What We Can Learn from Jonathan Edwards

Abstract

What We Can Learn from Jonathan Edwards Sarah Rivett (bio) Jonathan Edwards at 300: Essays on the Tercentenary of His Birth. Harry S. Stout, Kenneth P. Minkema, and Caleb J. D. Maskell . Lanham: UP of America, 2005. 175 pp. Jonathan Edwards: America's Evangelical. Philip F. Gura . New York: Hill and Wang, 2005. 284 pp. The two books reviewed in this essay form an interesting though somewhat unusual pair. One is a biography by Philip F. Gura that distinguishes itself from George Marsden's recent thoroughly comprehensive biography on Edwards (Jonathan Edwards: A Life, 2003) by presenting an "American portrait" of how Edwards's intellectual and evangelical contributions come together to generate an enduring legacy. The second book consists of a collection of thirteen essays written by some of the most influential Edwards scholars of recent generations who came together at the tercentenary of Edwards's birth (2003) to reflect upon the state of the field of Edwards studies by "thinking broadly and generally about Edwards's place in American life and letters" today (39). Gura masterfully and eloquently presents the mind and works of Edwards as a prism through which we see the religious and intellectual currents of the mid-eighteenth century channeled and refracted in a new form to constitute a sustainable religious culture for subsequent generations. The collection of essays makes these currents more explicit, separated into orderly subheadings of the exemplary topics in Edwards studies of recent years: theology of history, scripture, culture, society, race, and biography. [End Page 423] Reading these books alongside each other highlights the different objectives of each: the essay collection seeks to make scholarship relevant to contemporary life while Gura seeks to make the life of Edwards resonate in new ways with contemporary scholarship as well as a broader audience of interested readers. Yet despite these distinct purposes, there are several points of intersection between these books. Both carefully consider the numerous tensions or points of possible contradiction in Edwards studies: To what extent was he a solitary genius versus a man of his time? Was he a universal thinker or an integral though historically bound participant in mid-eighteenth century evangelical and Enlightenment culture? Are we to understand Edwards within a transatlantic framework of Anglo revivals and Newtonian physics or within the American exceptionalist paradigm of religious culture? As scholars, how are we to adjudicate the need to compartmentalize our study of Edwards in order to increase our comprehension of certain areas of his life alongside our desire to take a step back and view the full picture, the portrait as it were, of someone equally at ease and adept in his various roles as revivalist, theologian, and Enlightenment philosophe? The subtitle of Philip Gura's book, America's Evangelical, does much to answer these questions, for it evokes Edwards as a singular individual with a fairly specific identity, while also alluding to the multifarious influences constituting this identity. Edwards is America's evangelical, the progenitor of modern American Christianity. But as the narrative of Edwards's life recounted in Gura's book demonstrates, Edwards achieved this status through the catalyst of Lockean psychology, the philosophical debates about original sin that characterized an era struggling to place humans rather than God at the center of the universe, and the transformative impact of John Wesley's Methodism, as it countered the Arminian divinity rapidly gaining hegemony at Oxford. These were the contextual, transatlantic, and philosophical influences that allowed Edwards to achieve his singular status as America's Evangelical, a status acquired as his life works made Calvinism modern, religious experience correspond to enlightened understandings of sensory data and human faculties, and revivalism adaptable to new media forms. America's Evangelical succinctly and powerfully captures the place of Edwards at the tercentenary of his birth, alluding not only to the scholarly historiography on this luminous figure but also to Edwards's status as a [End Page 424] cultural and religious icon in contemporary evangelical circles that continue to claim Edwards as their prime progenitor. Both books reflect on this rather unusual juxtaposition, which as the introduction to Jonathan Edwards at 300 explains, has become remarkably more pronounced since the 1990s. Summarizing Kenneth...