The Thought Of Jonathan Edwards

Jonathan Edwards, a leader in the Great Awakening during the eighteenth century, still has much to teach the church. Evangelicals are rediscovering him through the efforts of several authors (John Gerstner, Iain Murray, Harry Stout, and others) and publishers (Banner of Truth, Soli Deo Gloria, and Crossway). Stephen Nichols offers Jonathan Edwards as an introduction, a gateway into the vast and rewarding life, thought, and writings of Jonathan Edwards. He intends it for anyone who wants to read Edwards but who needs a little help.

Jonathan Edwards has been recognized as the most influential evangelical theologian of all time. Before his death at the age of fifty-four, he had sparked a new movement of Reformed evangelicals who played a major role in fueling the rise of modern missions, preaching revivals far and wide, and wielding the cutting edge of American theology. He has never gone out of print, and Christians today continue to flock to seminars and conferences on him. In this biography of the great preacher and teacher, historian Douglas Sweeney locates for us the core and key to Edwards' enduring impact. Sweeney finds that Edwards' profound and meticulous study of the Bible securely anchored his powerful preaching, his lively theological passions and his discerning pastoral work. Beyond introducing you to Edwards' life and times, this book will provide you with a model of Christian faith, thought and ministry.

Scholars and laypersons alike regard Jonathan Edwards (1703-58) as North America's greatest theologian. The Theology of Jonathan Edwards is the most comprehensive survey of his theology yet produced and the first study to make full use of the recently-completed seventy-three-volume online edition of the Works of Jonathan Edwards. The book's forty-five chapters examine all major aspects of Edwards's thought and include in-depth discussions of the extensive secondary literature on Edwards as well as Edwards's own writings. Its opening chapters set out Edwards's historical and personal theological contexts. The next thirty chapters connect Edwards's theological loci in the temporally-ordered way in which he conceptualized the theological enterprise-beginning with the triune God in eternity with his angels to the history of redemption as an expression of God's inner reality ad extra, and then back to God in eschatological glory.The authors analyze such themes as aesthetics, metaphysics, typology, history of redemption, revival, and true virtue. They also take up such rarely-explored topics as Edwards's missiology, treatment of heaven and angels, sacramental thought, public theology, and views of non-Christian religions. Running throughout the volume are what the authors identify as five basic theological constituents: trinitarian communication, creaturely participation, necessitarian dispositionalism, divine priority, and harmonious constitutionalism. Later chapters trace his influence on and connections with later theologies and philosophies in America and Europe. The result is a multi-layered analysis that treats Edwards as a theologian for the twenty-first-century global Christian community, and a bridge between the Christian West and East, Protestantism and Catholicism, conservatism and liberalism, and charismatic and non-charismatic churches.

This illuminating analysis of Jonathan Edwards' philosophical-theological-ethical program focuses on his concept of beauty as our central clue to the nature of reality and the life of God. Delattre shows that beauty not only provides Edwards with a model for the manner of divine governance but operates throughout his thought as both the goal and means of redemption. Essential to his understanding of the operation of beauty as the law of moral order is Edwards' aesthetic/affectional model of the self, which corresponds to his aesthetic articulation of the system of being and good. Thus the distinguishing mark of Edwards' theology--his elevation to centrality of both the primary beauty of being's cordial consent to being and the secondary beauty of harmony and proportion--is shown to be the key to his interpretation of the dynamics of the moral and spiritual life.

Jonathan Edwards is the greatest theologian of colonial America as well as its first important philosopher. As a theologian, he represents without any concession Calvinistic Orthodoxy, re-thought and re-lived through the experience of the Great Awakening. The large majority of his writings are of a theological character, yet this theology is articulated and expressed through a systematic philosophical reflection. Edwardsian thought covers three major areas: First, being, grace, and glory; then, the doctrine of the will extending to the study of the original sin and evil; finally, an entirely original theory of knowledge synthesizing spirituality, aesthetics, and epistemology. The present book, the first edition of which appeared in French almost thirty years ago, is a uniquely comprehensive study of the work of Jonathan Edwards. It discusses all the aspects of his thought over against the background of classical Protestant theology and of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Western philosophy. Our time witnesses a significant renewal of interest in Jonathan Edwards. Professor Veto’s book should prove to be a major contribution to assist and to guide the readers of “America’s Theologian.”

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.

The problems of moral philosophy were a central preoccupation of literate people in eighteenth-century America and Britain. It is not surprising, then, that Jonathan Edwards was drawn into a colloquy with some of the major ethicists of the age. Moral philosophy in this era was so all-encompassing in its claims that it encroached seriously on traditional religion. In response, Edwards presented a detailed analysis and criticism of secular moral philosophy in order to demonstrate its inadequacy, and he formulated a system that he believed was demonstrably superior to the existing secular systems. In this comprehensive study, Norman Fiering skillfully integrates Edwards's work on ethics into seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British and Continental philosophy and isolates Edwards's particular contributions to the ethical thought of his time. In addition, Fiering traces the chronological development of Edwards's thought, showing the relationship between his wide reading and his writing.