This affliction was invisible to the intellectual leaders of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They could still give correct answers to the catechism, but their hearts were fixed not on God, but on land and trade.Įdwards’ remedy for the church was aimed at a form of the same disease that was assaulting the culture: the darkening and disabling of the mind through indwelling sin. From 1650 on, the Puritan laity had been drifting away from “the power of godliness” which had characterized the first generation. When he took over his grandfather’s congregation in Northampton, he found it in a condition of sleepwalking formalism, typical of New England’s spiritual decline. Edwards’ great achievement was the creation of a theology which confronted both of these crises head-on, opposing a humanist Enlightenment in society with an evangelical awakening in the church.Įdwards’ theology was forged in the flames of the Awakening. Another crisis lay both within the church and around it: the developing climate of humanistic rationalism, the secular drift of Western culture. One of these crises was internal: the loss of spiritual power within the Puritan renewal movement. Confronting a Dead OrthodoxyĮdwards applied his theological synthesis in confronting two critical problems in the eighteenth century. In many ways, he is the Johann Sebastian Bach of Puritanism, perfecting and summarizing this movement’s emphasis on Christian experience at a time when it was out of fashion. But above all else Edwards was nurtured by Puritan spiritual theology. And Edwards’ theology makes considerable use of reason and natural theology.
Some of these, like Cambridge Platonism and the philosophy of John Locke, utterly contradict one another, and seem far removed from Reformation thought. He was influenced by various currents of thought in the seventeenth century.
Edwards is undoubtedly the most powerful theologian writing in the Reformed tradition before the twentieth century.īut the sources of his thinking range far beyond Calvinism. Many of his major works are simply consistent applications of Calvin’s teaching on God’s grace and sovereignty. Edwards’ theological genius lay in his ability to summarize effectively the main thrusts of the Reformation and Puritanism and yet not merely to reiterate these, but to apply them to crucial problems in his own century.Įdwards’ theology is rooted in Calvinism. Jonathan Edwards may be the greatest American theologian and philosopher-and perhaps also the greatest mind-America has yet produced.
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