session into a hearing. Thomas Clap came with saddlebags loaded with evi-
The Politics of the Kingdom ∞πΩ
The dissatisfied minority appealed to the Hampshire Association, which discussed the question in August. Breck, however, preempted their deliberations by returning from the east, fortified with eight clerical testimonies concerning his orthodoxy and character, and accepting the call. The Springfield church then constituted an ordination council of four Hampshire clergy (three sympathetic to Breck and William Williams, who declined the honor) and four clergy from Boston. The eastern clergy took the matter so seriously that four of them, led by William Cooper, Colman's associate at Brattle Street, and including Samuel Mather, scion of that dynasty, made the arduous two-day journey to Springfield to convene an ordination council on October 7. The Hampshire Association met them there and insisted on turning the session into a hearing. Thomas Clap came with saddlebags loaded with evidence, and Rector Elisha Williams came all the way from New Haven to add firepower and perhaps to manage the anti-Breck, anti-Arminian, StoddardWilliams family, and regional cause.
The clergy met for a day and a half, hearing evidence behind closed doors. In the middle of the second day, just after Clap's testimony, the sheri√ entered and arrested Breck. This seemed to surprise everyone. The justices of the peace for Hampshire County were John Stoddard, Timothy Dwight, and Seth Pomeroy, all leading members of Edwards' Northampton congregation. Apparently someone, possibly Elisha Williams, had hatched a plan to arrest the visiting clergy on grounds of intrusion outside of their domain. At the last moment Pomeroy apparently thought better of such an audacious move and persuaded the justices to have Breck arrested instead.≤≠ They charged Breck with violating a Massachusetts statute against atheism and blasphemy.
The next morning, as the justices met for a hearing, the locus of the issue shifted to the court of public opinion. Breck's supporters called the Springfield populace together in front of the Town House to hear a man on horseback read Breck's confession of faith and in the process decry the highhanded tactics of his detractors. The Hampshire Association clerics viewed this as crass demagoguery. Even the horse, as one wag quipped, ''stood astonished'' at the ''vile errors'' being propounded. ''If he had had the tongue of Balaam's Ass, he would have reproved the madness of the prophet.''≤∞
The civil case against Breck was dubious on the face of it and was soon dropped. In the meantime, the Springfield church protested to the Massachusetts General Court concerning the interference in their a√airs. The House of Representatives rebuked the Hampshire magistrates for intruding in matters beyond their authority.≤≤ In December 1735, amid much excitement
∞∫≠ The Politics of the Kingdom
in the Boston press, the House also held hearings on the legality of the eastern participation in the ordination council. Predictably they ruled that the council was legal. Breck was ordained early the next year. Hampshire e√orts to bring in magisterial power had backfired. Boston clergy still controlled Massachusetts church a√airs, even though they did it in the name of congregational autonomy.
By this time the case was a colony-wide sensation. Boston newspapers were filled with charges and countercharges, often spiced with witty rhetoric and derision of opponents' views. The issue became a standing matter for debate. Edwards, though remaining anonymous, played a leading role. He drafted a ''Defence'' of the Hampshire Association that was published in Boston in 1736 along with a ''Narrative'' of the controversy written by his elder brother-in-law, Samuel Hopkins of Springfield.≤≥ Edwards' brief ''Defence'' responded to the widespread accusation that the Hampshire Association had acted ''tyrannically'' and countered that the Boston clergy had meddled beyond their domain. The Boston pastors published a scathing reply authored anonymously by William Cooper.≤∂ Edwards, again unnamed, fired the last shot in 1737 in a longer polemic answering the Bostonians.
A Letter to the Author of the Pamphlet Called an Answer to the Hampshire Narrative (1737) is hardly a timeless classic, but it does reveal something about Edwards and his time. In eighty-four pages of tightly reasoned polemic, it answered page by page Cooper's accusations. William Cooper was a supporter of Edwards and the awakenings, and Edwards was responding to him and his Boston colleagues at the same time that Benjamin Colman, copastor with Cooper at Brattle Street Church, was managing the various publications of Edwards' Faithful Narrative. Never minding that primary alliance, Edwards had some sharp words for his eastern counterparts.
That the two sides could launch scathing polemics on an issue of polity and procedure while still remaining allies in the cause of vital religion is indicative of a dimension of the eighteenth century that separates it from our time. It was an age of debate. Higher education was largely learning the art of debate. One could fiercely rail against an opponent's arguments yet see in that nothing personal. In this case, since all the authors remained anonymous (though in such a small world it was not hard to guess who was who), the polemics remained particularly impersonal—as though they were lawyers' briefs.
Edwards' A Letter can also be seen as a commentary on the ''modern'' direction in which eighteenth-century debate was headed. This was the age
The Politics of the Kingdom ∞∫∞
of acerbic Swiftean wit and satire. As the press increasingly depended on popular audiences, the most admired authors often spiced their polemics with biting humor and amusing ridicule. The strategy of Edwards' counterpolemic was to use the weapons of the easterners against themselves, attempting to shame them for resorting to modern techniques unbecoming of the clergy.
So he began in Pauline manner, ''We your brethren in the calling of Jesus Christ, and the ministry of his gospel, of the county of Hampshire,'' continuing in one long sentence to observe that the westerners have become ''the butt of your resentment and obloquy,'' have been portrayed as ''obnoxious,'' ''treated with indignity and contempt,'' and with ''disdain and insult as a set of wicked, contemptible men.'' The eastern brethren, the sentence continues, have thus ''acted much against the honor of Christ, the interest of Christianity, and to the prejudice of the ministerial character.'' Then, page after page Edwards went on answering specific accusations, but also constantly reverting to the theme that ridicule was inappropriate.
As author of part of the original Hampshire defense, Edwards was particularly stung by the ridicule. From the beginning, the easterners had derided the ''country'' clergy.≤∑ William Cooper likewise mocked the westerners' e√orts, sometimes saying with irony that an argument was ''so pleasant'' that he would give it in its own words, adding the derisive comment at the end ''What can be finer.'' Or repeatedly Cooper referred to Yale's rector, Elisha Williams, whom he believed had concocted the idea of having his uncle John Stoddard warrant the arrest of the eastern clergy, derisively as ''a person of distinction.'' ''They say,'' the Harvard graduate sco√ed concerning the Yale rector's letter, ''it came from a person of distinction, so we think it to be a letter of distinction.''
Although the westerners were not above using humor (the horse compared to Balaam's ass), Edwards himself disparaged it. ''Ridicule,'' he chided his sophisticated eastern colleagues, is ''cheaper than solid argument, though much less worthy of a gospel minister.'' Edwards, who pulled no punches as he excoriated his opponents for their alleged misrepresentation, did not mind being stinging himself, but his was stinging sobriety. His attack culminated by paralleling two columns. On one side he quoted Christ's prayer for unity (John 17) ''that they may all be one,'' with which the Boston clergy had closed their polemic. In the other column Edwards reiterated key phrases from their derisive attacks on the western clergy. Then he directly accused the easterners of destroying the unity of the province and called on them ''to repair the injuries you have done to us.'' ''Don't let us, reverend sir,'' he summarized, ''try
∞∫≤ The Politics of the Kingdom
who can conquer at sco√ and jeer, but let our arguments fight it out; not that we glory in the strength of our reason, but we glory in the goodness of our cause.''≤∏
Edwards' primary motive in defending against the inroads of Arminianism in western Massachusetts was his conviction that the cause was just, but he was also acting as the spokesman of the Williams ministerial clan and of the Stoddard Hampshire oligarchy. He and his family viewed western Massachusetts as analogous to a tribe of Israel that must serve God and obey his chosen servants. He stood among the dynasty of ministerial and political leaders who were called to rule this people. He depended on the patronage of William Williams and John Stoddard. All his instincts were hierarchical. As long as he was sure their cause was just, he had no hesitation about wielding oligarchical power. The old familial Stoddard-Williams system for attempting to ensure orthodoxy, promote piety, and enforce social discipline was still in place. His place was as a bright up-and-coming junior member of that family oligarchy.
Resentments
As in any dynastic system there were resentments and rivalries. Resentments arose especially among the most ambitious in the younger generation. In this case, we do not know the original source of the ill will between Edwards and some of his cousins, but it seems to have surfaced around the time of the awakening and Edwards' rise to international prominence. At the center of the opposition was his younger cousin Israel Williams, son of the patriarch, William Williams. Israel Williams was to William Williams what John Stoddard was to Solomon Stoddard, a younger son who, although a Harvard graduate, aspired to economic, political, and military—rather than ministerial—leadership in the valley. In 1735, when the trouble began, Israel was twenty-six years old and just coming into his own. Though Israel lived only five miles away in Hatfield and frequently rode past Edwards' house, for years to come he would conspicuously avoid the courtesy of a visit.≤π
Initially the hostility seems to have been more personal than principled, though historians have alleged grander issues. Perry Miller followed Sereno Dwight in speculating that the Williams family leaned toward Arminianism.≤∫ Perhaps that was a factor for Israel Williams, but it surely was not for the family as a whole, given their vigorous campaign against Robert Breck. Nor was the family generally opposed to the awakening.≤Ω William Williams
The Politics of the Kingdom ∞∫≥
had long championed revival, and he and other ministerial family members had enjoyed amazing awakenings in their own parishes. In 1736 Elisha Williams sent Isaac Watts a glowing account of the widespread awakening, particularly in his father's parish of Hatfield. There, he said, ''it seemed almost the universal cry (among the unconverted) what they should do to be saved.'' The revival brought ''an universal reformation of manners,'' frequent religious meetings, and many conversions.≥≠
Possibly there was some family resentment that the young Edwards had overshadowed the clan's patriarch and taken credit for the Northampton origins of a wider awakening. One critic of the revival reported that William Williams thought Edwards' account had been incautious.≥∞ Boston's Benjamin Colman had not helped matters when he appended his abridgment of the Faithful Narrative to the publication of two of Williams' sermons. Edwards himself wrote to Colman saying he wished that William Williams had been consulted.≥≤
Possibly there was simply some personal pique between the cousins. If so, Israel Williams would not have been the first of Edwards' younger cousins with whom there had been such a falling out. The dynamics of his relationship with Elisha Mix at Yale might be a clue toward how Jonathan related to younger relatives who had more worldly interests than his own and whom he thought could use his advice.≥≥
Nonetheless, whatever rivalries and petty jealousies may have been brewing, Edwards for the time being remained firmly entrenched as a loyal junior partner in the family hierarchy. He enjoyed the patronage of the leaders and gave them, on the whole, due deference. Were it not for later di√erences of principle on which he was thought to be betraying the family, these earlier resentments would be forgotten.
In the larger picture, the phenomenal awakenings and the question of whether they could be extended still loomed over everything. On the face of it, it looked as though such spiritual outpourings should provide the best vindication of the old system of personal control by the clerical elite. And on the larger kingdom question he and the Boston oligarchy remained allies, despite the sharp barbs they exchanged in their ecclesiastical disputes over who controlled the west. When the American edition of Edwards' Faithful Narrative appeared in 1738, not only was Benjamin Colman the sponsor but William Cooper joined three of his orthodox colleagues in signing the preface.≥∂
C H A P T E R ∞∞ kl
''A City Set on a Hill''
efore the American edition of A Faithful Narrative was available, Edwards found himself in a troubling position. He had gained international prominence, but had he claimed too much? In 1735 he had believed that nearly everyone in Northampton had shown hopeful signs of saving grace. Over a year later, in November 1736, when he was completing A Faithful Narrative, he was still proclaiming to the world that ''God has evidently made us a new people.'' Granted, he qualified the claim by acknowledging that there were doubtless some wolves in sheep's clothing and that the town still had many reasons to be humbled and ashamed, ''but in the main,'' he added, ''there has been a great and marvellous work of conversion and sanctification among the people here.''∞
In May 1737 Colman wrote him a long letter reporting the enthusiastic reception of A Faithful Narrative in England. Edwards responded that, while such news was heartening, ''at the same time it is a great damp to that joy to consider how we decline, and what decays that lively spirit in religion su√ers amongst us, while others are rejoicing and praising God for us.'' This gradual decline, he explained, ''appears not so much by a return to ways of lewdness and sensuality, among young or old, as by an over-carefulness about, and eagerness after the possessions of this life'' and a return of the heated party spirit that had so long plagued the town.≤
Even a dramatic sign from God failed to reawaken the spirit of two years earlier. In March 1737 an apparent disaster turned out to be, in Edwards' characteristic hyperbole, ''one of the most amazing instances of divine preservation, that perhaps was ever known in the land.'' Edwards so described the event in a letter to Colman, who forwarded it to the Boston Gazette. The Northampton meetinghouse was in decrepit condition and the town was
''A City Set on a Hill'' ∞∫∑
building a new one. On the Sabbath of March 13, the old building was crowded for the morning service. The winter of 1736–37 had been extremely severe and the heaving from the frost had shifted the wall so that the joists holding the back gallery were drawn out nearly from their supports. Just as Edwards was beginning his sermon, the packed gallery suddenly split in the middle and crashed, burying the people below, mostly women and children, with heavy shattered timbers and scores of bodies. The sound was like ''an amazing clap of thunder.'' Everyone who saw it and heard the ''dolorous shrieking and crying'' believed it ''was impossible but that great numbers must instantly be crushed to death or dashed in pieces.'' Yet when they finally dug out the buried, they found that while many were cut and bruised, a few seriously, no one was dead. Not even one bone was broken.≥
God had sent an awful rebuke to the congregation ''by so dangerous and surprising an accident,'' so that they would ''praise his name for so wonderful, and as it were miraculous, a preservation.'' Although many were truly a√ected by this amazing event, and remained grateful to God for his mercy, Edwards reported to Colman in May that ''it has had in no wise the e√ect that ten times less things were wont to have two or three years ago.''∂
The return of the town's near blindness to spiritual realities contrasted sharply with the overwhelming clear visions of divine beauty that intensified Edwards' own religious experience. In his ''Personal Narrative,'' probably written about 1740, he described one particularly memorable encounter. ''Once, as I rid out into the woods for my health, anno 1737,'' he recounted, ''and having lit from my horse in a retired place, as my manner commonly has been, to walk for divine contemplation and prayer; I had a view, that for me was extraordinary, of the glory of the Son of God. . . . The person of Christ appeared ine√ably excellent, with an excellency great enough to swallow up all thought and conception.'' The ecstasy lasted ''about an hour; which kept me, the bigger part of the time, in a flood of tears, and weeping aloud.'' During this time he felt ''an ardency of soul,'' which he could describe only as ''to be emptied and annihilated; to lie in the dust, and to be full of Christ alone; to love him with a holy and pure love.'' On several other occasions he experienced similar raptures.∑
The townspeople, far from sharing such ardency and desire for heavenly purity, limped along through a late spring in 1737 followed by an early summer drought.∏ Their contentiousness and the old party spirit increased. In May, about the same time Edwards confessed the town's problems to Colman, he preached a scathing sermon on the party spirit, envy, and backbiting that
∞∫∏ ''A City Set on a Hill''
set neighbor against neighbor in the small town. Many people abroad were now rejoicing in the blessings that had come to Northampton and would be greatly disappointed to hear of the renewal of its old party feuds. ''No town in America,'' he reminded his parishioners in an image he was using frequently, is ''so like a city set on a hill.''π
To add to the embarrassment, the new meetinghouse itself was a source of contention. Like just about everything else in the society, seating in New England meetinghouses was assigned by status. The hierarchically ranked seating plan would have to be redrawn for the new meetinghouse, but that was no easy task in a community with some social mobility. The town's seating committee had to rank each family in relation to every other. The town could not agree on whether to continue the practices of seating men on one side and women on the other (with young people in the balcony) or to seat people on the main floor by families. After much wrangling they decided to do both. The new meetinghouse included thirty-five box-shaped pews around the periphery, some of which were occupied by family units. The rest of the seating continued the traditional separation by gender, women on the opposite side of the aisle from their husbands. Seating by family was more comfortable, and the shift to this practice in eighteenth-century churches sometimes has been seen as a harbinger of the middle-class family of the modern era. It also could accentuate family rivalries when one family was seated more prominently than a near rival. That was particularly so when the town, consistent with Edwards' assessment of it, decided to make wealth the primary criterion in determining seating, to consider age secondarily, and to consider ''men's usefullness,'' as in public service to a lesser degree. Previously, age had been the primary consideration and wealth secondary.∫
Because New Englanders prided themselves on regulating their worship on the Bible alone, one might think that they would have taken more to heart the biblical condemnation of those who ''love the uppermost rooms at feasts, and the chief seats in the synagogues'' (Matthew 23:6). That they ignored this instruction reminds us how essentially hierarchical their social assumptions were. Not to honor social distinctions, even in church, was to them as unthinkable as it would be today for persons in the military not to honor di√erences in rank.
Although Edwards deplored the wrangles over the meetinghouse and preached against those ''who seek after an high seat in God's house above seeking eminent holiness,'' he took for granted that social hierarchies were God's provision for good order.Ω Like others of his tradition, he assumed that
''A City Set on a Hill'' ∞∫π
[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
Northampton's third meetinghouse (1737). The steeple reflected New England's turn toward eighteenth-century English fashion. It also helped set the building apart as a special sacred space, in contrast to the unadorned meetinghouses of a century earlier. (The clock was added later.)
even in a ''city set upon a hill,'' some were ordained by God to rule and others to be in subjection.∞≠ In his view of the family, he emphasized patriarchal governance. Though his own family was growing as a new daughter was born every two years (Timothy, the seventh child, was their first boy, born July 1738), Edwards gave no indication that he held a modern sentimental view of the family. In fact, when in late 1737 and early 1738 the Hampshire Association considered the meaning of an epidemic—probably the ''throat distemper''—
that was carrying away many children, it concluded, almost certainly with Edwards' approval, that God was warning them against the sins of parents
[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
The seating plan for the main floor of the 1737 meetinghouse reflected social rank. Young people were seated in the balcony.
''A City Set on a Hill'' ∞∫Ω
showing immoderate love of children, indulging them, and greedily hoarding up material wealth for them.∞∞
An additional source of contention may have been that, almost immediately upon completing the new meetinghouse, the town settled on building a separate town house for town meetings and for the county court. Previously the often rancorous town meetings were held in the same meetinghouse where Edwards preached. The new meetinghouse, unlike its predecessor, was steepled in typical eighteenth-century New England style, suggesting that English tastes had penetrated inland. Perhaps related to this adoption of the European custom of setting the church building apart was the prevailing sentiment to build a separate hall for town meetings and the courts. Whatever the reasons, the decision had symbolic importance. Puritans had built unadorned, unsteepled meetinghouses as a signal that no space was in itself sacred. All of reality was potentially sacred or secular, depending on how it was used. Town meetings were just as appropriate in the meetinghouse as anywhere. Furthermore, civil government, when properly conducted, was a sacred activity. Spiritual and civic leaders were to work hand in hand. In practice, the presence of the empty pulpit during the town meeting may have been a reminder of ministerial and spiritual authority in all matters. The new arrangement can be seen most immediately as a reversion to a more medieval, or at least Anglican, separation of sacred space. In that older arrangement sacred and secular were di√erentiated but, in theory, should cooperate in harmony. At the same time, the new arrangement can be viewed as a harbinger of a more modern version of the separation of sacred and secular spheres in which, even in theory, they would coexist in uneasy tension.∞≤
Biblical Perspectives
By the late 1730s Edwards was facing the disconcerting reality that just as Northampton was becoming internationally celebrated many of his parishioners were returning to their old ways of greed and constant infighting. He could not escape the evidence that he had overestimated the extent of genuine awakening. Real indications of the Holy Spirit's presence remained, but other evidence suggested that many apparent conversions were the devil's counterfeits. In response, Edwards preached three lengthy sermon series in attempts to correct the course his people were taking.
The first was a nineteen-unit sermon preached in winter 1737–38 on the parable of the wise and foolish virgins of Matthew 25:1–12, the same passage
∞Ω≠ ''A City Set on a Hill''
that had been called to mind a decade earlier by his dying sister Jerusha. The wise virgins were prepared for the coming of the bridegroom, while the foolish virgins were not. In this picture of the church, Edwards told his parishioners, the wise and the foolish were mixed together. Not until Christ arrived would it become fully apparent that only half of them were truly prepared. The crucial issue was how to tell the di√erence between the wise and the foolish. That question, which had plagued him personally in his youth, would preoccupy him for the next decade as a champion of awakening. He warned his parishioners, for instance, that it was ''one thing to be much a√ected in hearing of the dying love of Christ and another thing to . . . see certainly that Christ is supremely excellent.'' But such a di√erence between a√ecting but superficial sentimentality and truly spiritual a√ections was a subtle one. Or, he advised, ''don't content yourself with that that you think you are willing to have Christ for your saviour unless you are willing of free choice and not forced with the threatenings of hell'' or the desire of ''going to heaven.''∞≥ But how many could be sure about their true motives? Whether or not they were truly prepared would become apparent in how well they would survive trials of their faith. In times of declining faith, such as the Northamptonites were now experiencing, the hypocrites were those who ''leave o√ the laborious parts of religion'' and come ''secretly to live in ways of known sin.''∞∂
This sermon series was preparatory to another, Charity and Its Fruits which followed almost immediately. Published posthumously, Charity and Its Fruits became one of his best-known works. It was an ideal sequel to the sermons on the wise and foolish virgins because many of the applications dealt with how one might tell if an apparent work of the spirit was genuine. To Edwards the biblical principle was clear: ''By their fruits ye shall know them.'' The text, I Corinthians 13:1–8, proclaimed, as Edwards put it, that ''all that is distinguishing and saving and true Christianity be summarily comprehended in love.'' It followed, then, that evidences of love (or their absence) were the best test by which ''Christians may try their experience whether it be real Christian experience.''∞∑
This inescapably biblical test was what was making Edwards so concerned about many of his Northampton ''converts'' of three years earlier. I Corinthians 13 seemed almost tailored for the town since its fourth and fifth verses (''charity envieth not,'' etc.) addressed the very vices that so conspicuously plagued the ingrown community. Departing from his usual practice of choosing texts widely to suit various sermon topics, Edwards followed the
''A City Set on a Hill'' ∞Ω∞
order of the verses in I Corinthians, spending five sermons working through each phrase of verses four and five. The spirit of love of the truly regenerate, he emphasized to the Northamptonites, was the opposite of (in a sermon for each) envy, pride, selfishness, anger, and censoriousness.
The series, more positive than negative, and always preached in an appropriately gentle tone, concluded with what became one of Edwards' most popular sermons, Heaven Is a World of Love. There he depicted through many images the perfectly harmonious society, ''no string out of tune,'' bound together in the perfect love of God. Christ, the bridegroom for whom the church (the wise virgins) had waited, would bring the perfected saints into this eternal, happy society. In this heavenly union they would partake in the fountain of love that overflowed from the perfect love of the triune divine persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, for each other. So consumed would all be by the divine love that no twinge of envy would reduce the love of all whom God loved. Heaven, like everywhere else, would be hierarchical; some would be above others in glory, but such di√erences would cause no diminishment of happiness because all would wish only fullest happiness for others. In this world, by contrast, humans were never able to love as fully as they should. Everyone was weighed down with ''a heavy moulded body, a lump of flesh and blood which is not fitted to be an organ for a soul inflamed with high exercises of divine love. . . . Fain would they fly, but they are held down, as with a dead weight at their feet.'' In the next life the saints, with spiritual bodies only, would be able fully to express their eternally burning love to God and to each other.∞∏
The Charity sermons, simple and practical as they were, stood close to the heart of Edwards' theological enterprise. The very essence of reality, he emphasized in his more abstruse theological notebooks, was the intratrinitarian love of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The only possible reason for such a perfect being to create the universe was to extend that love to other, imperfect, beings. So, as he explained briefly to the parishioners of the river town: ''There in heaven this fountain of love, this eternal three in one, is set open without any obstacle to hinder access to it. There this glorious God is manifested and shines forth in full glory, in beams of love; there the fountain overflows in streams and rivers of love and delight, enough for all to drink at, and to swim in, yea, so as to overflow the world as it were with a deluge of love.''∞π
That God was in essence love was no novelty in Christian or Calvinist theology or in other thought of the era, yet Edwards' emphasis on this theme
∞Ω≤ ''A City Set on a Hill''
in a rigorously Reformed context was at the core of his revitalization of that tradition. His theology of love also anticipated, in some ways, later romantic and more liberal theologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet, once again, we must note a vast di√erence. Because Edwards was so thoroughly Reformed, there was no sentimentality in Edwards' love. To be loving as God loved simply meant that one had to love what God loved and to hate what God hated, which was whatever rebelled against God's love.
Ever since the awakening Edwards was seeing more and more implications of his earlier conviction that what must be central in his theology was not just that God was essentially love, but that God's love toward humans was essentially redemptive love. Specifically, he was seeing with increasing clarity that this theme must be the key for unlocking one of the grand mysteries of reality that he had long been thinking about—the mystery of history. Particularly, why would a perfect God be involved in the seeming imperfections of history?
For evangelical Christians that was one of the great questions of the time, an era when Deists were distancing God from history. One might compare Edwards' treatment of this theme and that of Charles Wesley in his famous hymn that begins ''And Can It Be,'' written the same year as the Charity sermons. Wesley writes, '' 'tis myst'ry all: th'immortal dies! Who can explore his strange design? In vain the first-born seraph tries to sound the depths of love divine.''∞∫ Edwards, though acknowledging the ultimate mystery, still wanted to explore its depths.
That these fundamental theological concerns were much on his mind is indicated in Edwards' choice of his theme when honored to deliver the public lecture in Boston on Thursday, May 24, 1739. Preaching from I Timothy 2:5 on the theme that ''Christ is mediator between God and man'' he carefully explained the theology of Christ's redemptive mediation, especially as it was an outgrowth of the eternal intratrinitarian love. This eternal origin of Christ's love guaranteed that the union between Christ and the saints e√ected in salvation would be everlasting. That confirmed the Calvinist doctrine of perseverance of the saints, that once persons were truly united to Christ they could not fall from grace. Further, the very essence of salvation or ''the covenant of grace'' was nothing less than a true ''union of the heart with Jesus Christ.''∞Ω
We have a rare contemporary depiction of Edwards during this Boston visit. Timothy Cutler, Edwards' his former teacher and now Boston's leading
''A City Set on a Hill'' ∞Ω≥
Anglican priest, reported on a call from Edwards. Cutler had recently learned of the death at sea of his youngest son, and Edwards' courtesy may have been related to that news. Cutler took a dim view of the Connecticut Valley awakenings, on which he was preparing a report for the bishop of London. He and Edwards, however, avoided that subject on which they knew they disagreed so totally. Cutler viewed the awakening as mostly ''whimsical appearances and fantastic shows.'' In his account to the bishop he disparaged Edwards' Narrative and those who a≈rmed it. He depicted, for instance, the four leading Boston clergymen who endorsed it as ''men of the lowest form in learning and judgement, contracted in their thoughts.'' Edwards was, of course, a possible exception on this score, but Cutler sketched his learning in a negative light. Cutler allowed that he was ''critical, subtil and peculiar'' but added, ''I think not very solid in disputation.'' Remembering him as a student, he described him as ''always a sober person, but withal pretty recluse, austere and rigid.'' Too much study, he believed, had taken a striking toll physically. Edwards, he wrote, ''continues his application [to study] and in such a degree, that he is very much emaciated, and impaired in his health, and it is doubtful to me whether he will attain the age of forty.''≤≠
While in his Boston sermon the alarmingly gaunt Edwards spoke of the foundational theological principle of Christ's eternal redemptive love, he was at the time deeply concerned with how that eternal love was expressed in history. In Northampton he was in the midst of his third and by far the largest sermon series, thirty sermons on A History of the Work of Redemption, showing how Christ's redemptive love was the key to all history. Edwards' sense that the awakening of 1734–35 had participated in a grand moment of redemptive history had convinced him that his theology should be integrated with the ongoing history of Christ's work. Whereas in the late 1720s Edwards had thought of his projected great theological treatise as ''A Rational Account,'' starting about 1736 he began developing in his notebooks a new historical approach that he believed to be revolutionary. At the end of his life he told the trustees at the College of New Jersey at Princeton that he hoped to write a ''great work'' called A History of the Work of Redemption, which would be ''a body of divinity in an entire new method, being thrown into the form of an history.''≤∞ The sermons, which bore the same title as the projected magnum opus and were published posthumously under that name, lacked most of the explicit theological exposition Edwards had in mind for his great work. Rather, these sermons, preached between March and August 1739, were
∞Ω∂ ''A City Set on a Hill''
largely historical narratives designed to introduce the Northamptonites to a sense of how they should understand their own history in the perspective of biblical and world history.
Not only was there little explicit theology in the sermons, A History of the Work of Redemption—in contrast to the two previous series—also contained relatively little that was directly practical. Almost two-thirds of the sermons were retellings of Old Testament and New Testament events, viewed in the light of the centrality of Christ's redemption. The core assumption was Edwards' typological view of reality. The biblical narratives provided innumerable examples of types of Christ (the destruction of Pharaoh and his hosts in the Red Sea was a type of Christ's defeat of Satan, the water of the sea was a type of the redeeming blood of Christ, also represented today in the waters of baptism, etc.).≤≤ The subsequent sermons continued the narrative through the basics of church history, showing how that history continued the biblically established patterns and fit specific biblical prophecies.
The constant motif, as in Edwards' view of nearly everything, was the conflict between God and Satan. The stories Edwards told were all variations of this same theme, the major theme of God's redemptive work among his chosen people and the minor theme of Satan's opposition. His text for the series was Isaiah 51:8, ''For the moth shall eat them up like a garment, and the worm shall eat them like wool: but my righteousness shall be for ever, and my salvation from generation to generation.'' In this large perspective one could see ''how shortlived the power and prosperity of the church's enemies is.'' Such transient power and glory is quickly ruined like the garments the moth consumes. The redemptive work of God, which would ultimately triumph, was the only thing of permanent worth.≤≥
Edwards constantly urged his parishioners toward grand perspectives to help them overcome the pettiness and self-absorption that went with their low horizons, which hardly reached to the next town. If they could view their recent revival not merely as a local phenomenon, but as an episode in an epic contest between the forces of Christ and Satan, then they might be less likely to be so distracted by more recent local events that were vastly more trivial. Edwards concluded his review of church history by citing ''but two'' of the recent awakenings. The first, was the ''remarkable revival of power and practice of religion in Saxony in Germany'' under August Hermann Francke and the Halle pietists. The other was the ''remarkable pouring out of the Spirit of God'' that his parishioners had just witnessed. Though he did not go into detail, by giving their awakening such a place of honor in his account, Ed-
''A City Set on a Hill'' ∞Ω∑
wards was making sure his parishioners saw the full significance of their recent experience in the history of redemption itself.≤∂
Edwards led his people on a journey that would help them see that all history, including their own, was of one piece, centered in Christ's work. If Christ's love was like the fountainhead of a river, then the ''beauty'' of God's redemptive providence could ''be compared to a large and long river, having innumerable branches beginning in di√erent regions and at a great distance one from another, and all comprising one common issue.'' Because of limited perspectives, people saw only parts of this immense pattern, and they appear ''like mere jumble and confusion.'' It was as though the journey on which Edwards was leading his people was to the top of a high mountain, where, having the divinely revealed perspective of redemption, they could see that these streams, sometimes apparently running in opposite directions, all converge ''at one mouth into the same ocean.''≤∑
Although Edwards' narrative was long and much of it retellings of familiar biblical stories, he was able to sustain a theme and the cumulative impact could be compelling. One Northamptonite, Nehemiah Strong, who was only ten and a half at the time of the sermons, recalled the series as a great event in his life. Strong, who became a professor of mathematics and natural philosophy at Yale, reportedly told Edwards' grandson Timothy Dwight how as the sermon series proceeded he became ''more and more engaged.'' At last when Edwards depicted Christ's second coming, the boy's ''mind was wrought up to such a pitch that he expected without one thought to the contrary the awful scene to be unfolded on that day and in that place. Accordingly, he waited with the deepest and the most solemn solicitude to hear the trumpet sound and the archangel call; to see the graves open, the dead arise, and the Judge descend in the glory of his Father, with all his holy angels; and was deeply disappointed when the day terminated and left the world in its usual state of tranquility.''≤∏
Edwards would have been pleased had all his parishioners reacted as young Nehemiah Strong did. The real application of the lengthy narratives was for the Northamptonites to begin to see themselves as standing directly in the stream of biblical history. Their experiences were of a piece with those recorded in the biblical narratives. As he had earlier reminded his hearers, the glimpses of Christ's saving work that they had seen surpassed in some ways the Old Testament types. The Northamptonites, if they could only see themselves in true perspective were participating in salvation history as surely as those who lived in the days of Moses, Samuel, David, or Elijah.≤π
∞Ω∏ ''A City Set on a Hill''
Looking Toward ''the Church's Year of Jubilee''
The sermons of A History of the Work of Redemption provide a window into Edwards' perception of world events as of 1739. One striking clue to his framework for understanding his times is the prominence he gave in his history to the formal Christianization of the Roman Empire in the time of Constantine. Four great sets of events, he told his parishioners, made up ''Christ's coming in his kingdom.'' The first was Christ's work on earth, including the defeat of his earthly enemies through the destruction of Jerusalem. The second was the destruction of the heathen Roman Empire in Constantine's time and the establishment of Christendom. The third would be the destruction of the Antichrist, the papacy. The fourth would be Christ's coming again in judgment. This is an amazing set of turning points. Edwards had raised Constantine's triumph to startlingly cosmic proportions. It was a historical turning point comparable to the two comings of Christ!≤∫
This remarkable elevation of the fourth-century emperor reveals that Edwards assumed that the advance of Christ's kingdom intimately involved politics. Some biblical prophecies, especially those of the book of Daniel, dealt explicitly with the rise and fall of empires, and Edwards' interpretation of Constantine in that framework was not unusual. Nonetheless, he o√ered a far more positive reading of Constantine than did his most immediate source, a recent commentary on revelation by Moses Lowman.≤Ω Aside from that, he took for granted, as did most of his religiously minded contemporaries, the spiritual significance of the politics of Christendom. Every stage, or ''dispensation,'' in the coming of Christ's kingdom involved a dark time when Christ or his saints su√ered deeply at the hands of Satan, followed by a victory in which Christ the righteous judge avenged the cause of justice. Excepting the final judgment, Christ used human military forces as (sometimes unwitting) agents of his justice.
In taking for granted that God used political agents as central players in his redemptive plans, Edwards was adopting the assumptions of two centuries of Reformation-era interpretations, especially in the Reformed tradition. John Calvin had dedicated his Institutes of the Christian Religion to King Francis I of his native France. Christians of almost all sorts assumed that the religious disposition of the ruler was crucial to the religious welfare of the people. In the not-so-distant revolution of 1649, Puritans had committed themselves to the principle that political action may be necessary to protect true religion. New England's survival as a stronghold for Reformed Chris-