ International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 68 (1–3): 201–13. Wilson-Kastner, Patricia (1978). ‘God’s Infinity and His Relationship to Creation in the Theologies of Gregory of Nyssa and Jonathan Edwards.’ Foundations 21 (4): 305–21. Yeo, Ray  S. (2016). Renewing Spiritual Perception with Jonathan Edwards: Contemporary Philosophy and the Theological Psychology of Transforming Grace. New York: Routledge.

Author Bio Seng-Kong Tan is Lecturer in Systematic and Spiritual Theology at the Biblical Graduate School of Theology, Singapore. He is the author of Fullness Received and Returned: Trinity and Participation in Jonathan Edwards (Fortress) and his recent publications include a chapter in Idealism and Christian Theology (Bloomsbury) as well as an entry in The Jonathan Edwards Encyclopedia (Eerdmans).

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chapter 17

Ecclesiol ogy a n d Sacr a m en ts Rhys Bezzant

Understanding the church requires attention to both Biblical themes and historical context, for any concrete instance of the corporate character of God’s purposes must necessarily build on theology and occupy time and space. Indeed, understanding Jonathan Edwards’s doctrine of church and sacraments involves interaction with his Protestant convictions, New England debates, the leadership and legacy of Solomon Stoddard (Edwards’s grandfather and former pastor of the First Church in Northampton), and Edwards’s immediate concerns regarding the vicissitudes of revival. Furthermore, without any major systematic piece of writing by Edwards on this topic, we have to search for his ecclesiological insights in disparate locations. Though the practical outcome of his ecclesiology is visible, the theological rationale for his ecclesiology often lies below the surface of his writing. For instance, Edwards’s definition of the church was derived from such themes as the purpose of the creation, the work of the Holy Spirit, the character of the millennium, as well as the doctrines of grace. Like Cyprian or Calvin before him, Edwards portrayed the church as ‘mother’, and in doing so drew together a variety of multifaceted and theologically complex topics to present the church’s overarching role to assure and to nurture. As we see in his ‘Notes on Scripture’, this maternal ‘lively image’, representing ‘the care that the church, especially the ministers of the gospel, should have of the interest of Christ committed to their care’ (WJE 15: 289), frames all subsequent insights. However, unlike Calvin, Edwards’s burden was to demonstrate divine propinquity, occasionally at the cost of divine predictability. The eighteenth century witnessed several types of Enlightenment thinking that distanced themselves from appeals to dogmatic authorities, and often accentuated the pursuit of knowledge sourced in the natural world, either through reason or experience. For some deistic philosophers, this resulted in the diminishing status of knowledge received by divine revelation. The possibility that God could be close to human beings, or that God might be powerfully

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268   Rhys Bezzant engaged in the physical order, was frequently discounted. For others, like Edwards, the natural world was a book that could be read with pious profit. He would rely on his own theological intuitions, read Enlightenment thinkers enthusiastically, and encourage growth in individual agency, but managed to pursue these insights in the context of his overall agenda to reenchant both the world and the experience of Christian believers within it. His explanation of the work of the Spirit as the engine of revivals, or the nature of religious affections in human experience, are evidence of his philosophical bridge-building. The backdrop for the recovery of the doctrines of grace in the sixteenth century was not assumptions about the distance of God from the world, but rather what was perceived as superstitious assumptions about mediated access to, and control over, grace in a commodified form which was mechanically close. No wonder then that Calvin wanted above all to demonstrate the transcendent Lordship of Christ—beyond the realm of manipulation by priestly mediators—with the work of the Holy Spirit to bridge the chasm. In Northampton, however, the challenge was not overreliance on the sacraments, but nominal appreciation by some of their benefits, and refusal by others to take the Supper at all. On the one hand, Edwards criticized those who refused self-examination and who hypocritically practiced ‘wicked dissembling in these our solemn vows [before the Supper]’ (WJE 16: 125). On the other, Edwards preached in ‘The Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is a Very Sacred Ordinance’, ‘[W]hat are we to think of those who turn their backs upon it [the Lord’s Supper] and cast a visible contempt upon it? . . . There is such an eminent sacredness in this ordinance that to cast open contempt upon it must render persons very guilty in the sight of God’ (Edwards 2007a, 46, 47). He wanted to render sacramental observance once again a strategy for sanctification in a mixed congregation. For Edwards it was not chiefly superstition but spurning the ­spiritual power of the sacraments, a kind of secularization, that caustically undermined ecclesiology. This chapter begins by outlining the traditional Protestant credentials of Edwards’s understanding of church and sacraments, for in one sense he is doing nothing new in terms of the overall theological shape of the church. The second section raises Edwards’s concern for purity in the church and therefore the value of its life distinct from the community in which it was set. How perforated or alternatively impervious the boundary of the church should be relative to the world around it had been a pressing and persistent question facing Protestant leaders in the sixteenth century and Puritan leaders of the churches in Massachusetts since the colony’s seventeenth century founding. In the third section, we investigate the impact of the revivals on Edwards’s ecclesiology, both in terms of the revivals’ fissiparous character as well as the accentuated role of the Holy Spirit in securing God’s presence and prosecuting God’s purposes. Finally, we shall place the church in the grand scheme of history and unpack the relationship of the church to the life of the Trinity and the providential design of the world. While some commentators have argued that Edwards had no exalted place for the church in his thinking and practice, this is surely incorrect. His lifelong service in local churches, his dismissal over revised requirements for partaking the Lord’s Supper,

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Ecclesiology and Sacraments   269 and his expansive vision for the history of God’s people all demonstrate that Edwards’s ecclesiology was not an afterthought but foundational to his prodigious theological and pastoral aspirations.

‘Begotten by His Word and Spirit’: The Church Defined by its Centre Edwards was shaped by Protestant convictions concerning the doctrines of grace, and in the History of the Work of Redemption spoke affirmingly of Luther’s ecclesiological posture: ‘Thus the church of Rome, instead of repenting of their deeds when such clear light was held forth to them by Luther and other servants of God, the reformers, does by general agreement in council persist in their vile corruptions, and wickedness, and obstinate opposition to the kingdom of Christ’ (WJE 9: 425). No wonder then that he vehemently opposed French Roman Catholic incursions and influence in North America. More positively, in a letter to John Erskine, Edwards gave voice to his Protestant convictions when affirming the Westminster Confession subsequent to a job offer in Scotland after his dismissal from Northampton in 1750 (WJE 16: 355), though of course he could also appeal to regional Protestant statements like the Cambridge Platform (1648) or Connecticut’s Saybrook Platform (1708). His favourite reading was from Dutch Protestant scholastics like Adrian Heereboord, Franck Burgersdijk, or Petrus van Mastricht, but there were also many recent English writers like John Edwards, William Perkins, John Owen or Richard Sibbes, whom he regarded as edifying conversation partners. He stood squarely within the tradition of Reformed Protestantism. While some of his theological opinions might occasionally have been eccentric, Edwards expressed essentially Protestant views on the nature of church and sacraments. Though Protestants had themselves debated—sometimes acrimoniously—the nature of ecclesiastical authority or sacramental efficacy, Edwards’s fundamental ecclesiological conviction, together with Protestants of varying theological stripes, defined the church from the theological centre out, focussing on the ways that God offers to the congregation his grace through a ministry of the Word, and derivatively a ministry of the sacraments. Grace must precede faith and obedience, for God’s promissory offer in Word and sacraments precedes our hearing and faithful response. Faith comes from hearing (Romans 10:17). In ‘The Excellency of Christ’, Edwards could summarize: ‘The church is the daughter of God . . . as he hath begotten her by his word and spirit’ (WJE 19: 593). This reflected Luther’s Christological corrective, which prioritized the centrality of Gospel proclamation: ‘The church was born by the word of promise . . . it is the promises of God that make the church and not the church that makes the promises of God. For the Word of God is incomparably superior to the church, and in this Word the church, being a Creature, has nothing to decree . . .’ (Luther 1970, 238). The possibility of reform

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270   Rhys Bezzant of the church in the sixteenth century emerged from a new commitment to let the Scriptures judge the church. Further, Edwards asserted that there are just two sacraments of the Gospel, namely baptism and the Lord’s Supper, though these were understood in a particular relationship to each other in New England. According to the Half-Way Covenant of 1662, those who had been baptized as infants were treated as church members, though they could not participate in the Lord’s Supper until they had rendered a testimony of conversion, creating a two-tier model of membership. In his ‘Lectures on the Qualifications for Full Communion in the Church of Christ’ delivered in the midst of the controversy of the late 1740s concerning worthy participation in the Lord’s Supper, Edwards acknowledged baptism’s covenantal dimension, locating this sacrament in the centre of the biblical narrative as it betokens God’s merciful offer of redemption: ‘God’s design was in the covenant of grace to make all needful provision for the comfort of his people’ for ‘God has appointed baptism as a seal of those indefinite promises’ (WJE 25: 426). Baptism is offered to infants and to adults (WJE 25: 363, 365). But in relation to the Supper, Edwards reminded his listeners that when the church ‘comes together at the Lord’s table’, they do so ‘according to Christ’s appointment’ (WJE 25: 387). The minister’s sacramental ministry was validated through dominical authority. Participating in the Lord’s Supper was dependent on ‘compliance with that covenant that was sealed in their baptism’ (WJE 25: 365) and involved deliberate and public acknowledgement of sincere profession of faith as distinct from mere doctrinal or moral conformity. Under these conditions, the Lord’s Supper testified to a truth, but also renewed the commitment of the communicant: ‘Their vow at the Lord’s Supper is a promising oath, and not as a common oath, but vastly more solemn and with more sacred circumstances’ (WJE 25: 372–3). Though long contemplated, Edwards had finally declared publicly his disagreement with his grandfather Solomon Stoddard over the nature of sacramental participation, who had held the Supper to be a converting ordinance. It is however important to point out that, unlike his Puritan predecessors, Edwards used the language of covenant not as the primary category for sacramental understanding, but as a signpost pointing to the category of participation, with the language of ‘communion’ as the central coordinating term. Of course, with marriage as a point of reference for the Supper, Edwards wrote of ‘a covenant of friendship, and of true spiritual friendship’ (WJE 25: 368). But through such a covenant, he then encouraged ‘greater intimacy’ (WJE 25: 363), for the covenant of grace is ultimately relational and filial. Building on this covenant language, Edwards encouraged people to enjoy ‘sensibly a real union and communion with Christ and one with another’ (WJE 25: 387). Covenantal the sacraments certainly were, but Edwards argued that they were more than this, for they promoted the purpose of deep fellowship or union with God and with other believers: The seventeenth century Puritans thought of the Lord’s Supper ultimately in terms of covenant theology, for that was gauze through which God revealed his salvation in history, and any discussion of communion would be subordinate to this overarching concept. In contrast Edwards, as both the last theologian of high

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Ecclesiology and Sacraments   271 Protestant scholasticism and the first theologian of the revival, thought of the Lord’s Supper in terms of communion with God, as that for him was the purpose of all being, and any discussion of the covenant would be subordinate to this end. (Danaher 1998, 287)

The relational and horizontal dimension of the Lord’s Supper was accentuated in the sacrament sermon ‘Envious Men’ (1730), in which the social solidarity engendered in the  sacrament stood as a judgment over the greed and contention of individuals in Edwards’s congregation (WJE 17: 108, 110, 120). We note however that though Edwards preferred the language of communion, his views cannot be mapped precisely onto the usage of this word in Calvin or Cranmer. Edwards’s almost Zwinglian position on the sacraments, for example in ‘Miscellany’ 539, demonstrates that the elements of bread and wine do not essentially secure communion with the Lord, but instead constitute the occasion for Christ by his Spirit to prepare us for the infusion of grace, ‘as Elijah, by laying fuel upon the altar, and laying it in order, gave opportunity for the fire to burn, when God should send it down from heaven’ (WJE 18: 85). Edwards affirmed traditional theological tropes like Christ as the host of the meal, the doctrine of accommodation by which God adapts himself to the capacity of the audience, and the benefits which accrue to the Christian in the meal, but he stopped short of the doctrine of receptionism espoused in some writings of the magisterial Reformers. The elements must be treated as distinct from profane use—signifying the need of reverence—but are not thereby secondary causes of grace. They merely impress a notion on our soul in order to ‘direct the stream of grace into that channel’ (WJE 18: 88). The feast might be described as a representation, a signification, a seal, or a special blessing. However this assumed the linguistic reservation that a sign and the thing signified must be distinct. The possibility of the elements being used for secondary causation was denied. In A Divine and Supernatural Light, he stated bluntly: ‘God makes use of means; but ‘tis not as mediate causes to produce this effect’ (WJE 17: 416). Note that in the sermon ‘Self Examination and the Lord’s Supper’, Edwards highlighted the subjective response, not the objective offer, which the Supper makes possible: ‘They that in eating and drinking do receive and embrace Jesus Christ, they eat and drink their salvation because they receive the Savior’ (WJE 17: 271). Edwards defended Christ’s presence at the meal, but not the Spirit’s presence through the elements. In listing the various ways that Christ comes down to his people, Edwards in a communion day sermon ‘Like Rain Upon Mown Grass’ speaks of Christ coming into the hearts of believers, but not of Christ coming down and making any particular use of the bread and the wine. At the end of such a sermon on divine condescension, Edwards surprisingly drew attention to the ‘covenant you have sealed this day in your partaking at the Lord’s table’ (WJE 22: 316). The Supper assists our remembrance even if it does not necessarily localize God’s presence. In as far as Edwards highlighted the power of the Gospel as the church’s animating centre, through a ministry of Word and sacraments he leveraged an experience of divine closeness, though he was patently aware that this theological posture might encourage

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272   Rhys Bezzant unhealthy clericalism. A church may be the people of God called to grow in assurance and receive all his benefits, but it was still ultimately (and perhaps dangerously) the minister, through whom such assurance and blessings flowed. In several Reformed traditions, plural eldership served as a brake on this centralizing and clericalizing polity, which Edwards in the second part of his 1748 sermon from Deuteronomy 1:13–18 in the middle of the communion controversy also defended: The business of these fathers of the people is to assist the minister to act with him not to act above him nor to act without him nor is he to act without them, but there is no church act without the concurrence of both.  (WJE 66: L. 25v)

Even if Edwards only resentfully doffed his cap to this kind of pastoral collaboration, we shall see in the following sections how deliberately he nonetheless adapted traditional ecclesiology to the decentralizing pressures of a revivalist church.

‘Separated from all Other Nations’: The Church Distinct from the World In New England, the tension between the church comprehending the nation (with everybody attending church on Sundays) and the church maintaining its own purity distinct from the nation (with full communicant membership only for those who were visibly regenerate) had been a significant area of contention for several generations before Edwards. The aspiration to be a city on a hill in the New World was an alternative to Old England’s compromised ecclesiological structure, for the very act of migration (in its several waves) was an act of separation for the sake of purity in a new Bible commonwealth and demonstrated a positive and visible model of divine purpose. Yet from the days of Anne Hutchinson, and debated as a result of the compromise solution of the Half-Way Covenant of 1662, New England Puritans struggled with how to express their distinction from the world, though this did not mean that they expected the church to be impeccable; in the Reformed tradition, much emphasis had been placed on the persistence of sin in the life of individuals and in the life of the church with Christ in his office as high priest securing both purity and forgiveness. Though avowedly a Protestant, Edwards from a young age wanted to revisit and revise Puritan assumptions concerning church purity. In his youthful ‘Resolutions,’ he raised fundamental questions concerning the nature of conversion and repentance, as his own experience as a believer was not easily mapped onto the rather stiff model which dominated pastoral theology of the period (WJE 16: 753–9). To secure regenerate membership of a local church, Puritan clergy insisted upon their pastoral responsibility to supervise an individual’s progress through the experiential stages of conversion. However, Edwards in rethinking conversion effectively began to rethink ecclesiology,

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Ecclesiology and Sacraments   273 for he limited the role of the clergy in their congregational as well as broader social roles. God could lead individuals to faith and repentance in different ways at different times through more dramatic and spontaneous awakenings and rituals of commitment. Edwards allowed that there is not just one form of polity which alone can protect gospel witness. Reflexively, then, when Edwards reimposed distinct qualifications for communicant membership that had been lost in Northampton, he was attempting to define the purity of the fellowship and its distinction from the host culture by stressing not the oversight of the minister but instead the Spirit’s work in the revivals and in individual hearts to mark out a sanctified people. The holiness of the church, affirmed in the creeds, was not secured through attention to the patterns of Christian initiation but was to be nurtured through attention to the eschatological goal of the Christian life, focused on celebrating the regenerates’ union with Christ in the practice of communion: ‘attend on this ordinance of the Lord’s Supper with the spirit of true glory’ (WJE 14: 469). Participating in the Lord’s Supper presupposed full membership and required regular self-examination. The church might still serve at some level as moral guardian of public order, with political suffrage limited to membership of a local church, but the church’s relationship with the standing order was being stretched to breaking point. Without the covenant as ‘an integrating platform linking God, self, church, and society’, the Puritan canopy, as Mark Noll so evocatively describes it, had begun to atrophy (Noll 2002, 44, 47). Not pastoral surveillance but the experience of spiritual union and separatism became ecclesiological markers: ‘Israel of old was separated from all other nations; they were not reckoned among the nations. So these [parishioners] are not of the world: their hearts have left it for Christ, and they follow him and not the vanities of the world’ (‘Glorying in the Savior,’ WJE 14: 463). However, the notion of exclusivism has to be understood with nuance. Edwards worked tirelessly in the course of the revivals to oppose more extreme elements, who would renounce all clergy as unregenerate, whose views on reform were immediatist, expecting purity now, or who renounced any possible means as conduits of grace. The ministry of James Davenport provides one such example of opposition to the standing order which Edwards refused to countenance. Edwards’s involvement on the council called in New London in 1743 to restrain Davenport’s enthusiasm is a case in point. Like Zwingli’s opposition to the Zurich Anabaptists, Edwards opposed those who made purity their only criterion for ecclesiology, and insofar as this was true, Edwards, though often seen as a separatist, would resist this claim. He affirmed the judgement of charity, erring on the side of inclusion not exclusion in welcoming half-way members through baptism. Edwards continued to promote the value of the visible church in the world, even if his hope was for this visible expression to be increasingly refined. The sacrament of the Lord’s Supper had a particularly important role to play in this agenda. In expounding the text of 1 Corinthians 10:17 about the one body partaking of the one bread, we note these terms in quick succession in Edwards’s sermon of 1751, ‘Sacramental Union in Christ’: ‘union of heart’, ‘relative union’, ‘vital union’, ‘mutual complacence’, ‘holy society’, ‘sweet harmony’, ‘sweet society’, ‘mutual converse’, summarized as ‘united in the same interest, the same happiness, the same inheritance, the same

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274   Rhys Bezzant profession, and the same worship’ (WJE 25: 586). These are signs of Edwards’s understanding that the Supper exercises a proleptic function to represent the eschatological unity of the body of Christ, which as an image sets up the people of God as distinct from those not of his body. Though the church is defined by its centre in the ministry of Word and sacraments, Edwards made clear nonetheless that when it comes to unity there is a difference between the role of sermon and the Supper. There are clear prohibitions in the Scriptures against partaking of the elements of the Supper unworthily, but there are no such prohibitions against listening to a sermon unworthily. The ministry of the Word is more inclusive, and the ministry of the table more exclusive. The church must aspire to regenerate purity but this does not mean reneging on its commitment to an indiscriminate appeal to faith in Christ. Whereas prayer and hearing a sermon are duties, Edwards argued in his Lectures that the sacraments are not duties but covenant privileges (WJE 25: 432–3), which he explains further in his sermon ‘The Thing Designed in the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is the Communion of Christians in the Body and Blood of Christ’: The sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is one of the greatest of Christian ordinances; and it is more distinguishing than other ordinances, except baptism. One end of these two ordinances is to distinguish those who are of the visible church as visible Christians from the rest of the world. As for public prayers and preaching, a heathen may come in and be present at them to satisfy his curiosity; they are not so distinguishing, and, therefore, the visibility of Christianity does not consist in them. (Edwards 2007b, 21)

Within the course of the Reformation in England, the tradition which prized discipline was again highlighted in Edwards’s age, which might be expressed through earnest preparation for communion, oral narrations of an experience of grace upon which to build church membership, or moral accountability through intense and intentional bonds of fellowship in the revivals. While Edwards was only a moderate ecclesiastical separatist, his sermon ‘On the Ends and Means of Excommunication’ recognized the necessity from time to time of some measure of spiritual separation, even if only temporary, of a recalcitrant individual sinner, functionally a diseased member, from the body (WJE 22: 71). In such a mechanism of last resort, we note Edwards’s further attempts to create a fellowship in which church health and spiritual purity might be promoted, without requiring a hard separation of the church from the world.

‘Pourings out of the Spirit’: The Church Dynamic in History Edwards’s postmillennial view of history, in which Christ’s kingly rule on earth, mediated through the ministrations of the visible church, was not personal but spiritual, magnified the work of the Holy Spirit. Christ remained seated at the right hand of the

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Ecclesiology and Sacraments   275 Father, but his body, the church, empowered by the Spirit, was nonetheless called to intervene in the decaying order of this world. Indeed, without an apocalyptic parousia to signal the beginning of the millennium, other signs were sought out, with the rapid advance of the Kingdom of Christ through missions or revivals powerfully alerting the church to its advance (Youngs  1996, 44). Effectively, investigating the life of the church or plotting its career in time and space were methods of ascertaining (with epistemological modesty) the progress of the millennium. As we see in The History of the Work of Redemption, this posture reflected a positive engagement with the world, for the Spirit who makes holy is also the Spirit who drives history: Though there be a more constant influence of God’s Spirit always in some degree attending his ordinances, yet the way in which the greatest things have been done towards carrying on this work always has been by remarkable pourings out of the Spirit at special seasons of mercy.  (WJE 9: 143)

When God in the eighteenth century did such dramatic work in fields or on commons outside the denominationally defined confines of the church or meetinghouse, he bound together Christians from different denominations in ecumenical ways in the open air. It was therefore not hard to believe that the divine presence was active and available despite institutional and ecclesiastical elites resisting the possibility. There were of course many painful disagreements and divisions among revived Christians in this period, for the story was not univocally positive (see Winiarski  2017). But as Kidd states: ‘We must . . . understand the awakenings of the 1730s and ’40s as born partially out of a sense of crisis in the world church of Protestantism, which seemed threatened with extinction should God not deliver and revive them . . . the need of the hour was international evangelical unity, not theological precisionism and bickering’ (Kidd 2004, 70, 72). Edwards was a leader in providing a theological rationale for, and defence of, the revivals, which counts as the bigger frame of reference for understanding his ecclesiology. Sweeney helpfully describes the rise of evangelicalism in this period as Protestantism with an eighteenth-century twist (Sweeney 2005, 24), and at least part of that twist is the way Edwards promoted renewed structures and strategies for the church which ­lubricated its mission and mobilized its laity. A prime example of this revived ecclesiology is the emergence of itinerancy. Without much warning, after two hundred years with no monastic itinerants in the Anglosphere, Howell Harris, George Whitefield, then the Wesleys after them, again took up the practice of preaching in the fields, as transgressive as this was of traditional parish boundaries and of the settled relationship between the parson and his people. Within limits, Edwards supported itinerants, and saw the rise of this ministry as portending the new relationships emerging in the light of the Spirit’s energizing. He welcomed Whitefield to Northampton in October 1740, and though Edwards was perhaps a little jealous of his English brother’s successes, he tried for a time following Whitefield’s powerful example to preach in ex tempore fashion. It didn’t take, but it did flag Edwards’s openness to new practices that were provocative and unpredictable. Whereas authority in New England had traditionally been generated from within the

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276   Rhys Bezzant congregation, with the emergence of anointed preaching of either clergy or laity in the fields, the older approach to authority was relativized and redefined with stunning effects. The experience of the revivals in America ultimately offered a new kind of unity amongst a variety of Christians or denominations along the eastern seaboard and provided a persuasive validation for dispersed authority too. This became a great awakening. A further illustration of the church’s dynamic contribution to the progress of providence was seen in Edwards’s sponsorship of the organization of prayer meetings across national borders, known as the Concerts of Prayer. The initiative had originally come from Presbyterians in Scotland, but Edwards had already been pondering the possibilities of international connexionalism, and wrote An Humble Attempt in 1747 to promote prayer and its millennial outcomes. By coordinating times of prayer between countries, and empowering lay people, both men and women, to take responsibility for its organization and execution, Edwards attested his own innovative aspirations, and theological acumen. Earlier forms of prayer outside of Sunday services had been a feature of Pietist or Moravian ecclesiology but was now funnelled into the world of English-speaking ­evangelicals. Further evidence for Edwards’s openness to collaboration outside of the parish is witnessed in his commitment to ministerial associations, for example consulting the Hampshire Association when opposing the appointment of Breck in Springfield, or in securing support for his own position in Northampton when threatened with removal. Though these associations had existed before his leadership of the revivals and were shaped by statements of faith like the Saybrook Platform of 1708, Edwards nonetheless took the opportunity to harness ecclesial networks for the sake of the longevity of the awakening. He still assumed, however, that a local church was not obliged to obey the counsels of a ministerial consociation. The mobility or flexibility to which these innovations testify is a function of new approaches to time and space in the eighteenth century, which impacted social realities with new experiences of speed, specialization and solidarity. The emergence of a market economy was a new kind of economic space, in which newspapers, letter-writing and international trade benefitted, as did evangelists. Rapid transport across seas and along newly built highways further shrank distances or collapsed impediments to mission and promoted the powers of individual agency. For Methodists to name their church not a meeting house but a tabernacle reminded their congregations of the pilgrim nature of Christian discipleship, building on the experience of ancient Hebrews after the Exodus. From time to time Whitefield could even visualize the crowd before him in the field using categories from the architecture and arrangements of the Tabernacle, which his booming voice could superimpose spatially on the auditory (Bezzant 2018, 202–8). We are prone to think of polity under the classic types of episcopacy, presbyterianism, or congregationalism, but with the birth of the modern world and the rise of evangelicalism within it, we can perhaps also speak of a fourth type, namely connexionalism. The Spirit might animate a new sense of belonging, binding believers together not through administrative regulation but with affective bonds of peace in a fragmenting world, and Edwards promoted such dynamic ecclesiological possibilities.

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Ecclesiology and Sacraments   277

‘All Things below for the Church’s Sake’: The Church Designed for Glory A virtue greatly prized in Edwards’s day but much less celebrated in our own is the capacity to wait. Not only were conditions of life more arduous to endure for him, but his claims that the labour pains of the millennium had only begun in the revivals powerfully reminded his listeners that the consummation lay still some centuries in the future. When speaking of the Lord’s Supper in his sermon ‘A Sight of the Glory of Christ’, Edwards wanted communicants to wait for each other as Paul had instructed the Corinthians to do. This type of waiting gave them practice in waiting for the second coming of the Lord as well (WJE 43, sermon #72). The Lord’s Supper pointed to the Lord’s return as it proclaimed the death of Christ until the parousia. The marriage feast that the Supper meagrely depicts identifies the blessings of the new age brought forward as well as the Lord’s consummated union with his people, the bride of Christ. Indeed, the most central feature of the new age will be the Lord dwelling with his people, as he did in typical ways in the tabernacle, Temple, or incarnation. Indeed, for Edwards the chief category for understanding the Scriptural story line is to see the church, our corporate participation in Christ, as the primary focus, and the world secondarily ordered to it. In his sermon of 1730 on Matthew 5:13, he preached that ‘the Church is an occasion of a Great Restraint of the wickedness of the world though the world is exceeding wicked and corrupt yet wickedness would rage to a vastly greater degree were it not for the restraints,’ and ‘[i]f it were not for the Church the world would be destroyed, for the world stands that the designs of Christ’s mediatorial Kingdom may be carried on.’ Or again: ‘The world would be destroyed if it were not for the church, inasmuch as all other things here below are for the church’s sake’ (WJE 45, L. 6r, L. 8r, L. 9r). Edwards’ apparently supralapsarian logic regarding the church within God’s elective purposes needs to be set against his settled infralapsarian position concerning the reprobate (WJE 18: 314–21). Furthering the ultimate aim of God’s own glory, then, the church as the bride or as the Kingdom is at the heart of God’s purposes. The purpose of the creation is for the Father to glorify the Son by giving to him a bride, and for the Son to glorify the Father by returning to him the gift of the Kingdom. We see this argument plainly in ‘Approaching the End of God’s Grand Design.’ The works of creation and providence subserve this chief end: Thus the grand design of God in all his works and dispensations is to present to his Son a spouse in perfect purity, beauty and glory . . . or in one word, the work of redemption is the grand design of [history], this the chief work of God, [the] end of all other works, so that the design of God is one.  (WJE 25: 119)

Edwards would resist the notion that the creation is the primary Biblical category. The new heavens and earth are not the climax of history. Instead, the consummation has

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278   Rhys Bezzant as its central concern the union of the elect with God himself, with the new creation as the necessary precondition. God’s glory reaches its apotheosis when the church returns to its source the glory which she has received, so that Christ can be glorified ‘in head and members’ (WJE 25: 119). It is the beatific vision of Christ which is the capstone on this age, not the beautiful sight of the renewed creation. The church might have providential priority but this does not mean that the material order is to be despised, nor that there is no continuity between this world and the next. Of course the church is an instrument used by God to serve the world. The mission of the church includes the care of the poor, and Edwards does not retreat from preaching against the greedy who extorted the needy. He was also concerned to protect society from harmful divisions by promoting strong civil magistrates. His own appreciation of the material world was expressed when for instance he observed and interpreted the physics of flying spiders. In 1723 he even sought to publish his paper on spiders in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, such was his interest in natural philosophy. He could also reflect on the glories of God refracted through nature in his ‘Personal Narrative’ (WJE 16: 790–804). His appreciation of daily labour was seen when he used the term ‘employments’, commonly applied to mundane activity, to refer to activity in the world hereafter, the world of love. A combination of love for the disenfranchized and opportunities to provide testimony to the nations of the ultimate purposes of the Lord was his motivation for taking up the position of missioner working with the native Americans in Stockbridge. The church’s privileged position enhances its quotidian responsibilities in the world, even if its life is to some degree distinct from the world and the world is a penultimate theological category. Edwards’s millennialism is on the whole optimistic about the advance of the Kingdom. Rather than reserve the language of the Kingdom for some utopian future, Edwards used the term to describe the church in the here and now, for in his estimation the Kingdom was the church understood eschatologically. In making a stark contrast between Christians and unbelievers, he divided them with reference to their allegiance to the Kingdom: ‘they that are in the kingdom of Christ and they that are in the kingdom of the devil’. And it is not that the kingdom refers to the invisible church, for he actually equates ‘the visible church and kingdom of Christ’. Or plainly: ‘By the kingdom of heaven, as is well known, is very commonly meant the Christian church’. This is a ‘mediatorial kingdom’, for it is the kingdom over which Christ the mediator reigns, who will at the end of the age hand it back to the Father (WJE 25: 357, 360, 379, 375). This is effectively the position which Calvin took (and was common to many expressions of Reformed faith): ‘since the church is Christ’s Kingdom, and he reigns by his Word alone, will it not be clear to any man that those are lying words by which the Kingdom of Christ is imagined to exist apart from his sceptre (that is, his most holy Word)?’ (Calvin 1960, IV/2/iv). As prophet, priest, and king, Christ the mediator of the Kingdom defines the nature of that Kingdom. He speaks through the people of God, uses the people of God to do a priestly ministry of evangelism in the world, and sets up his people as a royal nation, who bear his image and enjoy their status as adopted children in the King’s family. It is not just that the Kingdom belongs to God, but that this God has been

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Ecclesiology and Sacraments   279 revealed as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, which brings to our attention those New Testament terms deployed by Edwards for the glorified people of God, namely the body of Christ, and the temple of the Holy Spirit. Eschatology is never far from his musings. Edwards summarized the nature of his ecclesiology in ‘Images of Divine Things’ in these terms: The church in different ages is lively represented by the growth and progress of a tree; and the church in the same age, in Christ its head and stock, is like a tree. The various changes of a tree in different seasons, and what comes to pass in its leaves, flowers and fruit in innumerable instances that might be mentioned, is a lively image of what is to be seen in the church . . . A tree also is many ways a lively image of a particular Christian, with regard to the new man, and is so spoken of in Scripture. Corol. Hence it may be argued that infants do belong in the church. (WJE 11: 89)

While we may demur in asserting the validity of paedobaptism from a passing horticultural image, the overall case is sound. The church is both rooted in the purposes of God, and responsive to the environment in which it planted. The church must be defined theologically even when its polity is plastic and the structures of its mission malleable. The church can take up several different organizational forms but not at the expense of its organic nature. The church must serve the world, without losing its character as the first fruits of the new world, in which believers’ union with Christ and beatific vision of Christ define its consummation. The church is not merely a functional instrument of  mundane blessing but is essential to the divine and cosmic climax of this age. Eighteenth-century contingencies propelled Edwards’s reflections and made his ecclesiology distinctively evangelical, while still fundamentally Protestant.

Works Cited Bezzant, Rhys S. (2018). ‘ “He Followed Paul”: Whitefield’s Heroic, Apostolic and Prophetic Voice.’ Paul as Pastor. Ed. Brian S. Rosner, Andrew S. Malone, and Trevor J. Burke. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark. 193–211. Calvin, John (1960). Institutes of the Christian Religion. Ed. John T. McNeill. The Library of Christian Classics. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press. Danaher, William J. (1998). ‘By Sensible Signs Represented: Jonathan Edwards’ Sermons on the Lord’s Supper.’ Pro Ecclesia 7/3: 261–87. Edwards, Jonathan (2007a). ‘The Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is a Very Sacred Ordinance.’ Sermons on the Lord’s Supper. Ed. Don Kistler. Orlando: The Northampton Press. 31–53. Edwards, Jonathan (2007b). ‘The Thing Designed in the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is the Communion of Christians in the Body and Blood of Christ.’ Sermons on the Lord’s Supper. Ed. Don Kistler. Orlando: The Northampton Press. 1–30. Kidd, Thomas S. (2004). The Protestant Interest: New England after Puritanism. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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280   Rhys Bezzant Luther, Martin (1970). ‘The Babylonian Captivity.’ Three Treatises. Ed. H.  T.  Lehmann. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. 113–60. Noll, Mark A. (2002). America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. New York: Oxford University Press. Sweeney, Douglas  A. (2005). The American Evangelical Story: A History of the Movement. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic. Winiarski, Douglas  L. (2017). Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings in Eighteenth-Century New England. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Youngs, F. W. (1996). ‘The Place of Spiritual Union in Jonathan Edwards’s Conception of the Church.’ Fides et Historia 28/1: 27–47.

Suggested Reading Bezzant, Rhys  S. (2014). Jonathan Edwards and the Church. New York: Oxford University Press. Edwards, Jonathan (2003). ‘In True Conversion Men’s Bodies Are in Some Respect Changed as Well as Their Souls.’ The Blessing of God. Ed. Michael D. McMullen. Nashville: Broadman & Holman. 297–10. Hempton, David (2011). The Church in the Long Eighteenth Century. The I. B. Tauris History of the Christian Church. London: I. B. Tauris. Pauw, Amy Plantinga (2010). ‘Jonathan Edwards’ Ecclesiology.’ Jonathan Edwards as Contemporary: Essays in Honor of Sang Hyun Lee. Ed. Don Schweitzer. New York: Peter Lang. 175–86. Sweeney, Douglas A. (2005). ‘The Church.’ The Princeton Companion to Jonathan Edwards. Ed. Sang Hyun Lee. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 167–89.

Author Bio Rhys S. Bezzant is Senior Lecturer in Church History at Ridley College in Melbourne and is Director of the Jonathan Edwards Center Australia and sometime Visiting Fellow at the Yale Divinity School. Amongst his publications are Jonathan Edwards and the Church (OUP, 2014), Standing on their Shoulders (Acorn, 2015), Edwards the Mentor (OUP, 2019), and has translated Martin Luther: A Late Medieval Life (Baker, 2017). Ordained as an Anglican minister, he has worked in university and parish settings and presently also serves as Canon of St Paul’s Cathedral, Melbourne.

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chapter 18

Ethics Elizabeth Agnew Cochran

The first two decades of the twenty-first century marked a resurgence of interest in Jonathan Edwards’s ethics. Edwards’s most decisive contributions to contemporary religious ethics lie in his distinctive understandings of true virtue and the moral life. Through the work of scholars such as William Danaher (2004) and Stephen A. Wilson (2005), Edwards has gained recognition as an important thinker for the field of contemporary virtue ethics, an approach to philosophical and theological ethics that turns to historical texts to retrieve accounts of the virtues as a starting point for conceiving how the moral life extends beyond the moral dilemmas that occur in crisis moments. Following a shift represented in thinkers such as G.E.M. Anscombe (1958), Alasdair MacIntyre (1981), and Julia Annas (1993,  2011), virtue ethicists understand ethics in terms of a life well lived, so that the scope of ethics encompasses every day actions and decisions that affect our overall character. Virtue ethicists tend to affirm that moral growth in human beings occurs over time and that this growth is both facilitated and constrained by human beings’ material circumstances and context, including our particular relationships with others. Edwards’s account of virtue offers distinctive ways of looking at major questions of interest to virtue ethicists, in part because Edwards draws on philosophical and theological currents, such as Neoplatonism and (less directly) Stoicism, that have helped to shape historical Christian convictions but that have been less well represented in religious ethicists’ constructive retrievals of ancient texts (Cochran 2011, Cochran 2018). This essay highlights dimensions of Edwards’s moral thought that have been important in recent scholarship on Edwards’s ethics. First, I explore Edwards’s account of true virtue and its roots in his doctrine of God, specifically his understanding of God’s nature, perfections, and interactions with the created world. As Oliver Crisp (2017) rightly notes, Edwards’s ethic emerges from his doctrinal commitments, and scholars of Edwards’s ethics share a general consensus that Edwards’s doctrine of God and his theologies of creation and redemption are essential starting points for understanding his distinctive view of virtue. Second, I consider in more depth one set of questions

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282   Elizabeth Agnew Cochran that arises for scholars interested in retrieving Edwards’s ethic, questions of moral agency and free will that emerge from Edwards’s theological voluntarism. I conclude with reflections on Edwards’s theology of creation, arguing that his account of God’s ­activity in the created world provides resources for thinking about ethics and human agency that helpfully nuance and add complexity to the picture of human agency at work in Edwards’s view of true virtue. Edwards’s theology of creation also offers ­possible resources for engaging questions in social ethics, as scholars such as Gerald R. McDermott and Ronald Story (2015) have suggested, and offers a promising avenue through which future efforts to explore Edwards’s contributions to social ethics might be pursued.

‘True Virtue’ and Divine Exemplarity Aristotelian and Thomistic ethics conceive the virtues as excellences characteristic of human nature, dispositions that are constitutive of a good human life and that are essential for human beings to flourish (Hursthouse  1999, Porter  1990). Edwards, in ­contrast, understands true virtue as a form of universal love most essentially proper to God’s nature rather than human nature. Virtue, for Edwards, is aligned with God’s being and perfections. Broadly speaking, Edwards’s understanding of divine excellence as constitutive of the meaning of virtue is consistent with Neoplatonism and the tradition of Christian Platonism. One contemporary philosophical theologian who adopts a similar approach to virtue is Robert Merrihew Adams, whose ethic is informed largely by Plato and Augustine (Adams 1999). The most direct Neoplatonist influences on Edwards’s moral thought are Augustine and the Cambridge Platonists, a seventeenth-century British intellectual movement of Anglican divines who emphasize the harmony of faith and reason (Danaher 2004). A Platonist and Augustinian approach to virtue runs counter to Aristotelian understandings of the virtues as characteristic perfections of human nature (Danaher 2004, 137–9, 143–5). As a divine quality, virtue is not something that human beings can acquire through simply honing their natural instincts and inclinations. Instead, humans become virtuous as their lives are oriented toward God’s excellence and brought into a ‘union of heart’ with God (WJE 8: 557; Crisp 2017, 266) through the work and activity of the indwelling Holy Spirit (Wilson 2005, 64–70). Virtue is thus, in an important sense, a gift from God necessarily linked to capacities that are received in salvation, a point to which I return below. In describing the precise character of the divine excellence central to his conception of virtue, Edwards associates this excellence with holiness, goodness, beauty, and love. The breadth and richness with which Edwards describes facets of divine goodness have led contemporary scholars to differ somewhat in the precise dimensions of God’s character they see as central to his ethic. For example, Roland Delattre (1968), who wrote one of the earliest comprehensive studies of Edwards’s ­ethics, Clyde Holbrook (1973), and William Spohn (1981) emphasize a connection

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Ethics   283 between virtue and divine beauty, an emphasis that is borne out in Edwards’s ­reiteration of the theme of the beauty of divine holiness in a number of his works. Edwards’s early sermon ‘God’s Excellencies’ makes clear both that God possesses ­holiness, goodness, beauty, and love to an ‘infinite’ degree and that these qualities are essential to and constitutive of God’s very being. God is ‘not only an infinitely excellent being, but a being that is infinite excellency, beauty, and loveliness’ (WJE 10: 420–1). Edwards characterizes God in similar ways in his late work The Two Dissertations (1765), which, along with Treatise on Religious Affections (1746), represents one of the most ­significant contributions to Edwards’s moral thought. In The Two Dissertations, Part 1: The End for Which God Created the World, Edwards describes God as ‘the original good, and the fountain of all good’ (WJE 8: 424, 433–4). Yet while these characterizations of God’s nature are partly consistent with Neoplatonist conceptions of God as overflowing beauty and goodness, Edwards tempers these Neoplatonist ideas with the Christian ­theological affirmations that God is love, and that God is triune (Holmes 2000). Spohn (1981) ultimately argues that Edwards’s view of divine beauty must be interpreted in ­connection with a recognition that love to God is foundational to Edwards’s ethic: Edwards’s divine beauty is most fully embodied in the love, or relations of mutual ­consent, practiced among members of the Trinity. More recent scholarship places ­priority on the significance of these dimensions of Edwards’s doctrine of God, rather than divine beauty, as primary in shaping Edwards’s ethic. Both Amy Plantinga Pauw (2002) and William  J.  Danaher (2004) present accounts of Edwards’s Trinitarian ­theology that give pride of place to love as a central attribute of God. Because goodness and holiness are more fundamentally qualities of divine being than human being, God’s actions and character define the very nature of excellence. Likewise, because humans are virtuous only as the Holy Spirit empowers and facilitates their participation in the divine life (Crisp 2017, 272), God’s character defines the nature of virtue as well. God stands as a moral exemplar for human beings as we reflect on the character of the moral life, so that we are able to determine what virtue is through observing both the mutual relations of love within the Trinity and the love that the triune God embodies in creating and sustaining the world. These considerations of God’s character inform the conception of ‘true virtue’ that Edwards develops in The Two Dissertations, Part II: The Nature of True Virtue. Edwards’s account of true virtue is in some ways consistent with other theologians who identify virtue with love of God and neighbour and who stress the need to recognize that the category of ‘neighbours’ includes strangers, but Edwards’s development of these positions is clearly rooted in, and informed by, his understanding of the nature of God’s love. Just as the Trinity is characterized by relations of mutual consent, so does Edwards define true virtue as ‘benevolence to Being in general’, an exercise of ‘consent’ to God and to the entire created world. This consent accomplishes a ‘union’ of a moral agent’s heart with all other being in the universe (WJE 8: 540). Furthermore, just as Edwards understands the Trinity as existing in eternal relations of love, so he argues that ‘love to God’ is the chief part of virtue, both because God is ‘infinitely the greatest and best of beings’ and because God is the source and ground of all being and goodness in the universe (WJE 8: 550–5).

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284   Elizabeth Agnew Cochran At the same time, even as God is an appropriate object of love because God’s goodness makes him especially deserving, Edwards takes pains to clarify that virtuous benevolence does not ‘presuppose’ or require beauty in the beloved. He makes this argument by reflecting on the character of God’s love, explaining that God’s benevolence is prior to, and independent of, the beauty and existence of creatures and therefore cannot be said to depend upon their beauty (WJE 8: 542–3). Edwards’s true virtue is modelled on his understanding of divine love. In human beings, true virtue both reflects and participates in God’s goodness and images God’s love. By making divine love the paradigm of human virtue, Edwards establishes an ethic that is in some ways quite radical, even as it coheres with more general arguments in Christian ethics that emphasize the importance of love for God and neighbour. In stressing that the object of benevolence, or truly virtuous love, is ‘Being in general’, Edwards simultaneously makes clear that love directed toward a subset of the created world falls short of true virtue unless true virtue has given rise to it. Actions or dispositions of love toward particular human beings, including friends, family members, or strangers toward whom we might feel pity or gratitude, do not have any part in true virtue. True virtue must have ‘Being in general, or the great system of universal existence, for its direct and immediate object’ (WJE 8: 541). Loves toward particular humans possess a certain kind of goodness, which we will revisit below. But true virtue must adopt a broader perspective, directing itself toward the universal world, and other loves can only be considered part of true virtue if they take this universal love as their starting point. Edwards argues that most partial loves originate in self-love. Some forms of selflove are distorted by sin so that self-love becomes pure self-interest, ‘selfishness,’ or pride (WJE 8: 614). But Edwards makes clear that the sort of self-love that grounds most of our natural affections—love for friends and family members, for example—is not the same as this pure selfishness. Edwards allows that the sort of self-love that gives rise to natural affections is a means through which human beings take part in God’s providential oversight of creation, which directs the created world toward its good (WJE 8: 577–84). Nevertheless, while this self-love can tend to support a certain kind of goodness, Edwards is clear that the resulting natural affections are not virtuous, partly because of their origins and partly because of their scope. Edwards therefore shows caution about becoming overly confident in any sorts of loves that are partial, even loves such as patriotism that are directed toward large groups, because such loves may deceive us in a manner that inhibits our adopting more genuinely comprehensive loves (WJE 8: 610–17; McDermott 1992). The radical nature of Edwards’s ethic is underscored in reflecting on the implications of his view of Jesus Christ as a moral exemplar for certain forms of virtue. In one sermon in  his posthumously published collection of sermons A History of the Work of Redemption, delivered in 1739, Edwards suggests that although the term ‘virtue’ is most properly ascribed to God’s own holiness, one can also use the term ‘virtue’ to designate other selected attributes that God, in God’s divine nature, cannot be said to practice (Cochran 2011, 2–5). While this claim may initially seem to move Edwards closer to an Aristotelian understanding of the virtues as characteristically human excellences, his

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Ethics   285 differences from this approach to virtue remain evident in two ways. First, Edwards understands these multiple possible virtues as closely related to love so that love gives them unity; these virtues function as images or types of divine love. Edwardsean virtues, even virtues that are excellences of human nature, bear an inextricable relation to love and can only be understood fully by reflecting on the nature and character of divine love. Second, he retains the notion that God’s being and character are essential to our conception of these human excellences by presenting the incarnate Jesus Christ as the moral exemplar who defines these virtues of human excellence through embodying them perfectly in his own human nature (Cochran 2011, 62–93). Edwards’s Treatise on Original Sin affirms that Christ is a ‘most amiable and perfect example’ who helps humans understand the nature and character of human goodness (WJE 3: 199). As with true virtue, Edwards understands virtues that are human excellences as so closely related to God’s nature that they function as exceptionally high moral standards for human beings. He defines the paradigmatic virtues of this type, humility and meekness, through reflecting concretely on the actions and dispositions of Christ rather than abstract conceptions of human nature or human rationality (Cochran 2011, 62–93). Edwards’s sermon ‘The Excellency of Christ’ explains that Christ’s embodiment of human excellences makes God’s glory visible to human beings in a manner accessible to our natures. Edwards affirms that Christ’s excellences ‘are peculiarly fitted to invite our acquaintance, and draw our affection’ (WJE 19: 590), suggesting that Christ’s character traits both teach us of the nature of these excellences and invite us to appreciate their value. In turn, a consideration of Christ’s actions gives rise to an account of humility that functions as a radical call to self-denial and self-renunciation. Thomas Aquinas’s understanding of humility stands in contrast to Edwards in this regard. Aquinas urges human beings to avoid pride, an inflated and disproportionate sense of one’s own worth and accomplishments, and also to avoid pusillanimity, a vice associated with failure to make effective use of one’s gifts or talents. Humility and magnanimity, a virtue that ‘urges the mind to great things in accord with right reason’ and as a means of glorifying God, are thus complementary virtues for Aquinas (Summa Theologiae II.II, Q161.A1; Keys 2003). For Edwards, however, understanding Christ as the paradigm for perfect humility leads to a conception of humility that stands at odds with both pride and magnanimity. Edwards is aware of the dangers of spiritual pride (WJE 4: 414–18) and presents Christ’s resistance of pride as a significant indicator of his humility (WJE 9: 321). But Edwardsean humility is not merely the resistance of pride, but is instead, more starkly, a self-abasement linked to the renunciation of goods and attributions one might, through reason, deserve. Edwards explains that Christ’s humility and meekness are most supremely visible in his suffering at the end of his life (WJE 9: 323–4). Edwards explains that at this stage in life, Christ acts admirably in giving up honours that would rightly be his by virtue of his status and character. Indeed, Edwards explains that Christ’s virtue is greater because of the ‘unreasonableness’ of his suffering, the vastly disproportionate relation between Christ’s honour and his willingness to undergo suffering (WJE 9: 322–3). By making Christ the exemplar of humility, Edwards establishes an ethic that defines virtue in terms that require a willingness to suffer unjustly. Edwards

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286   Elizabeth Agnew Cochran presents a similar account of humility in Some Thoughts Concerning the Revival, which indicates that seeing oneself as dishonourable is a mark of humility, whether one is genuinely dishonourable or not (WJE 4: 418), and in Religious Affections, which suggests that genuinely pious Christians are likely to have so much humility that they fail to recognize their own humility (WJE 2: 334–5). Edwards’s understanding of divine love as exemplary for human virtues leads to an ethic distinct from Aristotelian and Thomistic accounts of the virtues. This does not mean that Edwards’s ethic is entirely at odds with Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas. Anri Morimoto (1995) identifies some intriguing points of continuity between Edwardsean and Thomistic accounts of justification, conversion, and moral growth, and Wilson (2005) identifies some continuity between Edwards and more Aristotelian and Thomistic positions on habit and secondary causation. In laying out his argument, Wilson demonstrates the value of working carefully through the complex relation of Edwards to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Puritan theology and to thinkers such as Nicholas Malebranche. Further consideration of Edwards’s ethics in relation to his contemporaries and immediate predecessors, building on both Wilson and the earlier work of Norman Fiering (1981), would be a promising avenue of research for future scholarship on Edwards. Nevertheless, despite this complexity, Edwards’s understanding of virtue is distinct from the Aristotelian and Thomistic perspectives that have been the most prominent voices in early virtue ethics, and its distinctiveness from these positions should be noted and appreciated. Virtue, for Edwards, can only be defined through reflection on God’s character and actions, and humans pursue virtue through being brought to participate in God’s being. Divine love provides a necessary foundation for understanding the nature and character both of true virtue in humans, and of other qualities we might designate as virtues, the virtues whose nature we come to ascertain through studying the excellences embodied in Christ’s human nature. Both true virtue and virtues such as humility point toward radical expectations placed on what it means to be virtuous. At the same time, this account of virtue is made more complex by attending to Edwards’s discussion of natural goodness, as will be shown below.

Virtue, Salvation, and Moral Agency Edwards’s account of true virtue points toward challenges faced by theologians and ethicists interested in retrieving historical Reformed texts for contemporary theological reflection. This section briefly addresses one of these challenges before this essay concludes with a consideration of Edwards’s theology of creation, which gives rise to views of goodness and beauty that provide resources that help to address it. In short, as Wilson (2005) emphasizes, Edwards’s soteriological commitments are closely linked to his account of how humans are formed in true virtue. In turn, the close and ­necessary relation between Edwards’s understanding of virtue and his soteriological commitments might well raise questions about whether Edwards can sustain a picture

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Ethics   287 of moral agency as authentic. Edwards detaches true virtue from ‘natural’ goods by maintaining consistently that justice and partial loves do not lead to true virtue or contribute to our capacities to exercise this virtue (WJE 8: 602). Moreover, he presents justification as a necessary condition for the practice or acquisition of true virtue, and, in doing so, reserves true virtue for the elect. Election, furthermore, is an act of God’s loving but arbitrary will rather than a reflection of human merit. These arguments generate questions about how actions or dispositions of true virtue can be attributed to human beings in genuine ways. In stressing the ways in which justice and partial loves do not lead to true virtue, Edwards builds on and reinforces essential soteriological claims that permeate his work as a whole. As noted above, both true virtue and moral goodness are properly qualities of God rather than humans. Humans receive capacities for these qualities when they are justified. Justification, in turn, is God’s act alone, a ‘change in nature’ that God effects in a human being (WJE 19: 340). It is important to note that in Justification By Faith, Edwards affirms that ‘there is indeed something in men that is really and spiritually good, that is prior to justification,’ a claim that differentiates his soteriology from some forms of Calvinism and that supports the argument I make below that Edwards’s view of natural goodness is an important part of his ethic. But Edwards nevertheless makes clear that in God’s eyes we remain ‘condemned’, or ‘infinitely guilty’, until we are justified, and this position affects the sort of goodness he is comfortable attributing to the unregenerate. Edwards is clear that God may see a human being as good only after this person has been justified; the goodness itself is mediated through the relation that justification (through the work of Christ) effects between God and the believer. Prior to justification, even a person with some faith is ‘in himself altogether hateful’ (WJE 19: 163–5). Justification is not only important for restoring God’s assessment of human goodness, but it is also essential to our capacity to exercise true virtue. Both because true virtue is more proper to God’s nature than to human nature and because sin damages our moral capacities, human beings require God’s assistance in order to exercise true virtue. When a person undergoes conversion, Edwards affirms, God gives that person a  capacity to exercise true virtue, and the unregenerate lack this capacity. Religious Affections describes this capacity as a ‘spiritual sense’, a ‘principle of nature’ through which God empowers a Christian’s natural faculties to be able to pursue virtue (WJE 2: 206). True virtue requires and depends on the specific activity of God’s grace and work in the initial experience of conversion and the ongoing agency of the Holy Spirit in the life of a Christian. The notion that virtue requires God’s grace would not by itself raise significant questions about how we can say that humans are morally responsible for virtuous actions and dispositions. The idea that divine grace and human agency both contribute to moral formation is important to the historical Christian tradition more broadly. What is particularly challenging about Edwards’s position is that not only does he make true virtue dependent on divine grace, but he more specifically draws an inseparable link between true virtue and God’s acts of grace associated with election and conversion. In turn, like many Reformed thinkers, he stresses that God bestows grace on some people and

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288   Elizabeth Agnew Cochran withholds it from others, and that these acts of grace are distributed according to the mysterious workings of God’s will (McClymond 1995). ‘Grace is a sovereign thing, exercised according to the good pleasure of God’ (WJE 3: 110). God accomplishes salvation for individual persons arbitrarily, and because the capacity for true virtue is linked to salvation, it follows that capacities for true virtue are distributed arbitrarily too. I have made note, in other writings, of ways in which Edwards softens the conclusions that might be drawn from these arguments. For example, in aligning the Holy Spirit with both God’s will and God’s love, Edwards establishes a necessary relation between love and the divine will that necessitates that the will’s activity be loving (Cochran 2011, 28–39). Moreover, Religious Affections presents conversion as a gradual process, making clear that one’s possession of capacities for virtue do not automatically make one virtuous (WJE 2: 275). This position seems to indicate that human beings are responsible for making good use of their moral capacities acquired through justification. On the other hand, despite this conception of conversion as a gradual process, one might remain uneasy that God’s bestowing of dispositions ordered toward true virtue removes human agency insofar as Edwards’s understanding of ‘moral necessity’ presents God and human beings as subject to a necessary coherence between our actions and dispositions. We are bound by a necessary connection between ‘moral causes’, such as habits or motives, and moral ‘effects’, or acts of the will (WJE 1: 156–8). Our desires and characters necessarily determine our actions so that we may find ourselves unable to act counter to our characters (WJE 1: 159–60). If God instils dispositions predisposed toward virtue in the elect, it might be argued these dispositions set conditions that automatically generate virtuous dispositions and actions. Edwards does ameliorate this concern somewhat by guarding against an overly mechanistic or prescribed view of moral formation in the elect, in part by indicating that humans can work to change our characters in certain ways. For example, he affirms that humans can at times avoid acting in keeping with tendencies of their character (WJE 1: 359) and that human beings can work to overcome bad habits (WJE 1: 161–2). These arguments suggest the possibility of preserving a kind of moral agency in the elect. But what of the unregenerate? Edwards reflects extensively on justice and natural loves, and these discussions are essential to forming a more complete account of Edwards’s significance for contemporary religious ethics. Edwards’s considerations of justice and natural love further nuance his account of moral agency and responsibility in humans by offering a starting point for reflecting more precisely on what may be truly ‘spiritually good’ in humans who have not been justified.

Edwards on Creation and the Goodness of Human Beings Edwards’s understanding of goodness, rooted in his views of the divine being and of God’s creation and providence, makes important contributions to our assessment of his ethic as a whole. As I stressed above, Edwards is clear that the goodness that human

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Ethics   289 beings can pursue apart from the specific intervention of God’s justifying grace lacks moral merit and in no way creates conditions that promote a moral agent’s acquisition of true virtue. Yet despite arguing that qualities such as the pursuit of justice and love for friends and family fail to lead to true virtue, Edwards offers a careful and compelling account of the created world as participating in God’s ‘fullness’, a divine attribute in which natural goodness is unified with ‘moral goodness’ and the realm of true virtue. Edwards insists on the coincidence of true virtue with objective categories of good and evil, and to secure this coincidence he advances an integrated account of beauty and reason. Edwards’s ethic preserves an orientation toward reason consistent with Stoic and Aristotelian accounts of natural law, but in integrating reason with beauty, he elevates perception, divine encounter, and aesthetic joy as primary moral tasks. In doing so, he provides tools for reflecting on the nature of the moral life as a more broadly human experience, even as his accounts of election and true virtue require caution in the conclusions we draw from these arguments. Edwards’s distinction between natural and moral goodness is at work in Treatise on Religious Affections and laid out most explicitly in The Two Dissertations. The Nature of True Virtue gives careful attention to two particular character dispositions that possess what Edwards calls a ‘natural goodness’, a goodness that Edwards distinguishes from the ‘moral goodness’ associated with true virtue. The first of these is justice, a principle that promotes equality and proportionality (WJE 8: 568–9). The second is a set of loves that fall short of the scope of universal benevolence: love for one’s family or friends, pity, and gratitude (WJE 8: 601–10). These qualities are not entirely unrelated to virtuous benevolence, the union of our hearts with God. Benevolence is the ‘highest’ or ‘primary beauty’ accessible to creatures, and is the form of beauty through which ‘spiritual and moral beings’ live out the purposes for which God has created us (WJE 8: 561). As qualities that embody natural goodness and possess a secondary beauty, both justice and partial loves are expressions of instincts that promote human flourishing and thereby glorify God (WJE 8: 602). Edwards’s soteriological commitments are consistent across his writings and require taking seriously his insistence on distinguishing moral goodness from natural goodness and primary beauty from secondary beauty. At the same time, the relation between moral and natural goodness is unexpectedly complex and integrated. Edwards’s account of ‘naturally good’ dispositions enriches our overall understanding of his ethic. Three interrelated lines of argument show how Edwards’s account of the created world gives rise to an ethic in which beauty and perception are key moral tasks, and the natural world exists in a complex relation to the beauty of true virtue. First, Edwards preserves a striking interplay between beauty and reason as concepts that help us describe and understand God’s oversight of the natural world. Norman Fiering argues that there is an ‘inherent rationalism’ in Edwards’s view of the universe (Fiering 1981, 343–4). Indeed, Edwards describes creation in terms that point toward a reasonableness and transparency intrinsic to God’s being. Rather than characterizing God’s work as inscrutable, Edwards follows the tradition of British rationalists such as Samuel Clarke in using the language of fitness to describe God’s creation and oversight of the world. God, Edwards explains, is a morally perfect being disposed ‘to everything

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290   Elizabeth Agnew Cochran that is fit, suitable, and amiable in itself ’ (WJE 8: 421). Creation is not the act of a hidden and inaccessible divine will, but the work of a creator whose goodness makes him subject to act consistently with the standards put forth by eternal fitnesses. Edwards conceives these standards as internal to and constitutive of God’s very being, but he is so committed to emphasizing God’s goodness that he maintains that God ‘knows what the greatest fitness is, as much as if perfect rectitude were a distinct person to direct him’ (WJE 8: 425). In turn, because God is subject to this standard of fitness, God is by nature disposed to celebrate and honour the being who is most objectively worthy of regard, and Edwards explains that God is this being because of God’s infinite goodness and unsurpassable moral worth (WJE 8: 422). The act of creation is a supreme vehicle through which God does what is fitting by glorifying himself. God’s power, goodness, justice, and wisdom are perfect, and Edwards explains that a perfect attribute will be exercised in every way possible. Creation is one mode of these attributes’ exercise, a vehicle through which they are given full expression. Indeed, Edwards characterizes the world as so closely connected to God’s moral attributes that he risks suggesting that God depends upon the world in order to achieve the highest possible degree of goodness. He clearly affirms in God the possession of dispositions or capacities to produce particular effects (WJE 8: 428–9). The created world, in turn, is one locus through which these sufficiencies are realized. Edwards’s account of the created order as the fulfilment of dispositions raises questions about whether Edwards sufficiently preserves divine aseity, the notion that God is sufficient for God’s own existence (Holmes 2003). Edwards’s account of creation as the fulfilment of God’s dispositions and his use of the language of ‘emanation’, associated with Neoplatonist thought, would seem to risk undermining the idea that God creates intentionally rather than spontaneously. But by developing a line of argument that conceives creation as a supreme act of divine communication, Edwards implicitly suggests that God does not need to create by indicating that God is aware of God’s own goodness whether or not God sees its effects (WJE 8: 431). Nevertheless, Edwards suggests, there is something in the nature of goodness itself that makes it fitting for a supremely good being to share this goodness with others. This goodness is shared partly by displaying God’s beauty so that this beauty can be known by, as Edwards puts it, a ‘glorious society of created beings’ (WJE 8: 431), for ‘it seems to be a thing in itself fit and desirable, that the glorious perfections of God should be known, and the operations and expressions of them seen by other beings than himself ’ (WJE 8: 430–1). We could argue that God creates freely while simultaneously remaining bound to moral necessity. Second, while Edwards preserves a clear distinction between natural and moral goodness, he simultaneously affirms that God imparts both of these forms of goodness to creatures in the act of creation, through communicating what Edwards calls God’s ‘fullness’ to them. Edwards clarifies that the term ‘divine fullness’ consists in God’s ‘natural and moral goodness’ (WJE 8: 433, n5). This definition of divine fullness as encompassing both natural and moral goodness is striking in its implications for how we might reflect on the significance of these terms for contemporary Christian ethics. Although Edwards differentiates natural goodness and moral goodness, both are passed

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Ethics   291 along to the creature in the act of creation as an expression of God’s love (WJE 8: 439). In associating both natural and moral goodness with creation, Edwards ensures that the created world truly and fully participates in God’s goodness and beauty. He resists establishing a sort of dichotomy between spirit and matter that could be implied by associating only natural goodness with the material world and adopting a more spiritualized conception of moral goodness. Indeed, Edwards makes it clear that he wishes to preserve a close relationship between moral goodness and the order of the natural world in order to guard against any sense that moral goodness could be an arbitrary category. He explicitly maintains that the categories of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ cohere with ‘the nature of things’ rather than being ‘arbitrary’ (WJE 8: 620, 624). In certain ways Edwards aligns his account of virtue with sentiment and beauty, but he is explicit that this association is not meant to make virtue a construct unrelated to the natural order. The exercise of true virtue requires the gift of a spiritual sense associated with justification. Edwards explains that he links virtue with beauty and sentiment to signify that virtue is something that can be grasped or perceived ‘immediately’ (if God has gifted us with a spiritual sense) without having to undergo a process of ‘argumentation’ (WJE 8: 619–20). But Edwards simultaneously stresses that the very structure of the spiritual sense is not arbitrary but instead presumes continuity between true virtue (or moral goodness) and the natural world. Edwards’s determination to defend the coherence of virtue with the goodness of the natural order allows him to avoid falling prey to a critique levied against Francis Hutcheson, whose moral sense is structurally similar to Edwards’s spiritual sense (Cochran  2011, 98–100, 106–15). Many of Hutcheson’s successors and contemporary interpreters raise questions about whether Hutcheson’s moral sense theory is noncognitivist (Frankena 1955, Jensen 1971). British rationalist Richard Price suggests that Hutcheson’s moral sense is a principle placed in humans by God through God’s pleasure and, as such, could be arbitrary in its construction. On such an account, the moral order would be something that exists in human minds, something that human beings construct through the exercise of their moral sense and sentiments, rather than something existing objectively in the natural world that human beings perceive (Price  1969). Price’s critique of Hutcheson points toward ways in which certain understandings of the spiritual sense could be at risk for isolating true virtue from the natural world. Yet in The Nature of True Virtue Edwards considers the question of whether the spiritual sense ‘is given arbitrarily so that if he [God] had pleased he might have given a contrary sense and determination of mind, which would not have agreed as well with the necessary nature of things’ (WJE 8: 620) and rejects this idea, arguing instead for a ‘correspondence’ or agreement between such a sense and the nature of things. (WJE 8: 622) Edwards’s clarification that the spiritual sense is not a new faculty helps him to secure and sustain this continuity between virtue and the natural world, and he consistently presumes this continuity in Two Dissertations. A further example illustrating true virtue’s correspondence to natural goodness is found in Edwards’s account of the effects of true virtue on a moral agent’s exercise of natural loves. He explains that true virtue, or benevolence, mingles with the practice of inferior loves,

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292   Elizabeth Agnew Cochran such as pity and gratitude, in a manner that elevates these loves without changing their ‘denominations’—for natural loves have the ‘same denomination’ as truly virtuous affections from the outset (WJE 8: 616). Edwards is also careful to affirm that the processes through which human beings are formed in virtue are aligned with these objective categories of good and evil, even as the acquisition of virtue depends on a moral agent’s possession of a spiritual sense. His insistence on this point is noteworthy because it complicates the ways in which his account of formation in true virtue’s acquisition depends on God’s justifying grace. In advocating an essential link between true virtue and the spiritual sense, Edwards reserves virtue for the elect who have been justified. But his account of the spiritual sense itself, as we saw above, stresses that this sense is not a new ‘faculty’, but is instead a principle that empowers our natural faculties to access virtue in a manner that sin otherwise prevents them from doing (WJE 2: 206). The Christian pursuit of true virtue is the activity of our natural understanding and will supported and strengthened by the gracious intervention of the Holy Spirit. In conceiving true virtue as the operation of our natural faculties, Edwards underscores the continuity between this virtue and the good inherent in the natural world that participates in God’s natural and moral goodness. The third distinctive feature of Edwards’s account of the created world builds clearly on the first two but merits its own consideration. Many of Edwards’s writings suggest a view of conversion as both an event and a process (WJE 2: 275, Ward 2004). In linking this process of formation specifically to the activity of a sense, and insisting on the correspondence of this sense with goodness in the natural world, Edwards associates the pursuit of goodness first and foremost with perception, that is, with having a vision that sees things rightly. Our fundamental moral task is to apprehend God’s beauty and take joy in God’s holiness. Edwards affirms in Religious Affections, ‘He that sees the beauty of holiness, or true moral good, sees the greatest and most important thing in the world, which is the fullness of all things, without which all the world is empty . . . Unless this is seen, nothing is seen, that is worth the seeing’ (WJE 2: 274). Proper moral vision is exercised not simply through the mind’s intellectual grasp of divine goodness, which Edwards indicates could function as a mere ‘notional’ or ‘speculative’ knowledge (WJE 2: 272), but more completely through what Edwards calls ‘the sense of the heart, wherein the mind . . . relishes and feels’ (WJE 2: 272). The sense of the heart informs our will and understanding so that we both perceive and delight in God (WJE 2: 272). In turn, this celebration of God’s beauty and goodness provides a starting point for exercising moral judgment and pursuing moral actions. A ‘taste’ appreciating God’s beauty guides Christians in ‘discerning and distinguishing the true spiritual and holy beauty of actions’, so that they can determine what actions are right and appropriate to being God’s followers (WJE 2: 283). This elevation of the perception and approval of beauty as a central moral task is crucial to considering how Edwards’s theology of creation informs his ethic. Religious Affections associates the acts of perceiving and approving beauty primarily with direct encounters with God, through experiential moments in which God reveals God’s own being to an individual Christian. But the conception of the created world Edwards

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Ethics   293 develops in The Two Dissertations emphasizes God’s communication of natural and moral goodness to the world so that the world authentically takes part in these dimensions of God’s nature and being. This account, coupled with Edwards’ elevation of the perception of God’s beauty as a central moral task, points toward an ethic that begins with looking for God’s goodness and work in the midst of everyday life and preparing oneself to take joy in the beauty of God’s goodness. Edwards’s theology of creation also serves as a potentially fruitful starting point for thinking about Edwards’s potential contributions to social ethics and applied ethics, which contemporary scholars have not explored extensively. Gerald McDermott and Ronald Story (2015) argue that Edwards makes important contributions to current reflection on social issues, emerging from his understanding of the ways in which Christian love orients us both to the good of society as a whole and to the good of our individual neighbours (McDermott and Story  2015, 18). McDermott and Story particularly stress the priority Edwards places on care for the poor as central to moral responsibility in Christians. While McDermott and Story’s consideration of Edwards’s import for social ethics takes the Christian love associated with true virtue as its starting point, a consideration of Edwards’s theology of creation provides resources for reflecting further on Edwards’s accounts of justice and partial loves and their potential significance for civic virtue and moral responsibility in the life of the Christian. Scholarship delving further into these understudied areas of Edwards’s thought could open up promising new ways of retrieving Edwards as a resource for contemporary social ethics.

Conclusion Edwards’s doctrine of God gives rise to a conception of virtue with much to contribute to contemporary virtue ethics. His well-developed view of virtue is helpful for scholars who wish to show that Reformed thought has something to offer to reflection on the virtues. Much like natural law (Grabill 2006), virtue is a topic that many twentiethcentury Reformed thinkers found to be at odds with Reformed ethics, following Barth’s critiques of virtue. Many twentieth-century Reformed thinkers rejected natural law and virtue theory in favour of divine command theory or covenantal theology (Nolan 2014, Vos 2015). But a number of historical Reformed theologians develop accounts of the moral life that are consistent with features of contemporary virtue ethics, and Edwards’s nuanced and complex account of virtue advances contemporary ethics by illustrating particularly well how certain commitments of virtue theory can be integrated with Reformed theology. Edwards understands virtue as fundamentally a divine quality, and a commitment to viewing Jesus Christ as a paradigmatic moral exemplar is central to his ethic. God’s self-revelation in the incarnate Christ offers the most complete and accurate picture of the character of divine beauty and goodness. But Edwards’s insistence on the radical presence of God’s goodness in the natural world simultaneously urges us not to think of

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294   Elizabeth Agnew Cochran morality in other-worldly terms but to cultivate habits of seeking and taking joy in God’s goodness and beauty in the midst of day to day interactions. This vision of God, both in reflecting on God’s self-revelation in the incarnation recounted in Scriptures and in discerning God’s presence in the world, provides a necessary and essential starting point for the pursuit of moral actions.

Works Cited Adams, Robert M. (1999). Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press. Annas, Julia (2011). Intelligent Virtue. New York: Oxford University Press. Annas, Julia (1993). The Morality of Happiness. New York: Oxford University Press. Anscombe, G.E.M. (1958). ‘Modern Moral Philosophy.’ Philosophy 33.124: 1–16. Cochran, Elizabeth Agnew (2018). Protestant Virtue and Stoic Ethics. London: T&T Clark/ Bloomsbury. Cochran, Elizabeth Agnew (2011). Receptive Human Virtues: A New Reading of Jonathan Edwards’s Ethics. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press. Crisp, Oliver (2017). ‘Moral Character, Reformed Theology, and Jonathan Edwards.’ Studies in Christian Ethics 30.3: 262–77. Danaher, William  J. (2004). The Trinitarian Ethics of Jonathan Edwards. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Delattre, Roland (1968). Beauty and Sensibility in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards. New Haven: Yale University Press. Fiering, Norman (1981). Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and Its British Context. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Frankena, William (1955). ‘Hutcheson’s Moral Sense Theory,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 16.3: 356–75. Grabill, Stephen  J. (2006). Rediscovering the Natural Law in Reformed Theological Ethics. Louisville, KY: William B. Eerdmans Press. Holbrook, Clyde  A. (1973). The Ethics of Jonathan Edwards: Morality and Aesthetics. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Holmes, Stephen  R. (2003). ‘Does Jonathan Edwards Use a Dispositional Ontology? A Response to Sang Hyun Lee.’ In Jonathan Edwards: Philosophical Theologian, ed. Paul Helm and Oliver Crisp. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. 99–114. Holmes, Stephen R. (2000). God of Grace and God of Glory. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Hursthouse, Rosalind (1999). On Virtue Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press. Jensen, Henning (1971). Motivation and the Moral Sense in Francis Hutcheson’s Ethical Theory. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Keys, Mary M. (2003). ‘Aquinas and the Challenge of Aristotelian Magnanimity.’ History of Political Thought 14.1: 37–65. MacIntyre, Alasdair (1981). After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. McClymond, Michael J. (1995). ‘Sinners in the Hands of a Virtuous God: Ethics and Divinity in Jonathan Edward’s End of Creation.’ Zeitschrift fur neuere Theologiegeschichte 2: 1–22. McDermott, Gerald R. (1992). One Holy and Happy Society: The Public Theology of Jonathan Edwards. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press.

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Ethics   295 McDermott, Gerald  R. and Ronald Story (2015). ‘Introduction.’ In The Other Jonathan Edwards: Selected Writings on Society, Love, and Justice. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. 1–19. Morimoto, Anri (1995). Jonathan Edwards and the Catholic Vision of Salvation. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press. Nolan, Kirk  J. (2014). Reformed Virtue After Barth: Developing Moral Virtue Ethics in the Reformed Tradition. Louisville, Ky: Westminster John Knox Press. Pauw, Amy Plantinga (2002). The Supreme Harmony of All: The Trinitarian Theology of Jonathan Edwards. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans. Porter, Jean (1990). The Recovery of Virtue. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Price, Richard (1969). A Review of the Principal Questions of Morals. 1758, 3rd edn 1787. Selected passages in The British Moralists, 1650–1800, ed. D. D. Raphael, 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 2: 131–98. Spohn, William  C. (1981). ‘Sovereign Beauty: Jonathan Edwards and the Nature of True Virtue.’ Theological Studies 42: 394–421. Vos, Pieter (2015). ‘Calvinists Among the Virtues: Reformed Theological Contributions to Ward, Roger  A. (2004). Conversion in American Philosophy: Exploring the Practice of Transformation. New York: Fordham University Press. Wilson, Stephen  A. (2005). Virtue Reformed: A New Reading of Jonathan Edwards’s Ethics. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.

Author Bio Elizabeth Agnew Cochran (Ph.D. University of Notre Dame, 2007) is Professor of Theology at Duquesne University. She is the author of two monographs, Protestant Virtue and Stoic Ethics (Bloomsbury/T&T Clark, 2018) and Receptive Human Virtues: A New Reading of Jonathan Edwards’s Ethics (Penn State University Press, 2011). She has also published articles in numerous journals including the Journal of Religious Ethics, Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, and Studies in Christian Ethics.

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chapter 19

A esth etics William Dyrness and Christi Wells

A growing number of scholars have argued not only that beauty and aesthetics lie at the centre of Jonathan Edwards’s thought, but that his views on the connection of beauty to God and God’s activity represents one of his most original contributions to theology (Delattre 1968; Farley 2001; Mitchell 2018). The close relationship of beauty to holiness appeared in his earliest reflections: ‘Holiness is a most beautiful and lovely thing . . .  [T]here is nothing in it but what is sweet and ravishingly lovely. ’Tis the highest beauty and amiableness vastly above all other beauties. ’Tis a divine beauty, makes the soul heavenly and far purer than anything here on earth’ (‘Misc’ a WJE 13: 163). And when later he came to reflect on the end for which God created the world, Edwards would see God’s disposition to communicate his own beauty in space and time as that which ‘excited God to give creatures existence’ (WJE 8: 434). In this article we will argue that Edwards’s ideas of beauty and attraction, grounded in his understanding of the ongoing work of God communicated in creation, though limited by the neo-platonic framework he inherited, expanded the reach of theological language even as it enriched the developing conversation about aesthetics. His close observation of creation led him to believe its beauty was a revelation of God almost on a par with Scripture itself (Lowance 1970, 143). But as a pastor immersed in the life and struggles of his congregation, Edwards’s view of beauty and God’s working also grew from a careful observation of the spiritual experiences he witnessed. Like Calvin before him, he was concerned with the reformation of worship—what that Reformer had called pietas; Edwards was concerned above all with discovering the nature of genuine religious experience—as opposed to the shallow show of emotions. This empirical and practical orientation allowed his growing sense of beauty to be fully embodied and rooted in the renewing work of the Spirit. He was convinced that true religion was above all the experience of God’s beauty. In what follows we will seek to show how this sense of beauty is grounded in Edwards’s dynamic view of God’s presence as this manifested itself in the spiritual life of believers, even as his neo-platonic metaphysic limited the historical impact of his aesthetic theology.

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Aesthetics   297

Edwards as Pastoral Theologian Edwards’s lifelong work as a pastor served as the starting point and context of his theological reflection—many of his theological contributions were first offered in the form of sermons. It was natural then that his theology addressed itself to the heart; Edwards consistently appealed to the imagination to mobilize the response of his congregation. A central aim of his preaching was to present an image that the listener could hold in mind, and that would move the affections—what Edwards addressed as the ‘sense of the heart’. Nehemiah Strong, later a lecturer at Yale, reported hearing Edwards preach on the final judgment. This was part of a series on the ‘History of Redemption’ Edwards preached in 1739, when Strong was only ten. He reports how the scene was laid out before him in a way that he would not forget. Hearing Edwards’s account of the final judgment his mind ‘was wrought up to such a pitch . . . [that] he waited with the deepest and most solemn solicitude to hear the trumpet sound and the archangel call; to see the graves open, the dead arise and the judge descend in the glory of his Father, with all his holy angels; and was deeply disappointed when the day terminated and left the world in its usual state of tranquility’.1 As we will argue below, this real life setting made it possible for Edwards’s aesthetic to be framed in multi-sensory and dramatic categories that carried deep implications for theological discourse, as well as for the developing understanding of aesthetics. John Locke, who Edwards read early in his career, persuaded the preacher that knowledge was based on the actual experience of the world. But as Norman Fiering points out, Edwards aligned himself rather with the theo-centric metaphysicians on the Continent than with the English empiricists. From these thinkers he came to interpret divine sovereignty in terms of concurrence in the ongoing creation, saw teleology as the ultimate level of explanation, and accepted the neo-platonic typological system—which meant rejecting Descartes’ view of extension as the essence of matter (Fiering  1988, 75–83). These intellectual resources were mobilized in the service of Edwards’s reading and preaching of Scripture. This meant the ideas of Locke were understood rather as images which Edwards understood in a visual sense, as pictures which could be formed in the mind in order to move the heart. The neo-platonic framework meant these images were interpreted figuratively, as external expressions (or types) of a deeper spiritual ­reality. This deeper reality was the dynamic presence and work of God. Though treated elsewhere in this volume, for our purposes, it is important to note that for Edwards God’s Being is both actual and dispositional. As Sang Hun Lee describes this Edwards has introduced ‘dynamism into the being of God without compromising God’s prior actuality’. Further this disposition ‘is completely exercised through the inner-trinitarian 1  This reminiscence of Nehemiah Strong is included in Timothy Dwight’s Travels in New England and New York, as quoted in WJE 9: 8–9.

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298   William Dyrness and Christi Wells relationships’ (Lee 1988, 6).2 Significant for purposes of this chapter is Edwards’s claim not only that God’s being is of surpassing beauty and fulness, but that this Being is dispositional, that is disposed to communicate its fulness to the creature, especially as the Spirit kindles what Edwards calls the sweet benevolence of Christ in the believer.

Edwards and Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics Edwards’s vocabulary of God’s dynamic inclination to communicate, both to create and to beautify the creature with God’s own excellency and proportion, reflects its eighteenth-century context, even as it goes beyond it. European conversations about aesthetics and beauty were in the early stages of development during Edwards’s life. On the Continent Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten virtually coined the term ‘aesthetics’ when he wrote his famous Aesthetica in 1750, which interestingly makes no appearance in Edwards’s opus. In addition to appearing after Edwards’s thinking was formed, Baumgarten was moving in a different direction than Edwards. Following his teacher Christian Wolff, Baumgarten sought to separate the various ‘sciences’, distinguishing for example theology from philosophy. Baumgarten accordingly defined ‘aesthetics’ as Scientia cognitionis sensitivae, or the science of sensuous knowledge, over against logic as a source of theoretical knowledge (Thiessen 2004, 156). Edwards’s sources—Francis Hutcheson and Lord Shaftesbury—were representatives of the Scottish Enlightenment which moved toward a more holistic description of human experience. Writing in 1726 Hutcheson defined beauty as that internal sense stimulated by external objects acting upon the body, expressing qualities—proportion, unity in diversity, harmony—that excite the senses (Hutcheson  1969/1726). While Continental philosophers were busy distinguishing the sciences into the recognizably modern categories, these Scottish thinkers sought to integrate notions of beauty and goodness. Francis Hutcheson defined beauty as the perception of some mind—were there no mind, he writes, there could not be objects called beautiful—and allied this inner sense with the ability to know, or feel the rightness or wrongness of an act.3 Edwards borrows heavily from this tradition and speaks often of the excellency of proportion and patterns of symmetry. But his neoplatonic framework allowed him to put these ideas, as dispositions in the mind of God,

2  Lee sees this dynamic and relational ontology as a very modern description of the nature of reality. Lee’s formulation of the dispositional character of God, while widely influential, has been subject to criticism by Stephen Holmes and Oliver Crisp. They argue Lee’s claim that the divine being is a disposition rather than a substance or pure form, implies a doctrine of the trinity that diverges from catholic orthodoxy (Crisp 2012, 54–5). 3  An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of BEAUTY and VIRTUE; In Two Treatises (London, 1726), reprinted in Paul McReynolds, ed. 1969, 2, 7, 14, and see McReynolds’ introduction where he notes Hutcheson’s indebtedness to Shaftesbury with respect to this inner sense.

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Aesthetics   299 into effective motion, as a dynamic process of creative communication of divine beauty to the creature. Though Edwards’s language was rich in aesthetic implications this did not connect directly with the art produced during this period for two primary reasons, one philosophical and one cultural. First, the beauty of any object is necessarily secondary beauty within Edwards’s aesthetic system, because an object cannot consent to being. Further, as we will show below, any aesthetic value an object may have is not inherent within the object, but rather depends on its recognition by a consenting viewer (WJE 8: 561, 564–5). Thus, for Edwards, the beauty of any specific artwork or artefact ought always to be secondary to the higher, spiritual beauty of being’s consent to being-in-general, which is the more central concern in his oeuvre. This philosophical predisposition toward the spiritual is amplified by the social context of colonial Massachusetts, which was informed by a Puritan distaste for material ostentatiousness. Compounded with this was the colony’s remote location and the pragmatism needed to survive on the frontier, with the result that art objects such as paintings, perhaps excepting portraits, were at the periphery of Edwards’s cultural world (Lovell 2005, 7–9). In the New England context, the assumption that things should be ‘useful’ meant that well-crafted, functional items would have been preferred (Dyrness 2004, 191). That this was the milieu within which Edwards operated is evidenced in the fact that the few examples he does give of material culture are more oriented toward craft. His mention of a mortise and tenon joint or a piece of embroidery, framed by his discussion of secondary beauty, calls to mind a world of high-boy chests and stitched samplers, rather than academic painting (WJE 8: 563, 573). Neither Edwards’s philosophy nor his social context was likely to engender a fruitful discussion with contemporary art, yet beauty remained central to his thought. As expressions of God’s creative communication, creatures invariably reflect their creator—in Edwards’s terminology they are types of the divine reality that underlies and sustains them. This ontology and the resulting typology shape his understanding of beauty. In ‘Images of Divine Things’ he specifies the world is a ‘mappe and shadow’ of God’s being and will. Though, as he writes elsewhere in that treatise, some things, both in Scripture and creation, are more ‘lively’ than others: ‘Everything seems to aim in this way; and in some things the image is very lively, in others the image but faint and the resemblance in but few particulars’ (WJE 11: 114). Note in particular the focus is on images, not ideas, and images that do their work—are lively, that is draw the heart toward God. Their ‘lively’ character could evoke emotions of terror and awe as well as delight, as his sermons famously illustrate. This led Edwards, writing in the Nature of True Virtue, to distinguish primary and secondary beauty. Beauty reflects the mutual attraction of being, what Edwards calls the ‘consent of being’, the highest of which is the spiritual consent of the human will with God, which is constitutive of true virtue. Such spiritual consent Edwards designates as Primary Beauty. Consistent with his Scottish sources, and indeed with the biblical tradition behind this, beauty is also a moral quality: ‘Virtue is the beauty of those qualities and acts of the mind that are of a moral nature, i.e. such as are attended with desert or worthiness of praise or blame’ (WJE 8: 539 his

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300   William Dyrness and Christi Wells emphasis). This consent to being represents primary beauty. Secondary beauty resides in the created order as this reflects (‘resembles’) the deeper beauty of God. But the purpose of this secondary beauty—the beauty of flowers, mountain, and seascapes—is to ‘assist those whose hearts are under a truly virtuous temper,’ Edwards writes, ‘to dispose them to the exercises of divine love, and enliven in them a sense of spiritual beauty’ (WJE 8: 565). Edwards saw that God’s purposes were to awaken in his congregation what he called ‘just affections’; the tendency to love others in proportion to the degree of their virtue embodies an attraction in which ‘a truly virtuous temper, relishes and delights’, reflecting the ultimate benevolence of Being itself (WJE 8: 571–2). God’s benevolence for Edwards flows forth as from a fountain, and ‘from his goodness, as it were [He] enlarges himself in a more excellent and divine manner . . . flowing forth and expressing himself in [the creature] and making them to partake of him, and rejoicing in himself expressed in them and communicated to them’ (WJE 8: 461–2). The goal of this is that the Holy Spirit dwelling in the believer produces a ‘sense of the heart’ that manifests God’s beauty and creates beautiful affections in the believer (see Mitchell 2007, 33–46). The consistent focus of Edwards on the goodness and beauty of the created order recalls the aesthetic attention that John Calvin gave to creation. Louis Mitchell has suggested the Edwards articulated his orthodox Calvinism ‘in a developed aesthetic language’ (Mitchell 2007, 36). Though Edwards was a Calvinist he did not frequently cite that reformer’s works.4 Still a comparison of their views of creation may offer a helpful perspective on Edwards’s achievement. As is well known, Calvin begins his Institutes, with a long exposition of the glories of creation: ‘Wherever you cast your eyes, there is no spot in the universe wherein you cannot discern at least some sparks of his glory. You cannot in one glance survey the most vast and beautiful system of the universe, in its wide expanse without being completely overwhelmed by the boundless force of its brightness’ (Calvin 1960, I, v. 1). As with Edwards this spectacle has a spiritual intention, as Calvin says in his commentary on Exodus 20:4–6), ‘whatever is seen above or below invites us to the true God’ (Calvin 1948, ad loc.). There is even in both a reference to God’s accommodation to human understanding, though with a distinctive difference. Edwards insists in a famous passage (on the Trinity) that ‘the whole creation, which is but the shadows of beings, is so made as to represent spiritual things . . . This is God’s manner, to make inferior things shadows of the superior and most excellent . . . Thus God glorifies himself and instructs the minds he has made’ (WJE 13: 434–5). Calvin’s notion of accommodation works with different premises. For Calvin it is the rhetoric of Scripture, not of creation, that represents God’s accommodation and that God uses to instruct human minds. For example, Scriptures speak of God as our enemy in order for us to understand his mercy in sending Christ. Such hyperbole Calvin uses to call attention to human intransigence and limited understanding. As he writes: ‘Expressions 4  This is how Edwards defined their relationship in Freedom of the Will: ‘I should not take it all amiss, to be called a Calvinist, for distinction’s sake: though 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’ (WJE 8: 750n4).

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Aesthetics   301 of this sort have been accommodated to our capacity that we may better understand how miserable and ruinous our condition is apart from Christ’ (Calvin 1960, II, xvi, 2). In contrast with Edwards, Calvin never suggests creation and its splendour are merely types, or figures of a deeper spiritual reality. Calvin would not have framed the relationship in Edward’s terms: ‘The material world, and all things pertaining to it, is by the Creator wholly subordinated to the spiritual and moral world’ (WJE 11: 61). Rather for Calvin creation stands in for God in a substantial way, so that the order that it represents has both a moral and aesthetic weight (Dyrness 2019, 72–79). Indeed Calvin, after his extensive praise of creation’s beauty, could go so far as to admit, ‘I confess . . . that it can be said reverently, provided that it proceeds from a reverent mind, that nature is God’ (Calvin 1960, I, v, 5). Though his belief that the world cannot hold God leads him to immediately qualify this by pointing out that ‘since nature is rather the order which has been established by God, it is harmful in such weighty matters, in which special devotion is due, to involve God confusedly in the inferior course of his works’. Nothing would indicate that, for Calvin, creation’s beauty represents a secondary expression of God’s glory. A parallel reference to the role of colour illustrates this difference. Edwards affirms in his ‘Images of Divine Things’: ‘The beautiful variety of colors of light was designed as a type of the various beauties and graces of the Spirit of God’ (WJE 11: 67). Calvin by contrast can promote the beauty of colours as an end in itself; the reformer asks: ‘Has the Lord clothed flowers with the great beauty that greets our eyes, the sweetness of smell that is wafted upon our nostrils . . . Did he not, in short, render many things attractive to us, apart from their necessary use?’ (Calvin 1960, III, x, 2). Whatever their role in drawing the heart to the praise of the creator, these things are given for enjoyment pure and simple. As we will argue in what follows, Edwards’s typology undermines the substantial character of creation’s goodness and beauty, so that, with respect to the purely aesthetic meaning of physical beauty, Edwards’s Neo-Platonism takes away with one hand what has been given with the other.

Beauty and Religious Affections This tension becomes clearly evident in Edwards’s extensive discussion of true and false religious affections during the Great Awakening. His empirical inclination appropriately leads him to explore the testimonies of those touched by the awakening, displaying an almost modern sense of what we call qualitative research. However, Edwards’s assessment of the revivals should be situated within the context of his broader empirical inquiries. Edwards’s emphasis on consent to beauty allows him in his more empirical writings to draw conclusions about our experience of God that, in some cases, provide a more generous reading of the material world and God’s self-communication than his typological writings. At the same time, when addressing the revivals, he consistently moves the focus toward the spiritual, rather than the material, which we argue undermines the substantial character of God’s self-communication by limiting any independent role for beauty.

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302   William Dyrness and Christi Wells The kinds of conclusions Edwards is able to draw from his empirical observations are framed by his neo-platonic aesthetic, in which kinds of beauty relate to one another in a hierarchical fashion, with primary or spiritual beauty elevated above secondary or natural beauty (Mitchell 2007, 41). In addition to this, the primary and secondary beauty are manifested differently in relation to God, humans, and the physical world. At the highest level, primary beauty has its source in the being of God and the ­consenting relationship of God to Godself within the Trinity (Mitchell 2007, 38)—a relationship, or ‘consent’, that constitutes primary beauty. Since Edwards also understands God to be the only necessary being, who upholds the rest of creation (WJE 6: 203–4), one is led to think of primary beauty manifested within the Trinity as necessary and ideal beauty, on which all other beauty is dependent. The human relationship to beauty is more complex, because while primary beauty within the Trinity is necessary, for humans it is contingent. There are human beings who participate in primary beauty, who, as Delattre stresses, ‘cordially’ consent to being-in-general (Delattre 1968, 21). Yet only these saints, who have the proper ‘sense of the heart’, truly recognize the beauty that is primary, ideal, or divine. Through this sense, brought about as a direct influence of the Holy Spirit, saints can recognize the image of being-in-general manifested in the natural world (Mitchell 2018, 30). Natural man, on the other hand, cannot fully recognize beauty in the material world, seeing only the secondary beauty of harmony and proportion internal to physical creation or human relationships. This apprehension of secondary beauty is in accordance with God’s intention, but does not entail that natural man recognizes ‘the ground and rule of beauty in the case’, just as one might enjoy a pleasant tune without knowledge of acoustics or music theory (WJE 8: 566). Edwards goes on to note that the difference between the apprehension of primary and secondary beauty is that natural man recognizes beauty strictly through the sensation of pleasure, rather than through ‘that spiritual cordial agreement wherein original beauty consists’, which would require the ‘sense of the heart’ (WJE 8: 567). The material world poses a different problem, since it cannot ‘consent’ in the same way humans do. As such, its relationship to primary beauty is contingent on the perception of human beings. Dellatre has shown how secondary beauty constitutes the law of proportion, which governs the natural world (Dellatre 1968, 185–88 and cf. WJE 6: 380–1). This is as close as bodies come to consent on their own. However, Sang Lee argues that ‘the natural world, when rightly perceived by the regenerate imagination of the saints, is the corporeal repetition of God’s own beauty,’ and an analogue to primary beauty (Lee 1988, 89). Lee also seeks to show how the saints’ perceptions relate to natural laws and proportions, arguing that the material world always exists virtually in the laws by which God has ordered the universe, but because of Edwards’s relational ontology, it  is fully actualized only when this is recognized by perceiving human beings (Lee 1988, 89–95). A divide in Edwards’s aesthetics should now become apparent. While God is primary beauty, the contingent nature of humans and other created things results in a distinction, indeed a gulf, between the saints and natural man, the spiritual and the material, and

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Aesthetics   303 primary and secondary beauty. Further, secondary beauty and the material world are subordinated to the spiritual and primary beauty in a hierarchical fashion. The result is that, in his empirical inquiries into God’s self-communication–both in nature and in the revivals–Edwards must constantly navigate this bifurcation. One way that Edwards does this is through typology, allowing the natural to point beyond itself. Yet, the ability of the saints to perceive primary beauty in the physical world suggests a more direct route across the divide. Mitchell points out that because ‘the structure of being-in-general is that of beauty’, there is an ‘aesthetic character in the laws of nature’ through which God’s self-expression, ad extra, is made evident (Mitchell  2018, 29–30). For Edwards, there is a real, deep, ontological connection between the beauty of the physical world as perceived through the senses, and the beauty of God. However, it would seem that the route across the divide is a one-way street, where primary beauty is only accessed ‘from above’. Since the ability of the saints to recognize primary beauty in creation via the ‘sense of the heart’ is a direct work of the Holy Spirit, and creation’s actualized participation in primary beauty is dependent on the saints’ perception, the aesthetic value of the physical world is always gifted from above, rather than inherent. This raises at least two significant issues. First, for natural man, beauty is only fully accessible on the secondary level. However, the Holy Spirit may externally aid humans’ natural capacities such that they have some idea of divine things from the natural world. This is what Edwards calls the ‘common’, as opposed to the ‘special’ work of the Holy Spirit in ‘Miscellany’ 782 (WJE 8: 462). It is the special work that corresponds to the new ‘sense of the heart’ (See also A Divine and Supernatural Light, WJE 17: 410–12). The oblique knowledge of divine things that ­natural man can glean from the world, while not salvific, may be preparatory for the ­saving work of the Holy Spirit, which perhaps explains the aesthetic (and dramatic) qualities of so many of Edwards’s sermons (Mitchell  2018, 24–25). However, it also shows how Edwards’s hierarchy effectively limits God’s self-communication in creation. The external work of the Holy Spirit results in human conviction, or ‘an ideal view of God’s greatness manifested in creation and in scripture’ (Mitchell 2018, 25). From an aesthetic standpoint, natural man can have sensible knowledge of secondary beauty in the world and ideal knowledge of God, but full, sensible knowledge of God is only communicated to those with the ‘sense of the heart’. A second issue concerns the created world itself. Edwards’s hierarchical aesthetic lends itself not to the recognition of the beauty of the world, but the beauty of God in the world. The emphasis that his relational ontology places on beauty as cordial consent to being-in-general entails a concomitant trivialization of particular material beings. While this allows Edwards to affirm the possibility of God’s self-disclosure as an aesthetic, embodied experience, creation qua creation matters far less than creation as a means of God’s self-communication. This tendency manifests itself early in Edwards’s corpus. In the “Spider” letter of 1723 Edwards provides a detailed description of his observations of the ‘wondrous and curious work of the spider’ (WJE 6: 163). The corollaries that flow from his empirical observation show how Edwards sees divine beauty in relation to natural world: the

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304   William Dyrness and Christi Wells ability of spiders to spin threads is due to the ‘wisdom of the Creator’, while the spiders’ seeming enjoyment of their apparent flying results from ‘the exuberant goodness of the Creator’. Yet Edwards also believed that ‘the chief end of this faculty that is given them is not their recreation, but their destruction’ (WJE 6: 167). From this he draws the corollary that ‘the wisdom of the creator is also admirable in . . . so adjusting their destruction to their multiplication they do neither increase, but taking one year with another, there is always an equal number of them’ (WJE 6: 168–9). Recalling that Edwards’ aesthetic ideal is one of harmony and proportion, with ­special attention given to complexity, his empirical observations of arachnid behaviour lead him to the divine beauty that upholds the world. Divine beauty orders and sustains creation in such a way that there is always the precise, proportionally correct number of creatures. This is a more generous reading of these creatures than we find in Edwards’s typological understanding of the spider, which consistently points to what is wicked or demonic (WJE 11: 97, 107, 135). However, the individual spiders themselves seem to be expendable, and almost tangential to Edwards’s point. This is a result of the manner in which Edwards subordinates the physical to the spiritual; the spiders are not mere images or types, but in the end their meaning is spiritual rather than aesthetic. The prioritization of the spiritual over the material also colours Edwards’s accounts and analysis of the revivals. While Edwards pays careful attention to empirical evidence surrounding the revivals, he always moves toward the spiritual. His own ‘Personal Narrative’ is typical of this approach (Mitchell 2018, 81). He writes, ‘God’s excellency, his wisdom, his purity and love, seemed to appear in everything; in the sun, moon and stars; in the clouds and blue sky; in the grass, flowers and trees; in the water and all nature . . .’ (WJE 16: 794). Notice that Edwards is not interested in his concrete experience of the beauty of the sun or the trees for their own sake, but only as they show forth God’s excellency and wisdom. At the same time, the attention Edwards gives to embodied experience sets him apart from those who, like Charles Chauncey, sought to discount the physical manifestations of the revivals simply as an arousal of the passions (Dyrness 2004, 180). For Edwards, because God is disposed to communicate himself in and to creation, and because those humans who consent to being-in-general share this same relational aspect, especially regarding the material world, it is not surprising that the development of the ‘sense of the heart’ could be manifested in both spiritual and physical ways. This is evident in the fact that in both the Affections and Distinguishing Marks, those signs that most involve sense experience, that ‘have effects on the bodies of men’ or make ‘great impressions on their imagination’ are not discounted as necessarily false signs (WJE 4: 230–5; 2, 131). However, they are generally insufficient, or negative signs, while positive signs are more spiritual in nature. John E. Smith suggests that this also reflects a correlation to the ‘common’ rather than ‘saving’ work of the Holy Spirit, an idea which we suggested limits how Edwards understands God’s self-disclosure in creation (WJE 2: 22–5). The way in which access to primary beauty is determined ‘from above’ resurfaces here. The outward, bodily manifestations of the revival experience do not point toward conversion on their

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Aesthetics   305 own; rather, they may represent an overflow of the spiritual awakening expressed in the ‘positive signs’ into all of life. Kathryn Reklis has made the helpful suggestion that we might think of Edwards’s sermons as scripts, which allow for an embodied enactment of revival theology. For Reklis, the ecstatic behaviours surrounding the revivals provide a pattern for understanding what being ‘swallowed up in God’s sovereignty’, or embraced by primary beauty, might look like (Reklis 2014, 59, 95–99). While Edwards’s understanding of the human reception of God’s beauty begins with the spiritual, it also, Mitchell notes, ‘tends toward expression in practice’, making God’s beauty in the life of the saint visible to the community (Mitchell 2018, 72–73). Consider Edwards’s case studies from the revivals in the Faithful Narrative, Abigail Hutchinson and Phebe Bartlett. Here Edwards gives serious weight to the experiences of a severely ill young woman and small child, including the physical manifestations of their experience—in Abigail’s case fainting, in Phebe’s, writhing and crying (WJE 4: 194, 200). These expressions, however, are carefully reinforced by other, more ‘spiritual’, indications of their ‘sense of the heart’. Abigail exhibits a sense of Christ’s excellency, as well as a love for all humans who are God’s creation (consent to being-in-general), and a sense of God’s glory appearing in nature (WJE 4: 194–5). Four-year-old Phebe experiences a complete change in her physical demeanour, yet Edwards is also careful to distinguish her vision of the divine from ‘any imagination of things seen with bodily eyes’ (WJE 4: 201). Their physical expressions constitute the embodied overflow of their spiritual experience that is visible to Edwards and others, perhaps in a manner parallel to the overflow of God’s own fulness in creation. Thus, in line with the rest of Edwards’s thinking, while he is able to affirm the physical, its meaning is still subordinated to the spiritual; it is gifted ‘from above’.

Conclusion Edwards’s insistence that beauty is a virtue expressing the consent to being that forms viewers as it attracts them to consent to its source in God, ties together the experiences of beauty and goodness in the closest possible way. It is significant that the most significant pages describing this beauty are to be found in Edwards’s work On the Nature of True Virtue which highlights the deep interconnection between the consent to being and virtuous love. Beauty is a theological virtue, grounded in the very being and action of God. This vibrant conception of beauty in turn reflects a dynamic conception of God who is completely perfect and creatively self-expressive (Lee  2009, 171). Connecting God actively to creation while preserving the divine actuality suggests a dynamic conception of God, that, one might suggest, Calvin was reaching for in his daring suggestion that nature is God. God’s creative self-expression in/as history, for Edwards, is not merely an emanation, but a purposive, and interpersonal expression of the innertrinitarian fulness. As he says: God is ‘infinitely the most beautiful and excellent: and all

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306   William Dyrness and Christi Wells the beauty to be found throughout the whole creation is but the reflection of the diffused beams of that Being’ (WJE 8: 550). Moreover, Edwards’s striking description of the beauty of God’s creation, and his careful observation of his congregation during the revival, implied beauty was something experienced in its concreteness. Sang Lee believes that this represents an original contribution to Western understanding of beauty and knowledge. Ideas, or images, are grasped together in their concrete forms not by abstracting their common qualities (Lee  2009, 118). This is something that humans by their very nature are disposed to do, an insight that modern cognitive psychologists have been able to show. Still by insisting that beauty is ‘consent’, that is registered in the (mental) agreement with creation’s order and proportion as expressive of God’s own inward beauty, both the experience of beauty and the object in which this inheres become simple conveyances to a higher spiritual end. One does not ultimately enjoy sunsets and the morning freshness for their own sake, one is really summoned by these experiences to enjoy God—what is enjoyable in them is God’s own beauty. As Edwards writes in ‘Images of Divine Things’, ‘The works of God are but a kind of voice or language of God to instruct intelligent beings in things pertaining to himself ’ (WJE 11: 67). While this enhances their role as revelation—almost like Scripture, it diminishes their value as ends in themselves—ends that might even be said to express, in their own creaturely way, God’s own special goodness and beauty. This weakness of course is grounded in Edwards’s ontology: God is the only true substance, all created substances partake and express this reality—what Oliver Crisp calls Edwards’s ‘mental phenomenalism’, or objective idealism. Though there appears to be law-like processes at work in creation, this is ultimately an illusion. Edwards’s view of God’s sovereignty could not allow that God would be subject to such natural laws—they represent rather the contingent, arbitrary creative acts which God at  every moment performs (Crisp  2012, 33 and 27). But why should the creature be ­relegated to the shadows? The astonishing qualities of spiders and flying insects that Edwards celebrates, we argue, deserve a more solid and substantial presence than Edwards’s Neo-Platonism and occasionalism can provide. The creature for Edwards is both promoted and belittled, it expresses the intimacy of God’s own essential creativity, but in the process it loses its stubborn independence. Because of this dichotomy, only the redeemed person, as enabled by the Holy Spirit, properly sees the beauty of creation. Only this experience, this consent to being, properly fulfils God’s purposes for creation. As Sang Lee puts this: ‘When a converted person perceives and delights in the beauty of a tree, the full destiny of that tree is truly actualized’ (Lee 2009, 122). By contrast for Edwards even love for a lower proportion can be ‘odious’ because ‘a lower proportion is often a deformity, because it is contrary to a more general proportion’ (‘The Mind’, WJE 6: 338). From the context it is clear that this deformity results essentially from its bodily character, for earlier in the paragraph he has just written: ‘As nothing else has a proper being but spirits, and as bodies are but the shadow of being, therefore the consent of bodies to one another, and the harmony that is among them, is but the shadow of excellency’ (WJE 6: 337). It is not clear whether this bodily consent can be odious because of its moral inadequacies, or simply by its bodily

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Aesthetics   307 character, its finitude. But how can bodily proportion be ‘odious’ when Scriptures insist that the ‘heavens are telling the glory of God’ (Ps. 19:1)? And why should the beauty of creation only be assessed from above, and not from below? One of the functions of Calvin’s extravagant description of creation as a theatre for the Glory of God, was to replace the medieval hierarchy and mystic journey to God with a call to discover God’s purposes in everyday life. Truth is understood horizontally and not simply vertically. This gave to the creature and human experience in the world a moral weight, and an aesthetic potential, that is undermined by Edwards’s Neo-Platonism. Calvin and the Reformed tradition after him have insisted that the relevant dichotomy is between God and creation, not between the physical and spiritual. Calvin’s description of creation drew fresh and careful attention to the solidity of things, something that was later embodied in the dramatic landscapes of Jacob von Ruisdael or in the streets and house of Delft painted by Jan Vermeer. Edwards own sense of things was also to have an aesthetic impact on subsequent generations. Ralph Waldo Emerson partook in his own way in Edwards’s awakening. As Lawrence Buell notes, Emerson represented the long American tradition of dissent and awakening that goes back to Anne Hutcheson and Jonathan Edwards; Emerson’s moral sentiment was a ‘secular descendent of Jonathan Edwards’s “divine and supernatural light”’ (Buell 2003, 160, 167). But for Emerson there is no personal God funding nature’s moral energy, it is rather a call of nature’s own depths—Edwards’s dichotomy has been supplanted; God’s sovereignty replaced by nature’s movement of the soul. The specific aesthetic potential of Edwards’s work that we have described would await another century and more to be fully explored. His expansive view of beauty, and its connection to love anticipates many subsequent discussions of beauty—even for those unaware of this precedent. Partially sparked by what might be described as an aesthetic turn in theology, scholars have focused on Edwards’s insistence on the centrality of beauty for the theological project. He has frequently been compared with the Catholic theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar, whose emphasis on salvation through the form of beauty in history and the cross has been argued to correct Edwards’s natural theology, recovering in the process his theology’s Protestant character (Ievins 2019).

Works Cited Buell, Lawrence (2003). Emerson, Cambridge: Harvard University/Belknap Press,. Calvin, John (1960). Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John  T.  McNeill, Philadelphia: Westminster Press. Calvin, John (1948). Commentary on Exodus, Trans. C. W. Bingham, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Crisp, Oliver (2012). Jonathan Edwards on God and Creation. New York: Oxford University Press. Delattre, Roland (1968). Beauty and Sensibility in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards, New Haven: Yale University Press. Dyrness, William (2004). Reformed Theology and Visual Culture: The Protestant Imagination from Calvin to Edwards. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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308   William Dyrness and Christi Wells Dyrness, William (2019). The Origin of Protestant Aesthetics in the Early Modern Period: Calvin’s Reformation Poetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Farley, Edward (2001). Faith and Beauty: A Theological Aesthetic. Burlington: Ashgate. Fiering, Norman (1988). ‘The Rationalist Foundations of Edwards’s Metaphysic’ in Nathan Hatch and Harry Stout, eds Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience, New York: Oxford University Press. 75–91. Hutcheson, Francis (1969). An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of BEAUTY and VIRTUE; In Two Treatises (London: 1726), reprinted in McReynolds, Paul, Four Early Works on Motivation. Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints. Ievins, John Fricis (2019). Love, Glory and Beauty in Jonathan Edwards and Hans Urs von Balthasar, PhD Dissertation, Durham: Durham University. Lee, Sang Hyun (1988). The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards, Princeton University Press. Lee, Sang Hyun (2009). ‘Edwards and Beauty,’ in ed. G.  R.  McDermott, Understanding Jonathan Edwards: An Introduction to America’s Theologian. New York: Oxford University Press. 113–23. Lovell, Margaretta M. (2005). Art in a Season of Revolution: Painters, Artisans and Patrons in Early America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lowance, Mason I. (1970). ‘Images and Shadows of Divine Things: The Typology of Jonathan Edwards,’ Early American Literature, 5/1: 141–77. Mitchell, Louis (2018). Jonathan Edwards on the Experience of Beauty. Eugene: Wipf and Stock. Mitchell, Louis (2007). ‘The Theological Aesthetic of Jonathan Edwards,’ Theology Today, 64 (1): 36–46. Reklis, Kathryn (2014). Theology and the Kinesthetic Imagination: Jonathan Edwards and the Making of Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thiessen, Gesa Elsbeth (2004). Theological Aesthetics: A Reader. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

Author Bios William Dyrness is Senior Professor of Theology and Culture at Fuller Theological Seminary, in Pasadena California. His research focuses on the aesthetics of the Protestant tradition. He is author of Reformed Theology and Visual Culture: The Protestant Imagination from Calvin to Edwards (2004), Poetic Theology: God and the Poetics of Everyday Life (2011), and most recently The Origin of Protestant Aesthetic in Early Modern Europe: Calvin’s Reformation Poetics (2019). Christi Wells is a PhD candidate in Theology and Culture at Fuller Theological Seminary, and Adjunct Professor of Theology and Interdisciplinary Studies at Lincoln Christian University in Lincoln, Illinois. Her research centres around the relationship between visual culture and corporate worship, with special attention to rural social contexts and the Stone-Campbell Movement.

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chapter 20

Im agi nation a n d Her m en eu tics Kathryn Reklis

At first glance, imagination and hermeneutics might seem strange bedfellows in the thought of any eighteenth-century thinker. In most Anglo-American and European thought of the time, the imagination was a dangerous faculty, the opposite of clear and distinct thought. It would seem to be at direct odds with ‘hermeneutics’ as a system of interpretation, especially, but not limited to, biblical interpretation. If one wished to arrive at a reliable hermeneutic—of scripture, nature, or history—that could withstand the growing scepticism toward Christian orthodoxy that plagued Edwards’s ministry, ‘imagination’ would not seem like a reliable bedrock on which to ground it. This chapter, however, will argue that the sanctified imagination is key to understanding Edwards’s overall hermeneutic, which will be defined as his system of typology whereby any and everything—textual, material, or ideational—can and does point to the nature of being as God’s self-communication and the work of God reconciling all things to God’s self in redemption. It will trace scholarly debates about Edwards’s place in eighteenth-century epistemological controversies, his conflictual relationship with the idea of the ‘imagination’ within these debates, and scholarly attempts to understand his unique system of typology as his particular hermeneutical theory. I will argue that it is possible to reconcile Edwards’s conflicting feelings toward the imagination—as a ne­ces­sary but dangerous faculty in knowing/sensing the work of God—with his theory of interpretation. In so doing, we can extend how we think about the imagination in Edwards’s work beyond what he might have intended. The chapter ends with suggestions for future directions for scholarship by thinking of his typological system as a form  of ‘imperial epistemology’ that expands how we think of Edwards’s colonial ­context and places Edwards in conversation with projects to constitute (or trouble) the modern subject. As will become clear in what follows, the terms of this chapter (as perhaps all chapters in this volume) intersect almost immediately with the terms of other chapters: the im­agin­ation is deeply connected to affections and aesthetics; so too is hermeneutics

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310   Kathryn Reklis connected to biblical exegesis, history and eschatology, and to Edwards’s philosophy of nature. And all of these terms are connected, for Edwards, to his ontology and epis­ tem­ol­ogy and to the order of salvation and the nature of God as Trinity. In an effort to see the particular debates surrounding the terms of this essay, it is easiest to start with the imagination and the eighteenth-century philosophical suspicion toward im­agin­ ation as a distraction to, if not destroyer of, clear and distinct thought, before connecting debates about the imagination to debates about Edwards’s theory of interpretation in his system of typology.

The Dangers and Promise of the Imagination in Eighteenth-Century Philosophy and Edwards’s Theology In our common use of the word ‘imagination’ we can see traces of the debates that preoccupied Edwards and his contemporaries. We might speak of something as ‘pure im­agin­ation’ or ‘nothing but imagination’—meaning something entirely made up, fanciful, and divorced from reality and fact. Or we might urge a colleague to ‘use a little imagination’ or ‘try to imagine it’—referring to an ability to think beyond the appearance of things to see something equally true (or possibly true) that does not immediately confront our senses. These two possibilities for the imagination were hotly debated in Edwards’s age. Indeed, the relationship of the imagination to sense data was one that preoccupied Edwards specifically. In an oft-quoted passage from his philosophical essay ‘The Mind’, he directly compares the ideas gained through sense experience to those generated by the imagination, strongly favouring the former: ‘The ideas of sense are more strong, lively, and distinct than those of the imagination; they have likewise a steadiness, order, and coherence, and are not excited at random, as those which are the effects of human wills often are, but in a regular train or series, the admirable connection whereof sufficiently testifies the wisdom and benevolence of its Author’ (WJE 6: 102). Leaving aside, for the moment, the implicit proof for God in this quote, here we both see the link between the imagination and the will and the suggestion that the will excites the imagination ‘at random’, resulting in less order and coherence of thought than ideas gained through the senses. In this comparison, imagination distracts from ‘reality’ which is known best through sense data. In an essay written shortly before ‘The Mind’ called ‘On the Prejudices of the Imagination’ he admits, however, that new sense data, especially information that ­challenges agreed upon truths or experiences, is often rejected by the imagination, which acts in this case not so much as a generator of fanciful fiction as a repository of customary knowledge. ‘We are prevented from the certain and rational apprehension of objects . . . by prejudices of the imagination formed from our earliest conscious

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Imagination and Hermeneutics   311 ex­peri­ences, by the ideas of sensation themselves which “clog the mind,” and by the weakness of our minds and the imperfections of our ideas of things’ (Anderson 1980, 122–3; see also WJE 6: 196, 348–9). In this sense the imagination is as responsible for ‘our ideas of things’, and it is the imagination which must be overcome if new knowledge— based on sense data and repeatable demonstration—is to advance. For example, Edwards was concerned about the new science of atoms and what it implied about matter and reality. That the world is actually comprised of tiny bits of matter that cannot be seen by the naked eye and that behave in ways not yet fully understood strikes the imagination as implausible. When confronted with new evidence like atoms, Edwards argued, the imagination (even of learned men) often rebels and insists on maintaining an outmoded understanding of the world. While Edwards himself is focused in this case on the imagination as a hinderance to new knowledge gained through the senses, it is not difficult to see how the advancement of sense-based science could use ‘a little imagination’ to accept revisions to the general ‘ideas of things’. These are cases where being able to think something that does not strike us as true or even immediately evident to our senses allows true knowledge about reality to advance. We will return to this sense of ‘imagination’ as an ability to see the reality of things even without immediate sense perception when we move into the heart of Edwards’s hermeneutical system of typology, which requires a sanctified imagination to be rightly perceived. In terms of epistemology and the relationship to sense data, Edwards was most straight-forward when he defined the imagination as ‘that power of the mind, whereby it can have a conception or idea of things of an external or outward nature (that is, of such sorts of things as are the objects of the outward senses), when those things are not present, and be not perceived by the senses’ (WJE 2: 210–11). In this rather neutral def­in­ition, the imagination is the power of the mind to represent things that can be known by the senses to the mind even when that sense data is not immediately present. The question for many interpreters of Edwards is whether this power is active in shaping know­ledge, and if so, how. Sang Hyun Lee calls the imagination in Edwards’s thought the ‘ordering, shaping power of the human mind’ (Lee 1988, 115). In so doing, he acknowledges that this is a conundrum, since Edwards’s commitment to empirical epistemology prevents him from accepting any activity of the mind prior to sense experience. John Locke, for ex­ample, intuited an active role for the mind in combining and reflecting on simple ideas gained through sense experience, but was wary to develop this into a full blown theory of the mind’s power, for fear that ascribing any active power to the mind would readmit the possibility of innate ideas already present in the mind, awaiting sense ex­peri­ence to be activated (Yolton 1968 40–52; Morris 1931, 50–3). This hybrid model— whereby innate ideas exist in the mind but must be activated by sense ­experience—was the path taken by Cambridge Platonists like Thomas Cudworth and the Third Earl of Shaftesbury when wrestling with empiricism (Willey  1953, 158–62; Grean  1967, 251). Most interpreters of Edwards on this point debate the degree to which he followed Locke and the empiricists (Yolton 1968, 40–52; Morris 1931, 50–3) or to what degree he

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312   Kathryn Reklis was influenced by the Cambridge Platonists (Lee  1988, 122–3; Tomas  1952, 60–84; May 1976, 3–101). To fully explicate this debate takes us too far afield into Edwards’s sources of thought (see Thuesen’s chapter in this volume) and epistemology (see Helm’s chapter) to be productive for this chapter, though Edwards’s commitment to the basic premise of empiricism seems beyond refute: ‘all ideas begin from thence [sensation] and there never can be any idea, thought, or act of the mind unless the mind first received some ideas from sensation, or some other way equivalent, wherein the mind is wholly passive in receiving them’ (‘Subjects to Be Handled in the Treatise on the Mind’, WJE 6: 390). Lee’s in­nov­ ation in this debate, however, is to shore up Edwards’s empiricist epistemology through an appeal to the imagination as the synthesis of the active and passive powers of the mind, and in so doing to complete Locke’s own epistemological system by accounting for how the mind can combine and order simple ideas to produce more complex ones. Lee’s solution is innovative because appealing to the imagination in this way goes against most eighteenth-century theories of the mind as well as against Edwards’s own terminology. Edwards was following common seventeenth- and eighteenth-century usage when he referred to the imagination as the power of the mind to cognize external objects even in their absence (Bond 1935, 54–69), but neither he nor his contemporaries had yet linked that term with the creative or synthetic power of the mind that would be  developed by philosophers and poets even a generation after Edwards’s death (Bond 1937, 245–64; Lee 1988, 126; Hart 1968, 318–34; Bate 1946, 185; Niebuhr 1983, 35). While Edwards did not use the term imagination to refer to ‘the mind’s nondiscursive shaping power’, Lee argues persuasively that in modern philosophical terms (that is, post-romantic Western thought) the imagination is the correct term to describe ‘the mind’s activity of ordering and relating particular ideas of all sorts, external and also mental’ and it is simply a matter of ‘Edwards’s language at this point lag[ging] behind his thought’ (Lee 1988, 126–7). Lee’s solution to this difficulty is to link the imagination to Edwards’s system of typ­ ology, to which we will turn shortly, as it is also the key to linking the imagination to Edward’s general hermeneutical system. But the main problem Edwards himself—and scholars of Edwards—see with the imagination is not its active power in the production of knowledge, but its dangerous flights of fancy. That is, Edwards is suspicious of the imagination because in eighteenth-century philosophical terms the imagination was primarily understood as responsible for the non-rational wanderings of the mind, prone to erroneous judgments. The hint of this worry was present in the quote from ‘The Mind’ examined above in which the imagination is linked to the movement of the will. This was, in fact, the great worry about the imagination in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy: because it did not belong to the processes of clear and distinct thought it was tied to the will, affections, and passions (Cassirer 1960, 104–8). In this sense, the imagination was not just a power of the mind to hold before itself an object of sense experience even in the absence of its real-world correlate (e.g. I can imagine an apple even when an apple is

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Imagination and Hermeneutics   313 not in front of me). It is also a power of the will to distort the images of the mind into fanciful fictions that have no basis in reality (e.g. I can imagine an apple sprouting wings and flying away). And this power is directed not by the intellect, beholden to laws and rules, but by the will which wants what it wants, often for all kinds of ­non-rational reasons. As often as not in Edwards’s wide corpus, the word ‘imagination’ is preceded by the modifiers ‘mere’ or ‘groundless’ as in repeated uses in his treatise Freedom of the Will: ‘this must be all mere imagination and delusion,’ ‘which must needs be a groundless imagination’, or ‘this is the work of pure imagination, and contrary to the reality of things’ (WJE 1: 337, 385, 386). The worries therein have to do with the mind’s ability to represent what is pleasant or appealing as true, even if those representations contradict truth or reality. By far the worst and most worrisome instance where the powers of imagination run astray belongs to religious inspiration. Far worse than an unwillingness to embrace atomic physics or to imagine flying apples, was a person’s willingness to make claims of divine inspiration on the basis of nothing more than an overheated imagination. This is what was meant by ‘enthusiasm’ in the eighteenth-century: when the imagination represents its own non-rational wanderings as the work of the divine spirit. In the aftermath of the Reformation and the Wars of Religion people on both sides of the Atlantic were making new claims to direct inspiration, basing their spiritual authority on the strength of their visions and emotional experiences (Hall  1989, 71–116; Kidd  2007, 24–54; Stout 1986, 127–47; 222–8; Noll 2003, 100–54). John Locke devoted a whole section of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding to enthusiasm and another to the difference between faith and reason, developing a three-tiered epistemological system that could distinguish between natural knowledge (those things we know by reason), true revelation (those things ‘above reason’ that we can take on faith), and delusion (those things ‘against reason’ that must be rejected) (Locke 1979, 414–40). Edwards did not have to write about Locke’s theory of religious inspiration directly, because he had a home-grown opponent in Charles Chauncy, who espoused a similar theory about the dangers of ‘enthusiasm’ and who debated Edwards publicly in a series of pamphlets about the nature of divine inspiration in the revivals of the 1730s and 1740s. For both Locke and Chauncy, enthusiasm is a vicious circle, whose wheel is driven by the overheated imagination: one believes one is inspired by God because one feels so strongly, and one feels so strongly because one believes one is inspired by God. Any experience will appear authentic if one ‘mistakes the workings of his own passions for divine communications, and fancies himself immediately inspired by the SPIRIT of God, when all the while, he is under no other influence than that of an over-heated imagination’ (Chauncy 1967, 231). The imagination, in this instance, is linked with the will, which is driven by the passions, or overwrought emotions. Chauncy was articulating a standard anthropology in which the soul/self is divided into faculties of reason, will, and passions, and a well-ordered soul is governed by ­reason. Reason is the centre of knowing and acting; ‘reasonable nature is suitably wro’t

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314   Kathryn Reklis upon, the understanding enlightened, the judgment convinc’d.’ Once convicted of the reasonableness and truth of something, the understanding moves the will and the mind is changed such that new understanding or new action can be undertaken. In a well-ordered subject, the will always follows the understanding/reason and the passions play a supporting role at best, ‘awaken[ing] the reasonable powers, and put[ting] them upon a lively and vigorous exercise’ (Chauncy 1967, 232). Even in religious matters, Chauncy concedes, the passions can play a role: excited by the objects of religion (God’s salvific work as presented in scripture and preaching) they can awaken the rational ­faculty to pursue the matter. But ‘’tho the passions shou’d be set all in a blaze,’ according to this anthropology, there can be no conversion, and therefore no real religion, if the understanding is not the governing principle (Chauncy 1967, 232). The imagination, in this scheme, is another name for the understanding disordered by the passions. The enthusiast mistakes her imagined inspiration for true understanding but is, in effect, beset by a disease of disorder in which the faculties are thrown out of true alignment. Edwards’s innovation in this debate was to reject Chauncy’s faculty anthropology— the division of the self into mind, will, and passions—in favour of a unified self, in which intellect and will, affections and inclination, head and heart are not parts of the self, but act in wholistic concert. He centres this discussion around the term ‘affections’, which are the ‘springs’ of all human action (WJE 2: 101). All our acting and knowing is a process of attraction and aversion—attraction toward the things we love or find most beautiful and away from those things we hate or find most averse. In other words, if there is a lo­gic­al order by which the dynamic unity of the self knows or wills anything it is this: the affections of love or hate (attraction or aversion) move the will (toward or away from the object as appropriate) and in that movement the understanding is enlivened. But this is not the same as saying our ‘passions’ (in Chauncy’s terms) do or ought to govern reason. Reason and understanding are already present in our affections—‘the heart cannot be set upon an object of which there is no idea in the understanding’ (WJE 2: 266). So, too, affections are not just strong emotions. Affections are linked to an object of attraction or repulsion, whereas emotions can be a state of feeling disconnected from an object. Emotions, like thinking and choosing, are dimensions of unified human experience, all guided by the affections (McClymond and McDermott 2011, 313; see also Thoughts on the Revival of Religion and Divine and Supernatural Light, WJE 17: 265–75, 408–25). On these terms, Edwards is able to counter that true religion, pace Chauncy, is always a matter of true affections, and therefore one should not be surprised that with true religion often comes strong feelings (Chauncy’s ‘passions’) and even strong bodily responses (for further discussion of the affections in Edwards’s anthropology, see Tan’s chapter in this volume; for further discussion of Edwards’s relationship to the revivals, see Kling’s chapter). This anthropological innovation left Edwards, however, in a conflicted relationship with the imagination as a power of the mind distinct from reason or understanding.

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Imagination and Hermeneutics   315 On the one hand, God makes use of the imagination to awaken the soul to the true nature of reality and as much as we need our imagination to represent objects of sense to our minds when they are not physically present, how much more so must we make use of the imagination to represent divine things to our minds: ‘Such is our nature, that we cannot think of things invisible, without a degree of imagination. I dare appeal to any man, of the greatest powers of mind, whether he is able to fix his thoughts on God, or Christ, or the things of another world, without imaginary ideas attending his meditations?’ Even more so, there is a link between the imagination and affections such that ‘the more engaged the mind is, and the more intense the contemplation and affection, still the more lively and strong the imaginary idea will ordinarily be’ (Distinguishing Marks, WJE 4: 236). Since true religion for Edwards is not simply a matter of intellectual understanding, but of understanding united to will and inclination through the affections, the imagination’s customary association with the will is a point in its favour. Even in this same treatise, however, Edwards is careful to disarticulate imaginings that might attend awakening from the content of true religion itself. The imaginings are more a product of the unified selves we are than a necessary component of spiritual awakening. The awakened soul ‘retains a divine sense of the excellency of spiritual things, even in its rapture: which holy frame and sense is from the Spirit of God’ even ‘the imaginations that attend it are but accidental’ (WJE 4: 238). We might say, then, that the soul who is alive to the excellence of spiritual things cannot help but represent those things in the imagination, but the content of any one person’s imagination is not the sum of spiritual things. A sense of the world unified in divine love may call ­different images to different minds: the images are but accidental while the truth of divine love is reality itself. If Edwards is somewhat sanguine about the role of the imagination in Distinguishing Marks (relatively early in the revival period), he grows more suspicious of those who rely on imaginary visions to ground their faith as the revivals take on antinomian and ecstatic fervour. People begin to take their visions as authoritative or sufficient for saving grace, setting themselves up as saved because of the strength of their visions. They are ‘apt to lay too much weight on the imaginary part’ and regard their imaginings ‘as though they were prophetical visions’ (WJE, 2: 235–7) This is Locke and Chauncy’s ‘enthusiastical’ vicious circle, and Edwards also condemns reasoning from the strength of visionary or emotional response. By the time he publishes Religious Affections a few years later, ‘Edwards had shifted his position, and no longer suggested that visions played a positive role in the spiritual life’ (McClymond 2007, 414). In his later writing, instead of debating the merits of the imagination in the spiritual life, Edwards focused his attention on the idea of the ‘sense of the heart’ and the process of sanctification and holy living manifest in concrete practices (Minkema 2005, 6–12; McClymond and McDermott 2011, 81). The question remains, however, what is the relationship between the ‘sense of the heart’ and the imagination? The next section addresses this question by setting both within the context of Edwards’s hermeneutical system of typology.

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Imagination, Hermeneutics, and the ‘Sense of the Heart’ For Edwards a ‘sense of the heart’ that is alive to the reality of divine things is the essence of salvation. Grace is the capacity to grasp reality as it really is, an interconnected web of being in which all things, from the arrangement of atoms to the events of human history, express the glory of God. This reality is at all times held in the power of God’s eternally creative work, but the human mind is ill equipped to grasp it. This is both because of our finitude—how can any finite mind grasp the glory of the infinite God?—and because of our fallen natures after sin, which stubbornly and perversely refuse to see the glory of God even when it stares us in the face. God accommodates our weakness in two ways: our finitude by arranging the world so that every aspect of it communicates God’s glory in a language we can understand and our sinfulness by regenerating our hearts so that we can speak this language. In both cases, that language is typology. For most Protestant Christians, typology refers to a system of biblical interpretation wherein events or figures from the Christian Old Testament (‘types’) figure forth events or figures from the New Testament (‘antitypes’). So Jonah hidden in the belly of the whale for three days is a type for Christ buried in the tomb for three days. Typology allows Christians to make sense of difficult, obscure, or what they consider obsolete ­passages from the Hebrew scriptures in a way that testified to the ongoing work of God in Christ and the church. Indeed for Edwards (and many other Christian interpreters), without typology as a guide much in the Old Testament would appear ‘wholly insignificant and so wholly impertinent and vain’ as to be useless or even ridiculous (‘Types of the Messiah’, WJE 11: 305–6; see also Brown’s chapter in this v­olume for Edwards’s ­relationship to biblical interpretation more broadly). But Edwards went beyond most Protestant typology to insist that the system of interpretation that links concrete, material and historical reality to divine reality extends to everything in existence: ‘I believe that the whole universe, heaven and earth, air and seas, and the divine constitution and history of the holy Scriptures, be full of images of divine things, as full as a language is of words’ (‘Images of Divine Things’, WJE 11: 54). In this more comprehensive typology, the ‘inferior and shadowy parts’ of the world represent ‘the more real and excellent, spiritual and divine’ so that anything in nature or in human history can be read as revealing the superfluous glory of God’s being (WJE 13: 434–45). Scholars have debated what to make of this extension of typology beyond purely scriptural sources. Perry Miller inaugurated this debate by insisting that Edwards’s ­‘exaltation of nature to a level of authority coequal with revelation’ both separated him definitively from his Puritan forebears and made him a progenitor to American transcendentalists and Emersonian idealism (Miller 1948, 27–8). Stephen Stein countered that Miller showed too much ‘antipathy to the scriptural dimension of Edwards’s work’ (Stein 1998, 125), while others have argued for a long-standing Puritan tradition that

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Imagination and Hermeneutics   317 stressed God’s effulgent love manifest in nature (Maclear 1956 and Nuttal 1946). In most of these debates, scholars have assumed a division within Edwards’s work between a liberal typology that reads nature in terms of ontological essences communicating connections on a scale of being and a conservative typology focused only on historical, biblical types and antitypes (Madsen 1965, 99). As a result, as Janice Knight has noted, Edwards ‘is cast as a thinker divided against himself—a conservative theologian trying to liberalize the typological theories of his contemporaries’ (Knight 2005, 194; see also Lowance 1989, 249–76). Alongside John Wilson’s work, Knight has been central in redirecting this scholarly debate toward the internal coherence of Edwards’s hermeneutical system. Read across his entire body of work ‘Edwards’s typology seems less a forged union of opposites than an expression of a deeply felt, original harmony flowing from an integrated theology and expressed from the earliest to the final works’ (Knight 2005, 195; Knight 1991, 543–51; Wilson 1989, 50–2). The harmony Knight sees in Edwards’s work links typology to the sense of the heart and both to debates about the imagination as central to Edwards’s overarching hermeneutics. Put more starkly, the ability to rightly interpret the world (nay, the cosmos) is the essence of salvation and this ability is given in the sense of the heart, or what we might be justified in calling a sanctified imagination. Centering salvation on a theory of typological interpretation does not mean that Edwards had an intellectualist understanding of faith. Salvation was not ‘getting our ideas right’. Rather, it was an ability to see all of the world as it really is—the expression of God’s very being in self-communication. This gift of vision, or right interpretation, is the gift of the Spirit in grace that is the essence of salvation. This is what is meant by ‘awakening’ to the truth of God’s sovereignty and redemptive work. God’s redemptive work reconciling sinful humans to Godself is part of God’s overall work in creation: both are woven together into a seamless teleological whole. The chief end for which God created the world is this: God’s ‘disposition to communicate himself, or diffuse his own fullness’ so that ‘there might be a glorious and abundant emanation of his­ infinite fullness of good ad extra, or without himself ’ (WJE 8: 433). We must think of ‘God’s determination to glorify and communicate Himself as prior to the method that His wisdom pitches upon as best to effect this’ (Misc., 1062, WJE 20: 432). In other words, God’s inherent desire to communicate Godself is fundamental to the Godhead. This ‘divine impulse precedes the creation of the world and informs the history of redemption’ (Knight 2005, 202; see also Strobel’s and Wainwright’s chapters in this volume for further discussion of the nature of God and ontology in Edwards’s thought, respectively). All of creation, and also all human history, can be read as reflecting the selfcommunication of God. Typology then, as a system of signs and images of God’s self-disclosure is not just accommodation to our finite and sinful natures, it is also the fit manner for such communication. God does not just leave some clues scattered in scripture or perhaps in nature to lead blind humans toward the truth. Rather, types reflect the very ontological truth of the cosmos: material things image forth spiritual things because ‘the very being, and the manner of being, and the whole of bodies depends

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318   Kathryn Reklis immediately on the divine power’—everything is held together by God’s thinking and God’s being (‘On Atoms’, WJE 6: 216; see also Zakai 2010). This emphasis on divine self-communication helps explain why Edwards could move so fluidly from historical, scriptural types to natural, ontological ones. As Knight argues, ‘the historical narrative and the natural image were merely alternative ways to understand the work of redemption and to retain it in the mind’ (Knight 2005, 196). Because God’s power and being uphold all things, not just in the created order but in the order of history and time, Edwards could read any natural phenomenon as revelatory of God’s self-communication. But he could also read any event in human history as revelatory as well. Gerald McDermott’s work has pressed our understanding of Edwards’s typological hermeneutics beyond debates about history and ontology to encompass Edwards’s keen interest in sources for revelation beyond the Anglo-Protestant world. The work of redemption was not, for Edwards, revealed only in types from the Old Testament, or even in the work of the spirit in the Christian church; ‘toward the end of his life, Edwards was in the process of reconceptualizing the history of redemption as a history of religions’ (McClymond and McDermott 2011, 87; see also McDermott 2000). In the same way, Edwards did not just look for antitypes in the New Testament, but throughout the entire drama of redemption. A natural event (e.g. the rising of the sun) or a historical reality (e.g. belief in spirits in indigenous American religions) both shadowed forth more fundamental, spiritual realities about the nature of God and God’s self-communication in redemption. This capaciousness of typological hermeneutics, perhaps more than anything, set him apart from his Puritan and Protestant forebears and peers (for comparative background see Davis 1972, Lowance 1980, and Lewalski 1979). If typology is the language by which God communicates Godself, the ability to understand that communication is the gift given in salvation. This is what Edwards means by the ‘sense of the heart’ or the ‘divine sense’ or ‘divine and supernatural light’ given in ­salvation. The Spirit of God graces the elect with a new capacity to not just know the intellectual truth of Christian doctrine, but to know personally and experientially that this truth is as true as the taste of honey or the colour red. This opens the hermeneutical field to read God’s self-communication in all things. McClymond and McDermott argue explicitly that this ‘sense of the heart’ is distinct from the imagination for Edwards and given Edwards’s suspicion toward the fanciful ‘visionary’ aspect of the imagination this reading is warranted (McClymond and McDermott 2011, 123). The unregenerate are often not prepared to see the truth in types and images and a good deal of Edwards’s grief over the revivals stemmed from how quickly people mistook their own flights of imaginative vision for the true her­men­eut­ ic­al key given by the spirit. In this sense, McClymond and McDermott are correct in saying that for Edwards ‘there is no salvation by the imagination. Salvation is only by Christ and the power of his Spirit, who alone can provide the sense of the heart, which alone can read the types’ (McClymond and McDermott 2011, 123). The imagination, however, has another valence in Edwards’s work, which we saw in the preceding section: it is the power of the mind to represent reality that is not

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Imagination and Hermeneutics   319 immediately present to the senses. This power is one of seeing through the imagination beyond the surface of material reality without leaving reality behind for flights of fancy. This is the power both to see an apple in my mind even when an apple is not present (vs. the ability to imagine an apple sprouting wings and flying away) and also the ability to know that this apple is made up of atoms, even though I cannot see them. In both cases, the mind has a synthetic, creative power that is not divorced from reality (i.e. fictional or visionary) even though it exceeds what our senses ex­peri­ence. This is what Lee calls the ‘mind’s nondiscursive shaping power’ to refer to ‘the mind’s activity of ordering and relating particular ideas of all sorts, external and also mental’ (Lee 1988, 127). While Lee concedes that Edwards never directly links the term ‘imagination’ with this power of the mind, we have good reason to do so. Furthermore, the sanctified imagination may be another way to refer to what Edwards’s called the ‘sense of the heart’. The imagination, Lee argues, ‘enables the mind to know and love what it experiences as meaningful wholes in their ultimate relational context’ whereby we can see the interconnectedness of all things in God’s being and power. This activity is made possible by God’s spirit so that ‘through the activity of the sanctified imagination . . . history and nature come alive and also achieve their union with God’ (Lee 1988, 8–9). Connecting the imagination and typological hermeneutics in this way allows us to see another dimension of the synthetic unity of Edwards’s thought, despite the unlikely conjuncture of these terms in eighteenth-century philosophy, or even in Edwards’s own terminology. It may also point the way to future directions for scholarship, to which I will turn in a final, brief section.

Future Directions for Scholarship For Lee rescuing the term ‘imagination’, even against Edwards’s own explicit use of it, is important because it brings Edwards into ‘histories of modern theories of the c­ reative process along with theories of such pivotal figures as Shaftesbury, Addison, Kant, and Coleridge’ (Lee 1988, 127). In this vein, Edwards’s work has been drawn into theological conversations about the centrality of ‘aesthetics’ and ‘art’ for Christian theology and spiritual life. In these conversations, Edwards is read as the rare voice in the Reformed tradition for whom aesthetics and beauty are central categories, rather than marginal ones to be approached with suspicion (Dyrness 2004; Gibson 2008; Louie 2013). Appeals to aesthetics or imagination, however, are often ways to position Christian theology beyond its own complicity with the modern project, which is implicated in genocidal Fascism, colonialism, chattel slavery, sexism, and ecological collapse. The assumption is that the over-reliance on reason led to the horrors of modernity, wherein a ‘return’ to imagination or aesthetics will provide a way out of them. I want to trouble this idea by suggesting whatever Edwards can contribute to our understanding of the modern ­subject, he must do so understood as fully within an imperial epistemology.

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320   Kathryn Reklis We need only think of Kant, whose famous three Critiques were all published within thirty years of Edwards’s death and which are often taken as a high point in articulating the rational modern subject, to see how central the imagination was for grounding that subject. The rational subject is held together, for Kant, in the power of aesthetic judgment and the pseudo-faculty of the imagination. The speculative reason by which we can know the world at all cannot give us any assurance that that world is not indifferent to our acting, and the practical reason by which we find the means to act cannot give us any assurance that the world is not hostile to our knowing. Speculative and moral/ practical reason do not hold together without introducing a third principle that unites them, which for Kant must be internal to the subject itself or the autonomy of reason will crumble. It is aesthetic judgment experienced in the imagination that gives reason back its sense of unity, through the sheer pleasure of realizing that the subject is someone capable of making an aesthetic judgment and insisting on its universality. What is affirmed in the act of judgment (saying ‘this is beautiful’ for example) has little or nothing to do with the object being judged and everything to do with the subject doing the judging. That is, an object itself is not beautiful per se, but incites the feeling of pleasure that is really the intuition of the subject’s own faculties in free, spontaneous play—which is the imagination. The modern subject feels himself to be a whole united with purpose in the imagination. For Kant, then, the imagination is central to the rational subject, and for this reason he is just as concerned and suspicious as Edwards about its flights of fancy. The im­agin­ation must have its wings clipped by the understanding, since it has a duty: to hold the subject together. Here is one key juncture where future work following Lee’s ­proposal could be done, comparing Kant’s view of the imagination as giving a sense or feeling of unity to the subject to Edwards’s view of the imagination. For Edwards, of course, the unity of the subject (such that it was ever under threat) is grounded in the very being of God and we feel or sense that unity when we are swallowed up in the sovereignty of God. Being swallowed up in God is itself a powerful and persistent metaphor in Edwards’s thought, showing up more than two hundred times in his searchable works. As I have argued elsewhere, this metaphor itself is meant to convey the listener into a ‘scenario of universality’: a paradigmatic set-up that prompts ­predictable, repeatable ways of being (thinking and acting) (Reklis 2014, 86; see also Taylor 2005, 13–20). Universality names Edwards’s desire to gather the totality of all things together in God’s being. The focus on universality should prevent us from falling into the easy assumption that Edwards’s alternative to Kant’s rational subject is somehow ‘outside’ modernity. Universality, rather, points to the way in which Edwards’s own theological imagination was deeply shaped by the imperial context of his age. This is to say more than he was a colonial agent or to investigate his imbrication in the material conditions of the colonial project by examining, for example, his role as a slave-holder, his views toward free and enslaved blacks, or his missionary work among Native Americans on the frontier (see Grigg’s and Saillant’s chapters in this volume). We might see traces of the imperial ­project in his very desire to gather up the fragmenting pieces of knowledge from a world

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Imagination and Hermeneutics   321 exploding beyond the ability of the human mind to take its measure, set in motion by colonial expansion. His typological comprehensiveness was a sign of his place in an imperial age more than an aberration within it. Edwards, then, might be offering an alternative conception of the modern subject within the same conditions of modernity: a subject defined by submission to God’s ­sovereignty instead of self-autonomous reason, but no less modern in its desire to see the expanding world held together in a fundamental unity. Future work, then, may wish to explore what difference a ‘sanctified imagination’ makes in assessing the role of the imagination in the modern project. In other words, does a subject held together by the sanctified imagination within an imperial epistemology really do anything different than one held together by an autonomous imagination and how can we speak about this difference without attempting to excise Edwards from his context in the colonial conditions of modernity’s formation? These questions become more pressing if or as we feel the collective strain of patriarchal ecological apocalypse under the weight of Modern Man (Wynter 2015; Drexler-Dreis and Justaert 2019). Under this strain, we may also wish to press beyond Edwards’s own intentions or desires to see what restless, anarchic forms of subjectivity escape the boundaries of Edwards’s own totalizing project in order to think beyond the modern subject, however held together. This will surely require new imaginative horizons and hermeneutics.

Works Cited Anderson, Wallace (1980). ‘Introduction.’ The Works of Jonathan Edwards Volume 6: Scientific and Philosophical Writings. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1–146. Bate, William Jackson (1946). From Classic to Romantic: Premises of Taste in Eighteenth-Century England. New York: Harper and Row. Bond, Donald F. (1935). ‘ “Distrust” of the Imagination in English Neo-Classicism.’ Philological Quarterly 14: 54–69. Bond, Donald F. (1937). ‘The Neo-Classical Psychology of the Imagination.’ Journal of English Literary History 4: 245–64. Cassirer, Ernst (1960). The Philosophy of the Enlightenment. Boston Beacon Press. Chauncy, Charles (1967). ‘Enthusiasms Described and Caution’d Against.’ The Great Awakening: Documents Illustrating the Crisis and Its Consequences. Ed. Alan Heimert and Perry Miller. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc. Davis, Thomas M. (1972). ‘The Traditions of Puritan Typology.’ Typology and Early American Literature, Ed. Sacvan Bercovitch. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 11–46. Drexler-Dreis, Joseph and Kristien Justaert, ed. (2019). Beyond the Doctrine of Man: Decolonial Visions of the Human. New York City: Fordham University. Dyrness, William A. (2004). Reformed Theology and Visual Culture: The Protestant Imagination from Calvin to Edwards. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gibson, Michael  D. (2008). ‘The Beauty of the Redemption of the World: the Theological Aesthetics of Maximus the Confessor and Jonathan Edwards.’ Harvard Theological Review 101 (1): 45–76.

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322   Kathryn Reklis Grean, Stanley (1967). Shaftesbury’s Philosophy of Religion and Ethics: A study in Enthusiasm. Ohio: Ohio University Press. Hall, David D. (1989). Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England. New York: Knopf. Hart, Ray L. (1968). Unfinished Man and the Imagination: Toward an Ontology and a Rhetoric of Revelation. New York: Herder and Herder. Kidd, Thomas S. (2007). The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Knight, Janice (1991). ‘Learning the Language of God: Jonathan Edwards and the Typology of Nature.’ William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 48: 543–51. Knight, Janice (2005). ‘Typology.’ The Princeton Companion to Jonathan Edwards. Ed. Sang Hyun Lee. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lee, Sang Hyun (1988). The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer (1979). Protestant Poetics and Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Locke, John (1979). An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Ed. Peter Nidditch. New York, Oxford University Press. Louie, Yin Kip (2013). The Beauty of the Triune God: The Theological Aesthetics of Jonathan Edwards. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications. Lowance Jr, Mason I. (1980). The Language of Canaan: Metaphor and Symbol in New England from the Puritans to the Transcendentalists. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Maclear, James F. (1956). ‘The Heart of New England Rent: The Mystical Element in Early Puritan History.’ Mississippi Valley Historical Review 42: 621–52. Madsen, William G. (1965). ‘From Shadowy Types to Truths.’ The Lyric and Dramatic Milton: Selected Papers from the English Institute. Ed. Joseph  H.  Summers. New York: Columbia University Press. May, Henry F. (1976). The Enlightenment in America. New York: Oxford University Press. McClymond, Michael  J. (2007). ‘Jonathan Edwards.’ The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Emotion. Ed. John Corrigan. New York: Oxford University Press. McClymond, Michael J. and Gerald McDermott (2011). The Theology of Jonathan Edwards. New York: Oxford University Press. McDermott, Gerald (2000). Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods: Christian Theology, Enlightenment Religion, and Non-Christian Faiths. New York: Oxford University Press. Miller, Perry (1948). Images or Shadows of Divine Things. New Haven: Yale University Press. Minkema, Kenneth P. (2005). ‘Jonathan Edwards: A Theological Life.’ Princeton Companion to Jonathan Edwards. Ed. Sang Hyun Lee. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1–15. Morris, C.R. (1931). Locke-Berkeley-Hume. Oxford: The Clarendon Press. Niebuhr, Richard  R. (1983). Streams of Grace: Studies in Jonathan Edwards, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William James. Kyoto: Doshisha University Press. Noll, Mark (2003). The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield, and the Wesleys. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. Nuttal, Geoffrey (1946). The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience. Oxford: Blackwell. Reklis, Kathryn (2014). Theology and the Kinesthetic Imagination: Jonathan Edwards and the Making of Modernity. New York: Oxford University Press. Stein, Stephen J. (1998). ‘The Spirit and the Word: Jonathan Edwards and Scriptural Exegesis.’ Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience. Ed. Nathan O. Hatch and Harry S. Stout. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Imagination and Hermeneutics   323 Stout, Harry S. (1986). The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England. New York: Oxford University Press. Taylor, Diana (2005). The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tomas, Vincent (1952). ‘The Modernity of Jonathan Edwards.’ The New England Quarterly 25 (1) (Mar.): 60–84. Willey, Basil (1953). The Seventeenth Century Background. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Wilson, John (1989). ‘Introduction.’ Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 9: History of the Work of Redemption. New Haven: Yale University Press. Wynter, Sylvia (2015). On Being Human as Praxis. Ed. Katherine McKittrick. Duke University Press. Yolton, John W. (1968). ‘Locke’s Concept of Experience.’ Locke and Berkeley: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. C.B. Martin and D.M. Armstrong. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Zakai, Avihu (2010). Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of Nature: The Re-Enchantment of the World in the Age of Scientific Reasoning. London: T&T Clark.

Author Bio Dr Kathryn Reklis is Associate Professor of Modern Protestant Theology at Fordham University in New York City, where she also holds affiliate positions in American Studies and Comparative Literature. Her first monograph Theology and the Kinesthetic Imagination: Jonathan Edwards and the Making of Modernity(Oxford University Press, 2014) used insights from performance theory to analyse bodily ecstasy in the mid-eighteenth-century revivals as a way of exploring alternative modernities in the Atlantic world. She is the co-editor of Protestant Aesthetics and the Arts (Routledge 2020) and is currently working on a cultural history of religion and literature programs.

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chapter 21

The Natu r a l Science s a n d Phil osoph y of Nat u r e Avihu Zakai

‘[T]o find out the reasons of things in natural philosophy is only to find out the proportion of God’s acting.’ Edwards, ‘The Mind’

Jonathan Edwards’s philosophy of nature demands our attention precisely because of its Janus-faced character. On the one hand, Edwards embraced some features of the new modes of thought and reasoning that developed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and are commonly associated with the term ‘scientific revolution’. On the other hand, he clearly rejected the kind of mechanistic view of the universe that became more and more prevalent among naturalists of his time, according to which all phenomena can be explained and understood by the mere mechanics of matter and motion (see Zakai 2010). When placed within their proper ideological, theological, and scientific contexts, Edwards’s writings on natural philosophy shed light not only on his specific reaction to contemporary intellectual culture but also on the broader issue of the relationship between science and religion in the early modern period, thus constituting an important chapter in the history of ideas. This essay accordingly analyses Edwards’s works on natural philosophy in a series of contexts within which they may best be explored and understood. First, it will point out the affinities between the content and form of Edwards’s natural philosophy and some main features of medieval, Scholastic and Renaissance thought: theology as the ‘Queen of Sciences’ (Regina Scientiarum), or scientia scientiarum (the ‘science of sciences’), science as ‘handmaiden to theology’ (philosophia ancilla theologiae), the emblematic or typological understanding of natural phenomena, and the belief in the ‘Great Chain of Being’ (scala naturae). Furthermore, because Edwards believed that the Theatrum Mundi was created by God to be the mirror of His divine excellence, his theology of nature conceived of the world as a medium for the contemplation of divine beauty.

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The Natural Sciences and Philosophy of Nature   325 For Edwards the natural world and its beauty were thus—in the tradition of Calvin and Reformed theology—a Theatrum Dei Gloria or theatre of God’s glory. The second part of this essay argues that Edwards’s works on natural philosophy in many ways resembled the views of the school of ‘natural theology’ or ‘physico-theology’. The English followers of this school of thought, the ‘physico-theologians’, set out to prove the being and attributes of God from the order and harmony of nature. Demonstrating ‘the wisdom of God in creation’, they were reacting to the perceived threats posed by the new modes of scientific thought and reasoning to traditional Christian thought and belief, in particular a Cartesian mechanical philosophy of nature.

Philosophia Ancilla Theologiae In his ‘Outline of “A Rational Account” ’ (c.1740) and elsewhere, Edwards reiterated the medieval view of philosophia ancilla theologiae, declaring that ‘all arts and sciences, the more they are perfected, the more they issue in divinity, and coincide with it, and appear part of it’ (WJE 6: 397). More specifically, he argued, that ‘after God had shown the vanity of human learning when set up in place of the gospel’, or ‘was pleased to make foolish the wisdom’ of classical learning and philosophy after Christ’s first coming, ‘God was pleased to make it [learning] subservient to the purpose of Christ’s kingdom as an handmaid to divine revelation’ (History of the Work of Redemption; WJE 9: 278). In other words, first ‘the gospel came to prevail without the help of man’s wisdom,’ but ‘then God was pleased to make use of learning as an handmaid’. Throughout history, Edwards said, ‘God has sufficiently shown men the insufficiency of (human reason)’ (WJE 9: 440–1). There could be no doubt, Edwards asserted in his 1739 ‘The Importance and Advantage of Thorough Knowledge of Divine Truth’, that ‘divinity’ stands ‘above all’ branches of the ‘arts and sciences’, since it ‘concerned God and the great business of religion’ (WJE 22: 85–6). This stark hierarchization marks a difference between Edwards and many other ­representatives of early modern scientific thought, not to speak of modern science. For Galileo, as he wrote in 1610, the invention of the telescope, or ‘spyglass’ was of immeasurable importance as a scientific device in determining ‘the surface of the moon, the Milky Way, nebulous stars, and innumerable fixed stars, as well as four planets never before seen’ (‘The Starry Messenger’ 27). For Edwards, by contrast, this scientific invention was rather evidence of a growing knowledge about heavenly things, and hence an important apocalyptic and eschatological sign. As he wrote c.1743 in his ‘Images of divine Things’ (# 146): The late invention of telescopes, whereby heavenly objects are brought so much nearer, and made so much plainer to sight, and such wonderful discoveries have been made in heaven, is a type and forerunner of the great increase in the knowledge of heavenly things that shall be in the approaching glorious times of the Christian church. (WJE 11: 101)

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326   Avihu Zakai Though Edwards undoubtedly would have been interested in such new astronomical information, science ultimately was a means to a divine end. Rather than swallowing it wholesale, Edwards thus appropriated elements of the new philosophy of nature to fit his religious epistemology. According to Edwards’s apocalyptic expectations (which were heightened by the ‘little revival’ of 1734/5 in Northampton), the most characteristic feature of the divine dispensation before the millennium would be the increase of learning, as in his own time: God will improve this great increase of learning as an handmaid to religion, a means of a glorious advancement of the kingdom of his Son, when human learning shall be subservient to understanding the Scriptures and a clear explaining and glorious defending the doctrine of Christianity. (History of the Work of Redemption; WJE 9: 441)

For Edwards the great advance of learning during the age of Enlightenment, including the natural sciences, was part of a grand teleological development. Based on his ­theological convictions, Edwards’s natural philosophy evidently had more affinities with the scholastic view of science as ‘handmaiden to theology’, and thus more with the  Doctor of the Church, Doctor of Grace, St. Augustine (354–430), and medieval ­theologians like the philosopher, Doctor Mirabilis, Roger Bacon (1214–1292), and the Doctor of the Church, Angelicus Doctor, Thomas Aquinas (c.1225–1274), and much less with Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton, the forerunners of modern science. In ‘Images of Divine Things’ (# 156) Edwards stated his belief that ‘The Book of Scripture is the interpreter of the book of nature’. It is a revelation which explicates to us the ‘spiritual mysteries’ that are ‘signified or typified in the constitution of the natural world’ (WJE 11: 106). Sacred, revealed truths are thus the sole foundations for the interpretation and understanding of world phenomena, and not the demonstrated, rational truths of science based on the light of reason. By giving this role to religious truths in interpreting the ‘order of the world’, Edwards’s thought recalls Pascal, who declared that the ‘whole conduct of things ought to aim at the establishment and the greatness of religion’. Religion, Pascal said, ‘ought to be so truly the object and center towards which all things lean, and whoever knows its principles should be able to explain both human nature in particular, and the whole conduct of the world in general’ (Pascal 1999, 170–1) Likewise, for Edwards, religion must be the end of creation, the great end, the very end. If it were not for this, all those vast bodies we see ordered with so excellent skill, so according to the nicest rules of proportion, according to such laws of gravity and motion, would be all vanity, or good for nothing and no purpose at all.  (‘Miscellanies’; WJE 13: 185)

The New England theologian had Pascal’s Pensées in his library. Needless to say, Pascal was among the fiercest critics of the new philosophy of nature, especially the

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The Natural Sciences and Philosophy of Nature   327 mechanistic philosophy of Descartes. He and Edwards shared the same detestation for mechanical philosophy. Edwards’s use of the medieval and scholastic concept of science as servant to theology contradicted not only modern scientific reasoning but also the views of the Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century. If salvation came through Christ alone, by Grace alone, through Faith alone, and what is necessary to salvation is revealed in Scripture alone, there was no need for human agency in the divine work of salvation. The Reformers’ battle cry of ‘sola scriptura’ thus made them averse to the Thomistic view of philosophy as handmaid of sacred doctrine, as if the revealed wisdom were somehow inadequate without reason making up the difference, as it were. The Reformers were thus anxious to avoid any confusion of the ‘way of nature’ and the ‘way of grace’ which is implied by the language of ‘reason as handmaiden’—the soteriological implication being that revelation must be supplemented by the natural understanding in order to be sufficient for salvation.

Edwards’s Typological View of Nature Edwards’s emblematic or symbolic view of the world of nature, his typological readings of the created order, also contradicted a mechanistic cosmology. Based on his symbolic, allegorical reading of world phenomena, Edwards believed that ‘natural things were ordered for types of spiritual things’. The ‘type’, he explained, ‘is only the representation or shadow of the thing, but the antitype is the very substance, and is the true thing.’ Hence, he wrote in ‘Images of Divine Things’ (#45 and #169) Christ was ‘the true light of the world in opposition to the sun, the literal light of the world, that is a type of the Sun of Righteousness’, that is the antitype. As in Renaissance thinking, nature for him was a great treasure of divine signs and metaphors. In this grand theological teleology of typological order, the whole world is imbued with spiritual, divine meaning and significance. There are ‘types of divine things’ in ‘the works of nature and constitution of the world’ (WJE 11: 62–3 and 114) Edwards thus believed that the Theatrum Mundi was created by the Deity to be the mirror of divine beauty and glory. The emblematic worldview, ‘which sees nature as a vast collection of signs and ­metaphors, was a staple feature of Renaissance thought’, as William B. Ashworth writes. However, ‘in the seventeenth century Bacon, Descartes, Galileo, and their followers rejected the notion that everything in nature carries a hidden meaning.’ Now, nature ‘was to be taken at face value and investigated on its own terms’. As long as one holds the view that ‘nature is an elaborate hieroglyph, important only as a source of mystery and wonder, then the separation of true phenomena from false becomes secondary, if not irrelevant. Such a worldview produced enchantingly elaborate works of art and literature, but its dissolution was an essential feature of the revolution in science’ (Ashworth  1986, 156–7). In contrast, the mechanical philosophy’s notion of a

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328   Avihu Zakai homogeneous and symmetrical, one-dimensional world of nature required uniformity of all bodies as well as a universal measure in the form of mathematics. As such, the new philosophy could not view natural phenomena as carrying hidden meanings and significances. It emptied the created order of teleological purposes, thus stipulating that nature did not manifest the presence of God. In other words, the new philosophy of nature read the libri naturales, the Book of Nature, or the Liber creaturarum, the Book of the Creatures, as a coherent, orderly text produced by an omnipotent author, who, in contrast to the emblematic view of nature, remains distinct from, and unmirrored by, nature, His creation. Typology then was dispelled by modern science. In classical and medieval theology, God ‘authored two books: the Bible and the Book of Nature’. In such a system of thought, Nancy Murphy argues, ‘events in nature, like linguistic expressions, are signs. To study them is to decipher God’s meaning. Here ­natural observations do play a part in the determination of belief, but they do so only because they are a kind of testimony’ (Murphy  1990, 5). Thus, for Hugh of St Victor (1096–1141), ‘the whole sensible world is like a kind of book written by the finger of God,’ and ‘each particular creature is somewhat like a figure . . . instituted by the divine will to manifest the invisible things of God’s wisdom’ (Harrison 1998, 1). Edwards’s natural philosophy evidently belongs to this classical and medieval tradition in which everything in the world of nature is an inextricable and essential part of a grand divine scheme. Likewise, Edwards’s emblematic view of reality resembles that of Gregory of Nyssa (c.331–c.396) who, in David Lindberg’s words, ‘believed deeply in the unreality’ of the ‘material world and yet recognized that it could provide signs and symbols that would lead mankind upward to God’ (Lindberg 1986, 31). To Edwards, as in patristic and medieval theology, the world of nature is ontologically inferior and subordinated to a higher divine reality beyond and above it. The ‘whole ­outward creation is but the shadows of beings’ and ‘so made to represent spiritual things’. The reason for this is that ‘it’s agreeable to God’s wisdom that it should be so, that the inferior and shadowy parts of his works should be made to represent those things that are more real and excellent, spiritual and divine, to represent the things that immediately concern himself and the highest parts of his work’. Or, in another place, ‘God does purposely make and order one thing to be in an agreement and harmony with another. And if so, why should not we suppose that he makes the inferior in ­imitation of the superior, the material of the spiritual, on purpose to have a resemblance and shadow of them?’ (‘Miscellanies’, 362 and 8; WJE 13: 434 and 53). Edwards’s belief that ‘the things of the world are ordered [and] designed to shadow forth spiritual things’ (‘Images of Divine Things’; WJE 11: 53) defined his understanding of religion’s role in the explanation of nature: where the ‘glories of astronomy and natural philosophy consist in the harmony of the parts of the corporeal shadow of a world; the glories of religion consist in the sweet harmony of the greater and more real worlds with themselves, with one another and with the infinite fountain and original of them’ (‘Miscellanies’, 42; WJE 13: 224).

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The Natural Sciences and Philosophy of Nature   329

The Great Chain of Being Together with his belief in science as ‘handmaiden to theology’ and in a typological view of nature, Edwards adhered to the classical and medieval concept of the ‘Great Chain of Being’ (scala naturae). Not only did Edwards reject the mechanical vision of a one-dimensional world of nature, but he denounced the consequences of such a view. In the final analysis, the mechanical view of the universe, according to Alexandre Koyré, discarded ‘all considerations based upon value-concepts, such as perfection, harmony, meaning and aim, and finally [implied] the utter devalorization of being, the divorce of the world of value and the world of fact’ (Koyré 1968, 4). For example, the Cartesian theatre of nature was radically different from the traditional scholastic and Renaissance conception of the world: ‘The world of Descartes is by no means the colorful, multiform and qualitatively determined world of the Aristotelian, the world of our daily life and experience,’ but ‘a strictly uniform mathematical world, a world of geometry’ (Koyré 1968, 100–1). Because it affected the whole fabric of the universe, this transformation was unacceptable to orthodox Christians such as Edwards. Hence in his theology of nature he returned to the Platonic and Neo-Platonic notion of the Great Chain of Being, or, as he called it, ‘the order of creation’, and strove to show that the whole fabric of the universe is founded on a teleology of values, which in turn defines the ontological status of beings in the ­created order. Attempting to preserve God’s presence and redemptive activity in the world, Edwards in one of his early miscellaneous notes (c.1723) invoked the notion of an hierarchically ordered universe, declaring the whole of creation to be characterized by ‘communication between one degree of being and the next degree of being’ according ‘to the order of being [emphasis added]’ (‘Miscellanies’, tt; WJE 13: 190) In other places he defined it as ‘the scale of existence’, ‘ranks of creatures’, or ‘the gradation or succession of created things’ (‘Miscellanies’, 1263; WJE 23: 206–7 and 211). This view resembles that of Dante’s Platonic and Neo-Platonic portrayal of the theatre of the world:   All things among themselves, possess an order; and this order is the form that makes the universe like God.   Here do the higher beings see the imprints of the Eternal Worth, which is the end to which the pattern I have mentioned tends.   Within that order, every nature has its bent, according to a different station, nearer or less near to its origin.   Therefore, these natures move to different ports across the mighty sea of being, each given the impulse that will bear it on. (Paradiso, Canto I)

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330   Avihu Zakai Closer to Edwards’s own times, the New England theologian’s view of the Great Chain of Being had been developed previously, among others, by the Cambridge Platonists, a group of seventeenth-century philosopher-theologians including Henry More (1614–1687), Ralph Cudworth (1617–1688), and John Smith (1616–1652), who ‘adhered to the ancient doctrine of microcosm and macrocosm which they related to the great chain of being. Thus various levels of reality emanated from God in an ordered hierarchical structure’ (McGuire 1972, 542). The new mechanistic philosophy of nature stood in opposition to the medieval concept of the ‘Great Chain of Being’. Yet, the concept did not disappear from the world of eighteenth-century imagination. Edwards adhered to the cosmological worldview of the Great Chain of Being, the belief that God’s cosmic providential plan was evidenced in the structure of order inherent in the universe, and so did many others of his time, such as Joseph Addison (1672–1719), Henry St. John Bolingbroke (1678–1751), Alexander Pope (1688–1744), Denis Diderot (1713–1784), Emmanuel Kant (1724–1804), and many more. ‘It was in the eighteenth century’, Arthur Lovejoy wrote in his classical study, ‘that the conception of the universe as a Chain of Being, and the principles which underlay this conception—plenitude, continuity, gradation—attained their widest diffusion and acceptance.’ Next ‘to the word “Nature”, “the great Chain of Being” was the sacred phrase of the eighteenth century, playing a part somewhat analogous to that of the blessed word “evolution” in the late nineteenth century’ (Lovejoy 1936/2001, 183–4). Yet Edwards’s version of the Chain of Being was distinct, since his occasionalism deprived nature itself of any participation in the affairs of divine providence. Because ‘nothing else has a proper being but spirits’, as Edwards claimed in ‘The Mind’ (WJE 6: 337), ‘in the various ranks of beings, those that are nearest to the first being should most evidently and variously partake of his influence’, or ‘be influenced by the operation of the Spirit of God’ (‘Miscellanies,’ 178; WJE 13: 327). His return to the classical and medieval notion of the Chain of Being signified a radical departure from current scientific thought. The notion of the hierarchical order of the universe as a chain of created spirits, based upon the concept of ‘excellency’, which defined these spirits’ relation to God, enabled Edwards to claim that ‘God created the world for the shining forth of his excellency’ (‘Miscellanies’, 332; WJE 13: 410) thus establishing world phenomena as a mode of reality in which ‘the beauties of nature are really emanations, or shadows, of the excellence of the Son of God’ (‘Miscellanies’, 108; WJE 13: 279). Written in the mid-1720s, these notes were subsequently incorporated into Edwards’s 1755 Concerning the End for which God Created the World (WJE 8: 526–31). Here he would argue again that the whole of creation is the overflowing of divine being. Continuity in the course of nature therefore depended, moment by moment, on God’s immanent activity in the world. In sum, Edwards’s thought is based, like that of the French Cartesian and occasionalist Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715), on the conviction omnia videmus in deo—‘we see all things in God’—and he continuously pursued the mind of God (mens Dei) in creation. In Concerning the End for which God Created the World he would write:

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The Natural Sciences and Philosophy of Nature   331 the whole universe, including all creatures animate and inanimate, in all its actings, proceedings, revolutions, and entire series of events, should proceed from a regard and with a view to God, as the supreme and last end of all.  (WJE 8: 424)

Edwards and the School of Physico-Theology Edwards’s philosophy of nature also has many affinities with the physico-theology tradition, whose advocates attempted to prove the being and attributes of God from the design of the universe. They sought to present evidence for the Deity’s power and wisdom by reference to nature, and thereby to confirm the validity of Christian theology. Physico-theology was developed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by various distinguished English philosophers and theologians who attempted to counteract the threat of atheism. According to Michael Prince, ‘the design argument assumed a correspondence between our experience of order in the natural and our derivation of behavioral norms for self and society’ by ‘describing all natural effects as expressions of providential plan, [and thus] design provided the basis for a theodicy’ (Prince 1996, 84) The physico-theologians emphasized the worship of the God of nature; their goal was theological one in search for examples of God’s providential plan in creation and His care for His creatures. In contrast to sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries natural theology, however, physico-theology ‘emphasized not the immediately perceptible regularities of the heavens and the scala naturae but, instead, the intricate contrivances of living organisms’ (Ogilvie 2005, 95). Physico-theology developed through a series of works. Important to mention, among many others, are Walter Charleton’s The Darkness of Atheism Dispelled by the Light of Nature (1654); John Ray’s The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation (1691), and Three Physico-Theological Discourses (1692); Richard Bentley’s A Confutation of Atheism from the Origin and Frame of the World (1692); William Derham’s Physicotheology: or, A demonstration of the being and attributes of God from His works of creation (1711–12), William Paley’s Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature (1802), as well as the Dutch natural philosopher Bernard Nieuwentijdt’s The Religious Philosopher: Or, the Right Use of Contemplating the Works of the Creator (1724). For more than a hundred years, defenders of the design argument bolstered their proofs with a variety of examples from astronomy and human physiology to show the intricate order and design of the world. To this list one may add Cotton Mather’s Christian Philosopher (1721/1994), and Jonathan Edwards himself, who was very much influenced by the ideas of the school, as can be seen in his works on natural philosophy where the theme of God’s ‘Wisdom in the Contrivance of the World’ frequently appears, as well as many entries in the ‘Miscellanies’, where the theme of the ‘Wisdom of God in the Work of Redemption’ recurs again and again.

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332   Avihu Zakai As physico-theologians attempted to locate all the phenomena of nature in the ‘Wisdom of God’, so did Edwards in what he called God’s ‘Wisdom in the Contrivance of the World’ in an eponymous series of notes written around 1732/3 (WJE 6: 307–10). Yet, unlike other physico-theologians, Edwards moved beyond the realm of nature to that of grace, or from space to time, as can be seen in the frequency of the notion of the ‘Wisdom of God in the Work of Redemption’ in his writings, most clearly in the ‘Miscellanies’. Here he set out to prove the being and attributes of God not only with reference to the created order and the world of nature but also, as I have argued elsewhere, in relation to time and history, conceiving the whole of history as the history of God’s work of redemption (Zakai 2003). The New England theologian’s language of nature, as well as his concepts of natural philosophy, are very similar to those of contemporary British and European physicotheologians. For example, in his ‘Of Insects’ (1719–20) Edwards declared ‘we may behold and admire at the wisdom of the Creator, and be convinced that [he] is exercised about such little things’ as insects (WJE 6: 161). In his famous ‘Spider Letter’ (1723), he praised ‘the wisdom of the Creator in providing the Spider’, and ‘all sorts of creatures’, with ‘all the necessities’ for their existence, such as the spider’s ‘silver web’. This, to him, was evidence of ‘the exuberant goodness of the Creator’ (WJE 6: 164–5) In the series ‘Wisdom in the Contrivance of the World’ Edwards, among other things, argued that the ‘wisdom of God’ appeared in ordering the ‘weight of the atmosphere’, in ‘the contrivance of the eye’, writing that ‘the roundness of the earth shews the wisdom of God’, and that the ‘­wisdom of God appears in placing of the Planets at a greater or lesser distance from the sun’ (WJE 6: 307–10). Edwards’s writings thus reflect a well-established theological genre of his time. But what were his overall intentions in his works on natural philosophy? He did not aim to contribute to current scientific thought, but rather to demonstrate, like the physicotheologians, God’s glory and His infinite power and wisdom in the world, and thus to reinforce Christian belief against atheism and materialism. Edwards did not use scientific methods based on observation, experiment, and demonstration, as did his contemporary Benjamin Franklin, but rather looked for proof of God’s wisdom and power in the marvellous fabric of the created order. Furthermore, each element in his natural philosophy served a definite aim. A few examples will suffice to confirm that Edwards’s goal was not the advancement of the new philosophy, or modern scientific thought, but rather the glory of God and the truths of the Christian religion. In his essay ‘Of Being’ (1722), Edwards wished to establish the essential connection between being and knowing, and to show that existence cannot be separated from consciousness in order to refute materialism. Since there is no being without knowing, Edwards claimed, ‘it is really impossible that anything should be, and nothing know it’; hence ‘nothing has any existence anywhere else but in consciousness’. Accordingly, those beings which have knowledge and consciousness are the only proper and real and substantial beings, inasmuch as the being of other things is only by these. From hence we may see the gross mistake of those who think material things the most

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The Natural Sciences and Philosophy of Nature   333 substantial beings, and spirit more like a shadow; whereas spirits only are properly substance. (WJE 6: 204)

Through this affirmation of an essential connection between existence and being, Edwards was aiming to refute materialism, or, more specifically, ‘Hobbes’s notion that God is matter and that all substance is matter’, as he wrote it in a note on ‘Things to be Considered an[d] Written fully about’ (WJE 6: 235). Instead, ‘nothing that is matter can possibly be God, and that no matter is, in the most proper sense, matter’. In these words from his essay ‘The Mind’, we find the beginnings of Edwards’s formulation of idealism, or idealistic phenomenalism, the theory that physical objects exist only in the mind or cannot exist unless they are perceived. For example, he argued in that text that ‘all existence is mental’ (WJE 6: 341). With its belief that physical objects exist only in the mind or cannot exist until they are perceived, Edwards’s idealism resembles that of Bishop George Berkeley (1685–1753), as put forth in his book A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, 1710. However, there is no direct dependence and Berkeley’s and Edwards’s idealism developed independently of each other. Edwards strove to prove God’s existence in His sovereign majesty and glory within the created world. An early example for this would be the essay ‘Of Atoms’ (1722). He claimed that ‘it is God himself, or the immediate exercise of his power, that keeps the parts of atoms . . . together,’ thus proposing that God’s divine activity controls and directs all the affairs of the material world, even the smallest particles of atoms. Accordingly, ‘it follows that all body is nothing but what immediately results from the exercise of divine power.’ These contentions were meant to serve as ‘an incontestable argument for the being, infinite power, and omnipresence of God. In ‘Of Atoms’, however, Edwards had yet another goal in mind: to prove God’s absolute sovereignty. In order to do that, he had to show that ‘what we call the laws of nature’ are in fact ‘the stated methods of God’s acting with respect to bodies, and the stated conditions of the alteration of the manner of his acting’ (WJE 6: 214–16). The mechanical philosophers, who argued that the world of nature operates on its own by secondary causes or natural laws, set an intermediate realm between God and the created order, thus radically reducing the divine involvement in the world and placing limitations on God’s sovereignty. Against this mechanical view according to which God uses the laws of nature as the means of controlling world phenomena, Edwards spoke for the power of God’s immediate immanence and the Deity’s redemptive activity in the world of nature. In another place Edwards put this case more boldly: ‘Every atom in the universe is managed by Christ so as to be most to the advantage of the Christian, every particle of air or every ray of the sun’ (‘Miscellanies’, ff; WJE 22: 184). This line of reasoning, of course, leads to a rejection of mechanical philosophy, as evinced by ‘Of Atoms’: ‘Hence we learn that there is no such thing as mechanism, if that word is taken to be that whereby bodies act each upon other, purely and properly by themselves’ (WJE 6: 214–16). Edwards used the scientific language of his time in order to prove the glory of God in the theatre of the world. In contrast to Newton’s definition of correct scientific procedure—‘for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called an

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334   Avihu Zakai hypothesis; and hypotheses, whatever metaphysical or physical, whatever of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy’ (‘General Scholium’, Newton 1686/1986, 547)—Edwards’s natural philosophy, like that of many physicotheologians, was based on unproved hypotheses. Edwards’s long series ‘Things to be Considered an[d] Written fully about’ provides further evidence that his work on natural philosophy belongs to the genre of physicotheology. He follows Ray, Derham, and other physico-theologians in attempting to prove the being and attributes of God from the Deity’s works of creation and to show how the wisdom of God is manifested in the created order. He strives ‘to shew how infinite wisdom must be exercised in order that gravity and motion will be perfectly harmonious’. He wants ‘to shew how the least wrong step in a mote may, in eternity, subvert the order of the universe’. Accordingly, he calls upon the reader to take ‘notice of the great wisdom that is necessary in order thus to dispose every atom at first, as that they should go for the best throughout all eternity’. All these arguments, of course, were intended to show ‘how God, who does this, must necessarily be omniscient and know every least thing that must happen throughout eternity’ (WJE 6: 231–2). Edwards attacks ‘that folly of seeking for a mechanical cause of gravity’, claiming that gravity rather arises ‘from the “immediate operation of God” ’, and that ‘gravity depends immediately on the divine influence’. We ‘may infallibly conclude that the very being, and the manner of being, and the whole of bodies depends immediately on the divine power’. Edwards’s goal in his natural philosophical writings is obviously the glory of God. As he put it: ‘Thus infinite wisdom is as much concerned, not only in the excellent creation of the world, but merely the creation of it, as infinite power’ (WJE 6: 234–5 and 246). In his ‘Beauty of the World’ Edwards began to construct the thesis that the ‘beauty of the world consists wholly of sweet mutual consents, either within itself, or with the Supreme Being’. This belief undergirded his typology, or, as he said in another place, the belief that the function of the world of matter and motion is to reflect the images and shadows of spiritual reality beyond and above it: the ‘whole outward creation, which is but the shadows of beings, is so made to represent spiritual things’ (‘Miscellanies’, 362; WJE 13: 434). Accordingly, in the corporeal world ‘the sweetest and most charming beauty’ is based upon ‘its resemblance of spiritual beauties’ (WJE 6: 305). In God’s ‘Wisdom in the Contrivance of the World’, Edwards showed his allegiance to the premises of physico-theology. A long series of natural phenomena—the weight of the atmosphere, the eye, the roundness of the earth, the order of the planets and comets, and many more—are explained and defined in this essay as based solely upon ‘the Wisdom of God’. Thus he argued, for example, that the ‘roundness of the earth shews the wisdom of God. If it were not round or nearly round, only some particular parts of it would be habitable’ (WJE 6: 308). In ‘The Mind’ Edwards again displayed his adherence to physico-theology, arguing that ‘to find out the reasons of things in natural philosophy is only to find out the proportion of God’s acting’. Hence, ‘the corporeal world is to no advantage but to the spiritual’ (WJE 6: 353–6).

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The Natural Sciences and Philosophy of Nature   335

Conclusion In his ‘Outline of “A Rational Account,” ’ Edwards described what he thought was the proper relationship between science and religion: ‘To shew how all arts and sciences, the more they are perfected, the more they issue in divinity, and coincide with it, and appear to be as parts of it’ (WJE 6: 397). These word clearly and powerfully capture Edwards’s intentions in his works on natural philosophy, as well as his deep and continuous indebtedness to classical, scholastic, and medieval theology. Edwards’s works in general, and those on natural science and philosophy of nature in particular, should be examined in the context of the ideological and theological transformations of his age. During his time, as he lamented in a 1757 letter to his colleague Thomas Foxcroft, ‘every evangelical doctrine is run down,’ and many ‘bold attempts are made’ against ‘Christ, and the religion he taught’ (WJE 16: 695). No wonder that much of his intellectual life, as he wrote shortly before his death, can be characterized as a struggle ‘against most of the prevailing errors of the present day’, which tended to ‘the utter subverting of the gospel of Christ’ (‘Letter to the Trustees of the College of New Jersey’, 1757; WJE 16: 727). This applies to his many works on ethics and morality, on history, apologetics against deism, and so forth. The realm of natural philosophy, or science, is no exception. Indeed, Edwards’s striving to preserve traditional Christian modes of thought and belief is very evident in his works on natural philosophy, where he tried, with other physicotheologians, to assert the being and attributes of God from the order and harmony of nature, and to demonstrate God’s glory and majesty within the confines of the order of creation, against the menaces of atheism, materialism, and mechanical philosophy.

Works Cited Ashworth, William B., Jr (1986). ‘Catholicism and Early Modern Science.’ God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science. Ed. David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers. Berkeley: University of California Press. 136–66. Galileo Galilei (1957). ‘The Starry Messenger Revealing great, unusual, and remarkable spectacles, opening these to the consideration of every many, and especially of philosophers and astronomers.’ In Discoveries and Opinion of Galileo. Trans. Stillman Drake. New York: Anchor Books. Harrison, Peter (1998). The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Koyré, Alexandre (1968). From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lindberg, David  C. (1986). ‘Science and the Early Church.’ In God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science. Ed. David  C.  Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers Berkeley: University of California Press. 518–36. Lovejoy, Arthur  O. (1936/2001). The Great Chain of Being. Cambridge, Mass.; Harvard University Press.

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336   Avihu Zakai Mather, Cotton (1994). The Christian Philosophers. 1721. Ed. Winton  U.  Solberg. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. McGuire, J.  E. (1972). ‘Boyle’s Conception of Nature,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 33: 523–42. Murphy, Nancy (1990). Theology in the Age of Scientific Reasoning. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Newton, Isaac (1986). ‘Newton’s Preface to the First Edition.’ 1686. In Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World. Ed. Florian Cajori, 2 vols. 1934. Berkeley: University of California Press. xvii–xviii. Ogilvie, Brian  W. (2005). ‘Natural History, Ethics, and Physico-Theology.’ In Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe. Ed. Gianna Pomata and Nancy G. Siraisi. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 75–103. Pascal, Blaise (1999). Pensées and Other Writings. Trans. Honor Levi, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Prince, Michael (1996). Philosophical Dialogue in the British Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zakai, Avihu (2010). Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of Nature: The Re-Enchantment of the World in the Age of Scientific Reasoning. London: T&T Clark. Zakai, Avihu (2003). Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of History: The Re-Enchantment of the World in the Age of Enlightenment. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Suggested Reading Bono, James, J. (1995). The Word of God and the Languages of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and Medicine. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Brown, Robert  E. (2008). ‘Jonathan Edwards and the Discourses of Nature.’ In Nature and Scripture in the Abrahamic Religions: 1700–Present. Edited by Jitse  M.  van der Meer and Scott Mandelbrote. Leiden; Boston: Brill. 83–114. Fehler, Brian (2009). ‘Jonathan Edwards on Nature as a Language of God: Symbolic Typology as Rhetorical Presence.’ In Religion in the Age of Reason: A Transatlantic Study of the Long Eighteenth Century. Ed. Kathryn Duncan. New York: AMS Press. 181–94. Rivett, Sarah (2011). The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Zakai, Avihu (2002). ‘Jonathan Edwards and the Language of Nature: The Re-Enchantment of the World in the Age of Scientific Reasoning,’ The Journal of Religious History 26 (February): 15–41. Zakai, Avihu (2006). ‘The Age of Enlightenment.’ In The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards. Ed. Stephen Stein. New York: Cambridge University Press. 80–99.

Author Bio Avihu Zakai, Emeritus Professor of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is the author, most recently, of The Pen Confronts the Sword: Exiled German Scholars Challenge Nazism (Albany: SUNY, 2018).

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chapter 22

Idea lism a n d A etiol ogy Sebastian Rehnman

Introduction Our discourse is filled with descriptions and explanations of how things come about. For instance, we talk about oaks existing on account of acorns and children existing on account of their parents. Thus, we describe and explain things in terms of causes, ­reasons, or explanations. Such descriptions and explanations may be called ‘causal’ and ‘aetiological’ by reference to cause, origin, reason or occasion (Gr. aitia). Aetiology changed radically in the seventeenth century with the new mathematical and mechanical understanding of nature. Early modern physics sought to account for nature merely in terms of the efficient causation of matter in motion as opposed to the intrinsic powers of substantial forms. With only masses of matter in motion it became difficult to account for beginnings of existence and the relation between cause and effect. To such as René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and Nicolas Malebranche God seemed to be the only effective cause in the physical world, but Thomas Hobbes was taken to claim that there exists nothing but matter and that motion is the universal cause of everything. To counter this, Samuel Clarke formulated a causal argument for the existence of God against ‘atheists’, Spinoza and Hobbes (Clarke 1705). Idealism arose in the Platonic tradition in the wake of Descartes as philosophers debated whether material things or only ideas in minds exist. For Cartesian dualism between body and soul arrived at by the methodical doubt seemed to make it possible to doubt ‘the existence of the external world’ including one’s body. If one can doubt the existence of one’s body, then one can doubt that there is anything else than minds with their ideas. In the British context, idealism seemed immediately to follow for John Norris, Arthur Collier, George Berkeley, (the American) Samuel Johnson and a host of others. In this context Jonathan Edwards sought to account for causes by reference to the ideas of God.

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338   Sebastian Rehnman Scholarship has been devoted to Edwards’s idealist aetiology since the late 1800s. A seemingly disproportionate amount of research (e.g. Lyon 1888; Smyth 1895; Gardiner 1900; Miller 1949; McCracken 1983; Marsden 2003) has been spent on singling out one source of influence and in particular a possible relation to George Berkeley. Today there is no evidence of such a relation and emphasis on the similarities can obscure their dissimilarities. Although Edwards may have read a couple of Berkeley’s anonymous essays and desired to read his published works, he never refers to Berkeley. However, such research assumes that one philosopher must have influenced Edwards. Other scholars have argued that he worked with a wide variety of sources in the context of the early modern Atlantic intellectual community (e.g. Anderson  1980; Fiering  1981; Thuesen 2008; Rehnman 2015). At Yale Edwards studied, taught, and researched within a broadly Cartesian curriculum in logic, ethics, physics, and metaphysics. His writings show his endorsement of early-eighteenth-century notions and experiments, and from this general philosophical framework Edwards developed his idealism and aetiology. Common sources rather than dependence would seem to be the case in Edwards, Berkeley, Collier, Norris, Leibniz, and others, as they all worked within the same trajectory of the modern turn to the subject. With the cartesian scaffoldings an independent thinker such as Edwards could develop a version of idealist aetiology. Most students at Yale probably remained within standard Cartesianism, while such as Edwards and Samuel Johnson moved on to idealism. Although a few scholars (e.g. Miller  1949; Morris  1991/2005; Lee 2000) have denied that Edwards claimed that ‘all existence is perception’ (‘Notes on Knowledge and Existence’; WJE 6: 398), it is not until recently that Edwards’s idealist aetiology has gained followers (Farris and Hamilton 2016). This chapter seeks first to plot and then to probe Edwards’s idealist aetiology.

Plotting Edwards’s Idealist Aetiology This section seeks to briefly clarify idealism and aetiology in Edwards. It begins with idealism and ends with aetiology. Edwards succinct expression of his account of reality as ‘all existence is perception’ is generally considered a sort of idealism, namely that mind and its ideas constitute what is real. In the ordinary cartesian trajectory being is exclusively and exhaustively divided into minds as thinking substances and bodies as extension in motion: ‘An INTELLECTUAL substance is a thinking substance; or a thing where in Immediately there is cogitation [---] A MATERIALL substance or a body is a substance extended into length, weadth & profundity’ (Brattle 1687/1995, 273). Unperceivable substances exist independently, and sensible properties depend on the existence of the substance they modify. Sensations, ideas, volitions, and passions modify mind, while size, shape, motion, and rest modify matter. Yet here Edwards departed from the general framework: those beings which have knowledge and consciousness are the only proper and real and substantial beings, inasmuch as the being of other things is only by these.

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Idealism and Aetiology   339 From hence we may see the gross mistake of those who think material things the most substantial beings, and spirits more like a shadow; whereas spirits only are properly substance.  (‘Of Being’; WJE 6: 206)

Thus, Edwards revises the dualism of mind and matter in his sources to a monism of minds as ‘the only proper and real and substantial beings’. In opposition to the view that spirits are ‘more like a shadow’ of material things, he repeatedly defends the view that ‘nothing else has a proper being but spirits, and [. . .] bodies are but shadows’. (‘The Mind’; WJE 6: 337) Just as bodies are ‘vulgarly’ supposed to cast shadows and thus ­shadows depend on bodies, so ‘metaphysically’ bodies are the shadows that minds cast and thus bodies depend on minds. This is how material things are ‘by these’ spiritual things. Edwards spells out this dependence more thoroughly: when I say, “the material universe exists only in the mind” I mean that it is absolutely dependent on the conception of the mind for its existence, and does not exist as spirits do, whose existence does not consist in, nor in dependence on, the conception of other minds.  (‘The Mind’; WJE 6: 368)

Without a mind having an idea of a body or the material universe, they cannot exist. Their existence does not only depend on but consist in the conception of a mind. Thus ‘all existence is perception’. Edwards adds: What we call body is nothing but a particular mode of perception; and what we call spirit is nothing but a composition and series of perceptions, or an universe of coexisting and successive perceptions connected by such wonderful methods and laws.  (“Notes on Knowledge and Existence”; WJE 6: 398)

This view that a body is a mode of a perceiving mind and a mind is a composite series of perceptions, raises, of course, the problem of how a body or the material universe can exist without a human conceiving them. It is here that God enters into Edwards’s meta­ phys­ics. For ‘the universal system, or sum total of existence’ is divided into ‘all intelligent existence, created, and uncreated’ (Concerning the End; WJE 8: 424). Natural theology was not only important in itself for Cartesianism generally but was also its very foundation. For without the knowledge of God nothing else could be known and without God nothing else could subsist (Le Grand 1694, 53–4). In Edwards’s words: ‘all being [. . .] is, in strictness, only a shadow of his.’ (‘The Mind’; WJE 6: 364) Every finite being not only depends on but consists in God having an idea of it: it is the shadow God’s idea casts. In an early statement of this general account of being, Edwards sets out that things really are God’s ideas: I will form my reasoning thus: if nothing has any existence any way at all but in some consciousness or idea or other, and therefore those things that are in no created consciousness have no existence but in the divine idea—as supposing the things in this room were in the idea of none but of God, they would have existence no other way, as we have shown in our Natural Philosophy; and if the things in this

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340   Sebastian Rehnman room would nevertheless be real things—then God’s idea, being a perfect idea, is really the thing itself.  (‘Miscellanies’ no. 94; WJE 13: 258)

Nothing exists, according to Edwards, but in some consciousness, and the furniture in the room as well as the material universe exist as the ideas of God. This not only aims to account for the existence of things that are not the objects of a human mind, but also to make it possible for ideas to be the only objects of human minds: Seeing our organs themselves are ideas, the connection that our ideas have with such and such a mode of our organs is no other than God’s constitution that some of our ideas shall be connected with others according to such a settled law and order, so that some ideas shall follow from others as their cause. (‘The Mind’; WJE 6: 359)

For instance, the organ of sight by which human minds seem to see ideas is itself a divine idea as is the human mind and its ideas. Although God was generally conceived by Cartesians as the supreme spiritual substance and Edwards uses such typical designations as ‘the uncreated consciousness’ and ‘the infinite mind’ (‘Of Being’; WJE 6: 204; ‘Miscellanies’ no. 205, WJE 13: 340–1), this meant for him that ‘speaking most strictly, there is no proper substance but God himself ’ (‘Of Atoms’; WJE 6: 215). So, starting from the commonly acknowledged premise at the time that only minds and their ideas are immediately and indubitably accessible whereas matter is not, Edwards found a basis for an ontological distinction between ‘two worlds, the external, the subject of natural philosophy; the internal, our own minds’ (‘The Mind’; WJE 6: 387). For the distinction between the directly accessible mind and the indirectly accessible matter, together with the distinction between primary and secondary qualities of matter, was generally supposed to establish that mind and body are two distinct substances. To this ontological dualism answers an epistemological one: the body and the senses obscure the views of the mind. The world seems so differently to our eyes, to our ears and other senses, from the idea we have of it by reason, that we can hardly realize the latter.  (‘The Mind’; WJE 6: 349)

From this Edwards infers a technical distinction between the ‘vulgar’ and the ‘rational account’ of the world. On the one hand, there is ‘the material world . . . existent . . . as is vulgarly thought’. On the other hand, the ‘rational account’ teaches that ‘the world, i.e., the material universe, exists nowhere but in the mind . . . the world [is] only mental [---] the existence of the whole material universe is absolutely dependent on idea’. Hence how the world seems to the senses is superficial, deceptive, or illusionary, whereas how the world is to reason is profound, genuine, and true. However, Edwards allows ordinary talk of the world: ‘yet we may speak in the old way,’ namely in the mechanistic way of ‘atoms’ and their primary qualities of ‘bulk and figure’ and ‘motion’ (‘The Mind’; WJE 6: 353–4). This though is just the vulgar conception of the world. In this way, the doctrine

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Idealism and Aetiology   341 of the direct perception of mind with its ideas and the indirect perception of matter is the basis for the dualism between mind and matter and the necessary condition of the distinction between the vulgar and the rational account of the world. From these assumptions, idealism may seem to follow easily. Since ideas are not material and not inaccessible, they can be viewed as constituting the world as it really is. Edwards’s idealism may then be connected with his aetiology, so that God’s ideas are the immediate causes of whatever exists. In Original Sin Edwards gives perhaps his most explicit and succinct argument that the immediate exercise of God on each occasion is the reason for anything that begins to exist: That God does, by his immediate power, uphold every created substance in being, will be manifest, if we consider, that their present existence is a dependent existence, and therefore is an effect, and must have some cause: and the cause must be one of these two: either the antecedent existence of the same substance, or else the power of the Creator. But it can’t be the antecedent existence of the same substance. For instance, the existence of the body of the moon at this present moment, can’t be the effect of its existence at the last foregoing moment. For not only was what existed the last moment, no active cause, but wholly a passive thing; but this also is to be con­ sidered, that no cause can produce effects in a time and place in which itself is not. ’Tis plain, nothing can exert itself, or operate, when and where it is not existing. But the moon’s past existence was neither where nor when its present existence is. In point of time, what is past entirely ceases, when present existence begins; otherwise it would not be past. The past moment is ceased and gone, when the present moment takes place; and does no more coexist with it, than does any other moment that had ceased twenty years ago. Nor could the past existence of the particles of this moving body produce effects in any other place, than where it then was. But its existence at the present moment, in every point of it, is in a different place, from where its existence was at the last preceding moment. From these things, I suppose, it will certainly follow, that the present existence, either of this, or any other created substance, cannot be an effect of its past existence. The existences (so to speak) of an effect, or thing dependent, in different parts of space or duration, though ever so near one to another, don’t at all coexist one with the other; and therefore are as truly different effects, as if those parts of space and duration were ever so far asunder: and the prior existence can no more be the proper cause of the new existence, in the next moment, or next part of space, than if it had been in an age before, or at a thousand miles distance, without any existence to fill up the intermediate time or space. Therefore the existence of created substances, in each successive moment, must be the effect of the immediate agency, will, and power of God.  (Original Sin; WJE 3)

Here the central phrases ‘dependent existence’, ‘effect’, and ‘created substance’ appear to mean the same. The phrase ‘dependent existence’ seems to suppose ‘independent existence’, while the words ‘effect’ and ‘created substance’ assume ‘cause’ and ‘Creator’ respectively. The passage is full of temporal expressions: ‘present’, ‘antecedent’, ‘foregoing moment’, ‘last moment’, ‘past’, ‘present moment’, ‘years ago’, ‘the last preceding moment’, ‘duration’, ‘next moment’, ‘an age before’, ‘time’ although there is ‘new existence’ in ‘each successive

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342   Sebastian Rehnman moment’. The first premise may be rephrased as ‘whatsoever present existence is dependent existence, must have a cause’. The next step is the cause of whatsoever present existence is dependent existence, and this must either be its own antecedent existence or God. But no cause can produce effects when and where it is not existing, and the past existence of any dependent existence was neither where nor when its present existence is, so the present existence of any dependent existence cannot be an effect of its antecedent existence. Therefore, whatsoever present existence is dependent existence must be the effect of the immediate power of God in each successive moment. Nothing but God can cause each beginning at each moment. Edwards adds the full implications: what nature is, . . . is nothing, separate from the agency of God; . . . God’s preserving created things in being is perfectly equivalent to a continued creation, or to his creating those things out of nothing at each moment of their existence. [---] God’s upholding created substance, or causing its existence in each successive moment, is altogether equivalent to an immediate production out of nothing, at each moment. (Original Sin; WJE 3: 400–2)

Immediately, instantaneously, and continuously God causes each thing to exist. For instance, it is God that makes a full-grown tree develop out of a sprout one thing, a forty-year-old adult one with an infant, and one body with one soul (Original Sin; WJE 3: 397–8). Indeed, ‘individual consciousness depends wholly . . . on the sovereign will and agency of God’ and ‘personal identity . . . depends on an arbitrary divine constitution’ (Original Sin; WJE 3: 399). So, whatsoever begins to exist must have a cause, but no thing that begins to exist can cause itself to exist, and thus it must be caused by God out of nothing at each moment of its existence. Each thing must be the ‘immediate exercise of divine power’ in ‘causing its existence in each successive moment’.

Probing Edwards’s Idealist Aetiology The above section sought to provide an overview of how Edwards aims to account for causes by reference to the ideas of God. Every finite being not only depends on but consists in God having an idea of it: it is the shadow God’s idea casts. On each occasion then the immediate exercise of God is the reason for anything that begins to exist. The following section attempts to concisely probe Edwards’s idealism and aetiology. Most people probably find Edwards’s account unconvincing and would reply: ‘I do perceive that the moon, this oak, that man, and so forth have continued to exist of themselves for a long time!’ However, Edwards’s idealism and aetiology cannot be assessed in such a way. For he agrees that we can truly talk of ‘the moon’s past existence’ and ‘present existence’, of ‘a tree, grown great, and an hundred years old’ and of ‘the body of man at forty years of age’ (Original Sin; WJE 3: 400, 397, 398). There is not disagreement over

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Idealism and Aetiology   343 such factual statements and Edwards’s metaphysics cannot be disproven by such claims. Our common way of talking about the continuing existence of things cannot be defended by adducing facts, since any such claim aimed at proving our common way of talking must rely on the presuppositions of what does and does not make sense in that way of talking. Edwards’s contention is different. He maintains that the moon, this oak or that man only ‘seems to be a permanent thing and that we only seem to perceive them as continuing to exist of themselves’ (Original Sin; WJE 3: 403 n. 5). For he contends for ‘the nature of things’ and ‘what nature is’, namely ‘nothing, separate from the agency of God’ but ‘an immediate production out of nothing, at each moment’ (Original Sin; WJE 3: 401). This formulation at the end of the passage in Original Sin probably means the same as the formulation at its beginning: ‘God does, by his immediate power, uphold every created substance in being’ (WJE 3: 400). Thus, Edwards both starts and ends with the same notion. In these formulations ‘substance’ and ‘nature’ are used interchangeably, so I take it that they signify the same. Moons, humans, and oaks are some of his examples of substances or natures. He adds the rhetorical question: ‘To what purpose can it be . . . to talk of their being dependent on God for continued existence, when they would of themselves continue to exist, without his help; nay, though he should wholly withdraw his sustaining power and influence?’ It is, according to Edwards, purposeless or senseless to talk of things continuing to exist of themselves, and thus ‘it is hard to know what they [opponents] mean’ (Original Sin; WJE 3: 402). He contends for how we talk sensibly of a substance and claims that we do so in saying that it is an immediate divine production out of nothing at each moment, because this is what its nature is. In order to understand Edwards’s contention of talking sensibly or not of things, notice how the relevant sentences make sense in different ways because of different relations between subject terms and predicate terms (cf. Morton 1687/1995, 149–55). His clearest examples are ‘man’ and ‘oak’, and the meaning of these subject terms are such that both the meaning of ‘is a hundred years old’ and its contrary ‘is not a hundred years old’ can be predicated of the meaning of ‘oak’, and that both ‘is forty years of age’ and its contrary ‘is not forty years of age’ can be predicated of ‘man’. The sentences ‘this oak is an hundred years old’ and ‘this oak is not an hundred years old’ would equally make sense, and ‘this man is forty years of age’ and ‘this man is not forty years of age’ would equally make sense. In these sentences the meaning of the subject term does not itself favour the meaning of either predicate to its contrary. However, in predicating ‘is an immediate divine production out of nothing at each moment’ of ‘man’, ‘oak’, ‘moon’, and so forth, the meaning of the subject term is such, according to Edwards, that it excludes the meaning of the contrary predicate. He maintains that we cannot say with purpose, ‘A substance is not an immediate divine production out of nothing at each moment,’ not because it is false but because it does not make sense. The predicate ‘is an immediate divine production out of nothing at each moment’ is essential to the meaning of ‘human’, ‘oak’, ‘moon’, and so forth, whereas ‘is forty years of age’ and its contrary are accidental to the meaning of ‘man’, and ‘is a hundred years old’ and its contrary is accidental to the meaning of ‘oak’. Now, sentences in which the meaning of the predicate is related accidentally or

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344   Sebastian Rehnman essentially to the meaning of the subject are both used to make statements. But stating (as (the English) Samuel Johnson kicked a stone with ‘mighty force’) ‘This man is forty years of age’ or ‘This oak is an hundred years old’ cannot rebut Edwards’s argument. For it concerns what is to count as sentences in which the relation of the meaning of the predicate is accidental to the meaning of the subject—over what accidental predicates are said—and that is decided by sentences in which the meaning of the predicate is essentially related to the meaning of the subject. To deny or affirm ‘is forty years of age’ of ‘man’ is to presuppose what would count as a man being forty, or to deny or affirm ‘is a hundred years old’ of ‘oak’ is to presuppose what would count as an oak being hundred, and whether the statement is true or not the sentences still make sense. Edwards argues that what counts as substances is that they are immediate divine productions out of nothing at each moment. In predicating ‘is an immediate divine production out of nothing at each moment’ of ‘substance’ and ‘nature’ he is (partly) defining those terms; that is what a substance or nature is. It is for this reason that negation of these kinds of sentences are altogether unlike. The negation of a sentence in which the meaning of the predicate is accidentally related to the meaning of the subject yields another such sentence, but the negation of a sentence in which the meaning of the predicate is essentially related to the meaning of the subject does not yield another def­in­ition­al sentence. Notice though that Edwards’s contention is not merely definitional but also existential. For in the lengthy quotation from Original Sin above, ‘existence’’ and ‘exist’’ do occur no less than twenty-one times and in the following paragraph sixteen times, which together is half of their occurrences in the entire chapter. The predicate ‘is an immediate divine production out of nothing at each moment’ signifies what it takes for any dependent thing to exist. Edwards is contending for what it takes for a thing—the moon, the oak, the man, and so forth—to exist at all. ‘The human being is an immediate divine production out of nothing at each moment’ and ‘The oak is an immediate divine production out of nothing at each moment’ assert that human beings and oak trees exist and nothing more. Used as statements these (partly) definitional sentences state both what the meaning of the subject term is and that humans and oaks exist. Definitional sentences can be used both as rules of language and as statements of existence. That is why Edwards maintains what it is to know ‘what nature is’ or ‘the nature of things’ such as human beings and oak trees. To state that human beings and oak trees are immediate divine productions out of nothing at each moment is to state what it takes for things to be or exist at all. Yet, Edwards seems not himself aware that his argument about ‘the nature of things’ is (partly) definitional and existential. But if he conceded this, then he can no longer claim that his argument shows only what things really are but also how we talk about things. However, it is plainly wrong that this is how we commonly talk about things, since we do not use ‘substance’ and ‘nature’ in his way. A substance is not according to him what we ordinarily call ‘substance’ and we are according to his use not talking of substances at all. Rather he is introducing and recommending a new use for substances or natures being immediate productions out of nothing at each moment that do not continue to exist of

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Idealism and Aetiology   345 themselves. Since a definition is not a factual description, one cannot object against Edwards’s definition as such but that will depend on what we are saying and want to be able to say about what exists. I will instead seek to show that his inference can be validly drawn only from the old or ordinary use of ‘substance’ or ‘nature’ but he attempts to draw it from his new or novel use. His idealism and aetiology affirm or presuppose for their intelligibility the existence of conditions that Edwards denies. Thus, his use is in­valid (In the following I am indebted to Wittgenstein’s argument against solipsism (Wittgenstein 1969, 46–74; Wittgenstein 1953/2009, 398–401; Wittgenstein 1968/1993, 255–9, 272–4; Wittgenstein 1964, 54–7).). Edwards cannot coherently use ‘existence at the present moment’ in stating that only the present moment exists. Although he contrasts ‘present existence’ with ‘antecedent existence’ and ‘past existence’ (as well as ‘present moment’ with ‘the last foregoing moment’, ‘past moment’ or ‘last preceding moment’ and ‘the next moment’), his argument denies that such contrasts can be drawn. For in his usage, ‘present’, ‘near’, and ‘now’ do not signify an interval in between any foregoing and any following, but ‘what exists at this moment, by this [divine] power, is a new effect; and simply and absolutely con­sidered, not the same with any past existence, though it be like it’ (Original Sin; WJE 3: 401). Only in our ordinary and non-Edwardsean use does it make sense to measure the change of things in terms of present, past, and future, but the conditions under which this usage makes sense are precisely what Edwards denies. Hence his use of ‘present’ and other temporal expressions is redundant and cannot be employed to state his argument. (It seems similarly that Edwards’s use of ‘where’ for ‘place’ or ‘space’ only makes sense in connection with the ordinary use of ‘there’, but the conditions of those employments he equally denies.) Edwards may grant that he cannot use our ordinary temporal (and local) expressions in stating his argument for divinity, but reply that it is ‘our own immediately present ideas and consciousness . . . the ideas now immediately in view’ that warrants present existence—where ‘present’ would have to be interpreted as presence, something given or ‘immediate’ (Freedom of Will; WJE 1: 183). For, according to him, ‘Consciousness is the mind’s perceiving what is in itself—its ideas, actions, passions, and everything that is there perceivable. It is a sort of feeling within itself. The mind feels when it thinks, so it feels when it desires, feels when it loves, feels itself hate, etc.’ (‘The Mind’; WJE 6: 345). One’s idea of existence is then one’s ‘own’ in the sense that one’s mind is ‘perceiving what is in itself [, . . .] and everything that is there perceivable’ is personal property. Whenever the moon, this oak, and that man is seen, it is always and everywhere, according to Edwards, one’s own immediately perceivable idea of the moon, this oak, and that man which is seen. So, as there are ‘two worlds, the external, the subject of natural philosophy; the internal, our own minds’ (‘The Mind’; WJE 6: 387), there are ‘our own’ immediately perceivable objects ‘there’, ‘in’, and ‘within’ consciousness on the one hand, and ‘our own’ mediately perceivable objects ‘there’, ‘out’, and ‘without’ consciousness on the other hand. To immediately perceive one’s own ideas is, according to Edwards, to know them ‘intuitively’ or introspectively (cf. the English etymology from the Latin intueri): ‘We know our own existence, and the existence of everything that we are conscious of in our

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346   Sebastian Rehnman own minds, intuitively. . . . When we therefore see anything begin to be, we intuitively know there is a cause of it’ (‘The Mind’; WJE 6: 370). To view one’s own immediately given ideas is then ‘to know this certainly in this intuitive independent manner’ (Freedom of Will; WJE 1: 182). It is an assurance that ‘is so strong and lively, that he [no one] can’t doubt of it’ (Religious Affections; WJE 2: 239). Thus one’s own idea of existence is introspectively, certainly, and indubitably justified. However, there are multiple confusions here. In supposing ‘two worlds’, Edwards equates superficial similarities between talk of things and talk of ideas. He assumes that as eyes are ordinarily said to stand in relation to corporal objects such as the moon, this oak, and that man, so consciousness may be said to stand in relation to mental objects such as ideas, actions, and passions. But things are talked of in terms of spatial location— the moon is in the sky, the oak is in the garden and the man is in the house—in ways that ideas are not as the mind is not a place. With an open door we may see the man in the house, but with an open mind we may not see the idea in the man. The man may walk out of the house, but the idea may not walk out of the mind. Nor are ideas but only things perceivable. Jonathan may see that Sarah sees but he cannot see that he sees Sarah seeing, since there is nothing for him to see or introspect but only to register, recognize, or reflect on his seeing. Reflecting is one way of understanding ourselves and seeing is one way of acquiring knowledge of our circumstances but not of our ideas. So ‘in’ and ‘out’ are not said of things and ideas in the same way as Edwards’s argument supposes. Yet, mistaking these categorically distinct kinds of statements of things and ideas, Edwards confuses different uses of ‘own’. He emphasizes that ideas are one’s ‘own’ in the sense that they are those that are ‘in’ or ‘within’ one’s consciousness ‘itself ’. Although that oak may or may not be Edwards’s own, his idea of the oak must (purportedly) be his own in his mind and no one else can have it. However, that identifies what the idea is with whose idea it is, but the logical criteria by which we determine what the idea is—the idea of the oak—and whose idea it is—who is having the idea of the oak—are not the same. The criterion by which we determine what idea it is is a definition, whereas the criterion by which we determine whose idea it is is the human being who expresses it in appropriate circumstances. If Jonathan has the idea of the oak in the garden and Sarah has the idea of the oak in the garden, they have the same idea since the meaning of the word ‘oak’ is explained in the same way, and they show that they have that idea by their behaviour (including verbal behaviour) in those circumstances. Thus, one’s idea is not one’s own in the sense that it is inalienable from oneself, and to have an idea of existence is not to stand in a relation to or to own an object. Moreover, if Edwards’s idea and consciousness of existence were his own and personal property, then it could not be intelligible for others. Each and every one would have had their own immediately present idea of ‘existence at the present moment’ and could say, ‘I have my own idea of existence at the present moment.’ That ideas are not one’s own inalienable and introspectively perceivable objects partly defeats Edwards’s assumption that one knows certainly and indubitably one’s own existence and the existence of everything that one is conscious of in one’s own mind. But there is in addition confusion in this claim to knowledge. To predicate ‘know’ of a

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Idealism and Aetiology   347 human being makes sense only if it also makes sense to predicate ‘do not know’, since in such sentences the meaning of the subject does not itself favour the meaning of either predicate to its contrary, but only used in statements is either predicate meant to fact­ ual­ly exclude the contrary one. For instance, it makes sense to say ‘I know the moon exists,’ ‘I know the oak exists,’ and ‘I know the man exists’ only if it makes sense to say that ‘I do not know the moon exists,’ ‘I do not know the oak exists,’ and ‘I do not know the man exists.’ So, it makes sense to predicate knowing of a person where it makes sense to predicate being ignorant, coming to know, finding out, or learning something. But then it also makes sense to predicate knowledge of things to a human being only where it makes sense to predicate doubt of things, since there can only be knowledge where there can be doubt. Thus, contrary to Edwards, the existence of everything one can come to know can be doubted (for logically good or bad evidence in given circumstances). Edwards may grant that one can doubt that the moon, the oak, the man, and so forth exist, but maintain that one cannot doubt that one exists: ‘We know our own existence.’ It is of course senseless to say ‘I doubt whether I exist,’ but not because one is certain of the evidence but because there is nothing that counts as doubting whether one exists. Edwards fallaciously infers that since one cannot doubt that one exists one must know that one exists by mistaking essential and accidental relations between the meaning of the predicate and the meaning of the subject in ‘I know I exist’. ‘I know I exist’ is of course like the sentence ‘I know the oak exists,’ but although ‘I do not know that the oak exists’ is intelligible ‘I do not know that I exist’ is unintelligible, since it does not describe something of which one might be ignorant and thus cannot be said to know. One may be unsure, uncertain or indecisive about the use of ‘exist’ but not ignorant that one exists. Rather ‘I (know I) exist’ is a manifestation of one’s existence. So, Edwards confuses the essential predication of absence of doubt for the accidental predication of presence of knowledge. To this Edwards may reply that whenever and wherever ‘I exist’ is expressible by someone there is ‘the same consciousness’ or ‘identity of consciousness . . . and therefore that personal identity’ or ‘identity of created substance itself ’, which justifies present existence (Original Sin; WJE 3: 398, 399; ‘The Mind’; WJE 6: 385–6). So he may grant that ‘the existence of everything that we are conscious of in our own minds’—consciousness of the moon, the oak, the man, and so forth—may come and go, but insist that there is always and everywhere ‘the same consciousness’ and ‘therefore that personal identity’ of one’s consciousness that warrants present existence. However, consciousness cannot be an object of perception as there is nothing to perceive or introspect—still less ‘a sort of feeling within itself ’. It is rather a precondition for any animal being in any occurrent mental or experiential state and for any human being ‘I’ must logically be expressible with all one’s acts. Identity of consciousness is a logical criterion rather than an in­dub­it­ able and certain knowledge of one’s present existence. Edwards moreover mistakes identity of consciousness with consciousness of identity (cf. Kant 1787, A 363, B 427). For he infers ‘personal identity’ from ‘same consciousness’, but identity of one’s consciousness beyond the consciousness of this and that does not prove consciousness of one’s identity as consciousness. He mistakes the possibility of the absence of consciousness of

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348   Sebastian Rehnman every existent with the presence of consciousness of one’s identity. But even so, Edwards’s metaphysics implies that identity of consciousness is ‘not absolutely and numerically the same’ in one person and that many persons may even have ‘the same consciousness’ (Original Sin; WJE 3: 402 n. 5). Apart from all this, is the problem that Edwards denies the conditions under which the use of ‘I’ makes sense. For our ordinary use of personal pronouns are interconnected and dependent on public criteria of persons such as distinctive continuities of body, behaviour, character, memory, and so forth. But according to Edwards these conditions do not hold and therefore he cannot know the meaning of ‘I’, ‘we’, and so forth on his account. Still less can others know the meaning of those terms on his account. Edwards may finally attempt to express occasionalism without the use of ‘I’ by granting that ‘same consciousness’ and ‘identity of consciousness’ do not make sense on his account, and affirming that all that exist is ownerless consciousness. In other words, deleting ‘our own’ and ‘now’ there exist only ‘immediately present ideas and . . . the ideas immediately in view’. So, by attending to current consciousness, naming it, and subsequently remembering what the word ‘consciousness’ was assigned to, one would know the meaning of that word. However, it is incoherent to suppose that ‘consciousness’ (not to mention ‘immediately’, ‘present’, ‘idea’, and so forth) can have meaning in this way. For there has not, according to Edwards, been a past to remember. Yet even so, a correct association of ‘consciousness’ with consciousness presupposes an independent criterion of correctness, but viewing an idea of consciousness cannot logically be the criterion, since ideas cannot be pointed at mentally or held up as standards of comparison with present consciousness. Rather whatever comes to mind in the present would be correct and thus nothing would be correct. So, on Edwards’s account the word ‘consciousness’ would have no meaning, and he and others could not know what it meant (cf. Wittgenstein 1953/2009, 243–315).

Conclusion Edwards aims to account for causes by reference to the ideas of God. Every finite being not only depends on but consists in God having an idea of it and God is the one immediate cause for anything that exists on each occasion. Together with many others in the (broadly) Cartesian tradition, Edwards takes idealistic aetiology to be the true factual description of things. However, the argument about ‘the nature of things’ is (partly) def­ in­ition­al and existential, and so he is introducing and recommending a new use for natures being immediate productions out of nothing at each moment that do not continue to exist of themselves. His inference can be validly drawn only from the ordinary use of ‘substance’ or ‘nature’ but he attempts to draw it from his novel use. His idealism and aetiology thus affirm or presuppose for their intelligibility the existence of conditions that he denies. So, Edwards’s argument for idealistic aetiology is invalid.

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Works Cited Anderson, Wallace E. (1980). Editor’s Introduction. In Wallace E. Anderson (Ed.), The Works of Jonathan Edwards: Scientific and Philosophical Writings. New Haven/London: Yale University Press. 1–143. Brattle, William (1687/1995). Compendium of Logick, According to the modern Philosophy, extracted from Le-grand & others their Systems. Boston, Mass.: Colonial Society of Massachusetts. Clarke, Samuel (1705). A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God: More Particularly in Answer to Mr. Hobbs, Spinoza, and their Followers. London: James Knapton. Farris, Joshua R., and Hamilton, S. Mark (2016). Idealism and Christian theology. Fiering, Norman (1981). Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and Its British Context. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Gardiner, H. N. (1900). The Early Idealism of Jonathan Edwards. The Philosophical Review 9: 573–96. Kant, Immanuel (1787). Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Vol. 4). Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1900–83. Le Grand, Antoine (1694). An Entire Body of Philosophy according to the Principles of the Famous Renate Des Cartes (Richard Blome, Trans.). London: Samuel Roycroft. Lee, Sang Hyun (2000). The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Expanded ed.). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lyon, Georges Henri Joseph (1888). L’Idéalisme en Angleterre au XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Alcan. MacCracken, John H. (1902). The Sources of Jonathan Edwards’s Idealism. The Philosophical Review, 11(1): 26–42. Marsden, George M. (2003). Jonathan Edwards: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press. McCracken, Charles J. (1983). Malebranche and British Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon. Miller, Perry (1949). Jonathan Edwards. New York: William Sloane Associates. Morris, William S. (1991/2005). The Young Jonathan Edwards: A Reconstruction. New Haven/ Eugene: The Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University/Wipf & Stock. Morton, Charles (1687/1995). A Logick System. Boston, Mass. Rehnman, Sebastian (2015). Towards a Solution to the ‘Perennially Intriguing Problem’ of the Sources of Jonathan Edwards’s Idealism. Jonathan Edwards Studies, 5(2): 138–55. Smyth, Egbert C. (1895). Some Early Writings of Jonathan Edwards. American Antiquarian Society, 10: 212–47. Thuesen, Peter J. (2008). Editor’s Introduction. In: The Works of Jonathan Edwards: Catalogues of Books (Vol. 26). New Haven, Conn./London: Yale University Press. 1–116. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1953/2009). Philosophical Investigations: The German Text with an English Translation (G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, & Joachim Schulte, Trans. 4 ed.). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1964). Philosophische Bemerkungen (Rush Rhees Ed.). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1968/1993). Notes for Lectures on ‘Private Experience’ and ‘Sense Data’. In: James C. Klagge & Alfred Nordmann (Eds.), Ludwig Wittgenstein Philosophical Occasions 1912–1951. Indianapolis: Hackett. 202–88. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1969). The Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the Philosophical investigations (2 ed.). Oxford: Blackwell.

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Suggested Reading Anderson, Wallace E. (1980). Editor’s Introduction. In: W. E. Anderson (Ed.), The Works of Jonathan Edwards: Scientific and Philosophical Writings. New Haven/London: Yale University Press., 1–143. Crisp, Oliver D. (2012). Jonathan Edwards on God and Creation. New York: Oxford University Press. Fiering, Norman (1988). The Rationalist Foundation of Jonathan Edwards’s Metaphysics. In: N. O. Hatch & H. S. Stout (Eds), Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 73–101. LoLordo, Antonia (2017). Jonathan Edwards’s Monism. Philosophers’ Imprint, 17(2), 1–14. Rehnman, Sebastian (2015). Towards a Solution to the ‘Perennially Intriguing Problem’ of the Sources of Jonathan Edwards’s Idealism. Jonathan Edwards Studies 5(2): 138–55. Rehnman, Sebastian (forthcoming). Edwards on God. London: Routledge.

This chapter consists of abbreviated portions of that book.

Reid, Jasper. (2006). The Metaphysics of Jonathan Edwards and David Hume. Hume Studies 32(1): 53–82. Thuesen, Peter J. (2008). ‘Editor’s Introduction.’ In The Works of Jonathan Edwards: Catalogues of Books. New Haven, Conn./London: Yale University Press. 1–116.

Author Bio Sebastian Rehnman is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Stavanger, Norway, and member of the research group Life Phenomena and Caring at the Faculty of Health Sciences. He is a certified philosophical counsellor in the Norwegian and Swedish societies of philosophical practice. His most recent book is Edwards on God.

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pa rt I I I

E DWA R DS ’ S R E L IGIOUS A N D SOCIAL PR AC T IC E S

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chapter 23

Spir itua lit y a n d Devotion Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe

The spirituality of Jonathan Edwards and his personal devotional practice is an area of Edwards studies that has especially benefited from the complete Yale edition of the Works and the programs and online resources of the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University. Volumes comprising his correspondence and other personal writings, decades of sermons, copious notes on Scripture, and the ‘Miscellanies’ recording preparatory reflections on biblical and theological topics open windows on Edwards’s own religious experience and practice that complement the seminal theological treatises and books on the revival of religion. The wave of publications associated with the 2003 tercentenary of Edwards’s birth, far from diminishing, continues to grow, with many studies of his theology, biblical exegesis, and preaching that relate to his devotional practice and experience. University and religious presses alike regularly publish books bearing at least indirectly on Edwards’s spirituality, aimed at both academic and popular audiences, many by scholars with connections at the numerous Jonathan Edwards Centers now operating around the world. Unlike some notable earlier New England Puritans like Cotton Mather, Edwards did not keep a regular diary, nor did he write meditative poetry like Edward Taylor. But the remarkable range of his writing, together with sources like Samuel Hopkins’s 1765 Life and Character of the Late Reverend Mr Jonathan Edwards, shed light on his interior life. As Hopkins observed, ‘there is much evidence, that he was punctual, constant and frequent in secret prayer.’ Special ‘days of fasting and prayer’ augmented regular time daily ‘set apart . . . for serious, devout meditations on spiritual and eternal things, as part of his religious exercise in secret’, and especially for ‘devout reading [of] God’s word and meditation upon it’. In Hopkins’s estimation, as a frequent guest in the Edwards home, ‘solemn converse with God in these exercises made his face, as it were, to shine before others’ (Levin 1969, 39). These characteristics were at once rooted in the practice of piety typical of seventeenth-century Puritan ‘heart religion’ and representative of the nascent evangelical movement that was beginning to flourish in his lifetime. The link that George Marsden in his magisterial biography identifies between spiritual experience

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354   Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe and the preaching ministry applies to the theological writing as well: ‘Edwards spoke [and wrote] from his own knowledge’ (Marsden 2003, 226).

Spirituality Personal and Public The personal and public nature of Jonathan Edwards’s spiritual life is illuminated by a letter he wrote in October 1740 to Eleazar Wheelock, a young colleague (and future founder of Dartmouth College) whose evangelistic work was on the rise. ‘Pray earnestly for me,’ Edwards intreated, ‘that I may be filled with the divine Spirit, and that God would improve me though utterly unworthy as an instrument of glory to his name, and of good to the souls of men.’ He went on to request Wheelock’s intercession for God to ‘bless Mr. [George] Whitefield’s coming here for good to my soul, and the souls of my people’ (WJE 16: 86). Edwards’s personal spiritual experience and his communal relationships and re­spon­si­bil­ ities in society as pastor and preacher of the gospel were interdependent. Edwards’s career elevated him to fame as a preacher and interpreter of religious revival, embroiled him in ecclesiastical controversies, and revealed his greatness as a theologian. At the core of his ministry, because for Edwards any effort on his part depended wholly on his receiving grace and power from God in Christ, was this yearning to be ‘filled with the divine Spirit’ of God, of which he wrote to Wheelock. His life was consumed with biblical study, meditation on Scripture, and earnestly humble prayer for that indwelling Spirit for himself and, because of the communal nature of Christian faith, for others. As much as he cherished solitude in his study, in nature, or on horseback—devotional settings for which he is well known—his deeply personal spirituality was never strictly private. It was expressed from pulpits in synergy with congregations of people, the most stunning example of which occurred at Enfield, Connecticut, on 8 July 1741, when he delivered Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God with remarkable effect. It was sustained in the Northampton parsonage by fellowship with visitors and students training for ministry (with some of whom, like Hopkins and David Brainerd, he became extraordinarily close) and through a network of correspondents that extended to Scotland and elsewhere. Most broadly, ‘early evangelicalism is a transatlantic story’ (Schwanda 2016, 1) and the spirituality of Jonathan Edwards developed as it did in a world that included the new hymnody of Isaac Watts, Enlightenment thought, and other religious, philosophical, and scientific developments of the era in Europe and North America. Above all other human influences, his faith experience was shaped and strengthened by his marriage with Sarah Pierpont, whom Edwards adored as a spiritual exemplar.

Biblical Devotion Of the varied themes that weave through Edwards’s devotional life, none is more im­port­ant than his lifelong daily attention to Scripture. An assessment in 2005 that his

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Spirituality and Devotion   355 approach to biblical hermeneutics ‘is the subject most neglected in the study of his writings and intellectual pursuits’ (Lee  2005, 87) was answered in the following ­decade with major works on Edwards’s exegetical methodology (Sweeney 2016), his engagement with the Psalms (Barshinger 2014), and an array of specialized topics related to Jonathan Edwards and Scripture (Barshinger and Sweeney 2018). That biblical scholarship for him was a devotional as well as an intellectual endeavour was confirmed in the most comprehensive survey of his thought to date, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards. Not only did Edwards seek to establish the Christocentric ‘harmony’ of the Old and New Testaments, he immersed himself in ‘a “harmony” between heart and text. The biblical hermeneutics of Edwards was of a piece with his entire exposition of the spiritual life and his well-known conception of the “sense of the heart” ’ (McClymond and McDermott 2014, 173). The documents that comprise Edwards’s ‘Personal Writings’ in the Yale edition of the Works—his youthful ‘Resolutions’, ‘Diary’, and spiritually smitten paean ‘On Sarah Pierpont’, along with the later ‘Personal Narrative’—have informed efforts by biographers and historians to narrate Edwards’s life for more than two centuries. Samuel Hopkins published much of this material, which he titled ‘extracts from his private writings’, in his Life and Character, and it was included in various forms in nineteenth-century editions of Edwards’s works. It has been easy for readers to skip over biblical references in these writings as if they were merely part of the furniture or wallpaper of colonial New England. While the Bible’s significance may seem ­self-evident for the spirituality of a minister like Edwards, recent scholarship on Edwards and Scripture has fixed attention on the overwhelming extent to which the Bible occupied his time and focused his mental labours, theological acumen, and spiritual energy. The primacy of the Bible in Edwards’s intellectual work established the consistently outward orientation of his piety. His concern for promoting the salvation of individuals, fostering an inner sense of God’s Spirit, and analyzing religious experience, including his own, was based on the belief that authentic experience of God comes not from within but from outside the self. In the language of Martin Luther, human nature being what it  is, our only hope is to be found extra nos, beyond us. With this Augustinian and Reformed theological framework, for Edwards the fountain of grace was therefore not to be sought inside the soul or with some innate human capacity. Indeed, for Edwards the indwelling of God’s Spirit required abandoning any reliance on one’s own self and giving oneself fully to the God who reveals himself in his Word. In the ‘Personal Narrative’ Edwards reflected that ‘the sweetest joys and delights I have experienced, have not been those that have arisen from a hope of my own good estate; but in a direct view of the glorious things of the gospel’. He cherished most deeply experiences of ‘an affecting sense of the excellency of the word of God, as a word of life; as the light of life; a sweet, excellent life-giving word: accompanied with a thirsting after that word, that it might dwell richly in my heart’. After a paragraph brimming with biblical citations, Edwards notes that in meditation ‘sometimes only mentioning a single word’ from Scripture ‘causes my heart to burn within me’ and would prompt ‘exalting thoughts of God’ (WJE 16: 800–1).

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Writing as Spiritual Exercise Such thoughts became the stuff of the ‘Miscellanies’, which can best be understood as commonplace books, as described by John Locke in A New Method of Making CommonPlace-Books (1706). These and other collections of notes ultimately found their way into sermons and formal theological work. The great mass of his writing on the Bible, according to Hopkins, resulted from his ‘opening his thoughts on particular passages of it, as they occurred to him in reading or meditation . . . by which his great and painful [i.e. painstaking] attention to the Bible, and making it the only rule of his faith, are manifest’ (Levin 1969, 82). The biblio-centric nature of Edwards’s piety, therefore, is at least partly responsible for the essential relationship between his devotional and intellectual life. It is the bridge connecting the personal writings and the broader complex of his writing and public ministry. As several editors of the Yale volumes argue, the ‘Miscellanies’ were not just preliminary notes for sermons and treatises. They were the means by which Edwards engaged in the time-honoured Puritan devotional practice of journal keeping. ‘The “Miscellanies” are a record of Edwards’s affective life, but it is a life centred on God and not the self.’ While the purpose of a conventional diary is self-scrutiny, Edwards surrendered his ‘affective inner life’ to the God whose redemptive love gave his life its meaning and purpose (WJE 13: 9–10; 18: 7–9). The daily practice of writing was for Edwards both a devotional and intellectual exercise. The two dimensions of his inner life cannot be separated. In a letter to the trustees of the College of New Jersey responding to their call to serve as president, he wrote, ‘My method of study, from my first beginning the work of the ministry, has been very much by writing . . . when anything in reading, meditation or conversation, has been suggested to my mind.’ Such diary-like writing was at one level ‘for my own benefit’, but it always related outwardly to God and to the work of the church, which for Edwards included engaging Enlightenment ideas and countering ‘the prevailing errors of the present day’ in sermons and in print (WJE 16: 726–7). As more than one scholar has observed, ‘it is difficult to read Edwards, even at his most philosophical, and not find that Edwards’s spiritual disciplines were intimately bound up with his pastoral and intellectual life’ (Guelzo 1993, 4).

Meditation in Nature The role of natural settings in Edwards’s devotional practice must also be understood within the context of his engagement with Scripture. Nature, or creation, as a recurring theme in Edwards’s spirituality has long attracted attention, sometimes by way of associating him with Transcendentalist thinkers of the next century or interpreting him for today as a kind of environmental mystic. He could rhapsodize in sermons about how,

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Spirituality and Devotion   357 once the soul is awakened from sin, ‘the face of the earth, the fields and trees’ display ‘a spiritual light shining from them that discovers the glory of the Creator’ (WJE 17: 323). The lifelong habit of devoting time to meditation in such settings began in childhood as he built a ‘booth in a swamp’ for prayer, found ‘secret places of my own in the woods, where I used to retire by myself ’ for ‘religious duties’, or ‘walked in a solitary place in my father’s pasture for contemplation’ and ‘looked up on the sky and clouds’ with ‘a sweet sense of the glorious majesty and grace of God’. During his first pastorate in New York City he ‘frequently used to retire to a solitary place, on the banks of Hudson’s River . . . for contemplation on divine things, and sweet converse with God’. At a time when he felt scriptural devotion flagging, recollection of special moments of closeness with God ‘in the orchard’ or ‘under the oak tree’ steadied him. But in all these circumstances a more careful reading of the text shows that his Bible always seems to have been open when God felt near. ‘I had then, and at other times, the greatest delight in the holy Scriptures,’ he wrote in connection with one of these moments. In reading, ‘every word seemed to touch my heart. I felt an harmony between something in my heart, and those sweet and powerful words’ (WJE 16: 769, 791–4). In line with his critique of both untethered religious ‘enthusiasm’ on the one hand and rationalistic ‘Arminianism’ on the other, Edwards denied that there is any real knowledge of God available apart from, or independent of, the biblical revelation. The glory of God that Edwards experienced in creation was but a sign or reflection of the majesty of the Creator he knew in the Psalms and other portions of Scripture. His most precise spiritual focus was not even God as Creator, much less the trees and clouds, but the person of Jesus Christ, whose divinity as Son of God he worshiped both as Saviour and as Lord of the cosmos. On one memorable occasion in 1737, riding ‘out into the woods for my health’, Edwards dismounted ‘in a retired place, as my manner commonly has been, to walk for divine contemplation and prayer’. There he sensed, beyond the glory of nature, ‘a view . . . of the glory of the Son of God; as mediator between God and man’. For upwards of an hour, ‘in a flood of tears, and weeping aloud’, he longed for nothing but ‘to be emptied and annihilated; to lie in the dust, and to be full of Christ alone’. Experiences like this were for Edwards ‘great enough to swallow up all thought and conception’. Edwards certainly adapted many of the eighteenth century’s new scientific interests and rational methods. But his yearning ‘to be totally wrapt up in the fullness of Christ; to be perfectly sanctified and made pure, with a divine and heavenly purity’ (WJE 16: 801) also projected older Puritan ways of knowing God into the era of Enlightenment and evangelicalism.

Tradition Tradition, then, alongside the biblicism he shared with the Puritan movement, was a force shaping Edwards’s devotional experience. The legacy of seventeenth-century Puritanism, and the Reformed or Calvinist theology that it carried forward, mediated

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358   Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe for Edwards strong, long-running currents in classical Christian faith and practice. Devotional manuals and other Puritan spiritual writing published on both sides of the Atlantic were widely available and influential throughout the seventeenth century in New England. Remarkably, the guidance on meditation and prayer they provided often resembled that appearing in Roman Catholic manuals, as well as echoing or borrowing from the devotional writing of Lutheran and Reformed pietists on the Continent. Puritanism as a devotional movement was part of a wider phenomenon of Christian spiritual awakening in the 1600s, as the rise of Puritan and pietist ‘heart religion’ coincided with the development of Catholic ‘sacred heart’ devotion. In this way, the devotional life of Jonathan Edwards was an eighteenth-century expression of centuries-long Christian spiritual tradition. The evangelical awakening of the 1730s and 1740s, of which Edwards was a leading participant, is typically interpreted as a movement of religious innovation during a time of social change, but there was also this conservative bent. Within the context of emer­ ging or shifting cultural realities, the experiential gospel of Edwards and other New Light clergy also represented a retrieval of the old Puritan practice of piety. Edwards belonged to a cadre of evangelical ministers, including Thomas Prince of Boston’s Third Church (Old South), that saw to the publication of new editions of seventeenth-century devotional manuals, spiritual autobiographies, and similar materials. A prime example was the diary of first-generation New England pastor Thomas Shepherd, ‘lately come to light’, which David Brainerd edited as he lay ill in Boston and for which, in August 1747, he wrote a preface while staying in the Edwards parsonage where he soon died (WJE 7: 451, 460, 513). Prince published this as Meditations and Spiritual Experiences of Mr Thomas Shepherd—precisely as Edwards was busy editing the just-deceased Brainerd’s own journals. A periodical overseen by Prince and his son, The Christian History, printed selections from the devotional writings of ‘the most famous Old Writers’ of Puritan England, Scotland, and ‘the first Settlers of new-England and their Children’, alongside contemporary reports of widespread conversions. The stated purpose of this ambitious enterprise was to demonstrate that ‘the pious Principles and Spirit’ of the ‘Old Writers’ was ‘at this day revived’ (Hambrick-Stowe 1993, 277–8). Edwards’s deference to the earlier Puritanism of New England is evident in his frequent favourable references and direct quotations, most notably of Thomas Shepherd, in his Treatise Concerning Religious Affections and elsewhere. In books of their sermons, Shepherd and Hartford founder Thomas Hooker, among others on both sides of the Atlantic, had developed a theology of preparation for conversion and growth in grace that came to characterize the spiritual side of ‘the New England way’. This ‘order of salvation’, a process of turning from sin and experiencing the grace of justification and sanctification in Christ, was never a fixed system. It was applied in varying degrees across New England, generally with charity and flexibility. But, as churches with their congregational polity required a testimony of faith for church membership, it did set a widely recognized standard. Nowhere was this pattern of experience-oriented pastoral theology more pronounced than in the Connecticut River Valley where Jonathan Edwards was reared and carried

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Spirituality and Devotion   359 out his ministry. His grandfather was born in Hartford in 1647 and Edwards grew up in the parsonage of the East Windsor church where his father was pastor. He graduated from Yale College and, after completing his brief first pastorate in New York City, Edwards moved back to the region, first as tutor at Yale. He began his career-defining pastorate at Northampton in 1726 as assistant to his aging grandfather Solomon Stoddard, whose powerful ministry had relaxed the accepted standards for admission to the sacraments while fostering ‘seasons of awakening’ in the congregation. Edwards reversed his grandfather’s sacramental policy but fully embraced and built on the Hartford area’s conversionist tradition. Edwards’s beloved Sarah Pierpont was a great-granddaughter of Thomas Hooker himself. The spirituality of Jonathan Edwards must be understood in the context of this longstanding Connecticut Valley religious culture. As one historian states, ‘Hooker’s preaching documents a vital stage in the development of Protestantism from the Reformation to the great Evangelical Revivals of the eighteenth and early nineteenth-centuries’ (Tipson 2015, 4). This was the historical and geographic setting in which Edwards prayed and preached. Edwards’s autobiographical description of his young adult spiritual awakening in the ‘Personal Narrative’ follows the broad outline of a classic Puritan conversion experience. As a senior student at Yale, with ‘many uneasy thoughts about the state of my soul’, he fell ill and was in anguish as God ‘brought me nigh to the grave, and shook me over the pit of hell’. The old cycle repeated itself, however, as ‘I fell again into my old ways of sin,’ ­followed by remorse and new resolutions to ‘apply myself to seek my salvation’. After putting to rest his struggle against the doctrine of predestination with ‘a delightful conviction’ of God’s sovereignty, he experienced a breakthrough while reading 1 Timothy 1:17—‘Now unto the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God, be honor and glory forever and ever, Amen.’ He recalled how at that moment, ‘There came into my soul, and was as it were diffused through it, a sense of the glory of the divine being; a new sense, quite different from anything I ever experienced before.’ With this new ‘inward, sweet sense of these things’, he remembered, ‘my mind was greatly engaged, to spend my time in reading and meditating on Christ; and the beauty and excellency of his person, and the lovely way of salvation, by free grace in him.’ Such thoughts ‘would often of a sudden as it were, kindle up a sweet burning in my heart; an ardor of my soul, that I know not how to express’. Reporting his experiences to his pastor-father, Edwards now believed he possessed a sound basis to pursue his vocation as a minister of the gospel (WJE 16: 791–2). This account would almost certainly have passed muster with Thomas Hooker, but then Edwards was writing about things that had happened fifteen years before. It is often pointed out that the ‘Personal Narrative’, as a retrospective literary construction, glosses over the hint of uncertainty that Edwards recorded in the ‘Diary’ he kept briefly during those young adult years. On 18 December 1722, he listed several reasons ‘why I, in the least, question my interest in God’s love and favor’. The first two relate directly to the old Puritan morphology of conversion delineated by Hooker and Shepherd: ‘Because I cannot speak so fully to my experience of that preparatory work, of which divines speak.’ Further, ‘I do not remember that I experienced regeneration, exactly in those steps, in

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360   Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe which divines say it is generally wrought.’ He added a few more sources of anxiety, that he did not ‘feel the Christian graces sensibly enough’ and ‘I am sometimes guilty of sins of omission and commission’, including ‘evil speaking’ (WJE 16: 759). Again, on 12 August 1723, he recorded, ‘The chief thing, that now makes me in any measure to question my good estate is my not having experienced conversion in those particular steps, wherein the people of New England, and anciently the Dissenters of Old England, used to experience it.’ But in neither of these cases does Edwards seriously doubt his salvation. It was comparison with a rigid understanding of the Puritan standard that caused him ‘in the least’ or ‘in any measure’ to question his spiritual state. Rather than lapse into despair, awareness of the old model prompted him to resolve to search out ‘the real reason, why they used to be converted in those steps’ (WJE 16: 779). Both entries are followed, day after day, with reflection on keeping his ‘Resolutions’ and the same ongoing introspective course of confession of sin and renewed sense of grace that had always typified Puritan piety. Perhaps in the decade and a half between the ‘Diary’ and the ‘Personal Narrative’, Edwards had come to appreciate that the seventeenth-century Puritan framework of salvific stages had served more as a pastoral, spiritual, and psychological guide than strict requirement and that actual experience was often assessed with the judgment of charity. In any case, there is no question that Edwards’s own experience of humility before God’s glory, that ‘new sense’ of God’s grace in Christ, and his lifelong devotional practice adhered to the general pattern of the Puritan model, which itself was rooted in what scholars since the work of Perry Miller have identified as an ancient ‘Augustinian’ type of piety (e.g. Tipson 2015, 308–9, 416). Conversion for Edwards, as for his Puritan forbears, was but the beginning of life in Christ. In sermons preached in Northampton during the early 1730s, prior to the first outbreak of revival under his ministry, Edwards set forth the pattern of God’s working in the soul. As the editor of the Yale edition notes with reference to God Makes Men Sensible of Their Misery, Edwards took wording directly from the ‘Miscellanies’ when he expounded the sequence of ‘humiliation, mortification, conviction, conscience, and conversion’, demonstrating once again the ‘integration of Edwards’s private, more speculative meditations’ with his public proclamation of the gospel (WJE 17: 140). In the early phases of conversion, ‘God makes men sensible of the sin of their hearts’ through bitter experience, painful self-examination, and ‘natural conscience’, by which ‘the awful and terrible greatness’ of God ‘excite[s] their terror’. In tune with his own experience, Edwards preached that throughout the process, ‘the Spirit of God in all his work upon the souls of men works by his Word’. For Edwards it was all the work of the Holy Spirit, and yet the penitent sinner must also act. ‘Be very particular’, he preached, ‘in setting your own sins in order before your own eyes. . . . Keep a catalogue of your sins in your mind and be often reading of it and often spreading of it before God’ (WJE 17: 148–55, 171). The life of faith for Edwards, in his preaching as in his personal experience, never eclipsed the ongoing need for humble self-examination and penitence which had always been a hallmark of Puritan piety.

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Spirituality and Devotion   361

Sense of the Heart In other sermons during the early 1730s such as Born Again and God Glorified in Man’s Dependence (Edwards’s first published work, after he had also preached it at a clergy meeting in Boston), he then proclaimed that ‘there is in conversion infused a principle of spiritual understanding and spiritual action that is far above any principles that man had before’ (WJE 17: 187). This new ‘infused’ spiritual reality is ‘not only caused by the Holy Ghost’, he was bold to state, it is actually ‘the gift of the Holy Ghost . . . dwelling in them’ as ‘a fountain of true holiness and joy’ (WJE 17: 208). ‘In conversion’, he preached in another early sermon, saints ‘are brought to see spiritual objects’—specifically, ‘light from the Word of God and the works of God’. He testified that in devotional reading of the Bible ‘a light shines from the sacred pages of it into the heart’—as well as in the world of everyday experience as ‘light shines from God’s works of creation and providence’. All is made new ‘by the inward and immediate influence of the Spirit on the heart’ (WJE 17: 322–5). Edwards delivered his strongest exposition of this theme homiletically in A Divine and Supernatural Light, in which he declared, ‘There is such a thing, as a spiritual and divine light, immediately imparted to the soul by God, of a different nature from any that is obtained by natural means.’ By ‘the renewing and sanctifying work of the Holy Ghost’, God restores reason and other human capacities that were ‘destroyed by the fall’, so that ‘the mind becomes susceptive of the due force of rational arguments’ for the truth of the gospel. Specifically, the Holy Spirit ‘acts in the mind of a saint as an indwelling vital principle’ and bestows a new ‘sense of the heart’ that enables ‘the perceiving of spiritual beauty and excellency’ (WJE 17: 410–12, 422). For all his intellectual acuity, Jonathan Edwards ached for ever-deeper experiences of that immediate indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Following the Puritan practice of devotional preparation for the sabbath, Saturday nights after the family had retired often were times of intense spiritual experience for Edwards. On one such occasion in January 1739, he wrote in his ‘Personal Narrative’, he felt overwhelmed by the ‘sense, how sweet and blessed a thing it was, to walk in the way of duty’ in tune with ‘the holy mind of God’. In meditation and prayer, ‘it caused me to break forth into a kind of loud weeping . . . so that I was forced to shut myself up, and fasten the doors’ (WJE 16: 803–4). If he himself could thus verge at times on the mystical, however, he never considered his own experience to be exemplary. That standard was modelled especially by his wife, and by the piety of young missionary evangelist David Brainerd. Edwards was first struck by the luminous spirit of Sarah Pierpont when he was at Yale and she was but a teenager. He was awed by his perception that the ‘almighty Being, who made and rules the world . . . in some way or other invisible, comes to her and fills her mind with exceeding sweet delight,’ that her greatest love was ‘to meditate on him’ knowing that one day she would ‘be ravished with his [i.e. God’s] love, favor, and delight forever’ (WJE 16: 789–90). This may be the eloquent gushing of a lovestruck college student, but after their marriage in 1727 his reverence for her and gratitude for their ‘uncommon union’ (as he called it on

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362   Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe his deathbed 31 years later) only matured. Houseguests like Samuel Hopkins observed that Edwards would often ‘admit her into his study, and converse freely with her on matters of religion’ and ‘pray with her in his study, at least once a day . . . just before going to bed, after prayers in the family’ (Levin 1969, 80, 43). In what the definitive modern biography describes as one of ‘the most revealing ­episodes in the whole Edwards saga’, during January 1743 Sarah Edwards ‘was enraptured by spiritual ecstasy that continued for more than two weeks’. Edwards was itinerating through most of the period of these occurrences, while Samuel Buell preached in his stead with evangelistic power. A number of others, including Buell, were at the parsonage and participated with Sarah in family devotions, so that, as she managed to keep up her household duties, her raptures were no secret. Upon his return, despite a sense of abject humility on account of Buell’s superior effectiveness, Edwards ‘was elated to learn of his beloved’s transfixing encounters with the divine’ (Marsden 2003, 240). He interviewed Sarah eagerly and included an anonymous version of her narrative in Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion. Striving to steer a safe pastoral and theological course between ecclesial orderliness and radical experientialism, Edwards nevertheless allowed himself to blurt his own deep desire: ‘Now if such things are enthusiasm, and the fruits of a distempered brain, let my brain be evermore possessed of that happy distemper! If this be distraction, I pray God that the world of mankind may be all seized with this benign, meek, beneficent, beatifical, glorious distraction!’ (WJE 4: 341). He would express the same view, with more restraint, in his admiration for the piety of David Brainerd, affirming ‘that there is indeed such a thing as true experimental religion, arising from immediate divine influences’ (WJE 7: 520–1)—all the while insisting that with both of his great exemplars such spiritual ‘enthusiasm’ bore fruit outwardly in holy living.

Prayerful Song When Sarah was in the throes of her two-week ‘heavenly Elysium’, as she later reported to her husband, one morning during family devotions she involuntarily leapt and fell as Buell read from the ‘melting hymns’ of Isaac Watts (Marsden 2003, 244–5). Buell, in Edwards’s absence, substituted the singing of some of these hymns in place of psalms in public worship, an innovation with which Edwards was sympathetic but endorsed only gradually. Edwards championed use of the new hymns in personal and family devotion but was at first cautious about introducing them in public worship. Watts, an English Dissenter, pioneered modern hymnody with Christomorphic paraphrases of the Psalms and with hundreds of original hymns, beginning with the publication of Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1707). He shipped a copy to New England as a gift for Boston pastor Cotton Mather and donated a set of his works to the Yale College library. Watts was directly connected with Edwards, as he and John Guyse edited Edwards’s A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God for publication in London (1737). In their preface,

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Spirituality and Devotion   363 Watts and Guyse refer to ‘the friendly correspondence which we maintain with our brethren in New England’ (WJE 4: 130). Edwards, for his part, noted in A Faithful Narrative that in the revival ‘public praises were then greatly enlivened . . . with unusual elevation of heart and voice’ in singing (WJE 4: 151). A few years later, in Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New-England (1742) Edwards defended the new ‘hymns of human composure’. The psalter should not be abandoned, he argued, but ‘’tis really needful that we should have some other songs besides the Psalms of David’ (WJE 4: 406–7). Meditative singing, and the devotional reading of hymns and psalms, were for Edwards a significant medium for spiritual experience. His youthful diary records his practice of ‘singing psalms in prose, and . . . singing forth the meditations of my heart in prose’ (WJE 16: 781). In the Personal Narrative, he wrote how as a young man he would often find himself ‘singing forth with a low voice, my contemplations of the Creator and Redeemer’ while feeling transfixed by God’s glory in nature. ‘Walking alone in the woods, and solitary places, for meditation, soliloquy and prayer, and converse with God . . . it was always my manner, at such times, to sing forth my contemplations’ (WJE 16: 794). Whether in personal and family devotions or in public worship, singing for Edwards evoked images of ‘the future world’ with ‘saints rejoicing that Christ loves and delights in them’. It was under the category of ‘Heaven’ that he wrote ‘Miscellanies’ that described singing as ‘the harmonious exercise of the mind’ and as expressing his ‘idea of a society in the highest degree happy’. He may have been thinking not just of a particularly good Sunday at church but of prayer time with Sarah when he wrote of the love and ‘inward concord and harmony and spiritual beauty of their souls’ as believers experience the joy of ‘sweetly singing to each other’. Music was a foretaste of celestial harmony, but just a foretaste. In heaven he anticipated ‘some other emanations than sounds, of which we cannot conceive . . . and the music they will make will be in a medium capable of modulations in an infinitely more nice, exact and fine proportion than our gross air, and with organs as much more adapted to such proportions’ (WJE 13: 303, 331). In the meantime, as he wrote in a letter from Stockbridge in 1751, ‘Music, especially sacred music, has a powerful efficacy to soften the heart into tenderness, to harmonize the affections, and to give the mind a relish for objects of a superior character’ (WJE 16: 411). The musicality of Edwards’s spiritual life was in tune with the vocabulary of ‘sweetness and beauty’ that characterized so much of his writing on meditation and prayer. Edwards’s personal prayers in solitude, like his experience with singing psalms and hymns, would have mirrored the character of his prayer practices witnessed by others in family devotions and in public worship. According to the first-hand observations of Samuel Hopkins, ‘his prayers were indeed extempore. He was the farthest from any appearance of a form, as to his words and manner of expression, of almost any man.’ He exhibited ‘a spirit of real and undissembled devotion’, combining fervency and orderliness, with ‘much of the grace and spirit of prayer’ on the one hand and ‘decency and propriety’ on the other. In accord with his spirituality in general, Edwards would both ‘pray with the spirit and with the understanding’ (Levin 1969, 49). In a ‘Miscellanies’ reflection Edwards wrote that while he despised ‘a whining tone, that some use’ in

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364   Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe preaching and prayer, nevertheless, ‘a melancholy musical tone doth really help in ­private, whether in private prayer, reading, or soliloquy’. Not that heartfelt faith was ‘a melancholy thing (for it is far from that)’, but such a manner of prayer ‘stills the animal spirits and calms the mind and fits it for the most sedate thought, the clearest ideas, brightest apprehensions, and strongest reasonings’ about spiritual things (WJE 13: 175). The ‘melancholy musical tone’ of Edwards’s prayers in solitude and in family devotions helped induce both depth of feeling and acute spiritual perception within the scheduled regularity of daily prayer in his study. His prayers, always shaped by awareness of ‘my own sinfulness and vileness’ and of God’s grace in Christ, were then punctuated from time to time, as already noted, with moments of extraordinary clarity when he felt that ‘ardency of soul . . . to be emptied and annihilated . . . and to be totally wrapt up in the fullness of Christ’ (WJE 16: 801–2).

Ecstasy and Order As drawn as Edwards was to ecstatic experience, he remained equally leery of spiritual chaos, for the same reasons that his Puritan forbears had been. The spirit of individualistic ‘Antinomian’ radicalism voiced by Anne Hutchinson in the 1630s—with her mockery of the standing order and claim of receiving ‘immediate revelations’ from God—seemed to be once again abroad in the land. At her trial, Hutchinson, in her gnostic-like hyperspirituality, denied an important tenet espoused by Shepherd, Hooker, and other leading clergy. They believed, and Edwards a century later affirmed, that because justification and sanctification were linked in the morphology of conversion it followed that sanctification could serve as evidence of justification. She rejected the notion that holy living was a sign of salvation and thus a source of assurance of grace. Such thinking was, by her lights, nothing but pharisaical works-righteousness, an unspiritual covenant of works. By contrast, the Puritan pastoral theology of which Edwards was heir was organized around a set of regular practices or ‘ordinances’ which were upheld as reliable means of grace. The orthodox tradition emphasized engagement with such outward forms and practices as Bible reading, church fellowship, public worship, the sacraments, catechesis, journal keeping, godly singing, and devotional routines in household and social settings. But the old model of a covenanted society centred on life in the gathered church was giving way to religious fragmentation and individualism in this period of evangelical awakening. Jonathan Edwards himself, in his own experience and in his preaching, helped to shape that new culture. In important publications—A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (1736); The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God (preached at Yale commencement, 1741); Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion (1742)—he defended the exuberant ‘spiritual delights’ of ‘experimental’ faith against the ‘Arminian’ drift of more rationalist urbane critics of revival, while sim­ul­tan­ eous­ly distancing himself from the revival’s ‘woeful extravagancies’. In the delicate balance of Edwards’s spiritual theology, he held fast to the necessity of the ordinances and

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Spirituality and Devotion   365 outward daily behaviour—the ‘external duties of devotion, such as praying, hearing, singing, and attending religious meetings’, along with ‘moral duties, such as acts of righteousness, truth, meekness, forgiveness and love towards our neighbor’, which are ‘vastly the greatest importance in the Christian life’ (WJE 4: 183, 282, 522–3). As he wrote in his Life of David Brainerd (1749), authentic faith is both experiential and ‘agreeable to the dictates of right reason and the holy Word of God’. It was essential to distinguish carefully ‘between real solid piety and enthusiasm, between those affections that are rational and scriptural, having their foundation in light and judgment, and those that are founded on whimsical conceits, strong impressions on the imagination, and those vehement emotions of the animal spirits that arise from them’ (WJE 7: 91–2). Edwards explored these themes in his great work, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746). In Religious Affections Edwards set forth his modification of the old faculty psych­ ology that had characterized Puritan thought, now organizing human behaviour under just two headings. ‘God has indued the soul with two faculties: one is that by which it is capable of perception and speculation, or by which it discerns and views and judges of things; which is called the understanding.’ Second, the ‘affections’, defined as much more than ‘passions’ or what we think of as emotions or feelings, subsumed both inclination or will with mind or heart. As the motivator and director of will and intellect, the affections were of central importance for his understanding of spirituality and religious experience. In the truly awakened, it was the ‘new spiritual sense’ or ‘sense of the heart’ that united the ‘understanding and will’ (WJE 2: 97–8, 272). But how to distinguish genu­ine religious experience from mere emotional frenzy or outward show? During the heat of the revivals, as one recent historian puts it, Edwards felt a ‘growing fascination with inciting a visible, embodied response in his audiences’ as an indicator of au­then­ti­ city (Winiarski 2017, 223). But he soon backed off, delivering a more cautious assessment of emotional displays in his Yale commencement address, Distinguishing Marks. Somatic or mental manifestations were no sign of grace one way or the other, he told the assembled scholars and clergy. In the dance that typified Edwards’s spirituality, he would affirm both sides of the religious spectrum on the same page of text. ‘They who condemn high affections in others, are certainly not likely to have high affections themselves,’ he argued against the critics of the revival; ‘they who have but little religious affection, have certainly but little religion.’ And just two paragraphs later he would state, ‘If it be so, that true religion lies much in the affections . . . such means are to be desired, as have much of a tendency to move the affections. Such books, and such a way of preaching the Word, and administration of the ordinances, and such a way of worshiping God in prayer, and singing praises . . . to affect the hearts of those who attend these means’ (WJE 2: 121). Religious Affections is organized in two sections, the first delineating twelve unreliable ‘signs’ of God’s presence, many of which, Edwards cautioned, could be marks of mere ‘enthusiasm’. Powerful experiences or an individual’s sense of certitude are simply not in themselves evidence of religious authenticity. The second part elaborates twelve ‘distinguishing signs of truly gracious and holy affections’, all of which can be summarized as the integrity of faith and practice in a life of Christlike love of God and neighbour. Edwards essentially built his case on the tenet of Calvinist orthodoxy that justification

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366   Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe and sanctification are inextricably linked in the redeemed believer. That is, in his nuanced attempt to negotiate the forces pulling New England religious life apart, Edwards was conscious of revisiting the crisis precipitated by Anne Hutchinson a century before. Referencing Thomas Shepherd for support, as he does in many footnotes, Edwards notes that ‘in his Sound Believer there is a long discourse of sanctification as the chief evidence of justification’ (WJE 2: 233–5). Religious Affections culminates with a strong affirmation of humble, God-centred daily Christian living in the world. ‘Gracious and holy affections have their exercise and fruit in Christian practice,’ Edwards concludes. ‘And in general a manifestation of the sincerity of a Christian profession in practice, is far better than a relation of experiences’ (WJE 2: 383, 420).

Science of the Soul The search for reliable ‘evidence’ of the inner workings of the soul was also surprisingly modern, in that it reflected the ethos of the new science of the Enlightenment era. Generations of scholars, beginning at least with Perry Miller, have explored the ­influence of Enlightenment thinkers on the philosophical ideas and diagnostic methods of Jonathan Edwards—an avenue of research well represented by articles in the online journal Jonathan Edwards Studies (at jestudies.yale.edu). Edwards borrowed directly from John Locke’s theory of the ‘simple idea’, for example, when describing his own distinctive concept of the ‘sense of the heart’. With regard to Edwards’s ­lifelong effort to discern and explain spiritual experience, recent scholarship has linked not only Edwards but his Puritan predecessors with the assumptions and methods of the new natural p ­ hilosophy. The integrity of Edwards’s spiritual and intellectual work is part of a more general pattern in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century that belies the facile but persistent narrative of opposition between science and religion. Edwards’s careful observation and analysis of religious experience—building on the work of Puritan divines before him—was not only rooted in the medieval ‘cure of souls’ tradition of pastoral theology but also expressed the inductive evidence-based science of the Enlightenment. The affinity of Calvinist Christianity with the empiricism of Francis Bacon and Robert Boyle led pastors to scrutinize all manner of ‘evidence culled from human souls’ to create a ‘science of the soul’ that incorporated goals and methods of the new science. This kinship of ‘experimental religion’ and ‘experimental’ natural philosophy is evident in the membership of Puritan clergy, including Cotton Mather of Boston along with prominent New England civic leader John Winthrop, Jr, in England’s Royal Society. The endurance of the older practice of faith testimonies and attention to utterances during luminous moments, such as the last words of dying saints, took on fresh significance for Edwards and other New Light clergy in the period leading up to and during the revivals in the Connecticut River Valley. In research reminiscent of Isaac Newton’s experiments on light and optics with a camera obscura, Edwards believed that his interviews with

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Spirituality and Devotion   367 parishioners might successfully detect the operation of the ‘divine and supernatural light’ in the converted mind. Parallels with European experimenters who theorized that camera obscura technology might ‘trace spirit impressions as they were channeled through the optic nerve and recorded in the brain’ make the language that Edwards employed to describe his work sound like an early form of neuroscience. He continued the research he had undertaken in Northampton with renewed interest among Native American converts during his years at the Stockbridge mission. Understanding the Great Awakening as part of an international ‘Evangelical Enlightenment’, Edwards’s evangelistic and scholarly involvement with the revivals ‘interacted with a broader transatlantic audience to partake in this new history of the Enlightenment. Jonathan Edwards implements a technique of observing souls in their native habitat and culling empirical data across a diverse human population parallel to that practiced by . . . natural philosophers’ (Rivett 2011, 10–11, 194, 277–8). Emblematic of the times but tragically for Edwards, his effort to fit the square peg of a renovated Puritan piety into the irregularly shaped receptacle of eighteenth-century New England culture ended badly with his famous dismissal from the Northampton church in 1750. At the Stockbridge mission, in addition to his regular ministry, Edwards devoted himself to completing his great theological works, for which the decades-long exercise of recording thoughts in ‘Miscellanies’ and other notebooks was preparatory. Of notable importance for Edwards’s spiritual theology is the connection between the ‘signs of truly gracious and holy affections’ that he had developed in Religious Affections in 1746 and his exposition in 1757 of The Nature of True Virtue, published posthumously in 1765. In True Virtue Edwards was not preparing a sermon for the laity or a tract to influence the New England clergy, but wrote in a philosophical idiom with the intent of locking horns with British intellectuals. Against those who explicitly or implicitly took God out of the picture, Edwards put forth a God-dependent definition of virtue as participation in divine love. The argument flows from the same Christ-centred mind that had preached sermons like the Charity and Its Fruits series (1738) and identified holy living as indicative of Spirit-infused religious affections. Here at the end of his career, he continued to build on the bedrock idea that only the ‘new spiritual sense’ or ‘sense of the heart’ bestowed by God in conversion could enable a person to see and live life as it is meant to be. Edwards argued that any expression of love motivated by something less than love for God falls short of true virtue. Even love for such important but secondary or ‘particular’ human entities as family, friends, or nation—which philosophers con­ sidered subjects of natural virtue—is exposed ultimately as self-love in disguise. With other philosophers who thought of virtue as ‘something beautiful’, Edwards went deeper, defining ‘true virtue’ as ‘the beauty of the qualities and exercises of the heart, or those actions which proceed from them’ in ‘benevolence to Being in general’. Insistence that selfless love for others flows from the ‘spiritual beauty’ of personal union with God’s love in Christ meant that True Virtue is as much a treatise on Christian spirituality as it is of ethics. Behaviour and piety are united for Edwards in a spirituality of beauty and benevolence (WJE 8: 555, 539, 548).

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368   Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe

Legacy Samuel Hopkins in Life and Character presented Edwards’s untimely death at Princeton as an exemplar or idealized model of a saint’s departure from this life. That is, Edwards’s serene and confidently faithful passing stands in the ancient Christian tradition in devotional literature of the good death. In Hopkins’ narrative, Edwards’s final moments are recorded as perfectly in tune with his life and thought, expressing benevolent concern for those he would be leaving behind. A group of friends had gathered in the room, ‘expecting he would breathe his last in a few minutes’. Not thinking he could hear them, they lamented his death ‘not only as a great frown on the college, but as having a dark aspect on the interest of religion in general’. Suddenly Edwards spoke, in what were his last words: ‘Trust in God, and ye need not fear.’ Hopkins interpreted Edwards’s intent not as if he were mediating a vision of heaven opening to him but as an act of ministry, ‘as much a matter of instruction and support, as if he had wrote a volume . . . God is allsufficient, and still has the care of His church (Levin 1969, 81). Jonathan Edwards devoted much of his career to analysing the life of the spirit. In the centuries since his death, from his first biographer and literary executor Samuel Hopkins to the work of historians today, the spirituality and devotional life of Edwards himself endures as a subject of scholarly and religious interest.

Works Cited Barshinger, David P. (2014). Jonathan Edwards and the Psalms: A Redemptive-Historical Vision of Scripture. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Barshinger, David P. and Sweeney, Douglas A., eds (2018). Jonathan Edwards and Scripture: Biblical Exegesis in British North America. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Guelzo, Allen  C. (1993). ‘The Spiritual Structures of Jonathan Edwards,’ Bulletin of the Congregational Library. Hambrick-Stowe, Charles E. (1993). ‘The Spirit of the Old Writers: The Great Awakening and the Persistence of Puritan Piety,’ in Bremer, Francis  J., ed. Puritanism: Transatlantic Perspectives on a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Faith. Boston, MA: Massachusetts Historical Society. Lee, Sang Hyun, ed. (2005). The Princeton Companion to Jonathan Edwards. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Levin, David, ed. (1969). Jonathan Edwards: A Profile, Boston, MA: Hill and Wang. Marsden, George (2003). Jonathan Edwards: A Life. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. McClymond, Michael J. and McDermott, Gerald R. (2014). The Theology of Jonathan Edwards. New York: Oxford University Press. Rivett, Sarah (2011). The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Schwanda, Tom, ed. (2016). The Emergence of Evangelical Spirituality: The Age of Edwards, Newton, and Whitefield. New York, NY and Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press. Sweeney, Douglas A. (2016). Edwards the Exegete: Biblical Interpretation and Anglo-Protestant Culture on the Edge of the Enlightenment. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

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Spirituality and Devotion   369 Tipson, Baird (2015). Hartford Puritanism: Thomas Hooker, Samuel Stone, and Their Terrifying God. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Winiarski, Douglas  L. (2017). Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings in Eighteenth-Century New England. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

Suggested Reading Kidd, Thomas S. (2007). The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Strobel, Kyle, ed. (2012). Jonathan Edwards, Charity and Its Fruits: Living in the Light of God’s Love. Wheaton, IL: Crossway. Sweeney, Douglas A. (2009). Jonathan Edwards and the Ministry of the Word. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.

Author Bio Charles  E.  Hambrick-Stowe combines the callings of Christian ministry and historical scholarship, most recently as pastor of the First Congregational Church of Ridgefield, Connecticut, and formerly as dean and professor of church history at Northern Seminary in Illinois. He is the author of articles and book chapters on Jonathan Edwards, the Great Awakening, and the New Divinity, along with other religious and historical topics. His books include The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England (1982), Early New England Meditative Poetry: Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor (1988), and Charles G. Finney and the Spirit of American Evangelicalism (1996). He is currently an independent scholar dividing his time between Delaware and New Hampshire.

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chapter 24

Biblica l Ex egesis Robert E. Brown

Jonathan Edwards was captivated by Scripture. In his ‘Personal Narrative’ he spoke of having had ‘the greatest delight in the Holy Scriptures, of any book whatsoever’ (WJE 16: 797). He was captivated by the meaning it provided to human existence, captivated by the window it provided into God’s mind and purposes, and perhaps most of all, captivated by its beauty. In a manner that is perhaps difficult for the modern imagination to comprehend, Edwards took the Bible into the marrow of his soul. And perhaps in a way even atypical for his own era, he was deeply engaged with the Bible as an object of theological contemplation. This importance of Edwards’s preoccupation with the Bible was recognized by his earliest biographers. Samuel Hopkins observed that he studied the Bible ‘more than all other books’ (Hopkins 1804, 88). Sereno Dwight offered that the Bible served as ‘an almost boundless field of investigation and enquiry’ for him. Both concluded that Edwards’s biblical commentary was unique and paradigm-shifting: in the words of Dwight, perhaps ‘no collection of Notes on the Scriptures, so entirely original, can be found’ (Dwight  1830, 57, 108). But Edwards’s captivation was only accomplished with considerable effort, in no small part because the intellectual currents of early modernity were dramatically eroding theological modes of textual reading in favour of empirical analysis, premised on a scepticism about God’s inclination to communicate, and the human ability to receive, divine revelation. These internal and external factors resulted in the production of a vast body of commentary over the course of his entire career, exceeded in the colonial era only by that found in Cotton Mather’s Biblia Americana (1693–1728). Neither Mather nor Edwards were able to publish their commentary in their own lifetimes, despite their best intentions and efforts to do so. Happily both have been published recently: all of Edwards’s major commentarial works are now available in the Yale edition in print or online. And in the past several years a number of monographs have appeared on Edwards’s biblical interpretation, though much more work remains to be done (Barshinger 2018). The Bible formed the core of Edwards’s understanding of reality; his larger theological enterprise cannot be properly understood apart from his biblical commentary.

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Biblical Exegesis   371

Exegetical Resources Edwards lived on the periphery of British empire, both geographically and culturally. Nonetheless he was able to insinuate himself into the mainstream of that religious culture, both as an important writer and thinker, and by way of his tenacious pursuit of knowledge. That tenacity carried him into the roiling world of biblical interpretation as well, which in his lifetime had become consumed with issues of critical scepticism regarding its authenticity and authority. Early and throughout his lifetime Edwards studied and wrote extensively about these issues. He was able to gain access to much of the literature of the day, and wrestled with all the major problems, from the authorship of the Pentateuch and the legitimacy of the canon to the intellectual coherence of prophetic and typological methodologies. Edwards received basic training in biblical interpretation in college. He studied Greek (and Latin) and developed a rudimentary knowledge of Hebrew, one that he worked to improve over the course of his life. The curriculum included daily Bible recitations involving Hebrew and Greek translation exercises; proficiency in both was required for qualification for the bachelor’s degree. Edwards constructed an 18-page notebook with Hebrew parsing exercises as an undergraduate. After graduation he became tutor, which included responsibility for language instruction. During his time at Yale he acquired several standard language aids, including Johann Buxtorf ’s Lexicon Hebraicum et Chaldaicum (1645) and an interlineated Biblica Hebraica (1609). His ‘Catalogue of Reading’ shows that he continued to seek out lexicons, grammars, concordances, Hebrew and Greek testaments, and other language aids throughout his career. Yet the biblical languages never became a tool for extensive exposition in his commentary. Of the 6000 entries in his ‘Blank Bible’ and ‘Notes on Scripture’, Edwards appeals to Hebrew or Greek translations on just some 300 occasions, and these are nearly always translations of single words rather than extended language work (Brown 2017, 69–71). Edwards’s ‘Catalogue’ and other manuscripts reveal that he also availed himself to the broad commentarial traditions of Europe. He consulted Catholic and Protestant works; Anglican, Dissenter, Lutheran, Calvinist, Baptist, and a host of other Protestant authors; Reformed, Remonstrant, Arminian and Socinian writings; English, Scottish, German, French, Swiss, and Dutch authors. He reached back to patristic sources, but also relied heavily on early modern works. His first immersion in this world after college may have come during his years as a tutor at Yale (1724–6), during which time he was given responsibility for organizing the collections of the library, which had been augmented by a large gift of books from Jeremiah Dummer. Among the 800 volumes in Dummer’s gift were lexicons, grammars, commentaries, harmonies, paraphrases, and works of sacred geography. It included important critical resources such as Pierre Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697), and apologetic works such as Edward Stillingfleet’s Origines sacrae (1662). Significantly, early entries in Edwards’s ‘Catalogue’ of desired books mention several titles found in the Dummer gift, including Bayle (Brown 2002, 5–6).

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372   Robert E. Brown The ‘Catalogue’ gives us an important window into Edwards’s early and abiding interests. On the upper right-hand corner of the first page he set a goal of acquiring cutting-edge works, many of which were tied to his interests in the problems of biblical in­ter­pret­ ation: he wanted, he wrote, to obtain ‘the best Geography, the best history of the world, the best Exposition of the Apocalypse, the best upon the types of scripture, the best Chronology, the best historical Dictionary of the Nature of Bayle’s Dictionary, [and] the best that treats of the Cabbalistical learning of the Jews’ (WJE 26: 164–5). Begun in 1722 and continued to the end of his life, it records over 700 titles he sought to obtain, many of which he did.1 These include numerous biblical commentaries. Chief among these were Matthew Poole’s Synopsis Criticorum (1669–76), Matthew Henry’s Exposition of the Old and New Testament (1707–21), and Philip Doddridge’s Family Expositor (1739–56). All three were Nonconformist ministers, and all three were invested in appropriating modern biblical interpretation while resisting its more radical or sceptical implications. All three were also committed to creating theological space for Christian dissent by way of an incipient evangelicalism and used their commentary to provide the biblical justification for such (WJE 26: 83–5). Other commentaries also loomed large for Edwards. John Lightfoot’s Harmony of the New Testament (1655) was an attempt to integrate the variations of the four Gospels into a synoptic whole; Lightfoot was the leading Christian Hebraist of his day and did much to locate the documents of the New Testament in their Jewish context. Indebted to Lightfoot, John Locke’s Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul (1705–7) represents a mode of interpretation that sought to unshackle the Bible from its theological trappings in order to uncover its historically contextualized meaning. The Paraphrase and Commentary on the New Testament (1703) by the otherwise theologically provocative Daniel Whitby represented a conservative backlash against critical scepticism of the biblical text. Edwards also sought and acquired a number of technical study aids. These included Augustin Calmet’s Historical, Critical, Geographical, Chronological, and Etymological Dictionary of the Holy Bible (1732), Alexander Cruden’s Complete Concordance to the Holy Scriptures (1701), Thomas Wilson’s Complete Christian Dictionary (1612), Johann Buxtorf ’s (the Elder) Lexicon Hebraicum et Chaldaicum (1607), Johann Buxtorf ’s (the Younger) Concordantiae Bibliorum Hebraicae (1632), Thomas Bennet’s Grammatica Hebraea (1727), Erasmus Schmid’s Novi Testamenti Graeci (1638), Abraham Trommius’s Concordantiae Graecae (1672), Edward Leigh’s Critica sacra . . . upon all the Greek Words of the New Testament (1639), copies of the Hebrew Bible and Talmud, English translations of the Targums, the Septuagint, and John Mill’s Novum Testamentum (1707), which documented the tens of thousands of variants in the Greek text. A third important category of literature in the ‘Catalogue’ are works aimed at solving specific interpretive problems. Several of these wrestle with the New Testament’s use of Old Testament prophecies, or more broadly, the connections between the Jewish and 1  See Peter Thuesen’s list of works cited in Edwards’s manuscripts, in Edwards, WJE 26: 428–72. These citations of course in no way represent the extent of the works he consulted.

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Biblical Exegesis   373 Christian dispensations: Isaac Newton’s Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John (1736), for example, John Gill’s Prophecies of the Old Testament respecting the Messiah (1725), Robert Fleming’s The Fulfilling of Scripture (1669), Thomas Sherlock’s The Use and Intent of Prophecy (1725), and Samuel Clarke’s A Discourse concerning the Connexion of the Prophecies in the Old Testament, and the Application of them to Christ (1725), as well as Humphrey Prideaux’s Old and New Testament Connected in the History of the Jews and Neighbouring Nations (1715–17). This problem would become a major part of Edwards’s own interpretative efforts. In addition, Edwards like many of his era was concerned about the internal and external consistencies of the biblical texts. Here he pursued works such as Nathaniel Lardner’s The Credibility of the Gospel History (1727–57), Jeremiah Jones’ The Canon of the New Testament (1726), William Whiston’s Chronology of the Old Testament: and of the Harmony of the Four Evangelists (1702), John Edwards’s An Enquiry into Four Remarkable Texts of the New Testament (1692), and John Shute’s Miscellanea sacra (1725). Edwards also devoted extensive attention to the origins and authorship of the Pentateuch and acquired at least two important works in this area: Louis Ellies Du Pin’s New History of Ecclesiastical Writers (1692), and William Warburton’s Divine Legation of Moses (1738–41). Another class of literature that was very important to Edwards’s interpretation were works that sought to harmonize the Bible with contemporary knowledge, particularly history, science, and comparative religions. For example, Edwards sought a number of geographical works, such as Samuel Bochart’s Geographia sacra (1646–51), Edward Wells’ Historical Geography of the Old and New Testament (1712), and Herman Moll’s Atlas Geographica (1711–17). Among historical works we find Arthur Bedford’s The Scripture Chronology Demonstrated (1730), Samuel Shuckford’s Sacred and Profane History of the World Connected (1728), Jacques Basnage’s History of the Jews (1706), and Thomas Broughton’s Bibliotheca historico-sacra (1737–9), to name a few. Edwards was very interested in the problem of other religions and pursued this line of interest. Chief among these works was Theophilus Gale’s Court of the Gentiles (1669–78), which attempted to show that other religions derived their beliefs and practices from corrupted biblical traditions (the so-called prisca theologia). He also makes note of John Weemes’ Explication of the Judiciall Lawes of Moses (1632) and Daniel Defoe’s Dictionary of Religions (1704). Edwards also sought out comprehensive works of world knowledge, such as Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopaedia (1738) and Jeremy Collier’s Great Historical, Geographical, Genealogical and Poetical Dictionary (1701). Edwards was also able to improve his access to important interpretive issues through the erudite journals of his day, including The Guardian, The Present State of the Republick of Letters, and the Monthly Review. In addition, Edwards’s interpretation was shaped by works that at first glance might seem tangentially related but were in fact essential to his commentary. Deism was at the height of its influence at the beginning of Edwards’s professional life. Its notoriety and appeal were due in no small part to its scathing critique of the Bible’s historical, scientific, religious, and moral authenticity. Of particular consequence for Edwards were the works of John Toland, and especially Matthew Tindal’s Christianity as Old as Creation

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374   Robert E. Brown (1730). Edwards notes dozens of such works defending the rationality of Christianity by way of defending the authenticity of Scripture. Of particular importance for him were Robert Jenkin’s Reasonableness and Certainty of the Christian Religion (1698), John Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), Jonathan Dickinson’s The Reasonableness of Christianity (1732), Charles Leslie’s A Short and Easie Method with the Deists (1699), Philip Skelton’s Deism Revealed (1749), John Leland’s The Divine Authority of the Old and New Testament asserted (1739), and Stillingfleet’s Origines sacra, or A Rational Account of the Grounds of Christian Faith, as to the Truth and Divine Authority of the Scriptures. Edwards’s use of several systematic theologies also needs to be taken into account when considering his interpretive influences. These works of divinity always included prolegomena on the nature of Scripture, and they were important platforms for the discussion of current interpretive controversies. Attention needs to be paid in particular to his use of Francis Turretin’s Institutio theologiae elencticae (1679–85), Peter van Mastricht’s Theoretico-practica theologia (1682–7), John Edwards’s Theologia reformata (1713), and Johann Stapfer’s Institutiones theologiae polemicae (1743–7). Besides his personal library, Edwards also made use of a network of colleagues and friends to obtain works on biblical interpretation. The Hampshire Association maintained a library for its member clergy (beginning in 1732, in no small part at Edwards’s behest). While records of its holdings are largely missing, these did include exegetically related works. Edwards’s ‘Account Book’ (1733ff) records works that he borrowed and lent to colleagues, including a number of works he used in his biblical commentary: Gale’s Court of the Gentiles, Prideaux’s Old and New Testament Connected, Warburton’s Divine Legation of Moses, Lardner’s Credibility of the Gospel History, Richard Kidder’s Demonstration of the Messias (1684–1700), John Owen’s commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews (1668–84), and Erasmus Schmid’s Novi Testamenti Graeci (1638). He also received books from foreign correspondents such as John Erskine and William McCulloch (WJE 26: 357–60).

The Interpretive Corpus Out of this pursuit of learning Edwards birthed a substantial body of interpretation, in direct commentary and other ancillary forms. His earliest efforts can be found in his ‘Miscellanies’, begun in 1722 at the end of his days as a graduate student. While this manuscript eventually became the repository for his more specifically theological deliberations, it appears that early on he also intended to use it as a repository for his biblical meditations. A number of the early entries are expositions of specific passages (e.g. Misc. e, k, uu, ww), while others consider important hermeneutical questions (e.g. Misc. dd, 6). Edwards seems to have quickly realized that his biblical commentary necessitated a different set (or sets) of notes. In 1723 he began his ‘Notes on the Apocalypse’; in 1724 he began his ‘Notes on Scripture’, a more wide-ranging work. Yet the ‘Miscellanies’ would continue to serve as an important location for his interpretive work, as he

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Biblical Exegesis   375 developed his approach to issues such as the prophetic and typological connections of Jesus’ messianic identity in the Old and New Testaments (e.g. ‘Miscellanies’ 891, 922, 1067–9). The ‘Notes on the Apocalypse’ participates in a long tradition of eschatological interest stemming from the Reformation, one that only intensified during Edwards’s lifetime. The conflicts between Catholic and Protestant European powers played themselves out bloodily in the colonies, and along with ecclesiastical skirmishes among various Protestant sects and tensions with native peoples, served to create a strong sense of religious fragility. Such eras in Christian history are always marked by a sense of the imminence of the eschaton, and Edwards was no exception. The apocalyptic literature of the Bible served as a means for comprehending the political and social instability engulfing him and his parishioners. In time it would inform his understanding of the significance of the re­vivals of the Awakening. In standard Protestant style, he took the warfare imagery of the Book of Revelation to describe the corruption and downfall of the papacy. This could only mean that the Millennium was fast approaching. Most influential on his thinking was the Presbyterian cleric Moses Lowman, whose Paraphrase and Notes on Revelation (1737) he acquired the following year. Like Lowman, and a host of early modern interpreters before him, Edwards understood the symbolic imagery of the book to have specific historical corollaries. Other important influences included Matthew Poole’s Synopsis Criticorum and Annotations upon the Holy Bible (1683–5) and the Anglican Humphrey Prideaux’s Old and New Testament Connected, among several others. The ‘Notes’ comprise 208 manuscript pages and contain ninety-four entries, some of which come from the last year of Edwards’s life (WJE 5: 15–25). It seems evident that his ‘Notes on Scripture’ were meant to relieve the burden that exegetical entries would have placed on the scope of the ‘Miscellanies’. It is made up of four notebooks containing 507 mostly lengthy entries, some of which became prototreatises. The entries are generally polished rather than rough notes; his sources are relatively hidden from view. While there is no order (canonical or topical) to the entries, several themes tend to dominate. Not surprisingly, Edwards is chiefly focused on the practical meaning of passages for the spiritual life of the saints, their redemption and holiness; he also devotes much attention to the doctrinal or theological implications of  passages. His most common interpretive tool was typology, which he employed extensively to connect passages and to explain interpretive or theological difficulties. He was also preoccupied with the prophetic texts of the Bible, as these were being held up to scrutiny by Deists and other critics. Finally, he devoted significant ink to unknotting the difficulties posed by critical historical and scientific work, including canonicity, the harmony of parallel texts (e.g. the four Gospels, Kings and Chronicles, etc.), the authorship of the Pentateuch, and the credibility of miracles, such as the creation story and the events of the Exodus. In 1730 Edwards came into possession of his brother-in-law Benjamin Pierpont’s interleaved Bible, which he came to call the ‘Blank Bible’. Such notebooks were common; one would take a bound volume of blank sheets and intersperse pages from the King James Bible between them. So constructed, the scribe could then enter notes on texts at

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376   Robert E. Brown the appropriate point, with the relevant text at hand. There is no evidence that this was anything more than an opportunistic acquisition by Edwards; perhaps he felt obligated to use it by the giving of the gift itself. In any case it became a major storehouse for his biblical commentary, growing to some 5500 entries over the next quarter-century. These entries are of course canonical in order. They differ from the entries in the ‘Notes on Scripture’ in other respects as well. They are much shorter on average, and much less polished. They are more contextually constrained, and less prone towards typological explication. They are less topical, and generally avoid knotty interpretive difficulties. Like the ‘Notes’ they are given to doctrinal and practical spiritual application. Edwards was so invested in typology that he developed separate sets of notes on the subject: ‘Images of Divine Things’ and ‘Types.’ ‘Images’ is a small 48-page folio volume with 212 entries, dating from roughly 1728 to 1742. The ‘Types’ manuscript is twenty pages with about thirty entries, dating from the mid-1740s to the mid-1750s. As will be ­discussed below, Edwards seems to have had a native attraction to typological interpretation that was closely tied to his divine ontology. This was buttressed by the use and thus divine sanction of typology in the Bible itself. Furthermore, typology was under attack in the eighteenth century as a subjective, irrational hermeneutic, and thus Edwards used these notes to develop his theoretical and apologetic defences of his use of this method. These notebooks shed much light on the interpretive strategy of the rest of his biblical commentary (WJE 11: 6–33). The greatest public format that Edwards’s interpretive method enjoyed is to be found in his sermons. The extant sermons number some 1200, which has been estimated to represent about eighty per cent of his total output. Twenty-two of these were published in his lifetime; another fifty posthumously. The full measure of the interpretive work found in the sermons has yet to be taken. Besides their exegetical substance, the sermons are important because they reveal what interpretive strategies Edwards was willing to take public or deemed important for his parishioners or his wider readership. Although Edwards preached from a broad range of canonical texts, he gravitated toward the Gospels, Isaiah, Psalms, I Corinthians, and Romans. As with his private commentary notebooks, Edwards’s sermons are not constrained by a close exposition of a given text; rather, the text serves as a starting point to discuss a chosen topic. The topics most frequented by Edwards were aspects of God’s nature, Christ’s redemptive work, and the practical challenges of the Christian life. Typology plays an important role in his in­ter­pret­ ation. Absent for the most part are discussions of controverted issues of interpretation, particularly those having to do with critical assessments of the Bible’s authenticity. Edwards’s theological treatises are another important though under-examined source for understanding the contours of his biblical interpretation. Many of them, such as Charity and Its Fruits (1738), Distinguishing Marks (1741), and Religious Affections (1746), began as sermon series. But all of them are fundamentally exercises in biblical interpretation, as his copious citations of texts in support of his arguments demonstrate (WJE 10: 130ff). Late in his career Edwards was planning to publish several treatises closely linked to problems of biblical interpretation. In his letter to the trustees of Princeton, who had invited him to become president of the college, he mentioned two ‘great works’ that he

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Biblical Exegesis   377 was intent on bringing to the public. The first, The History of the Work of Redemption, was originally a sermon series on Isaiah 51:8 delivered in 1739, meant to comprehend the grand soteriological drama. But in re-working it Edwards planned to use it as a theological summa, incorporating all of the cardinal doctrines of the Christian faith. It was the scriptural structure of the work that most captivated him: this was a novel approach in his mind, ‘an entire new method, being thrown into the form of a history . . . introducing all parts of divinity in that order which is most scriptural and most natural . . . shewing the admirable contexture and harmony of the whole’. He had come to the conviction that theology could not be conducted as a philosophical exercise abstracted from Scripture. Rather it must be closely connected to the biblical narrative from which it came. The other treatise was his projected ‘Harmony of the Old and New Testament’ treating ‘the prophecies of the Messiah, [and the] types of the Old Testament’, and how these formed a harmonious unity of ‘doctrine and precept’ (Edwards 1935, 411–12). One of the great rationalist critiques of the New Testament of the era had been its forced use of Old Testament prophecy and of typology to create a unified whole out of Judaism and Christianity. Edwards understood that to divorce the two testaments theologically would be a death knell to the coherence of the faith. To this end he had worked up a notebook of some 220 pages on the subject, covering Genesis through Psalms. But the real meat of this treatise would have been drawn from Nos. 891, 922, 1067, 1068, and 1069 of the ‘Miscellanies’, which address these problems at great length.

Reasoned Appropriation Edwards came of age in the era of new epistemologies, all aimed at achieving intellectual certainty against the backdrop of an invigorated scepticism about claims to knowledge. Scepticism about claims to knowledge rooted in authority was particularly strong, particularly authority derived from ancient religious texts. The appeal and aspirations of unfettered reason were pre-eminently powerful; reasoned evidence and proof became the standard against which all knowledge claims were measured. It was inevitable then that the Bible should be so measured; the practices of biblical criticism were almost a century old by the time Edwards began his exegetical explorations. Given these circumstances, it is not surprising that one of the primary concerns of biblical interpreters was the correlation of the Bible’s fact claims with the explosion of the empirical historical and scientific discoveries of early modernity. Edwards shared this preoccupation, and it would, in the end, produce in him a deeper appreciation for the interpretive challenges of this ancient text, and at times a more modest assessment of its capacities. It was, he concluded, a revelation given in foreign languages to an ancient people ‘whose customs and phraseology are but very imperfectly understood’. Since it was a ‘short, concise history, where only some particular facts . . . are mentioned, [while] innumerable others are omitted; . . . ’tis no wonder, that many doubts and difficulties arise’ (WJE 23: 376).

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378   Robert E. Brown The ‘Miscellanies’, ‘Notes on Scripture,’ ‘Blank Bible,’ and numerous other documents bristle with these sorts of concerns. Edwards came at this in several different ways. At the most fundamental level, his exegesis was coloured by the desire to root the meaning of texts in their historical milieu. Much of this involved language: paying close attention to the original semantic ranges for Hebrew and Greek words, their etymologies and usage. It also meant paying close attention to the cultures from which the texts arose, the distinctives of Jewish, Greek, and Roman social practices. One of his most important models in this method was John Locke’s Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul (1705–7). The broad appeal of this work lay in its rigorous, methodical insistence on restricting interpretation to what was historically plausible within the author’s cultural context. Furthermore, critics often identified the internal conflicts of the Bible as reason for scepticism about its historical authenticity. This was true of Old Testament works that described the same histories, such as Kings and Chronicles, or Ezra and Nehemiah. This was felt acutely with regard to the discrepancies between the synoptic Gospels, and between the synoptic Gospels and the Gospel of John. While he made no attempt at a sustained harmony of the Gospels, as had Cotton Mather in his Biblia Americana, Edwards did address such problems at several junctures in his commentary (e.g. ‘Notes on Scripture’ Nos. 220, 225, 446, 448). Other questions of historical authenticity had to do with the origin and contents of the biblical canon. Numerous copies of apocryphal texts had come to light in the seventeenth century, works which had been widely documented by patristic writers. John Toland’s Amyntor (1699) and Nazarenus (1718) argued for their authenticity and thus rightful place in the canon; he also criticized the canonical process itself, which many had resulted in a number of pseudepigraphal works being incorporated, especially in the New Testament. Edward took up this problem in many instances throughout his corpus, always seeking to resolve the question in favour of the canonical text. His most sustained entry is to be found in No. 1060 of the ‘Miscellanies’, ‘Concerning the Canon of the New Testament’. Likely written in the late 1740s, it is the second longest entry in that work. His major source is Jeremiah Jones’ Canonical Authority of the New Testament (1726), though he also relied heavily on Nathaniel Lardner’s Credibility of the Gospel of History (1727–57) on this issue in other instances. While his solutions here are similarly apologetic for the canon as both authentic and closed, it is the case that Edwards also shows himself sensitive to and accepting of the historical processes at work in canonization, such that the early church had to struggle to achieve consensus. Edwards also weighed in on what was the most controverted issue of his day: the origin and authorship of the Pentateuch. While most all of the books of Scripture had had doubts raised about their authorship, the Pentateuch held a special concern here, since it was fundamental to both the Jewish and Christian metanarratives. Scepticism had been voiced about its Mosaic authorship in medieval Jewish commentary and had been taken up as a cudgel against the Christian establishment in Europe by Thomas Hobbes, Benedict Spinoza, and Richard Simon, among others. The essence of their criticism lay in the many anachronistic features of the text (suggesting a later date), as well as its internal contradictions. They proposed an alternative, post-exilic origin, in the

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Biblical Exegesis   379 authorship of the priest Ezra, who used a body of texts handed down from courtly scribes over the centuries. Such a theory struck at the heart of early modern assumptions about historical reliability, which rested on first person, eye-witness testimony as a guarantor of factuality. If Moses did not record the events of the Exodus, why assume those stories were true? Entry 416 in the ‘Notes on Scripture’ is entitled ‘Whether the Pentateuch was written by Moses’. It is the longest essay in his entire biblical commentary, and dates from the early 1740s. Edwards relied almost exclusively on the Catholic priest Louis Ellies Du Pin’s argument in his New History of Ecclesiastical Writers (French 1686; English 1692), a work that appears in his ‘Catalogue’ in 1724, but may not have been acquired until the time of the writing of No. 416. Du Pin’s argument, aimed primarily at his colleague Simon, was to criticize the speculative nature of the scribal theory (it was lacking empirical evidence), to explain the inconsistencies of the texts as minor later additions, and to point to evidence in the texts of their pre-exilic origins (primarily the existence of the Samaritan Pentateuch, written in a pre-exilic script). Edwards follows this line of reasoning very closely, with some modifications. As with his work on canonicity, however, the largely apologetic exercise does show Edwards aware and capable of embracing the idea that the canonical texts were subject to the vagaries of historical transmission (Brown 2018, 126–43). It is clear that Edwards continued to wrestle with this problem subsequently and may have anticipated devoting a separate treatise to it. Extant among his manuscripts is an untitled notebook of 131 pages—nearly twice as long as No. 416 (which he refers to in that notebook as ‘my treatise’). It appears to have been written in the early 1750s. It elaborates on the arguments presented in No. 416, while adding several new arguments, particularly against the idea that the Pentateuch could have been forged and foisted upon an unsuspecting Jewish public. Conflicts between the Bible and external empirical sources were also of great significance to Edwards, as such issues raged throughout Europe. Three principle sources of conflict were most prominent: conflicts with natural science, discrepancies with pagan histories, and the relative influence of pagan religions. With regard to natural science, the primary issue at stake was the supernatural or miraculous mode of explaining events so prevalent on the pages of Scripture. Miracles had come under a withering philo­soph­ ic­al critique in early modernity; the emerging sciences compounded this by offering materialistic explanations of nature that seemed to obviate the need to appeal to mir­ acles. Beyond the philosophical problem of miracles lay the biblical miracles themselves. Even if miracles were possible, were the biblical miracles conceivable within the increasingly known mechanisms of nature? A flood of apologies for the coherence of miracles and the empirical rationality of biblical miracles appeared in Edwards’s lifetime. He sought a number of them: Jonathan Dickinson’s Reasonableness of Christianity (1732), as well as that of John Locke (1695), Richard Baxter’s Reasons of the Christian Religion (1667), Robert Jenkin’s Reasonableness and Certainty of Christianity (1698), Edward Stillingfleet’s Origines sacrae (1662), Samuel Chandler’s Vindication of the Christian Religion (1725), Thomas Jeffrey’s True Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion (1725), Philip Skelton’s Deism Revealed (1749), and George Turnbull’s Philosophical

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380   Robert E. Brown Enquiry (1731). Dozens of entries in the ‘Miscellanies’, ‘Notes on Scripture,’ ‘Blank Bible,’ address the problem of biblical miracles (e.g. Misc. 1150, 1190, 1231, 1319, and 1342). These entries on miracles tend not to present philosophical arguments for the possibility of miracles, but rather to focus on the plausibility of particular miracles in the biblical narratives, such as those attending the Exodus, and especially those performed by Jesus. Edwards’s arguments tend to centre on the plausibility and harmony of certain miraculous events within the parameters of early modern natural science, an effort that had a moderating effect on his supernaturalism. For example, entries 199 and 201 in ‘Notes on Scripture’ discuss the nature of the wood used to build Noah’s ark; gopher wood (cypress) was ideally suited for sea-faring vessels, thus lending credibility to the account of the Flood. For other accounts Edwards had to take a less literal approach to the text. Thus Joshua’s long day in which the sun (and moon) stood still could no longer be taken on its face in a heliocentric solar system. Edwards resolves this by arguing that this is just a description based on its appearance to the observer; in fact it was the earth that came to a stop (‘Notes on Scripture’ No. 117, 208, 209). This mode of interpretation is frequent, applied to the geology of the Flood, the tower of Babel, the feeding habits of locusts, and even the physiology of Christ’s death. Edwards even adjusted his eschatology to fit an expanding understanding of the universe. Following William Whiston’s New Theory of the Earth (1696) and Astronomical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion (1717), Edwards concluded that the universe would end in a dry, fiery conflagration, once comets had ceased their role in replenishing its moisture. And since a fiery earth would become the locus of Hell, the ‘new heavens and new earth’ spoken of in Revelation would be somewhere else in the universe. ‘Heaven’ and ‘earth’ were simply relative terms based on one’s location in space. Thus the biblical eschaton could be written into the fabric of modern physics (Brown 2002, 186–93). Edwards was also aware that the biblical accounts of the origins of the world and the history of humanity were at odds with the accounts of other cultures and religions, and that more recent and nearby historical accounts (Greek, Roman, Middle Eastern) were at odds with specific accounts in the Bible. Early modern historiography was rooted in the concept of factuality. The era was consumed with subjecting ancient texts, including the Bible, to comparative, objective empirical assessment. Edwards imbibed this empirical spirit and sought to defend the factuality of the Bible. The ‘Miscellanies’ contain numerous entries such as the ‘Facts of Christianity, their truth’ (e.g. No. 1324) and the ‘History of the Old Testament . . . confirmed from heathen traditions and records’ (e.g. Nos. 983, 1015, 1020). He availed himself of works such as Samuel Shuckford’s Sacred and Profane History of the World Connected (1728), Henry Winder’s Critical and Chronological History of . . . Knowledge (1745), and Robert Clayton’s Vindication of the Histories of the Old and New Testament (1752), as well as numerous sacred geographies and other historical works, in an effort to harmonize the Bible with other competing historical accounts and to buttress the credibility of the biblical stories. This extended to other religions as well, which in many cases offered radically different myths of origin and universal histories. Here Edwards resorted to a form of argument dating back to the Church Fathers, and one that had been revived in early modernity: the prisca theologia.

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Biblical Exegesis   381 This theory held that the mythologies and histories of other religions were obscurely derivative of the biblical accounts but could with some analysis be shown to be so. Edwards devotes dozens of entries in his notebooks to this question; his primary source for such knowledge is Theophilus Gale’s Court of the Gentiles (1669) and Andrew Michael Ramsay’s Travels of Cyrus (1727).

Figural Interpretation In spite of his investment in a historically and empirically contextualized reading of the Bible, Edwards remained primarily a theological reader of the text (Nichols 2018, 32ff; Sweeney 2016, 28ff). That is to say, while he did give serious attention to the constraining influence of factors such as historical context and scientific discovery on the meaning of the text, Edwards had no doubt but that the analogy of Scripture—the Bible is its own best interpreter—and the analogy of faith—the Bible is always consistent with confessional orthodoxy—ought to be the sufficient and controlling paradigms of its true meaning (Nichols 2013, 25). Scripture was, in the end, a highly personal form of communication: God’s word to humanity, an act of divine self-disclosure. Both content and form were the result of divine intention, whatever their material origins. Scripture was thus also intended to be received personally: only a personal engagement with the text could lead to the discovery of its truest meaning. While rationalistic methods of interpretation might be helpful for understanding the earthly contours of the text, it was the spiritual dynamic between reader and word that most directed his interest and understanding of its meaning. Edwards wrote often about the personal or subjective aspect of encountering the Bible: ‘There is a strange and unaccountable kind of enchantment . . . in Scripture history’, he wrote, ‘which . . . makes it vastly more pleasant, agreeable, easy, and natural, than any other history whatever’ (WJE 13: 202–3). In time he would closely link his understanding of the subjective power of Scripture with his recast understanding of regeneration. Edwards is well known for the aesthetic orientation of his theology. From his divine ontology to the conversion experience to spiritual perception, the role and recognition of beauty was paramount. Thus, it should come as no surprise to discover that his primary emphasis in biblical interpretation was also pitched to the principal function of beauty in that act. The nature of its beauty was two-fold. As the voice of God, there is an inherent, objective beauty in Scripture, imprinted by the inspiration of the Spirit. Correspondingly, there was a necessary cognitive disposition in the soul of the reader required to apprehend that beauty. Edwards’s aesthetic understanding of the interpretive act bears certain parallels to contemporary understandings of interpretation, in which the disposition of the reader decisively influences the ability to perceive. He was keenly aware that there were no purely objective readings, or, to put it another way, true readings are not simply or solely the result of rational deliberation. Edwards is perhaps most famous for his refashioning of the conversion experience in terms of Lockean sensate language: just as the physical senses provide the mind with

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382   Robert E. Brown knowledge, so humans can obtain a cognitive capacity for spiritual communications from God through spiritual regeneration. Since God’s communications constitute a direct experience of the Spirit, this new sense or ‘sense of the heart’ gives the saint an intuitive conviction of divine truths—Spirit-derived sense experience is a self-evident form of knowing, in the same way that tasting honey leads to an appreciation of its sweetness. He most often couched his description of the epistemological capacities of the new sense in aesthetic language. This Spirit-given sense enabled one to see the excellence, the harmony, the beauty of God, of Christ’s redemption, of Christian doctrine. In the same way that Edwards translated the theological doctrine of regeneration into early modern discourse about aesthetics, so he recast the classic doctrine of the Spiritimprinted, self-authenticating nature of Scripture into the language of sense and beauty.2 The soul could be taken up with wonder at God’s excellence and beauty, and these could be encountered in the inspired pages of the Bible. ‘Oftentimes in reading it, every word seemed to touch my heart. I felt a harmony between something in my heart, and those sweet and powerful words. I seemed to see so much light exhibited in every sentence, and such a refreshing ravishing food communicated that I could not get along in reading. Used oftentimes to dwell long on one sentence, to see wonder contained in it; and yet almost every sentence seemed to be full of wonders’ (WJE 16: 797). Possessing the quality of divine beauty and excellence, the Bible’s pages could similarly deliver an intuitive, self-evident conviction of their divine authorship and truth. They possess a ‘consistency, harmony, and concurrence’ that has all the appearance of being the ‘word and work of a divine mind’ (WJE 13: 410–11). The saint’s new sense of the heart and Scripture’s divine illumination work in concert to direct the soul: it ‘sweetly corresponds and harmonizes with the expressions of God’s Word . . . [creating] a symphony between the soul and these divine things.’ Beauty resonates with beauty: Scripture affects the soul ‘by stirring up correspondent affections of the mind . . . [as] one instrument of music answers of itself to another in harmony and concord’ (Brown 2002, 44–5). That Edwards would place such a strong supernatural or spiritual element at the core of his interpretive method helps in part to explain another important aspect of his exegesis: his commitment to typology. In their insistence that religious texts be read through a rationalistic and naturalistic lens, early modern interpreters were especially critical of appeals that they viewed as supra-rational avenues to meaning, such as prophecy and typology, which they viewed not as a divine superseding of reason but as a human abandoning the quest for a universal rational discourse. Anthony Collins’ Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion (1724) and Scheme of Literal Prophecy Considered (1726) and Matthew Tindal’s Christianity as Old as Creation (1730) made the case that Old Testament prophecy been distorted by the Christian tradition to suit its theological aims, and that typology had been employed to smooth over the historical and theo­ logic­al disparities between texts. 2  The doctrine of the Bible’s Spirit-marked illumination had been rejected by philosophers such as Benedict Spinoza and Deists such as Matthew Tindal, who argued that all texts, including religious texts, ought to be read naturalistically. On Edwards’s spiritual hermeneutic, see Stein 1977a.

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Biblical Exegesis   383 For Edwards as for most Protestants however, the fact that these interpretive devices were employed so frequently in Scripture signalled their divine origin; they were God’s chosen means of communication The fact that they give a coherence to the whole, particularly with regard to Jesus’ messianic identity, only solidified his confidence in them. Prophecy confirmed God’s control over human affairs and was proof of a singular drama of redemption. Typology provided the hermeneutical link between the dispensations of this drama. Edwards embraced them wholeheartedly as interpretive paradigms rooted in divine self-disclosure, and strongly resisted their early modern critics. His last anticipated great work, the ‘Harmony of the Old and New Testament’, was precisely targeted at this interpretive challenge (Minkema 1996, 52–65). Typology of course had a long history in Protestantism, especially among Puritans, who understood it as the literal sense of the text, since the literal sense was that intended by its divine author. He availed himself to several works pertaining to this genre, though not all of these are immediately evident as such. These included, most notably, Samuel Mather’s Types of the Old Testament (1683), as well as Richard Kidder’s Demonstration of the Messias (1684), John Gill’s Prophecies of the Old Testament Respecting the Messiah (1728), William Harris’ Principal Representation of the Messiah Throughout the Old Testament (1724), John Owen’s Epistle to the Hebrews (1680), Jacques Basnage’s History of the Jews (1706), and Johann Stapfer’s Institutes (1743). The ‘Miscellanies’, ‘Notes on Scripture’, and Blank Bible have numerous entries on typology, and more importantly, they abound in typological reasoning. His major theoretical work on typology however is to be found in his dedicated notebooks, ‘Images of Divine Things’, begun in 1728, and ‘Types’, begun in the late 1740s. Here we come to see that Edwards’s preoccupation with typology was not simply hermeneutical; rather it was informed by his ontology as well. In his ‘End for Which God Created the World’ (published posthumously in 1765), Edwards lays out the argument that creation is the emanation of God’s overflowing fullness. Nature is therefore ultimately an act of divine communication. But while it expresses the excellence and attributes of God’s being, its primary mode of revelation is rooted in God’s most important work, the work of redemption. Thus Edwards proclaims: ‘I believe that the whole universe, heaven and earth, air and seas, and the divine constitution and history of the holy Scriptures, be full of images of divine things, as full as a language is of words’ (WJE 11: 152). The character of that redemptive work is most clearly revealed in Scripture, which serves as a key to unlocking the redemptive typology of nature. ‘The book of Scripture is the interpreter of the book of nature . . . by declaring to us those spiritual mysteries that are indeed signified and typified in the constitution of the natural world’ (WJE 11: 106). The ‘Images’ notebook gives full voice to the multitude of ways in which nature typologically unveils the work of redemption. ‘The silkworm is a remarkable type of Christ. Its greatest work is weaving something for our beautiful clothing, and it dies in this work; . . . a worm’s dying . . . and then rising as a glorious flying creature, represents the resurrection of the saint’ (WJE 11: 100, 106). Typology also extends to human history and culture, as these are the platforms of God’s providence, and thus intimately connected to the work of redemption. ‘The late invention of telescopes . . . is a type . . . of the great increase of knowledge of heavenly things that shall be

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384   Robert E. Brown in the approaching glorious times of the Christian church; . . . the supplying of the world with its treasures from America, is a type . . . of what is approaching in spiritual things’ (WJE 11: 101). This ontological understanding of the centrality of typological communication in nature helps to explain Edwards’s luxuriant use of typology in his biblical interpretation. Counter to his Reformed and Puritan traditions, which closely restricted the use of typology to its biblical precedents, that is, to the examples used by the authors of the New Testament to interpret the Old, Edwards believed that his ontological typology warranted an expansion of the typological meaning of texts. At the end of the ‘Images’ notebook Edwards wrote out a list of scriptural types that go beyond New Testament precedent. Thus, clothes made from animals typify, by the death of their subjects, the legal application of Christ’s righteousness; spider webs typify the false confidence of wicked men; ravens typify wicked men (WJE 11: 132, 135). This typological expansion is characteristic too of the ‘Notes on Scripture’ and the ‘Blank Bible’: the feasting recorded in the book of Esther is typical of the eucharistic feast; Jonah’s being thrown overboard is typical of Christ’s substitutionary death; the pillar anointed with oil by Jacob points to the anointing of the Messiah (WJE 15: 60, 77, 84). Edwards’s use of typology reached its zenith in his projected ‘Harmony of the Old and New Testament,’ a treatise specifically targeted at the criticisms of prophecy and typology as a falsely unifying hermeneutic of the canon. Jesus’ fulfilment of the messianic identity as it was foreshadowed in Old Testament prophecy through type and antitype was the theological fulcrum of the New Testament, and so of Christian theology. It was in­ev­it­ able that Edwards would meet its critics head on. He does so in a number of entries in the ‘Miscellanies’ dating from the late 1740s: 891, 922, 1067, and 1068 address the proph­ ecies relating to the Messiah and their fulfilment in Jesus; 1069 is entitled ‘Types of the Messiah’. Together these entries reach over 350 manuscript pages. From these emerge several of Edwards’s working interpretive principles. First, he does not abandon the claim of literal fulfilment. He argues that many of the prophecies were exactly fulfilled by Jesus, appealing to rabbinic commentary to claim that the messianic nature of these prophecies pre-dated the writing of the New Testament. But more notably, he insinuates his ontological typology into his reading of Old Testament prophecy. Many of his cit­ ations of ‘messianic’ Old Testament texts fall outside of traditional Christian identifications of such passages. He took this direction because as he saw it, most all of the Old Testament was messianic, and thus typological, in nature: ‘’tis evident that the books of the Prophets, as well as the Psalms, do chiefly relate to the Messiah and the things that appertain to his salvation and kingdom . . . the accomplishment of which, is the grand fulfilment of the vision and prophecy, in which all prophetical revelations are summed up and have their ultimate result and consummation’ (Misc. 1067, Sec. 100). In Misc. 1069 he goes even farther. Since God’s great work in the universe is the work of redemption, and since the Messiah is the key to that redemption, nearly every aspect of the Old Testament—characters, places, objects, events—was typological in nature. But even more boldly, Edwards argues that the New Testament must be similarly typological; not only does it reveal Christ in the Old Testament through type, but even its own histories

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Biblical Exegesis   385 and characters must have an added typological dimension to them, in order to most fully reveal God’s redemptive work (WJE 11: 191–2; Brown 2017, 374–7). Recent studies of Edwards’s interpretation have explored some of the contours of his theological orientation. The typological and Christological focus of Edwards’s exegesis can be seen, for example, in his approach to the Psalms. The Psalms were the most cited book in his biblical commentary, and second-most cited in his sermons (Barshinger 2014, 6–8). They fit naturally with Edwards’s pastoral and theological interests in heart religion. They give voice to the full range of theological topics, but for Edwards they were particularly focused on the entire nature and work of Christ himself, as was the entire canon (Barshinger 2014, 164ff; Sweeney 2016, 95ff). Edwards also used his figural method to explore the social and spiritual contexts of his parishioners. In the aftermath of the 1735 revival, for example, Edwards executed a lengthy sermon series on the wise and foolish virgins (Matthew 25) aimed at reinforcing social norms of marriage, while at the same time reading out the problem of spiritual declension that was effecting his congregation (Chamberlain  1996, 5ff). The recent volume on Edwards’s exegesis demonstrates the importance that this subject has for understanding his larger intellectual project, with close studies delving into the contexts out of which he wrote, and the impact this had on his interpretation of the passages at hand (Barshinger and Sweeney 2018).

Works Cited Barshinger, David P. (2014). Jonathan Edwards and the Psalms: A Redemptive-Historical Vision of Scripture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barshinger, David P., and Douglas A. Sweeney (eds) (2018). Jonathan Edwards and Scripture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brown, Robert E. (2002). Jonathan Edwards and the Bible. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,. Brown, Robert  E. (2018). ‘Jonathan Edwards’ French Connection: the Pentateuch and the Practices of Public History,’ in Jonathan Edwards and Scripture, ed. David P. Barshinger and Douglas A. Sweeney. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 126–43. Brown, Robert  E. (2017). ‘Biblical Languages,’ and ‘Messiah,’ in The Jonathan Edwards Encyclopedia, ed. Harry S. Stout et al. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 69–71 and 374–7. Chamberlain, Ava (1996). ‘Brides of Christ and Signs of Grace: Edwards’s Sermon Series on the Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins,’ in Jonathan Edwards’s Writings: Text, Context, Interpretation, ed. Stephen J. Stein. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 3–18. Dwight, Sereno  E. (1830). ‘Life of President Edwards’ in The Works of President Edwards. New York: G. & C. & H. Carvill. Edwards, Jonathan (1935). ‘Letter to the Trustees of the College of New Jersey,’ in Representative Selections, ed. Clarence  H.  Faust and Thomas  H.  Johnson. New York: American Book Company, 409–14. Hopkins, Samuel (1804). The Life and Character of Jonathan Edwards. Northampton: Printed by Andrew Wright, for S & E. Butler. Minkema, Kenneth  P. (1996). ‘Jonathan Edwards, Messianic Prophecy, and the Other Unfinished “Great Work”: “The Harmony of the Old and New Testaments,” ’ in Jonathan

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386   Robert E. Brown Edwards’s Writings: Text, Context, Interpretation, ed. Stephen J. Stein. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 52–65. Nichols, Stephen R. C. (2013). Jonathan Edwards’s Bible: The Relationship of the Old and New Testaments. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications. Nichols, Stephen  R.  C. (2018). ‘Jonathan Edwards’ Principles of Interpreting Scripture,’ in Jonathan Edwards and Scripture, ed. David P. Barshinger and Douglas A. Sweeney. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 32–50. Stein, Stephen  J. (1977a). ‘The Quest for the Spiritual Sense: The Biblical Hermeneutics of Jonathan Edwards.’ Harvard Theological Review 70.1–2: 99–113. Sweeney, Douglas A. (2016). Edwards the Exegete: Biblical Interpretation and Anglo-Protestant Culture on the Edge of the Enlightenment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Suggested Reading Stein, Stephen J. (1997b). Editor’s Introduction, The Works of Jonathan Edwards Vol. 5, 15, 24. Stein, Stephen  J. (1974). ‘Jonathan Edwards and the Rainbow: Biblical Exegesis and Poetic Imagination,’ New England Quarterly 47.3: 440–56. Stein, Stephen J. (1985). ‘ “Like Apples of Gold in Settings of Silver”: The Portrait of Wisdom in Jonathan Edwards’s Commentary on the Book of Proverbs,’ Church History 54.3: 324–37. Stein, Stephen  J. (1972). ‘Providence and the Apocalypse in the Early Writings of Jonathan Edwards,’ Early American Literature 13.3: 250–67. Stievermann, Jan (2016). Prophecy, Piety, and the Problem of Historicity. Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck.

Author Bio Robert  E.  Brown is Professor of Religious Studies at James Madison University. He is the author of Jonathan Edwards and the Bible (2002), a study of Edwards’s engagement with early modern critical interpretation. He is the editor of the ninth volume of Cotton Mather’s Biblia Americana (2018) on the Pauline epistles.

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chapter 25

W r iti ng a n d Pr eachi ng Ser mons Kenneth P. Minkema

Jonathan Edwards spent considerable amounts of time in his study amassing a varied collection of books, pamphlets, manuscript notebooks, and other sources. But in many ways, these were compiled during time taken away from his primary public role as pastor: the writing and preaching of sermons. Week in and week out, starting in 1720, when he was licensed, to the end of his life nearly four decades later, he had to produce sermons for his congregations as a significant, if not the chief, requirement for his salary. Wilson H. Kimnach, who has done the most work on Edwards’s sermonic production, refers to Edwards’s ‘sermon mill’ that ground on with steadily increasing efficiency, as evidenced by the more than twelve hundred sermon manuscripts by him that have survived. This essay presents an overview of Edwards’s practices as a writer and as a preacher of sermons. These texts have, of course, been widely examined from the perspectives of intellectual and theological history for their doctrinal arguments, their revivalist strategies, and other features. Here, however, we will focus on the material and cultural aspects of Edwards as a sermon writer, as a way to gain further insight. By approaching him in these ways, we can understand him as a member of the colonial New England clergy, representative of his peers in the settings in which they spoke, the duties they fulfilled, and the manner in which they fulfilled them. And by looking at the ways Edwards applied and adapted his sermons through the many changes he experienced, as evidenced in his sermon manuscripts, we can appreciate his particular resources and his peculiar genius.

Writing Sermons Before putting pen to paper, Edwards had to prepare the medium on which to commit his thoughts. This meant acquiring paper, which usually came in folio reams, and of

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388   Kenneth P. Minkema various qualities. For his sermons, as for his notebooks, especially in the first half of his career, his paper of choice was cotton rag foolscap. Using a penknife, he would score and cut the large sheets in which the paper came into smaller pieces. In the earliest years of his preaching, before he came to Northampton, he utilized an octavo-sized format, which involved cutting pieces of paper that, when folded over once, were roughly the equivalent of one-eighth of a folio sheet, or about six inches high by four inches wide. Here, he may have taken a cue from his father, Timothy Edwards, whose earliest sermons were the same size. When he came to Northampton, however, he downsized his sermon format to duodecimo, that is, one-twelfth of a folio. This may have been owing to his grandfather Solomon Stoddard’s disapproval of the use of sermon notes in the pulpit, since a booklet four inches square was easier to ‘palm’ or conceal than a larger one, and so give something of an impression of noteless preaching. Even so, father Timothy also made the same shift in size in his later sermons, and there may have been still another, more concrete reason for this change in size, which we will get to in a moment. While sometimes a single leaf was originally incorporated or later tipped into a sermon booklet, by and large Edwards utilized double-leaf signatures, that is, pieces of cut paper folded once in half. This was an efficient and standardized format, stackable and expandable. He could add or subtract as many signatures as he needed, depending on whether the sermon required more development or not. And when he was done, he could then, using an awl, create holes in the entire booklet along the folds, and run thread through the holes, and stitch the whole thing together. Edwards made some of his earliest sermon manuscripts by laying out a stack of sheets cut to size, and then folding the entire sheaf in on itself. This is called an ‘infolded quire’. While Edwards continued this technique in some of his later notebooks, for his sermons he quickly switched to using folded-over sheets, stacked separately, which proved much more flexible. If he needed to add more paper, he could simply append new signatures to the bottom—or even to the middle—of the stack before binding the whole thing. This stackable-signature format could be accordioned out to impressive limits. For a preaching ‘unit’ or single sermon (that is, what he would deliver at one service), the average length of a sermon manuscript was eight to ten leaves, or sixteen to twenty pages. But Edwards would often preach sermons that were more than one preaching unit in length; these are called ‘discourses’. These discourses, in Edwards’s hands, could grow to include very lengthy series indeed, some becoming booklets of fifty leaves and more, many comprising multiple booklets. For example, his 1738 discourse on I Corinthians 13, later published as Charity and Its Fruits, consisted of fifteen sermons, while the discourse on the Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, begun the previous year, was nineteen preaching units in nine booklets. Longest of all was his 1739 discourse on Isaiah 51:8, later published as A History of the Work of Redemption, which weighed in at thirty units across twelve booklets. These discourses could take a considerable time to deliver, since Edwards would seldom be able to deliver them consecutively—and indeed, his congregation may have appreciated a departure from the script once in a while. Although Edwards mostly relied on his hand-cut signatures of foolscap, here and there in his sermon booklets from the Northampton and Stockbridge periods (as well as

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Writing and Preaching Sermons   389 in his notebooks) one comes across something different: another type of paper, or scraps with handwritings that are clearly not Edwards’. These repurposed pieces of paper are testimony to Edwards’s frugality. He would recycle almost anything that had some blank space on it that he could fill. This is fortunate, because these salvaged materials are full of information that reveal much about the contours and preoccupations of the lives of Edwards, his family, and his congregation. These ‘texts within texts’ fall into several categories, each revealing in its own ways. First, there are items that relate to town and church life. These include marriage ‘banns’, or a written notice of a couple’s intention to marry. These banns, written by the town clerk, had to be ‘published’, or displayed publicly, probably on a board outside of the church. A typical bann, as found in the Sermon on Ps. 119:1–3 from February 1745,1 reads: These may Certify that Zadok Lyman and Sarah Clark both of Northampton were published on the 18th day of Decr last by posting Up their Names & Intentions At the Usual place In Northampton Dated this 30th of Jany Anno Dom. 1744/5. Attest Saml Mather Town Clerk of Northampton

Another type of document in this category was the ‘prayer bid’, a written request from a member or members of the congregation for prayers on behalf of themselves or others, which Edwards would then include in his pastoral prayers during worship. These bids, written on small slips of paper, were written by the supplicants themselves, providing a wide variety of orthography, spelling, and grammar to be sure, but also an index to their day-to-day religious concerns. One such bid, from a time of war, is tragic: Elisha Pomroy and his wife together with there bretheren John, and oliver Pomroy Desire the prayers of thiss Congregation that God wold San[c]tify to them the death of there brother Simeon Pomroy at Louiburge for there spiritual good.

Although the campaign of 1745 to reduce Louisburg was unexpectedly successful, many New England militia died of disease in the camp. Several of Edwards’s sermons from that time concern the war, and this was by no means the only bid he was handed by an aggrieved family in the church that had lost a son. The Pomeroy family’s bid illustrates how these recycled documents can provide a clue as to the occasion for a sermon, that is, why a sermon was preached on a particular theme at a particular time. An earlier bid from the early 1730s poignantly demonstrates this connection: Samuel clap and his wife desire that thanks may be given to god in the congregation for his grate goodness to them in granting safe deliverence unto her when she was under very daingerous and distressing circomstances[.] [T]hay desire prayers also that god would perfect his mercy to them in recovering her to health again: and that 1  All references to manuscripts in this essay are to items in the Edwards Collection, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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390   Kenneth P. Minkema god would sanctify his holy hand in taking away their child by death to them and their chilldren and help them to behave themselves sutably under the various dispensations of god towards them.

This bid is included in Edwards’s Sermon on Ps. 94:12, which has as its doctrine, as if spoken to the family, ‘He is a happy man, though an afflicted one, whom God chastens and teaches out of his Word.’ Tucked into Edwards’s sermons and notebooks are ­hundreds of these banns and bids, a treasure trove of local and intimate knowledge that connects Edwards’s preaching to the lives of his parishioners. Letters are another type of document incorporated into Edwards’s manuscripts. These include letter ‘covers’, which were basically early versions of envelopes, on which the addressee, their location, and, on occasion (in the days before institutionalized mail delivery), the name of the person who conveyed the letter, were written, and in which the letter proper was enclosed and secured with a wax seal. Some of Edwards’s late sermons are made almost entirely of salvaged letters covers; it is interesting to picture him going around to various family members in his house collecting and preparing these for his further use. But then there are also notes, entire letters, and fragments of correspondence to be found. These include letters or parts of the letters by or to Edwards himself. Even the fragments, sometimes consisting only of a salutation or a conclusion, can provide a piece of information on Edwards’s whereabouts or activities. Correspondence to Edwards as the pastor of Northampton, in charge of discipline, shed light on other aspects of church affairs. One such item is stitched into the Sermon on Titus 3:2, the quarterly lecture given on 22 May 1747, which contains part of a request from church member Thomas Wait for a ministerial hearing to appeal the charge, made in early 1746, that he was the father of Jemima Miller’s child. In the event, Wait was exonerated. This anticipates a string of paternity cases in the late 1740s in which Edwards was unable to force the marriage of the couples involved. Correspondence between the women of the Edwards family is frequently present in Jonathan’s sermons. In this group we find letters—regrettably mostly fragments, because Edwards cut up the letters for his sermons—between his daughters or between his wife and daughters. Documents by colonial American women are rare, but the Edwards collection boasts an impressive inventory of women’s correspondence and private writings, supplemented by the pieces to be found in Jonathan Edwards’s sermons and notebooks. Here again, the texts literally woven into the sermonic or notebook form bind the domestic with the homiletic, the private with the public. Pedagogical writings are also to be found in the sermons, reflecting Edwards’s role as an educator of the members of his family and of his church. An important exercise in the home was learning to write, which would usually be joined with didactic lessons. So, one of the Edwards daughters was set to copying the sentiment, ‘Set your affections on Things above not on Things on the Earth,’ which piece of paper ended up in the Sermon on Isaiah 62:6–7 of April 1741. (Perhaps venting some weariness with this exercise, a scriptural lament appears on the page: ‘Oh that mine head ware water.’) And in 1744, ten-year-old Mary Edwards was copying out ‘Job feels the Rod yet bleses God,’ an exercise that found

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Writing and Preaching Sermons   391 its way into the Sermon on Eph. 6:11–13, dated July 1744. Also, Edwards regularly met with the young people in his congregation (men and women separately) to quiz them about their knowledge of the Bible; he would devise questions and then hand them out, giving the students till the next meeting to search the Scripture and come up with an answer. One such question was, ‘How often have we an account of the temple’s being pillaged of its treasure from the time that it was built till it was burnt by the Chaldeans?’ In the ninth booklet of the discourse on Matt. 25:1–12, from February or March 1738, we have a student’s answer: seven times, which he enumerates with the instances he has located (actually, the correct number, according to Edwards anyway, was eight). Thus, Edwards’s role as a teacher and mentor was joined with his office of pastor. Documents of a financial nature comprise another group. Invoices from merchants in Boston give us a detailed look at a typical shopping list for the family. One such list from 1741/2, later incorporated into the Sermon on Deut. 29:4 of September 1741, has an item for no less than twenty-seven yards of ‘Ribband’ (ribbon). And it is a rare invoice in the Edwards manuscripts that does not contain a line for chocolate; that same invoice records the purchase of two pounds in June and again in January. In 1742 or 1743, Sarah Pierpont Edwards apparently went shopping while in Boston, purchasing ‘a Gold Locket & Chane’ and ‘1 pare of Gold wires’, which could have been used in embroidery or brocade; the receipt ended up in the Sermon on Hebrews 2:7–8, from March 1743. The following year, Jonathan purchased a ‘Childs Plaything’. These and related expenses were apparently regarded as frivolous by members of Edwards’s congregation, some of whom felt the pastor and his family were ‘lavish’ and ‘of a craving disposition’. This resentment prompted a demand by a committee of the church that Edwards give an account as to his ‘manner of spending’; his draft of an explanation is likewise found tucked into a sermon booklet on Romans 12:10, dated March 1743. The Edwardses did live according to their rank, which was as members of the provincial gentry; theirs was a genteel but not an ostentatious lifestyle. Also, their family was ‘large and chargeable’, as Jonathan described it. It was always growing, the eleventh and last child, Pierpont, being born the year his father was dismissed from Northampton. Long before then, Pierpont’s parents had found it difficult to pry salary from the hands of the town constable or other officials. At least a partial record of this effort is preserved in the sermons, in the form of notes from Jonathan and on occasion Sarah. The ­concentration of these requests in the years 1742–3 reflect how this was a particularly difficult time financially, when New England was in the depths of the ‘Great Inflation’. This impression is strengthened by the fact that Edwards had to take out a loan in 1742 for £140 from Eleazar Porter of nearby Hadley, to be paid back in two instalments with ‘Lawfull Interest’; the agreement is found in the Sermon on Psalm 78:57 for June 1743. Edwards’s salary in 1742 was £350, so the loan, before interest, was equivalent to about forty per cent of his annual earnings. Even so, it seems that the family’s financial troubles continued. In 1744, for example, Sarah Pierpont Edwards hastily had to write a note pleading for as much of her husband’s salary as could be spared, as ‘Mr Edwards is under Such obligations that he cant Possibly do without it’. This ongoing issue is probably a testimony in part to the unsteady economy and

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392   Kenneth P. Minkema ­ uctuating currency values in colonial New England during this time; but the problems fl are also illustrative of the extents to which clergymen sometimes had to go to meet their expenses. Small wonder, then, that financial and economic themes are not absent in Edwards’s sermons, though one has to look carefully. From the beginning of his pastorate at Northampton, he chastised merchants for their hard business practices and factionalism, bemoaned lack of care for the poor and needy, and upheld commonwealth values. In sermons such as the one on Exodus 20:15 of 1740, he characterized theft as commercial ‘injustice’; and in the 1747 sermon on Ezekiel 22:12, he excoriated profiteering and extortionary pricing. The sermons therefore provide an index of Edwards’s souring relationship with his congregation, especially after the early 1740s. On another, more serious note, and one that gets us into an even more grim social reality of the day, we find in the manuscripts evidence of the Edwardses’ involvement in slavery. A receipt for a ‘Negro girl named Venus’, fourteen years of age, can be reconstructed from the pieces of the original indenture distributed between three sermons. We know that in 1731 Edwards journeyed to Newport, Rhode Island, to purchase her from a Richard Perkins, ‘marriner’. That Edwards had by the late 1740s cut up the bill of sale suggests that he sold Venus, or that she died. In either event, we know that African or Afro-Caribbean slaves were part of the Edwardses’ lives since they owned a succession of slaves. In addition, Edwards baptized and admitted to full membership several Africans, especially during the revivals. Another reality was illness. The Northampton prayer bids amply illustrate how disease was an everyday concern for the Edwardses and their neighbours; epidemics regularly swept through New England every few years, laying low and killing hundreds, if not thousands. The dangers that attended childbirth were another source of worry, since mortality rates for both mother and new-born were high. Edwards not only had to minister to his congregation but also see to the health of his own family members. For this, he called on the town’s doctor, Samuel Mather, whose medical recipes for treatments of various members of the Edwards family are found scattered throughout Edwards’s sermons. In 1744, for example, oldest son Timothy Edwards, then about age six, apparently was suffering from a tapeworm or some intestinal problem; the caustic concoction Mather prescribed included quicklime and ‘live Millepedes’, leading modern readers, who can view the prescription in the Sermon on Luke 16:22–3(a) from September 1744, to wonder if the treatments were worse than the diseases. By far, though, physicians’ prescriptions for Sarah Pierpont Edwards are the most frequent. The earliest is from 1734, when, following the birth of daughter Mary, she seems to have suffered from post-partum headaches, anxiety, possibly even depression. That Sarah Pierpont Edwards may have had uterine disorders associated with childbirth or even a miscarriage is further suggested by a subsequent receipt from Dr Mather in 1742, treating an ‘hysterical original’. Also, a receipt from Dr Joseph Pynchon of Springfield in 1744 seems to have been meant for relieving a respiratory illness that she contracted, perhaps brought on by a bitter winter. (See, respectively, ‘Paper on Justification’; Sermon on Luke 12:35–6, Dec. 1742; Sermon on Luke 16:22–3[a], Sept. 1744.)

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Writing and Preaching Sermons   393 Gender also emerges as an important category in Edwards’s sermons. Besides holding up a number of females as exemplars of evangelical piety in his printed writings, Edwards portrayed women as the more naturally religious of the two sexes. He preached to female cohorts in his congregation, as well as to young women in general, encouraging them to cultivate their religious sensibilities according to their ages and duties, as well as their inherent moral virtues. And to the end of his ministry at Northampton, he garnered a considerable amount of support among the town’s female church members. These are but a few of the ways in which Edwards, while quite patriarchal, was also transitional in the area of gender relations. But there is also chain of documents that opens up a related, though largely unknown, topic. It starts in the sermons and leads to the Edwards family’s support of abused wives, of the rights of women in marriage, and of divorce. The trail begins with a discarded note by Jonathan Edwards to fellow minister Robert Abercrombie of Pelham in 1746, stitched into the Sermon on I Corinthians 11:3 of March 1746. In his note, Edwards conveyed his wife Sarah Pierpont Edwards’s requirements for a ‘maid’, whose duties would include ‘spinning fine linen’. That search led to a woman named Elinor Gray, Abercrombie’s parishioner, who in January 1746 had initiated proceedings against her husband, Samuel Gray, for adultery, abandonment, and verbal and physical abuse. Doubtless intimately aware of Gray’s destitute condition, Abercrombie referred Elinor Gray to the Edwardses as a spinning maid, and, evidently almost immediately, she took up residence at the Northampton parsonage while her case made its way through the colony’s legislature and the governor’s council. Judge Timothy Dwight of Northampton, who in a few years would become Edwards’s son-in-law, took affidavits from both of the Grays, and submitted his statements to the Edwards family support for divorce. What causes the historian to do a doubletake when perusing these documents in the Massachusetts Archives is the name of the other person who supported Gray’s petitions for divorce and maintenance: Jerusha Edwards, who is usually only mentioned—mistakenly—as the fiancée of David Brainerd. This is the only known instance of Jerusha’s name appearing in a public legal document, so it is significant that when she chose to do so, it was in support of a woman in these circumstances. That Jerusha’s father had a role here, or was influenced by the case, is evidenced in a rather remarkable fragment that appears in a sermon from November 1749, though the handwriting of the fragment is much earlier, probably from the late 1730s or early 1740s. In what was possibly a response to a question posed in a ministerial association meeting or in an ecclesiastical council, Edwards maintains the rights of a wife within the context of marriage, affirming that abandonment, mistreatment, or abuse by a husband constitutes scriptural, moral, and legal grounds for separation and divorce. Indeed, under such circumstances, Edwards insists, a wife ‘is not only not scandalous for departing but tis her duty to depart’. At nearly the same time as daughter Jerusha was supporting Elinor Gray, Jonathan was helping in the divorce of Thankfull Hale from her husband Gideon, who had abandoned her and cohabited with another woman, who bore his child. Yet another feature of Edwards’s sermon manuscripts again speaks to female culture, this time even closer to home. In 1745 or thereabouts, a curious sort of paper begins to

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394   Kenneth P. Minkema appear in Edwards’s sermon booklets and working notebooks. It is very thin, like rice paper or tracing paper. And the shapes in which this paper is cut is never square; rather, the edges are rounded, or irregular, sometimes even shaped like a butterfly when the manuscript is fully opened. The paper is so delicate that Edwards would often envelop a sheaf of them, trimmed to size, in one or more foolscap leaves, creating a sort of cover to protect them. What was this? For the answer, we must look to Edwards’s wife and daughters. To supplement the family’s income, to provide gifts for family and friends, and to accessorize their wardrobes, Sarah Pierpont Edwards and some of her daughters made fans, an item that was essential for any respectable woman of the gentry class. While fully completed fans could be purchased, the individual elements—the paper and the ‘mounts’, usually made of bone—could be had separately. The Edwards women decorated pieces of the paper with what were apparently landscape scenes, done in ink and then painted. Next, they would cut the paper to shape, so that it fit on the mounts. This cottage industry left the unused remnants of the paper—including some bits of ink drawing and water-colouring at the edges—which Edwards would collect and incorporate into his writings, especially his sermons. In this manner, an aspect of feminine production and expression found its way materially into the very masculine domain of the sermon, even as female preaching became a hallmark of the Great Awakening. If Edwards’s sermons had visual markers of his home and family, they also contained reminders of his provincial and international interests and involvements. Edwards’s constant effort to remain abreast of the most recent books led him to search for titles on his own behalf and on behalf of his ministerial association’s library. In these searches, his mind could stretch across the colonies and even across the Atlantic. In 1738, commissioned by his fellow Hampshire County to find a set of The Republick of Letters, a serial publication that gathered together essays on current topics in philosophy, science, and other disciplines, Edwards had inquired with Boston minister Benjamin Colman. No sets were to be had in Boston, was the reply, which made its way into the Sermon on Revelation 21:8 from January 1745; but Colman offered to ‘send for ym to London’. The transaction was eventually completed, since the association’s list of books included the eighteen-volume series (WJE 26: 357–60). Scouring newspapers, journals, and the back pages of newly acquired books for recently published titles, Edwards would copy out adverts on pieces of scrap paper, later to be committed to his own ‘Catalogue’ of Reading. Beginning in the mid-1740s, Edwards began a correspondence with several Scot Presbyterian who were fellow revivalists and creators of the transatlantic Concerts of Prayer, especially John Erskine. In Edwards’s Sermon on Revelation 21:8, dated January 1745, we find an outline of a letter to Erskine lamenting that ministers in New England, ‘most of ’em’, were ‘a sort of half-way men’. If Edwards had friends in Great Britain, he also had opponents. Many of his published treatises had English writers as their targets. One such was John Taylor, Bishop of Norwich, whom Edwards took on in his defence of Original Sin. Treatise joined hands with sermon (in this case, the one on Romans 1:20, June 1743) when Edwards included discarded notes from Original Sin into a sermon; thus, a discussion of possible existence interrupts a consideration of God’s attributes.

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Writing and Preaching Sermons   395 Delving at some length into the many physical aspects of Edwards’s sermons as we have done here—the types of papers and the different recycled documents—is probably a departure from more standard considerations of sermon composition. But these material contents of Edwards’s sermons, the writings of others treating a range of pursuits, on and around which he wrote, were and are both physically and conceptually formative. For we see that Edwards and his sermons were enmeshed in many connections, in interlocking networks—familial, gendered, racialized, local, regional, provincial, and international—and that the very ‘stuff ’ of which the sermons were made—the ‘texts within texts’—map the relations that his sermons bear to these various networks. The seemingly mundane material and social practices involved in constructing sermons from the scraps of his own and other people’s lives reveal the connections between distinct, inseparable, and overlapping circles of activities. Which goes to show that sermons are never separate from life as lived. For Edwards, pastoral theology grew out of personal experience. One resource that Edwards created to aid himself in sermon development was a series of Sermon Notebooks, in which he sketched out ideas for sermons. There are three that have survived. No. ‘19’ (not Edwards’s number but that of a later cataloguer) is only a few leaves, containing less than a hundred entries, only one of which can be matched to a written sermon, delivered in late 1729; No. ‘14’ has approximately 170 entries dating from 1735 to 1739; No. ‘45’ is by far the largest, with over 750 entries spanning from the mid1730s to the late 1740s. There is also a small ‘Subjects’ notebook that seems to contain outlines for sermons to the Indians; a stray leaf of ‘Sermon Topics’ with similar entries may belong to that notebook. The entries in these notebooks are usually fairly brief, perhaps amounting to a statement of an idea for a doctrine, or a reminder to preach upon a certain topic from a certain scriptural text. Sometimes, however, the entries can get quite lengthy, as Edwards provides what is essentially an outline for the sermon. Edwards even earmarks some of these sermon proposals for different portions of his congregation, such as age cohorts or genders. A systematic search of the entries in these notebooks reveals that Edwards actually carried through with the composition and delivery of literally hundreds of them, so that we can often trace the origins of a given sermon by date, in the context of surrounding sermonic ideas, and see how Edwards developed the proposed sermon. Because at least two of these Sermon Notebooks cover the latter half of the 1730s, we can speculate that there were more such notebooks at one time. But even so, very few such sources exist for colonial New England; that these were constructed by Edwards makes them all the more valuable for investigating his homiletic strategies and practices. In the actual structuring and composition of his sermons, Edwards drew on learned practices. He largely conformed to the standard structure for Reformed preaching, which was tripartite: Exposition, Doctrine, Application. He typically started his sermons by ‘opening’ or examining the context of the scripture text on which the sermon was based. He would then name and defend a doctrinal statement, or a list of propositions, arranging his arguments into numbered heads. Finally, he would ‘apply’ the lesson to the

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396   Kenneth P. Minkema experiences of his hearers, or to the occasion of the sermon, utilizing different ‘uses’ such as self-examination, exhortation, instruction, ‘directions’, and ‘motives’. We should add, though, that while Edwards generally hued his sermons to this inherited form, he also experimented with it. In some sermons, the distinct parts of the three-part structure are blended, while other texts take on the form of the modern essay. Edwards’s use of rhetoric has been examined productively and at length by generations of scholars, and so we will only refer to them in passing. Perry Miller, Edwin Cady, Janice Knight, Anna Svetlikova, and others have contributed to understanding Edwards as an artist of language, wielding the rhetorics of sensation and of biblical and natural typ­ ology. More recently, Kimnach has provided what is the best study of Edwards’s literary techniques, which should be read by anyone interested in the topic of Edwards as a homiletician. And younger scholars such as Michał Choiński and Michael Keller, applying digital stylometric and affective programs to Edwards’s sermon corpus, have examined the pragmatic aspects of his awakening sermons and shifts in image-words within the Northampton sermons and between the Northampton and Stockbridge sermons. Such studies are highly suggestive for continuing examinations of Edwards’s homiletics. Once they were written and used, the sermon booklets had to be stored for future use. Early in his career, when his sermon ‘barrel’ was small and he was peripatetic, he could have kept them almost anywhere. But as they grew on his hand, the archive would have required arranging and upkeep for easy retrieval and reference. Canonical filing of the sermons would have been the most efficient for Edwards, since from the start he wrote the scriptural text of the sermon in the upper left-hand corner of the first page. His arrival in Northampton in late 1726 in all probability coincided with his acquisition of a William-and-Mary-style slant-top desk with three lower drawers. This desk, along with the matching cabinets and book boxes that Edwards eventually had built for him, has survived and is at Yale University. It has three copious lower drawers. An examination of the drawers show that they are four-and-a-half-inches deep, the perfect depth for storing duodecimo-sized manuscripts upright, so that the scripture texts would have been readily viewable as Edwards flipped through the canonically arranged booklets. By the end of his career, incidentally, Edwards’s sermon corpus would have amounted to approximately ten linear feet, which is nearly the exact capacity of the drawers if the sermons were stood on end with several rows in each drawer. Over time, this trove of booklets was steadily resourced and increased by Edwards. Each week, he, like his many clerical peers, usually had a regimen of sermon writing, requiring that he had ready two ‘regular’ preaching units worth of texts for the Sunday services, plus a weekday lecture and, every three months, a quarterly lecture. Add to this that, in any given week, he might have to write one or more ‘occasional’ sermons, and it is easy to see that he had to use his time efficiently. Occasional sermons were ones that could be civic in nature, declared by gubernatorial decree, such as the annual fast, held in April, or the annual thanksgiving, held in November; or decided upon by local congregations. These could be supplemented by special events inspired by droughts or rainfall, military defeats or victories, or the like. More than forty of Edwards extant sermons are inscribed ‘Fast’ or were likely preached on a fast day, while nearly thirty were preached or likely preached on a thanksgiving. Every two months, the Northampton

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Writing and Preaching Sermons   397 church celebrated the Lord’s Supper, so the mid-week lecture before the appointed Sunday would be preparatory or sacramental in tone, while the sacrament day itself would call for an appropriately themed sermon; at least thirty-five compositions among Edwards’s sermon corpus are labelled as relating to the sacrament. After this, there are a range of sermons for other occasions, such as ‘Contribution’ sermons, in which Edwards would encourage the congregation either to meet their annual pew rental (which would go towards ministerial salary or a general operating budget) or to give to some special need; approximately a dozen of his extant sermons are marked as such. Then there are ‘Singing’ sermons, preached before or during a meeting at which the congregation was being trained to sing in parts; disciplinary sermons, in which a church member was being admonished, censured, or even excommunicated for a persistent sin, such as drunkenness; and ordination sermons, preached at the installation of a minister, often one of Edwards’s former students. A final thing to consider under the writing of sermons is the question of how long Edwards’s sermons were. It is difficult to say with certainty. Theodore Dwight Woolsey, president of Yale College, stated in 1870 that Edwards’s sermons ‘sometimes were two hours in delivery’, but the operative word here is ‘sometimes’. Based on the average length of a manuscript, and allowing for amplifications here and there, it is more accurate to say that his regular, sabbath-day performances usually lasted sixty to seventy-five minutes, though he could perhaps have come close to Woolsey’s two-hour mark in some lectures or on special occasions. By the same token, some pre-sacramental and funeral sermons, to judge by the manuscripts, could be significantly briefer; this certainly was the case when Edwards was asked to preach in private homes, which was often.

Preaching Sermons What was it like to hear Edwards preach? There are conflicting descriptions of him as a speaker. The image of him that has come down is one who spoke over his congregation rather than to it, in keeping with a romanticized view of him as absent-minded, ethereal, even mystical. This caricature is perhaps best captured in the story that tells of how, during a sermon time at Northampton, the bell rope at the back of the meetinghouse fell to the floor, leading the wits in the congregation to quip that Mr Edwards had stared the rope in half. Also, Edwards was the first to admit that he relied on having a manuscript in the pulpit with him, no matter how he re-sized it; such a reliance was, he stated, ‘a Deficiency and Infirmity’. Thus, we come away with an image of Edwards with his nose in a manuscript, seldom if ever looking up from it.2 Hardly the consummate Reformed minister, preaching for hours without notes. 2 Hopkins, The Life and Character of the Late Rev. Mr Jonathan Edwards (Boston, 1765), 49. See, for example, The Memorial Volume of the Edwards Family Meeting at Stockbridge, Mass., September 6–7, A.D. 1870 (Boston, 1871), 124: ‘He held up his little, fine-written sermon, and read it off, scarcely taking his eyes off the paper.’

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398   Kenneth P. Minkema To balance out such pat stereotypes, perhaps it might be helpful simply to survey a selection of recollections from individuals who actually heard him preach. After Samuel Hopkins graduated from Yale College in 1741, he ‘rusticated’, or continued his education and training for the ministry, under Edwards. During this time, he kept a journal that provides many interesting insights, first into the nature of his spiritual struggles, but also into life in the Edwards home. And he describes Edwards’s preaching. For example, Hopkins journeyed to hear Edwards give a sermon at Newington, Connecticut, in 1742, in which ‘he preach’d with much power, and it seemed to have a great Effect. Some cried out in the Meeting-House. The house was filled with people; many came from Towns roundabout.’3 The size of the congregation, and the fact that many came from surrounding communities, was a manifestation of the religious fervour of the time, as conveyed in the breathless narrative of Nathan Cole racing to hear George Whitefield speak the previous year in nearby Middletown. But the full house was surely also a testimony to Edwards’s notoriety as an awakening preacher, particularly in the wake of the preaching and publication of Sinners, which he apparently repreached on several occasions. Hopkins went on to publish a number of his mentor’s writings, as well as a biography of him. In The Life and Character of . . . Jonathan Edwards (1765), Hopkins conjured Edwards in the ‘Desk’, or pulpit: His Appearance in the Desk was with a good Grace, and his delivery easy, natural and very solemn. He had not a strong, loud Voice; but appear’d with such gravity and solemnity, and spake with such distinctness, clearness and precision; his Words were so full of Ideas, set in such a plain and striking Light, that few Speakers have been so able to demand the Attention of an Audience as he. His Words often discover’d a great degree of inward fervor, without much Noise or external Emotion, and fell with great weight on the Minds of his Hearers. He made but little Motion of his Head or Hands in the Desk, but spake so as to discover the Motion of his own Heart, which tended in the most natural and effectual manner to move and affect others.

Northampton native Nehemiah Strong (1729–1807), later professor of mathematics and natural philosophy at Yale College, was ten-and-a-half-years old when Edwards preached his monumental discourse on Isaiah 51:8, otherwise known as A History of the Work of Redemption. Later in life, he recollected his impressions at the time to Edwards’s grandson and Yale College president Timothy Dwight. Strong’s mind, Dwight wrote in his Travels in New England: was from the beginning deeply interested in the subject. As it advanced, his feelings became more and more engaged. When Mr. Edwards came to a consideration of the final judgment, Mr. Strong said, his own mind was wrought up to such a pitch that he expected without one thought to the contrary the awful scene to be unfolded on that day and in that place. Accordingly, he waited with the deepest and the most 3  Samuel Hopkins, MS Journal, p. 35, entry for March 28th, 1742, Gratz Collection, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

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Writing and Preaching Sermons   399 solemn solicitude to hear the trumpet sound and the archangel call; to see the graves open, the dead arise, and the Judge descend in the glory of his Father, with all his holy angels; and was deeply disappointed when the day terminated and left the world in its usual state of tranquility.

Edwards’s relative, Rev. Stephen Williams of Longmeadow, who as a boy was kidnapped by Natives in the Deerfield Raid of 1704 and later redeemed, kept a diary for most of his life, an incredible resource for those interested in colonial New England life in general as well as Edwards in particular. Williams heard Edwards preach on many occasions and recorded them; in fact, one of the most cited entries in his diary is his eyewitness account of the effects on the Enfield congregation of Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. Williams consistently described his younger cousin’s sermons as ‘Excellent’, as ‘most awakening’, as the effects of his preaching as being ‘wonderfull’, his audiences ‘very woundrus’.4 And finally, in compiling his ‘Memoir’ of Edwards for the first of a ten-volume edition of Edwards’s writings published in 1829, Sereno Edwards Dwight interviewed as many elderly individuals as he could find who had heard both Edwards and his father preach. ‘[A]lthough Mr. [Timothy] Edwards’, wrote Edwards’s great-grandson, summarizing these oral histories, ‘was perhaps the more learned man, and more animated in his manner, yet Mr. Jonathan was the deeper preacher’. Powerful. Graceful. Engaging. Excellent. Deep. These adjectives complicate any portrayal of Edwards as one interested solely in ideas and not at all in delivery. As for needing a manuscript when he stepped into the desk, Hopkins further averred in his biography that Edwards ‘was not so confined to his Notes, . . . but that, if some thoughts were suggested while he was speaking, which did not occur when writing, and appeared to him pertinent and striking, he would deliver them; and that with as great propriety and fluency, and oftner with great pathos, and attended with a more sensible good affect on his Hearers, than all he had wrote.’ As Kimnach observes, Edwards almost certainly had most or all of a sermon memorized before delivering it, a practice he impressed on his students. Hopkins writes, probably reflecting his own tutelage under Edwards: ‘He would have the young Preacher write all his Sermons, or at least most of them, out at large; and instead of reading them to his Hearers, take pains to commit them to Memory.’ There are clues in the manuscripts sermons themselves that Edwards interacted with his audiences when he preached. First, whatever size sermon manuscript by Edwards one examines, the smallness of the script and the cramped lines lead one to see that reading these word for word would have been very difficult, that Edwards did indeed use the written text as a prompt. Further, when one examines most any of his manuscript sermons, one sees a plethora of small curved lines between sentences. These are called ‘pick-up’ lines, visual cues for Edwards to keep his place on the page when he looked up 4  Williams, Diary, III:35 (Aug. 6, 1735), 374 (July 8, 1741), 385 (Aug. 1, 1741), 400 (Oct. 14, 1741), Storrs Library, Longmeadow, Mass.

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400   Kenneth P. Minkema to make eye contact with his hearers. In addition, portions of sermons are comprised of series of questions posed to specific portions of the congregation. Are we to suppose that Edwards read these out without engaging the people to whom he was speaking? And finally, there are times when Edwards actually punctuated a sentence with an exclamation point! Looking at Edwards’s sermon corpus as a whole, we see a marked change occurring in early 1742 or thereabouts. Previously, Edwards had for the most part written out his sermons in full, or nearly so; afterwards, with a few important exceptions, he increasingly outlined his sermons, even dividing the pages into small boxes, each box often containing a head or subhead. Blank areas within and between these boxes, or between passages, served—much like the earlier pick-up lines, which largely disappear in the later sermons— as visual cues to expand on a point. Why Edwards made this transition at this time may have been due to a number of factors. First, and most obviously, was the influence of George Whitefield, who preached entirely without notes (though not without a well-memorized script), in a very dramatic fashion that included use of the body and of that undeniably incredible voice. Whitefield and his many imitators made this new brand of preaching very popular. It seems likely that Edwards made some effort to adapt his own delivery to this trend. And yet, Edwards was maturing as a preacher, and as he aged and gained more experience, it is entirely feasible that his need for a fully written out text proportionally declined. (Surely many pastors today can affirm this from their own experiences.) Finally, we must also acknowledge that, around 1742, his relation with his Northampton congregation had begun to decline, even as his perceived audience expanded beyond the local to the international scene, and his format for reaching his larger audience became the treatise more than the sermon. His sermons may physically reflect that changing relationship and focus. One important exception to Edwards’s outlining of his later sermons is his com­pos­ itions for the Mahican and Mohawk Indians at Stockbridge, of which we have nearly two hundred. When Edwards came to Stockbridge, he reverted to the octavo-sized format. With a new location and a new audience, he may have simply felt more comfortable with it, or perhaps it was more efficient because he would have to turn the page fewer times. But form was also a function of delivery. At Stockbridge, particularly in his sermons to the Natives, Edwards was faced with a new challenge: his words had to be interpreted, since he could not speak, and refused to learn, any Algonkian dialect. Thus, where his sermons beforehand were mostly tripartite in structure—text, doctrine, application— and rhetorically constructed with numbered heads and subheads in classical Reformed style, in his preaching to the Mahicans and Mohawks Edwards simplified his sermon structure, often, having named his text, skipping exposition of the text, or melding the different parts into one, so that his preaching became more narrative in style. He also adapted himself to the habit of reading out single sentences that he had written on the page, between each of which he drew a horizontal line. Upon reaching a line, pre­sum­ ably he would then turn to his translator—we know the names of two of them, John Wauwampuquununt and Ebenezer Maunnauseet—who would then render Edwards’s words. How the translator would actually do this, and how those translations were

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Writing and Preaching Sermons   401 received or understood, are open questions, because we don’t have any contemporary Native versions of Edwards’s sermons, nor any detailed Natives’ descriptions of his preaching. Perhaps mindful of this challenge, Edwards further altered the content of his preaching to the Natives. His sermons became more practical, even more pietistic—perhaps seeking to redirect the influence of neighbouring Moravian missionaries into what he considered more correct paths. Most noticeably, he became a story-teller, choosing biblical characters such as Mary or Cornelius and then, in a ‘Once-upon-a-time’ manner, telling the story of Christianity down to the present, with the Natives before him as the next chapter in the unfolding saga. This is not to say that Edwards abandoned imprecatory messages—do not be idle, do not get drunk—but there is a palpable change, especially in the sermons to the Natives during his first several years there. From the beginning of his ministry, Edwards repreached sermons. This was a necessary time- and energy-saving device in the midst of busy schedules, travel, family concerns, and other issues (by no means did Edwards spend thirteen hours of every day in his study). Also, in the early phase of his career, when Edwards was moving from place to place, repreaching the sermons he had on hand made perfect sense, since the auditory changed. Once he had gone through his existing sermon barrel at Northampton, Edwards had to produce sermons at an accelerated rate. But if he was asked to preach elsewhere, he could look back into his archive and likely find an appropriate piece to repreach; conversely, sermons originally composed to be delivered outside of Northampton could be re-tooled for delivery to his own church. Sometimes revising for repreaching meant only minor changes here and there; other times, it could involve substantial rewrites, even the addition of a new section, such as a part or whole of the doctrine or application. Other times, Edwards could, as Kimnach puts it, ‘cannabilize’ his own sermons, taking parts from two or more and uniting them to form a new one. Towards the end of his pastorate at Northampton, Edwards was even recasting a number of his earlier sermons in outlined form. He kept track of the repreaching of his sermons by inscribing them (usually on the front page) with notations, sometimes in English, simply stating the town where the sermon was repreached, and sometimes the date; or, especially in the earlier sermons, utilizing a series of shorthand symbols for letters, letter com­bin­ ations, and numerals.

Conclusion In his preface to Discourses on Various Important Subjects (1738), a collection of five sermons originally delivered during the period of the Connecticut Valley Awakening of 1734–5, Edwards has this to say about most of the texts that he chose for that volume: the practical discourses that follow have but little added to them, and now appear in that very plain and unpolished dress, in which they were first prepared and delivered;

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402   Kenneth P. Minkema which was mostly at a time, when the circumstances of the auditory they were preached to, were enough to make a minster neglect, forget, and despise such ornaments as politeness, and modishness of style and method.  (WJE 19: 797)

This reflection reveals Edwards’s lack of concern with ‘polite’ preaching, or, put more positively, his owning of the ‘plain style’, as a sort of identifier of his loyalties. But it also makes a concession to ‘circumstances’, allowing that the pace of time and of physical ­factors bore on the production and final form of sermons. Thus, the material sermon corpus of Edwards’s that we have, plus contemporary and later descriptions of him in study and pulpit, help us to reconstruct his method of composing sermons and the manner in which he preached them in a surprisingly detailed way, to a degree that we cannot for many other preachers of his calibre. Closer examination of his manuscripts, especially through the means of evolving technological tools, will doubtless yield much more valuable knowledge.

Works Cited Cady, Edwin (1949). ‘The Artistry of Jonathan Edwards.’ New England Quarterly 22 (Mar.): 61–72. Choiński, Michal (2016). The Rhetoric of the Revival: The Language of the Great Awakening Preachers. Gottingen, Germany: V & R Academic. Dwight, Sereno E. (1830). The Works of President Edwards. 10 vols. Vol. 1. New York. Dwight, Timothy (1969). Travel in New England and New York. Ed. Barbara  M.  Solomon. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Hopkins, Samuel (1765). The Life and Character of the Late Rev. Mr Jonathan Edwards. Boston. Keller, Michael (2018). ‘Experiencing God in Words: Rhetoric, Logic, Imaginative Language, and Emotion in Jonathan Edwards’ Sermons: A Computational Analysis.’ Ph.D. diss., Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Knight, Janice (1991). ‘Learning the Language of God: Jonathan Edwards and the Typology of Nature.’ William and Mary Quarterly 48 (Oct.): 531–41. Miller, Perry (1956). ‘The Rhetoric of Sensation.’ In Errand into the Wilderness. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University. 167–83. Svetlikova, Anna (2013). ‘Jonathan Edwards’ Natural Typology and the Problem of Subjectivity.’ Jonathan Edwards Studies 3.1: 27–42.

Archives and Special Collections Williams, Stephen. MS Diary, 1715–1782. Storrs Library, Longmeadow, Mass.

Suggested Reading Choiński, Michał (2016). The Rhetoric of the Revival: The Language of the Great Awakening Preachers. Göttingen: Vanderhoeck and Ruprecht. Kimnach, Wilson H. (1990). ‘Art of Prophesying: A General Introduction to Jonathan Edwards’ Sermons.’ In The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 10, Sermons and Discourses, 1720–1723. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1–258.

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Writing and Preaching Sermons   403 Kimnach, Wilson H. (1975). ‘Jonathan Edwards” Sermon Mill.’ Early American Literature 10 (Fall): 165–77. Kimnach, Wilson H., & Kenneth P. Minkema (2012). ‘The Material and Social Practices of Intellectual Work on the Eighteenth-Century Frontier: Jonathan Edwards’s Study.’ William and Mary Quarterly 69 (Oct.): 683–30. Kimnach, Wilson H., Kenneth P. Minkema and Douglas A. Sweeney, eds (1999). The Sermons of Jonathan Edwards: A Reader. New Haven: Yale University Press. Keller, Michael S. (2018). ‘Experiencing God in Words: Rhetoric, Logic, Imaginative Language, and Emotion in Jonathan Edwards’ Sermons.’ Ph.D. diss., Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Stout, Harry S. (1986). The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Author Bio Dr. Kenneth P. Minkema is the Executive Editor of The Works of Jonathan Edwards at Yale University, and Executive Director of the Jonathan Edwards Center & Online Archive and a member of the Research Faculty at Yale Divinity School.

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chapter 26

Education Esmari Potgieter

Introduction Jonathan Edwards was educated, and educated others, in a world that is strange to our own in many ways. Ministers were the principal teachers of their townsfolk and the Sunday sermon a source of instruction in the town school. Latin was the gateway into a college education. Colleges were founded on religious principles, their primary purpose being the education of new ministers for the colony. Science, or rather natural phil­oso­ phy, could be pursued within a unified system of knowledge, the whole of which pointed to the Creator. Yet, the world in which Edwards learned and taught was also a changing world. As a young student he encountered the beginnings of the Enlightenment’s challenge to supernatural and revealed religion. As the son of a minister and later a minister himself, he saw generations of Englishmen moving away from the Puritan religion of the first settlers. He heard his parish members complain about the strictness of their forefathers and he lamented their going to ‘the other extreme’ with their own children (WJE 14: 503). Moreover, as new land became scarcer, the duration of the time of youth increased. Young people, often living still in their parents’ homes by their late twenties, were tempted to give their unspent energies to ‘frolicking’ and ‘fornication’ (WJE 53: 464). It was on this youthful group that Edwards focused most of his pastoral energies, addressing more sermons to them than to any other age group (Minkema  2011). Children (persons under fifteen years of age) received scarcely less attention, as Edwards believed that ‘ordinarily those whom God intended mercy for were brought to fear and love him [sooner or later] in their youth’ (Farewell Sermon, WJE 25: 482–3). It should therefore not surprise that, as a missionary in Stockbridge, he declared himself to ‘feel the deepest interest’ in the education of the Indian children (WJE 16: 414). It has been mostly through dissertations that attention has been drawn to ‘Edwards as educator’. Of these, the most notable are Stelting’s (1998) and Van Wyk’s (2016). Edwards

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Education   405 is portrayed by both as a Christian educator worthy of emulation. Minkema (2011 and 2012) has written valuable biographical introductions to this aspect of Edwards’s life and work, pointing us to relevant primary sources. Edwards’s educational legacy has been studied from the viewpoints of theological education (Schuman  2017; Bezzant 2018, 2019), female education (Conforti 1993) and even deaf education (Chang 2016). His thought has been applied to questions in the religious education movement (Wyckoff 1948) and to the present-day quest for spirituality in education (Potgieter 2016). In this chapter a brief chronological overview of education in Edwards’s life is given, after which the primary components of his educational thought are examined. The concluding section offers a tentative evaluation of Edwards’s educational legacy against the backdrop of his revivalism.

An Overview of Education in Edwards’s Life Student and Tutor Edwards grew up in a household characterized by high educational standards and exceptional piety. His father, Timothy Edwards, was well known as a preacher and theologian in their parish in East Windsor and beyond. He set up a preparatory school in his house where he taught local boys and his own children. When chaplain service took him away from home, he wrote to his wife to remind her that the children should be revising their Latin grammar and practicing their writing (WJE 32). Yet, living as the only son among ten sisters, Jonathan seems to have grown up ‘in a world of women’ (Marsden 2003, 18). His mother had herself received a liberal education and later held religious meetings for women. She assisted her husband in preparing Jonathan for college, which he entered in 1716 at the relatively young age of thirteen. After almost three years in Wethersfield, Edwards and his fellow students moved to New Haven, where Yale College had been established as the future Collegiate School for Connecticut. Here Edwards encountered new avenues of learning, such as the newly acquired Dummer collection in the Yale library could afford. From Edwards’s letters written during the course of his studies, it appears that he was a conscientious student and somewhat antisocial (Marsden 2003, 37–9). He pursued a variety of fields of learning and wrote his early scientific papers during these years. However, against the background of his own spiritual struggles, Edwards’s main interest was in matters of theology. After having graduated as the valedictorian of his class, he remained two more years to study divinity. As Morris (2005, 38) illustrates in his compelling study of Edwards’s youth, it was ‘[n]ot the reading of Locke, or the study of Newton, but the experience of conversion’ during these years that had the most forma­ tive influence on the rest of his life and thought.

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406   Esmari Potgieter After brief periods of pastoral ministry in New York and in Bolton (Connecticut), Edwards became a tutor at his former college. During these two years at Yale he taught Rhetoric, Mathematics, Astronomy and Natural Philosophy (Minkema 2011). Here he also wrote his Resolutions and the greater part of his Diary. These sources indicate, as Stelting (1998, 156) remarks, that Edwards was from the beginning to the end his own most important student. They convey the ideals that he had for himself—ideals that were both spiritually and intellectually ambitious. He became ill for a quarter of a year, probably due to overworking himself.

Minister As pastor of Northampton in the years 1727 to 1750, Edwards approached his role chiefly as that of an educator and a scholar (Stelting 1998). Catechism classes to children and youth formed part of the weekly rhythm. Some sermons that were aimed at children or youth (such as Youth and the pleasures of piety, WJE 19) were preached during Sunday services. Others (such as The danger of corrupt communication among young people, WJE 22) were meant for age-specific meetings. By Edwards’s time, gender- and age-specific meetings had already entered the American social and religious scene (see Shields 2007). Yet Edwards showed a remarkable trust in the spiritual insights and experiences both of women and of young Christians. Recognizing their need for interaction, he encouraged youth to meet together for ‘social religion’ (WJE 4: 148). In the time of the Great Awakening he defended the religious meetings held by children amongst themselves (WJE 4, 407–8). The four-year-old Phebe Bartlet was famously held up as an exemplary convert (A faithful narrative, WJE 4: 200–4). There were times that Edwards’s efforts with the young members of his flock were greatly rewarded. In the revival of 1734 to 1735, as well as in the Great Awakening of 1740 to 1742, children and youth formed a great part of the ‘harvest’. It is somewhat ironic that Edwards’s relations with youth, both in the ‘Bad Book Case’ and in his heightening the standards of membership, would play such a large role in his eventual dismissal. Yet these instances prove, as Marsden (2003, 15) points out, that he applied to others the same high standards that he himself abided by.

Father and Mentor Edwards and his wife Sarah raised eleven children. Samuel Hopkins (1765, 43), who for a while resided with the family, recalls how Edwards led their daily family devotions by reading a chapter in the Bible, asking his children questions ‘according to their age and capacity’ and then giving an explanation or application himself. Edwards calmly admonished his children at the ‘first wrong step’ and often spoke to each one individually

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Education   407 ‘about their soul’s concerns’. As an adult wrestling with doubts, his daughter Esther Burr (1984, 224) would still find in Edwards a wise and sympathetic ‘Guide’. Hopkins was one of a number of ministerial candidates who benefited from the Edwards family’s hospitality, combined with Edwards’s theological instruction. It was not unusual at the time for a graduate divinity student to live with a minister and receive further training. Edwards wrote that this part of his work took ‘a great deal of time’ from him, as he gave individual attention to each young man’s knowledge and spiritual growth (WJE 4: 512). His friendly mentoring was continued through visits and, especially in the case of Joseph Bellamy, through personal letters (see Bezzant 2019).

Missionary and College President Edwards’s practical side as an educator is seen at its clearest in his correspondence from Stockbridge. He reminds sponsors and political leaders of the importance of instructing the Indian children. He stresses the need for able trustees and educators. He mentions the weekly instruction he himself gives to the children and he details plans for a female school. His letters also give an indication of the political confusions and opposition that would eventually frustrate his plans (cf. Claghorn 1998). Eventually convinced that he was called for the task of president of the College of New Jersey, Edwards left Stockbridge for Princeton. Hopkins (1765) gives a brief account of the few weeks that Edwards spent in Princeton before his unexpected illness and death. He preached every Sunday and held classes in divinity for the seniors, which were received by them ‘with the greatest satisfaction and wonder’. From a section in Some thoughts concerning the revival (WJE 4: 510–13), one may deduce the ideals that Edwards would have aimed for at the College, had he been given more time. Recalling the ‘infection’ he witnessed at Yale, he pleads that colleges will become ‘nurseries of piety’. Governors and instructors should ensure, both through an adequate curriculum and through frequent conversations ‘about the states of their souls’, that college students are equipped for future ministry.

The Aims of Education If the training of pious ministers was the main purpose of college education, then what was the purpose of education outside the walls of the Collegiate? As in his whole life, so in his learning and teaching, Jonathan Edwards was a goal-oriented man. He was acutely aware of the nearness of death and of the temporary nature of life as we know it. For this reason, he decided at the age of nineteen ‘to omit and put off, all but the most important and needful studies’ (Diary, WJE 40). By this time he had already grasped, not only with his intellect but also through affectionate experience, that there was but one thing that

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408   Esmari Potgieter was ‘important’ and ‘needful’: to know ‘the glorious majesty and grace of God’ (Personal Narrative, WJE 16: 793). Stelting (1998, 217) correctly concludes that Edwards’s aim in all of his educational endeavours was ‘to teach people to know God as he knew God’. Yet, as Stelting also recognizes, education could at most ‘create a context’ for the saving knowledge of God to be imparted. As a Calvinist, Edwards believed that true and saving knowledge of Christ was dependent on the sovereign work of the Spirit. From his own conversion experience he had learned to distinguish that knowledge of divine things which was merely ‘notional’ from that which was ‘sensible’. Only the second type could be called salvific, as it involved a person’s affections and will (cf. Religious Affections, WJE 2: 272). However, while the role of education in bringing people to the knowledge of God was limited, it was still indispensable. Edwards, like others in the Puritan tradition, believed that God used means to dispense his grace. Of these the most important might well be the ‘religious education of children’ (WJE 25: 723). Parents who have had their children baptized into the covenant could expect that their ‘thorough Care to bring up’ their children in God’s ways ‘would ordinarily be successful’ (WJE 66: # 891). Although rational knowledge of the gospel did not guarantee the regenerative work of the Spirit, there was more opportunity for the Spirit to work the more rational knowledge a person had (WJE 22: 100). In insisting on the salvific knowledge of God as the most important aim of education, Edwards was aligning himself with his Puritan heritage against a secularizing trend that was entering, however subtly, into both school and college education. From the 1730’s onwards the spelling book played an increasingly significant role in children’s acquisition of reading. Whereas the New England Primer had taught reading within the context of religion (the most famous example being the couplet for the letter A: ‘In Adam’s fall we sinned all’), the spelling book shifted the emphasis to method. Later, with Mary Cooper’s The Child’s New Play-Thing: being a Spelling Book Intended to Make the Learning to Read a Diversion instead of a Task (1742; reprinted in Boston in 1750), entertainment threatened to replace conversion as a dominant educational theme (see Monaghan 2005). Edwards was acutely aware of the liberal and utilitarian spirit of enquiry that increasingly shaped views of learning and education on both sides of the Atlantic (see Hall 2007). The problem that he saw in this approach was its lack of an ultimate worthy end. Aware of the argument that religious devotion makes one less ‘useful’ to the world, he countered: [That is] the same thing as to say that the world was made that the parts of it might be mutually useful to each other; that is, that the world was made to have all the parts of it nicely hanging together, and sweetly harmonizing and corresponding: that is that the world might be a nicely contrived world; that is, that the world was nicely contrived for nothing at all!  (WJE 13: 189–90)

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Education   409 In aiming for their eternal salvation, Edwards appealed to the deepest interests of his young listeners. He assured them that true religion did not mean that they would have to forsake their eagerness for ‘pleasures’ and ‘glories’. On the contrary, these things could only be acquired on the way of true religion (WJE 68: # 964). The saving knowledge of God occupied and satisfied a person’s whole being. Education had to reflect this by addressing the child in a holistic manner: ‘informing [his] understanding, influencing his heart, and directing its practice’ (To Sir William Pepperrell, WJE 16: 409). Two other educational aims should also be mentioned. The first concerns the ­millennium—that glorious age on earth which, Edwards thought, lay waiting. He expected that God would inaugurate the millennium using means such as preaching and human learning. Perhaps this expectation enabled him to appreciate even that learning which was not undertaken with any religious purpose in mind. He could see in the development of the mariner’s compass a thing ‘discovered’ by God to the world, for the purpose of bringing distant nations closer to one another and to the millennium (WJE 13: 369). Thus, while he purposefully strove for education that would advance the knowledge of God, he trusted that God in his providence was leading all sorts of learning in this very direction. Edwards also envisaged the achievement of a secondary, societal aim through educa­ tion: the promotion of English power and culture. He saw a political advantage for England and its colony if the loyalty of the Indians could be won through the education of their children (To Joseph Paice, WJE 16). Moreover, as a son of colonial England, he did not see the need for distinguishing between conversion and anglicizing. He wanted education to ‘change the taste of Indians, and to bring them off from their barbarism and brutality, to a relish for those things, which belong to civilization and refinement’ (To Sir William Pepperrell, WJE 16: 411).

The Roles of Teacher and Learner To the bitter end Edwards viewed his task as a minister as that of guide and teacher, knowing that he was responsible before an omniscient God (Farewell Sermon, WJE 25: 466). Yet, if a minister was responsible to teach, every Christian was responsible to learn: You are all called to be Christians, and this is your profession. Endeavor, therefore, to acquire knowledge in things which pertain to your profession. Let not your teachers have cause to complain, that while they spend and are spent, to impart knowledge to you, you take little pains to learn. (The Importance and Advantage of a Thorough Knowledge of Divine Truth, WJE 22: 97)

Edwards wished to point learners beyond their human teachers to that greatest teacher, Christ himself (WJE 67: # 926). Therefore, in his teaching endeavours outside of the

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410   Esmari Potgieter pulpit, he adopted strategies that would encourage (at least a certain form of) ‘­self-directed’ learning. Both the young congregants and the ministry students under his care were taught with the help of sets of questions. The questions were often intended to stimulate further study and reflection, according to the learners’ capacities. Thus, ‘Sam Wright’s son’ was assigned the question: ‘How many Persons do we Read of that in the Old Testament that were Raised from the dead’ (Questions for young people, WJE 39). His Questions on Theological Subjects (WJE 39) includes one that frequently occupied Edwards himself: ‘What good reason can be given why God, who is infinitely and unchangeably happy in him[self], should seek his declarative glory and make that his last end in his works?’ By comparing Edwards’s ‘Miscellanies’ with the notebook of one of his famous stu­ dents, Joseph Bellamy, Schuman (2017) has drawn some interesting conclusions. It appears that Edwards often assigned theological questions on matters that also interested him at the time. While he would point Bellamy to relevant authors, he clearly wished his student to reflect and draw conclusions for himself. Edwards himself found writing to be the most satisfactory way to grow in knowledge. He clearly took to heart Cotton Mather’s advice of daily building a ‘treasure’ of knowledge using ‘blank books’ and a pen (Mather 1726, 72). To the trustees of the College of New Jersey he confided: My method of study, from my first beginning the work of the ministry, has been very much by writing; applying myself in this way, to improve every important hint; pursuing the clue to my utmost... The further I traveled in this way, the more and wider the field opened . . .  (WJE 16: 726–7)

In the case of the Indian children at Stockbridge, nothing would satisfy Edwards but to make lifelong learners of them. To this end, he appreciated the value of entertainment and conceived of a number of strategies that would make learning enjoyable, fostering ‘an early taste for knowledge, and a regularly increasing appetite for it’ (To Sir William Pepperrell, WJE 16: 408). At the same time he recognized that his methods would be wasted on children who were ‘past their forming age’ (To the Reverend Thomas Prince, WJE 16: 638). Within the triangular educational relationship between Christ, the teacher, and the learner, the learner would ideally be converted and then shaped in totality. Edwards could not bear to have children taught by teachers who were not examples of piety themselves and took much pains to have unworthy candidates removed (cf. To Sec. Andrew Oliver & To the Commissioners, WJE 16). When tumult erupted at the boys’ school and the need for a new school master was desperate, Edwards sought to attract a certain man in whom he saw ‘real experimental piety’, ‘liberal education’ and ‘established character’ (To the Reverend Thomas Prince, WJE 16). Edwards knew that much depended on the character of the teacher. Moreover, he knew that teaching was most effective when the teacher and learner shared with each other not only information, but their very lives. This can be seen especially in his close mentoring of those students whom he prepared for ministry (an approach which was

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Education   411 adopted and institutionalized by his followers—cf. Bezzant 2018). Bezzant (2019) sees in Edwards’s mentoring practices a combination of the eighteenth century’s new appreciation for intimacy and friendship and the pedagogy of revivalism. New church leaders had to be taught, by conversation and by example, to fear the Lord.

The Curricula Edwards held decidedly Puritan views on children and on the aims of education. Yet, his pedagogy was shaped by many influences (cf. Van Wyk  2016). Like John Locke and David Fordyce, both of whose works on education he mentions in his catalogue of reading (WJE 26), he valued the cultivation of a taste for learning and of independent thought. This can be seen even in his approach to teaching the Westminster Assembly’s Shorter Catechism. Hopkins (1765, 43) recalls how Edwards taught his own children in a conversational manner, helping them not simply to memorize, but to understand the Catechism. Indeed for Edwards, learning without understanding was part of the ‘gross defects of the ordinary method of teaching among the English’ (To Sir William Pepperrell, WJE 16: 407). In the education of Indian children, Edwards saw an opportunity to realize his educational ideals without the encumbrances of English educational ‘defects’. Again, success depended to a large extent on the teacher: ‘the children should never read a lesson, without the master or mistress taking care, that the child be made to attend to, and understand, the meaning of the words and sentences which it reads... And the child should be taught to understand things, as well as words’ (WJE 16: 408). If learning was to serve understanding, two complementary strategies were necessary. Firstly, children had to be taught mainly through a ‘familiar way of conversation’ (WJE 16: 410). But for this to be possible, they had to know English. Helping the Indian children master English was such a priority for Edwards that he suggested the placement of English children in the Indian schools, or the temporary boarding of Indian children with English families (WJE 16: 413). It was perhaps for this reason that he also, for a time, took an Indian boy into his home (WJE 16: 636–8). Edwards felt that, once they had mastered English, the Indian children would be able to advance far in their learning. In his letter to Pepperrell he envisages a curriculum that consists of Scriptural history and stories; intertestamental history; church history in the context of prophecies fulfilled and still awaiting fulfilment; Biblical chronology and geography; spelling and writing; and a little arithmetic. Recognizing that his aspirations are high, he allows for differentiation in order that ‘children of the best genius might be taught more things than others’ (WJE 16, 411). (Significantly, as Van Wyk (2016, 238–9) points out, Edwards differentiates according to talent and not according to gender.) Finally, the children have to be taught singing, as it is a fitting part of Christian education, will be ‘unusually popular’ and has a powerfully formative influence. Edwards would even make arrangements for a temporary singing teacher (WJE 16: 597).

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412   Esmari Potgieter Minkema (2011) describes the catalogue of books that Edwards would have the t­eachers of Indian children use. This included Samuel Johnson’s two-volume English dictionary and a volume from Lardner’s Credibility of the Gospel history. For natural phil­oso­phy Edwards chose Andrew Baxter’s Matho, a fictional dialogue between a boy and his older friend about questions of science. (This choice highlights Edwards’s pref­ erence for dialogic methods and also serves to remind that he was not strictly pioneer­ ing the approach.) From the catalogue and from Edwards’s correspondence with Joseph Bellamy, who had undertaken to educate a few Indian boys himself, Minkema concludes that Edwards’s plans were probably overambitious from the start. As for his own studies, Edwards continually worked on a catalogue of reading (WJE 26) that contained works that he had read, as well as those that he wanted to obtain. He read as widely as possible, both for the sake of his own formation and for knowing the territory of the gospel’s enemies. A register of persons who borrowed books from him (WJE 26) shows that his library was a source from which he educated congregants and ministry students in matters pertaining to them. Yet, as in his own studies, so in that of others, he would always view the Bible as the ultimate educational resource. This can be seen both in the time and effort he spent in exegesis and in the pedagogical nature of his exegetical work (Sweeney 2016).

Evaluating Edwards’s Legacy The originality of Edwards’s own educational thought has arguably been exaggerated (cf. Stelting 1998, 180 and Van Wyk 2016, 293). This is not to deny his educational legacy. Through his New Light followers his influence has been greatly felt in American higher education and in social and educational action (cf. Chang  2016, Conforti  1993, and Schuman 2017). Stratton (2015) yearns for the same integration between spiritual revival and Christian education that he sees with Edwards and the early Edwardseans. Noll (1994) has sounded a note of caution, however, arguing that revivalism has been greatly responsible for the evangelical disdain for the life of the mind. According to Noll, Edwards himself showed no signs of such a disdain. Guelzo (2004) disagrees with this exemption, arguing that even in Edwards’s case, revivalism and a tendency towards anti-intellectualism went hand in hand. These diverging assessments show that, in evaluating Edwards’s educational legacy, one will have to deal with Edwards the revivalist. In his own day, Edwards and other New Light preachers were often criticized for frightening children with hell. His response was that children who were ‘out of Christ’ were ‘young vipers’ who needed ‘much to awaken them’ (WJE 4: 394). That Edwards could even refer to small children in the church as ‘out of Christ’ stands in uneasy contrast with the description of baptism in the Westminster Shorter Catechism (Question and Answer 94) as the sign and seal of ‘our ingrafting into Christ’. It was against such inconsistencies in the revivalist approach to children that Horace Bushnell would protest in his influential work Christian Nurture (1861).

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Education   413 Edwards is rightly admired for his conversational and individualized approach to children, youth, and students. From Edwards’s own words we know that individual conversations between him and his learners would mostly have concerned the learner’s ‘spiritual state’. One wonders if Edwards the revivalist departed from the pastoral advice of the Reformers (and early Puritans such as John Owen and Thomas Goodwin) of directing people’s gaze away from themselves to the divine promises given in the Word and sacraments (cf. Manetsch 2013). An overly subjective emphasis is arguably reflected in The Life of David Brainerd (WJE 7), which Edwards had published with a clear pedagogical intention in mind. Even after Edwards’s revision of the Diary, Brainerd still emerges in it as a highly introspective and often discouraged Christian. Edwards’s ecclesiastical context, shaped as it was by the Half-Way Covenant and by Solomon Stoddard’s improvisation, probably discouraged a reliance on the sacraments and on church membership for assurance. Yet, even in the case of his own children, Edwards could not rest with the baptismal promise and with the thorough Christian education that he and his wife provided. He believed three of his older children to be saved only after a visit by George Whitefield (WJE 16: 88). In short, Edwards’s revivalism seems to have created inconsistencies in his approach to the ordinary means of grace. He was certainly far from the overthrow of ordinary means (and of learning) that occurred in certain enthusiast quarters of the revival. He held to the end that ‘family education and order are some of the chief of the means of grace’ (WJE 25: 484). Yet, in A history of the work of redemption he had also insisted that ‘from the fall of man to this day wherein we live the Work of Redemption in its effect has mainly been carried on by remarkable pourings out of the Spirit of God’. It is hard to see how this could encourage anyone in the ordinary and daily business of educating or learning. In between revivals, such a person could at most hope for the ‘more constant influence of God’s Spirit always in some degree attending his ordinances’ (WJE 9: 143; emphases added). Both as a learner and a teacher, Edwards had a remarkable way of integrating the truths of God wherever he and his students encountered them. Furthermore, at a time when the connection between learning and orthodox religion was strongly disputed, he sought to channel all truth in service of the salvific knowledge of God. Yet, the question is whether Edwards’s thought may have also carried the seeds of disintegration, eventually helping to loosen the ties between education and the very purpose that he had wanted it to serve.

Works Cited Bezzant, Rhys S. (2019). Edwards the Mentor. New York: Oxford University Press. Bezzant, Rhys S. (2018). ‘American Theological Education at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century: The Edwardsean Legacy.’ Theological Education: Foundations, Practices, and Future Directions. Ed. Andrew M. Bain and Ian Hussey. Eugene, OR: Wifp & Stock. 74–87. Burr, Esther E. (1984). The Journal of Esther Edwards Burr, 1754–1757. Ed. Carol F. Karlsen and Laurie Crumpacker. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. Bushnell, Horace (1861). Christian Nurture. New York: C. Scribner.

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414   Esmari Potgieter Chang, Nathan W. (2016). The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards in the Founder of American Deaf Education: An Historical Theology of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet. PhD Diss. Deerfield, IL: Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Claghorn, George  S. (1998). ‘Introduction.’ Letters and Personal Writings, WJE Vol. 16. Ed. George S. Claghorn. New Haven: Yale University Press. 3–27. Conforti, Joseph A. (1993). ‘Mary Lyon, The Founding of Mount Holyoke College, and the Cultural Revival of Jonathan Edwards.’ Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 3(1): 69–89. Cooper, Mary (1742). The Child’s New Play-Thing: being a Spelling Book Intended to Make the Learning to Read a Diversion instead of a Task. London. Guelzo, Allen C. (2004). ‘Learning Is the Handmaid of the Lord: Jonathan Edwards, Reason, and the Life of the Mind.’ Midwest Studies in Philosophy XXVIII: Hall, David D. (2007). ‘Learned Culture in the Eighteenth Century.’ A History of the Book in America, Volume 1: The Colonial in the Atlantic World. Ed. Hugh Amory and David D. Hall. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. 411–33. Harris, Benjamin (c.1688). The New England Primer. Boston. Hopkins, Samuel (1765). The life and character of the late Reverend Mr Jonathan Edwards, president of the College at New-Jersey. Together with a number of his sermons on various important subjects. Boston: S. Kneeland. Manetsch, Scott  M. (2013). Calvin’s Company of Pastors: Pastoral Care and the Emerging Reformed Church 1536–1609. New York: Oxford University Press. Marsden, George M. (2003). Jonathan Edwards: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press. Mather, Cotton (1726). Manuductio ad Ministerium: Directions for a Candidate of the Ministry. Boston. Miller, Perry (1939). The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century. New York: The MacMillan Company. Minkema, Kenneth P. (2011). ‘ “Informing of the Child’s Understanding, Influencing his Heart, and Directing its Practice”: Jonathan Edwards on Education.’ Acta Theologica 31(2): 159–89. Minkema, Kenneth P. (2012). ‘Jonathan Edwards on Education and His Educational Legacy.’ After Jonathan Edwards: The Courses of the New England Theology. Ed. Oliver D. Crisp and Douglas A. Sweeney. New York: Oxford University Press. 31–50. Monaghan, E. Jennifer (2005). Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America. Amherst & Boston: University of Massachusetts Press. Morris, William  S. (2005). The Young Jonathan Edwards: A Reconstruction. The Jonathan Edwards Classic Studies Series. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock. Noll, Mark A. (1994). The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans. Potgieter, Esmari (2016). ‘Jonathan Edwards and a reformational view of the purpose of education.’ In die Skriflig/In Luce Verbi 50(1), 2016. https://doi.org/10.4102/ids.v50i1.2123. Schuman, Andrew (2017). ‘Training Ministers of “Light and Heat”: Jonathan Edwards’s Homebased Educational Approach and its Legacy.’ The Global Edwards: Papers from the Jonathan Edwards Congress held in Melbourne, August 2015. Ed. Rhys S. Bezzant. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock,. 261–75. Shields, David  S. (2007). ‘Eighteenth-Century Literary Culture.’ A History of the Book in America, Volume 1: The Colonial in the Atlantic World. Ed. Hugh Amory and David D. Hall. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. 434–76.

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Education   415 Stelting, Donald  E. (1998). Edwards as Educator: His Legacy of Educational Thought and Practice. PhD Diss. Kansas: University of Kansas. Stratton, Gary  D. (2015). ‘Revivalism and Christian Education.’ Encyclopedia of Christian Education. Ed. George T. Kurian and Mark A. Lamport. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. 1063–6. Sweeney, Douglas A. (2016). Edwards the Exegete: Biblical Interpretation and Anglo-Protestant Culture on the Edge of the Enlightenment. New York: Oxford University Press. Van Wyk, John R. (2016). ‘To Understand Things as well as Words’: An Examination of Jonathan Edwards as an Educator and his Pedagogical Methodology. PhD Diss. Deerfield, IL: Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Wyckoff, D. Campbell (1948). Jonathan Edwards’ Contributions to Religious Education. PhD diss. New York: New York University.

Suggested reading Brekus, Catherine A. (2001). ‘Children of Wrath, Children of Grace: Jonathan Edwards and the Puritan Culture of Child Rearing.’ The Child in Christian Thought. Ed. Marcia J. Bunge. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. 300–28. Cremin, Lawrence A. (1970). American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607–83. New York: Harper & Row. Edwards, Jonathan (2005). To the Rising Generation: Addresses Given to Children and Young Adults. Ed. Don Kistler. Grand Rapids: Soli Deo Gloria. Lull, David (2006). ‘Jonathan Edwards and the Christian Education of Today’s Young People.’ Journal of Christian Education 49(2): 15–21.

Author Bio Esmari Potgieter is a South African schoolteacher, specializing in the subjects Biblical Studies and Mathematics. Besides teaching qualifications, she holds an Honour’s Degree in Theology and a Master’s Degree in Philosophy from North-West University. She enjoys researching topics in the fields of Christian Philosophy of Education and Education for Community Development.

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chapter 27

Missions John A. Grigg

We can usefully, if somewhat artificially, divide Jonathan Edwards’s contribution to missions into three areas. First is the role that missions played in some of Edwards’s theo­logic­al thought during his lifetime. Second, is Edwards’s time as a missionary at Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Third, is the legacy of the Edwards’s corpus in the more than 250 years since his death. Of course, all three are intertwined, but I hope this approach will allow for a clearer explanation and understanding of Edwards’s contributions to Christian missions. Edwards’s life and work, of course, was shaped by his engagement not only with contemporary events and authors, but also with ideas generated by more than two centuries of debate over the nature of religion, truth, and the role of the church. Among these were the parallel ideas of vera religio (true religion) and prisca theologia (ancient theology). Originally found in the writings of various church fathers, early modern authors refined them further. Essentially, these concepts held that all religions contained threads—or remnants—of the ideas and practices of true religion (Christianity). Thus, for example, Cotton Mather celebrated the Muslim belief in Jesus as messiah while numerous authors argued that the religious practices of Native Americans suggested that these people were, in fact, descendants from the Lost Tribes of Israel. A second important theme which influenced Edwards was the changing ­interpretation of the means of Christian salvation which stemmed from the conflicts and divisions ­associated with the Reformation and subsequent wars of religion. The emergence of ­competing churches undermined the belief that eternal life could be obtained by simple adherence to the historical practices of one true church. Over time, several important concepts were embedded in Christian practice: religion became a private matter, ­separated from the state, and based on individual understandings of the truth. Individuals now had to intellectually assent to those propositions which they believed to be true rather than conforming to the requirements of an institution. Following from this, then, ministers such as Edwards came to see their role as presenting a rational basis for the embrace of true religion. This approach carried over on to the mission field aided by the belief that non-Christians already possessed some piece of true religion.

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Missions   417 Both Catholics and Protestants honed their rhetorical tools in a competition for souls that was fought over much of Europe. But, as European awareness of a wider world increased, vast new vistas for religious conversion were opened. At first, it was the Catholic Church which took the lead and, by the early decades of the seventeenth century, Catholic missionaries could be found in China, India, Japan, and the Americas. Protestant efforts lagged until the seventeenth century. Some of the earliest came in New England where the Puritans, stung by condemnation of the bloodshed of the Pequot War, supported the work of John Eliot while the Mayhew family worked among the Narragansetts of Martha’s Vineyard. Other Protestant mission efforts emerged from Europe: in 1706, two missionaries from Halle took up their posts at the Danish colony of Tranquebar, on the coast of India. Important in the growth of Protestant missions were the Moravians who moved throughout the Atlantic world, focusing at first on African slaves in multiple European colonies. Eventually other Moravians began to settle in the British North American colonies, intent on reaching Native Americans. By the eighteenth century, the need to reach Native Americans with the Protestant message had gained new momentum. Empire-builders in both Britain and the colonies could see that Catholicism was a critical component in the French alliances with various Indian groups. Thus, political leaders began to support outreach to Native Americans as a means of shifting the balance of power in the northeast. A blending of the spiritual and political can be found in Solomon Stoddard’s 1723 pamphlet Question Whether God is not Angry with the Country for doing so little towards the Conversion of the Indians? The work was a blistering attack on New Englanders for their failure to bring the Gospel to the Indians. Indeed, Stoddard argued that New England’s suffering during the Indian conflicts was God’s punishment, not for moral failure, but for refusal to preach to the Indians. By the middle of the eighteenth century, mission agencies in various parts of Britain supported a small number of missionaries (who often also served as local ministers or chaplains) in a number of colonies. While the success of these missionaries, at least in terms of the number of Indians actually converted, was limited, Cotton Mather, in 1728, could point to the growth of Indian missions as an important component of the rise of global Protestant missions.

Missions and Theology Although Edwards’s writings on missions are few, in recent years historians and ­scholars of religion have begun to explore the ways in which Edwards integrated the idea of the ‘heathen’ world into his broader theology. As Gerald R. McDermott (2000) has noted, Edwards came to subscribe to the idea of the prisca theologia, initially as a weapon in his rhetorical wars with deism. He deployed the concept to counter the deist claim that the vast numbers of heathen around the world—especially the multitude of Chinese—could be considered an argument against the Calvinist doctrine of particularity.

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418   John A. Grigg In time, however, Edwards further developed the prisca theologia concept. In various works—including Original Sin and the series of sermons published posthumously as The History of the Work of Redemption—he insisted that God had brought further ­revelation to the heathen throughout the history of the world. Edwards saw events such as Constantine’s conversion and the miracles performed by the biblical prophets to be a way of God reaching out to the heathen. Further, Edwards argued that the successive diasporas of the Jews were, at least in part, brought about by God in order to spread true religion to the heathen. Here, Edwards was making a profoundly important point, namely that the works of God were not only intended to reveal the nature of God to believers but were also performed and then recorded as a means to reach the heathen. McDermott (2000) has also explained that Edwards’s thinking on the fate of the nonChristian world led him to depart from strict Calvinism, when he argued that ‘holy pagans’ were one of four groups of people who could be saved without actually having direct knowledge of Christ. Edwards did not, however, believe that all the heathen could, or would, be saved. In keeping with many Reformed thinkers, Edwards believed in the wholesale conversion of the Jewish people prior to the establishment of the millennium. In contrast, McDermott has argued, Edwards believed Muslims would fulfil the role of the end times army opposed to God and would, therefore, be destroyed, not saved. In contrast, theologian Mark C. Rogers (2009) has argued that Edwards believed the millennium would be preceded by a general Christianization of the entire civilized world, a world which included the Ottoman Empire. While Edwards never issued a call for a great missionary effort to those parts of the world which were bereft of Gospel preaching, he applauded it when it took place, such as, for example, the Tranquebar mission. Furthermore, he was very concerned with domestic missions or revivals within Christendom. Thus, he supported the idea of prayer for revival throughout the Atlantic world. This was a primary reason that Edwards supported the Concert of Prayer, which ultimately led to his publication of the Humble Attempt in 1748, designed to promote the Concert in British North America. The idea originated with a number of ministers in Scotland, and Edwards became aware of it sometime prior to November 1745. Edwards promoted the Concert among his Northampton congregation and shared the idea with other ministers. However, the propagation of the Concert was slower than Edwards would have wished and that lethargy was most likely a significant influence in his writing the Humble Attempt. As with The History of the Work of Redemption, Humble Attempt tied revival and ­conversion to the end times. Mark Rogers (2009) emphasized the eschatological ­elements in Edwards’s Humble Attempt. According to Rogers, Edwards argued that prayer was the precursor to both converting preaching and to revival. The desire to pray was itself a gift from God but Christians could be motivated to prayer by Scriptural promises. In particular, in this context, believers needed to understand the prophetic promises contained within scripture. Rogers concluded that Edwards believed p ­ rophecy held the key to advancing the Gospel. But the Humble Attempt included other important concepts related to the church and missions. George M. Marsden (2003) has argued that Edwards believed a Concert of

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Missions   419 Prayer might well hasten the end of man’s rebellion against God. Thus, although designed to see God’s kingdom extended to the ‘heathen’, Humble Attempt also offered something for the saints. Gerald McDermott (2000) has pointed out that, in Humble Attempt, Edwards was one of the first Protestant theologians to enlist the laity in the great work of missions. The pamphlet called for all the church to invest in prayer for missions, not just the ministers. In one other area Edwards argued for the role of missions in the growth of the ­kingdom of God. This was, of course, the conversion of Native Americans through the work of a handful of Protestant missionaries such as David Brainerd. As I have argued elsewhere, Edwards’s The Life of David Brainerd was not primarily designed to promote missions. Nonetheless, in his lengthy appendix, Edwards cited the conversion of Indians in New Jersey as a sign of the work of God. There are other references to Indian conversions as signs of God’s work of redemption in Edwards’s letters and sermons although Edwards never fully developed this idea until after 1751, when, dismissed from the Northampton pulpit, he moved to Stockbridge to work at the mission there.

Missionary-Pastor Perhaps no aspect of Jonathan Edwards’s life has been the subject of as much recent scholarship as his work at Stockbridge from June 1751 until January 1758. This ­scholarship is a long-needed corrective to the Edwards record, as the six-and-a-half years he spent at Stockbridge amount to almost a fifth of the time he spent in ministry throughout his life. There are two interpretative perspectives which have emerged from this recent work. One centres around Edwards’s own motivation for moving to Stockbridge while the second has examined how Edwards’s approach to his ministry changed during his time at the mission. This second perspective has brought important examinations of the ways in which Native Americans influenced Edwards. Until recently, scholars argued that Edwards’s departure to the mission was his only available option following his Northampton dismissal. Recently, however, several authors have noted that Edwards had other choices. Marsden (2003) points out that Edwards was invited to pastor a breakaway church in Northampton. We also know that Scottish minister John Erskine had offered to procure Edwards a pastorate in Scotland and there is also evidence that he had received calls to Canaan, Connecticut and Lunenberg, Virginia (although the latter came after his installation at Stockbridge). All  these opportunities came with attendant difficulties but, then, so did a move to Stockbridge. Scholars have identified two different, but not contradictory, reasons for Edwards’s decision. Rogers (2009) has argued that Edwards’s move to Stockbridge was a natural progression of Edwards’s eschatological expectations. Moving to Stockbridge placed Edwards at one of the centres of what God was doing in preparation for the millennial outpouring of the Spirit—preaching the Gospel in order to hasten the conversion of the

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420   John A. Grigg Indians. Elsewhere, I have argued that Edwards’s decision to move to Stockbridge was driven, in part, by what Edwards had learned as he prepared David Brainerd’s ­manuscripts for publication. Edwards must have noticed the substantial independence with which Brainerd conducted his work. While some members of the English community at Stockbridge opposed Edwards’s appointment, they did not have the authority to prevent it. Edwards was appointed by both the Massachusetts government and the Company for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England, neither of whom offered much in the way of supervision. Thus, his position at Stockbridge would require little, if any, accountability to the English congregation. Furthermore, no colonist would have expected a white minister to be accountable to Native Americans for his theology. And the missionary agencies, generally speaking, proved remarkably long-suffering in their wait for success on the field. Stockbridge offered Edwards a place to pursue both his ministry and his writing with limited accountability. The mission had been founded in 1734 under the leadership of the Reverend John Sergeant with the support of the Mahican Indians. The Mahicans, New England Protestants who advocated Indian missions, and British authorities all wanted to mission to succeed. For this reason, the work at Stockbridge attracted government funding in addition to the money provided by the mission society. Thus Edwards was not m ­ oving to the ‘howling wilderness’ described by an older generation of historians but to a ­reasonably successful mission station and a well-established, albeit small, English community. Edwards took on at least three different roles, all of which had been pioneered by  Sergeant. As Edwards informed one of his Scottish correspondents—Thomas Gillespie—in 1751, Sergeant had been both a missionary-pastor to the Indian church and a pastor to the English congregation. Although there was but one church in the town which both Indians and English attended, Edwards preached to the two groups sep­ar­ ate­ly. This separation offers historians an important opportunity to contrast Edwards’s approaches to the two groups (see below). Edwards’s third role was as the overseer of small boarding school for Indian pupils. Although Edwards probably hoped to leave conflict behind him, he arrived at a time of turmoil in both the town and the mission, turmoil which his arrival did little to quiet. John Sergeant had died about eighteen months earlier and, although the Indians had been visited by supply ministers and Moravians, there had been no settled ministry during that time. Shortly before Edwards’s arrival, the Indians had suffered through a great illness which had carried away, among others, the sachem Umpachanee, leaving the Indians with something of a leadership void. There were also growing disputes over ­disposition of lands which fed into tensions between Indians and settlers and between different factions of settler leadership. Finally, not all members of the dominant English family in Stockbridge, the Williams, were supportive of Edwards’s appointment. Despite this opposition, Edwards was duly installed at the mission in early August 1751, a ceremony which was attended by both notables from the English community in western Massachusetts and many Indian leaders.

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Missions   421 There are signs that Edwards gleaned important lessons from the ministry of David Brainerd in undertaking the work at Stockbridge. When preaching, Brainerd had relied heavily on Indian interpreters. These included Moses Tatamy who worked for Brainerd during his most successful twelve months of preaching in New Jersey. Brainerd praised Tatamy in his diaries and it seems likely that this example encouraged Edwards that he could be successful using the same approach. Unlike Brainerd, and Sergeant, Edwards never even attempted to learn Indian languages. Instead he, like Brainerd, preached through an interpreter—John Wauwaumpequunnaunt. Also, like Brainerd, and in contrast to an earlier generation of New England missionaries, Edwards chose to live close to the Indian village rather than in the English settlement. Brainerd’s influence may also be seen in the long war of words Edwards fought with the Williams clan over the mission itself, the school, the fate of the Stockbridge Indians, and his own role. Scholars have noted that a portion of Edwards’s motivation—perhaps even the main contributor—was the close relationship between some of the Williams at Stockbridge and the members of the clan who had led the charge against Edwards during the Northampton communion controversy. But Edwards’s lengthy correspondence on the subject makes it impossible to escape the conclusion that he very much cared about an injustice which was being perpetrated against the people under his care. Rachel Wheeler (2008) persuasively argues that the work of Edwards—and his schoolmaster Timothy Woodbridge—played a role in enabling the Stockbridge Mahicans to remain on their land for several decades longer than might have been expected. Brainerd, too, had fought a legal and rhetorical war to protect the land of the Delawares in New Jersey from attempts to seize it by colonial land barons. Finally, it also seems likely that Edwards’s desire to recruit Indians as lay preachers—although ultimately unsuccessful—was also gleaned from Brainerd’s work. In one other area, Edwards may have applied something he learned from Brainerd although, here, there were most certainly other influences. Brainerd had noted that he found more success among the Delawares in New Jersey when he focused on the love of God. Marsden (2003) has noted a substantial difference between the way Edwards preached to the English congregation and the way he preached to the Indians. This contrast has been explored in much greater depth by Wheeler. For the most part, Edwards’s sermons preached to the English congregation were recycled Northampton sermons with Edwards’s normal focus on God’s judgment and the punishment which awaited unrepentant sinners. In contrast, the bulk of Edwards’s surviving sermons to the Indians were new. While not shrinking from the full version of the Calvinist Gospel—complete with terror and the judgment of God—he focused more on God’s mercy, emphasizing how it intertwined with God’s judgment. In addition, as Marsden notes, Edwards’s Indian sermons often focused on bible stories which contained narrative and metaphor. Wheeler notes that, not only was the sermon structure simplified compared to sermons delivered in Northampton, but that Edwards drew a great many of his sermon texts from the New Testament. Almost by default this reduced the number of passages which focused on the

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422   John A. Grigg judgment of God and instead recognized the compassion and assurances of God ­personified in the ministry of a forgiving Christ. In particular, Edwards relied on ­parables, particularly those found in Matthew and Luke. From these two gospels, he could draw on stories of farmers, fishermen, drought, and difficult travel. All these images were part of everyday life for his Indian audience. This approach to his Indian audience was in evidence in the first sermon he preached to them, the Sunday after his installation. A basic summary of the Gospel message, Edwards’s gave early signs that he wanted to meet the needs of his audience. In the wake of the epidemic, he focused on the hope that awaited the saved after death. Edwards reminded them that there was no death, no illness, no suffering, no enemies. Although emphasizing the torments which faced the unrighteous, Edwards presented the British and Indians as spiritual equals in that all peoples and cultures were equally degenerate. Europeans, in general, had failed the Indians, he argued: the French preached a false gospel, while the Dutch and English were more concerned with trade—largely ex­ploit­ ative in nature—than the Gospel. The idea of speaking to specific events in the life of the Stockbridge Indians continued throughout Edwards’s ministry. In August 1753 when the furore over management of the school waxed, he told his charges that sometimes Christians must wait for life after death for their just reward. During the French and Indian War, he encouraged them to stand firm in the face of both depredations by the French and lack of commensurate response to their plight from their British allies. None of this is to suggest that Edwards abandoned the hard doctrines of Calvinism, but it does suggest he was open to using a different approach for a different audience. Apart from Brainerd’s influence, why did Edwards change his approach at this stage of his ministry? While it is almost certain that Edwards’s restless intellect led to some of these changes, Wheeler persuasively argues that the different problems and life issues faced by the Indians led Edwards to construct a different theological and rhetorical approach. But it also seems likely that Edwards learned new approaches from the Indians themselves. Wheeler notes that, especially during the eighteen months that elapsed after Sergeant’s death and before Edwards’s arrival, Moravian missionaries were regular visitors to the town and were welcomed by the Indians. Indeed, a number of Moravians attended one of Edwards’s earliest sermons. Our understanding of Edwards’s views of the Moravians remains limited. In a 1750 letter, he described their beliefs as absurd, lumping them in with others on whom he took a dim view. He also failed to acknowledge the success of the Moravian missions to the Indians in any of his writings. But we don’t know if Edwards came to change his views as he encountered Moravians in person. However, Wheeler points out that, in the communion sermon given later that month, Edwards emphasized the blood of Christ, a departure from much of his sermons to that point. Wheeler suggests he may have gleaned this approach from the Moravians themselves or from the Indians who had been exposed to Moravian teaching in the previous years. Gerald McDermott (2000) has also argued that Edwards came to see more Indian humanity during his time at Stockbridge. Perhaps coming face to face with numbers of ‘holy pagans’ (see above) had a profound influence on Edwards.

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Missions   423 Wheeler has also argued that Edwards’s time at Stockbridge contributed to some shifts in his overall thinking that went beyond his sermon content. If not changing his theology, it certainly appeared to change his emphasis. Edwards came to, at least in part, abandon the idea of any kind of national covenant between God and England or God and New England and placed more emphasis on the individual’s relationship with God. His exposure to the unjust practices of the English at Stockbridge, following on from his own expulsion from Northampton, convinced him that humans were all equal in their sinfulness. While the English culture and language provided a better means to attain salvation than did Indian culture, in and of itself it conferred no spiritual advantage. That is, an Indian exposed to English culture could just as easily attain salvation as any settler. Indeed, the response of some Stockbridge Indians, and the concomitant depravity of many of the English reinforced Edwards’s views. In Wheeler’s analysis, these views were a significant influence on The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin which was written and published while he was at Stockbridge. Edwards’s other role at Stockbridge was to oversee the so-called Indian School. The school was born from the belief among the British that establishing boarding schools for young Indian boys, and occasionally girls, would enable them to be removed from what the English saw as their unhelpful, non-Christian culture. Such a school had been a key part of the Stockbridge design from the beginning of the mission. For this purpose, Timothy Woodbridge was employed as schoolmaster. Although a flawed individual in some ways, who was often side-tracked by land hunger, Woodbridge, as Marsden (2003) has argued, was genuinely concerned for the spiritual and temporal health of his charges. The school was struggling when Edwards arrived at Stockbridge, but he was determined to revive it and was aided in this by Woodbridge. Edwards came to believe that having a well-organized, functioning school was vital for keeping Native Americans, particularly the Mohawks, settled in the town. Early in his tenure at Stockbridge, Edwards met with representatives of both the Mohawk and Oneida to encourage them to send children to the school. In 1752, Edwards arranged for Gideon Hawley to be appointed as a second teacher for some of these children. Unfortunately, the school fell victim to the dissension and divisions between Edwards, Woodbridge, and Hawley on the one hand and the Williams clan on the other. With attendance falling, many of the Iroquois people also left Stockbridge. The final blow to the school came with the outbreak of fighting associated with the French and Indian War. While Edwards’s commitment to education as part of reaching Native Americans with the Gospel was no doubt a product of his own determination to triumph over his English enemies, there seems little doubt that he was also committed to the project as a vital part of the mission effort. In 1758, Edwards left Stockbridge to take up the final position of his career at Princeton. What kind of relationships had he enjoyed with those who had been his charges for more than six years? No doubt he was glad to leave the Williams clan behind. Historical judgment on his attitude toward the Indians is more mixed. Patrick Frazier (1992) argued that Edwards did not want to leave Stockbridge and only did so when a council of ministers opined that he should. Marsden (2003), on the other hand, while agreeing that Edwards was not particularly enthusiastic about moving to New Jersey, does not attribute this lack of enthusiasm to a desire for continuing to serve the Indians.

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424   John A. Grigg Indeed, Marsden argues, Edwards thought the Indians would be better served by his departure since it seemed to open the door for John Brainerd to take over the work at Stockbridge. The surviving documents do not allow for definitive conclusions on this matter., There is no question, however, that his time at Stockbridge had deeply transformed Edwards. As with so many aspects of Edwards’s life, it would be foolish to identify one cause for the changes which took place in both his ministry and his theology during his time at Stockbridge. His daily interactions with Native Americans, conflict with the Williams clan, Moravian influence, the example of Brainerd, and probably his own maturing were surely all part of the mix. Together they meant that while Edwards the missionary saw success at Stockbridge, Edwards the man was changed by his time at the mission.

Legacy While Edwards was certainly well known during his lifetime, much of his theological influence was limited to fellow members of the clergy—whether in British North America or in Britain itself. Joseph A. Conforti (1995) has noted that the Edwards who became well known to lay Christians did not really emerge until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The nascent Protestant mission movement which emerged, first in Britain, in the 1790s was a key vehicle in bringing Edwards to a wider audience. As Stuart Piggin (2003) has noted, this interest in Edwards came at a time when there was re-publication of many of Edwards’s works in Britain. Many of these publications played an important role in catalysing the mission movement. In particular, Freedom of the Will enabled early promoters of mission, such as Andrew Fuller, to articulate how the imperative to proclaim the Gospel did not contradict the Calvinist idea of election. Both Piggin and Andrew F. Walls (2003) have examined the extensive use of Edwards among those responsible for training prospective missionaries in Britain. The Baptist Missionary Society (BMS), London Missionary Society (LMS), the Scottish Missionary Society (SMS), and the founders of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) were all adherents to much of Edwards’s theology, as were the Irish Presbyterian Mission and the Welsh Calvinistic Methodists. Edwards’s works were extensively utilized by individual tutors—such as Thomas Chalmers and David Bogue—within the budding missionary training schools. Thus, many missionaries departed from Britain with a theology that was more or less Edwardsean in outlook. Bogue is a good example of the critical role played by those who trained missionaries in a wider dissemination of Edwards’s theology. As Walls has explained, Bogue was influential in the founding of the LMS which, originally, sent men without theological training to the field. When this proved to be less than productive, beginning in 1800 the society sent prospective missionaries to Bogue’s ministerial training academy. Bogue did not lecture in any formal sense but produced topical outlines and an accompanying reading list, with students expected to fill in the outlines based on their readings and

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Missions   425 then discuss their findings with Bogue. Both Walls and Piggin note the dominance of Edwards’s works in Bogue’s reading lists. The use of these outlines extended beyond those who trained with Bogue. After Bogue’s death, the outlines were published. At least one missionary, Aaron Buzacott in Raratonga, used the published outlines as a teaching tool for training Polynesian missionaries who were preparing for service in various parts of the Pacific. Eventually, Buzzacott translated the outlines into the local languages for further use. Walls argues that what was presented in these local languages was prob­ ably not a pure form of Edwards’s teaching, but nonetheless, his influence extended to a new generation of missionaries. In the United States, the New Divinity movement, heavily dependent on Edwards’s theology, was a major contributor to the American mission movement. As both Conforti (1995) and James R. Rohrer (1995) have noted, ideas of disinterested benevolence and Edwardsean millennialism inspired the push toward missions and were particularly important in the practices of the Connecticut Missionary Society (CtMS). As reports of the success of European missionaries in Africa and the South Pacific reached New England in the late 1790s, New Divinity clergymen were seized by a need to seek revival beyond their own parishes. As Rohrer notes, the CtMS was an overtly New Divinity organization, in large part animated by Edwards’s old postmillennial idea of a progressive manifestation of God throughout the world. Although the society, for all intents and purposes, utterly failed in its efforts to reach Native Americans, many of its trainees worked as traveling ministers in the fledging settlements along the borderlands of the expanding United States. While perhaps not missions in the strict sense, as Rohrer notes, not a few of the men who went into these areas certainly saw themselves as bringing light into the darkness. Beyond the more general influence of Edwardsean theology, specific publications played important roles in the birth and sustaining of Protestant missions. One of these was the Humble Attempt. Piggin (2003) has noted that one of Edwards’s old correspondents, John Erskine, now in his sixties, sent a copy of Humble Attempt to the English Baptist minister John Ryland. Ryland shared it among his circle of Baptist ministers which included, among others, John Sutcliff and Andrew Fuller. D.  Bruce Hindmarsh has noted that Sutcliff, minister at Olney and a future founder of the BMS, was so inspired that he became the primary catalyst for the institution of monthly meetings to pray for revival among Baptists in Britain. Piggin notes that the Humble Attempt also inspired Andrew Fuller to promote prayer for revival and, to this end, Fuller would read selections from it to his friends. Sutcliff published a cheaper version of Humble Attempt which was widely read in Baptist circles. William Carey, one of the giants of the early Anglo-Protestant mission revival, and another important figure in the founding of the BMS, made reference to the Humble Attempt in his 1792 An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens, often seen as the Ur-text of the mission movement. Humble Attempt was also an important foundational text of the LMS—which published their own edition—and of the Scottish Missionary Society of which Erskine was a founder. Rohrer (1995) has noted how the re-emergence of the Concert of Prayer in Britain was followed closely in New England. By 1794, at least some churches in Connecticut had

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426   John A. Grigg begun to observe regular prayer meetings for revival. Revivals broke out in some of the towns and further contributed to the expansion of the Concert. When news of mission efforts in far-flung parts of the world began to appear in print, they were often read to the saints gathered at such meetings. As in Edwards’s lifetime, the Concert of Prayer enabled the laity to be co-participants in the church’s calling to fulfil the Great Commission. The other Edwards work which directly spoke to missions was, of course, The Life of David Brainerd. Although Edwards’s version sold well, it was John Wesley’s 1768 version—shorn of much of Edwards’s Calvinism—which became a best seller, particularly in England. As Conforti has noted, the editions of the Life published in America beginning in the nineteenth century, varied from both the Edwards and Wesley ­versions. That published by Sereno Dwight incorporated Brainerd’s Journal, most of which Edwards had excluded from his publication. The Life reached an even wider audience when the American Tract Society published a shorter version in 1833 which stayed in print until 1892. As I have argued elsewhere, neither Edwards nor Wesley were primarily interested in Brainerd the missionary, but it was as a missionary that Edwards’s Brainerd became more widely known. This was especially true after the birth of modern Protestant missions. William Carey—in his Enquiry—mentioned Brainerd as one in the line of Christian missionaries which stretched, in Carey’s view, from the book of Acts through to John Wesley. Carey also deployed Brainerd’s example as an answer to two of what Carey saw as five objections, or impediments, to renewed mission work. Carey concluded his appeal by noting the treasures that awaited Paul, Eliot, and Brainerd in heaven. There seems little doubt that Carey played a primary role in creating the idea of Brainerd the missionary. So important was Brainerd’s example to the burgeoning Protestant mission movement, that a deep familiarity with the Life became all but essential for those willing to go overseas to preach the Gospel. Stuart Piggin (2003) has detailed the ways in which prospective missionaries used Brainerd as they approached missions. For most of them, Brainerd offered two important contributions. One was his personal piety: many missionary diaries were filled with references to Brainerd’s prayer life and spirituality as characteristics to be emulated. Indeed, as Piggin notes, some missionaries read the Life as part of their morning devotionals. But Brainerd’s accounts were also seen by some as providing a methodology for mission work itself: his decision to live among the Indians, his willingness to travel, and his constant preaching were all seen as keys to success. To some, such as Henry Martyn—himself to become a Brainerd-like figure to later missionaries—Brainerd’s celibacy was so useful that Martyn argued it was virtually essential to success on the field. In time, The Life of David Brainerd evolved from being an optional inspirational work to almost required reading. Both the LMS and the CMS frequently asked missionary candidates to discuss, or write about, their views of Brainerd. The Life of David Brainerd was also an important touchstone for the American missionary effort which emerged both from the concerns of the New Divinity movement and in response to the English movement. American missionaries, too, turned to the

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Missions   427 Life for inspiration and instruction. Andover Theological Seminary was the essentially the centre of the mission movement and Life of Brainerd was read by most seminarians. As with their British spiritual cousins, American missionaries, such as Pliny Fisk and Levi Parsons, drew inspiration from Brainerd, especially his piety and devotion. But beyond this, Rohrer (1995) has noted that many of the men dispatched by the New Divinity leaders to the borderlands of the new United States actively sought to imitate Brainerd’s heroic suffering on the mission field. Some, indeed, deliberately sought out harsher living conditions than what were available to them as a means to this end. On the other hand, Rohrer has also argued that many of the accounts of suffering were, at the least, exaggerated in order to ensure that the teller of the tale was up to the Brainerd example. As Conforti notes, Brainerd’s story also became the model for future missionary memoirs. Many of these works followed the pattern Edwards laid out in the Life. In addition to documenting their spiritual travails, missionaries reported on their travels through ‘heathen’ lands just as Brainerd had done. Brainerd’s story was also used by American mission societies to recruit missionary wives, in particular through the efforts of Mary Lyons at Mt. Holyoke College. These societies rarely allowed single people to travel to the mission field, fearful that they would succumb to temptations of the flesh. There was thus a need to find women willing to marry men who planned to be missionaries. Conforti has detailed the ways in which the Brainerd story was, again, utilized as an example. Edwards, in his publication of the Life, had noted the friendship between Brainerd and Edwards’s daughter Jerusha. In subsequent reinventions of Brainerd’s life, this relationship was transmuted into betrothal. Although there is no evidence for this, it became an accepted part of the account during the nineteenth century. Male missionaries now required wives who were willing to travel and sacrifice alongside them and Jerusha became the inspiration. Brainerd’s legacy, initially crafted by Edwards, continued and mutated beyond the first wave of American missions. By the later part of the nineteenth century, Protestant missionaries had a new group of heroes and examples—those from the first wave of missions—by which they could be motivated. So while Brainerd’s example continued, it was one among an increasing number. Moreover, changing cultures often meant that Brainerd was not the most pertinent example available. Thus, authors and speakers began to adapt, edit, and, in some cases fabricate portions of Brainerd’s life. For example, the student mission movement that began in the 1880s, often emphasized rugged masculinity as a key component of the successful missionary. Brainerd’s weak physique did not lend itself to this, and so there was a greater emphasis on Brainerd’s prayer life as a means to his success. We see the continued effect of the Life of Brainerd in the post-World War II years when many branches of American Protestantism reasserted the need for missionaries. The growth in post-World War II missions was due to an increasing number of nonordained westerners, who had undergone some kind of religious (although rarely, at least early on, academic) training. Probably the best known of these was Jim Elliot, who often referred to Brainerd in his own diary and who, along with four companions, was martyred in Ecuador. It is true that the Brainerd who was recruited into many of these

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428   John A. Grigg later mission efforts had many fabricated, fanciful aspects: various authors enlisted him as a civil rights worker, a progenitor of the Jesus Movement, and a regular practitioner of supernatural Christianity. But, the core of all these works was Edwards’s original, still offering an example more than 200 years after its initial publication.

Conclusions Jonathan Edwards has been the subject of a vast amount of scholarship and one is ­hesitant to suggest there are areas still profitable for researchers. Nonetheless, I do wish to conclude by suggesting some such avenues. One obvious area is that of how Native Americans themselves viewed Edwards and his most famous literary legacy, David Brainerd. Although academics such as Rachel Wheeler (2008) and Linford Fisher (2012) have touched on this, there appear to be opportunities for more work, especially when it comes to a possible long-term legacy. What is the historical memory, if any, of Edwards among the Mahicans? How do the Delawares themselves view Brainerd? And how do Cherokee people view Edwards, given that the first mission to them was named after David Brainerd? Such research could include aspects of cultural interaction, religion, and memory studies. There is also an opening for a more in-depth study of the role of the Edwardsean corpus in the missionary movements in the United States from the second half of the nineteenth century onward. Conforti (1995), Rohrer (1995), and myself (2009) have covered this to some extent, but one senses there is a great deal more that could still be un­covered. While The Life of David Brainerd would loom large in any such analysis, there is prob­ably also a great deal more that could be written about the influence of the Humble Attempt. The idea of prayer vigils is common among many Christian groups, especially those holding to transnational and/or non-denominational views such as Youth With A Mission, Servants to Asia’s Urban Poor, and Operation Mobilization to name a few. Finally, there is also a need to address the influence of Edwards outside the Anglosphere. Many of his works, especially The Life of Brainerd and the Humble Attempt were translated into multiple European languages. For example, Jan Stievermann (2017) has discussed the publication of different versions of Brainerd’s life into German in the 1740s and 1750s. But, this is a fairly isolated example—we still know little about the reception of Edwards’s works in these other parts of the world. Were they influential on missions? Going further afield, did any of these works have lasting effects on indigenous missions—such as those in Rarotonga noted above? For the most part, scholars have noted the existence of such translations but there has been little analysis. Jonathan Edwards was both a missionary and a motivator of missionaries. In his former role, he seems to have had little effect beyond his six-and-a-half years at Stockbridge. In the latter, his influence seems to continue. A great deal of scholarship has been devoted to both aspects, which have given us a greater understanding of his work and character. With that said, there are still opportunities for more analysis.

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Missions   429

Works Cited Conforti, Joseph  A. (1995). Jonathan Edwards, Religious Tradition, and American Culture. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Fisher, Linford  D. (2012). The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America. New York: Oxford University Press. Frazier, Patrick (1992). The Mohicans of Stockbridge. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Grigg, John A. (2009). The Lives of David Brainerd: the Making of an American Evangelical Icon. New York: Oxford University Press. Hindmarsh, D. Bruce (2003). ‘The Reception of Jonathan Edwards by Early Evangelicals in England.’ In Jonathan Edwards at Home and Abroad: Historical Memories, Cultural Movements, Global Horizons, edited by David W. Kling and Douglas A. Sweeney. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. 201–21. Marsden, George M. (2003). Jonathan Edwards: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press. McDermott, Gerald  R. (2000). Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods: Christian Theology, Enlightenment Religion, and non-Christian Faiths. New York: Oxford University Press. Piggin, Stuart (2003). ‘The Expanding Knowledge of God: Jonathan Edwards’s Influence on Missionary Thinking and Promotion.’ In Jonathan Edwards at Home and Abroad: Historical Memories, Cultural Movements, Global Horizons, edited by David  W.  Kling and Douglas A. Sweeney. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. 266–96. Rogers, Mark C. (2009). ‘A Missional Eschatology: Jonathan Edwards, Future Prophecy, and the Spread of the Gospel.’ Fides et Historia 41 (no. 1 Winter/Spring): 23–46. Rohrer, James  R. (1995). Keepers of the Covenant: Frontier Missions and the Decline of Congregationalism, 1774–1818. New York: Oxford University Press. Stievermann, Jan (2017). ‘The German Lives of David Brainerd: The Beginnings of Pietist Interest in an American Evangelical Icon.’ In Zwischen Aufklärung und Moderne: Erweckungsbewegungen als historiographische Herausforderung, edited by Veronika Albrecht-Birkner and Thomas K Kuhn. Münster: LIT. 119–39. Stoddard, Solomon (1723). Question, Whether God is not Angry with the Country for Doing so Little Towards the Conversion of the Indians? Boston: B. Green. Walls, Andrew  F. (2003). ‘Missions and Historical Memory: Jonathan Edwards and David Brainerd.’ In Jonathan Edwards at Home and Abroad: Historical Memories, Cultural Movements, Global Horizons, edited by David W. Kling and Douglas A. Sweeney. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. 248–65. Wesley, John. (1768). An Extract of the Life of the Late Rev. Mr. David Brainerd: Missionary to the Indians. Bristol: William Pine. Wheeler, Rachel (2008). To Live Upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the EighteenthCentury Northeast. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Suggested Reading Axtell, James (1995). The Invasion Within: the Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America. New York: Oxford University Press. Conforti, Joseph  A. (1995). Jonathan Edwards, Religious Tradition, and American Culture. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Kling, David W. and Douglas A. Sweeney, eds (2003). Jonathan Edwards at Home and Abroad: Historical Memories, Cultural Movements, Global Horizons. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.

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430   John A. Grigg McDermott, Gerald  R. (2000). Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods: Christian Theology, Enlightenment Religion, and non-Christian Faiths. New York: Oxford University Press. Nongbri, Brent (2013). Before Religion: a History of a Modern Concept. New Haven: Yale University Press. Robert, Dana (2009). Christian Mission: How Christianity Became a World Religion. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Wheeler, Rachel M. (2008). To Live Upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the EighteenthCentury Northeast. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Author Bio John A. Grigg is Professor of History at the University of Nebraska–Omaha. He is the author of The Lives of David Brainerd: the Making of an American Evangelical Icon (2009) as well as several articles on religion and missions. He is currently working on an ana­lysis of local authority in eighteenth-century New Jersey.

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chapter 28

M i n istry to th e Bou n d a n d Ensl av ed John Saillant

Introduction Jonathan Edwards’s ministry to the bound and enslaved reveals for us today his awareness of the hardships, including bondage, suffered by Native Americans as well as a deep irony in that he, a slaveholder, crafted theological tools his followers would use to design an intellectually-forceful abolitionism. One project of Edwards’s maturity—his defence of the historicity of the Bible and the narrative of redemption it implied—was bolstered, for him, by religious experiences of bound and enslaved individuals that fit his conversionism. A timeline of especially significant events is instructive. In 1731 Edwards bought Venus, an adolescent girl. In 1734 Edwards was among those establishing a mission to Indians in Stockbridge, while David Brainerd, whose biography Edwards would write, became a missionary in the Mahican village of Kaunameek. In 1736 Leah, Edwards’s slave, was baptized and, at some point, became a full church member. Around 1740 Edwards drafted a justification of slaveholding that nonetheless critiqued the slave trade. In 1750 and 1751 he visited the mission at Stockbridge before settling there. In 1753 two Englishmen murdered the son of Solomon Waunaupaugus, a leading Stockbridge Mahican, triggering Indian–English discord that Edwards followed and that intensified when one man was acquitted and the other was convicted merely of manslaughter. An Indian–black uprising was momentarily possible. In 1758 Edwards left the mission for the college where he died. His estate included Titus, an enslaved boy (Gura 2005, 165–71; Marsden 2003, 255–58, 364, 375, 406–7; WJE 16: 644). Unfree people and Edwards’s presence among them became a significant ­scholarly topic over two decades beginning in the 1980s. The inaugural scholars were Joseph A. Conforti and Rachel Wheeler. Writing on Samuel Hopkins and abolitionist

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432   John Saillant second-generation Edwardseans, Conforti (1981) provided a bridge that allowed other scholars to discern an earlier coalescence of abolitionism in Edwards’s thought as well as a later New Divinity abolitionism that thrived well into the nineteenth century. This long view in scholarship, about 1740 to 1830, was confirmed by Kenneth P. Minkema (1997;  2002) in his remarkable discovery of previously unexamined documents concerning Edwards’s ownership of slaves and his views on the slave system. Further analysis by Minkema and Harry  S.  Stout (2005) demonstrated that some later Edwardseans were proslavery, corroborating an argument made in more general terms by Larry E. Tise (1987). Edwards’s years at Stockbridge have always been acknowledged in twentieth-century scholarship, simply because he spent almost eight years there and he wrote some of his major theological works there. But the Indians themselves were never in focus until the scholarship of Wheeler, who worked toward a comprehension of interactions among Edwards and the Stockbridge Indians. She advanced the discipline by arguing that Edwards revised his sermon style for Indian congregants. Laura J. Murray (1998) and Joanna Brooks (2006) paralleled Wheeler’s efforts with major documentary editions of texts by Indians influenced by Edwardsean theology. The current essay seeks to build on the work on the scholars mentioned above in three ways. It treats Edwards’s actions and ideas concerning Indian missions as part of a larger complex that he endorsed, notably the labours of John Sergeant and David Brainerd. It analyses an advance in Edwards’s exegesis in the 1750s, particularly in a typological interpretation he conveyed to Joseph Bellamy, who himself had accepted some Indian boys into his home for lessons. And it argues that because Edwardsean typology critiqued the English settlers who mistreated Indians it became the foundation of the first modern abolitionism. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, typology allowed Protestant abolitionists to wipe away all prior justifications of the slave trade and slavery. Abolitionism came to be opposition to slavery in any circumstances whatsoever, not, as had been the case earlier, objections to enslavement in only some situations or resistance to enslavement without a larger critique of the slave system. Edwards himself never became an abolitionist, but he assembled some of the theological instruments that men and women used to create abolitionism soon after his death. In the mid-eighteenth-century English colonies, ‘bound’ and ‘enslaved’ carried multiple meanings, while liminal states existed between freedom and unfreedom. Some Anglo-Americans were bound in indentures, although their proportion of the EuroAmerican population was declining. Memories of English colonists (including some in Edwards’s family) seized during Indian–settler conflicts around the turn of the ­eighteenth century were still fresh. Military conflicts meant prisoners of war. New England Native Americans had suffered enslavement and sale to remote locations in the seventeenth century, yet Indian slavery became rarer after 1700 as Indians fell into other forms of bondage such as debt peonage and household or agricultural indentured servitude (Newell  2015, 1–59). Throughout Edwards’s maturity, Indians remembered and dreaded the enslavement their community members had endured (Jarvis 2010, 111–12). As the transatlantic slave trade swelled, the enslavement of blacks expanded throughout the English American colonies. As a slave owner, Edwards operated within the Atlantic

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Ministry to the Bound and Enslaved   433 slave system. Edwards thus preached, provided sacraments, and crafted theological treatises in a complex situation. Bondage such as indentured servitude was becoming less common among white people. The memory of past slavery was seared into the memories of Native Americans even as other forms of bondage replaced enslavement. Slavery in a brutal form was becoming more visible among African-born or Africandescended Americans. In the half-century after Edwards’s death, white Americans claimed liberty as almost uniquely their own while some Indians relocated to escape cruelty and tyranny and some blacks argued for interracial equality even as it was being undermined by the spread of a variety of exclusionary ideas and practices (Brooks and Saillant 2002, 3–33; Cipolla 2013, 40–5; Melish 1998, 1–49). This essay focuses on Edwards’s thoughts and actions concerning Protestant ministry to Native Americans (some bound) and African Americans (most enslaved). Such narrow focus was alien to the eighteenth century, so we should be self-conscious about differences between ourselves and Edwardseans. The earliest abolitionists, including those influenced by Edwards, presupposed—and had sometimes lived—a commonality of experience shared by slaves and those held in other forms of bondage, regardless of race. Only around 1830 did North American abolitionists start articulating the American slave’s experience as unique and unparalleled in human history—a belief still widely accepted. This essay begins with Native Americans, emphasizing their fear of enslavement and their dislike of other forms of bondage. Then it considers evidence on Edwards’s slaves and his views of the slave system, acknowledging his proslavery views. It concludes by arguing that experience among the Stockbridge Indians probably led him into a new typological interpretation of Psalm 82 and John 10:30–8, part of the process of handing over to his students and adherents a hermeneutics of types and antitypes that would inform the first North American abolitionism.

Edwardsean Missionaries in the Aftermath of Indian Slavery Transcriptions of Native Americans’ experience, including fears and memories of enslavement, are essential to analysis of Edwardsean mission work. Twenty-firstcentury scholars must be ambivalent about these sources. On the one hand, none were written by Indians. On the other hand, many were, especially in the context of the First Great Awakening, composed by ministers seeking to recount the religious experience of Indians in an empiricist fashion. Some of these ministers defended Indians against depredations committed by other Englishmen, yet in their own ways they circumscribed Indians. This essay does not approach accurate transcription of Indian experience nor does it lionize Edwardseans as record keepers, but it identifies structuring concepts and values inherent in the creation of the records and considers their legacy for Indian and black Protestantism. Some of these concepts and values—anxiety suffered by Indians,

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434   John Saillant Native rights to land, sovereignty enforced arbitrarily by English settlers—are alive today. We have inherited eighteenth-century political and religious vocabularies, so we inevitably understand Native and black experience with tools from the era of EuroAmerican appropriation of Indian land, the Atlantic slave system, the growth of a rightsoriented Anglo-American ideology, and the alembic of missions and revivals in which North American Protestantism was created. Edwards was aware of the history of English missions among New England Native Americans—and his acceptance of the Stockbridge pulpit was an endorsement of some of that history, if not all—so we commence with earlier transcriptions of Indian religiosity then move into those of men in Edwards’s circle, John Sergeant and David Brainerd, both former students at Yale Collegiate School. This circle was large. A number of Yale graduates were connected to Edwards and missions. For instance, Samuel Hopkins (the elder, pastor of a Springfield church) wrote a biography of Sergeant following on his death at age thirty-nine in 1749. Samuel Hopkins (the younger, later Edwards’s most famous pupil) recommended Edwards for Stockbridge. John Brainerd continued his brother’s missionary labours. Gideon Hawley passed from Edwards’s tutelage in Stockbridge to decades of service as a missionary to the Mashpee Indians. Edwards’s competition for the Stockbridge pulpit was, briefly, Ezra Stiles, later president of Yale. When in 1751 Edwards stepped into the Stockbridge pulpit, he was continuing a pursuit, pastoral and theological, that his fellow ministers had followed for several decades. Indian Converts, assembled by Experience Mayhew and published in 1727, collected many early accounts of New England Native Americans’ religious experiences. It is essential for understanding Edwards and the Indians around him. The earliest conversion accounts reflected a time before King Phillip’s War (1675–6), with no foreknowledge of the enslavement of Indians after the conflict and with plenty of faith that English ­settlers and Protestant Indians could coexist in one territory. Unlike those crafted by Edwardseans, these accounts of ‘praying Indians’ emphasized a rational (not an ­agonized) recognition of the superiority of Protestant Christianity to indigenous religions (Bowden 1981, 124–30). These early converts appeared to have made a smooth transition into Christianity even if sometimes remaining tempted by fornication and alcohol consumption. Such conversions reflected, of course, the English authors’ sense of their own superiority. Yet by 1730 the situation had changed. Sergeant and Brainerd were recognizing anti-Indian animus among English settlers and were hardly willing to claim English Protestants as superior. The First Great Awakening was, indeed, an effort to undermine English pretensions of superiority. At the border between evangelical Calvinism and the sufferings of displaced and dispossessed Natives, Sergeant, Brainerd, and, later, Edwards perceived agony among Native Americans—in one sense, surely a Native experience yet also, in another sense, a projection of the ministers’ conversionism. Before describing Edwardsean perceptions of Indians, it is necessary to note a difference between late-seventeenth-century and mid-eighteenth-century understanding of perception. Edwards embodied this new understanding, but the evangelicals, missionaries, and revivalists in his circle partook of it. It was their religious version of Lockean

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Ministry to the Bound and Enslaved   435 empiricism, entailing a detailed examination of one’s spiritual state and eventuating, when textualized, in conversion narratives and spiritual autobiographies. Conversionist spiritual empiricism formed the intellectual and moral framework with which the Edwardseans interacted with Indians and crafted accounts of Indians’ experience. Sergeant, Brainerd, and Edwards emphasized fear and anxiety as, in their understanding, essential in the early steps of conversion. Rational recognition of the superiority of Christianity held no interest for them: it indicated a lack of experiential faith. Edwards would almost certainly not have recognized the earlier Indian conversions as genuine since they included no passage through concern, anxiety, and compunction. Edwards and his missionary circle perceived and transcribed Indians’ experiences of fear, dread, anxiety, depression, and dislocation. Among those awful states was fear of enslavement as well as strong animus against bondage, particularly of children. On the one hand, Edwards and his fellows understood that these hard experiences had human causes. They mentioned loss of land, fraud in trade, avalanches of debt, overconsumption of alcohol, and English disdain of Indians, habits of breaking promises, and mistreatment of Indian children, including those (often girls) they held in service. On the other hand, the Edwardseans used conversionist tools to comprehend experiences Indians revealed to them. Suffering seemed an early step in a process that could lead to an infusion of grace. Other features of Edwards’s milieu provided instruments for understanding. One was rights-oriented ideology flowing from the Glorious Revolution, the English bill of rights, and Lockean political thought. Mistreatment of Indians was hence described by Edwards as acts of ‘sovereign’ and ‘arbitrary’ Englishmen. Two reasons for the Edwardsean perceptions now become apparent: the Indians were suffering under English colonization, while Edwards and his followers interpreted those hardships with the theological and ideological tools available to them. The ‘sovereign’, ‘arbitrary’ individual who ‘was inclined to engross all power’ and who operated outside biblical morality was familiar in Edwards’s world. Indians disliked, he believed, ‘a man of sovereign and forbidding airs’, a man ‘apt to assume and engross all power, profit, and honor’ (WJE 16: 510, 529–32). Yet Edwards himself could act sovereign over Indians. The ginseng (Panax quinquefolius) trade provides an example. He noted in 1752 that white traders knew that ginseng grew in New England and New York and would pay Indians (apparently men and boys) to harvest and transport it in late Autumn. Fearing that Indians far from Stockbridge would use their compensation to purchase rum, he argued against ‘wandering’ in search of ginseng (WJE 16: 543). By contrast Edwards did not object to maple sugaring although it entailed labouring in the woods in early Spring (WJE 16: 627). Solomon Waunaupaugus’s son would be murdered a year later as he and his own son, while maple sugaring, confronted two Englishmen apparently stealing horses. Perhaps Edwards assumed sugaring kept Indians close to Stockbridge, or he thought of it as an activity of men, women, and children less likely to involve alcohol than did meetings of men and boys with traders far from Stockbridge. In any event he attempted to redirect Indians’ choices about harvest and trade—against ginseng and for maple sugar. The textual history of New England Protestant missions among Native Americans everywhere revealed missionaries using and, occasionally, modifying inherited theological

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436   John Saillant and ideological languages to record their perceptions of Indians’ experiences. Indian Converts depicted Natives as readily and painlessly elevated by English Protestantism. The praying Indian was, in these accounts, a man of natural reason, often physically adept, who accepted, often soon after the first encounter, the superiority of Christianity. Mashquattuhkooit, renamed Paul after his conversion, was representative. ‘He was a Person of good natural Parts; but was in his younger Days too much inclined to strong Drink, and would sometimes drink to Excess: But God having effectually called him by his Grace, and enabled him in a publick and solemn manner to give himself to him, gave him Strength against that Lust. And this becoming a new Creature, he liv’d a new Life, and was look’d on by those that knew him as an exemplary Christian. Some of his Neighbours of good Credit, both English and Indians, have informed me, that he appeared to them a prudent, honest, and temperate Man’ (Mayhew 1727, 23). While some problems in Native life—notably alcohol consumption and temptation to fornicate with English women—were new, Indian Converts never suggested that trauma and suffering among the Indians were caused by European settlement. King Philip’s War (1675–6) hamstrung missionary efforts among Natives of eastern New England as well as leading to enslavement or transportation of some Indians to other colonies. Although King Philip’s War temporarily dampened English expansion, the overall effect was to render Indian land more open to settlers. Sergeant, Brainerd, and Edwards preached in the aftermath of the war, in a time when, as missionaries’ records show, Indians remembered the enslavement that followed the war. Around 1730, in western Massachusetts, the Housatanics, a branch of the Mahican, living in western Massachusetts, western Connecticut, and eastern New York and led by Konkapot and Umpachenee, requested an English minister as teacher and missionary. The Housatonics were under pressure from various directions: diseases carried from Europe ravaged all Native societies; trade (including in alcohol) with Europeans disrupted individual and communal life; English colonists had resumed westward expansion; and western Massachusetts was within the reach of New France soldiers and Mohawks, both of whom had warred against southern New England Indians. Most important for this essay are debts into which Indians fell (sometimes for alcohol and sometimes used by creditors to seize land or command labour) and servitude in settlers’ households (often for girls and sometimes quite objectionable to their families). Sergeant was appointed minister at Stockbridge in 1735. The colonial General Court designated land and funds for a church and schoolhouse, and the Housatonics came to be known as the Stockbridge Indians. Sergeant came to perceive that European settlement and expansion that had pushed Indians into anxiety and despair. Understanding this low, suffering state with his own mental and moral tools, he cast the Stockbridge Indians into the mould of the conversion experience typical of the First Great Awakening. Departing from the accounts in Indian Converts, Sergeant—like Brainerd and, soon, Edward—paid close attention, in an empiricist mood, to anxiety and suffering of Indians before the infusion of grace in conversion. While today we cannot judge these accounts as accurate or not from Native perspectives, we see a new

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Ministry to the Bound and Enslaved   437 textual record of close attention to the phenomenology of non-white people undergoing crisis conversion. This would become one defining feature of Native American and African American religiously-inspired literature of the late eighteenth century (Brooks 2003, 57–63, 106–13; Brooks 2006, 3–44). Sergeant’s first comments about Indians were platitudes about conversion, like those of Indian Converts. But as he became closer to Indians, Sergeant came to record their testimony about the hardships that accompanied the presence of English settlers. He recorded, for instance, Umpachenee’s words about English Major Ebenezer Pumroy, who, ‘when he was here last Winter, ask’d them several questions about the proprietors of several tracts of land, and so insisted upon it to know who they were and how they came by their Titles, that he was ready to conceive that the Major suspected they had no title at all to the lands they challenged’ (Hopkins 1911, 59). Umpachenee feared, in other words, that Indians would not be able to stop usurpers from taking their land regardless of titles recognized by the English. Sergeant became aware that Indian families objected to their daughters being in service in English households (Hopkins 1911, 81–2). When Aunauwauneekhheek insisted Sergeant lodge with him on a preaching tour, instead of with Dutch settlers, the white missionary interpreted that act as powerful hospitality, but it seems just as likely that the Indian was intent on keeping him away from the Dutch out of a fear that they would contaminate him with their anti-Native animus (Hopkins 1911, 85–6). Sergeant recorded the Stockbridge Indians’ dread of enslavement (Hopkins 1911, 32, 91, 101). He listened and recorded as Indians told him that traders defrauded them and abused their families (Hopkins 1911, 101). Sergeant’s biographer, the elder Hopkins, was himself adamant that English settlers treated Indians ‘injuriously’. Hopkins lectured his fellow Englishmen that we must ‘treat them according to the rules of equity and justice. We must not defraud and oppress them’. When Indians hurt one another while drunk, he continued, ‘Whether the guilt of that blood does not lie upon us I leave others to judge.’ ‘We alienate the Indians from us,’ he charged, and ‘deal thus injuriously with them’ and spread awareness of ‘ill-usage’. The typical English settler has been ‘left at his liberty to treat them [Indians] as he pleases, and to defraud them of all they have’ (Hopkins 1911, 180–8). Brainerd’s labours, as Edwards presented them in 1749, revealed this logic more explicitly. The minister acknowledged that Indians were suffering because of European settlers, yet he interpreted Natives’ anguish as part of conversion as well as recording Natives’ emotional and physical experiences from a Lockean–empiricist perspective. Brainerd wrote angrily about Indians thrust off their land or threatened with insecurity and dispossession. ‘The Indian affairs are very difficult; having no land to live on’, he wrote, ‘but what the Dutch people lay claim to, and threaten to drive them off from’ (WJE 7: 207). He was accused of ‘stirring up the Indians against the English’, when he wrote that he had been rather, perhaps with ‘too much warmth of spirit’, attempting ‘to vindicate the rights of the Indians, and complaining of the horrid practice of making the Indians drunk, and then cheating them out of their lands and other properties’ (WJE 7: 361). He sought to ‘procure’ land for the Indians among whom he preached,

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438   John Saillant both so the Natives could ‘live together’ and so they could be ‘under better advantages for instruction’ (WJE 7: 255). When some Indians were subject to seizure of their land by English authorities because of unpaid debts, Brainerd paid the monies owed (Grigg 2009, 103). His journal flowed with descriptions of Indians’ anguish. A summary list, inevitably using evangelical Calvinist conversionist language, is instructive. Indians ‘wept’ and ‘grieved’, evinced ‘deep concern’, ‘distress’, and ‘vehemence’, sobbed ‘bitterly’, begged for ‘mercy’, expressed ‘great mourning’, collapsed ‘flat onto the ground’, and showed themselves to be ‘pierced’ and ‘wounded’ (WJE 7: 279, 305–13). Anguish jumped from Indian to Indian like wildfire (WJE 7: 322), indicating to twenty-first-century readers that distress was endemic among New England Natives. Of course when an Indian woman was in such ‘great distress’ and ‘agony’ that ‘the sweat ran off her face for a considerable time together, although the evening was very cold’, he understood her ‘bitter cries’ as a sign of the ‘heart’ longing for Christ (Grigg 2009, 86–7; WJE 7: 345). Revealing his empiricist commitments, he described his journal as a work in which, during the ‘gracious outpouring of the divine Spirit among them [i.e., Indians] . . .  I have endeavored to note things just as from time to time they appeared to me’ (Fanshaw 1840?, 270). Edwards’s move to Stockbridge endorsed and echoed Sergeant’s and Brainerd’s efforts of the 1730s and 1740s in several senses: the importance of missions, fury at settlers’ mistreatment of Natives, understanding of Natives’ fear of enslavement and bondage, and commitment to recording the religious experiences of Indians (Grigg 2009, 86). Edwards was aware that Indians felt railroaded and repeatedly betrayed by the English and that they assumed that accord with the French would give them better security. Like Sergeant and Brainerd, he asserted that English behaviour impeded Indian conversions (WJE 16: 395–403). English settlers ‘alienate’ Indians, he asseverated, since ‘trade has been carried on with them in a way that has naturally tended to beget in them a distrust of us, and aversion to us’ (WJE 16: 437). Edwards attended to Indians’ fear of enslavement and their resistance to their children being put into service in English households (WJE 16: 443, 465, 498, 500, 529–30, 587–91). After three Indian girls had been ‘taken up and put out’ (i.e., placed in white households as servants), for instance, ‘their parents have in their great uneasiness gone . . . to bring them home. The parents of one of them . . . are greatly disgusted at the treatment’ (WJE 16: 475–6). His concerns were filtered through his own lenses. He was convinced that French Roman Catholics were telling Indians that the English planned to enslave them, and he disliked the Englishwoman who commandeered Indian girls as a member of the Northampton family that had challenged him on theological and pastoral grounds. Here we observe an understanding of the suffering of Natives in the time of European settlement along with an interpretation of Indian experience with conversionist and Lockean–empiricist tools. While from a twenty-first-century perspective this interpretation seems Eurocentric, this act of interpreting conveyed to late-eighteenth-century Native and black North American Protestants that their religious experience, in an Edwardsean sense, was worth attention and transcription. The first Indian and black evangelical Calvinism was the result.

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Ministry to the Bound and Enslaved   439

Edwards and the Enslaved From 1731 until his death—years in which Indian missions commanded his ­attention—Edwards held slaves. Indians, missions, and slaves were all connected in Edwards’s life. As he lay dying in Edwards’s household, Brainerd spoke of religious matters with Edwards’s ‘children and servants’, the latter possibly an euphemism for slaves (WJE 7: 466). After the murder of Solomon Waunaupaugus’s son, some Indians sought to enlist slaves in Stockbridge in an action against the English (Marsden 2003, 407; WJE 16: 644). Edwards’s thoughts and actions in relation to blacks and Indians ran roughly parallel, and the first generation of black and Indian Protestants shared some family resemblances. Unstudied until the 1990s, Edwards’s ownership of slaves and his thoughts on the slave system are now familiar to those concerned with ­eighteenth-century North American religion. Edwards’s father and other relatives were slave owners. Edwards himself followed suit no later than 1731, when he travelled to the colonial Rhode Island seaside city of Newport and bought Venus for eighty pounds. In Newport slave ships were provisioned; into Newport they sailed after transatlantic journeys that often included several stops on both sides of the ocean. Venus may have been born in Africa and disembarked in Newport, possibly after stops in the Caribbean and at other mainland ports. While names might have changed over time, Edwards’s other slaves were Titus, a boy who was included in his owner’s estate to pass to heirs, not to be manumitted; Leah (possibly Venus given a biblical name), who was baptized in 1736 and became a full church member; Joab and Rose Binney, possibly a couple; and Joseph and Sue, possibly also a couple. Edwards’s Northampton congregation included at least nine enslaved members along with at least two Indians (Marsden 2003, 255–8; Minkema 1997; Saillant 2005). Several black residents of Stockbridge—possibly slaves owned by Edwards and presumably men, because of the dangers of the journey—would in 1754 accompany a missionary ­expedition to an Oneida village, Onohquaga, to the north. Edwards sent his son Jonathan, Jr, to follow in 1755 (Marsden 2003, 403–4). Little is now known of those enslaved by Edwards, but we can surmise some details. Edwards kept abreast of news about the careers of Samuel Davies, James Davenport, and George Whitefield, all of whom preached to black slaves (WJE 16: 276). That awareness and the presence of slaves in the Northampton congregation indicate that Edwards must have preached to slaves both in his household and in the surrounding community. As points of comparison, Ezra Stiles, briefly considered for the Stockbridge pulpit before Edwards, met with groups of black worshipers in his home for sermons (presumably also hymns, prayers, and religious instruction) and mid-eighteenth-century New England Anglican ministers visited the homes of  black community members in order to provide sacraments such as ‘clinic ­baptism’ for the sick and dying. Whitefield endorsed similar practices (Brooks and Saillant 2002, 52–3; Records of St. John’s Episcopal Church 1755–1817; Saillant 2003,

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440   John Saillant 129–34).1 Edwards almost certainly did the same. Accepting hierarchies entrenched in families, churches, and government, Edwards must have viewed slaves and free blacks as relatively lowly members needing guidance and, at times, discipline from above. Since some of his slaves seem to have been married, he almost certainly expected black husbands and fathers to act in ways he understood as commanded by God. If we extrapolate from his interactions with Indians, he must have taken the religious experience of black people seriously, seeking to guide them to a gracious state when they evidenced concern or compunction. As with Indians, North American blacks had many reasons for anxiety that could be interpreted in a conversionist framework. As dread was felt as an experience both shared among many members of society and sparking a longing within black people for grace, African American Protestantism was created. Around 1740 a local controversy led Edwards to sketch thoughts on the slave system—the slave trade, enslavement of African-descended people, and intersections between slavery and society at large. This manuscript sheds light on the surmises made above. It also overlapped significantly with works by Anglican divine Morgan Godwyn, Congregational minister Cotton Mather, and Puritan jurist Samuel Sewall. Here we follow Edwards’s argument and flesh it out with similar works. The core of Edwards’s argument was that God ordained slavery insofar as it was granted to the Israelites that, in certain circumstances, they could enslave others and insofar as it was mentioned in the New Testament without ever being directly criticized by Christ or, later, Paul. (In the generation after Edwards, abolitionists would interpret Paul’s Epistle to Philemon as antislavery). Edwards concluded that slaveholding was, in some limited circumstances, just and that slave owners must treat those they owned benevolently. Yet Edwards declared the slave trade immoral. While this seems paradoxical, Edwards understood the slave trade as the occasion of a number of sins, such as violence and deception (war and manstealing) at its origins as well as cruelty and abuse (destruction of families and mistreatment of captives) in its transatlantic crossings. Edwards also criticized hypocrites who objected to slavery yet received benefits like goods, profits, and labour from the slave system (Minkema 2002). Not only slavery but also the form of the dispute concerned him, for in the attack on the minister he saw the expression of absolute judgment without reflective thought by the attackers on their role in very system with which their target interacted. Whether Edwards’s arguments were proto-abolitionist is a question not easily answered. On the one hand, he owned slaves and explicitly defended slaveholding, in some but not all situations. On the other hand, a commonplace among eighteenthcentury Anglo-American critics of the slave system was that the first goal for ­elimination was the slave trade. Presumably slavery was next. In the 1680s, moreover, Godwyn had made a similar argument, with more proto-abolitionist power albeit no

1  The Historical Society of the Episcopal Church generously provided an award that allowed the author to examine St. Johns’ records, now held in Kingston, Rhode Island.

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Ministry to the Bound and Enslaved   441 direct condemnation of the institution of slavery. Mather made similar arguments beginning in the 1690s. Godwyn had argued that although God allowed slaveholding if masters treated slaves benevolently there was no benevolence in American slavery (Vaughan 1995). He never inferred what seems obvious to modern readers—enslavement is prima facie wrong. Yet Godwyn delegitimized American slavery and pushed toward abolitionism even if he never imagined an imminent end of the slave system. Mather argued that even if slavery were consistent with the Bible, there was no scriptural justification for the enslavement of Africans within the Atlantic slave system (Stievermann  2010). While Mather undermined the slave system by questioning why the unfree were blacks, Godwyn and Edwards qualified legitimate slavery so heavily that the only forms left standing were ancient Israelite slaveholding and modern benevolent master–slave relations—in other words, as they saw it, virtually nothing of the Atlantic slave system. It would take Hopkins the younger and his adherents to state that benevolent slaveholding was an oxymoron—a notion, obvious today, that would pass into nineteenth-century North American abolitionism. Edwards’s arguments also overlapped with those of Sewall’s Selling of Joseph. Both men argued that it was immoral to benefit from the sins of others even if we ourselves did not commit the sin. In relation to the slave trade, there could be no legitimate purchase of a slave since the original act of obtaining of the slave, no matter by what means, was illegitimate (Saillant 2005, 141–3). The racial face of Edwards’s millennium has become important in twenty-firstcentury scholarship. Famously, now, Edwards prophesied that in the millennium Indians and Africans will preach God’s word, although his words contain infamous ­elements. While much of the globe was ‘ignorant’, he asserted that the millennium ‘shall be full of light and knowledge. Great knowledge shall prevail everywhere. It may be hoped that then many of the Negroes and Indians will be divines, and that excellent books will be published in Africa, in Ethiopia, in Turkey—and not only very learned men, but others that are more ordinary men, shall then be very knowing in religion’ (WJE 9: 480). Such prophecies belittled other religious traditions since the only future envisioned was one in which nonbelievers are swept into the prophet’s faith or are discarded out of history or into damnation. Yet his prophecy suggested that Edwards aimed for equality and unity under God for people of all races. That goal would corroborate what is surmised above: that benevolence and spiritual equality were for Edwards the standard of interracial relations even if, as redemption is in progress, slavery existed. Indeed that goal is precisely what inspired the Indian and black authors who joined the Edwardsean school in the eighteenth century. Edwards passed a three-fold legacy to Indians and blacks. Two can be described succinctly here: one was the intent to provide a record of spiritual conversion, the other was the commitment to benevolent interracial relations. In both of these, of course, God was the active agent, guiding, directing, and commanding. Early twenty-first-century scholarship emphasizes both the seriousness of the Indian and black absorption of such notions and the interface at which whites and non-whites influenced each other in relation to them (Levecq 2019, 225–34; Monescalchi 2019; Wheeler 2005, 137–8). The third

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442   John Saillant requires more commentary here since it was the key to eighteenth-century abolitionism—typology. Because the impediment to abolitionist Christianity was God’s allowance of slaves to the Israelites, an interpretation of the Old Testament that God did not allow enslavement would crush all Bible-based proslavery arguments. Typology created this interpretation: God did not intend that the Israelites enslave others but that they quell their own sins, but the Israelites misunderstood God’s word and took slavery literally. The New Testament would correct the Jewish misinterpretation, making clear that God had never condoned slavery. Antisemitism is obvious, yet this kind of hermeneutics recast the Christian Bible as an antislavery force (Saillant 2003, 31–5; Saillant 2005, 146–9). Life among the Indians influenced Edwards’s typologizing, then his abolitionist heirs made typology central. Edwards approached the doorstep of an abolitionist typology at the end of his life but never crossed the threshold. He had been adapting his preaching style for the Stockbridge Indians (Wheeler 2003), although, unfortunately, we do not know whether the black inhabitants of Stockbridge attended services with Natives or with whites. An adaptation in his theology, probably influenced by life among the Indians, appeared in his final exegesis, a letter of 1 December 1757 from Stockbridge to Joseph Bellamy. Edwards and Bellamy had been corresponding about education for Indian boys the latter had taken into his home as students (WJE 16: 688). Bellamy had also asked Edwards about John 10:34–6. Apparently Bellamy was perplexed by Christ’s question to his Jewish persecutors, ‘Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?’, and his subsequent claim to be the ‘sanctified’ one who said, ‘I am the Son of God.’ Edwards responded with a disquisition on the typological relationship between Psalm 82 and John 10:30–8, bitingly critical of the great men of the earth. They are called gods in Psalm 82 because, Edwards argued, the word of God had been revealed to them, establishing them as types of Christ. Yet they turned their backs on the word of God insofar as they ‘judge[d] unjustly’ and they declined to ‘defend the poor and fatherless’, ‘do justice to the afflicted and needy’, ‘deliver the poor and needy’, and ‘rid them out of the hand of the wicked’. Thus they ‘shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes’. Edwards interpreted the last verse of the psalm—‘Arise, O God, judge the earth: for thou shall inherit all nations’—as prophetic of the coming of Christ, the antitype. What ‘verifies’ (WJE 16: 735) the antitype was, Edwards asserted, Christ’s performance of ‘the works of my Father’ (John 10:37). Christ did God’s work, Edwards argued, while the Jewish judges and princes abandoned it. On the face of it, this argument is well known Edwardsean typologizing, without obvious connection to Stockbridge Indians or to the English settlers and traders who were, in his view, harming and scourging them. Yet a connection can be made insofar as Edwards’s thoughts on these verses evolved. Edwards commented on Psalm 82 and John 10 over many years. For only one example, a remarkably different interpretation of these verses appeared among Edwards’s 1722 notes on scripture. The difference between 1722 and 1757 is stunning. The ‘princes of Israel’ were gods, Edwards wrote in 1722, because the word of God was revealed to them, but their mortality (not their false judgments or their mistreatment of the poor and lowly) was the reason that they could not verify themselves as types. Christ was the antitype; they died as men yet he rose from the dead as the Son of God. Edwards

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Ministry to the Bound and Enslaved   443 emphasized the dignity (not the depravity) of the men of the psalm: ‘Thus also the word of the Lord came to the princes of Israel, i.e. that state and those circumstances came to ’em, and were ordered to ’em, that were typical of the Son of God, and were as it were God’s word, signifying the dignity and office of the Messiah. Such divine significations, when persons were made the inherent subjects of them, were generally of the Son of God, the eternal personal Word. And therefore when such a typification happened, or was ordered to a person, or any person became the inherent subject of such a divine signification, then the word of God was said to come to him’ (WJE 15: 578–80). A comprehensive argument would have to cover a number of Edwards’s references to Psalm 82 and John 10. Suffice it to state here that only after a half-decade among the Stockbridge Indians did he emphasize the depravity of the Israelite judges and their mistreatment of the poor and lowly despite their own pretension being gods. It is likely that the gods of Psalm 82 represented, in Edwards’s mind, the English settlers who had received God’s word but who, rejecting it, hurt the Indians. That interpretation made those, like him and Bellamy, who, in his mind, helped the Indians, better followers of God and closer to Christ, the antitype. Such typologizing was absorbed by black abolitionists like Lemuel Haynes who passed beyond forms of critique or resistance focused on particular slaves. Abolitionists were able to condemn the slave system in their time only because they condemned it in all times and places, especially among the Israelites, whose ‘right’ to enslave others was not to be taken, after the New Testament revelation, as literal but rather as typical of freedom from sin. God commanded the Israelites to conquer their own sins, not enslave others. Those with twenty-first-century perspectives often reject such reasoning. Its antisemitism is now obvious, and it would lead to Islamophobia in other early abolitionist works. It tied kindness, equality, and liberty so closely to theology that secular rationales for them were often lost. And it divided features of culture that derived from European origins, such as Christianity, hermeneutics, and alphabetic literacy, into anti-Indian and antiblack and pro-Indian and pro-black halves without leaving space for the question of whether Europe in America was itself the problem. Yet it was the bridge from the experience of the bound and enslaved to an abolitionism that would delegitimize all forms of slavery. Edwards thrust the first pillars of that bridge into the ground. Others completed the work.

Works Cited Bowden, Henry Warner (1981). American Indians and Christian Missions: Studies in Cultural Conflict. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brooks, Joanna (2003). American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures. New York: Oxford University Press. Brooks, Joanna, Ed. (2006). The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan: Leadership and Literature in Eighteenth-Century America. Foreword, Robert Warrior. New York: Oxford University Press. Brooks, Joanna and Saillant, John, Ed (2002). ‘Face Zion Forward’: First Writers of the Black Atlantic, 1785–1798. Boston: Northeastern University Press.

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444   John Saillant Cipolla, Craig N. (2013). Becoming Brothertown: Native American Ethnogenesis and Endurance in the Modern World. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Conforti, Joseph A. (1981). Samuel Hopkins and the New Divinity Movement: Calvinism, the Congregational Ministry, and Reform in New England between the Great Awakenings. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. Fanshaw, D. (1840?). The Life of David Brainerd, Chiefly Extracted from His Diary. By President Edwards. Somewhat Abridged. (1840?) New York: American Tract Society and D. Fanshaw. Grigg, John A. (2009). The Lives of David Brainerd: The Making of an American Evangelical Icon. New York: Oxford University Press. Gura, Philip F. (2005). Jonathan Edwards: America’s Evangelical. New York: Hill and Wang. Hopkins, Samuel (1911). Historical Memoirs Relating to the Housatunnuk [Housatonic] Indians. Boston: S.  Kneeland, 1753, repr. The Magazine of History with Notes and Queries. Extra Number 17: 9–198. Jarvis, Brad D. E. (2010). The Brothertown Nation of Indians: Land Ownership and Nationalism in Early America, 1740–1840. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Levecq, Christine (2019). Black Cosmopolitans: Race, Religion, and Republicanism in an Age of Revolution. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Marsden, George M. (2003). Jonathan Edwards: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press. Mayhew, Experience (1727). Indian Converts: Or, Some Account of the Lives and Dying Speeches of a Considerable Number of the Christianized Indians of Martha’s Vineyard and NewEngland. London: Samuel Gerrish. Melish, Joanne Pope (1998). Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and ‘Race’ in New England, 1780–1860. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Minkema, Kenneth P. (1997). ‘Jonathan Edwards on Slavery and the Slave Trade,’ The William and Mary Quarterly 54/4: October. 823–34. Minkema, Kenneth  P. (2002). ‘Jonathan Edwards’s Defense of Slavery.’ The Massachusetts Historical Review 4: 23–59. Minkema, Kenneth  P., and Harry  S.  Stout (2005). ‘The Edwardsean Tradition and the Antislavery Debate, 1740–1865.’ The Journal of American History 92/1: June. 47–74. Monescalchi, Michael (2019). ‘Phillis Wheatley, Samuel Hopkins, and the Rise of Disinterested Benevolence.’ Early American Literature 54/2: Spring. 413–44. Murray, Laura J., Ed. (1998). To Do Good to My Indian Brethren: The Writings of Joseph Johnson, 1751–1776. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Newell, Margaret Ellen (2015). Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of New England Slavery. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Saillant, John (2005). ‘African American Engagements with Edwards in the Era of the Slave Trade.’ Jonathan Edwards at 300: Essays on the Tercentenary of His Birth. Ed. Harry S. Stout, Kenneth  P.  Minkema, and Caleb  J.  D.  Maskell. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America. 141–51. Saillant, John (2003). Black Puritan, Black Republican: The Life and Thought of Lemuel Haynes, 1753–1833. New York: Oxford University Press. Stievermann, Jan (2010). ‘The Genealogy of Races and the Problem of Slavery in Cotton Mather’s “Biblia Americana.” ’ Cotton Mather and Biblia Americana—America’s First Bible Commentary: Essays in Reappraisal. Ed. Reiner Smolinski and Jan Stievermann. Tübingen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany: Mohr Siebeck. 515–76. Tise, Larry E. (1987). Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701–1840. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

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Ministry to the Bound and Enslaved   445 Vaughan, Alden T. (1995). ‘Slaveholder’s “Hellish Principles”: A Seventeenth-Century Critique.’ Roots of American Racism: Essays on the Colonial Experience. New York: Oxford University Press. 55–81. Wheeler, Rachel (2003). ‘ “Friends to Your Souls”: Jonathan Edwards’ Indian Pastorate and the Doctrine of Original Sin.’ Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture 72/4: December. 736–65. Wheeler, Rachel (2005). ‘Lessons from Stockbridge: Jonathan Edwards and the Stockbridge Indians.’ Jonathan Edwards at 300. 131–40.

Archives and Special Collections ‘Register of Baptisms, Burials, Communicants, and Marriages, 1755–1817.’ Records of St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral, 1715–1991. Mss. Gr. 94, box 16, folder 195. University of Rhode Island Distinctive Collections.

Suggested Reading Bailey, Richard A. (2011). Race and Redemption in Puritan New England. New York: Oxford University Press. Cameron, Christopher (2011). ‘The Puritan Origins of Black Abolitionism in Massachusetts.’ Historical Journal of Massachusetts 39/1–2: Summer. 79–107. Fisher, Linford D. (2017). ‘ “Why shall wee have peace to bee made slaves”: Indian Surrenderers during and after King Philip’s War.’ Ethnohistory 64/1: 91–114. Hambrick-Stowe, Charles  E. (2003). ‘All Things Were New and Astonishing: Edwardsian Piety, the New Divinity, and Race.’ Jonathan Edwards at Home and Abroad: Historical Memories, Cultural Movements, Global Horizons. Ed. David W. Kling and Douglas A. Sweeney. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. 121–36. Rivett, Sarah (2012). The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Silverman, David J. (2010). Red Brethren: The Brothertown and Stockbridge Indians and the Problem of Race in Early America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Wyss, Hilary E. (2000). Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and Native Community in Early America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Author Bio John Saillant is professor of English and History, Western Michigan University. He received degrees from Brown University, held a fellowship at Harvard University, and taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology before relocating to Michigan. His works include Black Puritan, Black Republican: The Life and Thought of Lemuel Haynes, 1753–1833 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), ‘Face Zion Forward’: First Writers of the Black Atlantic, 1785–1798, co-editor Joanna Brooks (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002), and, recently, articles in Georgia Historical Quarterly, Journal of Southern Religion, Early American Studies, Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies, and The CLR James Journal.

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chapter 29

Politics a n d Economics Mark Valeri

We can begin with two preliminary observations. First, in many ways Edwards held conventional political and economic views for a mid-eighteenth-century AngloAmerican Protestant. Like his evangelical colleagues during the second third of the eighteenth century—George Whitefield, say, or Gilbert Tennent, or Eleazar Wheelock— he wrote and preached as a loyal subject of England and advocate of the kingdom’s transatlantic military–commercial empire. Second, he nonetheless articulated theological and ethical tenets that made imperial loyalties merely a relative good: subordinate to evangelistic ministry and the inculcation of universal benevolence as a mark of holiness. Although he never denied Britain’s claim on American colonists, his teaching suggested that the eighteenth-century evangelical–imperial alliance was contingent, i.e. susceptible to reconsideration. Accountability to biblical precepts and a theology of virtue, as Edwards elucidated them, transcended and could even contradict national and imperial mandates. As a New England minister and evangelical–Calvinist divine, Edwards drew from the Bible, traditional Protestant—especially puritan—teaching, and contemporary ethical theories to offer observations on politics and economics. His ideas on imperial warfare, the British empire and its relation to France, the power of non-Christian states such as the Ottoman Empire, and the outcome of national-historical events rested on his reading of biblical prophecy. Passages from the books of Daniel, Ezekiel, and Revelation, for example, suggested possible scenarios for the future of geopolitical matters. As he read prophetic texts and speculated on millennial futures, he followed, relied on, and disagreed with a robust contemporary scholarship on apocalyptic literature, including textual studies by English dissenters such as Moses Lowman, Joseph Mede, and Matthew Henry; Anglican scholars such as Humphrey Prideaux and Arthur Bedford; and Scottish colleagues such as John Willison and John Erskine (WJE 5: 55–74 [editor’s ‘Introduction’]). For his statements on local, contemporary affairs Edwards applied

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Politics and Economics   447 s­ pecific biblical rules (on usury, for example) or extrapolated from generalized biblical commands such as the Ten Commandments. He took biblical refrains on humility or compassion, or denunciations of envy and avarice, and applied them to the conduct of magistrates and members of the Massachusetts government, the political habits of his parishioners, and the business practices or consumer habits of townspeople. He also, and perhaps most creatively, drew from contemporary philosophical and ethical ­writings by British authors such as Francis Hutcheson. Their reflections on moral ­dispositions such as envy, avarice, or benevolence informed Edwards as he discussed the ­virtue or vice of specific social behaviours. Such applications hardly amounted to a full or consistent political ideology. Edwards’s political and economic commentary, to put this a bit differently, consisted of partial reflections scattered over his whole career, with changing emphases and concerns. He did not write a comprehensive political theology, dwell on political theory, or author a  thoroughgoing critique of Britain’s economic system, of which Massachusetts ­merchants, farmers, maritime labourers, and artisans were a part. For the most part, his interpretation of contemporary civic events was piecemeal: inclusions, anecdotes, or asides in his miscellaneous observations, sermons, letters, notes on the Bible, and references in theological and ethical treatises.

Political Assumptions We can, however, detect an overall pattern in Edwards’s comments by placing them in the context of widespread Protestant sympathies for England’s constitutional monarchy as it developed from the Glorious Revolution (or Revolution of 1688) through the reign of George II (1727–60). During this period, most Protestant dissenters in England and New England, along with liberal Anglicans, extolled Britain’s post-Restoration government as a godsend. They valorized the Revolution of 1688, during which Whig leaders in Parliament ousted the Stuart King James II, who was rumoured to have converted to Catholicism. (The name Whig originated as a moniker for members of Parliament who favoured the exclusion of any Roman Catholic from the throne and who therefore vaunted parliamentary restrictions on the monarchy. The name Tory designated those who opposed such exclusion and extolled the crown’s authority over Parliament.) Through a complicated series of negotiations, parliamentary leaders and their agents invited William of Orange—a prince of the United Provinces (the Netherlands), grandson of Charles I, and fervent defender of Protestant regimes against Catholic aggression in Europe—to assume the throne. Parliament appointed him and his wife Mary as monarchs. Religious and civic leaders in New England such as Increase Mather celebrated William’s succession. It appeared to be a relief from an unsympathetic and crypto-Catholic government installed in New England by James II: the Dominion of New England and its despised Governor Edmund Andros (Dunn 1998).

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448   Mark Valeri We must recount this story in order to grasp several of Edwards’s political assumptions. Edwards recognized that proponents of the Whig monarchy and government—again, heroes to most New Englanders—often relied on the idioms of ‘liberty’ and England’s ‘constitution’. By liberty, Whigs meant, inter alia, the freedom of parliament, ecclesiastical institutions, and municipal or corporate organizations from extra-constitutional ­interference. By constitution, they meant the collection of customary prerogatives and rights vested in the people and their representatives. The term liberty especially carried religious connotations: the freedom of English people from state limitations on their chosen way of belief, i.e. Protestantism. William’s propagandists had argued that he invaded England in order to protect the religious liberty of English Protestants against Catholic and Stuart designs to abolish Protestantism (Armitage 2010). To enhance religious liberty in the realm, Whig apologists such as John Locke prompted Parliament to pass the 1689 Toleration Act, which permitted the worship of dissenting churches that upheld the authority of the crown, including Presbyterian, Independent (or Congregationalist), and Baptist. The Act tacitly excluded Protestant separatists or radical sects such as the Levellers who had gained notoriety during the Interregnum. The Act did not prohibit the private worship of Catholics who professed loyalty to the government. Many Catholic chapels and schools continued to operate after 1689. Yet it excluded atheists, Roman Catholics, and non-Trinitarian Protestants, e.g. Socinians, from legal recognition. They could not worship in public. Their clergy were not licensed. Whig proponents of restrictions on the scope of religious liberty in the kingdom argued that these groups were disloyal to the kingdom nearly by definition. Although William had relied on Catholic officers in his army, many Catholics—in England and on the Continent—refused to recognize the legitimacy of a post-Stuart monarchy. Atheists, as Locke had argued, could not be trusted to abide by the oaths and professions of fidelity that constituted the ligaments of civic order. Such groups fell outside of the broad-based, magisterial (i.e. pro-government) Protestant consensus that incited the Glorious Revolution and legitimated Britain’s political culture (Grell, Israel, and Tyacke 1991). Just as William’s reign was welcomed in New England, so too was the Toleration Act. It promised that New Englanders—including adherents of its Congregational order such as Edwards—could be considered loyal subjects. The crown assured them a liberty of conscience in such terms. William enacted his sympathies for dissenters with the appointment of latitudinarian, i.e. ecumenically minded, bishops such as John Tillotson and Gilbert Burnet, who pursued rapprochement among Anglicans, Presbyterians, Independents, and Baptists. New Englanders such as Edwards disagreed with the Arminian theologies of such bishops but nonetheless applauded their ideas of liberty for all English Protestants. William furthermore announced his sympathies by successfully urging Parliament to declare war on France less than a year after his accession. Anglicans and dissenters alike applauded William’s stance because Louis XIV had reinstituted persecution of Huguenots and commenced hostilities against neighbouring Protestant states on the Continent, including the Netherlands.

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Politics and Economics   449

Economic and Political Agendas for the Hanoverian Empire Edwards assumed, then, that all good New Englanders had inherited this reading of the Glorious Revolution and, with it, their identities as English and Protestant. They also lived in the shadow of changes within Britain’s political order that took place after 1714, when the first of the Hanoverian monarchs, George I, assumed the throne and replaced the Tory-affiliated reign of Queen Anne. Under the Hanoverians, Britain became an imperial state. The first of those changes concerned the development of transatlantic administrative procedures and institutions. Through the reigns of George I (1714–27) and George II (1727–60)—the latter of which included the administration of England’s first Prime Minister, Robert Walpole—British officials put into place a massive bureaucracy that reached from London to Boston and other colonial towns. The extension of British dominion often took the form of political counsellors, magistrates or judges, agents, inspectors, tax officials, and other civil servants who increasingly kept and organized public records, enforced regulations and statutes, and regularized the applications of laws across Britain’s territories. The import of being subjects of Britain, that is, became an inescapable fact for New Englanders—made real through everyday encounters with agents of the crown, the deliberations of local representatives to the colonial ­government, and legal procedures. In addition, the crown supported institutions that fostered English identities and notions of citizenship. These included publishing ­ventures, missionary societies, and schools. When New Englanders read transatlantic accounts of revival, participated in evangelistic work among Native peoples, or ­supported schools such as Yale or Moor’s Charity School (the precursor to Dartmouth College), they encountered expressions of civil society—common ideas of education, civility, decorum, and communal responsibility—closely linked to imperial loyalties (Brewer 1990). Second, after 1688, commercial development and new versions of political economy contributed to the integration and funding of Britain’s transatlantic empire. Seventeenthcentury economic thinkers, many of whom were merchants, had provided the data for an analyses of currency policy, taxation, trade regulations, funding for the crown and government, and overseas commercial expansion. Their eighteenth-century successors often functioned as official agents of the government and advocates for policies that enhanced the kingdom’s treasury. The government increasingly supported scientific and technological improvements, from marine navigation instruments to heavy machinery, irrigation techniques, and new forms of engines, that increased Britain’s economic productivity. The royal navy subdued the threat of piracy. Faster transatlantic travel abetted the spread of communication, which strengthened networks of ­merchants and their agents. Publishers produced manuals for doing business, along

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450   Mark Valeri with printed tables of prices and gazettes of ports throughout the realm. Commentators such as Richard Steele, whom Edwards read, provided political arguments for the ­liberalization of price and credit controls and for the spread of consumer spending. The convergence of prices across great distances signalled a genuine market economy across the empire. All of this helped to fund the navy and army, which protected Protestant interests across the globe and in turn allowed for greater colonial expansion. In Edwards’s day, loyalty to Britain, Protestantism, and commercial expansion appeared as interdependent agendas (Hancock 1995). Third, disputes among members of Parliament, municipal officials, government agents, colonial governors and their assemblies, and the crown hardened into something like a longstanding factionalism in British politics. This has been described as a standing contest between a Court party and a Country party. No respectable commentator denied the importance of ‘liberty’ and England’s ‘constitution’ for English identity, but partisans of Court and Country debated the meaning of those terms. For Court thinkers, the crown itself, the nobility, and the crown’s cadre of officials secured the liberties of loyal subjects through their promotion of the kingdom’s security and order. They embodied England’s constitution or particular form of political life. Court partisans understood the threat to such liberties chiefly in terms of external enemies such as France and internal perils such as overheated criticism of the crown. From the perspective of Court ideologues, such criticism appealed to the base instincts of common people—an effort to gain popularity to the detriment of order and national power (Jones 1978). For Country thinkers, whose ideas have been categorized under the rubric ‘republicanism’, the collective will of virtuous subjects and the rule of elected officials secured liberty and defined the constitution. Suspicious of corruption among the elite—of bribery, collusion, and dishonesty—Country partisans warned that the concentration of power in the court, or in colonial executives such as governors and upper chambers of assemblies, threatened the liberties of local institutions such as municipal cor­ porations and churches, as well as the liberties of individuals. They often wrote of the importance of a virtuous citizenry to detect vice and restrict the power of the elite, who placed personal ambition above the commonwealth (Robbins 1959). Fourth, despite partisan polemics, the development in British politics that most captured contemporary observers concerned imperial warfare. During and shortly after Edwards’s lifetime, Britain and France were formally at war from 1702 to 1713 (the War of the Spanish Succession or, in North America, Queen Anne’s War), 1743–8 (the War of the Austrian Succession or King George’s War), and 1756–63 (the Seven Years War or French and Indian War). In addition, the threat of hostilities among French forces in Canada, Native American nations, and English settlers was nearly continuous and included localized conflicts such as the 1722–4 Father Rale’s War. In many ways, Britain’s and France’s wars for empire in North America (as well as in the Indian subcontinent) constituted one key component of being English: anti-French, anti-Catholic, and antiabsolutist. Political virtue in such terms meant loyalty to England’s parliamentary, Hanoverian monarchy and its policy of liberty for Protestants, in contrast to France’s absolutist, Bourbon dynasty with its intolerance for all non-Catholic sects.

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Politics and Economics   451

Edwards’s Whig and Imperial Sentiments These large-scale political developments—the Revolution of 1688 and the ascendance of a Whig Parliament and Whig-affiliated crown, emergence of liberty and England’s constitution as fundamental political tenets, broad-based Protestant confession, omnipresence of the British empire, internal tensions between Court and Country views of political virtue, dependence of the commonwealth on an imperial commercial system, and constant war with Catholic France—framed, and gave meaning to, Edwards’s sometimes scattered and brief comments on politics and economics. For the most part, he followed the script implied in the above Whiggish history: a script that he encountered through history books, serial publications with essays by Whig observers in England, correspondence with British colleagues, and works of other New Englanders, such as Cotton Mather, who reiterated the standard narrative. He mentioned the worthiness of Whig advocates and disreputableness of Tory partisans, referred to William III as a hero, and took recourse to histories of the Glorious Revolution as edifying reading (WJE 26: 72, 87, 154). That is to say, Edwards can be described as a loyal subject of Britain, an admirer of the Hanoverian monarchs, a proponent of Britain’s commercial power, a Whig partisan with republican leanings, and a fierce enemy of all things French and Catholic. Edwards certainly had personal reasons for his loyalty to imperial Britain. He attended a college—one of those above-mentioned institutions that nurtured English ideas of civil society—founded by a colonial government that operated under imperial aegis. Yale was funded in part by a wealthy London merchant who placed the empire’s stamp on the school with the donation of a portrait of George I. Edwards’s licensure and ordination as an Independent minister were sanctioned by English law under the Act of Toleration. His salary and the maintenance of the local meetinghouse were paid in part by taxes mandated by law and collected from well-to-do subjects who had profited from the imperial economy. The government of Massachusetts, operating under the authority of the crown, legislated moral and ceremonial statutes, such as rules on sabbath observance and fast days, that he found crucial to his ministry. That government also recognized the authority of the clerical association of which he was a member. Late in his career, as a missionary pastor in Stockbridge, he depended on funds provided by a transatlantic missionary network and relied on the protection afforded by treaties with Native peoples and by military buffers against hostile, French-allied forces. He forged close ties with a transatlantic network of fellow divines and authors, along with publishers. Edwards wrote little about political theory per se, although he clearly aligned himself with British Whigs. He read, among British periodicals, The Independent Whig, the Monthly Review, and the Guardian: each of them Lockean and whiggish. They were fiercely critical of Britain’s Tories, who had gain power under Queen Anne (1702–14), endorsed High Church Anglican bishops who wished to reverse the dissenter-friendly policies of the Williamite government, and supported the increase of the prerogatives of

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452   Mark Valeri the crown. Edwards also collected books and pamphlets that magnified the glories of William as a protector of Protestantism and rehearsed the misdeeds of Catholic devotees of the deposed James II. These ‘Jacobites’ planned, or were rumoured to have planned, several rebellions against the post-Stuart crown: a 1689 uprising, 1696 assassination plot, conspiracies to abet a French invasion, a 1715 uprising, and a 1719 uprising. In 1745, Charles Edward, the so-called Young Pretender, a grandson of James II and last of the Stuarts, led a small force from France to Scotland, with ill-fated designs on London, to reclaim the crown. In his apocalyptic writings and his correspondence, Edwards mentioned Jacobite plots as a near constant threat to Britain, especially when combined with sometimes real conspiracies to upset the throne, concocted by French, Scottish, and Papal agents. We can, then, read many of Edwards’s references to liberty and civic-mindedness, on one hand, and to the Pope, slavery, and France on the other, as reflections of a contest between Whig constitutionalism and French-Catholic absolutism (WJE 5: 358, 430; WJE 16: 203, 830). Edwards’s Whig sentiments raises the question of his understanding of the relationship between New England’s churches—congregationalist, Reformed, and— after 1738 in many towns evangelical—and England’s established religious order. That is, how could Edwards be loyal to Britain’s imperial order when it was based in part on the establishment of the Church of England, with its bishops, sometimes Arminian and anti-evangelical leanings, formal liturgy, and elaborate ritual? Edwards wrote about such matters early in his career. Several of his ‘Miscellanies’ from the early 1720s, for example, concerned the 1716–19 Bangorian Controversy, which pitted the Whig Bishop of Bangor, Benajmin Hoadly, against Tory prelates, called Nonjurors, who refused to give their oath of allegiance to William III and his successors (WJE 26: 236–7). These nonjuring Tories argued that divine grace had appointed particular monarchs, bishops, and the ecclesiastical structure of the Church of England. From this perspective, it appeared that Parliament’s overthrow of James II amounted to rebellion against God’s reign. So too, the Toleration Act, with its countenance of dissent and nonconformity to Anglican liturgy, appeared as apostasy. Nonjuring Tories, that is, coloured the reign of George I as illegitimate and Jacobite rebellion as godly. At the behest of George I, who ruled in alliance with Whigs in Parliament, and in a sermon preached before the king, Hoadly contended that Christ himself made a distinction between particular earthly institutions—including dynastic lines and ecclesiastical denominations—and the kingdom of God. It was pure cant that James II had an irrevocable divine appointment, that the Church of England was the only true church, and that the Whig revolution betrayed England. Hoadly maintained that it was therefore right for Britons to confess their fealty to George I. It was also proper for them to take advantage of the kingdom’s relative leniency toward dissent by forming or participating in churches as their consciences deemed to be most faithful. Edwards admired Hoadly’s sermon, identifying himself as a loyal nonconformist. That is, he and his colleagues in the Hampshire Association and, later, his fellow evangelical preachers, recognized the legal establishment of the Church of England. They viewed themselves as loyal subjects of the Hanoverian administration and, unlike

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Politics and Economics   453 some of their puritan predecessors, did not agitate for an end to episcopacy in the Church. Yet they thought it their right—their liberty, in eighteenth-century parlance— to operate outside the authority of Anglican bishops and without conformity (hence the appellation ‘nonconformist’) to Church of England liturgical practices. Edwards also contended that it was not a contradiction for Presbyterians, and Independents such as himself, to organize themselves into national or provincial institutions even as they deferred to the crown and recognized the legitimacy of the Church of England. The monarchy, and the Whig episcopacy itself, protected the liberties of New England’s churches.

Economic Observations As indicated above, Britain’s political establishment depended on a commercial system that funded imperial projects and on a political economy that valorized market-style exchange as in the national interest. Although Edwards endorsed that system, it would be anachronistic to describe him as either a proponent or critic of what we have come to think of as a modern market economy. Before Adam Smith, whose Wealth of Nations appeared in 1776, Britain’s commercial ideologies did not include modern free-market notions of an economy free from governmental regulation. The economic thinkers of Edwards’s day presumed that the crown and parliament had responsibility for rules on foreign trade, currency policy, state-held monopolies, navigation acts for colonies, and statutory limits on credit, prices, and wages. Edwards presumed the dictates of England’s mid-century political economy as he critiqued the economic practices of his parishioners and the policies on currency and trade emerging from debates between the Massachusetts government and governor. He gave his economic advice in his sermons, in the form of admonitions to Christian virtue and civic-mindedness. Although Edwards assumed Britain’s commercial system to be a providential blessing, he frequently urged his people to avoid moral temptations that corrupted exchange in the market and, in process, distanced himself from Boston’s and London’s mercantile elite. Early in his ministry, before the revivals, he often remarked on the extent to which venality and avarice appeared to accompany the economic development of Northampton. His ideal was a close-knit town with relatively small levels of economic disparity between households, free-flowing charity to the indigent, and widespread economic competence. He often complained of an increasing concentration of wealth among the town’s elites, neglect of the poor, conspicuous consumption, and a turn to economically unproductive pursuits such as speculation in land. Pure selfishness appeared to him to have captured many of his people. Differences in economic status and interests overlaid the political factions that divided the town. Worldly pursuits—more land, more trips to Boston to sell and buy, more attention to accumulation and spending—eclipsed spiritual devotion and concern for the common good. Northampton hardly approximated a society of the godly in such terms (Valeri 1991 for this and the following three paragraphs).

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454   Mark Valeri Edwards, however, did not reject commercial pursuits out of hand. Rather than ­ romote a completely different set of economic principles—the highly disciplined p communitarianism of seventeenth-century puritan towns in England, say—Edwards maintained that his people pursue personal virtue within the regnant economy. He instituted a more robust and regular collection of poor relief in sabbath worship services, demanding a level of charitableness that rose above civic protocols for poor relief. He enhanced the role of church deacons, who were responsible for caring for the indigent in the congregation. He authored for his church a new covenant of faith in 1742, according to which members pledged to eschew all forms of fraud—i.e. passing bad notes of credit, selling inferior goods, or signing contracts with no intention of fulfilling them—pay debts in a timely fashion, and abate the debts of distressed neighbours. Edwards grounded his attempts at economic reform in a spiritual theology according to which the transformation of personal affections through conversion led to changes in social behaviour. Exhortations to charity and honesty, of course, could be construed as means to make Britain’s economic system more productive, sociable, humane, and patriotic. In these terms, they could serve to legitimate the imperial system. Along these lines, Edwards urged the people of Massachusetts to participate in commercial and religious networks that bound the town together and that bound New Englanders to their partners across the Atlantic. Britain’s transatlantic economy could be compared to the formation of the extended evangelical community of which Edwards was a part: linked by correspondence, the exchange of news and publication or advertisement of events that favoured Protestant Britons, and affections expressed over great distances. It was no contradiction for Edwards’s merchant admirers to compete in the transatlantic market with assiduity, even if they claimed to do so with more virtue than did their unbelieving competitors. Virtue, religion, trade rose together (Valeri 2010, 234–49). As an indication of his commitment to regnant commercial ideologies, Edwards urged the Massachusetts government during the late 1740s to stop the inflationary practice of ever-increasing emissions of new bills of credit. He chastised New Englanders who took out loans, only to use them to buy luxury goods. They delayed repayment, harming creditors whose loan contracts lost value over time. Edwards supported, that is, the very policies recommended by London creditors and the governor of Massachusetts, many of whom were the benefactors of evangelical publications and missions. Edwards had more than pecuniary reasons for such recommendations. He realized that a ­well-functioning, transatlantic system of commerce, conducted according to market principles, sustained Britain’s Whig, Protestant regime and its battle against vicious, largely French-speaking foes.

Provincial Politics When it came to local and provincial politics, Edwards rued incidents in Northampton and Boston that reflected Court and Country divisions throughout Britain. In

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Politics and Economics   455 Massachusetts, quarrels between the governor (perceived as the Court party) and the assembly (many members of which espoused Country sentiments) had erupted in 1729. When a native of Massachusetts, Jonathan Belcher, was appointed governor in 1730, most New Englanders celebrated what they regarded as the arrival of a protector of their liberties and constitution. Soon after taking office, however, Belcher provoked resistance from Country-minded parties in Massachusetts. Acting on the crown’s instruction, he demanded that the assembly provide him with a fixed salary instead of the customary annual stipend. He also insisted on currency reform. When Belcher’s opponents made overtures to the House of Commons to have him removed in 1731, the king himself issued a warning against Massachusetts. Massachusetts newspapers and sermons reported controversy, disorder, and riots in the streets of Boston. Belcher proceeded to appoint his favourites to positions in the government. His critics in turn accused him of bribery, corruption, and betrayal (Pencak 1981, 61–113). In Northampton, Edwards’s staunchest allies and supporters, wealthy elites such as his uncle Colonel John Stoddard, stood with Belcher. Other members of Northampton— newer residents, would-be traders, and debtors—allied themselves with radicals in the assembly. Edwards sided with his patrons. According to him, Country discontent often reflected popular passions such as envy and greed. It went hand in hand with a selfish disregard for the common good. He feared faction as a threat to the Whig constitution and the charter of Massachusetts, which secured the privileges of religious liberty. He never identified himself, however, as a Court zealot. Rather, he eschewed partisan quarrels as unseemly, unchristian, and self-serving: a contradiction to political virtue and the liberties of loyal subjects (McDermott 1992, 117–36). He explained in a 1751 letter to a Scottish correspondent that ‘there has been a sort of settled division of the people [of Massachusetts] into two parties, somewhat like the Court and Country party in England’. In Northampton, Edwards continued, the ‘chief men’, with ‘authority and wealth’—the ‘great proprietors’ of land—mirrored the Court, while the more popular faction, ‘who have been jealous of them’ and ‘apt to envy them, and afraid of their having too much power and influence in town and church’ echoed the Country (WJE 16: 382). Edwards frequently portrayed the Country-like critics of Northampton’s ruling elite, Massachusetts’s governor, and his allies in Boston as small-minded malcontents. True to his anti-partisanship and Whig-republican leanings, Edwards often dismissed all forms of political faction, from Country and Court sides alike, as symptoms of moral and spiritual decay. He did so most poignantly in his election day sermons, delivered on the occasion of the annual election of representatives to the Massachusetts assembly. Eighteenth-century preachers followed a fairly set script for such occasions. They explained the divine origin of civil government, affirmed the providential origins and covenantal responsibilities of New Englanders, rehearsed New England’s peculiar advantages (such as its churches and material prosperity), issued warnings against signs of divine displeasure such as political discord or economic crisis, and exhorted magistrates, ministers, and laypeople to repentance and reform. Sometimes preaching in a covenantal mode, Edwards asserted that New England was akin to a church: a visible society of the godly who had peculiar privileges and duties as a whole people. Its state of disrepair—factions and disrespect for rulers—indicated spiritual crises. The answer to

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456   Mark Valeri the region’s political distress lay in the virtues of deference and obedience and, more deeply yet, in a return to godliness. He offered a religious grammar to express an essentially Whig diagnosis: the vice of self-interest and party spirit, and the virtue of self-denial and civic-mindedness (WJE 17: 87–120).

Imperial Warfare After the revivals, Edwards turned his sights on the mounting geopolitical contest between British and French imperial dynasties. To be sure, he had taken note of affairs throughout Europe, and especially in France, just as the revivals had begun. In his 1739 History of the Work of Redemption, he surmised—chiefly from the book of Daniel—that recent advances in Protestant missionary efforts and mounting antagonism between Catholic regimes such as France and Spain and Protestant powers such as Britain augured the decline of Antichrist before an apocalyptic crisis. He was fascinated especially with the details of French-Catholic persecution of Protestants, tabulating the number of Protestant martyrs in France to 39 princes, 384 upper nobility, 147,518 lower nobility or gentlemen, and 760,000 commoners. Louis XIV, he warned, had nearly extirpated Protestantism in his realm. In his commentary on biblical prophecy, Edwards described a series of papal-inspired assaults on Protestants as the rage of devilish powers. Protestant Britain and her colonies—the glories of the Whig empire and blessings of liberty—according to such readings, were arrayed against Catholic France and other malevolent powers incited by the papacy (WJE 9: 428–9). Mindful of papal plots, Jacobite designs, pretenders to the throne, and the worldwide power of Catholicism, Edwards kept close track of Anglo-French conflicts during the 1740s. He wrote most fully about the widely publicized 1745 British assault on Louisbourg, a French fortress on Cape Breton Island. During the previous year, a combined French and Wabanaki force based at Louisbourg had attacked nearby British settlements and completely destroyed a fishing port and garrison. Prompted by Governor William Shirley, the Massachusetts government raised and funded a force under Council member William Pepperell to attack Louisbourg. It was, according to many British accounts, a New England David and French Goliath affair. Several of Edwards’s Northampton parishioners joined the expedition. The victory of the combined Massachusetts militia and British naval force produced widespread proclamation of divine blessings on Britain. Edwards curried the favour of Pepperell, a local hero, and wrote dozens of pages with details of the expedition: all evidence, Edwards took it, of providential purpose for New England and future demise of France (WJE 5: 32–5 [‘Editor’s Introduction’]; 422–3; 452–9; on popish powers, 300–1). The Louisbourg victory gave Edwards further reason to celebrate Britain’s imperial power. After 1745, he and fellow evangelicals such as Whitefield were so firmly committed to Britain that they dampened their criticisms of Anglicanism and laboured to demonstrate their importance to the imperial order (Choi 2018).

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Politics and Economics   457 As a missionary pastor on the frontier of Massachusetts from 1751 on, Edwards kept himself apprised, through newspapers and correspondence, of military affairs of the Seven Years War. He lamented Braddock’s defeat at Fort Duquesne and the loss of British forts on Lake Champlain and Lake George in 1755. He nonetheless took a sanguine attitude, as though the military misfortunes of the empire at any one time were secondary matters. He assured his people that, the occasional defeat aside, Christ would defeat the Antichrist. The French were doomed. He and his fellow evangelical Calvinists presumed that God would not let the cause of religious liberty, commercial prosperity, and parliamentary rule suffer permanent defeat (Marsden 2003, 414–31).

Beyond Imperial Loyalties For all of Edwards’s whiggery and devotion to Britain’s empire, his theological preoccupations sometimes suggested an aloofness from British patriotism. There are selections within his writings that posit spiritual loyalties, supernatural realities, and moral obligations that transcended political attachments. To use an Edwardsean metaphor, he indicated that divine light illumined the contingent and temporary nature of all political and economic obligations. To switch metaphors, he offered several platforms from which New England’s—and, indeed, Britain’s—Protestants could think above the imperial system. We can offer three of many possible examples. First, Edwards promoted an evangelistic agenda, including New Englanders’ missions to Native Americans, that denoted transnational and ecumenical loyalties. The more that Edwards invested himself in the revivals, and in work among non-Christian people, the more he contemplated the universal scope of the Christian church. In his 1748 An Humble Attempt, for example, he proposed that New Englanders join a transatlantic ‘concert’ of prayer for worldwide revival. To be sure, the leaders of this project were fellow subjects of Britain—from New England, Scotland, and England. As Edwards explained at the end of his proposal, the concert would be carried on under the aegis of a Hanoverian monarchy that had been providentially protected from its Jacobite pretenders. Yet Edwards hardly mentioned imperial agendas throughout the rest of the Humble Attempt. He traversed the contemporary religious landscape and its relation to biblical prophecy without reference to British affairs. His elucidation of the meaning of the apocalyptic images of the New Jerusalem and the New Babylon included no mention of Boston, London, or Edinburgh (WJE 5: 309–436). The invisible and cosmopolitan bonds of Christian devotion, rather than the visible markers of British identity, often captured Edwards’s imagination of the future of the gospel. The success of the concert of prayer and other missionary ventures, from Danish-pietist evangelism in Malabar (southwest India) to the surprising success of Lutheran missionaries among the peoples of Tartary (the Black Sea region), he maintained in the History of the Work of Redemption, depended on mutual affection among different churches across great distances (WJE 9: 435–6). He frequently preached

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458   Mark Valeri to his Native parishioners in Stockbridge about a God who offered belonging and forgiveness to all people and therefore regarded no nation or race above another (Wheeler 2008). Edwards also implied at times that the imperial system was a mere means in God’s hands for greater purposes: the preparation of the world for Christ’s kingdom through the spread of the gospel. He often suggested that the liberty offered in the Whig constitution had a greater—more expansive and enduring—import than the wellbeing of Britain or the security of individual rights. This view helps to explain how Edward’s successors during the 1770s came to hold the view that Britain’s betrayal of liberty in America vindicated disloyalty to the empire and political revolution. The real providential purpose for the liberty attained in the Glorious Revolution was the freedom for Protestants to practice their faith and to urge non-Protestants in far flung corners of the empire, including the Mohican peoples of western Massachusetts, to dissociate themselves from their inherited, national and religious identities and associate themselves with Christ’s universal reign. From this vantage, no earthly loyalties were irrevocable, no identities permanent. Second, several of Edwards’s recurring theological themes provided a perspective from which civic and commercial obligations, even the blessings of Britain’s imperial system, appeared as secondary, morally inferior priorities for the Christian. Like other Trinitarian thinkers, he claimed that God in God’s nature was sociable and loving or benevolent, the source of creation—of all being. That being the case, as he maintained in The Nature of True Virtue, only love for God reached the level of true virtue. He concluded that evangelical conversion, which evoked such love, was the means of moral excellence. In the process of his argument, Edwards described patriotism, or love for one’s country, as falling short of virtue. It was what he called a ‘private affection’, or an extension of self-love into devotion to one’s nation. As such, imperial loyalties were natural and ethically superior to a narrow self-regard that betrayed the interests of the nation for the sake of one’s self, family, close social group, or party (McDermott 1992, 143–51). Yet, as Edwards indicated often throughout the treatise, national loyalties hardly captured the virtue that characterized the soul attuned to Trinitarian realities (WJE 8: 554 [quotation], 602–3, 611–12). Disparities between what Edwards described as ideal moral dispositions or fidelity to divine command and common behaviour sometimes provoked him to quite ­extraordinary criticism. For all of his investment in the imperial economy, for example, his denunciations of worldliness and avarice, and exhortations to charity or love, sounded at times like a rejection of market practices as a whole. He even denied a central premise of the regnant economic system: market-pricing for goods and labour. True virtue, he believed, sometimes meant a just and intrinsic system of valuation for commodities and one’s labour (Valeri 1991). So too, Edwards occasionally paused his teaching on the providential purposes for Britain, and how battlefield losses to France served merely as preludes to BritishProtestant glories and the demise of papal Antichrist. He rose above such patriotic themes to explain military disasters as God’s judgment for the perfidy, backsliding, and

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Politics and Economics   459 avarice of New Englanders and English people alike. Indeed, he issued occasional warnings against imperial warfare. Nations, he explained in The Nature of True Virtue— and readers could hardly miss the reference to George II as well as to Louis XV—were prone by their very nature to grasp at empire and extend it as far as possible, even across the globe. The result was nearly constant violence and horrific bloodshed (WJE 8: 626–7). Only Christ, he scoffed, held such universal dominion. When it became manifest at the end of history, it would mean the end of the bloody reign of mortals. Imperial politics here sounded more like true vice than true virtue. This was hardly beating the drum for Britain. Edwards’s political and economic thought, then, can be seen as a vindication of Britain’s whiggish, imperial agendas in the short term as the best among worldly options. Britain at large, and the societies of Northampton and Boston close at hand, had improved on Stuart England, with its crypto Catholicism, proto-absolutism, and unfreedoms. So too, the British empire in 1750, with its commercial system, certainly was better for the cause of godliness than was Catholic France. Yet, in the end, Edwards held such judgments as provisional and contingent. We can detect in the higher frequencies of his evangelical theology notes of critique and intimations of alternatives to the mundane loyalties of the nation.

Works Cited Armitage, David (2010). The Ideological Origins of the British Empire. New York: Cambridge University Press. Brewer, John (1990). The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Choi, Peter  Y. (2018). George Whitefield: Evangelist for God and Empire. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans. Dunn, Richard S. (1998). ‘The Glorious Revolution in America,’ in Nicholas Canny, ed., Alaine Low, asst. ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 1: The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press. 445–66. Grell, Ole Peter; Israel, Jonathan  I.; and Tyacke, Nicholas, eds (1991). From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution in Religion in England. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. Hancock, David (1995). Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785. New York: Cambridge University Press. Jones, J. R. (1978). Country and Court: England, 1658–1714. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Marsden, George M. (2003). Jonathan Edwards: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press. McDermott, Gerald R. (1992). One Holy and Happy Society: The Public Theology of Jonathan Edwards. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Pencak, William (1981). War, Politics, and Revolution in Provincial Massachusetts. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Robbins, Caroline (1959). The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission, Development and Circumstance of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration

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460   Mark Valeri of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen Colonies. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Valeri, Mark (2010). Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Valeri, Mark (1991). ‘Jonathan Edwards’s Economic Thought,’ Church History 60: 37–54. Wheeler, Rachel (2008). To Live Upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the EighteenthCentury Northeast. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.

Author Bio Mark Valeri is the Reverend Priscilla Wood Neaves Distinguished Professor of Religion and Politics in the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics and Professor History (courtesy) at Washington University in Saint Louis. A historian of religion in early America, he has written about religious thought and the American Revolution and religion and commerce in New England from 1630 to 1760. His most recent book is Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America. He currently is working on a project that concerns conceptions of conversion, Protestant descriptions of other religions, and politics in AngloAmerica from the English civil war through the American Revolution. He was the Los Angeles Times Distinguished Fellow at the Huntington Library during the 2017/18 year.

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pa rt I V

E DWA R DS ’ S GL OBA L R E C E P T ION

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chapter 30

North A m er ica James P. Byrd

Since the early twentieth century, Edwards has been a constant focus of academic study, with scores of books, articles, and dissertations focusing on his life and legacy. Before this academic interest in Edwards developed, much of Edwards’s prominence in American history grew from his influence among evangelicals. Just as many evan­gel­ic­ als looked to the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century as the beginning of the movement, so they praised Edwards as a seminal leader. Not the gifted preacher that George Whitefield was, and not the organizer that John Wesley was, Edwards was reviv­ alism’s intellectual trailblazer and its defender against its critics (Sweeney 2007, 217–18). Neither Edwards nor anyone in his day could have predicted the influence he would have in American history. Edwards lived in the eighteenth century, but most Americans did not know much, if anything, about him until the nineteenth century. In Edwards’s lifetime and shortly thereafter, he may have been better known in Scotland than in colo­ nial America because several Presbyterian ministers in Scotland corresponded with Edwards and published his writings. When Edwards died after a smallpox inoculation in 1758, few obituaries appeared, indicating that relatively few colonists mourned him, especially as compared to the international torrent of grief that burst forth after George Whitefield’s death (Conforti 1995, 37).

‘Awakening’ Interest in Edwards It was not until 1808—fifty years after Edwards died—that an American edition of his writings was finally published (Conforti 1995, 36–7). During these early years of the nineteenth century, widespread revivals had spawned interest in previous revivals in colonial America, including interest in Edwards. Revivalists labelled the new revivals ‘the Second Great Awakening’, calling them sequels to colonial revivals, which they labelled the ‘Great Awakening’ or the ‘First Great Awakening’. The two ‘awakenings’ shared many similarities, but also had some major differences. The First Great

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464   James P. Byrd Awakening occurred mainly in New England and the middle colonies; the Second Great Awakening expanded from New England through the South and the old southwest. The First Great Awakening occurred mainly in British North America; the Second Great Awakening occurred in the newly constituted United States. By the time of the Second Great Awakening, colonists had lived through the Revolutionary War, which had changed their world in remarkable ways. Who could have guessed that outnum­ bered and outgunned patriotic colonists could defeat the mighty British Empire? The result was a new nation, filled with a confident people who challenged elites, including clergy. Revivals erupted that were diverse, flourishing on the frontier and in the cites. They moved in fits and starts, beginning in the 1790s and finally fading in the 1840s. Above all, these revivals provoked controversy, with some clergy defending the revivals and others attacking them. These debates drove clergy to look to the past for guidance—and for ammunition to support their views—and they looked especially to the colonial revivals. Meanwhile, in New England, a network of ministers who had studied under Edwards or who followed his teachings emerged and became known as the New Divinity, ‘the first indigenous school of American Christian thought’, as Douglas Sweeney observes (Sweeney 2017, 400; Conforti 1995, 11–12, 36–7). New Divinity leaders, including Joseph Bellamy and Samuel Hopkins, spread Edwards’s views and adapted them to the Second Great Awakening. These new revivals worried them, especially those led by uneducated ministers, revivals that seemed to discredit Calvinism and any serious theological reflec­ tion. Baptist and Methodist churches, among others, expanded across the nation, including on the frontier, where uneducated preachers led revivals that included emo­ tional outbursts. Word spread about the famous Cane Ridge revivals of Kentucky in 1801, along with other frontier revivals. Also, Methodists, led by Francis Asbury and his ever-expanding team of circuit rider preachers spread through the new nation, even challenging New Divinity territory in New England. Much of this departed in danger­ ous ways from the authentic American revivalist tradition, New Divinity clergy believed, a tradition of fervent revivalism combined with theological rigor—a tradition shaped by Edwards (Sweeney 2007, 219–22; Conforti 1995, 12–21). One of the challenges New Divinity ministers encountered came from Charles Grandison Finney, the leading preacher in the Second Great Awakening, somewhat par­ allel to George Whitefield’s influence in the previous century. Hailing from New York state, this lawyer turned preacher was ordained Presbyterian and travelled as an evan­ gel­ist, preaching throughout the northeast before taking pastorates in New York City. In the mid-1830s, he moved to Ohio, where he taught theology and eventually became president of Oberlin College, an evangelical school devoted to the struggle against slav­ ery (Sweeney 2007, 221–2). Finney not only preached revival: he transformed it, promoting a concept of revival that differed from Edwards’s. For Edwards, revival was—as he put it in the title of his Faithful Narrative—‘a surprising work of God’. Preachers could pray and preach, but they could not make a revival happen. There were techniques and tools—like publicity, prayer, and publications—that could help revivals along, but, in the end, revival was up to God (WJE 4: 96–211).

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North America   465 Finney agreed that no revival happened without the Holy Spirit’s movement among the people. But he believed people had the responsibility to make sure revivals were suc­ cessful. Revivals were not ‘surprising’, if executed properly. ‘A revival of religion is not a miracle,’ Finney wrote. ‘A revival is the result of the right use of the appropriate means’ (Finney 1835, 12). Preachers had the ability to preach successful revivals; they only had to use the methods that God gave them. Finney called these methods ‘New Measures’, and they included the ‘Anxious Bench’. This was a seat, placed near the minister, where ­people who were ‘anxious’ about the state of their souls could sit within view of the con­ gregation, who could then separate them out for special attention, including focused prayer and encouragement. Some Christians attacked the ‘Anxious Bench’, calling it a cheap and manipulative ploy that dishonoured God and deceived people. Mercersburg theologian John Williamson Nevin called the New Measures ‘heresy’. ‘The successful use of the Anxious Bench calls for no spiritual power,’ Nevin wrote. The bench, like many of the New Measures, were no more than spiritual ‘quackery’, gimmicks that fooled the soul. The Anxious Bench ‘creates a false issue for the conscience . . . usurps the place of the cross’, and ‘results in widespread, lasting spiritual mischief ’, Nevin wrote (Nevin 1843, 3, 19, 29). Controversy over the New Measures was good for Edwards’s reputation. As colonial America’s leading theologian and expert on revival, both opponents and advocates of the New Measures tried to enlist him on their side. Some ministers attacked Finney, say­ ing he was no Edwards, and that his revival techniques opposed the authentic revivalism that Edwards advocated. Finney took these critiques seriously, arguing that his revivals continued what Edwards had started. Finney called Edwards a ‘great man’ who ‘was famous in his day for new measures’. It impressed Finney that Edwards, while pastor in Northampton, renounced his predecessor Solomon Stoddard’s popular views on open communion. This was a courageous move, especially because Stoddard was also Edwards’s grandfather. Controversy erupted in the church, and it was a major reason why Edwards lost his job. As Finney wrote, ‘nothing, unless it was the revolutionary war, ever produced an equal excitement’—an overstatement, to be sure, but Finney had made his point: Edwards championed his own new measures and risked his pulpit for his con­ victions (Finney 1835, 241). In Edwards, Finney found a kindred spirit. Like Finney, Edwards faced attacks on his methods and defended his revival preaching from opponents like Boston clergyman Charles Chauncy. Finney did his research, reading Edwards’s Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New England and his Treatise on Religious Affections. Just as Edwards defended the religious affections in revivals, so did Finney. True religion was intense religion; it struck people deep down, transforming the inclinations of the mind, causing an affective response; it did not result from cold, dry preaching that lacked heartfelt appeal. Finney’s opponents replied that Finney was no Edwards. They rejected Finney’s claim that Edwards would have supported the New Measures, and they published the writings of Edwards and the New Divinity ministers to support their views. All this attention to Edwards—from both supporters and opponents of Finney— helped to shape the First Great Awakening’s reputation as a phenomenal religious move­ ment. (Conforti 1995, 22–4).

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466   James P. Byrd Finney’s enlistment of Edwards as a pioneer of the New Measures may not have pleased Edwards’s strictest disciples, but they had to get used to it: Finney and other evangelicals would shape their own views of Edwards and his legacy. For many evan­gel­ ic­als, the Edwards that mattered most was the Edwards they read about in his personal writings, especially his Personal Narrative, an inspiring conversion story, and his private notebook of ‘Resolutions’, a self-help guide from a model spiritual leader. In his ‘Resolutions’, Edwards warmed many evangelical hearts with lines like these: ‘Resolved, to endeavor to my utmost to deny whatever is not most agreeable to a good, and univer­ sally sweet and benevolent, quiet, peaceable, contented, easy, compassionate, generous, humble, meek, modest, submissive, obliging, diligent and industrious, charitable, even, patient, moderate, forgiving, sincere temper’ (WJE 16: 756–7). These and other ‘Resolutions’ appealed to various evangelicals, including southern Baptist Basil Manly, Jr, who followed Edwards’s example in self-examination but knew he could never meas­ ure up to Edwards’s spiritual discipline (Conforti 1995, 36–8, 41–4).

Missions and Disinterested Benevolence Perhaps Edwards’s greatest influence on future evangelicals related to self-sacrificing piety and devotion to missions. He supported international efforts for revival, and his church helped to sponsor an American Indian mission on the frontier at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where Edwards served after he lost his pastorate at Northampton. Moreover, Edwards’s best-selling book was not a major theological work like Freedom of the Will or Original Sin; it was the missionary classic, The Life of David Brainerd, pub­ lished in 1749 (WJE 7). David Brainerd, a colonial missionary to American Indians, admired Edwards and the admiration was mutual. He impressed Edwards with his spir­ ituality and his single-minded devotion to saving souls at all costs. Brainerd died in Edwards’s home at age 29 of tuberculosis, and he impressed Edwards in death as he had in life. To broaden Brainerd’s witness, Edwards published Brainerd’s journal along with Edwards’s commentary as The Life of David Brainerd, which inspired evangelicals with a story of self-sacrifice and devotion to Christ. Brainerd endured hardships in his mis­ sion, and evangelicals embellished these hardships as Brainerd’s legend grew. For many evan­gel­ic­als, Brainerd resembled a missionary Daniel Boone, who lived off the land, ate bear and other game, and braved the hazards of the frontier while living under God’s protection. Even venomous snakes would not dare bite him (Conforti 1995, 62–86). Brainerd’s legend progressed beyond the Life of David Brainerd, which Edwards intended as the perfect illustration of his Religious Affections, one of Edwards’s books Brainerd admired. Perhaps even more, Brainerd’s devotion to God resembled the moral life Edwards described in his posthumously published Nature of True Virtue. New Divinity ministers, like Samuel Hopkins and Jonathan Edwards, Jr, focused Edwards’s argument in True Virtue into a concern for ‘disinterested benevolence’. Authentic Christian faith and morality, they believed, centred on God and God’s concerns, not on

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North America   467 human self-interest. They criticized the self-centred faith of many Christians. Too often, Christians cared more about themselves than they cared about God. Some New Divinity ministers pushed this to an extreme, claiming that a true Christian would accept damnation if it would glorify God. There was much to argue with in this perspective, and many did, but it led Hopkins, Edwards, Jr, and others to advocate important moral reforms, including the abolition of slavery. All agreed that there was no better illustra­ tion of ‘disinterested benevolence’ than The Life of David Brainerd (Conforti 1995, 71–2, 75–8; Sweeney 2007, 225–6). The appeal of David Brainerd spanned across denominational and theological boundaries. John Wesley, founder of the Methodist movement and staunch Arminian with no love for Edwards’s Calvinism, admired The Life of David Brainerd so much that he published abridgments of it that went through seven editions. ‘Let every preacher read carefully over The Life of Brainerd,’ wrote Wesley to his fellow Methodists. ‘Let us be followers of him, as he was of Christ, in absolute self-devotion, in total deadness to the world, and in fervent love to God and man’ (Wesley 1853, 232). Due in part to Wesley’s encouragement and that of Bishop Francis Asbury, the most influential leader in American Methodism, Methodist circuit riders read Life of Brainerd and made him their model of sacrificial service on horseback in the American frontier. Throughout the nineteenth century, evangelicals travelled to Brainerd’s gravesite. Baptist Adoniram Judson Gordon, one of the greatest missionary advocates of his time, wrote of his pil­ grimage to Brainerd’s grave that he had ‘never received such spiritual impulse from any other human being as from him whose body has lain now for nearly a century and a half under that Northampton slab’ (Gordon 1896, 85; Conforti 1985, 309, 316; Conforti 1995, 62–86; Sweeney 2007, 222–3). Many evangelicals followed the example set by Wesley and others—they praised Edwards as a great preacher and defender of revival, without adopting his Calvinism. In addition to David Brainerd, Wesley published an edition of Edwards’s Religious Affections, although an edited one. Wesley did what he could to cut out the Calvinist fla­ vour of the work, calling Religious Affections a ‘dangerous heap, wherein much whole­ some food is mixed with much deadly poison’. There was an irony here, as Joseph Conforti notes. The New Divinity cited Edwards to oppose challenges from other reviv­ alists, including Methodists. Yet ‘the process of historical interpretation during the Second Great Awakening ended with the presentation of an increasingly Methodized Edwards to a popular evangelical audience.’ In addition to Life of Brainerd, Edwards’s personal writings like his ‘Resolutions’ and his Personal Narrative, spread throughout the country thanks to various presses, including the American Tract Society, which printed more than one million copies of his writings (Wesley 1964, 473; Conforti 1995, 33–4, 37, 42–4). Wesley’s adaptation of Edwards’s writings speaks not only to Edwards’s international influence, but to his authority among evangelicals who did not share his Calvinism. In a similar way, Edwards’s influence extended into Canada, seen especially in revivals called the ‘New Light Stir’, which occurred in the Maritime Provinces during the Revolutionary War. These revivals, some of which were led by evangelist and hymnist Henry Alline,

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468   James P. Byrd shared the Edwardsian emphasis on authentic religious experience and the New Birth, though they did not always reflect Edwards’s Calvinism (Marini 1982, 40–59; Noll 2002, 89–90, 148, 153–5). In addition, Canadian historians have been some of the leading Edwards scholars, including Don Schweitzer and Bruce Hindmarsh (see Schweitzer 2010; Hindmarsh 2003). In all, as Joseph Conforti summarized, at least three facets of Edwards attracted evan­ gel­ic­als. First, he provided the ultimate model for the spiritual life, both in his own wit­ ness and in his Life of Brainerd. Second, he was America’s preacher–theologian, not only a model for all revival preachers to follow, but he was the main authority on the conver­ sion experience. Third, he was an intellectual dynamo, recognized as the one American religious leader whose intellect garnered respect from European thinkers. Even those evangelicals who did not pay much attention to his theological treatises respected his intellect and found it a useful response to anyone who claimed American evangelicals were ignorant rubes (Conforti 1995, 36–8, 41–4).

The New England Theology Alongside his appeal to evangelical piety, Edwards had a major theological influence in the United States, manifesting in the ‘New England Theology’, which followed Edwards’s teachings while adapting his views to new situations (Conforti 1995, 4). Edwards’s greatest theological influence came through his Freedom of the Will (1754), a massive work that addressed the nature of freedom, and the question of whether freedom of the will contradicted the sovereignty of God and divine election. The full title of the work is worth quoting as it states the key issue as Edwards saw it: A Careful and Strict Enquiry into the Modern prevailing Notions of That Freedom of Will, Which Is Supposed to Be Essential to Moral Agency, Vertue and Vice, Reward and Punishment, Praise and Blame (WJE 1: 118). This was a direct attack on Arminianism, and especially on the claim that pre­des­tin­ ation turned people into machines who had no control over either their actions or their eternal destinies. Also attacked was the idea that if the will were determined in any way, then rewards and punishments were a farce. It made no sense to blame people for evil acts, or to praise them for good works, if these acts were determined and necessary, Arminians insisted. In Freedom of the Will, Edwards also engaged one of the major quandaries of Calvinist evangelicals: how could preachers offer God’s salvation to all if they believed that Christ died only for the elect? One of the keys to Edwards’s response was his famous distinction between ‘natural ability’ and ‘moral ability’. For Edwards, people were free if they had the ‘natural ability’ to do what they wanted. Most people are not free to run a six-minute mile, for instance, because they do not have the ‘natural ability’ to do so. Yet if people do have the ‘natural ability’ to do something, then they cannot blame anyone—including God—if they do not. This means that anyone who has the ‘natural ability’ to repent of their sins, ask Christ’s forgiveness, and live a holy life cannot blame God if they fail to do so.

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North America   469 The problem is that many people who have the ‘natural ability’ to repent and live godly lives, do not have the ‘moral ability’ to do so—that is, they do not want to repent, and they do not want to live for God. Most choices are determined, then, not by one’s natural inabilities, but by one’s ‘wants’—their inclinations and motives. So, unrepentant sinners had the ‘natural ability’ to repent, but they did not have the ‘moral ability’ to do so—sin corrupted them, misaligning their inclinations, causing them to want evil rather than good. Only God’s grace could change the heart and realign the inclinations, giving people the ‘moral ability’ to repent—that is, causing them to want to repent and live for God. No matter, in Edwards’s view—if they had the ‘natural ability’ to repent, God would hold them responsible if they did not. They were free to choose God, but they did not want to. Preachers should preach to all, therefore, offer the gospel to everyone, because almost everyone had the ‘natural ability’ to respond to the call (WJE 1: 156–62, 302–11; Sweeney 2007, 218–19; Holifield 2003, 121–2). This monumental work also addressed one of the major concerns of Edwards and the New Divinity—how one could believe in predestination and election without blaming God for damning innocent people to hell. Again, Edwards and the New Divinity drew on the distinction between ‘natural ability’ and ‘moral ability’—as long as people had the ‘natural ability’ to repent and to live a moral and Christian life, they could not blame God if they did not have the ‘moral ability’ to do so. In other words, sinners could not blame God if they were unwilling to repent (Holifield 2003, 122, 142–4). Many critics rejected Edwards’s view of ‘moral inability’. People were morally unable to repent on their own, Edwards said, because original sin tainted their souls and impaired their minds. Yet, if people needed God’s grace to give them the ‘moral ability’ to repent, and if God refused that grace to the non-elect, then it seemed, again, that God controlled who could be saved. In addressing this problem, Nathaniel William Taylor, professor at the new Yale Divinity School and main proponent of the New Haven Theology, stirred controversy, denying that Adam and Eve’s ‘original sin’ infected all people with guilt and a sinful nature until Christ supernaturally changed them. Taylor, who had studied at Yale with Edwards’s grandson, Timothy Dwight, agreed that all ­people had sinful natures. But Taylor denied that people received their sinful natures from Adam and Eve, just as he denied that sin was inevitable. ‘Sin is in the sinning,’ Taylor said. Everyone, despite their sinful natures, had the ability to resist sinning. Whereas Edwards insisted people naturally had a ‘moral inability’ to refuse sin and to turn to God on their own without grace, Taylor dismissed this idea. There was no ‘in­abil­ ity’, but only ‘ability’. This adapted Edwards’s thought in the Arminian direction. But, for Taylor, it was the best way to prevent people from blaming their sin and guilt on God, a concern shared by Edwards and the New Divinity ministers (Sweeney  2007, 226; Smiley 2017, 558). Freedom of the Will was a theological classic—to the point that a lot of non-theologians read it, though some wished they had not. After Mark Twain read Freedom of the Will, he wrote that he had ‘wallowed and reeked with Jonathan in his insane debauch’ until late in the night. Then he ‘rose immediately refreshed and fine at 10 this morning, but with a strange and haunting sense of having been on a three days’ tear with a drunken lunatic’.

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470   James P. Byrd In Twain’s view, Freedom of the Will revealed Edwards to be ‘a resplendent intellect gone mad’, especially near the end of the book, when ‘Calvinism and its God begins to show up and shine red and hideous in the glow from the fires of hell. . . . I was ashamed’, Twain wrote, ‘to be in such company’ (Twain 1917, 719–20; Gura 2007, 265–6).

Edwards and the Civil War A lot of intellectuals shared Twain’s opinion of Edwards’s theology. ‘By the time of the Civil War’, Douglas Sweeney wrote, ‘the New England Theology was dying’ (Sweeney 2007, 227). Just after the war began, a Methodist in Michigan preached on The Doctrine of Providence Viewed in Connection with the Present Crisis of the Country. He took a swipe at Edwards’s Freedom of the Will. This ‘celebrated metaphysical argument of the Elder Dr. Edwards’, which made the strongest motive the decider of the will, ‘is a soph­ ism, which clearly shows the inability of a great mind successfully to escape the conse­ quences of such reasoning’. There was no room for any fatalistic determinism in the Civil War, he said. This was a time for action, and all Americans needed to join the cause. ‘Should any supinely stand and fold his hands?’ No, everyone ‘from the President to the humblest citizen’ should move to action and ‘to unflinching duty’. Only then will Americans see ‘the noble bird, the American eagle, rising on prouder wing, and viewing with clearer eye, a higher destiny than she has ever yet beheld; then will her national honor be vindicated,’ he said (Baughman 1861, 13–14, 20–1). This was not the consensus view, however, as some wartime ministers praised Edwards’s theology and his literary acumen. On the eve of the Civil War, a Presbyterian minister in Illinois preached an inspiring sermon on the nation and the value of the Union, comparing how far the young nation had come in comparison with Europe. Speaking of American literature, he said many claim ‘we have no literature . . . of our own creating, . . . that is peculiar to ourselves and national’. Although American literature could not compare with that of England, ‘we have at least the beginnings of a literature’ that had enormous potential. As evidence, he cited Edwards as an American minister whose writings ranked ‘among the first of theologians’ (Glover 1860, 7–8). This enlistment of Edwards in the Civil War was part of the widespread respect for the Puritans during these years. The Civil War, the bloodiest conflict in American history, was one of the nation’s most anguished periods. It was also a period in which Americans turned to their colonial beginnings for examples of the American character and the role war played in it. Northern ministers recalled that New Divinity ministers, espe­ cially Jonathan Edwards, Jr. and Samuel Hopkins, strongly opposed slavery in the Revolutionary era. In addition, many in the North saw an attack on the Union as an attack on liberty, the ideal Americans had stood for since the Puritans. In a funeral ser­ mon from November 1861, a New England minister said that sacrifice for the Union was a worthy cause. A Confederate victory would mean ‘an end to that dream of liberty for which our sires crossed the sea, and were willing to cross the . . .sea of death, as so many

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North America   471 of them did’. Slavery was much worse than the ‘despotism’ the Puritans fled from, and they would hate it if they were seeing it from heaven (Bartol 1861, 11–12). This interest in colonial America during the Civil War included an interest in revivalism. Just before the Civil War began, Alexander T. McGill, Presbyterian min­ ister and professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, used Edwards and the Great Awakening as an example of how God raised up revivals just before calling his people to war. Just as Pentecost ‘prepared the Church for her martyr age, a great baptism of the Holy Ghost has often been a precursor to a baptism of blood’, he wrote (McGill 1861, 16–17). In God’s providential plan, revivals and wars often worked together to change hearts and to shape history, some ministers asserted. Preachers often said that revivals were God’s way of preparing Christians for the millennium—the 1000-year reign of Christ predicted in scripture—or even that revivals signified that the millennium had begun. The millennium would begin in America, many believed, and some ministers cited Edwards to support the claim. Although Edwards died a loyal subject of the British Empire, with no idea that there would be either a Revolutionary War or a new nation, northern ministers employed him to argue for the sacred mission of the United States. We find an example in a Thanksgiving sermon from November 1863, preached by Episcopal minister John M. Leavitt of Zanesville, Ohio. The war, in his view, was God’s purifying work, preparing the nation for its divine mission. This vision of a divine mis­ sion for America had been foreseen by Edwards, he said. ‘Jonathan Edwards appeared to kindle with prophetic flame when he uttered the sentiment—“As the old world crucified the Son of God, the new world shall usher in his final exaltation,” ’ which was probably a paraphrase of Edwards’s statement, ‘inasmuch as that continent has crucified Christ, they shall not have the honor of communicating religion in its most glorious state to us, but we to them’ (Leavitt 1863, 3, 6; WJE 4: 355–6). That same year, as the Civil War raged, Methodist abolitionist Gilbert Haven said, ‘America is the center of the history of the world to-day.’ The nation must live up to God’s commands to be a nation for liberty against slavery. ‘We must expunge the word “colored” from our Minutes. It ought never to have found a place there’ because Christ saves all people ‘with the same blood’ and on ‘the same altar!’ Sin had to be purged, no matter the cost. For example, ‘Edwards was driven forth into the wilderness, and among savages, by his aristocratic church of Northampton, after it had been blessed, under his labors, with the greatest revival it had ever enjoyed, simply because he scourged a popu­ lar sin.’ Americans needed a share in the kind of courage Edwards and others exempli­ fied—the courage to attack popular sins (Haven 1869, 352, 356, 358). Also employing the image of a courageous Edwards, some ministers drew on Edwards as an example of the right kind of radicalism—one who knew how to stand up against evil, as Americans should stand up against the evil of slavery by fighting the war. ‘I regard it as a holy war,’ said Presbyterian Samuel T. Spear of Brooklyn, New York. ‘The sword was never drawn in a more sacred cause, and should never be returned to its scabbard till the end is gained.’ Spear said this, knowing how much the war had cost, especially the blood already shed. But that sacrifice made the war that more necessary. The Union

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472   James P. Byrd must destroy the Confederacy, but it would require a harder war. ‘We have already lost much by playing war; and now if we mean to win in this struggle, we must make the rebels feel the war in its utmost severity.’ For some, opposition to slavery was radical— but radical did not always mean fanatical, which history proved. Some called the Puritans radical, yet God used them, as God used the patriots of the American Revolution. There was no better example than Jonathan Edwards, ‘that illustrious prince in theology, that profoundest of thinkers, as well as that most beautiful exhibition of the Christian virtues’. Edwards accepted ridicule from his church and loss of his position instead of compromising his principles (Spear 1862, 6–8, 11, 16–17). In addition to Edwards’s courage, his spirituality received notice in a sermon after the Lincoln assassination. One of the major concerns that ministers had with President Lincoln had to do with his religion. Raised in a Calvinist home, he spoke a lot about providence and God’s purposes, but he never professed to know what those purposes were and, most concerning to ministers, he never joined a church, nor did he speak openly about his spirituality. Added to all that, he was assassinated in a theatre on Good Friday, which appalled many minsters who saw theatres as dens of iniquity. ‘We should not say that President Lincoln had the finest spiritual quality,’ admitted Rev. William Potter in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Lincoln ‘was not a Fenelon, a Thomas a Kempis, a Channing, or an Edwards’. Instead, Lincoln’s faith ‘was on the broad level of common sense’. It was a different kind of religious faith that Lincoln possessed, which was not necessarily superior to the theological depth and piety of Edwards’s, but Potter gave Lincoln credit for ‘his sharp logic and keen humor’, which enabled him to see through many absurd theological claims. For example, when ministers droned on about wanting the Lord to be on Lincoln’s side in the war, he responded that he was less concerned to have God on his side and more concerned ‘that myself and the people should be on the Lord’s side’ (Potter 1865, 36).

Edwards and the Late Victorian Era This admiration of Edwards and the Puritans expanded after the Civil War. Like the Pilgrims, the Puritans became important as the beginning of the ‘American story’—an Anglo-American narrative of the nation’s beginnings. Amid rapid change in society and as the nation recovered from the bloodiest war in the nation’s history, Americans waxed nostalgic for colonial beginnings, and especially for the heroic, Puritan spirit. New Englanders erected monuments in honour of Puritans, including Edwards, and wrote histories of the nation with the Puritans as the vanguard of the American tradition. Edwards and the sober-minded Puritans stood for industry, frugality, and morality in the face of Victorian excess. The Calvinism of Edwards and the Puritans seemed to be forgotten in this selective remembering (Conforti 1995, 145–6, 148–52). This revival of interest in colonial America happened at about the same time—and addressed the same needs—as the rise of American literature as an area of specialization among scholars. In Moses Coit Tyler’s A History of American Literature (1878), which fit well as required reading in high school and college classes, twelve of his chapters ­concentrated

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North America   473 on New England (Conforti 1995, 163–4). In Tyler’s narrative, Edwards p ­ ossessed a towering intellect, in science and in religion, combined with an intense spirituality. Even his ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’ received praise, as Tyler commended its ‘merciless logic’ and ‘overwhelming intensity of realism’. Aside from his mastery of theology, ‘even from the literary point of view, and in spite of his own low estimate of his literary merits, he deserves high rank.’ This was high praise for Edwards’s contributions to the nation’s liter­ ary development, especially in a book that ‘shaped the study of American literature for more than a generation’ (Tyler 1881, 190–2; Conforti 1995, 166, 185). In this age of Puritan recovery, books on Puritans proliferated. One of the most suc­ cessful authors, Alice Morse Earle, celebrated Puritan beginnings in books like The Sabbath in Puritan New England (1891), which expanded into twelve editions. As she described them, Puritans were ‘brave, stern men and women’ who could be ‘cruel and intolerant’, yet ‘never cowardly, sternly obeying the word of God’, although they did not always understand it properly (Earle 1898, 327). Puritan strength was in synch with the times. As President Theodore Roosevelt said of Edwards, he ‘always acted in accordance with the strongest sense of duty, and there wasn’t a touch of the mollycoddle about him’ (Literary Digest 1916, 470; Conforti 1995, 158). The most complete biography of Edwards during these years was published in 1889 by Alexander  V.G.  Allen, a teacher in the Episcopal Theological School of Cambridge, Massachusetts. In this book, which appeared in the ‘American Religious Leaders’ series, Allen apologized for Edwards’s attachment to a backward theology, but said ‘he is the forerunner of the later New England transcendentalism quite as truly as the author of a modified Calvinism.’ Edwards stood ‘among the great names in America of the last cen­ tury’, Allen concluded, ‘the only other which competes in celebrity with’ Edwards was ‘Benjamin Franklin, who labored for this world as assiduously as Edwards for another world’. This was just one among many comparisons between Franklin and Edwards that would expand in the twentieth century (Allen 1889, 385, 388; Conforti 1995, 162–3). As renowned literary scholar Barrett Wendell put it, Franklin and Edwards represented ‘two distinct aspects of American character’, with Edwards representing religion and ‘the last­ ing tradition of the English Bible’ and Franklin representing ‘the equally lasting tradition of the English law’. Edwards, then, along with others in the colonial New England Calvinist tradition, were used to construct a common heritage and a ‘civil religion’ for the increasingly diverse nation. This narrative of Puritan origins would face widespread opposition, however, from those who did not align with this white, Protestant definition of the American origins and character (Conforti 1995, 166, 185; cf. Tyler 1881, 190–2).

The Neo-Orthodox ‘Recovery’ of Edwards As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, some Americans looked beyond New England to new founding heroes in honouring the American heritage. In the Progressive era (1890s–1920s), historians like Vernon L. Parrington evaluated American

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474   James P. Byrd history as a conflict waged between the friends and enemies of democracy (Hofstadter 1968, 414–15; Hall 1968, 49). From this perspective, he condemned Puritans for their theocratic government, which stood in contrast to the establishment of freedom and democracy that would later dawn in America. The nation’s heroes were those champions of democracy, led by Jefferson and his ideals, not Puritans. Parrington did give Puritans credit for their church polity, which had democratic features, but not their theology, which reeked of Calvinism. If there was a hero of the Puritan era, it was radical Roger Williams, who, despite his Calvinism, advocated religious freedom against the Puritan theocracy and rehearsed some of the same arguments Jefferson would make over a cen­ tury later (Parrington 1927, 20–1, 64–6). This negative treatment of the Puritans carried over to Edwards. Parrington called the Great Awakening a form of ‘lurid terrorism’, and praised Edwards for his intellect but condemned him for his theological backwardness. In his Main Currents in American Thought, Parrington titled one of its sections, ‘The Anachronism of Jonathan Edwards’. The same year (1927) that Parrington called Edwards an ‘anachronism’, Charles Beard called Edwards’s books ‘occult writings’ (Conforti 1995, 187–9; Gura 2007, 268; Crocco 2007, 306). A biography from this period, Jonathan Edwards: The Fiery Puritan, was the work of prolific historian, Henry Bamford Parkes. In his epilogue, titled ‘the Blight upon Posterity’, Parkes wrote, ‘Edwards died apparently a failure (Parkes 1930, 249). Edwards ‘was a great man’, and ‘the biggest intellect in the history of American Christianity’. But the New Divinity hardened his poetic theology into ‘mathematical tables’, and proved to be ‘more rigidly Puritanical’ than Edwards. Bellamy, for instance, ‘thundered against dancing’, and whereas Edwards was a drinker and ‘a heavy smoker’, Samuel Hopkins ‘neither smoked nor drank’. Although he would not have approved, Edwards’s followers degenerated into hardened Calvinists and moralistic fanatics who were out of touch with their intellectual times (Parkes 1930, 251–2). Even as Parrington and other Progressive-era historians marginalized Edwards, other scholars called him one of America’s greatest thinkers. Often, these lines of thought repeated much of what Alexander V.G. Allen had said decades earlier—that Edwards was a forerunner of Emerson and the Transcendentalist movement in American phil­ oso­phy. ‘Edwards was an originator,’ said Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce in 1911. ‘If the sectarian theological creed that he defended was to our minds narrow, what he him­ self saw was very far-reaching and profound.’ Also, ‘Edwards and Emerson had given tongue to the meaning of two different stages of our American culture. And these were thus far our only philosophical voices,’ Royce wrote (Crocco 2007, 308). Despite these appreciative assessments of Edwards, judgments like Parrington’s led many to believe that Edwards’s reputation had faded to irrelevance in the early ­twentieth century, only to be resuscitated by neo-orthodox thinkers like Joseph Haroutunian (Piety versus Moralism: The Passing of the New England Theology, 1932), Arthur C. McGiffert (Jonathan Edwards, 1932) and H. Richard Niebuhr (The Kingdom of God in America, 1937). Niebuhr looked for a ‘Jonathan Edwards redivivus’—an Edwards who could speak a prophetic word to the overly optimistic liberal Protestantism that held such public authority in the United States. In Protestant liberalism, Niebuhr

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North America   475 wrote, ‘a God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judg­ ment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.’ In response, Niebuhr articulated two main themes of the neo-orthodox Edwards. First, ‘theocentrism’—a theology that recovered the sovereignty of God and put God at the centre of religious life, reversing the trend of Protestant liberalism to place humanity—including human needs and happiness—at the centre of theological inquiry. Second, realism—a recov­ ery of sin, recognizing that humanity, despite evolutionary development, remains flawed, self-centred, and capable of catastrophic evil. In Niebuhr’s assessment, Edwards was a forerunner of twentieth-century existentialism. Speaking out against Progressive historians and their gross materialism, Niebuhr wanted to bring back religion’s power to function outside of and against culture—a point he would refine in his influential Christ and Culture over a ­ decade later. (Niebuhr  1956; Niebuhr  1937, xv, 193; Crocco 2007, 310–11; Conforti 1995, 190–2). The unquestioned leader in the neo-orthodox interpretation of Edwards was Perry Miller, a Harvard professor of American literature. Despite his atheism, Miller’s realism, fuelled by his wartime experience, led him to sympathize with the Puritans and Edwards. In his essay, ‘From Edwards to Emerson’, published in 1940, Miller extended the connection between these two thinkers that began in nineteenth century. Yet his major statement on Edwards came in 1949, when Miller published his intellectual biog­ raphy, Jonathan Edwards. This book contrasted the external biography of Edwards—the details of his life—with the life of his mind, giving much more space to the latter. His analysis of Edwards fit well alongside his monumental, two-volume intellectual history of Puritanism, The New England Mind (1939, 1953). As Joseph Conforti states, ‘Miller’s biography became the starting point for most of the work on Edwards for nearly three decades.’ Miller also led in developing The Works of Jonathan Edwards at Yale, beginning in 1953—a massive effort that spearheaded a renaissance in Edwards’s studies that remains vibrant. For all that Miller did in inspiring scholars to study Edwards, he took him out of his eighteenth-century world, envisioning him as an isolated genius. In Miller’s hands, Edwards was more psychologist than theologian, more fascinated by Locke than by the Bible. Furthermore, Miller neglected Edwards’s best-selling book, the Life of David Brainerd, and its widespread influence, just as Miller impeached the New Divinity for misrepresenting Edwards’s thought (Conforti 1995, 192–4).

Conclusion ‘Ever since the eighteenth century’, Douglas Sweeney writes, ‘Jonathan Edwards’s legacy and the fate of evangelicals in America have been symbiotically linked. As Edwards’s reputation has fared, so has the evangelical movement’ (Sweeney 2007, 217). In Edwards’s lifetime, there was no ‘evangelical movement’ as such, but his life and writings contrib­ uted greatly to that movement’s beginnings and its development. Yet evangelicals never monopolized Edwards’s legacy. Not only have non-evangelicals made their own uses of

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476   James P. Byrd Edwards, but they have often done so in opposition to—or in ignorance of—Edwards’s reception history among evangelicals. Edwards shaped a theological movement in New England, but his reputation outlived the New England Theology. Edwards’s Calvinism and attacks on Arminianism did not prevent America’s leading Arminians— the Methodists—from using him to support their cause. Equipped with parts of the Religious Affections, the Life of David Brainerd, and his personal writings they Methodized Edwards and expanded his reputation. Meanwhile, northern ministers enlisted him to summon patriotic devotion in the Civil War, and after the war they raised him up as one of the main shapers of the ‘American character’ before the Revolution. All these uses of Edwards set the stage for the widespread academic study of Edwards that exploded in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with over 5000 books, dissertations, articles, and theses published on Edwards.

Works Cited Allen, Alexander V.G. (1889). Jonathan Edwards. American Religious Leaders series. Boston and New York: Haughton, Mifflin and Company. Bartol, C. A. (1861). Our Sacrifices. A Sermon Preached in the West Church, November 3, 1861, Being the Sunday after the Funeral of Lieut. William Lowell Putnam. Boston: Ticknor and Fields. Baughman, J. A. (1861). The Sovereignty of Jehovah, or, The Doctrine of Divine Providence: A Sermon Preached on the Doctrine of Providence Viewed in Connection with the Present Crisis of the Country. Hudson, MI: W. T. B. Schermerhorn. Conforti, Joseph (1985). ‘David Brainerd and the Nineteenth Century Missionary Movement.’ Journal of the Early Republic 5 (3) (Autumn): 309–29. Conforti, Joseph (1995). Jonathan Edwards, Religious Tradition, & American Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Crocco, Stephen D. (2007). ‘Edwards’s Intellectual Legacy.’ Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards. Ed. Stephen J. Stein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 300–24. Earle, Alice Morse (1898). The Sabbath in Puritan New England. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Finney, Charles  G. (1835). Lectures on Revivals of Religion. 6th ed. New York: Leavitt, Lord & Co. Glover, L. M. (1860). Our Country Vindicated. A Thanksgiving Discourse. Delivered Nov. 29, 1860. Jacksonville, IL: Catlin & Co. Gordon, Ernest B. (1896). Adoniram Judson Gordon: A Biography. New York: Fleming H. Revell. Gura, Philip F. (2007). ‘Edwards and American Literature.’ Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards. Ed. Stephen J. Stein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 262–79. Hall, David  D. (1968). Puritanism in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Haven, Gilbert (1869). National Sermons. Sermons, Speeches and Letters on Slavery and Its War: From the Passage of the Fugitive Slave Bill to the Election of President Grant. Boston: Lee and Shepard. Hindmarsh, Bruce (2003). The Reception of Jonathan Edwards by Early Evangelicals in England. Edited by David  W.  Kling and Douglas  A.  Sweeney. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.

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North America   477 Hofstadter, Richard (1968). The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Holifield, E.  Brooks (2003). Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War. New Haven: Yale University Press. Leavitt, John M. (1863). Sermon Preached in St. James’ Episcopal Church, Zanesville, Ohio on the Occasion of the Nation’s Thanksgiving, Nov. 26th, 1863. Zanesville Daily Courier Office. Literary Digest, Vol. LII (1916). New York: Funk & Wagnalls. Marini, Stephen  A. (1982). Radical Sects of Revolutionary New England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McGill, Alexander T. (1861). Sinful but Not Forsaken. A Sermon Preached in the Presbyterian Church, Fifth Avenue and Nineteenth Street, New York, on the Day of National Fasting, January 4, 1861. New York: Anson D. F. Randolph. Nevin, John Williamson (1843). The Anxious Bench. Chambersburg, PA: Office of the Weekly Messenger. Niebuhr, H. Richard (1956). Christ and Culture. New York: Harper & Brothers. Niebuhr, H. Richard (1937. Reprint edition, 1988). The Kingdom of God in America. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Noll, Mark A. (2002). America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. New York: Oxford University Press. Park, Edwards  A. (1859). The Atonement: Discourses and Treatises. Boston: Congregational Board. Parkes, Henry Bamford (1930). Jonathan Edwards: The Fiery Puritan. New York: Minton, Balch, & Company. Parrington, Vernon L. (1927). Main Currents in American Thought, vol. 1. New York: Harcourt Brace. Potter, William  J. (1865). The National Tragedy: Four Sermons Delivered before the First Congregational Society, New Bedford, on the Life and Death of Abraham Lincoln. New Bedford, MA: Abraham Taber & Brother. Schweitzer, Don, editor (2010). Jonathan Edwards as Contemporary: Essays in Honor of Sang Hyun Lee. New York: Peter Lang. Smiley, Bobby. (2017). ‘Taylor, Nathaniel William.’ In The Jonathan Edwards Encyclopedia. Ed. Harry  S.  Stout, Kenneth  P.  Minkema, and Adriaan  C.  Neele. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans. 558. Spear, Samuel T. (1862). Radicalism and the National Crisis, a Sermon Preached in the South Presbyterian Church of Brooklyn, October 19th, 1862. New York: William W. Rose. Stout, Harry S., Kenneth P. Minkema, and Adriaan C. Neele, eds (2017). The Jonathan Edwards Encyclopedia. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans. Sweeney, Douglas A. (2007). ‘Evangelical Tradition in America.’ Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards. Ed. Stephen  J.  Stein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 217–38. Sweeney, Douglas  A. (2017). ‘New Divinity.’ In The Jonathan Edwards Encyclopedia. Ed. Harry  S.  Stout, Kenneth  P.  Minkema, and Adriaan  C.  Neele. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans. 400–4. Twain, Mark (1917). Mark Twain’s Letters, Vol II. Ed. Albert Bigelow Paine. Tyler, Moses Coit (1881). A History of American Literature II: 1676–1765. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons.

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478   James P. Byrd Wesley, John (1964). John Wesley. Ed. Albert C. Outler. New York: Oxford University Press. Wesley, John (1853). The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, Vol V. Ed. John Emory. New York: Carlton & Phillips.

Author Bio James P. Byrd is Professor of American Religious History, chair of the Graduate Department of Religion, and Associate Dean for Graduate Education and Research at Vanderbilt University Divinity School and Graduate Department of Religion. He earned his master’s degree at Duke University and his Ph.D. at Vanderbilt University. His research interests centre on religion, violence, and the Bible in American history. His latest book is Sacred Scripture, Sacred War: The Bible and the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). His upcoming book, A Holy Baptism of Fire and Blood: The Bible and the American Civil War, will be published in 2021 with Oxford University Press.

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chapter 31

Br ita i n a n d Eu rope Jonathan Yeager

Edwards Establishes an International Reputation Jonathan Edwards’s reception in Britain and Europe was based first on his reputation as a revivalist, and later as a theologian and philosopher. His initial reputation as a re­vival­ist and important American thinker was dependent on eighteenth-century booksellers, printers, and editors who published his works. Later in the eighteenth century, and into the twentieth century, British and European intellectuals began scrutinizing Edwards’s thought, leading to the modern perception of him as an innovative Calvinist to be celebrated, or an outmoded relic of the past, depending on the sympathies and approach of those who have studied him. This essay explains how Edwards’s initial ­publications established him first as a revivalist, and then later as a theologian and philosopher. The various booksellers, printers, and editors involved in publishing Edwards’s works greatly influenced the reception of Jonathan Edwards’s writings in Britain and Europe. The location where Edwards’s writings were printed had a profound impact on their reception. Throughout Edwards’s lifetime, there were three main places where his sermons, treatises, and books were printed: London, Boston, and Edinburgh. Of these three, London was the most important. As the largest city in the British Empire, with a population of roughly 600,000 people at that time, London was arguably the epicentre of the publishing world. Edwards’s international fame came as a direct result of the London publication of A Faithful Narrative in 1737. This was his detailed account of a revival that had taken place at his parish in Northampton, Massachusetts at the end of 1734 that lasted until the spring of 1735. At least twenty imprints of A Faithful Narrative appeared before the end of the eighteenth century, including multiple editions and reprints in English, German, and Dutch. More than any of his other books, A Faithful

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480   Jonathan Yeager Narrative propelled Edwards to stardom as a leader of the Great Awakening in America and the larger transatlantic evangelical movement. Edwards’s status as a junior minister in New England determined the lesser role that he would play during the stages of publication for A Faithful Narrative. The distinguished Boston clergyman Benjamin Colman wrote to Edwards, requesting a report of the awakening. After reviewing it, Colman took the letter, explaining the nature of the revival, and had it appended to a sermon by Edwards’s uncle William Williams that was published in 1736. Colman then forwarded Williams’s sermon with the added revival account to the London ministers John Guyse and Isaac Watts, who then asked their Boston correspondent for a fuller version of the awakening, with the intent of having it published in London. As a senior Boston clergyman, Colman placed himself in the position as the initial editor of the revival account, abridging Edwards’s narrative so that it would be suitable as an addendum to Williams’s sermon, while also acting as the author’s literary agent when communicating with Guyse and Watts in London. It was Colman’s decision, and not Edwards’s, to have this brief letter about the revival appended to Williams’s ­sermon. Edwards, in fact, expressed his concern to Colman about attaching his letter to the end of his uncle’s sermon, fearing that the elder Boston clergyman had acted rashly, and had not received approval from Williams. Despite his reservations, Edwards nevertheless fully submitted to Colman’s authority and plan of writing a fuller account of the awakening at Northampton to be forwarded to Guyse and Watts, who would then edit it for publication in London. Referring to Guyse and Watts as the editors of a forthcoming fuller version of the narrative, Edwards wrote to Colman in the spring of 1737, saying that ‘I willingly submit to their correction, if they think fit to publish it’ (WJE 16: 69–70). Edwards supplied the content of the revival narrative, but it was Guyse and Watts of London who edited the manuscript and secured a bookseller willing to publish it. As an unknown author from America, Edwards had no contacts with anyone involved in the book trade in London. No bookseller or printer in London would have been willing to underwrite a significant work by a young and unproven author about a remarkable awakening in a small town in provincial Massachusetts that affected hundreds of people in the Connecticut Valley (Sher 2006; Raven 2007). Edwards needed the patronage of two well-known and respected ministers in London to authenticate his story, and to use their influence to convince a member of the book trade to have his narrative printed. The London bookseller John Oswald eventually published A Faithful Narrative. By this time, Oswald was an established bookseller and recognized patron of religious literature in the London community. He published over 150 sermons during his lifetime, accounting for nearly half the corpus of his sponsored works. He exhibited a special interest in evangelical literature, publishing books, for instance, by the English ministers Philip Doddridge and George Whitefield, the Scottish divines Ebenezer and Ralph Erskine, and the female poets Anne Dutton and Elizabeth Singer Rowe. Importantly, Oswald underwrote several sermons by the dissenting minister John Guyse, who, along with Isaac Watts, spearheaded the efforts to have Edwards’s narrative published in

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Britain and Europe   481 London. By 1737, Oswald’s name could be found on the imprint of no fewer than ten of Guyse’s authored texts. Given this connection, it is likely that Guyse used his influence to convince Oswald to publish the revival narrative by Edwards. The full title of Edwards’s revival account appeared in print as A Faithful Narrative of the Surprizing Work of God in the Conversion of Many Souls in Northampton, and the Neighbouring Towns and Villages of New-Hampshire in New-England. This small, duodecimo book of less than 150 pages was printed on coarse paper, and, as stated on the bottom of the title page, sold for the reasonable price of one British shilling unbound, or 1s.6d. in calfskin. The fact that Edwards had no control during the publication process of his own book is evident on the title page. As the American historian Frank Lambert has rightly pointed out, it is unlikely that Edwards would have called this revival ‘a surprising work of God’ since he had been raised to expect periods of spiritual resurgence in various communities across colonial America. His grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, was a leader of many of these awakenings, or ‘harvests’ as he called them, with Edwards arriving in Northampton as an assistant pastor to experience the last of these (Lambert 2000). It is plausible that Isaac Watts and John Guyse came up with the title for Edwards’s book. When they received news of the revival at Northampton from Benjamin Colman of Boston, Watts revealingly called this event a ‘strange and surprizing work of God’. So strange and surprising in fact that Watts told Colman that he and his min­is­ter­ ial colleague ‘have not heard any thing like it since the Reformation, nor perhaps since the days of the apostles’.1 Whereas Edwards had grown up expecting God’s spirit to work in miraculous ways through local awakenings, Watts and Guyse had no such experience, which is presumably why they almost certainly titled the book, A Faithful Narrative of the Surprizing Work of God. Watts and Guyse did not limit themselves to tinkering with the title only; they also took the liberty of writing the preface and editing the book. In their preface, they remarked about the ‘astonishing’ revival that took place at Northampton, while cautioning their readers about some of the conversion stories that Edwards described in the narrative. Here, Watts and Guyse were no doubt referring to Edwards’s inclusion of the conversion accounts of two young women, one of whom was a four-year-old girl. In a world where females were suspected of being ruled by their passions, and not capable of offering credible testimony, the detailed accounts of Abigail Hutchinson and Phebe Bartlett in Edwards’s narrative might have been offensive to the more astute London readership, and so Watts and Guyse wanted to forewarn their audience of a few peculiar sections within the book. Within the preface, Watts and Guyse took great pains to argue that Edwards’s narrative was nevertheless accurate, pointing to the credible testimonies of ‘many other persons in New-England’ who witnessed this event (Edwards 1737). In addition to writing the preface, Watts and Guyse also arranged the layout of the narrative, and while they left most of Edwards’s story intact, they made minor editorial adjustments. 1  Isaac Watts to Benjamin Colman, February 28, 1737, Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 9 (1894–5), 352–3.

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482   Jonathan Yeager Despite the efforts of Benjamin Colman, Isaac Watts, and John Guyse in assisting with the publication of A Faithful Narrative, Edwards was sorely disappointed with the finished product. He was so irritated with the editorial work of Colman, Watts, and Guyse that Edwards took the liberty of writing some personal comments on the presentation copy that had been sent to Yale College. On the inside flyleaf cover of Yale’s presentation copy, Edwards signed his name, after inscribing the following remarks: ‘It must be noted that the Rev. publishers of the ensuing narrative, by much abridging of it, and altering the phrase and manner of expression, and not strictly observing the words of the original, have through mistake, published some things diverse from fact.’ The most glaring deficiency with the London edition can be seen on the title page, which ­embarrassingly situates the revival as having taken place in New Hampshire, rather than correctly in Hampshire County, Massachusetts. Edwards crossed out the word ‘New’ before Hampshire on the Yale presentation copy, so that the conversion of many ­hundred souls rightfully occurred in Northampton, and the neighbouring towns and villages of ‘Hampshire’ in New England. He also meticulously went through the book, crossing out various words and commenting in the margins about specific errors made by the editors. By the time that he had thoroughly examined the printed version of A Faithful Narrative, Edwards had no desire to have any of his manuscripts published in London, and this would in fact be the last of his first editions to be printed in England’s capital city. From this point onward, he made certain that he would have greater control of his manuscripts, which is why the bulk of his future books would be published in nearby Boston, where he could utilize the services of his trusted friend and fellow Congregational minister Thomas Foxcroft to oversee the presswork. Ironically, despite Edwards’s frustration with the unwelcome editorial changes made by Colman, Watts, and Guyse, A Faithful Narrative brought him international acclaim as a revivalist. Before the publication of A Faithful Narrative, virtually no one had heard of Edwards outside New England. But shortly after its publication, he began to gain attention as a leader of the evangelical movement in America. Evidence of Edwards’s transition from obscurity to celebrity status can be seen on the title pages of the German and English reprints of his book. The first German edition of A Faithful Narrative in 1738 did not mention Edwards on the title page. Instead, the more established and familiar names of Colman, Watts, and Guyse were featured (Stievermann  2014).2 This initial German edition of A Faithful Narrative was edited by the Pietist minister Johann Adam Steinmetz and published at Magdeburg. Serving as a Lutheran abbot and super­in­tend­ ent of the Prussian Duchy at a monastery near Magdeburg, Steinmetz used his influence to publish German translations of books by likeminded Christians, such as Philip Doddridge and Isaac Watts, while also editing several journals that transmitted news of revivals in America and Britain. Two years later, a German-born Pietist named Isaac Le Long published a Dutch translation of Steinmetz’s German edition of A Faithful 2  Stievermann’s article indicates that two German editions of A Faithful Narrative were published in 1738.

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Britain and Europe   483 Narrative (Bebbington  2007). This time, the 1740 Dutch edition displayed Edwards’s name on the title page, an indication that the American minister had established a reputation in Europe. By the early 1740s, Edwards was known internationally as the author of A Faithful Narrative. Further evidence of his burgeoning fame can be seen in the reprints of Edwards’s next major revivalist work, The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God, first published in Boston in 1741. The following year, a London reprint of The Distinguishing Marks appeared, identifying Edwards as the ‘Pastor of the Church of Christ at Northampton, and Author of the New-England Narrative, which was lately reprinted at London, and recommended by the Rev. Dr. I. Watts and Dr. Guyse’. The publisher of the 1741 London reprint of The Distinguishing Marks was Samuel Mason, a friend of the Welsh revivalist Howell Harris and the Anglican itinerant preacher George Whitefield. In the same year, a Scottish reprint of The Distinguishing Marks was published in Edinburgh by the firm of Thomas Lumisden and John Robertson. This reprint included a preface ‘To the Scots Reader’ by the Scottish evangelical minister John Willison, who is most likely the person responsible for shepherding this book through the press. The elderly Willison had become a prominent clergyman in Scotland by the mid-1720s. Significantly, Willison’s timely 23 June 1742 preface coincided with the most important revival in Scottish history. During that summer, the town of Cambuslang near Glasgow became the center of a series of awakenings in the western part of Scotland. The revivals in western Scotland peaked in July and August of 1742 when crowds reportedly numbering some 30,000 people gathered to participate in two communion services and hear the fervent preaching of men like George Whitefield. Willison had been one of the Scottish evangelical leaders of this revival and made it a point to link the events in Scotland with similar spiritual awakenings that had taken place in America under the leadership of Edwards (Fawcett 1971; Noll 2003; Beebe 2013). One of the main offshoots of the Cambuslang revival took shape in the nearby town of Kilsyth, roughly fifteen miles away. Like Cambuslang, the town of Kilsyth also experienced a noteworthy spiritual resurgence that centred around two communion services in 1742. The Kilsyth minister James Robe took notes of the event, publishing an account of it later that year. Not coincidentally, Robe entitled his book, A Faithful Narrative of the Extraordinary Work of the Spirit of God, at Kilsyth, and Other Congregations in the Neighborhood, an obvious tip of the hat to Edwards’s Faithful Narrative, and further demonstrating that the American minister had by the early 1740s become a recognized leader of the transatlantic revival movement. A second mimicking of Edwards’s Faithful Narrative can be seen in the title of an account about an awakening that occurred in the Veluwe region in Gelderland, within the Dutch Republic. Gerardus Kuypers, a pastor in Nijkerk, wrote about a revival that took place in in his town in 1749, publishing his version one year later as Getrouw verhaal en apologie of verdeediging der Zaaken Voorgevallen in de gemeente te Nieukerk op de Veluwe, the beginning of which translates as ‘a faithful narrative’ (Van Lieburg 2008; Ward  1992). One of the ministers of the Scots Church at Rotterdam named Hugh Kennedy published Dutch and English editions of this revival in the early 1750s. But

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484   Jonathan Yeager before then, he had issued a Dutch translation of James Robe’s narrative on Kilsyth in 1743 (Kennedy  1751;  1752;  1743). In addition to paying homage to Edwards’s Faithful Narrative through various reprints and imitated titles, all the revival literature mentioned intended to show that the awakening at Northampton, Massachusetts was part of a greater transatlantic evangelical movement. Even anti-Calvinists appreciated Edwards’s revivalist literature. The Arminian evangelical John Wesley read with great interest Edwards’s account of the awakening in Northampton in the early 1740s, determining that this and other early revivalist works by the American theologian could be useful to his Methodist societies. Beginning in 1744, Wesley issued abridgements of A Faithful Narrative, The Distinguishing Marks, and [Some] Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New-England, gutting the Calvinistic elements in them, and printing them cheaply so that his society members could purchase them for a few pence. Although Wesley could not stand Edwards’s Reformed theology, he thought that the evangelistic message presented within his early works could help lead people to Christ (Rivers 2010; Allison 2012).

Edwards’s Later Works Having established an international reputation as a revivalist by the 1740s, Edwards enhanced his prominence as an evangelical author in Britain and Europe through his later works, most of which were theological in nature. During his lifetime, the key individuals who assisted with the publication for most of Edwards’s books hailed from Boston. Samuel Kneeland printed the majority of his writings, which at first included most of his sermons, a third edition of A Faithful Narrative in 1738, and first editions of revival works like The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God (1741), Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New-England (1742), and Religious Affections (1746). Kneeland also printed notable first editions of his theological treatises, including Freedom of the Will (1754) and Original Sin (1758). Throughout much of this time, the Boston evangelical minister Thomas Foxcroft served as Edwards’s chief proofreader and editor. When Edwards died unexpectedly in 1758 from complications with a smallpox inoculation, the task of publishing his remaining manuscripts fell on his disciples Samuel Hopkins and Joseph Bellamy, who worked with Foxcroft and Kneeland to produce a biography of Edwards and a collection of his sermons. Hopkins, working primarily with Bellamy, also edited a short book entitled Two Dissertations, which included essays by Edwards on The Nature of True Virtue and The End for Which God Created the World. After a number of setbacks and several years, Hopkins finally completed the Two Dissertations and his Life of Edwards, which contained some biographical material on Edwards’s wife and daughter Esther Edwards Burr, a few letters, and a collection of eighteen discourses with a separate title page entitled Sermons on Various Important Subjects. Kneeland completed the presswork for these books from Boston in 1765.

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Britain and Europe   485 Unfortunately, the Two Dissertations and Hopkins’s Life of Edwards were poor sellers. Kneeland reportedly had stacks of both books in his shop collecting dust, and was considering selling them as wastepaper. Around the same time, Hopkins received word that several copies of the books sent to Scotland were going to be returned to America unsold. Exasperated with his lack of success, Hopkins resigned from his position as the editor of Edwards’s manuscripts, turning over his mentor’s papers to Jonathan Edwards Jr.

John Erskine’s Role in Promoting Edwards Nothing more might have come in promoting Edwards’s writings outside America had it not been for the Scottish Presbyterian minister and laird John Erskine, who became the leading disseminator of Edwards’s writings in the latter half of the century (Yeager  2011). Although other British admirers of Edwards, including the English Particular minister John Collett Ryland and the Anglican cleric Charles De Coetlogon, used their influence on printers and booksellers to issue reprints and a few new editions of Edwards’s works later in the eighteenth century, these were predominantly his smaller discourses and sermons. The exception was William Gordon, the Independent minister from Hertfordshire, England, who convinced his brother-in-law and London bookseller Thomas Field to issue an abridgement of Edwards’s Religious Affections in 1762, as well as a new edition of Freedom of the Will in the same year. Despite these efforts, no one did more to promote the full corpus of Edwards’s writings within Britain in the latter half of the eighteenth century than John Erskine, who had established a correspondence with Edwards as early as the 1740s, exchanging letters at first on the tempo of the revivals in America and Britain. Besides holding the same affinity for Calvinism, the two men shared a love of religious books and theology. Using his knowledge of the British book trade, and his wealth as a member of the Scottish gentry, Erskine sent Edwards hundreds of religious publications gratuitously, amounting to perhaps one-third of the American minister’s personal library (Mitchell 1997). Erskine also played a significant role in promoting Edwards’s later theological treatises. He rounded up subscribers in Scotland for Original Sin and Freedom of the Will, the latter of which became one of Edwards’s most influential theological books in Britain and Europe. English, Scottish, Welsh, and Continental Calvinists largely appreciated Freedom of the Will as an innovative take on Reformed teachings about divine election and human responsibility. Those outside the orb of Calvinism and orthodoxy, however, came to a different conclusion. They examined Freedom of the Will, but misunderstood Edwards’s point of thought, or dismissed him as an outdated theologian connected with the Puritanism of the past. Only a few years after Samuel Kneeland printed Freedom of the Will from Boston in 1754, Erskine made Edwards aware that his views on the will had been misappropriated

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486   Jonathan Yeager in Scotland in such a way as to affirm the determinism presented in Lord Kames’s 1751 Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion. In line with Edwards’s views in Freedom of the Will, the Scottish jurist had argued that people act on their motives, but different from Edwards, Kames suggested that individuals deceive themselves into thinking that they can make decisions contrary to their motives. Kames was saying that people falsely believe that they make free choices, but in reality God determines their actions. Edwards, on the other hand, had argued that individuals do make free choices, but because of their corrupt nature, they ultimately choose to sin. Edwards believed that because humans are not limited by any natural laws, and freely respond to sinful motives, God in no way compels them, which is why they are held responsible for their actions (Noll 2005). Edwards had read Kames’s Essays as early as 1755, having borrowed a copy of it from Joseph Bellamy. But he did not know that his ideas on liberty had been misappropriated in Scotland until Erskine informed him by post. Edwards subsequently followed Erskine’s advice by drafting a response in the form of a letter that outlined the differences on the will that he had with Kames. Erskine then took Edwards’s letter, dated 25 July, 1757, to members of the Edinburgh book trade, one of whom anonymously had it printed in 1758 as Remarks on the Essays, on the Principles of Morality, and Natural Religion. In a Letter to a Minister of the Church of Scotland (Yeager 2013). The publication of Edwards’s Remarks in Edinburgh shows that the theological ideas within Freedom of the Will had been circulating among some of Scotland’s enlightened elites shortly after the book was initially published in Boston in 1754. After Edwards’s death in 1758, Erskine worked with the Edinburgh bookseller William Gray to issue a new edition of The Life of Brainerd in 1765. Erskine selected this book to be republished in Edinburgh because it was not well known in Britain at that time. Even though the first edition published in Boston in 1749 drew nearly 2,000 subscribers, none of the names on the printed subscription list came from outside colonial America. Very few books from the initial print run were sent to Britain, and Erskine’s own copy did not arrive until after Edwards’s death. A few years later, Erskine used his influence to have Original Sin, Freedom of the Will, the Two Dissertations, and Hopkins’s Life of Edwards sold in Gray’s shop, which the Edinburgh bookseller advertised for the first time in 1769. Because American books were not readily available in Britain, except those that were reprinted in London and Edinburgh, Erskine wanted to use his connections to promote some of Edwards’s less-familiar non-revival works. More significantly, Erskine worked with Gray, and later with the bookseller’s daughter Margaret, to edit and publish several of Edwards’s dormant manuscripts. In the late 1760s, Erskine wrote to Jonathan Edwards Jr, prompting him to consider publishing some of his father’s writings. Erskine specifically had his eye on Edwards’s unfinished History of the Work of Redemption, which he had learned about as early as 1755.3 Edwards’s plan to publish this work, originally given as a sermon series in Northampton 3  Erskine to Joseph Bellamy, March 24, 1755, Joseph Bellamy Letters, Hartford Seminary Library, box 188, folder 2932, item 81,234.

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Britain and Europe   487 in 1739, was interrupted by his move to Princeton to become the president of the college there, and by his subsequent death (WJE 16: 725–30). Erskine hashed a plan to have Edwards Jr transcribe his father’s manuscript, and then send the sheets to him in Edinburgh, where he would edit them and find a publisher. Only lightly editing the manuscript, Erskine finished the work and passed it on to Gray, who published it in 1774 (WJE 9). Erskine and Edwards Jr made plans to publish more manuscripts, but America’s war with Britain for independence disrupted their efforts. On the whole, the American book trade suffered during the war, and exchanging letters across the Atlantic was very difficult (Brown 2010). As early as 1775, Edwards Jr began transcribing a set of his father’s sermons, but he had to find an American printer to complete the presswork since he could no longer maintain a viable correspondence with Erskine. By 1779, Edwards Jr had just finished his transcription when British forces took over the town of New Haven, Connecticut, where he served as a Congregational minister. The younger Edwards re­located inland to Hartford, where the firm Hudson and Goodwin printed his father’s Sermons on the Following Subjects in 1780. Once the war came to its conclusion, Erskine regained contact with Edwards Jr, and soon began collaborating again on another project. At the same time, Erskine also helped promote the sale of a second edition of Hopkins’s Life of Edwards that would be published in 1785 by a Glasgow bookseller and stationer (Hopkins 1785). In the same year that the second edition of The Life of Edwards came out, Erskine oversaw the publication of an Edinburgh edition of Edwards’s Sermons on Various Important Subjects, first printed at Boston in 1738. In this new Scottish edition, the same collection of sermons was included, as well as three previously published discourses: ‘God Glorified in the Work of Redemption’ (first published in 1731), ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’ (1741), and Edwards’s ‘Farewell Sermon’ (1751). These sermons were appended to the end, and the entire volume published by William Gray’s daughter Margaret, who had taken over her father’s business after his recent death. A few years later, Erskine once again approached Margaret Gray, convincing her to issue new editions of A History of the Work of Redemption from Edinburgh in 1788 in an octavo format at 5s. and a duodecimo book at the cheaper price of 3s.6d. By this time, octavo reprints of the book had come out in Boston in 1782 and New York in 1786. Erskine had reported to an English correspondent that A History of the Work of Redemption ‘is in high esteem in America, and that the London booksellers who have been repeatedly written for it reply that it is out of print’, and so he deduced that Gray’s new editions, and at varying formats and prices, would sell well in Britain (Yeager 2016).4 In the same year that the new Scottish editions of A History of the Work of Redemption were published, Erskine and Edwards Jr finished editing and transcribing a fresh set of sermons by the elder Edwards for Margaret Gray to publish. This new book was entitled Practical Sermons and included thirty-three discourses previously unpublished. The

4  Erskine to John Ryland, Jr, 19 August 1786, Edinburgh University Library.

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488   Jonathan Yeager younger Edwards had completed the transcription of these sermons prior to the American Revolution but dared not risk sending them to Erskine during the war. One year later, Erskine convinced Margaret Gray to publish Edwards’s Twenty Sermons. This volume included the fifteen discourses that the younger Edwards had published in Hartford in 1780, along with ‘A Divine and Supernatural Light,’ ‘The Church’s Marriage to Her Sons, and to Her God’, ‘True saints, When Absent from the Body, Are Present with the Lord’, ‘God’s Awful Judgement in the Breaking and Withering of the Strong Rods of a Community’, and ‘True Grace Distinguished from the Experience of Devils’. Erskine wanted to bring in these five additional sermons, because although they had been previously published in America during Edwards’s lifetime, they were not readily available in Britain. Although London would have been a better location to publish Edwards’s posthumous works, Erskine preferred to work with the Grays from Edinburgh. Erskine believed that many of the London booksellers were ‘careless and selfish’ in their business dealings, and would not complete the work correctly and in affordable formats.5 By the early 1790s, the younger Edwards had made an agreement with Margaret Gray to publish an additional three volumes of essays by his father, but only two would be completed. These essays consisted of excerpts from Edwards’s personal notebooks on a selection of topics. The first volume of transcriptions arrived in Scotland in June 1792. Erskine again served as the editor and then delivered the manuscript to Gray in the summer of 1793, publishing them as Miscellaneous Observations on Important Theological Subjects from Edinburgh in the same year. Unfortunately, Margaret Gray died in the spring of 1794, forcing Erskine to find another publisher for the second volume of essays. Erskine decided to give Margaret’s apprentice James Galbraith the opportunity to publish the second volume, which he did in 1796, appearing as Remarks on Important Theological Controversies. A third volume of Edwards’s ‘Miscellanies’ might have been published if the younger Edwards had not died unexpectedly in 1801. The years leading up to his death had been difficult and stressful. During that time, he was dismissed from his church in New Haven, took another pastorate at Colebrook, Connecticut, and then took on the position as the president of Union College in Schenectady, New York before his untimely death.

British and European Analysis of Edwards In the generations after Erskine and the younger Edwards, from the end of the ­eighteenth century until the late nineteenth century, two distinct patterns emerged on

5  Erskine to Ryland Jr, 20 August 1787, Edinburgh University Library.

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Britain and Europe   489 how to understand Edwards. British and Continental members within the orthodox Reformed tradition appreciated Edwards as a superb metaphysician, welcoming his new insights on Calvinism. Alternatively, non-Calvinists and unorthodox intellectuals ­coming out of the Romantic period in Britain and Europe—especially in England, Scotland, France, and Germany—tended to view him as holding archaic beliefs that needed to be adjusted to the current tempo of the culture, or outright rejected him as irrelevant author of the past.

British Readers At the end of the eighteenth century in England, Edwards’s writings received a boost from the Particular Baptists. John Erskine helped facilitate this renewed interest in Edwards by enlisting the help of the young Northamptonshire Baptist minister John Ryland Jr to help him promote some of Edwards’s posthumous works in England. Erskine also brokered a relationship between Ryland and the younger Edwards, and, perhaps most importantly, forwarded a copy of Edwards’s Humble Attempt to Northamptonshire in 1784. Edwards’s 1748 book calling for organized prayer led to the ‘Prayer Call of 1784’ among the Northamptonshire Baptists, a new English edition of the Humble Attempt in 1789, and ultimately to the formation of the Baptist Missionary Society (BMS) in 1792. Shortly after the founding of the BMS, one of its charter members, William Carey, travelled to Calcutta, after finding inspiration from reading The Life of Brainerd (Yeager 2016). Edwards also made a profound impact on the Northamptonshire Baptists theo­logic­ al­ly. The up-and-coming ministers of this Calvinistic denomination had been struggling with the prevailing opinion among the older generation that since God had already determined the number and timing of the elect, one should not preach to the unconverted. From reading Edwards’s Freedom of the Will in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Baptist ministers like John Ryland Jr and Andrew Fuller came to the conclusion that everyone should be presented with the gospel message. Drawing from Edwards’s notions of natural and moral inability, they argued that all people were obligated to act upon the knowledge of God’s saving grace, because there was nothing in their nature barring the exercise of their will, even if they were morally incapable of accepting salvation. With a new sense of freedom, these English Baptist ministers taught this more moderate form of Calvinism at their seminary in Bristol that continued until the end of the nineteenth century. Sympathetic nineteenth-century English Congregationalists likewise found value in Edwards’s writings. Edward Parsons and the Welsh Independent minister Edward Williams produced the first collected edition of eight volumes of the American’s works, between 1806 and 1811. Later English Congregationalists followed their lead, publishing a new edition of The Life of Brainerd in 1829, and A Faithful Narrative in 1827 and 1839. The most important promoter among the English Congregationalists at this time was Henry Rogers, chair of English language and literature at University College, London.

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490   Jonathan Yeager Two years before beginning this post in 1834, he published a two-volume set of Edwards’s works that went into a twelfth edition by 1879 (Bebbington 2007). Welsh interest in Edwards received a later start than that in England and Scotland. Despite the eighteenth-century Welsh revivalist Howell Harris’s knowledge of Edwards, the American evangelical did not become an influential voice in Wales until the turn of the nineteenth century, largely in part to the influence of the Independent church leader Edward Williams. Around the time that Williams partnered with Parsons in publishing a new edition of the collected works of Edwards, he produced his own Essay on the Equity of the Divine Government (1809), which drew heavily on Freedom of the Will and its discussion of natural and moral inability. The Independent minister John Roberts, one of Williams’s former students, also propagated Edwards’s moderate form of Calvinism and published extracts of Religious Affections in 1809. From this initial nudge from Williams and Roberts, Wales became a minor publishing hub for Edwards’s works in the nineteenth century. Before the turn of the century, Welsh Congregationalists brought out new editions of A History of the Work of Redemption, Religious Affections, Freedom of the Will, the Two Dissertations, and Original Sin (Bebbington 2007). In nineteenth-century Scotland, Edwards received mixed reviews. On the more favourable end of the spectrum was Thomas Chalmers, who cultivated the Edwardsean theology developed by Andrew Fuller in England to help him find a sure footing on solid orthodox Presbyterian ground that served him throughout his unofficial tenure as the leading evangelical in the country in the first half of the nineteenth century. Freedom of the Will was especially revered by Chalmers, who spoke favourably of the American theologian to his divinity students at Edinburgh University, and later at the Free Church College that he presided over (Noll 2012). Other Scots, including John Erskine’s nephew Thomas Erskine and the theologian John McLeod Campbell judged Edwards’s Calvinism—particularly in Freedom of the Will—as too harsh for the new age. Other British thinkers shared their opinion. As the rationalistic Enlightenment of the eighteenth century evolved into the more sentimental Romantic period of the nineteenth century, Edwards was seen as out of place by many of the leading voices at the time. The American theologian Michael McClymond argues that many nineteenth-century thinkers saw Edwards as a notable metaphysician, but who was born in the wrong place and at the wrong time. Had Edwards lived in Britain or Continental Europe later in the eighteenth century, or in the early nineteenth century, he surely would have had access to more current religious and philosophical literature. But living in a remote part of colonial America, and dying before the full blossoming of the Enlightenment, he could not be appreciated by the likes of the English Unitarian Joseph Priestley, the English poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge, or the Scottish Common Sense advocate Dugald Stewart. The agnostic editor of the Dictionary of National Biography Leslie Stephen concurred, describing Edwards as ‘formed by nature to be a German professor’, but ‘accidently dropped into the American forests’ (Stephen 1876). After examining such works as Freedom of the Will, such detractors equated Edwards with the religious scepticism of Thomas Hobbes, Anthony Collins, and David Hume.

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Britain and Europe   491

French, German, and Dutch Readers Early nineteenth-century French critics agreed with these British assessments of Edwards. In his Histoire des sects religieuses (1829), M. Gregoire accounted Edwards as one of the ‘Necessitarians’ of the previous age, whose thought could be tied with Hobbes, Hume, Kames, and Priestley. In the same year that Gregoire’s book came out, Edwards’s essay on ‘the mind’ was published in 1829, providing additional material for modern critics, who now wanted to address his philosophical idealism. Among the leading works examining Edwards’s philosophy was L’Idéalisme en Angleterre au DixHuitième Siècle (1888) by Georges Lyon, who, like Stephen and others, wondered how much more influential the American theologian would be had he not hailed from the backwoods of colonial Massachusetts (McClymond 2012). Only when the Hungarian native Mikos Vetö produced his 1987 work Le pensée de Jonathan Edwards did Edwards receive a more favourable French perspective on his philosophy (McClymond and McDermott 2012). Other than a few translations and shortened versions of The Life of Brainerd, there was not much German interest in Edwards’s other writings, from the time of the evangelical revivals of the early 1740s until the end of the nineteenth century (Stievermann 2018). One notable exception was a new edition of Steinmetz’s A Faithful Narrative that was published from Basel in 1860. The American John Henry McCracken brought attention once again to Edwards when he produced a German dissertation on his philosophical idealism in 1899. In the twentieth century, fresh comparisons with leading German philo­ sophers of the past brought new attention to Edwards’s thought. Another American, William Harder Squires, produced a 1901 German dissertation that identified Edwards’s ideas on the will with the volitional approach of Arthur Schopenhauer. A few years later, Squires produced the short-lived Edwardean quarterly journal that ran from 1903–4, with the hope that he could show Edwards’s influence on American thought from a theistic perspective. Mattoon Monroe Curtis took a different approach. He likened Edwards’s thought with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, remarkably arguing that the two men shared similar views on sin and grace, and essentially promoted the same kind of morality. Later German scholars in the twentieth century, including Eric Voegelin and Gustav Müller saw Edwards as a Puritan mystic, who struggled to reconcile his metaphysical philosophy with his internal spirituality (McClymond 2012). There was a similar drought and recovery of Edwards by the Dutch. After the initial focus on Edwards as a revivalist had faded, Dutch booksellers, printers, and Calvinist ministers worked together to publish an impressive number of his books in the second half of the eighteenth century. Important new editions came out within a relatively short span, including The Life of Brainerd (1756), Freedom of the Will (1774), A History of the Work of Redemption (1776), Religious Affections (1779), Concerning the End for Which God created the World (1778), Original Sin (1790–2), The Life of Edwards (1791), as well as various individual sermons. Utrecht alone could be attributed for producing eight new editions of Edwards’s works in the eighteenth century (Yeager 2016). But after this flurry of books and sermons, there was a Dutch drought of Edwards’s publications that did not

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492   Jonathan Yeager start to recover until the twentieth century, when the statesman Abraham Kuyper and the Reformed theologian Herman Bavinck contributed to the revitalization of Edwards as a Calvinist worthy of Dutch recognition (Bebbington  2007). After Kuyper and Bavinck, Edwards studies in the Netherlands continued to gain momentum with the Kampen professor Jan Ridderbos and his 1907 dissertation on The Theology of Jonathan Edwards.

The Modern Recovery of Edwards In twentieth-century Britain, attention to Edwards returned once again, due in large part to the influence of Martyn Lloyd-Jones, a Welsh Presbyterian who, after coming to an appreciation of Edwards in 1929, became the minister of the prestigious Westminster Chapel in London ten years later. Through Jones’s preaching at this important venue, and by his annual Puritan Conferences in the 1950s and 1960s, he shaped future leaders’ perception of Edwards, including the theologian J. I. Packer and Jones’s assistant Iain Murray, who founded the Reformed publishing firm of the Banner of Truth Trust in 1957. One year after the Banner of Truth was established, it issued new editions of select works by Edwards, and a biography of him in 1987 (Bebbington 2007). Today, there is a renaissance of Edwards studies that has been building off the ­influence of the Harvard historian Perry Miller’s 1949 biography, and the subsequent publication of the Yale University Press critical edition of his works (1957–2008) (McClymond and McDermott 2012). Edwards’s current popularity is firmly situated in America, but it is spilling over into Britain and Europe, where new translations of his works and detailed studies of his thought surface on an annual basis (Lesser 2008; www.worldcat.org). The establishment of Jonathan Edwards Centers in the twentyfirst century in Belgium, Germany, Hungary, and Poland, the first-rate scholarship by its directors, including Jan Stievermann of Heidelberg University and Tibor Fabiny of Károli Gáspár University, and the conferences sponsored by these centres has contributed to the burgeoning interest of Edwards in Europe. But as this essay has shown, his contemporary reputation in America and abroad was dependent on his initial fame as a revivalist, which was established by a number of booksellers, printers, and ministers acting as editors. Although Edwards detested how his Faithful Narrative was published in 1737, it brought him international acclaim by the early 1740s. After the revivals of the Great Awakening in America had waned, Edwards wrote several important treatises before he died in 1758, including Freedom of the Will, which enhanced his reputation, particularly in England, Scotland, and the Netherlands by the end of the eighteenth century. Here again, various booksellers, printers, and ministers took the lead in promoting him outside America, now as a theologian and philosopher. During much of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, Edwards’s value as a revivalist and theologian in Britain and Europe was divided into two camps: those with Reformed leanings, who

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Britain and Europe   493 appreciated his innovative interpretations of Calvinism, and those who studied him as an antiquated Puritan-like figure, who either needed to be liberally reinterpreted as a quasi-Enlightenment philosopher, or discarded entirely as an irrelevant thinker of a bygone era in American history. It is mostly those within the first camp, who revel in the current resurgence of Edwards studies.

Works Cited Allison, Christopher M. B. (2012). ‘The Methodist Edwards: John Wesley’s Abridgements of the Selected Works of Jonathan Edwards.’ Methodist History 50: 144–60. Bebbington, David (2007). ‘The Reputation of Edwards Abroad.’ In The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards. Edited by Stephen J. Stein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 239–61. Beebe, Keith Edward, ed. (2013). The McCulloch Examinations of the Cambuslang Revival (1742), A Critical Edition: Conversion Narratives from the Scottish Evangelical Awakening. 2 Volumes. Woodbridge, UK: Scottish History Society. Brown, Richard D. (2010). ‘The Revolution’s Legacy for the History of the Book.’ In A History of the Book in America. Volume. 2. Edited by Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 58–74. Fawcett, Arthur (1971). The Cambuslang Revival: The Scottish Evangelical Revival of the Eighteenth Century. London: Banner of Truth Trust. Hopkins, Samuel (1785). The Life and Character of the Late Reverend, Learned, and Pious Mr Jonathan Edwards, President of the College of New-Jersey: Together with Extracts from His Private Writings and Diary. And also, Eighteen Select Sermons on Various Important Subjects. Second Edition. Glasgow: James Duncan. Kennedy, Hugh (1743). Geloofwaardig en kort verhaal van’t heerlyke werk Godts. Rotterdam: Hendrik van Pelt and Adrianus Douci. Kennedy, Hugh (1751). Nederige verdediging van het werk des Heiligen Geestes. Rotterdam: Hendrik van Pelt and Adrianus Douci. Kennedy, Hugh (1752). A Short Account of the Rise and Continuing Progress of a Remarkable Work of Grace in the United Netherlands. London: John Lewis. Lambert, Frank (2000). Inventing the ‘Great Awakening.’ Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lesser, M. X. (2008). Reading Jonathan Edwards: An Annotated Bibliography in Three Parts, 1729–2005. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. McClymond, Michael J. (2012). ‘ “A German Professor Dropped into the American Forests”: British, French, and German Views of Jonathan Edwards, 1758–1957.’ In After Jonathan Edwards: The Courses of the New England Theology. Edited by Oliver  D.  Crisp and Douglas A. Sweeney. New York: Oxford University Press, 208–24. McClymond, Michael J. and Gerald R. McDermott (2012). The Theology of Jonathan Edwards. New York: Oxford University Press. Mitchell, Christopher Wayne (1997). ‘Jonathan Edwards’s Scottish Connection and the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Evangelical Revival, 1735—1750.’ Ph.D. dissertation. St. Mary’s College, University of St. Andrews. Noll, Mark (2012). ‘Jonathan Edwards, Edwardsian Theologies, and the Presbyterians.’ In After Jonathan Edwards: The Courses of the New England Theology. Edited by Oliver D. Crisp and Douglas A. Sweeney. New York: Oxford University Press, 179–96.

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494   Jonathan Yeager Noll, Mark (2005). ‘Jonathan Edwards’s Freedom of the Will Abroad.’ In Jonathan Edwards at 300: Essays on the Tercentenary of His Birth. Edited by Harry S. Stout, Kenneth P. Minkema, and Caleb J. Maskell. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 89–108. Noll, Mark (2003). The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield and the Wesleys. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity. Raven, James (2007). The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Rivers, Isabel (2010). ‘John Wesley as Editor and Publisher.’ In The Cambridge Companion to John Wesley. Edited by Randy  L.  Maddox and Jason  E.  Vickers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 144–59. Sher, Richard B. (2006). The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stephen, Leslie (1876). Hours in a Library. London: Smith, Elder, and Co. Stievermann, Jan (2014). ‘Faithful Translations: New Discoveries on the German Pietist Reception of Jonathan Edwards.’ Church History 83: 324–66. Stievermann, Jan (2018). ‘The German Lives of David Brainerd: The Beginnings of Pietist Interest in an American Evangelical Icon.’ In Zwischen Aufklärung und Moderne: Erweckungsbewegungen als historiographische Herausforderung. Edited by Thomas K. Kuhn and Veronika Albrecht-Birkner. Münster: LIT, 119–39. Van Eijnatten, Joris (2003). Liberty and Concord in the United Provinces: Religious Toleration and the Public in Eighteenth-Century Netherlands. Leiden: Brill. Van Lieburg, Fred (2008). ‘Interpreting the Dutch Great Awakening (1749–1755).’ Church History 77: 320–1. Ward, W. R. (1992). The Protestant Evangelical Awakening. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yeager, Jonathan M. (2011). Enlightened Evangelicalism: The Life and Thought of John Erskine. New York: Oxford University Press. Yeager, Jonathan  M. (2016). Jonathan Edwards and Transatlantic Print Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Yeager, Jonathan M. (2013). ‘An Unpublished Letter from John Erskine to Jonathan Edwards.’ Jonathan Edwards Studies 3: 169–72.

Author Bio Jonathan Yeager is UC Foundation Associate and Guerry Professor of Religion at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where he teaches courses on religious history and Christian thought. His books include Enlightened Evangelicalism: The Life and Thought of John Erskine (2011), Early Evangelicalism: A Reader (2011), and Jonathan Edwards and Transatlantic Print Culture (2016).

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chapter 32

Edwa r ds’s Pl ace a n d Importa nce i n A ngl o A m er ica n Liter atu r e Sandra M. Gustafson

Long recognized as foundational contributions to British American belles lettres, the works of Jonathan Edwards influenced later writers and shaped narratives of American literary history. Edwards appears in the first descriptions of early American literature, and he continues to figure prominently in anthologies and histories of American writing today. This essay will emphasize major authors—from Harriet Beecher Stowe and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., to Robert Lowell, to Marilynne Robinson—who have acknowledged his influence. As we shall see, the nature of that influence varies, for every generation of writers and readers creates a distinctive version of Edwards. Advancing a liberal vision of Christianity, Stowe and Holmes reacted against Edwards’s alleged theological rigidity and spiritual cruelty. Lowell wrote poems reflecting the Edwardsean revival of the mid-twentieth century and bearing the imprint of the New Criticism. And in recent years, Robinson has staked a claim as a latter-day Edwardsean, embracing his intellectual legacy as an inspiration and resource for her celebrated novels.

Edwards’s Influence on Nineteenth-Century Prose Edwards’s status was already well established in 1847, when Rufus Wilmot Griswold featured Edwards as the first author deserving of his own section in The Prose Writers of America: With a Survey of the History, Condition, and Prospects of American Literature. Griswold’s Prose Writers typifies a dominant approach to modern literature prior to the rise of professional academic criticism at the end of the nineteenth century, the period

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496   Sandra M. Gustafson when European and, later, American literatures first became objects of study, promotion, and analysis as national traditions (Graff 1987; Gura 2007; Gustafson 2007). Edwards initially appears in Griswold’s forty-page introductory essay on the ‘Intellectual History, Condition, and Prospects of the Country’. The essay can be broken into three sections, with the pivotal role played by Edwards made clear by the structure. Griswold opens with a discussion of the importance of a national literature for ‘glory and happiness’ (Griswold 1847, 13) and considers the obstacles facing the still-young American nation, including imitative tendencies and the practical difficulties of international copyright law. Next Griswold describes ‘the character of the Puritans’—‘acute, powerful, and independent in argument and conclusion’ (Griswold 1847, 17)—followed by the briefest mention of celebrated Puritan writers Samuel Newman (author of a respected concordance of the Bible), John Eliot (apostle to the Indians), and Cotton Mather (first American member of the British Royal Society). Praise for Edwards’s intellectual power and argumentative skill comes from three British intellectuals: the Scottish theologian Dr Thomas Chalmers; Sir James Mackintosh, the Scottish jurist and historian; and the English philosophical and historical writer, Isaac Taylor. Edwards’s antagonists (Tappan, Bledsoe) are mentioned, as are his contemporaries and successors (including Mayhew, Johnson, and Hopkins). Having established Edwards’s pivotal role as the first internationally recognized intellectual from British North America, Griswold segues into the lengthiest section of his opening discussion, providing an eclectic overview of literary genres or modes. He begins with ‘living theological writers’, turning next to ­leading ‘orators’, ‘political economists’, and ‘jurists’. He devotes space to prose genres such as ‘Biblical criticism and classical learning’, ‘ethnology’, and ‘natural science’, followed by literary categories such as ‘novelists and romancers’, ‘poets and poetry’, and ‘the drama’. In the culminating discussion of this introductory section, Griswold considers future prospects for an American literature that is at once national in spirit and transnational in accomplishment, with an approving reference to Goethe’s concept of a ‘Literature of the World’ (Griswold 1847, 47). The introductory essay is followed by a series of short author profiles, starting with Edwards. Goethe’s phrase resonates with the beginning of this profile: ‘The first man of the world during the second quarter of the eighteenth century was Jonathan Edwards of Connecticut’ (Goethe 53). Citing Robert Hall and Thomas Chalmers on Edwards’s ­merits as a theologian, and Dugald Steward and Sir James Mackintosh on his abilities as a metaphysician, Griswold describes Edwards as a writer celebrated throughout Great Britain and Europe for the power of his ideas. Comparing Edwards to Milton, Griswold underscores the theologian’s focus on ‘holy affections’ and aesthetics, that is, his ‘love of divine things for their own beauty and sweetness’ (Griswold  1847, 53). He praises Edwards’s style as ‘uncommonly good’, unsurpassed ‘in perspicuity and precision’ though perhaps ‘deficient in harmony’ (Griswold  1847, 68). Griswold attributes this deficiency to the haste of a busy minister pressed to fulfil a great many obligations. Noting stylistic improvements in the later treatises, he traces their greater polish to Edwards’s reading of Samuel Richardson’s novel Sir Charles Grandison. (Kimnach [2009] observes that the Edwards family owned several Richardson novels, including

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Edwards in Anglo-American Literature   497 Pamela and Clarissa.) The ‘very powerful imagination’ (Griswold 1847, 56) that is evident in Edwards’s early works was later reined in and disciplined, Griswold observes, though his mature writings manifest a keen wit. In closing, Griswold offers the descriptions of Edwards’s effects on his sermon audiences as the clearest evidence of his verbal power, emphasizing that Edwards had the ability to preach calmly and reservedly, yet so forcefully that his audience was swept up in the higher reality that he made present to them. Griswold contrasts the ‘mountebank declamation of these later days’ with Edwards quietly reading from ‘a small manuscript volume’, and he insists that this higher form of ‘eloquence’ surpassed the style ‘ascribed to Demosthenes’ (Griswold 1847, 56). With Edwards as initiating figure, Griswold’s Prose Writers of America provides a snapshot of his era’s literary culture: anchored in the Greek and Roman classics and the Bible; broadly belles lettristic rather than narrowly literary; balancing nationalistic tendencies with transnational aspirations toward a ‘literature of the world’. In 1880 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., the Fireside poet, man of letters, and physician, took a similarly broad approach in a substantial essay on Edwards. Assessing Edwards’s significance as a theologian and a writer, Holmes quotes George Bancroft’s article on Edwards for The American Cyclopaedia (1879)—‘Bellamy and Hopkins were his pupils; Dwight was his expositor; Smalley, Emmons, and many others were his followers; through Hopkins his influenced reached Kirkland, and assisted in moulding the character of Channing’ (Bancroft 1879, 444; quoted in Holmes 1880, 1)—and expresses a view quite similar to Griswold’s account of the American theologian’s influence on British divines: ‘Did not Dugald Stewart and Sir James Mackintosh recognize his extraordinary ability? Did not Robert Hall, in one of those ‘fits of easy transmission’, in which loose and often extravagant expressions escape from excitable minds, call him ‘the greatest of the sons of men’? (Griswold 1847, 2).1 Here Holmes reflects the consensus view of Edwards’s Anglo-American influence. Holmes proceeds to expand Griswold’s and Bancroft’s theological framing of Edwards by positioning him in a spectrum of English and European writers and philosophers, ranging from Chaucer and Dante to Hobbes and Kant. Many later critics and writers would follow Holmes down this path. He develops an extended comparison to the French Catholic philosopher Blaise Pascal, who like Edwards emphasized the central role of religious feelings or affections. The comparison with Pascal begins by establishing certain personal similarities between these two religious writers. They were precocious children who matured into delicate, nervous men with ascetic tendencies. Both lived ‘a retiring and melancholy kind of life’ (Holmes  1880, 3). They shared combative intellectual tendencies, ‘one fighting the Jesuits, the other the Arminians’ (Holmes 1880, 3). The similarities diminish when Holmes turns to an analysis of their respective prose styles. Of the two religious writers, Pascal is held to be much the superior stylist, a ‘true 1  Holmes notes that Hall, an English Baptist minister, famously read and re-read The Freedom of the Will as a child (Holmes 1880, p. 10). On the place of Freedom of the Will in Samuel Lorenzo Knapp’s Lectures on American Literature (1829), the earliest literary treatment of Edwards, and in Herman Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’, see Gura 2007, 263 and 276. In his valuable essay, Gura traces the critical reception of Edwards’s writings.

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498   Sandra M. Gustafson poet’ in Holmes’s view, while Edwards falls short except for a few passages in the w ­ ritings of his youth: ‘Pascal’s prose is light and elastic everywhere with esprit,’ while Edwards’s mature writing, ‘thickened as it is with texts from Scripture, reminds us of the unleavened bread of the Israelite: holy it may be, but heavy it certainly is’ (Holmes 1880, 3). Overreliance on Scripture, Holmes notes in a later, Emerson-like passage, has the effect of undermining ‘intellectual virility’ (Holmes 1880, 20). Continuing the comparison, Holmes observes that both writers favoured aphorisms, often on the same topics. Though Edwards lacked Pascal’s ‘exquisite wit’ (Holmes 1880 3), a satirical vein runs through his writings. Holmes’s best-known work on Edwards is itself a poetical satire called the ‘The Deacon’s Master-Piece: or, The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay. A Logical Story’ (1858). Published first in his Atlantic column and then collected in the volume Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, ‘The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay’ describes ‘the Deacon’s’ completion of a chaise (or shay) in 1755, when ‘Georgius Secundus’ (Holmes 1859, 295) ruled the British empire; British General Edward Braddock’s army (including young George Washington as Braddock’s aide-de-camp) was defeated by the French and their Native allies; and the Lisbon earthquake killed tens of thousands of people and unsettled the faith of many more. Holmes specifies that ‘the Deacon’ finished his work on ‘the ­terrible earth-quake day’ (Holmes 1859, 295), and that the chaise crumbled into a heap on its hundredth anniversary. (Holmes’s essay on Edwards opens with a satirical description of American habits of celebrating centennial anniversaries: ‘A foreigner might well think the patron saint of America was Saint Anniversary’ (Holmes 1880, 1).) Built from consistently strong materials, the chaise has an exceptionally long life. The crisis occurs when the parson drives the chaise to church, mulling over the end of his sermon. His inability to complete the sermon signals that a limit of some kind has been reached. There is no particular weakness in the vehicle’s structure; it simply exceeds the lifespan of its components and falls apart. Holmes’s implication is straightforward: brilliantly logical, uniformly strong, Edwardsean theology had nevertheless come to the end of its time. In the 1880 essay Holmes explained his reasons for thinking that Edwardseanism had reached a terminal point. Edwards’s terror preaching had alienated the sensibilities of his own congregation, which famously removed him from his Northampton ministry. Such imagery and the theology behind it provoked an even stronger negative response from Holmes’s contemporaries, notably the British writer and Liberal politician John Morley, who described ‘the idea of eternal punishment’ as ‘the most frightful idea that has ever corroded the human character’ (Holmes 1880, 16). Comparing the Northampton revivals to medieval religious frenzies and Edwards to Dante, Holmes writes, The body is to possess the most exquisite sensibilities, is to be pervaded in every fibre and particle by the fire, and the fire is to be such that our lime-kiln and ironfurnaces would be refrigerators in comparison with the mildest of the torturechambers. Here the great majority of mankind are to pass the days and nights...of a sleepless eternity.  (Holmes 1880, 17)

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Edwards in Anglo-American Literature   499 Later he cites Edwards’s own account of his wife’s uncle Josiah Hawley, who fell into spiritual despair and cut his own throat, prompting suicidal impulses in many people throughout the revival area. Holmes believed that such destructive religious beliefs and practices were bound to fail eventually, much as the deacon’s ‘shay’ fell apart. Holmes believed further that a central factor in this failure was the success of republican politics, which held implications for Calvinist theories of the will. In his essay he cites a passage from Montesquieu to argue that ‘ “in republics . . . the laws are always mild, because he who makes them is himself a subject” ’ (Holmes 1880, 24). Holmes extends the point: ‘We cannot have self-government and humane laws without its reacting on our view of the Divine administration’ (Holmes  1880, 24). Political selfgovernment leads to greater confidence in the individual’s capacity for governing the self. This leads to the concluding movement of his essay, which ends with a discussion of growing scepticism about the doctrine of the fall of man. Citing science and other ‘mighty explosives with which the growth of knowledge has furnished us’ (Holmes  1880, 26), Holmes calls for mutual respect and gradualism as opinions change. He is not looking for the collapse of the old order, as he did in ‘The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay’, but for ‘the kind of vital change that takes place in our bodies,—interstitial disintegration and reintegration’ (Holmes 1880, 26), resulting not in the revolutionary elimination of existing beliefs and institutions, but enabling ‘the path to be cleared for those who come after us’ (Holmes 1880, 26). Contrasted with the immediatism of his poem about the ­collapse of the old order, Holmes’s later gradualism reflects the dominant temper of the post-Reconstruction era. The righteous violence of a devastating civil war— celebrated in Julia Ward Howe’s ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ (1862), whose imagery recalls ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’ (1741)—left enormous rifts in American ­society. Abraham Lincoln’s appeal in his Second Inaugural Address to understand the war as God’s verdict on the institution of slavery left many Confederate sympathizers unpersuaded (Hodes  2015). In such a divided society, republican self-government required a more ‘humane’ understanding of God. Even before the war began, Harriet Beecher Stowe had criticized the violent, punitive image of God that she associated with the Edwardsean tradition in her third novel, The Minister’s Wooing (1859). Stowe’s first two novels—Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Dred (1856)—dealt with issues of faith and slavery in distinct yet complementary ways. Uncle Tom’s Cabin features Tom as a self-sacrificing martyr and Christ figure, while the title character of Dred prophesies retribution for slavery and dies as the result of injuries sustained when white supremacists attack his fugitive maroon community. Freedom is a product of violence in both novels; neither one convincingly envisions a peaceful way of ending slavery, or suggests the means to establish peace after war brings the system to an end. In her third novel, Stowe takes up the matter of slavery at an earlier moment in the nation’s history. Set in Newport, Rhode Island soon after the Revolution, The Minister’s Wooing features fictionalized versions of two historical figures with ties to Edwards: Samuel Hopkins, the minister of the novel’s title and Edwards’s real-life disciple; and Edwards’s grandson, Aaron Burr. Stowe presents Hopkins as over-involved in his ­theological studies. She comments on his failure to recognize the greater worth of

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500   Sandra M. Gustafson ministering to ‘the lowly African slave’ and mentions his protests against ‘slavery and the ­slave-trade’ (Stowe 1999, 55). Edwardseanism fails to provide Hopkins with the intellectual tools to establish his spiritual authority over his congregation and achieve meaningful change in the world. Less theology and more practical Christianity would have made him a more effective minister, Stowe suggests. Meanwhile, Burr is all too practical and worldly. He pursues two women: one is already married, and the second is the novel’s heroine Mary, who is also the object of Hopkins’s attentions. Burr’s worldliness and sensuality are revealed to Mary in a scene where Hopkins reflects on the millennium, and Burr mocks him with subtle but devastating irony. Mary responds by emotionally dis­tan­ cing herself from Burr emotionally. Her reaction leads him to remember his grandfather’s early testament praising the sanctity of his grandmother, Sarah Pierpont, which Burr recalls copying into a private notebook as an expression of his own feminine ideal. Burr recognizes in Mary the same ‘secret poise’ and ‘calm immutable center’ (Stowe 1999, 301) of faith that Edwards had found in Sarah. Stowe reproduces Edwards’s exquisite tribute, which combines the rhythms of the King James Bible with Petrarchan sentiments. Highlighting Mary’s piety and beauty, Stowe traces the rise of a feminine, sentimentalized, liberal Christianity designed to displace her inherited Calvinist theology, suggested by Mary’s rejection of both Hopkins and Burr. In this effort Stowe did not so much break with her father, the Presbyterian minister and moral reformer Lyman Beecher, as extend his reform-oriented approach in ways that emphasized the  spiritual potency of women. Embracing Nathaniel William Taylor’s modified Edwardseanism, Lyman Beecher promoted a semivoluntarist theology better suited to a republic. Beecher’s approach involved inquiry meetings ‘designed to foster self-scrutiny and a commitment to moral transformation among the converted’ (Gustafson 2011, 93). He believed that conversion should involve ‘rational commitment as well as emotional response’ (Gustafson  2011, 93), and like Edwards he distinguished between the heightened emotions of revivals and durable faith. Beecher gave added weight to ­reasoned discussion and self-regulation as central features of a Protestant republic. Stowe highlights the distinctive contributions of women’s piety to a Christian society in The Minister’s Wooing, at a time when reason and self-control were manifestly failing to provide the social resources needed to end the slave system. In her novels on slavery, Stowe had focused on the place of the body and the role of cruelty and torture in traditional Calvinism—a punitive stance toward corporeality that James Baldwin would later highlight in a discussion of Stowe’s own violence toward Tom (Baldwin 1955/2012). In The Minister’s Wooing she explicitly addresses this legacy, portraying Edwards as the synthesizer of a spiritual vision rich in analytical elaborations but lacking human compassion. The linked images of Edwards the hellfire preacher and abstract thinker hold centre stage for Stowe, as they did for Holmes. ‘The sermons preached by President Edwards’ on the fate of the damned, Stowe writes, are so terrific in their refined poetry of torture, that very few persons of quick sensibility could read them through without agony; and it is related, that, when, in those calm and tender tones which never rose to passionate enunciation, he read

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Edwards in Anglo-American Literature   501 these discourses, the house was often filled with shrieks and wailings, and that a brother minister once laid hold of his skirts, exclaiming, in an involuntary agony, ‘Oh! Mr. Edwards! Mr. Edwards! is God not a God of mercy?  (Stowe 1999, 195)

Stowe suggests that Edwards’s intellectual rigor and logical absolutism together sprang from an ascetic’s hatred of the flesh. Repudiating the body, which for Stowe holds the essentially human and yet thoroughly spiritual capacity for emotion, Edwards either expended his sentiments on the perversely ‘calm and tender tones’ in which he delivered terrifying evangelical sermons like ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’; or, through a rigorous intellectual ascesis, he sublimated his feelings into his influential and rigorously abstract theological edifice. She portrays Samuel Hopkins as equally ­ detached from human emotions. All that kept Edwards and Hopkins from descending into complete inhumanity, Stowe implies, was their appreciation for spiritually potent women: in Edwards’s case, the love for his wife Sarah revealed in his youthful prose poem; in Hopkins’s case, his love for the novel’s virginal Mary, whose intuitive, selfsacrificing, emotional piety represents Stowe’s ideal Christianity. Stowe suggests that for both men, feminine spirituality remained a largely untapped resource, a feature of their domestic lives whose influence on their thought remained unrecognized and unappreciated. Stowe and Holmes shared a preoccupation with Edwards’s terror preaching and abstract thought, seemingly fascinated by the revelation of a sadomasochistic dynamic at the heart of his metaphysical dualism, even as they minimized a different side of Edwards’s work: exemplary narratives of young women, notably the conversion narratives of Abigail Hutchinson and Phebe Bartlett contained in A Faithful Narrative of the Surprizing Work of God (1737). Abigail Hutchinson’s ecstatic spiritual visions and resignation under extreme physical suffering framed an influential type of female holiness, while young Phebe Bartlett demonstrates the emerging possibilities for infant conversion. Frequently reprinted in Faithful Narrative and as independent pamphlets, these and other works by Edwards helped shape later sentimental fiction and culture, particularly influencing the novels of Susan Warner, Stowe’s contemporary (Gura 2007, 276; Kim 2003). A notable instance in Stowe’s fiction is Little Eva, whose story combines features of Abigail Hutchinson’s and Phebe Bartlett’s conversion narratives: like Phebe, Eva is a holy child; like Abigail, her narrative arc ends in death. But while Abigail’s unspecified illness causes her to lose her ability to speak, Stowe gives Eva a charismatic voice even as she dies from consumption. Her deathbed speech to the assembled St. Clare household is among the novel’s most iconic scenes. While Abigail’s descent into silence and death remain mysterious—perhaps involving psychospiritual factors similar to those afflicting ‘holy anorexics’ (Gustafson  1994)—the source of Eva’s fatal illness is crystal clear. As she herself explains on several occasions, accounts of the tortures inflicted on enslaved people ‘sink into my heart’. Tom understands what is happening before any of the other adults: ‘ “Lor sakes!” he exclaims, after witnessing the impact that the news of Prue’s death has on Eva, “it isn’t for sweet, delicate young ladies, like you,—these yer stories isn’t; it’s enough to kill ’em!” ’

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502   Sandra M. Gustafson (Stowe 1981, 327). Tom knows the power of stories, and he is aware of how narratives of pious girls and women often end. The Minister’s Wooing hues closer to novelistic conventions: Mary does not die, she marries. Neither Edwards’s intellectual heir nor his biological descendant wins her hand, however. Instead she marries James Marvyn, an unregenerate young man who was thought to have been lost at sea. (In her introduction to the Penguin edition, Susan K. Harris highlights the drowning death of Stowe’s son Henry in an unregenerate state as the main catalyst for the novel. Stowe went on to join the Episcopal Church, which had been her mother’s early spiritual home, in 1864.) When Marvyn unexpectedly returns with an ample fortune, Hopkins recognizes Mary’s love for his rival and releases her from their engagement. She proceeds to shape their new home into an earthly heaven, while Marvyn supports Hopkins in his antislavery efforts. In these projects they are aided by Candace, a free black servant who has ‘transferred her allegiance’ (Stowe 1981, 326) to James and Mary. Stowe’s phrase emphasizes the voluntarism of her idealized domestic community. This ending celebrates the union of black and white, male and female, regenerate and unregenerate, in the service of a common project to reform the world. Edwardsean theology has been recast in a more humane, feminine form.

The Edwards Renaissance as a Literary Phenomenon Starting in the 1930s, Perry Miller contributed to the so-called Edwards Renaissance, providing a fresh and influential approach to the literature of New England and elevating it to a central place in the American literary tradition. In his 1949 biography Jonathan Edwards, Miller presented Edwards as an artist working in the medium of religious expression and theology: ‘He is one of those pure artists through whom the deepest urgencies of their age and country become articulate’ (Miller  1949, xi), who also prefigured the challenges of provincialism and anti-intellectualism facing ‘the artist in America’ (Miller 1949, xiii). As manifested in his sermons, his artistry was ‘primarily verbal’ (Miller 1949, 48) not formally innovative, comparable to working in the sonnet tradition. Through his verbal ingenuity Edwards produced strong impressions on his listeners, and this achievement justifies his designation as an artist; ultimately, his linguistic creativity launched a ‘revolution’ (Miller 1949, 48) in theological substance. It is possible to see in these descriptions how Miller recasts similar claims about the power of poetry that had recently been advanced by Cleanth Brooks in The Well-Wrought Urn (1947). Brooks and other proponents of close reading and literary formalism posed an influential challenge to the dominant biographical/historical approach that had been established in earlier critical works, such as Griswold’s Prose Writers. Emphasizing metaphor as the essence of poetic language, the New Critics rejected the poem’s propositional or ‘prose’ content (Brooks influentially coined the phrase ‘the heresy of

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Edwards in Anglo-American Literature   503 paraphrase’) in favour of a dynamic structure of tensions and resolutions organized through specific metaphors. As an intellectual historian, Miller did not go as far as Brooks in diminishing the importance of historical context, but he did stress Edwards’s contributions to aesthetics and rhetoric. His repeated references to Edwards as an ‘artist’ reveal his aspiration to make Edwards’s writings transcend their moment and come alive for modern readers, as they had for his first audiences. Two essays that Miller wrote in the period adjacent to the publication of Jonathan Edwards expand the biography’s claims. ‘From Edwards to Emerson’, first published in 1940 and reprinted in Errand into the Wilderness, presents a loose connection between these two profoundly dissimilar American writers that is suitable, as Miller later wrote, ‘for the textbooks, or for students’ notebooks’ (Miller 1956, 185). Miller found that ‘a passionate search of the soul and of nature’ (Miller 1956, 202), inherited from Calvinism and gradually stripped of dogma, flowed in a swelling stream from the Puritans, through Edwards, to Emerson and his New England contemporaries.2 The persuasiveness of this claim as it applies to Edwards will depend on one’s assessment of his attention to the natural world. His youthful spider letter, a handful of passages in the ‘Personal Narrative’, and some of the aphorisms that Miller edited as Images or Shadows of Divine Things (1948) offer the strongest evidence of this view. In ‘The Rhetoric of Sensation’ (1950)—also reprinted in Errand into the Wilderness— Miller developed the treatment of Edwards’s language that he had begun in the biography, explaining how ‘Edwards became a revolutionary artist in the midst of the eighteenth century because he took with painful seriousness Locke’s theory that words are separable from all reality’ (Miller 1956, 177). At the heart of his artistry is a paradox worthy of the most devoted New Critic: the experience of grace could only arise from the preacher’s words, while the fact that those words lacked any connection to their referents ensured that the listener’s response was not merely a reaction to the minister’s eloquence, but a moment of genuine holiness or insight. ‘The word must be pressed, and rhetoric must strive for impression,’ Miller explained. ‘It is a strength, not a weakness, of language that no matter how sensational it becomes, it has to depend upon something happening to the recipient outside and above its own mechanical impact’ (Miller 1956, 183). The parallels with Romantic theories of inspiration emerge more clearly in this passage: ‘To go from the word to a mechanical response, in preaching or in literary criticism, is a direct, natural, scientifically explicable process; but to get from the sensational impact of a word, through the emotion, to the saving, comprehending idea, there must be an indirect, a supernatural, a mysterious leap’ (Miller 1956, 181). Individual responses to words differ. The same phrase or sentence will leave one person indifferent; stimulate an emotional reaction in a second person; and lead a third person through and beyond feeling to a higher spiritual or intellectual understanding. Without claiming a line of influence, Miller characterizes Edwards’s preaching in terms designed to imply a comparison between his rhetoric of sensation, which 2 Stowe argues for continuities between Edwards and Emerson based on the rising flow of free discussion in Oldtown Folks (1869).

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504   Sandra M. Gustafson could be understood by everyone but only produced the effects of grace in a few, and nineteenth-century theories of mind. Miller cites the work of Søren Kierkegaard (a major influence on the existentialism of Miller’s day) to support his reading of Edwards: ‘in their different phrases both [Edwards and Kierkegaard] claimed that there is a fundamental limitation upon all literature, namely, that after the artist has provided the verbal environment, at this point another power must intervene if the beholder is to collect out of it the true conception’ (Miller 1956, 182). There are also similarities between Edwards’s reworking of Locke and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s post-Lockean contrast between a lower understanding and a higher reason. Emerson embraced Coleridge’s distinction and formed his mature style in response to it, a connection that Miller touches on in ‘From Edwards to Emerson’. Miller created an intellectual and aesthetic context for Edwards that challenged Holmes’s critical assessment. As  H.  Richard Niebuhr noted in 1959, the events of the twentieth century—the Great Depression, World War II, the Holocaust, the atom bomb, and the Cold War—made Edwards’s insights into human limitation and divine sovereignty newly relevant (Niebuhr 2010). At the same that Edwards became an important touchstone for literary scholars, he emerged as a figure in American poetry through the work of Robert Lowell. Lowell became absorbed in Edwards’s works as a young man, writing four poems of enduring interest on his predecessor. He even planned to produce a biography of his five times great-grandfather.3 The plan for a biography was never executed, perhaps because Lowell decided to leave that task to Perry Miller, who was a young faculty member when Lowell studied at Harvard in the 1930s. Miller’s biography of Edwards appeared in 1949, three years after Lowell published his Pulitzer-prize-winning volume Lord Weary’s Castle (1946), which contained two poems on Edwards. Similar to Miller’s reinterpretation of Edwards, these poems reconsider his life and works from the perspective of midcentury existentialism. Contrasting with Stowe’s and Holmes’s approach to Edwards as the source of an ascetic, punitive faith that was ill-suited for a modern republic, Lowell inhabited and transformed Edwards’s writings to reveal different aspects of his thought. ‘Mr. Edwards and the Spider’ and ‘After the Surprising Conversions’ appear sequentially in Lord Weary’s Castle, forming a kind of diptych on the suicide of Josiah Hawley, Edwards’s uncle by marriage. Read in sequence, the poems offer, in the first case, private reflections on Hawley’s death that incorporate phrases from both Edwards’s letter on spiders and ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’, and in the second case, a public narrative about the social contagion of existential despair that ends with a turn to the natural world in an attempt to achieve closure. ‘After the Surprising Conversions’ recasts a passage that appears late in A Faithful Narrative, where Edwards describes the eruption of ‘melancholy’ and suicide that turned the Northampton community away from the revival. A comparison of the passage from Edwards’s Faithful Narrative and the text of ‘After the Surprising Conversions’ reveals Lowell’s process of absorbing and reinterpreting Edwards’s words. The Edwards passage opens in the first person plural (‘withdrawing from us’), 3 For the relationship see . (Accessed August 24, 2020.)

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Edwards in Anglo-American Literature   505 moves  into a more restricted identification with the townspeople (‘the minds of ­people here’), and ends in an omniscient voice that refers to ‘them’ and ‘their response’ to the suicide: In the latter part of May, it began to be very sensible that the Spirit of God was gradually withdrawing from us, and after this time Satan seemed to be more let loose, and raged in a dreadful manner. The first instance wherein it appeared, was a person putting an end to his own life by cutting his throat. He was a gentleman of more than common understanding, of strict morals, religious in his behavior, and an useful honorable person in the town; but was of a family that are exceedingly prone to the disease of melancholy, and his mother was killed with it. He had, from the beginning of this extraordinary time, been exceedingly concerned about the state of his soul, and there were some things in his experience, that appeared very hopefully; but he durst entertain no hope concerning his own good estate. Towards the latter part of his time, he grew much discouraged, and melancholy grew amain upon him, till he was wholly overpowered by it, and was in a great measure past a capacity of receiving advice, or being reasoned with to any purpose. The Devil took the advantage, and drove him into despairing thoughts. He was kept awake anights, meditating terror; so that he had scarce any sleep at all, for a long time together. And it was observed at last, that he was scarcely well capable of managing his ordinary business, and was judged delirious by the coroner’s inquest. The news of this extraordinarily affected the minds of people here, and struck them as it were with astonishment. After this, multitudes in this and other towns seemed to have it strongly suggested to ‘em, and pressed upon ‘em, to do as this person had done. And many that seemed to be under no melancholy, some pious persons who had no special darkness, or doubts about the goodness of their state, nor were under any special trouble or concern of mind about anything spiritual or temporal, yet had it urged upon ‘em, as if somebody had spoke to ‘em, ‘Cut your throat, now is a good opportunity. Now! Now!’ So that they were obliged to fight with all their might to resist it, and yet no reason suggested to ’em why they should do it. (Edwards 1972, 206–7)

In the poem (reprinted in sections below), Lowell rewrites this passage in the form of a letter to an unnamed correspondent who has inquired about recent events. (The original text is addressed to the Rev. Benjamin Colman of Boston.) The poet quotes phrases and passages more or less directly from Edwards’s account (see the italicized text in the poem as printed below), modifying or adding details that cast the episode in a different light. For instance, where Edwards describes the Spirit of God withdrawing and Satan ‘let loose’, Lowell situates the negative turn in the revival in relation to calendars, one secular and the other sacred: 22 September, the date of his letter; and Ascension Day, the celebration of Christ’s bodily ascension into heaven, an ecumenical feast shared by all Christian churches. (In 1940 Lowell had converted to Roman Catholicism. He later renounced his ties to the Catholic Church.) This way of introducing the events has the effect of doubly framing them in human terms: the secular calendar marking worldly time, and the sacred calendar indicating the interface of human memory and sacred event. Lowell refers to the end of the revival only with the pronoun ‘it’; the punning

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506   Sandra M. Gustafson r­ eference to ‘begins to be more sensible’ suggests both a heightening of perception and a return of common sense. Compared to Edwards’s version of the same events, Lowell gives a much greater place to Edwards’s own role in provoking the tragedy. Writing in Edwards’s voice, Lowell describes how ‘a gentleman...kicked against our goad’—a reference to a moment in Paul’s conversion as described in Acts 26:14—and alludes to preaching a sermon ‘on a text from Kings’. September twenty-second, Sir: today I answer. In the latter part of May, Hard on our Lord’s Ascension, it began To be more sensible. A gentleman Of more than common understanding, strict In morals, pious in behavior, kicked Against our goad. A man of some renown, An useful, honored person in the town, He came of melancholy parents; prone To secret spells, for years they kept alone— His uncle, I believe, was killed of it: Good people, but of too much or little wit. I preached one Sabbath on a text from Kings; He showed concernment for his soul. Some things In his experience were hopeful. He Would sit and watch the wind knocking a tree And praise this countryside our Lord has made. Once when a poor man’s heifer died, he laid A shilling on the doorsill; though a thirst For loving shook him like a snake, he durst Not entertain much hope of his estate In heaven. Once we saw him sitting late Behind his attic window by a light That guttered on his Bible; through that night He meditated terror, and he seemed Beyond advice or reason, for he dreamed That he was called to trumpet Judgment Day To Concord. In the latter part of May He cut his throat. And though the coroner Judged him delirious, soon a noisome stir Palsied our village. (Lowell 2003, 61)

At a later point in the poem, Lowell introduces Edwards’s metaphysical frame for the revival’s failure (God withdraws, making room for Satan’s temptations), following the coroner’s diagnosis of delirium and the town’s rejection of that verdict. Where Edwards distanced himself from the townspeople’s desperate response to the suicide, Lowell employs first person plural pronouns: ‘we thought we could not rest / Till we had done with life . . . / We were undone.’ Lowell draws a sharp contrast between a spiritually

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Edwards in Anglo-American Literature   507 lukewarm but emotionally stable community (‘once unconcerned with doubt, / Once neither callous, curious nor devout’) and an agitated, desperate, self-destructive town led by a minister who shares their suicidal thoughts. At Jehovah’s nod Satan seemed more let loose amongst us: God Abandoned us to Satan, and he pressed Us hard, until we thought we could not rest Till we had done with life. Content was gone. All the good work was quashed. We were undone. The breath of God had carried out a planned And sensible withdrawal from this land; The multitude, once unconcerned with doubt, Once neither callous, curious nor devout, Jumped at broad noon, as though some peddler groaned At it in its familiar twang: ‘My friend, Cut your own throat. Cut your own throat. Now! Now!’ (Lowell 2003, 61–2)

As well as rearranging and revising lines from Edwards’s narrative, Lowell adds an ­element that is not present in the original: brief descriptions of the natural world. The passage describing the gentleman’s ‘hopeful’ experience includes references to  watching the wind knock a tree and praising ‘this countryside our Lord has made’.  Lowell returns to this theme in his closing lines. He first restates the date, and  so returns the reader to the poem’s opening and the mundane realities of ­everyday life: September twenty-second, Sir, the bough Cracks with the unpicked apples, and at dawn The small-mouth bass breaks water, gorged with spawn.

By returning to the beginning of the poem, Lowell hints at the cyclical nature of time and of spiritual elevation and depression. (Lowell famously suffered from bipolar disorder.) The rhyme scheme creates a bridge from the moment of spiritual crisis (‘Now! Now!’) to an apple laden ‘bough’, and then doubles down on the natural imagery with the end-rhymed final lines (‘dawn’, ‘spawn’). The closing images of apples left unharvested and a surfacing bass, its stomach full of spawn, evoke John Keats’s famous ode ‘To Autumn’. Keats depicts a world replete, whose gorgeousness elicits power from its melancholy. The sense of impending loss is tempered and made tolerable by the ­recognition of fruition and maturity (‘stubble-plains’, ‘full-grown lambs’). Lowell’s apples suggest Genesis and the dangerous but necessary knowledge of good and evil; they also hint at ripened souls waiting to be harvested. His decision to end with ‘unpicked apples’ weighing down—perhaps even breaking—the bough provides a tantalizing glimpse of how he imagined Edwards in the aftermath of the revival: able to witness the beauty and plenitude of the world, but not (yet) to act in it.

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508   Sandra M. Gustafson Lowell returned to Edwards and his writings in ‘Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts’ (1962). Here he takes a more distanced stance toward his illustrious ancestor, writing of him in the third person and relating his own ‘pilgrimage to Northampton’ where ‘I found no relic, / Except for the round slice of an oak / You were said to have planted’ (Lowell 2003, 355). Expressing both contempt and love, Lowell tells the story of Edwards’s life through references to his major writings, including the spider letter and ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’. He ends the poem with lines from Edwards’s response to the letter inviting him to assume the presidency of Princeton. Using quotation marks to identify the words as belonging to Edwards—a technique he had not employed in his previous Edwards poems—Lowell presents his own edited version of the original text. The changes that Lowell makes heighten but do not create the effect of the poem’s ending, which can be grasped without knowledge of the Edwards letter. Lowell collapses the deliberate distance he has been cultivating as Edwards’s words merge with his own: ‘I am contemptible/ stiff and dull. // Why should I leave behind / my delight and entertainment, / those studies / that have swallowed up my mind’ (Lowell 2003, 356). ‘Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts’ later appeared in For the Union Dead (1964), whose title poem concludes with a turn to contemporary pol­it­ical issues—the looming threat of nuclear war, the Civil Rights movement—that mirrors Lowell’s growing engagement with public concerns. In ‘Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts’ he mentions that Edwards gifted Sarah with ‘Pompey, a Negro slave’ (Lowell 2003, 354). ‘For the Union Dead’ presents New England history, including ‘frayed flags’ over ‘the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic’ (Lowell 2003, 377), fading before the ‘savage servility’ (Lowell 2003, 378) of modern life. Lowell’s last published poem on Edwards was ‘The Worst Sinner, Jonathan Edwards’ God’, which appeared in History (1973), a volume tracing major events and figures in Western history in sequential brief lyric poems. The poem on Edwards falls between a poem on Bishop Berkeley and another on the ‘Watchmaker God’, a reference to deism. Here the comparison with Edwards is flattened into a juxtaposition, conveying a sense of equivalence not only with the theologian, but with ‘God himself ’, who ‘cannot wake five years younger, / and drink away the venom in the chalice- / the best man in the best world possible’ (Lowell 2003, 470). Reduced to ‘History’, Jonathan Edwards and his God lose their power. *

The Significance of Edwards for Contemporary Literature So far I have described two phases of Edwards’s importance in Anglo-American literature: his significance as the founding writer of distinctively American prose in Griswold’s mid-nineteenth-century collection of critical biographies, and the literary

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Edwards in Anglo-American Literature   509 response in writings by Harriet Beecher Stowe and Oliver Wendell Holmes; and his equally foundational role in the mid-twentieth-century work of Perry Miller, which elevated the New England tradition to a central place in American literary studies, aided and amplified by the poetry of Robert Lowell. By some measures, Edwards’s place as a literary figure remains secure in the early twenty-first century. Selections from his writing reliably appear in anthologies of American literature, with ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’ remaining a perennial favourite. And yet in other ways his works seem remote from contemporary literary culture—perhaps more removed from literature as it is currently understood than ever before. The notion of belles lettres that underwrote Griswold’s capacious approach to ‘prose’ has faded. The novel form has established its dominance in the marketplace and is increasingly hegemonic in academic studies as well. Meanwhile the essay, which can claim formal descent from the sermon, barely registers as a vital literary presence. To assess the challenge of resituating Edwards as a figure of abiding significance for Anglo-American literature, consider the living writer with the best claim to be his literary heir: the novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson. A long-time faculty member in the University of Iowa’s Master of Fine Arts program, Robinson’s novels portray Calvinist characters and convey a Calvinist sensibility. She also writes combative essays where—like Saul Bellow, another fiction writer who made his home in the university system—she makes sweeping pronouncements about the failures of university education and the general ignorance of scholars. An avowed Calvinist, Robinson assumed the mantle of the Puritan tradition with the publication of Gilead (2004), her long-awaited second novel following the widely admired Housekeeping (1980). Robinson narrates Gilead from the perspective of the Reverend John Ames, a Congregationalist minister in a small Iowa town, who wrestles with the social implications of his theological inheritance. His father and grandfather were Congregationalist ministers before him—much as Edwards was the son and grandson of Congregationalist ministers—but their examples lead him in different directions: his grandfather was a committed abolitionist, while his father reacted against the devastation of the Civil War and became a Christian pacifist. Robinson uses point of view to explore the legacy of American Calvinism in Gilead and her two subsequent novels, which have the same setting and many of the same characters and events. At the core of her project is a question: how does the Reverend Ames, exemplary heir to the Puritan tradition alive in the American heartland of the 1950s, respond to cultural change and appeals for social justice—racial equality and civil rights in Gilead and Home (Robinson 2008b); migrant labour, sexual exploitation, and poverty in Lila (2014)? Ames is also concerned about the spiritual status of Jack Boughton, the son of a neighbouring Presbyterian minister, with whom he has had a close relationship. Are Jack’s problems a sign that he is not among the elect? With subtlety and tact, Robinson explores these issues by varying the point of view in each novel and presenting scenes from different perspectives. She invites readers to reflect on the main characters’ spiritual status, while moments of ecstatic, visionary writing provide a stylistic link to Edwards. Robinson has emerged in recent years as a deeply committed, theologically flexible Calvinist writer and an advocate for the Puritan tradition. Edwards figures prominently

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510   Sandra M. Gustafson in ‘Credo’, her statement of belief published in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin. Here she describes how a passage from Original Sin, encountered as an undergraduate student, was her ‘best introduction to epistemology and ontology’ (Robinson 2008a, 28); while his ‘sermon on Christian charity’ conveys the idea that ‘we do all err and fail, are in some degree helpless against human weakness, and that we owe ourselves and one another a chastening awareness of this fact, and forgiveness on just these grounds’ (Robinson 2008a, 29). In ‘Which Way to the City on a Hill?’ (2019) Robinson challenges current Marxist (and, as noted in ‘Credo’, Weberian) interpretations of John Winthrop’s ‘Modell of Christian Charity’ as a capitalist document by reading it in the context of a premodern (but distinctively Protestant) theory of moral economy. Edwards figures here as the transmitter of Winthrop’s philosophy and an unjustly neglected writer best known for ‘a sermon that mentions spiders’. ‘In the next century’ after Winthrop, Robinson writes, ‘Jonathan Edwards gave a long, highly detailed sermon titled “Christian Charity: or the Duty of Charity to the Poor, Explained and Enforced.” In it he makes every argument for liberality Winthrop has made and a few more, and refutes every argument for delay, parsimony, or resentment, even though, he says, the town governments take responsibility for assisting the poor.’ Robinson’s ultimate goal in this essay is to revive a sense of a distinctive New England tradition, superior to Old World hierarchies and free from the injustices of Southern slave society—a usable past for today’s religious liberals that ­echoes the origin story of American democracy presented by Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835, 1840) and George Bancroft’s History of the United States (1834–74). Her overt political aims distinguish the essay from Miller’s more philosophically oriented work, even as her selective representation of the Puritan past ignores key facts such as the mutilation and execution of Quakers by Bay Colony leaders. Robinson is very much of our literary moment. By writing novels that reflect a specific perspective on the American past and simultaneously pursuing a form of Calvinist identity politics in her essays, Robinson follows an approach pursued by Toni Morrison and other distinguished contemporary novelists. In making out her case that Edwards has been neglected, Robinson notably fails to mention the Yale edition of Edwards’s works (26 vols., 1957–2008)—even though she serves on the board of the Edwards Center at Yale—and ignores a substantial body of criticism that has brought the tools of literary analysis to bear on Edwards’s writing. One might begin with Edwin  H.  Cady’s still valuable essay on ‘The Artistry of Jonathan Edwards’ from 1949 (Cady 1949), the year of Miller’s biography. Since that time, literary scholars have pursued three main areas of inquiry: stylistic and textual analysis of Edwards’s sermons; investigations of his approach to typology; and consideration of his contributions to narrative forms that in turn contributed to the development of the novel. Beginning with his 1963 dissertation on ‘The Literary Techniques of Jonathan Edwards’, Wilson H. Kimnach has been a leading editor and interpreter of Edwards’s sermons. When discussing Edwards as a practitioner of the sermon form, Kimnach typically emphasizes his continuities with the preaching of his father Timothy Edwards and his stylistic and thematic resemblance to his grandfather Solomon Stoddard, an

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Edwards in Anglo-American Literature   511 influential and widely published author of sermons and other religious writings. Kimnach notes further that ‘the sermon form inherited by Edwards from his forebears dramatized the mediation of the divine in its very formal structure....The drama of mediation results from the close argumentative linkage within the sermon as the preacher moves from the Word of God (Text) to human understanding (Doctrine) to human conduct (Application), or from the eternal to the temporal to the moment of experience’ (Kimnach 2007, 105). Further, he notes the importance of aesthetics and the affections as mediating elements in Edwards’s most important sermons and discusses how in the 1740s Edwards’s sermons became increasingly analytical, stretching into multi-part theological arguments, and paving the way for his treatises. Though not specific to Edwards, the sermon form fed into the literary essay, with Emerson being a pivotal figure. A second area of literary scholarship on Edwards’s writings is typology and the related modes of symbolism and correspondence. Edwards figures as a quintessential example of American self-expression in Sacvan Bercovitch’s numerous influential works, beginning with the essays in his early edited collection Typology and Early American Literature (1972). A more fine-grained study is Janice Knight’s ‘Learning the Language of God: Jonathan Edwards and the Typology of Nature’ (1991). Knight reviews the critical debate prompted by Perry Miller’s edition of Images or Shadows of Things Divine, focused on whether Edwards understood typology in a ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ way and develops an alternative reading of Edwards’s typological writings, finding in them God’s ‘ceaseless desire to communicate . . . through all time and all creation’ (Knight  1991, 551). More recently, Anna Svetlikova has suggested that Edwards’s ­theory of language (including typology) can be fruitfully discussed in terms of the Ricoeur–Derrida debate in French philosophy (Svetlikova 2009). Edwards’s connections to writing by, about, and for women is a third area that has received some attention from scholars. Kimnach (2009) notes the importance for Edwards of the rules for effective argument in the Ladies Library, as well as the previously mentioned influence of Samuel Richardson’s novels. As noted earlier, Edwards’s descriptions of Abigail Hutchinson and Phebe Bartlett, as well as his lovely account of young Sarah Pierpont, inspired later writers. The gendered aspects of Edwards’s preaching, especially themes of embodiment and voice as they relate to his representation of these young women, have also been examined (Gustafson 1994). * In an unexpected twist, Jonathan Edwards’s literary legacy now also includes the Broadway musical sensation Hamilton (2015). Featuring Aaron Burr as a foil to and nemesis of Alexander Hamilton, the production includes ‘Wait for It’ (Miranda and McCarter 2016, 91–3), an affecting song in which Burr reflects on his burdensome heritage: ‘My grandfather was a fire and brimstone preacher, / But there are things that the homilies and hymns won’t teach ya. / My mother was a genius / My father commanded respect. / When they died they left no instructions. / Just a legacy to protect.’ He

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512   Sandra M. Gustafson c­ ontrasts this legacy with Hamilton’s motivating—and in some ways liberating—lack of a family history and wonders, ‘if there’s a reason / he seems to thrive when so few survive,’ concluding, ‘then God dammit / I’m willing to wait for it’. Does Hamilton’s energy and brilliance—similar in some ways to Edwards’s own—signal that he’s among the (sacred or secular) elect? A connection to Edwardsean theology is suggested in the ­chorus, which in one iteration reads: ‘Life doesn’t discriminate / between the sinners and the saints / it takes and it takes and it takes / and we keep living anyway, / we rise and we fall and we break / and we make our mistakes.’ (The preceding variants for ‘Life’ are ‘Love’ and ‘Death’.) When Burr fatally shoots Hamilton, completing the narrative’s tragic arc, he returns to this chorus, voicing his regret that he survived the duel but permanently tarnished his reputation, while Hamilton died but was redeemed through fame. Mapping the sinners-and-saints distinction onto the worldly realm of the nation’s founding, Miranda draws out the Edwardsean element of American civil religion in the fresh and unexpected context of a hip-hop inflected Broadway musical.4

Works Cited Baldwin, J. (1955/2012). ‘Everybody’s Protest Novel.’ Notes of a Native Son. Boston: Beacon Press. 13–23. Bancroft, G. (1879). ‘Jonathan Edwards.’ in Ripley, G. and Dana, C., eds. The American cyclopædia: a popular dictionary of general knowledge.. 2nd ed. New York: Appleton. 441–4. Cady, E. H.(1949). ‘The Artistry of Jonathan Edwards.’ New England Quarterly 22 (1): 61–72. Graff, G. (1987). Professing Literature: An Institutional History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Griswold, R. W. (1847). The Prose Writers of America with a Survey of the History, Condition, and Prospects of American Literature. Philadelphia: Carey and Hart. Gura, P.  F. (2007). ‘Edwards and American Literature’. In Stein, S.  J. ed. The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards. Ed. Steven  J.  Stein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 262–79. Gustafson, S.  M. (2011). Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gustafson, S. M. (2007). ‘Literature.’ in Burgett, B. and Hendler, G., eds. Keywords of American Cultural Studies. New York: New York University Press. 145–8. Gustafson, S.  M. (1994). ‘Jonathan Edwards and the Reconstruction of ‘Feminine’ Speech.’ American Literary History 6: 185–212. Hodes, M. (2015). Mourning Lincoln. New Haven: Yale University Press. Holmes, Sr, O. W. (1859). The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Company. Holmes, Sr, O. W. (1880). Jonathan Edwards. An Essay. New York: A.S. Barnes & Co. Kim, Sharon Y. (2003). ‘Beyond the Men in Black: Jonathan Edwards and Nineteenth-Century Woman’s Fiction.’ in Kling, D.W. and Sweeney, D. eds. Jonathan Edwards at Home and 4  Edwards remains a vital presence. As this essay was going to press, The New Yorker published a short story by Joyce Carol Oates featuring an Edwardsean title: ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’ (2019).

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Edwards in Anglo-American Literature   513 Abroad: Historical Memories, Cultural Movements, Global Horizons. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. 137–53. Kimnach, W. H. (2007). ‘Edwards as Preacher’ in Stein, S. J. ed. The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards. New York: Cambridge University Press. 103–24. Kimnach, W. H. (2009). ‘The Literary Life of Jonathan Edwards’ in McDermott, G. R., ed. Understanding Jonathan Edwards: An Introduction to America’s Theologian. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 133–44. Knight, J. (1991). ‘Learning the Language of God: Jonathan Edwards and the Typology of Nature.’ William and Mary Quarterly 48 (4): 531–51. Lowell, R. (2003). Collected Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Miller, P. (1956). Errand into the Wilderness. New York: Harper & Row. Miller, P. (1948). Images or Shadows of Divine Things. New Haven: Yale University Press. Miller, P. (1949). Jonathan Edwards. New York: William Sloan Associates. Miranda, L. and McCarter, J. (2016). Hamilton the Revolution. New York: Hachette Book Group. Niebuhr, H. R. (2010). ‘The Anachronism of Jonathan Edwards’ in Kimnach, W.H., Maskell, C. J. D., and Minkema, K. P., eds. Jonathan Edwards’s Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God: A Casebook. New Haven: Yale University Press, 169–72. Oates, J. C. (2019). ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.’ The New Yorker, October 14: 64–71. Robinson, M. (1980). Housekeeping. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Robinson, M. (2004). Gilead. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Robinson, M. (2008a). ‘Credo.’ Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Spring. 22–32. Robinson, M. (2008b). Home. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Robinson, M. (2014). Lila. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Robinson, M. (2019). ‘Which Way to the City on a Hill?’ New York Review of Books, 18 July. . Stowe, H. B. (1999). The Minister’s Wooing. Harris, S.K., ed. New York: Penguin. Stowe, H. B. (1981). Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly. Douglas, Ann, ed.. New York: Penguin. Svetlikova, A. (2009). ‘Alternative Viewpoint: The Literary Life of Jonathan Edwards’ in McDermott, G.  R., ed. Understanding Jonathan Edwards: An Introduction to America’s Theologian. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 145–9.

Author Bio A professor of English and concurrent professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame, Sandra  M.  Gustafson has written widely on early American literature and ­culture. Her works include numerous essays and two monographs: Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic (Chicago, 2011) and Eloquence is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America (North Carolina, 2000). She ­currently edits the Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol. A, and from 2008 to 2018 she served as editor of the MLA-affiliated journal Early American Literature.

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chapter 33

Asi a Dongsoo Han

Academic study on the worldwide influence of Edwards beyond the United States is virtually undeveloped and remains at an infant stage. In particular, there has been little comprehensive and critical research on Edwardsean scholarship in Asia, and, thus, the active studies and flourishing publications of Asian scholars have been largely un­acknow­ledged.1 This chapter aims to give an overview of the scholarship of Asian Edwardseans and the significant publications of primary and secondary sources on Edwards in Asia.

Jonathan Edwards in Korea To date, the Republic of Korea is where the second-largest group of Edwardseans in the world is actively working. Korean Edwardsean scholarship has a long history which traces back to the end of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries when American missionaries rushed into Korea. Circumstances in which Jonathan Edwards could be naturally introduced and known to Korea were prepared by American ­missionaries’ significant influence on Korean Christianity and society as well as their leading role in the theology and revivals of the Korean Church. First of all, the majority of the western missionaries working in Korea were American and, in particular, Presbyterian. Accordingly, the Reformed theology of American Presbyterian missionaries dominated in the early Korean Church. Cooperating with Canadian and Australian Presbyterian missionaries, they established the Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Pyongyang in 1901, where it is supposed that the professors taught Edwards to students. Their theological background made them prone to identify with Reformed and Puritan 1  The most recent and extensive research on Asian scholarship related to Edwards is this writer’s Ph.D. dissertation, ‘Jonathan Edwards in Korea: A History of the Reception of Jonathan Edwards’ (2019), which was written at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

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Asia   515 traditions. Among American Presbyterian professors, the Northern Presbyterians were usually graduates of New Brunswick Theological Seminary, McCormick Theological Seminary, Union Theological Seminary in New York, or Princeton Theological Seminary, while the Southern Presbyterians were alumni of Union Theological Seminary in Richmond or Louisville Presbyterian Seminary (Park 2004, 471–8). All those schools strongly featured Puritan piety, passion for the gospel, and spirit of revival movements. Consequently, their graduates inherited the theology of the early American Puritans and were acquainted with Edwards. HongMan Kim describes in his Puritan Theology of the Early Korean Presbyterian Church, ‘When graduates of Princeton Theological Seminary went out for missions, their saddlebags included books of Puritans such as  John Owen, Stephen Charnock, John Bunyan, Johan Flavel, and Scotland [sic] Presbyterian theologians including Samuel Rutherford and Thomas Boston, and a nextgeneration Puritan, Jonathan Edwards’ (Kim 2003, 73–4). Therefore, it is plausible that they referred to Edwards in their classes at the seminary. One strong piece of evidence is Biography of the Church History written by ChunKyung Oh in 1923, which contains a reference to ‘Edwards’ in its thirty-nineth chapter (Oh 1923, 129–32). This work is currently regarded as the first Korean reference to Edwards; if an earlier reference exists, the source has not yet been found. Oh published this book during his last year at the seminary. It implies that he must have learned about Edwards from his professors during his school years and that other students would later read this book as a textbook for history classes at the school. One more critical source is The Work of the Pastor, a textbook for a pastoral theology class at that school, which was written by a Presbyterian missionary professor C. Allen Clark in 1936. Arguing for a pastor’s responsibility for facilitating the growth of the church by a revival movement, Clark provides Edwards as an example (Clark 1919, 161). Another overarching factor impacting the introduction of Edwards into Korea in the early stage of Korean missions is the experience of great awakenings in Korea in the first decade of the twentieth century. A Methodist missionary Robert A. Hardie aided in sparking the first revival. At the ‘union meetings of Bible study and prayer’ in the summer of 1903, where seven missionaries in Wonsan gathered, Hardie served as the main speaker for the gathering. During the meetings, he prayed for the Holy Spirit to fill him and finally experienced a spiritual awakening. The Holy Spirit overwhelmingly urged him to confess his sins of racial superiority, reliance on his ability rather than the power of the Spirit, and of looking down on uncivilized Koreans. His penitence stimulated other missionaries to confess their sins and repent. During the following Sunday morning service in the church he pastored, Hardie again confessed his sins. Listening to him, the audience in the church also experienced the extraordinary work of the Holy Spirit (Hardie 1914, 22–3). The flame of the revival immediately spread throughout the city and expanded beyond Wonsan to Pyongyang and other towns. By 1905, the revival became widespread throughout the country. The united council of the Presbyterian and Methodist Church finally held revival meetings in major cities in 1906. They also began gathering every evening near the end of this year, to prepare and pray for the Presbyterian men’s Bible study and prayer meetings in Pyongyang in January of 1907,

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516   Dongsoo Han and for the Methodist revival meetings in February. With the support of this concert of prayer, about 1,500 men gathered in January, and the Holy Spirit brought about a remarkable thing among them one night. ‘After prayer, confessions were called for, and immediately the Spirit of God seemed to descend on that audience. Man after man would rise, confess his sin, break down and weep, and then throw himself to the floor and beat the floor with his fists in a perfect agony of conviction . . . Sometimes after a confession, the whole audience would break out in audible prayer’ (Lee  1907, 33–4). God’s mighty power also manifested at the meetings for women, which were held during the following week. The flames of revival immediately spread throughout the whole city and eventually to other parts of Korea. The Great Revivals in Wonsan and Pyongyang produced both massive conversions of non-Christians and spiritual awaken­ing of existing Christians. Believers were also inspired by the Great Revivals to jettison all their superstitious religions and to devote themselves entirely to the true Christian faith. One can find parallels between the Great Revivals in Korea and the First Great Awakening in the United States.2 The Korean revival took place while leaders were preaching just as the First Great Awakening was ignited by a series of ministries and sermons of great pastors and preachers. Both revivals also brought about massive penitence and conversion. Therefore, the great awakenings in 1903 and 1907 could play a mediating role in the introduction of Edwards, who was identified as a leading figure of the First Great Awakening. While Edwards had been introduced to Koreans in the early twentieth century, it was not until the second half of the century that his primary sources were translated and his thoughts started to be researched academically. In particular, the critical changes and circumstances of Korean Christianity and society impacted the development of Edwardsean scholarship. The Korean Church experienced remarkable numerical growth. By the middle of the 1990s, one-fourth of Korea’s population was Christian. However, the external growth did not only bring about positive results; it also produced adverse reactions. A growth-oriented mindset infiltrated the Korean Church. Churches became accustomed to indiscriminate application of church growth theory and the acceptance of Charismatic practices. Diverse heterodox teachings were also running rampant. This period was an era of turbulence, and consequently, scholars and pastors attempted to research Edwards with the hope of seeking a model of godly Christian life and sound theology. One of the influential factors in the development of Edwardsean scholarship was the publication of Martin Lloyd-Jones’s The Puritans: Their Origin and Successor in 1990. Lloyd-Jones’s remarks in this work, ‘I am tempted, perhaps foolishly, to compare the Puritans to the Alps, Luther and Calvin to the Himalayas, and Jonathan 2  Howard A. Johnston visited Korea in October 1906 and gave reports about the revivals that he had witnessed in Wales and India. American missionaries also referred to George Whitefield, John Wesley, Charles Finney, and other historical figures with respect to revivals. However, it is still not doubted that the experience of revivals in Korea also promoted American missionaries to introduce Edwards, a leader of the First Great Awakening, into Korea.

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Asia   517 Edwards to Mount Everest’ (Lloyd-Jones 1990, 365) inspired many Korean Christians to take an interest in Edwards. From 1969 through 1999, seventy-six primary and secondary sources on Edwards were translated into Korean. Twenty-four Korean scholarly studies on him had also been completed by the end of the twentieth century. The first primary source was translated in 1969 when ‘An Unpublished Essay on the Trinity’, a part of David Fuller’s Valiant for the Truth: A Treasury of Evangelical Writings, was published by Boyce. In the same year, the first Korean journal article on Edwards was also produced. UiWhan Kim, a late professor of Chongshin Theological Seminary, contributed an article entitled ‘Jonathan Edwards’s Concept of Faith’ to the Presbyterian Theological Quarterly in March 1969. It is the only Edwardsean article written by a Korean scholar before 1980. More primary and secondary sources on Edwards were published in the 1980s and 1990s. The first two volumes of Edwards’s writings were translated in 1984: Charity and Its Fruits, translated by Gang Seomun and published by Jeongeumsa on 25 January, and The Life and Diary of David Brainerd, translated by GiHyang Yoon and published by Christian Digest on 1 September. His sermon ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’ was also translated as a part of Peter F. Gunther’s Sermon Classics by Great Preachers in the same year. The first translation from the Yale edition was Freedom of the Will. The publisher Yale Munhaksa provided this book with a translation by JaeHee Chae in 1987, but it did not include the editor’s introduction and the author’s introduction from the Yale edition. Other volumes from the Yale edition have primarily been translated in the twenty-first century. The first Korean expert on Edwards was SangHyun Lee, who was the Kyung-Chik Han Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. He wrote a doctoral dissertation at Harvard University in 1972 entitled ‘The Concept of Habit in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards’. There was one more dissertation in the twentieth century: KyoungChul Jang’s ‘The Logic of Glorification: The Destiny of the Saints in the Eschatology of Jonathan Edwards’ (Jang  1994), submitted at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1994. If the second half of the twentieth century established a solid foothold for Korean Edwardsean scholarship, it is the current century which has witnessed its explosive advancement. Two decisive factors influenced this development. One is the ter­cen­ten­ ary of Edwards’s birth in 2003 and the other is the centenary of the Pyongyang Revival in 2007. When the religious atmosphere heated up in a large portion of the Korean Church, Christian scholars drew more attention to Edwards, who was regarded as one of the leading figures of pious Puritans and the First Great Awakening. As a result, Koreans published six doctoral dissertations, thirty-eight monographs, and twenty-four journal articles from 2001 through 2008.3 During the past fifty years, fifty-two primary sources of Edwards and forty-one ­secondary works about him have been published or released either as monographs or as e-books. The publishing company, Revival and Reformation, has translated and 3  For detailed information about all secondary sources written by Korean Edwardseans, refer to the bibliography of my dissertation (Han 2019, 306–24).

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518   Dongsoo Han ­ ublished five volumes from the original Yale edition of the Works of Jonathan Edwards: p Religious Affections (YE vol. 2, 2005), Great Awakenings (YE vol. 3, 2005), Original Sin (YE vol. 4, 2016), A History of the Work of Redemption (YE vol. 9, 2007), and Freedom of the Will (YE vol.1, 2016). This company also translated two more books from the Yale edition: The Sermons of Jonathan Edwards: A Reader (2005) and George Marsden’s Jonathan Edwards: A Life (2006). Seven tracts of Jonathan Edwards’s Famous Sermon Series have been also published in 2004 and 2005: Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (2004), A Divine and Supernatural Light (2004), Knowledge of Divine Truth (2004), A Farewell Sermon (2004), Much in Deed of Charity (2004), God Glorified in the Work of Redemption (2005), and Heaven Is a World of Love (2005). Meanwhile, Edwards’s five works concerning the Great Awakening have been published under the name of Jonathan Edwards Classics Series: Concert of Prayer (2000), The Distinguishing Marks (2004), Some Thoughts Concerning the Revival (2005), The Nature of True Virtue (2005), and A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (2006). Other publishing companies have paid much interest to various books on Edwards’s life, theology, and sermons. Consequently, works of George Marsden, Kenneth Minkema, Wilson Kimnach, Douglas Sweeney, D. G. Hart, Sean Michael Lucas, Conrad Cherry, Gerald McDermott, and SangHyun Lee have become known to Koreans. Most recently, I finished the translation of Sweeney’s Edwards the Exegete: Biblical Interpretation and Anglo-Protestant Culture on the Edge of the Enlightenment. It was printed by a Christian publisher, Christian Literature Crusade, in June of 2020. Korean scholars have so far produced at least 188 research studies on Edwards including thirty-four doctoral dissertations, seven monographs, ninety-seven journal articles, and fifty-nine essays. Ten of thirty-four doctoral dissertations were written from abroad, and the other twenty-four in Korea (see the detailed topics of those dissertations at the end of this essay). The subject matters in which Korean researchers have been engaged are extensive, and they include Edwards’s life and his thoughts on spirituality, religious affection, revival, soteriology, moral thoughts and aesthetics, preaching and sermons, the Trinity, free will, original sin, philosophical thought, Bible interpretation, Reformed theology, Puritan theology, practical theology, the Holy Spirit, social vision, eschat­ ology, and literature. However, they disclosed a bias for subject matter choices in that they have been more attracted by Edwards’s thoughts on true religion, spirituality, religious affections, soteriology, and ethics as well as his preaching. By contrast, Edwards’s views of original sin, free will, social affairs, mission, and hermeneutics have been marginalized for some time. Additionally, Edwards’s thoughts on education, economy, the doctrine of the church, the doctrine of communion, and ecology still remain to be researched. Beyond conducting flourishing research, Korean scholars have made fruitful efforts in two other areas. One is the organization of the Society of Jonathan Edwards in Korea at the end of 2002. Scholars gathered once or twice every year through 2010 with one or two of them presenting articles at every meeting. The other is the Jonathan Edwards Conference in Korea, an annual meeting co-hosted by SungWook Jung, a professor at Denver Seminary, and HyunChan Shim, founder of Trinity Institute of Washington. At

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Asia   519 every meeting since 2013, three to five scholars have made presentations to audiences of approximately two hundred Korean local pastors and lay Christians. In fact, many Korean local pastors have significant interest in Edwards. Namjun Kim, the senior pastor at Yullin Church, is a prolific writer and he has mentioned Edwards more than fifty times in his many books (Han 2019, 172–3). Geumsan Baek, the founder of Revival and Reformation publishing company, wrote Can’t We Live like Jonathan Edwards (1999) and Annual Rings of Jonathan Edwards: His Maturity and Discernment (2007) for spiritual encouragement of lay Christians. Many other local pastors also mention or cite Edwards in their sermons and preaching. We can observe three significant characteristics contributing to the Korean Edwardsean scholarship. First, studies on Edwards have usually developed by confessing Christians. Among all printed Korean writings on Edwards, only a handful of writings have been written from a non-Christian perspective and published by secular publishing companies. As Korea is a multi-religious nation where more than threefourths of the population is non-Christian, the American Christian Edwards is quite alien to the majority of Koreans. Therefore, apart from those who study American phil­ oso­phy or American literature, it is hard for ordinary non-Christian Koreans to have interest in an American theologian. They would not even know his name. Secondly, one of the crucial reasons why Korean scholars have studied Edwards has been to discover spiritual resources from him. From the beginning, Koreans could relate to him in the Puritan tradition and the revival movement. Since then, Korean pastors and scholars appealed to him as a spiritual resource whenever the Korean Church suffered from a spiritual crisis and desperately sought for religious revival. For example, in the 1980s and 1990s when the Korean Church experienced stagnation of church growth and spiritual confusion, a number of essays on Edwards and the Great Awakening referred to him as a spiritual model for pastors as well as godly saints. Such a tendency has been also shown in the current century. Scholars and pastors have written at least fifteen articles and essays on true religion, spirituality, and revival in relation to Edwards. Moreover, studies on his moral thoughts, preaching, and practical theologies also attempted to find some spiritual and practical insights from him for the Korean Church. Thirdly, studies on Edwards have usually been led by Reformed theologians and pastors. At least twentyeight out of the thirty-three Korean Edwardseans (one scholar wrote two dissertations) who wrote doctoral dissertations on Edwards are Presbyterians. Among all Korean journal articles and essays on Edwards, only three works are from non-Presbyterians. One of the reasons is that Korean Presbyterians have been the most substantial portion of the population of Korean Protestant Christians. Indeed, two-thirds of Korean Protestant Christians are Presbyterians. Therefore, it seems natural that Presbyterians have produced more works than believers of other denominations. However, the most important reason can be explained by the religious interests and preference of each denomination. Korean Methodist Church and the Holiness Church, the second and third largest denominations in Korea, have preferred John Wesley to Edwards as a spiritual resource, and they have not felt comfortable with the Reformed theology of Edwards.

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520   Dongsoo Han Korean Edwardsean scholarship still has a long way to advance. They are trying to open a new Jonathan Edwards Center in Korea as soon as possible and make a partnership with other centres around the world. Another critical issue is to produce more research studies in English. Among all works written in Korea, only two doctoral dissertations, and at best eleven journal articles, have been written in English, although many of them have an English abstract. It is also hard to find Korean scholars’ journal articles published in American journals, except some written by SangHyun Lee. More English writings are required for further communication with global scholars. For a broader worldwide network, Koreans are also encouraged to participate and engage in inter­ nation­al conferences and annual meetings of academic societies.

Jonathan Edwards in Other Asian Countries In addition to Korean scholarship, there are also small groups of Edwardseans in other Asian locations. Japanese Edwardsean scholarship has been steadily growing. The Jonathan Edwards Center Japan hosted an international conference at International Christian University on 26–7 March 2016. The astounding research of Anri Morimoto proves that the first Japanese translation of Edwards is the book named The God of Wrath, translated by Mamoru Iga and published in 1948 (Morimoto 2012, 225–32). It was from Edwards’s famous sermon ‘Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God’. This sermon was also translated again by Toru Iijima and was published by CLC Publishing in 1991 under the title of Sinners in the Hand of An Angry God: Deuteronomy 32:35. There has been intermittent publication of journal articles by Japanese scholars on Edwards’s thoughts in the last century. They include Takeda Suzuki’s ‘Jonathan Edwards’s “a new sense” ’ (1956), ‘Jonathan Edwards’s Spiritual Formation: Ancestry and Inheritance’ (1974), and ‘Jonathan Edwards’s Spiritual Formation: Regional and Home’ (1976); Yuko Kodama’s ‘Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening’ (1969); Toru Iijima’s ‘Jonathan Edwards and the Year 2000: On the Prediction of the Arrival of the Millennium’ (1982); Naoki Onishi’s ‘The Grand Scheme: Typological Methods of Jonathan Edwards’ (1985) and ‘Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening’ (1997); Yoshiki Mao’s ‘A Study on Jonathan Edwards and Revival’ (1986); Katsuzo Kimura’s ‘On Jonathan Edwards’s Personal Narrative’ (1992); David  N.  Marchie’s ‘Prayer: Forum for Divine–human Encounter: A Study on Jonathan Edwards’ (1992); and Nobuko Fujioka’s ‘From the Great Migration to Jonathan Edwards: Notes on Puritanism in Colonial New England’ (1996). However, it is in the current century that Japanese scholars have made great advances in Edwardsean scholarship. In 2008, Morimoto, one of the leading Japanese Edwardseans and the author of A Study of Jonathan Edwards: Ontology and Relief Theory of American Puritanism (1995), projected with Shinkyo (Protestant) Publishing Company the publication of the collection of seven volumes of Edwards’s works:

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Asia   521 Freedom of the Will (vol. 1, translated by Hisako Shibata), Nature and Beauty (vol. 2, translated by Naoki Onishi), Original Sin (vol. 3, translated by Takeshi Okubo), The Great Awakening and Ecclesiology (vol. 4, translated by Shitsudai Masui), History of the Work of Redemption (vol. 5), Theological Writings (vol. 6, translated by Taku Suda), and Sermons and Letters (vol. 7, translated by Mikayo Sakuma). Of these, volume three was published in 2015 and volume one in 2016. The editing director, Morimoto, has researched various subject matters on Edwards. He has published at least fourteen art­ icles in Japan and abroad, as well as a series of nineteen biographical essays titled ‘Jonathan Edwards Memoirs’ in the magazine Formations from January 1992 through December of 1993. Other scholars also have contributed to Japanese Edwardsean scholarship. Iwata Yazawa, a professor of Hokuriku Gakuin University, received a doctorate at Calvin Theological Seminary by writing ‘Covenant of Redemption in the Theology of Jonathan Edwards: The Nexus between the Immanent and the Economic Trinity’ in 2013. He released two more journal articles afterwards: ‘Is Jonathan Edwards a Pantheist?’ (2016), and ‘National Covenant in Jonathan Edwards: Theological and Social Ethics Foundation of the American Laurel (Jeremiad)’ (2019). Yazawa is also the author of the entries of ‘Covenant’, ‘Resolutions’, ‘Farewell sermon’, and ‘Earthquake’ in Eerdmans’ The Jonathan Edwards Encyclopedia (2017). There are several additional active Edwardseans in Japan. The year of 2002 witnessed at least four significant writings: Yoshio Murakami’s ‘The Eschatology of Jonathan Edwards’, Hideo Oki’s ‘Introduction to Jonathan Edwards’, Shono Masamichi’s ‘A Study of Theology of Christian Life in Jonathan Edwards’s “David Brainerd” ’, and Shitsudai Masui’s ‘The First Great Awakening Movement and the Inter-Atlantic Colonial Exchange: Focusing on Jonathan Edwards’s Letters’. Naoki Onishi also wrote ‘American Conceptualization of Time and Jonathan Edwards’s Post-Millennialism Reconsidered’ in 2004. In the case of China,4 two Chinese scholars received their doctorates by writing dissertations on Edwards. Kin Yip Louie, the Heavenly Blessings associate professor in theo­logic­al studies at China Graduate School of Theology in Hong Kong, wrote ‘The Theological Aesthetics of Jonathan Edwards’ at University of Edinburgh in 2007 and it was published under the title The Beauty of the Triune God: The Theological Aesthetics of Jonathan Edwards (Louie 2013). Unfortunately, he has presented no more articles or lectures on Edwards. The other scholar is Victor Xinping Zhu from mainland China. He studied at Edinburgh and completed a valuable work, ‘Jonathan Edwards’s Judeo-centric and Cosmic Vision of the Millennial Kingdom’ in 2019. Since the first translated book Edwards’s Selected Writings of Jonathan Edwards, Sr. was published by Chinese Christian Literature in Hong Kong in 1960 (translation by Ping-The Hsieh), a handful of primary sources of Edwards have been published in Chinese language: The Experience That Counts (Chinese title of Religious Affections), translated by Theological Translation Fellowship in Taipei (1994); The Distinguishing 4  For an extensive study on Chinese Edwardsean scholarship, see Pinto 2019.

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522   Dongsoo Han Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God was translated by Charles Chao in Taipei (2003); Religious Affections, translated by Liyan Du and published by China Zhigong Publishing in Beijing (2001); Religious Affections, translated by Ji Yang and published by Xinzhi Sanlian Bookstore in Beijing (2013); and Jonathan Edwards’s Collection, translated by Bingde Xie and published by Religious Culture Press in Beijing (2015). Secondary sources have been also translated in mainland China: Helen K. Hoister’s Jonathan Edwards: The Great Awakener, translated by Wenli Cao and published by Huaxia Publishing House (2006); George Marsden’s Jonathan Edwards: A Life, translated by Jiangyang Dong and published by Zhongguo Shehui Kexue Publishing (2012). The first biographical introduction of Edwards researched by a Chinese scholar is Daxin Yu’s A Thinker in the Affection of the Holy Spirit: Jonathan Edwards, which was published by Christian Classics Library in Hong Kong in 2003. There also are three significant Chinese journal articles researching Edwards’s theological thoughts: Heyun Ma’s ‘Two Sides of American Puritanism: Comparison between Franklin and Edwards’ (2010), Yiming Liu’s ‘On Religious Thoughts of Jonathan Edwards’ (2012), and Jiang-bo Hu’s ‘Christian Sin and Buddhist Emptiness: The Angry God vs. A Smiling Buddha’ (2013). Lastly, in Singapore, Seng-Kong Tan, a professor at the Biblical Graduate School of Theology, is their most prominent scholar. He has produced precious research works on Edwards. One of his masterpieces is Fullness Received and Returned: Trinity and Participation in Jonathan Edwards, published by Fortress Press in 2014. He also produced valuable essays, such as ‘Learning from Jonathan Edwards: Toward a Trinitarian Theology of Contemplation and Action’ (Bezzant, 179–202), and ‘Jonathan Edwards’s Dynamic Idealism and Cosmic Christology’ (Farris, 177–96). In summary, Korean Edwardsean scholarship has developed rapidly and formed the second-largest guild in the world. Almost 190 doctoral dissertations and journal articles have been produced. Beyond doctoral students, innumerable master students have had interest in Edwards and produced master level theses. Scholars are teaching Edwards in their classes at colleges and graduate schools. Many Koreans are now reading primary and secondary sources on Edwards. Local pastors frequently refer to Edwards in their pulpits. Edwards is currently regarded as one of the greatest religious and historical figures in the Korean Church. In addition, several other Asian countries have been increasing their scholarship in recent years. Japanese scholars are expanding their research areas related to Edwards. More primary and secondary sources on Edwards are about to be printed in Japanese. Chinese and Singaporean Edwardsean scholarship have been slowly but steadily growing. If each can work to more solidly connect with other Edwardseans worldwide, a solid global network can be created which will benefit everyone’s development.

Works Cited Clark, A (1919). Pastoral Theology. Presbyterian Publishing Fund: Seoul, Korea. Han, D. (2019). ‘Jonathan Edwards in Korea: A History of the Reception of Jonathan Edwards,’ PhD dissertation, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, IL.

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Asia   523 Hardie, R.A. (1914). ‘God’s Touch in the Great Revival,’ Korea Mission Field 10: 22–5. Kim, H. (2003). Puritan Theology of the Early Korean Presbyterian Church. IyetZeogGil: Seoul, Korea. Lee, G. (1907). ‘How the Spirit Came to PyongYang,’ Korea Mission Field 3, no. 3: 33–7. Lloyd-Jones, D.M. (1990). The Puritans: Their Origins and Successors. Word of Life: Seoul, Korea. Morimoto, A. (2012). ‘An Edwardsean Lost and Found: The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards in Asia,’ in O.D.  Crisp & D.A.  Sweeney (eds), After Jonathan Edwards: The Course of New England Theology. Oxford University Press: New York. 225–36. Oh, C. (1923). Biography of the Church History. HwaldongSuHae: Seoul, Korea. Park, Y. (2004). History of the Korean Church I: 1784–1910. The Korea Institute of Church History: Seoul, Korea. Pinto, R. (2019). ‘ “America’s Theologian” Enters the Middle Kingdom: Uncovering the Earliest Chinese Reception of Jonathan Edwards,’ Jonathan Edwards Studies 9, no. 2: 60–82.

Doctoral Dissertations of Korean Edwardsean Scholars An, J. (2015). ‘The Acceptance and Development of Puritan Practical Piety Tradition in Jonathan Edwards: Focused on His Personal Writings,’ PhD dissertation, Presbyterian University, Seoul, Korea. Cheong, Y. (2011). ‘Jonathan Edwards’s Covenant Theology in Light of the Trinity,’ PhD dissertation, Baekseok University, Cheonan, Korea. Cho, H. (2011). ‘A Study on ‘God’s Glory’ in Jonathan Edwards’s Sermons,’ PhD dissertation, Seoul Christian University, Seoul, Korea. Cho, H. (2011). ‘Jonathan Edwards on Justification: Reformed Development of the Doctrine in Eighteenth-Century New England,’ PhD dissertation, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, IL. Cho, J. (2015). ‘A Study on Jonathan Edwards’s Redemptive Historical Bible Interpretation in Comparison with Augustine and Calvin,’ PhD dissertation, Asia United Theological University, Anyang, Korea. Choi, J. (2019). ‘Jonathan Edwards’s Theology of Sanctification from the Viewpoint of Dispositional Ontology,’ PhD dissertation, Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Kansas City, MO. Ha, J. (2012). ‘A Comparative Study on the Doctrine of Justification of John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards,’ PhD dissertation, Baekseok University, Cheonan, Korea. Han, D. (2019). ‘Jonathan Edwards in Korea: A History of the Reception of Jonathan Edwards,’ PhD dissertation, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, IL. Hong, B. (2015). ‘Modern Application through Research of Jonathan Edwards’s Seeking and Saving Preaching,’ PhD dissertation, Chongshin Theological Seminary, Seoul, Korea. Jang, K. (1994). ‘The Logic of Glorification: The Destiny of the Saints in the Eschatology of Jonathan Edwards,’ PhD dissertation, Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, NJ. Jeon, G. (2013). ‘The Trinitarian Ontology of Jonathan Edwards: Glory, Beauty, Love, and Happiness in the Dispositional Space of Creation,’ ThD dissertation, Boston University, Boston, MI. Joo, Y. (2012). ‘Understanding the Role of Affections in Christian Spiritual Discernment: Interdisciplinary Dialogue Between Jonathan Edwards and Neuropsychology,’ PhD dissertation, Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, NJ.

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524   Dongsoo Han Jung, P.  -B. (2014). ‘Jonathan Edwards and New England Arminianism,’ PhD dissertation, University of the Free State, South Africa. Kang, H. (2016). ‘A Study on Interpretation of History Through Jonathan Edwards’s “A History of The Work of Redemption,” ’ PhD dissertation, Westminster Graduate School of Theology, Seoul, Korea. Kang, W. (2003). ‘Justified by Faith in Christ: Jonathan Edwards’s Doctrine of Justification in Light of Union with Christ,’ PhD dissertation, Westminster Theological Seminary, Glenside, PA. Kim, S. (2014). ‘The Doctrine of Sanctification of Jonathan Edwards: Sanctification of Persistent Changes in the Progress of Conversion,’ PhD dissertation, Keimyung University, Daegu, Korea. Kim, S. (2011). ‘A Study of Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Politics,’ PhD dissertation, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Seoul, Korea. Kim, S. (2019). ‘A study of Jonathan Edwards’ view on the work of the Holy Spirit,’ PhD dissertation, Calvin University, YongIn, Korea. Kim, S. (2001). ‘The Theology of Spirituality of Jonathan Edwards,’ PhD dissertation, Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea. Kim, Y. (2008). ‘A Study on the Doctrine of the Trinity in the Theology of Jonathan Edwards,’ PhD dissertation, Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea. Lee, J. (2017). ‘The Vision of the Fullness of the Church: Jonathan Edwards’s Interpretation of Zechariah 8 and 12–14,’ PhD dissertation, Torch Trinity Graduate University, Seoul, Korea. Lee, J. (2009). ‘A Study on the Religious Affections in the Theology of Jonathan Edwards,’ PhD dissertation, Chongshin Theological Seminary, Seoul, Korea. Lee, J. (2008). ‘A Study on Pastoral Ethics of the Korean Church: Focused on Edwards’s Virtue Ethics,’ ThD dissertation, The Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Seoul, Korea. Lee, S. (1972). ‘The Concept of Habit in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards,’ PhD dissertation, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Lee, S. (2009). ‘A Study on the Doctrine of the Holy Spirit in the Theology of Jonathan Edwards (1703–58),’ PhD dissertation, Chongshin Theological Seminary, Seoul, Korea. Lee, Y. (2016). ‘Jonathan Edwards’s Doctrine of Sanctification in Light of Union with Christ,’ PhD dissertation, Chongshin Theological Seminary, Seoul, Korea. Na, D. (2013). A Study on Design Ethics Realizing Social Responsibilities: Edwardsean and Levinasian Approach,’ PhD dissertation, HongIk University, Seoul, Korea. Noh, B. (2003). ‘The Doctrine of the Regeneration in the Theology of Jonathan Edwards: in Relation to the Theology of Calvin and Wesley,’ PhD dissertation, Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea. Paik, M. (2020). ‘A Study on Religious Affections in the Sermons of John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards,’ PhD dissertation, Seoul Theological University, Bucheon, Korea. Park, G. (2017). ‘A Study on the Doctrine of Justification in Reformed Theology: Focusing on Martin Bucer and Jonathan Edwards,’ PhD dissertation, Asia United Theological University, Anyang, Korea. Pyo, J. (2002). ‘A Study on Jonathan Edwards’s Theory of Disposition,’ PhD dissertation, Hoseo University, Cheonan, Korea. Ryu, G. (2018). ‘Jonathan Edwards’s Federal Theology in Exegetical Perspective: The Doctrinal Harmony of Scripture as A Framework for Understanding the History of Redemption,’ PhD dissertation, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, IL.

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Asia   525 Son, S. (2019). ‘Jonathan Edwards’s understanding of a history of the work of redemption: centered on a history of the work of redemption,’ PhD dissertation, Baekseok University, CheonAn, Korea. Song, H. (2015). ‘Analyses of Jonathan Edwards’s Dismissal Controversy,’ PhD dissertation, Pyeongtaek University, Pyeongtaek, Korea.

Selected Writings of Japanese Edwardsean Scholars Fujioka, N. (1996). ‘From the Great Migration to Jonathan Edwards: Notes on Puritanism in Colonial New England,’ Nagoya Institute of Technology Common Course Classroom Language and Culture Lecture Series 17: 45–60. Iijima, T. (1982). ‘Jonathan Edwards and the Year 2000: On the Prediction of the Arrival of the Millennium,’ American Studies 16: 222–30. Kimura, K. (1992). ‘On Jonathan Edwards’s Personal Narrative,’ Ryukoku University Review no. 441: 2–14. Kodama, Y. (1969). ‘Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening,’ in K.  Ohashi (ed.), Puritanism and the United States: Tradition and Rebellion to Tradition, Nanyuntang: Tokyo, Japan, 129–67. Mao, Y. (1986). ‘A Study on Jonathan Edwards and Revival,’ Doshisha American Studies 22: 59–68. Marchie, D. (1992). ‘Prayer: Forum for Divine–human Encounter: A Study on Jonathan Edwards,’ Tohoku Gakuin University Review, Teacher and Shingo 24: 49–83. Masamichi, S. (2002). ‘A Study of Theology of Christian Life in Jonathan Edwards’s David Brainard,’ Bulletin of Seigakuin University Research Institute 24: 285–74. Masui, S. (2002). ‘The First Great Awakening Movement and the Inter-Atlantic Colonial Exchange: Focusing on Jonathan Edwards’s Letters,’ The Journal of American and Canadian Studies 20: 95–115. Morimoto, A. (2012). ‘A Definite and Comprehensive Commentary on Edwards’s Theology,’ Evangelical Studies Bulletin 83: 6–11. Morimoto, A. (2016). ‘A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in Jonathan Edwards’s Center Japan,’ Humanity Studies: Christianity and Culture 48: 1–11. Morimoto, A. (1995). A Study of Jonathan Edwards: Ontology and Relief Theory of American Puritanism, Shobunsha: Tokyo, Japan. Morimoto, A. (2012). ‘An Edwardsean Lost and Found: The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards in Asia,’ in O.D.  Crisp & D.A.  Sweeney (eds), After Jonathan Edwards: The Course of New England Theology, Oxford University Press: New York, 225–36. Morimoto, A. (1995). Jonathan Edwards and the Catholic Vision of Salvation, Pennsylvania State University Press: University Park, PA. Morimoto, A. (2005). ‘Jonathan Edwards and ‘Great Awakening’,’ Bulletin of Research Institute at Seigakuin University 31: 340–73. Morimoto, A. (2004). ‘Jonathan Edwards and Protestant America of Philosophy,’ American Studies 38: 41–59. Morimoto, A. (2013). ‘Reciprocal Performance Habit’s Transformation of the Concept of Substance: Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy and Theology,’ British Philosophy Studies 36: 5–16. Morimoto, A. (1995). ‘Relief as a Fulfillment of Existence: Jonathan Edwards’s Habit Theory,’ Chuangwenshe, 18–20.

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526   Dongsoo Han Morimoto, A. (1999). ‘Salvation as Fulfillment of Being: The Soteriology of Jonathan Edwards and its Implication for Christian Mission,’ The Princeton Seminary Bulletin 20, no. 1: 13–23. Morimoto, A. (2010). ‘The End for Which God Created in Jonathan Edwards,’ in D. Schweitzer (ed.), Jonathan Edwards as Contemporary: Essays in Honor of Sang Hyun Lee, Peter Lang Publishing: New York, 33–47. Morimoto, A. (2005). ‘The Modern Range of Edwards’s Theology,’ Humanities: Christianity ad Culture 36: 19–41. Morimoto, A. (1995). ‘The Seventeenth-Century Ecumenical Interchanges,’ in S.  Chiba, G.R.  Hunsberger, L.E.J.  Ruiz (eds), Christian Ethics in Ecumenical Context: Theology, Culture, and Politics in Dialogue, William B. Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, MI, 86–102. Morimoto, A. (1999). ‘Understanding God’s Existence and the Underlying Ground of Creation: Tillich-Balt-Mortmann-Thomas-Edwards,’ in Systematic Theology Research Institute (ed.), Paul Tillich Study, Seigakuin University: Ageo, Japan, 199–30. Murakami, Y. (2002). ‘The Eschatology of Jonathan Edwards,’ Bulletin of Hokuriku Gakuin University and Hokuriku Gakuin University Junior College 26: 97–108. Onishi, N. (2004). ‘American Conceptualization of Time and Jonathan Edwards’ PostMillennialism Reconsidered,’ The Japanese Journal of American Studies 15: 19–36. Onishi, N. (1997). ‘Jonathan Edwards and ‘Great Awakening’,’ American Studies 31: 1–17. Onishi, N. (1985). ‘The Grand Scheme: Typological Methods of Jonathan Edwards,’ Humanities: Christianity and Culture, International Christian University 19: 133–49. Oki, H. (2002). ‘Introduction to Jonathan Edwards,’ Bulletin of Research Institute at Seigakuin University 26: 3–5. Post, S. G. (2009). ‘What is Agape in the Case of Jonathan Edwards (1703–58) and Samuel Hopkins (1721–1803),’ Bulletin of Institute of Christian Culture, Tohoku Gakuin University 27: 95–116. Suzuki, T. (1956). ‘Jonathan Edwards’s “a New Sense”,’ Yamagata University English Study 2. Suzuki, T. (1974). ‘Jonathan Edwards’s Spiritual Formation: Ancestry and Inheritance,’ Soka University Faculty of Literature 4, no. 1: 81–93. Suzuki, T. (1976). ‘Jonathan Edwards’s Spiritual Formation: Regional and Home,’ Soka University Faculty of Literature, Special Issue in Commemoration of the 5th Anniversary of the Founding: 3–15. Yazawa, I. (2016). ‘Is Jonathan Edwards a Pantheist?,’ Bulletin of Hokuriku Gakuin University and Hokuriku Gakuin University Junior College 8: 345–56. Yazawa, I. (2005). ‘Jonathan Edwards’s Doctrine of Trinity: Trigonage as “Repetition of Divinity,” ’ Bulletin of Tokyo Theological University Research Institute 8: 191–08. Yazawa, I. (2019). ‘National Covenant in Jonathan Edwards: Theological and Social Ethics Foundation of the American Laurel (Jeremiad),’ Bulletin of Hokuriku Gakuin University and Hokuriku Gakuin University Junior College 11: 141–51. Yazawa, I. (2006). ‘The State of Christ and God in Jonathan Edwards,’ Bulletin of Tokyo Theological University Research Institute 9: 167–84.

Selected Writings of Chinese Edwardsean Scholars Liu, Y. (2012). ‘On Religious Thoughts of Jonathan Edwards,’ Journal of Yunmeng 2: 48–52. Louie, K.  -Y. (2007). ‘The Theological Aesthetics of Jonathan Edwards,’ PhD dissertation, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK.

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Asia   527 Louie, K.  -Y. (2013). The Beauty of the Triune God: The Theological Aesthetics of Jonathan Edwards. Pickwick: Eugene, OR. Ma, H. (2010). ‘Two Sides of American Puritanism: Comparison between Franklin and Edwards,’ Science and Technology Information 13: 201. Marsden, G. (2012). Jonathan Edwards: A Life, Zhongguo Shehui Kexue Publishing: Beijing, China. Zhu, X. (2019). ‘Jonathan Edwards’s Judeo-centric and Cosmic Vision of the Millennial Kingdom,’ PhD dissertation, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK.

Selected Writings of Singaporean Edwardsean Scholars Tan, S.  -K. (2014). Fullness Received and Returned: Trinity and Participation in Jonathan Edwards, Fortress Press: Minneapolis, MN. Tan, S.  -K. (2016). ‘Jonathan Edwards’s Dynamic Idealism and Cosmic Christology,’ in J.R. Farris, S.M. Hamilton, J.S. Spiegel (eds), Idealism and Christian Theology. Bloomsbury Academic: New York, 177–96. Tan, S.  -K. (2017). ‘Learning from Jonathan Edwards: Toward a Trinitarian Theology of Contemplation and Action,’ in R.S. Bezzant & K.P. Minkema (eds), The Global Edwards: Papers from the Jonathan Edwards Congress Held in Melbourne, August 2015, Wipf and Stock: Eugene, OR, 179–02.

Author Bio Dongsoo Han (PhD, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) did undergraduate and master’s studies in Korea before completing a ThM at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. His research has focused on the history of the reception of Jonathan Edwards in Korea. He is the Korean translator of George Marsden’s Jonathan Edwards: A Life which was translated and published in 2006. He is also working with a Korean publisher that is publishing translated versions of Yale’s Works of Jonathan Edwards. He is a fellow at the Jonathan Edwards Center at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and is ordained by the Korean Presbyterian Church.

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CHAPTER 34

Austr a li a Stuart Piggin

There is a wide gap between Edwards’s influence on Australia, which, though invisible, was probably seminal, and the conscious reception of him by Australians for which there is not abundant evidence. Inasmuch as Edwards was constitutive of the evangelical movement, he helped shape Australia which has been one of the major centres of evangelical Christianity in the Anglophone world. Along with the Enlightenment and Utilitarianism, the Pietistic Calvinism of Edwards’s evangelicalism shaped a new world out of the more progressive elements in the old world (Piggin and Linder 2018). Yet, because the stream of specifically American influence on Australian society and culture did not become a torrent before the end of the Second World War, it flowed through mainly British filters. Edwards’s reception in Australia is most easily identified in British missionaries and clergy in the nineteenth century, Australian ministers and theologians in the twentieth century, and academic theologians in the early twenty-first century, so that the conscious reception of Edwards in Australia today is probably more evident than it has ever been. This reception history reflects a growing appreciation of the richness and utility of Edwards’s thought. It has proven adept at addressing the Australian experience, from cross-cultural missions to Indigenous ministry and multiculturalism (Bezzant 2017, 27–33), and from a robust defence of Reformed faith to an experience-based apology for pneumatological movements associated with revivals and Pentecostalism, and a trinitarian ecumenism which addresses Australian sectarianism by transcending denominationalism and Australian secularism through its theistic account of creation.

Edwards’s Influence on Australia’s Clerical Pioneers The two most influential and controversial of Australia’s pioneering clergy—Samuel Marsden and John Dunmore Lang—were indebted to Edwards. Chaplain Marsden read

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Australia   529 Brainerd’s Diary on the voyage to New South Wales in 1793. He recorded that he had been ‘reading of Mr Brainerd’s success among the Indians’, and he resolved that the ‘same power can also effect a change upon those hardened ungodly sinners to whom I am about to carry the words of eternal life’ (Marsden 1858, 5,8). Marsden’s thinking here arises from Edwards’s conviction that because in the Great Awakening, along with colonials, black slaves and American Indians were converted, the gospel is demonstrably the power of God for the salvation of all humankind (Piggin 2003, 266, 270). Admittedly, Marsden is here comparing Indians to convicts, not Australian Aborigines, but missionaries to the Aborigines longed for the conversion and even occasional revival of Aborigines, not only for their benefit, but as evidence that the millennial power of God was at work here, too. Lang, Sydney’s first Presbyterian minister, was an admirer of American political, as well as religious, thought. On a trip to America, he visited the burial ground of the Presbyterian Church at Princeton, ‘to muse for a moment over the grave of Jonathan Edwards . . . the great philosopher and divine . . . It is a peculiarly interesting spot, from the hallowed associations which it calls up’ (Lang 1840, 294f.). He mused for more than a moment, copying out the long Latin inscription on Edwards’s grave. Not surprisingly, Presbyterian ministers in the nineteenth century refer to Edwards more than ministers of other denominations. Robert Steel, second only to Lang in terms of his influence on the development of Presbyterianism in New South Wales, had been, like Lang, mentored by Thomas Chalmers who insisted that his theology was ‘that of Jonathan Edwards’ (Bebbington 2003, 185). Awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by the University of Göttingen in 1861, Steel was the minister of St Stephen’s, Sydney, from 1862 until his death in 1893. He was a firm, but peace-loving Calvinist, who taught theology at St Andrew’s College in the University of Sydney, helped promote union among Presbyterian bodies, was deeply devoted to cross-cultural missions, and engaged energetically in public affairs, while (unlike Lang) carefully avoiding political morasses. Shortly after his arrival in Sydney, he published Burning and Shining Lights, which includes a not entirely uncritical account of Edwards. ‘The Metaphysical Divine’ perhaps went too far with his passionless reasoning and his prose style was defective, even vulgar. But, if Edwards fell short of the average British gentleman in the latter respect, his discipline and attention to duty exceeded that of Nelson or Wellington. He stands among the very loftiest intellects. But he was no less remarkable as an evangelist of the cross. Metaphysicians have not been generally popular speakers or preachers; but Jonathan Edwards was a preacher of extraordinary power, whose words were the means of winning many souls.  (Steel 1864, 45)

Steel admired Edwards’s revival sermon on ‘Justification by Faith’, which ‘well known as a most argumentative piece of reasoning, was the means of the greatest awakening’ (72), and he insisted that it was very important for ministers to ‘interest their people in the work of God’s Spirit in the awakening of souls’ (66). With the stirrings of revival then evident in Australia, Britain and America, Steel had reservations about the new

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530   Stuart Piggin techniques of revivalists, commending Asahel Nettleton for avoiding such practices as anxious seats, female exhorters and late-night meetings. In this matter, Steel favoured the old ways of Edwards over the new ways (Barnes 1993, 101). Revivals in nineteenth-century Australia were surprisingly frequent (Piggin and Linder  2018, 332–45). They were, however, mainly local and mainly Wesleyan. Presbyterians, apparently shared Steel’s reservations about revivalism: altar calls, they felt, were not a great idea in small communities as everybody knew everybody else. It was observed that, of all congregations, Presbyterians were the least mercurial (Presbyterian Assembly of NSW, Blue Book, 1885, 48). Mercuriality apparently predisposes to revival! But Methodism was that part of the evangelical family which was growing more rapidly than any other. So, in a spirit of holy emulation rather than sectarian rivalry, Presbyterians had to take their practices seriously. In coming to terms with the possibility and desirability of revivals, Jonathan Edwards helped. The Rev Archibald Mackray, Presbyterian minister of Ashfield in Sydney, gave a substantial, well-researched lecture on revival to an Association of Presbyterian Sunday School Teachers. He agreed with Jonathan Edwards in viewing revivals as ‘those great periodical Religious movements which form the chief landmarks of history’. He likened them to revolutions which shape history: ‘Does not the doctrine of Crisis hold an imperial place in the philosophy of history?’ (Mackray 1870, 30, 31). Mackray quoted at length the most famous passage in Edwards’s account of revival in Northampton in 1734/5, A Faithful Narrative, as the normative, defining description of revival. Mackray adds (10): The ‘Thoughts on the Present Revival,’ which this great theologian published at the time, and his later treatise on ‘the Religious Affections’ ought to be carefully studied by everyone who is praying and working for a revival of the Lord’s work in his own community.

Addressing the three chief agencies in promoting awakenings (prayer, diffusion of revival intelligence and the use of lay evangelists), Mackray told his hearers (28) that ‘the revival in New England, which arose under President Edwards, is to be traced to the meeting for prayer of a few devoted Christians, maintained throughout the whole night. Barrenness and death is the righteous penalty for prayerlessness.’ John Auld, who took over the Presbyterian work in Ashfield from Mackray, retained Mackray’s hope for revival. He was able to report an awakening move of the Spirit among his people first in 1876 and again in 1881. The latter accompanied a ­two-week long mission and followed a season of ‘unceasing prayer’ for revival. In 1885, Presbyterian missioner, David Allan, preaching through the Bathurst region west of Sydney, drew upon the work of Edwards, ‘a great authority on the subject’ to explain his success, quoting him to the effect that ‘A revival of religion is nothing but the immediate result of an uncommon attention’ (Presbyterian Assembly of NSW, Blue Book 1885, 48).

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Edwards Criticized in Australian Classic None of the foregoing is surprising. What is surprising is that Edwards suddenly turns up in arguably the finest of Australia’s literary classics, Joseph Furphy’s Such is Life (1980/1903). One of the fascinating differences between eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury evangelicalism is the apparently rapid contraction in the latter of typology, of which Edwards was the master. But if it evaporated from evangelical theology, it finds idiosyncratic expression in this quirky, antipodean Tristram Shandy. Furphy was a bullock driver in the western plains of the Riverina district of Victoria from 1873 until 1884 when he began to write Such is Life. It was eventually published in 1903 under the pseudonym of Tom Collins. For Collins (181) the flat landscape: bespeaks an unconfirmed, ungauged potentiality of resource; it unveils an ideographic prophecy, painted by nature in her impressionistic mood, to be deciphered aright only by those willing to discern through the crudeness of dawn a promise of majestic day . . . Faithfully and lovingly interpreted, what is the latent meaning of it all?

‘Ideographic prophecy’—is that not another aspect of the ‘eternal language’ through which Edwards and Coleridge sought to learn the ‘latent meaning’ from history and nature as well as the Bible? (Piggin and Cook 2004). One evening, Tom Collins was reflecting on the intricacies of theology with the help of Jonathan Edwards when he spied the very Australian type of pilgrim, a swagman. But let Tom tell us (105) about that in his own inimitable style: The refined leisure of the day had been devoted chiefly to the study of my current swapping-book—Edwards on Redemption—and now, half-stifled by the laborious blasphemy of the work, I was seeking deliverance from the sin of reading it by watching the multitudes of white cockatoos through my binoculars, and piously speculating as to their intended use.

Edwards’s History of the Work of Redemption, published posthumously in 1774, may be laborious, but it does not meander like Such is Life. It is focused and unrelentingly doctrinal. Furphy did not like doctrine and he especially did not like Edwards’s ­doctrine of predestination, which is the most likely reason that he described the book as ‘blasphemy’. Edwards’s high seriousness, however, had the same mind-altering effect on Furphy as it has on many who read him: it was making him think about the purpose of everything, even cockatoos. Edwards’s radical typology identifies types of the glory of God and the work of redemption in every creature and every event, that is, in nature and history as well as in the Bible. So it is not all that surprising that, under the influence of

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532   Stuart Piggin Edwards, Furphy was speculating on the use of cockatoos, even if he felt the disingenuous Australian need to downplay that speculation as pious. It was then no sort of a leap (107–8) to think of the pilgrim who came into the sights of his binoculars, namely the swagman, as a type of Christ: Heaven help him! That nameless flotsam of humanity . . . Few and feeble are his friends on earth; and the One who like him, was wearied with his journey, and, like him, had not where to lay his head, is gone, according to His own parable, into a far country. The swagman [unlike the earthly Jesus] we have always with us—And . . . the Light of the world, the God-in-Man, the only God we can ever know, is by His own authority represented for all time by the poorest of the poor. Yet whosoever fails to recognise in the marred visage of any social derelict the image of Him who was despised and rejected of men . . . can have no place among the Architect’s workmen, being already employed on the ageless Babel-contract.

Furphy’s Socialism is this-worldly and consistently opposed to respectable, institutionalized denominationalism, but it is a world, replete with types, where bullock ­drivers and swagmen are the truest pilgrims precisely because Christ is happiest to identify with them in their poverty and need. Strong on morality and conscience, Furphy saw no reason for preserving Christian dogmas of heaven, hell and judgement as of any relevance to their maintenance. Furphy himself would probably claim that by shedding Edwards’s ‘stifling’ metaphysic, while preserving the instinct for typological thinking about nature, he came closer to laying bare the Australian psyche.

Australia’s Jonathan Edwards The most remarkable flowering of Edwardsean thinking in Australian religious history is associated with the name of an Anglican minister, Geoffrey Bingham (1919–2009). He made much of Edwards’s trinitarian theology, which was certainly rare among Australian evangelicals and early even among American evangelicals outside the academy. His was a ministry richly synthesizing vital elements in evangelical Christianity, from Reformed biblicism to pneumatic experientialism. His personal spirituality was refined during World War II in the cruel fires of the Kranji jail where he was a prisoner of the Japanese for three and a half years. His heart theology stressed the dynamics of grace and the subjective experience of death with Christ to sin. Long before the Charismatic movement became significant numerically in Australia, Bingham sought to live in a continuing experience of the Holy Spirit. Based on what he understood to be ‘prophetic intimacy’ with the Triune God, his ministry witnessed revival in numerous of his missions both in Australia and overseas where he was a missionary. He also had a strong eschatology, seeing Jesus as God’s ‘telos’ for the nations. He was accordingly attentive to what God was doing in the contemporary world as he worked

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Australia   533 out his plan of redemption. In all this, Bingham’s thought was in profound harmony with that of Edwards, but it is often hard to determine whether his thinking was initiated by Edwards or was embraced because he found it so congenialized with the trajectory of his life’s calling. In his last decade, Bingham documented the effects of Edwards on his life and ministry (Bingham 1999). It is a revealing document. He claims that from the age of 20 he was familiar with Edwards. He writes: ‘I was in Moore Theological College in 1940 and his name was well known. . . . I returned to Moore College in 1952. There Edwards’s name and fame was linked with others such as James Denney, Peter Forsyth, J.C. Ryle and R.W.  Dale. We all thought of Edwards as being amongst the “greats”. ’ This is a ­surprising revelation, because although it prided itself on being an evangelical college, Moore College, the Anglican theological college in Sydney, never taught the history of evangelicalism until a fourth-year unit on it was introduced in 1997. Before that students were not taught Church History beyond the Reformation. So, if Bingham is right, it would appear that after Marcus Loane, College Principal and one deeply interested in the history of evangelicalism, departed on his appointment as a bishop in 1958, the spirituality associated with Edwards was lost in the rush to discard Keswick-style piety. Many babies were thrown out with that bath water. Like John Wesley and the afore-mentioned Mackray, Bingham was influenced towards seeking revival in his ministry through reading Edwards’s classic description of evangelical revival, A Faithful Narrative. ‘I know it fired me forever,’ he wrote, adding: ‘That such happenings could arise from strong biblical preaching confirmed my belief that all that was required of the minister of the church was to preach sincerely the Scriptures and the Spirit of God would move in power.’ Here is evidence that Bingham’s conviction that the ‘living word of God’ was foundational to Christian ministry was corroborated, rather than initiated, by his reading of Edwards. He always expected God to ‘do something’ when he preached or taught from the Scriptures. Perhaps, precisely because Edwards confirmed rather than changed his understanding, he was the more important in Bingham’s thinking. Edwards was his constant companion. ‘There have been times’, he wrote, ‘when I could turn to no other man but this one: no one has ever spoken quite like this one. I feel wonderfully at home with him. I have read innumerable books on revival, both histories of revivals, and revival theories. I have seen the futility of some of these theories, and have resonated to others of them because they comport with Edwards and the Scriptures.’ After mentioning Edwards’s account of his weeping aloud over the beauty and sweetness of God in Christ, Bingham said: ‘I have not heard other writers talk quite this way. If I say I talk this way then it is not a matter of emulation or imitation, but that I know my experience is authentic when it is in parallel with his.’ Or, in another example where he compares himself with Edwards, he wrote: Edwards has been called ‘the theologian of the heart’. In my case I was always this— if not on the level of Edwards—but he gave me heart to believe I was on the right track. I do not believe that the reading of Edwards necessarily induces ‘heart religion’,

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534   Stuart Piggin but I believe it confirms and encourages those whose heart lies in this direction. At the same time it rebukes an emotionalism which does not raise ‘holy affections’ but those mainly born of the flesh.

In a recent biography, Bleby (2012, 339) reports that as Bingham’s end drew near, he ‘­continued to read, and found a kindred spirit particularly in the American puritan ­theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), whose biography and writings he kept close to his bedside’. From 1967 to 1973 Bingham was principal of the Adelaide Bible Institute (now the Bible College of South Australia) and then served as director of the New Creation Teaching Ministry (NCTM) well into the new millennium. NCTM’s doctrinal stance was: ‘biblical and Reformed, without prejudice to the movements of God’s Spirit which come at times of revival and renewal of the Church’ (Bingham and Pennicook 1998, 7). NCTM, ‘a proclamatory teaching and publishing ­ministry’, gave Bingham, a compulsive teacher and writer, the opportunity to expatiate and mature his theological system forged with the help of his powerful intellect and passionate heart. He wrote 197 books, many of them laced with quotations from Edwards. He recruited an ever-expanding army of devoted disciples and a team of teachers who were fired by his passions, including his passion for Edwards. His teaching team was made up mainly of Reformed ministers from different evangelical denominations: Ian Pennicook, Martin Bleby, Grant Thorpe, Deane Meatheringham, Trevor Faggotter, Dean Carter, Dominic Smart, John Calvert and John Dunn. Together they taught at Summer, Autumn and Winter Schools in Adelaide, Spring Schools in Sydney, Pastors and Ministry Schools, and annual conferences for NCTM supporters. It is possible to be quite explicit about the references to Edwards in the team’s teaching because it has all been preserved in the NCTM’s archives which were digitized before NCTM was closed on 15 February 2013. Evidently, Bingham’s early enthusiasm for Edwards was based on his study of the Banner of Truth edition of Edwards’s works, especially Religious Affections and History of the Work of Redemption. He repeatedly quoted 1 Peter 1:8, speaking of Jesus Christ: ‘Without having seen him you love him; though you do not now see him you believe in him and rejoice with unutterable and exalted joy’ to make Edwards’s point that ‘no religion is true that does not have these deep affections’. In NCTM’s last two decades especially, references to Edwards became increasingly common and covered far more areas of theology: grace, virtue, benevolence, discipline and holiness, man as God’s image, and the covenant. Most of the team seemed to find Edwards more accessible through the scholars who had studied him: Conrad Cherry, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards: A Reappraisal (1966); Treatise on Grace, ed. Paul Helm (1971); and Carl Bogue, Jonathan Edwards and the Covenant of Grace (1975). But themes which seemed to excite Bingham and his team the most, especially when viewed together, were the Trinity, God’s eternal purpose and the end for which he created the world, and marriage. The intersection of these three grand themes constituted the fugal structure of the universal melody as Lutheran theologian, Robert Jenson, argues in America’s Theologian (1988).

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Australia   535 When Bingham read Jenson he was so enthused by it that others in the team eagerly devoured it, and through it Edwards’s trinitarian ‘marriage theology’ and ‘spousemysticism’ found its way into numerous lectures over the next two decades. The most quoted extract from Jenson was his citation (43) of ‘Miscellanies’ 741: ‘There was, [as] it were, an eternal society or family in the Godhead, in the Trinity of persons. It seems to be God’s design to admit the church into the divine family as his son’s wife.’ In a lecture he delivered in 1990 on ‘The Covenant of Marriage’, Bingham admitted, ‘I have not been able to give the reference to Edwards’ Miscellanies apart from Jenson’s own references to that work which he used for his writing from the original MSS of Edwards. The Miscellanies are not presently available in print.’ ‘Miscellanies’ 741 was not printed in the Yale edition until 2000, but Ian Pennicook recalls the delight with which Bingham welcomed the Yale volume on ‘Miscellanies’ a-500 edited by Thomas Schafer (WJE 13). Bingham cited it with reference to the Sabbath in his book The Glory of the Majesty (1998, 115). At the 2008 Ministry School, Trevor Faggotter, in support of his contention that ‘Marriage as a prophecy accords with one of Jonathan Edwards’ esteemed insights,’ cited the Schafer volume on ‘Miscellany’ 103: ‘This spouse of the Son of God, the bride, the Lamb’s wife, the completeness of him who filleth all in all, is that for which all the universe was made. Heaven and earth were created that the Son of God might be complete in a spouse.’ It is probably safe to conclude that Bingham and his team never transcended Jenson’s understanding of Edwards, but it is not unreasonable to suggest that Bingham might have arrived at this understanding without Jenson’s help. Bingham was Australia’s twentieth-century Jonathan Edwards. A further vector for the reception of Edwards in Australia was the debate engendered by the Charismatic movement. The so-called ‘third wave’ associated with the name of John Wimber and the Vineyard Movement, claiming to be neither Charismatic nor Pentecostal, but rather ‘empowered evangelical’, was particularly controversial, and Edwards was invoked on either side of the debate. In March 1990, with Wimber drawing large crowds in Australia, Harry Goodhew, Bishop of Wollongong, a region of the conservative evangelical Sydney Diocese, presented a copy of Edwards’s Charity and its Fruits to his clergy, as ‘an antidote to Wimber’. His hope was not to assault Wimber, but to encourage the clergy to foster a vital spirituality based on Edwards’s theology rather than Wimber’s! His clergy found Charity hard going; preaching at that depth was beyond most clergy even in a diocese where biblical preaching was highly prized. An outgrowth of the Vineyard Movement, the ‘Toronto Blessing’, led to a more ­determined study of Edwards by both Pentecostals and conservative evangelicals in Australia. At issue was the significance of the strange ‘manifestations’ associated with the Toronto Blessing: were they sufficiently compatible with the ‘manifestations’ of the Spirit, grounded in Christology and grace, as in I Corinthians 12:7? One Australian Pentecostal leader, Barry Chant, contrasted Edwards’s biblical foundations and Christological focus with the Toronto Blessing’s absence of them (Chant  2013, 116f., Piggin 2000, 92). For their part conservative evangelical critics of the Toronto Blessing cited Edwards’s claim that all such ecstatic manifestations do not prove that a work is of the Spirit of God (Benfold 1995). They failed to see that, while Edwards’s secondary

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536   Stuart Piggin purpose was to persuade enthusiasts to rein in their excesses, his primary purpose was to get the rationalists not to dismiss a movement which was outside their experience just because it was characterized by strange phenomena. It was largely lost on Australian conservative evangelicals that Edwards was far more worried by those who were in danger of quenching the Spirit than by those who unwisely refrained from testing the spirits.

Edwards in Academic Research in Australia In the last three decades the reception of Edwards by Australian academics has gained considerable momentum thanks almost exclusively to the increasing availability of Edwards’s works through the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University. In 1985 Stuart Piggin, then a lecturer at the University of Wollongong, south of Sydney, spent eight months at Yale studying Edwards’s papers in the Beinecke Library under the expert tutelage of Wilson Kimnack, scholar of the rhetoric of Edwards’s sermons. Piggin has since written a number of academic papers on Edwards and given numerous addresses on Edwards at academic and church conferences. In 2005 he was appointed Director of the Centre for the History of Christian Thought and Experience in the Ancient History Department at Macquarie University in Sydney. The Centre fostered doctoral research in the reception of Classical and Christian Thought in the modern world. Three of its students wrote theses comparing Edwards with Saint Augustine: Susan Steele-Smith (2007) on typology; Chris Dixon (2013) on the heart; and Irene Petrou (2016) on salvation. Steele-Smith concluded that for both Augustine and Edwards the typological interpretation of Scripture was more of an art than a science and that, in spite of their attempts to establish guidelines for the correct use of typology, the only definitive rule is a Christ-centred, redemptive reading of texts. Chris Dixon visited the Yale Jonathan Edwards Center during her research. In analysing the validity of the appellation of Edwards as the ‘American Augustine’ she employed the metaphor of the heart as the most suitable heuristic both for locating correspondences of thought and for identifying the reality of the intra-trinitarian love. She does not contend that Edwards rediscovered and then promoted Augustinian thought. Rather through his synthesis of Neoplatonic philosophy, Reformed theology and Lockean epistemology, Edwards projected a vision of the beauty and trinitarian being of God which is prefigured, apart from Neoplatonism, from other sources in Augustine. Dixon’s demonstration that trinitarianism in both Augustine and Edwards, rather than an afterthought, is foundational to the theology of soteriology, Christology and pneumatology is consistent with the primacy attached to the doctrine of the Trinity in recent scholarship. Petrou commenced her doctoral study with a comparison of Augustine and Edwards on holiness, but then prolonged her

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Australia   537 research by comparing both with Maximus, the Confessor. Most comfortable with the thinking of the Greek fathers, Petrou focuses on theosis or deification, traditionally accepted as central to Orthodox theology. By emphasizing the continuities rather than the differences between the three theologians on deification, Petrou reinforces the argument of contemporary scholars more familiar with the Western tradition, such as David Meconi, Norman Russell and Michael McClymond, that the hitherto dominating dichotomy of East vs West in theological thought warrants the revision it has recently received. Two further doctoral theses by Australian scholars on Edwards are demanding of attention, not only for their quality and originality, but also because, remarkably, they both review Edwards’s writings across his entire life. Both were quickly published and are readily accessible. Rhys Bezzant’s study (2014) of Edwards’s ecclesiology is a survey in short compass of the great works of Edwards: inter alia Charity and its Fruits; A History of the Work of Redemption; A faithful narrative of a surprising work of God; The Religious Affections; An Humble Attempt; The Life of Brainerd, even an analysis, mercifully brief, of the Stockbridge treatises: Freedom of the Will; Original Sin; True Virtue and The End for which God created the World. This in itself makes the book very useful: it is as good as any place to start the study of Edwards. This is the more so because the structure of the book follows Edwards’s life experience, beginning with his childhood in East Windsor, and proceeding through his education, his undergraduate days at Yale, his early pastoral appointment in New York, his postgraduate years at Yale, his pastorates in Northampton and Stockbridge, and ending with his appointment as President of the College of New Jersey. It is, in effect, yet another biography of Edwards— an account of his life and thought, arranged around the theme of his lifelong thinking on the Church. Bezzant characterizes Edwards’s ecclesiology as revitalized orthodoxy. Edwards worked for the repristination (90, 158, 168, 181, 182, 190, 210) of the ecclesiology which the Puritans had developed in New England, a church which was in a dynamic relationship with creation and history, and which was renewed through the experience of revival, through the practice of such evangelical initiatives as itinerancy, concerts of prayer and cross-cultural missions, and through Edwards’s specialty, namely doctrinal clarification. While conducting the research on which this book is based, Bezzant in 2010 was appointed Director of the Jonathan Edwards Center Australia at Ridley College in Melbourne. It held an international conference on Edwards in 2015 (Bezzant 2017). In his 2014 monograph on the church, Bezzant had reflected on Edwards’s pastoral insights and practices. Readers, impressed by their surprising worth, will welcome a follow-up volume, Edwards the Mentor (Bezzant 2019). Whereas Bezzant stresses Edwards the preacher and pastor, Carol Ball (2015) stresses Edwards the writer, the litterateur. Thanks to the work of Marsden and Minkema, Edwards’s outer and even inner life are now knowable. But Ball is writing about something else: not the Edwards who was, but the Edwards whom Edwards wanted to be, namely his persona. This is the Edwards who early in his converted life resolved on

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538   Stuart Piggin what he wanted to be, struggled to become, and largely succeeded in becoming in the last decade of his life. What she has identified is the Edwards who is important (37) ‘not in terms of the self uncovered but in terms of the self that was needed to be shaped for the world he envisaged’. In identifying the chief external threats to the ‘Authority’ in Edwards’s life, Ball reviews the literature of the Deists and the theistic critics of Calvinism. She thus not only identifies those in opposition to whom Edwards forged his persona, but also the means by which he would forge it, namely writing: ‘he believed his talent was writing’ (47). Potentially, this throws valuable new light on all of Edwards’s writings. It clearly illuminates one of Edwards’s most celebrated letters, that to the ‘Trustees of the College of New Jersey’. Written in 1757, it begins: ‘My method of study, from my first beginning the work of the ministry, has been very much by writing.’ If the weight of scholarship hitherto has been to show how Edwards evolved his major treatises out of his sermons which became series, and this is true as far as it goes, Ball makes the opposite point that even his sermons are evolved from his writing. In reviewing Freedom of the Will, Original Sin, and The Nature of True Virtue, Ball maintains that these, his major treatises, are mature, successful attempts to ‘construct the whole world around him in accordance with the worldview he acquired during his conversion moment’ (56). Here is found the articulation of ‘that theo-genetic concept that gave cogency to all his religious and philosophical tenets, the hall mark of his religious and philosophical persona’ (57). The circle is closed: it is a powerful thesis, deftly argued. Yet, it is not entirely satisfactory to distinguish between ‘Edwards the pastor’ and ‘Edwards the writer’ (121), arguing that Edwards aspired more to the latter. Might it not be argued that, for Edwards, the chief way of being a pastor was as a writer? For the sort of writer he becomes in expression of his persona is very different from other commoner types of writer. He may well be understood as a ‘litterateur’, but his aversion to artistry makes him a distinctive litterateur, an evangelistic pastoral litterateur.

Reflections by Australians on Edwards’s Trinitarianism It remains to report on two antipodean developments arising from Edwards’s trinitarian thought, the more arresting because they are not confined to the evangelical ambit. North American theologian, Steven  M.  Studebaker, having researched the extent to which Edwards is to be located within the Augustinian mutual love tradition of the Trinity, has proceeded to explore Edwards’s affinity with a major exponent of that tradition, David Coffey, a contemporary Australian Catholic theologian who studied under Karl Rahner in Munich. Studebaker (2011) conceived of his comparison as an ecumenical exercise highlighting the common trinitarian theology shared by Edwards and Coffey. They shared the view that the Trinity is to be understood as the Father, the

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Australia   539 Son generated by the Father from eternity, and the Spirit who proceeds from and subsists in the mutual love of the Father and the Son. They shared a similar understanding of the imminent and the economic Trinity and of the integration of this theology with Christology and pneumatology. Together, in Studebaker’s view, they laid a foundation for the construction of a new understanding both of redemption in terms of a transformative relationship with the trinitarian God and of the role of grace in all religions. Tony Golsby-Smith is the founder of 2nd Road, a consultancy which gives team training to commercial enterprises in strategic conversations, innovation and design. Following its success with major Australian corporations such as BHP Billiton and the Australian Tax Office, it was acquired by the Accenture Company. Golsby-Smith is an honours English graduate from the University of Sydney and in 1995 was awarded the Visiting Chair of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. In his design and strategic thinking he has drawn extensively on Classical philosophy and Christian theology. The intellectual fundamentals of 2nd Road’s strategy Golsby-Smith has made explicit through a movement he created called ‘Gospel Conversations’ (see website). Here he has expounded Edwards’s trinitarianism by which he has been especially captivated. He testifies that when he first read Edwards’s ‘Unpublished Essay on the Trinity’, he got no further than the first sentence and went away and thought about it for three months. He came to revere Edwards as the most seamless thinker in the Church in the last 400 years, responsible for one of the great paradigm shifts of world philosophy, a mind so capacious that the early twenty-first century has still not caught up with his thinking. With Edwards’s help, Golsby-Smith peered into the nature and operations of the Trinity and explored their implications for understanding creation and the role of human initiative within creation. What does the work of God as revealed in Scripture tell us about the essence of God not revealed explicitly in Scripture? The cross and resurrection reveal that God must be more than one. If Christ is not God his death cannot save us, but if Christ is God and God dies who will raise him? So, there must be at least a Father and a Son. Nicaea affirmed the divinity of Jesus against the Arians and the Trinity was formulated in creedal form. But the problem remained, why would such a God want or need to bother with creation? With Newton’s help, Edwards came to understand first that the building blocks of reality was not substance, but motion. At the core of God’s nature is action. Then, the second part to Edwards’s new paradigm: energy is not an impersonal force. The universe speaks a personal message: everything is about life and consciousness. The agency of this personal energy is the disposition of God which ultimately shapes all reality. All creation is the extension, or enlargement, of God. Creation is the amplification of the Trinity along the axis of Christ, the Word, the idea of the idea. God’s human creatures acquire knowledge of the disposition of God through a trinitarian process: the intent of the Father, the Word of the Son, and the breath of the Spirit. God desires intentional design to carry out his work of amplification. To know God is to know ourselves as his agents of amplification. For Golbsy-Smith the gospel is to be shared because it reveals how great humans are as bearers of the glory of God and as agents of the amplification of his design for the world. Because it is more

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540   Stuart Piggin fundamentally concerned with thinking, consciousness, and creativity than with feeling, conscience and passivity, it is the key to success in all human activity, including the worlds of commerce and industry, politics and the arts. Tony Golsby-Smith is Australia’s twenty-first century Jonathan Edwards.

Works Cited Ball, Carol (2015). Approaching Jonathan Edwards: The Evolution of a Persona. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. (Based on ‘Jonathan Edwards: “Born to be a Man of Strife” The Evolution of a Persona’. PhD, University of Queensland, 2012.) Barnes, Peter (1993). ‘Robert Steel (1827–1893)’ Presbyterian Leaders in Nineteenth Century Australia. Ed. Rowland Ward. Melbourne: Rowland S. Ward. 98–109. Bebbington, David W. (2003). ‘Remembered Around the World: The International Scope of Edwards’s Legacy.’ Jonathan Edwards at Home and Abroad: Historical Memories, Cultural Movements, Global Horizons. Ed. David  W.  Kling and Douglas  A.  Sweeney. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. 177–200. Benfold, Gary (1995). ‘Jonathan Edwards and the “Toronto Blessing” in ‘No Laughing Matter’, The Briefing, 152, 7 March. Bezzant, Rhys  S. (2014). Jonathan Edwards and the Church. New York: OUP. (Based on ‘Orderly but not Ordinary: Jonathan Edwards’s Evangelical ecclesiology’, ThD, ACT, 2011.) Bezzant, Rhys S. (2019). Edwards the Mentor. New York: OUP. Bezzant, Rhys S. (ed.) (2017). The Global Edwards: Papers from the Jonathan Edwards Congress held in Melbourne, August 2015. Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock. Bingham, Geoffrey (1999). ‘The Effects of Jonathan Edwards on my Life and Ministry,’ unpublished typescript, 9 December (in possession of the author). Bingham, Geoffrey, and Pennicook, Ian (1998). ‘Principles of New Creation Teaching Ministry: Some Thoughts from the Discussion of Geoffrey Bingham and Ian Pennicook, January 1998’, printed but unpublished (in archive of the New Creation Teaching Ministry, Adelaide). Bleby, Martin (2012). A Quiet Revival: Geoffrey Bingham in Life and Ministry. Blackwood: New Creation Publications Inc. Chant, Barry (2013). This is Revival. Adelaide: Tabor. Dixon, Christine (2013). Jonathan Edwards—The American Augustine?: The Concept of the Heart in the Theological Thought and Experience of Augustine of Hippo and Jonathan Edwards. Saarbrücken: Lambert Academic Publishing. (Based on ‘The Concept of the Heart in the Theological Thought and Experience of Augustine of Hippo and Jonathan Edwards’. PhD, Macquarie University, 2008.) Furphy, Joseph (Tom Collins) (1980). Such is Life. 1903, Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Golsby-Smith, Tony (2012). ‘Introducing the Trinity: How language reflects the Trinity’, Gospel Conversations at https://www.gospelconversations.com/talks/how-language-reflectsthe-trinity Jenson, Robert (1988). America’s Theologian: A Recommendation of Jonathan Edwards. New York: OUP. Lang, John Dunmore (1840). Religion and Education in America: With Notices of the State and Prospects of American Unitarianism, Popery, and African Colonization. London: T.  Ward and Co.

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Australia   541 Mackray, Archibald  N. (1870). Revivals of Religion: Their Place and Power in the Christian Church. Sydney: John L. Sherriff, Publisher. Marsden, J. B. (1858). Memoirs of the Life and Labours of the Rev. Samuel Marsden, of Paramatta, Senior Chaplain of New South Wales. London: Religious Tract Society. Petrou, Irene (2016). ‘From North Africa to Byzantium and to New England: Augustine, Maximus and Jonathan Edwards on the meaning and shape of Christian Salvation’, PhD, Macquarie University. Piggin, Stuart (2003). ‘The Expanding Knowledge of God: Jonathan Edwards’s Influence on Missionary Thinking and Promotion.’ Jonathan Edwards at Home and Abroad: Historical Memories, Cultural Movements, Global Horizons. Ed. David W. Kling and Douglas A. Sweeney. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. 266–96. Piggin, Stuart (2000). Firestorm of the Lord: The History of and Prospects for Revival in the Church and the World. Carlisle: Paternoster Press. Piggin, Stuart and Linder, Robert  D. (2018). The Fountain of Public Prosperity: Evangelical Christians in Australian History, 1740–1914. Clayton, VIC: Monash University Publishing. Piggin, Stuart and Cook, Dianne (2004). ‘Keeping alive the heart in the head: The Significance of “Eternal Language” in the Aesthetics of Jonathan Edwards and S. T. Coleridge’, Literature and Theology, 18.4: 383–414. Steel, Robert (1864). Burning and Shining Lights, or Memoirs of Eminent Ministers of Christ. London: T. Nelson and Sons. Steele-Smith, Susan (2007). ‘God’s Code Exposed in Different Worlds: A Study of the Place of Typology in the Biblical Interpretation of Augustine & Jonathan Edwards’. MA dissertation, Macquarie University. Studebaker, Steven M. (2011). The Trinitarian Vision of Jonathan Edwards and David Coffey. Amherst, New York: Cambria Press.

Author Bio Conjoint Associate Professor Stuart Piggin was Director of the Centre for the History of Christian Thought and Experience at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia from 2005 to 2016 and Head of the Department of Christian Thought of the Australian College of Theology. His publications, apart from those on Edwards, include Evangelical Christianity in Australia, published by Oxford University Press and now in its third edition, and (with Robert D. Linder) The Fountain of Public Prosperity: Evangelical Christians in Australian History 1740–1914, published by Monash University Press in 2018, and Attending to the Australian Soul: Evangelical Christians in Australian History 1914–2014 (2020).

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chapter 35

A fr ica Adriaan C. Neele

‘Then shall the many nations of Africa . . . be enlightened with glorious light.’ Thus said Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) in a sermon in 1737, posthumously published in A History of the Work of Redemption (WJE 9: 927). For Edwards, this ‘glorious light’ was a Protestant gospel expectation. Edwards had an international outlook—one that included Africa—throughout his writings, including Freedom of the Will, Original Sin, ‘Notes on the Apocalypse’, ‘An Humble Attempt’, ‘A Draft Letter on Slavery’, A History of the Work of Redemption, Life of David Brainerd, ‘Miscellanies’, ‘Notes on Scripture’, and various sermons (WJE 1: 101; WJE 3: 151, 171, 185, 195; WJE 5: 133, 134, 164, 169, 174, 226, 227, 250, 411; WJE 7: 196; WJE 9: 472, 480; WJE 13: 180, 424; WJE 15: 170, 189, 191, 250, 371, 372, 399, 490, 498, 499; WJE 16: 70–3; WJE 19: 713, 714; WJE 20: 303, 307, 338, 397; WJE 23: 320, 339, 447, 454, and WJE 24: 152). Furthermore, Edwards’s subtle view of anti-slavery, or immediatism, is demurely present in a draft letter of 1738. Here, the preacher of Northampton not only sees colonialization as something ‘to disfranchise all the nations of Africa’ but also foresees that it will be a hindrance for gospel proclamation—unlike pro-slave traders who pointed to it as a means of spreading the gospel (WJE 16: 72). Nonetheless, in ‘the latter days’, according to Edwards, many nations would be ‘full of [gospel] light and knowledge’ and ‘excellent books will be published in Africa’ (WJE 9: 479, 480). Thus, Edwards’s attention on Africa cannot go unnoticed. Even less attention, however, has been given to the reception of Edwards’s works in Africa (Kling and Sweeney 2003). This absence in Edwards research is remarkable, as many of his works have been reprinted, translated, and published from the eighteenth century onwards, particularly by those who had a vested interest in missionary ­movements and societies labouring throughout Africa. In fact, the reception of Edwards’s thought in Africa is primarily through the work of nineteenth-century missionaries and missionary societies—willing or unwilling participants in the colonial European expansion in Africa. Several of his works were translated into Arabic, Dutch, English, French, and German and found their way from Cairo to Cape Town. What follows is a preliminary overview from North Africa to Southern Africa of the distribution, use, and appropriation of some of Edwards’s works throughout the

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Africa   543 continent. This overview is in two parts, (1) North Africa and (2) Southern Africa, and is followed by a conclusion.

North Africa and the Middle East When one visits Egypt, a stop at the American cemetery in old Cairo, El Qahira, is worthwhile. Next to one of the oldest Coptic monasteries, the Abu Sefein Convent, is the resting place of Presbyterian missionaries—teachers trained at Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary and a Yale graduate among others. At one time in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these men and women were active throughout North Africa and the Middle East with Cairo as their main hub for living, travel, translation, publication, preaching, and teaching. In fact, two schools of New England, Andover Theological Seminary (founded 1807) and Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary (founded 1834), were instrumental in the dissemination of Edwards’s thought and work in this region of the world. Pliny Fisk (1792–1825) and Levi Parson (1792–1822) both studied at Andover and were commissioned by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions to go to Syria, Palestine, and Egypt (Tracy 1842, 171). The Congregational missionary Fisk notes in his diary in 1823 that he passed the pyramids of Giza while reading Edwards’s The Life of David Brainerd: ‘contrast this monument of Brainerd and his character to the character and the accomplishments of the Pharaohs, and all their cities, mausoleums, temples, and pyramids’ (Bond 1828, 249). Fisk concluded that the ancient Egyptian rulers ‘indeed have perished already’, but the crown of glory which Brainerd won ‘shall remain forever’ (Bond 1828, 249). On his way from Smyrna to Jerusalem via Egypt, Parson noted in his diary, ‘The way to the throne of grace is dark and difficult. But after reading a few chapters in the bible and a few pages in the memoirs of David Brainerd, I found relief ’ (Morton 1830, 251). Both missionaries to the Middle East and Northern Africa, then, drew encouragement from Edwards’s work (in particular The Life of David Brainerd) as one of America’s missionary protagonists. The founder of Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary, Mary Lyon (1797–1849), not only envisioned the students and teachers of that seminary ‘as the living embodiment of the work of redemption that Edwards described’ (Porterfield 1997, 44) but also ‘advance[d] women’s education in terms of Edwardsean theology’ (Porterfield 1997, 25). Moreover, students remembered her teaching with ‘Edwards’s History of Redemption’ in one hand, and she also offered each graduate a copy of Edwards’s A History of the Work of Redemption. In fact, one of her students, Fidelia Fiske (1816–1864), was the founder and first principal of a female seminary at Orumiyeh in Persia (Urmia in present-day Iran) in 1843, modelled after Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary. It introduced ‘Nestorian students’ to Edwards’s ‘Redemption Discourse’ as well as Richard Baxter’s The Saints’ Everlasting Rest (Laurie  1863, 58). This mission school and others throughout North Africa and the  Middle East distributed Edwards’s works. Also, Bible colporteurs or traveling ­booksellers throughout the region—often supported by the American Bible Society and

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544   Adriaan C. Neele British and Foreign Bible Society—became disseminators of evangelical works as well, including those of Edwards (Malick 2008, 17). Furthermore, Lyon’s call ‘to cultivate the missionary spirit among its pupils’ was answered by the many alumnae who were affiliated with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), a Congregational Church organization founded in 1810, or with the missionary boards of other Protestant denominations (Mt. Holyoke College Missionaries Collection; Conforti 1993; Allen 2008). Among them was Mary Galloway (d. 1881) (Purington), who is buried at the cemetery ­mentioned above across from the grave of Dr Andrew Watson (1834–1916). Watson not only established the Mission Theological Seminary in Cairo in 1864 but also introduced a generation of missionaries in the Middle East to Edwards’s A History of the Work of Redemption, translated in Arabic in 1868. This translation was printed by the American Press in Beirut, Syria, which was supported by the American Tract Society (1825). The American Tract Society had already published Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God in 1849 in Arabic. The press in Beirut translated and published many ­evangelical works, including John Bunyan’s (1628–1688) Pilgrim’s Progress, Isaac Watt’s (1674–1748) First Catechism, The Saints’ Everlasting Rest, The Call to the Unconverted, and The Reformed Pastor by Richard Baxter (1615–1691) (Malick 2008; Freidinger 1923; Antakly 1976). However, Edwards was recognized as the evangelical primus inter pares, attested by the Greek Orthodox priest in Beirut Knuri Jebara, who in 1869 purchased sixty copies of Edwards’s ‘History of Redemption’ in Arabic and gave them to his people throughout Syria and Lebanon (Jessup 1910, 333). Thus, not only the English editions but also the Arabic translations of Edwards’s works were widely known from Baghdad to Bahrain, including Teheran, Jerusalem, Cairo, and Alexandria. The ­spiders spinning this Arabic web were the printing press in Beirut and the main depot of book distribution in Cairo. Returning to the American Cemetery in Cairo, one finds the grave of William Borden (1887–1913)—a Yale graduate whose life was shaped by Edwards’s The Life of David Brainerd. The wealthy Borden was determined to become a missionary to Uyghur Muslims in north-western China but decided first to study Islam and Arabic in Cairo. In March 1913, he contracted cerebral meningitis and died a few weeks later at the age of twenty-five. By this time, great parts of North Africa and the Middle East were under British colonial rule (1882–1914). The Egyptian resistance to writings in English was only overcome decades later, attested by more recent translations in Arabic of Edwards’s works such as A Humble Attempt, The Life of David Brainerd, and A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (Edwards 2016). In summary, the dissemination of Edwards’s works in Northern Africa came primarily through the nineteenth-century American missionary movement, printing press, and distribution depot in the Arabic world. For Edwards, Egypt was the ­providential type of redemption (WJE 5: 198; WJE 9: 152); for the missionaries, it was a gateway to Northern Africa. That British colonialization also contributed to the propagation of Edwards’s thought should not be overlooked.

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Africa   545

Southern Africa The nineteenth-century Protestant missionary movement was instrumental in getting Edwards’s work and thought to Africa. This includes activity in Southern Africa. For example, there is the nineteenth-century mission work in Lesotho and South Africa through the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society (hereafter ‘PEMS’) as well as the Moravian Missions and Methodist Missions, respectively. Furthermore, these missionary societies were inextricably associated with the work of the London Missionary Society (hereafter ‘LMS’)—and together, all of them were instrumental in the reception of Edwards’s work and thought in Southern Africa.

London Missionary Society Exploring the reception of Edwards’s works and thought in nineteenth-century Africa, one must consider the influential LMS as a major disseminator of Edwards’s works, in particular the HWR. The LMS was founded as the Missionary Society (1795) ‘to spread the knowledge of Christ among heathen and other unenlightened nations’ (LMS Archives), resonating with Edwards’s view on missions (WJE 9: 927). Its work in Africa was most significant in Southern Africa, commencing in 1797, and Central Africa, launched in 1877. Illustrative for the LMS in Southern Africa is the work of the Scottish Congregationalist Robert Moffat (1795–1883). Not only did he embody Edwards’s vision for mission work by propagating the gospel through the translation of the Bible and Bunyan’s Pilgrims Progress in the Setswana language, but he also admired and consulted ‘President Edwards’s Argument’ that reason is insufficient for salvation. In Missionary Labours and Scenes in South Africa—an immensely popular and classic work of missionary activity in Africa in the Victorian era—Moffat cites favourably at length from Edwards’s ‘Miscellaneous Observations’, noting, What instance can be mentioned, from any history, of any one nation under the sun, that emerged from atheism or idolatry into the knowledge or adoration of the one true God, without the assistance of revelation? The Americans, the Africans, the Tartars, and the ingenious Chinese, have had time enough, one would think, to find out the right and true idea of God; and yet, after above five thousand years’ improvement, and the full exercise of reasons, they, at this day, got no farther in their progress toward true religion . . .  (Moffat 1842)

This illustration would not be complete unless one notes Moffat’s deep influence in Southern Africa by opening a ‘missionary road’ for the LMS to the Cape region, being an advocate of British imperial rule. The founders of the LMS were, like other founders of other nineteenth-century ­missionary societies, ‘awash with Edwards’ (Kling and Sweeney 2003, 274) and belonged

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546   Adriaan C. Neele to the same group of evangelicals who established the British-based Religious Tract Society (1799). This tract society was highly instrumental for reprinting the HWR with the title History of the work of redemption, comprising a summary of the history of the Jews up to the destruction of Jerusalem in 1831, 1835, 1837, 1838, and several times in 1841 (Johnson 1940; Edwards 1831; Kennedy Fyfe 2000). The publication enjoyed a positive reception and was embraced by many missionaries, though the review in The Imperial Magazine was more tempered: But when he [Edwards] enters on ‘the completion of the work of redemption’ in a future state, the ground on which he stands appears less secure. Entering a region that is veiled by the clouds and shadows of futurity, the light by which he is guided becomes, on many subordinate particulars, somewhat dim and indistinct. (Drew 1831)

The LMS, furthermore, provided book allowances to their overseas missionaries. The catechist George Gogerly established a library in India with his allowance. The library initially had ten books, three of which were Edwards’s works—the HWR among them (Piggin 2003, 279). Book allowances were not exclusively for India, attested by the many copies of various nineteenth-century editions of Edwards’s HWR found in mission libraries throughout Africa as well. Last but not least, the LMS was involved in the founding of other missionary societies such as the Dutch Missionary Society (1797), the Rhenish Missionary Society (1799), and the aforementioned French missionary organization, the PEMS—all contributing to missionaries in Southern Africa impacted by Edwards.

South Africa The cradle of mission work in South Africa is located in the Cape region, Genadendal (Valley of Grace), where the oldest mission station is found as a result of Georg Schmidt (1709–1785), the first Protestant and Moravian missionary in that region. This mission station became a model not only for Moravian missions but also for the missionary societies and missionaries throughout Southern Africa. The leadership of Hans Peter Hallbeck (1784–1840) at this Moravian mission station is linked to the first recorded great awakening (1832) in the Cape Colony, the establishment of a seminary and school for training indigenous pastors and teachers, and the founding of a printing press— embodying Edwards’s vision of mission work (Boon 2015).1 Moreover, Hallbeck’s library 1  The pattern of translation of the Bible, translation of evangelical works, the writing of a catechism, and the founding of a printing press is a constant refrain for many missionary organizations, echoing Edwards’s vision. Besides the missionary organizations mentioned in this chapter, there is also the Glasgow Missionary Society that established the Lovedale Mission School and Lovedale Press in the Eastern Cape, South Africa and the activities of the American Board of Presbyterian Missionaries in Natal, South Africa. Prof. Dr Rudolph Britz is acknowledged. See also Steven Paas (2011), Johannes Rebmann. A Servant of God in Africa before the Rise of Western Colonialism (Nürnberg: VTR, 2011).

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Africa   547 in Genadedal not only consisted of several Moravian authors but also German Pietists and British and New England Puritans. Surveying the catalogue, it is remarkable to note the similarity of the works printed at the American Press in Beirut, which included Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Watt’s First Catechism, and Baxter’s The Saints’ Everlasting Rest, The Call to the Unconverted, and The Reformed Pastor—mostly in the German language. Furthermore, Edwards’s A History of the Work of Redemption is listed as ‘President Edwards, The History of Redemption, comprising a Summary of the History of the Jews up to the destruction of Jerusalem. A.D. 1739 (London: Religious Tract Society, 1831)’. On the first page, a note is found stating: 1834. Presented by the Committee of the Religious Tract Society, to their esteemed friends the Moravian Society’s Missionaries at Gnadenthal. To be kept for the ­permanent use of the Missionary Families who are now, or may hereafter be ­stationed there.  (Boon 2015, 407)

Moreover, the library contained one of the German translations of Edwards’s Faithful Narrative (1737). However, it was not the translation by the Lutheran Pietist Johann Adam Steinmetz (1689–1762) but a translation of Benjamin Colman’s abridged ­version of Edwards’s revival narrative by the Reformed Pietists from Solingen in the  Lower Rhine area—the copy now held in the Moravian archives at Hernnhut (Stievermann 2014). In addition to the reception of Edwards in South Africa via the Moravian missionaries, one must consider the work of the Methodist missionaries in the Eastern Cape. Establishing the town of Wesleyville in 1823, the missionaries not only disseminated the teachings of John Wesley (1703–1791) but also brought many of his edited works, including ones authored by Edwards. In the Methodist Church of Southern Africa’s archives at Rhodes University, South Africa, one finds preserved an abridged version of Faithful Narrative titled A Narrative of the Late Work of God (1744) along with extracts from four other works of Edwards: The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God (1744), Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New-England (1745), An Extract of the Life of the Late Rev. Mr David Brainerd (1768), and in volume twentythree of Wesley’s Works, An Extract from a Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1773) (Hammond  2017; Allison  2012; Cragg  2011). Despite Wesley editing and abridging—that is, removing Edwards’s anti-Arminian sentiments, the doctrine of predestination, supralapsarianism, and ‘Edwards’s reminders of humanity’s perpetual moral degeneracy’ from his writings—the ‘Methodist Edwards’s’ works were admirably disseminated throughout Southern Africa (Allison 2012). The strong interwoven connection of the LMS and the Religious Tract Society was a model for many other mission organizations as well. The Dutch edition of the HWR (Edwards 1776), moreover, can be situated within the growing mission consciousness in  the Dutch Republic that contributed to the founding of the Nederlands Zendingsgenootschap (1797). One of the co-founders, Johannes Theodorus van der Kemp (1747–1811), became a missionary medical doctor in South Africa, while another

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548   Adriaan C. Neele co-founder, Cornelis Brem (1722–1803), was a translator of many works of ‘evangelical revival’, including works of Edwards (Boone 1990). In other words, besides the LMS, Moravian, and Methodist missionary efforts, the Dutch missionary enterprise also reached Southern Africa—collectively contributing to the dissemination of Edwards’s work. Last but not least, the work of the revivalist minister of the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa, Andrew Murray Jr (1828–1917), requires attention. Murray’s theology and piety were shaped in the Dutch Republic during his studies at Utrecht University through the work of the Réveil—a Swiss-French Protestant revival movement influential in the Dutch aristocracy. Furthermore, Murray was influenced by the founders of the Dutch Missionary Society and by translators of Edwards’s works in Dutch. Murray, then, became the epitome of Edwards’s vision for gospel propagation—founder of the Mission Training Institute at Wellington (later called the Huguenot College), the Ministers Missionary Union, the Bible and Prayer Union, and the Layman’s Mission League (Ross  1998). For the Wellington initiative, he turned to the Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary, which was readily sending teachers to the Cape. Abbie Park Ferguson (1837–1919) and Anna E. Bliss (1843–1925), daughters of New England Congregationalist ministers, were some of the first missionaries and teachers to arrive at the first women’s college in South Africa. They each took over leadership of the college (Robert 1998). And so, Mary Otis Preston (1857–1929) arrived at Murray’s school in 1882 in order to train teachers (Spafford papers). Like Fiske in Northern Africa and Arabia, so Park, Bliss, and Preston received a copy of Edwards’s the HWR from the principal of Mt. Holyoke’s school, Mary Lyon, before heading to South Africa. Murray’s acquaintance with Edwards was via the Dutch Réveil movement, the Dutch Missionary Society, as well as the teachers of America’s Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary. In fact, Murray not only drew inspiration from Brainerd’s life as a missionary, his prayer-life, and his ‘unflagging pursuit of holiness’, but he also promoted works of Edwards—among them David Brainerd’s Personal Testimony (Searle 1978). In this abridged work of Edwards’s The Life of David Brainerd, the Dutch Reformed Church revivalist preacher found in ‘Edwards’s Brainerd’ a call for missionary fervor, and a passion for prayer, especially among friends of missions—contributors, local helpers, committees, councils, and missionary study classes, that they may pray as real spiritual warriors in God’s prayer legion. (Searle 1978, 11)

Murray’s extraordinary attention to prayer in his ministry was strengthened by Brainerd’s example, as he conveyed to one of his parishioners in his study at Wellington: You will find three pages of the diary are sufficient to read at one time if you desire to be influenced by it immediately and practically . . . read, and pause, and read again as in God’s presence, until you hear the voice of the Spirit.  (Searle 1978, foreword)

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Africa   549 This exceptional attention to the immediate influences of the Holy Spirit resulted in his understanding of the apostolic spiritual gifts and made the Dutch Reformed preacher and pastor more of a forerunner of the Pentecostal movement than someone simply appropriating Edwards’s thought. Despite Murray’s high esteem of Edwards and Brainerd in particular—notwithstanding experiencing similar times of revival in the Cape region as in Edwards’s New England—the differences between Edwards and Murray in theology and practice cannot go unnoticed. He notes: Before the days of revival, the situation of our congregation was lamentable. Love of the world and sin; no earnestness or heartfelt desire for salvation; sinning and idleness that was the order of the day for most . . . when the Lord started to move among us how intense were the prayers for revival and the cries for mercy. . . . And none of this was expected by anyone, nor prepared by anyone, nor worked up, or preached by anyone. It was all the Spirit of God, and not for a few hours or days, but months long.  (Hammond 2017)

Murray’s theology of faith healing, scheduled conferences of revival, and holiness ­conventions resonate more with the ‘revival’ style of evangelism of Charles Finney (1792–1875) than with Edwards’s ‘surprising work of God’. In summary, the reception of Edwards’s thought in South Africa was interdenominational, international, and inspired by the missionary movement. Edwards’s understanding and articulation of revival (WJE 2) shifted with time, as attested by Murray’s ministry (Lee 2006), though his mission outlook continued to be a stimulus to many.

Lesotho The kingdom of Lesotho, surrounded by South Africa, is a recipient of Edwards’s work through the nineteenth-century French missionaries to Basutoland (as Lesotho was called then) like Adolphe Mabille (1836–1894) (Neele 2015). Mabille was trained at the Mission House of the Société des Missions Evangéliques chez les peuples non-chrétiens Paris (Paris Evangelical Missionary Society) that was founded in 1822 by proponents of Le Réveil (The Awakening) in France with the assistance of the LMS (Neele  2013; Parker 1914; T’seuoa 2011). The founders of the French Missionary Society, like their British counterparts, established in 1836 a Société des Livres Religieux for the translation, publication, and distribution of religious publications and included works of Baxter, Bunyan, Calvin, Ryle, and Spurgeon—publications in French like those in Arabic and German for missionary organizations. As such, the Société was solely responsible for the French translation and distribution of A History of the Work of Redemption as Histoire de l’oeuvre de la Redemption (1854) (Edwards 1823, 1838, 1854). Mabille’s acquaintance with Edwards came early in his life, writing to his soon-to-be wife Adèle Casalis (1840–1923) that for the soon-to-be missionary couple, ‘as Brainerd says somewhere, we shall never think it enough to live at the rate of ordinary Christians’ (Smith 1939, 83; WJE 7: 495).

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550   Adriaan C. Neele Furthermore, Mabille drafted a quarto-size manuscript of systematic theology, titled Dogmatique, of which a third of the 592 pages deals with ‘On the Work of the Redemption’ (De L’Œvre de la Rédemption) (Mabille 2010, 146–574). The missionary to Basutoland acknowledged in the manuscript, ‘Voyez le président Edwards: Nous le suivons presque entièrement dans cette recherché’ (See president Edwards: [Who] we [will] follow almost entirely in this study) (Mabille 2010, 147). This Dogmatique was used by Mabille at the mission station of Morija, Basutoland, which was an exceptional and exemplary working out of Edwards’s vision as expounded in the HWR, laying out a holistic vision for missionary work where gospel proclamation coincides with ‘set[ing] up schools among them, and a printing press to print Bibles and other books for their instruction in their language’ (WJE 9: 435). Many of Mabille’s printed and published works have been carefully preserved at the Morija Archives, Lesotho, among them the manuscript containing the outlines of systematic theology as well as a children’s catechism modelled after Edwards’s Redemptive Discourse. In 1865, the first catechism of forty-eight pages in Sesotho (the vernacular language of Basutoland) for religious instruction entitled Katekisma ea Lipolelo tsa Bibele (Catechism of Sayings of the Bible; Mabille 1865) was published by the PEMS at Strasbourg. This catechism became the cornerstone of religious instruction in Lesotho and was reprinted by Mabille between 1875 and 1896 in five editions as Katekisma ea Litaba tsa Bibele (Catechism of the Tidings of the Bible). This influential catechism in question-and-answer format contained the following structure: ‘The first 1656 years, to the deluge’ (Katekisma, 3; Mabille 1865, 165–75); ‘From the time of the flood to the calling of Abraham’; ‘Abraham to Moses’; ‘Exodus to [David] Salomon’; ‘David to Babylonian Captivity’; ‘Babylonian Captivity to Christ’; ‘Christ’; ‘Christ after resurrection’; and, ‘To the end of the world’ (Katekisma, 45–7; Mabille 1865, 209–29). In fact, the structure of the catechism follows closely Mabille’s outline of redemptive history (De L’Œvre de la Rédemption) as found in his Dogmatique. Moreover, the content of the catechism resonates also with Mabille’s work, but in some cases, however, it follows Edwards’s exposition of redemptive history and appropriates it for a Basuto context. Examination of the Mabille’s Katekisma, moreover, shows that the author actually may have relied more on the French edition of Edwards’s discourse on redemptive history in writing a catechism in the Sesotho language than his own work. In sum, Edwards, the French edition of the HWR, and the French missionaries to Lesotho were (in)directly instrumental in teaching first-generation Sesotho pastors in systematic theology as well as in instructing Basuto children for the first-time with a Christian catechism.

Conclusion Edwards stated his hope in 1737: ‘Then shall the many nations of Africa . . . be enlightened with glorious light.’ This came to fruition throughout the nineteenth century and well

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Africa   551 into the twentieth century on the continent of Africa. The nineteenth-century American, British, Dutch, French, and German Protestant missionary societies aided by various tract societies were the main disseminators of Edwards’s work and thought from Arabic-speaking Northern Africa to Sesotho, English, and Dutch-speaking Southern Africa. Edwards’s works The Life of David Brainerd (Conforti 1985) and A History of the Work of Redemption led the way stirring up and supporting these missionary societies and missionaries. ‘Gospel light’, books, translation, and publication in Africa, for Edwards, were the main propagators for the people to be ‘delivered from all their darkness, and [to then] become a civil, Christian and an understanding and holy people’ (WJE 9: 972; Edwards 1854, 387–8). The reception accounts—from a Greek Orthodox priest purchasing the ‘History of Redemption’ for instructing his people in Beirut to a French missionary pastor using the Histoire for catechizing his people in Basutoland— are fascinating. Missing in these accounts, however—and for that matter in all of the reception of Edwards’s works and thoughts in Africa—is the reception by the indigenous people themselves: their perspective, worldview, and understanding of Edwards’s writings, whether translated or accommodated. This aspect of reception research is much needed in order to come to a more balanced assessment of Edwards’s influence and appropriation in Africa, if there was any. Furthermore, missionary archives throughout Africa are on the brink of extinction—not all are, but many are, and this would be a profound loss for research. Moreover, humanities studies on Africa, and in particular South Africa, promoting ‘decolonization’ may challenge the findings presented in this chapter. Therefore, the ecumenical reception and appropriation of Edwards in nineteenth-century Protestantism in Africa—from Moravian and Methodist missionaries to the Dutch Reformed Andrew Murray—requires a more interdisciplinary reassessment with colonialism, nationalism, and missions history than has been previously presented.

Works Cited Allen, Deborah  W. (2008). ‘Accommodating Conscience and Culture: Mary Lyon’s Appropriation of Jonathan Edwards in Personal Devotion and Public Evangelism.’ Dominguez Hills: California State University, Master Thesis. Allison, Christopher M.B. (2012). ‘The Methodist Edwards: John Wesley’s Abridgement of the Selected Works of Jonathan Edwards.’ Methodist History (April) 50.3: 144–60. Antakly, Waheeb  G. (1976). ‘American Protestant Educational Missions: Their Influence on Syria and Arab Nationalism, 1820–1923.’ Washington, D.C: The American University, Ph.D. diss. Boon, Pieter. (2015). ‘Hans Peter Hallbeck and the Cradle of Missions in South Africa. A Theological-Critical Study.’ Bloemfontein: University of the Free State, Ph.D. dissertation, promotors Rudolph M. Britz, Adriaan C. Neele. Boone, Th. (1990). ‘Zending en gereformeerd Piëtisme in Nederland: een historisch overzicht,’ Documentatieblad Nadere Reformatie. Voorjaar 14.1: 34. Bond, Alvan (1828). Memoir of the Rev. Pliny Fisk, A.  M., Late Missionary to Palestine. New York: Crocker and Brewster.

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552   Adriaan C. Neele Conforti, Joseph (1985). ‘Jonathan Edwards’s Most Popular Work: “The Life of David Brainerd” and Nineteenth-Century Evangelical Culture.’ Church History (June) 54.2: 188–201. Conforti, Joseph (1993). ‘Mary Lyon, the Founding of Mount Holyoke College, and the Cultural Revival of Jonathan Edwards.’ Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation (Winter) 3.1: 69–89. Cragg, Donald (2011). A Spark of Grace: The Wesleyan Methodist Mission in South Africa 1816–1883. Cape Town: Methodist Publishing House. Edwards, Jonathan (1823). L’union dans la prière pour la propagation de l’Evangile: abrégé d’un humble essai. Paris: H. Servier, Libraire, Rue de l’Oratoire no. 6. Edwards, Jonathan (1838). Quelques réflexions sur la vie du missionnaire Brainerd. Lausanne: M. Ducloux. Edwards, Jonathan (1831). History of the work of redemption, comprising a summary of the history of the Jews up to the destruction of Jerusalem. London: Printed for the Religious Tract Society. Edwards, Jonathan (1854). Histoire de l’oeuvre de la Redemption. Toulouse: Société des Livres Religieux. Edwards, Jonathan (1868). ‫إدواردز‬, ‫ مطبعة‬:‫(األريكية اإلمرسالية تاريخ الفداء )بريوت‬A History of the Work of Redemption). Beirut: American Presbyterian Press. Edwards, Jonathan (2016). ‫( العواطف الدينية‬Religious Affections). Hoda Bahig (transl.) Alexandria: Sparkle Printing Solutions. Freidinger, W. A. (1923). ‘Centennial of the American Mission Press-Beirut, Syria’. The Muslim World, vol. 13.2 (Apr.): 163–6. Hammond, George (2017). ‘Wesley, John (1703–1791).’ The Jonathan Edwards Encyclopedia, Harry  S.  Stout, Kenneth  P.  Minkema, Adriaan  C.  Neele (eds). Grand Rapids: William Eerdmans Publ, 594–5. Drew, Samuel (ed.) (1831). The Imperial Magazine and Monthly Record of religious, philosophical, historical, biographical, topographical and general knowledge, vol. I, second series. Jessup, Henry H. (1910). Fifty-Three Years in Syria. New York, Toronto: Fleming H. Revell Co. Johnson, Thomas H. (1940). The Printed Writings of Jonathan Edwards 1703–1758. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kennedy Fyfe, Aileen (2000). ‘Industrialised Conversion: The Religious Tract Society and popular science publishing in Victorian Britain.’ Cambridge: University of Cambridge, Ph.D. diss. Kling, David  W., and Sweeney, Douglas  A. (eds) (2003). Jonathan Edwards at Home and Abroad: Historical Memories, Cultural Movements, Global Horizons. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Laurie, Thomas (1863). Woman and Her Savior in Persia. Boston: Could and Lincoln. Lee, Hee-Young (2006). ‘The Spirituality of Andrew Murray Jr. (1828–1917). A TheologicalCritical Assessment.’ Bloemfontein: Ph.D.  dissertation University of the Free State, Promotor Rudolph M. Britz. London Missionary Society. Mabille, Adolphe (2010). Dogmatique [1856] (Morija: Morija Archives and Museum). Mabille, Adolphe (1865). Katekisma ea Lipolelo tsa Bibele. Imprimé pour la Société des Mission Evangéliques de Paris; Strasbourg: Imp. De Veuve Berger-Levault.

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Africa   553 Malick, David  G. (2008). The American Mission Press. A Preliminary Bibliography. n.p.: ATOUR Publications. Moffat, Robert (1842). Missionary Labours and Scenes in Southern Africa. London: John Snow. Morton, Daniel O. (1830). Memoir of Rev. Levi Parsons: first missionary to Palestine from the United States. Hartford, CT: Cooke & Co. Neele, Adriaan C. (2015). ‘The Reception of Edwards’s A History of the Work of Redemption in Nineteenth-century Basutoland,’ Journal of Religion in Africa 45: 68–93. Neele, Adriaan C. (2013). ‘Theological Education of Nineteenth-century French Missionaries: An Appropriation of the Catholicity of Classical Christian Theology,’ Studia Historiae Ecclesiasticae, 39.2 (Dec.): 149–78. Paas, Steven (2011). Johannes Rebmann. A Servant of God in Africa before the Rise of Western Colonialism. Nürnberg: VTR. Parker, Irene (1914). Dissenting academies in England: their rise and progress, and their place among the educational systems of the country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Piggin, Stuart (2003). ‘The Expanding Knowledge of God. Jonathan Edwards’s Influence on Missionary Thinking and Promotion,’ in David W. Kling, and Douglas A. Sweeney (eds), Jonathan Edwards at Home and Abroad. Colombia: University of South Carolina Press, 279. Porterfield, Amanda (1997). Mary Lyon And The Mount Holyoke Missionaries. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Robert, Dana L. (1998). ‘Ferguson, Abbie Park and Bliss, Anna Elvira,’ in Gerald H. Anderson (ed.) Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions. New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 209–10. Ross, Andrew  C. (1998). ‘Murray, Andrew, Jr.’ in Gerald  H.  Anderson (ed.) Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions. New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 481–2. Searle, Walter (1978). David Brainerd’s Personal Testimony. Selected from his journal and dairy. Foreword by Andrew Murray. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House. Smith, Edwin W. (1939). The Mabilles of Basutoland. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Stievermann, Jan (2014). ‘Faithful Translations: New Discoveries on the German Pietist Reception of Jonathan Edwards.’ Church History 83.2: 325. Tracy, Joseph (1842). History of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Compiled Chiefly from the Published and Unpublished Documents of the Board. New York, M.W. Dodd. T’seuoa, Ntabanyane Samson Khama (2011). The Message of Morija. A Historical Study of the Sermons of the Missionaries of the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society at Basutoland (­1863–1881). Bloemfontein: University of the Free State.

Archives and Special Collections Evangelical Theological Seminary (Cairo), Library Rare book room, archive. Mount Holyoke College, Archives and Special Collections, South Hadley, Massachusetts, Florence Purington Correspondence MS 0578. LD 7082.18 Purington. Mount Holyoke College, Missionaries Collection, Circa 1841–present. Collection number: RG 29. LD 7093.8 M5. Mount Holyoke College, Spafford papers, 1879–1933. Collection number: MS 0717. LD 7096.6 1879 Preston.

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554   Adriaan C. Neele

Suggested Reading Kling, David  W., and Sweeney, Douglas  A. (eds) (2003). Jonathan Edwards at Home and Abroad: Historical Memories, Cultural Movements, Global Horizons. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.

Author Bio Adriaan Neele (PhD, University of Utrecht) is Director of the Doctoral Program and Professor of Historical Theology at Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary, and Consulting Editor at the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University. He was Director of the Jonathan Edwards Center Africa and Professor of Historical Theology at the University of the Free State, South Africa.

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chapter 36

L ati n A m er ica Heber Carlos de Campos, Jr.

History of reception tells us much about the recipients through the topics they ­appropriate. Thus, the reception of Jonathan Edwards in Latin America sets a course whereby two religious groups reveal quite a bit about Latin American Christianity in the past few decades. Not only does it reveal the two groups that have grown exponentially on the continent with a vibrant faith, but it also reveals the moments they went through where Edwards came into their story. Certain periods of their history are very revealing of when Edwards became interesting to them. On the other hand, the reception of Edwards in Latin America reveals much about Edwards himself, what parts of his theological legacy have long lasting impact, and how his transitional moment between Puritanism and Modernity allows for partial and conflicting readings of this complex figure. The two portraits presented below reveal a Jonathan Edwards not only as he is appreciated by Latin Americans but also the most famous and somewhat simplistic aspects of Edwards known in the English-speaking world. The Revivalist and Reformed are possibly the two most distinguishing features of Edwards appropriated by English-speaking evangelicals as well as Latin Americans, and that tells us something about Edwards that cuts across international boundaries. Therefore, this essay will tell the story of the reception of Jonathan Edwards in Latin America in twos: two groups, two moments, two portraits. It will begin by introducing the two groups within Latin American Christianity—a historical Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism—and the two moments of their history where Edwards was introduced to them: the Charismatic interest widespread in the 1950s and 1960s and the recent popu­lar­ity of Reformed theology. The rest of this piece will be a summary of the works by Edwards and about Edwards that reveal his theology of Revival and his Reformed identity. This survey will focus more on the Portuguese-speaking part of Latin America, since Brazil has been the fifth most popular country accessing the Jonathan Edwards Center website (edwards.yale.edu) in the past decade and the only Latin American country in the ‘top 10’ list, which has led the Jonathan Edwards Center to establish one of its global centres there. There has arguably been more production of Edwards in Portuguese in

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556   Heber Carlos de Campos, Jr. one country than in many other Spanish speaking countries put together. Hence, this chapter will focus more on Brazilian reception and production, though it will occasionally mention Edwards’s impact in the Hispanic countries of Latin America as well.

Spirituality and Theology in Latin America To narrate the reception of Jonathan Edwards in Latin America requires that we begin by framing the different religious groups that appropriated him. Though the inter­ nation­al scene tends to associate Latin American Christianity ecclesiastically with the Roman Catholic Church and theologically with Liberation theologians, to investigate the reception of Jonathan Edwards in Latin America is possible because of the significant growth of two other representatives of the Christian Faith on the continent: Evangelicalism associated with more historical churches and both early and con­tem­por­ ary Pentecostalism. Though there was some Protestantism in Brazil due to immigration, the historical Protestant churches were established in Latin America mainly through missions in the nineteenth century, but in the mid-twentieth century, they were outgrown by Pentecostals in many countries (see Orr 1978, 121–45, 156–98). Pentecostals outnumbering historic Protestants coincided with the powerful influence of the charismatic movement within historical Protestant churches (called ‘Charismatic Renewal’) in the 1950s and 1960s, generating several splits within traditional churches (Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists) where a group would start the charismatic version of its tradition. However, it was only in the past forty years that Protestants in general became a much larger section of each country’s population. For example, in Brazil, Protestants went from six per cent in 1980 (about 7 million) to twenty-four per cent in 2019 (about 50 million). This impressive growth has come with an upsurge of different representations of evangelical faith—even some mutations on historical Evangelicalism and the early grass-roots Pentecostalism. In Latin America, the mutation produced by the entrance of the prosperity gospel, a growing biblical illiteracy, and the abandonment of ascetic tendencies common in historical Pentecostalism is often called ‘Neopentecostalism’. This deviation has awakened the interest of many Evangelicals and Pentecostals to search for deeper theological and historical roots that embody the orthodoxy of their faith more adequately. The growth of Pentecostalism in the mid-twentieth century and the recent search for more historical roots represent two different stages of appropriation of Jonathan Edwards in Latin America: first, a mere introduction of Edwards, and second, a growing familiarity with him. The two major groups of Latin American Protestantism (Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism) and the two different periods mentioned in the previous paragraph (mid-twentieth-century growth of Pentecostals and Charismatics and the recent search

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Latin America   557 for deeper roots) provide the lenses through which we can trace the reception of Edwards in Spanish and Portuguese-speaking America. Their interest in Edwards has arisen especially because he represents a successful spirituality. Because of his as­so­ci­ ation with the First Great Awakening, those who have approached Edwards as initial investigators have been drawn by several features of revivalist spirituality that were brought to Latin America by nineteenth-century missionaries and that were spread even further by Pentecostal growth. Some of those features are fervorous preaching, intense prayer, evangelistic zeal, many conversions, all existing in the context of revival meetings where internal fire and church growth are the goals of a successful ministry. Revival has been the goal of Evangelicals and Pentecostals since their early days. Hence, this study will show that Edwards’s role as a revivalist was the first connection between Latin America and the preacher of Colonial America and remains the most attractive one. A second connection, however, has arisen more recently. As Pentecostal leaders have gradually abandoned their historical anti-intellectualism in pursuit of a more formal theological training, and as historical churches have also augmented their theological investigations, a significant portion of both groups have become enamoured with Reformed theology in ways that were not common before. The recent creation of a Gospel Coalition organization both in the Hispanic world as well as in Brazil is a testament to this growing identification with the Reformed tradition. An interest that started through publications and small conferences in the last fifteen years of the twentieth century grew exponentially in the twenty-first century as social media created a larger platform that expanded conferences, publications, and theological schools that identified themselves with the Reformed faith (Campos Jr, forthcoming). This has provided an increased interest in Jonathan Edwards as a theologian and philosopher, more spe­cif­ic­ al­ly as a Reformed thinker. This is a second avenue which connects Edwards to Latin American Protestants, and this study will survey how this investigation is still in its initial stages and is yet to mature. So, these two portraits of Edwards—Revivalist preacher and Reformed thinker—will be investigated as part of the reception of his story and his thinking in Latin America. Most Latin American studies about him and publications of his work could fit in one of these two categories. The secondary literature on Edwards is mainly devotional and inspirational, though some academic work produced by Latin Americans will be surveyed as well.

Edwards the Revivalist In the mid-twentieth century, the scarce works that mentioned Jonathan Edwards always associated him with a revivalist spirituality. Perhaps there is no better example than the collection of biographies written in Portuguese by American missionary Orland Spencer Boyer (1893–1978), a Pentecostal pastor and missionary who worked

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558   Heber Carlos de Campos, Jr. mainly in the northeast of Brazil from the late 1920s onwards. This collection entitled Heróis da Fé (Heroes of Faith), still in print with over 300 thousand copies sold, provides a hagiographic portrait of Edwards who developed a lifelong prayer habit that started when he was seven or eight years old and whose wife was equally spiritual in prayer as she repeatedly experienced weakness due to heavenly revelations over a period of three years. The doctrine most emphasized by Edwards was new birth. Boyer attempts to quantify the number of conversions during the First Great Awakening in New England (between 35,000 and 50,000 conversions). Edwards’s famous sermon ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’ was powerful because he fasted, prayed, and did not sleep for three days prior to his preaching (Boyer 1964, 6–7, 47–54). Translated works that deal with revival repeat these emphases on spirituality associated with Edwards. The publication of William E. Allen’s The History of Revivals of Religion in Portuguese in 1958 told the story of revivals impacted by the ministry of Charles G. Finney. The introduction highlights in capital letters that revival is the key to evangelizing the world. The large number of conversions in New England (estimate of 50,000) is the result of two by-products of the awakening: feverous spirituality and constant witnessing. David Brainerd’s ministry is fruitful (i.e. many conversions) because of much prayer, just like the Lycus Valley revival came as a result of prayer (Allen  1958, 22–4). A similar story of Edwards’s spirituality and the awakenings is told  by Homer Duncan in his Revival Fires, translated into Portuguese in 1982 (Duncan 1982, 25–8). This portrait of prayer, evangelistic zeal, and numerical growth matches the framework of much of Latin American Evangelicalism and, especially, Pentecostalism. This interest in the revivalist Edwards determined the first primary works that were published in Brazil. The publication of Sinners as a powerful sermon as well as other sermons that deal with holiness such as the fourteenth sermon of Charity and Its Fruits, The Diary of David Brainerd (largely unassociated with the missionary movement but connected to the spirituality of the awakened person), the Distinguishing Marks, and both Nick Needham’s as well as James Houston’s summaries of Religious Affections are ex­amples of which of Edwards’s works were initially imbibed in the last quarter of the twentieth century (Edwards  1975; Edwards  1992a; Edwards  1992b; Edwards  1993a; Edwards 1993b; Edwards 2008). Only recently have we seen the publication of full texts by Jonathan Edwards such as Charity and Its Fruits, A Faithful Narrative, and Religious Affections as a desire to have further and deeper studies into Edwards in Brazil has grown (Edwards 2015; Edwards 2017; Edwards 2018a). Following the surge of interest in revival spirituality, there came the first careful investigations of Edwards in the Portuguese language. Still in the 1990s, as a result of lectures taught in Brazil, there came the publication of Gerald McDermott’s Seeing God, which works so closely with Edwards’s reliable signs of true spirituality (McDermott 1997). In the early 2000s, Marcos Henrique de Araújo attempted to delineate the centrality of sanctification in Jonathan Edwards’s corpus (Araújo 2003). This fascination with revival piety continued as other sermons on spirituality and holiness by Edwards were published (Edwards  2004; Edwards  2010a) and T.  M.  Moore’s Praying together for true

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Latin America   559 revival—a shorter and edited version of Edwards’s Humble Attempt—also came out in Portuguese (Edwards 2010b). A similar wave came forth in Hispanic Latin American literature, though a little later than in Brazil. Translations of Boyer’s biography, McDermott’s study, the same two summaries of Religious Affections that came out in Portuguese, a brief biography by Mark Shaw, and David Brainerd’s Diary almost all came out in the twenty-first century (Boyer  1983, 43–9; McDermott  2000; Edwards and Needham  2000; Edwards  2013; Shaw 2002, 133–62; Edwards 2018b). Ernest Klassen, a Canadian missionary who has worked in Peru and Mexico, has broken new ground by introducing Edwards and his revival preaching in Spanish through two different books. Before Klassen, Edwards was known in Hispanic Latin America through a book by José Moreno Berrocal (Berrocal 2008), a minister in Spain, but there was no significant study coming from any Latin American ministry. The first of Klassen’s books was an introduction to the life and thought of Edwards by putting together a short biography, translating Distinguishing Marks, and laying out a few implications of Edwards’s thought for the Latin American context. Klassen also included translations of Edwards’s Personal Narrative and his 70 Resolutions as appendices (Edwards and Klassen 2002). Aware of a growing concern for revival in Latin America, Klassen suggests that Hispanics should learn from Edwards how to manifest first the balance between knowledge of Scripture and experience of the Spirit’s power; second, the openness to the unusual phenomena that could be produced by God; and third, the wisdom to exercise spiritual discernment. Klassen’s second work is more thorough as it attempts to analyse twelve features of preaching that revives (Klassen  2017). Since the work is an intersection of Edwards, revival, and preaching, it makes sense to find that those features fit within three cat­egor­ ies: those that regard the spirituality of the preacher (e.g. prayer and fasting, a perspective of eternal realities, spiritual pride), those concerning the theology of revival (e.g. balancing the role of Word and Spirit, teaching both God’s sovereignty and human responsibility), and others of a homiletical nature (e.g. passionate preaching, the im­port­ance of application, Christ-centredness). While aware of God’s mysterious works, Klassen believes there is biblical and historical foundations to connect a certain type of preaching to the awakening of unbelievers and the revival of lethargic believers, two effects of preaching that galvanize each other. These popular appropriations of the themes of revival and spirituality have, however, taken two different directions. On the one hand, Edwards is used by Pentecostals as a model of revival fire that needs to be regained. In fact, even today it is common to use Martyn Lloyd-Jones report of Sarah Edwards’s alleged levitation across the room (Lloyd-Jones 1993, 354–77) as proof that we should not be sceptical of impressive phys­ ic­al manifestations in a true revival (Rosas 2017). This Edwards is the ‘charismatic supporter of experience’ used to reinforce the unusual happenings in charismatic gatherings. On the other hand, more traditional evangelicals have tried to distance Edwards from a mystical and pragmatic understanding of revival such as Charles Finney’s (Santos 2012). This second Edwards is the ‘genuine revivalist’ who does not manufacture religious experiences.

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560   Heber Carlos de Campos, Jr. The two directions mentioned above are blurred in the translated works that interpret Edwards. Wesley Duewel portrayed Edwards negatively as emphasizing God’s judgment, thus showing the darker side of the Calvinist mind, while George Whitefield brought forth the consolations of God and the shedding of the Spirit. Duewel ends up pitting Edwards against Finney’s understanding of revival, which he appreciates. Thus, Duewel is theologically within the first group but making the distinction of the second group (Duewel  1995, 55–6). On the other hand, Eifion Evans portrays the Half-way Covenant of Solomon Stoddard and the increasing Arminianism of New England as evidence of generalized apostasy prior to the Great Awakening, thus distinguishing Edwards from models prior to him rather than after him (Evans, n.d.). Despite the different distinctions and the variety of hermeneutical paradigms, it is the discerning Edwards that analyses revival—the one who distinguishes himself from less orthodox spirituality—that is the direction many more academic investigations have taken. Perhaps the most significant of all contributions to the discerning Edwards portrayal was the master’s thesis of Luiz Mattos initially written in English (Mattos 1997) but later published in Portuguese (Mattos 2006). Mattos begins his research by raising the signs of what some call a ‘Brazilian revival’—e.g. the spiritual renewal of the 1950s and 1960s that spurred charismatic gifts, a growing hunger and yearning for God, the extra­or­din­ ary growth of the evangelical churches—and the criticism raised by its opponents—e.g. obsession for mysticism, the abandonment of central doctrines such as God’s sovereignty and human sinfulness, lack of moral reform—to initially conclude that such contrasting analyses hinder a clear evaluation of the Brazilian movement. The bulk of his thesis is a careful investigation of Edwards’s works on revival and other related works in order to list a series of main features of revival drawn from the First Great Awakening. In a quasi-Old Lights manner, Mattos concludes that there is no true revival going on in Brazil at the end of the twentieth century, though he perceives a few positive notions within the Brazilian evangelical movement. Similar perceptions of the piety and theological perspicuity of the revival analyst from Northampton can be found in Brazilian academic circles (Matos 1998; Arantes 2017). Despite the considerable attention given to the revivalist Edwards, there are still interrelated areas largely unexplored in Latin American studies. Very little has been done on the American sociological context that preceded and concurred with Edwards. Wilson Porte’s article on Edwards’s doctrine of the Eucharist and his dismissal from Northampton is an initial attempt to engage sociological factors as well as theological ones (Porte 2012). Only recently have we had biographies such as Iain Murray’s and George Marsden’s A Short Life translated into Portuguese, thus giving the lay reader a fuller picture of this eighteenth-century revivalist (Murray  2015; Marsden  2015). In Spanish, there is not a single full-blown biography of Edwards. However, the very timid academic endeavours in Brazil are still short of a larger picture. Though one must concede that it is more challenging for those who live outside of North America to become familiarized with the nuances of Colonial days, it would be fruitful for Latin Americans to understand Edwards more historically than just as a revival icon. There needs to be further investigation into literature that looks at the history of Colonial America with a

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Latin America   561 larger set of tools than just theology. This would widen the hermeneutical horizon of Latin American students of Jonathan Edwards. Another area that lacks further exploration is connecting Edwards to philosophical and theological antecedents. Discussions over faculty psychology or the meaning of ‘affections’ would make the reading of Edwards much more productive and easier to locate in continuity or discontinuity with the tradition. Jonas Madureira’s article is a fine exception that just came out. He argues for the meaning of ‘affection’ as ‘sensation of the mind’ considering philosophical debates contemporary to Edwards, and traces some continuity with Augustine of Hippo, all in light of fine Edwardsean historiography (Madureira 2019). However, this initial incursion is still introductory in comparison to full monographs on certain topics of Edwards’s theology or large tomes that locate an aspect of Edwards’s theology within his corpus and within the tradition. A more structured framework of Edwards’s thought on revival, affections, and spirituality in comparison with the great tradition teaches us what to expect in terms of redemptive advancement and also moderates what, if any, of Edwards should be mimicked. In short, a broader reception of Edwards as revivalist would assist in guiding a more informed appropriation of him.

Edwards the Reformed Theologian The contours of a second portrait of Jonathan Edwards are a recent phenomenon, as new as the impact of internet and social media. There are at least three phenomena in Latin American Evangelicalism and early Pentecostalism that prepared for the reception of Edwards as a Reformed theologian. First, there was a growing interest in theological education, even including those who not long ago were anti-intellectualists. That is, even Pentecostals who had a history of ordaining people without previous training began to pursue the study of theology. Secondly, as a subset of the first point, there has been a slow but progressive attention given to historical figures within the Evangelical tradition. Books by and about Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Owen, and Jonathan Edwards demonstrate a greater appreciation for the history on which the Evangelical faith stands. Thirdly, and most specifically, the past two or three decades has seen the wide acceptance of the Reformed faith (at least in its soteriological understandings) crossing denominational boundaries and going beyond those denominations that have been historically Reformed, thus reaching the whole spectrum of Evangelicals and Pentecostals. Due to the impact of translated works by Martyn Lloyd-Jones (1993, 354–77; 2013), J. I. Packer (1996, 335–55), and John Piper (2008; 2009; Piper and Taylor 2011) showing Edwards as one of their heroes, there has been an increasing desire to know more about him. This portrayal of Edwards as the theologian within the Puritan and Reformed trad­ ition has provoked many in Latin America to produce more published books about Edwards and online translations. Brazilian publishing houses such as Publicações

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562   Heber Carlos de Campos, Jr. Evangélicas Selecionadas (PES), Editora Fiel, Editora Cultura Cristã, and, to a certain extent, Edições Vida Nova, were all very eager to spread Reformed authors and, consequently, works by and about Edwards. Besides all the works already cited, the publication of Steven Lawson’s devotional biography The Unwavering Resolve of Jonathan Edwards (Lawson 2010) and a whole edition of the periodical Fé para Hoje composed of articles on Jonathan Edwards (no. 37, July 2012) by Editora Fiel illustrate the desire to popularize the legacy of Edwards as a sound Reformed antecedent. Works by Edwards that portray some of these Reformed distinctives are his sermon on Romans 9:18 conveying God’s sovereignty in our salvation, his exposition of Romans 5:10 showing the depravity of unregenerate men (Edwards  2019), The End for Which God Created the World (Piper 2008, 109–218; Edwards 2018c), The Divine and Supernatural Light for its understanding of regeneration as a solely divine enabling to see (Edwards  2004, 57–78; 2010c, 23–51), besides some of the works mentioned in the previous section that refer to God’s sovereignty in bringing about revival as well judgment upon unrepentant sinners. Websites both in Portuguese and Spanish have translated several of Edwards’ sermons and pieces of other works,1 spurred by this interest in rescuing the faith of our fathers that to some has been totally new. A greater awareness of the Reformed tradition has spurred the production of some academic articles by Brazilian researchers. Cognizant of Edwards’s rich theological and philosophical tradition, many articles have arisen exploring his debates surrounding Freedom of the Will, whether it be the Arminian context (Campos 2012), the ac­cus­ation of determinism (Castelo 2013), or evaluating the influence of John Locke on the treatise (Alexandrino 2015). This engagement with a long academic conversation around the most respected of Edwards’s work enriches the debate in Brazilian soil, fer­til­iz­ing future reflections that might go even deeper. A similar facet of this investigation of the philosopher/theologian comes forth in a master’s thesis by Ezequias Domingos de Abreu, which was later published as a book (Abreu 2004; 2009). The work is a study on the role of reason in the apprehension of reve­la­tion in the thought of Jonathan Edwards. Based on solid secondary literature, Abreu analyses the epistemology of Edwards in dialogue with Hobbes and Locke to say that Edwards absorbs some elements of Lockean empiricism without being limited to Locke’s epistemology. Regenerated reason as a cognitive apparatus is augmented in its epistemological powers by having the ‘sense of the heart’ added to its ability to process any kind of revelation from God, absorbing the beauties of God in a new way with a new sensibility. The author believes such epistemology brings an important alternative to scientism on the one hand, and mysticism on the other. Though all these broad strokes painting the portrait of Edwards as a Reformed thinker are encouraging of an incipient Edwardsean academia in Brazil, they still lack a larger frame. Because the reception of Edwards as Reformed is happening as the 1  Two examples suffice, one in Portuguese (http://jonathanedwardsselecionados.blogspot.com/) and the other in Spanish offers a partial translation of Sereno Dwight’s Memoir (https://www.cimientoestable.org/files/Las_Obras_de_Jonathan_Edwards_Cap_1_-_8.pdf).

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Latin America   563 Reformed faith is being discovered by many, there is a need to grasp a larger view of the Reformed tradition in order to place Edwards within such a tradition. In fact, most of these young researchers are largely unaware of the academic discussion whether Edwards was, in fact, Reformed or not—or at least how one should go about classifying his continuities and discontinuities with the tradition. This concern of Edwards’s connection to the tradition has just been initially raised in an article on Freedom of the Will (Campos, Jr 2016) and in a book chapter on Original Sin (Campos, Jr 2017), but the Latin American context requires further explorations. After all, through the study of Edwards, Latin American Evangelicalism can get a better grasp on the Reformed tradition prior to him as well as the new era dawning during his days.

New Explorations of Edwards Trying to present the whole of Edwards in Latin America in only two portraits, albeit large ones, is possibly simplistic. There is no doubt that these two portraits do not represent everything that has been written about Edwards. There are a couple of short pieces on Edwards and Christian education (Portela Neto  2012; MacAllister 2018), the first one arguing for a worldview applied to the study of nature (e.g. ­spiders) and to philosophical abstractions (Mind). There is also a master’s thesis looking at Edwards’s concept of alterity (otherness) during his missionary years at Stockbridge (Lima 2017) and a doctoral dissertation on Edwards’s rhetoric of history (on his understanding of providence) written by a Spaniard serving in Chile (Naffziger 2015). These are examples of other literature that do not exactly fit any of the two moulds presented earlier. However, as mentioned in the introduction, the two portraits surveyed in this chapter are a testament both to the diversity of Edwards, who lived in a transitional period, and the diversity of those who appropriate him. In other words, the portraits are due to the most prevalent perceptions of recent Evangelicalism in Latin America, but they are also witnesses to the complex figure that is Jonathan Edwards. Since George Marsden says that Edwards can be ‘simultaneously a strict conservative and an innovator’ as he makes his theological views ‘intellectually viable in the Enlightenment era’ (Marsden  2003, 458), one must admit that different portraits are partially due to this multifaceted thinker. Several debates on who are the true heirs of Edwards reinforce such a challenge to place him in an easily defined box. On the other hand, the two Latin American portraits of Jonathan Edwards testify to the interests of the two groups mentioned in the introduction (historical Evangelicals and Pentecostals) as well as the two moments in which Edwards was more interesting to Latin American Protestants: first, when Pentecostalism became the majority of Protestants and the upsurge of the Charismatic Renewal was looking for examples of successful spirituality; and second, when the advancement of theological studies opened the door to interest in the Reformed faith and some historical defenders of it. In this

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564   Heber Carlos de Campos, Jr. sense, the history of the reception of Edwards provides insights into the history of Latin American Protestantism. This second appropriation of Edwards has provided a much fuller account of the New Englander. Interest in Edwards the Revivalist preacher and the Reformed thinker coexists amongst most Latin American readers of Edwards. However, there are a few avenues of Edwards studies that could possibly provide the tools for merging these two portraits. There are at least two avenues through which one could possibly attain a more holistic perception of the one Edwards: the first would be a greater view of history as the work of God’s redemption, modestly asserted in Humble Attempt, which has been translated into Portuguese, but more unfolded in History of the Work of Redemption, which has not been translated; the second avenue would be an aesthetic perception of the world which integrates natural philosophy with the beauty of redemption, i.e. both general and special revelation, a topic that has just been introduced by the translation of Dane Ortlund’s book, Edwards on the Christian Life (Ortlund 2018) but which still needs to be deepened. After all, Latin Americans should not be content in perceiving only the Edwards one appreciates but the Edwards in all the richness of his insights that has transformed him into a figure popular both in academic and ecclesiastical circles around the world.

Works Cited Abreu, Ezequias Domingos de (2009). A Razão e a Revelação em Jonathan Edwards. Londrina: Abreu. Abreu, Ezequias Domingos de (2004). ‘O papel da razão na apreensão da revelação em Jonathan Edwards.’ Centro Presbiteriano de Pós-Graduação Andrew Jumper, Th.M. thesis. Alexandrino, Alan Renêe (2015). ‘A influência filosófica de John Locke sobre Jonathan Edwards: uma breve incursão histórica.’ Revista Teologia Brasileira n. 42, Allen, William E. (1958). História dos Avivamentos Religiosos, trans. by Helcias Câmara. Rio de Janeiro: Casa Publicadora Batista. Arantes, Paulo Corrêa (2017). ‘Jonathan Edwards: protagonista e crítico do fenômeno religioso conhecido como o “grande avivamento do século 18”. ’ Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie, Master thesis. Araújo, Marcos Henrique de (2003). ‘A centralidade da doutrina da santificação nas obras de Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758).’ Centro Presbiteriano de Pós-Graduação Andrew Jumper, Th.M. thesis. Berrocal, José Moreno (2008). Jonathan Edwards: La Pasión Por la Gloria de Dios. Barcelona: Andamio. Boyer, Orlando (1983). Biografia de Grandes Cristianos. Florida: Vida. Boyer, Orlando (1964). Heróis da Fé vol. 1. Rio de Janeiro: O. S. Boyer, 5th ed. Campos, Heber Carlos de (2012). ‘O Ambiente Teológico Arminiano nos dias de Edwards.’ Fé para Hoje n. 37 (July): 51–60. Campos, Jr, Heber Carlos de (2017). ‘A Re-Formed Understanding of Imputation in Jonathan Edwards’s Original Sin.’ In The Global Edwards, ed. Rhys S. Bezzant. Eugene, Or: Wipf & Stock, 223–43.

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Latin America   565 Campos, Jr, Heber Carlos de (2016). ‘Jonathan Edwards sobre a Liberdade Humana: reformado ou não?’ Fides Reformata vol. 21, n. 2: 67–96. Campos, Jr, Heber Carlos de (Forthcoming). ‘(Re)Discoveries of the Reformed Faith in Brazil’, Oxford Handbook on Calvinism, edited by Bruce Gordon and Carl Trueman. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Castelo, Paulo Afonso Nascimento (2013). ‘Jonathan Edwards e o Livre-Arbítrio: Uma Breve Análise de seus Principais Conceitos e Controvérsias.’ Fides Reformata vol. 18, n. 2: 65–74. Duncan, Homer (ed.) (1982). Fogos de Avivamento, trans. by Eunice Machado. Queluz, Portugal: Núcleo—Centro de Publicações Cristãs, Duewel, Wesley (1995). O Fogo do Reavivamento, trans. by Neyd Siqueira. São Paulo: Candeia. Edwards, Jonathan (1975). Pecadores nas Mãos de um Deus Irado. São Paulo: Publicações Evangélicas Selecionadas (PES). Edwards, Jonathan (1992a). O Dom Maior. São José dos Campos: Fiel. Edwards, Jonathan (1992b). A Verdadeira Obra do Espírito: Sinais de Autenticidade, trans. by Valéria Fontana. São Paulo: Vida Nova. Edwards, Jonathan (1993a). A Vida de David Brainerd. São José dos Campos: Fiel. Edwards, Jonathan (1993b). A Genuína Experiência Espiritual, ed. Nick Needham, trans. by Marcia Serra Ribeiro Viana. São Paulo: Publicações Evangélicas Selecionadas (PES). Edwards, Jonathan, and Nicholas Needham (2000). Los Afectos Religiosos: La Válida Experiencia Espiritual. Ciudad de Mexico: Faro de Gracia. Edwards, Jonathan, and Ernest Klassen (2002). Características de Un Auténtico Avivamiento: Presentando Jonathan Edwards al Contexto Latino. Lima, Peru: Grafitec y Cia. Edwards, Jonathan (2004). Pecadores nas Mãos de um Deus Irado e outros Sermões de Jonathan Edwards, trans. by Luís Aron de Macedo. Rio de Janeiro: Casa Publicadora das Assembléias de Deus (CPAD). Edwards, Jonathan (2008). Uma Fé Mais Forte que as Emoções, ed. James Houston, trans. Cláudia Ziller Faria. Brasília: Palavra. Edwards, Jonathan (2010a). A Busca da Santidade, trans. by Elisabeth Gomes. São Paulo: Cultura Cristã. Edwards, Jonathan (2010b). A Busca do Avivamento, trans. by Marcos Vasconcelos. São Paulo: Cultura Cristã. Edwards, Jonathan (2010c). A Busca do Crescimento, trans. by Susana Gueiros. São Paulo: Cultura Cristã. Edwards, Jonathan (2013). La Verdadera Espiritualidad: Fe y Avivamiento, ed. James Houston. Brazil: Editorial Patmos. Edwards, Jonathan (2015). Caridade e Seus Frutos: Um estudo sobre o amor em 1 Coríntios 13, trans. by Valter Graciano Martins. São José dos Campos: Fiel. Edwards, Jonathan. (2017). A Surpreendente Obra de Deus na conversão de muitas centenas de almas, trans. by Renata M. de Rezende dos Santos. São Paulo: Shedd Publicações. Edwards, Jonathan (2018a). Afeições Religiosas, trans. Marcos Vasconcelos and Marcelo Cipolla. São Paulo: Vida Nova. Edwards, Jonathan (2018b). El Diario de David Brainerd, trans. by Gabriel Edgardo Llugdar, Accessed at Edwards, Jonathan (2018c). O fim para o qual Deus criou o mundo, trans. by Almiro Pisetta. São Paulo: Mundo Cristão. Edwards, Jonathan (2019). Amigos ou Inimigos de Deus? trans. Renata Santos. São Paulo: Publicações Evangélicas Selecionadas (PES).

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566   Heber Carlos de Campos, Jr. Edwards, Jonathan (n.d.). A Soberania de Deus na Salvação. São Paulo: Publicações Evangélicas Selecionadas (PES). Evans, E. (n.d.). Reavivamentos: Sua origem, progresso e realizações. São Paulo: Publicações Evangélicas Selecionadas (PES). Klassen, Ernest (2017). La Predicación que Aviva: Lecciones de Jonathan Edwards. Barcelona: CLIE. Lawson, Steven  J. (2010). As Firmes Resoluções de Jonathan Edwards, trans. by Ana Paula Eusébio Pereira. São José dos Campos: Fiel. Lima, Sérgio Paulo de (2017). ‘Alteridade de Jonathan Edwards na Prática Missiológica junto aos índios Moicanos durante os anos 1751 a 1758 nos limites da Nova Inglaterra.’ Master thesis, Mackenzie Presbyterian University. Lloyd-Jones, D. Martyn. Jonathan Edwards e a crucial importância de avivamento. São Paulo: Publicações Evangélicas Selecionadas (PES). Lloyd-Jones, D. Martyn (2013). Los puritanos: Sus origenes e sucesores. Edinburgh: Banner of Truth. Lloyd-Jones, D.  Martyn (1993). Os Puritanos: Suas Origens e Seus Sucessores, trans. Odayr Olivetti. São Paulo: Publicações Evangélicas Selecionadas (PES). MacAllister, John (2018). ‘Por que a educação cristã precisa de Jonathan Edwards?’ Teologia Brasileira 71 (Oct.). Accessed at McDermott, Gerald (1997). O Deus Visível: Doze Sinais da Verdadeira Espiritualidade, trans. by Hans Udo Fuchs. São Paulo: Vida Nova. McDermott, Gerald R. (2000). Viendo a Dios: Jonathan Edwards y el Discernimiento Espiritual. Salem, Virgina: Gerald R. McDermott. Madureira, Jonas (2019). ‘A graça dos santos é o alvorecer da glória: uma nota sobre affection como sensation of the mind em Religious Affections de Jonathan Edwards.’ Fides Reformata vol. 24, n. 1: 39–49. Marsden, George (2015). A breve vida de Jonathan Edwards, trans. by Francisco Wellington Ferreira. São José dos Campos: Fiel. Marsden, George (2003). Jonathan Edwards: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press. Matos, Alderi Souza de (1998). ‘Jonathan Edwards: teólogo do coração e do intelecto.’ Fides Reformata vol. 3, n. 1: 72–87. Mattos, Luiz Roberto França de (1997). ‘Jonathan Edwards and the criteria for evaluating the genuineness of the “Brazilian revival”. ’ Centro Presbiteriano de Pós-Graduação Andrew Jumper, Th.M. thesis. Mattos, Luiz Roberto França de (2006). Jonathan Edwards e o Avivamento Brasileiro. São Paulo: Cultura Cristã. Murray, Iain (2015). Jonathan Edwards: Uma Nova Biografia, trans. by Angelino Junior do Carmo. São Paulo: Publicações Evangélicas Selecionadas (PES). Naffziger, Juan Sánchez (2015). ‘Immediate and Progressive Divine Agency: Jonathan Edwards’ Rhetoric of History.’ Ph.D. diss., University of Seville. Orr, J. Edwin (1978). Evangelical Awakenings in Latin America. Minneapolis: Bethany Fellowship. Ortlund, Dane C. (2018). Jonathan Edwards e a Vida Cristã: Viver para a beleza de Deus. São Paulo: Cultura Cristã. Packer, J. I. (1996). Entre os Gigantes de Deus: Uma Visão Puritana da Vida Cristã, pp. 335–55. São José dos Campos: Fiel.

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Latin America   567 Piper, John (2008). A Paixão de Deus por Sua Glória: Vivendo a Visão de Jonathan Edwards. São Paulo: Cultura Cristã. Piper, John and Justin Taylor (eds) (2011). Fascinado pela Glória de Deus. São Paulo: Cultura Cristã. Piper, John (2009). La Pasión de Dios por su gloria—Viva la Pasión de Jonathan Edwards. Colombia: Editorial Unilit. Porte Jr, Wilson (2012). ‘Jonathan Edwards: A doutrina da ceia e sua demissão de Northampton’, parts 1 and 2, Teologia Brasileira n. 5 (May) and 6 (June). Accessed at and Portela Neto, F. Solano (2012). ‘O desconhecido Jonathan Edwards.’ Fé para Hoje n. 37 (Jul.): 38–42. Rosas, Tiago (2017). ‘A Levitação da Esposa de Jonathan Edwards.’ Gospel Prime, 2 May. Santos, Gilson (2012). ‘Avivamento: As Perspectivas de Jonathan Edwards e Charles Finney.’ Fé para Hoje n. 37 (Jul.): 14–24. Shaw, Mark (2002). 10 Grandes Ideas de la Historia de la Iglesia, pp. 133–62. Barcelona: Publicaciones Andamio.

Author Bio Heber Campos Jr (Ph.D., Calvin Theological Seminary) is Associate Professor of Historical Theology at Centro Presbiteriano de Pós-Graduação Andrew Jumper, in São Paulo, Brazil, and Director of the Jonathan Edwards Center for Brazil. He is a professor at the JMC Seminary in São Paulo and at the International Faculty of Reformed Theology. In addition to teaching, he serves as a pastor at the Parque das Nações Presbyterian Church in Santo André, and as a member of the Editorial Board of Editora Cultura Cristã. He has been a Presbyterian minister since 1999.

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chapter 37

Edwa r ds St u die s Today Douglas A. Sweeney

The most important year ever in the history of Edwards studies was surely 2003, which marked the tercentennial anniversary of Edwards’s birth. Over the course of that year, scores of gatherings took place to commemorate Edwards and his international legacies, several of which yielded major scholarly publications. The most celebrated of these were the Yale-sponsored conference at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., which yielded Jonathan Edwards at 300: Essays on the Tercentenary of His Birth (2005); a conference at Princeton Theological Seminary on Edwards as theologian, which yielded The Princeton Companion to Jonathan Edwards (2005); and a conference at the Minneapolis Convention Center for Protestants convened by John Piper, a well-known Baptist clergyman, which yielded 1703–2003: Reflections on Jonathan Edwards 300 Years Later (2003).1 In that very same year, George Marsden released Jonathan Edwards: A Life, which won the Bancroft Prize; Stephen Stein began to edit The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards; and several scholarly periodicals featured Edwards as well.2 In the Republic of Korea, by then the second-largest geographical centre of interest in Edwards, NakHeung Yang published the first comprehensive biography of Edwards in Korean; Revival & Reformation, an up-and-coming Christian publisher, began its Korean translation of some of the volumes in the Yale Edition of The Works of Jonathan Edwards; and a wide array of scholars met in three different settings to launch a Jonathan Edwards Society in Korea.3 Tens of thousands of pages on Edwards appeared in 2003, 1  Stout, Minkema, and Maskell 2005; Hyun Lee 2005; and Piper 2003. 2  Marsden 2003; and Stein 2007. Examples of the journals include the Journal of Religious Ethics, The Journal of Presbyterian History, Christian History, and the Italian journal, Studi di Teologia (published by the Instituto di Formazione Evangelica e Documentazione). 3 See especially Yang  2003; Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 1: Religious Affections 조나단 에드워즈 전집 제1권: 신앙감정론, ed. John E. Smith, trans. SungWook Jung (Seoul: Revival & Reformation, 2005); and Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 7: The Great Awakening 조나단 에드워즈 전집 제7권: 부흥론, ed. C. C. Goen, trans. NakHeung Yang (Seoul: Revival & Reformation, 2005).

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Edwards Studies Today   569 more than a dozen major books and scores of articles in English, and countless works in other languages.4 At the end of that year, Ken Minkema, the Executive Editor of Yale’s Edwards project and the most important facilitator of modern Edwards scholarship, submitted a stateof-the-art historiographical analysis, ‘Jonathan Edwards in the Twentieth Century’, summarizing the last hundred years of work in the field. He reported that ‘the number of secondary publications on Edwards fast approaches 4,000, making him one of the most studied figures in Christian thought and the most studied American intellectual figure before 1800’. He quantified a surge since the 1960s in the study of Edwards’s life by those working in the humanities and theological studies—one fuelled, no doubt, by The Works of Jonathan Edwards at Yale, begun by Perry Miller in the 1950s and continued by Harry Stout and Minkema himself through the twenty-first century—especially in departments such as literature, history, cultural studies, and philosophy. And he underscored a spate of recent work in three areas: Edwards’s doctrine of the Trinity; his understanding of history, especially as seen in his sermons and private notes on the history of redemption; and his biblical exegesis and commentary.5 Max Lesser’s massive, annotated Edwards bibliography, Reading Jonathan Edwards, which covered roughly ninety-nine per cent of all the scholarship written about Edwards from 1729 through 2005, confirmed and coloured in the sketch Minkema had drawn. Lesser stressed the surge in humanistic scholarship on Edwards since the mid-twentieth century, reinforcing Minkema’s description of this trend. He noted in a snapshot of the field from 1965 to 1978 that ‘each of the decades since 1940’ saw ‘a doubling of the number of [Ph.D.] dissertations on Edwards over the previous one’. Reviewing the years 1979 to 1993, he reported that the number of scholarly conferences on Edwards had ‘­tripled over the previous fifteen years’, while the number of scholarly books had ‘more than doubled’. And in an analysis of the field in the period spanning 1994 to 2005, he fretted more transparently than Minkema had done that ‘if the last seventy-five years of Edwards study can be divided between recovery and reclamation, the last dozen [1994–2005] have become increasingly evangelical and, regrettably, partisan’. A growing number of theologians had engaged in Edwards studies, expanding the guild to a size unmatched since the time of the Second Great Awakening. But much to Lesser’s chag­ rin, a large number of its members now laid claim to Edwards’s faith and reflected Edwards’s modus operandi.6 Although no one has updated Lesser’s bibliography since 2005, Yale’s Jonathan Edwards Center has maintained close tabs on the world of Edwards studies. In 2011, its leaders launched an online journal, Jonathan Edwards Studies, now the most important place to keep abreast of work in the field, most fascicles of which list ‘Recent Publications’ (http://edwards.yale.edu/publication/online+journal). They have also maintained an unpublished bibliography of recent work on Edwards—an unannotated addendum to the published work of Lesser—listing 113 books, 166 articles, 91 doctoral dissertations, 4  An annotated bibliography of many of these writings may be found in Lesser 2008. 5  Minkema 2004 (quotation from 678). 6  Lesser 2008, 31, 323, 456.

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570   Douglas A. Sweeney and 36 master’s theses from 2005 through 2018. This document demonstrates that scholarship on Edwards has only grown in recent years, in nearly every cognate discipline. Students in church history, philosophy, and theology, however, have written the lion’s share of recent publications.7 The most important institutions giving rise and direction to Edwards scholarship today are the Global Edwards Centers. Beginning in 2008, when the last of the letterpress volumes in The Works of Jonathan Edwards was released,8 Yale’s Jonathan Edwards Center (JEC) began to launch other Centers to promote the use of The Works of Jonathan Edwards around the world. These Centers were given access to the ever-growing, online edition of Edwards’s Works, along with other digital helps that would facilitate their efforts to advance Edwards studies in their own parts of the world. There are now a dozen Centers spread all across the globe. Their mission is ‘to further the individual and collaborative study of the life and work of Jonathan Edwards’, according to the website of the metropolitan Center (at Yale in New Haven). ‘The JEC global affiliates are recognized research units with regard to Jonathan Edwards studies.’ They promote ‘fundamental research in Edwards and his influence through collaborative research, education and publication’.9 The first of these Centers emerged in Wroclaw, Poland (2008), at the Evangelical School of Theology (Ewangelikalna Wyzsza Szkola Teologiczna). Founded by faculty members Joel Burnell and Jacek Zielinski, it facilitated conferences, symposia, and scholarship on Edwards in relation to Protestant history and theology (in a country where Protestants like Edwards have long constituted a tiny minority of the general population). The best known of its initiatives was an international conference, ‘Christianity in Today’s World: The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards’, held in 2011. Featuring leading Edwards scholars from eight countries on four continents, this gathering yielded two influential publications: a Polish translation of Yale’s Jonathan Edwards Reader and a volume of conference papers in both English and Polish.10 The next Edwards Center began in Bloemfontein, South Africa (2009), at the University of the Free State. Led initially by professors Dolf Britz and Adriaan Neele, and more recently by a West African graduate student in Bloemfontein, Victor EmmaAdamah, it aims ‘to empower aspiring next generation African leaders in academia and church with primary resources for research, education, and publication’. It functions as the hub of an online network of African universities offering rigorous but affordable 7  This bibliography is in the possession of the author. Inasmuch as some of its listings deal with Edwards along with others, I have had to make judgement calls regarding which count as publications about Edwards. 8 Edwards 2008. 9  See the Yale Center website at http://edwards.yale.edu/Global+centers. 10 Edwards  2014 is the Polish translation of A Jonathan Edwards Reader, ed. John  E.  Smith, Harry S. Stout, and Kenneth P. Minkema (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). The Wroclaw conference papers were published in Burnell 2012, a publication of the Evangelical School of Theology, a slightly revised version of which was issued for Anglophone readers in Jonathan Edwards Studies 4, No. 2 (2014).

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Edwards Studies Today   571 academic opportunities in the history of Christianity, paying much better attention than any other institution to the reception of Edwards in African church history. Attracting scholars from both Africa and other parts of the world (Donald Whitney from the U.S., Peter Jung from South Korea, and other up-and-coming voices in the field of Edwards studies), it is best known regionally for its ties to the rich but underused Morija Archive, which is based in Lesotho and holds thousands of rare books on Southern African church history, missionary work, governmental publications, journals, theses, maps, and other treasures.11 The third Edwards Center started in Deerfield, Illinois (2010), at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS). Led by Professor Douglas Sweeney, it hosted lectures, symposia, and graduate-level classes, published a blog, an annual magazine, articles, and books. It sponsored a paper competition, whose winners earned a cash prize and guaranteed publication in Jonathan Edwards Studies. Some of its own ­graduate students published scholarship on Edwards in Jonathan Edwards Studies, other refereed journals, and with academic presses. It functioned for nearly a decade as a clearinghouse for cutting-edge scholarship on Edwards. It featured recordings on its website of on-campus lectures by the likes of Rhys Bezzant, Catherine Brekus, Ava Chamberlain, Oliver Crisp, Michael Haykin, Paul Helm, David Kling, George Marsden, Michael McClymond, Gerald McDermott, Ken Minkema, Anri Morimoto, Richard Muller, Adriaan Neele, Mark Noll, Jan Stievermann, Anna Svetlikova, Jonathan Yeager, and others. Its best-known publications included work by the ­graduate ­student fellows of the Center: David Barshinger, Hyun Jin Cho, Daniel Cooley, Mark  Rogers, and Owen Strachan, for example. In 2019, when Sweeney moved to  Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, Alabama, the Edwards Center at TEDS  moved to  Grand Rapids, Michigan, and is now led by Neele at the Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary, which will continue and expand upon the work done at TEDS.12 The next Center came to life in Melbourne, Australia (2010), at Ridley College, an Anglican divinity school. Led by Professor Rhys Bezzant, it built a Facebook page for the international work of the Jonathan Edwards Centers, offered coursework on Edwards, and hosted the most important Edwards conference ever to convene outside the United States, ‘Jonathan Edwards Congress 2015: The Global Edwards’. This conference yielded a volume of new scholarship on Edwards. And Bezzant quickly became a world leader in the study of the ecclesiastical Edwards, publishing innovative works on Edwards’s doctrine of the church and the philosophy and practice of mentoring others—especially

11  The best-known publication to emerge from the Center’s work in Morija is Neele 2015, 24­–48. For general information on the work of this Center, see its website at https://www.ufs.ac.za/edwards. 12  Some of the best-known publications to emerge from this Center are Rogers 2009; Barshinger 2014; Strachan and Sweeney 2010, 2018; Cooley and Sweeney 2018; Cho 2012; Sweeney 2016; and Barshinger and Sweeney 2018. For general information on its work and recordings of its lectures and symposia, go to http://jecteds.org/.

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572   Douglas A. Sweeney young college graduates before the rise of post-baccalaureate seminaries—in the way of Christian ministry and theology.13 The Jonathan Edwards Center in Brazil (2011) arrived hot on the heels of Ridley’s Center. Led by Heber Carlos de Campos, Jr, a professor in the Andrew Jumper Graduate School of Mackenzie University, Sao Paulo, Brazil (Centro Presbiteriano de PósGraduação Andrew Jumper), it features graduate-level coursework and research assistance in both Portuguese and English in a Presbyterian context. It has hosted several lectures by noted Edwards scholars. Its best-known publications are those of Campos, its director, a specialist in the history of Reformed scholastic thought and pastoral theology.14 The next Center to emerge was rooted in two places at once (2011): the Evangelical Theological Faculty (Evangelische Theologische Faculteit) in Leuven, Belgium, and the Free University of Amsterdam (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam). Called the Benelux Center, it is headed by professors at each of these schools—Andreas Beck in Leuven and Willem Van Vlastuin in Amsterdam—with a great deal of support from Phillip Fisk, also of Leuven. It plans to host an international Edwards conference in 2020. In the meantime, Van Vlastuin and Fisk, in particular, have published several books and refereed journal articles on Edwards and the history of Reformed theology.15 The Edwards Center in Heidelberg arose the following year (2012). Hosted by Professor Jan Stievermann of the University of Heidelberg, it soon became a clearinghouse for top-tier scholars in both Europe and North America. Housed in the University’s Heidelberg Center for American Studies, a thriving research centre and a magnet in its own right, it has sponsored an inaugural, transatlantic Edwards conference, several major public lecturers, and a handful of doctoral and master’s-level students. Its personnel maintain a special interest in interpretations of Edwards ‘from a transatlantic and comparative perspective’, as they say on their website. And because its leader also serves as Executive Editor of The (Cotton) Mather Project, which is publishing a critical edition of Mather’s life work, the ‘Biblia Americana’ (http:// matherproject.org/node/24), it also specializes in Edwards’s exegetical materials. Stievermann and his student, Ryan Hoselton, in fact, have published several major studies of Edwards’s biblical exegesis in the context of transatlantic biblical criticism in the early modern West.16 The Edwards Center in Hungary was the third to form in Europe, the second to form in Eastern Europe (2012). Directed by Professor Tibor Fabiny at the Károli Gáspár 13 See especially Bezzant  2017; Bezzant  2014; and Bezzant  2019. For general information on the Edwards Center in Melbourne, go to https://www.ridley.edu.au/centres-of-excellence/jonathanedwards-center/. 14  See especially Campos 2017a; and Campos 2017b. 15  See especially Van Vlastuin 2002, which treats Edwards on the Spirit in revival; Van Vlastuin 2014; Fisk 2014; and Fisk 2016. 16  See the Heidelberg website (http://www.jonathanedwardsgermany.org/) for general information. For examples of the scholarship of Stievermann and Hoselton, see Stievermann 2016; Stievermann 2014; Hoselton 2015; and Stievermann and Hoselton 2018.

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Edwards Studies Today   573 University in Budapest, it was built on a foundation laid earlier by Fabiny at ‘Jonathan Edwards in Europe’, a conference co-sponsored by the Bishop of the Dunamellék (Danube) District in the Reformed Church of Hungary and the Edwards Center at Yale in 2007. That conference yielded a book, published in English and Hungarian, and also led to further scholarship on Edwards at the school. In fact, a second global congress, ‘The Relevance of Jonathan Edwards Today’, convened at Károli Gáspár University in 2019, and featured scholars based in the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Poland, and the U.S.17 The Edwards Center in Japan was the first to form in Asia (2016). Led by Anri Morimoto, a faculty member and Provost of the International Christian University in Tokyo, its mission is ‘to broaden the scope of research and education on Jonathan Edwards, early America and related studies with the help of researchers and scholars across institutions in Japan and Asia’. It advanced this mission admirably at an inter­ nation­al conference held in 2016, ‘The Transcultural Impact of Jonathan Edwards’, which included leading scholars of world religions and literature from Tokyo, East Asia, and several other parts of the world. The ripest fruit of this gathering was presented in a special edition of Jonathan Edwards Studies. And the Tokyo Edwards Center is facilitating a Japanese translation of some of the volumes of The Works of Jonathan Edwards (Yale Edition), now in process at the Shinkyo Publishing Corporation.18 Not until 2017 was an Edwards Center founded in its eponym’s home country. The Jonathan Edwards Center in the United Kingdom stands now on three institutional legs: one at the University of Liverpool, led by Professor Daniel Hill in the Department of Philosophy; one at Queen’s University (in Belfast, Northern Ireland), led by Professor Crawford Gribben in the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics; and one at the University of Glasgow, led by Professors Scott Spurlock and Mark Elliott in Theology and Religious Studies. Though still in its infancy, it has already sponsored an inaugural Edwards conference, an annual lectureship, several summer seminars, and a great deal of research and scholarly publication. Stay tuned for more to come in the very near future.19 The newest Edwards Center is based at Gateway Seminary in southern California (2019). Led by Professor Chris Chun, it features a designated research room, an original portrait of Edwards that was painted and presented by the Edwards scholar Oliver Crisp, and regular public lectures. It too has hosted a major international conference, ‘Regeneration, Revival and Creation: Religious Experience and the Purposes of God in 17  The first conference volume was published as Fabiny 2008, and McDermott 2009. Information on the second conference is found at https://www.jesociety.org/2019/07/06/jonathan-edwards-workshopjec-budapest-13-14-dec-2019/. 18  For general information, see the Tokyo Center website at http://jecjapan-en.info.icu.ac.jp/. Selected conference papers are found in Jonathan Edwards Studies 6, No. 2 (2016). Information on the Japanese translation of Edwards’ Works is found at http://www.shinkyo-pb.com/2015/02/24/post-1221.php. 19  Rehnman  2021. For more information on the Edwards Center  U.K., consult the website of the Department of Philosophy in the University of Liverpool: https://philevents.org/event/show/32818. For a sampling of Gribben’s publications on transatlantic Protestantism/Puritanism, see Gribben  2011; and Gribben and Spurlock 2015.

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574   Douglas A. Sweeney the Thought of Jonathan Edwards’, featuring scholars from the U.S., Canada, Korea, and the U.K. Papers from this gathering were published in a volume that appeared in 2020. Chun himself continues to publish both on Edwards and his legacies, especially among Baptists around the world.20 As the work of these Global Edwards Centers now attests, Jonathan Edwards Studies has become the premier journal for new scholarship on Edwards and his international legacies. Begun in 2011, it is edited from Yale, online, open access, and anonymously refereed. Its editorial board is composed of the directors of the Global Edwards Centers (plus one additional scholar, Ava Chamberlain of Wright State University in Dayton, a former editor of The Works of Jonathan Edwards in New Haven). It is published twice a year. And its contributors comprise a who’s who of Edwards studies: David Barshinger, Rhys Bezzant, Ava Chamberlain, Oliver Crisp, Philip Fisk, Mark Hamilton, Michael Haykin, Paul Helm, Michael McClymond, Gerald McDermott, Ken Minkema, Richard Muller, Mark Noll, Jan Stievermann, William K. B. Stoever, Peter Thuesen, Mark Valeri, Willem Van Vlastuin, Douglas Winiarski, Jonathan Yeager, and others.21 A Jonathan Edwards Society (JESociety) has emerged in recent years to complement the more traditional work of the Global Edwards Centers. It is led by Rob Boss, an independent, entrepreneurial, and tech-savvy scholar based in Fort Worth, Texas. Boss describes his Society as ‘a growing network of Jonathan Edwards scholars and enthusiasts who promote research and interest in America’s Theologian through in­nov­ation, collaboration and publication’. He solicits, edits, and publishes collaborative works, creates ‘visualizations’, and develops new software that enables others to use his digital products. The leading edge of his work is known as the ‘Miscellanies Project’. Inspired by a diagram in Wilson Kimnach’s ‘General Introduction’ to the sermons in The Works of Jonathan Edwards (Yale Edition, vol. 10), which depicts conceptual links between the ‘Miscellanies’, ‘Blank Bible’, sermons, and other manuscripts in Edwards’s vast corpus, Boss has crafted pictures of the ways in which the topics in Edwards’s writings hang together. These ‘visualizations’ help others see the number of times Edwards wrote on various topics, the emphases he placed on these topics during his lifetime, and the relationships among them in his ‘Miscellanies’ notebooks and corpus as a whole. Boss’s Miscellanies Companion (2018) represents the first fruit of scholarly labour on these pictures. Each contributor to that project was given two ‘visualizations’ on his or her topic, one that ‘maps’ Edwards’s comments on that topic in the ‘Miscellanies’, another that ‘maps’ the range of his comments on that topic in Yale’s letterpress edition of The Works of Jonathan Edwards. Each scholar was asked to reflect on the frequency and emphases of Edwards’s varied commentary on his or her topic and develop new interpretations of Edwards as a result.22 20  For general information on the Edwards Center at Gateway, see https://www.gs.edu/academics/ jonathan-edwards-center/. The Gateway conference volume is in press at Wipf & Stock (Eugene, OR). For an example of Chun’s work on Edwards’ Baptist bequest, see Chun 2012. 21  See http://jestudies.yale.edu/index.php/journal/index. 22  See https://www.jesociety.org/ for general information; and Boss and Boss 2018.

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Edwards Studies Today   575 The most important summary of Edwards’s major writings is Michael J. McClymond and Gerald R. McDermott, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards (2012). In 45 chapters, these two leaders of our guild paint a comprehensive picture of Edwards’s best-known thinking, introducing us not only to his theological work but to interpretations of that work by other Edwards scholars. Part One, ‘Introduction: Historical, Cultural, and Social Contexts’, presents five different chapters on Edwards’s spiritual life and times. Part Two, ‘Topics in Edwards’s Theology’, has thirty-one chapters on nearly everything under the sun of Edwards’s brilliant Christian mind, from aesthetics to revelation, God and the Trinity, salvation, the church, and eschatology—organized, as Edwards seemed to prefer as he planned his unfinished magnum opus, in redemptive-historical order. Part Three, ‘Legacies and Affinities: Edwards’s Disciples and Interpreters’, adds nine important chapters on appropriations of Edwards from his own day to ours. The authors tie the book together with an emphasis on what they call the five major sections of Edwards’s theological symphony: Trinitarian communication (‘the violins’), creaturely participation (‘the violas, cellos, and basses’), necessitarian dispositionalism (‘the horn section’), theocentric voluntarism (‘the woodwinds’), and harmonious constitutionalism (‘the percussion section’). Students must hear the sections together, they insist, to appreciate the performance. Further, ‘a caveat regarding many existing interpretations of Edwards’s theology is that they capture one or another part of the symphony, yet fail to construe the sound and flow of the whole.’ Throughout all three parts of this monumental book, and especially in the conclusion, McClymond and McDermott interpret Edwards as a ‘global theologian for twenty-first-century Christianity’, much more useful, they claim, than the more frequently studied Karl Barth as a resource for contemporary theology. Edwards bridges East and West, they argue, Protestantism, Orthodoxy, and even Roman Catholicism, conservatism and liberalism, charismatic and non-charismatic Christian churches. Indeed, ‘his thought’, they suggest, ‘may have more linkages and more points of reference to various constituencies within world Christianity than any other modern Christian theologian’. If these authors ‘had to choose one modern thinker—and only one—to function as a point of reference for ­theological interchange and dialogue’ today, they would clearly choose Edwards, a ­catholic evangelical Calvinist who is read and used by tens of thousands all around the world.23 More recently, the leaders of the Yale Edwards Center have produced a Jonathan Edwards Encyclopedia (2017), a sourcebook of basic information on Edwards’s context, life, thought, and legacies, which includes contributions from nearly everyone at work in the field of Edwards studies. With nearly 400 entries by 169 scholars, it is a culmination of many years of labour in New Haven as well as the spread of Edwards studies during the past generation outside the Ivy League and its network of privileged, liberal Protestant and secular academic institutions. This landmark volume features celebrated scholars—some of whom are also represented in this Oxford Handbook—writing on topics about which they have published well-known work: Robert Brown on ‘Biblical 23  McClymond and McDermott 2012.

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576   Douglas A. Sweeney Languages (Hebrew and Greek)’, Ronald Story on ‘Charity’, Rhys Bezzant on ‘Ecclesiology’, Ava Chamberlain on ‘Elizabeth Tuttle Edwards (b. 1645)’, Jan Stievermann on ‘German Pietism’, Thomas Kidd on ‘Great Awakening’, Sang Hyun Lee on ‘Habit’, Oliver Crisp on ‘Idealism’, Seng-Kong Tan on ‘Incarnation’, Gerald McDermott on ‘Islam’, Stephen Stein on ‘Scripture (Exegetical Sources)’, David Kling on ‘Second Great Awakening’, and Amy Plantinga Pauw on ‘Trinity’, for example. But perhaps more importantly, it also features lesser-known, up-and-coming scholars treating topics about which they are doing new research: Ryan Hoselton on ‘William Ames’, Reita Yazawa on ‘Covenant’, David Barshinger on ‘Hermeneutics’—the list could go on and on. As the editors have written in the volume’s ‘Introduction’, the Encyclopedia ‘fills an essential gap’ in reference works about Edwards and his world. It corrects ‘certain stubborn errors or myths about Edwards’s life and those of his family and acquaintance[s]’. It also provides ‘succinct synopses of topics large and small, well known and little known in Edwards’s life, as well as easily referenced sketches of the people and events of his times, any or all of which can be followed up in more depth by consulting the suggested readings at the end of each entry’. Stout, Minkema, and Neele hope to publish an expanded, online version of this work, which will include new entries on subjects identified by readers as important to the study of Edwards’s life, world, and legacies.24 Such open-ended, online, collaborative publications are facilitated today by the digital edition of The Works of Jonathan Edwards, which is now nearly complete. Yale’s letterpress edition of The Works of Jonathan Edwards ceased with volume 26, entitled Catalogues of Books (2008). But the digital edition spans 73 volumes (http://edwards. yale.edu/), many of which are large and full of manuscript material unread until now even by most Edwards specialists (few of whom have spent sufficient time in the archives to familiarize themselves with Edwards’s crabbed handwriting). This online edition features nearly all of Edwards’s hitherto unpublished sermons, his commentary on many different passages of Scripture, his manuscript notebooks (on controverted doctrines, hot-button issues, and plans for the future), local records of a wide array of ecclesiastical meetings (including those that led to Edwards’s own ejection from Northampton), and family correspondence. Its comprehensive scope, easy-to-use software platform, and unfettered access are transforming the world of Edwards studies in our time—presenting scholars with a host of new subjects and materials requiring more attention. Two subjects that most agree require more research are Edwards’s Stockbridge period and his biblical exegesis. As discussed above by John Grigg, David Kling, and others, Edwards ministered in Stockbridge, Massachusetts as a missionary from 1751 through 1757. Grigg has demonstrated well that Edwards’s own life in Stockbridge has received due attention, especially in recent years, but much work remains to be done on his reception. He preached hundreds of new sermons to the English and the Indians, oversaw the administration of three different schools, wrote theological tomes, penned 24  Stout, Minkema, and Neele 2017, x.

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Edwards Studies Today   577 scores of still understudied letters to friends abroad, and represented the mission to supporters and governmental agencies. We have hundreds of books and articles on the theological work that emerged from this setting. But the daily round of Edwards’s life and ministry in this period, and especially his reception, reputation, and legacies among Native Americans, want detailed attention. We need scholars who can specialize in British and Native American history in New England and its outposts to the west, and who can learn the relevant Native American languages and cultures: Algonquian languages/cultures such as Mahican, now extinct; Lenape/Delaware languages/cultures like Munsee and Unami (which are also Algonquian); Iroquoian languages/cultures such as Mohawk; and, of course, French language, culture, and history as well. As discussed above by Robert Brown, Stephen Nichols, and others, we also need assistance with Edwards’s biblical materials. During the past 10 years, Edwards’s labours on the Bible have at last begun to receive the attention they deserve. But we still know precious little about his love affair with Scripture and engagement with the scholars who helped him study and apply it in the parish and beyond: Matthew Poole, Cotton Mather, Matthew Henry, John Owen, Moses Lowman, the Chevalier Ramsay, Arthur Bedford, Louis Ellie Du Pin, and scores of other Europeans. Such students of the Bible were the most important secondary sources in his study, Scripture itself being the most important primary source. He perused them more frequently than Locke, Berkeley, Newton, Malebranche, and the others who have drawn the most attention hitherto in Edwards studies. They seldom played as great a role in directing his agenda as a scholar and a writer. But they played a greater role in his pursuit of that agenda. He spent decades, quite literally, poring over their biblical writings, doing his most important work with them at hand. Edwards’s biblical exegesis shaped his personal life, conversion, weekly schedule, and spirituality; his household routine, pastoral work, and social life; his political sensibilities and feelings about England’s foreign policy and wars; and, of course, his philosophy, theology, and treatises. We have much more to learn from Edwards’s vast biblical corpus. Those interested in Edwards’s work with modern higher criticism have much more work to do on his handling of the historicity of the Pentateuch, the scope of biblical prophecy, the synoptic problem, and more. Those inclined toward the contents of Edwards’s major treatises have far more to do on their relation to the Bible and what Edwards took to be the Bible’s theological claims. And all of us have more to do on Edwards’s biblical world and exegetical interlocutors, and the bearing of these sources on his preaching, teaching, and writing. The contributors to this Handbook have highlighted other subjects needing more attention. With respect to the topics in Part One of this volume, we are now in a position to do far better work on the sources of Edwards’s thought and the ways in which those sources made a difference in his thinking and congregational ministry. The last of the volumes of the letterpress edition of The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Catalogues of Books (vol. 26), provides annotated transcripts of his ‘Catalogue’ notebook (i.e. his literary wish list), his personal ‘Account Book’ (a register of books he owned and lent to his friends), a list of the books in his ministerial library (a collection of the Hampshire County Association of clergy), and several other windows onto his bibliographical

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578   Douglas A. Sweeney world. We can now search his corpus for authors, titles, and phrases with a few strokes and clicks. Of course, the backgrounds to Edwards’s thought have had many students since the time of Perry Miller and the founding in New Haven of the critical edition of The Works of Jonathan Edwards—most recently Adriaan Neele, whose Before Jonathan Edwards (2019) is a treasure trove of insight into Edwards’s Latin sources and Reformed scholastic background.25 But we still do not agree about the best ways to characterize the nature and significance of Edwards’s use of the most important sources of his thought. Was he traditional or modern, an empiricist or a rationalist, a realist or an anti-realist, orthodox or innovative? We need more and better work on the ways in which Edwards wielded sources from a wide array of intellectual contexts, manufacturing a blend of British American, Reformed, evangelical theology and ministry. With respect to the topics in Part Two of this volume, Edwards’s intellectual labours have received a great deal of attention in recent years. More theologians are working with his theological treatises (and some of his private notebooks) than ever since the heyday of the New England Theology in antebellum America. Most of these scholars, though, are using Edwards’s concepts for their own, constructive purposes. Few of them are working hard to understand Edwards in his early modern contexts. Even fewer are attempting to make sense of Edwards’s doctrines in relation to the biblical interpretation that supported them. And almost none of them is doing for Edwards’s thought what Perry Miller did: explain it in relation to the secular concerns that preoccupy thinkers in our own, present age, rendering it accessible to the global literati. During the past 80 years, we have moved from a time in which the best Edwards scholars knew little about theology but made Edwards attractive to a wide range of thinkers, both Christian and non-Christian, to a time in which the best Edwards scholars know Edwards better than he knew himself but interpret him primarily for other theologians. We need more work today that interprets Edwards whole, in his early modern contexts, and connects Edwards’s thought to the intellectual labours of a wider range of people. Part Three of this volume treats religious and social practices. Inasmuch as Edwards worked as a privileged theologian (an elite, white male) and most social historians usually study non-elites, we need far more work on the everyday practices and social realities that shaped Edwards’s life. Far too many have divorced Edwards’s writings from his mundane affairs and thus have missed and misinterpreted much of what was really going on in his work. We need more and better research on his everyday piety, family, community, interpersonal care of those placed in his charge, and the bearing of these things on his engagement with the leading trends in eighteenth-century New England, Great Britain, and Western Europe. The most glaring needs of all in the world of Edwards studies are related to the chapters in Part Four of this volume. Edwards’s international legacies are vastly understudied. Anglophone scholars know little of his influence on non-Western peoples, even less about the rise of serious scholarship on Edwards undertaken outside the Western world in recent years. In 2003, Max Lesser published a bibliography of 25 Neele 2019.

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Edwards Studies Today   579 Edwards editions printed all around the world since the eighteenth century; though woefully incomplete, it did more than anything else to chart the use of Edwards’s works in the two-thirds world.26 More recently, the Global Edwards Centers have enabled more engagement with our subject in several parts of Asia, Latin America, and Africa— and have facilitated connections between Edwards scholars everywhere. But as this volume makes clear, there is much more work to do on Edwards’s global reach and reception. Such international scholarship is far more difficult than traditional social, cultural, and intellectual history. Edwards has been studied in so many different places, in so many different languages, that no single scholar or consortium of scholars has the wherewithal to study his global reception comprehensively. The most important role of the Global Edwards Centers is to equip native speakers to study the legacies of Edwards in their own back yards and then communicate their findings through the everexpanding network of Edwards scholars they support. Less than 20 years ago, amid the tercentennial commemorations of Edwards’s birth convened in 2003, it was common to hear that thousands of books and articles had been written on ‘America’s theologian’, fixing him once and for all—in marble, set in stone— amid the pantheon of America’s founding fathers and spiritual heroes. We hope this volume has made clear that such statements were misleading. Despite the massive body of work devoted to Edwards’s life and thought, a great deal remains to be done. Edwards’s statue is not set, nor his place within the temple. Please join us in our effort to understand and interpret this elusive cosmopolitan—a colonist who scanned the whole world from his study—and his spiritual, literary, and academic heirs. Only if and when you do so, continuing the labours of the authors of these pages, will we gain a reliable and useful understanding of Edwards’s form and seemingly boundless, international appeal.

Works Cited Barshinger, David P. and Sweeney, Douglas A. eds (2018). Jonathan Edwards and Scripture: Biblical Exegesis in British North America. New York: Oxford University Press. Barshinger, David P. (2014). Jonathan Edwards and the Psalms: A Redemptive-Historical Vision of Scripture. New York: Oxford University Press. Bezzant, Rhys S. ed. (2017). The Global Edwards: Papers from the Jonathan Edwards Congress Held in Melbourne, August 2015, Australian College of Theology Monograph Series. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock. Bezzant, Rhys S. (2019). Edwards the Mentor. New York: Oxford University Press. Bezzant, Rhys  S. (2014). Jonathan Edwards and the Church. New York: Oxford University Press. Boss, Robert L. and Sarah B. Boss, eds (2018). The Miscellanies Companion. n.p.: JESociety Press. Burnell, Joel (2012). Theologica Wratislaviensia, vol. 7. Campos, Jr, Heber (2017a). ‘A Re-Formed Understanding of Imputation in Jonathan Edwards’s Original Sin,’ in Bezzant, ed., The Global Edwards 26  Johnson 2003. For Lesser’s reflections on this project, see Lesser 2003.

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580   Douglas A. Sweeney Campos, Jr, Heber Carlos de (2017b). Doctrine in Development: Johannes Piscator and Debates over Christ’s Active Obedience. Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books. Cho, Hyun-Jin (2012). Jonathan Edwards on Justification: Reformed Development of the Doctrine in Eighteenth-Century New England. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Chun, Chris (2012). The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards in the Theology of Andrew Fuller. Leiden: Brill. Cooley, Daniel and Sweeney, Douglas A. (2018). ‘The Novelty of the New Divinity,’ in ‘A New Divinity’: Transatlantic Reformed Evangelical Debates During the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Haykin, Michael A. G. and Jones, Mark. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Edwards, Jonathan (2008). Catalogues of Books, ed. Peter J. Thuesen, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 26. New Haven: Yale University Press. Edwards, Jonathan (2014). Wybór pism, ed. Joel Burnell. Wroclaw, Poland: Ewangelikalna Wyższa Szkoła Teologiczna. Fabiny, Tibor, ed. (2008). Amerika teológusa: Bevezetés Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) gondolkodásába. Budapest: Károli Gáspár University Press. Fisk, Philip J. (2014). ‘Divine Knowledge at Harvard and Yale: From William Ames to Jonathan Edwards,’ Jonathan Edwards Studies 4: 151–78. Fisk, Philip J. (2016). Jonathan Edwards’s Turn from the Classic-Reformed Tradition of Freedom of the Will, New Directions in Jonathan Edwards Studies. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Gribben, Crawford and Scott Spurlock, eds (2015). Puritans and Catholics in the Trans-Atlantic World, 1600–1800. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Gribben, Crawford (2011). Evangelical Millennialism in the Trans-Atlantic World, 1500–2000. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Hoselton, Ryan (2015). ‘Jonathan Edwards, the Inner Witness of the Spirit, and Experiential Exegesis,’ Jonathan Edwards Studies 5, No. 2: 90–120. Hyun Lee, Sang, ed. (2005). The Princeton Companion to Jonathan Edwards. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Johnson, Thomas  H. (2003). The Printed Writings of Jonathan Edwards, 1703–1758: A Bibliography, by Thomas  H.  Johnson, rev. ed. By M.  X.  Lesser. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Theological Seminary. Lesser, M. X. (2003). ‘An Honor Too Great: Jonathan Edwards in Print Abroad,’ in Jonathan Edwards at Home and Abroad: Historical Memories, Cultural Movements, Global Horizons, ed. David Kling, W. and Douglas  A.  Sweeney. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 297–319. Lesser, M. X. ed. (2008). Reading Jonathan Edwards: An Annotated Bibliography in Three Parts, 1729–2005. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Marsden, George M. (2003). Jonathan Edwards: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press. McClymond, Michael J. and Gerald R. McDermott (2012). The Theology of Jonathan Edwards. New York: Oxford University Press. McDermott, Gerald  R., ed. (2009). Understanding Jonathan Edwards: An Introduction to America’s Theologian. New York: Oxford University Press. Minkema, Kenneth  P. (2004). ‘Jonathan Edwards in the Twentieth Century,’ Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 47 (December): 659–87. Neele, Adriaan C. (2015). ‘The Reception of Edwards’ A History of the Work of Redemption in Nineteenth-century Basutoland,’ Journal of Africa Religious History: 24–48. Neele, Adriaan  C. (2019). Before Jonathan Edwards: Sources of New England Theology. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Edwards Studies Today   581 Piper, John, ed. (2003). 1703–2003: Reflections on Jonathan Edwards 300 Years Later. Minneapolis: Desiring God Ministries. Rehnman, Sebastian (2021). Edwards on God, Ashgate Studies in the History of Philosophical Theology. Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge. Rogers, Mark C. (2009). ‘A Missional Eschatology: Jonathan Edwards, Future Prophecy, and the Spread of the Gospel,’ Fides et Historia 41 (Winter/Spring): 23–46. Stein, Stephen  J. ed. (2007). The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards. New York: Cambridge University Press. Stievermann, Jan (2014). ‘Faithful Translations: New Discoveries on the German Pietist Reception of Jonathan Edwards,’ Church History 83 (May): 324–66. Stievermann, Jan and Hoselton, Ryan P. (2018). ‘Spiritual Meaning and Experimental Piety in the Exegesis of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards,’ in Barshinger and Sweeney, eds., Jonathan Edwards and Scripture, 86–105. Stievermann, Jan (2016). Prophecy, Piety, and the Problem of Historicity: Interpreting the Hebrew Scriptures in Cotton Mather’s Biblia Americana, Beiträge zur historischen Theologie. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Stout, Harry S., Kenneth P. Minkema, and Adriaan C. Neele, eds (2017). The Jonathan Edwards Encyclopedia. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Stout, Harry S., Kenneth P. Minkema, and Caleb J. D. Maskell, eds (2005). Jonathan Edwards at 300: Essays on the Tercentenary of His Birth. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Strachan, Owen and Sweeney, Douglas (2010, rev. ed. 2018). The Essential Edwards Collection, 5 vols. Chicago: Moody Press. Sweeney, Douglas A. (2016). Edwards the Exegete: Biblical Interpretation and Anglo-Protestant Culture on the Edge of the Enlightenment. New York: Oxford University Press. Van Vlastuin, Willem (2014). ‘A Retrieval of Jonathan Edwards’s Concept of Free Will: The Relevance for Neuroscience,’ Jonathan Edwards Studies 4, No. 2: 198–214. Van Vlastuin, Willem (2002). De Geest van opwekking: Een onderzoek naar de leer van de Heilige Geest in de opwekkingstheologie van Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758). Heerenveen, Netherlands: Uitgeverij Jongbloed. Yang, NakHeung (2003). The Life and Theology of Jonathan Edwards 조나단 에드워즈 생애와 사상 Seoul: Revival & Reformation.

Author Bio Douglas A. Sweeney (Ph.D. Vanderbilt University) is Dean and Professor of Divinity at Beeson Divinity School, Samford University. He founded one of the global Jonathan Edwards Centers, serves on the editorial board of Jonathan Edwards Studies, and has written numerous books and articles about Edwards, including Edwards the Exegete: Biblical Interpretation and Anglo-Protestant Culture on the Edge of the Enlightenment (Oxford UP, 2016).

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Index

Note: For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages.

A

Abolitionism: see also Slavery  40, 431–3, 441–3, 464, 466–7, 470–2, 542 Abstractism (philosophy)  136, 140–8, 563 Act of Toleration  36, 81, 451 Aesthetic(s): see also Beauty  5, 65, 124–5, 160–1, 209, 253, 298–301, 309–10, 319–21, 381–2, 496–7, 503, 510–11, 518, 521, 564 Affections natural affections  284 religious affections  15, 38–9, 251, 256–62, 264, 267–8, 301, 367, 465, 518 Africa  61, 63–4, 425, 439, 441, 570–1 Alsted, Johann Heinrich  70–1, 227 America  13, 24–5, 52–3, 55–7, 59, 63–5, 230–1, 383–4, 426, 458, 479–83, 485, 490, 492–3, 529, 560–1, 573 understanding of  10, 58, 64, 83–4, 276, 443 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions: see also Mission(s)  64, 543–4 Ames, William  80, 139, 185, 221–2, 575–6 Andover Seminary  64, 427, 543 Anglican: see also Church of England  26–7, 43–6, 52, 71, 75–7, 84, 106, 152, 166, 227–8, 282, 371, 375, 439–40, 446–8, 451–3, 483, 485, 532–3, 571–2 Anthropology  5, 120, 139, 313–14, 573 Anti-Catholicism  41, 220, 240–1, 450 Anti-realism (ontology)  145 Antichrist  33, 222–3, 227–9, 240–1, 456–9 Antinomianism  189–90, 315, 364 Apocalypse, Apocalypticism: see also Eschatology, Millennialism  57–8, 219–20, 226–7, 321, 372, 375

Apollinarianism 135 Apologetics: see also Christianity  77, 81–3, 220, 224, 335 Aquinas, Thomas  111, 136, 203, 205–6, 286, 326 Arianism  126, 152, 155–6, 539–40 Aristotle  70, 139, 286 Aristotelianism  70–1, 94, 119–20, 139, 282, 284–6, 288–9, 329 Arminius, Jacobus  185 Arminianism  23–6, 30, 45–6, 187, 189, 237, 356–7, 468, 475–6, 560 Asia  6, 217, 573, 579 Astell, Mary  84 Atheism  331–2, 335, 475, 545 Atonement: see also Jesus Christ  4–5, 185, 236 Augustine of Hippo  120–1, 123, 133, 155, 167, 173, 221, 237–8, 257, 282, 326, 536–7, 561 Augustinianism  5, 120–1, 154–5, 170–1, 227, 243, 245, 258, 282, 355, 360, 536–9 Australia  6, 528–41, 571–2

B

Baptism (sacrament)  35, 43, 47, 183–4, 270, 273–4, 412, 439–40, 471 Baptist Missionary Society: see also Mission(s)  60, 62, 424, 489 Baptists: see also Dissenters  47, 59–60, 62–3, 371, 425, 448, 464, 466–7, 489, 556, 568–9, 574 Particular Baptists  61–2, 81, 489 Separate Baptists  28 Barth, Karl  207–8, 575 Baxter, Richard  56–7, 70, 72, 379–80, 543–4, 549

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584   index Beatific vision  65, 122, 129, 155, 250, 263, 277–9 Beauty: see also Aesthetics  9–10, 111, 118, 122–6, 128–9, 160–1, 200–1, 261, 282–4, 288–93, 296, 301–5, 324–5, 359, 381–2, 533 primary beauty  123, 289, 299–300, 302–5 secondary beauty  289, 299–300, 302–3 Bedford, Arthur  78, 219–20, 373, 446–7, 577 Belcher, Jonathan  41–2, 454–5 Bellamy, Joseph  10, 17, 74–5, 80–1, 107, 247, 407, 410, 412, 432, 442–3, 464, 474, 484–6, 497 Berkeley, George  84–5, 92, 104–6, 108–9, 333, 337–8, 508, 577 Bible: see also Prophecy, Revelation, Typology  77–80, 107, 166–7, 215, 221–6, 235–6, 328, 356–7, 370, 377, 379–81, 390–1, 406–7, 412, 431, 441, 446–7, 475, 496–7 authority of  35, 46–7, 173–4, 176–7, 216–17, 220, 235–6, 380–1 canon of  175, 226, 371, 378, 384–5 criticism/critical study of  77, 83, 166–7, 217, 355, 377, 379–80 inspiration of  173, 382 interpretation of  11, 35, 40, 153, 172, 175, 216–17, 240–1, 372–3, 375, 381, 441–2 translation of  40–1, 77–8, 545 Boyle, Robert  71, 82–3, 85, 326, 366–7 Brainerd, David  56, 62–3, 65, 354, 358, 361–2, 393, 419, 428, 431–2, 434, 468, 543 death of  10, 38–9, 41–2 and relation with Jonathan Edwards  41–2, 421 Brakel, Wilhelmus à  185, 190 Brazil  6, 555–63, 572 Breck, Robert  25–6, 45–6 British colonialism  18, 544 British Empire: see also Imperial wars  5, 65–6, 371, 446–7, 449–51, 453–4, 459, 464, 471, 479–80, 498 Buell, Samuel  27, 307, 362–3 Burr, Aaron  499–500, 511 Burr, Esther Edwards  38–9, 413, 484–5 Buxtorf, Johannes the Elder  372 Buxtorf, Johannes the Younger  237, 371–2

C

Calvin, John  35, 56–8, 92, 107, 151, 165–7, 173, 177–8, 183–4, 186–7, 237, 259–60, 267–8, 271, 278–9, 296, 300–1, 305–7, 324–5, 516–17, 549, 561 Calvinism: see also Reformed/Reformed Protestantism  23, 34, 45–6, 54–5, 59–60, 62, 80, 107, 212, 215, 241, 245, 255, 287, 300–1, 418, 422, 426, 434, 438, 457, 464, 467–70, 472–6, 484–5, 488–90, 492–3, 500, 503, 509, 528, 538 Cambridge Platform  20–1, 269 Cambridge Platonists  101, 257, 259–60, 282, 311–12, 330 Carey, William  52, 60, 62–4, 212, 425–6, 489 Cartesianism: see also René Descartes  5, 70–1, 105–6, 110, 137, 139–40, 324–5, 329–30, 337–9, 348–9 Catholic Church  417, 505 Causality: see also Cartesianism, God/Father, Occasionalism  231–2, 254–5 real cause  92 transient cause  210 Chalcedon, Council of  137–8, 143, 146–7 Charismatic movement: see also Pentecostalism  532–3, 535, 555–7, 559–60, 563–4 Charity: see also Virtue  39, 43–4, 47, 161, 453, 458 Charles I  35–6, 447 Charles II  36 Chauncy, Charles  227–8, 247, 313, 465 China  61, 63–4, 417, 521–2, 544 Christianity  8, 33–4, 65–6, 73–4, 81–3, 168, 366–7, 401, 427–8, 434–6, 443, 499–500, 514–17, 528, 532–3, 555–6 defense of (apologetics)  83, 220–1, 224, 236–8, 274, 326, 373–4, 380–1 history of  168–9, 217, 474, 495, 500–1, 570–1, 575 nature of  376–7, 416, 441–2 Christology: see also Jesus Christ  135–7, 155–9, 535–7, 539 Chubb, Thomas  75–6, 167 Church: see also Ecclesiology  34, 95, 156, 161–2, 175, 183–9, 192, 194–5, 216, 220, 222, 267, 318, 326, 416

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index   585 Church discipline  18, 20, 35, 390 Church Fathers  380–1, 416 Church Missionary Society: see also Mission(s)  60, 424 Church of England/Anglican Church  20–1, 34–6, 54, 71, 81, 452–3 Civil War (United States)  227, 470–2, 475–6, 499, 509 Clarke, Samuel  71, 82–3, 121–2, 152, 289–90, 337, 372–3 Clerical authority: see also Ministry  25–6, 29–30, 270, 451 College of New Jersey (Princeton)  14, 30–1, 34, 45, 76, 79, 85–6, 225, 335, 356, 407, 410, 537–8 Collins, Anthony  78, 83, 166–7, 173–4, 223–4, 382, 490 Colonies (British/American): see also British Empire, Commerce  8, 36, 46, 53–4 colonial identity  36–7, 43, 49 colonialism  319, 417, 432–3, 436–7, 550–1 colonial politics  375, 456 Commerce  454, 539–40 Commonwealth  5–6, 9, 13–14, 33–4, 36, 39, 272, 392, 450–1 Communion  151–4, 160–3, 193, 206, 263–4, 270 Compatibilism (philosophy)  111, 255 Concert of Prayer: see also Revivalism  47, 59–60, 418, 425–6, 457–8, 515–18 Concretism (philosophy)  137–41, 147–8 Congregationalism: see also Cambridge Platform, Dissenters, New England Way  20–1, 45–6, 60, 106, 152, 184, 186, 276, 448, 452, 509, 545, 548 Connecticut (colony)  3–4, 8, 17–31, 44–6, 70–1, 354, 398, 405–6, 419, 425–6, 436–7, 487–8 Constantine (emperor)  35, 171–2, 418 Conversion: see also Justification, Pneumatology, Redemption, Revivalism  24, 419, 501–2, 528–9 conversion experience  18, 23, 29–30, 44–5, 381–2, 408, 468 signs of true conversion  21, 43–4, 270, 304–5, 358 understanding of  47, 272–3, 287–8, 292, 360–1, 367

Cotton, John  186, 194–5, 227–8 Covenant, of grace  183–6, 189, 192, 222, 270 of redemption  141–2, 154, 183, 190–2 of works  184, 187–8, 194, 222, 364 national covenant  183–4, 187–9, 194–5, 423 Covenant renewal  188 Covenant theology  4–5, 183, 185, 194–5, 221–3, 225–6, 270–1 Creation  5, 80–1, 93, 96, 98–9, 105–6, 109–10, 123–4, 155, 165–9, 171–2, 176, 217, 220, 222, 238, 240, 243–4, 252–3, 255, 259–62, 267, 277–8, 281–2, 284, 286–93, 296–8, 300–7, 317–18, 328–31, 334, 357, 361, 375, 383–4, 458, 539–40 Cromwell, Oliver  36 Cutler, Timothy  45–6, 71

D

Davenport, James  273, 439–40 Death: see also Fall  7–8, 10–11, 14, 19, 28–9, 38, 40–2, 56–7, 61, 76, 81, 92–3, 101, 105, 171–2, 224, 229, 235, 237, 242, 277, 368, 380, 384, 422, 501–2 Deism: see also Enlightenment, Natural religion, Natural theology  78, 105–6, 148–9, 166–7, 170, 178, 217, 237, 335, 373–4, 417, 508 and biblical criticism  377, 495–6, 572 and confidence in reason  166–7, 169–70 Depravity: see also Anthroplogy, Fall (fallen nature), Sin  63, 221, 241–6, 255, 562 Descartes, René: see also Cartesianism  100, 106, 297–8, 326–9, 337 Determinism: see also Cartesianism, Mechanistic philosophy, Predestination theological determinism  92, 96, 109, 201, 253–4, 470, 485–6, 562 Devil: see also Evil, Sin  41, 240–1, 278–9, 505 Devotion  46–8, 84–5, 248, 353, 406–8, 426–7, 453, 457–8, 466–7 Dissenters, Dissent: see also Baptists, Congregationalism, Presbyterianism  43–5, 81, 215–16, 227–8, 307, 360, 372, 446–8, 452 Doddridge, Philip  77–8, 372, 480–3

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586   index Du Pin, Louis Ellies  372–3, 379, 577 Dummer collection (Jeremiah Dummer)  71–2, 82, 371, 405 Dwight, Sereno Edwards  22, 370, 399, 426 Dwight, Timothy  28–9, 231, 393, 398, 469

E

East Windsor (Conn.)  3–4, 6, 17–19, 44–5, 70–2, 405, 537 Ecclesiology  161, 194–6, 537 Education  6, 13, 18, 38, 83–4, 384–5, 423, 442, 449, 518, 543–4 Edwards, Elizabeth Tuttle  4, 38, 576 Edwards, Jerusha  38–9, 41–2, 393, 427 Edwards, Jonathan, Centers, at Andrew Jumper Graduate School of Mackenzie University  572 at Evangelical Theological Faculty and the Free University of Amsterdam  572 at Ewangelikalna Wyzsza Szkola Teologiczna 570 at Gateway Seminary  573–4 at International Christian University 577–8 at Károli Gáspár University  492, 572–3 at Ridley College  537 at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School  571 at University of Heidelberg  572 at University of Liverpool and Queen’s University and University of Glasgow 573 at University of the Free State  570–1 at Yale University  353, 536, 555–6, 569–70 Edwards, Jonathan, Society of, (JE Society)  518–19, 574 Edwards, Jonathan biography  3–10, 14–15, 17–31 family life  10–14 legacy of  247–8, 368 manuscripts of  69–70, 72, 76, 78, 225–7, 374–6, 384–5, 387, 576 originality of  412 personality of  22, 26–7 reputation of  13–14, 25, 29–30, 53, 220, 465, 474–6, 479–84, 492–3, 576–7 spirituality of  21, 193–4, 354, 472–3, 557–9

Edwards, Jonathan, published works, Charity and Its Fruits  367, 376, 388, 517, 535, 537, 558 Discourses on Various Important Subjects 393 “Justification by Faith Alone,”  82 “The Excellency of Jesus Christ,”  269–70, 285–6 Distinguishing Marks  27, 55–6, 229–30, 304–5, 309, 314–15, 364–5, 376, 483–4, 517–18, 547, 558–9 Divine and Supernatural Light  23, 271, 303, 314, 361, 487–8, 517–18, 561–2 End for Which God Created the World  170–1, 217–18, 263, 282–3, 330, 383–4, 484–5, 491–2, 537, 562 Faithful Narrative  22–3, 25, 47–8, 52–5, 63, 219, 305, 362–5, 406, 464, 479–84, 489–90, 492–3, 501–2, 504–5, 517–18, 530, 533, 537, 547, 558 Freedom of the Will  56, 61–3, 75–6, 92–3, 104–5, 110–11, 167, 211, 237–8, 242, 255, 262–3, 313, 424, 466, 468–70, 484–6, 489–93, 517–18, 520–1, 537–8, 542, 562–3 God Glorified in the Work of Redemption  487, 517–18 History of the Work of Redemption 56–8, 60–1, 76, 79, 218, 221, 225, 269, 274–5, 284–5, 325–6, 376–7, 388, 398, 413, 418, 456–8, 486–7, 490–2, 517–18, 520–1, 531–2, 534, 537, 542–7, 549–51, 564 Humble Attempt  51–2, 56, 58–61, 64, 219, 229, 276, 418–19, 425, 428, 457, 489, 537, 542, 544, 558–9, 564 Humble Inquiry 195 Life of David Brainerd  365, 413, 419, 426–8, 466–7, 475–6, 542–4, 548, 550–1 Nature of True Virtue  75–6, 237, 283–4, 289, 291–2, 299–300, 305–6, 367, 458–9, 466–7, 484–5, 517–18, 538 Original Sin  61–3, 73, 104, 106, 108, 209–11, 235, 237, 241–2, 247, 284–5, 341–5, 347–8, 394, 418, 423, 466, 484–6, 490–2, 509–10, 517–18, 520–1, 537–8, 542

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index   587 Religious Affections  28, 63, 104, 106–7, 112, 114–15, 123, 257–8, 261–3, 282–3, 285–9, 292–3, 315, 345–6, 358, 364–7, 376, 408, 465–7, 475–6, 484–5, 490–2, 517–18, 521–2, 534, 537, 544, 547, 558–9 Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God  26–7, 55, 105–6, 235, 354, 399, 473, 487, 499, 501, 504, 508–9, 517–18, 544, 558 Some Thoughts  28, 58–9, 72, 230–1, 285–6, 362–5, 407, 465, 484, 517–18 True Grace Distinguished from the Experience of Devils 487–8 Edwards, Jonathan, posthumously published/ unpublished writings of “Beauty of the World,”  303, 334 “Blank Bible,”  57–8, 77–8, 82, 173, 218, 236, 371, 375–6, 378–80, 383–4, 574 “Catalogue of Reading,”  69, 72–9, 81–5, 220, 371–3, 379, 394, 411–12, 576–8 “Controversies,”  80–1, 168 “Diary,”  6–7, 18–19, 51, 355, 359–60, 406–8 “Discourse,”  95, 122–4, 127–9, 131–2, 153–5, 204, 250 “Images of Divine Things,”  111, 172, 279, 299–301, 306, 316, 325–8, 376, 383 “Miscellanies,”  9–10, 76, 78, 82, 94, 138–9, 147, 151–2, 155–9, 167–71, 186, 207–8, 218, 229–32, 236, 242, 251, 254, 258–60 “Notes on Knowledge and Existence,”  144, 338–9 “Notes on Scripture,”  78, 82, 236, 267, 353, 371, 374–6, 378–80, 383–4, 442–3, 542 “Notes on the Apocalypse,”  226–7, 230, 374–5, 542 “Of Atoms,”  94, 141, 333, 340 “Of Being,”  91, 105, 107, 144, 338–40 “Of Insects,”  332 “On Sarah Pierpont,”  8, 355 “Personal Narrative,”  51, 77, 107, 278, 304, 355, 359–63, 370, 407–8, 466–7, 503, 559 “Personal Writings,”  355 “Resolutions,”  6–7, 18, 272–3, 355, 359–60, 406, 466–7, 521, 559 sermon manuscripts  5, 387–8, 393–4 “Spider Letter,”  303–4, 332, 503, 508 Edwards renaissance  3, 502–8 Edwards, Richard  4, 38

Edwards, Sarah (Pierpont)  3, 8, 10–11, 26–7, 29, 39, 354–5, 359, 361–2, 391–4, 500, 511, 559 Edwards, Timothy  3–4, 38, 40, 44–6, 106, 387–8, 392, 399, 405, 510–11 Edwardseans: see also New Divinity  64, 412, 431–5, 514–15, 519–22 Egypt  209, 220–1, 543–4 Election: see also Predestination  61–2, 80–1, 199–208, 241, 286–9, 424, 468–9, 485 Eliot, John  40–1, 417, 495–6 Elizabeth I  35 Emerson, Ralph Waldo  307 Emmons, Nathanael  247 Empiricism: see also Epistemology, Philosophy  5, 108–10, 216–18, 311–12, 366–7, 434–5, 562 Enlightenment: see also Bible (criticism/critical study of), Deism, Empiricism, History, John Locke, Mechanical philosophy, Natural philosophy/sciences  22, 46, 77, 83–5, 229, 236–7, 267–8, 298–9, 354, 357, 367, 490, 528, 563 challenge of  215–17, 356, 404 philosophy of  48, 56, 69, 72–3, 80–4, 152, 166–7, 228, 231, 267–8, 326, 366–7 Enthusiasm: see also Revival(s)  24, 27–9, 112–14, 166, 228, 257–8, 273, 313, 356–7, 362, 364–6 Epistemology  22–3, 174, 177, 251, 309–12, 319, 321, 326, 509–10, 536–7, 562 Erskine, Ebenezer  52 Erskine, John  59–60, 73, 221, 269, 374, 394, 419, 425, 446–7, 485–90 Eschatology: see also Millennialism  5, 207, 279, 309–10, 380, 517–18, 521, 532–3, 575 Evangelical/Evangelicalism: see also Revivalism  15, 46–9, 52–4, 59–64, 72–5, 77–8, 84–5, 215, 226, 262, 275, 279, 335, 353–4, 357–9, 364–5, 367, 372, 393, 412, 434, 437–8, 446–7, 452–4, 457–9, 466–8, 479–84, 490–1, 501, 531, 533–5, 538–9, 544, 548, 561, 569, 575, 577–8 Edwards and contemporary evangelicalism  47, 275–6, 475–6, 528, 530–3, 543–4, 555–8, 560–3

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588   index Evangelism: see also Missions  21–3, 40, 47, 278–9, 457–8, 549 Evil: see also Death, Devil, Sin, Theodicy  7, 100, 115, 211, 240, 254, 258–9, 289, 291–2, 468–9, 471–2, problem of  207–11, 235–6, 238–40

F

Fall: see also Anthropology and Sin  245 of Adam/Original Fall  63, 158, 165–6, 209–11, 219–20, 222, 235–6, 240, 242, 408, 413, 499 understanding of  80–1, 238, 245, 361 fallen nature  157–8, 205–7 Family: see also Gender  4, 390, 578 and religious practice  5, 13, 44, 47, 361–4, 406–7 understanding of  3, 49, 390–2, 413, 439 Father Rale’s War (1722–1725): see also Imperial Wars  37, 450 Filioque  126, 154–5 Finney, Charles G.  549, 559 Franklin, Benjamin  49, 84–5, 332, 473 Free agency/Free will  92, 109, 184, 281–2, 518 French and Indian War (1755–1763): see also Imperial Wars  37, 422–3, 450

G

Galilei, Galileo  325–8 Gender  4, 393, 395, 406, 411 ideology 34 roles 15 General Court (Massachusetts)  37–8, 436–7 Glasgow Missionary Society: see also Mission(s) 60 Glorious Revolution  4, 435, 447–9, 451, 458 God/Father attributes of  131, 324–5, 331–2, 334–5 beauty of  300–1, 303, 382 blessedness of  118, 122, 124–5, 127–9 the decrees of  109, 191, 199–200, 202–5, 207–9, 269–70 attributes of  131–2, 324–5, 331–2, 334–5, 383–4 divine simplicity of  92–3, 122–3, 128–31 essence of  91–3, 122, 125, 130, 191, 201, 203–4, 211–12, 539–40

fullness of  98–100, 122–3, 127, 130–1, 156, 161–2, 170–1, 200–5, 288–91, 383–4 as Godhead  93, 122, 124–6, 154–5, 162–3, 317, 535 glory of  95, 98, 126–7, 130, 159, 165–6, 201, 246, 257, 277–8, 285–6, 301, 305–7, 316, 324–5, 332–5, 357, 360, 363, 531–2, 539–40 goodness of  130, 169–70, 208, 243, 283–4, 289–91, 293–4 happiness of  128–30, 202 immutability of  92–3, 122–3, 128–32 love of/as Love  65, 95–6, 123, 160–2, 282–4, 288, 291–2, 359–60, 367 mercy of  167, 246–7, 270, 421–2 nature of: see also Trinity  95, 110, 140–1, 169–70, 208, 309–10, 317–18, 418 providence of: see Providence revelation of: see also Bible, Natural revelation  71, 222–3, 270–1, 292–3, 296 sovereignty of  23–4, 62, 107–8, 235, 238–9, 305–7, 317, 320–1, 333, 359, 468, 474–5, 559–62 as (true) substance  92, 252–3, 306 timelessness of  93 will of  14–15, 96–7, 100–1, 121–2, 203–5, 208, 211, 239, 257, 287–8 wrath of  157, 207–8, 247 and divine understanding  125–7, 153, 155, 158 and necessary truths  100–2 Gospel(s): see also Bible, New Testament  372, 375–6, 378, 422 Gouge, William  5 Grace  24, 63, 95–6, 151, 153–4, 159–60, 221, 243, 268–9, 271, 287–8, 292, 316–17, 354–5, 358, 440, 469, 538–9 confirming grace  210 efficacious grace  159–60, 210 means of  44, 364, 413 special grace  255, 259, 261 sufficient grace  210–11 Great Awakenings: see also Revivalism  515–16 The First Great Awakening  433–4, 436–7, 463–5, 516–17, 521, 556–8, 560 The Second Great Awakening  65, 215, 463–4, 467, 569 Great Chain of Being  324–5, 329–30

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index   589 Great Commission: see also Mission(s)  56–7, 60, 62, 425–6 Gregory of Nyssa  264, 328 Grotius, Hugo  174–5, 223–4, 237

H

Half-Way Covenant  20, 186–7, 194–6, 270, 272, 413, 560 Hampshire Association of Ministers  25–6 Harris, Howell  52–4, 275–6, 490 Hawley, Joseph  25 Haynes, Lemuel  443 Heaven: see also Beatific Vision  91, 159, 161–2, 171–2, 222, 226, 229, 246, 264, 271, 278–9, 363, 368, 383–4, 426, 470–1, 505–6, 535 Hell: see also Punishment  55, 107–8, 210, 217, 222, 226, 229–30, 235, 246, 359, 380, 412, 469–70, 532 Henry VIII  34–5 Henry, Matthew  77–8, 372, 446–7, 577 Hermeneutics: see also Bible  5, 354–5, 433, 441–3, 518, 576 History  34–5, 79, 93, 96–7, 157–8, 215, 274–7 study of  190 understanding of  33–4, 170–2, 317–18 History of redemption  99, 190, 219, 318 Holiness  28, 125–7, 129–30, 133, 153–4, 159–60, 209, 229–30, 236, 238, 273, 282–5, 292, 296, 375, 446, 501–3, 534, 536–7, 548, 558–9 Holmes, Sr., Oliver Wendell  495, 497, 508–9 Holy Spirit (the Spirit): see also Trinity, the indwelling of  98, 156, 159–60, 194–5, 300–1, 355, 361 the personhood of  129, 153–4 Hooker, Thomas  8, 70, 358–60 Hopkins, Samuel  10, 17, 40, 64–5, 74, 355, 361–4, 368, 370, 398, 406–7, 431–2, 434, 464, 466–7, 470–1, 474, 484–5, 499–501 Howell, William  220 Human nature: see also Anthropology  137, 139–40, 143–4, 161–2, 168–9, 205–6, 282, 285–7, 326, 355 Hutcheson, Francis  291–2, 298–9, 446–7 Hutchinson, Anne  272, 364–6 Hymnody  354, 362–3

I

Idealism  104–5, 108–10, 143–4, 200–1, 217–18, 252–3, 306, 316–17, 333, 337–8, 341–3, 491 Idealistic phenomenalism  172, 333 Images  92, 99, 123–4, 171–2, 178, 218, 254, 283–5, 297–300, 304, 306, 312–13, 315–18, 334, 363, 383–4, 457 Imagination  27, 257–8, 260, 297, 302, 304–5, 309–15, 317–21, 496–7 imago dei  139–40, 257 Immaterialism  136–7, 139, 141–9, 171, 252, 257 Imperial wars: see also British Empire  33–4, 320–1, 446–7, 450–1, 456–9 Infralapsarianism: see also Fall (understanding)  80–1, 277 Inspiration: see also Bible, Revelation  111, 173, 381 Islam  221, 241, 443, 544 Israel  35, 39–40, 171–2, 188, 209, 223–4, 230, 416, 440–3

J

Jacobite Uprising  79, 168–9, 451–2, 456–7 James II  36, 447, 451–2 Japan  417, 520–2, 573 Jesus Christ: see also Atonement, God. Trinity, Justification  56–8, 153, 199–200, 207, 241, 262, 357, 374–5, 383–5 as moral exemplar  9, 262, 284–5, 293–4 ascension of  221, 505–6 crucifixion of  47, 238–9 divinity of  126–7 incarnation of  138–9, 142–3, 200–1, 204–5, 285–6 redemptive work of  97–8, 184–5, 235–6 relation to Father  127, 160–1 resurrection of  96–7, 171–2, 229–30, 241, 539–40 return of  58, 61, 171–2, 226–30, 277, 442 two natures of  137–49, 155–8 union with  15, 151–2, 162–3, 186–7, 192, 199–201, 263, 273 Johnson, Thomas H.  69–70 Jonathan Edwards Studies (journal)  366, 569–71, 573–4 Jones, Griffith  52

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590   index Jones, Jeremiah  372–3, 378 Journal keeping  356, 358, 364, 398, 437–8 Justification: see also Atonement, Conversion, Jesus Christ  24, 78, 160, 192–4, 241, 286–8, 290–1, 358, 364–6

Lowell, Robert  495, 504–9 Lowman, Moses  227–9, 375, 446–7, 577 Luther, Martin  100, 269–70, 355, 516–17, 561 Lutheranism  46, 52–5, 57, 80, 357–8, 371, 457–8, 482–3, 534, 547

K

M

King George’s War (1744–1748): see also Imperial Wars  37, 450 King Philip’s War (1675–78): see also Native Americans  40–1, 434–6 Kingdom of God/Christ: see also Millennialism 277 advancement of  51–3, 58–61, 65, 175, 217, 226, 274–5, 419, 458 on earth  33, 278–9 Korea (Korean Church)  514–20, 522, 568–71, 573–4

L

Language  6, 23, 40–1, 96, 111, 153, 161, 171–5, 177–8, 316, 344, 371, 378, 382, 423, 503 understanding of  105, 122 Latin America  555–64, 578–9 Latitudinarianism  45–6, 71–5, 82, 448 Lesotho  60–1, 545, 549–50, 570–1 Liberalism (theological)  22–3, 26–7, 46, 474–5, 495, 500, 575 Lightfoot, John  219–20, 372 Lloyd-Jones, Martyn  492, 516–17, 559, 561 Locke, John: see also Bible (criticism/critical study of), Empiricism, Epistemology, Enlightenment, Natural theology, Rationalism  22–3, 71, 73–5, 82, 104, 106–10, 112–16, 166–7, 172–5, 177, 255–6, 259–60, 297–8, 311–13, 356, 366, 372–4, 379–80, 411, 434–5, 437–8, 448, 475, 503–4, 536–7, 562, 577 London Missionary Society: see also Mission(s)  60, 424–6, 545–9 Lord Herbert of Cherbury  166–7, 169–70 Lord’s Supper  19, 560–1 Northampton controversy over  18, 20, 38 as converting ordinance  20, 44–5, 186 participation in  20, 35, 43–4, 268–70, 273 and sacramental piety  43, 273–4, 277 understanding of  20, 161, 270

Malebranche, Nicholas: see also Occasionalism  71, 91, 95, 105–6, 286, 330, 337, 577 Marriage: see also Family, Gender, Women 9–10 bans 389 covenant  183, 192–3 divorce  38, 393 and spirituality  8, 381 understanding of  12, 270 Mastricht, Petrus van  70–1, 74, 80–2, 107, 165–6, 185, 190, 269, 373–4 Mather, Cotton  19, 40, 44–6, 70, 73–4, 80–1, 171–2, 219–21, 227–8, 331, 353–4, 362–3, 366–7, 370, 378, 410, 416–17, 440–1, 451, 495–6, 572, 577 Mather, Eleazar  20 McCulloch, William  52–3, 55, 374 Mechanical philosophy: see also Cartesianism  324–9, 333–5 Mede, Joseph  227–8, 230, 446–7 Meditation  353–8, 360–3, 374–5 Mental phenomenalism (philosophy)  94, 96, 109, 252, 306 Metaphysics: see also God/Father, Idealism, Ontology, Realism  104, 110, 119–20, 136, 143–4, 177, 246, 253, 338–9 Methodists, Methodism: see also Wesley, John and Charles  8, 276, 424, 464 Methodist missions  55–6, 467, 484, 515–16, 519, 530, 545, 547–8 Middle Ages  70–1, 225–6, 307 medieval Christendom  33–4 medieval theology  70, 80, 261, 324–30, 332, 335, 378–9 Millennialism: see also Eschatology  58, 226–8, 231, 278–9, 425 premillennialism 228 postmillennialism 228

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index   591 Miller, Perry  69–70, 175, 177, 316–17, 360, 366, 396, 475, 492, 502–4, 508–11, 569, 578 Mind–body dualism  137–40, 259, 337, 339–41 Ministry  4–5, 7–8, 10, 18–19, 409–10, 422 practice of  23–4, 43–4, 356, 419, 431 understanding of office  269–74, 354 Miracles  96–7, 112–13, 156–7, 171–2, 418 debate over  166–7, 218–19, 375, 379–80 Mission(s)  367, 416–19 missionary movement  52–3, 56–60, 63–6, 424–8, 456–8, 514–17, 528–9, 545–50, 558 missionary societies  60–3 missions to Native Americans  30, 37, 40–2, 46, 320–1, 420–2, 431–8, 466–7 missions to enslaved  439–40 Moffatt, Robert  545 Moral agency  211, 281–2, 286–8 Moral goodness  116, 287–93 Moral necessity  242, 255–6, 288, 290 Morija Archives  550, 570–1 Mt. Holyoke Seminary  64, 427, 543–4, 548

N

Native Americans: see also Imperial Wars, Mission(s)  37, 40–2, 221, 375, 409, 416, 419–23, 426, 442, 450–1, 576–7 and raid on Deerfield  41–2, 399 Mahican (or Mohican) Indians  41–2, 400–1, 420–1, 428, 431, 436–7, 458, 576–7 the evangelization of  30, 40–2, 47, 56–7, 59, 61–4, 278, 320–1, 366–7, 400–1, 417, 425, 431–43, 449, 457, 466 Mohawks  42, 400–1, 423, 436–7 Natural goodness  286–92 Natural philosophy/Natural sciences  219–20, 225, 324–6, 328–9, 332, 334–5, 366–7, 398, 404, 412 Natural reason  81–2, 113, 152, 165–6, 168–70, 176–7 Natural religion  71, 83, 166–70, 176–8 Natural revelation  166 Natural theology  106, 116–17, 165–6, 175, 307, 324–5, 331, 339

Nature  71, 165–7, 172, 175, 303, 309–10, 337, 356–7, 384 laws of  176–8, 217–19 understanding of  324–33 Neonomianism 187 Neoplatonism  217–18, 281–3, 290, 298–9, 536–7 Nestorianism  135, 138 New Divinity: see also Edwardseanism  64–6, 231, 247, 425–7, 431–2, 464–7, 469–71, 474–5 New England: see also Puritanism  3–4, 6–7, 10–11, 14–15, 18–23, 33, 35–7, 39–47, 51–9, 77, 80–1, 104–7, 171–2, 186–8, 194–5, 223–4, 226–8, 230, 267, 270, 272, 275–6, 299, 353–4, 357–60, 366–7, 387, 391–2, 399, 417, 423, 432–40, 446–50, 454–7, 463–4, 468, 472–6 and Congregationalism  184, 186, 276 New England Theology  81, 227–8, 468, 470, 475–6, 578 New England Way: see also Congregationalism  20–3, 186, 194–5, 358 New Learning  22, 77, 81–3, 220–1 New Light  27, 47–9, 358, 366–7, 412, 467–8 New Testament  35, 39–40, 43–4, 79, 171–2, 174–5, 183–4, 187–9, 219–20, 224–5, 278–9, 316, 318, 354–5, 372–8, 384–5, 421–2, 440–3 New York City  4–5, 18–19, 45, 72, 356–9, 464 Newport (Rhode Island)  11, 392, 439, 499–500 Newton, Isaac  22, 69, 73–4, 78, 82–3, 85–6, 111, 227–8, 326, 333–4, 366–7, 372–3, 405, 530, 577 Northampton (Massachusetts)  3–5, 7–8, 10–11, 14–15, 21, 25–30, 37–9, 43–6, 51–5, 59–60, 73–4, 76, 193–5, 219, 230, 275–6, 354, 366–7, 387–99, 406, 419, 421–3, 453, 455, 459, 481–4 First Congregational Church of  17, 19–20, 22–4, 44–5, 60–1, 75, 85, 241, 267–9, 273, 358–60, 400, 418, 439–40, 466 Novels  74–5, 84–5, 496–7, 499–502, 508–11

O

Occasionalism  96, 105–6, 171, 200–1, 210–12, 231–2, 244–5, 247, 251–2, 254, 306, 330, 348

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592   index Old Light  27, 47 Old Testament  35, 39–40, 79, 174–5, 185–6, 188–9, 195, 222–5, 316, 318, 372–3, 376–8, 382, 384–5, 409–10, 441–2 Ontology: see also God, Idealism, Occasionalism, Realism  92–3, 98–9, 108, 252–3, 261–2, 302–3, 306, 381 Being (in general)  65, 91–2, 209, 283–4, 299, 302–5, 367 dispositional ontology  93n.1, 119–20, 171, 200–1, 297–8 substance  91–2, 94, 108–10, 119–20, 137–40, 143–6, 171–2, 178, 209–10, 252–4, 259, 306, 333, 338, 340–5 Orthodoxy  22, 25–6, 71–2, 80–1, 85, 127–8, 136, 142, 146–7, 167, 185, 199, 215–16, 240, 248, 309, 381, 485 Owen, John  70, 74, 80, 112, 151, 156, 173, 185–6, 188, 193–4, 221–2, 269, 374, 383, 413, 514–15, 561, 577 Oxford University  46, 54, 112

P

Panentheism  93, 99, 201 Paradise 184 Paris Evangelical Missionary Society: see also Mission(s)  60–1, 545–6, 549–50 Park, Edwards Amasa  247 Pascal, Blaise  326–7, 497–8 Patriarchy, patriarchal society, gender  3–4, 6, 13–14, 29–30, 39–40 Peace of Westphalia  33–4 Pentateuch: see also Bible, Old Testament  78, 371–3, 375, 378–9, 577 Pentecostalism  528, 535–6, 549, 555–9, 561, 563–4 Personalism (theology)  118, 123–4, 129–33 Philosophia ancilla theologiae 324–5 Philosophy: see also Aristotelianism, Cartesianism, Empiricism, Enlightenment, Epistemology, Idealism, Platonism/Neoplatonism, Ontology  17–18, 48, 69–70, 82, 104–5, 107, 119–20, 168, 217, 219–20, 231, 278, 299, 312–13, 319, 324–8, 330–5, 340, 404, 406, 409, 474, 491, 511 Pierpont, James  8

Piety: see also Devotion  8, 15, 22–3, 25, 27, 29–30, 34, 46–8, 353–6, 359–62, 367, 393, 405, 410, 426–7, 466, 468, 472 Pietism  46–7, 52–7, 80, 226, 276, 357–8, 401, 457–8, 482–3, 546–7 Plato  168–9, 237 Platonism/Neoplatonism  70–1, 101, 117, 139, 217–18, 257, 259–60, 281–3, 290, 296–9, 301–2, 306–7, 311–12, 329–30, 337, 536–7 Pneumatology: see also Holy Spirit  151–63, 194, 253, 261–2 Poetry  76–7, 353–4, 495–6, 500–4, 508–9 Poole, Matthew  77–8, 80, 237, 372, 375, 577 Prayer  5, 13, 41, 51–2, 58–9, 273–4, 353–4, 363–4, 389–90 Concert of Prayer  47, 59–60, 161, 276, 418–19, 425–6, 457–8 Preaching: see also Minister, Revivalism, Sermons  18, 21, 23–4, 26–7, 46, 52, 55, 58, 61–2, 183–4, 246, 275–6, 278, 297–8, 360, 387–8, 390, 397–401, 409, 418, 421, 442, 455–6, 465, 510–11 Predestination  23, 199–212, 359, 468–9, 531–2, 547 Presbyterianism: see also Dissenters  4–5, 18–19, 36, 45–6, 52, 60, 63, 72, 276, 394, 424, 463–4, 485, 490, 492, 514–16, 519, 529–30 Prideaux, Humphrey  219–20, 358, 372–4 Prince, Thomas  53, 358 Princeton Theological Seminary  471, 514–15, 517, 568–9 Print culture  36–7, 47, 69–70, 83–5 Prisca theologia (or ancient theology)  76, 168–9, 177–8, 220–1, 225, 237, 373, 380–1, 416–18 Prophecy  59–60, 166–7, 174–5, 226–7, 229, 315, 371, 375, 382–5, 411, 418, 441, 456–7 interpretation of  79, 223–5, 227–9, 240–1, 372–7, 446–7 Prose  363, 501–3, 529 prose style  495–8, 508–9 Prosperity gospel  556 Protestants (Protestantism): see also Reformation  33–7, 46–8, 52–7, 60, 63–5, 73–4, 80, 215–16, 219–21, 225–7, 229, 267–70, 272–3, 275–8, 316, 371,

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index   593 375, 383, 417, 419, 424–8, 433–6, 438–9, 446–52, 454, 456, 458, 474–5 Providence  39, 79, 276–7, 288–9, 330, 361, 383–4, 405, 472 special providence  218–19 Psychology  23, 28, 115, 118, 120–1, 123–7, 130–1, 133, 138, 153, 155, 177, 251, 257, 262–3, 561 psychological terminology  123 Punishment: see also Death, Evil, Hell, Sin  12–13, 208, 235–6, 242, 246, 417, 421, 468 eternal punishment  95, 166–9, 498 Puritan(s): see also New England, Congregationalism  3, 9–10, 12–15, 19–20, 47, 70–1, 77, 175, 184, 195, 215–16, 218, 261–2, 270, 286, 316–17, 357–60, 364, 366–8, 404, 408, 472–5, 495–6 English Puritanism  33–6, 80, 139, 227–8 New England Puritanism  40–1, 43–4, 46, 52, 56–7, 107, 272–3, 353–4, 417, 454, 470–1 Pilgrims 186

Q

Queen Anne’s War (1702–13): see also Imperial Wars  37, 450 Queen Mary  34–5

R

Race/racism  40, 61–2 Rationalism: see also Cartesianism, Enlightenment, John Locke  72, 81, 175, 216–18, 227–8, 289–90 Realism (philosophy)  136, 145, 147, 216–17, 224, 244, 252, 474–5, 577–8 relative realism  145–6 Reason  71, 81–2, 104, 106–7, 112–14, 121–2, 152, 165–78, 288–90, 313–15, 319–20, 327 Redemption: see also Atonement, Cross, Jesus Christ, Justification  51–2, 58–9, 96–9, 116–17, 126–7, 155, 165–6, 171–2, 185, 187, 189–92, 195, 205–6, 215–16, 219, 231, 241, 246–7, 270, 309, 318, 383–5, 419 cosmic redemption  56 Redemption history: see also Salvation history  126, 168, 215–16

Reformed/Reformed Protestantism: see also Calvinism  34–5, 71, 261–2, 269, 319, 384, 420, 557, 561–4 Reformed Church  237, 245, 514–15, 550 Reformed Orthodoxy  23, 35, 72, 104, 128, 136, 139–40, 158, 165–6, 170, 185–6, 194, 200, 208, 271–2, 293, 355, 485 Reformed theology  80–2, 212, 217–18, 222–4, 227, 485 Religion(s)  48, 53, 55–6, 83, 166–7, 225, 373, 379–81, 515–16 and Christianity  51–2, 168–9 true religion  63, 76, 165–6, 229, 262, 296, 314–15, 365, 380, 416, 518 understanding of  71, 217–18, 328 Republic of Letters  69–70, 74–5, 83–5, 216 Réveil 548–9 Revelation: see also Bible  76, 106, 165–7, 170–8, 221–3, 246, 258, 293–4, 306, 326, 364, 370, 383–5 and divine inspiration  111–12, 168–9, 173, 313, 381 as accommodation  271, 300–1, 314–15 as condescension  173 necessity of  167–70 of God in Scripture  81–2, 112–14 Revival(s): see also Conversion, Enthusiasm, First and Second Great Awakening, New Light, Old Light, Réveil  13, 46–7, 51–3, 58–62, 115, 161, 225–7, 267–9, 273–5, 301, 304–6, 313, 362–5, 418, 425, 457, 467–8, 482–3, 492–3, 514–17, 519, 529–31, 533–4, 547–9, 555–61 in Britain  53–6, 394, 483, 490 in the colonies  27, 195, 230, 326, 358–9, 366–7, 449, 479–81 in Europe  54–5, 57, 483–4 controversies over  25–30, 247, 275–6 revivalist preaching  24, 385, 387, 484 Revivalism: see also evangelicalism  14, 58, 410–13, 434–5, 463–5, 471 Revolutionary War (United States)  49, 231, 463–4, 470–2, 487–8 Robe, James  55, 483–4 Robinson, Marilynne  495, 508–11 Root, Timothy  29–30 Rowland, Daniel  52, 54

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594   index

S

Salvation: see also Redemption  6, 20, 23, 28, 47, 55–6, 62, 80–1, 98, 129, 159–60, 165–6, 177–8, 184–5, 191, 207–8, 215–19, 221–5, 241, 248, 254, 259, 271, 287–8, 317–18, 327, 355, 358–60, 409, 423 Salvation history: see also Bible (interpretation of)  215–16, 221–5 Sanctification: see also Holiness  96, 151, 192, 243, 259, 263, 268, 273, 309, 311, 315, 317–19, 321, 357–8, 361, 364–6 Saybrook (Connecticut)  45, 269 Saybrook Platform  18, 45–6, 269, 276 Science(s): see also Natural philosophy/ sciences  36–7, 70–1, 220, 310–11, 335, 373–4, 379–81, 404 science and religion  78, 82, 176–7, 227–8, 261, 298–9, 327–34 scientific revolution  324–7, 354, 357, 366–7 Scottish Missionary Society: see also Mission(s)  60, 424–5 Scotland: see also Presbyterianism, Revivalism  36–7, 45–6, 52–3, 55–60, 64, 72–3, 79, 81, 184, 276, 298–9, 354, 394, 418–19, 446–7, 451–2, 457, 463, 483–8, 490, 495–6 Scottish Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge: see also Mission  56–7 Secularism  48, 79, 83–5, 114, 307, 408, 575–6, 578 Secularization  231, 268 Self-love  96, 236, 243, 251, 284, 367, 458 Sense of the heart: see also Affections  24, 258–60, 292, 297, 299–300, 302–5, 315–19, 354–5, 361, 365–7, 381–2, 562 sensus divinitatis  106, 110, 165–6 Sergeant, Abigail Williams  38, 75 Sewall, Samuell (Judge)  40, 440–1 Shepherd, Thomas  358–60, 364–6 Shuckford, Samuel  219–21, 373, 380–1 Sin: see also Anthroplogy, Fall, Theodicy  157–60, 208–11, 246–8, 254, 260–1, 272, 358, 396–7 nature of  169–70, 241–5, 287, 469

original sin and its transmission  63, 209–11, 236–7, 241–5, 247–8, 251, 469, 518 total depravity  242, 255 Slavery  11, 26–7, 39–40, 319–21, 392, 417, 431–3, 435, 438, 451–2 debate over  464, 466–7, 470–2, 499–502 defense of  40 slave trade  36–7, 542 Smallpox  14, 30–1, 76, 463, 484–5 Society  4, 13–14, 24–5, 29–30, 35–6, 39, 43, 58–60, 187–8, 273–4, 354, 449 social ethics: see also Ethics  281–2, 293, 331, 521 understanding of  130, 263–4 Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge: see also Mission(s)  56–7 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel 56–7 Socinianism: see also Arianism  371, 448 Sociology 560–1 South Africa  6, 545–9, 570–1 Spener, Philipp: see also Pietism  46 Spirituality  63–4, 159, 193–4, 259, 353–9, 364–8, 426, 466, 472, 491, 501, 518, 535, 556–61 Springfield (Massachusetts)  38, 276, 392, 434 First Church of  18 Stapfer, Johann Friedrich  80–1, 237, 373–4, 383 Stockbridge (Massachusetts)  14, 17, 30–1, 38, 41–2, 61–3, 75–6, 278, 363, 366–7, 388–9, 396, 400–1, 404, 407, 410, 416, 419–24, 428, 431–2, 434–7, 439–40, 442–3, 451, 457–8, 466, 537, 563, 576–7 Stoddard, Esther  3–5, 17–18, 37–9 Stoddard, John (Colonel)  28–9, 37–8, 41–2, 455 Stoddard, Solomon  4–5, 7–8, 19, 21–3, 25, 30, 37–8, 41, 44–6, 57, 70–1, 106, 387–8, 417, 465, 510–11 and revivalist preaching  21, 52, 481 on church membership  20–1 on pastoral power  20–1, 26

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 12/19/2020, SPi

index   595 on the Lord’s Supper  20, 28–30, 186, 195, 267, 270, 358–9, 413, 560 Stoddardeanism  19, 23 Stone, Samuel  17–18, 70, 81 Stowe, Harriet Beecher  495, 499–502, 504, 508–9 Strong, Nehemiah  297, 398–9 Supernaturalism: see also Miracles, Pneumatology, Providence  15, 23

T

Taylor, John  73, 237, 241, 394 Taylor, Nathaniel William  247, 469, 500 Tennent, Gilbert  28, 52, 446 Theocentricism  217–18, 231–2, 244, 252–3, 259, 261, 474–5, 575 Theodicy  239, 244–5, 331 Theologia practica  70–1, 74, 80–1, 107, 185, 373–4 Theologia prophetica 223–5 Theosis  161, 536–7 Thirty Years War  33–4 Thomism: see also Aquinas, Thomas  324–5 Thomistic axiom  260–1 Thomistic ethics  282, 286 Thornwell, James Henley  247 Tindal, Matthew  78, 166–9, 176, 217, 373–4, 382 Tory Party/Tories  447, 449, 451–2 Trinity, Trinitarianism: see also God/Father, Jesus Christ, Holy Spirit  83, 95, 119, 121–3, 132–3, 152, 168–9, 190–1, 205, 217–18, 221–2, 264, 282–4, 538–40 immanent Trinity  151–5, 158 trinitarian relations  93, 120–1, 123–4, 127, 130–1, 170–1, 302 perichoresis of  119, 121–2, 127–33, 155, 250–1 Turnbull, George  237, 379–80 Turretin, Francis  74, 80–1, 107, 165–6, 177–8, 373–4 Typology  225, 297–8, 311–12, 319, 396, 432, 510–11, 531–2, 536–7 biblical types  222–3, 236, 371, 374–7, 382–5, 433, 441–3

natural types  116–17, 302–4, 324–5, 327–8, 334 typological worldview  171–2, 299–301, 309–10, 316–18

U

Unitarianism 490

V

Venus (slave): see also Slavery  11, 392, 431, 439 Virtue: see also Holiness  5–6, 8–11, 74–5, 159–60, 259, 261–2, 284–6, 305–6, 446–7, 450–1, 453–6, 471–2 disinterested benevolence  65, 425, 466–7 self–control  6–7, 9, 11–13 true virtue  28, 65, 281–4, 286–92, 299–300, 367, 458–9 Vitringa, Campegius  224 Von Balthasar, Hans Urs  307

W

War: see also Imperial Wars  28–9, 33–4, 36–7, 40–1, 59, 227, 313, 389, 416, 422–3, 427–8, 432–6, 440, 446–8, 450–1, 457, 467–8, 470–2, 487 Watts, Isaac  47–8, 54, 73–6, 155–6, 237, 354, 362–3, 480–3 Wesley, Charles  46–8, 52, 275–6 Wesley, John  46–8, 52–4, 237, 275–6, 426, 463, 467–8, 484, 519, 533, 547 Westminster Confession of Faith  45–6, 165–6, 184–5, 187–9, 194–6, 269 Wheelock, Eleazar  354, 446 Whig Party/Whigs  73–5, 227–8, 231, 447–8, 451–9 Whiston, William  78, 83, 152, 155–6, 219–20, 227–8, 372–3, 379–80 Whitby, Daniel  75–6, 227–8, 372 Whitefield, George  11, 26–7, 46–9, 52–3, 275–6, 354, 398, 400, 413, 439–40, 446, 456, 463–4, 480–1, 483, 560 William of Orange  36, 447–8, 451–2 Williams, Abigail  38, 75 Williams, Elisha  19, 38 Williams, Ephraim, Jr.  38, 75–6

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596   index Williams, Ephraim, Sr.  38, 41–2 Williams, Stephen  41–2, 399 Williams, William  38, 480 Winthrop, John  39, 509–10 Winthrop, Jr., John  366–7 Witsius, Hermann  80, 185, 221–2, 224 Women: see also Family, Gender, Patriarchy  6, 38–9, 84, 390, 404–5, 407, 481, 511, 543–4 and female spirituality  48–9, 58–9, 393, 406, 500–2 roles of  8–13, 15, 39, 393–4, 427

Y

Yale College  xv, 4–5, 8, 18–19, 27, 34, 37, 45–6, 70–2, 76–7, 94, 104, 106, 112, 177, 297, 338, 353, 355–6, 358–65, 370–1, 396–8, 405–7, 434, 449, 451, 469, 475, 482, 492, 510–11, 517–18, 535–7, 543–4, 555–6, 568–70, 572–6

Z

Zwingli, Ulrich  183–4, 273 Zwinglianism 271