The Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University

The following is a brief excerpt from E. Brooks Holifield's Theology In America on the theology of Jonathan Edwards.

Professor Holifield is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of American Church History at Candler School of Theology, Emory University. He is the author of several books, including the widely acclaimed Theology In America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).

"In typical New England Calvinist fashion, Jonathan Edwards defined theology as `the doctrine of living to God by Christ.' In many otherways, Edwards was a typical New England theologian, a Calvinist concerned about piety in a local congregation. Yet no other theologian in America would equal him in intellectual depth or enduring influence of generations of successors. For a hundred years after his death,competing schools of theology either struggled for his mantle or strove to overcome his logic. He never lacked for critics: Arminians of every variety would continue to view him as a monumental defender of Calvinist error while some conservative Calvinists would long view his theology as a source of heresy. His admirers, however, formed an Edwardean theological culture that entrenched itself in the leading Reformed seminaries of the nation even as some of them crafted theological revisions that Edwards would never have accepted.

Edwards drew the common distinction between the two kinds of theological knowledge, the first speculative, derived from the exercise of the understanding, and the second practical, consisting of the `sense of the heart,' the gracious inclination of both the understanding and the will. The aim of theology was to nurture a `sense' of divine thingsthat took one deeper into their nature than the speculative understanding alone could penetrate and to `guide and influence us in our practice.' His favorite text in systematic theology was the Theoretico-Practica Theologia of the Reformed theologian Petrus van Mastricht (1630-1706)--a teacher at Utrecht in the Netherlands from 1677 until his death--who made a point of showing that every speculative truth in theology had a practical implication. Just as Edwards strove to overcome a sharp distinction between the will and the understanding, so he tried also to ensure aclose linkage between the speculative and the practical. A `speculativeknowledge' was of `infinite importance' for without it there could be no `practical knowledge.'...

He entertained no doubts about either the value of rationality or therationality of theology. Edwards wrote about moral philosophy,metaphysics, atomist theory, optics, the corpuscular theory of light,and the nature of gravity. In essays written when he was a student at Yale between 1716 and 1720, he displayed a knowledge of Newtonian science, and his reading of John Locke, probably when he was a tutor at the college, confirmed an interest in philosophy that went back to his undergraduate years. In 1729 he began to think about writing a`Rational Account' of all the `Main Doctrines of the Christian Religion,' and in the mid-1740's he projected a book to `shew how allthe arts and sciences, the more they are perfected, the more they issuein divinity, and coincide with it, and appear to be as parts of it.' Theology for Edwards remained the highest expression of rationality,though he also though that it offered the clearest insights into reason's limits.

While some read him chiefly as a philosophical theologian, immersed in the conversation with Locke, Malebranche, the Cambridge Platonists, or the British moralists, others, like his firstbiographer Samuel Hopkins, emphasized that he `studied the Bible more than all other books' and that his most frequent recourse as at heologian was to such works of biblical criticism as Matthew Poole's Synopsis Criticorum (1669-76) and Matthew Henry's Exposition of the Old and New Testaments (1708-10). In response especially to the deists, he occupied himself with the critical study of scripture, writing on inspiration; the scope of the canon; authorship of biblical texts, including the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch; and the historicity of biblical reports. He was, infact, both a philosophical and a biblical theologian, and for him thesetwo sides of theology coincided. Both as a philosopher and an exegete,he sought to preserve Calvinist orthodoxy, including the standard Calvinist balance between reason and revelation. Nevertheless, he recast conventional categories, and his vision of divine `excellency'inspired a way of thinking that shaped his views of rationality,ethics, metaphysics, biblical interpretation, and the meaning of the practicality of theology."[1]

[1] Holifield, E. Brooks, Theology in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 102-104.

* Theology In America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War by  Brooks Holifield

* The Theology of Jonathan Edwards by Conrad Cherry

* The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards by Sang Hyun Lee