Marsden - Jonathan Edwards: a Life

Jonathan Edwards, ca. 175055

Published with assistance from the Annie Burr Lewis Fund.

Copyright 2003 by Yale University.

All rights reserved.

This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

Designed by James J. Johnson and set in Adobe Caslon type by Keystone Typesetting, Inc., Orwigsburg, Pennsylvania.

Printed in the United States of America by R. R. Donnelley and Sons, Harrisonburg, Virginia.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Marsden, George M., 1939

Jonathan Edwards : a life / George M. Marsden.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-300-09693-3 (alk. paper)

1. Edwards, Jonathan, 17031758. 2. Congregational churchesUnited StatesClergyBiography. I. Title.

BX7260.E3M412 2003

285.8092dc21

[B]

2002013611

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To a generation of Edwards scholars who made this work possible

But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of
the power may be of God, and not of us.

II Corinthians 4:7

A number of people of common sense have asked me something like, Isnt there a good bit written on Jonathan Edwards already? or Arent there quite a few other biographies of Edwards? Their implication, I believesince they are people of common sensehas been, Why would anyone spend years working on a subject that has been so well covered?

Part of the answer is that, despite the vast specialized literature about Edwards, there is no recent full critical biography. The last was Ola Wins-lows Pulitzer Prizewinning Jonathan Edwards, 17031758, published in 1940. Perry Millers influential, brilliant, and often misleading Jonathan Edwards (1949) was a sketch of Edwards intellectual life. Patricia Tracys Jonathan Edwards: Pastor (1980) dealt only with his years in Northampton. Iain Murrays Jonathan Edwards: A New Biography (1987) provides a well-documented updating of biographies in the honorable but uncritical tradition of Edwards earlier admirers.

Further, a revolution in Edwards studies, especially during the past decade, has made a full critical biography feasible in a way that it never was before. In recent years The Works of Jonathan Edwards project at Yale University has brought to fruition a generation of scholarship begun under Perry Miller in the 1950s. Since the early 1990s, the project has transcribed most of Edwards enormous corpus of previously unpublished writings. Most of these works were known to Edwards specialists and were available in principle to anyone who had the patience to decipher his nearly illegible handwriting. Today the transcriptions can be perused by computer in ways that were unthinkable a generation ago. Further, the volumes of the Yale edition of The Works of Jonathan Edwards provide not only definitive editions of familiar writings, but also much that was not previously available and extensive introductions that fill in many of the gaps of earlier scholarship. In the meantime, scholars continue to add to an enormous literature about Edwards. The works published through just 1993 fill two volumes of M. X. Lessers annotated bibliographies (