The Global Edwards

Papers from the Jonathan Edwards Congress held in Melbourne, August 2015

Rhys S. Bezzant, Bezzant

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781532635977
• eBook ISBN: 9781532635960
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

In a globalized world, networks are key, whether they are networks of people, ideas, or interests. In this volume of essays on the texts and teachings of Jonathan Edwards, contributors from each continent ask questions about how the world of Edwards explains or illuminates the world of today, whether in the area of systematics, missions, historiography, politics, church-planting, or biblical studies. Such diverse discourses enrich the networks of scholarship that the contributors represent, and provide a global snapshot of contemporary research in Edwards studies. These papers were presented in August 2015 at the Jonathan Edwards Congress held at Ridley College in Melbourne, Australia, where personal engagement with the topics at hand made the worldwide network of Edwards aficionados and scholars not merely a virtual aspiration but an experience in time and space. This book will not only inform its readers but surprise them as well, as they track the power of eighteenth century theological ideas in the late modern world.

Part I

Global Vision

1

The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards in Britain

David Bebbington

The name of Jonathan Edwards does not loom large in histories of theology in Britain. The American is usually ignored, as in Bernard Reardon’s study of Religious Thought in the Victorian Age, or relegated to a single allusion, as in Tudur Jones’s Congregationalism in England, 1662–1962.1 By contrast, accounts of parallel developments in the United States give Edwards pride of place. That is true of general overviews such as Mark A. Noll’s America’s God and E. Brooks Holifield’s Theology in America as well as more specialist works such as Allen C. Guelzo’s Edwards on the Will: A Century of American Theological Debate and Joseph A. Conforti’s Jonathan Edwards, Religious Tradition and American Culture, both of which examine the subsequent reputation of the theologian.2

It is not surprising that American authors should lay stress on a homegrown product, but it is more culpable that writers about Britain should neglect him. The lacuna may be laid at the door of multiple presuppositions. One is a certain insularity, the silent assumption that Britain was self-contained in its doctrinal concerns, or, if affected at all, then swayed almost exclusively by influences emanating from Germany. Another is that the Church of England led the way in Christian intellectual affairs to the extent that patterns of thinking in other denominations were of little or no importance. And a third is that what mattered in Anglican thought in the nineteenth century was the emergence of the Oxford Movement and of liberal theology because they shaped the developments of the twentieth century—a belief that has discouraged the scrutiny of Evangelical thought at the time. All these notions may be detected in Reardon’s lucid book on Victorian theology, the standard work of the last generation.

Yet in reality British readers frequently absorbed American texts, which after all were written in their own language. Many of these readers were outside the Church of England, for at mid-century nearly half the population at worship in England and Wales was Nonconformist and Scotland was overwhelmingly Presbyterian. And Evangelicalism, though it was to be eclipsed during the twentieth century, was in the ascendant in British society at large during much of the nineteenth century. Hence at that period, an American who was a non-Anglican Evangelical was likely to enjoy a wide influence. Despite the general neglect of Jonathan Edwards in the literature, his legacy to subsequent generations in Britain is amply worth exploring.

The near silence about Edwards in nineteenth-century Britain contrasts starkly with contemporary opinion. The two Congregationalists who edited the first collection of Edwards’s works, which appeared in 1806–11 in Britain rather than in America, could assert that the theologian “ranks with the brightest luminaries of the christian church, not excluding any country, or any age since the apostolic.”3 If that bold claim might be considered the partisan appraisal of co-religionists, we can point to the judgment of Henry Rogers, the editor of the more popular selection from Edwards’s works issued in 1834, that the American was “held in profound veneration by thinking men of all parties.”4 This selection reached a twelfth edition by 1879, demonstrating the wide circulation of the texts composed by Edwards. Rogers’s verdict is further confirmed by the publications of the Religious Tract Society (RTS), a pan-Evangelical agency that printed much of the popular Christian literature of the time. The Society put into print a range of titles by Jonathan Edwards. It published Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God by 1831; The History of Redemption appeared in that year, followed two years later by Select Sermons of President Edwards; the Exchange of Christ and the Life of David Brainerd came out around the same time; and at about mid-century the Society went so far as to publish the Treatise concerning Religious Affections in 500 pages, an exceptionally long book for it to put on its list.5 As late as the 1880s the Society issued Pardon for the Greatest Sinners and a life of Edwards in its “New Biographical Series.”6 There was clearly a demand for the writings of the theologian, and even an interest in his own story down to around 1890. By comparison, the American Tract Society, the equivalent of the RTS in the United States, removed Edwards from its publication lists in 1892.7 We can therefore conclude that British attention to the American lasted virtually as long as in his own country.

Edwards appealed to the British public not just because he was a profound explorer of Christian doctrine. As the titles printed by the RTS suggest, he was valued as a stirring preacher who could challenge unbelievers. His life of Brainerd, the pioneer evangelist among the Native Americans, exercised a fascination over a missionary-minded public. And his warm encouragement of spiritual experience, as in the Treatise concerning Religious Affections, acted as an aid t...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Part I: Global Vision
• Part II: Global Conversation
• Part III: Global Practice