Jonathan Edwards's Writings: Text, Context, Interpretation

This collection of essays presents groundbreaking contemporary scholarship on the writings of the eighteenth-century American philosopher and theologian Jonathan Edwards. These essays range widely across the Edwardsian canon, including his most prominent and important published texts - Religious Affections and The Nature of True Virtue - as well as unfamiliar and unpublished treatises and sermons. They measure Edwards against significant Western religious and philosophical figures including Solomon Stoddard, Thomas Shepard, George Berkeley, and William James. The current debate concerning the nineteenth-century Edwardsian tradition is also featured in essays which show prominent American evangelicals, such as Nathaniel William Taylor, Charles Grandison Finney, and Edwards Amasa Park, competing for the mantle of Edwards. A compact survey of current Edwards scholarship, this book engages the full range of Edwards's writings and shows their central importance for the history of American religion and culture.

"This book will take its place in libraries next to the finest works abou;this creative thinker." --Religious Studies Review

"... gives a fine sense of the present state and the future direction of Edwards studies... Recommended for upper-division undergraduate and graduate students." --Choice

"... this volume opens up new windows, not only on previously neglected texts of Jonathan Edwards, but on the larger cultural functions and effects of those texts." --Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences

Here is a compact survey of current Edwards scholarship. These essays present groundbreaking contemporary scholarship focusing on the writings of the 18th-century American philosopher and theologian Jonathan Edwards. They range widely across the Edwardsian canon, including his most prominent and important published texts--Religious Affections and The Nature of True Virtue--as well as unfamiliar treatises and sermons.

STEPHEN J. STEIN is Chancellors' Professor of Religious Studies, Adjunct Professor of History, and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is a member of the Editorial Board of The Works of Jonathan Edwards, editor of volume 5 in that edition (Apocalyptic Writings) and author of The Shaker Experience in America: A History of the United Society of Believers, which was awarded the Philip Schaff Prize in 1994 by the American Society of Church History.

Acknowledgments

Introduction by Stephen J. Stein

Part I. Text: Integrating Unpublished Manuscripts and Public Texts

1. Brides of Christ and Signs of Grace: Edwards's Sermon Series on the Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins. Eva Chamberlain

2. Misrepresentations Corrected: Jonathan Edwards and the Regulation of Religious Discourse. Christopher Grasso

3. The Deist Connection: Jonathan Edwards and Islam. Gerald R. McDermott

4. The Other Unfinished "Great Work": Jonathan Edwards, Messianic Prophecy, and "The Harmony of the Old and New Testament." Kenneth P. Minkema

Part II. Context: Interpreting Texts and Identifying Influences

5. "The Death of the Prophet Lamented": The Legacy of Solomon Stoddard. Paul R. Lucas

6. The Godly Will's Discerning: Shepard, Edwards, and the Identification of True Godliness. William K. B. Stoever

7. Did Berkeley Influence Edwards? Their Common Critique of the Moral Sense Theory. Ricahrd A.S. Hall

8. Perception and Love in Religious Affections. Wayne Proudfoot

Part III. Interpretation: Identifying and Claiming the Edwardsian Tradition

9. Nathaniel William Taylor and the Edwardsian Tradition: A Reassessment. Douglas A. Sweeney

10. Oberlin Perfectionism and Its Edwardsian Origins, 1835-1870. Allen C. Guelzo

11. "Reason for a Hope": Evangelical Women Making Sense of Late-Edwardsian Calvinism. Genevieve McCoy

12. Edwards A. Park and the Creation of the New England Theology, 1840-1870. Joseph Conforti

Contributors

Index