God Glorified in
the Work of Redemption, By the Greatness of Man's Dependence on
Him, 1731; A Divine and Supernatural Light, Immediately
imparted to the Soul by the Spirit of God, Shown to be both a
Scriptural, and Rational Doctrine, 1734; The Duty and
Interest of a People, Among Whom Religion has been planted, to
Continue Stedfast and Sincere In The Profession and Practice of
it, 1736; A Letter To The Author Of the Pamphlet Called An
Answeer to the Hampshire Narrative, 1737; Discourses on
Various Important Subjects, Nearly concerning the great Affair of
the Soul's Eternal Salvation, 1738; The Distinguishing
Marks Of a Work of the Spirit of God, 1741; The Resort and
Remedy of those that are bereaved by the Death of an eminent
Minister, 1741; Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,
1745; Some Thoughts Concerning the present Revival of
Religion in New-England, 1742; The great Concern of a
Watchman for Souls, 1743; The true Excellency of a Minister
of the Gospel…1744; A Treatise Concerning Religious
Affections, 1746; Religious Affections; A Careful, and
Strict Enquiry ... of that Freedom of Will, 1754; The Great
Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended, 1758; Two
Dissertations, 1765: a. "The Nature of True Virtue" and
"Concerning the End for which God Created the World."
The works of Jonathan
Edwards. Perry Miller, general editor. New Haven: Yale UP,
1957-1989. BX7117 .E3 1957 Library Has: v.1-v.9:
Freedom of
the will. Edited by Paul Ramsey. 1957. BX7117 .E3 1957 v.1
Religious
affections. Edited by John E. Smith. 1959. BX7117 .E3 1957
v.2
Original sin.
Edited by Clyde A. Holbrook. 1970. BX7117 .E3 1957 v.3
The great
awakening: A faithful narrative. The distinguishing marks. Some
thoughts concerning The revival, letters relating to The
revival. Preface to True religion by Joseph Bellamy. Edited
by C. C. Goen. 1972. BX7117 .E3 1957 v.4
Apocalyptic
writings. Edited by Stephen J. Stein. 1977. BX7117 .E3 1957
v.5
Scientific and
philosophical writings. Edited by Wallace E. Anderson.
1980. BX7117 .E3 1957 v.6
The life of David
Brainerd. Edited by Norman Pettit. 1985. BX7117 .E3 1957
v.7
Ethical
writings. Edited by Paul Ramsey. 1989. BX7117 .E3 1957
v.8
A history of the
work of redemption. Eited by John F. Wilson. 1989. BX7117
.E3 1957 v.9
A Jonathan Edwards
reader. Edited by John E. Smith, Harry S. Stout, and Kenneth
P. Minkema. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995. BR50 .E34
Aldridge, Alfred O.
Jonathan Edwards. NY: Washington Square P, 1964. BX7260 .E3
A59
Brand, David C. Profile
of the Last Puritan: Jonathan Edwards, Self-Love, and the Dawn of the
Beatific. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991.
Carse, James P. Jonathan
Edwards & the Visibility of God. NY: Scribner, 1967.
BX7260.E3 C3
Conforti, Joseph A.
Jonathan Edwards, Religious Tradition, and American Culture.
Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995.
Cowell, Patricia.
Jonathan Edwards. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988.
Davidson, Edward H.
Jonathan Edwards: The Narrative of a Puritan Mind. Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1968. BX7260 E3 D3
Elwood, Douglas J. The
Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards. NY: Columbia UP,
1960. BX7260.E3 E5
Fiering, Norman. Jonathan
Edwards's Moral Thought and its British Context. Chapel Hill: U
of North Carolina P, 1981. BX7260 .E3 F53
Hatch, Nathan O. Jonathan
Edwards and the American Experience. NY: Oxford UP, 1988. BX7260
.E3 J65
Jenson, Robert W.
America's Theologian: A Recommendation of Jonathan Edwards.
NY: Oxford UP, 1988. BX 7260 .E3 J45
Kuklick, Bruce. Churchmen
and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey. New Haven:
Yale UP, 1985. BT30 .U6 K85
Lesser, M. X. Jonathan
Edwards. Boston: Twayne P, 1988. PS742 .L47
- - -. Jonathan Edwards:
An Annotated Bibliography, 1979-1993.Westport, CT: Greenwood,
1994.
Levin, David. Jonathan
Edwards: A Profile. NY: Hill and Wang, 1969. BX7260 E3 L4
Miller, Perry. Jonathan
Edwards. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1981. BX7260 .E3
M5
Oberg, Barbara B. and Harry
S. Stout. Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards, and the
Representation of American Culture. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1993.
Scheick, William J., ed.
Critical Essays On Jonathan Edwards. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980.
BX7260.E3 C67
- - - - - The Writings Of
Jonathan Edwards: Theme, Motif, and Style. College Station: Texas
A & M UP, 1975. PS742 S3
Smith, John E, Harry S.
Stout and Kenneth P. Minkema. A Jonathan Edwards Reader. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995.
Tracy, Patricia J.
Jonathan Edwards, Pastor: Religion and Society in Eighteenth
Century Northampton. NY: Hill and Wang, 1980. BX7260.E3
T72
Beam, Perry. "Sarah
Pierrepont and the Gentle Side of Jonathan Edwards." Pleiades
10:1 (Winter 1990): 38-42.
Bell, Richard H. "On
Trusting One's Own Heart: Skepticism in Jonathan Edwards and Soren
Kierkegaard." History of European Ideas 12:1. (1990):
105-116.
Bushman, Richard L.
"Jonathan Edwards as Great Man: Identity, Conversion, and Leadership
in the Great Awakening." Critical Essays on Jonathan Edwards.
Ed. William J. Scheick. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1980.
Chamberlain, Ava. "The Grand
Sower of the Seed: Jonathan Edwards's Critique of George Whitefield."
New england quarterly 70.3 (Sep 1997): 368-86.
Dunn, Elizabeth E. "'A Wall
Between Them Up to Heaven': Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin."
Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards, and the Representation of
American Culture. Eds. Barbara B. Oberg and Harry S. Stout. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Gustafson, Sandra. "Jonathan
Edwards and the Reconstruction of 'Feminine' Speech." American
Literary History 6:2 (Summer 1994): 185-212.
Lowance, Mason I. Jr.
"Sacvan Bercovitch and Jonathan Edwards." Sacvan Bercovitch and
the Puritan Imagination. Ed. Michael Schuldiner. Lewiston, NY:
Mellan, 1992.
- - -. "Jonathan Edwards and
the Platonists: Edwarsean Epistemology and the Influence of
Malebranche and Norris." Studies in Puritan American
Spirituality 2. 1991: 129-152.
Munk, Linda. "Hiz Dazzling
Absence: The Shekinah in Jonathan Edwards." Early American
Literature 27:1 (1992): 1-30.
Pudaloff, Ross J. "'Sinners
in the Hands of an Angry God': The Socio-economic and Intellectual
Matrices for Edwards' Sermon." Mosaic 16 (1983): 45-64.
Scheick, William J. "The
Grand Design: Jonathan Edwards' History of the Work of Redemption."
Critical Essays on Jonathan Edwards. Ed. William J. Sheick.
Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1980.
| Top
| I. Liberal Innovations made by Solomon (Samuel)
Stoddard (Edwards' Grandfather)
1. Stopped the
requirement that church members profess an experience of saving
grace.
2. Accepted intellectual
will to believe and assumption of Christian duties.
3. Opened the Lord’s
Supper to everybody, arguing that the sacrament need not be
reserved as a seal of faith for the believers, but might very well
be a means of converting to belief.
4. Believed that
salvation rested on individual moral effort as well as on grace;
stressed morality rather than piety.
Jonathan Edwards is
considered the leader of The Great Awakening in New England. It is a
name given to a religious revival in 1730s which brought about the
following changes in the Puritan theology:
1. Stressed the
emotional side of religion.
2. This weakened
institutional authority; regeneration was not certified by church,
but by one’s own emotional conviction.
3. It bypassed doctrinal
orthodoxy; the convert’s immediate sense of participating in
spiritual reality rendered intellectual formulations less
significant.
4. It made religion more
popular; it is easier to experience emotional excitement than
rational understanding.
5. It made religion more
democratic; by emphasizing the individual experience of
conversion, and the equal capacity of everyone, child or adult,
rich or poor, ignorant or wise, to be touched by the inner
experience of grace.
6. It made religion
trans-colonial; breakdown of distinctions between church and
creed, it encouraged the proliferation of sects which led to
vagueness in doctrine, laxness in discipline, and faded into
general religious indifference. It gave rise to a community
organized in pursuit of secular values.
| Top
| III. Aspects of Edwards' Religious
Philosophy
1. His mystical
conversion at age seventeen - "I often used to sit and view the
Moon, for a long time; and so in the daytime spent much time in
viewing the clouds and sky, to behold glory of God in these
things; in the meantime, singing forth, with a low voice, my
contemplations of the Creator and Redeemer." from "Personal
Narrative."
2. He agreed with John
Locke in the concept that ideas are generated by sense impressions
- knowledge must be supplemented by faith.
3. He believed in the
intuitive process; a person must passively surrender to receive
grace through senses. One cannot achieve saving grace through a
rational process.
4. From Isaac Newton,
Edwards borrowed the concept that the harmonious working of the
universe reflected the magnificence of "the Great Geometrician" or
God.
| Top
| IV. Edwards' Concrete Theism: Theism,
Pantheism, and Panentheism
According to Douglas Elwood
(listed above, pages 6-23), Edwards' theology opposes any view that
separates the Creator and the creation. He is interested in
discovering a unifying concept that would do justice to the majesty
of God and to the immediacy of His presence. His neo-Calvinism
appears in his conception of God in terms of absolute beauty
and not merely absolute power.
Theism
usually pictures the relation as one of spatial separation, as two
mutually exclusive circles - one representing the world, the other
God. The problem with this view is that it does not explain how,
if God is entirely separate from the world, He can at the same
time be active in the world in any intelligible sense.
Pantheism usually
pictures the world and God in terms of coextensive circles -
mutually inclusive, but also indistinguishable. God's
individuality is lost.
Elmood says that both these
traditional views are inadequate and even religiously dangerous. The
one separates God from the world, the other identifies God with the
world.
Pan-en-theism:
The third way in theology describes the relation in
concentric circles - the outer circle representing God in all His
inclusiveness, the inner circle symbolizing the world. The world
is in God. God includes the world yet He is "infinitely more
besides." He is the dynamic and creative center of the world - its
inner depth. This third way places God and the world in a
relationship of mutual immanence: God in the world and the world
in God. The "world in God" is logically prior to "God in the
world." and introduces a pan-en-theism - God is united with His
world and at the same time distinct from it in what has been
called "ecstatic transcendence."
Immediacy is not a union in
which the mystic loses self-consciousness, rather it is a living
encounter with the eternal Presence that confronts us along our
daily, concrete experience. Looked at in this light, Edwards'
philosophical position could be called concrete theism. This
element of concreteness enables him to look upon the the Christian
experience of God as not so much a separate and extraordinary event
as it is an overtone that is present potentially in every ordinary
experience we have.
1. Discuss Edwards's
manipulation of biblical language in Sinners in the Hands of an
Angry God. What specific transformations does he perform? And how
does his use of language in the "Application" section of the sermon
differ from and comment on the earlier doctrinal section?
2. Discuss the fact that
Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin were contemporaries. Explain,
with specific references to their works and more general comments on
their ideas, why this fact seems startling.
3. Write a brief comparative
analysis of form and function in Edward Taylor's poems and Jonathan
Edwards's sermons.
4. Discuss the following
statement, from "The Nature of True Virtue," in light of colonial
American history: "Things are in natural regularity . . . when he
whose heart opposes the general system, should have the hearts of
that system, or the heart of the ruler of the system, against him."
Include in your discussion both the decision of the Puritans to
settle in the New World and the later struggle of the colonists for
independence.
5. Jonathan Edwards is
considered the last great Puritan because of his efforts to revive a
dying theology. Discuss the important arguments contained in his
famous sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God..
MLA Style
Citation of this Web Page:
Reuben, Paul P.
"Chapter 2: Early American Literature: 1700-1800 - Jonathan
Edwards (1703-1758)." PAL: Perspectives in American Literature-
A Research and Reference Guide. URL:
http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap2/edwards.html
(provide page date or date of your login).
