In the middle of the seventeenth century, the English ballad The World Turned Upside Down appeared as a protest against Parliament's new laws regulating the celebration of Christmas. The woodcut on its frontispiece playfully depicts what the subtitle describes as “the ridiculous fashions of these distracted times”: a man wears his trousers on his arms and shirt on his legs, a rat chases a cat, a wheelbarrow pushes a man, a horse drives the cart, and so on. Few deny that the seventeenth century was one of the most tumultuous in all of English history. The political history of the period saw the meteoric rise of puritan political power, the execution of a king, the Interregnum, the Restoration of the monarchy, and the Glorious Revolution, to name only the most obvious upheavals. Religious history, inextricably intertwined with the political, saw similarly transformative changes. New sects proliferated, and spotty or nonexistent censorship meant the print market was flooded with religious literature of all sorts. Puritans first suffered under the Laudians, then gained power and retaliated against their opponents, only to suffer again when their political fortunes were reversed. Little wonder that many in the day saw a church in crisis—indeed, in need of salvation itself.
In this useful work, Daniel Norman portrays his subject as particularly well suited for this challenge. He sees John Edwards (not to be confused with the better known preacher of the Great Awakening) as an “unduly neglected figure” (1) who can teach us much about the church of his day, and perhaps even our own. Although his Calvinism meant that Edwards was in the minority and often on the defensive, Norman argues he was unique in that he “willingly subordinated many doctrines and practices which he held dear to the unity of the church, while remaining in the church and continuing to defend his Reformed understanding” (4). This role as “dissenting conformer” made his brand of toleration unique among his peers both within and outside the established church, a posture which Norman counts as Edwards's chief contribution.
Following a survey of Edwards's life and context in Restoration England, the core of the book consists of four chapters highlighting Edwards's commitment to trinitarian orthodoxy and the unity of the church. The lengthiest chapter covers his polemics against the antitrinitarians, a chief target of which was John Locke, the anonymous author of The Reasonableness of Christianity. The work was one of several in the day to offer a Christianity that minimized or excluded as unnecessary truths not accessible via reason. Edwards responded with Socinianism Unmask'd, which accused Locke of selective exegesis and claimed his teaching was tantamount to atheism, or at least had an “atheistic tang” (48). Many others joined the subsequent pamphlet war, but Edwards, who prided himself on not letting any insult go unchallenged, held his ground. Norman gives a thorough accounting of these conflicts and sides with those who judge Locke to have been among the antitrinitarians or Socinians, the more common term of the day. As a reader of Edwards, Norman has an eye for mining the occasional bon mot or insult out of the dense polemics, such as when Edwards calls out Locke's professed lack of knowledge of Socinian writings: that just made Locke an “Ignoramus Socinian,” (52) that is, a Socinian, but not a very well-read one.
Norman's second key theme is Edwards's commitment to the unity of the church. This commitment, however, was qualified. Edwards condemned and excluded those who challenged traditional ideas about the Trinity or Incarnation, but sought to engage in debate others in the church he believed to be in error on theological doctrines, such as Arminians or those who upheld an episcopal polity. Although Edwards was operating from a position of weakness as a Calvinist, Norman depicts his accommodation of the established Church's theological diversity as principled rather than pragmatic. When it came to dissenters who chose to leave the Church of England over questions of sacraments, liturgy, or church government, Edwards sympathized but chose in each case to favor the unity of the church. At the same time, he defended these “orthodox dissenters” against critics by pointing out that even some church leaders did not consistently uphold the Thirty-Nine Articles.
Saving the Church of England contributes to the understanding of the evolution of Calvinism in the Restoration era, a time when those committed to the Reformed tradition had to negotiate their position as minority players in the English religious landscape. Previously, the most substantive modern treatment of Edwards was a chapter in Dewey Wallace's excellent study Shapers of English Calvinism, 1660–1714 (2011). Wallace's subtitle—Variety, Persistence, and Transformation—hints at his thesis, and his Edwards embodies it as an uneasy conformist to the Church of England who emphasized its Reformed heritage but creatively transformed that heritage to meet new theological challenges. Norman has more interest than Wallace in defending Edwards's agenda, going so far as to say that had conformists and non-conformists alike adopted his understanding of what counted as essential and non-essential and accommodated those who disagreed with love, “Church of England schism could have largely been avoided” (205). Such a claim is not sustainable historically, but it does reveal Norman's sympathies, which lie with Edwards's attempt to save the English church by guarding its orthodoxy and rooting out heresies. Indeed, Norman hints at but does not extensively develop Edwards as “someone to instruct the present day” (8). In a similar vein, he occasionally inserts himself into historical arguments, such as when he claims one antitrinitarian writer “completely missed Edwards's logic and attempted to make Edwards appear inconsistent” (54). Surely this misses the point of polemical writing, which does not count charitable reading of one's opponent as a virtue. Overall, this sympathy does not detract from the book's main historical purpose of outlining the principles informing Edward's thought and key controversies. The question remains whether or not the church he sought so fervently to restore to Reformed orthodoxy wished to be so saved.
