What is a handbook for? The Oxford English Dictionary tells me it is, “Originally: a book small enough to be easily portable and intended to be kept close to hand, typically one containing a collection of passages important for reference or a compendium of information on a particular subject.” At nearly 600 pages, The Oxford Handbook of Jonathan Edwards is (for those who still prefer their books in the flesh) not “easily portable,” nor should it be, for the range and depth it offers. As a compendium, it is an intensive, erudite tour of the thought, life, and reception of early America's most famous theologian, of the many worlds in which he moved, and those in which he continues to—including many this reviewer is seeing for the first time. One finds him, for example, appearing in a 1990 dispute between Charismatic evangelical communities in Australia, and ghosting the American cemetery in old Cairo, where nineteenth- and twentieth-century New England missionaries who “were instrumental in the dissemination of Edwards's thought and work in this region” (543) are interred. Every reader of this collection will come away with their own revelations; it contains multitudes.
That the Handbook is so tremendously thorough comes as a surprise to absolutely no one; its contributors are a veritable who's who in Edwards studies. The volume's riches, then, are as one would expect, and all the better for being leavened with vital new perspectives on Edwards. Eleven contributors are from outside the United States, a welcome internationalism that gives teeth to the Handbook's most distinct contribution: an initial lay-of-the-land of evangelical and academic engagements with Edwards across the globe. On other counts, it must be said, variety is lacking. Thirty-three of the book's thirty-nine contributors are male, an imbalance I care a great deal less about than the fact that almost all of them are either academics in the fields of church or religious history or seminarians. This composition has its own effects, both for better and for worse.
But for now, let us stay with this issue of genre. The Handbook comprises thirty-seven chapters divided into four parts. Part 1 explores Edwards's parochial, historical, and missionary contexts, bookended by chapters by Ava Chamberlain and Peter J. Thuesen on what were, for Edwards, his most intimate spheres of influence: his family and his books. Part 2 is the longest section, as it should be. From Robert W. Caldwell III's learned exploration of the interface between Edwards's “Spirit Christology” (155) and his trinitarianism, to Kathryn Reklis's exhilarating tour of the worth and work of a “sanctified imagination” (317) in Edwards's thought (even as, she suggests, it functions “within an imperial epistemology” [319]), these chapters explore the foundations and highest reaches of Edwards's theology. Parts 3 and 4 look onto wider worlds. Part 3 externalizes Edwards's relations with both the institutions of his day and the “servants, African slaves, ministerial students, parishioners, itinerant revivalists, and missionaries” that, as Chamberlain puts it in the very first chapter, “embodied his internal mental life” (14). Part 4, the most original, covers Edwards's international reach.
I found thrilling the ways the chapters intersect with each other, both within and across sections. John Saillant's excellent, careful chapter on Edwards's ministry to the bound and enslaved (Part 3), which claims not that Edwards was an abolitionist but that abolitionist Christianity gained a foothold in his typology, might be read alongside David D. Kling's earlier sense (Part 1) that “Edwards is best understood as a transitional figure in international missions” (52). Heber Carlos De Campos, Jr.'s framing of the “upsurge of different representations of evangelical faith” in twentieth-century Brazil (Part 4) recalls George Marsden's survey of the Protestant “sects of various varieties” (45) that flooded eighteenth-century New England (Part 1). This is not to say that the chapters exist in some kind of easy alignment; it would be very dull if they did. William Wainwright identifies God, in Edwards's ontology, with divine simplicity, and Kyle C. Strobel, with “standard,” albeit idiosyncratic, “attributes of classical trinitarianism” (123). Willem Van Vlastuin rearranges the emphases of the three preceding chapters, on the Father, Son, and Spirit, to examine Edwards's views on the covenant of grace, a subject that Phillip Hussey and Michael McClymond then approach from a different angle when they clarify where predestination, in Edwards's “Miscellanies,” refers primarily not “to the election or rejection of individual human being, or of an elect covenant people, but rather to the christological conditioning of creation as such” (199).
Other debates were, to this reviewer, less recognizable. There are moments so deep in the weeds it can be hard, even for one with a strong taste for theological specificity, to ascertain to what audience they might be addressed. The collection supplies an answer: the authors are writing, chiefly, for each other. Who else but another theologian could appreciate S. Mark Hamilton's forays into Chalcedonian dictates, Hylomorphic dualism, the possibility that a “three-part concrete-nature view (Part 1—the Son + Part 2—human soul + Part 3—human body) . . . might open the door to the Nestorian heresy,” and “the abstract-nature account of the hypostatic union” (137, 140). Beyond this, they are arguing with Edwards, and then with each other's arguments with Edwards. Sebastian Rehnman, for instance, invokes Wittgenstein's natural language philosophy to contend that “Edwards fallaciously infers that since one cannot doubt that one exists, one must know that one exists by mistaking essential and accidental relations between the meaning of the predicate and the meaning of the subject in ‘I know I exist’” (347).
One sign of this internal-facing disposition is the uniformity of the chapters’ biographies. Part of this is inevitable, of course. There are very few contexts in which one could responsibly talk about Edwards without invoking Sang Hyun Lee and Oliver Crisp's divergent readings of Edwards's metaphysics, or Marsden's biography, or McClymond and Gerald R. McDermott's comprehensive account of Edwards's theology, or anything by Kenneth P. Minkema. But the Handbook makes only slight reference to authors who have, for instance, provided Indigenous contexts for Edwards's evangelism, notably Linford D. Fisher and Joanna Brooks. And there is no reference at all to, say, Sharon Cameron's discovery of Edwards's centrality to an idea of impersonality, or, also from 2007, Branka Arsić's brilliant reading of Melville's attorney in “Bartleby, the Scrivener” as “Edwards's philosophical disciple” (21). Manuscripts such as these are simply not in the volume's orbit.
My worry, then, is that one would be forgiven for coming away from the Handbook thinking that literary criticism and theory had very little to contribute to Edwards studies. Misapprehension about what the field is and does also manifests organizationally; the one chapter on literature appears in Part 4, alongside accounts of Edwards's reception in North America, Britain and Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa, and Latin America—as though literary study of Edwards were its own continent. Disappointing as this placement is, it is also deserved, since Sandra M. Gustafson's straightforward survey of nineteenth- to twenty-first-century American authors’ invocation of Edwards moves in the direction of national. A respectable approach, to be sure, but I would have appreciated analysis.
Need it be said, these disciplinary qualifications do not and cannot override the mastery that the book evinces, the seriousness with which its chapters plumb Edwards, in all his dimensions, and the stunning provision it makes for the continuance of his study. We are indebted to them all.
