Jonathan Edwards's Religious Psychology

Abstract

Jonathan Edwards scholarship, thriving since late 1940s when Perry Miller wrote his influential book on great thinker, has flourished even more than usual in recent years with significant new books by Wallace E. Anderson, Norman Fiering, Terrence Erdt, and Patricia J. Tracy. 1 Though much of this recent work surpasses Miller, one is grateful for 1981 reprinting of his Jonathan Edwards (1949), which, as it fades from influence among colonial historians, remains an interesting document of twentieth-century culture because of Miller's use of Edwards to attack modern American liberals. To so use Edwards, Miller had to render him palatable to modern readers and rescue him from liberals' image of an inhuman preacher of fiery hell. His strategy both to put Edwards at odds with his contemporaries and to bring him closer to us by arguing that his preaching was America's sudden leap into modernity. A courageous man of existential angst, Miller's Edwards accepted loneliness of human beings in a cold, inhuman universe. source of Edwards's modern sensibility his youthful readingthe central and decisive event in his intellectual life '-of John Locke's An Essay concerning Human Understanding. Miller, accepting Sereno Dwight's mistaken dating, believed that at fourteen Edwards realized that English empiricist the master-spirit of age and promptly wrote his brilliant notes on The Mind, which firmly followed Locke's sensational psychology. It only to be expected that backwoods prodigy later described religious experience according to a strictly empirical model, reducing even divine grace, Miller thought, to status of a sense perception. In Edwards's outwardly tragic life Miller found a nice morality play of tough-minded thinker out of step with his prosperous and complacent society; voted out of Northampton pulpit,