The Edwards of History and the Edwards of Faith

Robert E. Brown. Jonathan Edwards and the Bible. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. xxiv + 292 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00.

Philip F. Gura. Jonathan Edwards: America's Evangelical. New York: Hill and Wang, 2005. xvi + 284 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $24.00 (cloth); $15.00 (paper).

David W. Kling and Douglas A. Sweeney, eds. Jonathan Edwards at Home and Abroad: Historical Memories, Cultural Movements, Global Horizons. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 2003. xxiv + 330 pp. Notes and index. $59.95.

George M. Marsden. Jonathan Edwards: A Life. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003. xxii + 615 pp. Illustrations, maps, chronology, appendices, notes, and index. $35.00 (cloth); $22.00 (paper).

Avihu Zakai. Jonathan Edwards's Philosophy of History: The Reenchantment of the World in the Age of Enlightenment. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003. xx + 348 pp. Notes and index. $55.00.

The Works of Jonathan Edwards, volume 22, Sermons and Discourses, 1739–1742, edited by Harry S. Stout, Nathan O. Hatch, with Kyle P. Farley. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003. xiv + 582 pp. Illustrations, appendix, notes, and indexes. $95.00.

The Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University (http://edwards.yale.edu).

In 1888, a century and a half after Jonathan Edwards delivered his well-known sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," the liberal Congregationalist Lyman Abbott reflected on religious change in America. Arguing that Edwards was the "most characteristic preacher of the Calvinistic school in New England in the eighteenth century," Abbott took sordid delight in quoting some of the most provocative and no doubt to his readers, offensive portions of the now widely reprinted sermon. What had taken place in the intervening one hundred fifty years, according to Abbott, was a sea change in popular belief, nothing less than a "new Reformation." And the reform was all for the better. Abbott relished the thought that "no minister could utter such sentiments in any pulpit in New England to-day and retain his pastorate." For all his brilliance and alleged colonial typicality, Edwards had become an embarrassment to the Gilded Age Christians of his own backyard, a relic of a bygone age of religious barbarism and intolerance. The sovereign and capricious Almighty of Edwards had become an "Indulgent Parent," happily tempered through the American experience.¹ Henry Ward Beecher, Abbott's famous predecessor at Brooklyn's Plymouth Church, had thought similarly about Edwards' "Sinners": "I think a person of moral sensibilities, alone at midnight, reading that awful discourse, would well nigh go crazy."² So influential were these sentiments that by the early twentieth century one writer would subtitle her book on Edwards The Divine Who Filled the Air with Damnation and Proved the Total Depravity of God.³

Despite Edwards's dismissal from the halls of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century religious propriety, he has strangely, in the past half-century or so, reemerged in some of the cultural spaces formerly eager to see him go. Edwards has made his way back onto the map.⁴ This work was begun in large part by Harvard's Perry Miller in the mid twentieth century, but Yale University Press's willingness to edit and publish The Works of Jonathan Edwards (WJE [1953–]), not secured without some considerable nudging from Miller, has resulted in Yale's centrality to the revival of scholarship on Edwards. While Miller anticipated just a few volumes in the Yale edition, his successors as editors—John E. Smith and, especially, Harry S. Stout and Kenneth P. Minkema—have expanded the series now to twenty-seven volumes. This well-funded and superbly executed set of critical editions has not only made readily accessible the bulk of Edwards's most important work, but each of the volumes contains substantial editors' introductions that orient researchers to new work on Edwards's life and thought as much as to the documents themselves. Some...