This is a popular devotional book by an up-and-coming Edwards scholar. It offers important lessons in authentic spirituality from the life and work of Edwards.

The book has two parts. In Part One, Strobel offers “a broad overview of the journey of faith” with help from Edwards’ writings. “Here, we look at how our path is oriented to heaven, how it is an ascent in God’s glory and how it is the way of affection” (16). Or as Strobel puts this later, in the conclusion to Part One,

We started by focusing on heaven as a world of love, a place where love reigns because the God of love reigns there. This functions as a horizon point for us, because it helps to orient the Christian life. Heaven is the place we are striving toward, and therefore knowing the destination helps orient us in our pilgrimage. Second, we looked at salvation as grasping both beauty and glory, and ascending to the Father in the Son. Jesus becomes human so that we can participate in the divine life. The life of faith, therefore, is a life of   grasping the beauty and glory of God and becoming beautiful and glorious creatures of God. Third, we addressed religious affection, which is the way of the heart. God calls his people to love him with their whole hearts and follow him as faithful children. This love is seeing the beauty and glory of God in Christ by the illumination of the Spirit (66).

In Part Two, the author examines various tools for use on the journey. “Specifically,” he says, “I highlight spiritual disciplines, what Edwards called means of grace, and then the interconnection of knowledge of God and ourselves” (16). In chapters on “Spiritual Disciplines as Means of Grace,” “Knowledge of God and Knowledge of Self,” “Meditation and Contemplation,” and “Jonathan Edwards’s Spiritual Practices,” Strobel offers advice on how to grow in godliness by reappropriating practices such as meditation, contemplation, Sabbath observance, fasting, conferencing, soliloquy, silence and solitude, and prayer, as exemplified by Edwards.

It is important, Strobel avers, to read both parts of the book together, observing its overall “flow.” Stroble refuses to speak of practices, he says, “until we have a firm grasp of the big picture of the Christian life. If we started with practices, as so many have, we will ultimately lose sight of their role in leading us to Christ. Inevitably, I fear, a focus on disciplines digresses quickly to self-help. Edwards offers a different way” (16), a much more theological way than most popular books provide.

This primer on Christian godliness presents no new research. Nor is it aimed at academics. It is short, easy to read, and comes warmly recommended for believers seeking a closer walk with God.

E. A. Johnston, Asahel Nettleton: Revival Preacher, A Biography (Ashville, NC: Revival Literature, 2012).

This is a work of hagiography most likely to be read by Reformed evangelicals. Written by an evangelist, prolific Christian author, and conference speaker with Ambassadors For Christ International, its author also serves as a fellow of the Stephen Olford Center for Biblical Preaching.

Johnston’s book is the longest one on Nettleton to date. It is more current than Bennet Tyler’s Memoir of the Life and Character of Asahel Nettleton (1844); more thorough than J. F. Thornbury’s God Sent Revival: The Story of Asahel Nettleton and the Second Great Awakening (1977); and more readable and useful to a wider range of people than the now-dated dissertations written on Nettleton and his work: George Hugh Birney, Jr., “Life and Letters of Asahel Nettleton, 1783-1844” (Hartford Theological Seminary, 1943), and Sherry Pierpont May, “Asahel Nettleton: Nineteenth Century American Revivalist” (Drew University, 1969).

Aimed at kindred spirits seeking revival in the present, it is spiritually edifying but historically inaccurate. It is rather thinly researched, full of massive block quotations from the author’s favorite sources but hardly any interpretation of the subject’s life, work, or even historical location that is informed by recent scholarship or older social histories. It repeats the shop-worn caricatures of Nettleton’s opponents as harmful wolves in sheep’s clothing. (Nathaniel Taylor was as a Pelagian, Charles Finney one of the greatest threats to genuine religion in all of American church history, modern evangelical history a story of declension, etc.) It claims to provide reliable history of the New England Theology, but does so without reference to most of the leading works of scholarship by specialists in the field (Joseph Conforti, Allen Guelzo, David Kling, Mark Valeri, Jack Fitzmier, Mark Noll, Charlie Phillips, Oliver Crisp, et al.)

On the bright side, Johnston has reprinted 40 letters written by Nettleton to colleagues (taken from Birney’s dissertation); first-hand accounts of the revival of 1820, mainly in upstate New York, and Nettleton’s role in leading it; memories of Nettleton’s life by Francis Wayland and others; and large sections of important primary sources.

This is not a book for scholars, or for students of church history. But among modern-day Calvinists who are looking for support as they work to revive the church, it is a book that will be cherished. Evangelical Arminians (and others) will feel attacked. But Nettletonians should find in their eponym great inspiration.

In December 2012 the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University announced that, in partnership with William Eerdmans Publishing Company, it will be producing A Jonathan Edwards Encyclopedia. The volume, to be published in print and online, will be comprised of some 450 entries, or 300,000 words.

Over 75 scholars, PhD and ThM students from around the world have signed up to contribute to this unprecedented reference source for the growing audience of Edwards around the world. The JEC’s staff greatly anticipates working with contributors and presenting to readers what is sure to be a useful collection.

To expedite this project, the JEC has created a portal on its website, A New Encyclopedia [http://edwards.yale.edu/publication/encyclopedia], to solicit signing up for entries.  We cordially invite you and your students to write one or more listed but not assigned yet entries.

The entry should be written with an eye to Edwards’ particular view of the topic, or how the event or theme played a part in his life. Please do not use footnotes, but provide a selected bibliography of up to three sources at the end of the article.

Entries are due by June 15, 2014. We look forward to your response before May 1, 2013 (edwards@yale.edu)

With thanks,

Harry S. Stout, General Editor, A Jonathan Edwards Encyclopedia, Chair and
Jonathan Edwards professor of American Religious History department Yale
University

For correspondence: Kenneth P. Minkema and Adriaan C. Neele, Associate
Editors (edwards@yale.edu)

The study is organized into three parts: methodology, cultural and historical background, and sermon analysis. In first chapter, Choiński defines the scope of rhetoric, he selectively reviews the history of rhetoric including the classic taxonomy or the “canon of rhetoric”: inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, and pronunciatio. Combined with traditional rhetorical analysis, he utilizes the relatively new approach to rhetoric called the pragmatic approach defined as the “relations of signs to interpreters.”

Chapter two delivers an admirable historical and cultural overview of New England as it relates to the Great Awakening and to the subjects of his study. The author walks the reader through preaching practices in Puritan New England from 1620 to the dawn of the Awakening. He also considers the phenomenon of the Great Awakening from an historical standpoint and surveys some of the key historical interpretations. The author strikes a cautious but sympathetic tone in his treatment of his controversial topic. In the end, the author agrees that there was a general spiritual awakening in New England in the 1740s rather than a constructed or invented phenomenon on the basis of a few pockets of revival.

Chapter three, the bulk of the dissertation, is devoted to the analysis of ten sermons which the author selected to demonstrate the rhetorical range of material that was produced in the Great Awakening. His work here is largely composed of rhetorical commentary upon each of the sermons. The selections are Whitefield’s What Think Ye of Christ?, Abraham’s Offering Up His Son Isaac, The Lord Our Righteousness, The Conversion of Zaccheus, Jonathan Edwards’s Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, Future Punishment of the Wicked Unavoidable and Intolerable, and The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God, Gilbert Tennent’s The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry, Jonathan Parsons’s A Needful Caution in a Critical Day, and Andrew Croswell’s The Apostle’s Advice to the Jaylor Improved. A brief conclusion summarizes the findings concerning each of preachers. Concerning Edwards in particular, He observed “intricate rhetorical mechanisms” and “highly elaborate imagery and structured argumentation” as well as extended metaphors.

This dissertation will be useful for specialists who interested in the construction and delivery of revival sermons, especially concerning the preaching of the Great Awakening. The author’s expertise is in rhetoric, so his main contributions lie in that domain. A second group who may be helped by this dissertation are pastors who have formal training in rhetoric. These pastors could find sermon inspiration in this analysis of the “rhetoric of revival.” To be sure, this study’s aim is to describe the main rhetorical features of the selected sermons. While Choiński does pay close attention to the primary source materials in his study, he does not marshal any significant argument concerning the “rhetoric of revival.”

— Daniel Cooley, Senior Fellow of the Jonathan Edwards Center at TEDS

This booklet featuring Edwards’ best-known statements on Christian prayer will surely be cherished by many Reformed evangelicals. It is published by the author’s own ministry in Michigan. A Philippino native, Najapfour came to the United States in 2006 for graduate work at Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary. He is currently the pastor of United Reformed Church in Caledonia, MI, an avid blogger (biblicalspirituality.wordpress.com) and spiritual writer.

This work has five brief chapters on Edwards’ view and practice of prayer; an annotated bibliography of primary and secondary sources on Edwards and prayer; an appendix of excerpts from Edwards’ correspondence on prayer (which also includes a snippet on prayer from Edwards’ eulogy for the short-lived missionary, David Brainerd); another appendix on the prayerful friendship of Edwards’ daughter Esther Edwards Burr and Sarah Prince; and a concluding prayer by Trevin Wax (another avid blogger and spiritual writer) adapted from many of Edwards’ famous “Resolutions.”

Those who want a comprehensive treatment of Edwards’ approach to prayer should consult Peter Beck, The Voice of Faith: Jonathan Edwards’s Theology of Prayer (Joshua Press, 2010). But Christians looking for a brief, inspiring booklet on the subject can do no better than this work by Pastor Najapfour.

Kyle Strobel is quickly becoming one of the most prolific scholars working on Edwards’ thought today. And this revised version of Strobel’s Aberdeen dissertation is his most important work on Edwards to date.

Strobel’s overarching argument is that Edwards worked primarily as a Reformed theologian whose doctrine of God and of the Trinity funded a “theocentric vision of reality,” which, in turn, became the primary force in Edwards’ thought (p. 2). Strobel supports this contention using four key points: “First, Edwards’s theology begins with God, in his eternal life as Trinity, as the ontological principle which grounds his systematic task. Second, Edwards begins ‘from eternity’ and then ‘descends’ to address God’s work in time, or, in other words, God’s economic movement to create and sustain. Third, this work in time is the work of redemption, directing the ‘revolutions in the world’ and guiding it toward resurrection, judgement and consummation. Fourth and finally, Edwards’s theology is a theology of redemptive history, grounded in and formed by the God who is redeeming, or more specifically, the God who redeems in, through and as Christ” (4).

In three main sections, Strobel treats Edwards’ doctrine of the Trinity (section one), Edwards’ view of God’s purpose in the creation of the world (section two), and Edwards’ Trinitarian doctrine of redemption (section three). Along the way, he seeks “to trace the ‘metanarrative’ of Edwards’s theology” (p. 12), a storyline that shaped nearly everything he wrote.

On its surface, Strobel’s argument appears rather commonplace, largely unexceptional to those who know Edwards. But as Strobel makes clear, he has offered it in contradiction to Sang Lee and others (especially McClymond and McDermott) who follow Lee’s view of Edwards’ philosophical theology. Strobel thinks these scholars misconstrue Edwards’ thought by portraying it, not in terms of Trinitarian dogma, but of late modern philosophy. Strobel thinks his synthesis accounts for Edwards better, offering a more comprehensive and coherent view of Edwards’ grand vision of God and the world (p. 232).

I agree that Strobel’s Edwards is more accurate than Lee’s. There is little new here. Strobel rehearses sources and themes treated well by many others. He exaggerates the extent to which his argument is novel. He exaggerates his differences with McClymond, McDermott, and others–seeming to relish his confession that, “in this volume I ‘go after’ almost everyone!” (p. xi). Still, he does provide a fine way of making sense of Edwards’ thought in systematic terms. I cannot think of another text that handles Edwards better in relation to dogmatic debates about the nature of God.

John Martin, The Last Judgement

Jonathan Edwards is an apocalyptic prophet, not so much as a prognosticator but as a revealer of what lies hidden.  Edwards discerned the trends of events of his own time and place and viewed them sub specie aeternitatis.  Since then some of these trends have gathered momentum and come to fruition in our own day.  The framework of Edwards’ world-view is radically eschatological.  He interprets the course of human and natural events as tending inexorably towards a future denouement in the form of the establishment of God’s postmillennial kingdom on earth.  His conceptions of history and nature are teleological.  Edwards conceives of history as a divine comedy.  Though history has its periodic tragic regressions when its wheels seem to turn backwards, its overreaching arc is towards a postmillennial denouement.  The locus classicus of Edwards’ eschatology, together with its attendant philosophy of history, is his History of the Work of Redemption, an updating of Augustine’s City of the God. This was to be a new kind of divinity written in an historical key.  It would have been Edwards’ theological summa had it not remained unfinished at his death.  Edwards’ postmillennialism lodged in the American psyche and took a secular turn in the nineteenth century when it gave rise to fictional utopias (Bellamy’s Looking Backward) and dystopias (Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance) as well as utopian social experiments like Brookfarm.

As might be expected of one who took the bird’s-eye view of history and discerned deeper historical trends, Edwards pronounced jeremiads on his own social-political milieu with its emergent mercantile economy based upon the unregulated pursuit of self-interest.  He diagnosed this cultural malaise as a symptom of Arminianism which in all its forms he strenuously opposed throughout his life.  He understood that forms of self-determination, individually and collectively, which were not consonant with the will of God or an expression of disinterested benevolence to general being are nothing less than demonic and doomed.  On one reading (Alan Heimert’s) Edwards, as a fomenter of the Great Awakening that prepared the way for the American Revolution, is a prophet of the American capitalist-republican polity.  On an alternative reading he is more rightly regarded as an American Jonah who stands in stark judgment on the American cult of self-reliance (Arminianism again) as represented paradigmatically by Edwards’ contemporary and nemesis, Benjamin Franklin; indeed, Franklin had the victory over the American mind.

The focus of this conference is the light that Edwards sheds on contemporary social, political and economic movements.  The conference will consider which of these Edwards would have approved and those he would not have.  In brief, the purpose of this conference hopes to bring an Edwardsean perspective on, among other things, the many conflicts that have riven contemporary society, the crises that seem endemic to it, but also those things boding well for the future.  This perspective need not be narrowly sectarian.  The conference encourages applying the spirit, if not the letter, of Edwards to interpreting the present age.

Papers need not be confined to Edwards alone.  They may be concerned with other, later thinkers or even your own reflections on these matters.  The only criterion is that the papers be informed by an Edwardsean perspective broadly conceived.

SOME SUGGESTED TOPICS:

• Edwards’ eschatology and philosophy of history
• Edwards’ eschatology in its historical context
• Arminianism
• American utopian and dystopian literature
• Utopian social experiments
• The social, political, and economic context of Edwards’ thought
• Contemporary cultural trends in light of Edwards’ eschatology and ethics.

Please e-mail your papers or abstracts to me in Microsoft Word format no later than September 1^st, 2013.  The papers should be geared to a reading time of 20 to 30 minutes.

DATE:  Thursday, October 3^rd through Saturday, October 5^th, 2013

LOCATION:  The First Churches, Northampton, Massachusetts

Newport, Rhode Island’s Sarah Osborn (1714-1796) has long been known as a lay Edwardsean Christian leader during and after the Great Awakening in New England. But not until now has she enjoyed the sort of critical acclaim that is commensurate with her historical significance.

In this latest of her books on early American Christian women—such as the landmark Strangers & Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740-1845 (1998)—Catherine Brekus, a member of our Center’s Board of Visitors who teaches at the University of Chicago Divinity School, offers a sympathetic narrative of Osborn’s life and ministry that is clearly the best treatment of the subject ever written.

Born in London to a Congregationalist tanner and his wife, Sarah Haggar moved to Newport with her family in 1730. While still a young girl, she married a sailor, Samuel Wheaten, in 1731 (against the wishes of her parents) and had a son named Samuel in 1732 (who died young, at age 11, in 1744). Husband Samuel died at sea only two years after their marriage (1733), while Sarah was still a teen. Several years later (1742), she would remarry, but this time to a widower with three boys of his own, Henry Osborn, a tailor, who was more than twice her age.

Sarah lived a fruitful life as a teacher, the mistress of a local boarding school, and a lay leader of Newport’s First Congregational Church. She led a large women’s prayer group. She founded several Bible studies. Most famously, perhaps, she led a ministry to slaves and free blacks in the region. (She owned a slave herself and was something of a racist, but had a passion for gospel ministry with Africans.) These efforts hit their peak during the mid-1760s when she supervised a startling revival from her home. “The numbers who crossed Sarah Osborn’s threshold each week were astonishing,” writes Brekus. “During the summer of 1766 more than 500 people crowded into her house every week, including almost 140 on Sunday nights alone. . . . By January 1767, 525 people were coming to her house every week, including at least 70 Africans. Remarkably, more than 5 percent of Newport’s black population passed through her doors every Sunday evening” (pp. 254, 260).

Even after this revival, Osborn’s ministry continued and exerted striking influence in Newport and beyond. Osborn’s women’s group, in fact, took the lead in the appointment of Edwards’ student, Samuel Hopkins, to the pastorate of their church in 1770. (This happened behind the scenes. Only men in the church could vote. But the ladies in Sarah’s charge persuaded their husbands of Hopkins’ merits over much initial skepticism.)

Hopkins and Osborn grew close. Hopkins assumed primary leadership of most of Osborn’s meetings. But as he did, he consulted her and other women for help (most significantly Susanna Anthony, a close friend of Osborn and supporter of Hopkins’ ministry). Hopkins persuaded many women to oppose the slave trade—no mean feat in a seaport town that found this trade extremely lucrative. He pushed the New Divinity, divisively, in town. (Ezra Stiles served the Second Church untill 1776, gently opposing Hopkins’ views.) And when Sarah and Susanna (known as “Susa”) passed away, he published their memoirs, canonizing them for later evangelicals.

Brekus’s research is based largely on Sarah’s own writings: her memoir, ten volumes of her diaries, over a hundred letters, and a short tract, The Nature, Certainty, and Evidence of True Christianity (1755). But it has also involved extensive use of Hopkins’ Memoirs of the Life of Mrs. Sarah Osborn; Elizabeth West Hopkins’ Familiar Letters, Written by Mrs. Sarah Osborn and Miss Susanna Anthony; and a cache of other primary materials: diaries, conversion accounts, sermons, church records, periodicals, treatises, etc. What a treasure.

This book is a great read. It whets my appetite for the volume of Osborn’s diaries that Brekus is now editing for Yale University Press.

This is one of the most important books written on Jonathan Edwards by a constructive, philosophical theologian.

Oliver is a friend. We published a book together last summer. I am biased in his favor. Nevertheless, I speak the truth. He is a brilliant theologian and a fascinating conversation partner, sometimes even a vigorous sparring partner, with Edwards.

As Crisp makes clear at the beginning of the book, it is not an effort in history. It is not aimed primarily at understanding Edwards in relation to his context, but in dialoguing with Edwards on his view of God and the world: “this is not a study in the history of ideas or in historical theology. It is an account of Edwards’s philosophical theology cast in the collegial mode, where we shall be concerned not only to understand what Edwards says but also to engage him on the issues he considers, with a view to ascertaining whether or not the views he expressed are coherent” (p. 3).

Some of the time, Crisp concludes that Edwards’ views do cohere. At other times, he says, they do not. However, even where Crisp believes that Edwards’ thinking was confused, he works to iron out and engage his subject’s metaphysical musings in a respectful, constructive, and edifying manner.

No one will like everything the author does with Edwards. In eight short chapters, fewer than 200 pages, he engages Edwards’ ontology (chapter one), his views of God’s nature (chapter two), God’s freedom (chapter three), God’s aseity (chapter four), and even God’s excellency (chapter five), his doctrine of the Trinity (chapter six), his alleged panentheism (chapter seven) and view of the consummation of human history in heaven and hell (chapter eight). Along the way, Crisp depicts his famous subject as an occasionalist (a depiction used to account for most of the things Crisp dislikes in Edwards’ view of God and the world); a pure-act theist whose thinking militates against the dispositional ontology that Sang Lee attributed to Edwards and his God (Crisp assumes—I think falsely—that a dispositional God cannot be fully actualized); a full-bore Neoplatonist; a thoroughgoing idealist; a proponent of theosis; a panentheist; and one whose logic of reprobation might be used to teach a form of universalism. Crisp levels major claims but that, of course, is part of his charm.

All of us should be grateful for this erudite, charitable, constructive engagement with Edwards, whose theology did verge at times on idiosyncrasies that can be difficult to fathom. Crisp’s book will not appeal to those impatient with speculation about God and God’s relation to the universe. But for those who love to think about the deep things of God, it offers a feast of food for thought. Highly recommended.

This fascinating revision of the tragic story of Jonathan Edwards’ “crazy grandmother” is one of the most important books in Edwards studies in many years. It chronicles the life and hard times of Elizabeth Tuttle, whom Edwards scholars have long known but never known well.

The daughter of a successful Puritan family in New Haven, Elizabeth married after conceiving her first child out of wedlock. Her husband, Richard Edwards, came from a less prominent family and was two years her junior (only 20 when they married), but was determined by the court to be the father of her child (a daughter, Mary). Richard confessed to having slept with Elizabeth long before their wedding but denied being the father of her baby. He claimed another local man, Joseph Preston, was the father, saying Elizabeth had granted this in private conversation.

Richard never managed to prove this claim in any court of law, but refused to raise the baby as his own. (Elizabeth’s parents raised Mary.) He settled down with Elizabeth for more than 20 years, siring several children with her, including Jonathan Edwards’ father (Timothy Edwards, born in 1669). But eventually, their marriage ended poorly, in disaster, which was aggravated by Richard’s insecure male ego and mental illness in the family leading to brutal, bloody murder.

In 1676, Elizabeth’s brother, Benjamin Tuttle, struck their sister, Sarah Slauson (Jonathan Edwards’ great aunt), in the head, with an ax, in her Stamford home in front of her four children (ages 12, 9, 6 and 4). Though Benjamin had suffered mental illness much of his life, he was executed by hanging for his crime the following year. Most of the family would recover from this tragedy with time, but three Tuttles never did. Sister Mercy spiraled downward into mental illness herself, later murdering her teenage son, Samuel, with an ax (in 1691, in front of Samuel’s brother Francis). She was deemed insane by the court and thus spared the death penalty. David, Mercy’s brother, also suffered from depression and had to be cared for to the end of his life by Thomas, another sibling. And Elizabeth, of course, suffered her own mental illness, which exacerbated the trouble with her husband.

In 1691, after a two-year public battle, Richard finally received a bill of divorce from Elizabeth. He had accused her of “obstinately Refusing Conjugal Communion” with him “for Many years” (120) toward the end of their marriage. Lying atop his other claims to have been cuckolded at the outset of their marriage by Elizabeth, to have been verbally abused (Elizabeth “often Threaten[ed] my Life to Cut my Throat when I was Asleep,” 135), to have been cheated on again after the two of them were married (Richard claimed his wife admitted this but never proved it in court), the charge of sexual abandonment would finally prove persuasive.

Less than six months later, Richard married Mary Talcott, a younger woman with whom he had confessed to having sex during his conjugal abandonment at home. The two had several children together, living a much less scandalous life after the early 1690s. Richard never cared for Mary, though. Nor did he do anything for Elizabeth above the call of duty from the court. In fact, Elizabeth disappears from the record after this–like so many other early American women.

She does not disappear, though, at least not forever, from discussions of Edwards’ family. Jonathan’s first biographers knew almost nothing about her. But in the late nineteenth century eugenics was all the rage. Many regional genealogists, Edward family enthusiasts, and students of eugenics retrieved Elizabeth and used her to interpret Jonathan’s genius, account for the residue of melancholy and sexual immorality in the family (Aaron Burr, Jr., being a customary example of the Edwardses’ sexual sins), and even oppose family planning by contending, for example, that if Elizabeth were sterile we would never have known Jonathan. Winship’s Jukes-Edwards: A Study in Education and Heredity (1900), which compared Edwards’ bloodline rather favorably, no glowingly, to that of a pseudonymous clan of social misfits, ne’er do wells, and hardened criminals, is only the best known of such eugenic encomiums.

Chamberlain has succeeded in writing an outstanding history of Elizabeth and her family–a model microhistory set in colonial New England. In her noble effort to listen to what she calls Elizabeth’s “silence” and allow her, paradoxically, “to speak for herself” (188), she appears a biased champion of her lady’s reputation, defending it against the men who sullied it so long. But this is probably what we need in order to set the record straight, to swing the pendulum of Edwards’ family history back in a sensible direction.

This book is must reading for Edwards scholars, historians of gender, sex, power, and mental illness in America, and anyone else interested in New England cultural history.