Finding God in Solitude: The Personal Piety of Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) and Its Influence on His Pastoral Ministry by Donald S. Whitney (review)

There seems to be an endless supply of books on Jonathan Edwards. Ever since the Harvard historian Perry Miller’s 1949 biography of the American minister and theologian, there has been a revived interest in the academy on Edwards, leading to an increasing number of journal articles, dissertations, and published books that appear annually. Edwards has been examined from nearly every possible vantage point, from George Marsden’s award-winning Yale University Press biography in 2003 to Gerald McDermott and Michael McClymond’s 750-page tome on The Theology of Jonathan Edwards published by Oxford University Press in 2012. In addition to the interest generated by historians and theologians, Edwards has been studied through the lens of psychology, literature, and pastoral experience. With so many books available on Edwards, one has to wonder if there is any aspect on the great American thinker that has not been explored. In Finding God in Solitude, Donald Whitney contends that Edwards’s piety has received scant attention from scholars, arguing that the American minister’s personal spirituality was the center of his ministry as a pastor and writer.

Whitney’s monograph is organized into three main chapters along with a lengthy introduction and conclusion. Much of the first chapter is a rehashing of the biographical details of Edwards’s life supplied by Marsden and other historians, including Edwards’s conversion experience, his installation as a pastor of the Congregational church in Northampton, Massachusetts, his role as a revivalist during the Great Awakening, his move to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, as a missionarypastor to Native Americans, and his untimely death in 1758 shortly after becoming the president of a college that would later be renamed Princeton University. There are a host of secondary-source quotations of mundane information throughout this initial section that should have been paraphrased, and there is not much in the way of new information or new insight on Edwards’s life. Furthermore, although Whitney’s book was published in 2014, he somehow missed the latest scholarship provided by Ava Chamberlain on Edwards’s ancestors in her brilliant 2012 book on his paternal grandmother entitled The Notorious Elizabeth Tuttle, as well as important details on the most popular book that Edwards wrote that is developed in John Grigg’s 2009 monograph, The Lives of David Brainerd. There are also some glaring deficiencies in Whitney’s descriptions of Edwards’s publications. For instance, he makes the mistake of calling the 1738 Boston publication of A Faithful Narrative the “second edition,” when it fact it was the third edition of that book, following on the heels of two earlier editions published in London and Edinburgh.

Where Whitney’s monograph shines is in the last two chapters, devoted to Edwards’s personal piety and pastoral ministry. Whitney explains in fascinating detail how the Bible was the hinge on which Edwards’s piety turned. All Edwards’s spiritual practices, including meditation, prayer, fasting, solitude, and journaling, were formed out of his understanding of scripture. Edwards expected that his congregation should practice all the same disciplines of piety that he completed on a regular basis, relenting only on the amount of time that he expected each person to be able to devote toward these activities. The difficulty that Edwards had in transferring his expectations of piety to his congregation in Northampton is one of the major reasons why he was ultimately fired by his church in 1750 and forced to move to the remote frontier village of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, until being installed as the college president at Princeton in 1758.

For those interested in understanding Edwards’s piety, Whitney’s book will be essential reading. Putting aside the introduction and first chapter, the second and third chapters offer deep insight into the relatively untapped field of Edwards’s...