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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
‘There is no historical task’, wrote Albert Schweitzer in 1906, ‘which so reveals a man's true self as the writing of a Life of Jesus.’ In his famous study of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century quest for the ‘historical Jesus’, Schweitzer exposed the tendency of each generation of scholars to find its own thoughts in the man from Nazareth. Since Schweitzer, scholars have become ever more skeptical about the possibility of ‘objective’ interpretation. Hans-Georg Gadamer, noting the predilection of readers to rewrite texts in their own language, concluded that ‘all understanding is self-understanding’. Quentin Skinner, taking a different tack, complained that history all too often becomes ‘a pack of tricks we play on the dead’. And Peter Novick, carrying the criticisma step further, observed that even if scholars recognize the specks in their opponents' eyes, they usually fail to see the logs in their own. In short, if modern hermeneutical studies since Schweitzer have conveyed one overriding message, it is that subjectivity is inescapable.
2 Schweitzer, Albert, The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of Its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede, trans. Montgomery, W. (New York: Macmillan, 1968), p. 4. Originally published as Von Reimarus zu Wrede (1906).Google Scholar
3 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, ‘On the Problem of Self-Understanding’, in Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans, and ed. Linge, David E. (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 55–57.Google Scholar
4 Skinner, Quentin, quoting Voltaire ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, in Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics, ed. Tully, James (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 37.Google Scholar
5 A paraphrase of one argument from Novick, Peter, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 12CrossRefGoogle Scholar
6 On Edwards' popular influence in the nineteenth century, see two articles by Conforti, Joseph: ‘Jonathan Edwards's Most Popular Work: “The Life of David Brainerd” and Nineteenth-Century Evangelical Culture’, Church History 54 (1985): pp. 188–201CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and ‘Antebellum Evangelicals and the Cultural Revival of Jonathan Edwards’, American Presbyterians 64 (1986): pp. 227–241Google Scholar. On the nineteenth-century influence of Edwards' Brainerd, see also Norman Pettit's introduction to The Life of David Brainerd, WY7: pp. 71–79.
7 May, Henry F., ‘Jonathan Edwards and America’, in Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience, ed. Hatch, Nathan O. and Stout, Harry S. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 23.Google Scholar
8 Winslow, Ola Elizabeth, Jonathan Edwards (New York: Macmillan, 1941), pp. 326–327.Google Scholar
9 Miller, Perry, Jonathan Edwards (1949; reprint, Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981), p. 63.Google Scholar
10 Quoted in Donald Weber, ‘The Recovery of Jonathan Edwards’, in Hatch and Stout, eds., Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience, p. 65. See also Niebuhr, H. Richard, The Kingdom of God in America (1937; reprint, Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), especially pp. 137, 193Google Scholar; and Sandon, Leo Jr., ‘Jonathan Edwards and H. Richard Niebuhr’. Religious Studies 12 (1976): pp. 101–115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
11 This formulation is borrowed from Hunter, James Davison, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: BasicBooks, HarperCollins, 1991).Google Scholar
12 Murray, Iain H.Jonathan Edwards: A New Biography (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1987), p. xxixGoogle Scholar. As a resident of Great Britain, Murray is not technically a combatant in the American ‘culture wars’ identified by Hunter (see previous note). Yet Murray's engagement with American scholars is evidence that culture wars affect societies on both sides of the Atlantic.
13 Gerstner, John H., ‘The View of the Bible Held by the Church: Calvin and the Westminster Divines’, in Inerrancy, ed. Geisler, Norman L. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1979), p. 402.Google Scholar
14 Holleman, Warren Lee, ‘Jonathan Edwards' Vision — As Viewed Through Feminist Hindsight’, Journal of Religious Studies 17 (1991): pp. 1–18.Google Scholar
15 Peter Novick makes this point in That Noble Dream, 6. Yet the effects of subjectivity — e.g., the tendency of readers to ‘rewrite’ texts in their own language — are not always immediately obvious. Wendy Griswold has pointed out that subjective ‘reconstructions’ of a cultural object (such as a text) usually become apparent only in comparison with the reconstructions of others.(See Griswold, Wendy, ‘A Methodological Framework for the Sociology of Culture’, Sociological Methodology 17 [1987]: pp. 1–35.) The juxtaposition of different interpretations of Edwards thus becomes an important interpretive exercise.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
16 Rorty, Richard, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 42–43Google Scholar. Rorty borrows the phrase ‘glassy essence’ from Isabella's ‘ape and essence’ speech in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure.
17 My argument is somewhat akin to that developed by Wendy Griswold in her study of interpretations of the Barbadian novelist George Lamming. Griswold surveys the widely divergent readings of Lamming by reviewersin the West Indies, Britain, and the United States. From this, she hypothesizes a correlation between the power of cultural objects and their ‘perceived degrees of ambiguity’. In the case of Lamming, his ambiguous writing style supports a rich variety of interpretations. See Griswold, Wendy, ‘The Fabrication of Meaning: Literary Interpretation in the United States, Great Britain, and the West Indies’, American Joumal of Sociology 92 (March 1987): pp. 1077–1117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
18 Noll, Mark A., ‘And the winner is… Jonathan Edwards?’ Reformed Journal 39 (March 1989): pp. 5–6Google Scholar; see also Noll, , ‘God at the Center: Jonathan Edwards on True Virtue’, The Christian Century 110 (8–15 September 1993): pp. 854–858.Google Scholar
19 Bushman, Richard L., ‘Jonathan Edwards as Great Man: Identity, Conversion, and Leadership in the Great Awakening’, in Critical Essays on Jonathan Edwards, ed. Scheick, William J. (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1980), pp. 41–64Google Scholar. Originally published in Soundings 52 (Spring 1969): pp. 15–46.Google Scholar
20 An Unpublished Essay of Edwards on the Trinity, ed. Fisher, George P. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1903), p. 77Google Scholar. Fisher's edition, a direct transcription of Edwards' rough notes, retains Edwards' own peculiar capitalizations and abbreviations. I have used modern capitalization and have replaced abbreviations with the intended words or phrases.
21 Ibid., pp. 88, 93–94.
22 Ibid., p. 110. An earlier, but similar, attempt by Edwards to explain the Trinity is no. 94 of the ‘Miscellanies’, See The ‘Miscellanies’, a–500, ed. Thomas A. Schafer, WY 13: pp. 256–263. Interestingly, Edwards defended his own philosophical speculation about the Trinity as a natural application of reason to Scripture. If such use of reason must be condemned as unscriptural, Edwards declared, then ‘I am not afraid to say twenty things about the Trinity which the Scripture never said’ (p. 257).
23 The ‘Miscellanies’, a–500, no. 362, p. 434.
24 God's Excellencies', in Sermons and Discourses, 1720–1723, ed. Wilson H. Kimnach, p. 423.
25 Concerning the End for which God Created the World, in Ethical Writings, ed. Paul Ramsey, WY 8: pp. 432–33.
26 Ibid., p. 531.
27 Essay on the Trinity, pp. 120–21.
28 Ibid., p. 123. Various scholars have noted the importance of the internal dynamics of the Godhead to JE's theology. See, e.g., Fiering, Norman, Jonathan Edwards's Moral Thought and Its British Context (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), pp. 82–84Google Scholar; Cherry, Conrad, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards: A Reappraisal, rev. ed. (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 25–27Google Scholar; Lee, Sang Hyun, The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 4ffGoogle Scholar; and Jenson, Robert W., America's Theologian: A Recommendation of Jonathan Edwards (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 104–106.Google Scholar
29 The ‘Miscellanies, ’ a–500, no. 22, p. 211.
30 Various authors have noted the Arminianizing tendencies of much nineteenth-century theology. See, e.g., Smith, Timothy L., Revivalism and Social Reform in Mid- Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Abingdon Press, 1957), pp. 33, 88ffGoogle Scholar; and McLoughlin, William G., Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607–1977 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 113ff.Google Scholar
31 ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’, Jonathan Edwards: Basic Writings, ed. Winslow, Ola Elizabeth (New York: Meridian, 1966), p. 159Google Scholar. A recent, and relatively judicious, presentation of this sermon in a school textbook may be found in Prentice Hall Literature: The American Experience (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1989–).Google Scholar
32 Warfield, Benjamin B., ‘Edwards and the New England Theology’, in Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. Hastings, James, vol. 5 (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1908–1927), p. 225Google Scholar. For a lengthier treatment of the opinions of Warfield and other nineteenth-and early twentieth-century theologians on Edwards, see Noll, Mark A., ‘Jonathan Edwards and Nineteenth-Century Theology’, in Hatch, and Stout, , eds., Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience, pp. 260–287.Google Scholar
33 Freedom of the Will, ed. Paul Ramsey, WY 1: p. 131.
34 Quentin Skinner has cautioned against facile identifications of ‘influence’ of one thinker upon another. Nevertheless, the well-known argument of Perry Miller — that Edwards recast traditional Calvinism in the idiom of Newton and Locke — has become a commonplace in the literature. (Cf. the evaluation of Smith, James Ward, who argues that each of Edwards' major works was ‘designed to reinterpret a fundamental Calvinist axiom in the light of Newton and Locke’. In The Concise Encyclopedia of Western Philosophy and Philosophers, rev. edition, ed. Urmson, J.O. and Rée, Jonathan [London: Unwin Hyman, 1989], pp. 86–87Google Scholar) I would argue that the ‘influence’ of Calvin (or Newton, or Locke) upon Edwards is difficult to determine with any precision. Thus, while arguments for ‘influence’ are not entirely devoid of explanatory force, as Skinner contends, such assertions must only be ventured in the presence of overwhelming supporting evidence.(See Skinner, Quentin, ‘Meaning and Understanding…’, pp. 45–56.)Google Scholar
35 According to Sydney Ahlstrom, no doctrine of JE was more ignored by subsequent generations than the imputation of Adam's sin. See Ahlstrom, , A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972), p. 308Google Scholar. Similarly, Patricia J. Tracy claims that ‘Edwardsean theology was … the Western world's last emphatic statement of man's utter depravity’. See Tracy, , Jonathan Edwards, Pastor: Religion and Society in Eighteenth-Century Northampton (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979), p. 6Google Scholar. Rufus Suter argues that JE's exclusivist scheme of salvation seems ‘remarkably foreign and remote’ to most contemporary persons. See Suter, , ‘The Strange Universe of Jonathan Edwards’, Harvard Theological Review 54 (1961): p. 125.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
36 ‘Miscellaneous Observations Concerning the Divine Decrees in General, and Election in Particular’, in The Works of President Edwards, ed. Austin, Samuel, vol. 5 (Worcester, 1808), p. 357.Google Scholar
37 Freedom of the Will, p. 399.
38 The ‘Miscellanies’, a–500, no. n, p. 169.
39 Kuklick, Bruce, Churchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 35.Google Scholar
40 Freedom of the Will, p. 164. Balancing freedom and determinism was, of course, no small philosophical challenge, and some scholars have maintained that Edwards' position between the two poles was essentially unstable. This is implied, e.g., by Guelzo, Allen C., Edwards on the Will: A Century of American Theological Debate (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), pp. 81–82.Google Scholar
41 The ‘Miscellanies’, a–500, no. o, p. 170.
42 Ibid., no. 71, p. 240.
43 Freedom of the Will, p. 174.
44 Conforti, , ‘Jonathan Edwards's Most Popular Work’, p. 199.Google Scholar
45 This point is made, e.g., by Pahl, Jon, Paradox Lost: Free Will and Political Liberty in American Culture, 1630–1760 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 151Google Scholar. Pahl notes that JE, in fact, ‘supported the anti-extremist status quo — the establishment of mediation, where human liberty was connected in some way to both the providence of God and moral responsibility’ (p. 161).
46 Original Sin, ed. Clyde A. Holbrook, WY 3: p. 402.
47 ‘Things to be Considered and Written fully about’, #47, in Scientific and Philosophical Writings, ed. Anderson, Wallace E., WY 6: pp. 241–242Google Scholar. Cf. The ‘Miscellanies; a–500, no. 125[a], p. 288:’ ‘Tis certain with me that the world exists anew every moment, that the existence of things every moment ceases and is every moment renewed.’
48 ‘Of Atoms’, in Scientific and Philosophical Writings, p. 214. Cf. the statement in the ‘Miscellanies’, (no. 741) quoted by Jenson, America's Theologian, p. 43: ‘Every atom in the universe is managed by Christ so as to be most to the advantage of the Christian’.
49 ‘A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God…’, in The Great Awakening, ed. Goen, C.C., WY 4: p. 152.Google Scholar
50 Ibid., pp. 168, 104. For a more detailed analysis of the conversion process as outlined by Edwards, see Jinkins, Michael, ‘The “True Remedy”: Jonathan Edwards' Soteriological Perspective as Observed in his Revival Treatises’, Scottish Journal of Theology 48 (1995): pp. 185–209.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
51 Religious Affections, ed. Smith, John E., WY 2: pp. 99–100.Google Scholar
52 Ibid., p. 120.
53 Ibid., p. 266.
54 Ibid., p. 144.
55 Ibid., p. 406. In a provocative recent article, Andrew and Thomas Delbanco argue that Edwards' emphasis on religious practice helped shape a twentieth-century, quasi-religious organization: Alcoholics Anonymous. Bill Wilson, A.A.'s founder, encountered Edwards through William James, who claimed that the insistence on judging religion by its fruits encapsulated the whole of Edwards' thought. Wilson subsequently emphasized practice over piety in A.A.'s ‘Twelve Steps’. See ‘Annals of Addiction: A.A. at the Crossroads’, The New Yorker, 20 March 1995.
56 Hall, David D., introduction to Ecclesiastical Writings, Wy 12: p. 84.Google Scholar
57 ‘An Humble Inquiry into the Rules of the Word of God, Concerning the Qualifications Requisite to a Complete Standing and Full Communion in the Visible Christian Church’, in Ecclesiastical Writings, p. 213.
58 William A. Clebsch, e.g., charges that JE's revivalist heirs, ‘the Charles Grandison Finneys and Dwight Lyman Moodys and Norman Vincent Peales … enshrined religious feeling as a substitute for thinking’. See Clebsch, , American Religious Thought: A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 55–56.Google Scholar
59 ‘The Nature of True Virtue’, in Ethical Writings, pp. 540, 550.
60 See, e.g., his ‘Notes on the Apocalypse’ and ‘An Humble Attempt’ in Apocalyptic Writings, ed. Stephen J. Stein, WY 5.
61 ‘Postmillennialism’ refers to the optimistic belief that the Kingdom of Christ will be realized before the actual Second Coming. On millennialist thought in American culture, see Tuveson, Ernest Lee, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America's Millennial Role (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).Google Scholar
62 Goen, C.C., ‘Jonathan Edwards: A New Departure in Eschatology’, Church History 28 (1959): pp. 25–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The primary critique of Goen is that of John F. Wilson, who argues that Goen failed to recognize the importance of Edwards' postmillennialist precursors. ‘History, Redemption, and the Millennium’, in Hatch and Stout, eds., Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience, pp. 131–41.
63 ‘Some Thoughts Concerning the Revival of Religion in New England…’, in The Great Awakening, pp. 353–55.
64 A History of the Work of Redemption, ed. John F. Wilson, Wy 9. The inclusion of ‘History’ in the title of this work is misleading, as Wilson has argued (see his introduction, pp. 97–99). Edwards was not writing history in the postcritical sense, and thus the Work of Redemption cannot be evaluated in terms of modern historiography. For another statement of this argument, see Wilson, , ‘Jonathan Edwards as Historian’, Church History 46 (1977): pp. 5–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
65 Work of Redemption, pp. 294, 305.
66 Ibid., pp. 228, 354.
67 Ibid., pp. 373, 414. Some years earlier, in the ‘Miscellanies’, Edwards implicated France as the ‘grand fountain of Popery’. France ‘has been the great river that has watered the antichristian world; this has been their market place, their great university, the seat and fountain of their learning and policy’. See The ‘Miscellanies’, a–500, no. xx, p. 185.
68 Work of Redemption, pp. 423, 409.
69 Ibid., p. 517.
70 ‘The Mind’, in Scientific and Philosophical Writings, 350 (#27). Cf. The ‘Miscellanies’, a–500, no. 179, p. 327: The ‘existence of all corporeal things is only ideas’.
71 See, e.g., ibid., p. 215: ‘[T]here is no proper substance but God himself.’ Or again, p. 356: ‘[A]ll material existence is only idea.’
72 The ‘Miscellanies’, a–500, no. 362, p. 435.
73 Both notebooks are contained in Typological Writings, ed. Wallace E. Anderson, Mason I. Lowance, and David H. Watters, WY 11.
74 Much recent scholarship on JE has focused on his typologizing. The emerging consensus seems to be that JE's use of natural, as well as biblical, types was not discontinuous with the practices of his immediate Puritan predecessors. See, e.g., Cherry, Conrad, Nature and Religious Imagination: From Edwards to Bushnell (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980)Google Scholar. Other literature on JE and typology includes: Butler, Diana, ‘God's Visible Glory: The Beauty of Nature in the Thought of John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards’, Westminster Theological Journal 52 (1990): pp. 13–26Google Scholar; Knight, Janice, ‘Learning the Language of God: Jonathan Edwards and the Typology of Nature’, William and Mary Quarterly 48 (1991): pp. 531–551CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Wainwright, William J., ‘Jonathan Edwards and the Language of God,’ Journal of the American Academy of Religion 48 (1980): pp. 519–530CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Earlier this century Miller, Perry first laid the foundation for study of JE's typology with his edition of Edwards' Images or Shadows of Divine Things (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948)Google Scholar. See also Miller, , ‘From Edwards to Emerson’, in Errand into the Wilderness (1956; reprint, Cambridge Mass.: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1984).Google Scholar
75 The biblical revelation of Christ was the necessary precondition for viewing nature's divine glory, as Simonson, Harold P. notes in ‘Jonathan Edwards and the Imagination’, Andover Newton Quarterly 16 (1975): pp. 109–118Google Scholar. For discussion of Edwards' biblical hermeneutics, see Cherry, Conrad, ‘Symbols of Spiritual Truth: Jonathan Edwards as Biblical Interpreter’, Interpretation 39 (1985): pp. 263–271Google Scholar; Stein, Stephen J., ‘The Quest for the Spiritual Sense: The Biblical Hermeneutics of Jonathan Edwards’, Harvard Theological Review 70 (1977): pp. 99–113CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Stein, Stephen J., ‘The Spirit and the Word: Jonathan Edwards and Scriptural Exegesis’, in Hatch, and Stout, , eds., Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience, pp. 118–130.Google Scholar
76 ‘Images of Divine Things’, no. 33, Typological Writings, p. 59.
77 Ibid., no. 142, p. 100.
78 Ibid., no. 146, p. 101.
79 ‘Types’, in Typological Writings, p. 152.