Edwards In Our Time

This fine work of intellectual retrieval highlights the abiding importance of Jonathan Edwards, one of the most significant figures in American religious history. Written by ten experts on the subject, these thought-provoking studies illustrate the many ways the influence of Edwards continues to be felt in contemporary American thought and explore how his ideas can enliven and shape modern theological discussion. Refusing to treat Edwards as simply a historical voice, this volume points out in ingenious ways how Edwards can be an ongoing resource for religious reflection in our time.

Jonathan Edwards and the Life of God aims to offer a retrieval of Edwards’s theology of participation for contemporary evangelical theology. It critically expounds and elucidates the concept of participation in God, or theosis, in Edwards’s Trinitarian theology as it relates to around three unions: the three persons of the Trinity, the hypostatic union of the divine and human in Christ, and that of believers with Christ. This volume brings Edwards’s rich theological work into conversation with the patristic (Augustine and the Cappadocians) and Reformed traditions (Calvin and, especially, Barth), in order to construct with Edwards a more hopeful, liberating, and truly human version of Christian life. Consideration of the life of God in Edwards thus moves “beyond” in two senses: first, perspectives on participation beyond those of Edwards from Barth, Volf, the Cappadocian Fathers, and others in the tradition, are engaged in order to locate and critique and enhance it; and secondly, in the sense that, as Hastings argues, participation leads, for Edwards and others, into the “beyond” of the beatific vision—the glory of God.

Since the publication of Sang Hyun Lee's revolutionary commentary, The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards, scholars have considered the possibilities of understanding Jonathan Edwards's thought in terms of dispositional laws, forces, and habits. While some scholars reject the notion of a dispositional ontology in Edwards, others have taken the concept of disposition in his thought beyond the usage the Northampton minister ever indicated, especially with respect to soteriological considerations. The preacher of "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" is made to be an inclusivist, if not a crypto-universalist. Jonathan Edwards's Vision of Reality substantiates that Edwards, in an effort to combat deistic and materialistic Enlightenment paradigms, employs dispositions in his philosophy, but that his radical theocentrism and Calvinistic particularism established its boundaries within his apologetical reconsideration of spatiotemporal and metaphysical reality. Within his "spiritual vision" of reality, Edwards leaves no stone unturned: history and even the reprobate find inherent value and a positive functional role not only in God's program of self-glorification but as manifestations of divine being--the damned are "deformities" in God. The logic of Edwards's theocentric vision of reality pushes his ideas to the limits of acceptable Reformed orthodoxy, and sometimes beyond those limits.

Was Jonathan Edwards the stalwart and unquestioning Reformed theologian that he is often portrayed as being? In what ways did his own conversion fail to meet the standards of his Puritan ancestors? And how did this affect his understanding of the Divine Being and of the nature of justification? Becoming Divine investigates the early theological career of Edwards, finding him deep in a crisis of faith that drove him into an obsessive lifelong search for answers. Instead of a fear of God, which he had been taught to understand as proof of his conversion, he experienced a ‘surprising, amazing joy’. Suddenly he saw the Divine Being in everything and felt himself transported into a heavenly world, becoming one with the Divine family. What he developed, as he sought to make sense of this unexpected joy, is a theology that is both ancient and early modern: a theology of divine participation rooted in the incarnation of Christ.

This volume provides an interpretative key to Jonathan Edwards's theology developed from within his own doctrinal constructs. Strobel offers a dogmatic exposition of Edwards's theology by unveiling the trinitarian architecture of his thought. Building upon this analysis, Strobel applies his construct to reinterpret three key areas of redemption debated widely in the secondary literature: spiritual knowledge, regeneration, and religious affection. In order to achieve this purpose, Strobel's approach is theological rather than philosophical, employing Edwards's self-confession as a Reformed theologian to guide his analysis. In advancing a theological reading of Edwards, Strobel focuses on the systematic nature of Edward's theology, ordering it according to his doctrinal affirmations. This necessitates, as many Edwards scholars now affirm, a primary focus on Edwards's trinitarian theology, where the Trinity serves as the key ontological principle which orders the whole of his doctrinal construction. By grounding the interpretive key in Edwards's understanding of the Trinity, Strobel's idiosyncratic exposition of his doctrine of the Trinity serves to recast Edwards's theology in a new light.

With a new afterword by the author

This book endeavors to examine and critically assess the theological anthropology of Jonathan Edwards with a view to considering how this anthropology coheres with his apologetic methodology. Specifically, the question has been raised whether Edwards' doctrine of man is consistent with the picture painted of Jonathan Edwards by John Gerstner that he was the epitome of the classical apologist. It is argued that Edwards practiced an eclectic apologetic sans apologetic self-awareness. In other words, Edwards was a child of his training and time.

Avihu Zakai analyzes Jonathan Edwards's redemptive mode of historical thought in the context of the Enlightenment. As theologian and philosopher, Edwards has long been a towering figure in American intellectual history. Nevertheless, and despite Edwards's intense engagement with the nature of time and the meaning of history, there has been no serious attempt to explore his philosophy of history. Offering the first such exploration, Zakai considers Edwards's historical thought as a reaction, in part, to the varieties of Enlightenment historical narratives and their growing disregard for theistic considerations. Zakai analyzes the ideological origins of Edwards's insistence that the process of history depends solely on God's redemptive activity in time as manifested in a series of revivals throughout history, reading this doctrine as an answer to the threat posed to the Christian theological teleology of history by the early modern emergence of a secular conception of history and the modern legitimation of historical time. In response to the Enlightenment refashioning of secular, historical time and its growing emphasis on human agency, Edwards strove to re-establish God's preeminence within the order of time. Against the de-Christianization of history and removal of divine power from the historical process, he sought to re-enthrone God as the author and lord of history--and thus to re-enchant the historical world. Placing Edwards's historical thought in its broadest context, this book will be welcomed by those who study early modern history, American history, or religious culture and experience in America.