George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, A Life (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2003)
This is the latest and probably the best available full biography of Jonathan Edwards (1703--1758), to which its winning the 2004 prize for works in American history (Bancroft Prize) can attest. It is hefty, topping out at 505 pages of text, plus an additional 110 pages of tables, notes, and index. As biographies of religious figures go, it is superior to Bruce Gordon's recent biography of Calvin, comparable to the best biographies I've read of Martin Luther and Desiderius Erasmus, and superior to its assessment of Edwards' intellectual life than the Perry Miller intellectual biography of 1949. Marsden makes a special point of correcting some ideas about Edwards' thought which Miller made current, such as the image of Edwards being virtually alone in New England to grasp the importance of new ideas from the English Enlightenment by John Locke and Isaac Newton. Edwards was a genius, and original, but he was not intellectually isolated.
Someone who knows no details of Edwards' writings may be puzzled by his reputation as one of the most brilliant homegrown American intellects. His popular persona is as the author of fire-breathing sermons such as `Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God', and as the catalyst for two `Great Awakenings' in and around Northampton, Massachusetts in 1734--35 and 1741--42. This is no more accomplishment than the typical revivalist preacher parodied by the novel Elmer Gantry, by Sinclair Lewis. Edwards' accomplishment, on which Marsden and Miller agree, is to present a thoroughgoing Calvinist theology based on the epistemology and physics of his day, 200 years after Calvin, in an integrated picture, sustaining both an eyes open sense of the physical world combined with a conviction for the reality of the Bible as a coherent picture of God's working in the world. His theological works on subjects such as original sin and freedom of the will are paradigms of reasoning, and the latter stands in good stead with modern doctrines of the subject.
In his own day, extending up to the Civil War, his biography of his protégé, David Brainerd, who died young from tuberculosis, was almost as widely distributed and read as that early best seller, Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography. Many of his works were published and avidly read in England and Scotland. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, published an abridgment of that work in England, and it remains one of the best paradigms of selfless missionary work to have been written.
Edwards' theology had two seemingly inconsistent sides to it. He did embrace his contemporary thought, but he put it in defense of theological ideas close to 160 years old, current 100 years before, when the Puritans established themselves in New England. Therefore, his theological thinking quickly lost ground after his death, only to be rediscovered after the Civil War. His theological idealism also lead to problems in his pastoral career, and placed him in the role of combatant against several strains of Christian thought, such as Arminianism (free will and resistible grace) , Socinianism (Jesus was human, leading to Unitarianism), Latitudinarianism (broad freedom in interpreting Anglican doctrine) and Deism (Rational picture of God as great Clockmaker).
Edwards doctrinal battles became very personal when he tried to reverse the liberal confessional policies of his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, who he replaced as pastor in 1729. While Stoddard was liberal in allowing people to be admitted to communion, Edwards' father, Timothy, a pastor in Connecticut, was more conservative, and that reserve evolved in Jonathan Edwards ecclesiastical policies.
Edwards crisis began in 1744 with his taking public issue with young boys, several of whom were sons of prominent Northampton families, who were being titillated by reading midwives' manuals, and who used that knowledge to make distasteful and disparaging remarks to local girls. Edwards made a public case of the matter, and make the enormous mistake of listing witnesses names along with the violators, without distinguishing between the two groups. His situation was exacerbated by the death of two of his most powerful allies in central Massachusetts. Then, in 1748, just a few months after his uncle John Stoddard's death, Edwards decided to reverse his grandfather's liberal policies regarding receiving the sacraments, and began a campaign to require professions of faith before being admitted to communion. The normal method to address such matters was to bring the issue before the entire congregation of male members, which made the matter even worse. The congregation became so incensed over the issue that they would not even allow Edwards to preach on the subject. In 1750, the internationally known Edwards was dismissed as pastor from his church in Northampton, whereupon he took up a pastoral and missionary post on the frontier, in Stockbridge, where he encountered further `political' contests with people inclined to milk the English fund for missions to the Indians, for their own enrichment. In these disputes, Edwards took the day, up to the outbreak of the French and Indian War of 1755.
In 1757, Edwards was offered and took the position of president of what was to become Princeton University in New Jersey, after publishing his works on Original Sin and Freedom of the Will, but while still working on a History of Redemption and the Harmony of the Old and New Testaments. In 1758, he died as the result of a smallpox vaccination which went wrong.
Edwards seemed to fulfill, even more than Luther, the image of Christian theologian who relied on the senses, a nominalist. He was imbued with the fine details of the beauty of nature as God's handiwork, and a staunch advocate of the value of the scriptures as 'eyewitnesses' to the correctness of Christian doctrine. I suspect that many of his beliefs may be viewed with embarrassment by modern Christians, such as his assessing the events of the day as evidence that the coming of the New Jerusalem was imminent. He took very seriously, for example, the Biblical expectation that other religions would fall before Christianity before the second coming. While he was pastor at Northampton, after the Great Awakening, he preached to the congregation that their experiences were of a piece with those of the Biblical narratives. They were participating in salvation as surely as contemporaries of Moses, David, or Elijah.
But even the Awakenings had opponents, lead by Boston's Charles Chauncy who made the very modern, skeptical argument that spiritual regeneration could show in many ways, and people are easily deceived by uncontrolled emotion. Edwards' argument, stated in his `Religious Affections' was that indeed, spiritual renewal was, in fact, found in emotions, and one cannot separate reason from the will and its `affections'. Ironically, the liberal Congregationalist pastor was the leader of the `Old Lights' party, opposing the more conservative `New Lights' party lead by Edwards, to which several sensationalist travelling preachers subscribed, without Edwards rigorous thinking.
What may amaze us today is the extent to which these doctrinal controversies were carried out in written tracts (a familiar part of ecclesiastical and theological controversy since the days of Luther and Calvin), generally printed in Boston, sometimes by the skeptical atheist, James Franklin (Benjamin's older brother). These tracts generally demonstrated the far higher level of rigorous thinking on Edwards' part, as he typically shredded his opponents' arguments. In his `Religious Affections,' Edwards showed supreme intellectual honesty by stating that one can never be certain that such experiences are genuine, as Satan can counterfeit them if he wishes.
Among today's evangelical preachers, it appears Edwards' permeating spirituality, consistently argued from deep study, is having a renaissance, to address the tendency to preach a shallow `Gospel of Success'. This book will not replace the study of Edwards thought itself, but it is a very big help in putting him in context.
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Top reviews from other countries
dbello88
Excellent biography, poor kindle version.
Reviewed in Brazil on August 3, 2018
Michael Print
Wonderful Biography
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 14, 2018