Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The thought-world of early evangelicalism
- 2 Spener and the origins of church pietism
- 3 The mystic way or the mystic ways?
- 4 The development of pietism in the Reformed churches
- 5 The Reformed tradition in Britain and America
- 6 Zinzendorf
- 7 John Wesley
- 8 Jonathan Edwards
- 9 The disintegration of the old evangelicalism
- Conclusion
- Select and user-friendly bibliography
- Index
8 - Jonathan Edwards
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The thought-world of early evangelicalism
- 2 Spener and the origins of church pietism
- 3 The mystic way or the mystic ways?
- 4 The development of pietism in the Reformed churches
- 5 The Reformed tradition in Britain and America
- 6 Zinzendorf
- 7 John Wesley
- 8 Jonathan Edwards
- 9 The disintegration of the old evangelicalism
- Conclusion
- Select and user-friendly bibliography
- Index
Summary
Jonathan Edwards (1703–58) is a prime example of many things, not least of the still persisting sense of evangelical fellowship; for no one could have disliked his Calvinism more than the arch-Arminian John Wesley, yet it was Wesley who went to considerable trouble to make versions of Edwards's works available to his own flock, and this at a time when his own relations with the great representative of English evangelical Calvinism, George Whitefield, were fractious. To the same sense of fellowship testified the publishing history of his most famous tract, the Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God … in Northampton … First published in England in 1737, with a commendatory preface by the Congregationalist ministers John Guyse and Isaac Watts arguing that Edwardsian revival was the old Baxterian middle way, it was almost never out of print for the next century. If ever revival seemed to flag, someone somewhere would reprint the Faithful Narrative as a classic analysis, description, and exhortation to return not to seventeenth-century Puritanism but to the fires of revival.
Edwards and ministerial authority
In this there was an element of paradox, for Edwards fought desperately to preserve a sort of Reformed Orthodoxy, at a time when it was losing its grip in his own country. And he retained an encyclopedic or systematic mind familiar in the old Reformed tradition.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Early EvangelicalismA Global Intellectual History, 1670–1789, pp. 140 - 155Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006