The Edwards at 300 Symposium and the Future of Jonathan Edwards Studies

Marking Jonathan Edwards's 300th birthday, specialists assembled at the Library of Congress in October 2003 to discuss their latest work and to assess the state of scholarship on Edwards. The conference came precisely 50 years after Perry Miller conceived the Works of Jonathan Edwards project. It provided an excellent opportunity to assess the renaissance in Edwards studies that has flourished since the project began. The occasion also offered an opportunity to suggest new directions in Edwards scholarship, a valuable discussion given the multitudinous studies of him and his thought in the past 50 years.

The 2003 publication of George Marsden's Jonathan Edwards: A Life served as a unifying point for the conference, as Marsden's biography built upon the foundation of the past decades of Edwards scholarship. Marsden gave the keynote address for the conference and considered Edwards's uses in the twenty-first century. He believes that Edwards's Calvinism can be used to chasten America's cheery self-image and help explain the problem of human evil. Marsden contrasted Benjamin Franklin's fame with Edwards's relative lack of popular attention, and argued that wider popular knowledge of Edwards might supply America with much-needed history "in a minor key." Edwards also could provide the large American evangelical community with an exemplar devoted to the life of the mind, he argued. Attention to Edwards might give Americans a renewed appreciation of the ideal of beauty, which has been discarded in favor of instrumentalism in both churches and the broader culture.

Marsden's sense of the past and future usefulness of Edwards's thought was echoed in other papers and discussions. For instance, Amy Plantinga Pauw contended that Edwards's deep conviction of human and national limitations could help the United States embrace more humble and realistic narratives of its own purposes. John Saillant showed how Edwards's Calvinist typology provided significant theological resources for the first generation of African-American Christian abolitionists. Philip Gura argued that the Edwardseans exercised a great deal of mostly unrecognized influence on nineteenth-century sentimental literature. Finally,Mark Noll showed how Edwards's Freedom of the Will more profoundly influenced British intellectual life than American, but often in entirely unpredictable ways, as various thinkers, sometimes even skeptics, made use of his theory of the bound will in ways that Edwards would have found abhorrent. The national obsession with "freedom" made Edwards's view of severe human limitations intellectually unpalatable to most American observers.

Some participants suggested that despite the enormous amount of writing on Edwards, we still may not know him that well. In particular, several panelists argued that scholars have yet to appreciate Edwards the biblical exegete. Douglas Sweeney and Stephen Stein both suggested that if many scholars honestly considered Edwards's utter devotion to the Bible, they might not like him as much. This selective forgetfulness about Edwards's core Calvinist beliefs goes back at least to Perry Miller. Stein noted that Edwards's biblicism committed him to justifying many brutally violent scriptural episodes.

Another challenge raised by the state of Edwards studies is that of seeing the brilliant and prolific Edwards in context. To be sure, most studies of Edwards have simply sought to understand and explain Edwards's ideas, and this has been a daunting but rewarding task. However, some panelists called for more understanding of Edwards in his imperial/colonial context. Ava Chamberlain, for instance, discussed Edwards's scramble to contend with legal Anglicization and the increasingly negative view of women in adultery cases. Rachel Wheeler used Edwards's writings at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, to reveal the difficulty of joining Native American and European histories. Little work has been done on the Native American influence on Edwards's most important theological works, despite the fact that he produced them while at Stockbridge. However, especially in Original Sin one can see a strange kind of egalitarianism. All nations needed forgiveness, thought Edwards, and in this sense all were equal. But the belief that all nations needed forgiveness in Christ also justified the inequalities inherent in the...