About Edwards

Jonathan Edwards & The Bible

The following is a brief excerpt from Professor Stephen Stein's introduction to one of Edwards’ biblical commentaries called Notes on Scripture, published as volume 15 of the Yale University Press edition of the Works of Jonathan Edwards.

"Edwards' reputation as an avid student of the Bible began during his lifetime; he himself had a hand in spreading word of it. In 1757 Edwards sketched for the Trustees of the College of New Jersey several projects he hoped to publish in the future, including a ‘History of the Work of Redemption’ and a ‘Harmony of the old and new Testament.’ The former was to present a Christian theology as history in which all events in time would be considered ‘so far as the scriptures give any light.’ The latter was to deal successively with the prophecies of the Messiah, Old Testament types, and ‘the harmony of the old and new Testament.’ Of this second project, the ‘Harmony,’ Edwards wrote: ‘In the course of this work, I find there will be occasion for an explanation of a very great part of the holy scripture; which may, in such a view be explained in a method, which to me seems the most entertaining and profitable, best tending to lead the mind to a view of the true spirit, design, life, and soul of the scriptures, as well as to their proper use and improvement.’ Edwards’ untimely death a year later kept him from fulfilling these plans." [1]

"His core beliefs as an exegete of the Bible included a supernaturalism that affirmed a God revealed through sacred texts and a three-story universe inhabited by humans and spirits, both good and evil. For Edwards, the boundaries of the Christian canon were not debatable. He accepted the prevailing view that the biblical canon had been closed long ago and that there was no need to augment it. He showed little patience with those in his day who claimed inspiration for new revelations. [He] also viewed the Bible as a comprehensive source of knowledge. Writing in late 1728 or early 1729, Edwards asserted that ‘the doctrines of the Word of God are the foundation of all useful and excellent knowledge…Revelation is that light in the world from whence has beamed forth not only the knowledge of religion, but all valuable truth; ‘tis the fountain of that light which has lightened the understandings of men with all sorts of knowledge.’ In his judgment, the biblical canon was a coherent and ordered source of beneficial knowledge and historical truth as well as a revelation of God’s plan of salvation.

According to the commentarial tradition, the task of the exegete is to interpret sacred texts and to identify and reconcile conflicting elements within the canon. The commentator must clarify obscurities, find coherence in what may seem to be incoherent, harmonize elements that appear discordant, and propose moral possibilities where the text seems to approve of immoral actions. In his efforts to interpret the Bible, Edwards resorted to these same time-honored commentarial strategies. He found meaning in obscure passages by reading them against others, as when he interpreted the struggle of Jacob and Esau in their mother’s womb (Gen. 25:22) as a reference to the war between the flesh and the spirit (Gal. 5:17). He reconciled differences among parallel texts by resorting to linguistic and syntactical arguments, as in the case of the disparate accounts of Jesus’ passage through Jericho (Matt. 20, Mark 10, and Luke 18). He discovered virtue in the scatological when viewed from a spiritual perspective, for example, proposing a "mystical signification" of the severe penalty dealt to the woman who grabbed the genitals of her husband’s opponent (Deut. 25:11-12). He used multiple levels of meaning to rise above the offense of the literal, showing how the vow made by Jephthah the Gileadite need not result in the offering of his daughter in a burnt sacrifice (Judg. 11:30-40). But at the same time, Edwards refused to conflate or confuse his commentary with canon, affirming the Protestant principle that Scripture alone is the authoritative source of Christian teaching. He recognized that interpreters, himself included, could err." [2]

"The revival of interest in Edwards [in the second half of the twentieth century], sparked in part by the Neo-Orthodox movement and the resurgence of evangelicalism, brought increased attention to the biblical side of his intellectual activity. The influence of Edwards on such figures as H. Richard Niebuhr is now common knowledge. Niebuhr’s classic study of The Kingdom of God in America, for instance, contains extensive discussion of Edwards’ evangelicalism, Calvinism, and millennialism. Other scholars influenced by Niebuhr focused more directly on Edwards’ use of the bible. Conrad Cherry, for example, demonstrated the critical role the Bible played in much of Edwards’ writing as a primary form of proof and evidence. The context for Edwards’ theology was biblical—that is, it must be understood within the framework of the work of redemption. Writing later in another venue, Cherry asserted that ‘Jonathan Edwards was preeminently a biblical theologian’ and noted perceptively: ‘In giving his wholehearted attention, Puritan fashion, to biblical, and by extension to cosmic, typology, he anticipated our contemporary absorption with the meaning and function of religious symbolism.’" [3]

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