At just three chapters and some 150 pages, one senses that this book will serve as a prelude to a more thorough investigation of the subject matter, rather than a complete study. Indeed, with its focus on providing a context and methodology for analyzing certain aspects of Edwards's theology, it in many ways provides a blueprint or road map for how such analysis might be undertaken. Reklis's aim is to understand how Edwards attempted to fashion an understanding of the self in the face of early modern forces of transformation. Rationalism, capitalism, and slavery served to produce an increasingly fragmented or segmented idea of the self, one in which the body in particular was subordinated to a peripheral position. While Edwards was certainly a promoter of and participant in these fragmenting influences, he also recognized their peril to the spiritual well-being of his parishioners, as well as the social harmony so closely connected to religion in his theology.
Reklis extends the recent theological interest in the body and desire to Edwards's rhetorical and theological prosecution of the revivals. As such, the book explores the role that the body played in fostering the shared sense among the leaders of revivals (and their followers) that their experiences were in fact marks of divine effluence, as well as common experiences across time and place (the awakenings as a serial, trans-Atlantic phenomenon). Edwards's concerns about the fragmentation of the self found their answer in his theology of the divine being as an all-consuming beauty. God's being, as an irresistible beauty, draws all things into itself; humans, as a result, have the potential to reflect that beauty and its inherent harmony. The key for Edwards, and one that distinguished his theological anthropology from rationalist critics such as Charles Chauncy, was that God's beauty draws the whole person into divine communion: mind, body, and affections. Thus the body could serve as a potential (though not necessary) marker of God's work and presence, and as such an instrument to shape the understanding of that presence, and foster its continued development.
To conceptualize how the body functioned as a creator and conduit of knowledge, Reklis applies categories of performance theory to Edwards's role as an agent and articulator of revivalism, specifically the categories of scenario, repertoire, and kinesthetic imagination. Edwards's sermonic performances created a repertoire for the acting out of conversion experiences, heavily dependent on the body and emotions. That is, the repetitive nature of revival encounters resulted in a kind of recognized bodily morphology that marked God's work in the soul. Edwards's interpretive writings about the revivals, especially his Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (1737), served to create a scenario of universality: a belief that the comprehensive nature of the work of revival and its bodily expressions was an indicator of its divine origin. In all of this the body served as a vehicle of kinesthetic imagination. As the revivals were repeated, bodily gestures communicated the presence of God, but in each instance, the actors had to reimagine what those gestures had been and were to be.
One of the strengths of this study is its attempt to situate Edwards's theology of revivals and of the body in his historical context. Reklis analyzes how competing public forums (the tavern and the market place), new social relations (slavery), and the broadly shared turn toward epistemological certainty (rationalism and empiricism) undermined the human capacity for social concern, to the extent that they disrupted communal considerations and promoted the autonomy and interest of the self instead. Edwards's theology of the revivals was in part a response to this elevation of the individual over the communal. By insisting that conversion consisted in the “swallowing up” of the self into the divine being, with its perfect relational harmony (beauty), Edwards projected this back into his ideal of a divinely-ordered society, in which human relations would express this divine aesthetic harmony.
