Marsden on Edwards Highlights (I)

Most of George M. Marsden’s introduction to Jonathan Edwards: A Life (Yale University Press, 2003) seemed worth underlining. Here are a few bits:

“A number of things will be particularly striking to twenty-first-century readers about early eighteenth-century New England. First, the world into which Edwards was born will make a lot more sense if we think of it as British rather than American.” (p2)

“Edwards was an aristocrat by New England standards. Clergymen in New England wielded more authority and could expect more deference to their opinions than in most other parts of the British World. Further, Edwards belonged to an elite extended family that was part of the ruling class of clergy, magistrates, judges, military leaders, village squires and merchants. The Stoddards and the Williamses, along with a few other families with whom they intermarried, ruled the Connecticut River Valley, or western Massachusetts (Hampshire County) and parts of Connecticut.” (p3)

“Eighteenth-century Britons viewed their world as monarchical and controlled by hierarchies of personal relationships…. Society was conceived as an extended household.” (p3)

“Edwards lived at the vortex of conflict among three civilizations – the British Protestant, French Catholic, and the Indian.” (p3)

“The central principle in Edwards’ thought, true to his Calvinistic heritage, was the sovereignty of God. The triune eternally loving God, as revealed in Scripture, created and ruled everything in the universe. Most simply put, the sovereignty of God meant that if there were a question as to whether God or humans should get the credit for anything good, particularly in matters of salvation, the benefit of the doubt should always go to God. Edwards avoided allowing God’s rule to be thought of as a distant abstraction, as it could become. Rather he emphasised that God’s very purpose in creation was the great work of redemption in Christ. Everything in the universe pointed ultimately to the loving character of the triune God.” (p4)

“… the central practical motive in his life and work was his conviction that nothing was more momentous personally that one’s eternal relationship to God. Many Christians affirm this proposition, yet most have not followed its implications for personal relationships with utter seriousness. Most who have taken it seriously have been activists rather than thinkers. Edwards was both. He built his life around disciplines designed constantly to renew that eternal perspective. In his sermons and writings he turned his immense intellectual powers to rigorously following out the implications of God’s sovereignty for understanding humans’ eternal destinies, as defined by his Biblicist and Calvinistic heritage. If there is an emphasis that appears difficult, or harsh, or overstated in Edwards, often the reader can better appreciate his perspective by asking the question: “How would this issue look if it really were the case that bliss or punishment for a literal eternity was at stake?” (p4f)

“… after spending countless hours with Edwards, my point of view regarding him is complex. He was such a multisided person and thinker that to answer the question of what I think about him depends on what particular aspect of his life or thought we are talking about. I find him to be a person of immense personal integrity. He was intensely pious and disciplined, admirably but dauntingly so for those of more ordinary religious faith. His unrelenting intensity led him to follow the logic of his faith to its conclusions. His accompanying seriousness made him not an easy person to spend time with as a casual acquaintance, although he would have been fascinating to talk to about matters that concerned him. His prowess as a logician made him exceedingly sure of his opinions, sometimes given to pride, overconfidence, tactlessness, and an inability to credit opposing views. At the same time, he was often aware of his pride and was constantly trying – and apparently often succeeding – to subdue his arrogant spirit and to cultivate such Christian virtues as meekness, gentleness, and charity. As was common for eighteenth-century leaders, he was authoritarian, yet he was also extremely caring. He was much loved by those closest to him. His opponents found him aloof, opinionated and intolerant. For a time he won the hearts of almost everyone in his Northampton parish; then he lost them again in a bitter dispute, a quarrel of former lovers.” (p5f)

“Edwards came of age at a time and place that would give him an acute sense of the juxtaposition of old and new outlooks in this revolution taking place in British culture… Seventeenth-century Puritanism in turn was in many respects closer to the world of medieval Christendom than it was to that of even nineteenth-century America. Puritanism was part of an international Calvinistic movement to reform Christendom, not to destroy it. Its goal had been to establish one pure church supported by the Christian state.” (p7)

“A precocious teenage intellectual who immersed himself in the literature of the emerging British Enlightenment, the world of Locke and Newton and Addison and Steele, Edwards was confronted with how hopelessly quaint, dated, and even laugable the provincial world of East Windsor would look to British sophisticates…. Jonathan, after an early intellectual and spiritual crisis, emerged intensely committed to demonstrating how his heritage was not only viable but the answer to all the questions posed by the new world of his day. Those answers were not only intellectual, but also practical, built around awakenings and missions as the engines through which the triune God would eventually bring the modern world to his love in Christ.” (p7f)