Teaching Edwards

Gerald McDermott, Roanoke College

Teaching Edwards is always a challenge. It is a challenge because Edwards struggles with 18th-century issues that are not always immediately relevant to today's students.

But the challenge can be fairly easily met, successfully, for a teacher conversant with Edwards and his intellectual project. For Edwards' principal nemesis was the skeptical and even moderate Enlightenment (see Henry May, The Enlightenment in America), particularly in the form of deism. Problems raised by these Enlightenment thinkers are perennial ones, which reappear in other guises today. The resourceful professor can make these connections, and thereby help students appreciate Edwards's contemporary philosophical and theological relevance.

I have found that the following issues, important for Edwards, can become compelling for students: the beauty of the divine, revivalism, preaching, salvation, spiritual discernment in Religious Affections, freedom vs. determinism in Freedom of the Will, human nature in Original Sin, typology (which can be particularly intriguing to students), morality and beauty in The Nature of True Virtue, war and society (students especially like the realism of George Marsden's Jonathan Edwards: A Life on these matters), God's purposes in creation, and how Christ relates to the religions.

Of course, the danger is presentism, reshaping Edwards, like putty in the hand, to make him more appealing to current sensibilities. But close attention to Edwards's texts can help prevent that.

I have taught Edwards in two kinds of classes, both the American religion intro (200-level), and a 300-level course on Edwards. In the first, students find The Nature of True Virtue most engaging (I have used the whole treatise with great success), the Personal Narrative, and selections from Images of Divine Things.

In the 300-level Edwards course, I use the Marsden biography, plus the Yale Jonathan Edwards Reader. For supplemental (optional) texts, I use the Yale sermons reader, plus assorted monographs.

Typically I choose about ten of what I consider to be the best recent monographs, and require each student to do a 5-10 page book review of their choice. I also require them to write a major research paper, and to make at least two class presentations on one or more of the readings for the day.

I also give a final exam, in which I have students write an outline of the principal argument of three of the major treatises. I give them a list of ten of such treatises and sermons ahead of time.

Gerald McDermott
Professor
Roanoke College