Jonathan Edwards and the Gospel of Love

2. Personae

7 2 PERSONAE God cannot be made synonymous with the essence of reason or of life or of power, nor with the more popular modern conceptions of limits or of transcendence or of the future. God is what He wills Himself to be. — Karl Barth “Jonathan Edwards divided men in his lifetime,” says biographer Iain Murray, “and to no less degree he continues to divide his biographers. . . . The nature of his greatness, the significance of his life and thought, an assessment of his character and writings—on all these, and much else, judgments are divided.” One recent scholar sees Edwards as theologian, cosmologist, aesthete, reformer, and social and psychological analyst—a typically varied and largely correct though incomplete assessment that reflects, says another student, Edwards’s pronounced “intellectual and spiritual elusiveness.”1 In much of the historical literature, four images of Edwards loom especially large: Edwards as an intellectual, as a revivalist, as a Calvinist, and as (an encompassing term for an overarching impression) a scold. So strong are these images among the broad literate and academic public that even the quite different and diverse scholarly explorations of the past thirty years seem to have had only modest effect on them. They should therefore serve as a reasonable springboard into the heart of this present examination. Perry Miller, whose 1949 biography of Edwards may be said to have inaugurated the late twentieth-century wave of scholarly study, saw him as the quintessential lonely intellectual, a frontier pastor nurtured in the Calvinist tradition who also read Locke and Newton, saw the need to reconcile their insights to Calvinist precepts, and spent his life attempting to do precisely that. Having lived through a ghastly global depression > > personae 8 and ghastlier global war, Miller admired Edwards’s skepticism about the American faith, including what Miller took to be mainstream twentiethcentury religious faith, in intrinsic human goodness, the efficacy of reason , wealth as the measure of excellence, and the inevitability of national progress. At some level Miller, though a nonbeliever, saw in Edwards a kind of “dark angel” standing athwart the creed of perpetual improvement , a view that, though only partially correct, was shared by the glum proponents of a mid-twentieth-century school of theological orthodoxy. A Harvard scholar awash in a culture of Babbitry and materialism, Miller also, perhaps especially, admired Edwards as an exemplar of the life of the mind against all odds, struggling for understanding, grappling with nonutilitarian Ultimate Questions. And it must be said that Miller seemed particularly impressed that Edwards led the life of the mind in a backwoods town like Northampton rather than in, say, Cambridge. Miller’s depiction of Edwards as a modern thinker no longer carries the whole scholarly field, not least in its neglect of the tenacious hold over Edwards of Christian faith and the Bible. “The Edwards who emerges in Miller,” says Donald Weber, “is a figure unnaturally forced into a variety of modernist poses that simply cannot be defended. Miller claimed too much.”2 Yet despite many revisions, Miller’s view of Edwards as a great thinker and writer, a figure representing more than rigid Calvinism and damnation preaching, has partially endured. The modern Yale edition of Edwards’s writings, following Miller’s lead, treated him from the outset in the 1950s first and foremost as a theologian and philosopher. The first volumes of the Yale series were not sermons, for example, but the treatises Freedom of the Will, Religious Affections, and Original Sin, three of the most theological and metaphysical of Edwards’s works—understandable , perhaps, given the fact that Miller was the first general editor of the series. Edwards the intellectual is as multifaceted as Edwards the historical figure. Though emphasized less perhaps by recent than by earlier biographers , his observations of the immediate natural world were penetrating and acute. He describes, as an adolescent “natural philosopher,” how woodland spiders “fly” by floating or “swimming” through the air as they change the length of their filament, and notices how one can see their webs at a great distance if the sun is behind them—an optical effect that he understood from reading Isaac Newton on “the incurvation of the personae 9 rays passing by the edge of any body.” He applied Newtonian optics in studying rainbows and the color spectrum, and pondered many curious puzzles—why fire needs air, why bubbles break, why sunlight is warmer at sea...