One Holy And Happy Society

Jonathan Edwards (1703&–58) was arguably this country's greatest theologian and its finest philosopher before the nineteenth century. His school if disciples (the &"New Divinity&") exerted enormous influence on the religious and political cultures of late colonial and early republican America. Hence any study of religion and politics in early America must take account of this theologian and his legacy. Yet historians still regard Edward's social theory as either nonexistent or underdeveloped. Gerald McDermott demonstrates, to the contrary, that Edwards was very interested in the social and political affairs of his day, and commented upon them at length in his unpublished sermons and private notebooks. McDermott shows that Edwards thought deeply about New England's status under God, America's role in the millennium, the nature and usefulness of patriotism, the duties of a good magistrate, and what it means to be a good citizen. In fact, his sociopolitical theory was at least as fully developed as that of his better-known contemporaries and more progressive in its attitude toward citizens' rights. Using unpublished manuscripts that have previously been largely ignored, McDermott also convincingly challenges generations of scholarly opinion about Edwards. The Edwards who emerges from this nook is both less provincial and more this-worldly than the persona he is commonly given.

Jonathan Edwards on the Experience of Beauty relates Edwards' idea of beauty to his understanding of the psychology of religious experience. In his vocabulary of the language of beauty Edwards articulates a traditional understanding of beauty in the various relations that constitute primary and secondary beauty. All beauty, however, is ultimately founded on the beauty of God's Trinitarian being. Edwards' concept of the "sense of the heart," related to his psychology of religious experience, is articulated as an infusion of God's beauty. This experience results in a new perception and manifestation of holiness and beauty in the lives of the saints, both individually and corporately. True believers are to be "proportioned Christians," showing forth beauty in their affections. Edwards explicated this perspective in sermons, treatises--especially Religious Affections--and in a number of cases he presented, including the religious experiences of David Brainerd, Sarah Edwards, and his own awakening and conversion. In these cases, the language of beauty plays a prominent descriptive role. In summary, Jonathan Edwards on the Experience of Beauty shows the importance of Edwards' idea of beauty for his understanding of genuine religious experience. Edwards defines true or genuine religion as an experience of God's beauty that becomes manifested in the beauty of the affections. Further, in articulating that understanding, he utilized the vocabulary of his language of beauty. For Jonathan Edwards, beauty is the structure of genuine religious experience.

Say "New England" and you likely conjure up an image in the mind of your listener: the snowy woods or stone wall of a Robert Frost poem, perhaps, or that quintessential icon of the region--the idyllic white village. Such images remind us that, as Joseph Conforti notes, a region is not just a territory on the ground. It is also a place in the imagination. This ambitious work investigates New England as a cultural invention, tracing the region's changing identity across more than three centuries. Incorporating insights from history, literature, art, material culture, and geography, it shows how succeeding generations of New Englanders created and broadcast a powerful collective identity for their region through narratives about its past. Whether these stories were told in the writings of Frost or Harriet Beecher Stowe, enacted in historical pageants or at colonial revival museums, or conveyed in the pages of a geography textbook or Yankee magazine, New Englanders used them to sustain their identity, revising them as needed to respond to the shifting regional landscape.

How do we know and speak about God's relation to this world? Does God reveal himself through his creation? This book recaptures a Christian vision of all reality: that the world is full of divine signs that are openings into God's glory. Bringing together insights from some of the tradition's greatest thinkers--Edwards, Newman, and Barth--Gerald McDermott resurrects a robust theology of creation for Protestants. He shows how and where meaning can be found outside the church and special revelation in various realms of creation, including nature, science, law, history, animals, sex, and sports.

Recently, the immanent Trinity (God as in himself) has been criticized as abstract and impractical as opposed to the economic Trinity (God in relation to the world). Many scholars argue that the immanent Trinity is detached from the real life of believers and God's economic work of redemption and thus abstract and impractical. But is this assumption itself really true? What if the blueprint of God's work of redemption is already located in the immanent Trinity as the divine idea? What if Jonathan Edwards, arguably the American greatest theologian, expounds this doctrine as a vital driving force in his theology? Rediscovering the doctrine of the covenant of redemption will help us to see that the immanent Trinity actually is not abstract, but highly practical, simply because the redemption of the believers hinges on the divine plan located there. This study is a fruit of the recent convergence of the resurging doctrine of the Trinity and the renaissance of studies of Jonathan Edwards.

In this provocative study, David W. Hall argues that the American founders were more greatly influenced by Calvinism than contemporary scholars, and perhaps even the founders themselves, have understood. Calvinism's insistence on human rulers' tendency to err played a significant role in the founders' prescription of limited government and fed the distinctly American philosophy in which political freedom for citizens is held as the highest value. Hall's timely work countervails many scholars' doubt in the intellectual efficacy of religion by showing that religious teachings have led to such progressive ideals as American democracy and freedom.

New England theologian Jonathan Edwards came to prominence at the culmination of a dramatic paradigm shift in millennialism that had begun in the sixteenth century, declaring that a thousand-year earthly kingdom would arrive in the future. For Edwards, the land of Israel would be the ideal location of the millennial kingdom, and the people of Israel, after their restoration, would play critical and decisive roles in the millennium's commencement. Edwards's millennial vision was also cosmic, however, and included both Europe and China. Unlike his Protestant predecessors and his Puritan contemporaries, Edwards's millennialism de-centralized England and New England. Contrary to what many have argued, Edwards neither originated nor advocated the notion of the American redeemer nation. In America's Theologian Beyond America, Victor Zhu establishes the coherence of Edwards's Judeo-centric and cosmic vision of the millennial kingdom and argues that this vision is an indispensable part of Edwards's theological system. He highlights three theological loci in Edwards's millennialism: the greatness of God's divine sovereignty, the magnificence of His glory, and the capaciousness of His kingdom. Zhu demonstrates Edwards's conviction of the progressive realization of the kingdom, refuting the prevailing misinterpretation that Edwards thought the millennium was imminent. He explores Edwards's cosmic vision of the millennial kingdom, which extended from New England and Israel to China and other parts of the "heathen" world. In conclusion, Zhu examines the contemporary relevance of Edwards's millennialism in Chinese millennial movements.

This text offers a cultural history of Universalism & the Universalist idea - the idea that an all-good & all-powerful God saves all souls. Bressler puts forth the unique argument that early Universalists were proponents of an 'improved' Calvinism.