Jonathan Edwards has long epitomized the Puritan preacher as fiery scold, fixated on the inner struggle of the soul and the eternal flames of hell. In this book, Ronald Story offers a fundamentally different view of Edwards, revealing a profoundly social minister who preached a gospel of charity and community bound by love.

The first chapters trace Edwards's life and impact, examine his reputation as an intellectual, Calvinist, and revivalist, and highlight the importance for him of the gentler, more compassionate concepts of light, harmony, beauty, and sweetness. Story then explains what Edwards means by the “Gospel of Love”—a Christian faith that is less individual than interpersonal, and whose central feature is the practice of charity to the poor and the quest for loving community in this world, the chief signs of true salvation. As Edwards preached in his sermon “Heaven Is a World of Love,” the afterlife itself is social in nature because love is social.

Drawing on Edwards's own sermons and notebooks, Story reveals the minister's belief that divine love expressed in the human family should take us beyond tribalism, sectarianism, provincialism, and nationality. Edwards offers hope, in the manner of Walter Rauschenbusch, Karl Barth, Martin Luther King Jr., and other great “improvers,” for the coming of a world without want and war. Gracefully and compellingly written, this book represents a new departure in Edwards studies, revising the long-standing yet misleading stereotype of a man whose lessons of charity, community, and love we need now more than ever.

Scholars no longer see Jonathan Edwards as the fire-and-brimstone preacher who deemed his parishioners “sinners in the hands of an angry god.” Edwards now figures as caring and socially conscious and exerts increased influence as a philosopher of the American school of Protestantism. In this study, he becomes the progenitor of an alternative tradition in American letters.

In Knowing, Seeing, Being, Jennifer L. Leader argues that Edwards, the nineteenth-century poet Emily Dickinson, and the twentieth-century poet Marianne Moore share a heretofore underrecognized set of religious and philosophical preoccupations. She contends that they represent an alternative tradition within American literature, one that differs from Transcendentalism and is grounded in Reformed Protestantism and its ways of reading and interpreting the King James Bible and the natural world. According to Leader, these three writers' most significant commonality is the Protestant tradition of typology, a rigorous mode of interpreting scripture and nature through which certain figures or phenomena are read as the fulfillment of prophecy and of God's work. Following from their similar ways of reading, they also share philosophical and spiritual questions about language, epistemology (knowing), perception (seeing), and physical and spiritual ontology (being). In connecting Edwards to these two poets, in exploring each writer's typological imagination, and through a series of insightful readings, this innovative book reevaluates three major figures in American intellectual and literary history and compels a reconsideration of these writers and their legacies.

The untold story of how an unlikely Harvard atheist helped resurrect one of America’s greatest Puritans 

Jonathan Edwards is widely regarded as one of America’s most important and original thinkers. Prior to the mid-twentieth century, however, he was largely unknown to the learned community, except, perhaps, as a preacher of terror due to his well-known sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” In 1948 and 1949, Harvard professor of English Perry Miller published four pieces on him, including the acclaimed biography, Jonathan Edwards, and only a few years later he became the general editor of Edwards’s collected works. Miller’s efforts helped to resurrect Edwards as America’s greatest Puritan and to solidify him as central to the American experience, and their names have been closely intertwined ever since. 

Miller, an iconoclastic scholar widely considered to be the founder of American studies, was known for his brilliant scholarship, devoted teaching, and hard living. Dying prematurely in 1963, he remains an enigmatic and controversial figure, with no biography available. In Reviving Jonathan Edwards, Stephen D. Crocco explores why this Harvard atheist, with an eerie sense that his time was short, delayed work on his planned magnum opus—a sweeping intellectual history of early America—to edit the works of the greatest of all American Puritans. 

In a riveting history that combines biographical insight with a detailed look into mid-century academia, Crocco draws on a large body of unpublished correspondence to offer an intricate detective tale of a decades-long publishing endeavor. He provides fresh portraits of Miller and the editorial committee he assembled, which included Sydney Ahlstrom, Roland Bainton, H. Richard Niebuhr, Norman Holmes Pearson, Paul Ramsey, and John E. Smith, and follows the story long after Miller’s death, tracing the repeated, sometimes seemingly intractable challenges that publishing the many volumes on Edwards’s work faced. He concludes by tracing Edwards studies up to 2003, the 300th anniversary of his birth, when the quiet revival of this colonial minister had evolved into a full scholarly renaissance.