Present at the Creation

Jonathan Edwards

A Life

by George M. Marsden

Yale University Press, 640 pp., $35

Jonathan Edwards and the Bible

by Robert E. Brown

Indiana University Press, 352 pp., $35

Jonathan Edwards's Philosophy of History

The Re-Enchantment of the World in the Age of Enlightenment

by Avihu Zakai

Princeton University Press, 368 pp., $49.95

"The Miscellanies," 833-1152

Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 20

edited by Amy Plantinga Pauw

Yale University Press, 560 pp., $95

Writings on the Trinity, Grace, and Faith

Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 21

edited by Sang Hyun Lee

Yale University Press, 592 pp., $95

Sermons and Discourses, 1739-1742

Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 22

edited by Harry S. Stout, et al.

Yale University Press, 608 pp., $95

The Supreme Harmony of All

The Trinitarian Theology of Jonathan Edwards

by Amy Plantinga Pauw

Wm. B. Eerdmans, 196 pp., $22

America's God

From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln

by Mark A. Noll

Oxford University Press, 640 pp., $35

ALMOST NO ONE seems to deny that Jonathan Edwards is America's greatest theologian--perhaps the greatest mind America has ever produced, in any field. But that doesn't mean many like him very much. Born three hundred years ago, on October 5, 1703, Edwards has always provoked extreme reactions.

No shrinking lily herself, Harriet Beecher Stowe complained that Edwards's sermons on sin and suffering were "refined poetry of torture." After staying up one night to browse in his works, Mark Twain reported, "Edwards's God shines red and hideous in the glow from the fires of hell, their only right and proper adornment. By God, I was ashamed to be in such company." Generations of American college students have learned similar conclusions about his most famous sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," in the "Puritans" section of their classes on American literature.

Such received opinions and settled readings of particular texts often cry out for a contrarian critic with a lance long enough to deflate them. But, even if it is an accurate reading of such sermons as "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," the notion of a hellfire-obsessed Edwards derives from abstracting a small portion of his works, never set in balance with the rest. And it obscures the fact that both in intellectual creativity and cultural influence, Edwards towers above any other religious thinker to have graced the American scene.

His 1754 "Freedom of the Will" set the agenda for philosophical debates for more than a century by its daring attempt to resolve the antinomy between freedom and determinism. Edwards also challenged Enlightenment presumptions about evil, history, and reason. His theological classic, the 1746 "Religious Affections," may be the most acute work on spiritual discernment in the history of Christian thought. Edwards seems, in fact, far more obsessed with beauty than wrath. In his emphasis on experience and his effort to extract himself from European thinking, he laid the foundation for subsequent American intellectual life. And in his attempts to combine a radical vision of holiness with the most capacious appreciation of beauty in God's creation, he laid the foundation for subsequent American public life. Jonathan Edwards is America.

BORN THE ONLY SON of a Harvard-educated pastor and theologically astute mother, Edwards studied theology at Yale and became its head tutor, the functional equivalent of president. After a year pastoring a Presbyterian congregation in New York City, he preached for twenty-four years as Congregationalist pastor at the First Church in Northampton, Massachusetts, New England's largest church outside Boston.

From 1740 to 1741 Edwards was a leader of, and public apologist for, the Great Awakening, the religious revival that swept up and down the Eastern seaboard. Edwards enjoyed his congregation's favor for fifteen years, but tensions began to mount when Edwards read from the pulpit the names of young men who were accused of reading a midwife's manual and harassing young women. In 1750 the Northampton church dismissed Edwards over the question of communion requirements. Edwards then spent almost seven years as a missionary to Indians in Stockbridge (western Massachusetts), writing there some of his most celebrated treatises: "The Nature of True Virtue," "Concerning the End for Which God Created the World," "Freedom of the Will," and "Original Sin." In 1758 he assumed the presidency of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), but died five weeks later after a smallpox outbreak.