Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) is widely regarded as one of the major thinkers in the Christian tradition and an important and influential figure in American theology. After Jonathan Edwards is a collection of specially commissioned essays that track his intellectual legacies from the work of his immediate disciples that formed the New Divinity movement in colonial New England, to his impact upon European traditions and modern Asia. It is a unique interdisciplinary contribution to the reception of Edwardsian ideas, with scholars of Edwards being brought together with scholars of New England theology and early American history to produce a groundbreaking examination of the ways in which New England Theology flourished, how themes in Edwards's thought were taken up and changed by representatives of the school, and its lasting influence on the shape of American Christianity.

Philip J. Fisk offers a critical reappraisal of Jonathan Edwards's Freedom of Will, interpreting Edwards from within his own tradition, Reformed Orthodoxy (±1550-1750), avoiding the outdated paradigms of the conventional interpretation of Edwards and his tradition, a so-called deterministic, reconciliationist Calvinism, and demonstrating from primary sources, such as Harvard and Yale commencement theses and quaestiones, that Edwards departed ways with Reformed Orthodoxy's robust and highly nuanced view of freedom of will, contingency, and necessity.

Among his many accomplishments, Jonathan Edwards was an effective mentor who trained many leaders for the church in colonial America, but his pastoral work is often overlooked. Rhys S. Bezzant investigates the background, method, theological rationale, and legacy of his mentoring ministry. Edwards did what mentors normally do--he met with individuals to discuss ideas and grow in skills. But Bezzant shows that Edwards undertook these activities in a distinctly modern or affective key. His correspondence is written in an informal style; his understanding of friendship and conversation takes up the conventions of the great metropolitan cities of Europe. His pedagogical commitments are surprisingly progressive and his aspirations for those he mentored are bold and subversive. When he explains his mentoring practice theologically, he expounds the theme of seeing God face to face, summarized in the concept of the beatific vision, which recognizes that human beings learn through the example of friends as well as through the exposition of propositions. In this book the practice of mentoring is presented as an exchange between authority and agency, in which the more experienced person empowers the other, whose own character and competencies are thus nurtured. More broadly, the book is a case study in cultural engagement, for Edwards deliberately takes up certain features of the modern world in his mentoring and yet resists other pressures that the Enlightenment generated. If his world witnessed the philosophical evacuation of God from the created order, then Edwards's mentoring is designed to draw God back into an intimate connection with human experience.

Jonathan Edwards has been recognized as the most influential evangelical theologian of all time. Before his death at the age of fifty-four, he had sparked a new movement of Reformed evangelicals who played a major role in fueling the rise of modern missions, preaching revivals far and wide, and wielding the cutting edge of American theology. He has never gone out of print, and Christians today continue to flock to seminars and conferences on him. In this biography of the great preacher and teacher, historian Douglas Sweeney locates for us the core and key to Edwards' enduring impact. Sweeney finds that Edwards' profound and meticulous study of the Bible securely anchored his powerful preaching, his lively theological passions and his discerning pastoral work. Beyond introducing you to Edwards' life and times, this book will provide you with a model of Christian faith, thought and ministry.

Scholars have long recognized that Jonathan Edwards loved the Bible, but preoccupation with his roles in Western "public" life and letters has eclipsed the significance of his biblical exegesis. In Edwards the Exegete, Douglas A. Sweeney fills this lacuna, exploring Edwards' exegesis and its significance for Christian thought and intellectual history. As Sweeney shows, throughout Edwards' life the lion's share of his time was spent wrestling with the words of holy writ. After reconstructing Edwards' lost exegetical world and describing his place within it, Sweeney summarizes his four main approaches to the Bible-canonical, Christological, redemptive-historical, and pedagogical-and analyzes his work on selected biblical themes that illustrate these four approaches, focusing on material emblematic of Edwards' larger interests as a scholar. Sweeney compares Edwards' work to that of his most frequent interlocutors and places it in the context of the history of exegesis, challenging commonly held notions about the state of Christianity in the age of the Enlightenment. Edwards the Exegete offers a novel guide to the theologian's exegetical work, clearing a path that other specialists are sure to follow. Sweeney's significant reassessment of Edwards' place in the Enlightenment makes a major contribution to Edwards studies, eighteenth-century studies, the history of exegesis, the theological interpretation of Scripture, and homiletics.

This dissertation is a theological analysis of the trinitarian shape of Jonathan Edwards' aesthetics of beauty. The contributions of this dissertation lie chiefly in three areas. The primary aim of this study is to advance the burgeoning field of the study of Jonathan Edwards by elucidating his views of beauty. In so doing, I present him as a rich source for the theological engagement of beauty, which could serve not only the field of Edwards studies, but also that of theological aesthetics more broadly.

Avihu Zakai analyzes Jonathan Edwards's redemptive mode of historical thought in the context of the Enlightenment. As theologian and philosopher, Edwards has long been a towering figure in American intellectual history. Nevertheless, and despite Edwards's intense engagement with the nature of time and the meaning of history, there has been no serious attempt to explore his philosophy of history. Offering the first such exploration, Zakai considers Edwards's historical thought as a reaction, in part, to the varieties of Enlightenment historical narratives and their growing disregard for theistic considerations. Zakai analyzes the ideological origins of Edwards's insistence that the process of history depends solely on God's redemptive activity in time as manifested in a series of revivals throughout history, reading this doctrine as an answer to the threat posed to the Christian theological teleology of history by the early modern emergence of a secular conception of history and the modern legitimation of historical time. In response to the Enlightenment refashioning of secular, historical time and its growing emphasis on human agency, Edwards strove to re-establish God's preeminence within the order of time. Against the de-Christianization of history and removal of divine power from the historical process, he sought to re-enthrone God as the author and lord of history--and thus to re-enchant the historical world. Placing Edwards's historical thought in its broadest context, this book will be welcomed by those who study early modern history, American history, or religious culture and experience in America.

Edwards Amasa Park (1808-1900) of Andover championed Edwardsean Calvinism in the United States from the Jacksonian era until the very close of the nineteenth century by employing rhetorical strategies that lent his New England theology fresh apologetic usefulness. The thesis demonstrates that Park has been incorrectly identified as a Taylorite but, extending the argument of Joseph Conforti, ought to be viewed as re-casting his inherited Hopkinsian exercise scheme into a fresh historical synthesis influenced by contemporary patterns of thought. Park's own training at Andover in the irenic divinity of Moses Stuart and Leonard Woods, his application as rhetorician of the work of Hugh Blair and George Campbell and his exposure in Germany to the Vermittlungstheologie of Friedrich Tholuck and Julius Müller gave specific definition to his own theological project. Additionally, the thesis argues that Park ought not to be viewed as a romantic idealist in the line of Horace Bushnell or as a proto-liberal in advance of the Andover liberals who succeeded him. Park retained a life-long commitment to a commingled epistemology and methodology derived from Lockean empiricism, Baconian induction, natural theology and Scottish common sense realism. As a formidable apologist for his revivalist inheritance identified with Jonathan Edwards and Samuel Hopkins, Edwards Amasa Park conserved the substance and prolonged the influence of his beloved New England theology by securing for it modes of expression well fitted to his nineteenth-century audience.

This volume provides an interpretative key to Jonathan Edwards's theology developed from within his own doctrinal constructs. Strobel offers a dogmatic exposition of Edwards's theology by unveiling the trinitarian architecture of his thought. Building upon this analysis, Strobel applies his construct to reinterpret three key areas of redemption debated widely in the secondary literature: spiritual knowledge, regeneration, and religious affection. In order to achieve this purpose, Strobel's approach is theological rather than philosophical, employing Edwards's self-confession as a Reformed theologian to guide his analysis. In advancing a theological reading of Edwards, Strobel focuses on the systematic nature of Edward's theology, ordering it according to his doctrinal affirmations. This necessitates, as many Edwards scholars now affirm, a primary focus on Edwards's trinitarian theology, where the Trinity serves as the key ontological principle which orders the whole of his doctrinal construction. By grounding the interpretive key in Edwards's understanding of the Trinity, Strobel's idiosyncratic exposition of his doctrine of the Trinity serves to recast Edwards's theology in a new light.

Profiles the lives and achievements of more than 270 spiritual leaders, arranged alphabetically, who made major contributions to the history of American religious life.