Edwards and Eve: Finding Feminist Strains in the Great Awakening’s Patriarch

If casual readers remember Jonathan Edwards, they remember him for the fiery sermons that were so coolly received by his Northampton, Massachusetts, congregation. Most Americans remain unaware of the voluminous and variegated writings he left behind; as Sydney Ahlstrom wryly notes, Edwards’s sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” is for many readers “the only thing he ever produced” (Ahlstrom 301). As an entry point into the corpus of Edwards’s work, this sermon’s popularity seems particularly regrettable if only because it is what Philip Gura calls “atypical” of Edwards (“Jonathan Edwards” 159). The common practice of teaching “Sinners” in isolation makes a caricature of its author, creating a historical picture of Bible-thumping and Calvinist theocracy so pronounced as to relegate Edwards’s abilities as an author to the background. This characterization of Edwards renders him “a curious artifact of a lost century and not a vital part of our literary tradition” (Gura 159), but in Edwards’s self-promoted “best thoughts” (Schafer 2), his newly available Miscellanies and Notes on Scripture, we find texts whose relevance to current questions of gender offer the modern reader a reason to return to Edwards. Most notably, Edwards’s surprisingly positive treatment of Eve in these sources reveals his willingness to deviate from the ideological background with which he has become synonymous and a theological innovator whose praise of Eve anticipates that of modern feminist theologians. These selections also underscore Edwards’s participation in a cultural negotiation of the discursive space that eighteenth-century women and their literary counterparts occupied, and Edwards’s vindication of Eve functions as an affirmation of the validity of feminine subjects and opinions in the public sphere.

Though many modern feminist theologians praise Eve as the culmination of creation, Jewish and Christian writers have blamed Eve for the sinful and fallen nature of humanity for the majority of the past two thousand years. Ancient writings and modern preaching have been equally vehement in their denouncement of Eve as a wicked and fallen temptress. The apocryphal Book of Sirach states that Eve “did sin originate, and because of her we all must die” (25:24). The equally apocryphal Book of the Secrets of Enoch portrays Eve as the sexual partner of Satan, who “entered and seduced Eva” (31:6), and Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews preserves an even harsher rabbinic tradition suggesting that the name חוה or Eve “might signify חויא ‘serpent’, because she was the serpent” (Ginzberg 91)—an equation that makes Eve, like Satan, the mother of all lies and root of all evil. These ancient representations have traditionally met with approbation from orthodox Christianity; John Thompson’s examination of Eve’s historical treatment summarizes: “Neither Denis nor Augustine is concerned to ameliorate Eve’s guilt” (113), and Calvin also “sees [Eve] more at fault than the man, on account of her deception, her seduction of the man, and her leading role in the advent of mortality” (132). While theologians such as Luther and Ambrose lessened the burden of guilt placed on Eve, the majority, like Calvin, denounced her as the type and origin of sin.

Because of his position as Edwards’s theological predecessor, Calvin’s negative portrayal of Eve represents a precedent that readers might expect Edwards to follow. After all, Ahlstrom describes Solomon Stoddard, Edwards’s grandfather and the most important religious influence in his life, as a man “in many ways more Calvinistic in spirit than most New Englanders” (162). Edwards attended Yale University, an institution “committed to conserving the Puritan heritage” (Ahlstrom 295), and he emerged as a symbol of “Old-Style Calvinism” (Ahlstrom 300). Moreover, both Calvin and Edwards occasionally made chauvinistic statements describing women as second-class citizens. The DeBoer translation of Calvin’s commentary on 1 Timothy 2:13 typifies his opinion that “the true order of nature prescribed by God lays it down that woman should be subject to man” (241), an incapacitation Calvin clearly supports as a universal measure: “The subjection applies to the whole feminine sex” (245). In the one notable instance in which...