Reviving Jonathan Edwards

Perry Miller’s Mid-Century Mission

Stephen D Crocco

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781625349385
  9781625349392
• eBook ISBN:
  9781685752255
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

The untold story of how an unlikely Harvard atheist helped resurrect one of America's greatest Puritans 

Jonathan Edwards is widely regarded as one of America's most important and original thinkers. Prior to the mid-twentieth century, however, he was largely unknown to the learned community, except, perhaps, as a preacher of terror due to his well-known sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." In 1948 and 1949, Harvard professor of English Perry Miller published four pieces on him, including the acclaimed biography, Jonathan Edwards, and only a few years later he became the general editor of Edwards's collected works. Miller's efforts helped to resurrect Edwards as America's greatest Puritan and to solidify him as central to the American experience, and their names have been closely intertwined ever since. 

Miller, an iconoclastic scholar widely considered to be the founder of American studies, was known for his brilliant scholarship, devoted teaching, and hard living. Dying prematurely in 1963, he remains an enigmatic and controversial figure, with no biography available. In Reviving Jonathan Edwards, Stephen D. Crocco explores why this Harvard atheist, with an eerie sense that his time was short, delayed work on his planned magnum opus—a sweeping intellectual history of early America—to edit the works of the greatest of all American Puritans. 

In a riveting history that combines biographical insight with a detailed look into mid-century academia, Crocco draws on a large body of unpublished correspondence to offer an intricate detective tale of a decades-long publishing endeavor. He provides fresh portraits of Miller and the editorial committee he assembled, which included Sydney Ahlstrom, Roland Bainton, H. Richard Niebuhr, Norman Holmes Pearson, Paul Ramsey, and John E. Smith, and follows the story long after Miller's death, tracing the repeated, sometimes seemingly intractable challenges that publishing the many volumes on Edwards's work faced. He concludes by tracing Edwards studies up to 2003, the 300th anniversary of his birth, when the quiet revival of this colonial minister had evolved into a full scholarly renaissance. 

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Front Matter
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Body
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Perry Miller and the “Recovery“ of Edwards
• Chapter Two: Yale Ought to Publish Mr. Edwards
• Chapter Three: Something Fine for American Religion and Scholarship
• Chapter Four: A Clear and Fair Exhibition of Edwards’s Thought
• Gallery
• Figure 1
• Figure 2
• Fgure 3
• Figure 4
• Figure 5
• Figure 6
• Figure 7
• Figure 8
• Figure 9
• Figure 10
• Figure 11
• Figure 12
• Chapter Five: Agitation on Behalf of Edwards
• Chapter Six: Restarting the Edwards Edition
• Chapter Seven: Major Changes on the Way
• Chapter Eight: From Filing Cabinet to Edwards Renaissance
• Afterword
• Back Matter
• Notes on Titles and Abbreviations
• The Yale University Press Edition of “The Works of Jonathan Edwards“
• Notes
• Index
• Back Cover