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.