Edwards's Intellectual Context

Scripture focus

And of the children of Issachar, which were men that had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do.

1 Chronicles 12:32 KJV

At a glance

Summary of the chapter

For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Edwards was pictured as a brilliant but isolated mind, marooned in the American wilderness far from Europe's intellectual centers — Leslie Stephen's memorable jab likened him to a German professor set down among the trees. Recent research, especially by Norman Fiering, William Morris, and Peter Thuesen, has overturned this picture, documenting Edwards's participation in a genuine 'Transatlantic Republic of Letters' that connected educated readers on both sides of the ocean during the early Enlightenment.

Thuesen's catalog of Edwards's reading shows a mind ranging far beyond narrow Puritan divinity: logic and metaphysics, deist and skeptical writers, history, science, politics, exegesis, poetry, novels, and even some Jewish and Islamic sources. Edwards was as fluent in the new 'polite' or 'latitudinarian' literature fashionable in his youth as he was in older Reformed scholasticism, living out what Thuesen calls a 'fruitful tension' between Enlightenment openness and Reformed tradition rather than choosing one against the other.

The chapter also dismantles two convenient but misleading dichotomies — enlightenment versus piety, and Protestant biblicism versus Catholic scholasticism — showing that many Enlightenment figures, Newton among them, were deeply religious, and that Reformed theologians freely used the same scholastic methods as their Catholic counterparts.

Key points

• Older narratives of Edwards as an intellectually isolated colonial thinker have been overturned by decades of source-critical scholarship.
• Scholars now describe a 'Transatlantic Republic of Letters' linking well-read Britons, Europeans, and colonial Americans during the early eighteenth century.
• Peter Thuesen's research documents Edwards's reading across theology, philosophy, science, history, and even non-Christian sources.
• Edwards lived in creative tension between Reformed scholastic tradition and the new 'polite' Enlightenment literature of his era, rather than rejecting one for the other.
• The common opposition of 'enlightenment' to 'piety,' or Protestant Bible-only religion to Catholic philosophy, does not hold up under close historical examination.

A line worth remembering

the fruitful tension between Enlightenment 'latitude' and Reformed traditionalism animated Edwards's entire career.

McClymond & McDermott The Theology of Jonathan Edwards, ch. 3

Related Scripture

• Proverbs 9:9
• Acts 17:22-23
• 1 Thessalonians 5:21
• Colossians 2:8

For reflection and discussion

1. Why might Christians be tempted to imagine faithful believers of the past as more isolated from their culture than they really were?
2. What would it look like today to hold Scripture and serious engagement with contemporary thought together, as Edwards did?
3. Where do you see false either/or choices — faith versus reason, tradition versus openness — being forced on Christians in your own setting?