Jonathan Edwards and the Bible

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J Jonathan Edwards and the Bible ROBERT E. BROWN

Jonathan Edwards and the Bible

This book is a publication of Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, Indiana 47404-3797 USA http://iupress.indiana.edu Telephone orders 800-842-6796 Fax orders 812-855-7931 Orders by e-mail [email protected] © 2002 by Robert E. Brown All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brown, Robert E., date Jonathan Edwards and the Bible / Robert E. Brown. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-253-34093-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Edwards, Jonathan, 1703–1758—Contributions in Biblical interpretation. 2. Bible—Criticism, interpretation, etc.—United States—History—18th century. I. Title. BS500 .B75 2002 220.6′092—dc21 2001006084 1 2 3 4 5 07 06 05 04 03 02

To my family

The Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize Essay of the American Society of Church History for the Year 1999

Contents Acknowledgments Introduction

1. Bibliophile

xi xiii

1

Edwards and the Bible / 2 Critical Literacy / 5 Seeds of Discontent / 13

2. Knowing and the Historical Mode

27

The Critique of Historical Knowledge / 30 A Symphony with the Soul / 35 Tradition and True Religion / 45

3. Sacred History and the Common Sense

57

The Suf¤ciency of Experimental Knowledge / 59 A New Sense of Reason / 64 Edwards and Locke on the Bible / 76

4. Plain Obvious Sensible Facts

88

Critical Method / 89 Authentic Text / 99 Authorial History / 111

5. Sacred History and the “History” of Religions

129

The Origins of “Rational” Religion / 132 Nature’s Thesaurus / 144 Rumors and Shadows / 151

6. Theology in the Historical Mode

164

A Rational Account of Religion / 166 An Entirely New Method / 169 The Harmony of Sacred History / 179 Physico-History / 183

7. Denouement Notes Bibliography Index

197 201 271 289

Acknowledgments All projects of this nature come to fruition only by the unseen and unheralded efforts of many, and the present study is no exception. I would like to thank the members of my dissertation committee at the University of Iowa, Philip Cummins, Ralph Keen, Kenneth Kuntz, and James McCue, for consenting to the arduous task of reading the manuscript. I would especially like to thank my advisor and mentor, T. Dwight Bozeman, whose example of academic rigor as well as empathy for the historian’s subjects has taught me more about true scholarship than I can put into words. His precise but always fair and instructive criticism encouraged me to be better, and is responsible for much of the quality that this work has attained. I am also grateful to the faculty, staff, and student colleagues in the School of Religion who have helped along the way, especially Maureen Walterhouse, who steered me through the administrative maze of the university. Many thanks as well to Ann Louise Olson, Jeff Pessin, and the gang at Bowen. Scholars at other institutions have also been of signi¤cant help, and have stimulated my own thinking about Jonathan Edwards. I have especially appreciated and bene¤ted from the generosity of Ken Minkema, Ava Chamberlain, Douglas Sweeney, and Peter Thuesen of the Works of Jonathan Edwards at Yale University. Wilson Kimnach offered timely advice on several occasions. Thomas Schafer was kind enough to engage me in a long late-night conversation about the “Miscellanies,” and the availability of his transcriptions at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University has aided me greatly. George Marsden graciously read and commented on a portion of the manuscript. Gerald McDermott encouraged my ¤rst trip to Yale to take a personal look at Edwards’s manuscripts, which proved to be a critical moment in my scholarly life. This project received its inspiration from a seminar on critical thought taught by Samuel Preus at Indiana University, whose scholarship and mentoring were important to my professional growth. Gary Ebersole provided encouragement, a happy teaching environment, and sound professional advice during the revision process. The staffs at several libraries, including those at the University of Iowa, Yale University, Indiana University, the University of Missouri–Kansas City, and the Forbes Library of Northampton, Massachusetts, have been very accommodating to the often overbearing demands of an author. I would like to thank the American Society of Church History for their kind recognition of this project through the award of the 1999 Brewer Prize, with

If Scripture, though deriv’d from heav’nly birth, Has been but carelessly preserv’d on Earth; If God’s own People, who of God before Knew what we know, and had been promis’d more, In fuller Terms, of Heaven’s assisting Care, And who did neither Time, nor Study spare To keep this Book untainted, unperplext; Let in gross Errours to corrupt the Text: Omitted paragraphs, embroyl’d the Sense; With vain Traditions stopt the gaping Fence, Which every common hand pull’d up with ease: What Safety from such brushwood-helps as these? If written words from time are not secur’d, How can we think have oral Sounds endur’d? Which thus transmitted, if one Mouth has fail’d, Immortal Lyes on Ages are intail’d: And that some such have been, is prov’d too plain; If we consider Interest, Church, and Gain. More safe, and much more modest ’tis, to say God would not leave Mankind without a way: And the Scriptures, though not every where Free from Corruption, or intire, or clear, Are uncorrupt, suf¤cient, clear, intire, In all things which our needfull Faith require. And still the nearer to the Spring we go More limpid, more unsoyl’d the Waters ®ow. Thus, ¤rst Traditions were a proof alone; Cou’d we be certain such they were, so known: But since some Flaws in long descent may be, They make not Truth but Probability. Tradition written therefore more commends Authority, than what from Voice descends: And this, as perfect as its kind can be, Rouls down to us the Sacred History. —John Dryden, Religio laici (1682)

special thanks to those who performed the daunting task of reading the many ¤ne manuscripts. It has made this effort an additionally gratifying one. Many thanks as well to Robert Sloan and the rest of the editorial staff at Indiana University Press for steering this project to publication. Some material in this book appeared previously in copyrighted form in the Journal of Religion, July 1999, and is used with permission. Such an undertaking would have been impossible without the moral, material, and patient spiritual support of a host of friends and family members. My debt to the households of faith in Bloomington and Iowa City is great, as is that to my friends Karen and Jay Adams, Morgan and Jenni Swink, Denny and Sherry Fisher, and Paul and Cathy Gutjahr. My special thanks to Paul Gutjahr, whose academic savvy and support have been indispensable to me; he is a gift as a colleague and an even greater gift as a friend. To my brother Corey, many thanks for the gift of the laptop computer and for all the technical expertise on such matters over the years. Finally, to my family—Dad, Mom, Pat, Bill, Susan, Corey, Laura—words fail to express all that your support has meant to me, and how much a part of this work each of you has become. It is to all of you that this work is dedicated.

xii

Acknowledgments

Introduction In the upper right-hand corner of the ¤rst page of his “Catalogue” of reading, Jonathan Edwards made a list of “Books to be enquired for” for his embryonic personal library. He intended to acquire, as he noted, “the best geography, the best history of the world, the best exposition of the apocalypse, the best general ecclesiastical history from Christ to the present time, the best upon the types of the Scripture, the best Chronology, the best historical dictionary of the nature of Bayle’s dictionary, the best that treats of the cabbalistical learning of the Jews, [and] the best history of the lives of philosophers.”1 Whether he was successful in his pursuit, at least to his own satisfaction, remains a matter of investigation; the “Catalogue” is as much a re®ection of his reading interests as his reading habits.2 The list is of interest, however, because his preoccupation of the moment illustrates one of the most notable (and noticeably overlooked) elements of his wider intellectual project. On its face the list is testimony to the diversity of Edwards’s interests from the earliest moments of his professional career. But it is also a portent of the broad spectrum of issues that in time would intersect with his consuming interest in matters of biblical interpretation, particularly with the host of problems associated with the nature of biblical historiography. The present study is shaped in part by an interest in the question of when and in what ways critical historical thought began to affect the self-consciously precedential nature of colonial American biblical interpretation.3 It is generally acknowledged that one of the chief features of Edwards’s Puritan heritage was its strong adherence to a realistic reading of the biblical narratives. Dwight Bozeman has characterized this mentality as a kind of primitivism: since the sacred texts evoked “the one and only signifying history of the race,” they offered a panorama of primordial religion that “in principle must be immediate to the experience of the present age and reader. Sacred history was not to be conceived historically as a distant, alien, and heterogeneous world. It was to be reentered and experienced. Both its characterization of the human scene and its right to compel belief were absolute, ultimately placing in question the very right of other dramas to exist.”4 By the eighteenth century competing dramas were gaining a ¤rm footing in Anglo-American society, and threatened to relativize the template of Puritan historical consciousness. While Edwards certainly embraced the spirit of the Puritan mentality, in a real sense he could only applaud it, or hold it as an ideal to be sought after in modi¤ed form. The process of intellectual separation from

the world of the ancients had begun for him, as it had for nearly everyone in the literate world. The intellectual premises that gave rise to a sense of the immediacy, integrity, and absolute primacy of sacred history had been eroding under an array of philosophical, scienti¤c, and historiographical pressures since the middle of the seventeenth century. Edwards and others still held out the biblical traditions as the signifying history of humanity, but they could do so only at the cost of sustained intellectual effort. For they were aware that the “Scripture history” was not an all-encompassing record of human religious experience, but instead represented the special history of a geographically localized people. It was in fact, as he acknowledged, a “very short concise history, where only some particular facts and circumstances” were included, while “innumerable others are omitted, that would be proper to be mention’d, if the main design were to give a clear full . . . history.”5 For Edwards it was also a history that was written out of an experience distant in time and alien in cultural perspective. The Puritan consciousness may have held up the biblical world as “an order of complete perfection” offering a sacred pattern that was indifferent to historical process, but for Edwards the barriers of time and place imposed by the intervening millennia were considerable. The fact that the biblical narratives were “given in antient languages” and “used among a people whose customs and phraseology are but very imperfectly understood” was the source of a host of interpretive dif¤culties, dif¤culties that required resolution or explanation before that world could be appropriated as a normative religious reality.6 The present study addresses the manner and degree to which such problems permeated Edwards’s religious thought and career, and, indirectly, their signi¤cance to the development of colonial religious thought in general. Western societies have experienced a profound alienation from their formative traditions over the past several centuries, as well as a persistent ambivalence over how, if at all, to assimilate them into modern culture. This study describes in part the onset of this dissonance between past and present in American society. When in the American religious ethos did the events and teachings encompassed in the biblical texts cease to be simply or fundamentally a primordial reality to be emulated, and begin to be thought of as products of culture in need of explanation? In what ways did the encounter with critical thought impose a psychological separation on the interpreters of those texts, such that the stories no longer served as the unfettered medium through which that sacred reality was reentered, but rather, at least in the context of that critical thought, became a barrier to identifying with the primitive past? Or, to put it more baldly, when did it become re®exive to think of the Bible as a problem to be solved as a requisite step to receiving it as divine speech to be heeded? In particular this study focuses upon the role that a constellation of conceptual issues about the nature of historical method played in shaping Edwards’s xiv

Introduction

own estimation of the biblical narratives, and the impact this had in turn upon his theological re®ection and writings. Most speci¤cally this historical criticism focused on the biblical narratives; but eventually it was extended to all of the genres of the canon to the degree that they represented historical forms of communication. In Edwards we encounter evidence of the early and transformative impact of critical historical interpretation on American religious thought, a transformation that for him was profound and surprisingly creative in effect. Throughout his career he expended considerable effort seeking to understand and explicate the connection or reciprocity between increasingly divergent bodies of religious and secular knowledge, whose separation both derived from and contributed to the critical historical study of the Bible and to that book’s eventual devolution as a religious and societal authority. Edwards does not represent the beginning of this transformation in American religious thought, nor is he an isolated instance in the early eighteenth century. In fact the implications of critical interpretation permeated public culture during his career. But his work does represent one of the most comprehensive and systematic treatments of these issues in the colonial period. As such it provides an important indication of the issues’ impact during a period typically treated as lacking in such in®uences. Furthermore, it is a dimension of his thought that offers to reshape scholarly perceptions of the nature of his work. The problem of biblical criticism is a ubiquitous feature of Edwards’s work, an aspect absent of which the nature and genesis of his entire theological career cannot be adequately understood, or can hardly be made intelligible at all. The great task of Edwards’s theological career was to reconstruct and reinterpret the rationality or cogency of Christian belief with reference to the intellectual assumptions of the age. This included, as has been amply studied, his response to challenges to the substance of traditional Christian doctrine and religious experience, as well as to the epistemological and metaphysical issues that were at the root of almost every intellectual problem in the eighteenth century. But looming behind more narrow debates about Christian doctrine was the universal contention over their traditionary sources,* sources that were increasingly understood to derive from a historical context primitive and alien to that of the present. Hans Frei has described the development of this cognitive dissonance from sacred origins as the “eclipse” of biblical narrative. Prior to the late seventeenth century, interpreters traditionally employed a realistic reading of the scriptural texts, in which the meanings of the stories were identi¤ed with their historical form. The narratives were taken to relate actual historical events, and their *I have consciously chosen to use the word “traditionary” to refer to epistemological claims based on written (historical) texts. This choice has been made quite intentionally; the American sense of “traditional” carries too much of a connotation of “customary,” what was needed was a word that would effectively communicate the notion of written material: thus “traditionary.”

Introduction

xv

meaning was understood to be embedded literally in the events themselves. Potential disparities of meaning between individual narratives were harmonized by interpretive methods, such as allegory or typology, that minimized their historical variation.7 In the eighteenth century the historicity or factuality of those events, and thus their assumed literal meaning, was widely called into question. As the narrative world of the Bible became increasingly detached from the ostensive world of facts, critical historical explanations offered to replace traditional, more credulous, interpretations of the texts. As the realistic reading of biblical narrative broke down, so too did the understanding that the world it depicted presented an all-encompassing religious reality. The assumption that the canopy of sacred narrative could adequately account for a presently informed understanding of the world was signi¤cantly modi¤ed, where it was not abandoned altogether. Furthermore, the balance in the negotiation between past and present was quite clearly reversed: “the Bible’s own story [became] increasingly dependent on its relation to other temporal frames of reference to render it illuminating and even real.”8 Frei recognized the presence of a signi¤cant school of interpretation in the eighteenth century that remained largely traditional in its outlook. This branch of rational apologetics continued to press for the literal truth of sacred history on the basis of its inspiration and on evidence for its factual reliability. But such appeals could no longer be made, he observes, without meeting “historicalcritical interpretations of the Bible on the latter’s home ground.” That is, such thinkers could no longer simply identify the historical form of the texts as a basis for asserting their truthfulness and meaning. Rather, they had to argue on rational and empirical grounds for the reliability of that history, for the plausibility of its literal interpretation and traditional religious meaning. Such an interpretive strategy “constituted an acknowledgment that, in the interpretation of the theologically signi¤cant biblical narratives, historical explanation governs explication of the text.” In this sense, despite their traditional view of these narratives, such thinkers’ interpretive and apologetic strategy was “actually part of a program of self-modernization.” They accepted the modern canons of history, which produced the same logical distinction between form and meaning, and thus the same reversal of the direction of interpretation. Even conservative interpreters attempted to accommodate the biblical narratives to an increasingly divergent body of scienti¤c knowledge and facts. They too allowed that the meaning of the text hinged upon the interpreter’s ability to ascertain its reliability and consonance with a contemporary knowledge of the world. In doing so they had in effect relegated the con¤rmation of that narrative to their present experience and understanding of the world, at least in part.9 The eclipse of biblical narrative thus cast its shadow even over those most opposed to the radical results of critical thought. xvi

Introduction

Central to the claims made here about this literature, therefore, is the underlying assertion that the early modernization of biblical interpretation was more a conversation between two parties than a divorce between them. As Frei intimates but as scholars have too often ignored, the strategy of rational apologetics was an important component in the eventual emergence of modern forms of biblical interpretation. In the eighteenth century at least, apologetic and radical schools of interpretation represent parallel phenomena within the emerging awareness of the psychological distance imposed on the past by critical method. Both radical and conservative interpreters contributed signi¤cantly to the development of a critical historical method for handling sacred texts. Together they formed a shared republic of letters on these matters, and were part of a common drama. Their approaches are more alike than not, and at many points have more in common with each other than with contemporary modes of biblical interpretation. To view them as diametrically opposed or as qualitatively distinct is to impose an anachronistic view of the history of interpretation upon the era. Beyond this, measured in terms of number of adherents and volume of publications, this “modernizing traditionalism” dominated Edwards’s intellectual environment.10 The interpretive method characteristic in Edwards is in fact most representative of the age, and thus is crucial to the full understanding of eighteenth-century biblical interpretation. The conservative participation in the transformation to modern interpretative strategies is historically signi¤cant, even if its conceptual achievements have not proven in retrospect to be decisive. Scholars may be uninterested in or puzzled by the fact that ¤gures such as Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, and Blaise Pascal devoted so much of their writing to this form of biblical interpretation, given their modern sensibilities for other sorts of philosophical problems. But many of them remained relatively traditional in their biblical interpretation, as did Edwards. The problems associated with their founding cultural narrative were quite naturally of fundamental concern to them, regardless of their otherwise more progressive outlook and disciplinary expertise.11 Edwards clearly belongs to this stream of conservative interpretation. Stephen Stein has characterized his thought as “relatively untouched” by the transition to newer modes of interpretation. His approach to biblical interpretation fell within the bounds of a “traditional exegetical outlook,” one characterized by its assumption of the coherence and credibility of a divinely authored text.12 As a characterization of the broad outlines of Edwards’s biblical interpretation, Stein’s assessment is accurate. It would be a mistake to conclude, however, that critical thought played little if any role in shaping his interpretive method. Though he did retain a high degree of con¤dence in the integrity of scriptural history, his approach was really a kind of hybrid traditionalism, one modi¤ed in signi¤cant ways by his accommodations to the new learning. He took seriIntroduction

xvii

ously the implications and contributions that other disciplines (e.g., philology, history, epistemology, natural science) offered for understanding the biblical texts. In this sense, within the standards of the time, Edwards’s approach is probably best described as “modestly critical.” The more pertinent question with regard to his engagement with critical thought, however, and the question with which this study is ultimately concerned, is the degree to which such ideas penetrated and reshaped his thought within the broad patterns of traditional interpretive assumptions. In no way can it be said that Edwards was isolated from or unaffected by critical historical methods, either in his biblical interpretation or in his theological concerns. In the truest sense his thought is the product of, and not an exception to, the forces producing the eclipse of biblical narrative in western culture. To think critically in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not carry the strong sense of dichotomy and con®ict implied in the contemporary distinction between critical and pre-critical thought. Contemporary usage is thus likely to be almost wholly anachronistic for the period, and ought to be used cautiously, if not discarded altogether. Rather, scholars need to develop a contextually sensitive understanding of how the participants were self-consciously critical in method and theory. Though they certainly used the word “criticism,” and used it promiscuously, to describe their methods and to distinguish themselves from the thinking of the ancients, Edwards’s contemporaries understood the term in a more ®uid way, one less strictly de¤ned and much broader in scope than present usage tends to allow for. Thus it should come as less of a surprise that otherwise traditional religious thinkers could embrace critical attitudes, or that many of the most learned critical interpreters of the Bible were relatively traditional in their theological outlook.13 To be “critical” in Edwards’s intellectual milieu was largely synonymous with being “judicious,” and in this sense, allied with the notion of historical erudition. Its antithesis was more properly something like “credulous” rather than “traditional,” to say nothing of “religious” or “theological.”14 It was a standard of historical thinking to which all those who considered themselves informed, including Edwards, aspired. As importantly, it was a standard against which the learned were increasingly comparing the traditional sources of their intellectual heritage, including the biblical narratives. Its application to biblical interpretation was especially concerned with replacing theologically or ecclesiastically imposed interpretations with those grounded, at least in theory, in historical study. Many if not most considered it only natural that the preeminent source of western religious thought would meet the measure of critical erudition, and that the biblical authors wrote as informed and conscientious historians. Thus in general Edwards’s contemporaries sought explanations that re®ected a harmony between past and present approaches to historiography, while at the same time modifyxviii

Introduction

ing traditional interpretations of the biblical narratives when these became less plausible. This was an uneasy harmony, of course, as more radical critics pressed for naturalistic and politically advantageous interpretations of the religious sources of European culture. But the point of departure between conservative and radical critics, as William Baird points out, was principally ideological rather than methodological. What distinguished them most was how they used the results of critical thought, either to justify or to undermine traditional notions of the biblical narratives as good history and sound religion.15 The divergence between critical and traditional thought had begun to create fault lines in what had previously been a more or less uni¤ed approach to biblical interpretation within Christendom, but the full implications of that divergence were far from clear or conclusive. One suspects that at least some of the past and current reticence toward engaging Edwards’s biblical materials stems from the perception of their intractably pre-critical nature.16 While scholars have found ways to make his philosophy, ethics, and analyses of religious experience interesting and relevant to contemporary thought, this has proven somewhat daunting with regard to his interpretation of the Bible, where it has not been dismissed out of hand. There is simply no way to make Edwards a twentieth-century, and thus presumably relevant, thinker in this regard. The question of his relation to modernity is an important one, of course, though the term itself is problematically elastic— here I have framed it largely in terms of methodology and consciousness. But the more important question to ask, it would seem, is not the degree to which Edwards is retrievable as a historical thinker but the degree to which he was engaged with and his thought transformed by the problems of historical modernity. In this sense the conclusion of irrelevance is certainly premature and ill-advised. Edwards and his contemporaries stood at the headwaters of the modern approach to history and biblical interpretation, while we ¤nd ourselves somewhere farther downstream. But both (to mix metaphors) stand as part of a common drama. The theoretical issues that occupied them continue to be of interest to professional historians; the problems posed and strategies adopted during that era are not as alien to our own as might be assumed.17 And in an age when a greater sensitivity toward the constructed nature of our own views of the physical world and of human history prevails in academic rhetoric, perhaps an engagement with Edwards’s reconstruction of sacred history need not be so far off. To understand his response to criticism as an attempt to restructure his interpretation of the biblical materials within the working intellectual assumptions of the day offers insight into the way such issues were subsequently framed and resolved. This is not to remake Edwards as a modern, but rather to understand and appreciate the complexity of the problems he faced, as well as the subtlety and rationale of his interpretive strategies. Such attempts to unIntroduction

xix

derstand him ought to be relevant both to historians of colonial America and to those concerned with contemporary issues, regardless of his lack of conformity to our own assumptions about history and historical method. This study offers a partial mapping of the territory to be explored. If it encourages such an engagement to proceed, it will have achieved a signi¤cant part of its purpose. Early in his career Edwards remarked to his parishioners that one must be “pretty well versed” in the Scriptures in order to make sense of them. The same could be said of his extensive biblical commentary. One must enter into what is largely uncharted territory with some trepidation. The reticence of scholars to explore his biblical commentary no doubt also re®ects a sense of the overwhelming background of materials and historical context that needs to be appropriated in order to properly understand the signi¤cance and development of his thought. The relevant literature of the period is vast and interwoven, making its comprehension dif¤cult. Such dif¤culties notwithstanding, the present study offers to revise current understandings of Edwards’s intellectual career. Not only must his biblical interpretation be given its due place of importance in his thought, but it must also be recognized just how deeply critical historical problems penetrate his more familiar theological treatises and manuscripts. It is simply no longer possible to address his epistemology, typology, psychology of religion, sermonic literature, or a host of other areas of his thought responsibly without taking into account issues of biblical and critical interpretation. This study makes a unique contribution to the understanding of Edwards’s appropriation of modern developments in historical method. Scholars have attempted to understand his historical thought almost exclusively in terms of his own narrative productions, such as his accounts of the religious events of Northampton and elsewhere. Chief among these for consideration has been “A History of the Work of Redemption.”* It is most frequently offered as the epitome of his historical sophistication. Here Edwards is understood to have operated in an uncharacteristic and almost hermetically sealed intellectual environment, with the conclusion that his approach to history writing was naïve and already anachronistic. The result of this approach has meant that Edwards’s relation to the historical erudition of his time still remains largely unexamined. This study takes a novel approach to the problem, suggesting that

*In the text I have tried to consistently distinguish between (1) Edwards’s works that were published or publish-ready during his own lifetime, by using italics, and (2) all his other works and materials, by using quotation marks. When referring to works that have subsequently been published (e.g., in the current Yale edition), I have used italics. Thus, for example, I speak of Edwards’s Religious Affections, but also his “History of the Work of Redemption” and “Notes on Scripture.” But when I cite/refer to the latter two from the Yale edition, it is as the History of the Work of Redemption and Notes on Scripture.

xx

Introduction

the most fruitful way to assess his relation to the new historiography can be found by examining his engagement with critical biblical interpretation. While this is principally a study of Edwards’s thought, it in turn proposes to revise perceptions of the role of the Bible in colonial America. The ¤rst half of the eighteenth century was a period of subtle but distinct transformation in the way that American interpreters viewed the nature of their founding religious narrative. This necessitated new ways of thinking about the relation of that narrative to the new scienti¤c modes of inquiry, a transformation that anticipates and provides the context for similar developments in major elements of nineteenth-century American religious thought. One may rightfully anticipate that further study of colonial religion will be instructive for understanding such later developments, and reveal unsuspected continuities with our own era as well.

Introduction

xxi


1

Bibliophile A person must be pretty well versed in the Scripture, before one can see their scope and drift, their connection, harmony and agreement.1 However this hinders not, but that we may, and very commendably too, spend some time and thoughts on the Historical part of Scripture; it being reasonable to think, that what the Wisdom of God has judged ¤t to make part of his word, we may judge ¤t to make part of our study.2

The degree to which European and British intellectual circles were consumed with the problems of biblical criticism by the early seventeenth century has been well documented in recent decades.3 As Henning Graf Reventlow has observed, these issues were not just the private or academic concerns of a class of technically pro¤cient scholars or religious thinkers. Rather, they were problems that “attracted widespread public interest, had far-reaching political consequences and claimed to be a decisive in®uence on all areas of public life.”4 In contrast, scholars generally have relegated the importance of biblical criticism for American religious history to the late nineteenth century, due largely to its advent and rapid dissemination as a technical discipline in theological schools and universities during this period.5 This is so in spite of the growing body of evidence that colonial culture was self-consciously transatlantic in its orientation, and so might be expected to follow such developments with interest. By narrowly identifying the signi¤cance and impact of critical thought in America with its technical or scienti¤c practice, scholars have overlooked the tremendous importance such thinking had for religious life in earlier periods of American history. Thus while they have given nodding attention to the rise of rationalism in eighteenth-century American religion and to the debates over reason and revelation, such efforts have failed to recognize and explore the complex and relatively sophisticated nature of these controversies.6 Closer study reveals a much more intimate connection of American biblical interpretation to the transatlantic community of ideas. By the early eighteenth century a shared body of erudite literature ensured that discussions of critical issues in colonial British society were nearly contemporaneous with those in the leading intellectual centers of Europe. Thus, for the better part of two centuries prior to more de¤nitive nineteenth-century developments, the principal theoretical and ideological elements of critical interpretation had already crossed the At-

lantic, and were beginning to have a signi¤cant presence in the religious and intellectual life of colonial America. Far from being a relatively recent or modern preoccupation, then, the problem of the relationship of critical thought to the Bible is almost as old as the American experience itself.

Edwards and the Bible If there is a need to recognize and account for the importance of these developments in colonial religious history, this is equally the case with the study of Edwards himself. Stephen Stein’s now decades-old observation concerning the new Edwards scholarship is as true today as when it was ¤rst made. It remains puzzling that “the Bible, one of the shaping forces in the theological development of Jonathan Edwards, has largely been ignored in the assessments of this colonial divine.” In spite of “the quantity of his writings on the Bible, there is an amazing paucity of serious scholarship dealing with it. The contemporary renaissance of interest in Edwards has hardly touched this dimension of his work.”7 Aside from Stein’s own work in the area, even the broadest contours of Edwards’s biblical interpretation remain enigmatic. The general inattention to his biblical interpretation only compounds the lack of understanding of his appreciation for the signi¤cance of critical historical thought. Indeed, one observer has even gone so far as to con¤dently assert that the evidence “tends to establish that Edwards was equally unconcerned with one of the most original efforts of eighteenth-century Protestantism, [the] scienti¤c inquiry into the Scriptures.”8 To date there has been no sustained scholarly treatment regarding the impact of critical historical method on his thought. The present study offers to signi¤cantly revise current understandings of Edwards’s response to such developments, and in turn, of the role of the Bible in colonial American religion. Other than characterizing him as a rather traditional interpreter with a peculiar penchant for typology, modern biographers of Edwards have almost universally passed over the subject and materials of his interest in the Bible, let alone his preoccupation with critical issues.9 This is so despite the fact that his biblical writings constitute a large portion, if not the majority, of his literary output. Instead, his interpreters have consistently chosen to emphasize a picture of Edwards dominated by three features: his aptitude for philosophy (both metaphysical and natural), his involvement in revivals and his analysis of those religious experiences, and his culminating theological achievements on subjects such as original sin, free will, and virtue. A more considered estimation of his life and intellectual career, however, renders such standardized and partial characterizations less than satisfactory. More importantly, such narrowed interpretations, aside from being unbalanced, do a disservice to the issues they do emphasize. Edwards, of course, saw 2


no dichotomy between his attention to matters of biblical interpretation and his more generally scienti¤c intellectual exercises; in fact he freely integrated them. But this was not an integration that was innocent of the dif¤culties posed by historical investigation. As the chapters that follow show, the problem of critical biblical interpretation was a constant in his career. It was the subject he continually attended to in the midst of the more tumultuous and celebrated events of his life, and the subject to which he always returned when these events had run their course. Most importantly, the Bible and the critical historical problems associated with it repeatedly intersected with the signal events and literary productions of his life, and shaped his conduct in them. No area of his career—not his theology, ethics, epistemology, hermeneutics, philosophy of religion, natural science, historiography, eschatology, or public discourse— remained untouched by these issues. They are in fact much of what de¤nes him as a religious person and thinker. His observation in that early sermon that one must be “well versed in the Scripture” in order to comprehend “their scope and drift” was contemporaneous with his determination to “study the Scriptures so steadily, constantly and frequently” as to ¤nd himself progressing “in the knowledge of the same.”10 It can be fairly said of Edwards that his determination to grasp the scope, connection, and harmony of the Scriptures in the face of their critical examination became a consuming passion for the rest of his life, one that resulted in the culminating literary productions of his career. Edwards himself was not loath to acknowledge the importance of the Bible for his religious biography. He recalls that during the years after his conversion and during his New York pastorate, he was particularly affected by the biblical texts, upon which he used to meditate while making his well-known sojourns through the countryside. I had then, and at other times, the greatest delight in the Holy Scriptures, of any book whatsoever. Oftentimes in reading it, every word seemed to touch my heart. I felt a harmony between something in my heart, and those sweet and powerful words. I seemed to see so much light exhibited in every sentence, and such a refreshing ravishing food communicated that I could not get along in reading. Used oftentimes to dwell long on one sentence, to see wonder contained in it; and yet almost every sentence seemed to be full of wonders.11

He speci¤cally mentions the importance that historical narrative had in this regard: “The histories of the past advancement of Christ’s kingdom have been sweet to me. When I have read histories of past ages, the pleasantest thing in all my reading has been, to read of the kingdom of Christ being promoted.”12 Such recollections are on one level an expression of a rather traditional pietism regarding God’s Word, and as such are nothing unusual. But the “Personal Narrative” itself stems from a time in his career (c. 1739) when he had long since Bibliophile

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been engaged in the contest over the method of critical interpretation that imperiled this traditional form of piety. Thus these recollections, while no doubt authentic, may well have been colored by or have received an emphasis from his response to this subsequent theological dynamic. Upon closer scrutiny, his highlighting of the importance of sacred history to his spirituality may also re®ect a later and strongly felt urgency about maintaining the religious centrality of the biblical narratives against the background of their critical dismissal. Writing in 1765, Edwards’s ¤rst biographer, Samuel Hopkins, chose to highlight the importance of the Bible for the course of Edwards’s career. Here we are given the portrait of someone whose religious consciousness was possessed by the Bible’s substance, as well as of someone for whom it provided a tempering intellectual in®uence. Though he pursued all manner of learning in his quest for knowledge, Hopkins relates, Edwards still managed to study the Bible “more than all other books.” As he had with his theological “Miscellanies,” Edwards “wrote a great deal on the Bible, in the same way, by penning his thoughts on particular passages of it, as they occurred to him in reading or meditation.” In Hopkins’s estimation, at least, Edwards’s signi¤cance as a religious thinker was to be measured in great part by his interpretive acumen. He “cast much light on many parts of the Bible, which has escaped other interpreters. And by which his great and painful attention to the Bible, and making it the only rule of his faith, are manifest.”13 While his characterization of Edwards’s unique competence as a biblical interpreter is undoubtedly overstated, Hopkins’s recognition of the importance of the Bible to his theological project is precise. Edwards’s nineteenth-century biographer Sereno Dwight also chose to emphasize the importance of his biblical interpretation for estimating his signi¤cance as a religious thinker. “Regarding the sacred volume with the highest veneration . . . his regular and diligent study of the Sacred Scriptures, led him early to discover, that they opened before him an almost boundless ¤eld of investigation and enquiry.” Signi¤cantly, Dwight focused on the critical orientation of Edwards’s biblical interpretation. Edwards made it “his standing rule, to study every passage which he read, which presented the least dif¤culty to his own mind, or which he had known to be regarded as dif¤cult by others, until such dif¤culty was satisfactorily removed.” He was led to engage in such work because of those “passages [that] he found to be incorrectly rendered; many were very obscure, and dif¤cult of explanation,” while in others he found “apparent inconsistencies and contradictions.” Speci¤cally, Dwight points to a fundamental problem in early modern hermeneutics—the religious divergence between the Old and New Testaments due to their historical and cultural disparity—as an issue that was central to Edwards’s own interpretative concerns.14 4


Like Hopkins, Dwight overestimates the distinctiveness of Edwards’s work. Thus Dwight suggests that from his earliest studies Edwards “had already entered on a series of investigations, which, if ultimately found correct, would effectuate most important changes in the opinions of the Christian world.” The penetrating observations of his biblical commentaries show them deserving of equal consideration with his theological treatises: “Perhaps no collection of Notes on the Scriptures, so entirely original, can be found.”15 Yet even though these encomia overstate his place in the history of interpretation, they nonetheless give due recognition to the importance that such issues had for him, and thus ought to have for contemporary studies of his thought. Any detailed and balanced interpretation of Edwards’s theological career must take into consideration the immense body of work represented in his biblical interpretation, and attempt to account for its signi¤cance in the development and contours of his intellectual project.

Critical Literacy Edwards’s preoccupation with critical historical issues was even more sustained and systemic to his work than the comments of Hopkins and Dwight intimate. His manuscripts reveal a trajectory of increasing interest and technical sophistication that reached its climax in the last decade of his life, an interest that, but for his untimely death, gave every appearance of being the next great phase and achievement of his career. His education almost certainly would have included some exposure to such problems. His father’s vocation suggests that Edwards probably had an early introduction to the prevailing theological discussions of his day. His matriculation would have built on this knowledge. Even at its inception the curriculum at Yale College was broader and more current than is often supposed. This curriculum devoted two days each week to the study of divinity, a discipline that included not only theology proper but also Bible reading, exposition, and, for graduate students, Scripture analyses. Though divinity at Yale was predicated upon the study of two early-seventeenth-century theologians, William Ames and Johannes Wolleb, the original donation to the school’s library contained some forty additional theological works. Students no doubt would also have been familiar with the works of a number of later Reformed divines whose scriptural loci were dominated by critical concerns, such as those of François Turretin, John Owen, and Peter van Mastricht (even Edwards’s young ¤ancée, Sarah Pierrepont, owned a copy of van Mastricht’s work). In addition, the grammars, lexicons, and commentaries that students would have studied as a part of their training gave attention to these issues.16 Edwards had the advantage as a senior, post-graduate, and tutor (1720–1722, 1724–1726) of greater access to the college library, whose collections had been Bibliophile

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signi¤cantly improved by the gift of Jeremiah Dummer. While it is unclear what speci¤c use he may have made of the collection—evidence that he signed for books or inscribed them is lacking—he was certainly familiar with its contents, having been made responsible for its organization.17 Dummer’s gift comprised some eight hundred volumes, including a number of important works that were taken up with or bore upon critical historical issues.18 These included works on astronomy, earth theory, sacred geography, secular and ecclesiastical history, comparative religion, apologetics, and travel, as well as a number of biblical grammars, lexicons, commentaries, textual harmonies, historical synopses, and paraphrases. The most notable among these were works such as Jean Bodin’s A Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, Pierre Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary, and Edward Stilling®eet’s Origines sacrae, or, a Rational Account of the Grounds of Natural and Revealed Religion. The Dummer gift also included the work of a deist, the Earl of Shaftesbury’s Characteristics.19 There seems to be little reason to doubt that Edwards would have taken particular notice of the library’s holdings, and in fact the evidence suggests that this was precisely the case. Important titles from of each of the speci¤c subject areas noted in the aforementioned “best of ” list in his “Catalogue,” for example, were extant in Dummer’s collection—in that list Edwards explicitly identi¤es his desire to obtain Bayle’s Dictionary, and implicitly, his interest in Thomas Stanley’s history of philosophy, which he mentions by name on the ¤rst letter sheet (also a part of the Dummer gift).20 The fact that Edwards made this list in 1722 likely re®ects his increased familiarity with the collection during his subsequent theological apprenticeship in New Haven. Furthermore, there is a signi¤cant overlap of titles between those in the Dummer collection and the early entries in his own “Catalogue” (not coincidentally, also begun in 1722), mutual entries that include a number of relatively obscure titles such as Michael Geddes’s History of the Church of Malabar. This connection to the library’s holdings is made clear on the second page of the “Catalogue,” where Edwards notes a particular work on the history of the papacy that he has come across there: a “text on it in the College Library.” It is hard not to conclude that this collection made a signi¤cant impact on the orientation of his intellectual pursuits, including his awareness of critical historical interpretation.21 While he most likely was introduced to the broad dimensions of critical biblical interpretation during his time at Yale, his chief engagement with the speci¤c problems pertaining to scriptural history came from his own reading in the years that followed, particularly after he had settled at Northampton. Norman Fiering has shown that Edwards’s geographical location did not translate into cultural isolation, but that instead he operated as an active participant in British and Continental philosophical discussions. That he was able to do so was due largely to the rapid dissemination of information made possible through learned journals that were readily available in the colonies. These jour6


nals contained lengthy and often serialized abstracts of works from almost every imaginable discipline. They served as a forum for the public, vernacular, cosmopolitan, and most importantly, relatively current transmission of ideas from all of the major intellectual centers of Europe. It was a communication network composing a “remarkably well-integrated republic of letters,” such that “New England shared many common borders with these countries in the realm of thought.”22 Edwards’s “Catalogue,” for example, makes reference to some nineteen periodicals of varying erudition dating from the 1730s through the 1750s. These range from the Present State of the Republick of Letters, History of the Works of the Learned, Young Students Library, London Magazine, and Monthly Review to more genteel or semi-popular periodicals such as the Guardian, Newcastle General Magazine, and Ladies Library.23 Through these he was able to keep reasonably up to date on current discussions throughout the course of his career, even in the relative isolation of Stockbridge, when he was doing some of his most important work on biblical interpretation. What is not generally well known or appreciated is that almost without exception these journals kept their readers abreast of current theological controversies, particularly those relating to the ongoing debates about sacred historiography. They were important conduits of information as to how new developments in the natural and humanistic sciences raised problems for traditional understandings of the biblical drama and how they contributed to the progress of critical interpretation. They included wide-ranging discussions about the implications that developments in astronomy, chronology, geology, paleontology, antiquarian studies, comparative religions, textual criticism, and modern historical method had for the biblical narratives. Works representing a wide range of perspectives were reviewed by the contributors, including those of critics such as Richard Simon, John Toland, Matthew Tindal, Anthony Collins, and Isaac Vossius, as well as encyclopedists such as Pierre Bayle, Jeremy Collier, and Ephraim Chambers. They included the ideas of heterodox thinkers like William Whiston, Thomas Burnet, and William Warburton, as well as of those of more traditional apologists such as Samuel Shuckford, Augustin Calmet, Isaac Newton, Jean Le Clerc, Arthur Bedford, Jean Alphonse Turretin, Louis Du Pin, Lenglet du Fresnoy, Humphrey Prideaux, and Jacques Basnage. These discussions invariably devolved to the problem of how to relate new intellectual developments to the accounts of sacred history, and thus to how the nature of the biblical narratives was to be understood. Edwards and his contemporaries faced two chief problems in trying to understand the historiography of the biblical accounts. First and foremost, there was the question of whether they could be trusted as authentic records of past events. Second, there was the question of whether or in what way the explosion of new knowledge about the natural world and diversity of human culture could be incorporated into the biblical cosmology, or how at least the latter could be harmonized with Bibliophile

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it—whether the unity and cogency of the grand narrative of the Bible could be preserved, and at what cost to its traditional interpretation. Typical of such concerns is the space given in these journals to works that raised questions about the authenticity of the biblical accounts themselves. Thus one ¤nds frequent notices and abstracts of works such as Toland’s Origines hebraicae (questioning the accuracy of Jewish histories stemming from the Mosaic period), Whiston’s Collection of Authentick Records (which considers the value of extra-canonical writings for understanding the biblical narratives), du Fresnoy’s New Method of Studying History (which discusses the application of modern critical methods to sacred history), and Jean Alphonse Turretin’s Method of Interpreting Scripture. Chronology was a particularly important issue as the records of other cultures became available for comparison. So too were the problems of canonicity, textual transmission, authorship, and forgery. As importantly, these periodicals were taken up with the problem that more consistently empirical theories and methods of knowledge posed for the biblical narratives. Characteristic of this concern, for example, is the serialization of Thomas Brett’s Chronological Essay on the Sacred History, in which Brett discusses the theories of Richard Simon and Jean Le Clerc regarding the diversi¤cation of human language. Both had argued for the view that changes in language are due to the effects of time and culture. Brett objected to the implications that this theory had for understanding of the story of the tower at Babel. He preferred to explain the history of linguistic pluralism as a result of this episode of direct divine intervention. He was willing to concede, however, that the Babel incident was a local rather than universal event, and that not all people (language) groups were present there. Thus Brett himself arrived at a view that recognized the force of these new arguments, while attempting to accommodate them to a more literal reading of the narrative.24 Edwards was also occupied with this question, as well as a host of related problems.25 There are similar discussions in these journals of a whole range of issues, such as the tensions between modern and biblical astronomical observations, the problem of the miraculous or seemingly exaggerated descriptions of natural and historical phenomena, and the problems that fossils presented for the biblical account of the Deluge. While some of these discussions may in retrospect seem quaint or antiquarian, they dominated the intellectual attention of the period. More importantly, they are real measures of the paradigmatic transformation of biblical interpretation taking place in the eighteenth century, signals of a momentous shift in Western cultural mentality. Edwards frequently cites material gleaned from these periodicals in his biblical manuscripts such as the “Blank Bible” and the “Notes on Scripture.” His other reading likewise shows a decided orientation toward the manifold issues associated with critical historical interpretation. Approximately one-third of 8


the nearly seven hundred entries in his “Catalogue,” for example, bear in some way upon his interest in the integrity of the biblical narratives. These include over one hundred works on secular and ecclesiastical history, over eighty works of biblical commentary, as well as dozens of related treatises on astronomy, earth science, epistemology, geography, chronology, travel, comparative religion, and theological apologetics. A survey of his citations shows that he was able to obtain or gain access to a fairly broad and contemporary selection of the titles entered into the “Catalogue.” These include, among others, John Locke’s Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul, Jacques Basnage’s History of the Jews, Humphrey Prideaux’s Old and New Testament Connected, William Warburton’s Divine Legation of Moses, Augustin Calmet’s Historical and Critical Dictionary of the Bible, Jeremiah Jones’s Canon of the New Testament, Matthew Poole’s Synopsis criticorum, Nathaniel Lardner’s Credibility of the Gospel History, the chronology of Arthur Bedford, the sacred geographies of Edward Wells and Thomas Salmon, the encyclopedias of Collier and Chambers, Henry Winder’s Critical and Chronological History of Knowledge, and Samuel Shuckford’s Sacred and Profane History of the World Connected. His citations no doubt indicate only a portion of his actual library. The “Catalogue” is testimony to the depth and seriousness of Edwards’s interest in and awareness of the critical issues of his day. And it may well indicate components of his library that, though they did not ¤nd their way into his citations, may have nonetheless contributed to the development of his views. He had effective access to an even greater array of authors through the generosity of friends and family, the libraries of colleagues, and the Hampshire Association’s library. He appears to have been a driving force behind the institution and operation of the ministerial library.26 Unfortunately, no records remain of its holdings. From the evidence that does exist, however, it appears that this collection probably re®ected the broad range of interests indicated by Edwards’s personal catalogue. The sole entry in the Association’s records of books purchased refers to works directly related to historical study, most notably Theophilus Gale’s Court of the Gentiles.27 Edwards’s “Catalogue” also notes “a Book in the Spring¤eld Library” of a similar vein—Joseph Addison’s Evidences of the Christian Religion (1721).28 He and his colleagues actively shared such works with each other. In his “Account Book,” begun in 1733 and used to the end of his life, he kept a record of books he lent to others. These entries show that he lent Humphrey Prideaux’s Old and New Testament Connected, Samuel Clarke’s Evidence of Natural and Revealed Religion, William Warburton’s Divine Legation of Moses, Henry Winder’s History of Knowledge, and Nathaniel Lardner’s Credibility of the Gospel History, as well as a variety of ecclesiastical histories and learned periodicals. His correspondence reveals a lifelong practice of borrowing and lending books among his colleagues and friends such as Joseph Bellamy. One of his most important benefactors in this Bibliophile

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regard was the Scottish minister John Erskine, who regularly sent him packages of books that addressed matters of critical interpretation. Edwards looked upon his foreign correspondents, and especially Erskine, as important conduits of timely scholarship, remarking to him somewhat wistfully on one occasion: “I am fond of knowing how things are going on in the learned world.”29 It is evident that Edwards was hardly a parochial student of the Bible, but was instead eminently international in his approach to matters of textual interpretation. His participation in the republic of letters was impressively active and aggressive, and relatively current. He was aware of the major (as well as many of the seemingly minor and arcane) problems that the application of a critical historical method and interpretation posed for the traditional understanding of the sacred texts. He weighed in on most with considerable force, producing some of the earliest and most systematic treatments of these issues in American religious thought. By the time Edwards began his studies at Yale, critical biblical interpretation had been a live issue in European thought for nearly three-quarters of a century. Figures such as the Anglican Thomas Hobbes, the Quaker Samuel Fisher, the Jewish excommunicant Benedict de Spinoza, and the Catholic Richard Simon had raised most of the relevant objections to the surety of the biblical texts, including their authorship, transmission, canonical status, historical authenticity, internal inconsistencies, con®icts with natural science and external histories, miraculous mode of explanation, prophetic inspiration, and epistemological uncertainty.30 Their ideas had been popularized for decades by deists such as Charles Blount and John Toland, and would continue to be disseminated in his lifetime by the likes of Anthony Collins, Thomas Morgan, and Matthew Tindal. Before the close of Edwards’s career Jean Astruc would identify the ¤rst two strands (J and E) of the documentary hypothesis of the Pentateuch’s composition (1753). After graduation Edwards remained in New Haven for two years, continuing his theological studies in preparation for the ministry. Toward the end of this period he began his “Catalogue,” theological “Miscellanies,” and notes on “Natural Philosophy.” This intellectual ®owering continued during his initial pastorate in New York and his tutorship at Yale; by 1723 he had begun his “Notes on the Apocalypse,” and in 1724 he initiated his most sustained biblical commentary, the “Notes on Scripture.” It was also at about this time that he began to play with possible titles for his great summary project, the “Rational account of Christianity, or the perfect harmony between the Doctrines of the Christian Religion and human Reason manifested.”31 His concern for systematic biblical interpretation, therefore, was a founding theological interest, and even at this early stage intimations of the critical cast of his interests are revealed. The earliest entries in the “Catalogue” are heavily populated with the titles of commentaries and historical introductions, as well 10


as with treatises from various auxiliary disciplines. Though ostensibly concerned with doctrinal issues, the “Miscellanies” also include his earliest discussions of interpretive issues pertaining to the Scripture history.32 The pattern of interpretation in “Notes on the Apocalypse” is similarly concerned to show that its highly symbolic descriptions could be anchored in real or present-day historical events, and that they also could be accommodated to the contemporary understanding of the cosmos.33 And it is perhaps more than metaphorically signi¤cant that the ¤rst entry in the “Notes on Scripture” relates to a problem of historical explanation: the issue of the present river courses of Babylon visà-vis their description in Genesis.34 From the late 1720s up to about 1740 Edwards’s interest in biblical criticism developed into a more sustained and wide-ranging effort. With No. 199 of the “Notes on Scripture” (c. 1729)—a discussion of the construction of Noah’s ark derived from Arthur Bedford’s chronology—Edwards’s biblical commentary began to exhibit a decided shift toward critical issues, augmenting its previously and largely typological and spiritualized method of exegesis.35 Parallel to this development in his commentary notebooks, related topics such as the inspiration, miracles, and mysteries of the Scriptures become more frequent as entries in the “Miscellanies.”36 In the early 1730s, he copied out an extract of Edmund Gibson’s Third Pastoral Letter. On this single sheet of paper he recorded the bishop’s assertions that the writings of the New Testament were “ ‘the known and undoubted records of our saviour’s life and actions,’ ” and were received as such by the churches of antiquity. Any attempt to corrupt these histories would have been met with a swift appeal to the “ ‘authentick writings,’ ” which were “ ‘kept with the greatest of care in the archives of several churches that had been planted by the apostles.’ ”37 The noticeable increase in attention and acceleration of Edwards’s productivity on such matters may have resulted from the coalescence of several in®uences, including the cumulative effect of his reading program, the new responsibilities and intellectual independence he gained upon Solomon Stoddard’s death, and the intensi¤cation of the controversies with deism. In any case, from this point forward critical issues came to the forefront of his concern. Scattered among his manuscripts are several proposals for treatises, in varying stages of development, which he did not complete or publish. The most well known of these is a rough outline for a comprehensive project intended to treat a variety of theological questions, which he entitled “A Rational Account of the Main Doctrines of the Christian Faith Attempted.”38 This project was surely inspired by and modeled after, if not Edward Stilling®eet’s Origines sacrae, then the plethora of similar “rational accounts” generated in English religious literature during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He never took up the treatise in any formal way. He may have realized its overly ambitious scope, or he may have concluded that the exigencies of the moment called for Bibliophile

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more particular treatments of some of these issues, such as would appear in Original Sin and Freedom of the Will. The absence of a ¤nished treatise leaves many questions unanswered about its ultimate composition and signi¤cance for the interpretation of Edwards. Nonetheless it quite clearly provided the organizing motif of his broader intellectual project; the outline intimates the subjects of nearly all of his major treatises. The substance of this “Rational Account” was to have been drawn from his theological “Miscellanies”; in fact, he refers to this collection of notes as such.39 He evidently considered the problems of biblical interpretation to fall within the scope of this proposed treatise, as his early expositions in the “Miscellanies” on particular biblical texts would seem to indicate.40 It was only subsequently that he separated such concerns into manuscripts such as the “Notes on Scripture” and the “Blank Bible.” Yet even after beginning these more specialized sets of notes, he continued to treat a number of theoretical problems relating to biblical criticism in the “Miscellanies” proper, as the various entries on “Christian Religion,” “Inspiration,” and “Revelation” demonstrate. That Edwards should incorporate the problems of biblical interpretation into his apology for Christian doctrine is to be entirely expected: the “rational accounts” so prevalent in Anglican circles that undoubtedly inspired his own work invariably treated critical issues pertaining to sacred history. Also extant among his manuscripts is a small notebook that contains sketched entries for another contemplated work, referred to as the “Rough Notes on the Truth of the Christian Religion.” Untitled by Edwards and probably dating from the late 1730s, this book is ¤lled with notations on the critical problems pertaining to the historical authenticity of the scriptural accounts. It also addresses the kinds of interpretive questions treated at length in the “Miscellanies” and in various sermons and notes, as well as broader epistemological and doctrinal issues. Almost identical in orientation to the genre represented by Stilling®eet’s grand work, it offers the glimmerings of an Edwardsean “rational account” of the Scriptures themselves.41 By the late 1730s these concerns began to emerge from his private notes and ¤nd greater expression in his public discourse. In 1737, for example, he delivered a two-part sermon on 2 Peter 1.19 (designated here as “Divine Revelation Is a Light”) on the necessity and rationality of revelation. In late 1739 he gave a sermon on biblical epistemology that has come to be known in editions of his works as “Christian Knowledge.” He followed up on this in early 1740 with a sermon defending the authenticity of Christ’s miracles and another offering a critique of the notion of rational religion, now known as “Man’s Natural Blindness in Religion.” In May of that year he gave the ordination sermon for Edward Billing. This extraordinary sermon was the most complete exposition to date of his views on the issues at stake regarding the critical interpretation of the Bible. Taken together these sermons are an important indication that 12


such issues were not merely private concerns, con¤ned to esoteric discussions in the clerical manse, but were matters of conversation in the public square. It is signi¤cant that Edwards chose to deliver several of these sermons as public lectures, where area clergy, leading merchants, and political of¤cials would be present. Such meetings served as an important forum for communicating in colonial society and for identifying the religious de¤ciencies of the community.42 The most important sermons from this period compose a single work whose focus, at least at ¤rst glance, appears to be about something else entirely: the “History of the Work of Redemption” (1739). While this great treatise was certainly developed with soteriological and other doctrinal issues in mind (e.g., religious revival and millennial eschatology), it is also one of his most important treatments relating to critical historical interpretation. Indeed, he came to realize later—if he had not at the time of its delivery—that this treatise could serve as an extraordinarily useful vehicle for reasserting the religious primacy of the Scripture history against the rationalistic claims of its many detractors. Edwards was thoroughly engrossed from the inception of his career with critical interpretive issues. They penetrate all of his major manuscript collections, and indeed, come to be one of the directing concerns in them. It is clear as well that biblical criticism stimulated the production of some of his major treatises and signi¤cantly in®uenced the prosecution of others, such as the “History of the Work of Redemption.” In fact, critical interpretive issues can be fairly said to have reshaped the focus of much of his work, particularly that of his mature years.

Seeds of Discontent His projected “Rational Account” and its various progeny were largely provoked by a singular phenomenon: the critique of revealed religion arising from the ferment of a loosely associated group of free thinkers variably known as deists. Like any pejorative, the designation of “deism” was used in a polemical and often indiscriminate manner, with the result that it was and remains an elusive phenomenon to describe. Some ¤gures such as John Toland eschewed the term, while others such as Matthew Tindal and Charles Blount embraced it as a badge of honor. Sometimes used interchangeably with the term “atheism,” it also found application to any number of schools of heterodox belief (Arianism, Socinianism, Arminianism, even Quakerism), some of which included the staunchest apologists for the Anglican establishment (Samuel Clarke, William Whiston, and John Tillotson, for example). Deism was not a formally organized movement with a de¤nitive creed, yet many participants were af¤liated through private clubs and by a shared hostility toward traditional religion. Its elusiveness is further complicated by the fact that many if Bibliophile

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not most of its signal thinkers, such as Anthony Collins and Matthew Tindal, were also members of the Anglican church. Deism thus ostensibly emanated from within the margins of institutional orthodoxy while at the same time providing its most provocative and intensely anti-clerical critics. And yet precisely because the contest over deism was an internecine struggle, its rhetorical and ideological potency was acute, even if the number of its adherents was actually smaller than feared.43 Notwithstanding its elusiveness, however, certain features invariably come to the fore in most descriptions of deism. These include an emphasis on intellectual liberty and rationality, a rejection of claims to religious privilege resting on authority, and a radical denial of the most fundamental aspects of supernatural Christianity (miracles, prophecy, revelation) as they were traditionally understood in favor of an ethical, naturalized form of religious belief. Deists effectively sought to portray traditional, established religion as intellectually suspect, politically corrupting, and religiously super®uous. For all the theological variability within deism, one of the most constant components of its rhetoric was the use of a critical historical method to undermine the authority of sacred tradition. Deists helped to popularize a heightened historical consciousness toward ancient religious texts, one that in time would be transmitted to more traditional thinkers through their engagement with critical issues, leading to adaptive interpretations on their part. The deist critique of the biblical texts was hardly a subtle or subterranean effort. It was instead an undisguised frontal assault on the authenticity, teachings, and interpretation of sacred history as a revealed body of writings. For the better part of a century one volley followed another off English presses. Deists served as the vanguard for the dissemination of more technically sophisticated works by ¤gures such as Benedict de Spinoza and Richard Simon, though they sometimes made important conceptual contributions themselves.44 In their apologetic efforts they popularized the notion that the scriptural texts were an amalgam of primitive, superstitious, irrational beliefs derived from an antiquated culture, bound up in demonstrably compromised historical narratives. They disputed the authenticity and intelligibility of those narratives, as well as their privileged interpretive status as divinely authored texts. Their treatments of a variety of issues such as prophecy, mystery, textual transmission, forgery, and natural religion were uni¤ed by their common intent to demote the exclusive authority attributed to sacred Scripture. Their echo of the increasingly common insistence that the Bible be read as any other book was not only an expression of a desire for a historically contextualized method of interpretation, but also an attempt to characterize Christianity as just one of the many traditional religions of the world, and thus a tradition having no unique cultural standing. Deism is the ideological framework in terms of which Edwards’s career as a 14


theological polemicist must be understood, and from which it ¤nds its rationale.45 The earliest strata of the “Miscellanies” are taken up with the competing claims of rational and revealed religion, and such entries become only more frequent and extensive over time. This is particularly so with regard to critical biblical interpretation; Edwards repeatedly identi¤es the works of deists as the source of his consternation in these matters. Chief among these was Matthew Tindal’s Christianity as Old as Creation (1730), the appearance of which coincided with the intensi¤cation of his attention to critical issues. Tindal’s “Deist Bible” encapsulated the chief criticisms leveled at scriptural history: that its authenticity was unascertainable, that it was epistemologically suspect, and that its contents were religiously inferior to the achievements of natural religion. Edwards was no doubt aware of this work from its appearance, though his ¤rst mention of it appears only late in his career. It provided the stimulus to some of his most important work, most notably the “Book of Controversies.”46 Tindal was in many respects the principal interlocutor in his apologia for the rationality of traditionary Christianity, though Edwards was aware of arguments like Tindal’s from the 1720s. At its heart deism was a profoundly political program, and its critique of scriptural history was fundamental to its political strategy. As J. A. I. Champion and others have observed, deism did not represent just a controversy over the competence of human reason, but “an attack upon the perceived injustice of the distribution of authority in society.” Since the authority of the church was rooted in tradition, deists developed their critical historical apparatus in order to show that that tradition was corrupt, both at its point of origin (the Bible) and in its subsequent development (church teaching and polity). Since it was history that authorized the present regime, historical criticism offered to deauthorize its political, ecclesiastical, and cultural institutions.47 Their intent, therefore, was “to ¤nd an intellectual strategy which would permit escape from a political theology whose theoretical power and widespread reception walled in the dissident.”48 By challenging the authority of the narratives on which English social institutions rested, deists challenged the political supremacy of those institutions as well. The championing of the autonomy, and indeed superior competence, of human reason in relation to revelation implied a political autonomy as well: that society could and would remain pious, moral, and ordered without the sustenance of its regnant religious tradition. By undermining the historical authenticity of the Bible they effected a cultural disestablishment of England’s founding political text, and thus called into question the hegemony of its religious institutions. Such challenges were swiftly met by the representatives of Anglican orthodoxy. In 1697, for example, Parliament passed the Blasphemy Act, which barred from of¤ce any who denied the divine authority of the Bible (the second offense was punishable by a three-year prison sentence).49 Though few were proseBibliophile

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cuted under this law, it served to put the public on notice concerning the limits of religious liberty and dissent.50 Signi¤cantly, the contest between the establishment and its critics helped to foster the modernization of English historiography and historical method. Since history legitimated the status quo, it became necessary for its defenders to present a “cogent and credible version of the past” in their accounts of that arrangement. Arguments and representations by thinkers on both sides of the debate were measured by the factual accuracy of their competing interpretations. Rules of evidence and textual apparati such as footnotes became obligatory in order to give the impression that the ideal of a “credible, true, and good history” had been achieved.51 These critical tools were applied not only to histories of Anglicanism proper, but also to discussions of the historical authenticity of the biblical narratives. Although the historiography of deism in America generally treats it as a largely post-Revolution phenomenon, there is evidence to suggest that the effects of biblical criticism were already asserting themselves in the colonies in the early eighteenth century, if not before, and were having a signi¤cant impact on institutional religion during that time. And though particularly acute in New England, this appears to have been colony-wide phenomenon.52 Edwards was hardly alone in his desire to acquire critical materials for his library, for example. By the 1720s deistic works were being read widely among the lettered elite, and were to be found in bookshops as remote as Maine.53 One of the most striking examples of this increasing literacy can be found in the collection of James Logan (1674–1751), who amassed a library of over twenty-¤ve hundred volumes during his lifetime. A Quaker and a self-educated polyglot, Logan engaged book agents across Europe to purchase the most recent works of leading intellectuals, and entertained personal relationships with many of them, such as the botanist Carl von Linne. In addition to a vast array of scienti¤c, philosophical, and historical treatises, Logan’s library included dozens of the latest and most important treatises on biblical criticism. He possessed no fewer than seven different copies of Richard Simon’s critical histories of the Old and New Testaments. He owned Pierre Bayle’s Dictionary (and those of Ephraim Chambers, Jeremy Collier, and Louis Moreri), as well as Hobbes’s Leviathan and Spinoza’s Tractatus. Several periodicals from the republic of letters can be found in his collection, including the Acta eruditorum. He also owned the methodological treatises of two of the leading French humanist historical theorists, Jean Bodin and Charles Estienne. He managed to acquire forty-four versions or portions of the Bible in ten different languages (including Arabic and Syriac), the Qu’ran, the Mishnah, and several rabbinical and Islamic treatises. And the collection is replete with the period’s standard apologia for sacred history, including the works of Stilling®eet, Locke, Robert Boyle, Samuel Bochart, Burnet, Whiston, Le Clerc, Du Pin, Laurence Echard, Hugo Grotius, and Ralph Cud-

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worth.54 While colonial libraries merit considerably more study with regard to these issues, such evidence suggests that their contents will reveal the existence of a widespread and relatively serious appreciation for critical biblical interpretation. By the 1730s colonial periodicals had become a forum for advertising deistic works, for polemicizing on the relative merits of deism, and for airing suspicions about leanings of particular individuals, all important evidence of the public stature that these issues had attained. In 1735, for example, the Philadelphia newspaper the American Weekly Museum was already lamenting the degenerative impact of deism in the colonies.55 From 1743 to 1746 Jeremiah Gridley published the American Magazine and Historical Chronicle out of Boston, in which he promoted the works of the likes of Voltaire (Charles Chauncy, for one, found Gridley’s religious convictions beyond the pale).56 A 1745 editorial in the Boston Evening Post castigated the Reformed church in Geneva for its efforts to expand its articles of subscription. That venerable seat of orthodoxy had sought to require communicants to confess that the Hebrew vowel points were “of divine original” even though, the editors argued, “¤ve parts in six of the Learned World have thought them of human, and comparatively modern Invention.”57 It is hard to judge which is more remarkable: that the editors could expect their audience to be knowledgeable about such a seemingly arcane matter or that they could make such a provocative assertion about the integrity of the biblical texts without fear of creating a backlash in the process.58 In 1752 William Livingston, graduate of Yale, New York lawyer, and future governor of New Jersey, was editing the Independent Re®ector, whose essays on religion provoked an attack on him as an atheist and a deist. James Parker received a similar response for his editorial oversight of the New-York Gazette in the 1750s.59 Similar events transpired in the south as well. In 1734 the Maryland Gazette was already editorializing against deism. As early as 1722 the president of Virginia’s William and Mary College, James Blair, acknowledged that deism was an issue in the region; by 1741 Sir John Randolph was publicly defending himself against the charge of deism through the General Magazine and Historical Chronicle (though his defense may have revealed more of his unorthodox sympathies than he had intended). In 1728 William Byrd could report ¤nding a rather intense anti-clericalism in North Carolina. John Wesley’s mission to Georgia in 1737 convinced him that deism was alive and well there, to the point that he felt compelled to preach against it, having encountered “the ¤rst Convert to Deism” in Savannah.60 The morphology of colonial religious biography in the early eighteenth century was often marked by a new element of spiritual process, evidenced in periods of ®irtation with deism during the early adult years. For some, like

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Gridley, the ®irtation developed into conviction and therefore redirected them to secular careers such as the law, as well as to religious polemics. For others, this encounter left a permanent cast upon their lives, even though they eventually recovered some if not most of their orthodoxy.61 Perhaps the most notable example of this new development in American biography is to be found in the career of Ezra Stiles, who was de®ected by religious doubts in both his personal and professional life. After graduating from Yale in 1746, he remained af¤liated with the college until 1755 while pursuing a secular career. During this period he began reading a number of rationalist and deistic interpretations of Christianity such as William Wollaston’s Religion of Nature Delineated (1725) and Shaftesbury’s Characteristics (1705). He adopted ¤rst Arminianism, and then having become skeptical about the Calvinist interpretation of Scripture, took the almost logical next step and entertained doubts about the Scriptures themselves. Prompted by the challenge of an unnamed “ingenious deist” in New Haven in 1749, Stiles took a self-described “Deistical turn” himself, and proceeded for the next several years to ¤nd his way clear to a renewed con¤dence in the historical authenticity of the sacred texts.62 Yet even after his appointment to the church in Newport, Rhode Island, Stiles still wrestled with critical issues, only coming to his fullest con¤dence about them after 1758.63 When he returned to Yale as president in 1778, it was with a strong sense of religious catholicity, a skepticism of strict creedalism, and a desire for students to come to orthodox convictions by way of an honest investigation of opposing views. This strategy appears to have been a relatively ineffectual one, such that by the end of his tenure Yale was perceived as a breeding ground for in¤delity.64 Edwards’s own biographical struggles do not appear to have ever involved serious doubts about the authenticity of the sacred texts, though they did involve similar reservations about the justness of the central tenets of Calvinism, as well as concerns about the morphology of his conversion experience. Yet such events were not far removed from his personal life, as the sorry episode with his younger cousin, Joseph Hawley, illustrates. As a theology student in Cambridge in the 1740s Hawley also came to entertain certain deistic ideas about the Christian revelation, and hence was diverted to the law. On his return to Northampton he was a vocal and disputative Arminian who brashly led the effort to remove Edwards from the church. While Hawley’s grief over this incident eventually led to some sort of reconciliation with Edwards and to his eventual return to orthodoxy over a period of years (c. 1754–1762), the effects of such in¤delity on Edwards’s life were real, and not lost on him.65 The rise of deism and its association with criticism were followed closely in the American colonies. Formal responses were not long in coming. Perhaps the most ambitious of these was Cotton Mather’s massive “Biblia Americana,” begun in the late seventeenth century but never published. Mather did publish

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two works that responded to deism in a limited way, his Reasonable Religion (1700) and A Man of Reason (1718). In his God Deals with Us as Rational Creatures (1722), Benjamin Colman offers a line of argument similar to Mather’s.66 Samuel Willard’s Compleat Body of Divinity (late seventeenth century, but only published in 1726) gives a treatment of critical issues very similar to that of John Owen, a favorite among Puritan polemicists. In 1730 the Reverend Robert Bulkley of Colchester, Connecticut, found himself compelled to speak out against deism in his sermon “The Usefulness of Revealed Religion.”67 By 1732 the New Jersey minister Jonathan Dickinson had published his own Reasonableness of Christianity, in which he attempted to defend the historical authenticity of the biblical documents and address attendant problems such as miracles and prophecy. He was quite aware that such an effort was necessary as a prerequisite to discussing doctrinal disputes, since his deistic interlocutors would not allow him to “take it for granted, that the Scriptures are a Divine Revelation; that is yet to be prov’d.” Critical issues confronted him at every turn. When arguing for the general depravity of the human race, for example, Dickinson ¤rst had to acknowledge that his appeals to the third chapter of Genesis as probative evidence had to be tempered in light of “that debate, whether this story is literally, or allegorically to be understood.”68 His subsequent Familiar Letters (1745) exhibits a similar attempt to deal with the problems of myth and historical authenticity, which is conducted in a fairly sophisticated manner. The polemics within the American religious community often caught up its more rationalistic members, namely the Arminians, in the accusation of “downright Deism.”69 While this was not altogether unwarranted—some Arminians did follow their inclinations to that point—¤gures such as Charles Chauncy and Ebenezer Gay produced spirited defenses of the necessity of revelation. For all of his demurrals from traditional Calvinism, for example, Jonathan Mayhew defended the historical sources of Christian belief against the negative judgments of deism. His arguments (Christian Sobriety, 1763) are largely those of the English latitudinarians, which he assimilated from Locke.70 Edwards’s own awareness of the implications that the deistic critique of historical tradition had for the theological understanding and institutional arrangement of New England appears at the outset of his career. One of his ¤rst criticisms of deism was directed at the effect its skepticism of tradition had on religious society, at its apparent disinterest in or inability to foster religious, and therefore communal, cohesion. When was any social worship performed by deists? And if there should be a society of deists that were disposed socially to express their love to God, and honor of him, which way would they go to work? They have nothing from God to direct them. Doubtless there would be innumerable jangles about [it]

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and eternal dissensions, except they were all resolved to fall in with the Christian model. We may be therefore convinced, that revelation is necessary in order to right social worship.71

His pronouncements would intensify and become more public over time. Alarmed by the deists’ boldness, he commented on occasion to his parishioners that the Bible was openly derided and its doctrines and miracles aggressively ridiculed in the “publick houses and open streets” of the nation, a state of affairs not to be ignored.72 Writing to John Erskine in 1748, he discussed recent intelligence about a certain clerk of the Privy Council. Gilbert West, who was now an orthodox apologist, had formerly been “a notorious deist.” He con¤des his hunger for such information to Erskine: “I should be glad if you would inform me more particularly in your next [letter] concerning this affair and what the present state of in¤delity in Great Britain is.”73 These associations of malcontents existed not only in London but in the proliferation of social clubs on American soil as well. Often clandestine in their activities, clubs had been active in the colonies since the late seventeenth century, and were nurseries of the same kind of dissent as found in London coffeehouses. A club meeting in 1698 at the establishment of one Colonel Fletcher, for example, was suspected by the governor of New York of being a source of political agitation; the Pewter Platter club of Philadelphia (1702) actually did engage in overt protests against the Quaker authorities. Similar clubs existed throughout the colonies, such as Newport’s Society for Promoting Virtue and Knowledge, by a Free Conversation (1730–1745), and the Tuesday Club of Annapolis (1745–1756). Student versions of these private societies existed at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.74 These clubs were able to garner of¤cial tolerance by positioning themselves as charitable or trivial societies, but their function as a place of political and religious dissent was widely suspected. That the American congregants of such clubs would be ignorant of or reticent to entertain skeptical views of the Bible seems highly unlikely.75 On at least one signi¤cant occasion the debate over critical interpretation struck very close to home for Edwards, undoubtedly leaving a profound impression on him. The controversial affair regarding Robert Breck’s suitability to settle with the congregation at Spring¤eld is almost universally characterized as an instance of the spread of Arminianism in the colonies, or as evidence of changing ecclesio-political dynamics. This seems especially so of Edwards’s biographers, who often identify this incident as a stimulus to Edwards’s efforts at revival.76 But as in the case of others who were attracted to Arminianism, Breck also apparently toyed with skeptical notions concerning the Bible. The of¤cial record of the clerical investigation (printed up in Boston and thus intended for public consumption) clearly shows that one of the principal concerns of the ministerial association was the accusation by his detractors, spear20


headed in this case by Thomas Clap, that Breck had publicly denied the historical integrity of sacred writ. Clap’s letter concerning his own conversations with Breck asserts that Breck had denied that two passages in the New Testament (John 8.1–11 and 1 John 5.7–8) were inspired because they were spurious additions to the text. He further claims that Breck cited Jeremiah Jones’s Canon of the New Testament as an authority for his conclusions. Clap relates that Breck responded to this charge by claiming that he did not hold this as “his real and ¤xed opinion, but only as a Matter of Doubt, which he talked of for Argument sake.”77 Breck’s letter in response to these accusations is also included in the report. While he questions the reliability but not the sincerity of the witnesses, he claims that in fact he was only proposing that such critical problems were serious ones. An in¤del would not accept claims of textual integrity on the authority that God was obliged to “keep Scripture Pure and Uncorrupt,” but would respond by arguing that “God has in his Providence given the World suf¤cient Reason to think that these Places are Interpolations, and not of divine Inspiration.” Furthermore, Breck claims that that these views were from an immature period of his career, deriving from personal conversations with pastors intended to clear his own doubts, and not representative of his present position on the subject. In any case, he asserts, the Jones text did indeed conclude these passages to be spurious.78 Clap’s second response to Breck in the report again asserts that the latter’s doubts about the passages in question were his in earnest, and not merely hypothetical, and furthermore, that Jones was of no support to Breck’s views. The point of disagreement between them, Clap concludes, is the interpretive signi¤cance of these textual corruptions. Breck believes that God does not preserve the biblical texts through an infallible transmission process, and that this calls into question their inspiration. Clap agrees with Breck’s premise, but argues in turn that God provides suf¤cient evidence in the extant body of variant texts to reconstruct the original text, and thus preserve its original integrity and claim to inspiration.79 What is most instructive about this episode is the window it provides on just how deeply critical issues had penetrated the dynamics of colonial religious life. Whatever the truth of the accusations against Breck, doubts about the historical integrity of the American church’s founding document were being addressed in the public square. Their resolution was to be sought through the contested ¤eld of critical historical methodology. This shared experience on the part of Clap and Edwards of what they thought was an instance of open skepticism toward the historical Christian revelation, and that within the ranks of the clergy no less, no doubt made a lasting impression on both. It certainly came at a pivotal time for Edwards in the development of his own views on such subjects. He would expend considerable effort over the years dealing with Bibliophile

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these very questions, and many years later he would produce an extended treatment of the problem of canonicity using Jones’s book.80 Even though they would later clash over the great issue of the 1740s—the authenticity of the revivals— on the matter of critical skepticism Clap and Edwards were in accord. In 1741 Breck was admitted to the Hampshire Association, a development that, as Edwards’s biographers have noted, would lend a decided and decidedly ironic twist to Edwards’s ousting from the congregation at Northampton. But Breck’s presence (as well as that of others) may also have contributed to the direction of theological conversations within the Association itself in the intervening years.81 In any case it is clear that critical concerns did occasionally animate its meetings. In the fall of 1744, for example, the Association (with Edwards present) voted to consider at its next meeting four questions, the third of which was “whether the Apostles, St. Paul in particular, apprehended the Day of Universal Judgment so near, that it might probably happen in the age in which he lived.” While the minutes regrettably do not record the outcome of such conversations, they evidently were a matter of some import—they were still considering this question a year later—and of some variety. A subsequent question concerned “whether any particular Prophecy in Scripture is Designed to Point out more than one Event.” It is possible that Edwards may have been responsible for pushing the discussion of these two questions himself; they appear several times in his manuscripts.82 That other members of the Association were also interested in such questions illustrates how vital critical issues were in the ¤rst half of the eighteenth century, even in a frontier setting, as well as the conceptually sophisticated level of the discussions undertaken.83 These issues continued to reverberate in colonial religious life in the 1740s and 1750s. When Thomas Clap was made president of Yale in 1740, he observed that the college was “not so perfect, but that it would admit of sundry Emendations.”84 Besides driving out New Light students such as David Brainerd, Clap also attempted to restrain the deistic elements among them. Perhaps in®uenced by his encounter with Breck, he added a new stricture to the college’s constitution in 1745: “if any Scholar deny the Holy Scriptures or any Part of them to be the Word of God [and continue] Obstinate therein after the ¤rst and second admonition, He Shall be Expelled.”85 Several years later he was still trying to put down these inclinations, even going so far as removing Samuel Clarke’s works from the library shelves.86 Clap’s reactionary impulse did not meet with universal accolade. The by now recovered Ezra Stiles, for one, while conceding to Clap that “Deism has got such Head in this Age of Licentious Liberty,” insisted that Clap’s myopic response was self-defeating. The “only Way left to conquer and demolish it, is to come forth into the open Field and Dispute this matter on even Footing—the evidences of Revelation in my opinion are nearly as demonstrative as Newton’s Principia, and these are the Weap-

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ons he used.”87 Taking a cue from his own biography, Stiles thought the best antidote to in¤delity was a thorough intellectual immersion in it. Edwards shared the intuitions of both men. Like Clap, he could be rather reactionary in his characterizations of deists. At the same time, however, he did not shy away from being as well informed as possible on the many currents of their historical critique. He was determined, therefore, to address the claims of deism publicly and in a systematic, sophisticated fashion—to be on even footing as it were, in order to assert the claims of the authenticity of the sacred texts and their historical accounts. The 1740s and 1750s likewise represent the most active and technically pro¤cient years of his treatment of critical historical problems. The later entries in the “Notes on Scripture” and the “Miscellanies” show an even more pronounced interest in them. In the early 1740s he wrote a long essay on the Mosaic authorship in Book 3 of the “Notes on Scripture” (No. 416) that he would come to refer to as his treatise on the subject. In or around 1747 he produced another treatise-like entry in his “Miscellanies” (No. 1060) on the canonical status of Old and New Testament books, an effort for which, ironically enough, he employed Jeremiah Jones’s Canon of the New Testament. He also penned Misc. Nos. 1067–1068 (some 250 pages), the “Prophecies of the Messiah,” in which he addressed claims that questioned the historical connections drawn by the authors of the New Testament between the mission of Jesus and the Old Testament. His “Blank Bible” continued to augment the biblical commentary of the “Notes on Scripture,” and like them is dominated by critical concerns (his notes on “Hebrew Idioms” also date from this time, being bound with a 1747 issue of the Boston Gazette). During this period Edwards also began a series of six new notebooks, one of which was entitled “Subjects of Enquiry.” In it he recorded his intentions to revisit many of the issues he had been reading and writing about for the past several years. He wanted again to undertake to “show largely what evidences there are that the facts of the Mosaic History never could be forged.” He would seek to do so by observing elsewhere in the Old Testament “what con¤rmations there are of the truth of the Mosaic history”; he also thought to “look through my notes on the Pentateuch and observe all the con¤rmations of the History from the Fables and Traditions of the Heathen.” These concerns also applied to the histories of the New Testament. “In reading the Evangelists” he intended “to observe critically whether all that Jesus did during his publick ministry could be accomplished in one year”; he also planned to “read over Lardner a second time and sum up the evidence.” He speculated about the possibility of “reading the NT, observing the places in the Acts and Epistles where Christ’s miracles and other important facts of Christ’s life are referred to [in a manner] agreeable to the Evangelists.”88 The unifying thread of his many deliberations in these notes is a concern for historical or factual reconciliation: between the

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Old and New Testaments, within the New Testament itself, and between the biblical narrative and various external histories. History itself—that is, the genre of historical narrative—had clearly become a problem for him. He saw the need to consider whether historical knowledge itself was a viable form of understanding—what those things are “which make a history of past ages to be credible in a present age”—and whether a narration of events that are chronologically and geographically distant can possess an epistemological standing comparable to direct personal observation.89 He also wanted to ground the biblical narratives in contemporary notions of erudite historiography, to show that they were suf¤ciently credible according to such standards. Increasingly for Edwards it was their capacity for historical authentication that justi¤ed the ef¤cacy of the biblical narratives. The years at Stockbridge were clearly ones of professional hardship. He was forced to scavenge notepaper from envelopes and the margins of old book pages to record his thoughts. Yet it was also a remarkably productive period in his career, and this is particularly so with regard to his treatment of critical issues. He continued to obtain current works such as John Leland’s View of the Principal Deistical Writers (1753); his “Catalogue” shows that he had his eye on a new edition of Bayle’s Dictionary.90 In 1753 he began a notebook in which he recorded his plans to supplement his prior treatise on the “Mosaic History.” What is evident from this substantial collection of notes (131 pages) is that, as in the case of its predecessor, Edwards was as concerned with the general historical reliability of the Pentateuch as he was with questions about its authorship.91 Whether or not he envisioned the publication of a major treatise on the subject is a matter of speculation, but it is clear that the issues remained an ongoing problem for him. At about this time he also wrote an important entry in his “Book of Controversies” entitled “The Importance of Doctrines and of Mysteries in Religion,” an essay that is fundamentally concerned with the critique of historical religious knowledge. Another notebook, “Scripture Prophecies of the Old Testament,” was begun near the end of his years at Stockbridge.92 But by far the two most ambitious efforts from his mature period are his “Harmony of the Old and New Testament” and its companion piece, the planned revision of his “History of the Work of Redemption.” Deists had long used their critique of notions like prophecy and typology to undermine the privileged status of the Bible. By highlighting the historical disparity between the Jewish and Christian canons they intended to show their religious dissimilarity or disunity. The “Harmony,” as Edwards describes it, was to have brought to summation his considered response to this constellation of issues concerning biblical prophecy, typology, and doctrine. Unfortunately, he left this work in a rather preliminary state. The original notebook, begun in 1748 or shortly thereafter, consists of some 220 pages of notes, though the entries are brief and 24


the arguments are not given to elaboration.93 Nonetheless the project as he envisioned it provides stark testimony as to how central and pressing critical historical issues had become in his thinking; no doubt the abundant number of entries in the “Miscellanies” and Scripture notebooks would have provided ample material for this project. From 1755 to 1757 Edwards also developed three notebooks for the revision of the “Work of Redemption.” These manuscripts, like the original sermon series, show his plan to produce a defense of the historical integrity of the biblical narratives on which any history of God’s redemptive acts depended. At the time of his remove to Princeton Edwards was preparing to develop and publish these two works as the culminating efforts of his career.

While the full story of the impact of critical thought on colonial institutions will require considerably more study, one can only expect that if these issues were rife among those responsible for the theological orthodoxy of the community, they were almost certainly popular among its less contented members. Given this, the explosion of deistic controversies over the Bible after the Revolution should hardly come as a surprise. It is certainly true that as an organized publishing phenomenon the early national period was de¤nitive for an American deism. But it is a mistaken assumption to conclude that colonial thinkers were more or less immune to the movement’s play for public sentiment with regard to the Bible.94 In fact the pre-war period was shaped by this dynamic, and further study will surely reveal the deep penetration of critical thought into the colonial consciousness. The new vigor of deism after the war simply re®ects the changed political arrangement in America, rather than the belated discovery of such ideas by a new citizenry. The complaints of deists previously directed at the English establishment were now turned in a new direction; the place and focus of their ideological polemic shifted with the displacement of national power, and with a vengeance. In the new republic deists had another chance to effect their political and religious agenda after it had largely failed in England. Thus Ethan Allen’s broadside, Reason the Only Oracle of Man (1784), a work considerably devoted to the historical criticism of the Bible, would appear almost immediately. Thomas Paine’s classic, The Age of Reason, Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology, followed a decade later. It too is a devastating and well-informed work of biblical criticism.95 But the underlying historical questions that made the repudiation of revealed religion possible had been percolating through American institutions for decades. Once the seat of national power had been transferred to American soil, the religious agitation so typical in English politics simply followed. Edwards was no stranger to these concerns. The manifold expressions of his interest in critical biblical interpretation offer to provide an alternative percepBibliophile

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tion of the principal impulses of his theological career, and a different sense of the ®ow of his biography. It seems clear that from the outset he was preeminently concerned with the rationalistic critique regnant within deism, the implications of which threatened the very foundations of traditional Christian institutions. Over the course of time the various philosophical and doctrinal components of his grand project were realized, along with more occasional writings such as his Faithful Narrative, Religious Affections, and Brainerd memoirs. But looming over all of them was the gradual yet continuing development of his apologia for the Bible. From the earliest moments of his intellectual development he was cognizant of the importance that critical historical interpretation of the Bible played in the deistic critique, and set about incorporating these problems into his larger rational account of Christian belief. Just after he assumed the pastorate at Northampton he began to seriously engage these issues, only to have them somewhat interrupted by the awakenings of the mid1730s. But almost immediately afterward he returned to them, and began to insert them into his preaching to his parishioners and to wider communal circles. His preoccupation with these problems was once again interrupted in the early 1740s by the turmoil of the Great Awakening, but here too, when the revivals had ebbed away, he rather quickly returned to them. After his dismissal from Northampton and his relocation to the relatively isolated environment of Stockbridge, Edwards’s biblical interpretation continued to ®ourish; it was in this period that he arrived at his culminating and perhaps most creative treatments of the issues at stake. But for his premature demise, it seems evident that the next decade of his life would have been devoted to explicating these issues to a wider public.

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2

Knowing and the Historical Mode I distinguish knowledge and certainty from faith founded on report, so that I am able to separate what can be known from what can be believed in every religion.1 And there is all the question, whether religion has divine excellencies or no.2

During its modern re¤nement the writing of history has experienced episodic crises regarding its rightful place among the scienti¤c disciplines. Such episodes have usually been provoked by questions about the suf¤ciency of its methodological rigor. Almost invariably the concern for methodology has been symptomatic of a deeper problem: whether historical writing provides its audience with anything approaching knowledge of the past. The present dilemma of postmodernism is only the most recent of these episodes, but it is in no way unique in recognizing the inherent dif¤culties of the historical enterprise.3 Present debates center particularly on the inherently distorting in®uence of the historian in creating a narrative of the past and on the theoretical dif¤culties of even presuming that there is a past “there” to represent. Edwards’s era was also taken up with such problems, though in somewhat different dress. Then the concern was for bias in the form of overt subterfuge, as well as the more mundane concern about whether suf¤cient material resources existed for the task of reconstructing the past. In both instances, however, the deeper crisis of con¤dence turns on whether the methods of historical investigation and the construction of historical narratives yield an epistemologically signi¤cant or useful product. That is, they share a concern for the rationality or intelligibility of historical discourse. To speak of the “reasonableness” of things in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was not an attempt, as it is commonly understood, to make them acceptable to straight-thinking men and women, to those who insisted on a sort of common-sense plausibility in their philosophy. It was rather an assertion of philosophical necessity and an acknowledgment of the ef¤cacy of the rhetoric of demonstration, and thus a term indicative of the deep epistemological concerns of the age. This is the meaning, for example, that John Locke gives the term in the Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), and it was the motive for the titling of so many “rational accounts” of Christianity in Anglican apologetic literature. Edwards’s attempt to assert the reasonableness of the Christian revelation both philosophically and rhetorically is a product of this mentality, and

likewise an indication of his own epistemological anxieties. The assembly of materials associated with his theological apologia—the “Rational Account,” the “Miscellanies,” the “Mind,” the “Rough Notes,” and his sermon literature— address a constellation of such issues relating to the biblical texts. Whatever Edwards had in mind for their ¤nal disposition, it is evident from the aggregate of his writings that epistemological considerations played a central part in his response to the critical problems associated with sacred history. Studies of Edwards’s conception of human religious understanding have exhibited a narrowness of focus not unlike those generally addressing early modern epistemology, having almost completely ignored the connections he explicitly draws between his epistemological re®ection and critical biblical interpretation. Taking as their starting point Perry Miller’s attribution of the decisive impact of Locke’s empiricism on Edwards’s intellectual orientation, students of Edwards have directed a considerable amount of attention to the shape and sources of his philosophical thought.4 While such work has yielded important discoveries concerning his methodological orientation, the development of his idealist metaphysics, and the experiential elements of his philosophy of religion, it has been conducted almost wholly without reference to the philosophical and critical controversies surrounding sacred historiography. Yet for all the interest shown in the methodological premises of Edwards’s epistemology, it is pertinent to observe that the question of the origin of the mind’s ideas was not as important an issue to him as securing the certainty of those ideas, whatever their origin.5 Studies that attempt to revise or replace Miller’s interpretation of Edwards as a religious sensationist have at the same time continued to miss the essential character of much of his work. Edwards did not need Locke to convince him that sensations produce ideas; this was a commonplace in his scholastic and theological heritage. Nor by utilizing Locke’s basic analysis of the mind did he commit himself to a thoroughgoing empiricism.6 Discovering a monolithic explanation of the origin of the mind’s ideas appears to have held little if any interest for him. The pressing question for Edwards was not whether or how the mind came to its ideas through the senses, but rather whether the ideas produced by sense experiences could qualify as a bona ¤de form of knowledge or were simply products of the imagination. He confronted the task of describing the philosophical coherence of religious experiences and the ideas they generated, ideas that form the core of historical reportage. Locke and other thinkers became important precisely because they offered such an analysis of sense experience, that the ideas it generated could qualify as knowledge. Edwards’s interest was not to show that religious ideas were sense ideas, and therefore empirical, but rather to show that (religious) sense ideas were knowledge, and therefore rational. This was a question of some discussion in early modernity, and one of critical importance for the philosophical estimation of sacred historical traditions. 28


Edwards did not develop his religious epistemology in isolation from the theoretical problems pertaining to the historical sources of theology. He devoted at least as much, if not more, attention to these issues as he did to other philosophical problems. It was of paramount importance to him to elucidate the epistemic status of religious ideas within the broad domain of philosophical knowledge, and this was a project in which the critical problems accompanying historical knowledge played a crucial role. Whatever the relative importance Locke, or Nicolas de Malebranche or Antoine Arnauld, may prove to have had for his overall theory of knowledge, this issue remained at the heart of his epistemological re®ection, deeply in®uencing his appropriation of his philosophical heritage. A studied understanding of his treatment of historical religious knowledge, therefore, offers to provide important information about his relation to wider philosophical currents. Edwards’s treatment of historical religious knowledge was intimately related to his theory of the manifestation of the divine excellence in creation. The contemporary interest in his philosophical theology has resulted in a considerable effort to elucidate the origin and character of this theory, especially with reference to his postulation of the “new sense” of the heart. This has been characterized as the quintessential component of his thinking, and with good reason. For Edwards, all being is an expression of the divine effulgence and is therefore preeminently spiritual in nature. The very purpose of creaturely existence is to manifest and apprehend the divine excellence, something for which the mind and soul must be divinely enabled.7 This analysis underwrites every signi¤cant area of his thinking, and helps to explain the tendency of his descriptions of religious phenomena to devolve to this level of interpretation. According to Edwards, the matters narrated in the sacred texts also manifest this excellence, and therefore play an instrumental role in the development of the new sense. His assertion that true religious understanding was rooted in a sense of the divine excellence in things was integrally connected to his epistemology of revelation, which itself was dominated by the problems of critical thought. An understanding of the latter, therefore, offers to provide a fuller account of this central aspect of his thought. But beyond this, it offers to more properly locate his primary insight within the broad constellation of philosophical issues of which it was but one component. It is a commonplace to assert the importance of Locke or Puritanism for his theory of the new sense, but the speci¤c context in which he received these sources signi¤cantly transformed his use of them. His preoccupation with the new sense was not simply (or even primarily) a response to empiricism, nor was it an attempt merely to assert the affective dimension of religious faith. Rather, it was one aspect of his desire to secure the intelligibility of religious ideas and language in a philosophical milieu where these were in danger of being pushed aside. In this respect his broader concerns with the problems of religious knowledge were Knowing and the Historical Mode

29

speci¤cally and fundamentally historical in nature. The genesis of the fundamental aspects of his epistemology can be traced to concerns about historical sources of knowledge: Edwards’s theory of divine excellence was instrumental in his attempt to secure a role for religious tradition in literate discourse, and this theory was in turn shaped by the encounter with critical thought. His determinations about the nature of historical religious knowledge and its relation to critical thought thus deserve a central place in any attempt to evaluate his philosophical program.

The Critique of Historical Knowledge At the heart of the turmoil that characterized so much of seventeenthcentury European philosophy were questions about the epistemological certainty of religious belief. Engendered in part by the injection of classical sources of skepticism into post-Reformation political and religious controversies, these new questions had signi¤cant and long-lasting repercussions for assessing the historical sources of religious knowledge. Proposed solutions to the problem of philosophical skepticism invariably found application beyond general epistemology and metaphysics: the theological disciplines, particularly biblical interpretation, faced a renewed scrutiny in this new philosophical climate. In addition, the fervent search for epistemic certainty reinforced parallel anxieties about the authority of social institutions. Doubt and dissent over the latter often found expression in the form of philosophical critique. The question of whether or in what sense claims to religious truth based on historical traditions could be considered reliable, informative, and rational was thus simultaneously a philosophical, political, and ecclesiastical challenge. It raised doubts about whether a political and ecclesiastical establishment based on such traditions had any legitimate claim to social hegemony, and contributed to the dissatisfaction expressed toward institutions premised upon and legitimating such claims.8 The integral relationship between developments in epistemology and the critical study of sacred history has not always been fully appreciated. “These two movements, though developing at the same time and often through the activities of the same persons, have rarely been studied as parts of a common intellectual drama.”9 Yet the phenomenon of Richard Popkin’s aptly named “epistemological-historical” critique of biblical narrative was at the center of intellectual re®ection and controversy for most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As such it was part of a wider debate over the conception of “knowledge” and the propriety of its claims upon various ¤elds of human learning. The rhetoric of knowing and rationality were frequently opposed in the literature of the time to concepts such as faith, revelation, testimony, and tra30


dition. This commonplace dichotomy is indicative of the fact that a wellestablished epistemological demarcation ¤rst established in the scienti¤c disciplines was taking root in theology and biblical interpretation as well. Such contrasts were not indictments of the validity of religious knowledge per se, but they often revealed attitudes about the relative validity of historical modes of religious knowledge. Terms such as “faith” and “revelation” were common synonyms for the notion of “historical testimony,” and freighted for an underlying set of criteria used alternately to displace or safeguard the knowledgeclaims derived from historical traditions. “The universal Disposition of this Age is bent upon a rational religion,” observed Bishop Thomas Sprat in 1667. It was an observation that would have met with little dissent in most intellectual circles during the century that followed.10 Just what constituted such a rational religion, however, and whether historical sources could further its cause, was a matter of pointed disagreement. Sprat and his latitudinarian colleagues in the Royal Society and the episcopacy were particularly sensitive to the sustained argument that emanated from a disparate array of critics of the Anglican establishment, including Herbert of Cherbury, Thomas Hobbes, and Benedict de Spinoza, as well as a variety of other Cartesians, deists, Quakers, and English Catholics. Such thinkers were united in their strict strati¤cation of knowledge-claims according to speci¤c criteria of certainty. Their expressed preference for an indubitable standard of knowledge presented a formidable philosophical challenge to proponents of traditionary religion and provided the conceptual means for a vigorous historical critique of the biblical narratives. Their use of the rhetoric of epistemological indubitability had important common political and ideological advantages as well. These “modern dogmatists,” as Sprat pejoratively referred to them, were so labeled because of their shared commitment to an a prioristic concept of knowledge (scientia) that employed a method of demonstration from intuitive ¤rst principles.11 While resulting in an infallible certainty about particular types of ideas, this method severely restricted what could be properly considered knowledge, and potentially subordinated a vast body of human understanding to the realm of opinion, uncertainty, and skepticism. The supposed dogmatism of these thinkers rested in their predilection for certain types of knowledge-claims based simply on their relation to the criterion of indubitability, before due consideration of their claims to truthfulness could be made. Their tendency to restrict the language of rationality to its scienti¤c form made its application to other ¤elds of knowledge where the claims for intuitive principia were dif¤cult to substantiate extremely problematic.12 These thinkers often drew inspiration for their epistemological and discursive method from the model of mathematics (more geometrico), which had gained ascendance in the seventeenth century as a means to competently reKnowing and the Historical Mode

31

solve all but the most Pyrrhonistic kinds of skepticism.13 For example, Descartes’s famous determination to include in his judgments nothing more than what presented itself clearly and distinctly to his mind is derived from the regula of the more geometrico. Clarity and distinctiveness are characteristic of the intuition and demonstration fundamental to this method. His philosophical method cast a long shadow over the epistemological discussions that followed, especially on matters of religious authority. The ideal of resolving epistemological problems by proceeding through secured de¤nitions, postulates, axioms, and propositions was a compelling one, acknowledged on all sides when used appropriately to result in evident forms of knowledge. The application of this method had potent implications for the consideration of historical forms of knowledge, especially its religious forms. It thus provided the philosophical underpinning for a rigorous epistemological critique of the scriptural narratives.14 Once the standard of clarity and distinctiveness had been introduced into discussions of religious knowledge against the background of skepticism, empirical sources appeared relatively defective. According to such an analysis they were easily shown to be incomplete, obscure, and unreliable, and thus open to doubt. Divine revelation was in the end only a type of historical testimony; a record of the circumstances and meaning of past events, constructed from memory, and resting on the credibility of witnesses, the reliability of authors, and the integrity of the transmission process. At best such records could only appeal to a probative or moral, but not an infallible, certainty. By asserting an alternative rule of judgment, proponents of the more geometrico believed they could secure certain kinds of religious knowledge quite apart from historical traditions while avoiding the inherent instability of knowledge claims rooted in historical circumstance. The popularization of the more geometrico as an epistemological and discursive method by advocates of Cartesianism and the resulting impact on the estimation of historical religious knowledge is pointedly illustrated in the work of Benedict de Spinoza.15 In his analysis, the very foundations of deriving a “Scriptural knowledge” depended solely on having “a trustworthy history of the sacred writings.” But it was just such a history that “the ancients neglected, or at any rate, whatever they may have written or handed down has perished in the lapse of time.” Thus the possibilities for reconstructing a genuine history have been “to a great extent, cut from under us”; the history that remains is “not so much imperfect as untrustworthy.” 16 In Spinoza’s analysis such a state of affairs is inherent in the nature of historical texts and the understanding derived from them. In his epistemology he distinguished the contents of the understanding as knowledge of the ¤rst, second, and third kinds (experience, deductive reason, and intuition, respectively). These three kinds of knowledge are characterized by adequate (clear 32


and distinct) or inadequate (confused) ideas of things. Adequate ideas result from “direct intellectual insight into the fundamental principles that cause things to be what they (essentially) are.” Inadequate ideas are produced by “shaky, super¤cial and shifting inferences and abstractions” based on the appearance of things. Because it originates in experience and sense perception, knowledge of the ¤rst kind (which Spinoza also denotes by the terms “opinion” and “imagination”) is composed of inadequate ideas; these remain inadequate so long as they do not yield to descriptions of the second and third kinds. Since they are based on rational explanations, knowledge of the second and third kinds provides the mind with adequate ideas of things; these are accompanied by an awareness of their absolute certainty.17 In Spinoza’s scheme, history is a form of knowledge of the ¤rst kind. As with the other ¤gures mentioned here, he did not absolutely dismiss the validity of either historical traditions or moral certainty per se. Yet such knowledge remained for him of a dubious nature and of subordinate value, and this had important implications for the epistemological standing of the biblical texts.18 The “truth of a historical narrative, however assured, cannot give us the knowledge nor consequently the love of God.” For the “love of God springs from knowledge of Him, and knowledge of Him should be derived from general ideas, in themselves certain and known, so that the truth of a historical narrative is very far from being a necessary requisite for our attaining our highest good.” 19 Because they are rooted in sense perceptions, and more particularly, because their authors rely upon imaginative explanations of events (such as miracles, prophecy, or supernatural explanations of any kind), the scriptural accounts generally offer only inadequate ideas about their religious subject matter.20 This is not necessarily to say that these accounts are inventions out of whole cloth, but as historical reports they are highly ¤ctionalized, accommodated to the meanest and most primitive capacities of the understanding, and inevitably corrupted by the passage of time. The manner of description and interpretation of events does not give a clear and evident form of religious knowledge. It is only when these narratives are understood in light of the natural order behind them and their moral purpose is deciphered that they become, in Spinoza’s words, a “divine revelation.”21 The true meaning of the biblical texts was to be found within the boundaries of rational moral philosophy and natural science. This method ruled out supernatural modes of explanation, such as those contained in the narratives themselves, as well as conclusions that the events were adequately rendered by the literal descriptions of their authors or that their certitude could be ascertained through some mode of spiritual illumination.22 Spinoza’s advocacy for reading the Bible “as any other book” was in one sense a reiteration of the humanist respect for historical and grammatical context, but it was also a claim that the Bible was not substantially different from Knowing and the Historical Mode

33

any other book. Only by studying the biblical narratives within the nexus of historical causation did their true meaning and value become known. The investigation of issues such as provenance, authorship, compilation, and transmission reveals these narratives for what they are—records of a particular and primitive religious understanding of the past. It is only when this analysis has been completed that their religious value can be appreciated. The true Word of God consists in the demonstrable moral precepts contained in, but detachable from, the historical narratives themselves. True religion is found in piety, rather than a series of historically derived beliefs. All Scripture was written primarily for an entire people; therefore its contents must necessarily be adapted as far as possible to the understanding of the masses, and proved only by examples drawn from experience. . . . [T]he truth of the narratives, be they what they may, has nothing to do with the Divine Law, and serves for nothing except in respect of doctrine, the sole element which makes one history better than another.23

Spinoza’s assertion of a primarily moral function for history was common to the era; the notion that history was philosophy teaching by example continued to be an important paradigm well into the eighteenth century. It was an understanding that Edwards shared. What is different about Spinoza’s analysis, however, is the belief that the moral function could be safely detached from the historical authenticity of the narratives, that the persuasive force of their moral claims could remain without the epistemological certainty of the underlying factual claims. This was an entirely controversial conclusion, and one from which Edwards strongly dissented. Such a move also placed the moral claims of the texts under the judgment of a wider framework of moral science, threatening both their uniqueness and their ultimate authority. The use of critical philosophical and historical methods to establish the necessity of this conclusion complicated Edwards’s receptivity to such methods. But more to the point, it provoked his re®ection on the problem of ascertaining the epistemological certitude of historical traditions as a prelude for asserting the authority of their moral claims. While certainly only part of a diverse and very broad culture of critique, Spinoza’s treatise represented one of the most thoroughgoing applications of a demonstrative method to the epistemological estimation of the biblical narratives. In this sense, its appearance was something of a precipitating moment. Coming after several decades of philosophical inquiry into the nature and suf¤ciency of historical religious knowledge, Spinoza’s views enjoyed almost immediate dissemination and reaction in English intellectual circles. The appearance of the Theologico-Political Treatise drew rapid published criticisms from, among others, the Cambridge Platonists Henry More and Ralph Cudworth, the Dissenter Richard Baxter, and the natural philosopher Robert 34


Boyle.24 Equally importantly, the naturalistic and critical method of the Treatise was readily adopted by deists, whose vision of a universal, demonstrable, and non-traditionary religion was consonant with Spinoza’s own resolution of the problem of religious knowledge.25 Such views were also diffused among later eighteenth-century Bible critics such as François Voltaire, who also sharply contrasted the uncertainty of historical knowledge with that gained from geometry: “The same is not true of certainty founded on appearances, or on unanimous reports of men drawn up for us.”26 The popularization by deists and others of the signal elements of Spinoza’s method dominated the religious climate of the era. The English theological establishment was faced with a growing and sophisticated philosophical and critical analysis of the scriptural history, an analysis to which it responded with considerable vigor.

A Symphony with the Soul There is no evidence to suggest that Edwards ever read Spinoza’s Treatise, though he does occasionally refer to him by name, and could have become familiar with his work through a number of secondary sources. But he did encounter the central elements of Spinoza’s philosophical and historical approach to biblical interpretation through his exposure to deistic literature.27 Deists were the primary cultural mediators of the kind of critical analysis of the Bible offered by Spinoza, and it was their version of theological naturalism that had a de¤nitive in®uence on the development of Edwards’s religious epistemology. His manuscripts reveal a serious and prolonged engagement with the sharply contested estimation of historical modes of religious knowledge. If not formally organized as a sustained treatise, his work here is far from inchoate. The issues recur frequently in both his private notes and his public discourse, and provide ample material for assessing the development, shape, and direction of his thinking.28 In a manner consistent with his characteristic integration of theological heritage and new intellectual trends, Edwards directed his energies against the increasing separation between religious and philosophical knowledge occurring in radical strains of rationalistic thought, and against the reduction of the former to the latter. Whereas philosophical critics of the Bible urged a skepticism about the reliability of historical knowledge in general and about sacred history in particular, Edwards sought to identify grounds for assurance regarding their epistemological certainty or reliability. He made a sustained effort to evaluate the epistemological status of historical religious knowledge through a consideration of the nature of historical texts in general, as well as of the biblical texts as a historical medium of information. Blending elements of traditional Reformed views concerning the divine qualities of Scripture with his experiential and aesthetic theory of knowledge, he arrived at a solution in Knowing and the Historical Mode

35

keeping with his fundamental commitment to the notion that religious knowledge and assurance are the result of an evident, infallible, and spiritual certainty. This in turn informed his approach to related issues in theology, ethics, and the philosophy of religion, as well as redirecting his energies toward the development of his Redemption discourse at the close of his career. The kind of infallibilist critique offered by Spinoza and appropriated by deists represented an attempt to overcome the problem of skepticism by identifying a core of rational religious knowledge possessing absolute certainty. This restriction of knowledge to its intuitive and demonstrative forms came with a certain cost, however, because it theoretically consigned a vast sum of human cognition to the realm of (uncertain) opinion and belief. This included —perhaps most particularly troubling to a large number of religious thinkers —the information communicated through sacred history. Two chief epistemological alternatives were developed in the seventeenth century to answer the problems raised by this epistemological-historical critique. One strategy, a method most common to Reformed orthodoxy, involved an attempt to answer the infallibilist critique on its own grounds. Like rationalist and radical biblical critics, Reformed thinkers assumed the epistemic necessity of a certainty derived from evident principia. But unlike them, Reformed thinkers sought to mitigate any potential skepticism about historical religious knowledge implied in this method by showing that scriptural history satis¤ed these epistemological criteria. Seeking to overcome the separation of these two positions in the contemporary debate, they advanced an alternative theory of “theological certainty” based on the intuitive textual signs of scriptural credibility. The thought of the Puritan divine John Owen, for example, is representative of this approach.29 A second strategy, the subject of the ensuing chapter, began by conceding that the greater part of human understanding failed to rise to the level of absolute certainty, but rejected the notion that such a failure necessitated a radical skepticism about its epistemological status. It was an approach that was especially characteristic of latitudinarian Anglican thought, and one that increasingly in®uenced Reformed thinkers in the eighteenth century. It owes a special debt to the theological writings of Robert Boyle as well as the work of several Anglican divines.30 Edwards’s own approach incorporated elements of both of these strategies. The importance and function of the new sense of the heart has received considerable emphasis in contemporary discussions of Edwards’s thought, whether concerned with the nature of his religious epistemology, theology, ethics, or aesthetics. Such studies, however, have been largely concerned with the more properly psychological aspects of his analysis, with the phenomenology of the spiritual sense as it shapes the understanding, will, and affections. While some attention has been directed to how these issues are related to his consideration of the concept of revelation, none of these studies have explored the critical 36


philosophical context of these concerns, their connection to the wider problems of biblical interpretation, or their fundamental importance to his theory of the new sense. Yet for Edwards they were paramount and inseparable, from the earliest to the last moments of his career.31 His attention to religious cognition appears in the earliest strata of his literary corpus. What is perhaps most noticeable about these early writings is the pronounced concern for the theoretical problems surrounding the basic intelligibility of a spiritual form of perception. In No. aa of the “Miscellanies” (1722), for example, he raises the question of the status of an illuminated religious knowledge relative to other forms of knowledge and certainty. There may undoubtedly be such a thing as is called the testimony of faith, and a sort of certainty of faith that is different from reason, that is, is different from discourse by a chain of arguments, a certainty that is given by the Holy Spirit; and yet such a belief may be altogether agreeable to reason, agreeable to the exactest rules of philosophy. Such ideas of religion may be in the mind, as a man may feel divinity in them, and so may know they are from God, know that religion is of divine original, that is, is divine truth. Yea, this faith may be to the degree of certainty, for he may certainly intuitively see God and feel him in those ideas; that is, he may certainly see that notion he has of God in them. The notion of God, or idea I have of him, is that complex idea of such power, holiness, purity, majesty, love, excellency, beauty, loveliness, and ten thousand other things. Now when a man is certain he sees those things, he is certain he sees that which he calls divine. He is certain he feels those things to which he annexes the term God; that is, he is certain that what he sees and feels, he sees and feels; and he knows that what he then sees and feels is the same thing he used to call God.32

His concern for the rationality of a supra-natural or illuminated form of knowledge addresses precisely the kinds of issues raised by proponents of the more geometrico, who argued that the demonstrative criteria of this method excluded from consideration any sources of knowledge beyond the normal or natural rational capacity of the human mind. Edwards clearly accepts the underlying claim that a demonstrative level of certainty is the legitimate criterion for knowledge, including religious knowledge. That is, he assumes the epistemological premises of the more geometrico. It is also obvious that by this point he had begun to incorporate Locke’s terminology into his consideration of spiritual perception, and thus it is important to observe both the context and manner in which he uses the Essay and the conclusions that he draws from its empirical method. Edwards’s response to Locke is often viewed as one of reaction. According to one reading Edwards found Locke’s method compelling, and so set out to articulate a fully if cryptically sensationist account of the new sense. In the alternative reading he perKnowing and the Historical Mode

37

ceived empiricism as an implicit threat, and set about to articulate his religious epistemology in speci¤cally (if only super¤cially) Lockean terms in order to forestall it. Both views assume that Locke’s Essay was the driving impetus for the development of his theory and that this treatise implies or demands such a sublimation of the concept of spiritual knowledge, compelling Edwards to respond accordingly. But Locke did not deny the possibility of an illuminated knowledge, and in fact he explicitly allowed for it. Furthermore, throughout his manuscripts Edwards never raises any sort of protest against Locke’s empiricism. One expects that had he found it troubling in any signi¤cant way he would not have hesitated to criticize it, or at least would have offered some sort of justi¤cation for adopting it. His use of Locke is rather consistently and almost entirely constructive, though certainly discriminating. And this is especially true of his use of sense rhetoric in describing this “testimony of faith.” Edwards employs Locke’s validation of experience as an intuitive and thus philosophically certain source of knowledge as a justi¤cation for the supposition of an illuminated knowledge, which comes from a direct experience of God, immediately available to the mind. The proposition that this sense is spiritual in origin makes it no less rational than the natural intuitions of the mind. Intuitions can be reliably derived from sense experience—one can be certain “what he sees and feels, he sees and feels.” That the origin of this experience or testimony is not natural does not argue against its intelligibility. “Now no man can deny but that such an idea of religion may possibly be wrought by the Holy Spirit. ’Tis not unphilosophical to think so.”33 Other entries in the “Miscellanies” elaborate on this fundamental view. As an intuition this testimony of faith is clear and distinct, and gives an infallible conviction of its truthfulness. No long chain of arguments can add to its evidence, for “nothing else is requisite in order to seeing the proportion of ideas but clearness, or having the ideas themselves clear.”34 “The idea appears so real . . . and brings so many strong yet ineffable marks of truth, that ’tis a sort of intuitive evidence, and an evidence that the nature of the soul will not allow it to reject.”35 As with the philosophical critics of the Bible, it is clear that Edwards’s fundamental epistemological orientation was infallibilist in nature.36 Unlike these thinkers, however, he was unwilling to restrict the quali¤cations of such knowledge, and thus the notion of human rationality, to ideas derived apart from sense experience, or to admit that sense experience was not equally an intuitive form of knowledge or that only nature can produce sense experiences. The character and certainty of true religious knowledge comes from an external source. As a form of experience it is not necessarily universally evident in the way that other forms of demonstrative knowledge, such as mathematics, are, but it is no less certain because of this.37 While fully possessed of the character of philosophical knowledge, this tes-

38


timony of faith is at the same time qualitatively distinct from the rational apprehension of natural objects by both its object and its origin. As an intuition of a divine reality it is in fact only comprehended analogously by the language of philosophy. What Edwards describes here is really a kind of super-intuition, one that has no exact counterpart in natural epistemological terms, and one that even exceeds the clarity and certainty of normal sense intuitions.38 But, while qualitatively distinct, this illuminated knowledge is nonetheless philosophically comparable to intuitive sense perception. Testimonies, even those of divine origin, are experienced. Spiritual knowledge consists in the apprehension of the peculiar impress of the divine properties of its ideas—an excellence, a majesty, a beauty, the myriad qualities inherent in them—yet it remains a real apprehension. One that is well acquainted with the gospel and sees the beauties, the harmonies, the majesty, the power and the glorious wisdom of it, and the like, may only by viewing of it be as certain that it [is] no human work, as a man that is well acquainted with mankind and their works, by contemplating the sun may know it is not a human work.39

Edwards also makes these connections in his more properly philosophical works. Thus, for example, in entry 19 (c. 1724) of the notes on “The Mind,” he associates his familiar metaphors for the perception of spiritual ideas with the evident nature of sensation: “Sensation. Self-evidence. Things we know by immediate sensation, we know intuitively, and they are properly self-evident truths: as, grass is green, the sun shines, honey is sweet.”40 This entry is followed by an entry on “Inspiration” that draws the same parallel to physical sense experience. The evidence of prophetic inspiration is “an absolute sort of certainty; and the knowledge is in a sense intuitive, much in the same manner as faith and spiritual knowledge of the truth of religion.” The prophet “has so divine a sense . . . that he immediately sees that God is there as we perceive one another’s presence when we are talking together face to face.”41 The early date at which he arrived at the fundamental character of the new sense and the concern he shows for ascertaining its intuitively certain nature suggests that the culture of skepticism regarding the possibility of such an experiential knowledge played an important role in directing his analysis. And although Norman Fiering has argued persuasively that in many ways Edwards’s epistemology more properly belongs to the rationalist tradition, Edwards nonetheless appears to have found Locke’s language particularly applicable for the explication of experimental religious knowledge. It is easy to see why this would be so. Locke’s epistemology employed affective language to describe the process of knowing in much the same way that Edwards’s Reformed and Puritan heritage did. But Locke’s method also provided him with an ac-

Knowing and the Historical Mode

39

count of sensitive knowledge that cogently articulated its intuitive, clear, and infallible character in the context of its philosophical critique. Fiering concedes that Edwards shared a “terminological heritage” with Locke that accorded well with the latter’s “stress on sensation and direct experience as the basis of all knowledge.” He asserts, however, that Edwards’s religious epistemology, especially his sense of the heart, is no more empiricist in orientation than its evidencing an “accidental parallel to Lockean simple ideas” meant to display “enough of his fashionable language to satisfy empiricist critics.”42 But it would appear that while Edwards may not have been a thoroughgoing empiricist, his appropriation of Locke’s terminology was more than merely conventional. It was not by any means an attempt to show that sense experience was the basis for all knowledge, but the choice between rationalism and empiricism is not one that Edwards would have felt compelled to make, nor was it seemingly an issue that concerned him. Rather, his interest in Locke corresponded to the latter’s justi¤cation of the senses as a source of scienti¤c knowledge. His use of Locke was a serious attempt to give philosophical expression to the selfevidential nature of the experiential religious knowledge characteristic of Puritan and Reformed religious psychology.43 Edwards’s interests in the epistemological problems attending to sacred history are closely related to these developments, and not coincidentally they also appear at the earliest stages of his career. His treatment developed in dialectic with his broader theory of religious knowledge, and was crucial to its formation. It was an integral component of his theory of the sense of the heart, providing, for example, the answer as to where the mind gained the content of the ideas with which the affections concur. The cogency of the notion that a supernatural quality could inhere to either the mind or a written text was rapidly dissolving in the philosophical milieu in which Edwards operated, and it is little wonder he devoted so much effort to the explication of this theory. It was precisely this epistemological hypothesis that many biblical critics found objectionable. Spinoza, for example, simply found no evidence to support the epistemological assumptions contained in such a view. What is meant by this supernatural faculty I will leave to its propounders to explain. Personally, I can only suppose that they have adopted a very obscure way of stating their complete uncertainty about the true meaning of Scripture. If we look at their interpretations, they contain nothing supernatural, at least nothing but the merest conjectures. [Those] who demand supernatural faculties for comprehending the meaning of the prophets and apostles seem truly lacking in natural faculties, so that we should hardly suppose such persons the possessors of a Divine supernatural gift.44

40


Matthew Tindal reiterated this criticism sixty years later. He argued that Protestant appeals to the illuminated qualities of Scripture bordered on enthusiasm. Rather than exclaiming its supernatural excellence, theologians should settle for the “innate Excellency” that is “writ on our Minds.” Any “internal marks” that the sacred text may possess can only be those that are rationally evident; that is, those that concur with the principles of natural religion and not those claimed to be perceived supra-rationally.45 To thinkers like Spinoza and Tindal, the supposition of an illuminated dimension to the interpretive task was a seemingly super®uous theory. It offered no obvious advantage or distinction in discovering the verbal meaning of texts. Moreover, it inclined its proponents to ignore contextual factors, and to rely instead on a kind of irrational or enthusiastic inspiration. Worst of all, this theory of theological certainty rested on the premise of a privileged perspective. Since this intuition was spiritually or divinely induced, and thus not universally accessible, it could not be, in their view, truly rational. Universality to the knowing capacities of human minds was at the core of the very de¤nition of rationality. This backdrop brings Edwards’s own treatment of sacred history into sharp relief. In one of his earliest re®ections on its nature as a source of knowledge, for example, he discusses the effect that the biblical narratives have on the minds of their readers. There is a strange and unaccountable kind of enchantment, if I may so speak, in the Scripture history; which, notwithstanding it is destitute of all rhetorical ornaments, makes it vastly more pleasant, agreeable, easy and natural, than any other history whatever. It shines brighter with the amiable simplicity of truth. There is something in the relation that at the same time very much pleases and engages the reader, and evidences the truth of the fact. It is impossible to tell fully what I mean, to any that have not taken notice of something of it before. One great reason why it is so, doubtless is this: the Scripture sets forth things just as they happened, with the minute circumstances of time, place, situation, gesture, habit, etc. in such a natural method, that one seems to be actually present; and we insensibly fancy not that we are readers but spectators, yea actors in the business. These little circumstances wonderfully help to brighten the ideas of the more principal parts of the history. And although the Scripture goes beyond other histories in mentioning such circumstances, yet there are no circumstances [that] are mentioned but those only that wonderfully brighten the whole story and illustrate, nobody knows how, every part of it. One seems to know exactly how it is from the relation, as if they saw it. The mind is so led that sometimes we seem to have a full, large, and particular history of a long time; so that if one should shut the book immediately, without taking particular notice, one would not sup-

Knowing and the Historical Mode

41

pose the story had been told in half so little room. The story is so told that one’s mind, although the things are not mentioned, yet naturally traces the whole transaction.46

It might be tempting to interpret this passage as evidence of the insularity of Edwards’s thinking with regard to the critical problems surrounding biblical history, as a facile allusion to the sort of primitivism emblematic of his Puritan predecessors. Placed before this history “one seems to be actually present,” not merely its reader but a witness and even a participant in the drama. Yet the very act of making explicit what previous generations almost involuntarily assumed suggests that he was aware of the psychological gap opening between the text and its present readers and of the polemic being directed against such an identi¤cation with the past. It suggests that the spiritual, almost magical quality of the scriptural narrative was something he could no longer simply assume; it had to be re-articulated. Thus while it reads on its surface as a traditional, precritical treatment of sacred history, it is also clearly an attempt to secure an epistemological anchor for that history. It addresses the questions of how or why sacred history should be received as a compelling narrative, of how it possesses the capability to relate an authentic representation of the past, and of what ability it has to convince the reader of its truthfulness. In contrast to rival attempts to understand the biblical narratives as examples of a merely humanly derived history, the “Scripture history” is by Edwards’s account a peculiarly authored and crafted story. It possesses an enchantment that does not reside in any special rhetorical sophistication or ®ourish, since in fact it is devoid of such features.47 Rather, it is a history that possesses a peculiar power, one which impresses itself upon the affective sensibilities of the reader, so “pleasant, easy and natural, engaging” that the imagination of the reader is transported back into the events themselves. Its peculiar ability to communicate to the reader is to a large degree inexplicable or ineffable—one must possess a certain perceptive capacity—nevertheless it is a history that directly “evidences the truth of the fact.” Like the new sense of the heart, sacred history carries with it an intuitive certainty of its authenticity.48 And as with the testimony of the Spirit to the heart of the saint, the sense of excellence and certainty delivered by sacred history is also derived from a kind of super-intuition. According to Edwards, such a divinely mediated impression of certainty regarding sacred history ¤nds its epistemological precedent in the events of that history itself. David’s assurance of God’s covenant with his progeny, for example, was determined by such marks, which are “good ground of the highest and most perfect kind of assurance that mankind have in any case whatsoever.”49 For Edwards, the peculiar qualities of sacred history are extra-mundane. One ¤nds that God’s being is manifest in the scriptural texts, and thus they 42


“themselves are an evidence of their own divine authority.” But this does not mean that their apprehension is outside of the rational faculties. They manifest their divine character in the same way that human beings manifest their distinct personalities in what they produce. Possessing a “consistency, harmony and concurrence of the train of actions and sounds, and their agreement to all that we can suppose to be in a rational mind,” they appear to be the “word and work of a divine mind, to one that is thoroughly acquainted with them, as ’tis that the words and actions of an understanding man are from a rational mind, to one that has of a long time been his familiar acquaintance.”50 The choice here of experiential metaphors can hardly be coincidental. As with the new sense of the heart, Edwards worked to develop a conception of this stamp of excellence upon text and tradition that was thoroughly intelligible in terms of sensitive knowledge. In this case the divine qualities are known through the idiosyncrasies of authorship, similar to those found in natural, human productions. The mind has an inherent ability, derived from repeated experience, for identifying the traits of particular agents. Its visual and stylistic judgments are especially acute; subtle marks of authorship or provenance are often detected almost unconsciously. Yet the force of such perceptions is compelling. Edwards argues that perceptions of the divine characteristics of scriptural texts are made in an analogous manner. Thus they are in principle no less intelligible or rational than the perceptions of the more mundane features of these or any other texts. More than this, they appear to operate in precisely the same way that such natural perceptions do, provided one has a thoroughgoing acquaintance with the characteristics of their author. Their origin is different, and the mind’s receptive capacities must be conditioned to them by the new sense. But beyond this, it is simply a practiced familiarity with the divine marks that makes them recognizable. The authorial metaphor is a favorite of Edwards’s in his attempt to describe the peculiar features of the biblical texts. His use of natural metaphors to describe the spiritual qualities of the text is at once rhetorically effective and somewhat conceptually problematic. As with his employment of metaphors of taste, sight, and smell in the analysis of the spiritual sense, he describes the divine properties of the sacred text in terms of a concrete experiential metaphor that makes his argument easy to follow. At the same time, however, it is not always entirely clear where in his analysis a simple and natural familiarity with the texts leaves off and where the spiritual qualities themselves become preeminent.51 One suspects that this is simply an illustration by way of analogy on his part, but the potentially adverse implications of his employment of such natural comparisons—that they can encompass purported spiritual in®uences, and thus make such theological explanations super®uous—are not considered by him. It may also be the case, however, that he is working under the notion of a particular physiological theory of the mind’s interaction with its environKnowing and the Historical Mode

43

ment, both physical and spiritual. Benjamin Bennet, for instance, asserted that God’s spiritual communications make “impressions” on the brain in the same way that natural human forms of communication do. It may be that Edwards held similar views.52 If the perception of the Scriptures’ divine nature and truthfulness is intuitive, why is it not universally accessible? This was one of the fundamental criticisms leveled at the illumination theory by interpretive naturalists like Spinoza, who were inclined to insist that the evidentiary mark of true religious knowledge was its universal rational character. Edwards attempted to answer this question by claiming that dif¤culties encountered in discerning this certi¤cate of authenticity arose not from a defect in the means of communication, but from a defect in the means of perception. The natural disinclination to be affected by those things encountered in the biblical texts is due to a spiritual inability to appreciate them. Edwards viewed the demand for a natural, rational access to certainty regarding these accounts of spiritual realities as an unwarranted narrowing of the notion of rationality. Even the natural ability to rightly discern matters is open to distortion, particularly by the passionate dimension of thought and judgment. “It need not be at all strange that sin should so blind the mind, seeing that our particular natural temper oftentimes very much blinds us in secular affairs; as when our natural temper is melancholy or jealous, cowardly, and the like.”53 He attempted to answer this criticism more constructively by drawing on another analogy, in this case with the natural aesthetic sense. The natural perception of beauty or excellence is similarly intuitive and affective, as well as privileged, in its character. Natural beauty is not equally or universally comprehended; idiosyncratic and temperamental elements condition its appreciation. Nonetheless it is still considered rational in the sense that the perception of it is real, even if individually diverse. The same is true, he argues, of divine beauty. The perception of its excellence, though supernatural, is also primarily an aesthetic or affective phenomenon, and so similarly remains a plausible supposition, even if it is not universally acknowledged or recognized. “And why may there not be that stamp of divinity, or divine glory on the word of God, on the scheme and doctrine of the gospel, that may be in like manner distinguishing and as rationally convincing, provided it be but seen?”54 Edwards’s conclusions about the diversely aesthetic nature of the divine marks are rooted in the precedent of the historical events themselves. He asserts, for example, that the apostle Peter’s claim not to have followed “cunningly devised fables” was based on his having personally perceived Christ’s glory. This glory possessed such a “bright and evident appearance of divinity” that it “removed all doubt”—“it was as it were intuitively certain.” He concludes that the very same kind if not magnitude of glory is present in the verbal and historical representation of Christ, needing only to be perceived. “Doubtless there is such 44


an admirable excellency, beauty, and glory in the gospel; and if there be, why mayn’t some men see it? And if they do see it, why may it not be a certain evidence to those men of the divine authority and truth, as much and much more than Peter’s seeing the outward glory of Christ at his trans¤guration?”55 Edwards’s grappling with these thorny epistemological issues relating to sacred historical traditions is a striking instance of his creative adaptation of a Protestant theory stemming from the Reformation. Yet if his pursuit of a theological certainty for the scriptural accounts generally follows Reformed theory, it is perhaps this decidedly heightened aesthetic account of the cognition of historical religious knowledge that gives his theory its notable and noticeably Edwardsean cast. The correspondence between his view of sacred history and his treatment of the sense of the heart enabled him to incorporate both into an integrated and comprehensive theory of religious understanding rooted in an epistemological dialectic of the perception of divine beauty. Whenever or however it is considered that the mind apprehends spiritual things, this apprehension turns on whether such things inherently possess or manifest God’s beauty—“there is all the question.”56 The sancti¤ed mind, he argued, possesses a real tendency to avoid “errors in judgment about religion” and a corresponding inclination to recognize truth, since it more easily recognizes “what ideas are harmonious and what not.” It rejects as false “everything in divinity that is not harmonious. The soul distinguishes as a musical ear; and besides, holiness itself consists in spiritual harmony; and whatever don’t agree with that, as a base to a treble, the soul rejects.”57 The sancti¤ed mind is similarly in®uenced through its reading of Scripture. It possesses a new sense of spiritual things; thus “it looks into God’s Word and sees a thing spiritual of which it has an idea; . . . it sees that there is an exact correspondency, and that things consent in the same manner.” The new disposition “sweetly corresponds and harmonizes with the expressions of God’s Word.” The consent of the affections to the recognition that Jesus is the Messiah is “the ¤rst and principal manifestation of the symphony between the soul and these divine things.”58 But it is a melody that the soul hears in the musical score of the sacred texts. The soul is assured about their content because its inclination to divine beauty resonates with that beauty resident in them. The Spirit of God works in concert with the Scripture “by stirring up correspondent affections of mind, whereby the mind is naturally put in mind of the text that is so agreeable to it; as much as . . . one instrument of music answers of itself to another in harmony and concord.”59

Tradition and True Religion The problems associated with historical religious knowledge percolated through Edwards’s important public pronouncements on the nature of true reKnowing and the Historical Mode

45

ligion over the course of his career. His theory of the new sense as the perception of the divine excellence became for him the touchstone by which the marks of true religion were distinguished equally from enthusiastic excess and dead intellectualism. His assertion of the affective or experimental nature of religion, however, was not simply a disembodied if somewhat slightly subdued version of the fervent heart religion manifested in the awakenings of the 1730s and 1740s. As Edwards worked his way toward a more complete analysis of the new sense he simultaneously worked toward an understanding of its epistemological connection to the sacred texts. His major contributions to religious psychology show that he was vitally concerned to root religious experience in the traditions of sacred history, particularly in light of the denigration of that history as evidenced by both enthusiastic and rationalistic religious commentators. Here his theory of the inherent divine excellence of the biblical texts made a decisive, if somewhat complicating, contribution to his analysis of the origins and character of true religion. This concern structures the core argument in his most de¤nitive early statement on the new sense, A Divine and Supernatural Light.60 Far from being a bland accession to empiricism or an assertion of the primacy of experience in true religion, it is instead an attempt to ground the affective dimension of true religion in a historical mode of apprehension, while at the same time distinguishing it from naturalistic (mediate) modes of causation. This proved to be a subtle task. In this sermon the close association between the perception of the divine excellence of spiritual things and its mediation by a historical source produced a degree of tension for certain aspects of his theory of religious cognition. In order to guard against what he viewed as a pernicious tendency in rationalistic theology to make religious knowing a merely natural or intellectual phenomenon, Edwards strongly insisted on the immediate and supernatural properties of this affective cognition.61 But such an emphasis on the unmediated nature of spiritual perception had the potential to sublimate or even preclude the importance if not the function of historical, traditionary sources of religious knowledge. If this light is immediate and supernatural, as Edwards contended, how was it distinguishable from raw enthusiasm? That is, what need or role was there for a textual medium at all? Furthermore, if this capacity of the mind to perceive divine beauty is chie®y an affective one, and not, in his terms, a matter of reason as ratiocination, how can he also speak of it as requiring or involving some degree of speculative or propositional content? At the outset of his argument Edwards severely curtails the experiential range of spiritual enlightenment by disassociating it from enthusiasm, that is to say, from continuing revelation or inspiration. True enlightenment “teaches no new thing of God,” no propositions not already “contained in the Word of God.” 62 Furthermore, his constructive statement of its essential nature, “a true 46


sense of the divine excellency of things,” asserts that it is a sense that pertains directly and exclusively to those “things revealed in the Word of God.” Spiritual light is primarily a sense of the excellence of the gospel drama, but it is consequently also a conviction of its “truth and reality.” These are inseparable in his analysis. To view its divine glory is to be compelled as to its truth.63 Having grounded the new sense in a textual world as a guard against its imaginative extremes, Edwards begins the delicate task of distinguishing the new sense from a simply rational comprehension of or belief in biblical testimony. This was critical as well to his project, because his primary intent in this sermon was to show that this sense stands outside the natural causal order, that it is “divine and supernatural.” His repeated stress on the “immediacy” of the new sense means precisely this: that it is not the result of any natural means of causation. This did not mean for Edwards, however, that it was entirely outside or divorced from the natural order. And in fact, as one might suspect from his insistence on its connection to the world of the sacred text, this spiritual light is in a real sense immanent to the natural order. Such an analysis necessitated a careful delineation of just how the natural means of reason and text could be involved, and indeed requisite to the initiation of the new sense, without being assumed to be its cause—a conclusion that would reduce the new sense to the rationalistic interpretation of faith as a mere cognition of certain facts. How can Edwards say that God uses natural means to provide the initial grist for the new sense, and also claim that it comes immediately from God? He is insistent that such means are requisite. They include the active involvement of the intellectual faculties; the new sense is not implanted in an occult manner. “Reason indeed is necessary in order to it, as ’tis by reason only that we are become subjects of the means of it.” This also involves a textual medium—“it is not given without the Word.”64 But Edwards argues that this does not imply that the new sense is brought about naturally, because these means have no innate power to produce it; they are not mediate or secondary causes. Thus he insists, for example, that the ontological eminence of the Scriptures remains hidden without the activated new sense. The Bible primarily possesses an informational function. It is “only made use of to convey to the mind the subject matter of this saving instruction,” and this only “by natural force or in®uence.” 65 In order to make such a ¤ne distinction he is compelled to maintain a subtle dialectic between the new sense and its textual mediation. This he does in part by distinguishing between the affective, intuitively inferential components and the strictly deductive components of the rational faculties. In its affective capacity reason is involved in every aspect of the perception of divine excellence. The new sense of the heart is intuitive and affective, but it nonetheless involves acts of apprehension—“the faculty of mental perception”—and is not merely emotional.66 The heart is the mental faculty that perceives beauty. It is precisely Knowing and the Historical Mode

47

because it involves an affective intuition that the Spirit can immediately address it, simply by the revelation of divine beauty. The only rational process in the sermon that Edwards excludes from the new sense is that of ratiocination, or the “power of inferring by arguments.”67 It is presumably this sort of “reason” that by its very attributes, if utilized, would be capable of claiming natural causation. Any chain of propositions that culminated in a new sense would be observably part of the natural reasoning process, and thus beyond the immediate in®uence of the Spirit. But it is this very quality that excludes ratiocination from being claimed as the cause of the new sense of the heart. Depending on logical demonstration rather than experiential intuition, its perceptions cannot be immediate, but only inferential. This sort of reasoning, therefore, only has the capacity to perceive truth, but not beauty. No one attempts to construct an argument that something is beautiful; its apprehension is either sensitively intuited, or lacking. Such reasoning “may determine that a countenance is beautiful to others, it may determine that honey is sweet to others; but it will never give me a perception of its sweetness.”68 Since the new sense is a matter of the perception of divine beauty, not merely and only consequently the perception of divine truth, it is a matter of affective intuition. It is conceptually, at least, open to the immediate presentations of the Spirit, and so in Edwards’s scheme, an eminently supernatural and rational supposition. It is in this manner that he can also appear at times to devalue the Bible’s role in cultivating the new sense, and yet simultaneously insist that its divine qualities are crucial to the formation of that sense. Edwards’s analysis seemingly relegates the Bible to a largely natural and instrumental role, that of conveying information to the mind. As with ratiocination, the Bible appears to provide only natural information because it operates in the same way. It provides factual testimony. Its ideas are not intuitively known; one can only infer their truth or plausibility. But this is not the whole case, and in fact he insists that the intelligibility of his theory of a new sense depends in large measure on the assertion that there is an immanent divine beauty in the contents of the texts themselves. For the purpose of the new sense is not to perceive the meaning of the words—natural reason does that—but rather the ontological distinctiveness of the ideas themselves. The former is a matter of ratiocination, the latter a sensitive intuition. The renewed heart senses the glory or beauty of what those words intimate, and so is compelled to a lively conviction of their reality. Thus a dialectic is maintained between sense and text. The Bible cannot be the cause of the new sense, because the perception of its divine excellence requires a faculty ontologically capable of apprehending it, which it cannot induce. At the same time, however, it provides the dramatic world to which the spiritually formed heart responds. “The mind can’t see the excellency of any 48


doctrine, unless that doctrine be ¤rst in the mind; but the seeing the excellency of the doctrine may be immediately from the Spirit of God; though the conveying of the doctrine or proposition itself may be by the Word.”69 Rational in®uences provide the content, the very conditions that allow the Spirit to activate the apprehension of the supernatural properties of the text, and so in a very real sense, natural and supernatural conditions are requisite for the Spirit’s gracious activity. Thus the Bible not only conveys information to the mind, but also conveys the beauty or eminent worth of that information, which is recognized by the heart, “provided it be but seen.”70 Furthermore, this inherent textual beauty is the matrix through which the new sense is capable of being acknowledged. That is, the delighted response of the heart to the textual world is the very thing that makes the new sense empirically observable, and thus available to the con¤rmation of both subject and spectators. Edwards’s treatment of the dialectic between the sense of the heart and the sacred text was not simply dictated by dogmatic or polemical concerns. Rather, it was also heavily indebted to his ontological interpretation of the nature of language. Language possesses an ability to communicate not only information but also elements of being or personality. As he had previously done, for example, in Misc. No. 333 (1728), he argues in this sermon that God’s recorded speech, like human speech, betrays the identity of its author. By its very nature it must be “vastly different from men’s word.” Thus it should be expected that “there would be such an excellency and sublimity in his speech or word, such a stamp of wisdom, holiness, majesty, and other divine perfections, that the word of men, yea of the wisest of men should appear mean and base in comparison of it.”71 The matters presented in the biblical story have a quality “so divine and godlike” that they are readily distinguished from “things merely human, or that men are the inventors and authors of.”72 Such a conclusion is concomitant with his view that the new sense is an immediate communication from God. Since intelligent creatures are nearest to God in “the gradation of the different order of beings” it is only reasonable to expect that his communication to them would be direct, from being to being, and not by any ontologically inferior secondary causes or means. Spiritual light is the highest gift that God bestows on humankind; it is the “highest excellency and perfection” of the rational creature. Thus it is only ¤tting that God not employ mere secondary causes. There is “no gift or bene¤t that is in itself so nearly related to the divine nature, there is nothing the creature receives that is so much of God, of his nature, so much a participation of the Deity: ’tis a kind of emanation of God’s beauty.”73 But if Edwards insists on an ontologically superior form of communication for conferring the new sense, he also concludes that the written text participates in God’s ontological distinctiveness. It too is a kind of emanation from God, and so is intimately connected to the dynamic of spiritual rebirth. Knowing and the Historical Mode

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The tension over the priority between spiritual perception and its association with a textual medium continued to animate his treatment of the religious affections and their various manifestations in the awakenings of the 1730s and 1740s. He seems to have recognized the potentially misleading inferences that his parishioners or readers might draw from his own emphasis on the affective and immediate nature of spiritual light and his relative or rhetorical subordination of the scriptural contribution to its activation. His reservations about the more extreme manifestations of affective religion directed him to a systematic analysis in subsequent years, as he attempted to defend the legitimacy of the underlying movement of religious awakenings and to distinguish true spiritual light from blind enthusiasm.74 It was in this regard that the spiritual function of written sacred traditions was elevated in its signi¤cance and more closely associated rhetorically with the very nature of the new sense, and thus the character of true religion.75 These concerns pushed him to stress the importance of the cognitive side of the equilibrium between spiritual light and sacred text. In 1739 Edwards preached a series of three sermons that have come to be known by the title “Christian Knowledge.”76 His explicit intent in delivering them was to reiterate to his listeners that they should have not only a “spiritual and experimental” knowledge of religion but a “doctrinal knowledge” or “knowledge in divinity” as well. Here Edwards argued that the so-called speculative or natural knowledge of divinity is “of in¤nite importance in this respect,” as it is the very means to its practical or spiritual comprehension. What separates truly gracious affections in the saint from mere enthusiasm is the fact that when his “faith is in exercise, it is not about something he knows not what.” “There is no other way by which any means of grace whatsoever can be of any bene¤t, but by knowledge.”77 Such is the nature of man, that no object can come at the heart but through the door of the understanding: and there can be no spiritual knowledge of that of which there is not ¤rst a rational knowledge. It is impossible that any one should see the truth or excellency of any doctrine of the gospel, who knows not what that doctrine is. A man cannot see the wonderful excellency and love of Christ in doing such and such things for sinners, unless his understanding be ¤rst informed how those things were done. He cannot have a taste of the sweetness and excellency of divine truth, unless he ¤rst have a notion that there is such a thing.78

This concern to rein in or qualify the experiential aspects of spiritual light by stressing the importance of its roots in traditionary knowledge also appears in his published treatments of the revivals, at a time when it had become increasingly incumbent upon Edwards to defend the awakenings against the charge of enthusiasm. In his recounting of the experiences of the Northamp50


ton revival, for example, he emphasizes that the Scriptures played an extraordinary role in the gracious experiences of his parishioners. “While God was so remarkably present amongst us by his Spirit, there was no book so delighted in as the Bible; especially the Book of Psalms, the Prophecy of Isaiah, and the New Testament.” He observes that it was common upon their conversion for people to “have had many texts of Scripture brought to their minds, that are exceeding suitable to their circumstances, which often come with great power, and as the Word of God or Christ indeed.” Conversion creates a sense of rediscovery of previously mundane matters of religion, such that “the Bible is a new book: they ¤nd there new chapters, new psalms, new histories, because they see them in a new light.” He describes this newfound appreciation for sacred writ as occasionally approaching iconic status, such that by “reason of their esteem and love to God’s Word” they were at times “greatly and wonderfully delighted and affected at the [mere] sight of the Bible.”79 Edwards’s analysis of the problem of historical religious knowledge is particularly manifest, and perhaps comes to its culmination, in his mature and most integrated treatment of the nature of true religion, the Religious Affections (1746). Here the problem of the role of Scripture in religious experience and perception converges with the fundamental problem of epistemic certainty. The ¤rst ¤ve signs of true religion in the Religious Affections are themselves almost wholly taken up with epistemological considerations, dealing with the nature of the mind’s perception of divine things. The fourth and ¤fth signs show Edwards once again seeking a delicate balance between the relative priority of the intuitions mediated by the spiritual sense and inspired revelation, while he attempts to answer both the rationalist critique and the charge of enthusiasm. The fourth sign of the gracious affections is “the mind’s being enlightened, rightly and spiritually to understand or apprehend divine things.” The ¤fth sign addresses the question of whether and in what way truly gracious affections are “attended with a reasonable and spiritual conviction of the judgment, of the reality and certainty of divine things.” Like the third positive sign of the Distinguishing Marks, both assert the indispensable role of written tradition in religious understanding, while claiming at the same time that it is this enlightened sense that makes the true appreciation of Scripture possible. As with his previous insistence on the cognitive foundation of true religion, Edwards here af¤rms that gracious affections are not “heat without light,” since they “arise from some information of the understanding, some spiritual instruction that the mind receives, some light or actual knowledge.” But he now appears willing to create a much closer rhetorical association between the new sense and its textual matrix. Thus he speaks of Christ making the Scriptures “a means of the heart’s burning with gracious affection” by opening them to the understanding of the reader. This process of enlivening the affections has “the nature of instruction in it,” in the manner that one who “has perceived Knowing and the Historical Mode

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the sweet taste of honey, knows much more about it, than he who has only looked upon and felt it.”80 The subtlety of this change of emphasis in his classic metaphor can make it easy to pass over, but its signi¤cance merits attention. In claiming that the perception of the taste of honey carries the nature of instruction, Edwards has moved beyond his initial insistence that a fundamental quality of the new sense is its immediate, aesthetic, and non-ratiocinative character. This still remains true, but now he has moved to argue that there is also a certain degree of re®ective cognition that takes place as well. An enlightened understanding of the biblical texts apprehends not only their divine beauty, but their content as well. To “spiritually” understand them here is also “rightly to understand what is in the Scripture . . . what used to be contained in the meaning of it, and not the making of a new meaning.” It is to “behold the wonderful spiritual excellency of the glorious things contained in the true meaning of it, and that always were contained in it, ever since it was written.” The “spiritual taste” of the soul helps it to rightly interpret the meaning of the words, because there is a harmony between “the disposition and relish of a sancti¤ed soul and the true meaning of the rules of God’s Word.”81 The character of the spiritual sense, therefore, has moved from perceiving the divine beauty in the matters of the gospel to actually aiding in their cognitive apprehension, a process that in A Divine and Supernatural Light was relegated to a largely speculative or naturalistic function. This is not to say that Edwards ever denied such a role for the new sense, or that his analysis in the Religious Affections represents a substantial departure from his early views. It is to point out, however, that in this treatise a signi¤cant re-description of the new sense is taking place, one that noticeably emphasizes its traditionary and propositional dimensions. At the same time, his treatment of these issues in the Religious Affections also offered an answer to attempts to characterize the sacred texts as mere conduits of religious information. It is this resistance to the belief that these texts could be savingly comprehended by merely rational or natural faculties that perhaps explains his resistance to characterizations that relied on arguments about their probability, or moral certainty. Particular strains of Anglican thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries rejected the assertion that indubitability must accompany true knowledge, and maintained instead that probable standards of assurance were suf¤cient for most areas of human understanding. This included the religious knowledge derived from historical documents, even from the scriptural accounts themselves. Given his own fundamental inclination toward a quali¤ed version of philosophical infallibilism, Edwards was a fairly strong critic of the contention that a bare moral certainty was suf¤cient as the sole or primary justi¤cation of religious belief or knowledge. Matters of as great importance as the communication of God’s saving will to humanity 52


required the highest degree of certainty possible. One “may therefore undoubtedly suppose, that there is some sort of evidence that God has given of this covenant and these promises being his, beyond moral evidence.”82 Edwards’s reasons for so arguing originate from his theory of the intuitive spiritual knowledge delivered by the Spirit in regeneration and resident in the sacred text. More speci¤cally, this view rested on the sharp distinction in Reformed theology between the internal and external marks of evidence or certainty. The external marks of Scripture, such as recorded performances of miracles and ful¤llment of prophecy, or the demonstration of the authorial credibility, canonical integrity, and transmissional reliability of the narratives, are, in Reformed terminology, purely rational evidences. That is, such evidences, while important, are capable only of probable certainty, and address only the natural rational faculty of the understanding. They thus can possess only an ancillary or con¤rming function for the religious understanding. Because they provide only a probative level of certainty, they can never in and of themselves be the foundation of an infallible knowledge of the veracity of the religious teachings of Scripture, or of the historical integrity of the narratives on which such teachings depend. The internal marks or evidences cannot be replaced by, compensated for, or equated with such external “rational and credible arguments.”83 His criticism of this minimalist version of epistemological fallibilism appears in its most systematic form in the Religious Affections, indicating once again the strong epistemological orientation of this treatise and its connection to critical discussions about historical forms of religious knowledge.84 In the ¤fth sign he addresses the relationship of spiritual knowledge to areas of moral evidence. “Truly gracious persons,” he argues, “have a solid, full, thorough and effectual conviction of the truth of the great things of the gospel.” These matters are no longer “matters of opinion, which, though probable, are yet disputable.” Rather, these issues are “settled and determined, as undoubtable and indisputable.” The saints have “not only a predominating opinion that these things are true, and so yield their assent, as they do in many other matters of doubtful speculation; but they see that it is really so.”85 His insistence upon the intuitive nature of spiritual knowledge naturally precluded any consideration of a soteriologically suf¤cient moral certainty. Belief built upon moral certainty constituted only a historical faith, an intellectual assent to propositional knowledge.86 Such belief rested not “on evidence, but altogether on education, and the opinion of others.” It was no different in kind from the beliefs held by members of other religious traditions, even though the beliefs themselves happened to be true. The knowledge of spiritual things, to the contrary, does not arise merely from the rational proofs or arguments that justify the facts of Christian belief.87 Such moral conditions of belief lack the non-mediated character of intuitive knowledge. Beliefs drawn from justi¤caKnowing and the Historical Mode

53

tions of the historical veracity of propositions also require a particular degree of specialized information, meaning that they no longer depend upon the universal illuminating activity of the Spirit, but rather upon the personal circumstances of the individual. The lack of universality of such esoteric information means that both theoretically and in practice, the epistemological conditions of saving knowledge are not readily forthcoming. There are not “nineteen in twenty, if not ninety-nine in an hundred, of those for whom the Scriptures were written, that [are] capable of any certain conviction of the divine authority of the Scriptures, by such arguments as learned men make use of.” Unless men may come to a reasonable solid persuasion and conviction of the truth of the gospel, by the internal evidences of it, in the way that has been spoken, viz. by a sight of its glory; ’tis impossible that those who are illiterate, and unacquainted with history, should have any thorough and effectual conviction of it at all. They may without this, see a great deal of probability of it; it may be reasonable for them to give much credit to what learned men, and historians tell ’em; and they may tell them so much, that it may look very probable and rational to them, that the Christian religion is true; and so much that they would be very unreasonable not to entertain this opinion. . . . It is impossible that men, who have not something of a general view of the historical world, or the series of history from age to age, should come at the force of arguments for the truth of Christianity, drawn from history, to that degree, as effectually to induce them to venture their all upon it. After all that learned men have said to them, there will remain innumerable doubts on their minds: they will be ready, when pinched with some great trial of their faith, to say, How do I know this, or that? How do I know when these histories were written? Learned men tell me these histories were so and so attested in the day of them; but how do I know that there were such attestations then? They tell me there is equal reason to believe these facts, as any whatsoever that are related at such a distance; but how do I know that other facts which are related of those ages, ever were?88

This kind of argument against the suf¤ciency of moral certainty was of course precisely the objection directed by rationalistic critics against any sort of claim for the necessity or adequacy of a historically dependent religious knowledge in general, including claims relying on an illuminated sacred text. Edwards was willing to admit the force of such an argument, but only insofar as it pertained to assertions made about the nature or type of epistemological assurance to be had regarding the factual authenticity of the Scripture history. It may be that his theological preconceptions so heavily in®uenced his thinking at this point that he simply failed to see the theoretical dif¤culty in his position. It is perhaps more likely, however, that his answer to such a charge of inconsistency lay, consciously or not, in his radical critique of the nature of rational 54


religious knowledge itself, a revision that emasculated the entire notion of any mode of true religious understanding separable from traditionary sources. As a part of his approach to the problem of religious epistemology, Edwards would come to claim that historical religious knowledge was the only source of human ideas about religion, and that in fact this traditionary knowledge was in effect universally accessible. Once this claim was advanced, however, he resisted attempts to make saving belief dependent on merely probable historical grounds, insisting that the infallible certainty requisite of true religious knowledge logically demanded its intuitive, spiritual comprehension and conviction. In any case, he was adamant in his insistence that, given the necessity of historical religious knowledge in general, its infallible certainty was consequent.89 Such a view would appear to obviate the function of extrinsic evidences in epistemological considerations. The scriptural accounts are theoretically convincing before any external or rational evidences are even proffered.90 Yet while maintaining that “there is no spiritual conviction of the judgment, but what arises from an apprehension of the spiritual beauty and glory of divine things,” Edwards did allow a subordinate role to external evidences, one that was, at least in theory, strongly circumscribed by these epistemological considerations. Thus they “are not to be neglected, but highly prized and valued; for they may be greatly serviceable . . . yea they may be in some respects subservient to the begetting of a saving faith in men.”91 In fact, Edwards increasingly found it necessary to rely on evidential arguments in his engagement with critical issues, far more than he might have preferred, and with more urgency than his epistemological principles would seem to allow for.

Edwards’s treatment of religious epistemology was fundamentally an attempt to ground the truthfulness of Christian religion in two empirical or experiential sources, the new sense of the heart and an intuitively apprehended text. Both represent a reaction to the era’s widespread skepticism about experience, particularly that which was historical in nature, as a source of religious knowledge. His work utilized a theory previously employed by Protestants to justify the religious authority of the Bible in post-Reformation con®icts with Catholicism for an important auxiliary task, the justi¤cation of the epistemological authority or cogency of the Bible in a more broadly philosophical milieu. His conviction that the biblical traditions carried an intuitive sensate quality of their authenticity served to ground his otherwise pronounced emphasis on the experimental dimensions of religion in a source external to the vagaries of individual emotionalism. This entailed maintaining a delicate and perhaps somewhat paradoxical balance between the priority of the new sense and the sacred text in provoking the saint’s new perceptive capacities. This theory Knowing and the Historical Mode

55

formed the heart of his response to the critical epistemological issues relating to scriptural history and their implications for the nature of true religion. There is no evidence to suggest that Edwards ever changed his fundamental commitment to the notion that religious knowledge and assurance are the result of the evident certainty delivered to and by the Scripture history through its divine qualities. In fact there is strong evidence to suggest that he was developing new applications of this epistemological method at the end of his life. His writings do suggest, however, that he found it increasingly dif¤cult to rely simply upon the theory of theological certainty to defend the epistemological suf¤ciency of sacred history. The appeal that such a view had was of limited value in the intellectual context of the eighteenth century. Its cogency depended upon the assumption of certain premises about the nature of human understanding that were themselves theologically and not evidently derived, a theory that critics who were in search of a universally accessible, rational epistemology were unwilling to adopt. Furthermore, the speci¤c points of debate that had occasioned the critique of historical religious knowledge, namely the host of problems associated with the authenticity and intelligibility of historical traditions, were not resolvable by evident (intuitive or demonstrative) forms of reasoning. The best resolutions such historical problems could hope for were those based on accumulated or circumstantial evidence and plausible explanations, both of which could attain only a moral or probable certainty. The philosophical infallibilism that Edwards and his Reformed colleagues resorted to in their appeal to theological certainty may have provided them with a theoretical basis for answering the general problem of epistemological skepticism and its implications for traditionary religious knowledge, at least with respect to soteriology. But such an appeal did nothing to resolve the critical problems that undermined con¤dence in the Bible’s historical documents, or the implications these problems had for religious epistemology. Edwards thus found it necessary to broaden his theory of religious epistemology in such a way that it would be capable of accounting for those aspects of historical religious knowledge that made it undeniably uncertain and obscure. To this end he increasingly turned to solutions proffered in the fallibilist religious epistemology characteristic of latitudinarian Anglican theology.

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3

Sacred History and the Common Sense In short then, either we must destroy all Historical Faith out of the World, and believe nothing . . . but what we see our selves, or else we must acknowledge, that a Moral Certainty is a suf¤cient foundation for an undoubted assent, not such a one cui non potest subesse falsum, but such a one cui non subest dubium, i.e., an Assent undoubted, tho’ not infallible.1 Though probably the ablest metaphysician who has appeared, he never warped from the path of common sense.2

When John Witherspoon arrived at Princeton in 1768 he found that the college’s theological curriculum still bore the distinctive philosophical characteristics of his most luminous predecessor. By all accounts he moved swiftly to expunge Princeton theology of its idiosyncratic character, namely the metaphysical idealism and theocentric ethical orientation that funded the new divinity, largely under the in®uence of Edwards’s two most prominent disciples, Joseph Bellamy and Samuel Hopkins. How contentious this transformation under Witherspoon’s hand was is not easy to assess, although the entire divinity faculty, including Edwards’s son, left within a year of his arrival. What cannot be doubted, however, is the de¤nitive cast that his introduction of the Scottish common sense philosophy had on the intellectual outlook of Princeton. It would exercise an epistemological hegemony over that institution well into the next century.3 That Princeton’s theology should continue to be yoked to Edwards’s peculiar form of metaphysics well after his death is testament to the power of his theological agenda beyond its aesthetic delineation of the new birth, and perhaps to a lack of theological initiative on the part of his two successors at Princeton, Samuel Davies and Samuel Finley. But Edwards’s approach was not one that remained compelling in the emerging world of intellectual and political egalitarianism, with its correlate attraction to a pragmatic and popularly accessible system of philosophy. Witherspoon objected to Edwards’s (or more speci¤cally, Berkeley’s) idealism as a short step from Hume’s skepticism, in that it denied the seemingly evident fact of the tangible reality of the material world. Thus it potentially could be used to cast doubt on the tangible realities of God’s

providence and redemption. But beyond this objection, Witherspoon perceived that Edwards’s metaphysical system was by all measures counter-intuitive and of little use in a culture bene¤ting from and dedicated to the discovery of the factual world.4 In short, it lacked the kind of common sense appeal on which the late eighteenth-century intellectual and religious world thrived. The transition at Princeton was observed with approval by some of Edwards’s old adversaries, Charles Chauncy for one remarking that Witherspoon was “no friend to the grand and distinguishing Tenets of Mr. Edwards which have been almost universally imbibed in that part of the Country.”5 But unknown to either Chauncy or Witherspoon was the degree to which Edwards’s own epistemological leanings had begun to shift toward arguments rooted in the same sort of common sense appeal constitutive of Witherspoon’s program. Had Edwards lived to guide Princeton for any substantial amount of time, or had Witherspoon had the luxury of becoming more acquainted with his predecessor’s broader work, their mutual appreciation for a more pragmatic epistemology might have become more evident. Even though in many ways Edwards’s philosophical outlook more properly belongs to the seventeenth rather than the eighteenth century, one of the important intellectual bridges between these two periods was the shared preoccupation with factual knowledge. This was particularly true regarding biblical interpretation, where concerns about the authenticity of the historical narratives led to extraordinary efforts to alternately undermine or maintain the reliability of those accounts. The appeal to empirical evidence was increasingly becoming the basis on which questions of truth were being decided: in natural philosophy, in history, and ultimately in any system of religious thought rooted in a historical tradition. Maintaining the unity of biblical, scienti¤c, and historical knowledge required an epistemology suitable to all of these disciplines, namely one that appealed to the high probability of fact claims and that operated by moral suasion. For this task common sense philosophy was almost perfectly suited, offering a credible and accessible way to assert that this explosion of confusing and contradictory data was ultimately reconcilable. It is small wonder then that it exercised such a profound in®uence in early national American religious thought, not only at Princeton but in the larger culture as well, its grip on the American imagination only ¤nally broken by the combined effects of Darwinism and higher criticism.6 It was precisely these sorts of concerns about biblical interpretation that began to move Edwards in the direction of a more pragmatic philosophical outlook, not only implicitly in his reliance on empirical evidence to vindicate the biblical histories, but even more explicitly in his later treatments of epistemological issues. This is not to say that Edwards was preparing to shift the entire grounds of his epistemological system or that he would have become an advo-

58


cate for the common sense; his theological reservations about a mere moral belief in gospel matters would have precluded that. He was ¤nding, however, that questions regarding the religious authenticity and authority of the biblical traditions were increasingly being framed in terms of their coherence with empirical discovery. As he was forced to respond in kind, his biblical interpretation shows a corresponding reliance on historical argument or explanation in order to maintain that coherence, an appeal to factual reliability (in addition to religious suitability) in attempting to resolve problematic textual features. This necessitated a corresponding shift in his epistemological orientation as well. The assertion of the divine excellence of the Scriptures was quintessentially a theological argument, and offered nothing by way of settling factual disputes. Questions of factuality could attain some level of plausibility (possessing a moral certainty), but not the absolute certainty offered by Edwards’s native epistemology. His later manuscripts reveal his attempts to work out an epistemological justi¤cation of the biblical traditions based on arguments from the common sense. One cannot say what would have transpired had Edwards lived long enough to leave a more enduring stamp on Princeton’s intellectual orientation. But all the evidence points to the conclusion that his engagement with biblical criticism and its implications for the Scripture history was to become the next great phase of his apologetic and publishing career. Given the necessary reliance of his biblical apologetic on the same moral appeals that lay at the root of the common sense philosophy, it is at least plausible to think that the ability of this system to wed epistemology, science, and religion into a coherent whole would have had some utility for Edwards’s program, at least rhetorically if not methodologically. Given the dominance of this intellectual union at Princeton in succeeding generations, it is perhaps not too conjectural to consider whether he might have taken that institution in a direction similar to the one spearheaded by Witherspoon, at least in terms of its approach to biblical interpretation.

The Suf¤ciency of Experimental Knowledge Perhaps the most articulate eighteenth-century presentation of the infallibilist critique of historical religious knowledge is to be found in Matthew Tindal’s Christianity as Old as Creation (1730). It was certainly one of the most notable. No less than forty-seven responses to Tindal appeared in print within a few years of its publication, no doubt due in part to his liberal use of the works of a number of Anglican divines to establish his argument. For Tindal, the very historicity of particular religions and the insistence that the authenticity of their truth claims was inseparable from their historical provenance

Sacred History and the Common Sense

59

threatened to make all religious belief vulnerable to the problem of skepticism. The de¤nitive qualities of real knowledge, and thus true religion—clarity, demonstrability, universality, inalterability—were absent from historical religion. Though similar to Tindal in his fundamental philosophical orientation, Edwards was unwilling to consider any form of infallibilism that threatened to undermine the biblical representation of true religion, or one that offered to supplant it with the “purely rational” and non-traditionary alternative of natural religion. His response to such strong versions of infallibilism in turn forced him to develop a more pliant analysis of history and experience as sources of religious knowledge. It was an analysis that rooted the adequacy of historical knowledge in its nature as an approximate rather than evident body of information, and one that emphasized the consonance of such knowledge with basic human rationality, or common sense. It may be more than mere coincidence that Edwards’s earliest appeal to a less rigorous conception of historical religious knowledge followed so soon after the appearance of Tindal’s treatise. The problems associated with testimonial forms of communication that were at the heart of Tindal’s critique were soon the focus of Edwards’s consternation. ’Tis unreasonable to expect any other than that there should be many things in such a revelation, that should be utterly beyond our understanding, and seem impossible. . . . [it is said that] “If God makes a revelation to us, he must reveal to us the truth as it is, without accommodating himself to our notions and principles”; which would indeed be impossible: for those things which are our received notions in one age, are contrary to what are so in another; and the word of God was not given for any particular age but for all ages. It surely becomes us to receive what God reveals to be truth, and to look upon his word as proof suf¤cient, whether what he reveals squares with our notions or not.7

In any case, his response to the critique of traditionary religion represented by Tindal began in earnest in the mid-1730s, reaching its most sophisticated treatment in the last decade of his life. It resulted in certain modi¤cations of his treatment of historical knowledge and a broadening or reworking of his consideration of biblical epistemology.8 Whereas he had been prepared to argue that “there are all kinds of internal evidences” of the biblical revelation based on its “majesty, holiness, sublimity, [and] harmony,” he would also increasingly come to rely on the claim that “there are all kinds of external evidences” that attested to its authenticity as well.9 The acute epistemological problems associated with these external characteristics of revelation came to steadily occupy his attention and consideration. About them one could not achieve the philosophical certainty that he primarily advocated for the soterio-

60


logical reception of sacred texts. These problems, therefore, required a more sustained and systematic analysis of the nature of historical knowledge. This meant elevating the functional status of what in Reformed epistemology were decidedly auxiliary if not almost super®uous arguments based on moral certainty. It was an effort that cannot be simply attributed to his expressed motive of intending to awaken or con¤rm spiritually clouded or anemic minds, the function to which he theoretically assigned arguments based upon external, fallible evidences. Rather, his increasing use of these evidences suggests that he was stepping onto a different rhetorical platform, the grounds of which severely limited recourse to theological arguments like an illuminated religious knowledge. The rules of this discourse restricted knowledge to what were generally accepted, universally accessible—and in the case of historical records, probabilistic—forms of argument. This aspect of Edwards’s biblical epistemology was part of a broader trend toward a reliance on moral argument that is observable in orthodox Reformed thought beginning in the late seventeenth century. For example, even though he explicitly subordinated their epistemological function and importance, John Owen devoted substantial consideration to moral arguments in favor of the extrinsic, historical probity of Scripture as he responded to the work of Samuel Fisher and Benedict de Spinoza. A generation later Reformed theologians such as Jean Alphonse Turretin pointed toward a decided shift away from the appeal to internal evidences, relying even more heavily upon the suf¤ciency of moral certainty and historical evidences for a justi¤cation of the sacred accounts.10 Late Reformed orthodoxy witnessed “a major shift in emphasis away from the positive declaration of divinity in terms of the causality and attributes of Scripture and, in addition, an equally pronounced shift toward the discussion of critical and exegetical issues.” Attention was devoted to critical issues that threatened to undermine or erode the traditional Reformed doctrine of internal evidences, attention which in its own way accelerated that erosion. “This shift in emphasis cannot be credited simply to polemic. It must also be understood as a re®ection of the shift in hermeneutics from the spiritual, typological, and generally theological methods in vogue during the Reformation . . . to the increasingly historical and critical methods of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”11 Such a strategy was readily at hand for Edwards in the form of a second development in seventeenth-century philosophy, one that paralleled the more geometrico as a response to skepticism, but one that also received its stimulus from historical criticism of the Protestant principle of sola scriptura. Its proponents asserted that a moral certainty based on probable evidence was suf¤cient to justify belief in historical claims, and thus was suf¤cient to justify religious belief, if not to engender it. They also claimed that even when such beliefs in-


61

volved varying degrees and kinds of incomprehensibility, they were in principle capable of satisfying the criteria of real knowledge, broadly considered. By making this argument they sought to expand the concept of knowledge beyond the restricted notion of the term scientia so that it incorporated the probative, experiential, and a posteriori areas of human understanding, including—and especially—historical religious knowledge. This “constructive” or “mitigated” skepticism, as it has been termed, rede¤ned the notions of certainty and rational proof by replacing the criterion of philosophical indubitability (that which logically cannot be doubted) with a concept of psychological indubitability (that which a reasonable person cannot doubt). Within this framework, a judicious assent to probative evidence rather than absolute philosophical assurance provided suf¤cient rational certainty about traditionary forms of religious knowledge. This constructive skepticism contained within it nearly all of the salient features of what was to become known as the system of common sense philosophy. It was an especially prominent philosophical position in latitudinarian Anglican thought, and it gained an increasing audience in the eighteenth century in continental Reformed circles as well. Edwards incorporated a number of elements of this view into his efforts to counter the critique of historical religious knowledge as it was represented in Tindal and other deistic thinkers. Though it did not signal any kind of abandonment of his central theory of religious knowledge, it nonetheless represented an increase in the complexity and nuance of his views, a re¤nement of his analysis of the problem that historical knowledge presented for religious certainty, and a broadening of his philosophical arsenal against the critics of Protestant scripturalism. Furthermore, it constituted an implicit recognition on his part of the need for a universally as well as theologically acceptable mode of philosophical discourse. It represented a recognition that the grounds of the discussion with regard to traditionary religious knowledge were shifting, and that such debates were destined to be arbitrated by recourse to a different kind of epistemological method. As a conceptual strategy, constructive skepticism was particularly amenable to the political, religious, and philosophical programs of latitudinarian English thought, and provided a unitive epistemology for all of them. But it also required substantial explication to an audience uneasy about its wider intellectual and ideological implications.12 This suspicion was rooted in increasing doubts about the Anglican claim to privileged authority, and was expressed in criticism of establishment claims to privileged secular and religious knowledge, especially as these were derived from the historical traditions of the Bible. The public and egalitarian elements of an ascendant experimentalist philosophy were therefore often emphasized to forestall criticism of the intellectual hegemony of the Anglican establishment. In arguing that the epistemological foundations of the English philosophical and religious arrangement were avail62


able to public observation and amenable to common sense, its defenders attempted to reassure the wider public that this arrangement was still the safest and best for society. By arguing that the biblical histories and their authors operated under similar constraints, they attempted to reassure the public that the traditionary sources underlying that arrangement were similarly reliable, and not the product of political collusion or priestcraft.13 Defending the suf¤ciency of historical religious knowledge on the grounds of its moral certainty was an approach rooted in earlier Anglican defenses of its doctrine and rule of faith in the face of Catholic polemic, perhaps most notably in William Chillingworth’s Religion of Protestants, a Safe Way to Salvation (1638).14 Such an approach continued to appear in several strands of lateseventeenth-century English thought. Dissenters such as Richard Baxter, for example, though often at odds with the Anglican hierarchy, joined them in making a concerted case for the adequacy of moral certainty.15 Cambridge Platonists such as Ralph Cudworth and Henry More responded similarly in their critiques of the positions of Hobbes and Spinoza, claiming that their method denigrated the certainty of sense knowledge, derogated from historical testimony, and invalidly distinguished reason from assent to evidence.16 This explication of historical knowledge was especially prominent among the leading latitudinarian thinkers of the late seventeenth century.17 It particularly marked the work of its two leading epistemological theoreticians, the bishop of Worcester Edward Stilling®eet, and the natural philosopher Robert Boyle. Stilling®eet, a prodigious consumer of a broad spectrum of intellectual disciplines, devoted much of his professional effort to defending the historical integrity of the biblical narratives. Much of this went toward defending the suf¤ciency of probable forms of knowledge.18 Boyle was the leading advocate of this epistemology in natural science, and early on recognized its applicability to theological issues. An extremely erudite lay theologian, Boyle integrated his scienti¤c and religious epistemologies into a coherent philosophical program.19 Through his prodigious publications he became largely responsible for this program’s development and dissemination in both forms of discourse.20 This allying of the epistemological causes of historical religion and natural science represented, in Barbara Shapiro’s words, “not simply a recombination of earlier views, but rather an innovative development of important new directions in modern thought.” The application of this methodology to history was part of an overall strategy to “expand the realm of the probable” while contracting the “realm of the certain,” a strategy that was designed to vindicate the factual over the axiomatic.21 Boyle’s work in natural philosophy provided the kind of theoretical orientation with which theologians could account for the apparent epistemological de¤ciencies of their own historical sources. The association of experimentalist theory with the problems of religious epistemology was an important element in wedding notions of approximation and Sacred History and the Common Sense

63

moral certainty—a judicious proportioning of assent to evidence—to the latitudinarian estimation of the knowledge claims of the scriptural accounts.22 Joining the epistemological underpinnings of experimentalism and religion served to imbue the latter with the theoretical prestige of what ultimately was to become the dominant method of natural science, and thus offered to enable claims regarding religious knowledge to maintain their intellectual standing. Along with the considerable contributions of Anglican divines such as Stilling®eet and John Tillotson, Boyle helped to establish an approach to epistemological problems that would sustain British theology well into the eighteenth century, providing models that were subsequently adopted by continental Reformed theologians, and in turn, by Edwards himself.

A New Sense of Reason While the lack of more speci¤c information about the sources of Edwards’s intellectual development may necessitate thinking of his philosophical heritage in terms of milieu rather than direct in®uences, his thought belongs to an identi¤able transatlantic community of ideas. His exposure to the fundamental tenets of constructive skepticism and their application to the problem of religious knowledge can be fairly well documented. There is no direct evidence that he ever possessed the major works of either Boyle or Stilling®eet, yet he frequently cites a number of works derivative of them, some of which include substantive recapitulations of their explanations of the nature and adequacy of historical knowledge.23 His appropriation of a more approximate understanding of historical religious knowledge follows rather closely the main features of the latitudinarian synthesis. The popularity and cogency of Tindal’s treatise primarily stimulated his use of these sources. Drawn from a century-long legacy of epistemological criticism, Tindal’s analysis of traditionary religious knowledge identi¤ed two chief causes of its philosophical de¤ciency. First, critical scrutiny of the processes of history precluded any certainty regarding the reliability of the information or ideas received from religious traditions, and indeed, prevented an adequate recovery of those things that might be available in them. There can be no assurance of their “conveyance to Posterity; much less that this, or that, has been convey’d entire to distant Times and Places.” This is especially so if “a Revelation be of any Bulk; and which may have gone through the Hands of Men, who not only in the dark Ages of the Church, but even in the Beginning, if we judge by the Number of corrupted Passages, and even forg’d Books, were capable of any Pious Fraud.” The “very Nature of Probability is such, that were it only left to Time itself, even that would wear it quite out.”24 Second, the knowledge claims advanced by historical religions often involved an unwarranted or intolerable level of obscurity or incomprehensibility 64


that also made them dubious, if not irrational. Some of this is due to the corruptibility of testimony, but it is also attributable to an almost inherent superstitious irrationality (e.g., “mystery”) in ancient religions. Generally speaking, knowledge is constituted by self-evident principles, or from propositions derived from them. Knowledge claims possessing less certainty depend upon their connection or consonance with evident forms of knowledge for their plausibility. The more they appear to deviate from the evident truths of reason, the lower their credibility. Since the claims of historical religious traditions can achieve only a probable status, their plausibility depends upon the degree to which they recapitulate evident forms of religious knowledge (for Tindal, the notions found in natural religion).25 Given their historical derivation, the dif¤culties that such obscurities present appear to be irresolvable by a rational method. The greater the obscurity involved, the less connection they bear to demonstrable religious knowledge, and the less probable they become. Tindal argues that the willingness of Protestants to maintain “mysteries contrary to Reason” (e.g., the Trinity) involved them in the same kind of pious irrationality that the Catholics whom they criticized embraced by maintaining certain “mysteries contrary to Sense” (e.g., transubstantiation). To assent to mysteries of either kind is to violate the very reasoning process itself. And to suppose any Thing can be true by Revelation, which is false by Reason, is not to support that Thing, but to undermine Revelation; because nothing unreasonable, nay, what is not highly reasonable, can come from a God, of unlimited, universal, and eternal Reason. . . . [O]ur self-evident Notions being the Foundation of all Certainty, we can only judge of Things, as they are found to be more or less agreeable to them; to deny this on any Pretence whatever, can serve only to introduce an universal Scepticism.26

Though Edwards began to voice his objections to the sort of critique represented by Tindal relatively early in his career (e.g., Misc. No. 583, c. 1732) his attention to such issues seems to have noticeably intensi¤ed in the late 1730s and early 1740s.27 In the last decade of his life his most systematic and penetrating analysis appeared, located in two closely connected treatments of the problem of epistemological obscurity: Misc. No. 1340 (“Mysteries”), and an entry in his “Book of Controversies” entitled “The Importance of Doctrines and of Mysteries in Religion.” Both were explicitly aimed at Tindal’s Christianity as Old as Creation.28 It is evident from these documents that Edwards saw Tindal’s critique of mystery as a general assault on the rational adequacy of historical forms of religious knowledge, or that at the very least he chose to use this opportunity as a venue to express the synthesis of his maturing ideas. And it is in them that he turned, not to the argument of theological certainty, but rather to a characteristically latitudinarian or experimentalist analysis of the nature of knowledge in order to arrive at his answer. His solution to the probSacred History and the Common Sense

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lems posed by historical testimony was three-fold, addressing the concept of rationality itself, the role and utility of experience in generating valid information or knowledge, and the methodological similarities between the investigation of nature and the investigation of history. At each point it becomes evident that he was searching for an approach that signi¤cantly broadened the boundaries of human understanding, and that he found the latitudinarian synthesis a particularly valuable resource. Edwards takes issue with what he perceives to be an overly narrow and somewhat confused or imprecise de¤nition of rationality on the part of infallibilists like Tindal. He locates the fundamental defect of Tindal’s critique in its failure to adequately account for the full range of human rationality, a defect attributable in large part to Tindal’s failure to suf¤ciently distinguish the rules or criteria of evident knowledge from the various elements of the reasoning process itself. In contrast to what he perceived as Tindal’s narrowly construed de¤nition of rationality and its consequent failure to encompass traditionary religious knowledge, Edwards modi¤ed and expanded his own terminology in order to incorporate the approximate and progressive aspects of human understanding. Edwards’s working de¤nition of “reason” is essentially no different than Tindal’s. It is the “power or faculty an intelligent being has to judge of the truth of propositions,” either by “intuition and self-evidence,” or by “putting together several propositions, which are already evident by intuition, or at least whose evidence is originally derived from intuition.”29 But he proceeds to show that he has an understanding of this de¤nition that entails a more encompassing notion of reason, both in terms of its psychological processes and in terms of its use of evidentiary criteria. The question at issue, as he characterizes it, is whether the concept of reason or rationality requires that all its knowledge claims attain to an evident level of philosophical demonstration in order to be certi¤ed, or whether they need only to be suf¤ciently demonstrated so as to incline a rational person to accept them. Tindal, Edwards concludes, wants to claim the former: that because it is the faculty of reason by which the mind judges the truth of matters, the propositions in any claim to knowledge must always be certain, clear and distinct, in order to be considered reasoned. Obscurity or incomprehensibility at any point undermines the epistemological status of an entire set of related propositions. But, he suggests, if this is Tindal’s claim it is an overly narrow one. Such a restriction of the concept of reason would imperil a substantial range of human knowing. Rather, he insists that any de¤nition of reason or knowledge must be broad enough in its application to include propositions that are not clearly evident, but only derived from or related to evident propositions. At ¤rst sight this too seems to be what Tindal wants to argue, that the ra-

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tionality of ideas is judged by their conformity to evident propositions. But Edwards draws this connection or conformity more loosely. The rationality of historical propositions is rooted in the “general proposition” that historical testimony is a valid or reliable form of communication. This is an intuitively evident claim that no one seriously questions. The faculty of reason is the power of judgment in evaluating various kinds of evidence. While it may be rooted in the intuition of particular rules of operation, it proceeds from them to consider and ultimately incorporate non-evident claims of knowledge. Thus no matter how obscure or uncertain particular historical statements are, this in itself cannot be the basis of their dismissal, since their potential truth claims rest on an intuitive proposition. The concept of rationality cannot be restricted simply to the speci¤c (i.e., evident) character of particular kinds of ideas.30 Edwards wants included in any notion of demonstration those ideas that are compelling or convincing, even though they may be only partially comprehended, or merely probable. Examples of the general propositions that Edwards claims are evident to reason are abundant, particularly with regard to historical forms of knowledge. They include statements such as “the testimony of our senses may be depended on,” and “the testimony of our memories is worthy of credit,” or “the testimony of history and tradition is to be depended on.”31 The particular propositions whose claims to reasonableness depend upon such general principles may themselves not be capable of proof or demonstration in the strictest sense, yet they are capable of receiving approbation. This would include those “particular truths concerning what has been before the present age . . . considered in themselves and separate from this testimony, which yet are truths of that sort, and so circumstanced, that all mankind do, ever did and ever will rely on the truth of.” A vast number of propositions relating “occurrences and matters of fact—persons, things, actions, works, events and circumstances” beyond direct observation—are grounded in an implicit acceptance of the principium that testimonial knowledge is reliable, even though its comprehension and certainty may be only partial or probable.32 I say, all that is known by the experience of mankind, is known only by one or more of these testimonies excepting only the existence of that idea, or those few ideas, which are this moment present in our minds, or the immediate objects of present consciousness. And yet how unreasonable would it be to say, that we must ¤rst know these things to be true by reason, before we give credit to our experience of the truth of ’em.33

The statement “divine testimony can be reliably received as true” is, like the statement “the testimony of history and tradition is to be depended on,” a general or intuitively certain proposition. Thus the propositions found in a divine


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revelation, which are but one type (albeit a special one) of historical knowledge, are to be scrutinized in a manner similar to other kinds of historical propositions. Particular statements in a divinely guaranteed testimony may not be evident; they may also be dif¤cult to comprehend, factually problematic, or seemingly repugnant to reason in some way. But this is no cause to reject them, any more than ¤nding that such circumstances attended any particular statement of fact would necessarily lead us to reject it or the general proposition that historical testimony is trustworthy. For whether any supposed or pretended divine revelation be indeed such, is a general proposition. And the particular truths delivered in and by it are particular propositions implied in and consequent on that general. Tindal supposes each of these truths must be judged of by themselves, independently of our judging of that general truth, that the revelation that declares them is the word of God; evidently supposing that if each of these propositions thus judged of particularly, can’t be found to be agreeable to reason or if reason alone will not shew the truth of them; then that general proposition that they depend on, viz. that the word that declares ’em is a divine revelation, is to be rejected: which is most unreasonable and contrary to all the rules of common sense.34

Edwards thus speci¤cally sought to expand his epistemological theory in order to incorporate the non-demonstrable elements of human understanding. He increasingly articulated the view that notions such as “clarity” and “certainty” are approximate qualities of knowledge, not simply absolute ones, and thus they are only relatively necessary for real understanding.35 This characteristically latitudinarian emphasis on the inexact nature of human knowing enabled him to argue for the adequacy of historical religious knowledge in spite of the admitted dif¤culties in comprehending it or in ascertaining its factual reliability. In contrast to his early and strong insistence on the clarity and immediacy of true religious understanding, he came to allow that obscurity does not disqualify its authenticity, and indeed, is concomitant with its nature as a kind of testimony. Some late writers insist that “for a thing to be revealed, and yet remain mysterious is a contradiction. ’Tis as much as to say a thing is revealed and yet remains hid.” Answer: the thing revealed is the truth of the doctrine; so that the truth of it no longer remains hid, tho’ many things concerning the manner may be hid. Yea, many things concerning the nature of things revealed may be clear, tho’ many things concerning the notion of the same things may remain hid. God requires us to understand no more than what is intelligibly revealed. That which is not distinctly revealed, we are not

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required distinctly to understand. It may be necessary for us to know a thing in part, and yet not necessary to know it perfectly.36

Tindal’s claim that reason is the ultimate measure of knowledge failed to recognize or make the distinction between the rule of reason and reason broadly considered, confusing the standards of certainty and clarity with rationality, the faculty of thinking and discerning. But reason as a faculty was “not properly an highest rule of judging or truth and falsehood, nor lowest rule neither, nor any rule at all.” It is true that reason is the judge of what we perceive, but this is because it is “the only judging faculty by which we determine truth and falsehood.” The rules of judgment that reason employs are themselves diverse, and distinct from reason itself, just “as a power of discerning truth, and a rule to regulate and determine the use of that faculty, are quite different things.”37 Rules must be chosen according to the subject matter: logical methods of demonstration in some instances, rules governing historical attestation in others. To say, that argument or evidence is a higher rule, than revelation, is to make evidence and divine revelation entirely distinct, implying that divine revelation is not of the nature of evidence or argument. . . . ’Tis true, divine testimony is not the same thing as argument or evidence in general; because ’tis a particular sort of evidence. So there are other particular sorts of evidence, and persons might speak as intelligibly, if they should single out any other kind of evidence, and should assert that reason or evidence was superiour to that sort of evidence. As for instance, one sort of evidence is human testimony of credible eye witnesses; another is credible well-vouched history; another is memory; another is present experience; another is geometrical measuration; another is arithmetical calculation; another is strict metaphysical distinction and comparison. Now would it not be an improper and unintelligible way of speaking to ask, whether evidence was not above experience; or whether argument was not above measuration or calculation?38

The rules for judging divine testimony share certain basic assumptions with the rules for general historical knowledge. These rules are no less rational because the resulting clarity or certainty may be of varying degrees; it still remains the faculty of reason that employs them to evaluate the evidence presented to it. Reason may be equated with argument or evidence, but if used in this manner it must not be construed so narrowly as to refer only to the argument or evidence of infallible demonstration. For in fact rational argument and evidence must be understood broadly enough to encompass the variety of avenues in which the mind receives information, including diverse types of testimony. Having argued for the necessity of broadening the concept of rationality to


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include non-evident forms of knowing, Edwards proceeds to make the case that experience constitutes a major resource in the range of human understanding, if not its chief source. One of the problems with the demand for epistemological rationality as articulated by Tindal is that it appears to make little or no allowance for any historical or experiential means to knowledge, since these cannot by their nature be con¤rmed by reason operating by intuition and deduction. This restrictive assessment of reason and knowledge does not account for the fact that the notions of evidence and demonstration, or indubitability, are psychological as well as logical. For Edwards, evident truths can also be those that “none doubts”—those found true by general experience, or demanded by the common and universal sensibilities of the human mind. The measure of claims to religious knowledge, because they are historical and experiential in nature, must be made according to the canons of rationality appropriate to this kind of knowledge. What really must determine the concept of their rationality is their standing as a “good and just ground of our assent.”39 Like the latitudinarians, therefore, Edwards came to insist that the reasoning process is inseparable from experience. In this case, however, it is not the experience of the divine beauty or excellence that he has in mind, but rather the kind of experience involved in most forms of information acquisition, namely the common experience of the senses. This experience integrally in®uences and informs the mind’s most deeply held convictions, and offers to provide the means to advance them. Reasoning in fact relies upon the interplay of such experience and critical evaluation, in religious knowledge as well as many other disciplines of human understanding. Let the argument be testimony or experience or what it will, we must judge of the goodness or strength of the argument by reason. And thus it is we actually determine, that experience is so good and sure a medium or proof. We consider the nature of it, and our reason soon shows us the necessary connection of this medium with truth. So we judge of the degree of dependence that is to be had on our senses; as it is by repeated testimony of the senses, and by viewing the agreement of one with another, and by enquiring in innumerable instances the agreement of the testimonies of the senses with all criteria of truth, and so rationally estimating the value of those testimonies. . . . For judging by experience is one way of judging by reason, or rather experience is one sort of argument which reason makes use of in judging.40

Edwards actually does believe that Tindal and other rationalistic critics have incorporated the element of experience into their de¤nition of reason, but claims that they have done so in an unconscious and defective fashion. He argues that their insistence on the use of reason and their consequent dismissal

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of historical religious knowledge is based upon a confused or inconsistent use of terminology. Many of the free thinkers of late ages deceive themselves, thro’ the ambiguity or equivocal use of the word REASON. They argue that “we must make our reason the highest rule by which to judge of all things, even of the doctrines of revelation; because reason is that by which we must judge of revelation itself. ’Tis the rule on which our judgment of the truth of a revelation depends; and therefore undoubtedly must be that, by which particular doctrines of it must be judged”; not considering that the word “reason” is here used in two senses. In the former case, viz. in our judging of the divinity of a supposed revelation, the word means the “faculty” of reason taken in the whole extent of its exercise. In the other case, ’tis the “opinion” of our reason, or some particular opinions that have appeared rational or new.41

That is, when these thinkers claim that reason is the highest rule of judgment, they begin with the claim that since it is the faculty of reason by which the mind operates at all times, reason is therefore the ¤nal judge of the evidence to any claims of revelation. With this conclusion Edwards agrees. But they also insist that any propositions generated by or contained in such a disclosure must therefore be clear, distinct, and certain in order to retain the claim to be both rational and revelatory. Edwards argues that used in this latter sense the term “reason” really stands for opinion based on previous experience. But if one can assess the testimony to be divine, as when there is reason to believe historical testimony to be generally reliable, the fact that its assorted consequent propositions are unclear or problematic in some way does not constitute a violation of reason, but rather of what is held likely to be the case. They turn out to be violations of present expectations based on past experience, but not of the faculty of reason. There is a great difference between those two. ’Tis true, the faculty of reason is that by which we are the judge of everything; or ’tis the eye by which we see all truth. And after we have received revelation, still by the faculty of reason, we received the particular doctrines of revelation; yea, even those that are most dif¤cult to our comprehension. . . . But this is an exceeding different thing from making an “opinion,” which we ¤rst establish without revelation by reason (only), our rule to judge of particular doctrines which revelation declares.42

This is typically the case with all testimonial knowledge. Edwards invokes the case of travel accounts, a standard experimentalist illustration, to make his point. If someone “of the soundest judgment and greatest integrity” were to travel to another country, witness there various customs, events, or phenomena


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that were foreign to the culture from which he came, and then were to return and report these things, his audience would be wholly reliant on his testimony for its understanding or knowledge of them. To reject those accounts because they are not amenable to “reason,” when in fact what is meant by reason is “the particular ‘opinion’ we should have had, independent of his testimony,” would be unwarranted. If the basic integrity of the reporter can be ascertained, prudence requires that one proceed to consider possible manners in which his testimony might or might not be reconcilable to experience and reason.43 Confusing the powers of reasoning with reasoned opinion is analogous to mistakenly identifying the capacity of sight with unaided vision, as though the latter were incapable of improvement because it is the result of the employment of the natural faculty. This would be as unreasonable as it would be if a man should say, that he never will rely on my representation made by the best microscope or telescope, that is different from the representation which he has by his naked eye, because his eye is the rule by which he sees even the optick glass itself, and by which he judges whether it be regularly made, tending to give a true representation of objects.44

Edwards’s appeal to examples from exploration and natural science is hardly coincidental; they were characteristically used in the experimentalist analysis of religious knowledge. Boyle, for example, often argued that the history of discovery is replete with instances in which reports were initially controversial and rejected because they were thought contrary to reason, or too fantastic to be believed, only to be shown subsequently to be the case. By analogy it should not be surprising if the same holds true for historical religious knowledge, since its method of discovery is identical. Experience continually forces the mind to reexamine its “assured” understanding or interpretation of things. The history of thought shows just how much human understanding relies on opinion or belief that is overturned by subsequent discovery. Testimony cannot be ruled out of court simply because it is testimony, or because it appears to be fantastic, or obscure. What must be ascertained instead are strict criteria for judging testimonial knowledge.45 The testimony of others must count as a kind of knowing, or else disciplines such as medicine and geography would be impossible. [The] knowledge we have of any matter of fact, which, without owing it to ratiocination, either we acquire by the immediate testimony of our senses and other faculties, or accrues to us by the communicated testimony of others. I see not, why that, which I call theological experience, may not be admitted; since the revelations . . . whose being divine, and relating to theological subjects, does not alter its nature.46

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Edwards contends that the dif¤culties often encountered in interpreting the scriptural narratives are not necessarily due to any inherent irrationality in those accounts but are due rather to a failure to distinguish between experiential beliefs and truly evident knowledge, a refusal to re-evaluate these beliefs in the presence of contrary evidence, or a mistaken insistence that such contrary information itself be of the nature of evident knowledge. It is true, he acknowledges, that we judge “the credibility and validity of the man that testi¤es” by the rules of reason, but here is meant the faculty of reason whereby it distinguishes truth from falsehood. As long as that testimony does not violate the canons of evident reason or the appropriate rules of historical evidence, the fact that its claims may be dif¤cult to ascertain cannot be the premise upon which it is rejected. And this is what he claims his interlocutors are doing. The third strand in Edwards’s critique of Tindal revolves around his invocation of another element constituent to the experimentalist analysis of knowledge: the analogy to the investigation of nature. At the heart of this analysis was the assertion that both were primarily exercises in interpretation rather than axiomatic logic. Boyle, for example, defended his approach both to the study of nature and to the study of religion on the grounds that the spectrum of human understanding extended beyond the bounds of evident clarity and certainty, and so was too signi¤cant for its informational value to be dismissed on dogmatic philosophical grounds.47 Responding to the charge that obscurity in historical accounts was tantamount to a conclusion of their irrationality, Boyle argued that, as with the study of nature, the best approach to resolving such dif¤culties was one that was rooted in an interpretive model, in a dialectic of observation, hypothesis, and revision. Unlike rationalistic propositions, which are evident, historical propositions are contingent upon an understanding of other ideas, not all of which may be known or accessible at any given time. The study of nature or religion, like all historical disciplines, employs a progressive epistemological procedure that only gradually clears away obscurities as additional propositions are discovered and integrated into an evolving interpretation. They must accordingly be approached with diligence and with openness to unexpected interpretive results, lest they be dismissed prematurely as unintelligible or irrational.48 The pitfall that the geometrician faces is in this regard is like that of the swimmer who is satis¤ed to collect only the ®otsam he ¤nds on the surface of the sea. The epistemological virtuoso, in contrast, is like the diver who brings up pearls from the bottom of the sea, objects that were not apparent without additional investigation.49 Similarly, Edwards argues that the comprehension of both nature and Scripture is primarily an interpretive, rather than logical or mathematical, enterprise. The written Scriptures consist of a “vast variety of parts, many books, histories, prophecies, prayers, songs, parables, proverbs, doctrines, promises,


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sermons, epistles, and discourses of very many kinds.” Given this disparate array of forms, content, authorship, and historical variation, it should come as less of a surprise that “there should be mysteries, things incomprehensible and exceeding dif¤cult to our understanding.” Such a situation is not unique to the investigation of religion, however, but is “analogous to the mysteries that are found in all [the] other works of God, as the works of creation and providence,” especially those that “are observable in the system of the natural world and the frame of man’s own nature.” Investigating either nature or religion is essentially an interpretive enterprise, since both, as “divine works . . . are, in different senses, a divine word. Both are the voice of God to intelligent creatures; a manifestation and declaration of himself to mankind.”50 Understanding the book of nature or the book of Scripture is a progressive act of interpretation requiring a balance of studied judgment and re-evaluation based on the discriminate observations of additional experience. Though neither may be ever fully understood or clearly comprehended, both can yield a highly probable and thus real understanding or knowledge of their meaning. Such a result is suf¤cient for both ¤elds of inquiry, and therefore deserving of reasoned assent. In addition to his early championing of the ideals of the more geometrico in his soteriological epistemology, therefore, Edwards came to suggest that the most appropriate model for understanding the character of religious knowledge could be found in this new experimentalist approach to the study of nature. If infallibilists like Tindal were prepared to reject the epistemological adequacy of historical claims in general or of divine testimony in particular, then they would be forced to acknowledge that there are any number of areas of human understanding that possess the same defects, and are thus open to the same criticism. On close inspection ¤elds of knowledge such as natural philosophy are also found to incorporate obscure ideas, thus yielding only partial comprehension and probative certainty concerning their truthfulness.51 Edwards points to studies found in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society on such topics as electricity or magnetism that, though well attested, are often obscure to the non-specialist and even to the experts themselves. One ¤nds, for example, that “there are several things in mechanicks and hydrostaticks, that by testimony of our senses are true in fact, . . . that reason never ¤rst discovered, before the testimony of sense declared them.” Even now they remain “very great paradoxes, and if proposed would [have] seemed contrary to reason, at least to the reason of the generality of mankind, and such as are not either mathematicians or of more than common penetration, and what they cannot reconcile to their reason.”52 But such problems are elemental to the object of study and to the method of investigation. Given the determination that nature is essentially an ordered and intelligible phenomenon, the fact that

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particular discoveries may not be fully explainable or may raise additional perplexities is no ground for dismissing them as irrational: “such a mysteriousness is no other than is to be expected in a particular and exact observation of nature, and a critical tracing of its operations.”53 Divine testimony shares in this paradigm. Once its origin and general authenticity have been ascertained, its obscurities can be tolerated, with the expectation that further study may well lead to their resolution. The method of the experimentalist is the most apt for resolving dif¤culties encountered in claims to religious knowledge. Its procedural skepticism is an aid in resolving them, because it produces a requisite receptiveness to novel concepts and solutions. It predisposes the observer to question previous interpretations, and creates sensitivity to the need for additional information. But by making skepticism toward experience procedural rather than theoretical, one ultimately gains a knowledge that would otherwise be dismissed. The experimentalist contention that human understanding is possessed of a historical dimension, that it consists in the progressive acquisition and comprehension of information, was important in shaping Edwards’s response to the infallibilist critique. The absolute demand for clarity and certainty in religious epistemology rested, according to his analysis, on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of knowledge. Whether considered in the case of individuals or of whole cultures, even “truths of reason” that derive from disciplines considered to be largely demonstrative are actually arrived at through a dynamic and gradual process of accumulation.54 The recent development of natural philosophy provided the quintessential illustration for Edwards of this progressive element of human understanding. It is this model that he relies on to justify the fact that the scriptural accounts are not completely intelligible. “It may be expected, that as in the system of nature, so in this system of revelation, there should be many parts whose use is but little understood, and many that should seem wholly useless, yea and some that should seem rather to do hurt than good.”55 But it can reasonably be expected that just as “the philosophical world makes progress in the understanding of the book of nature, and unfolding the mysteries of it,” so the understanding of divine testimony will improve in due time.56 The scriptural accounts are of such a nature, containing such depths and hidden treasure of knowledge, that there should be room for improvement of understanding, and to ¤nd out more and more, to all the wisest and best of men, to the end of the world: and that the case in this respect should actually be the same as concerning the works of nature; that there should actually be a gradual improvement in the understanding of it, that many things that were formerly great and insuperable dif¤culties, unintelligible mysteries, should now by further


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study and improvement be well cleared up, and cease to remain any dif¤culty; and that other dif¤culties should be considerably diminished, tho’ not yet fully cleared up.57

Edwards and Locke on the Bible Given the importance that Locke’s thought held for Edwards and has held for Edwards scholarship, Locke’s treatment of historical religious knowledge and its subsequent impact on Edwards is pertinent to this study. Perry Miller’s attribution of Locke’s decisive in®uence upon Edwards’s intellectual development has fostered signi¤cant scholarly interest in the relationship between their respective epistemologies.58 While Miller himself showed little if any interest in Edwards’s biblical interpretation, Miller’s thesis has produced some attempts to account for Edwards’s theory of biblical revelation within the context of his adaptation of Locke’s epistemology. Such studies posit a fundamental tension between Edwards’s appropriation of Locke’s empiricism and his own theory of a spiritually realized form of religious knowledge. According to this line of interpretation, he attempted to resolve this con®ict by describing his own belief in the supernatural origin and spiritually illuminated perception of religious ideas in Lockean terminology, a strategy that in effect abrogated the physical sensationalism constitutive of Locke’s empiricism. Edwards believed such a synthesis was justi¤ed in part because the mind had empirical access to rational ideas about religion through written revelation. These ideas were then utilized by the Spirit to induce an apprehension of the divine excellence that was essential to the new sense of the heart.59 In light of the previous discussion of his use of Locke’s empiricism, however, it is more plausible to conclude that the motivation for Edwards’s treatment of the problem of reason and revelation lay quite apart from any direct in®uence of Locke’s method, and indeed, quite apart from any theory of the origin of ideas whatsoever. Rather, his particular interlocutor on these matters was clearly Tindal, whose criteria for judging the rationality of ideas offered to subordinate if not exclude historically derived propositions, including divine testimony, from consideration as a basis for religious knowledge. In fact, at critical points Locke’s and Edwards’s estimations regarding the epistemological status of biblical revelation are markedly similar, and it appears that to some degree Edwards appreciated the complementary nature of their respective views. Drawing on related epistemological resources, each attempted to offer resolutions of the suggested con®ict between reason and revelation by maintaining that religious understanding could be rational even when it lacked the evident qualities of knowledge (scientia), properly considered. Locke’s Essay appeared in the midst of the century-long development of the epistemological-historical critique of biblical religion. It was in the context of 76


this philosophical debate that he offered his assessment of the rationality of revealed religion, and it is this context that helps to explain the varied reaction to the Essay. His treatise was the focus of controversy in part for the putatively destructive implications that it had for traditionary revelation. It was Stilling®eet, for example, a principal theological exponent of philosophical fallibilism, who was one of Locke’s most severe critics on this point. His criticism was bolstered by the fact that many deists invoked Locke as an authority for their own views of reason and revelation. Yet Locke’s intellectual milieu was closely associated with latitudinarian in®uences; the essential similarity of his epistemology to Boyle’s, for instance, has been noted.60 And Locke certainly saw himself within the broad spectrum of latitudinarian thought on this issue, as his subsequent epistolary exchanges with Stilling®eet and dismissal of John Toland’s interpretation of the Essay show.61 Did Locke in fact intend to diminish or subordinate the value of historical religious knowledge because it failed to reach an intuitive or demonstrative certainty, or did he, like other latitudinarians, argue for its suf¤ciency on the basis of its probative certainty? His approach to the problem and choice of language certainly lent itself to varying interpretations, an outcome he may well have anticipated.62 Locke’s treatment of the relationship between reason and revelation is in itself fairly unremarkable, and quite separable from his theory of the origin of ideas.63 While anchoring knowledge in ideas derived from experience, however, Locke continued to maintain that the term “knowledge” properly applied only to ideas meeting the classical criteria of certainty, clarity, and distinction. Ideas derived from testimony did not belong to the realm of knowledge, but to that of belief or opinion. He shared this conventional analysis with the geometricians, thus opening himself to the charge (or commendation) that his method entailed an implicit rejection of revealed religion. And he maintained this view in the context of an Anglican epistemological apologetic determined to minimize the functional if not technical distinctions between belief and knowledge. Like many critics of the Bible, Locke strictly differentiated between knowledge and faith. He makes it clear that his de¤nition of knowledge, “the perception of the agreement or disagreement of ideas,” encompasses the same standards of clarity and distinction that infallibilists typically adopted. Knowledge has to do with ideas derived by intuition and demonstration (he adds sensation as well), those whose comprehension is clear and evident: “whatever comes short of one of these, with what assurance soever embraced, is but Faith, or Opinion, but not Knowledge, at least in all general Truths.”64 This categorical distinction would appear to undermine the epistemic status of revelation. Faith or opinion depends upon probability, which can be compelling when derived from facts concurrent with the general consent (constant observation) of others. But such assent becomes problematic when this rule is contravened, as Sacred History and the Common Sense

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when “Testimonies contradict common Experience, and the reports of History and Witnesses clash with the ordinary course of Nature, or with one another,” circumstances quite characteristic of the biblical accounts.65 Faith in a claim to revelation is further quali¤ed or conditioned by certain subjective limitations. That is, the recipient to a claim of revelation must be sure that the revelation is authentic and that it has been interpreted correctly: “our Assent can be rationally no higher than the Evidence of its being a Revelation, and that this is the meaning of the Expressions it is delivered in.”66 The propositions of revelation are not matters of knowledge to begin with, and under these additional constraints their certainty or assurance is further reduced. Thus to some degree they are subordinate to propositions that are known evidently: whatsoever Truth we come to the clear discovery of, from the Knowledge and Contemplation of our own Ideas, will always be certainer to us, than those [ideas] which are conveyed to us by Traditional Revelation. For the Knowledge, we have, that this Revelation came at ¤rst from God, can never be so sure, as the Knowledge we have from the clear and distinct Perception of . . . our own Ideas.67

If Locke subordinates revelation to knowledge, however, he also greatly circumscribes the range of propositions that can make the claim of knowledge. The vast majority of human understanding falls short of the absolute standard of scientia: “most of the Propositions we think . . . upon, are such, as we cannot have undoubted Knowledge of their Truth.”68 The actual range of propositions, therefore, that revelation is subordinate to or restrained by turns out to be fairly limited. Furthermore, Locke consistently emphasizes the weakness and obscurity of the mind’s ideas and the importance of recognizing and of resting content in its limitations.69 Probable forms of understanding must compensate for this great want of knowledge. This does not give rise to the specter of skepticism, however, because probable information is capable of rising “so near to Certainty” that it determines our thoughts and actions as much “as the most evident demonstration.”70 Locke does assert that nothing can be received for revealed truth that contradicts “our clear intuitive Knowledge,” but his purposes for insisting on this are very speci¤c, and stand within the long tradition of Christian philosophy. Rejecting this premise would constitute a rejection of the operating discriminative powers of the mind, exchanging the certain for the doubtful. It would subvert “the Principles, and Foundations of all Knowledge, Evidence, and Assent,” leaving the mind no criteria by which to judge between “Truth and Falshood, [the] Credible and Incredible in the World.”71 But the range of this knowledge is limited, and it is only this kind of knowledge that Locke con-

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cludes is irreducibly determinative for evaluating the status of claims to revelation.72 Furthermore, Locke argues that the assent of faith, including assent to the propositions of traditionary revelation, is itself a proper and thoroughly rational act. He has no intention “to be thought here to lessen the Credit and use of History” since “we receive from it a great part of the useful Truths we have, with a convincing evidence.”73 Generally accepted criteria exist (outlined by Locke in 4.16.6–11) that enable testimony to be judged deserving of our assent. When such ideas are consonant with our knowledge, observation, and experience, they “border so near upon Certainty, that we make no doubt at all about them; but assent to them as ¤rmly, and act, according to that Assent, as resolutely, as if they were infallibly demonstrated, and that our Knowledge of them was perfect and certain.” For Locke, the ideas derived from revelation, like ideas generally derived from testimony, are capable of the highest degrees of probability and assurance. Belief in them can be an “Assent founded on the highest Reason,” an assent that “perfectly excludes all wavering as our Knowledge itself.” 74 He is relatively con¤dent, therefore, that the general evidences for the reliability of religious testimonies can be ascertained. Con®icts with common experience and the course of nature do arise. Yet these con®icts are not themselves evidence of the irrational or defective nature of traditionary revelation, but of con®icting experiential information. Locke takes this view because, like Boyle and Stilling®eet, he still maintains the traditional philosophical description of propositions as those that are of, against, or above reason.75 It was this third category that critics like Toland and Tindal manifestly rejected. But he still accepts the limitation that in cases where the information that a revelation communicates is “above reason” (e.g., bodily resurrection), it must overrule previous experience and understanding, even when it is mysterious, paradoxical, or inobvious. The light of reason does not prevent God from revealing things at odds with present understanding, and in such instances revelation “must carry it, against the probable Conjectures of Reason.” It is therefore rational in these instances to assent to those things that are “above reason,” since “the Mind, not being certain of the Truth of that it does not evidently know . . . is bound to give up its Assent to such a Testimony.” Unlike the deists, therefore, Locke allows for the existence of propositions that are not evident but are not on that account “contrary to reason.” These are only against human experience or expectations.76 What then is to be made of Locke’s seemingly radical subordination of faith to reason in chapter 18 of book 4? First, Locke himself gives clear indications that this chapter has a speci¤c aim with limited applications, and so provides interpretive parameters that limit its implications within the broader con-


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text of the Essay. Even to treat reason as if it were in opposition to faith is “a very improper way of speaking.” Truly said, assent cannot be made without ratiocination. Thus, and signi¤cantly, Locke enters the discussion of the relative superiority of reason to revelation only as a concession to conventional language. Furthermore, he seems to have in mind here the particular kind of assent to revelation often appealed to by enthusiasts, namely, a faith that transgresses the mind’s own rational judgment, one that operates “without any Reason for believing.” It is only in this limited and speci¤c way that reason and faith can be said to be opposed. Reason in this sense is the natural, deliberative discovery of certainty or probability (the latter characteristic of the normal act of faith). Faith, on the other hand, is taken here to mean an assent made to a revelation “as coming from God, in some extraordinary way of Communication,” without any consideration of its certainty or probability, i.e., without reference to reason whatsoever. Leaving aside the fact that he thinks such a claim is either disingenuous or unintelligible, Locke insists that even if the existence of such a faith is granted for the sake of argument, it still does not follow that such a non-rational faith can also contravene rational knowledge. Even if this faith is possible, it cannot communicate new (non-natural) simple ideas (for which there is no cognitive or linguistic referent). And the actual knowledge revealed (even if redundant of natural knowledge), being twice removed from rational certainty (since it comes by testimony), is always less sure than the rational or sensitive apprehension of propositions or facts. Thus it cannot impose itself upon evident knowledge. His clear intent here is to limit the prerogatives of any such non-rational claim to a revealed knowledge. Furthermore, no such claim of non-rational faith need be made in order to assent to the written Christian revelation. For Locke, the special case of non-rational faith is quite distinct from the notion that the Scriptures may require assent to something “above reason.” There are many areas of religious understanding that are “beyond the Discovery of our natural Faculties, and above Reason,” wherein the mind is persuaded by propositions having only “probable Grounds, which still admit a Possibility of the contrary to be true, without doing violence to the certain Evidence of its Knowledge.” In such cases revelation “ought to determine our Assent even against Probability,” and so “it may be [a] Matter of Faith, and be also above Reason. Because Reason, in a particular Matter, being able to reach no higher than Probability, Faith gave the determination, where Reason came short; and Revelation discovered on which side the Truth lay.”77 Locke’s refusal to blur the lines between certainty and probability and between knowledge and faith put his epistemology at odds with particular developments in latitudinarian thought. But his allowance that an assent to the propositions of a historical revelation results from a compelling assurance of 80


their veracity, and so constitutes a rational form of understanding, is consistent with and indeed characteristic of latitudinarian thought. More importantly, it is precisely this element in his thought that sharply distinguishes it from the more radical treatments of reason and revelation typically present in the infallibilist critique of the Bible, particularly in eighteenth-century deist writings.78 Locke simply refused to restrict the notion of rationality to, or identify the term “reason” with, the scienti¤c area of human understanding. While he conceded that some may have taken “reason” to signify “true and clear Principles” or deductions made from them, he maintained that its more proper use was as a reference to that faculty “whereby Man is supposed to be distinguished from the Beasts.”79 That is, in the capacity for critical thought. As a discriminating faculty, reason is used to discover or determine both certainty and probability, and is the means whereby assent to both is regulated. Reason too is conditioned by the mind’s ignorance, by a lack or obscurity of ideas, the assumption of false ones, or the absence of probative evidence.80 Thus while Locke ¤rmly distinguishes knowledge from faith, and restricts the application of the former term to intuitive and demonstrative (yet sensitive) propositions or ideas, he does not distinguish reason from faith, or more properly, he does not categorically oppose them.81 Characteristic of the constructive skepticism underlying latitudinarian epistemology, he insists that assent to an authentic revelation, like assent to other forms of probable evidence, is a reasoned act, even when obscure, troublesome, paradoxical, or against experience. Studies that address Edwards’s relation to Locke on the question of historical religious epistemology have tended to consider this relationship from within the context of the theoretical implications of Locke’s sensationist empiricism, rather than with the latter’s express views on the rationality of revelation in mind. Claude Smith, for example, argues that while Edwards “was heavily Lockean in his epistemology and psychology,” he came to conclude that Locke’s “treatment of the sources of the materials of knowledge [was] inadequate in the area of man’s knowledge of God.” In particular, he “explicitly disagreed with Locke’s analysis of the relation of reason and revelation.” Edwards did not believe that the communication of God’s will could be restricted to the information available through the ¤ve senses. He therefore was forced to radically transform if not abrogate Locke’s empiricism by appealing to the existence of a spiritual intuition, or sense of the heart. This supernaturally induced inclination of the will directed the mind toward a receptive apprehension of divine communications that lay beyond the purview of an empiricist framework.82 Like Smith, David Laurence also sees Edwards’s development of these concepts as un-Lockean adaptations or extensions of empiricism made for his own theological purposes. Laurence interprets Locke’s admonitions against enthusiastic forms of inspiration as contrary to the kind of spiritual illumination so integral to Edwards’s thought. This dismissal was motivated by Locke’s preferSacred History and the Common Sense

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ence for a religious knowledge based upon an intellectual assent to propositions delivered by the natural senses. But Edwards adapted Locke in order to argue that since experience produced knowledge, a spiritual source of experience could produce spiritual knowledge. Contrary to Locke’s sensationism, Edwards believed that the primary source of such experience was the believer’s perception of the divine excellence found in Scripture. Its truth was perceived through its spiritual and affective, not merely natural and propositional, character.83 It is true of course that Edwards did propose a theory of divine illumination as his principal response to the epistemological critique of revelation. This theory accounted not only for the spiritually perceptive capacities of the regenerate mind but for the qualitative distinctiveness of the sacred text as well. Like other theologians in the Reformed tradition, Edwards believed that there was an inherent “impress of divine excellence” on the Christian revelation, one that corresponded to and resonated with the renewed faculties of the regenerate mind and that provided it with an unwavering epistemological certitude. This was the earliest and never-abandoned foundation of Edwards’s biblical epistemology. Viewed from this perspective, Edwards’s recourse to a theory of divine illumination does appear to be at odds with Locke’s epistemology, and analogous to the kind of enthusiasm that Locke was at pains to suppress. But it can hardly be coincidence or mere omission that Edwards nowhere speci¤cally mentions Locke or the Essay in his extensive criticism of those who would “make reason a higher rule than revelation,” especially when he frequently mentions Tindal and his treatise in that criticism.84 Locke in fact proved to be a helpful resource to Edwards in his own thinking about the Bible. One ¤nds, for example, that he often cites Locke’s commentary on the New Testament epistles regarding the historical-grammatical meaning of words and phrases in his Scripture notes. Edwards’s epistemological critique of natural religion also bears striking parallels with that found in Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity, a work he owned and used constructively.85 It is quite conceivable that Locke’s complete disavowal of the deists’ version of rational religion in that work provided part of the interpretive lens through which Edwards viewed the Essay itself. In any case, he appears to have had a favorable opinion of Locke’s work on many problems relating to biblical interpretation.86 Miller and others have attempted to reconcile these presumably contrary impulses—Edwards’s adoption of empiricism and his retention of spiritual illumination—by suggesting some form of sublimation or reinterpretation of his spiritual theory, or by proposing that in fact he set out to domesticate Locke’s empiricism by spiritualizing it. But neither of these hypotheses seems necessary in order to explain the relationship of their respective religious epistemologies. Locke explicitly rejects the notion that the argument of the Essay 82


in general or his critique of enthusiasm in particular rules out the sort of special spiritual illumination proposed by Edwards. “In what I have said I am far from denying, that God can, or doth sometimes enlighten Mens Minds in the apprehending of certain Truths, or excite them to Good Actions by the immediate in®uence and assistance of the Holy Spirit, without any extraordinary signs accompanying it.” The ordinary believer can receive a spiritually induced apprehension that is short of inspiration and yet is not enthusiasm either. Locke does not deny that God “illuminates the Mind with supernatural Light.” He only denies that such illumination can be recognized as divine without its being conformable to reason, or without carrying a kind of authority “which convinces us that it is from him, by some Marks which Reason cannot be mistaken in.”87 There seems to be little reason to suppose, therefore, that Locke’s Essay or the empiricism behind it was the stimulus for Edwards’s treatment of the problem of reason and revelation. It is much more likely, given Edwards’s own explicit identi¤cations of such, that his work was driven by the criticism of divine illumination found in thinkers like Spinoza and reiterated by derivative ¤gures such as Tindal.88 Tindal’s strong preference for rational religion was motivated by a subtle but decided identi¤cation of reason with evident forms of knowledge. His opposition of revelation to reason rests on the distinction between evident knowledge and merely probable revelation. Since ideas derived from revelation do not rise to the level of knowledge, they also fail the test of rationality. In effect, Tindal invokes Locke’s condescension to conventional language in the Essay as the legitimization of an uncompromisingly infallibilist epistemology. He interprets Locke’s assertions that reason must judge revelation and that revelation cannot contradict reason as tantamount to the claim that rational religion cannot be other than that derived from evident knowledge. To claim otherwise is to forsake the rational (i.e., the clearly known) for the irrational (i.e., the probable or obscure). Whereas Locke claimed that religious propositions could be rational and thus assented to when they seemed highly probable, even if they were “above reason,” Tindal rejects any assent made to such propositions and interprets the Essay as giving license to this conclusion. Since it is the case that “our self-evident Notions [are] the Foundation of all Certainty, we can only judge of Things, as they are found to be more or less agreeable to them; to deny This on any Pretence whatever, can serve only to introduce an universal Scepticism.” 89 To abandon “this Rule for the sake of what depends on human tradition” requires that “we quit certainty for that, which is not pretended to amount to more than Probability.”90 Reason has to do with knowledge and certainty. Belief and probability are qualitatively distinct from these, and thus outside the bounds of rational thought. As is clear from the preceding discussion, Edwards perceived that this rhetorical separation of reason from revelation and belief was at the heart of the Sacred History and the Common Sense

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deistic critique, and set about to effectively respond to it. Furthermore, he did not interpret Locke’s Essay as giving rise to such a conceptual turn. If he perceived the fundamental congruity between his views and Locke’s, however, he also recognized that some of the principal elements of Locke’s terminology lent themselves to contrary interpretations, and thus were in need of revision. In the last decade of his career Edwards began to expand his apologetic strategy in order to account for the extension of Locke’s method developed by Tindal. This change of strategy produced a corresponding shift in his rhetoric toward the kind of conceptual and terminological blurring found in latitudinarian treatments of reason and revelation, but resisted by Locke. It is possible to ¤nd statements in Edwards’s manuscripts, therefore, that mask his basic agreement with Locke. According to Locke, in order for a proposition to qualify as true knowledge it had to meet fast standards of clarity and certainty. On this he was unwilling to compromise, even in the face of the misunderstanding of his religious epistemology by critics and admirers alike. The same cannot be said for Edwards. In contrast to his early and strong inclination toward a concept of religious knowledge that was immediate, clear, and infallibly certain, the evidence indicates that he subsequently sought to broaden his epistemological terminology so that it would more readily account for the inexact nature of human understanding. One ¤nds, for example, that in the ¤nal scheme for his central work on epistemology, the “Subjects to Be Handled in the Treatise on the Mind” (dating from the late 1740s or early 1750s), he included an entry on “Certainty and Assurance” that bears signs of the in®uence of his encounter with Tindal. He now intended to use this treatise to show how “many things that are not demonstrations in themselves to men” remain “strong arguments,” even though they may “want of proper clearness and full comprehension of the ideas.” Here Edwards stresses the progressive, psychological elements of epistemological categories. The notion of assurance, for example, is one that “is capable of in¤nite degrees.” No one has “such a degree but that it might be heightened, even of that that two and two make four. It may be increased by a stronger sight or a greater clearness of ideas; minds of clearer and stronger sight may be more assured of it than those of more obscure vision.” Something “which is a demonstration at one time may be only probable reasoning at another, by reason of different degrees of clearness and comprehension.”91 Similarly, notions such as clarity and certainty themselves are not absolute but relative, and thus only relatively important for a real understanding of things. “’Tis not necessary that persons should have clear ideas of the things that are the subject of a proposition, in order to being rationally convinced of the truth of the proposition.” If, for example, even mathematicians are willing to allow for “many kinds of quantities, [such] as surd quantities and ®uxions, concerning which they have no clear ideas,” how much more should a certain 84


level of inexactness be tolerated in claims to religious knowledge derived from experience and testimony?92 As a result of this shift in his terminology and method, Edwards became critical of what he viewed to be overly rigorous demands for an epistemology based on clarity and demonstration, including those deriving from Locke. As Leon Howard has pointed out, Edwards rejected Locke’s de¤nition of knowledge in “The Mind” (entry No. 71). Howard attributed this rejection to the rationalist (and subsequently idealist) orientation of his philosophy, derived principally from his early reading of Antoine Arnauld’s Art of Thinking.93 There is good reason, however, to question whether this was the motive or context for Edwards’s criticism. Wallace Anderson has argued that entry No. 71 most likely dates from the years 1748–1749, much later than the period (early 1720s) that Howard supposed. It comes instead from the very period during which Edwards was most engaged with the problems raised by Tindal.94 Thus it appears that his motive for rejecting Locke’s de¤nition may well have originated in his concerns about the implications that it had for traditionary religious knowledge, and not in any rationalistically oriented rejection of his empiricism or epistemology per se. This is apparent in the alternative de¤nition for knowledge that he proposes in this work. Knowledge is not “the perception of the agreement or disagreement of ideas,” but rather “the perception of the union or disunion of ideas,” or “the perceiving of whether two or more ideas belong to one another.”95 Edwards introduces this seemingly modest change in terminology here precisely because he had been revising his own thinking in the direction of demanding less clarity or precision of religious propositions. The perception of union-disunion, or a simple “belonging to one another,” was in his view a less stringent epistemological criterion. Such a de¤nition was suf¤ciently ®exible to allow for the incomplete expression or comprehension of ideas, while still deeming them to be a kind of knowledge. Hence “it is not impossible to believe or know the truth of mysteries or propositions that we cannot comprehend, or see the manner how the several ideas that belong to the proposition are united.”96 Thus if Edwards was critical of Locke’s epistemology because of any implicit threat it posed to religious belief, it was not because of its empiricism or radical subordination of revelation to reason, but because of the potential implications that its infallibilistic criteria had for traditionary religious knowledge. Even here, however, it is more likely that it was Tindal’s appropriation of Locke’s de¤nition of knowledge rather than the Essay itself that disturbed Edwards and provoked his criticism.97 For it is in his explicitly anti-Tindalian treatment of mysteries in the “Book of Controversies” that he lists this de¤nition as one of the principal targets of his treatise. At the outset of this essay he Sacred History and the Common Sense

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proposes several items for address, among them: “Concerning the falseness of that proposition that knowledge is only the perception of the agreement or disagreement of two ideas”98 Tindal’s efforts to exclude merely probable or somewhat obscure ideas from any consideration of claims to religious knowledge pushed Edwards to conclude that Locke’s de¤nition could be taken to an unwarranted extreme, wherein only those ideas possessing a mathematical certainty would qualify as rational knowledge. It was this aspect of Locke’s epistemology that he attempted to liberalize in order to include less-evident presentations of ideas. “Perhaps it cannot be properly said that we see the agreement of the ideas unless we see how they agree, but we may perceive that they are united and know that they belong one to another, [even] though we do not know the manner how they are tied together.”99 Edwards’s later approach to epistemology allowed for a form of knowledge that contained an inexpressible association of ideas, in which ideas were seen to agree even if their exact relationship could not be precisely articulated.

The wide gulf proposed to exist between Locke and Edwards on the rationality of revealed religious knowledge and on the function of the Bible in delivering that knowledge is thus perhaps narrower than previously assumed. It is apparent that the motive or context for Edwards’s consideration of the problem of the epistemological adequacy of the biblical writings was not provided by Locke’s epistemology, through either his empiricism or his supposedly rationalistic devaluation of revelation. Rather, the context consistently identi¤ed by Edwards as provoking his response was the type of infallibilism regarding the criteria of knowledge proposed by thinkers, such as Matthew Tindal, who often utilized Locke’s terminology and celebrity to advance their case. It was not the constraints of Locke’s epistemology, therefore, but rather Tindal’s insistence that revelation be constrained by a restricted understanding of rationality that led Edwards to reorient his own epistemological convictions with regard to the issues involved. Edwards’s resolution of these issues represented an implicit recognition on his part that whatever putative suf¤ciency an ascertained “theological certainty” had for guaranteeing historical religious knowledge, its philosophical and apologetic limitations were manifest in the new intellectual climate. Extrinsic arguments, if not ultimately determinative for his religious epistemology, were unavoidably the new polemical ground on which he labored. His integration of experimentalist solutions to the problem of historical knowledge with his ultimate con¤dence in the reality of an intuitive spiritual sense of the divine excellence of the scriptural accounts resulted in a hybrid religious epistemology. Infallibilist in its general and soteriological orientation, it sought 86


to ground true religion and sacred tradition in a matrix of epistemological certainty. But it was also construed broadly enough to incorporate probative and obscure forms of religious understanding. So conceived, a historically derived religious understanding could continue to lay claim not only to rationality but even to a status as knowledge. It may seem somewhat paradoxical that Edwards, given his life-long convictions about the spiritual and infallible perception of the authenticity of the scriptural accounts, should be so engaged in endorsing a probabilistic and approximate understanding of the nature of historical religious knowledge. This is especially so in light of the sharp criticism of moral certainty that appears, for example, in the Religious Affections. Part of the resolution of any incongruity in this regard (if in fact such existed in his mind; he gives no indication that it did, nor does he offer any attempts to harmonize these elements) may lie in the strongly aesthetic characterization he gave to the spiritual sense. The perception of beauty may not be accompanied by an ability to fully articulate that in which beauty consists. Similarly, the mind’s spiritual conviction about the excellence and certainty of the Bible was, in Edwards’s view, infallible and clear in its assurance that the text was divine, even if the exact manner in which its particular features participated in that divinity were not fully understood. Since the ultimate conviction about its truth and authenticity was an aesthetically certain one, the historical communication of the ideas themselves could allow for some obscurity and uncertainty. But it must also be recognized that his appropriation of “constructively skeptical” solutions to the problem of historical religious knowledge was an expansion of his fundamental epistemological theory, an elaboration to some degree at odds with its core convictions. As with any such endeavor, theoretical tensions were bound to exist, tensions he may have sought to resolve had he lived to work out in a more systematic fashion his epistemology of religion. Arguments that historical sources in principle have the capacity to provide knowledge, however made and however successful, do not of course demonstrate that particular histories are reliable conduits of information. The religious and epistemological justi¤cation of the precedential divine histories was thus closely tied to their factual reliability. Not surprisingly, Edwards immersed himself in the host of critical problems that had arisen about the authenticity of the scriptural accounts, in the debates raging around questions concerning the authorship, transmission, and credibility of the scriptural accounts. It is to this important chapter in his development as a historical thinker that we now turn.


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4

Plain Obvious Sensible Facts When we consider these books barely as histories, delivered to us on the faith of a superstitious people, among whom the custom and art of pious lying prevailed remarkably, we may be allowed to doubt whether credit is to be given to what they tell us concerning the original, compiled in their own country and as it were out of the sight of the rest of the world.1

Edwards hardly could have known of Lord Bolingbroke’s sentiments regarding the historical integrity of the scriptural narratives at the time Bolingbroke ¤rst expressed them. After penning them during his exile in France (1735–1738), Bolingbroke appears to have kept them relatively private, allowing the Letters to be published only after his death, in 1752.2 But Edwards was certainly aware of the sorts of notions advanced by Bolingbroke well before the Letters appeared; the ideas raised in them were hardly original. In fact they animated the intellectual and religious milieu throughout Edwards’s lifetime, and he was intimately familiar with them from the outset of his career. The shock registered at the revelation of Bolingbroke’s views was due not to any innovation on Bolingbroke’s part, but rather to his relatively good standing within the orthodox Anglican establishment. His sins were those of duplicity and betrayal, not originality or invention.3 Despite Edwards’s obvious interest in the controversial intellectual currents of his day, and despite the considerable attention the contemporary literature on Edwards gives to this interest, relatively little study has been directed to his appropriation of developments in critical historical methodology. Such studies as do exist, most notably those of Perry Miller and Peter Gay, have been preoccupied with the question of the relative modernity of his historiography, and have rendered fairly harsh judgments in this regard. Their shared conclusions that his approach to historical writing was positively medieval, thoroughly uncritical, and fairly pathetic have gone largely unexamined and unaltered since they were ¤rst reached.4 Even less interest has been expressed for Edwards’s engagement with critical biblical interpretation. No substantial body of work exists here at all. This fact is probably not coincidental, since any broad consideration of his historical thought would inevitably encounter his manifold interest in the problems that the new critical approaches to history created for biblical interpretation. Scholars have been content instead to restrict their consideration of the historical

Edwards to his narrative constructions, such as the “History of the Work of Redemption” and Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God. No sustained effort has been made to connect his historical thought with his response to critical biblical interpretation, even though the two were nearly inseparable for Edwards and his contemporaries. My intent here is neither to claim nor to disclaim Edwards for historical modernity, though the conclusions reached in this chapter certainly address prior interpretations of his thought. Of far more interest and importance is the character of his appreciation for the problems encountered in interpreting the biblical narratives as history, in an age when being a critical historian was rapidly becoming one of the touchstones of intellectual coherence and respectability. Whether or to what degree such an explanatory approach to the sacred narratives could be reconciled or integrated with their traditional religious interpretation and with the mentality that underlay it was a question that occupied nearly every serious intellectual ¤gure of the eighteenth century. It also dominated much of the discussion about the nature of a truly critical historical method and the production of narratives generated by such a method. An examination of his treatment of the scriptural histories themselves, therefore, promises to have signi¤cant results for the broader consideration of Edwards as a historical thinker.

Critical Method Like many of his more traditional Anglican and Reformed contemporaries, Edwards sought out and imbibed what he could of the most recent developments in critical thought. In the process he modi¤ed his understanding and interpretation of the biblical narratives, while at the same time vigorously resisting the more radical or skeptical implications of this new approach. Edwards’s ambivalence toward criticism is itself signi¤cant, indicative of a more complex reception of this new method than is often acknowledged. This ambivalence was widely shared in the highly charged ideological context in which the critical interpretation of ancient texts developed. It is prudent therefore to begin by attempting to understand what constituted critical thought and method in the early eighteenth century, and to consider why it was both eagerly pursued and regarded with uncertainty if not suspicion by a wide range of religious thinkers. Perhaps the most striking feature of early modern biblical interpretation is its overall disarray. If there is one word that best describes the literature of this period, perhaps it is “chaotic.” Schools of thought are simply impossible to identify—leading thinkers subscribed to so many disparate and contrary opinions on matters of interpretation that characterizing them in any de¤nitive way is probably not advisable, if it is even possible. Most embraced both traditional Plain Obvious Sensible Facts

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and innovative approaches to interpretive problems, and in the more daringly imaginative these approaches were often combined to create radical if not bizarre conclusions. William Whiston is a prime example of such an intellectual hybridization. A historical critic who did much to recover the ancient documentary sources of Christian and classical antiquity, he was at the same time a primitivistic Arian who eschewed the notion of an eternal hell and attempted to employ Newtonian physics to disprove it. But Whiston was also an arch opponent of the deists, an uncompromising biblical literalist who believed that Old Testament prophecies were ful¤lled in the New to such an extent that any disparities between them required emending the prophetic texts in favor of the Christian rendering of those passages. This and other examples should serve as a caveat to anyone attempting to come to an understanding of what constituted “critical interpretation” in this period, let alone its genetic relationship to contemporary modes of criticism. Nonetheless, some sense of what it represented to early modern participants in this discourse, including Edwards, is possible. The mistake is to assume that by roughly de¤ning what “criticism” meant to them and by observing how they practiced it, one is enabled to con¤dently categorize any of them as having or not having passed from a traditional to a modern interpretive mentality. The emergence of the “critick’s method” in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was marked by an increasingly rigorous application of humanist philological and historical erudition to ancient texts and traditions. In this sense it was a constructive exercise aimed at recovering the authentic past from its spurious representations. This ideal was to be accomplished by identifying the original form, purpose, and meaning of historical records and traditions, largely by removing errors accreted to them during the intervening centuries. This notion of historical judiciousness is evident, for example, in one of the reference works possessed by Edwards, Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopedia (1728). Chambers de¤nes “sacred criticism” as the application of literary criticism—“the art of judging of facts”—to the Bible. Such criticism considers “not only history, but also the discernment of the real works of an author, the real author of a work, the genuine reading of a text, and the art of discovering suppositious monuments, charters, [and] interpolated passages.”5 Richard Simon’s pivotal work on the Old and New Testaments proceeded from a similar understanding. Criticism, he wrote, is “a term of art” applicable to any work; its purpose is “to examine the variant readings, and establish the true ones.” Since the Christian religion consists “principally in matters of fact” the work of the historical critic is paramount to its proper understanding. And since the “Sacred Books have not been exempt from faults that the passage of time and the negligence of copyists bestow upon every sort of work, there have always been learned people in the Church who have applied themselves to correcting

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its Bibles.” Thus, according to Simon, the purpose of those who practice this art “is not to destroy but to certify.”6 As Chambers’s de¤nition intimates and Simon’s own work demonstrates, this critical approach to sacred history was not limited simply to issues of textual emendation, but also included a broad range of issues such as authorship, manufactured evidence, and cosmology. Comparisons made between the parallel historical accounts of the Israelite nation as well as between the parallel Christian histories of the four gospels revealed signi¤cant problems of consistency. The resolution of the discrepancies by traditional harmonization techniques proved to be less and less compelling, though the literary industry aimed at resolving them was massive and vibrant. Debates about the appropriate interpretation of many of the signal events of sacred history, such as the Eden creation, the Deluge, Babel, and Joshua’s long day, became particularly acute. Under the pressure of the increasing knowledge of the world more modest and often naturalistic reinterpretations of these events were forthcoming. These novel modi¤cations of traditional interpretations were often met with considerable outcry. Perhaps more than any other constellation of issues, the truth or factuality of the biblical histories occupied the center of critical religious study. Were these documents produced by those traditionally assumed to be their authors, or were they later forgeries? Were their authors in a position to provide reliable information about the events entailed? Could they be corroborated by other historical accounts? Did they accord with new theories in the natural sciences and new information about other cultures and their historical traditions? How could they be reconciled with the sacred accounts of other religious traditions? Were they, ¤nally, able to stand up to the critical standards of historical writing now being demanded of more recently produced narratives, including recent narratives of ecclesiastical history? The practice of this sort of critical methodology underwrote many of the constructive contributions made to mainstream biblical interpretation by the likes of Hugo Grotius, Louis Cappel, Richard Simon, Jean Le Clerc, John Mill, and Johann Bengel. The appropriateness of such a method was, of course, not without its detractors. The pristinely divine origin of the Bible assumed by many theologians and biblical scholars led them to resist critical conclusions regarding the historically conditioned features of the text. François Turretin, for example, successfully engineered a confessional rejection of Cappel’s work demonstrating the late origin of the Hebrew vowel points that was incorporated into the Helvetic Formula Consensus (1675). Doctrinal concerns also played their part; the anti-Protestant polemic laced throughout Simon’s treatments of the Old and New Testament texts contributed to the hostile reception of his historical judgments in the wider republic of letters. Nonetheless, this

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erudite form of criticism was within the mainstream of Protestant and Catholic humanistic traditions of interpretation, and its results were increasingly recognized. There was also a second and increasingly popular form of criticism that served to further complicate attitudes about the suitability of such a method for biblical interpretation. Patrick Lambe has argued that this alternative form of criticism, expressed in the form of satire or wit, was the preferred method of free thinkers and philosophes as a means to broader cultural and philosophical ends. Derisively skeptical in nature, ideologically and often commercially driven, satirical criticism employed the results of the historical criticism of the Bible in order to undermine or ridicule its religious uniqueness and authority.7 Such critics generally made fewer signi¤cant contributions to the biblical scholarship of the era, but in their role as wits and journalists they served as important interpreters and arbiters of its potential cultural signi¤cance. This mediatorial role provoked a certain level of hostility and disdain from erudite practitioners of biblical criticism, who more often than not accepted the religious authority of their object of study. But it also conferred an identi¤cation of these two forms of criticism to the popular mind, thereby contributing to the suspicion and ambivalence with which biblical criticism was often regarded.8 Edwards was thoroughly taken with the problems created by the application of both forms of criticism to the biblical materials. His notes and biblical commentary fairly bristle with entries on critical problems. Nowhere, perhaps, is this more pointedly illustrated than in his “Table” for the “Miscellanies.” As Thomas Schafer has astutely observed, this index is a “theological document in its own right,” revealing Edwards’s attention to major theological problems as well as his perception of their interrelationships.9 In it there are dozens of entries concerning the problems of scriptural history, such as the “Facts of Christianity, their truth,” the “History of the New Testament, early written,” the “History of the Old Testament from Moses’ time con¤rmed from heathen traditions and records,” and the “Pentateuch written by Moses.”10 Edwards’s interest in critical thought, however, embodies the sort of ambivalence so often expressed toward its suitability and value for biblical interpretation. On the one hand, he clearly thought of himself as a participant in the broader movement of critical interpretation that was underway. He embraced those thinkers whose work was esteemed in the republic of letters. Jean Alphonse Turretin “is abundantly cited by Stapferus and every where spoken of exceeding highly and as very much celebrated in the World. The many Citations that he makes for him show him to be a man of uncommon smartness and greatness of judgement.”11 “Dr. Doddridge in his notes on the NT often cites Elsner’s Observations with great approbation . . . and calls him an admirable critick.”12 He notes the importance that possessing a critical objectivity 92


or disinterestedness in the subject has for a historical interpreter. “Dr. Lardner in his 8th volume . . . says of Beausobre’s History that this author did not implicitly embrace the prevailing opinion of the times in which he lived and allowed himself to consider impartially what he met with in antiquity.”13 And as is evident from his “Account Book” and related epistolary exchanges, Edwards and his associates had an established network through which they exchanged books of this nature, a practice that lasted throughout his career: Aug. 1733 Lent to Mr. Allis the second volume of Millar’s History of the Propagation of Christianity Lent to Mr. Hopkins 2nd vol. of Prideaux, Sept. 27, 1733. Sept. 6 [1734] Lent to Judah Hutchinson Mr. Clark’s Evidence of Natural and Revealed Religion. Lent to Job Strong the ¤rst two vols. of Prideaux May 9, 1747 Lent to Mr. Hopkins of Shef¤eld the third to sixth volumes of Lardner’s Lent Warburton’s Divine Legat. to Mr. Bellamy Feb. 1751 Lent to Mr. Hopkins Dr. Winder on Knowledge Dec. 22, 175514

Indications of Edwards’s receptivity to critical thought are also evident in the breadth of his reading program, not only the works he possessed but also those he was actively pursuing. These included many of the pivotal thinkers of the era, who often had theological and interpretive agendas quite at odds with his own, and some of whose critical judgments about the biblical narratives were quite heterodox and controversial in their day.15 Edwards seems to have had little or no reservations about the fact, for example, that in their present form the received texts of the Old and New Testaments required serious emendation. He sought what he knew to be the better critical editions of both. “A new edition of the Hebrew Bible by Father Houbigant of the Oratory where are many corrections of the text with a Latin translation with the ¤nest and most beautiful letters and critical notes.” “Bengelius’s Annotations on the New Testament. Mr. Harvey in the 2nd vol. of his Dialogues says the author is a critick of accurate judgment and delicate taste.”16 In addition, Edwards sketched out his own critical program of study in various manuscripts, much of which no doubt would have come to fruition in his later treatises, chief among them the “Harmony of the Old and New Testament.”17 His notes about his plans for various historical investigations must also be given weight in this regard. Perhaps the best example of this is in the notebook “Subjects of Enquiry,” written for the most part during the transition of his attention from the analysis of true religion in the mid-1740s to the speci¤cally critical historical problems that occupied the last decade of his life. Some of the entries in this notebook relate to general questions of historical method, such as whether the present human experience of the world is similar to that of the ancients, and whether it can be determined that reports Plain Obvious Sensible Facts

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from foreign places or ancient times have been reliably transmitted.18 He also thought at some point to develop his technical understanding of the historical method, and so “to enquire concerning the things which make a history of past ages to be credible in a present age.”19 Other entries in this notebook address speci¤c issues relating to the historical authenticity of the Old or New Testament, all of which were being contested in the deistic literature. He proposed, for example, “in reading the Evangelists to observe critically whether all that Jesus did during his publick ministry could be accomplished in one year,” and also to read “the Acts and the Epistles to observe the evidences of the truth of the fact of Christ’s resurrection and other chief facts relating to Christ.”20 He realized that all of this material would need to be organized in a coherent system. Thus he intended to make “tables of what I have written on several subjects, especially such as I have written more largely upon; at least tables of the texts of SS.”21 Edwards was actively embarked on a plan that would devote considerable attention to the critical historical study of virtually the entire corpus of biblical literature. Yet it is also the case that he strenuously resisted the most radical and negative judgments about the historical integrity and meaning of the biblical texts, especially when these judgments were promulgated in deistic literature as part of their critique of the prevailing religious authorities. His own writings about controverted issues of biblical interpretation almost always served an apologetic purpose, were polemical in their tone, and were modest in their departures from traditional historical judgments. He did not engage the issues in a rigorously erudite study, in the manner of a Cappel or a Bengel or a Simon, for example; rather he was preoccupied with the implications that such interpretations had for the contest over the religious arrangement of AngloAmerican society. He worked primarily as a theologian absorbing the impact of critical thought with the intent to moderate it, rather than as a historical critic per se. Like many of his contemporaries, he found it dif¤cult to negotiate the boundaries between tradition and its revision, or between erudition and satire, and thus embodied an ambivalence about the value of critical thought. He found it particularly dif¤cult to allow for novel historical judgments, in whose name subversive religious claims were being made simultaneously. He excoriated for their “magisterial, contemptuous, sovereign, assured, supercilious, overbearing, insulting, overlooking airs” those critics who made “vast pretences to an accurate and clear view of the scope and design of the sacred penmen and a critical knowledge of the originals.” Though Edwards himself recognized the cultural and temporal distance between the present and the past, he resisted the notion that this made these texts irretrievable, quipping that it was “easy to re¤ne and criticize a book to death.”22 When Perry Miller and Peter Gay made their respective assessments of Edwards as a historical thinker, they did so by evaluating his historiography 94


in light of the “new history” emerging from the efforts of noted eighteenthcentury ¤gures such as François Voltaire, David Hume, and Edward Gibbon. The quintessentially modern historical outlook of such thinkers, according to Miller and Gay, lay in their substitution of secular and naturalistic for religious or theological explanations of historical development. As a part of its secularizing agenda, the new history also sought to replace the biblical periodization and architectonic of history (creation and consummation, fall and redemption, the four monarchies of Daniel) with political, humanistic, or organic schematizations. The new historiography, Gay wrote, was marked by its “anticlericalism, its worldliness, and its aggressive modernity.” It was a historical approach that was “scienti¤c rather than metaphysical, critical rather than credulous, naturalistic in temper, and wholly incompatible with revealed religion of any kind.” Part and parcel of the new history in Gay’s characterization was its ideological intent. It was involved not simply with matters of erudition, but also with how this erudition could be utilized for religious criticism and social change. It was this combination of erudition and critique that distinguished the new history from Edwards’s own historical thought. “The philosophes’ histories made secular propaganda by providing information about a real past; Edwards’s history made religious propaganda by arousing memories of a religious myth.”23 Edwards’s historical work suffers by comparison. More or less oblivious to the critical philosophical changes being visited upon historical method and history writing by his contemporaries, Gay concludes that he continued to operate as though the intellectual revolution going on around him had little if any implication for his approach to the discipline of history. The books, the journals, and letters of his late years, like those of his early years, betray no skepticism of miracles, no doubt of Scripture, no rebellion against God’s sovereignty, no deviation from the Augustinian vision of history. In the midst of the greatest revolution in the European mind since Christianity had overwhelmed paganism, Edwards serenely reaf¤rmed the faith of his fathers.

In Gay’s estimation, Edwards is a tragic and to some degree sympathetic ¤gure. Though a brilliant student of modern thought, he had a rigid adherence to his Puritan heritage that prevented him from making the necessary conceptual accommodations to the scienti¤c view of human history that was emerging in the works of Voltaire, Montesquieu, and others. To read Edwards’s historical work against this backdrop is to “leave the familiar terrain of the modern world with its recognizable features and legible signposts for a fantastic landscape, alive with mysterious echoes from a distant past, and intelligible only—if it can be made intelligible at all—with the aid of outmoded, almost primitive maps.” 24 Plain Obvious Sensible Facts

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It is of course entirely true that Edwards continued to think historically according to categories principally derived from a universalized biblical drama. History begins with Eden and its aftermath, and ¤nds its resolution in millennial splendor. His historiography was derived in part from the monarchic pattern set forth in the book of Daniel, and he pointedly stressed the providential nature of historical causation. But on closer examination the decidedly anachronistic character of his historical thought and the sharp disjunction between Edwards and his more enlightened contemporaries is in need of revision, and for several reasons. It is now evident, for example, that the new historians were no more interested in recovering the “real past” than were their more theologically minded contemporaries, nor was their methodology or practice of it substantially different or improved. Furthermore, their interest in using history to critique the present social and political setting signi¤cantly distorted their historical judgments. Everyone subscribed to the ideal of objectivity and factual rectitude in the eighteenth century; but all wrote as well with partisan ideologies barely hidden. In addition, scholars have raised serious questions about whether the new history was as conceptually distinct from its predecessors as has been asserted, arguing instead that it was not as secularized and certainly not as monolithically opposed to religious explanations. Rei¤ed, quasimetaphysical explanations such as “progress” and “nature,” for example, stood as conceptual cousins to traditional religious explanations such as providence. The new historians, furthermore, were heavily dependent on the theologically oriented historical erudition of the seventeenth century, both as methodological models and as sources of information, an indication of closer connections in their respective methods and narrative productions than has often been acknowledged.25 In any case, the preoccupation with the philosophical or metahistorical elements of eighteenth-century historiography and with their implications for assessing Edwards’s thought overlooks the equally important concern for issues pertaining to the critical apparatus employed in the new historical disciplines. Regardless of whether or to what degree there was a paradigm shift underway in eighteenth-century historiography, methodological questions about the determination of historical authenticity or factuality were paramount for all historical thinkers of the period. Those concerned with the problems of criticism measured the historical acumen of their predecessors and contemporaries by their ability to produce or recognize true works about the past. Any attempt to evaluate Edwards’s historical thought must take these methodological issues into account, and to do so leads inexorably to an examination of his approach to the critical issues surrounding the scriptural accounts. Studies of the history of biblical interpretation and its relation to broader trends in historical method often mask the essentially traditional outlook of its practitioners in the early modern period. Though their contributions did 96


provoke heated controversies, with some signi¤cant exceptions they continued to work within the broad conceptual and rhetorical framework of the biblical story, af¤rming the basic intelligibility and historical authenticity of the events recorded therein, or at least working within their broad outlines. This is true, for example, of Jean Bodin as well as Richard Simon and Giambattista Vico, generally thought of as some of the most critical and progressive historical thinkers of the era. It is even truer of more conservative or mediating scholars such as Johann Bengel, Jean Le Clerc, and Robert Lowth. More characteristic of the critical historical work of these ¤gures was their increasing willingness to alter their interpretation of various features of the grand biblical drama in an effort to make them conformable to the explosion of information becoming available through the republic of letters. What was new about their biblical interpretation was the common pattern of providing explanations employing natural or historical causes as well as a more sophisticated understanding of historical context in order to account for certain features of the stories and anomalies in the text. While attempting to harmonize their new and less theologically determined renderings within the broader narrative framework, they nonetheless were willing to reshape or discard traditional interpretations of cardinal biblical stories in order to make them conform to the contemporary state of knowledge. Skeptics and apologists alike, then, were increasingly dissatis¤ed with many of the speci¤c details of the scriptural history, or at least with their traditional interpretation, even if the most pro¤cient biblical scholars were conceptually prepared to work within the larger outlines of its narrative. Given Edwards’s essentially traditional approach to biblical interpretation, it should come as no surprise that his own historical judgments are likewise relatively conservative. But his willingness to af¤rm the grand narrative can hardly count against the assessment of his historical acumen. What is perhaps more noteworthy in his approach is his inclination to acknowledge the historical limitations of the biblical accounts, and his creative attempts to relate them to a broad body of secular knowledge. He perceived that the very historical form of divine revelation contributed to its interpretive dif¤culties.26 Beyond this, he was prepared to recognize that these accounts were not the transparent or complete histories they traditionally had been taken to be. Though they remained universally signi¤cant for the religious understanding and welfare of humanity, they did not ¤nally present the comprehensive and pristine narrative of human history that had been assumed, a source of interpretive dif¤culty even for the religious historian. So I might further observe, that if we have a revelation given in antient languages, used among a people whose customs and phraseology are but very imperfectly understood, many dif¤culties should arise hence; and that in a


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very short, concise history, where only some particular facts and circumstances that concern the special purpose and design of that revelation are mentioned, and innumerable others are omitted, that would be proper to be mention’d, if the main design were to give a clear, full, connected, continued history of such a people or such affairs, as the history mentions; I say in such a case ’tis no wonder, that many doubts and dif¤culties arise.27

Edwards’s acknowledgment that the Scripture history was a concise and limited narrative was a recognition of the fact that the universalistic interpretation of the biblical narrative was becoming less and less compelling. It still remained for him, however, to consider whether the limited history it did recount was factually authentic, and in what respects it could be related to historical traditions outside of its purview. It is these sorts of concerns that mark the development of his historical thought. It is likely to be more helpful, therefore, to evaluate his appropriation of critical thought according to those characteristics most relevant to early modernity rather than to more contemporary de¤nitions of the term. Such an approach offers to shed light on the decided impact that historical criticism actually had on his intellectual project. Modern notions of critical thought are almost wholly unsuitable for this period, if we understand them to entail a rather complete skepticism about received traditions, to be characterized by wholly naturalistic explanations of religious phenomena, and to be exempt from a deference to any controlling religious or theological perspective. Early notions of what constituted criticism were more ®uid and much broader in scope than present usage tends to allow for. Hard distinctions between critical and pre-critical thought simply do not hold for the era. It is probably accurate to say that few historical thinkers and still fewer biblical interpreters in the period from 1650 to 1750 can be identi¤ed as “critical” in the contemporary sense of the term.28 The picture that emerges of biblical interpretation in Edwards’s lifetime is instead one constituted by a rather heterogeneous mix of critical and theological modes of explanation coexisting more or less uneasily even in its seminal practitioners, regardless of their particular con¤dence in or skepticism toward the biblical narratives.29 Even the most identi¤ably critical thinkers of the era could employ religious arguments when it suited their purposes, and nearly all were remarkably credulous about ancient sources when the surface narratives of such reports suited their particular ideological agendas. The historiography of the Enlightenment that portrays the emergence of a rational, historical mentalité in the eighteenth century through the efforts of prescient, heroic individuals is itself an anachronistic invention, and one not applicable to the way in which critical historical method was developing in a still highly religious age. Those who participated in its development made distinctions not so much between critical and pre-critical thought as between 98


competent and incompetent critics, between the discerning and the gullible. They inhabited points along a spectrum of critical thought that included any number of theological positions; indeed, individual ¤gures could inhabit several different points along that spectrum, depending on the issue at hand. They used each other’s work as sources of historical erudition, and recognized each other as a part of the critical milieu.30 Edwards and his like-minded colleagues ought to be understood, therefore, as residing at the conservative end of this spectrum of criticism rather than in a class of thought distinct from it. The critical culture in which Edwards operated was a far more textured and religiously cosmopolitan environment than is usually acknowledged.31 It should come as less of a surprise, then, that otherwise traditional religious thinkers could embrace critical attitudes, that many of the most learned critical interpreters of the Bible were relatively traditional in their theological beliefs, or that together they formed a diverse but shared critical republic of letters. To ignore this phenomenon makes it more likely that scholars will miss the richness of the thought of the period, and to pass over what makes it signi¤cant in its own right. It is more important to identify the degree to which critical historical explanations came to function even for those who were otherwise still traditionally religious in their general explanatory procedure, and it is a mistake to dismiss their work for being irretrievably pre-critical. Thus for a ¤gure like Edwards one must attempt to gauge the degree to which critical thought penetrated and shaped his biblical interpretation and the way it coexisted, but also came to compete to some extent, with his theological interpretations of the biblical stories. Only when the seriousness of his historical method of interpretation is recognized for what it is will the shape of his religious thought be more properly understood.

Authentic Text When Oxford fellow John Mill’s Novum Testamentum appeared in 1707 it provoked a considerable stir among skeptics and apologists alike. The result of years of study, it was the most ambitious effort to date to accumulate the known variants of the Greek New Testament in a single edition. Mill enumerated some thirty thousand of these, and like other attempts to improve the received text, it did not go unnoticed or unchallenged. The eventual reaction to his work may or may not have surprised Mill, had he lived more than two weeks after its publication. Such critical work in England had been challenged a generation earlier, for example, when Brian Walton’s Polyglot Bible was attacked by John Owen. Though textual criticism had been a part of the theological disciplines for some time, it was by no means universally embraced. Daniel Whitby, among others, responded in print; his Examen variantium lectionum J. Millii (1709) voiced his concern that critical textual studies underPlain Obvious Sensible Facts

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mined the popular faith, if not worse.32 He was not alone in this perception. Mill’s “thirty thousand” became something of an invocation in deist literature for the unreliability of the sacred texts. As had Anthony Collins and John Toland before him, Matthew Tindal questioned whether “those thirty thousand various Readings, which are own’d to be crept into the New Testament” did not make these texts completely doubtful.33 It troubled Johann Bengel enough that he produced a new annotated Greek text (1734) from the best available manuscripts, and perhaps more importantly, that he introduced a new disciplinary method and critical apparatus to the whole enterprise of textual criticism, something Mill had not done. Many years later, Edwards himself remarked on the notoriety of Mill’s work, observing in his “Catalogue” that it was spoken of as “a Book in every Bodies Hands.”34 Eighteenth-century thinkers inherited a number of residual problems pertaining to textual authenticity from the critical work of the preceding centuries, mostly composed of a mixture of historical and theological issues thrown into the cauldron of ecclesiastical politics. During the Reformation period many if not most of the presumably settled issues surrounding the authority of holy writ had been reopened. By the end of the seventeenth century, however, they were being fueled anew by a greatly improved access to ancient Christian documents as well as the increased advantage they offered for the purposes of ideological critique. Of these problems three received considerable attention: textual corruption, inspiration, and canonicity. Not surprisingly, Edwards invested his energies in all of them. Richard Simon’s critical histories of the Old and New Testaments (1678 and 1689, respectively) served to distill most of the crucial textual debates in the coming decades. He rejected as late interpolations passages such as 1 John 5.7 and the end of Mark’s gospel, for example, and pointed out all of the salient contradictions between textual versions of the testaments as well as those between the parallel historical accounts within them (e.g., early and late royal histories, the synoptic gospels). In Edwards’s lifetime these problems were commonly known and popularly bantered about.35 The corruption of the biblical texts manifested itself in a number of ways, some of which Edwards does not seem to have been so troubled by. Nonetheless he recognized their real force, which was not always the case among traditional interpreters. His Irish namesake John Edwards, for example, followed ¤gures like François Turretin and John Owen by ®atly asserting that the present texts were incorrupt, and indifferent to the vagaries of historical transmission. Responding to Simon’s claims of a marred Hebrew text, John Edwards asserted that “we have reason . . . to be thorowly perswaded that the Books are entirely transmitted to us without any Corruption, and are the same that ever they were, without any Diminution or Addition.” 36 Edwards the American does not seem to have shared these concerns and 100


convictions entirely. Naturally, he did not have the technical pro¤ciency, resources, or time to be seriously engaged in text-critical pursuits, and this may account for some of his seeming unconcern. This is not to say, however, that he did not recognize their presence, or the signi¤cance they posed for asserting the integrity of the text. He actively pursued works of textual criticism; Mill, Bengel, and Houbigant appear in his “Catalogue” along with a host of other textual aids. He seems in principle to have accepted the fact that transmission was a historical process requiring critical emendations to preserve the basic integrity of the text, though he also clearly assumes a high degree of preservation.37 Edwards had had a ¤rsthand encounter with the potentially divisive nature that textual variants pose, in the case involving Robert Breck, who had voiced concerns privately and publicly about the authenticity of the adulterous woman and trinitarian witness passages in the New Testament (Jn. 8.1–11 and 1 Jn. 5.7). But even traditionalists were divided over such issues by this time. In his Canon of the New Testament (1726) Jeremiah Jones raised serious doubts about the trinitarian passage, while in his Novum Testamentum Graecum the equally astute Johann Bengel af¤rmed its authenticity. It is somewhat curious that Edwards does not devote any consideration to either passage in his “Notes on Scripture,” “Blank Bible,” “Miscellanies,” or early sermonic corpus, except as glosses. It is a strange silence, but perhaps not too much should be made from it; he also passes over the end of Mark’s gospel almost completely in his sermons and manuscripts, yet occasionally employs it as genuine.38 At the same time he sought interpretive strategies that minimized the impact of such problems, particularly as they raised issues about the internal coherence of the texts. Here he predictably harmonized passages so that their contradictions seemed more apparent than real. He was particularly taken with efforts attempting to reconcile the differing accounts of historical events in the Old and New Testaments. These largely concerned name and number disparities in works such as Joshua and Judges, between works such as the books of Samuel and Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah, as well as synoptic problems on the chronology of Jesus’ travels and his genealogy.39 While these sorts of issues may seem tedious if not tri®ing to the contemporary reader, it must be remembered that deists and other skeptics were just as tediously trotting out such problems as evidence of textual unreliability. Thus it was imperative that their resolution be worked out in detailed ways. Beyond this consideration, however, such problems clearly constituted real conceptual dif¤culties for traditionalists like Edwards, and thus provide evidence of his own emerging historical sensitivities. Occasionally he was willing to entertain relatively subtle interpretations. Thus he notes that in the ¤fth chapter of the gospel of John, Jesus’ speeches appear in the form of a single continuous discourse, when it is likely that they are mostly a distillation of conversations with his Jewish audience that were adapted for the purposes of the Plain Obvious Sensible Facts

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author.40 It is also clear that Edwards was engaged in a wider public dialogue on such matters. In 1744, for example, he and the Scottish divine William McCulloch began a correspondence on critical matters that lasted for several years, at least until 1747. Their interchanges addressed, among other things, the problems of different historical reckoning of the length of the captivity in Babylon in Jeremiah and 2 Chronicles, as well as the internal calendrical dif¤culties in the prophecies of Daniel. Not surprisingly Edwards arrives at their reconciliation, but only by concluding that the passages in question were true in different senses.41 In addition to empirical evidence concerning the integrity of the written texts, two theological conceptions of their authenticity occupied the attention of critical thinkers of the era. The ¤rst of these, inspiration, was especially troublesome when it came to considering the production of sacred historical narratives. A common understanding of inspiration during the era assumed a kind of ecstatic state on the part of the prophet, a form of possession analogous to pagan oracles, in which an author’s mind and speech were to some degree beyond his or her immediate control. The recording of the prophetic experience thus emerged as a type of automatic writing. But this was clearly not the case with the accounts recorded in scriptural history, which had all the appearance of being as sober and deliberative as their ancient counterparts, devoted to the investigation of empirical evidence, and thus not the result of ecstatic vision. Did this mean then that the sacred narratives were not similarly inspired, and that their authority was impaired? Figures such as Hugo Grotius and Benedict de Spinoza suggested that only the prophetic books could make such a claim to inspiration. Thomas Hobbes simply dismissed the notion of inspiration as a metaphor for the pious moral content of the sacred writings.42 Others countered such assertions by modifying their notions of what inspiration entailed. Richard Simon, for example, rejected the dictation theory of inspiration, but argued that the Holy Spirit aided the biblical historians in such a way as to prevent their deception, a view he claimed to have borrowed from Cornelius a Lapidé. He also asserted that though the books were subsequently compiled by editors, their inspired authority was preserved by the fact that these editors were public scribes, members of the schools of the prophets.43 In his Five Letters Concerning the Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures (1685) Jean Le Clerc lays out a range of commonly held opinions on the issue. While it is no easy matter to discern Le Clerc’s own views—he relates these as the opinions of a pseudonymic friend—he outlines the theory that the historical parts of the Bible owe their authenticity simply to the sincere intentions of the authors. These needed only a good memory and a requisite honesty to write their accounts, the point of the scriptures being to “make us good men, not able criticks.” 44 The assurance to be had about these histories lies mainly in their ascertained reliability, not their inspiration. 102


Edwards was thoroughly engrossed with the problem of inspiration, and attempted to resolve it in a way that was characteristically if not uniquely his own. One of his earliest comments appears in the twentieth entry of “The Mind” (c. 1724), a passage that embodies his fundamental position as well as intimating a potential adaptation. His account encompasses the concept of inspiration with a decidedly aesthetic aura. The biblical authors had an absolute certainty about their inspiration. Their “knowledge is in a sense intuitive, much in the same manner as faith and spiritual knowledge of the truth of religion.” Inspiration consists in the “brightness” of the ideas raised, as well as their “perfect agreement with the excellencies of the divine nature.” The prophet has so divine a sense, such a divine disposition, such a divine pleasure . . . that he sees immediately that God is there as we perceive one another’s presence when we are talking together face to face. And our features, our voice and our shapes are not so clear manifestations of us, as those spiritual resemblances of God that are in the inspiration are manifestations of him.45

Edwards roots his theory of inspiration in the aesthetic perception of the divine being, a further indication of the centrality of this insight for his theology and biblical interpretation. As with his articulation of the sense of the heart, he also employs his familiar analogy of personal communication. His use of this description is similarly problematic, in that it is not immediately clear whether prophetic inspiration is different in kind from the common spiritual sense, or only in degree.46 While Edwards no doubt believed that there was a clear difference, it illustrates the dif¤culties involved in attempting to explicate concepts such as inspiration in rational terms without losing their supernatural distinctiveness. He closes this entry in “The Mind” with a comment that is tantalizingly opaque: “But yet there are doubtless various degrees in inspiration.” What did he intend by this statement? Does it refer to a graduated spectrum on which the illumination of the saints and the prophets could both be arranged? Or was he speculating about the possibility that other ancients outside of the biblical economy had been also inspired, as he does elsewhere? Or was he similarly considering whether the genres of the Bible required different degrees of inspiration in their production? The second of these three possibilities seems the most likely to be in his mind here. The ¤rst should be ruled out, for Edwards subsequently makes clear the distinction between illumination and inspiration in the sermon series “Charity and Its Fruits” (1738). There he borrows a scholastic taxonomy of the gifts of the Spirit, between the common and the saving and the ordinary and extraordinary. Common gifts belong to the godly and ungodly; saving (or special) gifts of course do not. Extraordinary gifts include those of inspiration Plain Obvious Sensible Facts

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and prophecy, and ceased with the closing of the apostolic age. Ordinary gifts are those spiritual gifts granted to the post-apostolic church. Essentially, ordinary gifts are the same as saving gifts. They are operative in conversion and sancti¤cation, and include the spiritual illumination of the saints. Quite interestingly, however, extraordinary gifts are also common gifts. Thus, while limited in time and scope within the church, they also exist outside of the church among the ungodly without such limitations. Though unusual, they are not intrinsically salvi¤c, but “are common to good and bad” alike. They are therefore in principle available to the heathen.47 Edwards was quite willing subsequently to acknowledge that inspiration, while distinctly prophetic, might also be a fairly common experience. “It may be worthy of consideration whether or no some of the heathen philosophers had not with regard to some things some degree of inspiration . . . which led ’em to say such wonderful things; inspiration is not so high an honour and privilege as some are ready to think.”48 The third possibility, that the biblical historians possessed a lesser degree of inspiration, seems less likely. As he states in the “History of the Work of Redemption,” this is “no common history” but rather one “written by men that came with evident signs and testimonies of their being prophets of the most high God, immediately inspired.” And even though “they are histories, yet they are no less full of divine instruction . . . than other parts of the holy Scriptures that are not historical.”49 But this is not to say the Edwards did not devote attention to the problem that mundane biblical genres such as history posed for the traditional theory of inspiration. By the late 1720s he had produced several short treatments in the “Miscellanies” on this problem. In the most systematic of these he makes a theological argument for the inspiration of the biblical histories, appealing to the “necessity” of such records in the economy of redemption.50 In Misc. No. 352 (1729) he discusses Moses’ inspiration in terms of his intimacy with God, and makes an argument reminiscent of Simon’s regarding the safeguarding of subsequent historical records, concluding that these too were produced by members of the prophetic of¤ce. At other times he explores the personal dimension of the process of inspiration, concluding that these penmen retained control of their faculties in writing. In fact, authorial personality could actually predominate in the production of certain texts, as when Solomon wrote his love song. Israel’s philosopher-king “set himself in his own musings to imagine and point forth to himself a pure . . . love.” The “musings and feelings of his mind,” while remaining “in a philosophical and religious frame,” nonetheless were “carried away in a sort of transport.” Solomon’s innate creativity appears to have been the initiating factor in the production of that book, subsequently utilized but not obliterated by the Spirit: “the train of his imaginations were guided and led on by the Spirit of God.” Thus the Spirit “made use of his loving inclination, joined with his musing philosophical disposition, and so directed and conducted it in this train of imagination.”51 104


This concern about the processes of inspiration and their relationship to literary genre runs through the “Notes on Scripture” as well, in both early and late entries. One of the most trenchant criticisms made of the biblical texts on this score was to claim that their provenance and subject matter suggested a natural or human rather than divine origin. This was particularly troublesome for a book like Job, which purported to record the words of a Gentile; Edwards invested considerable time arguing for its inspiration and canonicity, in part by defending the recording of dreams and parables as inspirable literary forms. He claimed the same for the book of Psalms, arguing that its function as a book of national worship did not mitigate against its also being inspired and that song was the form of speech most closely allied with prophesy in the ancient world.52 This analysis also had to be extended to books that seemed to treat largely secular matters, as with the case of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, which did not “treat of divine things but temporal matters or husbandry.”53 These criticisms and Edwards’s analysis were extended to the literary genres of the New Testament as well, especially the apostolic epistles (and even the gospel histories themselves). In the late 1730s he began to develop a set of notes that indicate his plans for a studied response. A frequent claim made by deists and others was that such letters were largely occasional writings, not intended for a wide audience or as authoritative pronouncements, and thus not inspired.54 His “Rough Notes” address all of these claims in systematic fashion. Thus the “apostles’ doctrine and precepts were looked upon as infallible and as having the force of a rule by them and the church in their days. This doctrine was thus spoken under the names of the traditions that had been delivered.”55 Edwards’s treatment of the problem of inspiration was very much a work in progress, and so de¤nitive conclusions about its ¤nal form cannot be reached. This perhaps should not come as a surprise; his reading included some very heterodox thinkers on this issue, and even the most traditional interpreters that he read were searching for theories that would accommodate the distinctions being made between history writing and other prophetic forms of literature. Benjamin Bennet, for example, a strident opponent of the deists and one of the most frequently cited works on inspiration in Edwards’s notes, had himself moved in the direction of the views espoused by Simon and Le Clerc. He too owned that the relating of historical facts does not require as high a degree of prophetic inspiration, but rather only a low degree of Spirit-given direction so as to avoid mistakes in reporting, the authors remaining fully possessed of their natural faculties, memories, and reason.56 Edwards at least would have agreed that inspired historians retained possession of their natural faculties. His theory in any case would have been utilized to defend the authority of the historical portions of the biblical corpus. But this is not to say that he was unaffected by current discussions, or that these would not have had a creative effect on the articulation of his own views. Furthermore, it was not an effort Plain Obvious Sensible Facts

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without an intended outcome. No doubt some of his thoughts on the subject would have been brought together in the “Harmony of the Old and New Testament,” where the issues of the correspondence between prophecy and ful¤llment were paramount. As importantly, he appears to have been preparing to treat them with considerable attention in the culminating theological treatise of his career, the “History of the Work of Redemption,” by expounding on the historical development of the prophetic consciousness and its various forms of communication.57 The nature and scope of the sacred canon was likewise a signi¤cant issue in the eighteenth century. If considerations of inspiration addressed the psychological experience of the divine-human encounter, deliberations about the canon addressed the criteria to be used for evaluating which books gave evidence of such an experience. Like the issue of inspiration, determinations about canonicity involved a complex set of theological and historical judgments, and so did not admit to a ready solution. An intrinsically theological concept, decisions about the propriety of a book’s canonical status ultimately could not be resolved by critical study; yet at the same time historical investigation signi¤cantly challenged traditional complacency about the criteria and process of canonization. Though the issue of the canon had been revisited during the Reformation, its received form had for the most part been reaf¤rmed. Even the intertestamental apocrypha, though rejected by Protestants as non-canonical, continued to play a more signi¤cant role in Protestant piety and Bible publishing than is sometimes remembered. But by the late seventeenth century greater access to the primitive sources of Christianity and a consequent awareness of the great diversity of belief and practice in the early church threw the question open once again, this time with a considerably lesser degree of settlement. For the Old Testament this was mostly a matter of casting doubt on those books included rather than suggesting an alternative canon. For the New Testament, however, the availability of other primitive Christian works further complicated any suggested remedy.58 Determining the nature and scope of the canon essentially involved the use of two basic means of evaluation, one theological and the other historical. The theological criterion had to do with content: did a book contain teachings that commended themselves to a conclusion of their divine origin? The historical criterion had to do with usage: did a book’s claims to divine authority have a historical resume within the early church? Both measures were used to undermine the stated boundaries of the Old and New Testaments during Edwards’s lifetime, particularly by deists. It was only too easy to ¤nd ethical dif¤culties with the received texts, for example, particularly with those of the Old Testament, where many of the leading characters were adulterers, thieves, idolaters, and murderers. On this score it was hard to distinguish exemplary sacred his106


tory at times from the heroic narratives of pagan mythology, and this became a common refrain among its ideological critics. The question of historical patrimony was an even thornier problem. While the Old Testament canon could be fairly passed off through its sanctioning by the early church, traditional assertions about the New Testament canon were not so easy to sustain. These rested on the apostolic connections of the books as well as their universal reception by the earlier church, and critical historical study severely challenged these assumptions. In 1699 John Toland published a study of John Milton, Amyntor, in which he produced a catalogue of early Christian works consisting of apocryphal gospels, acts, epistles, and apocalypses. Toland noted that these works all claimed to have an apostolic connection, some even making the claim to have been authored by Jesus himself. Many of them were to be found cited in patristic authorities as inspired books. Why weren’t they in the canon? Furthermore, various patristic writers were openly skeptical about some of the books in the received canon; the apostolic authorship or origin of several of them was open to doubt. The ¤nal shape of the canon itself was only settled at a relatively late date, and not without dif¤culty.59 He followed this up some years later with Nazarenus (1718), a study of the apocryphal Gospel of Barnabas, whose manuscript he had discovered in Amsterdam in 1709 (a text he was accused of forging in an effort to undermine the canon). He claimed that this was in fact an Ebionite text, the work of a primitive Christian group that maintained a sort of unitarian Jewish orthodoxy apart from Pauline, Gentile, Trinitarian Christianity, and the sect from which Islam derived its monotheism and interpretation of Christianity.60 Taken as a whole, he argued, the evidence from early Christian sources made it clear that orthodoxy in the early church was a relatively ®uid and unsettled concept. Canonization was thus a historical and political process, not an infallibly inspired one, and not one that had produced a de¤nitive or suf¤ciently inclusive collection of authoritative works.61 Claims like Toland’s—and there were many of them—required theologians’ renewed attention to the whole issue of canonicity, and particularly to its historical origins and criteria. Two of the most weighty responses to the new critique, Jeremiah Jones’s Canon of the New Testament (1726) and Nathaniel Lardner’s Credibility of the Gospel History (1727–1757), attempted to answer Toland and others by producing comparably erudite studies of the origin and collection of the received canon. Both scholars were non-conformists. Lardner was an Arian and Jones most likely was, yet like many Arians (e.g., William Whiston) they were relatively conservative or traditional on most questions of biblical interpretation. Both works had an enduring presence in critical debates, in®uencing the work of key ¤gures such as Johann David Michaelis (Einleitung in die gottlichen Scrhiften des nuen Bundes, 1750) and Johann Semler (Abhandlung von freier Untersuchung des Canon, 1771–1775).62 Edwards owned Plain Obvious Sensible Facts

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both Jones and Lardner, and used them extensively in his own historical investigations into the canon.63 The canonical problem appears frequently throughout his manuscripts, including the “Miscellanies,” “Notes on Scripture,” “Blank Bible,” and various other papers.64 Many of the entries center on the more notoriously problematic books of the two testaments. Some of these, such as Job, the Song of Solomon, and Ecclesiastes, had been criticized for their questionable provenance or lack of elevated content. He attempts to address these problems, interestingly enough, by grounding them in a historical context rather than relying solely on arguments as to their theological suitability. The book of Job was of particular concern since it related the religious experiences of a person outside of the redemption narrative of God’s people. Edwards attempts to reconstruct a historical provenance (the geographical location of Uz, and its proximity both locally and temporally to Moses) that at least brings it into contact with the biblical narrative. Based on its “Arabic style” he accepts the theory that Elihu was the probable author. This work required someone of “eminent piety and wisdom,” since only such persons “were wont to be inspired, and to be improved as the penmen of holy inspired writings”—one example of his broad theory of inspiration in the ancient world. But Elihu was also a likely candidate because he was an eyewitness; good history required proximity to the events, someone “that lived near the time when the things were transacted.” Though not written by Moses, the book of Job was nonetheless subsequently embraced by him through his relationship with his father-in-law, the priest Jethro, and so entered into the stream of biblical redemption.65 Others books, such as Daniel and Revelation, were questioned because of their doubtful authorship or initially troubled acceptance into the canon. Here again Edwards attempts to reconstruct the historical context of their origin and reception, in order to authenticate their authority. He rejects a Maccabean date for Daniel (such would imply its being a forgery and “¤ctitious pretence”), for example, by arguing that it was accepted as an authentic work of the Babylonian prophet in Jewish antiquity. This in spite of the fact that there were sectarian rivalries over the canon in intertestamental Judaism, and in spite of the existence of contemporaneous apocryphal works that were excluded from the canon. So too for the book of Revelation, most frequently targeted by deists because of its late acceptance into the canon; Edwards resorts to patristic testimony certifying its early authority in the church. On the book of Jude’s citation of the apocryphal Enoch, he concludes that this was an acceptable practice established in the pattern of the Old Testament historians, who “when speaking of things recorded in Scripture History many ages after those Histories were written do mention particulars not recorded in those histories.”66 By far the most thorough and studied treatment among all the entries in his manuscripts, however, is Misc. No. 1060, “Concerning the CANON of the 108


NEW TESTAMENT.” Perhaps the longest entry in the “Miscellanies” save for the “Types of the Messiah” (Misc. No. 1069), it was composed at about the same time, probably toward the latter years between 1744 and 1749, perhaps 1748. Though essentially an excerpt from Jones’s Canon of the New Testament, it is nonetheless an important indication of the direction of Edwards’s approach to the canonical question. In it he records in impressive detail the early patristic evidence regarding the authority of the received canon, particularly the gospels and the book of Acts (the end of this entry leaves the impression of an un¤nished work, one that would have continued on to the epistles and the apocalypse). This includes their citation and inclusion in the proto-canonical book catalogues of the patristic writers as well as their recorded usage in religious assemblies. Hence his own conclusion: “it follows that the primitive Christians are proper judges, to determine what book is canonical, and what not. ’Tis next to impossible, either that so great a number of men should agree in a cheat, or be imposed upon by a cheat.”67 Interestingly, Edwards extensively cites Jones’s argument on the near-apostolic origins of the Syriac version as proof of an early canon.68 Robert Breck had used this material some ¤fteen years earlier to support his view of spurious interpolations in the New Testament, since the Syriac lacks 1 John 5.7 and John 8.1–11. Edwards uses the absence of whole books in this version (e.g., 2 Peter, Revelation) as an indication that it preceded the ¤nal canonical collection, stark testimony to the divergent in®uence that critical historical study could have in colonial religious thought. His use of Jones and other “orthodox critics” also exposed him to the diverse nature of early Christianity, however. Thus in Misc. No. 1060 he records evidence that the apostolic literature circulated unevenly among the churches, reaching some much later than others. Additionally, the persecution of the church meant there could be “no publick noti¤cation of universal agreement in this matter.”69 Some books were passed over in the patristic catalogues, their “credit not suf¤ciently established” at the time, and some, like 2 Peter and Revelation, were publicly disputed.70 He observes that apocryphal works such as the Shepherd of Hermes and the Epistle of Barnabas were also read in the churches as “pious and useful books,” and that a whole list of imitative gospels, acts, epistles, and apocalypses circulated among them.71 Thus Edwards was well aware of the fact that the process of creating and collecting the works of the received canon was hardly a religiously or historically pristine one, and that the theological condition of early orthodoxy was relatively diverse. Without a doubt he consistently interprets such potentially contrary information to the favor of his traditionalist thesis. Nonetheless this was not an exercise conducted in isolation from the growing historical awareness of the travails involved in reaching a canonical consensus. Edwards was also prepared to interject the issues of inspiration, prophecy, and canon into his public discourse. In his 1738 sermon series, “Charity and Its Plain Obvious Sensible Facts

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Fruits,” he devoted signi¤cant portions of two preaching units (the second and fourteenth) to their consideration. Here many of the problems addressed in his private notes surface: the inspiration of individual ¤gures such as Moses, David, Daniel, Job, and Elihu, for example, as well as the closing of the canon at the end of the apostolic age. In this case the “fruit” produced was “an established written revelation of the mind and will of God” for the church.72 Ten years later, at the time he was composing Misc. No. 1060, he delivered a second sermon series on the same passage, this time more fully devoted to the critical problem of the ceasing of prophecy and the closing of the canon in the ¤rst century. Here he more directly employed the results of his historical studies. “The antient writers . . . inform us of it as a fact continuously received as undoubtedly true; that the apostle John did collect together the writings of the other apostles and evangelists and settled the canon of the New Testament.”73 Even more signi¤cantly, it is apparent that Edwards intended to include the historical development of the canon in his revision of the “History of the Work of Redemption.” He planned there to observe “through the successive ages from Moses’ birth to the Apostle John’s death how extraordinary [the] dispensation[s] of providence were for the introducing, perfecting, and con¤rming a standing written rule of faith and practice, even the canon of the Scriptures.”74 In the main his approach to authenticating the sacred texts is characterized by its adherence to traditional af¤rmations of their apostolic origins and divine authority. At the same time what is most striking about his treatments, un¤nished as they are, is their notable reliance on historical veri¤cation and explanations of their authenticity. Perhaps most notably, Edwards devotes little attention to appeals to the self-authenticating, internal marks of the texts— their divine excellency and sublime content. This is not to say, of course, that he would not have done so had he the opportunity to fully develop his thoughts on these matters. In general, however, theological justi¤cations of the books of the canon, while important to him, were substantively augmented by evidential arguments rooted in appeals to historical fact. In retrospect some of his historical reconstructions may seem highly speculative and even naïve; nonetheless his approach clearly intimates a transition away from predominantly theological explanations of such religious phenomena. Edwards’s writings on textual authentication are early, wide-ranging, and long lasting; they constitute an important element in his broader treatment of critical biblical interpretation that began to coalesce in the late 1740s. Some of it may have been intended for an individual treatise, in much the same manner that his treatments of the authorship of the Pentateuch and messianic typology were. It seems even more likely, however, that this material would have been incorporated into the two ¤nal great projects of his career, the “Harmony of the Old and New Testament” and the “History of the Work of Redemption.” Here again Edwards foreshadows subsequent nineteenth-century 110


developments. The ¤rst published work on the problem of canonicity by an American author was Archibald Alexander’s Canon of the Old and New Testaments Ascertained, which did not appear until 1826. The two most important sources for the development of Alexander’s treatment? Jeremiah Jones and Nathaniel Lardner.75

Authorial History If there was anything that members of literate culture in Edwards’s era agreed upon, regardless of their varying estimations of the scriptural accounts, it was the preeminently factual nature of historical narrative; indeed, this sentiment has been characterized by some as the de¤ning mark of early modern historical thought.76 Jean Bodin’s classic treatise on method (1566) described history as the “true narration of facts,” “the image of truth,” “a record of events which is placed in the clearest public view.”77 Well established from the outset in Renaissance theory, this conception of what historical writing entailed was so stable and so prevalent as to be a commonplace in the ensuing centuries. Jean Le Clerc (1700) distinguished history by its complete adherence to factuality, truthfulness, and impartiality.78 Henry Winder, an author cited frequently by Edwards, de¤ned it simply as “a relation of the affairs and transactions of others.”79 History, the encyclopedist Ephraim Chambers related, was “a recital, or description of things as they are or have been, in a continued, orderly narration of the principal facts and circumstances thereof.”80 A number of forces converged to fasten this view of historical narrative in the culture of erudition from the sixteenth century onward. The political and religious disharmony of the period shattered notions of a broad consensus about the Christian past as well as the implicit trust in authoritative traditions required for such a consensus. In its place grew a heightened suspicion of fraud and credulity and a fear of imposition that resulted in the desire to recover and rewrite the truth about the past. This process of fragmentation and reconstruction meant devising and implementing a historical theory and method possessing greater critical accuracy and sophistication, and resulted in the elevation of the factual to a place of unrivaled importance for evaluating historical writing. The new historical mentality, as Joseph Levine observes, valued this “distinction above any other kind” and sought “to ¤nd out how to establish it in practice.” It was thus “necessary to devise some explicit criteria for recovering the historicity of an event,” and this entailed inventing “a new idea of fact, a notion that the literal representation of past or present could be interesting in and for itself, or for some present purpose, and that it could and should be radically distinguished from a spurious or imaginary description.”81 The push for factual recovery manifested itself nearly everywhere, not only in history writing proper but also in the critical methods of study in other disPlain Obvious Sensible Facts

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ciplines. Rooted in an early push to separate the use of common sense language in rhetoric from scholastic analytic philology, it soon provided the conceptual leverage for those who also wanted to distinguish history from those forms of rhetoric in which invention was tolerated and even appreciated—in poetry, for example.82 The historical approach to philology continued to ®ourish throughout the sixteenth century, and spawned critical studies in a number of other disciplines as well, perhaps most notably in French legal studies, a discipline that produced such pivotal historians as François Baudouin, François Hotman, Estienne Pasquier, and Jean Bodin. Erudite legal history had a political function—a reliable access to the past meant a more stable legal present—and so the emphasis on textual criticism, authentic primary sources, and established facts met an urgent practical concern.83 The search for national legal origins precipitated the search for authentic national histories in which traditions of common law were rooted. Critical approaches to national history in turn contributed to the development of critical approaches to ecclesiastical history.84 These historical studies were greatly aided and in®uenced in method by antiquarian studies ®ourishing in Italy, England, and elsewhere. Concurrently, historians and others committed to a mitigated form of empirical epistemology had to defend their discipline against the criticisms of ¤rst the philosophical pyrrhonists, and then the geometricians, to whom the appeal to factuality was addressed.85 This obsession with the factual also manifested itself in signi¤cant changes in the form of historical writing. Since the best history was the most factual one, the best history was the most comprehensive one. This meant amassing more and more information, which resulted in an increasingly encyclopedic literature that impaired the lucidity of the narrative.86 The effect of this well-ingrained preference for history as a factual record was to foster an equally strong disavowal of invention. Thus history was de¤ned largely by its distinction from the genres of invention: fable, romance, poetry, or myth. These forms of literature could be de¤ned and distinguished in a fairly innocuous manner, as in Ephraim Chambers’s characterization of fable and romance as, respectively, “a tale, or feigned narration . . . disguised under the allegory of an action” and a “fabulous relation of certain intrigues and adventures in the way of love and gallantry, invented to entertain and instruct readers.” But others could be less charitable in their estimations, castigating such literary forms for the very quality of invention. Jean Le Clerc distinguished poetry from history by the former’s convention of entertaining with ¤ctions. To read poetry was, in his words, to read the work of a liar. Similarly, Mathias Prideaux’s Easy and Compendious Introduction for Reading All Sorts of Histories, a work that appears in Edwards’s “Catalogue,” concludes that romances are the “Bastard sort of Histories,” which “may be noted not for any great uses of them, but for manifold abuses by them.” They were, in his words, the “Brat of Invention, and Spawn of idle Hours.”87 Regardless of the tone of 112


the rhetoric, however, the distinction between the factual nature of the historical and the ¤ctive nature of the fabulous was assiduously maintained.88 The reasons for this hard and fast distinction are understandable. While history and ¤ction may be understood relatively in contemporary discussions, occupying different points along a spectrum of invention, in early modern historical thought ¤ction implied a kind of deception, lying, and, ultimately, fraud. This the advocates of the new history were loath to be associated with, since the very reason for their critical method in disciplines such as law and national or ecclesiastical history was the recovery of the truth about the past. They sought to clear away legendary and fraudulent interpolations that had accumulated over the centuries, thereby rectifying the political and religious impositions that had been foisted upon European social institutions. Historical credulity was the object of much of the intellectual discontent of postRenaissance life and was inimical to the new empirical, scienti¤c spirit of the age. Demonstrated charges of invention or bias, therefore, sounded the deathknell to the claims of any historical work. It was this universal agreement about the distinction between history and fable among all its participants that made the debate about biblical history so contentious, and virtually determined the course of its development. To propose that the founding text of Christendom lacked factuality was to suggest that it had been predicated upon a deception, not to say multiple and gross deceptions, something intolerable to the historical sensitivity of the age. This proposition thus became the locus of an alternating skepticism toward and apologia for the scriptural narratives, indeed the entire canon, which carried over to their religious authority and value. As Francis Gastrell observed, the “truth of the Christian religion depends upon plain obvious sensible facts,” and so it was hard for many “to conceive how mankind should be so far imposed in matters of this Nature, as to agree in the belief of so many strange Facts, performed in such a public manner, in so many places, for a whole age together, before so many witnesses, of different characters, and interests, if none of them all were true.”89 Hans Frei’s observation that traditional biblical interpreters in the eighteenth century took the literal, historical form of biblical narratives as evidence that they were reliable historical reports is entirely accurate, but it ignores the fact that this assumption was held by skeptics as well.90 That is, deists, philosophes, and other free thinkers similarly assumed that if the biblical narratives could be shown by credible means to belong to the genre of history, then they also should be deemed to be authentic representations of the past. This explains to a large degree the intensity of their attempts to demonstrate the fantastically inventive nature of those accounts and their derivation from the mythic traditions of other cultures. To successfully relegate biblical history to a genre akin to heroic saga was a preemptory argument against its credible representation of the past, and thus its authority. Plain Obvious Sensible Facts

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By the late seventeenth century the essential criteria for determining the authenticity and credibility of historical reports (particularly in the case of ancient histories) were popularly known and commonly agreed upon. They included, with various permutations, that an author be suf¤ciently informed on the subject, be a person of evident judgment and integrity, and betray no obvious or implicit bias or motives to lie. Authors should also be eyewitnesses to the events they recounted, or short of this, have access to eyewitness accounts. They should have access to empirical evidence such as physical monuments (e.g., erected memorials), and particularly, they should have access to public institutional records, all witnessed to by appropriate citations. There should be an evident, public nature to the events recounted; these should not be things done in secret or in the presence of only a few individuals. There should be no serious internal contradictions in an account, no detectable lies, forgeries, fables, or inventions of any kind. Finally, there should be no contradictory external reports, and preferably, there should be corroborating external reports.91 These criteria were insisted upon for histories of all kinds, including ecclesiastical, and without dissent became the criteria that skeptics and apologists used to either condemn or justify the critical acumen of the biblical historians. By at least the late seventeenth century these concerns and the historical considerations that shaped them had ¤ltered into colonial American society and were affecting discussions about the nature of scriptural history there as well. The prominent New England divine Samuel Willard, for example, felt compelled to address them in what would become the culminating summary of his life’s work. He asserted that the scriptural accounts were not primitive fables but were composed of “matters Historical.” “The truth of them is in relating matters of fact as they were; and there is no story there, but is related right, however incredible some things may seem to a carnal mind; there is nothing Romantick there.”92 But as much as any other ¤gure these issues affected the thought and career of Edwards himself. It has been one of the burdens of the present study to demonstrate that the problems of critical thought touched disparate areas of his intellectual program, but their impact on his biblical interpretation is evident even by the most casual observation. They permeate every stratum of the “Miscellanies,” and indeed dominate the latest entries. No less than one-¤fth of the “Notes on Scripture” are taken up with critical historical problems, and hardly a page in the “Blank Bible” lacks such entries. These entries cover the full range of problems extant in the contemporary literature, and no doubt the work of several scholarly careers would be required to fully delineate them. What is clear, however, is that Edwards had markedly absorbed the historical sensibilities of the age. The factual and ¤ctive nature of scriptural history consumed his interest. While it was certainly intended in part as a mnemonic device, for example, one cannot help but be impressed by how often he capitalizes 114


the word “FACT” where he writes of these issues. Historical interpretation intruded upon and even competed with his native inclinations toward theological interpretation; passages initially treated in a typological manner are frequently reassessed in terms of their historical authenticity. The view that Edwards was somehow serenely isolated or insensitive to contemporary historical thinking simply must be discarded. To the degree that modern historical thought and biblical interpretation can be characterized by a preoccupation with questions of factuality and the employment of historical forms of explanation, Edwards can arguably be cast as someone who had decidedly imbibed the modern historical consciousness and had imported it into his perception of sacred narrative. Nowhere did critical thought collide more notoriously with traditional biblical interpretation during his lifetime than over the seemingly intractable problem of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. When Thomas Paine appealed to the new nation in his Age of Reason (1794) to embrace a more rational form of religion, he did so in part by alluding to the shaky historical foundations of biblical religion. At the very origin of that religion lay a deception, which if exposed undermined it in its entirety. “Take away from Genesis the belief that Moses was the author,” and it becomes nothing more than “an anonymous book of stories, fables, and traditionary or invented absurdities, or of down right lies.”93 Paine’s conclusion is of course illogical, but an understandable one; as a cultural intuition it was almost universal, and one that stretched back nearly two centuries. In part it rested on the assumption, longestablished in western thought, that temporal priority was equivalent to philosophical superiority: the oldest is the truest. But even more than this, it rested on contemporary assumptions about the requisite factual nature of history and on the strong preference for authors to have written contemporaneously to the events they recorded. If the Pentateuch was not written by Moses but at some far distant time, then the likelihood that it was an erroneous and even intentionally fraudulent work seemed evident.94 Though Benedict de Spinoza is often credited with interjecting the issue of Mosaic authorship into European intellectual life, it had a much longer prehistory, arising in part from discussions in medieval rabbinic literature as well as in early seventeenth-century English radicalism.95 Spinoza in fact credits the idea to one Ibn Ezra in order to bolster his claim not to be departing from acceptable Jewish interpretation, and at least two other major ¤gures whose works he knew well proposed the idea ahead of him, Isaac La Peyrére (PreAdamites) and Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan). But while the idea of non-Mosaic authorship may have been widely bandied about in the seventeenth century, it was Spinoza’s compelling presentation that seemed to crystallize the controversy, and led to his being identi¤ed as its chief proponent. The problem of the authorship of the Pentateuch is suggested by the book Plain Obvious Sensible Facts

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of Deuteronomy itself, the last chapter of which records Moses’ death. Traditional commentators were of course aware of this fact, but generally worked around it by ascribing this chapter to a trustworthy successor, usually Joshua, the reputed author of the next book in the canon. But accumulating observations of a number of other historical discrepancies made the Mosaic authorship of the rest of the Pentateuch increasingly dif¤cult to maintain. Spinoza points out a number of features that were to become commonplace in subsequent treatments, such as the use of the third person to describe Moses’ activities, the book of the Law being inscribed around the circumference of a single altar, anachronistic references to place names and conditions that could only have come from a later period, and comments within the text that seem intended to explain it to an audience unfamiliar with its details. For his part Spinoza proposed what might be called a compilation theory of authorship. Moses did in fact write several books that are mentioned in the narrative, including the book of the battle with the Amalekites, a book of the Law that contained only religious legal codes, and the few songs ascribed to him. The Pentateuch incorporates these and other materials into a much larger narrative, certainly a post-exilic production and probably the work of the priest Ezra.96 That this text is a compilation is further demonstrated by the disjointed quality of the narrative; Spinoza concludes that Ezra set down the historical and legal precepts “promiscuously and without order, with no regard for dates . . . in order that they might at some subsequent time be more readily examined and reduced to order.”97 Taken in their entirety these textual features seem to point to two conclusions: that the Pentateuch was written by someone who lived much later than Moses, and that the “book of the Law” that Moses did write was something far different from what is now extant, a text almost wholly without historical commentary.98 What distinguishes Spinoza’s work on this problem from most others is the rather dispassionate astuteness of his historical judgments. While he was no doubt aware of the subversive implications of his work, he does not explicitly equate the post-Mosaic provenance of the Pentateuch with any form of invention, nor does he overtly exploit his conclusions for political purposes. He nowhere suggests, for example, that a late dating severely diminished the historical authenticity of the Pentateuch (he has other reasons for concluding this, alluded to earlier in the present study). Nor does he suggest in any way that Ezra’s authorship implies that the Pentateuch’s history is a forgery, or an attempt to impose a priestly cabal upon the Jewish nation. In fact he explicitly rejects such an implication of his work.99 Whatever his intentions, however, such judgments were soon caught up into a broader debate in European and especially English culture about their historiographical and ecclesiastical implications.

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Having circulated privately among scholars for several years, Spinoza’s conclusions met with strong reaction when they ¤nally appeared in print. The notion that Ezra might have written the Pentateuch was latched on to as evidence of its malevolent origins, and was rebroadcast popularly in free-thinking publications such as Charles Blount’s Oracles of Reason (1693), and later in Voltaire’s writings. More erudite responses came from critical scholars such as Richard Simon, but they frequently amounted to adaptations of Spinoza’s thesis. Despite his protestations to his religious superiors that he had written in order to refute Spinoza, Simon also concluded that Moses was but one of several authors of the Pentateuch and, going further, that he had utilized Chaldean accounts of creation and the Deluge to construct those in Genesis. Simon did argue, however, that such historical judgments did not threaten the Pentateuch’s integrity. The question of Mosaic authorship was ultimately unimportant to the Pentateuch’s historical reliability and authority, since it as well as the other Old Testament histories were written, collected, or amended by public scholars (the prophets), and were largely abridgements of original public registers.100 Regardless of the relative sympathy or antipathy of such scholars toward Spinoza’s views, however, the question of authorship devolved almost entirely to the question of invention, with all of its subversive historical and political implications. This most contested of early critical issues, therefore, was not merely or even primarily a question of historical judgment about the speci¤c question of authorship. Rather, it was an argument about whether the Pentateuch (as well as the rest of the Old Testament) provided a factual account of providential history, and beyond this, whether or not it was an intentional fraud. To admit to the force of the case against Mosaic authorship was to concede these conclusions. It is within this context that Edwards’s own work must be understood.101 Edwards’s response to the constellation of issues regarding the question of pentateuchal authorship is found chie®y in two documents. The ¤rst of these is entry No. 416 in the “Notes on Scripture,” a relatively polished essay and by far the longest of any in the four notebooks of this series.102 This entry was evidently written during the years 1740 to 1745; sometime in 1743 seems a probable date.103 The second document is a notebook, begun possibly in the late 1740s but probably in the early 1750s, in which he returned to this question with the obvious intent to revise and elaborate upon the earlier essay.104 The former period is, interestingly, bracketed by Edwards’s involvement in the awakenings and by his important analyses of these developments (Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival in Religion appeared in 1742; the Religious Affections in 1746). Thus during a time noted for its importance to his development as the quintessential American interpreter of religious experience he was also deeply engaged in the fundamental critical historical problem of his age. During the


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later phase of his career, when he was at work on his great culminating doctrinal treatises, he had also once again embarked upon an ambitious treatment of the era’s signal question of higher criticism. It is seemingly the earliest such effort in colonial religious thought, at least with regard to its nature as a formal treatise, and with the probable end of being published in some manner. Without a doubt, this material represents one of the most signi¤cant contributions to American biblical interpretation in the eighteenth century, and is deserving of a more thorough scholarly attention. Yet to date it has not received any study whatsoever. Entry No. 416 bears the heading “Whether the PENTATEUCH was written by Moses.” This, Edwards observes, has been the “voice of all antiquity,” the received opinion of Jews and Christians alike; that Moses wrote these ¤ve books by the command and inspiration of God, “excepting only some particular passages that were inserted afterwards by a divine direction for the better understanding of the history.”105 The theological explanations offered at the outset to account for the authorship and interpolations of these books, however, belie the essentially historical mode of explanation that Edwards adopts to account for the pressing problem of the insertion of non-Mosaic material. Appeals to providential agency are largely absent from the body of his argument. In fact, his effort to explain the genesis of the Pentateuch is probably the most striking example of a purely historical approach among his writings, again indicating the degree to which critical thought was transforming his own. The main thrust of his conclusion for Mosaic authorship rests on an appeal to the unitary features of the Pentateuch—that these ¤ve books form one continuous narrative indicative of a single author—and to elements indicating that its provenance must have preceded the Jewish captivity in Babylon. He begins by appealing to the biblical portrayal of Moses as a literary agent. One of the enduring controversies in intellectual circles in the eighteenth century was the origin of letters. Traditional Christian historiography had generally assumed that Hebrew was the ¤rst human language (at least after the Deluge), and that Moses had introduced writing to the world. This assumption was being vigorously contested, however, as comparative studies of linguistics and ancient historical traditions outside the Bible suggested that other languages and literate cultures may have preceded Israelite society. Ideological critics were quick to turn this into an argument that the primitive Hebrew people were crude, illiterate nomads lacking any art or science; hence Moses was at best a founding ¤gure of this people, shrouded by the mists of a prehistoric time.106 While Edwards does not attempt to argue here that Moses was the author of letters, he does resist the notion of Israelite illiteracy by pointing to instances in the narratives where Moses is described as making a record of the laws and events that came to pass during the sojourn to Canaan.107 Furthermore, this

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record was said to have been laid up in the ark of the covenant, and was therefore presumably extant at the time of the captivity.108 He notes that it appears to have been a common practice in the ancient world (including monarchial Israel) to keep public records, including national and sacred histories, records that were then committed for safekeeping to public of¤cials (priests). This is the same pattern observed in the Pentateuch.109 That a historian should be an eyewitness to events was a cardinal virtue in the new critical history, and so to show that Moses could have been an author contemporary to the founding events of the Israelite nation and religion was important to Edwards’s strategy. That Moses could have written the founding sacred histories of the nation, but that subsequent generations would have lost all trace of them, seemed highly improbable. He proceeds to address the suggestion that Moses was responsible for producing only a very truncated book of precepts (perhaps those found in the book of Deuteronomy), a book that was later incorporated, along with additional legal as well as historical material, into what has come to be known as the Pentateuch. Having already observed that Moses was said to have made written records of historical events as well as revealed law, Edwards appeals to the seamless quality of the narrative and legal portions of the Pentateuch. This seamlessness is both conceptual and stylistic, a quality he takes to be indicative of a single hand. History and precept are integrally and inseparably bound together. They are so “connected, interwoven, blended, inwrought, and incorporated” in the narrative, there is “such a connection, and reference, and dependence,” that they appear “as it were to grow together as the several parts of a tree.” The laws, as they stand, are parts of the continued history; and the history of the facts is only as an introduction and preamble, or reason and enforcement, of the laws, all ®owing in a continued series, as the several parts of one uninterrupted stream.110

As evidence of their literary inseparability Edwards points to the conceptual interdependence of history and law in the Mosaic account.111 For any people to accept such a complex and burdensome body of precepts would have required some sort of historical rationale. Rites such as the Passover would not be compelling without a historical explanation of their origin. The laws are inexplicable without a historical context, pointing to the necessity of an original work comprising both. There is sort of a retrograde momentum to this argument as well. Just as the Sinaitic covenant would have required an accompanying history, so this history would have required the pre-history of the patriarchs, and so forth back to the creation.112 He takes the evidence of a single and harmonizing hand behind the Pentateuch as probative of Mosaic author-


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ship, because the argument for an alternative, editorial authorship rested in large part on the haphazard arrangement of the historical and legal materials. History and law are everywhere so grafted one into another . . . and do as it [were] grow one out of and into another, and ®ow one from another in a continued current, that there is all appearance of their originally growing together, and not in the least of their being arti¤cially patched and compacted together afterwards. It seems impossible impartially and carefully to view the manner of their connection, and to judge otherwise.113

Edwards also appeals to other evidence to bolster the Mosaic origin of the unitary features of the text. He observes that the term “law” does not hold a strictly legal denotation in either the Pentateuch or later parts of the Old Testament. In both there are many instances of its application to purely historical passages from these ¤ve books, suggesting they were original to them. Furthermore, and “well nigh suf¤cient alone to determine the matter,” there are instances in which the author refers to the wilderness sojourn of the Israelites as being on “this side” of the Jordan, whereas later biblical historians always refer to the eastern wilderness as the “other side” of the Jordan.114 This evidence of contemporaneity seemed signi¤cant because, it will be remembered, the many anachronistic references in the texts were often cited as evidence of their later origin. Finally, and perhaps most signi¤cantly, Edwards notes that there are frequent references to both the historical and the extra-Deuteronomic legal portions of the Pentateuch in subsequent books of the Old Testament (to citations of which he devotes over 25 percent of the essay). This, he concludes, points to a common, prior, written tradition from which these later, disparate authors drew their accounts of Jewish history, given the rather remarkable consistency between their reportage and the structure of the Pentateuch.115 If they had not this history among them, or one that exactly agrees with it, it would have [been] morally impossible but that, amongst this vast number of citations and references, with so great a multitude of particularities and circumstances mentioned by so many different writers in different ages, there must have been a great many inconsistencies with the history, and a great many inconsistencies one with another. And it would have puzzled and confounded the skill of any writer that should have attempted to form an history afterwards, that should everywhere, without jarring, so harmonize with such various manifold citations, and rehearsals, and reference so interspersed in and dispersed through all those writings of several ages; and unless those writers had such a record to be their common guide, it could [not] have been otherwise than utterly impossible.116

In spite of his rhetoric that the unitary nature of the Pentateuch was convincing evidence of Mosaic authorship, however, it really only pointed to a 120


common hand, and not necessarily to the time of origin. Edwards may have sensed this; in any case, he devotes the last major portion of the essay to the hypothesis that Ezra was its real author. Again, it should be kept in mind that the common assumption of the age was that histories were as a rule singularly authored, and were not the product of a slowly evolving amalgam of oral or written cultural traditions put together by anonymous editors. This is why, for instance, Voltaire rejected fragmentary theories of the Pentateuch, and no doubt why the search for an alternative to Mosaic authorship centered on some other single individual, most often Ezra (the fact the Ezra was a priest made the theory doubly appealing to ideological critics). Against Ezra’s authorship Edwards proposes several dif¤culties. One of these is a moral argument from silence. If the Jewish people had had a sacred Mosaic book of laws, however truncated, how could they be induced to accept another book in its stead? Moreover, even if this had occurred, why would they not also maintain a fealty to the original? How could such an important sacred text, preserved for centuries, be so abandoned as to disappear without a trace? Would not at least some extant copies have remained, at least for some time subsequent, presumably making their historical existence recoverable? But Edwards offers other, positive historical arguments challenging the notion of an Ezraic or post-exilic authorship. First, it appears that the Jewish community both in captivity (Daniel) and in the century of repatriation prior to Ezra’s return (Haggai) were well acquainted with the book of the law. In addition, he claims, the style of writing in the Pentateuch differs signi¤cantly from Ezra’s known work, the book of Chronicles (this work also evidently derives its genealogies from the Pentateuch, but at the same time they differ in parts, suggesting different authors). Finally, he observes that the Hebrew text of the Samaritan Pentateuch is composed of a pre-exilic “Phoenician” script, while the Jewish (Masoretic) version is of a post-exilic “Chaldeac” script, a state of affairs inconsistent with a theory of the post-exilic origin of the urtext.117 The cumulative weight of this sort of evidence argues strongly in favor of a pre-exilic Pentateuch. Most importantly, the post-exilic community’s evident possession of a “book of the Law” prior to Ezra’s return would have made it impossible for him to palm off a new work as Moses’ own, ancient text. It was generally assumed in Edwards’s lifetime that if the Pentateuch were the work of later author, including and perhaps particularly Ezra, then it could only have been intended as a forgery, a work of priestly imposture and tyranny. Edwards closes this essay by brie®y addressing the phenomenon of later, anachronistic insertions, which in principle he accepts as actual yet viable (divinely directed) alterations made to render the historical references clearer to a subsequent audience. He insists, however, that they are very few in number, and rather hastily dismisses even the validity of these, as well as their importance.118 It is clear from the conclusion of the essay that it was an un¤nished Plain Obvious Sensible Facts

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work; he gives several directions to himself to examine passages in the New Testament regarding Mosaic authorship, as well as to consult other secondary works. The entire essay is also ¤lled with later interlineations, demonstrating both its un¤nished nature and the care that Edwards devoted to it in the ensuing years. That he saw it as a particularly signi¤cant essay is evident in his frequent and consistent references to it in the revision notebook and elsewhere as “my treatise,” the “Pentateuch Written by Moses.” While it is quite apparent then that Edwards always intended to develop this essay into something larger, the motivation for expanding it is not expressly given, nor is the direction or character of that augmentation clear. But the problem of forgery alluded to toward the conclusion of the essay is certainly suggestive, and it is this issue that dominates the revision notebook. The problem of forgery was fundamental to critical considerations of historical authenticity, and was particularly wedded to the underlying ideological contest over the locus of religious authority in Christian society. The proposed forgery of the founding biblical history offered to undermine the entire rationale for the ecclesiastical state. Thus it is of little surprise that it should come to play such an important role in Edwards’s treatment of the authorship of the Pentateuch. The development of a disciplinary historical erudition was intimately related to the ideological contests over religious authority in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and the new critical approaches to biblical interpretation were readily enlisted in them. The “methodological apparatus, both implicitly accepted, and explicitly forged, was linked to the ideological function of historical discourse. The intellectual disunity of the period meant that participants had to search for some form of authoritative leverage in polemical debate, for a form of knowledge that could be deployed and maintained with a status of certainty and objective truth. Thus, in an age of religious disunity, the past, and the presentation of the past, became a displaced crucible for ideological dispute.”119 The agitation in English society for political reform and religious toleration relied heavily on the critique of the legitimacy and authority of the ecclesiastical status quo. This led inevitably to debates about national and ecclesiastical origins, and these broadened quickly to include considerations of the nature of biblical historiography, from which “divine right” arguments for royal and clerical establishment were derived. Arbitrating political and religious contests in the context of historical argument produced a considerable pressure toward the development of a more critical method and literary apparatus as aids to historical interpretation.120 It was a shared cultural assumption that truth and reality could be derived from historical representation; empirical facts, therefore, were the coin of the realm for historical authenticity. To be exposed as a “false coyner” or “romantick imposture” spelled doom for one’s interpretation of history, and thus for one’s religious or political conclusions. Moral authority rested on historiographical integrity; this integrity 122


rested on the historical probability (i.e., factuality) of a given narrative’s account of things.121 Perhaps nowhere was this ideological contest more acutely expressed with regard to the historical origins of biblical religion than over the charge of priestcraft. One of the most powerful conceptual and emotional weapons at the disposal of proponents of political and religious freedom was the claim that standing social institutions had been foisted upon common society by the clerical imposition of a fraudulent religion based on a forged religious history. As J. A. I. Champion has shown, the charge of priestcraft loomed behind virtually every attempt to deconstruct traditional religious beliefs and texts in the eighteenth century, as well as behind attempts to provide their alternative by reconstructing the history of true religion. While Champion’s work does not address critical biblical interpretation per se, the dynamic of its development was thoroughly shaped by this sensitive issue. To the degree that the biblical accounts could be shown not to be what they had been traditionally represented to be, the argument that they were the imposture of a tyrannical priesthood could be made more effectively.122 Edwards apparently began his later notebook on the Pentateuch in the early 1750s. It is constructed of gleanings from other documents; such a scavenging process was characteristic of his Stockbridge period, as suf¤cient paper appears to have proven dif¤cult for him to obtain. These include, toward the beginning of the manuscript, Antoine Arnauld’s De la fréquente Communion, a work that he also used to construct the second of the three revision notebooks for the History of the Work of Redemption. John Wilson notes that he acknowledged the gift of Arnauld from John Erskine in a July 1752 letter. The eighth page is from an April 1753 advertisement for Edwards’s Freedom of the Will (perhaps a discarded misprint; the treatise appeared in 1754). Together these pages ¤x an approximate terminus a quo for this work.123 The last pages in the notebook are constructed from the remnants of correspondence and prayer bids, the ¤nal page being a December 1756 letter from Gideon Hawley. The total length reaches 131 pages, or more than twice as long as the original essay in the “Notes on Scripture,” clearly intimating the signi¤cance of the overall project to Edwards. It is untitled, but its purpose is clear from the ¤rst line: “Mention the abundant evidence that the history was written by Moses and refer to my treatise on this subject.”124 It is also clear that the charge of forgery had come to the fore as the chief concern for Edwards, a problem he had just begun raising at the close of No. 416. Repeatedly, the evidence that he marshals in favor of the historical authenticity of the narratives results in the conclusion that neither “the history of the Pentateuch nor the other histories of the Jews in the old testament were forged after the captivity.”125 This conclusion as to his motivation is con¤rmed by the substance of the “Method” proposed for the envisioned treatise that he Plain Obvious Sensible Facts

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began to sketch out toward the end of the notebook, the second point of which was to show that the [h]istory of their nation that we have after Moses’ time was a history they had in [Israel] among them before the captivity as their true history, and was in general a true history; and those psalms, proverbs and prophecies, etc., were no counterfeit thing or pretended to be of a different date and different original from what they truly were, and the Pentateuch in general was what they called the Law of Moses and was handed down as such from antient times.126

The charge of priestcraft was a pervasive and potent one, and could hardly be ignored. The choices seemed clear to virtually all of the participants in the discussion: either the Old Testament narratives were factually authentic accounts contemporary to the central events, or they were late and therefore fraudulent inventions and impositions. While this mindset did shift attention away from a more judicious tone of historical investigation (characterized in Spinoza’s work, for example), it nonetheless helped to engender an increased application of critical historical standards to the biblical texts. Edwards’s treatment of the Pentateuch is no exception to these in®uences. But while ascertaining its factual reliability was primary for him, it was also preliminary. Such a conclusion ultimately had an apologetic purpose; demonstrating its factual nature provided a straight line to the argument for its Mosaic authorship, and thus an argument against priestcraft. The notebook does include new arguments not raised in the earlier essay. One of these has to do with the notion or ideal of authorial impartiality. Part of the reliability of historians was measured by their ability to distance themselves from their subjects, and to be appropriately critical of them where necessary. Edwards notes that the author of the Pentateuch was quite capable of excoriating the behavior of the Jewish people as a whole: “So much said in the History against the nation—their FAULTS related in such a manner.”127 That such a history had been written and embraced pointed to the impartiality of its author. That it would be preserved and venerated by the very people it denigrated seemed to point to its authenticity; no nation would embrace false criticisms of itself, and most would seek to remove even true ones from their cultural consciousness.128 For the most part, however, the notebook is composed of extensive and important elaborations of arguments ¤rst alluded to in the original essay.129 Edwards’s chief aim is to establish the public and enduring character of the historical events and religion of the Hebrew nation, and the same character of its historical records, thereby establishing the latter’s resistance to tampering and invention. With the establishment of empirical grounds for a universal, national historical consciousness and discourse, the suggestions of a religious 124


fable and forgery being introduced to and even imposed upon the Jewish people would be much more dif¤cult to sustain. His principal instruments for accomplishing this purpose were derived from the notion of monuments, or memorials, and from the claim of a regulated national discourse based on publicly accessible archives. One of the fundamental contributions that antiquarian studies were making to the new critical approach to history was in the use of material culture (coins, obelisks, buildings, etc.) to decipher the past and to shed light on the veracity of historical records. Thus the ability to show that the author of the Pentateuch and other Old Testament historians had relied on this sort of empirical data to construct their narratives was presumptively favorable to the conclusion that they had operated according to critical standards, and had written more nearly contemporaneously to the events they recorded. Edwards utilized this argument in No. 416, but in the notebook his documentation of the “monumental” nature of the biblical accounts is much more extensive. These monuments could be either physical or ritualistic in nature. The histories point to any number of places, altars, and objects, for example, that continued to exist at the time of their writing, lending weight to their claim to factuality: Monuments. The silver trumpets were spoken of in the Law as things that were to be kept for stated use in the Land of Canaan. MONUMENTS. The broad plates that covered the altar made of the censers of Korah and his company. AARON’S ROD that budded by which so many wonders were wrought. OG’S IRON BEDSTEAD spoken of as remaining when the history was written. THE PILLAR OF RACHEL’S grave.130

But such memorials could also be composed of cultural rituals, and in fact for Edwards these seem to be the more compelling kind. The whole constitution of the nation in any part of it civil and ecclesiastical appears to be founded on the facts. . . . Their religion and all the innumerable rites belonging to it. . . . All these were monuments, and witnesses of the truth as every Law, every custom, . . . [and] the very being of the nation and their possession of the country and the names of the cities among them belonging to the states of the nation was a monument of the facts and a steady witness of the truth of them.131

He also devoted considerable space in his revision notebook to the notion that the signal events, laws, and rites were thoroughly public in nature. The rubric, “FACTS PUBLICKLY KNOWN,” forms a kind of leitmotif for the notebook; virtually all of the other arguments made in it funnel into the broad stream of the universal awareness of this narration of providential history.132 The laws were widely promulgated, and its accompanying rites were commuPlain Obvious Sensible Facts

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nally prescribed. Thus the possibility of their priestly and fraudulent imposition was severely inhibited. “Their customs which were monuments of the facts were the most publick possible and very frequent such as whole nations going there; tribes in the year to commemorate those facts to the tabernacle built at that time by miraculous order and where were kept many miraculous memorials of the facts.”133 As importantly, there was a long-standing, written tradition of these facts, a national archive that was universally accessible. These books were “presented to be laid up in a most publick repository, in the most publick building they had in the nation to which all the nation were to resort three times a year.”134 The combined effect of these public features of the Israelites’ history and religious cult, in Edwards’s estimation, was to develop an ingrained, societal knowledge of their sacred heritage, a condition not easily prevailed upon to accept any recent and obviously invented cultural tradition. This argued strongly against the claim that Ezra or some other priestly conspirators had written the Pentateuch, and added much in favor of the idea that these practices and the narratives explaining them were of ancient origin. If any would palm the book containing the law and history of the facts, they must make the people believe that they always had those laws and this account of facts among them and all those things in that state dependent on the laws and facts from the beginning. The senses of the whole nation would contradict it and all would know that it was now new and thus they never heard of it before.135

Edwards’s preoccupation with the public nature of Old Testament history was motivated by his adoption of the factual nature of authentic history. History as a record of veri¤able facts was the sine qua non of critical erudition; to absent the biblical narratives from this realm of discourse was to consign them to realm of fable. His attempt to establish the factual nature of scriptural history, while traditional in its intent, is nonetheless indicative of just how thoroughly his historical thought had been in®uenced by erudite notions of the genre. His integration of critical historical standards into his biblical interpretation was a signal that an important conceptual transition was underway. The concern for factuality is evident not only with regard to the question of the Mosaic history; rather it permeates his biblical interpretation throughout the “Notes on Scripture” as well as the “Miscellanies” and the “Blank Bible.”136 The entries in the Pentateuch notebook were not limited to the question of the authorship and historical authenticity of the ¤rst ¤ve books of the Old Testament. All of the arguments put forth on behalf of these had a similar utility for the remaining historical narratives, in order to demonstrate that the later history “in general is a true record of the affairs of the nation and not some great ¤ction.”137 Edwards also began to treat the speci¤c problems of 126


these works, and indeed expanded this treatment to the historical problems of the prophetic and poetic books of the Old Testament as well.138 This largely occupies the last quarter of the manuscript, including the sections on method, and suggests that he was considerably broadening the scope of his investigations. Taken as a whole, the contents of the notebook strongly suggest that he intended to develop a major treatise on the problems of critical biblical interpretation. It is possible, of course, that this material may have been intended to be assumed into the “Harmony of the Old and New Testament,” but its bulk and divergent subject matter argues against this. It seems much more likely this work would have stood on its own, and was perhaps one of those projects Edwards had in mind when he cautioned the trustees in Princeton that he had several works in development for publication in addition to the “Harmony” and the “Work of Redemption.” That he was still adding to it at least as late as 1756 shows that his analysis of the founding biblical history remained a work in progress, one that undoubtedly would have continued after his transition to New Jersey.

Edwards’s vigorous effort to defend the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch gives clear evidence of the impact that critical historical thought was visiting upon his understanding of the biblical narratives. The evidence and alternative explanations that he offers against the conclusion of their post-exilic origin show that, consciously or unconsciously, he had absorbed the fundamental outlook and criteria of authenticity regnant in the new history. He applied these critical conceptions of what a true history consisted of in a complex and relatively sophisticated manner to the biblical accounts. This application was, however, heavily conditioned by the polemical context in which he operated; his rejection of the non-Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch was virtually determined by the ideologically driven skepticism most often associated with its advocacy. Ever the apologist for tradition, Edwards’s employment of a contemporary historical sensibility and method was directed by his desire to uphold the religious authority of sacred history. By simply observing that the biblical accounts possessed the form and features of good history, he straightforwardly moved to the conclusion of their historical authenticity and traditional provenance. It would be a mistake, however, to understand his resistance to the idea of the non-Mosaic authorship in and of itself as evidence of a “pre-critical” mentality. Critics of no less stature than Jean Le Clerc, for example, were offering similar analyses. Le Clerc takes the view that most of the Pentateuch was written by Moses. Moses was able to write a credible history because he used a critical method, relying on the monuments left behind by the patriarchs to verify his account, as well as citing his other, written, sources. This authorial history Plain Obvious Sensible Facts

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was augmented by only a few interpolations—he allows no more than eighteen later additions, all minor.139 The desire to defend an ancient historical tradition, furthermore, cannot be taken to mean that Edwards’s historical work was not fundamentally altered by his encounter with critical thought. By adopting critical standards for his estimation of the scriptural history, he was in fact signi¤cantly changing the ground rules by which he evaluated its validity and cogency. It was no longer suf¤cient simply to embark on purely theological interpretations such a typology in order to garner their religious authenticity; these stories had to be explained historically as well, and justi¤ed according to critical notions of authentic history. They now carried the additional burden of requiring correlation with empirical data, a task that was becoming increasingly daunting as the knowledge of the natural world and human culture expanded exponentially. The kind of historical interpretation employed by Edwards was a legitimate program of modernization. It was also a program that carried within it inherent tensions and a momentum toward increasingly naturalistic and untraditional interpretations of the sacred texts. The picture of Edwards presented by Perry Miller and Peter Gay as an isolated and anachronistic historical thinker simply cannot be maintained. He was thoroughly taken with the new conceptualization of history as factual enterprise, and attempted to measure the preeminent history of his culture by such standards. While it is certainly true that he occupied a position at the conservative end of the critical spectrum, he was in no way ignorant of or unaffected by critical historical thought. The program adopted by Edwards was in fact the dominant approach in the eighteenth century, and was shared in some measure by such critical luminaries as Isaac Newton, John Locke, Jean Le Clerc, and Johann Bengel. Under the broad in®uence of the British apologetic culture, the program of “critical traditionalism” that Edwards adopted was to become the paradigm for American biblical interpretation for the next century and a half, meeting its demise as the dominant mode of cultural discourse only at the end of the nineteenth century. As with so much else in Edwards’s intellectual biography, his historical thought was thoroughly engaged with and shaped by the pivotal developments of the age. His forays into the realm of critical biblical interpretation are perhaps the most striking instance of his native inclination to connect sacred history with profane knowledge.

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5

Sacred History and the “History” of Religions Vain, wretched Creature, how art thou misled To think thy Wit these God-like Notions bred! These Truths are not the product of thy Mind, But dropt from Heaven, and of a Nobler kind.1 The great and universal end of God’s creating the world was to communicate himself.2

Edwards once made a youthful resolution not to let it look as if he “was much read, or was conversant with books or the learned world.”3 He also was known to criticize his clerical opponents for their dependence upon such learning, rather than the Bible, in their theological arguments. But Edwards had a distinct reputation as well among his detractors as the most abstract sort of theologian, one who, in the words of Charles Chauncy, “made use of more philosophy [in religion] than anyone that I know of.”4 “Too metaphysical” was the frequent criticism of his Freedom of the Will, for example, a charge subsequently recounted if not acknowledged by Edwards in Original Sin.5 The fact is that he was very well read and much at home in the republic of letters, contentedly so, and this erudition naturally ®owed into his public discourse, even in sermons to his more unassuming parishioners. Living in the “age of reason,” neither Edwards nor his contemporaries seemingly had much choice but to engage in a highly philosophical form of religious discourse. But it was an era distinguished not so much by its peculiar rationality as by the breakdown of the traditional agreement within Christendom to bracket rational speculation about religion within the con¤nes of a revealed tradition. The search for the most rational form of religion represented one of the most vexing problems in early-eighteenth-century intellectual culture. Nearly everyone agreed that true religion was amenable to right reason, but how either term was to be understood was a sharply divisive question, and part of the ground of ideological contest. The concept of a rational natural knowledge of God has always been a delicate issue in Christian theology, there being an inherent dif¤culty in the notion of a morally culpable yet ultimately unredemptive knowledge of God apart

from revelation. This problem was exacerbated by the growing insistence during Edwards’s lifetime that such a rational knowledge was not only possible but even preferable to revealed theology. In this intellectual climate natural religion took on the character of a demonstrable science, and one demonstrably superior to the vagaries of competing historical claims to revelation. This scienti¤c concept of natural religion suggested that it was or had the potential to become a comprehensive philosophical discipline, and so could serve as the foundation of social religion and morality. It also suggested that historical religious knowledge would be marginalized as a tenuous concatenation of rationally obscure propositions. A rational natural religion offered to show that revealed religion was vestigial to true religion. A corresponding explosion of interest in the religions of other cultures accompanied this elevation of the status of natural religion. Fueled by new empirical data from colonizing and missionary efforts, those who were so interested could avail themselves of an encyclopedic body of information on religions from every corner of the globe, from antiquity to the present. This wealth of information presented a profound conceptual challenge to European religious thinkers, who were used to contemplating their heritage almost solely in terms of its connection to the ancient Near East, and also were used to a single overarching narrative centered on that time and place. Fitting these new religions into that scheme in the absence of any historical connections to its traditional center required a measurable degree of intellectual subtlety. Skeptics and apologists alike were thus confronted with a two-fold problem. First, they had to be able to articulate and circumscribe the bounds of true religion; not all religion was good religion. Second, they had to account for its presence or lack thereof in the history and culture of human religions. However one de¤ned true religion, whether it was rooted primarily in nature or in revealed tradition, explanations were still demanded as to why it coexisted with patently false religion in every discoverable instance. If heathen religions had begun as a pure form of natural theology, why had they so seemingly degenerated from this into superstition? If, on the other hand, other religions represented the corrupt workings of the heathen mind, why did they seemingly correspond in many instances with biblical religion? For deists, the answer to the ¤rst question was explained politically, as the result of priestcraft. For apologists the answer to the second question was to be found in the universal dissemination of revealed teaching. But the answer to either question required one to come to terms with the relationship of true religion to historical traditions, most pointedly the sacred traditions of the scriptural accounts. This meant reconstructing the history of religion in all its manifestations. Edwards’s reputation as a philosophical theologian has been no less prominent in recent scholarship than it was among his contemporaries, and with

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good reason; he was with little doubt the most philosophically adept American thinker of the colonial period. Considerable attention has been devoted in recent decades to his philosophical writings, such as “The Mind” and his notes on “Natural Philosophy,” as well as his more philosophical theological treatises, such as Freedom of the Will and Original Sin. In addition, scholars have given notice to the importance that nature had in the development and articulation of Edwards’s central theological concerns, especially those related to his broader philosophical speculations. But relatively little exploration has been made of his express and rather persistent resistance to the increasing theological naturalism of his age, particularly as it threatened the preeminence of historical tradition in the development of religious knowledge. Studies that do exist have interpreted the philosophical elements of Edwards’s theology either as a concession to the rationalizing inclinations of the era or, in reaction to this type of interpretation, as a rather straightforward reiteration of the traditional Christian subordination of reason to revelation.6 As a result, scholars have generally overlooked the more innovative elements in his treatment of human religiosity and the creative stimulus they provided to his overall theological project, particularly as it shaped and directed his later treatises. The problems of natural and comparative religion were integral to the development of critical historical interpretation during this period, since they provided a conceptual and ideological alternative to the account of true religion depicted in the Scripture history. The cogency of deistic attempts to undermine the legitimacy of the scriptural accounts through critical historical means depended in large measure on their ability to offer an alternative view of religion that would safeguard the social order and the code of moral behavior that underwrote it. Thus it was imperative for traditionalists like Edwards not simply to defend the historical authenticity of those accounts, but to develop a critique of rationalistic interpretations of religion that would more closely wed the origins of all forms of religion to sacred history. It should be noted here that Edwards had a deep and pervasive appreciation for the beauty and religious signi¤cance of nature from his early youth, as anyone who reads his biographical writings cannot fail to be impressed by. Thus his sensitivity to the aesthetic qualities of nature was rooted in a native experience of its powerful effect upon the soul, and so precedes in some sense his later theoretical considerations of the place of nature and its promotion of rational religious re®ection in the divine-human relationship. But his obvious and immediate appreciation for nature should not be interpreted, as it sometimes has been, as an indication that he inclined to some sort of quasi-romantic exaltation of nature at the expense of the historical sources of religion. In fact, when Edwards came to re®ect upon the place of nature in the knowledge of God, he radically diminished its autonomy as a source of religious knowledge

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and sentiment. Contrary to the rationalizing trends of his day, and in contrast to a consensus developing to some degree within his Reformed heritage, he sought to circumscribe the rational suf¤ciency of human religiosity by appropriating a theory that most religious knowledge was the result of a process of cultural acquisition. Rather than merely emphasizing the traditional limitations placed on natural religion by subjective epistemology (e.g., human ¤nitude, sinful deprivation), he proposed that what appeared to be speculatively developed notions of religion were chie®y derived from a diffuse tradition of revelation. The apparent rationality of such ideas, therefore, rested principally upon the effects of education, not deliberation. After locating the rationality of all religion within the sphere of revealed knowledge, Edwards pressed on to ask the more fundamental question of the particular religious message that nature was designed to communicate. If, as he argued, the essential purposes of all created existence were providential and redemptive, then the natural knowledge of God must itself be chie®y taken up with these concerns, rather than merely conveying the brute knowledge of God’s being and attributes and human moral duty. Both parts of this strategy in effect served to preempt the entire question of the degree to which rational religious knowledge preceded or was unfettered by revealed tradition, historically the point of debate between its various interpreters. It also shifted Edwards’s consideration of the matter away from pure polemics to a more constructive theological task, away from answering the question of what subjectively was or was not possible to discover about God from the natural world and toward the question of what God intended to be known through nature. In response to the deists’ scathing critique of the historical origins of revealed religion, Edwards countered that rational religion had a history too, as it were, and that in fact the two shared an interrelated history of oral and subsequently written tradition. Rational religion had no demonstrative advantage over revealed religion, but rather was also historically and culturally conditioned, and in fact was derivative of it. Thus the more important question, in Edwards’s way of thinking about the problem, was what could be discovered of the manifold expressions of divine providence, using sacred history to discern the signi¤cance of nature and of other religions.

The Origins of “Rational” Religion One consequence of the early modern debates over religious epistemology was an increasingly sharp disagreement over the character of “natural religion.”7 Deists largely rejected or de-emphasized religious knowledge of a historical origin because it lacked a universal rational accessibility. The particular or exclusive origin of such knowledge claims meant they lacked the ca-

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pacity for the kind of rational demonstration characteristic of the mathematical disciplines (more geometrico) that deists idealized. Historical religious claims relied instead on the authority of privileged testimony, and as such depended upon external or merely probable evidences for their con¤rmation. Such knowledge was further compromised by its susceptibility to the kinds of historical processes that produced marked degrees of conceptual variation. This variation all but ensured that uncertainty and irrationality would take precedence in historical religions. An alternative, more rational method of obtaining religious knowledge was therefore necessary, one that could be used to identify a core set of religious tenets transcendent to time and place. The deists’ championing of natural religion was motivated by just such an epistemological quest. While their account of human religiosity recognized the partial (though largely derivative and thus super®uous) value of historical religions, it sought to discover an underlying set of independently demonstrable, universal, and enduring ideas common to them all. Since all true knowledge, including religious knowledge, requires a clear apprehension of and infallible certainty about its ideas, true religion must possess a scienti¤c status separable from its historical provenance. Revealed religion failed these criteria; the ideas gleaned from ancient sacred histories were shrouded in the obscurities of time and the superstitions of the primitive mind. Natural religion, however, was acquired in an intuitive or demonstrative manner, and thus offered to provide a universal core of essential religious ideas. Once this foundation of rational religious understanding had been established, those true religious beliefs and practices that emerged through the circumstances of history could be identi¤ed in any religion. Those ideas at odds with the evident beliefs and practices of natural religion could be safely discarded as their irrational or super®uous character emerged.8 This understanding of the epistemological divide between natural and historical religion lies at the heart of Matthew Tindal’s Christianity as Old as Creation (1730), a treatise perhaps as important as any for the direction of Edwards’s intellectual development. In Tindal’s analysis, the lack of a demonstrative method prevents any historical religion from making a compelling claim to unique religious truths, and so relegates all of them to an inferior philosophical status. I see no Middle, but that we must either own, that there are such internal Marks ¤x’d to every Part of the True Religion, as will enable the Bulk of Mankind to distinguish it from all false Religions, or else that all traditionary Religions are upon a Level: Since those, who, in every Country, are hired to maintain them, will not fail to assert, they have all external Marks; such as Uninterrupted Traditions, incontested Miracles, Confession of Adver-


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saries, Number of Proselites, Agreement among themselves; and all those other external Arguments, that the Papists and Mahotmetans set so high a value on.9

For Tindal, the distillation of a rational natural religion is the only viable option in the face of the uncertainty and self-interest characteristic of historical religions. Evident standards must judge the truthfulness and purity of religious ideas: “if we deviate from this Rule for the sake of what depends on human tradition, we quit certainty for that, which is not pretended to amount to more than Probability.” In order to be counted authentic, an external revelation “must be as immutable as God himself.” Since critical historical study shows that this is not the case with the biblical traditions, one must turn to those resources of religious knowledge that are immutable, namely, to those ideas that are native to the operations of the mind.10 Thus he concludes that intuitive knowledge is especially “the knowledge of God himself, who sees all things by intuition.” It is in the best sense of the term an “inspired” mental process, “that divine, that uniform light, which shines in the Minds of all Men, and enables them to discern whatever they do discern.”11 This light makes the rational understanding of God apart from historical testimony possible, and allows the mind to recognize those parts of a religious tradition that are consistent with this understanding. Suffering no “alteration, diminution, or addition,” natural religion “carries its own Evidence with it, those internal, inseparable Marks of Truth,” something that cannot “be said of any Religion, which depends on Tradition.”12 In a word, if the highest internal Excellence, the greatest Plainness, and Simplicity, Unanimity, Universality, Antiquity, nay, Eternity, can recommend a Law; all These, ’tis owned do, in an eminent Degree, belong to the Law of Nature. A Law, which does not depend on the uncertain meaning of Words and Phrases in dead Languages, much less on Types, Metaphors, Allegories, Parables, or on the Skill or Honesty of weak or designing Transcribers (not to mention Translators) for many Ages together; but on the immutable Relation of Things always visible to the whole world.13

In making their case for the immutably rational character of natural religion, deists inverted the traditional hierarchy in Christian theology between natural and revealed theology. Rather than serving as an incomplete and inadequate propaedeutic to revealed religion, natural religion now functioned as its end, as a sort of Rosetta stone for all forms of true religion. Traditionary religion in turn was relegated to the role of providing examples of particular historical manifestations of this natural rational human religiosity. This exclusive preference for demonstrative over historical forms of religious knowledge in turn provoked an equally polarized reaction on the part of some orthodox 134


thinkers, whose radical subordination and devaluation of natural religion offered to effectively eliminate the distinction between rational and revealed religion.14 While it is clear that Edwards shared the deists’ preference for a religious certainty based on “internal marks,” he rejected their assertion that it was an absolute claim. Probative evidence played a signi¤cant role in his estimation of the verity of religious ideas presented in the biblical narratives. He also rejected their conclusion that only natural religion could lay claim to such certainty, and ultimately, that it could lay claim to any such certainty at all. His appreciation for the problems posed by a rationally autonomous natural religion began to appear as early as 1724, when he was still a tutor at Yale. I suppose ’twill be acknowledged by the deists, that the Christian religion is the most rational, pure and congruous religion that is or ever was established in any society of men whatsoever—and will except only themselves, that serve God more according to his will! But can any believe, that God has so wholly thrown away mankind . . . that there never yet [should] be a society of men, that have rightly paid respect to their Creator and the Supreme Being?15

The problems associated with a historically derived body of religious beliefs continued to occupy Edwards’s attention throughout his career. In fact, it was a fundamental consideration in his efforts to maintain the religious centrality of the Scripture history, and had a pivotal impact on his theology, ethics, and hermeneutics. The ¤rst step toward demonstrating the necessity of revealed religion meant developing the positive case for the adequacy of testimonial knowledge and for the historical authenticity of the biblical narratives. The next step taken by Edwards was to develop an account of natural religion that maintained its traditionally subordinate status in theology. This meant developing an argument that rational religion was not independent of or prior to historical religious knowledge but was in fact derivative of it, and meant developing this argument in such a way that responded to the contemporary critique of revealed religion.16 Given the in®uence of Reformed thought on his biblical interpretation in general, it should come as no surprise that Edwards was indebted to this theological tradition in his assessment of natural religion. But the history of Reformed interpretations of natural religion is itself rather complex, and the relationship of Edwards’s thought to that tradition is no less so. In comparison to some of its medieval predecessors, the Reformed view of natural religion gave a more prominent place to the intellectually depriving effects of sin on the human apprehension of divine things in the creation. Reacting to what they perceived as the overly optimistic anthropology underlying assertions of the rational and demonstrative character of natural religion in certain strands of Sacred History and the “History” of Religions

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medieval theology, Calvin and other Reformers sharply disparaged the ability of human reason to acquire a true understanding of God and religion of its own accord. In Calvin’s words, human beings lacked the “natural ability to mount up unto the pure and clear knowledge of God.” Thus there is no “approved religion, founded upon common understanding alone.”17 This rather fast restriction of natural theology remained a central component of Reformed orthodoxy well into the seventeenth century. Whereas some prominent medieval systems emphasized the philosophical limitations of natural theology in terms of intellectual ¤nitude, Reformed thought tended to cast these in terms of soteriology. Corrupted by human depravity, the natural knowledge of God serves chie®y to render moral creatures without excuse; it has no propaedeutic function in preparation for salvation. Reformed dogmatics thus seldom developed an independent focus on natural theology. Instead, it was treated as a form of revealed theology, derived from the (natural) revelation of creation. Even as revealed theology, however, it could be adequately recovered by the regenerate mind only when aided in its deliberations by scriptural correctives. A true natural theology was the result of, and not the precursor to, a supernatural theology derived from revelation.18 This restricted view of natural religion encountered certain problems in the seventeenth century, however, problems that forced a re-articulation of the relationship between reason and historical revelation in Reformed circles. One of the most acute problems that such a view faced was the potential support it lent to theoretical atheism (materialism), one of the great specters of religious controversy during the period.19 If followed strictly, the logic of an extreme subordination of the rational knowledge of God in favor of an elevated scripturalism could lead to the supposition that atheism not only was possible, but was likely to be the state of individuals and cultures beyond the means of a revealed tradition. This was in fact the claim of early Socinians (Rakow Catechism, 1605), who found that the possibility of atheism provided a curious sort of synergism for their own more extreme version of the Protestant principle of sola scriptura. They appealed to reports that cultures in Brazil and India had no knowledge of any deity, for example, as proof of their own belief that there was no rational knowledge of God outside of a received tradition of revelation, most notably that of the Scriptures rationally interpreted.20 The Reformed doctrine of natural theology, therefore, found itself open to the criticism that it lent support to atheism. The need to distinguish their views from Socinianism, as well as to quash the threat of religious and social disorder implied by even the theoretical possibility of atheism, led a signi¤cant number of Reformed thinkers to develop a more positive assessment of the natural rational knowledge of God as the century progressed. This resulted in what John Platt has termed a “strange hybrid” in orthodox polemical theology.

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While continuing to reject the soteriological adequacy of natural theology, Reformed theologians reintroduced the classical proofs for the existence of God as part of their rational apologetic against Socinianism. A number of leading divines adopted this approach, including theologians at Leiden (Franciscus Junius, d. 1602), Geneva (François Turretin, d. 1687), and even the very conservative Utrecht (Peter van Mastricht, d. 1706). Turretin argued, for example, that the orthodox “uniformly teach that there is a natural theology, partly innate (derived from the book of conscience by means of common notions) and partly acquired (drawn from the book of creatures discursively).” The question, as he put it, was “whether such a natural faculty implanted in man may be granted as will put forth its strength of its own accord, and spontaneously in all adults endowed with reason, which embraces not only the capability of understanding, but also the natural ¤rst principles of knowledge from which conclusions both theoretical and practical are deduced (which we maintain).” This position he viewed as quite distinct from the doctrine of the Socinians, who “deny the existence of any such natural theology or knowledge of God and hold that what may appear to be such has ®owed partly from tradition handed down from Adam, and partly from revelations made at different times.”21 In spite of its of¤cial rhetoric on natural theology, therefore, Reformed thought carried within it a certain degree of conceptual malleability that enabled its proponents to adapt their polemic to a variety of contexts. The result was that in the seventeenth century there were two streams of emphasis in Reformed thought concerning natural theology. One tradition of interpretation, running through ¤gures such as William Ames (d. 1633) and Johannes Coccejus (d. 1669), had almost no place for natural theology in any theoretical consideration of human religious knowledge, emphasizing instead the almost exclusively revealed origin of true religion.22 The systems of divines such as Franciscus Junius and François Turretin, on the other hand, allowed for a more positive, though still constrained, estimation of a rational natural theology. From the late seventeenth century onward, however, the factors that contributed to the elevation of the status of natural theology in orthodox circles were nearly reversed, and threatened to invert its traditionally subordinate role in religious considerations. Socinians experienced a parallel inversion. The rationalist elements of their theory of biblical interpretation had so whittled away the range of deducible biblical doctrine that later Socinians came to espouse the very notion of a rational natural religion repudiated by Socinus himself. In England, Herbert of Cherbury, as well as his deist admirers such as Charles Blount, popularized the notion that true religion could be attained, and indeed must be attained, through reason without any consideration of revealed tradition. The anti-atheistic and anti-Socinian polemic that had motivated the elevation of natural theology in Anglican apologetics (e.g., Boyle lectures) was


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quickly co-opted by deists as a partial justi¤cation to reject revealed religion entirely, and that on the authority of the bishops themselves. In Reformed circles, the constrained views of Turretin and van Mastricht eventually gave way in the eighteenth century to systems in which natural theology was given a foundational and propaedeutic role, such as in that of Christian Wolff.23 Traditionalists of every stripe, therefore, were ¤ghting a rear-guard action throughout the ¤rst half of the eighteenth century. Their elevation of natural theology against enthusiasm and materialism had to be modi¤ed in order to counter rationalist assertions that natural religion could be interpreted as a conceptually autonomous and morally suf¤cient body of religious knowledge. Through an innovative combination of theological, historical, and epistemological arguments, they articulated a fairly radical interpretation of the origin and nature of rational religion, one that emphasized the historical and culturally dependent nature of religious thought, and one that availed itself of empiricist elements in the new epistemology. This approach had a signi¤cant role in the development of Edwards’s interpretation of natural religion, and again shows his af¤nity with certain developments in Anglican apologetics. Edwards’s metaphysical speculations in “The Mind” and elsewhere concerning the ideal nature of the universe and its implications as a proof of God’s being were written as rather unfettered philosophical exercises. But relatively early in his career he gave voice to his belief that such proofs were also resident in Scripture. This testimonial knowledge was suf¤cient to establish the tenets of natural religion, and in fact made purely rational proofs super®uous. “Suppose all the world had otherwise been ignorant of the being of God before, yet now they might know it; because God has revealed himself, he has shown himself, he has said a great deal to us and conversed much with us. And this is every whit as rational a way of being convinced of the being of God.”24 To be sure, one ¤nds on the whole that he is quite capable of speaking of the propriety of theologizing from both books of God’s revelation—“those things by which he makes himself known, or by his word and works.”25 And, to be sure, one also ¤nds him speaking of natural religion as something evident to the rational faculties. In fact, his early sermons can sometimes seem relatively innocent of his subsequent emphasis on the sociological origins of religious knowledge. Thus he could con¤dently assure his parishioners that the doctrines of Christianity are in themselves most rational, exceeding congruous to man’s natural reason. Many of the doctrines are taught by the light of nature: such as the being of God and his being an almighty, all-wise, most holy, a good and bountiful Being; and that he created the world, that he made all things according to his pleasure, so as to show forth his glory. . . . All these doctrines of the Word of God human reason teaches, and they are called the doctrines of natural religion.26

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Edwards’s analysis of natural religion certainly drew upon traditional theological explanations as to its soteriological inadequacy. He concluded that the approach of Tindal and other deists was religiously defective because, for the most part, it resulted in theological ignorance and obscurity. It not only failed to promote worship in society but also gave sparse knowledge of the works of God, of God’s will and dealings with humanity, of the means of appeasing God’s justice, and of the afterlife.27 He concluded that, given all of the indications that point to the spiritual privation of the human condition, “it can’t be imagined that God would leave [us] to our reason as the only rule to guide us in that knowledge and business which is the highest end of life, for it is not to be depended upon.”28 But the evidence suggests that the extremely rationalistic claims being made by deists on behalf of an autonomous natural religion pushed Edwards to augment traditional resolutions of the problem. While such explanations proposed to constrain the rationality of natural religion by appeals to human intellectual ¤nitude and depravity, their admission—and indeed assertion—of natural religion’s essential demonstrability provided little impediment to a mentality that embraced demonstration as the sine qua non of human understanding. This he saw clearly. “But now the humour of the deists is to reject every thing that they have from supposed revelation, or any tradition whatsoever, and to receive nothing but what they can clearly see, and draw out the demonstrable evidence of, from the foundation of their own unassisted reason.” 29 The most effective response to this view, in his mind, was to undermine its premise; namely, that natural religion was founded upon “unassisted reason.” For Edwards this involved adopting a theory and rhetoric that emphasized the cultural acquisition of religious knowledge. Such a strategy was designed largely to preempt the entire discussion of the relative rationality of natural religion by showing that the concept of “rationality” itself was not simply a matter of deductive reasoning, but one that included an element of socialization as well.30 This view soon appeared as well in his preaching, as the public debate with deists intensi¤ed. He emphasized not the rational transparency of natural religion but rather its muddled understanding outside the culture of revelation. There [were] a variety of opinions about it amongst the wise men and philosophers of the heathen. There was scarcely anything that there was so great differences amongst them, men famed through all succeeding ages for their knowledge and wisdom. Yet their reason was not suf¤cient to ¤nd out men’s true happiness. We can give reasons for it now; it is revealed, and it seems so rational, that one would think the light of nature suf¤cient to discover it. But we, having always lived in the enjoyment of gospel light and being accus-


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tomed to it, are hardly sensible how dependent we are upon it, and how much we should be in the blind and dark about things that now seem plain to us, if we never had had our reason assisted by revelation.31

His sublimation of the evident character of rational religion and its subsequent location within the stream of traditionary religious knowledge are perhaps the most signi¤cant aspects of Edwards’s epistemological critique of natural religion. And his treatment in this regard provides a pivotal framework for interpreting his use of more traditional language asserting the rationality of natural religion.32 This critique derived from his conclusions about the nature of rationality itself. Tindal and other deists might “urge it upon mankind as an assertion that they ought to believe” that the “light of nature is so suf¤cient to teach all mankind what they ought, or in any respect need, to believe and practice for their good, that any additional instruction is needless and useless.” But if this were so, he concludes, “then all instruction in families and schools is needless and useless; all instruction of parents, tutors, and philosophers; all that has been said to promote any such knowledge as tends to make men good and happy by word of mouth, or by writing and books; [and] all that is written by antient and modern philosophers and learned men.”33 Deists misconstrued the nature and suf¤ciency of rational religion because they ignored the largely socialized character of reasoning and learning. This social theory of rationality and its application to religious knowledge was rapidly ascending in Anglican apologetics. As William Law argued, much of what was typically considered “natural light” was in fact culturally derived belief. “Reasonable truths” appear to be so in large part because of social conditioning. “Natural knowledge, or the light of nature, is a knowledge and light that is made natural to us, by the same authority, which makes a certain language, certain customs, and modes of behaviour, natural to us. Nothing seems to be our own, but a bare capacity to be instructed, a nature ¤tted for any impressions.” Thus human beings “are no more left to ¤nd out a God, or the ¤tness of moral virtue, by their own reason, than they are left by their own reason to ¤nd out who are their own parents.”34 Like Law and others, Edwards argued that what made something appear to be reasonable was more often a matter of instruction than of deduction. He argued further that such was particularly the case with the so-called rational knowledge of religion. Observation of the history of religion shows that far from being a deductive, a priori enterprise, religious knowledge actually results from a socialized recognition of the reasonable nature of a given proposition or interpretive framework. Christian philosophers (including deists) have achieved a superior understanding of natural religion not because their powers

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of reasoning are superior, but because of the superiority of the materials and presuppositions that have been a part of their received culture. History, observation, and experience are the things, which must determine the question . . . ’tis manifest from fact, that nature alone is not suf¤cient for the discovery of the religion of nature. That is, no means we have by meer nature, without instruction, have any tendency to bring men to knowledge of the nature of God and our natural relation to and dependence on him, and the consequent relation we stand in to our fellow creatures, and the duties become these relations, suf¤cient actually to reach the effect, either universally, or generally, or in any prevailing degree. Nor does it appear to have proved suf¤cient so much as in a single instance. A suf¤ciency to see the reasonableness of these things, when pointed out, is not the same thing, as a suf¤ciency to ¤nd them out. . . . We hardly can have a conception how it would be, if there never had been any revelation, for we are bred up in the light of revelation from our very infancy.35

It is true that the notions of natural religion are evident “by the light of nature,” but they are so only in an a posteriori fashion; rational in the generic sense of “convincing” and “arguable” rather than spontaneously self-evident or demonstrable. There are many things [in natural religion], now they are revealed, seem very plain, and as if we could easily arrive at a certainty of them if we never had had a revelation of them. It is one thing to see that a truth is exceeding agreeable to reason, after we have been told it and have had it explained to us, and have been told the reason of it; and another to ¤nd it out, and clearly and certainly to explain it, by mere reason. ’Tis one thing to prove a thing after we are showed how, and another to ¤nd it out and prove it of ourselves. . . . ’Tis therefore unreasonable to suppose that philosophy might supply the defect of revelation; for without revelation there would be no such thing as any good philosophy, that is, except now and then in some rare instances, and then attended with abundance of darkness and imperfection.36

Edwards makes clear that in statements such as these he is not simply referring to the philosophical obscurity of the more esoteric or abstract components of natural religion, but to the unattainability of even its most fundamental tenets. The very being of God itself, as well as the personal nature (intelligence, will) and character of Divinity, the derivation of the created world from a First Cause, and human moral duty are all in doubt without a culture of revealed instruction. They do not possess anything like the kind of self-evident rationality that the deists propose.37 At a theoretical level this view of natural religion involved a relatively subtle


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conceptual shift. Its proponents did not deny that nature possessed the characteristics needed to underwrite a general knowledge of God, or that the mind possessed the native capacity to discover them, at least in principle, or that it could have a speculative knowledge of divine things. But it represented a real shift as to how such knowledge was understood to be acquired, amounting to no less than a denial of its deductive philosophical acquisition. Whatever theoretical arguments could be made for the potential rationality and demonstrability of natural religion (claims that Edwards reserved traditional theological criticisms for), the facts of the case were that human beings were universally precluded from such an achievement by the accumulative, progressive nature of the process of learning and by the accidents of human history. The human mind is so conditioned by culture and education that it was not possible to arrive at the precepts of natural religion de novo. The mind accepts them, and accepts them to be rationally demonstrable, only after ¤rst having been shown by testimony and instruction that and how it is so.38 Thus, while he continued to speak of natural religion in terms of the innate rational operations of the human soul as the imago dei, Edwards increasingly framed the question of its origin in terms of its almost exclusive dependence on historical sources, on the authoritative testimony that preceded these operations.39 It was one thing, however, to make this argument about learning in cultures possessing a biblical heritage, and another to account for the presence of natural or normative religion in cultures outside the stream of canonical revelation. Given his inclination toward a socio-historical interpretation of religious knowledge, it is perhaps understandable that Edwards should develop a similar explanation for the appearance of vestigial elements of true religion in other cultures. If natural religion was not drawn chie®y from an unmediated re®ection upon “the book of creatures,” then it must have had its origin elsewhere, in a tradition of revelation. Thus he would come to argue that true religion persisting outside of the biblically in®uenced cultures of Europe could also be shown empirically to have had its real origin in some form of traditionary religious knowledge. Its ¤rst and continuing source of information was through the transmission of a primitive revelation extending in some form back to Noah, and through Noah to Adam.40 Edwards’s consideration of the possible historical origins of natural religion went hand in hand with his critique of its autonomous rationality. As early as 1729 he had begun to speculate about the traditionary sources behind its origin and maintenance in other cultures. I believe that most of those parts of natural religion that were held by the heathens before Christ came into the world, were owing to tradition from those of their forefathers that had the light of revelation; and many of these, being exceeding evidently agreeable to reason, were more easily upheld and

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propagated; and especially because many of their wise men, and men that had in®uence and rule over them, who saw their rectitude and agreeableness to reason better than others, did as it were renew them from time to time, and used to travel into other countries and gather up remains of truth which they found scattered about in other parts of the world, preserved in the same manner by tradition; and some of them traveled to that part of the world that had divine revelation in their possession, and those things amongst them which appeared most agreeable to their reason, they transplanted to their own country.41

This theory of a traditionary source for natural religion continued to develop over the following decades. It appears not only in his private notes, but in his public discourse as well: “All the right speculative knowledge of the true God, which the deists themselves have, has been derived from divine revelation.” He could suggest to his parishioners and his fellow clergy that “in all probability most of those parts of what is called natural religion that were held by the heathen before Christ came into the world were owing to tradition down from their forefathers, Noah and those descending of their ancestors that were after him.” 42 The constitution of natural religion continued to be his chief concern during the last decade of his life, especially during the last two years of his sojourn in Stockbridge.43 This sociological interpretation of natural religion had certain af¤nities with the experimentalist understanding of the knowledge of nature, features that in part may help explain its attractiveness to latitudinarian apologists as well as to other traditional thinkers like Edwards. As noted previously, latitudinarians such as Boyle used the model of empirical natural philosophy as a justi¤cation for the a posteriori character of historical religious knowledge. In a similar fashion, they drew an analogy between the physical knowledge of nature and the natural religious knowledge that could be derived from it. If natural science resulted from the progressive accumulation of testimonial knowledge within a community of scholars, then it should come as no surprise that natural religious knowledge might exhibit the same characteristics. Its rational demonstration is not deduced from evident principles, but elucidated a posteriori from factual data accompanied by a tradition of interpretation. Such a view also provided an avenue to critique the deist assertion that the universality of natural religion suffered due to priestly corruption and suppression. Orthodox thinkers argued that its lack of universality was due to its historical and sociological character rather than political entanglements. It failed to ®ourish outside of Christendom because it lacked the capacity for evident demonstration a priori, apart from tradition; the reason for the advanced state of natural theology within Christendom was that it rested upon more reliable information. Sacred History and the “History” of Religions

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Edwards’s solution to the rationalization of natural religion was not simply to reiterate traditional notions of the subjective limitations of such knowledge, but to illuminate its social derivation. In doing so he hoped to preclude the discussion of its rational autonomy and religious suf¤ciency by showing both historically and empirically that the phenomenon of natural religion was always encompassed by a tradition of revealed religion. As importantly, his approach shifted the grounds of the debate away from the question of what was or was not subjectively possible to discover about God from the natural world, and toward the question of what God intended be known through nature. The more important issue for Edwards was not the question of what humans were capable of deciphering from nature, but rather was always the question of what nature was designed to communicate.

Nature’s Thesaurus Edwards’s particular response to the theological rationalism of his day was not limited merely to critique. His theory of natural religion also had important connections to and implications for his positive treatment of the religious utility of nature. If, as he maintained, a tradition and culture of revelation sustained natural religion itself, then it was only reasonable to conclude that the essential purposes of all created existence are likewise arrived at through revelation. These purposes are quite clearly providential and redemptive in scope. The natural world must be intended primarily, therefore, to communicate not merely a generic knowledge of the being and attributes of God, but rather the redemptive designs of the divine will. In like manner, the natural knowledge of God must itself be taken up chie®y with these concerns. In the last decade of his life Edwards undertook to complete a series of treatises, each of which had its genesis some thirty years earlier in his “Rational Account of the Christian Religion.” His End for Which God Created the World, Nature of True Virtue, and “History of the Work of Redemption” form a tightly woven trilogy intended to address the serious challenges to traditional Christian thought represented in contemporary religious rationalism.44 Each in its own way was motivated by his desire to turn back assertions about a religion of unassisted reason, and each attempts to do so in part by arguing that natural religion is wholly derivative of historical revelation. That he was prepared to incorporate this theory into his formal public theology is another indication of how signi¤cant it had become for his theological agenda. As an exercise in teleology, the End for Which God Created the World comes closer than any of Edwards’s other treatises to being an exercise in purely natural theology, though one aimed at the assertions of “modern freethinkers.”45 Yet even here he persists in eschewing a rationalistic approach to his subject; rational re®ection upon the natural order reveals nothing of the divine will or 144


the chief means of human happiness. There are two reasons for this state of affairs. First, history shows that true natural religion is actually the result of a tradition of revelation. It is not “to be supposed that mankind, who, while destitute of revelation, by the utmost improvements of their own reason, and advances in science and philosophy, could come to no clear and established determination who the author of the world was, would ever have obtained any tolerable settled judgment of the end which the author of it proposed to himself in so vast, complicated and wonderful a work of his hands.” Rather, it is “the revelation which God has given to men” that “has been in the world as a light shining in a dark place.” It is this historical tradition that accounts for human “attainments in the habitual exercise of reason, which are far beyond what otherwise they would have arrived to.” This “has been the occasion of great improvement of their faculties, [and] has taught men how to use their reason (in which regard, notwithstanding the nobleness and excellency of the faculties which God has given them, they seemed to be in themselves almost helpless).” Any consideration of the purposes of creation, therefore, must be derived from revelation rather than speculative reason. Even though Edwards structures this treatise according to what ¤rst reason and then the Scriptures disclose about the end of creation, the element of reason in view here is actually reason operating within a revelatory culture of learning.46 Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, Edwards argues that natural religion must be rooted in revelation because creation is rooted in the emanation of God’s fullness, which is a supremely communicative or revelatory act. The fullness of God’s excellence is, in a sense, too good to remain within itself. Since it is capable of being communicated, it is almost irresistible that it should be: “it seems a thing amiable” and ¤tting “that this light should shine forth in beams of communicated knowledge and understanding.” At its most basic level the chief end that moved God to create the world was “the disposition to communicate himself or diffuse his own fullness,” that “there might be a glorious and abundant emanation of his in¤nite fullness of good ad extra.”47 But the nature and content of this communication must be quali¤ed further by a consideration of how it results in God’s glory, which is the speci¤c end of all of God’s acts.48 Since God’s glory is a concern of his ultimate will, the act of creation must ¤nd its reason for being in his acts of providence, the use of creation according to his will. And the interpretive framework for divine providence is found in the verbal expression of God’s fullness, namely his Word. In order to be determined what was aimed at or designed in the creating of the astonishing fabric of the universe which we behold, it becomes us to attend to and rely on what he has told us who was the architect that built it. He best knows his own heart, and what his own ends and designs were in the wonderful works which he has wrought.49


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Edwards therefore structures his scriptural argument through a chain of “chief ends” that ultimately ¤nd their highest expression in the notion of God’s glory. Creation ¤nds its chief end in the consideration of providence, which in turn ¤nds its chief end in the moral and intelligent (human) part of creation. The chief end of such creatures is in seeking their highest good, “knowing their Creator,” and “complying with his design in their creation and promoting it.” And this is achieved only through the work of redemption, “the chief work of providence towards the moral world.” The work of redemption is therefore the ultimate achievement of God’s glory, and as such, is the chief end of the act of creation.50 Properly speaking, therefore, natural religion is not simply a matter of tracing the outlines of the divine being and attributes and the moral imperatives of the creature in the physical universe and human conscience. Rather, it is intimately connected to the theology of redemption. Thus the natural knowledge of God is ultimately taken up with the matters of sacred history. Creation points to something beyond its own mere existence for its meaning, and this meaning can be found only through the Scriptures in the history of the work of redemption. In a real sense, to frame the issue only or primarily in terms of subjective epistemological capabilities is to begin with the wrong question and arrive at an unsatisfactory answer. The real question to be asked is what nature, as the emanation of God’s fullness, is intended to communicate. And the answer lies in the special counsels of divine providence. If the end of creation is communicative, and if the substance of this communication is redemptive in scope, then discovering the means to interpret this expression of God’s will becomes paramount. Recent studies have emphasized the prominent place that God’s nature as self-communicating Being had in Edwards’s theism; some studies have located the motive for his treatment of the divine effulgence in creation within his trinitarian theology.51 It is also apparent, however, that the impetus for the development of this aspect of his theology derived from his desire to answer the claims being made on behalf of rational religion. God’s revealing of himself is not rooted primarily in fallen humanity’s need for instruction and reconciliation, but rather in the nature of relations between intelligent and moral beings or spirits. God delights in verbal intercourse (an inherently historical activity) whether his creatures exist in a state of enlightened innocence or of darkened and guilty ignorance. Such communication forms the essence of the divine-human interaction. It is simply unthinkable to Edwards that the supreme intelligence of the universe would lack either the desire or the capacity to express himself to his creatures, or would leave them to a merely ratiocinative mode of discovering their knowledge of the divine.52 His critique of rational religion thus has implications for understanding his assertion that the natural world is a primary medium of divine knowledge and 146


divine speech. It is well chronicled that this irrepressible divine inclination to communicate ad extra found preeminent expression, according to Edwards, in the language of typology. This was a typology not only in the traditional sense of the ful¤llment of Old Testament images in the New, but a typology that also ¤nds its ful¤llment in the events of secular history, as well as in the “language” of nature. The character of this natural or ontological typology has been the subject of much interest and debate. Perry Miller’s portrayal of Edwards as a secretive, modernizing visionary, a ¤gure straining to liberalize his conservative typological heritage, has been as controversial as it has been in®uential.53 Janice Knight has argued in turn that much of the scholarship relating to Edwards’s typology (regardless of its estimation of his traditionalism or modernism) is united by its acceptance that a basic dichotomy exists between his putative liberal typology of nature and his heritage of conservative historical typology. Such an assumption places an inherent contradiction at the center of his typological explorations.54 Knight proposes instead that the theoretical components of his typological hermeneutic exhibit a strong internal coherence. He disregarded the supposed delimitation between ontological and historical typologies not because of his encounter with modernism, but because such an impetus already existed within the Puritan tradition of typology concerning the concordance of the work of creation and redemption. “Edwards’s typology seems less a forged union of opposites than an expression of a deeply felt, original harmony ®owing from an integrated theology.”55 Edwards’s treatment of ontological typology contains elements of both of these views. Miller was right to conclude that this project originated out of a sense of contradiction. Neither Knight’s observation of the ease with which he employed and interspersed ontological and historical types nor her conclusions about its internal coherence need be taken to imply that his typology did not also stem from a perceived tension, speci¤cally from his reaction to denials of the appropriateness of the typological interpretation of texts in general or of nature in particular. It is clear, for example, that Edwards was aware that his approach was in con®ict to some degree both with his Puritan tradition and with certain modern developments. He realized his insistence that nature was structured according to a typological pattern went beyond traditional strictures that limited its applicability to biblical precedent—strictures found, for example, in Samuel Mather’s Types of the Old Testament (1683), a work he owned. If we may use our own understandings and invention not at all in interpreting types, and must not conclude anything at all to be types but what is expressly said to be and explained in Scripture, then the church under the Old [Testament], when the types were given, were secluded from ever using


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their understanding to search into the meaning of the types given to ’em; for God did, when he gave ’em, give no interpretation. When we are suf¤ciently instructed that all these things were typical and had their spiritual signi¤cation, it would be on some accounts as unreasonable to say that we must interpret no more of them than the Scripture has interpreted for us, and than we are told the meaning of in the New Testament, as it would be to say that we must interpret prophecy, or prophetical visions and types, no further than the Scripture has interpreted it to our hand. . . . For by Scripture it is plain that innumerable other things are types that are not interpreted in Scripture (all ordinances of the Law are all shadows of good things to come).56

But he was perhaps even more concerned to refute “those who cry down all types,” thinkers such as Matthew Tindal and Anthony Collins, who rejected ¤gurative (prophetic and typological) modes of interpretation as irrational and nonsensical, preferring to restrict textual meaning to that derived from literal and historical interpretive criteria. This rejection of typological interpretation extended to efforts to rid the interpretation of nature of any but the most general principles of natural theology. Edwards was quite aware that his ontological typology went against this stream of contemporary thought as well. I expect by very ridicule and contempt to be called a man of a very fruitful brain and copious fancy, but they are welcome to it. I am not ashamed to own that I believe that the whole universe, heaven and earth, air and seas, and the divine constitution and history of the holy Scriptures, be full of images of divine things, as full as a language is of words.57

But if he had resigned himself to such ridicule, he was also of the belief that he was not alone in those views. He cites several contemporary sources to this effect (e.g., Ramsay’s Philosophical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion and Stapfer’s Institutes), sources he also resorted to for his treatment of historical religious knowledge and his critique of rational religion. He was in fact part of an international movement aimed at revising a constellation of issues pertaining to religious epistemology and typology.58 Edwards saw that contemporary developments threatened the entire framework of natural theology and hermeneutics presupposed by the biblical authors. Responding to this challenge was a task of the ¤rst order. If things in nature “were not designedly ordered to have an agreeableness” to spiritual things, then the employment of such images by the biblical authors would be both philosophically invalid and rhetorically ineffective.59 Furthermore, the principle of ontological hierarchy dictated that nature be subordinate and contributory to the spiritual and moral purposes of creation, that it anticipate these higher realities. For “why should not we suppose that he makes the inferiour in imitation of the superiour, the material of the spiritual, on purpose 148


to have a resemblance and shadow of them? We see that even in the material world, God makes one part of it strangely to agree with another, and why is it not reasonable to suppose he makes the whole as a shadow of the spiritual world?”60 Though he was aware that his typological method would be perceived to some degree as innovative as well as reactionary, it remained vital to his theology, as his notebooks on typology as well as the “Miscellanies” and “Notes on Scripture” make abundantly evident.61 His exalted sense of the spiritual signi¤cation of nature, at least as many scholars have interpreted it, would appear to be at odds with his equally forceful reinterpretation of the grounds of natural religion. It seems improbable, however, that Edwards would have embarked simultaneously on two projects so seemingly contrary in purpose. Could he really have invested nature, even if only subconsciously, with an autonomous or co-ordinate religious meaning and authority (particularly in the manner or for the purposes suggested by Miller and others) while at the same time consciously and systematically working to divest the human mind of any native claim to perceive that meaning? Even allowing for the fact, recognized by all, that he reserved the perception of natural types in some measure to the regenerate saint, his contention that the mind perceives the divine in nature only a posteriori through the medium of historical testimony or revelation would seem contrary to his purported extraordinary investment in and pursuit of the meaning of “the language and lessons of nature.”62 On further examination, however, his motivation for proposing such a wideranging natural typology could be explained at least in part by his very insistence on the primacy of testimonial religious knowledge and his consequent critique of rational religion. His proposal of a traditionary source for natural religion necessitated that even the Edwardsean saint rely exclusively on revelation to ¤nd the religious meaning in nature; the Bible was the key that opened the door to this divine panorama. The graced perceptive capacities of the saint may well give him or her an ear and an eye for the divine excellence in nature. But the only manner in which the language of nature could be deciphered, even by the regenerate mind, was through the system or pattern of revealed instruction. No new rational capacity for understanding the speci¤c religious meanings of nature was conferred by conversion apart from revelation. The evidence provided by his typological writings suggests that Edwards was proceeding at least in part according to premises that are consistent or compatible with, and perhaps indicative of, his rejection of a purely rational natural religion. As Knight and others have pointed out, Edwards always insisted that this typology had direct precedent in the Bible, whether through speci¤c example or general principle. If the particular ontological type itself was not to be found in Scripture (as was often the case), then the principle that validated its use was located there. Sacred History and the “History” of Religions

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The book of Scripture is the interpreter of the book of nature two ways, viz., by declaring to us those spiritual mysteries that are indeed signi¤ed and typi¤ed in the constitution of the natural world; and secondly, in actually making application of the signs and types in the book of nature as representations of those spiritual mysteries in many instances.63

Edwards’s ontological typology rested consciously on the presupposition of a revealed or historical typology; it is in principle entirely dependent upon the latter for its interpretation. It was important, in his view, to recognize that the language of nature is a foreign language, conceptually speaking. Since there is no access to a purely rational natural theology, the language of nature is not native in the sense that a mother tongue would be. It requires instead that one acquire a new tongue, and pay careful attention to the nuances of its rules of operation in order to interpret it appropriately. Types are a certain sort of language, as it were, in which God is wont to speak to us. And there is, as it were, a certain idiom in that language which is to be learnt the same that the idiom of any language is, viz. by good acquaintance with the language, either by being naturally trained up in it, learning it by education . . . or by much use and acquaintance together with a good taste or judgment, by comparing one thing with another and having our senses as it were exercised to discern it (which is the way that adult persons must come to speak any language, and in its true idiom, that is not their native tongue). Great care should be used, and we should endeavor to be well and thoroughly acquainted, or we shall never understand [or] have a right notion of the idiom of the language. If we go to interpret divine types without this, we shall be just like one that pretends to speak any language that han’t thoroughly learnt it. We shall use many barbarous expressions that fail entirely of the proper beauty of the language, that are very harsh in the ears of those that are well versed in the language. God han’t expressly explained all the types of Scriptures, but has done so much as is suf¤cient to teach the language. [People] ought to be exceeding careful in [the] interpreting of types, that they don’t give way to a wild fancy; not to ¤x an interpretation unless warranted by some hint in the New Testament of its being the true interpretation, or a lively ¤gure and representation contained or warranted by an analogy to other types that we interpret on sure grounds.64

Conversely, this perspective may also help to explain the kind of luxuriance in Edwards’s practice of natural typology and the internal coherence observed by Knight. Having abandoned the notion of a purely rational natural theology, Edwards found it necessary to rediscover or reinvent the language of nature 150


through the dictionary and vocabulary of revelation. After he proposed that natural religious knowledge is ultimately concerned with the history of the work of redemption, it was only ¤tting and indeed requisite to ¤nd the redemptive events of that history regnant in nature. And after he had once fallen upon typology as the grammar of that discourse, it was possible to greatly expand the range of its vocabulary. By restricting the knowledge of God to revelation, he restricted the discovery of the religious signi¤cance of nature to revelation as well. But in doing so he also substantially opened the semantic range of the language of nature, because its meaning was no longer con¤ned to the general knowledge of God’s being and providence traditionally assigned to it. Its content could now be ¤lled with the wealth of redemptive divine images or patterns found in Scripture. The “multitude of those things that I have mentioned are but a very small part of what is really intended to be signi¤ed and typi¤ed by these things.” There “is room for persons to be learning more and more of this language and seeing more of that which is declared in it to the end of the world without discovering all.”65 Biblical typology warranted the expansion of natural types because it, and not the vague and meager re®ections of unaided reason, gave them voice, and because creation was fundamentally structured to communicate the history of redemption. At the same time, this interpretive scheme ensured that such an expansion in the vocabulary of nature would be strictly rule-governed through an authoritative precedent. It was precisely because the mind was restricted to revelation for an accurate knowledge of the divine in nature that Edwards could possess such con¤dence and such freedom in discovering the shadows of spiritual reality there. The scriptural pattern served as both a controlling paradigm and a liberalizing in®uence on his use of typology.

Rumors and Shadows At ¤rst glance one of the items on the “best of ” list in Edwards’s “Catalogue” seems oddly out of place, at least with regard to any relationship it might have to critical historical concerns. His desire for the best book “that treats of the cabbalistical learning of the Jews” might seem to be more revealing of an interest in mystical metaphysics, say, than in historiography. But for European Christians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from Isaac Newton to nearly everyone else, the Kabbalah held a widespread fascination as a form of esoteric knowledge about the past.66 Viewed as a body of occult wisdom (both philosophical and theological), it was looked on as a possible compendium of ancient knowledge of the world long lost and now hidden in an indecipherable code. Along with its pagan counterpart, Egyptian hieroglyphics, it tantalized as a potential key to unlocking the truth about the primordial past.67 At the very least Edwards’s early interest in the Kabbalah anticipates his Sacred History and the “History” of Religions

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consuming interest in other religions, one that decidedly intersected with his efforts to understand the nature of sacred historiography. He discerned relatively quickly in his career that theology had entered into a new state of affairs, that to understand Christianity meant understanding it comparatively, within the context of its relationship to other religions. He would come to perceive that the sacred traditions of the past maintained in these alternative faiths posed a signi¤cant challenge to understanding the biblical drama as a universal account of human religious history and experience. Thus like so many in this age he set out to reconcile them, or at least relate them in some organic fashion. If natural religion was a problem for eighteenth-century religious thinkers, then the phenomena of other religions were equally so. They were intimately related, and interpretations of the ¤rst often suggested a similar resolution of the second. A growing dissatisfaction with the traditional assumption that the Scripture history represented a comprehensive account of the religious development of humanity is evident in European thought since the Renaissance, voiced by leading historians and biblical scholars such as Jean Bodin and Richard Simon. The wealth of new information about other cultures and their religions, many of which received no mention in the biblical accounts, left theologians with little choice but to accommodate these narratives in some way to account for this phenomenon. Contemporary estimates that only one-sixth of the world’s population lived within the bounds of Christendom required an explanation as to how the original true religion of Noah had become so diversi¤ed, and so quickly. Religious diffusion and diversity were seen as problems rather than virtues; moving away from the center (Eden, Noah) meant moving away from perfection, or separation from the parental culture of religion. Scholars employed a mixture of naturalistic, historical, and theological explanations to account for this diversi¤cation, almost always integrating them into the skeleton of biblical history, but also ¤nding that only the bare bones of that historical outline were suf¤ciently useful in their work of reconstruction. Using the pivotal events of that saga as a template for world history, they produced a substantial body of erudite literature that attempted to correlate this vast new ¤eld of ethnographic detail.68 The emerging awareness of the historiographical limitations of the biblical accounts almost immediately became a part of the ideological contest within European society over the religious prerogatives of Christianity as well. Since different religious traditions offered varying representations of the past, critics could propose alternative visions of the origins of the primeval religion. As there existed no historical method to adjudicate between them, it was impossible to de¤nitively rule in favor of any one of them. Those skeptical of established religion thus set about “revising the exclusivity of Christian history and belief not by denying God but rewriting the history of religion.” Their achievement was in separating “the idea of ‘true religion’ from the sociological 152


example of seventeenth-century Christianity.”69 Though the era certainly experienced measurable conceptual breakthroughs in the comparative study of religion, other religions continued to be interpreted primarily “with reference to contemporary discussions about the nature and veri¤cation of Christian belief.” 70 It is only recently that Edwards’s thoroughgoing fascination with other religions has begun to be documented and addressed.71 It represents one of the overarching concerns of his career, however, and like his attention to critical historical interpretation, one that intensi¤ed in the last decade of his life. This is hardly coincidental; the comparative treatment of religion was inseparable from a critical estimation of the Scripture history. The perceived scope of the scriptural record of the history of religion was rapidly narrowing in the eighteenth century, and this was true for Edwards himself; it required that he develop an interpretive strategy to compensate for this fact. He accomplished this largely by projecting the signal elements of the Scripture history, its leading ¤gures, key events, and central religious teachings, into the sacred traditions of other religions. If the world’s religious history could no longer be squeezed into the con¤nes of the biblical drama, then it would be encompassed by exporting that narrative into those traditions. Edwards would maintain the primacy of the biblical story, but only at the cost of diminishing its primitive integrity, a concession to the inadequacy of the universalistic interpretation of the surface narrative. His interest in other religions quickly manifested itself in his speci¤c reading pursuits. Shortly after he made his resolution about the Kabbalah he also made entries on other important Jewish texts, including the works of Philo and Maimonides, the Talmud, and the Hebrew Bible. This comparative interest was soon registered more broadly. On the second page of the “Catalogue” he mentions “a book comparing all religions with the Christian that I have seen at New Haven.” This was no doubt a reference to Daniel Defoe’s Dictionarum sacrum seu religiosum (1704), which is recorded on the same page. A new edition had appeared just that year; he had obtained it by the next.72 His search for additional compendia of religions continued over the years: Benjamin Martin’s Bibliotheca technologica (1737) and Thomas Broughton’s Bibliotheca historico-sacra (1737) are both entered in the “Catalogue” in the year of their publication. By this time he was also seeking a critically annotated copy of the Qu’ran: a “New Translation of the Alcoran of Mahommed with Explanatory notes taken from the best Commentatours.”73 Sometime in 1749–1750 he took notice of John Lockman’s Travels of the Jesuits (1743), a geographical account of the customs and religions of various nations, particularly those of China. The Jesuits were well known for their descriptions of Chinese religion, an interest he shared.74 His most trusted authorities on matters of comparative religion were some of the era’s most popular works on the subject, works he managed to acquire Sacred History and the “History” of Religions

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over the course of his career. These included Hugo Grotius’s De veritate (1624), Theophilus Gale’s Court of the Gentiles (1669), Ralph Cudworth’s True Intellectual System of the World (1678), William Turner’s History of All Religions in the World (1690), Jacques Basnage’s History of the Jews (1706–1707), Humphrey Prideaux’s Old and New Testament Connected in the History of the Jews (1715), Samuel Shuckford’s Sacred and Profane History of the World Connected (1728), the Chevalier de Ramsay’s Travels of Cyrus (1727) and Philosophical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion (1748), Arthur Bedford’s Scripture Chronology (1730), Patrick Delaney’s Revelation Examined with Candour (1732), William Warburton’s Divine Legation of Moses (1737–1741), Henry Winder’s Critical and Chronological History of Knowledge (1745), and Philip Skelton’s Ophiomaches, or Deism Revealed (1749). Through these he had effective access to the ideas of an array of prominent interpreters of religion such as Gerhard Voss, Samuel Bochart, Georg Horn, Athanasius Kircher, Louis Thomassin, and Noël Antoine Pluche.75 His pursuit of works on geography, world history, and travel accounts must likewise be taken into account as sources of his knowledge of other religions.76 All told, his reading list and acquisitions, like the library of James Logan in Philadelphia, betray the relative accessibility of this sort of material in the colonial period, and are indications of a vital American interest in the subject. From these sources Edwards adopted what might be called a version of degenerative Christian euhemerism, an interpretation of other religions that had its roots in ancient Greek philosophy and that patristic theologians subsequently adapted. In attempting to explain the intellectually and morally offensive character of their native mythology, classical Greek philosophers theorized that these stories represented the misinformed and irrational apotheoses of historical characters from the mists of antiquity. Early Christian theologians translated this for apologetic purposes into the view that the pagan accounts had corrupted the historical events and ¤gures of the Bible into the fabulous myths of their heroes and divinities. This Christian euhemerism was complemented by the theory that pagan religions also had access to revealed truth through the traditions of Noah, or even independent revelation within their own cultures. The combination of these theories thus had the double advantage of diminishing the religious stature of pagan religions and myths while at the same time legitimating their continued study, since at their core they embodied divine revelation, revelation made accessible in part by allegorical interpretation. The notion of an ancient theology (prisca theologia) was revived during the Renaissance as a way of reinvesting ancient myths with universal and eternal religious truths, and continued to be popular in the seventeenth century with ¤gures such as Ralph Cudworth and Henry More. But allegorical interpretations were increasingly augmented by attempts to provide Christian euhe154


merism with foundation in historical erudition. Aided by the widespread dissemination of ancient documents and new ethnographic data on contemporary religions of the world, scholars sought to articulate the precise historical connections between scriptural history and other ancient traditions, thereby imbuing their euhemerism with a demonstrable, empirical, historical factuality.77 This was accomplished in part through a rather tortured use of philology, often excruciating in detail, used to discover the etymological connections between names of places and ¤gures, as well as by converting any and all formal similarities between various religious beliefs and practices into their biblical equivalents.78 The connections between revealed forms of religion and other traditions, therefore, could be drawn in several ways. Other cultures possessed true religion in part as the result of some degree of divine inspiration of their ancient philosophers, a process that planted kernels of biblical religion in heathen culture in preparation for the gospel. But more generally these divine teachings made their way into other cultures by a process of historical transmission, ¤rst from a body of tradition handed down through the posterity of Noah, and second from the continued intercourse of other civilizations with the nation of Israel. Given Edwards’s sociological explanation of natural religion, it is not surprising that he also readily adopted this amalgamated view regarding the revelatory core of the teachings and practices of other religions; in fact they were part of the same interpretive strategy. Whereas deists saw a native natural religion behind the corruption of priestcraft in other religions, Edwards saw there a native revealed religion behind the corruption of ignorance and imagination. Thus the course of interpretation he plotted was almost by necessity an effort to provide concrete historical evidence of the connection between sacred history and profane fable, and between true worship and pagan idolatry. His interest in comparative religions emerges throughout the materials of his biblical commentary. Perhaps none other is as revealing of his historiographical concern as the index to the “Miscellanies.” “Heathens had much from ancient tradition . . . and from the Jews.” “History of the Old Testament from Moses’ time con¤rmed from heathen traditions and records.” “Scripture, history attested by heathen philosophers.” “Tradition, what the ancient heathens had of divine truth was very much from tradition from their forefathers.” “Traditions of the heathen . . . showing the ancient religion of mankind to be agreeable to the religion of the holy Scriptures.” “Heathen world, things that happened therein that were attestations of Christ’s divine mission.”79 In all he lists some sixty theological subjects in the index that other religions had in common with the biblical tradition. This interpretive strategy shows up early on in the “Notes on Scripture,” No. 111 (1728), and the “Miscellanies,” Misc. No. 350 (1729).80 It fairly explodes in the 1740s. His reconstruction of the history of other religions rested on a contracted Sacred History and the “History” of Religions

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sense of time and geography. God arranged the dispersal of humankind after the ®ood in such a way that “the nations of the world, might have had some means to have led ’em . . . to the knowledge of the true God and his way.” The Jewish nation was strategically situated at the crossroads of civilization— Asia, Africa, and Europe—so that the withering traditions of Noahic revelation might be refreshed by the Mosaic institutions, and thus “there remained by tradition many scraps of truth” among them until the appearance of Christ. It was ¤rst Abraham and then Moses who instilled learned culture in them, Abraham as the father of arts such as astronomy and Moses as the founder of letters and the institutions of true religion. The nations remained in close vicinity to Palestine until the close of the Roman Empire, ensuring that they were “all within hearing of these great things” in the Jewish and Christian dispensations. It was probably only after this that the New World began to be more fully populated.81 This localized, Semitic-centered view of the primitive world allowed Edwards to develop detailed treatments of its various historiographical connections. Profane traditions seem to recount world history just as it is described in Genesis 1–10, as well as the history of the Jewish nation. The Deluge, for example, is universally remembered in indigenous stories from China to Peru.82 The rather indecipherable catalogue of nations can be precisely identi¤ed with current geographical knowledge.83 The Greek myths of Niobe and Orpheus and Eurydice recount the pillaring of Lot’s wife; Joshua’s invasion of Canaan and presumed wars with its resident giants are re®ected in myths of the wars between giants and gods.84 Ancient Near East historians similarly record events in the history of the Jewish nation, such as the destruction of Sodom, or those in the lives of Jacob, David, Solomon, and Elijah.85 Some pagan historians recount that Egyptian priests acknowledged the fact of the Exodus; some Egyptian fables have this event as their historical kernel. The Greek shepherd ¤gures Pan and the fauns are vestiges of a memory of the presence of God shepherding the Israelites through wilderness. One also ¤nds extra-biblical veri¤cation of such Exodus events as the bitter waters of Marah and the plague of poisonous snakes.86 More often than not the historical connection is revealed in the etymology of names. Thus Noah becomes the Roman Saturn with his three sons Jupiter (Ham), Neptune (Japheth), and Pluto (Shem). Jupiter is equivalent to Zeus Belus, or Baal of the Phoenicians, indicating that his name is probably a corruption of the Israelite equivalent, Jehovah (so too Apollo); he is also the Egyptian Ammon, or Ham. Ham’s cursed son Canaan corresponds to the god Mercury.87 The patriarch Joseph’s biography and his rise to prominence with the pharaoh are retold in the Egyptian myths of Apis and Serapis. Nimrod the son of Cush becomes Bacchus, from the Phoenician Bar-Cush. This process of etymological manipulation was almost endlessly malleable. The formal similari156


ties between the biographies of Moses and Bacchus suggest a connection there as well, and so logically indicate a con®ation of the stories of Nimrod and Moses. Moses is also the Egyptian Osiris cum Dionysus cum Bacchus.88 Just as important if not more so for Edwards, profane religious beliefs and practices emulate those of true biblical religion. The creation story, for example, ¤nds correlation in various accounts of an original chaos; some Greek philosophers espoused a verbal or ex nihilo theory of cosmology. Adam, Eve, and the Eden story all have their counterparts elsewhere.89 So do fundamental doctrines such as the unity of God, the angelic rebellion, original sin, immortality, the last judgment, and the ¤nal con®agration of the world.90 Satan can be found lurking in the Babylonian worship of a dragon, the Greek myth of Ophion, and perhaps most interestingly, among certain “priests in Asia” (India) who “carry about a serpent in a brazen vessel, which they attend with a great deal of music and many charms in verse.”91 Even Greek philosophy received its impetus from the Mosaic revelation, its philosophers having translated the divine name Yahweh, “I am that I am,” into the “study of being” or metaphysics.92 Some of these phenomena indicate not only a process of historical transmission but also something more, a general pattern of inspiration. Many of these doctrines could be attributed to the transmission of the Noahic or Mosaic tradition, but others could not. Among these the most interesting to Edwards were premonitions of distinctly Christian doctrines such as the Trinity and the coming of a divinely appointed mediator, the Messiah. These of course could not be as readily connected with the transmission of Noahic or even Israelite tradition, which preceded Jesus’ lifetime. The necessary implication was that they had been divinely implanted in those cultures by inspiration, a conclusion that he readily embraced as evidence of divine preparation for the gospel. The central theoretical concern in early-eighteenth-century comparative studies of religion was to understand the origin and direction of its cultural diffusion. Nearly everyone assumed that the origin of true religion was to be found in the oldest and most advanced post-diluvian civilization, from which it was disseminated throughout the world. The search for the original point of diffusion, however, became enmeshed in the ideological contest over the cultural supremacy and hegemony of the biblical traditions in contemporary European society. If one could show that the Mosaic theocracy developed later than that of other ancient nations, and thus was presumably derivative of them, then the argument could be made that it was also culturally inferior and therefore dispensable. But the case for cultural priority was by no means easily veri¤ed, since a suf¤ciently critical historical apparatus for judging the real connections between ancient civilizations was not forthcoming. As John Toland observed, the assumed direction of cultural and religious diffusion from the Jewish nation to its heathen neighbors could be made to ®ow the other way. “What is so con¤dently said of their learning it from the antient Books of the Sacred History and the “History” of Religions

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Jews, may be as easily deny’d as af¤rm’d.”93 Thus the evidence at hand was easily manipulated to the advantage of partisan assumptions. The methodological procedure for addressing this issue consisted largely of scouring classical historical sources to reconstruct the history of religious devolution, aided by a forced use of philology (etymology) to draw historical connections between various cultures and their religious traditions. On theory and method both sides of the contest were agreed; what separated them was their identi¤cation of the ¤rst literate culture, the source of true religion. It was to the supposition of the derivative nature of Jewish civilization that critics of the church devoted their intellectual enterprise. The most signi¤cant challenge to the traditional theory espoused by Edwards, and the most popular among deists, was the theory of Egyptian priority. This view commended itself in part because the Jewish nation by its own account had spent its formative years in that land, and had only subsequently developed its own religious institutions. Furthermore, since Moses had been a member of the royal class, trained in all its wisdom (according to the book of Acts), it was easy to assume that he was an initiate of Egyptian religion and its occult arts. And since in the minds of many Egypt represented the cradle and pinnacle of ancient civilization, it was an attractive alternative theory. This theory of reversed diffusion received a substantive impetus in the work of the Cambridge Hebraist John Spencer, whose De legibus Hebraeorum (1685) proposed that Jewish religious law was derivative of Egyptian law, though accommodated to God’s will by way of certain Mosaic re¤nements.94 Spencer’s work suggested that Jewish ritual was primarily the result of historical development rather than immediate divine intervention, and thus represented a culturally relative set of institutions rather than a revealed code of behavior. He sought to save appearances by asserting that God had adapted Egyptian rituals to give them their true redemptive function, but the damage his thesis did to the traditional theory of Jewish religious primacy and superiority was manifest. Such views became widespread and controversial in English circles, marked by similar attempts at reconciliation. Thomas Burnet advocated the theories of Spencer and John Marsham in his Archaeologiae philosophicae (1681), with the caveat that the Egyptians had received their instruction from Noah. Burnet’s student Newton employed this view in his private notes (“Theologiae gentilis origines philosophicae,” c. 1680s). For Arian interpreters of Christianity such as Burnet and Newton, Spencer’s theory lent support to the notion of an original and universal Noahic form of true (unitarian) religion. John Edwards attacked the theory in his Compleat History . . . of All the Methods of Religion (1699), as did John Woodward in his Wisdom of the Ancient Egyptians (1700). Theophilus Gale’s Court of the Gentiles was generated in large part as a response to Spencer’s early work, and Samuel Shuckford’s Sacred and Profane History counters it as well.95 Not surprisingly, the Egyptian hypothesis was recycled re158


peatedly in the deistic literature. Toland popularized it in his Origines Judaicae (1709); here Moses is presented as an Egyptian priest educated in the hidden mysteries of the prisca theologia, his legislation simply a vulgarization of this sublime teaching for the sake of the Jewish rabble. Matthew Tindal also adopted the hypothesis.96 Some went further, suggesting not only that the Jews had inherited their religion from pagan sources but that in fact they were one of the most backward of nations in the ancient Near East, devoid of literate culture and therefore parasitic on others.97 Edwards was well aware of the negative implications of Egyptian priority for biblical historiography.98 The ideological debate over cultural priority was essentially irresolvable given the level of historical erudition of the day. Both sides mined classical sources with remarkable credulity, grasping onto any shred of evidence, no matter how tenuous, in favor of their theory of cultural priority. One example of this can be seen in the celebrity gained by the ancient historians Sanchuniathon, Berossus, and Manetho. Sanchuniathon was a Phoenician priest of roughly Mosaic antiquity (c. 1200), Berossus a third-century hellenized Babylonian priest and historian (c. 280), and Manetho his Egyptian contemporary. All of their works survive only as extracts in writers such as Josephus and Eusebius, most of the material relating the exaggerated chronologies of ancient kingdoms, but also preserving some mythological themes. Nonetheless Edwards and his sources cite these three extensively as providing authoritative corroboration of biblical history in contemporaneous ancient records. Similarly, critics such as Voltaire facilely cite them as providing evidence of their countertheories of cultural priority.99 In many instances critics simply reversed the euhemeristic dependency. Thus Toland argues for the Jewish mythologizing of pagan history; Voltaire sees Moses as a Jewish translation of the Bacchus myth.100 Where Edwards seizes on the fact that Indian Brahmans have a tradition about Adam as proof of Semitic priority and in®uence, Voltaire takes this Vedic ¤gure of Adimo as proof of the opposite. Both, however, were simply repeating information from early-seventeenth-century sources such as Hugo Grotius, who appropriated it from medieval scholars such as Maimonides. Their respective reconstructions of the history of religion did not essentially differ on theoretical or methodological grounds, but rather on how these were to be employed in the service of a polemical agenda regarding the relationship between true religion and the scriptural account of its fortunes. Edwards’s appreciation for other religions may seem quaint if not strange when compared anachronistically to contemporary sensibilities, but his views were those most commonly held during the early eighteenth century, and by its leading intellects.101 Thus it should in no way be minimized as a serious attempt to elucidate the historical origins of the world’s religions. The erudite form of euhemerism was an important ¤rst step in the comparative study of religion, helping to establish the awareness that Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Sacred History and the “History” of Religions

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Canaanite, and Greek cultures and mythological traditions were in fact genetically related. Most importantly, it must be recognized that his antagonists shared the theoretical and methodological assumptions of Edwards’s approach. Many if not most embraced some version of euhemerism and the prisca theologia to explain the formal similarities between various religions and the universal presence of natural religion. The degree of erudition on these matters was relatively constant; it was the ends to which that erudition was employed that distinguished individual efforts. The study of religion in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries often remained strongly colored by the theological assumptions and ideological agendas of its earlier practitioners. The use of the Deluge as an interpretive key, for example, continued to inform important studies such as Jacob Bryant’s New System of Antient Mythology (1774– 1776), Thomas Maurice’s Indian Antiquities (1793–1800), Edward Davies’s Mythology and Rites of the British Druids (1809), and George Stanley Faber’s Origin of Pagan Idolatry (1816). Similarly, later ideological critics such as Charles Dupuis (Origin of All Worship, 1795) would claim that the myths of all religions, including Christianity, were nothing more than allegories of pagan astrological myths.102 The theory of a central point of primeval cultural diffusion and the close linguistic analysis of texts employed in euhemeristic interpretations provided the working concepts of the early modern study of mythology and comparative religion well into the nineteenth century, reaching its scienti¤c zenith in the work of the German philological school and in the “solar mythology” of Friedrich Max Müller.103 The most important conceptual breakthroughs in comparative religion in the eighteenth century, the psychological and polygenic theories of religion developed by Bernard de Fontenelle and Giambattista Vico, would not be incorporated into the study of religion until the late nineteenth century, in the anthropological work of E. B. Tylor (Primitive Culture, 1871).104 While his views of the history of religion may have been typical of the early half of the eighteenth century, a transition is evident even among traditional interpreters regarding the perceived adequacy of a speci¤cally Judeo-Christian center of the world’s cultural and religious diffusion. This development produced dissension within the apologetic camp. The reigning comparative construct in 1720 had already become somewhat anachronistic by 1750. Jewish history increasingly came to be seen as subsequent to if not derivative of its ancient neighbors, particularly Egypt and Babylon. The center of cultural diffusion was moving even farther east, as the notion of an Aryan or IndoEuropean proto-civilization gained currency, a theory that would explode in popularity after the turn of the century. Though these developments largely passed over Edwards, this is not to say that he was unaware of them. Interpreters in the apologetic camp were also becoming dissatis¤ed with elements of the more literal or universalistic interpretation of the scriptural accounts, and 160


sought ways to adjust their views to the changing climate of opinion. Edwards uses the Chevalier de Ramsay’s works extensively, for example, to support his theory that the ancients had ideas about the Trinity and the Messiah derived from independent revelation. Jacques Basnage (History of the Jews, 1706), however, rejected any notion of an ancient theology for lack of historical evidence.105 Another of his sources, John Leland’s View of the Principal Deistical Writers (1754–1755) equates Ramsay’s theories of the prisca theologia with deism.106 Ramsay, on the other hand, explicitly rejected the pivotal role of the Jewish nation in cultural dissemination as advocated in Theophilus Gale’s Court of the Gentiles, a work that perhaps more than any other shaped Edwards’s interpretation of the history of religions. Ramsay argued that the belief that other cultures could have gained their knowledge of true religion from intercourse with the Jewish nation was itself lacking in historical credibility, an outmoded view. The “Jews and their Opinions were too long concealed in a Corner of the Earth, to be reasonably thought the primitive Light of the Gentiles.” Since critical historical study ruled out such a scenario, it meant that the atrophying Noahic tradition had to be supplemented by recurrent divine revelation.107 Edwards was exposed to the nascent Indo-centrism of mid-century comparative studies through the work of Samuel Shuckford. Convinced that Indian and Chinese cultures were the oldest in the world, Shuckford proposed that the ark came to rest in the mountains of northern India rather than in the commonly assigned region of Armenia. Such a distant circumstance would explain, for example, why the Mosaic history has so little to say about such an important ¤gure in human history as Noah. Assuming that the ancestral Fohi of Chinese mythology was in fact Noah would also explain why Chinese culture was so unaffected by ancient Near East polity and language (having been excepted from the Babel incident).108 Edwards excerpts this information in No. 455 of the “Notes on Scripture,” though he also raises reservations about it. His reading of authors such as Shuckford also exposed him to increasingly naturalistic explanations of the history of religion among its more traditional interpreters, a fact that would come to have a signi¤cant impact on his biblical interpretation. Interpreters of all persuasions were increasingly attracted to such explanations. Jean Bodin, for example, had proposed that religious diversity could be explained in part by differing climatic zones. This was a very popular view among many interpreters, including Richard Simon, Jean Le Clerc, Thomas Burnet, William Whiston, Humphrey Prideaux, Giambattista Vico, and Shuckford. By the eighteenth century, therefore, even more apologetically inclined interpreters such as William Warburton were in search of “the natural Causes of Paganism” in addition to its theological causes.109 While it appears that Edwards was content to fashion some sort of amalgamation out of these varying points of view, it is also evident that he was aware Sacred History and the “History” of Religions

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of some of the disputes over the traditional reconstruction of the history of religion even among its contemporary proponents. What this would have meant for his ¤nal treatment of other religions can only be guessed at, though some of these more updated points of view probably came too late in his career to have effected too radical a change in his overall reconstruction. But Edwards would have had to come to terms with such considerations, if not in his understanding of other religions, then in his appreciation of the need to root the Scripture history in a broader empirical framework.

The challenges of understanding the nature of world religions demonstrates how complex it was becoming in the eighteenth century to relate a burgeoning array of cultural phenomena to the historical traditions of Christianity. It also reveals just how intimately related critical historical concerns were to a disparate array of issues in Edwards’s broader theological agenda. His treatment of rational and comparative religion represents a signi¤cant transition to the consideration of Christianity within a larger context of the study of religion as well as a historiographical compensation for the limited scope of the biblical narrative and its account of the development of human religiosity. These alternative forms of religion had a decided impact on his consideration of the Scripture history and its relation to profane knowledge. The storied world of the Bible was shrinking due to the pressures brought to bear on it from a more informed knowledge of the empirical world. His response was to export that drama from the pages of Scripture, locating it in the sacred traditions of the world and thus thoroughly insinuating it into the universal culture of learning. Edwards sought to maintain the primacy of the scriptural accounts in his theory of religions. While the speci¤c form of his theory soon became outdated, its substance was nonetheless an acknowledgment of the incompleteness of those accounts. It is an indication that the universalistic interpretation of the biblical narrative was dissolving in part even for him and that it needed to be transformed to ¤t the new circumstances of the historical knowledge of human culture. In a real sense the Scripture history now needed external con¤rmation of its truthfulness through its correlation to profane knowledge; its veri¤cation was to be sought in part outside itself. To some degree the panorama of sacred history was becoming for Edwards and others as much a pattern for interpreting the history of religious experience as a speci¤c record of it. It is also evident that he perceived these issues to be intimately connected to his historiographical concerns and that he intended to incorporate them into his anticipated treatments of critical historical problems. At some point in the early 1750s he reminded himself “to look through my notes on the Pentateuch and observe all the con¤rmations of that History from the Fables and Tradi162


tions of the Heathen.”110 The comparative study of other religious traditions would be used to verify the historical accuracy of the Mosaic history, and thus presumably its authorship. At the same time the same traditions could be used in a dispositive way to con¤rm the rational nature and purposes of that history. In his sketches for revising the Pentateuch treatise he made a note on the “MYTHOLOGY OF THE HEATHEN.” Here he intended to observe that while the Mosaic history contained matters of a seemingly fantastic nature, they were “nothing akin to the fables of men’s inventing in old times,” containing none of the “amorous intrigues or pleasant stories of things” that were so patently foolish, gay, childish, and carnal.111 Finally, and perhaps most intriguing itself, Edwards intended to incorporate these issues into his revision of the “History of the Work of Redemption.” There he would observe in proper order just how and when the nations had “opportunity to become acquainted with the true God and the true religion” during their dispersal and through their contact with the strategically situated Jewish nation and its traditions of revelation.112 Edwards’s approach to the problem of natural religion and the religions of other cultures de¤es simple attempts to categorize his thought along conventional lines. He was deeply invested in an appropriation of various streams of early modern thought, an engagement that at times produced some surprisingly innovative results. His attempt to cast all forms of religious expression within a matrix of culturally inculcated traditions offers promising avenues for reassessing his analysis of religious epistemology and experience as a whole, as well as his typological hermeneutic. Much more study will be needed to bring to light the connections and coherence of what for Edwards was a very complex set of intellectual concerns. What is clear from the present study, however, is just how important the problems of critical biblical interpretation were to a whole range of theological issues in his thought. It illustrates how fruitful additional investigation into this area of his thought may be for the wider body of Edwards scholarship. If this is true for treatises such as The End for Which God Created the World and The Nature of True Virtue, it is equally true of his two ¤nal great works, “The History of the Work of Redemption” and “The Harmony of the Old and New Testament.” It is to a consideration of his culminating work that this study now turns.


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6

Theology in the Historical Mode The Christian revelation gives us a most rational account of the design of God in his providential disposition of things . . . and of the way and means of God’s accomplishment of it.1 To object against a book’s being divine merely because it is historical is a silly objection.2

Students of Jonathan Edwards have long appreciated that his theological interests were signi¤cant for his consideration of the problems of history and historical discourse. They have noted, for example, that he used his conception of God’s self-communicating nature to argue for the necessity of a divine intrusion into the processes of human history. The working thesis of this study has been that Edwards was equally concerned about the implications that achievements in the historical disciplines had for theology. Critical historical problems fundamentally in®uenced his approach to theological discourse. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the three “great projects” that bookend his career: his “Rational Account” of Christian belief, the “History of the Work of Redemption,” and the “Harmony of the Old and New Testament.” The ¤rst of these treatises was never formalized beyond its outline. The last is represented by a notebook of material that remained in a very preliminary state. The materials relating to the “Work of Redemption,” by contrast, give a much fuller sense of his future intentions for them. The three works were integrally connected, however, and so deserve to be considered as parts of a broader, coherent whole. This broader program, it is argued here, was designed in large measure to respond to the range of critical historical issues plaguing traditional biblical interpretation, and by extension, offering to plague traditional theology as well. If the End for Which God Created the World and the Nature of True Virtue served as the conceptual prolegomena to Edwards’s critique of the religious rationalism of the day, then to a large extent the “History of the Work of Redemption” and the “Harmony of the Old and New Testament” were to serve as the substance of that effort. They represent his culminating attempt to provide a countering rational account of historical biblical religion. In his well-known letter to the trustees of the College of New Jersey Edwards discussed his plans to revise and expand the earlier and still unpublished “Harmony” of the Jewish and Christian testaments. The “Harmony” was to be

structured in three parts: the prophecies of the Messiah and their ful¤llment, the typological relationship between the testaments, and their doctrinal and moral unity.3 In addition, he foresaw that this treatise would provide an ideal means for treating an array of other interpretive problems. His description of this project in the letter is somewhat problematic when compared to the original notebook.4 The notebook appears to have been completed during the years surrounding his separation from the congregation at Northampton.5 The commentary is almost mono-thematically devoted to the problem of “af®iction,” and records his preoccupation with “showing kindness to enemies.” The issues of humility, self-denial, returning good for evil, and exhibiting patience in suffering appear over and over. Thus, while these notes may prove to be illuminating of the emotional anguish that Edwards experienced at his dismissal, they reveal little of his actual plans for the “Harmony” as he subsequently outlined it in the letter to the Princeton trustees. By the late 1750s he had re¤ned and reorganized the project substantially; it was now a work that would have no doubt depended heavily on material from the “Miscellanies” and “Notes on Scripture.” His intention to offer “an explanation of a very great part of the holy Scripture” would no doubt have included the discussion of critical issues. A companion piece to this projected treatise, the “Work of Redemption” was to be the culminating effort of his theological career, a “body of divinity in an entire new method,” written with the “prevailing errors of the present day” in mind.6 If the “Harmony” has suffered from scholarly neglect, its conceptual cousin has bene¤ted from an abundance of attention. This treatise has been read in a variety of ways since its original and posthumous publication in 1774. Some have looked upon it as part of Edwards’s broader effort to describe and justify contemporary revivalist movements. Others have understood it largely in terms of the evidence it provides of his preoccupation with the doctrine of last things, viewing it alternately as a seditious apocalyptic work, as an eschatological primer, or as a presentation of an innovative brand of millennialism. Still others have seen in it a creative contribution to an emerging American religious consciousness—as an allegory for religious conversion, for example, or as a founding text for later notions of American civil religion and manifest destiny. And there are those who have viewed the “Work of Redemption” as a fairly straightforward effort at reconstituting a universal Christian narrative, one indicative of Edwards’s antiquated relation to developments in eighteenthcentury historical method.7 Relatively little consideration, however, has been given to indications that he conceived the “Work of Redemption” as part of a cohesive intellectual project, or to the possible controversial elements that may have contributed to his decision to revisit this sermon series after a lapse of some twenty years. Still less if any consideration has been given to the possibility that modernizing develTheology in the Historical Mode

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opments in biblical interpretation may have motivated him to produce a historical narration of Christian doctrine. This chapter argues that the “History of the Work of Redemption” was the fundamental instrument of Edwards’s effort to make a rational presentation of historical Christian belief. Rather than intending it to serve as merely another treatment of religious revival or Protestant soteriology, he conceived the “Work of Redemption” as a comprehensive, systematic exposition of doctrine. Furthermore, it argues that the narrative form of this treatise was indispensable to such purposes. His choice of a method structured according to biblical history was a direct response to the problems that critical historical approaches to the Bible presented for traditional religious epistemology and theology. Such an interpretive framework reveals the “Work of Redemption” as an original and creative contribution to American religious thought against the backdrop of an increasingly critical and skeptical age. Edwards’s treatise shows that he anticipated the signi¤cance that problems in biblical interpretation would come to have for traditional theology, and illustrates his intention to integrate or account for them within his wider intellectual project.

A Rational Account of Religion It is well known that Edwards planned to produce a treatise that he tentatively referred to as “A Rational Account of the Main Doctrines of the Christian Faith,” an effort that virtually inaugurated his intellectual career. Perry Miller characterized it as his intended “summa of Calvinism,” though it certainly represented something more far-reaching.8 While the “Rational Account” was one of his earliest ambitions, Edwards did not see this project through to any de¤nitive end. It is this fact that perhaps explains why scholars have devoted so little effort to understanding the nature and scope of this stillborn work, its connection to the broader literary world to which it belonged, or the signi¤cance it holds for interpreting the larger body of Edwards’s work, including the “Work of Redemption.” Since the middle of the seventeenth century many interpreters had begun to shy away from the conviction that the biblical narratives were the work of careful, well-informed, and well-intentioned historians. The ancients’ portrayal of history shaped by providential intervention was increasingly at odds with a complex and scienti¤c view of the natural world and of human history. If biblical history proved to be less reliable and less rational than previously supposed, then the necessity of a religion derived from that history was in question. Responses to these developments within Protestant orthodoxy aimed at defending the integrity of sacred history and the religion derived from it were not long in coming. Rational accounts of the Christian religion and its historical sources also begin to appear in the middle of the seventeenth century. 166


This virtual sub-genre of philosophical apologetics is perhaps epitomized by Edward Stilling®eet’s massive Origines sacrae (1662), a work that pre-dates Benedict de Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus and the critical historical issues it raised by nearly a decade. Stilling®eet’s treatise addresses an impressively wide range of issues, particularly those pertaining to the rational explication of scriptural history and of Christian beliefs derived from that history. These include the comparative study of profane histories, other religions, the historical methodology and authenticity of the biblical accounts, the problems of prophecy, inspiration, and miracle, and philosophical descriptions of the being of God, the doctrine of Christ, and the problem of evil. Edwards’s grand project, therefore, was not an idiosyncratic work but was instead patterned after a well-established literary formula.9 By the time he came to produce a more de¤nitive outline for his own “Rational Account,” the same broad philosophical interests typical of the genre were beginning to emerge within it.10 In addition to subjects such as the doctrine of God, the Trinity, the decrees, and grace, for example, the treatise was intended to address epistemological problems pertaining to religious belief: “Faith, or a right believing of divine truths. Of spiritual knowledge before faith.” He also planned to present a sweeping argument concerning the centrality of theological discourse for philosophical knowledge, to “shew how all the arts and sciences, the more they are perfected, the more they issue in divinity, and coincide with it, and appear to be parts of it.”11 Edwards clearly expected to draw upon the “Miscellanies” as well as other sets of notes for the substance of his “Rational Account.” The broad scope of interests and materials contained in these manuscripts strongly suggests that his own “Rational Account,” like the literature upon which it was modeled, would have extended beyond considerations of doctrine to include problems associated with biblical interpretation. Much of his important biblical commentary in this regard appears in the “Miscellanies” proper, an indication of the relevance that interpretive problems had for his broader theological enterprise. One set of papers, the “Rough Notes on the Truth of the Christian Religion,” may be of particular signi¤cance in this regard.12 Like the outline of the “Rational Account,” this document dates from the 1730s. It details Edwards’s plan to address a broad range of critical issues pertaining to scriptural history, such as the possibility that the biblical accounts were forgeries and the problem of prophetic and apostolic inspiration. At one time these papers were sewn together with the outline of the “Rational Account” itself. If Edwards bound them together, it offers at least circumstantial evidence that the “Rational Account” may have incorporated a treatment of critical historical problems.13 But even if this proves not to be the case, the “Rough Notes” manuscript still contains material directly linking it to the “Rational Account.” For in the “Rough Theology in the Historical Mode

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Notes” Edwards outlines his intention to treat topics other than those pertaining to biblical criticism, including atheism, immortality, the doctrine of the atonement, and the rationality of Christian doctrine in general. These of course are the very topics anticipated in the “Rational Account,” and the kind addressed in other rational accounts, such as Stilling®eet’s Origines sacrae. Regardless, therefore, of whether these two outlines were originally sewn together by Edwards or by a later hand, the overlap of their subject matter directly links them. It seems quite likely that had he succeeded in producing his own “Rational Account” it would have incorporated a rational defense not only of important theological topics but of critical historical problems pertaining to the biblical narratives as well. The development of the “Rational Account” seems never to have progressed very far beyond the 1730 outline, though it is evident that he continued to envision its formulation.14 Why he made no sustained attempt to complete this treatise can only be a matter of speculation, though it is certainly possible that its ambitious scope proved to be prohibitive. The evidence does suggest, however, that he found it preferable to serialize the major themes of the “Rational Account” as a group of smaller, more manageable, and perhaps more timely projects. Several of the topics initially proposed in the anticipated summa eventually became important treatises in their own right: “free will,” for example, and “creation: the ends of it.” He also proposed in the outline “to shew how absurd [it is] for Christians to write treatises of ethics distinctly from divinity as revealed in the Gospel,” and to have “one section or chapter concerning NATURAL NOTIONS . . . to shew that many things that are so-called are certainly prejudices.”15 Other topics entered in the outline, such as the doctrine of the Trinity and the typological nature of creation, received extensive treatment in his unpublished notes, and were likely among those subjects he expressed a hope of bringing to publication after his move to Princeton. The fact that works such as the Freedom of the Will, the End for Which God Created the World, and the Nature of True Virtue had their genesis in the “Rational Account” might suggest a similar point of departure for his treatise on redemption. If so, its connection to that work might also provide important interpretive clues for understanding its peculiar nature and purpose. In fact, it is apparent that Edwards planned for the substance if not the form of the “History of the Work of Redemption” to appear as part of his “Rational Account” from the outset. In considering the doctrine of the Trinity in the outline, he states that he intends to address this topic “before I begin to treat of the work of redemption.” Furthermore, the respective roles of the Godhead in “the affair of redemption” would also be addressed, but only after he was ¤nished “with all the doctrines relating to man’s redemption.”16 There seems little reason to doubt, therefore, that Edwards originally conceived of the substance of his redemption treatise as an essential part of the 168


“Rational Account.” Furthermore, there is direct evidence that some of the major aims of the “Rational Account” were to be taken up in the revised “Work of Redemption.” As he sketched out his revision of the original sermon series in the 1750s, for example, he once again raised the issue of the centrality of theological discourse to philosophical knowledge, a subject that he had explicitly laid out as a part of the “Rational Account” some twenty-¤ve years earlier. All truth seems to con¤rm and illustrate divine truth. How philosophy, the more and more it is brought to perfection, the more and more it becomes a branch of divinity. How all the sciences, the more they are truly understood and taught, are like streams that empty themselves at last into divinity as the last branch, into a great river. The greater and greater discoveries are made in them, so much more do the various streams come together into one.17

The preponderance of this sort of evidence shows that the “Work of Redemption” clearly played an instrumental role in Edwards’s subsequent execution of the substance of the “Rational Account.” What was it about the nature of this particular enterprise that led to its eventual serialization apart from the whole, the ¤rst topic in the “Rational Account” to be so rendered? If the 1739 sermon series represents the initial serialization of his greater project, was it also an initial effort to provide a more comprehensive explication of Christian doctrine and its ultimate compatibility with human reason? Was this what he had in mind when he insisted that it was the “Scripture history” itself that presented the “most rational, excellent account” of all of the doctrines relating to the grand designs of providence?18 Did Edwards’s strong interest in a rational defense of the biblical narratives, evident elsewhere in materials relating to the “Rational Account,” play a role in the original development of the Redemption discourse, or in his desire to return to it during the last decade of his career?

An Entirely New Method “In a method entirely new!” opened the Monthly Review’s derisive notice of the appearance of Edwards’s treatise, a thrust at its publisher’s advertisement. Far from anything novel, the unnamed reviewer declared it “a long, laboured, dull, confused rhapsody” whose method relied upon a tired recasting of scriptural history, interpolated, where that account was silent or left off, with “facts not to be met with in any history sacred or prophane.” Edwards, that “poor departed enthusiast,” was clearly a visionary divine intoxicated with pious reveries, given to instances of “the most unbridled imagination.” The motive behind the treatise was evidently one of self-promotion, a demonstration of its author’s theological prowess designed to “add as much as possible to the dif¤culty and weight” of Christian belief “by entangling the plain gospel into a gordian knot.” The work was nothing more than a “curious specimen of Theology in the Historical Mode

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spiritual bombast.” On the eve of yet another revolution in the English commonwealth, the reviewer sensed in Edwards’s treatise an evocation of the same apocalyptic fervor that had fueled a previous ignoble uprising: “far from being in a method entirely new, it is merely an attempt to revive the old mystical divinity that distracted the last age with pious connundrums: and which, having, long ago, emigrated to America, we have no reason to wish should ever be imported back again.”19 Needless to say, Edwards hardly would have been pleased by such a riposte, but more to the point is whether he would have recognized the treatise that he anticipated writing in the reviewer’s characterization. In his letter to the Princeton trustees he had laid out his own conception of the work as he discussed his plans to revise and expand the 1739 sermon series. The “Work of Redemption” would be developed as a body of divinity in an entire new method, being thrown into the form of a history; considering the affair of Christian Theology, as the whole of it, in each part, stands in reference to the great work of redemption by Jesus Christ; which I suppose to be, of all others, the grand design of God, and the summum and ultimum of all the divine operations and decrees; particularly considering all parts of the grand scheme, in their historical order . . . introducing all parts of divinity in that order which is most scriptural and most natural; a method which appears to me the most beautiful and entertaining, wherein every divine doctrine will appear to the greatest advantage, in the brightest light, in the most striking manner, shewing the admirable contexture and harmony of the whole.20

What did Edwards conceive as the nature and scope of this divinity? Why did he think the method he proposed to be new and signi¤cant, and why did he consider a new method to be desirable, even necessary? While Perry Miller and Peter Gay disagreed somewhat in their assessment of his relationship to modern historical awareness, they did agree that the “Work of Redemption” stands as the representative example of Edwards’s achievement as a historian.21 John F. Wilson, on the other hand, has taken issue with the characterization of the “Work of Redemption” as principally a work of (universal) historiography. The theological preoccupation of the treatise observed but dismissed by both Miller and Gay in fact reveals Edwards’s primary intention in writing it. Edwards’s own characterization of the work shows that “he did not identify his approach exclusively or even secondarily as historical, or in terms that establish that he was committed to historical writing as preeminent.” “Beyond doubt,” Wilson concludes, “the Redemption project remained primarily a theological program in his mind.”22 Wilson proposes that the concerns of the “Work of Redemption” were instead essentially soteriological in nature. The revised treatise was intended to 170


bring Edwards’s thought “to its summation in a volume that would give theology a new basis in the theme of God’s redemption of the world.” As such it represented “a systematic discussion of the doctrine central to his mature thinking.” 23 Accordingly, Wilson identi¤es the Redemption discourse as a part of the broad stream of Puritan interpretation of this fundamental topic. He argues that the “Work of Redemption” moves in a somewhat new direction regarding this subject, however. Standard Puritan treatments were especially occupied with the subjective aspects, or application, of redemption, a concern demonstrated by their concentration on such issues as the morphology of conversion and the visibility of the saints (concerns that Edwards shared, and addressed in works like the Religious Affections). What he intended to offer in the “Work of Redemption” was a theological analysis of the objective side of redemption, as it manifested itself through a providentially guided human history. In this sense his treatise represented a new method for theology.24 Wilson’s interpretation no doubt identi¤es important elements in Edwards’s design for this project. Edwards explicitly attributed a primarily theological function to this treatise; he also clearly intended the “Work of Redemption” as a recitation of the signal events of redemptive history. Yet there is strong evidence that he also envisioned an additional and broader pedagogical function for the revision of the “Work of Redemption.” The letter to the trustees speci¤cally describes such a function, one seemingly more comprehensive than a singular or even systematic treatise on the subject of redemption. Wilson discounts what he takes to be Edwards’s later, more expansive description of the “Work of Redemption,” however, because the three notebooks in which he sketched out his planned revision show no signi¤cant change in method or content from the original sermons. They represent instead “more the clari¤cation, speci¤cation, and proposed ampli¤cation of the argument of the Redemption Discourse as already framed than signi¤cant departures from it—or proposed revisions that would transform it.” “Recognizing the literary characteristics of the original sermons leads us to place less emphasis upon the presumptive changes and recasting that the passage from the letter to the trustees implies.” 25 But such a conclusion rests on the premise that Edwards originally conceived the “Work of Redemption” solely or primarily as a presentation of soteriology, or that at some later point he did not come to realize additional purposes for the treatise. What if his later comments more accurately describe the purpose and design of this treatise in both its original and revised forms, or at the very least, represent an elaboration or adaptation of the original sermon series? Could Edwards have desired to develop his Redemption discourse so that its doctrinal utility might be more fully realized, so that it might also function as a more systematic and comprehensive presentation of Christian belief consonant with the expressed design of the “Rational Account”?26 Theology in the Historical Mode

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Several considerations lend support to such an interpretation. First—and this probably cannot be emphasized too strongly—Edwards clearly identi¤es the purpose and substance of his divinity in the letter to the trustees, with repeated allusions to its broad and systematic nature. He intended that it should treat “the whole affair of Christian Theology,” using a method that would “introduce all parts of divinity in the most scriptural and natural order.” He also identi¤es the narrative framework of the redemption motif as essential to the systematic nature of the treatise. It would enable “all parts of the grand scheme to appear in their historical order,” and so allow “every divine doctrine to appear to its greatest advantage.” This divinity would thereby be thoroughly comprehensive, “carried on with regard to all three worlds,” “beginning from eternity” and carrying forth until “at last we come to the consummation of all things.” 27 Since he is generally not given to being careless in expressing his intentions, this description ought to be accorded due consideration. Furthermore, his choice of the term “redemption” in the letter was one pregnant with meaning for Edwards, and it was not simply a synonym for soteriology. It was rather a fundamental and all-encompassing category for describing theology as a whole, one that he used elsewhere to this effect. This is the substance, for example, of his discussion in the End for Which God Created the World, a work considered by Wilson and other scholars as his prolegomenon to the “Work of Redemption.” Here he characterizes the ultimate end of the creation as the emanation and perception of God’s glory. This glory is most clearly or signi¤cantly manifested in divine providence toward the moral and intelligent part of creation, and is expressed most particularly in the greatest work of providence, the work of redemption. “Thus ’tis evident that the glory of God is the ultimate end of the work of redemption—which is the chief work of providence towards the moral world.” The entire logic of God’s selfcommunication points to a union with his creatures through the instrument of redemption. For Edwards, “redemption” is a term that makes reference to the whole of God’s work ad extra, and thus to the whole of those doctrines relating to this work.28 Redemption is the “summum and ultimum of all the divine operations and decrees,” and as such is a most appropriate motif around which to organize the systematic treatment of doctrine. Therefore, his most de¤nitive statement on the nature of this treatise intimates that rather than merely representing a systematic exposition of the doctrine of redemption, it was to be a systematic exposition of doctrine, using “redemption” as its organizing motif. Furthermore, rather than indicating any kind of sharp departure from the original plan of the “Work of Redemption,” Edwards’s later characterization of the treatise is actually consistent with the broad doctrinal scope and orientation of both the original sermon series and the three notebooks of the revision. It is also consistent with the time frames and contexts in which he pro172


duced them.29 It is apparent, for example, that the systematic presentation of doctrine was at the forefront of his concerns at the time he delivered the original series. Almost immediately after ¤nishing the Redemption sermons in August of 1739, he delivered one of his most signi¤cant treatments of the importance of doctrinal knowledge. In November of that year he preached the sermon that has come to be known as “Christian Knowledge.” An attempt to address the “common de¤ciency in a doctrinal acquaintance with the principles of religion, and the truths of Christian divinity,” it speci¤cally argues that a full knowledge of biblical doctrine is essential to true religion. This speculative or natural knowledge of doctrine is not just for the idle amusement of divines and ministers, but is instrumental in the acquisition of a spiritual or heart-felt knowledge of religion. As such all doctrine should be considered indispensable, the supreme science. And it is available only from one source: “It is only the word of God,” not human reason, “which teaches us Christian divinity.” It is “taught by God in a book full of instruction” containing “a summary of all things of this nature needful for us to know.”30 The timing of this sermon shows that questions of doctrinal instruction were a matter of concern at the time, and raises the question of whether his previous delivery of the Redemption sermons was in fact intended as a systematic presentation of doctrine. The November sermon certainly would have served as a most suitable conceptual epilogue to such an effort. This sermon’s stress on the vital importance of a broad knowledge of Christian doctrine and on the exclusively biblical source of this knowledge comports well with the thesis that the “Work of Redemption” was in fact an attempt to provide his parishioners with an overview of such knowledge in a ready form.31 The timing of Edwards’s return to the Redemption series also accords well with his expressed desire to produce a comprehensive divinity. The production of a systematic treatment of doctrine was the manner in which clergy traditionally brought together the body of unpublished (sermonic) material that they had developed over the course of their careers. One can note the collection of Samuel Willard’s sermons on the Westminster Confession into his Compleat Body of Divinity (1726) as an American example of this practice. It would have been quite natural for Edwards to have undertaken such an endeavor at this point in his career, and even expected from someone of his stature. There was certainly ample material in his sermons, the “Miscellanies,” and other notes for a comprehensive work of divinity. And in fact, Edwards was planning an important addition to the method of the revised treatise that would speci¤cally incorporate a broader discussion of theological issues alongside the historical narration of God’s redemptive acts. The later Redemption notebooks reveal that he intended to provide some type of critical apparatus to this end in the text: “Let there be large marginal notes at the bottom of the page and the re®ections and doctrinal observations and disputations be in Theology in the Historical Mode

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them.” 32 Such an apparatus would have allowed him to expand upon important theological controversies without unduly interfering with the narrative ®ow of his historical divinity. And it offers to show that his revision of the “Work of Redemption” was being structured for a systematic treatment of doctrine, including those polemical aspects so common to the genre. Finally, and most signi¤cantly, all the evidence suggests that Edwards had settled on a speci¤cally historical method for teaching doctrine at the outset of his career, and that it was a method he continued to advocate and employ to the end of his life. His early catechetic practices with the children of Northampton, for example, employed biblical history as an instrument to teach doctrine. He kept at least two sets of papers detailing his pedagogy. One of these contains over one hundred questions concerning the content of biblical history, while the other contains some ¤fty additional questions on doctrine. While he had other more popular tools, such as the Shorter Catechism, at his disposal, he evidently thought they should be augmented by a historical method of instruction.33 This preference for teaching divinity through the prism of biblical history appears only to have heightened over time, remaining central to his pedagogical philosophy. For example, in discussing his plans for the educational curriculum at the Stockbridge mission with one of its benefactors, William Pepperell, Edwards expressed his preference for sacred history as an instructional instrument. Besides the things already mentioned, there are other things, which, as it appears to me, ought to be done, with regard to the education of children in general, wherein the common methods of instruction in New-England, are grossly defective. The teacher, in familiar discourses, might, in a little time, give the children a short general scheme of the Scriptural history, beginning with the creation of the world, and descending through the various periods of that history, informing them of the larger divisions, and more important events of that story, and giving them some idea of their connection one with another.34

He goes on to suggest that the children should also be taught some of the geography and chronology of Scripture, the intertestamental and secular history that bridges the Old and New Testaments, as well as ecclesiastical history and its ful¤llment of biblical prophecy. In short, the method outlined in this letter recapitulates the essential framework of the “Work of Redemption.” Consistent with his previously noted emphasis on the functional value of doctrine, he states that the purpose of rehearsing of scriptural history was to engender true religious affections. A “familiar applying of the events of the story discoursed, for the informing of the child’s understanding, in®uencing his heart, and directing its practice.”35 It was just this sort of instruction that his son later re174


called as characteristic of his father’s teaching during their time in Stockbridge. “I remember that besides preaching on the Lord’s day, he was wont to have an evening exercise, in the winter, at a private house, in which he gave them an account of sacred history, with practical re®ections.”36 The content and method of his practical pedagogy thus clearly anticipates and parallels the very content and method of the Redemption discourse. His consistent and enduring preference for using a historical form of theological instruction strongly intimates that the purpose of this treatise from its inception may well have been that of a systematic and comprehensive presentation of biblical doctrine, or at the very least, that it proved amenable to such purposes later on. The almost complete overlap of doctrinal concerns between the outline of the “Rational Account” and the “Work of Redemption” also suggests that this treatise came to serve as the sum and substance of his aim to produce a rational explication of Christian belief. Assuming the primarily doctrinal purposes of the “Work of Redemption,” what could have motivated Edwards to employ a historical method for such a treatise? Based on the rather un¤nished nature of the original exposition, Wilson has concluded that the 1739 sermon series is best understood as a “prototreatise.” Its unusual prose form and arbitrary sermon divisions indicate that Edwards planned to develop it further; he undertook it as a preliminary foray into his subject, as a work in progress. Since his treatises in general were developed in response to contemporaneous issues and events, it might be reasonable to suppose that the “Work of Redemption” arose out of similar concerns. Wilson identi¤es the religious revivals in Northampton during the 1730s as the appropriate context for understanding the signi¤cance of the Redemption discourse. Relatively secure at this time in his role as pastor and community leader, Edwards intended to give a more complete theological exposition of the spiritual events recently witnessed in his congregation. This effort had as its precursors his God Glori¤ed in the Work of Redemption (1731) and Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (1737).37 No doubt this explanation is substantially correct, though as Wilson notes, it is also apparent from earlier entries in the “Miscellanies” (and from the 1730 outline of the “Rational Account” itself ) that his interests and plans for the Redemption discourse predate the events of the 1730s.38 The years immediately preceding and following the original Redemption sermons, however, also represent a period when he was particularly occupied with the critical historical problems being raised about the biblical narratives. These were issues that often found their way into other sermons at the time, as he attempted to provide an apologetic for the traditionary nature of true religion.39 Two years prior to the Redemption sermons, for example, in August and November of 1737, Edwards delivered successive public lectures on 2 Peter 1.19. In them he presented his case for the necessity of revelation and for locatTheology in the Historical Mode

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ing the origin of all religion in biblical historical traditions. His concern was provoked by those “deists at this day in our own nation” who “reject the Bible and all revealed religion and hold that the Bible is a mear human book and Christ a cheat, and [that] God wont give any revelation of his mind any other wise than by the light of nature.”40 His sermon “Christian Knowledge,” motivated by the same concerns, came just two months after his preaching of the Redemption series. In January and again in March of 1740 he delivered public lectures on the historical authenticity of the miracles of Christ.41 That February he delivered an additional set of three sermons concerning the deists’ proposition that “human reason is suf¤cient without the scripture,” sermons that collectively have come to be known as “Man’s Natural Blindness in Religion.” 42 In May of that year he gave the ordination sermon of Edward Billing in Cold Spring, Massachusetts. As with other public lectures where clergy were present, Edwards used this latest opportunity to address the rationality of accepting historical testimony as the principal source of religious belief.43 At the time he developed his redemption narrative, therefore, Edwards was clearly using the platform of the sermon, especially the more formal lecture, to address controversial issues of biblical interpretation. Given this state of affairs, it should be less of a surprise to discover that the Redemption series itself was oriented to a similar context.44 And in fact the dispute about the authenticity of scriptural history is one of the driving concerns of the series. Twenty of the thirty sermons in the original series show varied attention to problems pertaining to the rationality and suitability of the Scripture history as the source of Christian belief. Edwards is often at pains to connect that history where he can to the known body of secular history and knowledge, and to account for its perceived de¤ciencies. He chronicles the rise of prophecy and inspiration, for example, and throughout he carefully documents the development of the written canon.45 This attention to critical problems reaches its zenith in the thirteenth sermon, which comes between his treatments of the Old Testament history and the life of Christ. Here he takes up the critique of the historical records directly and almost exclusively. It is his goal to refute those who would suggest “that it may be [that] some subtile, cunning persons contrived this history and these prophecies,” or those who dismiss the Old Testament narratives merely as the profane records of civil government. The explicit objects of his ire are the deists, who—unlike such heretics as the Arians and Socinians—refuse to “own the Scriptures to be the word of God,” and who in particular reject the very notion that historical documents can function as the repository of the divine mind. To object against a book’s being divine merely because it is historical is a silly objection, just as if that could not be the word of God that gives us an

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account of what is past, or as though it was not reasonable to suppose that God, in a revelation he should give to mankind, would go to give us any relation of the dispensations of his own providence.46

Clearly, one of the primary tasks Edwards set out for himself in the original “Work of Redemption” was to argue for the abiding relevance of the Scripture history in an age in which its integrity and thus its religious necessity were being openly eroded. Establishing its historical authenticity was indispensable to his theological narration of the acts of providence, since “the written word of God is this main instrument Christ has made use of to carry on his Work of Redemption in all ages since it was given.”47 These concerns also greatly occupied his attention during the period that he was recasting his plans for the “Work of Redemption.” The time at Stockbridge (1751–1757) encompassed some of the most active years in his treatment of the problems that critical historical approaches presented for biblical interpretation. The “Notes on Scripture” and “Blank Bible,” for example, are laced with such problems. He also kept a notebook during this time concerning certain “Subjects of Enquiry,” which was almost wholly given over to arguments for the historical authenticity of the Old and New Testaments. After 1753 he began a new set of notes (reaching 131 pages) on the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, a signi¤cant expansion of his previous effort on the subject. His Stockbridge sermons also address critical historical themes such as the authenticity of Christ’s miracles and the probative evidence for his resurrection. Most notably, it was during this period that Edwards began to draw together his plans for the projected “Harmony of the Old and New Testament,” a work consumed with the interpretive signi¤cance of critical issues. A few years before moving to New Jersey, Edwards began to record his plans for revising the “Work of Redemption” in three notebooks (totaling nearly 175 pages). While these manuscripts are quite rough and fragmented—the shortage of paper at Stockbridge found Edwards recording his thoughts in the margins of pages scoured from books, letters, fan paper, and prayer bids—they give important indications of the issues that occupied his attention. With the exception of the third notebook (concerned with ecclesiastical history), what is perhaps most remarkable about these journals is their preoccupation with critical historical problems. Works similarly concerned with the integrity of the biblical accounts, such as Henry Winder’s History of Knowledge, Thomas Salmon’s Geographical Grammar, John Leland’s View of the Principal Deistical Writers, and Johann Stapfer’s Institutiones are copiously cited and worked into his revised argument. Edwards attends to a wide range of historical questions impinging on scriptural integrity, such as the populating of the New World, the origin of the Talmud, the veracity of miracle stories, and the potential forgery of the Old Testament histories and canon. No doubt his new plans to Theology in the Historical Mode

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adopt an apparatus of marginal notes and footnotes would have served as a vehicle to address points of critical as well as doctrinal dispute; as previously noted, such an apparatus was now considered to be indispensable to critically informed historical writing. The revision of the Redemption series was thus devoted to negotiating the relationship between critical secular knowledge and biblical history, and to providing compelling evidences for the “great con¤rmation of the authenticity” of the latter.48 Above all, Edwards was dedicated to using this treatise to show that the history supplying the rationale and substance for his magisterial divinity was itself reliable. His new method for theology was to be devoted to presenting “evidence of the TRUTH of those facts and that history.”49 His divinity represented a serious and sustained effort on his part to systematically address the broad implications of historical criticism for traditionary Christian belief. There is strong evidence, therefore, to suggest that Edwards was focused on the question of the empirical authenticity of the biblical accounts during the years surrounding both his initial preaching of these sermons and his plans to revisit them. More than simply an occasion for elaborating a theology of redemption, the series was an attempt to address issues of historical method as well. The clear polemical nature of the “Work of Redemption,” along with its shared concerns for a rational defense of doctrine and of the authenticity of biblical history, also shows its close af¤nity with Edwards’s purposes for the original “Rational Account.” These concerns greatly shaped the substance and form of the argument presented in the “Work of Redemption” itself. The intensely debated issues surrounding the philosophical cogency and historical integrity of the scriptural accounts provide crucial contextual clues for understanding the purpose and design of his summary treatise. The question that remains, then, is why Edwards would choose such an unsystematic and unwieldy literary form to present a subject traditionally treated with strict regard for a speci¤ed conceptual order, and still more why he thought it was important to do so. He was well aware that the “immethodical” presentation of ideas inherent in historical narrative was one of the chief criticisms that those who insisted on rational and literary consistency made of religious knowledge as it was presented in the Bible. A divinity structured according to the Bible’s narrative scheme would certainly incorporate much of this unevenness and consequent obscurity, and thus invite similar criticism and skepticism. Furthermore, by choosing a narrative structure for his divinity Edwards was explicitly turning away from certain time-honored models of theological method favored by the Reformed tradition.50 Why did he believe that a narrative method was particularly suitable and advantageous to the purposes of a systematic theology?51

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The Harmony of Sacred History Edwards’s choice of theological method was motivated by several important considerations that were at the root of much of the skepticism expressed toward Christian doctrine during his lifetime. A narrative scheme would allow him to provide a convergent treatment of the many divisive issues he had spent his career attending. His broader solution to the problem of critical skepticism was multifaceted, asserting at various points the selfauthenticating nature of biblical narrative, the suf¤ciency of common sense probability in the face of unresolved critical problems, the derivative nature of natural and other religions, and the validity of a typological hermeneutic. All of these approaches ¤nd expression in the “Work of Redemption,” his more historico for theological doctrine. As argued in the preceding chapter, he made a concerted effort to show that rational religion was neither as self-evident or as free from obscurity as its proponents claimed. This state of affairs necessitated a clearer and fuller revelation from God. For there “is doubtless some design that God is pursuing and scheme that he is carrying on in the various changes and revolutions that from age to age happen in the world; there is some certain great design to which providence subordinates all the successive changes that come to pass in the state of affairs of mankind.”52 In addition, however, he argued that, theologically speaking, the works of providence were preeminent to the works of creation. Creation was simply the stage for God’s work of redemption. This of course necessitated a divine narration of providential intervention. Creaturely reason was incapable of discerning the religious meaning behind the events of human history.53 It is no doubt signi¤cant that several entries in the “Miscellanies” concerning the necessity of a narrative of redemption date from the time of his sermon series, for the opening and closing sermons or chapters of the “Work of Redemption” also posit this fundamental need for a revealed theology of providence in the face of a ratiocinative theology of nature. If we behold the events of providence in any other view than that in which it has been set before us, it will all look like confusion, like a number of jumbled events coming to pass without any order or method, like the tossing of the waves of the sea. Things will look as though one confused revolution came to pass after another merely by blind chance, without any regular design or certain end. But if we consider the events of providence in the light in which they have been set before us under this doctrine in which the Scriptures set them before us, they appear far from being jumbled and confused,

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but an orderly series of events, all wisely ordered and directed in excellent harmony and consistence, tending all to one end.54

The ¤rst and last sermons of the Redemption discourse in which this theoretical consideration of history appears serve as the literary and conceptual bookends for the entire treatise, providing the interpretive context for the intervening argument. History is the preeminent stage of divine activity. And if historical narrative is the singular means of divine communication, of deciphering that activity, then ascertaining the harmony or consistence of that narrative is of crucial importance. It required that he attend to critical problems that potentially undermined the historiography of redemption in his recapitulation of it. He was aware of the potential gulf between the contingent truths of history and the necessary truths of reason. It was important to ¤nd some way of maintaining the intelligibility of history and its rational connection to the truths of religion. The adoption of the epistemological standards of the more geometrico provided the philosophical rationale for the deists’ criticism of the Bible and for their subordination of traditionary to natural religion. They held that the reliability of the biblical narratives was unascertainable, and that this uncertainty put them in con®ict with “reason,” a term deists employed almost exclusively as a synonym for demonstrable forms of knowledge. If the “Work of Redemption” is devoted to providing evidence of the factual reliability of sacred history, it is no less concerned with the need to reassert the primacy of revealed over rational religion. As he does elsewhere, Edwards develops a sustained argument in this treatise that natural religion is not only not demonstrable, but is epistemologically and historically derivative of revealed traditions passed down from antiquity. Natural religion may seem to be evident and reasonable, but this is only after the fact, a consequence of cultural conditioning. Civilized nations, in his reading of the historical record, did not have an adequate notion even of natural religion without tradition. Rather, they “lay one age after another, and nothing proved effectual to enlighten ’em; the light of nature, and their own reason, and all the wisdom of learned men, signi¤ed nothing till the Scriptures came.”55 In a nearly contemporaneous entry in the “Miscellanies” Edwards notes the following: “Preface. To Rational Account. To mention some things that may justly make us suspect that the present fashionable divinity is wrong.” The “fashionable divinity” he has in mind here is undoubtedly the autonomous natural religion of the deists, for he speci¤cally objects to the notion that religion can be had on the basis of natural morality.56 His objections to the contemporary approach to divinity as a natural moral science are of a piece with his increasing aversion to rationalistic views of natural religion, and indicate a further motive for prosecuting a theology in the historical mode. It is precisely 180


this kind of analysis that one encounters in the revision of the “Work of Redemption.” In the ¤rst notebook, for example, Edwards raises the issue of the development (or lack thereof ) of rational religion in other cultures. Quoting Henry Winder’s History of Knowledge, he observes: Tradition must by [Moses’] time in the nature of things degenerate into great obscurity and uncertainty and languish into a state of even nescience, even if the Hebrew chronology is admitted. . . . Tho they set out with the tabernacle of reason and had solid foundations of information to build upon; it in fact proved that with all their strengthened faculties and growing powers of reason the edi¤ce of religion rose in the most absurd deformities and disproportions. . . . [Thus] we may justly ascribe the great improvements in the world on this subject of religion to divine revelation either vouchsafed in the beginning when this knowledge was competently clear and copious or at the death of paganism, when this light shown forth in its consummate [form] at the coming of Christ.57

As such entries indicate, Edwards was intent on ®eshing out the implications of his claims about the traditionary and non-ratiocinative character of natural religion in the “Work of Redemption.” His historical method offered the ideal format for such an argument. Revealed religion would be the organizing principle of religious knowledge, one in which the secondary value of natural religion would be illustrated. A divinity structured according to sacred narrative would have allowed Edwards just the kind of vehicle he needed to trace out the historical relationship between revealed and natural religion, enabling him to make his case for the character of the latter as a subordinate and derivative manifestation of received religious knowledge. Beyond his concern to circumscribe the claims of rational religion, one of the most important considerations shaping his choice of method for his divinity came out of his desire to answer the deists’ epistemological criticism of the biblical narratives. He could do so by providing his own account of the knowledge generated by the Scripture history, one comparable to the epistemic certainty of the more geometrico. Edwards had always insisted that the narrative genre of sacred history was not just suf¤cient for, but particularly suited to, the communication of divine knowledge. Drawing on elements of the Reformed tradition, he maintained that sacred history was qualitatively different from other histories, at least for the regenerate reader. The gracious emanations of the Spirit to the reader and in the text resulted in a history that delivered an intuitive certainty about its contents, a certainty comparable if not superior to that of mathematics and the fundamental sense experiences analyzed by Locke. This illuminative quality of scripture guaranteed an absolute or infallible certainty regarding the reliability and truthfulness of biblical knowledge claims, even though they resided in the form of historical statements. These Theology in the Historical Mode

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internal marks were the wholly suf¤cient grounds and means of the certainty of Scripture; they were typically described in terms of the native affective or aesthetic qualities of Scripture, such as its divinity, majesty, purity, beauty, perfection, excellence, or harmony.58 His appropriation and development of this theory was of long standing, and forms the heart of his epistemological justi¤cation of the rationality of Christian belief and its historical sources. This is clearly the operative epistemological theory underlying his appeal to the primacy of sacred history in the original Redemption sermons as well. “How rational, worthy and excellent a revelation is that, and how excellent a book is the Bible that contains how much beyond all other books in the world. And what characters are here of its being indeed a divine book.” “No common history has such penmen as this history, which was all written by men that came with evident signs and testimonies of their being prophets of the most high God, immediately inspired. Though they are histories, yet they are no less full of divine instruction . . . than other parts of the holy Scriptures that are not historical.” The biblical narration of divine providence shows that its various parts are “harmonized and connected together as a regular, beautiful, and glorious frame.” Scriptural history provides “a most rational, excellent account” of God’s redemptive work, “exceedingly showing forth the glory of his perfections, his majesty, [and] his wisdom.”59 Edwards’s theory that the biblical narratives possessed a spiritually realized but nonetheless intuitive certainty was a crucial element in his response to the prevailing philosophical skepticism regarding a historical divine testimony. His belief in the supreme ef¤cacy of this historical presentation of redemption was at the heart of his decision to recapitulate it for his parishioners. Signi¤cantly, Edwards describes his “new method of divinity” in precisely the same manner in his letter to the Princeton trustees. The similarities between his description of this treatise and his account of the intuitive and affective properties of Scripture are striking, and can hardly be coincidental. The historical framework of his proposed divinity represents a way of presenting the breadth of Christian doctrine that is “most scriptural and most natural.” It is a method that is “most beautiful and entertaining, wherein every divine doctrine will appear to the greatest advantage, in the brightest light, in the most striking manner, showing the admirable contexture and harmony of the whole.” 60 His more historico would display Christian doctrine in all its beauty, light, harmony, and affective force. It seems highly probable, therefore, that one of the primary motives for his choice of method was imitative. If the ideal or divinely given pattern for communicating religious knowledge was narrative in form, then the recapitulation of that pattern offered the best and most compelling means for expressing the essential themes of Christian divinity. If in fact the scripture history is selfauthenticating through its divine excellence and harmony, then it is especially 182


reasonable and natural to attempt to emulate these features in theological discourse. Sacred history, in Edwards’s view, served as the quintessential epistemological model for doing theology. Unlike the prevailing loci model of Reformed divinity that treated critical and philosophical issues within the doctrine of scripture, his method would translate the very form of dogmatics into a response to the problems of biblical interpretation. As he had explained in his letter to the trustees, he envisioned the “Work of Redemption” as a divinity “thrown into the form of a history.” His plan to produce a comprehensive treatment of doctrine would coincide with his desire to assert the primacy and integrity of scriptural history.

Physico-History Edwards’s method of biblical interpretation has often been noted for its imaginative and rather unrestrained qualities, qualities revealing of a mentality that was still relatively unburdened by critical historical concerns. He has also been characterized as perhaps the last great American intellectual to believe that natural science and traditional religion could be held together in a coherent system of discourse. Each of these descriptions is correct to a large degree, but each also disguises a lurking sense of tension in his biblical commentary between the sort of world discoverable by scienti¤c investigation and the one depicted in sacred history. In point of fact his knowledge of and esteem for the new science placed a decided encumbrance on his interpretation of the Scripture history. His sensitivity to the achievements of the new science forced him to pay closer attention to the empirical implications of the kinds of physical statements made in the Bible, and signi¤cantly shaped his understanding of the nature of its language. There is a real sense in which science and the Bible collided for Edwards, producing a fallout evident in his recognition of the limited perspective that the ancient authors had of the world. Judging by the output of publications on the subject, scholarly interest in Edwards’s scienti¤c writings seems to have peaked a generation ago, if not earlier.61 The small body of work that does exist has been preoccupied largely with the impact that the new science and especially Newton had on the development of Edwards’s metaphysical idealism, as well as on the method behind his prosecution of theological questions.62 In general scholars have interpreted his scienti¤c interests as indicative of a fairly progressive mind. The materials bear this out. While he may not have been as precocious and original in his scienti¤c work as has sometimes been represented, his notes on natural philosophy reveal someone who was keenly perceptive of and enthralled by the enterprise as a whole, who was committed to the procedure of discovery and intent on revising traditional preconceptions about the natural world. Though in many ways he held an inordinate esteem for the wisdom of the ancients, on this issue Theology in the Historical Mode

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he was decidedly in the camp of the moderns. The success of modern science even had theological implications for him. The Newtonian synthesis, for example, was nothing less than a work of providence: “The true philosophy of Sir Isaac Newton. One thing to make way for the glorious universal setting up of Christ’s kingdom.”63 But Edwards also lived in an age when empirical knowledge of the physical world was intruding upon traditional interpretations of the surface narrative of the Bible. It was beginning to raise serious questions about the adequacy of ancient descriptions of cosmology and of historical events involving miracles or other forms of divine intervention. This was chie®y a problem related to the more developed disciplines of astronomy and physics, but it also was becoming a dif¤culty for rudimentary disciplines such as earth theory (geology), paleontology, meteorology, chemistry, zoology and botany, and human medicine. Humanistic disciplines such as geography and antiquarianism were also being brought to bear with increasing rigor on the interpretation of the biblical texts, requiring additional grounding in and negotiation with the contextual world of which these accounts were a part. This was one venue where ideological critics such as the deists largely did not generate the more divisive applications to sacred history.64 This was due in part to the fact that the practitioners of science, the holders of technical knowledge, were themselves by and large relatively orthodox members of the ecclesiastical and academic communities. They generally advocated a reconciliation of the new science with the interpretation of Scripture in order to preserve the sense of the latter’s authority and integrity. At the same time, however, such ¤gures were responsible for advocating the need for changes in traditional interpretation, for attempts to make it conformable to modern physical theories, and for generating controversial and imaginative interpretive strategies in order to accomplish this end. This was not a problem that thinkers like Edwards could easily dismiss, therefore, as the work of skeptics and in¤dels. These views were coming from the pens of generally traditional biblical interpreters, and had to be entertained more soberly.65 He was deeply in®uenced by these developments. Some of them he resisted, others he embraced; but he attempted to integrate all of them into a coherent discourse about the natural world in its ancient and modern depictions. Above all else he sought to harmonize the two, and to use this synthesis to vindicate the divine origin and authenticity of the scriptural accounts. The rising subgenre of physico-theology in Anglican apologetics, in which he was well read, was not so much an effort to produce a scienti¤cally informed natural theology as it was an effort to insinuate contemporary physical theory into the cosmology and interpretation of the Bible. This required a substantial reinterpretation of its historical descriptions by making them conformable to natural law, a strategy that in turn offered to diminish the pertinence of their religious 184


explanations. Edwards imbibed this strategy as well as its implicit tensions. Thus modern science made signi¤cant inroads into his biblical interpretation, not only directing his attention to the tensions between the two but also serving as a moderating in®uence on his reading of texts, even competing to some degree with his more properly theological mode of interpretation. He had embarked on an agenda to invest the biblical narratives with the authority of empirical science, thus providing a plausible “physico-history” of the work of redemption. While recognizing some of the tensions that science generated in American educational institutions, the historiography of colonial science has tended to focus on its impact on particular theological considerations, most notably on the development of natural theology.66 Its speci¤c critical impact on biblical interpretation has not been explored. But intimations of colonial interest in this interpretive strategy can be found as far back as the late seventeenth century. For example, Charles Morton—colleague of Theophilus Gale, teacher of Daniel Defoe, and professor of philosophy at Harvard—wrote what according to Norman Fiering was the ¤rst American contribution to be reviewed in a learned European journal, “An Enquiry into the Physical and Literal Sense of that Scripture” (Jeremiah 8).67 In it he takes up the problem of a passage referring to the migratory patterns of birds, particularly the stork “in heaven, who knoweth her appointed times.” While the text itself uses avian migration as a point of contrast to the failures of Israelite spiritual instincts, Morton is concerned with establishing a connection between the natural history of the Bible and empirical ornithology. Knowing from astronomy that the moon and earth share a similar topography (and atmosphere), he argues that this is the most likely location of their wintering site. Morton’s reasoning is elegant and imaginative.68 More signi¤cantly his essay indicates that by this time colonial biblical interpretation was being in®uenced by the achievements of empirical science. By the ¤rst half of the eighteenth century the kinds of works prosecuting this sort of reconciliation were common in colonial libraries. Edwards’s own “Catalogue” and reading citations reveal that he possessed such works early, and read broadly in the genre.69 Edwards’s predilection for typological interpretation permeates nearly all of his manuscripts and published treatises. He shows no signs of doubt about its suitability as an interpretive method at any point in his career. Works such as “Images of Divine Things,” “Types of the Messiah,” and “Harmony of the Old and New Testament” suggest he considered its contemporary re-articulation to be of crucial importance to Christian theology. But it was a mode of interpretation that was meeting with increased skepticism in his day. Deists such as Anthony Collins argued that the premier instance of biblical typology, the christological interpretation of the Old Testament in the New, could not be taken literally. The Old Testament passages did not intend what the New TesTheology in the Historical Mode

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tament authors said they did. The apostolic authors were in fact using a rabbinic form of interpretation that allowed for the free use and even alteration of texts provided these were in keeping with the spirit of the passage and the weight of Jewish tradition. Typology was also coming under pressure from a renewed emphasis on the historical-grammatical meaning of texts, long a staple of Protestant hermeneutics but now being more rigorously utilized at the expense of other theological modes of interpretation. The new physical sciences added to the push for contextualized interpretation, resulting in signi¤cant changes in the way in which the Bible was perceived, changes that Edwards consciously or unconsciously absorbed. This can be seen most vividly in his treatment of certain passages whose typological and physical interpretation overlap. Edwards freely discoursed on the typological signi¤cance of any, and nearly every, event of Israel’s history. The story of Noah’s ark, for example, was “upon many accounts” a type of the church: like Christ the ark was a refuge from the storm of wrath, and like him it received every sort of creature, even the vilest. The dove, like the gracious soul, can ¤nd no rest in the world, while the carnal raven feeds on the carrion of pleasure.70 He naturally took this story literally, as a historical event; it was this literal aspect that gave typological interpretation its rationale. But the literal reading of the biblical account of the Deluge also brought its own set of dif¤culties. In fact his ¤rst entries on it attend to such issues: Nos. 199 and 201 (1730) in the “Notes on Scripture” detail the identity of gopher wood (cypress) as well as the qualities that made it ideal for sea craft (resistance to water and rot). Only by anchoring the story in the empirical world of contemporary science could its theological meaning be sustained.71 Another example of this interpretive tension is found in his treatment of Joshua’s long day. On one level, the sun’s standing still is a type of Christ’s ¤ghting for his church; the moon’s standing still typi¤es the church’s dependence.72 But heliocentric astronomy made the literal reading of this passage impossible. Thus Edwards resorts to an accommodation: it was not the sun but the earth that stopped in its revolution, making the heavenly bodies appear stationary. Proof of the historicity of the event lies in the biblical author’s observation that both the sun and the moon stood still, something that would occur in a heliocentric solar system if the earth stopped revolving, but not in a geocentric universe—a fact unknown to the recorders of this story.73 Besides speci¤cally moderating his typological inclinations, the problems that current theories in the physical sciences generally posed for the literal reading of the Scripture history crop up frequently in his biblical commentary. For all his preference for immediate or spiritual explanations of God’s interaction with creation, especially upon its moral agents, Edwards employed secondary causes to explain providential and miraculous events in sacred history

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with considerable alacrity.74 This included questions on cosmology (the age of the universe, the location of heaven), the geology of the Deluge, the geographical scope of the Babel incident, the optics involved in Israel’s battle with the Moabites, and botanical and zoological discussions of the tree of life, ¤g trees, the feeding patterns of locusts, and Jonah’s great ¤sh. His commentary registers the impact of astronomy, meteorology, and oceanography in his considerations of the book of Job and the story of Sodom, and of human physiology in the book of Proverbs and the story of Goliath.75 The interest in physiology even extends to Christ’s passion, and whether the descriptions of the gospels conform to medical knowledge about the post-mortem properties of blood.76 Perhaps one of the more revealing examples of Edwards’s negotiation between science and biblical interpretation comes in regard to cosmology and his consideration of the notion of a plurality of worlds. This ancient theory of Democritus had been revived by the two most celebrated technological advances of modern science: the microscope and the telescope. The published drawings of Robert Hooke (1665) and Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1673) of the cellular world re-ignited interest in the concept of a great chain of worlds within worlds. Galileo’s discovery that the moon did indeed have a topography resembling the earth’s had a similar effect on speculation about whether the moon or other planets in the solar system might be inhabited. Scienti¤c and theological opinion was decidedly split on the matter, Galileo for one ®atly rejecting the notion (no doubt having in mind that the Inquisition had burned Giordano Bruno at the stake for such views). But others strongly advocated the theory, including Galileo’s colleague Tommaso Campanella, the astronomers Johann Kepler and Christiaan Huygens (Kosmotheoros, 1698), and Bernard de Fontenelle (Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes, 1686). It appears to have had a wide advocacy in England; its supporters included John Wilkins, Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, Thomas Burnet, John Ray, Richard Bentley, William Derham, and William Whiston.77 Edwards’s interest in the question was an early one; a 1722 entry in the “Catalogue” lists Daniel Sturmy’s Theological Theory of a Plurality of Worlds (1711). The issue also appears in his notes on “Natural Philosophy.” There he rejected the atomistic version of the theory, which proposed that the universe comprises an in¤nite number of microcosms within microcosms. “To prove that this world cannot be a small body, for instance, a particle of water of some greater . . . and also to prove that there cannot be another world in a particle of our water.” 78 But he eagerly embraced the view that the stars of the universe are suns, and therefore are most likely to have their own planetary systems as well. Over time, however, he came to express serious reservations about the possibility of other planets being inhabited. Just as plants produce an abundance of seeds that do not come to fruition, so the universe may produce an abundance


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of planets that are seemingly super®uous. The nobility derived from the great size of planets such as Jupiter and Saturn was no guarantee that there would be life on them. God’s election favors the meaner parts of creation, so perhaps this principle applies to planetology as well. Like the discovery of New World peoples, the theory of the plurality of worlds also posed serious problems for the doctrine of original sin, and was being exploited for this end. Thus it is perhaps no surprise that Edwards reacted rather dimly to it late in his career.79 More historically oriented scienti¤c disciplines also made a signi¤cant impact on Edwards’s interpretive method, developments he seems to have embraced more readily. Titles from the “two eyes” of history, chronology and geography, appear frequently in the “Catalogue.”80 His letters and private notes reveal a special interest in geography, particularly evident in his pursuit of various maps and globes, including those of Canaan (an interest he sought to incorporate into his pedagogy).81 The very ¤rst entry in the “Notes on Scripture” addresses the difference between the present and the primeval arrangements of the four rivers of Eden. Others address the post-diluvian dispersal of nations, the location of Job’s homeland Uz and Lot’s portion of land, the geographical descriptions used by Ezekiel, the location of cities in the Holy Land, the ancient setting of Arabia and its peoples, and the economic conditions of Solomon’s reign.82 It is of little surprise that sacred geography should have such a decided interest for Edwards. In the absence of any systematic study or knowledge of Palestine, increasing skepticism was being voiced about the descriptions provided in the scriptural accounts. Travel accounts, including those owned by Edwards, were already being used in attempts to authenticate them. It was not too long after Edwards’s death that the French historian Constantin Volney argued from his own ¤eld work that Palestine was and always had been a wilderness devoid of any civilization, and that the Old Testament accounts were therefore purely mythical (Travels in Egypt and Syria, 1786).83 For Edwards, as for skeptics such as Volney and Voltaire, such issues were integrally related to the authenticity of the texts. “’Tis proof that the Scripture history [is true], that the geography is consistent. Were it a mere ¤ction, the geography must be feigned too, at least in great measure, and there would unavoidably be innumerable blunders and inconsistencies.”84 His concern to root that history in the world of empirical geography foreshadows what would become an abiding interest in the Holy Land in academic and popular American Protestantism throughout the nineteenth century.85 Historical-grammatical considerations also became increasingly important for Edwards’s interpretive method over time. One ¤nds in the “Notes on Scripture” as well as the “Blank Bible” a developing sensitivity to context; the meanings of words and passages are to be determined by the usage and practices of the ancient culture in which the authors lived. The Hebrew word Ashteroth, for

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example, signi¤es “®ocks,” and can be used to discover the speci¤c nature of Canaanite worship, which nominated the moon as the patron of shepherds. Jesus’ engaging the doctors of the Temple, while perhaps precocious, was also perfectly in keeping with the practices of the day. The Temple was a place “where young persons in particular were examined and had liberty to ask questions they thought proper for their further information. He might be said to be in the midst of the doctors, as they sat on benches of a semicircular form raised about their auditors and disciples.”86 Paul’s description of apostles as the “last” of all Christians is borrowed from customs of the Roman circus; his frequent analogies drawn from the Olympic games also illuminate the meaning of the theological lessons of his epistles. The Lord’s supper in the primitive church was part of a wider religious practice in the ancient world, that of “eating together in a religious manner” as a “token of mutual friendship.”87 Perhaps nowhere did his interest in employing the fruits of scienti¤c study in the service of Scripture history manifest itself more vividly than over speci¤c issues pertaining to eschatology, namely, the nature of hell and the universal con®agration. Edwards’s reputation as a neurotic, if not manipulative, ¤re-and-brimstone preacher is ¤rmly engraved in the mythology of early American religion. What is not appreciated, however, is the degree to which the question of the ¤nal consummation of all things had become for him a problem of physics and astronomy as well. Not simply an issue of evangelical persuasion or of maintaining the justice of God, this was as much a matter of assessing the feasibility of the mechanics involved in the eschatological scenario depicted in the Bible.88 For Edwards, as for almost all intellectuals of the era, “the last day became an object, not merely of theological speculation as to its unfolding, nor merely of millenarian expectation as to its time, but also of scienti¤c re®ection as to how it would occur. The last day became part of the new science.”89 The nature of God’s ¤nal disposition of things had been a problem in English thought since at least the middle of the seventeenth century.90 The Socinian objection to the eternity of hell’s torments was rather eagerly adopted by a number of leading Anglican thinkers, including Henry More, Joseph Glanvill, Isaac Barrow, Thomas Burnet, Isaac Newton, John Locke, John Tillotson, Samuel Clarke, and William Whiston. Beyond the question of the justice of such a notion, their argument against it rested on the claim that it was a corruption of primitive Christian belief. The Greek word in the New Testament traditionally translated as “eternal” or “unending” (aiwniws) was more properly understood to mean “a period of long duration.” Beyond this, however, such thinkers argued that the alternative concept of annihilation, besides being more just, was also more consonant with the natural laws governing the dissolution of the universe. Newtonian physics treated the universe like a ma-


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chine, and, as with other machines, predicted that it would eventually wind down. Theologians and scientists thus sought to discover ways of reconciling this natural process of entropy with biblical descriptions of a ¤nal ¤ery con®agration. A great number of possible scenarios were suggested. Henry More, for example, theorized that the earth was gradually drying out, and so eventually would become tinder for volcanoes, meteors, and lightning. Joseph Glanvill proposed that the earth would become a ¤ery comet and ®y off into space. By far the most notorious of these efforts, however, was Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth (1681–1689). This treatise was a pioneer work in earth science, attempting to provide a theory of the formation and dissolution of the planet in terms of contemporary physics while paying heed to the descriptions of the biblical accounts. But it was also an attempt to use this rudimentary earth science in behalf of the doctrine of annihilation. Like his colleague More, Burnet believed that volcanoes and meteors would bring about the earth’s demise, using elemental fuels such as sulfur to ignite a ¤ery inferno. This was a thoroughly natural and predictable event, some two hundred years still removed (he surmised that the topography of Catholic Rome made it the likely ®ash point). Burnet concluded, however, that the con®agration would serve as a precursor to hell, or rather, that it should be equated with hell. The intensity of the ¤nal con®agration would be such that the wicked would be entirely consumed by it, after an initial but limited period of suffering. Hell, therefore, would be a form of annihilation. The con®agration would also be redemptive, leading some if not most of the wicked to repentance before being consumed. The new earth would be formed out of the remaining puri¤ed materials.91 Burnet’s treatise caused a considerable stir. Deists such as Charles Blount (Oracles of Reason, 1693) used it as proof that the Bible could not be taken literally or rationally (Burnet had argued that the accounts of creation and con®agration were to be understood allegorically). William Whiston, though like Burnet an annihilationist, objected to his view that these descriptions were mere allegories. Alarmed at the adverse implications that Burnet’s theory had for the literal authenticity of the Bible, he set about to propose a more compelling physical description of the con®agration while at the same time employing it to further the argument for annihilation. He attempted to show that the biblical accounts were good literal and scienti¤c history, reconcilable with Newtonian physics though accommodated to the perceptions of an ancient audience. In his New Theory of the Earth (1696) and Astronomical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion (1717) Whiston employed Newton’s thesis that comets were responsible for the maintenance of the universe (by replenishing the material of celestial bodies) to argue that the earth’s history could be explained

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almost exclusively by cometology. The earth had been created by a comet; a comet had destroyed Eden after the fall; the Deluge was caused by a passing comet. Comets, therefore, were the most likely candidates to bring about the con®agration. When they had expended their material they would no longer be able to sustain the stars, which would soon lose their substance; the earth would be restored by the resulting celestial ¤re to its original state of paradise. Like Burnet, Whiston used his earth theory and general cosmology to argue that the con®agration would end in the annihilation of the wicked rather than their eternal torment. These views were brought together in a separate treatise in 1740, his Eternity of Hell Torments Considered.92 Whiston presented a particularly dif¤cult challenge for traditionalists like Edwards because he argued in the strongest terms that the biblical cosmology could be taken literally and still be reconciled to the best science of the day. He could hardly be accused of arriving at his views of divine punishment by rejecting the authority or literal meaning of the Bible. Thus some manner of interpretation had to be developed that would show that the notion of eternal hell also accorded well not only with sound biblical interpretation but also with modern physics. The “geography of hell” had changed, and it was incumbent upon Edwards to adapt his interpretation accordingly.93 Edwards’s treatment of these issues is scattered throughout the various strata of his writings—the “Table” to the “Miscellanies” alone lists over one hundred entries on various aspects of hell and the con®agration. These include some of the earliest entries in his private manuscripts as well as his public discourse. Aimed in part at the “Freethinkers of the present age,” his early sermons on hell seem most intent on conceptualizing the reality of the psychological and physical aspects of its torments and on asserting that the vivid language used to describe them is appropriate to that reality. At the same time Edwards acknowledged that these descriptions were not to be taken literally; they are only “metaphors and similitudes.” But this does not make them any less real; he supposes that if anything, as physical metaphors they understate the intensity of the spiritual suffering of hell. One of the analogies he draws on to explicate the nature of the pain of hell is that of lightning. This, he speculates, is the physical reality behind the biblical metaphor of ¤re and brimstone. The heat of this phenomenon is known to be intensely hotter than any manmade source; if “¤re and brimstone” is the biblical euphemism for lightning, then hell’s torments will be horrible indeed.94 This process of accommodating his understanding of eschatological cosmology can be seen in other early documents as well. The end of the world would not come about simply as a result of some unpredictable divine intervention. Edwards accepts the mechanical view of the universe; modern physics (gravity) guarantees its demise in a rather clockwork fashion.


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We need no more than the knowledge of the nature of things, to know that this world must come to an end: mutual attraction, stoppage by attrition, and vis inertiae of matter, and the gradual evening of the face of the earth, will either of them in time unavoidably bring its ruin.95

In his apocalyptic writings he addresses the problem of reconciling the vertically described picture of the universe in the Bible with the relativistic understanding of location in modern astronomy. He rejects the Whistonian contention that the “new earth” spoken of in Revelation is simply the present earth restored (the literal reading), since “¤re by purging” could bring it only to its primitive state, but not to its glorious state. Rather, the promise of a “new heaven and earth” need not be taken to refer literally to those seen now, but could refer to an entirely new arrangement in another part of the universe. This is so because the terms “heaven” and “earth” are to be understood phenomenally. Their meaning is relative to location: if “we were in Jupiter or Saturn, that which would be under our feet would be called earth by us, and that which was over our heads, heaven.” Heaven and earth are simply the “vulgar meaning of the words” that refer to what is below and above, not speci¤c planets and stars. Thus it is possible and even probable that the new heaven and earth “will be some glorious place in the universe prepared for this end by God, removed at an immense distance from the solar system.” Though “there is nothing said of such a remove in this prophecy,” yet it “seems to suppose it in the same place.” For “the Scripture does not represent things, especially in prophecy and vision, according to philosophical verity, but as they appear to our eyes.”96 His concern for such matters especially intensi¤ed after the appearance of Whiston’s Eternity of Hell Torments in 1740.97 From this point on his treatment of them takes on a more decidedly polemical tone; gone is the more playful speculation of his earlier notes on the Apocalypse and natural philosophy. From 1740 to 1745 he produced a string of entries in the “Miscellanies” aimed at answering the central claims raised by Whiston on the nature of hell and its relation to the con®agration.98 In them one sees just how thoroughly considerations of astronomical mechanics shaped his response, and thus how important natural science had become for the reformulation of his theology, at least on this issue. They reveal the degree to which he found it necessary to accommodate the biblical descriptions and their traditional literal interpretation to a modern understanding of the cosmos and to the laws that governed it. Like Whiston, Edwards was a cometologist.99 In his schematization comets are responsible for replenishing the stars, and thus for sustaining the current operations of the universe. They help to prove that the universe will predictably end; as the stars draw off their mass the comets will eventually dissipate. Having lost the source of their sustenance, the stars and planets will in turn meet 192


their demise. But comets also disturb the motions of other celestial bodies, and so will send them into a phase of universal collapse, the perfect equivalent of Isaiah’s description of the heavens being rolled up like a scroll.100 This immense condensation of matter will produce a ¤ery cataclysm. “Philosophy tells us that the motions of the several parts of the visible world must, in great length of time, gradually cease; and that if it ceases, it will all run together into a common heap; but if it does so, it must necessarily be involved in a great con®agration. For I suppose ninety-nine parts in an hundred of the visible world are the most ¤erce liquid ¤re.”101 Given that the known laws of physics and the material composition of the universe are adequate to demonstrate the inescapable fact of the ¤nal con®agration, what are the mechanics of God’s ¤nal judgment, and what in them militates against the notion of annihilation? Again, the Bible’s vulgar language of appearances must be accommodated to known astronomy, and can be reconciled to it. When it speaks of the heavens raining down ¤re upon the earth, this is due to the position of the human observer. What in fact will happen is that gravitational pull will cause heavenly bodies to collapse upon one another. Thus the sun and earth will rush toward each other. The heat generated by this event will turn the earth into molten metal, a liquid globe of ¤re. “What a storm of ¤re and brimstone will this be when the innumerable stars of heaven shall come down like rain.”102 It is on this terrestrial hell that the wicked will spend eternity.103 But this will not lead to their annihilation. Just as the saints receive a resurrected body that is eternal and indestructible, so too will the damned. Since it is not in their present bodies but in resurrected bodies that they suffer judgment, they will suffer a kind of physical torment without being consumed. This is possible because the reconstitution of the universe will produce a change in the elements, the acquisition of a rari¤ed nature that permits constant sensations of pain without consumption. Thus it is “not unlikely that as the senses that will be acted upon by the rays of light and particles of ¤re will be altered, so the rays of light and particles of ¤re that will act upon them will be altered.”104 What implication these materials may have for understanding Edwards’s public discourse on divine retribution is a matter for further study. His acceptance of the new physics led him to conclude that the biblical characterizations of hell were to be understood metaphorically, yet at the same time he insisted that the physical imagery behind the metaphors revealed dreadful portents of divine wrath. Was his use of such vivid imagery in sermons like “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” motivated in part by his awareness that the terror of hell was diminishing in the culture? Perhaps more signi¤cantly, his rejection of the sort of literalism represented by Whiston pushed him to embrace an understanding of the relationship between scienti¤c and biblical descriptions of the natural world that would become prominent in Protestant liberalTheology in the Historical Mode

193

ism. But Edwards’s rejection of the identi¤cation of scriptural language with “philosophical verity” was intended to defend traditional doctrine; Whiston’s extreme literalism was intended to buttress a doctrinal departure, if not innovation. The debate shows that the association often made between progressive hermeneutics and modern theological conclusions is not a necessary one, but was at least in early modernity a somewhat plastic one, determined in part by the ideological considerations at hand. Edwards, at least in his eschatology, reversed the paradigm, insisting on a looser association between the discourses of science and religion, and believing that traditional theology was best supported by such an interpretive strategy.

Edwards’s theology was fundamentally shaped by his appropriation of modern critical modes of discourse. Important aspects of his eschatology were partly determined by his reading of current scienti¤c theory and by the widely shared belief that it formed a uni¤ed world of discourse with theology, when both were understood properly. On balance the evidence is clear that he saw the critical implications that scienti¤c discovery had for biblical interpretation, and that it signi¤cantly affected his interpretive strategy. Far from being oblivious to its effects, he was deeply impressed and disturbed by the potential that science held for theology, and invested considerable energy in attending to the relationship between them. It served both constructive and apologetic purposes in his approach to theology. This should not be at all surprising. Thinkers of any stature during the era were embarked on similar projects. Nearly all attempted to reach some sort of concord between science and the Scripture history, most often by employing mediate causes as instruments of divine intervention. This produced quite a variety of resolutions, some quite novel and even controversial, but within the broad con¤nes of the ecclesiastical establishment and the republic of letters. Invariably they became subjects of the contest over the prerogatives and authenticity of the biblical accounts, their traditional interpretation, and their implications for the fundamental doctrines of the faith. Edwards was well read in a broad cross-section of the major works of this genre, and was similarly pressed into secondary explanations. Many of the staunchest supporters of the authenticity and divine nature of the scriptural accounts, and those most extensively cited by Edwards, had in fact succumbed to more naturalistic interpretations of the biblical data. Reconciliation was always problematic, and once embarked on that road, many found it dif¤cult to resist a greater use of this mode of explanation. Though he is best known for his work as a student of religious experience, as a philosopher of religion, and as a preacher of revival, the entirety of his work suggests that his interest in biblical interpretation deserves an important 194


place in contemporary estimations of Edwards’s intellectual achievements and of his signi¤cance to American religious thought. The “History of the Work of Redemption” has an integral and complex association with his reception of critical historical approaches to the Bible, and illustrates how profoundly these issues affected his broader theological enterprise. From the earliest moments of his professional life, Edwards had planned a constructive treatment of the problems associated with biblical historiography. He closely linked this treatment with his broader concern for presenting a rational case for Christian belief. He initially sought to produce a recapitulation of redemptive history that was at least instrumentally a doctrinal primer, if not fully conceived as a systematic work of doctrine. As he proceeded, he found the critical problems that attended that history were unavoidable, such that the “Work of Redemption” took on a parallel function of asserting the integrity of the biblical narratives as well. The evidence suggests that with the passage of time, he came to realize the greater potential of this treatise both for teaching doctrine and for addressing critical historical problems. Thus the “Work of Redemption” came to serve as the de facto embodiment of the major aims of his long-anticipated “Rational Account” of Christian doctrine and of the historical narratives from which it derived. The Redemption discourse represents his answer to the enduring problem of the reasonableness of historical religious knowledge, and represents the substance of his assertion of the primacy of such knowledge over the prevailing rational religion of his day. It seems clear that in this treatise Edwards was not engaged merely in writing a narrative of universal history, but rather was intent on producing a theological recitation of God’s redemptive activity. At the very least it seems improbable that his broad reading of the geographic, travel, and encyclopedic literature of his day would not have disabused him of the notion that an adequately comprehensive universal narrative could still be generated in the face of such an explosion of information. He was willing to acknowledge the historiographical limitations of the biblical narratives and to transform his interpretation of the Bible accordingly. He recognized that a new method for maintaining the centrality and universality of the Scripture’s religious message was called for. What Edwards offered in its place was a theology of providence: ¤nding in the narratives a discernible pattern of meaning for religious experience that extended beyond the discrete history of the Bible, a pattern for deciphering divine activity in human experience irrespective of time and place. Recognizing that some of world’s past and all of its present history lay outside the purview of sacred historiography, the “Work of Redemption” identi¤es the pattern of divine providence in the template of the Scripture history so that the activity of God might be discernible outside its pages. The “Work of Redemption” was fundamentally shaped by Edwards’s concerns over the “problem” of history, but it was the problem of historical knowlTheology in the Historical Mode

195

edge and the authenticity of biblical history rather than the writing of a universal historiography per se that informed its conception and development. He was well aware that the seemingly uncertain and immethodical presentation of religious knowledge characteristic of historical narratives was one of the chief criticisms made of traditionary religion. But from his point of view a theology in the form of sacred narrative appealed to the soul at a more profound level, offering it a view of true beauty and true virtue, and as such, offering it the real opportunity to consent to Being. As importantly, such a scheme allowed for a convergent treatment of the divisive issues in religious epistemology and critical biblical interpretation, problems that if left unattended threatened to undermine any systematic exposition of traditional theology. The “History of the Work of Redemption,” therefore, stands as testimony to the fact that critical historical issues were becoming part of the prolegomena of theological method in colonial American thought. Its real signi¤cance lies in the fact that with this work one ¤nds American theological method thoroughly engaged with the problem of critical history. Edwards was one of the earliest American thinkers to recognize that utilizing historical sources for doctrine without addressing the problems that threatened to undermine those sources only promised to invite intellectual derision as well as religious skepticism. In the “Work of Redemption” one ¤nds theological method engaged with the problem of critical biblical interpretation in a substantive and innovative way. The Redemption discourse is drawn into a conversation with the underlying philosophical and critical issues that pressed in upon theological discourse. His use of a narrative method to teach doctrine offered him the means to address those problems in a timely and context-speci¤c manner. Edwards’s effort was perhaps the earliest and most systematic attempt in the colonial era to operate with regard to these new parameters. It is in a true sense a narrative theology, one perhaps deserving of his designation of this treatise as one that placed Christian divinity on a new footing.

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7

Denouement

Despite the misgivings he had expressed to the college trustees in the fall of 1757, Edwards accepted their invitation to the presidency of Princeton soon after. On January 8, 1758, he preached his ¤nal sermons to the Indian and white congregations at Stockbridge. A few days later he removed to New Jersey to take up his duties, arriving on the sixteenth of February. That week he was inoculated against smallpox, to which he succumbed within a month.1 Though they do not seem to have been noticeably active, the few weeks he spent as college president were not idle ones, either. He took on the roles of teacher and pastor, questioning the senior class on their knowledge of divinity and preaching to them on Sundays. For one of his messages that February he resurrected the sermon from twenty years ago on 2 Peter 1.19, “Divine Revelation Is a Light.” An unnamed editor has noted that it was “possibly his last sermon,” but it was also certainly one of his ¤rst, there being only two Sundays remaining in February after his arrival, and his ¤rst sermon having been on Hebrews 13.8. Given the direction of his studies at Stockbridge and the intention to further them that he had expressed to the trustees that fall, the choice of the 2 Peter sermon hardly seems coincidental. As the sermon is one of his most important public treatments of the growing chorus of criticism surrounding the scriptural history, it is at least reasonable to speculate that in choosing it he was setting about to establish the intellectual tone and scope of his presidential mission. This would be, as he had intimated to the trustees, an academic mission preeminently focused on critical historical issues. Despite the turmoil he encountered with the Williams family over the management of the Indian school, as well as the frontier violence instigated by the French, the years at Stockbridge had been remarkably productive ones for Edwards. In addition to producing his monumental treatises on the will, original sin, true virtue, and creation, he was engaged in reworking his “History of the Work of Redemption,” his massive “Harmony of the Old and New Testament,” and his arguments for the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. The latter, now showing evidence (in the revision notebook) of delving into historical questions surrounding most of the other Old Testament books, seems a likely candidate as one of those “other works” he told the trustees he hoped to see to publication. Promising to reach a considerable length, it was simply too big to incorporate into the “Harmony” itself. Edwards also continued to preach on critical themes while at Stockbridge.

In February of 1754, for example, he preached a sermon on Christ’s resurrection from Matthew 28. The sermon outline is structured according to questions of the historicity of the resurrection, including the speci¤c details of “how he rose” as well as the “evidence of his resurrection”: that he “appeared to many”; that the disciples “had no temptation to lie”; that his antagonists “could not ¤nd out that he was not [raised].” In December of 1756 he delivered the extensive sermons on Christ’s miracles he had previously given as public lectures in January and March of 1740. One can bemusedly entertain the image of Edwards holding forth on issues that the majority of his frontier parishioners, be they Indian or white, were probably unaware of and almost certainly blithely unconcerned with. It will no doubt never rival the image of Edwards at En¤eld, nor should it. Yet it is still an image that ought to be entered into the broader consciousness of Edwards as a cultural ¤gure: the brilliant philosopher and theologian who was also, if not yet equally, an astute historical thinker, the pastor and man of letters who precisely and insightfully anticipated issues that his parishioners and the broader community would inevitably have to confront in their religious lives. And it is an arresting image of the degree to which these concerns had captivated his energy and attention, one that can in some sense symbolize the culminating theological motivations of his life and career. Speculating about what might have been had Edwards survived his encounter with early modern medicine is something of a formal pastime among scholars, and it is no less tempting to think about how the issues canvassed here would have contributed to the next chapter of his career. Given the way that criticism of the Bible intruded into the political discourse of early national life in the 1780s, one wonders whether he might well have initiated aspects of this conversation during his tenure at Princeton, and what impact such a contribution might have had on the social and intellectual ferment in the colonies in the decade prior to the war of independence. But there is really little speculation involved in assuming the importance that critical historical interpretation would have had for Edwards in the coming years. All the evidence from the Stockbridge period points to a forthcoming engagement with a host of concerns pertaining to biblical interpretation. As his letter to the trustees clearly outlines, the accumulated mass of his private biblical commentary was about to be offered to the public through the impressive achievement of the “Harmony,” as well as its conceptual cousin, the “Work of Redemption.” There can no longer be any doubt as to the signal importance that critical thought had for the entire span of Edwards’s career, and no reason to continue to ignore its importance to the other, more noted facets of that career. As with nearly every other intellectual current that held implications for religious traditions coursing through European life in the eighteenth century, Edwards avidly pursued the latest developments in biblical criticism, and gave considerable attention to their potential effect upon those traditions. The record that 198


he left behind gives ample testimony to the scope and intensity of that interest. That record is integrally woven into all aspects of his theological biography, and though for the most part it shadows the public biography, it nonetheless deserves due recognition in the scholarly estimation of Edwards. The present study has really done little more than touch upon the impact of critical thought on areas beyond the central question of his historical thought, and it will no doubt take the work of several careers to sort out its full signi¤cance. But it is clear that critical biblical interpretation offers an important window on nearly every other aspect of his thought, whether doctrine, epistemology, typology, natural and comparative religions, true religion, natural science, or public discourse. These are simply unintelligible without taking into consideration his biblical commentary and its critical orientation. And there are entire areas that still need be considered. The real measure of his hermeneutic, so richly and complexly delineated in the “Miscellanies,” “Notes on Scripture,” “Blank Bible,” and sermons has yet to be taken. Edwards’s lifelong interest in and commentary on critical biblical interpretation provides a speci¤c instance of just how deeply this problem had penetrated American religious life generations before its in®uence is typically acknowledged by historians. Taken by itself, it would be an impressive testimony to his prescient sensitivity to theological issues as well as his enormous intellectual appetite. There is every reason to believe, however, that these issues were rife in early eighteenth-century colonial life, and to suspect that broader studies will signi¤cantly change the way in which the religious, political, and cultural dynamics of early American life are understood. Edwards’s contribution to that picture will no doubt reinforce his prominent place in colonial religious thought.

Denouement

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Notes Introduction 1.

Jonathan Edwards, “Catalogue of Reading” (c. 1722), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, p. 1. (Unless published editions or otherwise noted, all Edwards manuscripts cited hereafter are deposited at the Beinecke Library.) The “Catalogue” is a notebook of forty-three pages, and contains entries spanning his entire postgraduate life (1722–1757).

2.

Thomas H. Johnson, “Jonathan Edwards’ Background of Reading,” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 28 (1931): 202.

3.

For the purposes of de¤nition, I am concerned here with “criticism” as it was manifested as a particular cultural attitude toward the past that found expression in the discipline of an erudite historical method. Peter Gay has described it as a “solvent of custom, accepted explanations, and traditional institutions,” a desire to investigate phenomena without the constraints of tradition, and a “political demand for the right to question everything.” In essence this criticism was a form of skepticism toward the authorized past, at least the past as it was interpreted and transmitted by previous cultures, whose ignorance and credulity were thought to have inclined them toward inventive explanations of events. In contrast, critical historical thinkers operated with a premised suspicion of surface narratives, employed explicit rules or methods intended to remove error and obscurity from their interpretation, and sought to render alternative historical accounts that were credible and impartial. This approach to history had important implications for biblical interpretation both as a technical discipline and also in a general cultural attitude toward canonical sources of religious authority. See Paul Hazard, The European Mind (1680–1715) (London, 1935), pp. 29–52; Peter Gay, The Enlightenment (New York, 1966), pp. 34, 121–126, 141–149; and J. A. I. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and Its Enemies, 1660–1730 (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 11–17.

4.

Theodore Dwight Bozeman, To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism (Chapel Hill, 1988), pp. 16, 34, 38. See also William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism (New York, 1938), pp. 128ff., and Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (New York, 1939), p. 20.

5.

Jonathan Edwards, Misc. No. 1340 (c. 1756), pp. 25–26 (all citations of the “Miscellanies” Nos. 833–1356 are taken from the transcripts of Thomas Schafer deposited at the Beinecke Library).

6.

Bozeman, To Live Ancient Lives, pp. 17–18; Edwards, Misc. No. 1340, pp. 25–26.

7.

Frei’s speci¤c interest was in the “eclipse” of the perception of biblical narrative as a form of history by its perception as a form of myth, and in the various dif¤culties this created for nineteenth-century Protestant hermeneutics.

But other scholars have utilized this rubric more generally, as a way to conceptualize the superceding of the biblical narrative by a scienti¤c and critical view of the world and its history. This application of Frei’s work aptly describes the milieu in which Edwards functioned. 8.

Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study of Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven, 1974), pp. 1–16, 49–50.

9.

Ibid., pp. 86–88, 91–92.

10.

See William Baird, The History of New Testament Research, vol. 1 (Minneapolis, 1992), p. 156.

11.

This is true as well of many of the early modern biblical interpreters, especially in Germany and England. To cite just one example, Robert Lowth is credited as an early critic of Hebrew poetry, identifying a fundamental stylistic device known as parallelism. At the same time he was quite traditional in his interpretation, adamantly insisting that Job was an entirely historical ¤gure, for example. Such a combination of creatively critical and traditional interpretations is far more typical of Edwards’s era than is usually acknowledged.

12.

Stephen J. Stein, “The Spirit and the Word: Jonathan Edwards and Scriptural Exegesis,” in Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience, ed. Nathan O. Hatch and Harry S. Stout (Oxford, 1988), p. 119. On the broad outlines of Edwards’s approach to interpretive and critical issues, see Stein’s introduction to Jonathan Edwards, Notes on Scripture, ed. Stephen J. Stein, vol. 15 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, 1998), pp. 4–21.

13.

It is signi¤cant to note, for example, that almost without exception the signi¤cant critical biblical scholars of Edwards’s era, including Richard Simon, Johann Bengel, Johann Wettstein, and Johann Michaelis, espoused relatively traditional views of the general historical reliability of the narratives. See Baird, New Testament Research, chs. 1–5.

14.

See, for example, the entry on “Criticism” in Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopedia; or, An Universal Dictionary of the Arts and Sciences, vol. 1 (London, 1741).

15.

Baird, New Testament Research, pp. 164–165.

16.

See Stephen J. Stein, “Jonathan Edwards and the Rainbow: Biblical Exegesis and Poetic Imagination,” New England Quarterly 47.3 (1974): 440.

17.

See two recent works in this regard, Richard Evans’s In Defense of History (New York, 1999), and Carl Schorske’s Thinking with History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism (Princeton, 1998).

1. Bibliophile 1.

Jonathan Edwards, “A Spiritual Understanding of Divine Things . . . ” (1723), in Sermons and Discourses 1723–1729, ed. Kenneth P. Minkema, vol. 14 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, 1997), p. 95.

2.

Edward Wells, An Historical Geography of the Old and New Testament (1711) (Oxford, 1809), p. vii.

3.

See Henning Graf Reventlow, The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World (London, 1984); Frei, Eclipse of Biblical Narrative; Klaus

202

Notes to pages xvi–1

Scholder, The Birth of Modern Critical Theology: Origins and Problems of Biblical Criticism in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1990); Jean-Robert Armogathe, ed., Le Grand Siècle et la Bible (Paris, 1989); Yvon Belaval and Dominique Bourel, eds., Le siècle des Lumières et la Bible (Paris, 1986); Françoise Deconinck-Brossard, “England and France in the Eighteenth Century,” in Reading the Text: Biblical Criticism and Literary Theory, ed. Stephen Prickett (Oxford, 1991), pp. 136–181; and Peter Hanns Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (Berkeley, 1975), pp. 9–30. 4.

Reventlow, Authority of the Bible, p. 2.

5.

See, for example, the list of volumes in the Society for Biblical Literature series on “The Bible in America,” which to date is wholly weighted toward post–Civil War developments; on this series, see Mark Noll, “Review Essay: The Bible in America,” Journal of Biblical Literature 106.3 (1987): 493–506. The same can be said for Nathan Hatch and Mark Noll, eds., The Bible in America: Essays in Cultural History (Oxford, 1982). Some exceptions exist, such as Jerry Wayne Brown’s The Rise of Biblical Criticism in America (1969), which reaches back to 1800, though it still focuses on technical practitioners. Edward Davidson and William Scheick, Paine, Scripture, and Authority (Bethlehem, Pa., 1994), addresses these issues in a limited way for the Revolutionary period.

6.

The topic receives passing treatment in some works; for the most part, however, the rise of “rational” religion is characterized in terms of its importance to doctrine, church polity, religious experience, and politics, but without reference to the critical historical dimension of these issues. See, for example, Samuel Morison, The Puritan Pronaos: Intellectual Life of New England in the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1936), pp. 234ff.; Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), pp. 435–436; Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind (Cambridge, Mass., 1966), pp. 196–199; Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (Oxford, 1986), pp. 135–137; and Patricia Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America (New York, 1986), pp. 131ff.

7.

Stephen J. Stein, “The Quest for the Spiritual Sense: The Biblical Hermeneutics of Jonathan Edwards,” Harvard Theological Review 70.1–2 (1977): 99; and Stein, “The Spirit and the Word,” p. 123. See also Stein, “Introduction,” in Edwards, Notes on Scripture, pp. 21ff.

8.

Jean-Pierre Martin, “Edwards’ Epistemology and the New Science,” Early American Literature 7.3 (1972): 249.

9.

In the last century numerous biographies of Edwards have appeared, all of which ignore his biblical interpretation. The singular exception to this oversight, to my knowledge, is Alfred Owen Aldridge’s Jonathan Edwards (New York, 1964), which at least gives some attention to the problem of “reason and revelation” in his thought (see pp. 150–162). Stephen Stein notes one M.A. thesis addressing this dimension in Edwards, Fred Beuttler’s “Jonathan Edwards and the Critical Assaults on the Bible” (Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 1988); see Edwards, Notes on Scripture, pp. 33–34.

10.

Jonathan Edwards, “Resolutions,” No. 28 (c. 1722), in Letters and Personal

Notes to pages 1–3

203

Writings, ed. George S. Claghorn, vol. 16 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, 1998), p. 755. 11.

Edwards, “Personal Narrative,” ibid., p. 797. Entries in his autobiographical writings also reveal his struggles to retain this sense of relish during this period, a dynamic more revealing than the idealized version presented by the later recollection. See his “Diary,” ibid., pp. 760, 764, 769, 780.

12.

Edwards, “Personal Narrative,” p. 800.

13.

Samuel Hopkins, The Life and Character of Jonathan Edwards (Northampton, 1804), p. 88.

14.

Sereno Dwight, “The Life of President Edwards,” in The Works of President Edwards, ed. Sereno Dwight, vol. 1 (New York, 1830), pp. 57, 108.

15.

Ibid., p. 58. Dwight speculates on the possibility that Edwards may have intended to publish his scriptural notes as “an Illustration of the more dif¤cult and obscure passages of the Bible.” Dwight also relates that this interest was an important part of Edwards’s kindred relationship with his sister Jerusha, who liked to read scienti¤c theology as well as pursue “the systematic study of the Scriptures, by the help of the best commentaries”—an intriguing comment on reading patterns of colonial women, to be sure, but also on the fact that critical concerns were not the sole property of the clergy. His portrayal of Edwards’s biblicism is also of interest because Dwight himself operated in an era when critical studies were ascendant; this may account in part for his attention to this aspect, as well as his selection of this sort of material for his edition of Edwards’s works. Given the alternating reverence and disdain expressed for Edwards in the nineteenth century as his legacy was negotiated, it would certainly be worth investigating what in®uence and use his biblical materials may have had for both his admirers and his critics. The most recent studies of Edwards’s theological legacy show that his in®uence continues to be examined along philosophical and doctrinal lines, particularly in terms of the progress of the New Divinity movement, but without reference to critical interpretive controversies. See Mark Noll, “Jonathan Edwards and the Nineteenth-Century Theology,” in Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience, pp. 260–287, and Joseph Conforti, Jonathan Edwards, Religious Tradition, and American Culture (Chapel Hill, 1995).

16.

On the early curricula at Yale and Edwards’s education, see Richard Warch, School of the Prophets: Yale College, 1701–1740 (New Haven, 1973), pp. 38–40, 193–198, 226–249, 278–308; Roland H. Bainton, Yale and the Ministry (New York, 1957), pp. 8–40; Brooks M. Kelley, Yale: A History (New Haven, 1974), pp. 1–45; Norman Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and Its British Context (Chapel Hill, 1981), pp. 13–32; and William S. Morris, The Young Jonathan Edwards: A Reconstruction (Brooklyn, N.Y., 1991), pp. 59–102.

17.

A task for which he received an additional stipend of ¤ve pounds, for his “Trouble and Pains in sorting the Books and ¤xing Catalogues to ye Boxes.” See Ola Winslow, Jonathan Edwards 1703–1758 (New York, 1940), p. 92; Anna Marie Monrad, “Historical Notes on the Catalogues and Classi¤cations of the Yale University Library,” in Papers in Honor of Andrew Keogh (New Haven, 1938), pp. 251–255.

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18.

Dummer was something of a critic himself, having earlier published a treatise questioning the historical basis for the Christian practice of sabbathkeeping, De Jure Judaeorum Sabbati (Leyden, 1703). Jonathan Edwards, Sermons and Discourses 1730–1733, ed. Mark Valeri, vol. 17 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, 1999), p. 217.

19.

Other signi¤cant examples include Jeremy Collier’s Historical Dictionary, Samuel Bochart’s Geographia sacra, William Derham’s Physico-Theology and Astro-Theology, Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth, William Whiston’s Theory of the Earth, Chronology of the Old Testament, and Harmony of the Four Evangelists, Jacques Basnage’s History of the Jews, Pierre Jurieu’s Critical History of Doctrine, Laurence Echard’s Ecclesiastical History, Robert Jenkin’s Reasonableness and Certainty of the Christian Religion, Charles Leslie’s Easy Method with the Deists, John Harris’s Boyle Lectures, John Ray’s Wisdom of God in Creation, John Smith’s Confutation of the Scepticks, Robert Boyle’s Works, Isaac Barrow’s Works, Henry Hammond’s Paraphrase and Annotations of the New Testament, Jean Le Clerc’s Annotations, Genesis, and Ars critica, Joseph Hall’s Paraphrase on the Hard Texts of Scripture, Thomas Gataker’s Adversaria sacrae scripturae, John Lightfoot’s Horae hebraicae and Works, James Ussher’s Annals of the Old and New Testament, Matthew Poole’s Synopsis criticorum, James Bonnel’s Harmony of the Holy Gospels, Edmund Calamy’s Inspiration of the Old and New Testament, Nicolas Fontaine’s History of the Old and New Testament, and Samuel Parker’s Divine Authority of the Scriptures.

20.

On Dummer’s collection, see Louise May Bryant and Mary Patterson, “The List of Books Sent by Jeremiah Dummer,” and Anne Stokely Pratt, “The Books Sent from England by Jeremiah Dummer to Yale College,” both in Papers in Honor of Andrew Keogh, pp. 423–492 and 7–44, respectively. On Edward’s use of the library, see Warch, School of the Prophets, pp. 242–243. It is true, of course, that some 260 of these books were stolen during the struggle for control of the location of the college. However, it appears from Thomas Clap’s catalogue of the library’s holdings in 1743 that most of the works on biblical interpretation survived and thus were available to Edwards (unless they represent replacement purchases of subsequent years). Edwards’s own “Catalogue” would seem to provide indirect con¤rmation that they were present during his years in New Haven. See Thomas Clap, A Catalogue of the Library of Yale College in New-Haven (London, 1743).

21.

His theological apprenticeship in New Haven must have been a much more active and fruitful period in his intellectual formation than the paucity of information would suggest. His “Catalogue,” “Miscellanies,” notes on “Natural Philosophy,” intimations on a letter sheet of the “Rational Account” of the Christian religion, and “Notes on the Apocalypse” all stem from 1722– 1723.

22.

Fiering, Edwards’s Moral Thought, p. 15.

23.

Norman Fiering, “The Transatlantic Republic of Letters: A Note on the Circulation of Learned Periodicals to Early Eighteenth-Century America,” William and Mary Quarterly 33 (1976): 642–660; Fiering, Edwards’s Moral Thought, pp. 13–47; Thomas H. Johnson, “Jonathan Edwards’ Background of Reading,” pp. 193–222.


205

24.

Present State of the Republick of Letters, February 1729, art. 15. Such examples abound. A physician named Jonathan Harles (Present State of the Republick of Letters, March 1729, art. 20) contributed an essay on whether certain incidents in the Bible (Lot’s wife, Jacob’s hip socket, and Jesus’ healings) could be accounted for in light of current medical knowledge. The July 1750 issue of the Newcastle General Magazine reviewed the Comte de Buffon’s Natural History, and discussed whether his climatic theory of human physiognomy could be squared with the biblical accounts of human dispersion.

25.

See Edwards, Notes on Scripture, Nos. 240 (c. 1735), 410, and 430 (c. 1746), pp. 190, 417, and 509, respectively. They show Edwards to be well aware that modern language theories recognized the inherent tendency of languages to diversify over time, and cognizant of the problems this posed for the story of the tower at Babel.

26.

At their fall meeting in 1732 it was left to him and three others to propose a “Catalogue of Books” to be purchased for the library, and he was also charged to produce “rules for the regulating” of the library. Two hundred pounds were pledged for its inception, Edwards being one of the six who pledged twenty pounds (eight others pledging ten pounds). The following spring some one hundred eighty pounds had been collected, and his committee had developed a set of sixteen rules to govern its operation. See the “Records of the Hampshire Association of Ministers,” 1731–1747, Forbes Library, Northampton, Mass., pp. 4–7 (October 3, 1732, and April 11, 1733). Edwards’s generosity worked in his favor, as one of the rules for patronage of the library was that competing requests for a book were resolved in favor of the higher benefactor.

27.

Ibid., p. 34 (April 7, 1741). This entry also includes one Mr. Jones’s “History of the Turks” as well as two travel accounts and a history of France.

28.

Edwards, “Catalogue,” p. 10.

29.

Edwards, “Letter to Erskine” (1752), in Letters and Personal Writings, p. 493. On these activities, see a number of his letters, pp. 32, 70, 88, 98–99, 172, 216– 218, 223, 224, 247, 347, 363–367, 375, 489, 660–666, 678, 681, 700, 718. See also various entries in his “Account Book” (c. 1733–1755).

30.

See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1650), Samuel Fisher, Rustick’s Alarm to the Rabbies (1660), Benedict de Spinoza, Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670), and Richard Simon, Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (1678) and Histoire critique du texte du Nouveau Testament (1689). The poem of Dryden (Religio laici) cited at the front of the present study was prompted by Simon’s work, and gives eloquent expression to the concerns and confusion of the era over the new interpretation. See Elias J. Chiasson, “Dryden’s Apparent Scepticism in Religio laici,” Harvard Theological Review 54 (1961): 207–221.

31.

Jonathan Edwards, “Catalogue of Reading” letter-sheet, James Caskey transcript (Chicago, 1931), L.5.

32.

See, for example, his short essay on the rhetorical qualities of biblical and non-biblical historiography (Misc. No. 6 [1723]), and the discussion of the problem of conceptual intelligibility (Misc. No. dd [1723]); see also Misc. Nos. 126, 131, and 139 (1724), in Edwards, The “Miscellanies,” ed. Thomas A. Schafer, vol. 13 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, 1994). I am

206


grateful to Thomas Schafer for his assistance in dating a variety of Edwards’s manuscripts, and for making available his transcripts of the entire “Miscellanies.” 33.

No. 22 (1723), for example, is concerned to identify the signi¤cance of the land of Canaan with respect to its strategic location, its relative accessibility to modern geographic divisions of the world into Europe, Asia, Africa, America, and Terra Australis Incognita. In No. 41 (1724) Edwards discusses the dif¤culty of understanding the notion of a “new heavens and new earth” within a heliocentric astronomical theory, one he resolves by observing that positional descriptions in astronomy are relative rather than ¤xed or absolute. See Jonathan Edwards, Apocalyptic Writings, ed. Stephen J. Stein, vol. 5 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, 1977), pp. 133, 141–142. Because of its ¤gurative language, the correlation of biblical apocalyptic with informed understandings of history and nature was an especially dif¤cult task, and one that occupied considerable space in Edwards’s manuscripts. In later (c. post-1730) entries in the “Apocalypse” he used a number of critically oriented works to supplement his efforts, including Nathaniel Lardner’s Credibility of the Gospel History, Humphrey Prideaux’s The Old and New Testament Connected in the History of the Jews and Neighbouring Nations, Laurence Echard’s Roman History, and Arthur Bedford’s Scripture Chronology.

34.

The last entry is in a similar vein, discussing the implications of the plain sense meaning of the Song of Solomon for its inspiration. See Edwards, Notes on Scripture, Nos. 1, 507, pp. 49, 610–613.

35.

This appears to have been a period of a concentrated encounter with critical problems through the works of ¤gures such as Bedford, Patrick Delaney, and Edward Wells. Overall, some 30 percent (if not more) of these manuscripts are taken up with critical issues.

36.

See, for example, Misc. Nos. 229, 231 (1726), 352, 358, and 359 (1729) on inspiration; Edwards, “Miscellanies” (Works 13). His public discourse at this time also begins to show evidence of these concerns. In his sermon “True Nobleness of Mind” (1728), for example, he raises the issues of miracles, prophecy, and historical testimony in regard to scriptural authority. In his 1730 sermon “Practical Atheism,” he observes that people are given to skepticism, to question whether “the Scriptures and the scheme about a creator and judge and a future state is only an invention of men,” and that humankind “is prone to in¤delity and to catch at arguments for it.” And his 1731 sermon “Perpetuity and Change of the Sabbath” addresses an issue of critical historical debates as well. See Edwards, Sermons and Discourses 1723–1729, p. 233, and Sermons and Discourses 1730–1733, pp. 51, 220, respectively.

37.

This extract was subsequently incorporated into his most extensive treatment of the canonical problem, Misc. No. 1060. See Jonathan Edwards, “Extracts Out of the Bishop of London’s Third Pastoral Letter,” c. 1731–1732. Gibson was a High Church cleric, an opponent of all revisionist movements within Anglicanism (e.g., deists, latitudinarians, and Methodists), who as bishop of London (1723) was the titular head of the colonial Anglo-American churches.

38.

This outline of the “Rational Account” most likely dates from around 1730,

Notes to page 11

207

with additions being made to it over a period of some ¤fteen years. This was also the year that he received the “Blank Bible” from his brother-in-law Benjamin Pierrepont, in which he recorded a great measure of his scriptural commentary. See Jonathan Edwards, Scienti¤c and Philosophical Writings, ed. Wallace E. Anderson, vol. 6 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, 1980), pp. 394–397. 39.

See his short paper, “The Beauty of the World” (c. 1726), in Scienti¤c and Philosophical Writings, p. 306.

40.

See, for example, Misc. entries e, g, k, m, dd, ss, uu, xx, and yy.

41.

The outlines of the “Rational Account” and the “Rough Notes” were sewn together at one time, a fact that may suggest Edwards understood his efforts to resolve critical historical problems as an integral part of his “Rational Account.”

42.

See Richard D. Brown, “Rural Clergy and the Communication Networks of 18th-Century New England,” in his Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America 1700–1865 (New York, 1989), pp. 65–81; and Susan O’Brien, “Eighteenth-Century Publishing Networks in the First Years of Transatlantic Evangelicalism,” in Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and Beyond 1700– 1990, ed. Mark A. Noll, David W. Bebbington, and George A. Rawlyk (Oxford, 1994), pp. 38–57.

43.

On the de¤nitional dif¤culties surrounding the phenomenon of deism, as well as its counterpart, Anglican orthodoxy, see James A. Herrick, The Radical Rhetoric of the English Deists: The Discourse of Skepticism, 1680–1750 (Columbia, S.C., 1997), pp. 23–39; Robert E. Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy: A Study in Adaptations (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), pp. 205–234; Roger D. Lund, “Introduction,” and J. G. A. Pocock, “Within the Margins: The De¤nitions of Orthodoxy,” in The Margins of Orthodoxy: Heterodox Writing and Cultural Response, 1660–1750, ed. Roger Lund (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 1–32 and 33–53, respectively.

44.

It was Thomas Morgan, for example, who initially proposed a tension between Jewish (superstitious, Petrine) and Gentile (natural, Pauline) Christianity (The Moral Philosopher, 1737). His argument was important for the formation of the later theories of Johann Semler and F. C. Baur.

45.

For recent treatments of Edwards’s apologetic strategy within this context, see Michael J. McClymond, Encounters with God: An Approach to the Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Oxford, 1998), pp. 80–106; and Gerald R. McDermott, Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods: Christian Theology, Enlightenment Religion, and Non-Christian Faiths (Oxford, 2000), pp. 17–33.

46.

See his letter to Joseph Bellamy (February 12, 1757) thanking him for sending Cudworth and Tindal. Edwards, Letters and Personal Writings, p. 700.

47.

Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft, pp. 11–12. See also Roger Lund, “Introduction,” in Margins of Orthodoxy, pp. 1–29.

48.

J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure, and Political Practice during the Ancièn Regime (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 277–282.

49.

Ibid., p. 286.

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50.

Perhaps not surprisingly, all three individuals prosecuted under the Act between 1729 and 1770 were deists. See Herrick, Radical Rhetoric of the English Deists, p. 8.

51.

Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft, pp. 11–12.

52.

See, for example, G. Adolf Koch, Republican Religion: The American Revolution and the Cult of Reason (Gloucester, Mass., 1964), pp. 3–27; Kerry S. Walters, The American Deists: Voices of Reason and Dissent in the Early Republic (Lawrence, Kans., 1992), pp. 1–50, and Rational In¤dels: The American Deists (Durango, Colo., 1992), pp. 3–40.

53.

Robert J. Wilson, The Benevolent Deity: Ebenezer Gay and the Rise of Rational Religion in New England, 1696–1787 (Philadelphia, 1984), pp. 62–67; Walters, Rational In¤dels, p. 3.

54.

See Edwin Wolf, ed., The Library of James Logan of Philadelphia 1674–1751 (Philadelphia, 1974).

55.

The city’s American Magazine and Monthly Chronicle for the British Colonies was editorializing on the same issues in 1758. See Herbert Morais, Deism in 18th-Century America (New York, 1934), pp. 79–81.

56.

Ibid., pp. 29–30, 69–72.

57.

Boston Evening Post, September 9, 1745.

58.

Not too long after this, acts of open de¤ance were reaching an almost comical pitch, such as a 1773 incident in Salisbury, Connecticut. The sheriff there jailed two rather con¤dent strangers for mouthing deistic blasphemies; they promptly broke out of jail and then advertised the speci¤c nature of their in¤delity in the local paper. See Edmund S. Morgan, The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1727–1795 (New Haven, 1962), p. 316.

59.

Morais, Deism in America, p. 76–77.

60.

Ibid., pp. 83–84.

61.

In his pilgrimage to a more rationalistic Anglicanism, for example, Samuel Johnson encountered the historical critique of the Bible in Anthony Collins’s Discourse on the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion, an experience from which he was able to recover. Morais, Deism in America, pp. 67– 69, 74–75.

62.

His “in¤delity” during this period was no secret, and in 1750 it cost him the position at Stockbridge that eventually went to Edwards. Morgan, Gentle Puritan, pp. 80–88.

63.

In that year he sought to publish a long sermon (140 pages) on the historical evidences of the Scriptures entitled “A Discourse on the Study of the Scriptures,” an effort that drew on the work of Richard Simon, among others. He reconsidered on the advice of a friend and colleague, who detected in it some less than orthodox views. Morgan, Gentle Puritan, pp. 167–168.

64.

Ibid., pp. 58–77, 394–398.

65.

See E. Francis Brown, Joseph Hawley, Colonial Radical (New York, 1931), pp. 1–30; Walters, American Deists, pp. 15ff.; Morais, Deism in America, pp. 67ff. Edwards complained bitterly of Hawley’s religious moorings in a 1750 letter to John Erskine, observing that he was “a man of lax principles in religion,


209

falling in, in some essential things, with Arminians, and is very open and bold in it . . . and we have none able to confront and withstand him in dispute: and some of the young people already show a disposition to fall in with his notions.” Edwards, Letters and Personal Writings, pp. 353–354. On his rapprochement with Hawley, see his letter written to him in 1754, ibid., pp. 645–654. 66.

In 1740 Colman lamented in a letter to a fellow minister, William Hooper, about the presence of deist books at Harvard, including those of Thomas Chubb. Robert J. Wilson, Benevolent Deity, p. 66.

67.

Ibid., p. 67.

68.

Jonathan Dickinson, The Reasonableness of Christianity (Boston, 1732), pp. 41, 57. “That debate” was touched off by, among others, Thomas Burnet’s claim of the allegorical nature of the Eden story in his Archaeologiae philosophicae (1692).

69.

Koch, Republican Religion, pp. 14–15; Morais, Deism in America, pp. 61–63.

70.

On Mayhew, see Alan Grago, “The Supernatural Rationalism of Jonathan Mayhew,” Perspectives in Religious Studies 13.2 (1986): 113–125. Mayhew also found it necessary to omit from his preaching certain biblical proofs that his audiences found untenable; see Morais, Deism in America, pp. 70–71.

71.

Edwards, Misc. No. 127 (1724), in “Miscellanies” (Works 13), p. 291.

72.

Edwards, “Divine Revelation Is a Light” (1737), p. 23. A concern later echoed as well in Jonathan Dickinson’s Familiar Letters (1745), see Morais; Deism in America, p. 80.

73.

See also his letter to William McCulloch (1748) on these matters. Edwards, Letters and Personal Writings, pp. 249, 255.

74.

In the early 1730s Yale had one such club of students attached to a Quaker, David Ferris, who claimed that the inner light of the Spirit made written revelation super®uous. See Warch, School of the Prophets, p. 265.

75.

See David S. Shields, “Anglo-American Clubs: Their Wit, Their Heterodoxy, Their Sedition,” William and Mary Quarterly 51.2 (1994): 293–304.

76.

On the Breck affair, see Charles E. Jones, “The Impolitic Mr. Edwards: The Personal Dimension of the Robert Breck Affair,” New England Quarterly 51.1 (1978): 64–79, and Ezra Hoyt Byington, “The Case of Rev. Robert Breck,” Andover Review 13 (1890): 517–533, both reprinted in Critical Essays on Jonathan Edwards, ed. William J. Scheick (Boston, 1980), pp. 8–20 and 21–33, respectively.

77.

The committee also took testimony from two witnesses to the effect that Breck had actually used the pulpit to explicate his views. Daniel Kirtland of Norwich claimed that he heard reports that Breck had preached there against the inspiration of John 8. Nathaniel Huntington of Clap’s own Windham congregation claimed that he had actually heard Breck preach the same, and that Breck had shown him the passage in Jeremiah Jones’s work in order to prove it to him.

78.

In fact, Jeremiah Jones does raise questions about the authenticity of both passages, noting that Syriac versions of the New Testament lack them. Jones

210


uses this evidence to argue for the early date of the Syriac versions, and thus for the basic NT canon, so Breck was apparently adapting his argument for somewhat different purposes. But Jones was also a Dissenter, and probably an Arian, so his conclusions here no doubt had theological import for him as well. He notes, for example, that 1 John 5.7 was not employed against Arians until the fourth century. See Jeremiah Jones, A New and Full Method of Setting the Canonical Authority of the New Testament (Oxford, 1827), p. 100. 79.

See the Narrative of the Proceedings of Those Ministers of the County of Hampshire (Boston, 1736), pp. 4–15, 21–30, 57ff. Edwards was added to the investigating committee of the Hampshire Association seemingly as an afterthought, in order to ensure an odd number of votes. He also had a signi¤cant hand in the production of its documented ¤ndings. The Association’s own minutes barely mention the affair, except to note the formation of the committee and a subsequent vote to consider the authority of “Ecclesiastical Councils” on such issues. See the “Records of the Hampshire Association of Ministers” (Forbes Library, Northampton, Mass.), pp. 15, 18 (April 8, 1735; March 16, 1736). Edwards wrote ¤ve letters in relation to the affair, but unfortunately they deal only with the process of the examination, not its content. Edwards, Letters and Personal Writings, pp. 58–64.

80.

It is somewhat curious, and perhaps signi¤cant, that in the numerous entries on the Trinity in the “Miscellanies” Edwards does not use 1 John 5.7 as a proof text; nor is it treated in the “Notes on Scripture” or “Blank Bible.” He uses it only once in his early sermons (1720–1733), as a passing citation, in a sermon on the work of the Holy Spirit (1729); see Edwards, Sermons and Discourses 1723–1729, p. 415. He also appears to have studiously avoided using the John 8 text in the “Notes on Scripture,” the “Blank Bible” (with one exception, a gloss on John 8.6), the “Miscellanies,” and at least the early sermons (1723–1733), perhaps an indication of his own concerns about the authenticity of 1 John 5.7 and John 8.

81.

Ebenezer Gay’s nephew and namesake, for example, joined the Association in October of 1742, having located in Suf¤eld, Connecticut, earlier that year. In 1741 an itinerating Edwards had incorporated ninety-¤ve new (and New Light) parishioners into the church there. See Robert J. Wilson, Benevolent Deity, pp. 94–98; and the Association’s “Records,” p. 39.

82.

Edwards has an extensive entry (No. 842) in the “Miscellanies” on this very subject, one that dates from this time period (c. 1742–1743). It appears again in Misc. Nos. 1198 and 1199 (c. 1753).

83.

See the Association’s “Records,” pp. 44–46 (October 9, 1744; October 9, 1745).

84.

Warch, School of Prophets, pp. 313–314.

85.

Bainton, Yale and the Ministry, p. 12. Interestingly, when Clap published his Catalogue of the Yale library in 1743 for his students, he organized the works in divinity under subheadings re®ective of critical issues, such as “Natural Religion,” “The Truth of the Scriptures,” “Histories of the Bible,” and “Harmonies of the Bible.” The library by this time also possessed substantial holdings on chronology, geography, secular and ecclesiastical history, and biblical commentary.


211

86.

Clap produced his own formal answer to deism in his Essay on the Nature and Foundations of Moral Virtue and Obligations (1765); see Morais, Deism in America, p. 71.

87.

Walters, American Deists, p. 1; Morgan, Gentle Puritan, p. 394

88.

Edwards, “Subjects of Enquiry” (c. 1750) (editorially designated as Notebook 5), pp. 14, 16–18.

89.

Ibid., pp. 21–26.

90.

Edwards, “Catalogue” (c. 1751), p. 26.

91.

Edwards, “Notebook on the Pentateuch,” (c. 1753–1757); an unnamed editor insightfully gave this work the title “Defense of the authenticity of the Pentateuch as a work of Moses and the historicity of the Old Testament narratives.” See also the additional folder that contains miscellaneous scraps and notes on the “Mosaic History.”

92.

This set of notes is bound with a Princeton commencement program dating from 1754, as well as a 1756 copy of the New York Mercury.

93.

Edwards’s given title to this notebook is “The Harmony of the Genius, Spirit, Doctrines and Rules of the Old Testament and the New.” By the time he wrote to the trustees of Princeton (1757) he had taken to calling the expanded version or revision “The Harmony of the Old and New Testament.”

94.

Morais, Deism in America, p. 16. Aldridge argues that the ¤rst formally published deist works in colonial America date from 1771 and 1772. Nonetheless one should be cautious not to confuse formal declarations with origins, for it is clear that privately and not so privately held sentiments in this regard pre-date these developments by several decades. See A. Owen Aldridge, “Natural Religion and Deism in America before Ethan Allen and Thomas Paine,” William and Mary Quarterly 54 (1997): 835–848.

95.

See A. J. Ayer, Thomas Paine (Chicago, 1988), pp. 1–20, 140–158; and Jack Fruchtman, Thomas Paine and the Religion of Nature (Baltimore, 1993).

2. Knowing and the Historical Mode 1.

Cherbury, Edward Herbert, De veritate (1624), trans. Meyrick H. Carrel (Bristol, 1937), p. 315.

2.

Edwards, Misc. No. aa (1723), in “Miscellanies” (Works 13), p. 178.

3.

See Richard Evans, In Defense of History, pp. 1–37.

4.

Miller’s Lockean thesis has functioned in a paradigmatic way for much of the ensuing scholarship in this area, though more recently scholars have presented cogent arguments for alternative assessments. See Perry Miller, “Jonathan Edwards on the Sense of the Heart,” Harvard Theological Review 41.2 (1948): 121–145; and Miller, Jonathan Edwards (New York, 1949), pp. 52– 62. Studies offering important modi¤cations to Miller’s thesis, while accepting its basic tenets, include Claude Smith, “Jonathan Edwards and ‘The Way of Ideas,’ ” Harvard Theological Review 59.2 (1966): 153–173; Paul Helm, “John Locke and Jonathan Edwards: A Reconsideration,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 7.1 (1969): 51–61; George Rupp, “The ‘Idealism’ of Jonathan Edwards,” Harvard Theological Review 62.2 (1969): 209–226; and David

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Laurence, “Jonathan Edwards, John Locke, and the Canon of Experience,” Early American Literature 15.2 (1980): 107–123. Norman Fiering’s thesis, in contradistinction to Miller, holds that features of Edwards’s thought are more reminiscent of certain theocentric strains of rationalism. See Fiering, “The Rationalist Foundations of Jonathan Edwards’s Metaphysics,” in Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience, ed. Harry S. Stout and Nathan O. Hatch (Oxford, 1988), pp. 73–93; and his Edwards’s Moral Thought, pp. 33–45. Rationalist in®uences have been noted as well by Leon Howard, “The Mind” of Jonathan Edwards (Berkeley, 1963), pp. 1–25; William S. Morris, “The Genius of Jonathan Edwards,” in Reinterpretation in American Church History, ed. Jerald C. Brauer (Chicago, 1968), pp. 29–65; and Wallace Anderson, “Immaterialism in Jonathan Edwards’ Early Philosophical Notes,” Journal of the History of Ideas 25.2 (1964): 181–200. 5.

Edwards in fact proves to be rather eclectic in his use of rationalist and empiricist sources, a phenomenon that may account for the considerable disagreement over his intellectual heritage, and one that probably prevents a ready classi¤cation of his thought. On the often derivative and eclectic nature of colonial philosophy in general and of Edwards’s philosophy in particular, see Norman Fiering, “Early American Philosophy vs. Philosophy in Early America,” Charles S. Pierce Society, Transactions 13.3 (1977): 216–237; and Fiering, Edwards’s Moral Thought, pp. 13–47.

6.

So Perry Miller, “Edwards, Locke, and the Rhetoric of Sensation,” in Critical Essays on Jonathan Edwards, ed. William J. Scheick (Boston, 1980), pp. 120–135.

7.

As the “Miscellanies” show, Edwards came to this view remarkably early. He had already ®eshed out its broad outlines between 1722 and 1724, before he had begun graduate studies at Yale. This included the pervasive presence of the divine excellence, the universe as a shadow of this excellence, the revelatory or communicative nature of God’s being, and the affective, infused nature of human religious apprehension. See Misc. Nos. l, p, aa, gg, kk, ll, 3, 6, 64, 77, 83, 92, 96, 97, 104, 106, 108, 119, 123, 126, 127, 138, and 141.

8.

The standard treatment of the problem of skepticism in seventeenthcentury thought is Richard H. Popkin’s History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley, 1979). On its various manifestations in English religious thought, see Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the SeventeenthCentury Revolution (London, 1993), pp. 413–435; John Spurr, “ ‘Rational Religion’ in Restoration England,” Journal of the History of Ideas 49.4 (1988): 564–576; and J. A. I. Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft, pp. 25–52.

9.

Richard Popkin, “Cartesianism and Biblical Criticism,” in Problems of Cartesianism, ed. Thomas Lennon, John Nicholas, and John Davis (Montreal, 1982), pp. 61–62; see also Popkin, “Some New Light on the Roots of Spinoza’s Science of Bible Study,” Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 91 (1986): 171–188. Popkin argues that historians of philosophy and science have been remiss by excising religious elements from seventeenth-century philosophical problems, since in fact they shed signi¤cant light on theoretical concerns; see Popkin, “The Religious Background of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 25.1 (1987): 35–50.

10.

Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal-Society of London, 2nd ed. (London, 1702), p. 374. On the apologetic nature of Sprat’s historical chronicle, see


213

Michael Hunter, “Latitudinarianism and the ‘Ideology’ of the Early Royal Society: Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1667) Reconsidered,” in Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England 1640–1700, ed. Richard Kroll, Richard Ashcraft, and Perez Zagorin (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 199–218. 11.

Sprat also identi¤es a second group that posed a similar challenge, the “antiscripturists” (radicals and enthusiasts), whose in®uence on the development of biblical criticism should in no way be minimized. Like the “modern dogmatists,” radical religious groups held out an alternative source of certainty (the Spirit) and expressed doubts about whether the historical character of the Scriptures compromised their epistemic status and thus ecclesiastical authority. Elements of this critique began to emerge as early as the 1640s; Ranters, Levellers, and Muggletonians questioned the historical and textual authenticity of the biblical narratives, which they perceived to be an instrument of social and political oppression. Such criticism reached its zenith of erudition with the appearance of Samuel Fisher’s nine-hundred-page Rustick’s Alarm to the Rabbies (1660). Fisher, an Oxford-educated Puritan turned Baptist turned Quaker, loosed his erudition upon the authenticity of that text with hitherto unmatched force, making a frontal assault on the Anglican establishment through the instrument of historical criticism: “Ye are afrighted to think what will now come on it to have learned men exercise their Critical Abilities about the Scripture, for fear they ¤nd your Foundation faulty and fallible, and full of ®aws.” See Samuel Fisher, Rusticos ad academicos; or, The Rustick’s Alarm to the Rabbies (London, 1660), pp. 105, 48, 6, 126, 131, 171 intra alia. For a discussion of Fisher’s approach, see William C. Braithwaite, The Beginnings of Quakerism (Cambridge, 1961), pp. 283–293. On the views of early radicals and their in®uence on later deists, see Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (New York, 1972), pp. 149ff., 209–215; and Michael Heyd, “The Reaction to Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth Century: Towards an Integrative Approach,” Journal of Modern History 53.2 (1981): 258–280.

12.

While the distinctions between the approach of Sprat and his colleagues and that of their “dogmatic” opponents might roughly parallel those between empiricist and rationalist schools of thought, closer examination reveals that the terms “infallibilist” and “fallibilist” are more appropriate descriptions, and thus are the terms that I will endeavor to use consistently here. It was not their theory of the generation of knowledge but the strictness of their de¤nitions of knowledge that distinguished these viewpoints, at least with regard to the treatment of traditionary religious knowledge. Thus there are infallibilists who would normally be considered empiricists (e.g., Hobbes) or non-rationalists (e.g., Fisher), while there are fallibilists who, while championing the validity of experiential methods and forms of understanding, were not philosophical empiricists in the strict sense of the term (e.g., Robert Boyle and Edward Stilling®eet).

13.

The power of this method and the rhetoric it employed ought not to be underestimated. See Peter Dear, “Mersenne’s Suggestion: Cartesian Meditation and the Mathematical Model of Knowledge in the Seventeenth Century,” in Descartes and His Contemporaries, ed. Roger Ariew and Marjorie Grene (Chicago, 1995), pp. 44–47.

214


14.

Popkin, “Cartesianism and Biblical Criticism,” pp. 61–64. The application of Descartes’s method to historical forms of religious knowledge became especially divisive within the Dutch Reformed and French Protestant communities in the seventeenth century. See Ernestine Van der Wall, “Orthodoxy and Scepticism in the Early Dutch Enlightenment,” and Theo Verbeek, “From ‘Learned Ignorance’ to Scepticism: Descartes and Calvinist Orthodoxy,” in Scepticism and Irreligion in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Richard H. Popkin and Arjo Vanderjagt (Leiden, 1993), pp. 136–141 and 36– 39, respectively; and Klaus Scholder, Birth of Modern Critical Theology, pp. 117–121, 132–142. The fundamental insights and applications of this method are both earlier and broader than Cartesianism proper. Herbert of Cherbury’s work, for example, precedes Descartes by a decade. Cherbury’s De veritate (1624), the full title of which reads The Truth, and Its Distinction from Revelation, Probability, Possibility, and Falsehood, proposes an epistemological method that operates on the same strong preference for evident knowledge over moral arguments. See Cherbury, De veritate, pp. 308–310, 314–317; and De religione laici, trans. Harold R. Hutcheson (New Haven, 1944), pp. 95, 99, 121. On the relation of Cherbury’s epistemology to his treatment of sacred history, see R. D. Bedford, The Defence of Truth: Herbert of Cherbury and the Seventeenth Century (Manchester, 1979), pp. 26–28, 51–54, 67–70.

15.

See Popkin, “Cartesianism and Biblical Criticism,” pp. 66–69. Thomas Hobbes belongs to this infallibilist tradition of critique as well. The more geometrico informs the epistemological and discursive structure of the Leviathan (1651) and the skepticism it expresses toward traditionary religion. He sharply distinguishes reason and scienti¤c knowledge from historical knowledge (as well as from ideas of sense, experience, memory, opinion, and prudence). See Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, 1983), pp. 99–105; Luc Borot, “History in Hobbes’ Thought,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes, ed. Tom Sorrell (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 310–311; and Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge, 1991), ch. 7.

16.

Benedict de Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise trans. R. H. M. Elwes (New York, 1951), p. 120.

17.

Spinoza’s views on this subject are expressed in his Theologico-Political Treatise (1670); A Treatise on the Improvement of the Understanding (1677); and Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order (1677). On the connection of Spinoza’s epistemology to his biblical interpretation, see Margaret Wilson, “Spinoza’s Theory of Knowledge,” in The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, ed. Don Garrett (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 94–120. Spinoza’s work may also show the in®uence of the radical religious interpretation of the Bible, illustrating that these quite disparate epistemological orientations shared signi¤cant conceptual similarities with regard to the question of historical religious knowledge. On the relationship of Spinoza to this movement, see Popkin, “Spinoza, the Quakers and the Millenarians, 1656–1658,” Manuscrito 6.1 (1982): 113–122, 130–131; Popkin, “Spinoza and Samuel Fisher,” Philosophia 15.3 (1985): 219–232; and Popkin, “Some New Light on the Roots of Spinoza’s Science of Bible Study,” pp. 171–176.


215

18.

E. M. Curley, “Experience in Spinoza’s Theory of Knowledge,” in Spinoza: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Marjorie Grene (New York, 1973), pp. 30–31.

19.

Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise, pp. 61, 77–79.

20.

Alan Donagan, “Spinoza’s Theology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, ed. Don Garrett (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 360–362.

21.

Donagan, “Spinoza’s Theology,” pp. 360–367. On the various elements of Spinoza’s epistemological analysis of the scriptural accounts, see the Theologico-Political Treatise, pp. 13–19, 25–29, 40–42, 59–60, 77–80, 94–97.

22.

See Frei, Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, pp. 42–46.

23.

Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise, pp. 77–79. For his analysis of religion as piety, see chs. 5 and 12–15 especially; his seven universal dogmas of true religion appear in ch. 14 (pp. 186–187).

24.

Rosalie Colie, “Spinoza in England, 1665–1730,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 107.3 (1963): 183–219.

25.

Rosalie Colie, “Spinoza and the Early English Deists,” Journal of the History of Ideas 20.1 (1959): 23–46.

26.

François Voltaire, “Certainty,” in Philosophical Dictionary, vol. 1, trans. Peter Gay (New York, 1962), pp. 158–160.

27.

Even here, with the exception of his reading of Matthew Tindal, much of his exposure to their ideas appears to have come through secondary sources. Furthermore, Edwards was often sparse and cryptic about naming his sources. In fact, at no time does he name any interlocutors for the topic under consideration here, his apologia for an infallible divine sense of Scripture. Nonetheless the deists’ critique of historical religion and their promulgation of a universal, demonstrable, and non-traditionary religious knowledge was widely disseminated. At the time of the writing of Misc. No. 6 and other early entries on the subject, he apparently had not done any signi¤cant reading of primary deist sources or their eighteenth-century critics. Most of his early knowledge of their views probably came from his reading of sources such as John Owen.

28.

Though connections between his epistemology and his theology of Scripture have been investigated to some extent, even these studies have passed over the issues posed by critical historical thought. See, for example, Smith, “Jonathan Edwards and ‘The Way of Ideas,’ ” pp. 153–173; Stein, “Quest for the Spiritual Sense,” pp. 101–102; Conrad Cherry, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards: A Reappraisal (Bloomington, Ind., 1990), pp. 47–49; Morris, Young Jonathan Edwards, pp. 241–246; and John Gerstner, The Rational Biblical Theology of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 1 (Orlando, Fla., 1991), pp. 96–113, 185–190.

29.

For a treatment of Reformed views on epistemological certainty in general, see Richard Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, 1987), pp. 205–215. Owen’s chief contributions on the issue are his anti-Quaker treatise, Of the Divine Original of the Scriptures (1659), and his response to the latitudinarians in The Reason of Faith (1677), an extension of his larger Pneumatologia (1674).

30.

Most notably, Edward Stilling®eet’s Origines sacrae; or, A Rational Account of the Grounds of Natural and Revealed Religion (1662), the most comprehensive

216


Anglican defense of the authenticity of sacred history produced in the seventeenth century. See Spurr, “ ‘Rational Religion’ in Restoration England,” pp. 574–576. The pervasive in®uence of this theory in Anglican epistemology is treated in Henry van Leeuwen, The Problem of Certainty in English Thought 1630–1690 (The Hague, 1963); Barbara Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, 1983); and Frederick C. Beiser, The Sovereignty of Reason: The Defense of Rationality in the Early English Enlightenment (Princeton, 1996), pp. 20–83, 220–265. 31.

On Edwards’s epistemology and sense of the heart as an adaptation of Locke’s empiricism, see Miller, “Jonathan Edwards on the Sense of the Heart,” pp. 121–145, and “Edwards, Locke, and the Rhetoric of Sensation,” pp. 120–135. On the soteriological dimension of these elements of Edwards’s thought, see Cherry, Theology of Jonathan Edwards, pp. 12–55; Robert W. Jenson, America’s Theologian: A Recommendation of Jonathan Edwards (Oxford, 1988), pp. 65–78; Terrence Erdt, Jonathan Edwards: Art and the Sense of the Heart (Amherst, 1980), pp. 21–42; and William Wainwright, “Jonathan Edwards and the Sense of the Heart,” Faith and Philosophy 7.1 (1990): 43–62. For their relevance to problems in his ethics and aesthetics, see Fiering, Edwards’s Moral Thought, pp. 123ff.; Roland Delattre, Beauty and Sensibility in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards: An Essay in Aesthetics and Theological Ethics (New Haven, 1968), pp. 58ff.; and Clyde Holbrook, The Ethics of Jonathan Edwards (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1973), pp. 97–112.

32.

Edwards, Misc. aa, in “Miscellanies” (Works 13), pp. 177–178.

33.

Ibid.

34.

Edwards, Misc. No. 141, ibid., pp. 297–298.

35.

Edwards, Misc. No. 201 (1726), ibid., p. 338.

36.

Edwards’s inclination toward philosophical infallibilism is also indicated in his early entries in “The Mind” and “Natural Philosophy.” His scienti¤c education, for example, was largely Cartesian, and his ¤rst attempts at formulating an approach to natural philosophy were also axiomatic, deductive, and highly metaphysical in application (it has long been observed that physics was, for Edwards, a conduit to metaphysics). See Morris, Young Jonathan Edwards, pp. 103–128; and Edwards, Scienti¤c and Philosophical Writings, pp. 39, 44–45, 50–51. Various entries in the “Notes on the Mind” reveal a decided preference for the epistemological standard of clear or evident ideas; see, for example, the entries on “Certainty” (No. 5), “Rules of Reasoning” (No. 8), and “Truth” (No. 10, corollary 3; No. 15). On his inclination toward the geometric or axiomatic method in his philosophical and theological writings, see Scienti¤c and Philosophical Writings, pp. 122–124; Fiering, Edwards’s Moral Thought, pp. 31–40, 323ff.; Morris, Young Jonathan Edwards, pp. 295, 300–308.

37.

Even though it lacks universality, it nonetheless retains a very egalitarian character, one that serves to obtain a kind of universality, at least with respect to the mean capacities of human mind. “This is . . . a sort of seeing rather than reasoning the truth of religion; which the unlearned are as capable of as the learned, and which all the learning in the world can never overthrow.” Edwards, Misc. No. 201 (1726), in “Miscellanies” (Works 13), p. 338.


217

38.

Edwards, Misc. No. aa, ibid., p. 178. He goes on to argue that the intuitive knowledge we have by natural reason and the senses is in fact only a shadow of the type of clarity and distinction possible with spiritual knowledge. The fullest apprehension of this will occur when the natural veil is ¤nally removed from the mind: then “there will [be] immediate intellectual views of minds . . . more immediate, clear and sensible than our views of bodily things with bodily eyes.” Edwards, Misc. No. 182 (1725), ibid., pp. 328–329. See as well No. 267 in his Notes on Scripture, p. 221.

39.

Edwards, Misc. No. 256 (1727), in “Miscellanies” (Works 13), pp. 365–366. He cross-references this entry with Misc. No. 410 (1729), where he compares the believer’s perception of the excellency of the gospel to Peter’s eyewitness perception of it in the glory and majesty of Christ; in both instances the viewer comprehends its truth as “certain evidence,” an “intuitive certainty.” He develops this view of the eyewitness experiences of Peter and Moses in later entries in his Notes on Scripture; see Nos. 265–266 (1737), pp. 212–220.

40.

Edwards, “The Mind,” in Scienti¤c and Philosophical Writings, p. 346. This casting of religious perception in the language of intuitive sense experience was common in Reformed and Puritan works, including those of John Owen, Peter van Mastricht, François Turretin, Johannes Wolleb, Richard Sibbes, William Ames, and Richard Baxter. Calvin, for example, appeals to the “secret testimony of the Spirit” as the ultimate grounds for the certainty of Scripture. He also employs a similar kind of affective language. Scripture “exhibits fully as clear evidence of its own truth as white and black things do of their color, or sweet and bitter things do of their taste.” See John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, vol. 1, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford L. Battles (Philadelphia, 1960), pp. 74–81.

41.

Edwards, “The Mind,” No. 20, in Scienti¤c and Philosophical Writings, p. 346.

42.

Fiering, Edwards’s Moral Thought, p. 125.

43.

See also Paul Helm, “John Locke and Jonathan Edwards,” p. 58; David Lyttle, “The Sixth Sense of Jonathan Edwards,” Church Quarterly Review 167 (1966): 50. There is a perceptible evolution over time in his terminology and descriptive account of this knowledge. The term “testimony of faith” is gradually replaced by terms such as “divine” or “spiritual” light and “sense of the mind.” These in turn give way to the “new sense of the heart,” a term that Edwards came to conceptualize in Lockean language as a new simple idea. See Edwards, Misc. Nos. 396–397 (1729), in “Miscellanies” (Works 13), p. 408, as well as his sermon A Divine and Supernatural Light.

44.

Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise, p. 114.

45.

Matthew Tindal, Christianity as Old as Creation; or, The Gospel a Republication of the Religion of Nature (London, 1730), pp. 193, 302–305.

46.

Edwards, Misc. No. 6 (1722–1723), in “Miscellanies” (Works 13), pp. 202–203.

47.

This idealization of a straightforward style was part of the vocabulary that the new historians used to distinguish their method and writing from ancient classical authors, who employed an arti¤cial eloquence rather than factual evidence in their histories to persuade their audiences. Thus Jean Le Clerc argues that good history must use a style that is simple, clear, unadorned, and unaffected in order to ensure that it is the appeal of truth that

218


convinces the reader. Edwards’s echoing of this sort of language may indicate a similar interest on his part to distinguish biblical history from its ancient counterparts, and to show its af¤nity with the new history. See Jean Le Clerc, Parrhasiana, or Thoughts upon Several Subjects, as Criticism, History, Morality, and Politics (London, 1700), pp. 130–141. Gerard Reedy observes that Anglicans also emphasized the plain style of the biblical texts as evidence of their divine origin; see Reedy, The Bible and Reason: Anglicans and Scripture in Late Seventeenth-Century England (Philadelphia, 1985), p. 98. 48.

Reformed thought typically divided the instrumental component of its theory of biblical epistemology into the internal and external evidences, or marks, of scriptural credibility. Intuitive in nature, the internal marks are the principal and wholly suf¤cient means of conviction concerning the certainty of scriptural authenticity. Reformed thinkers characterized these marks in terms of the Scripture’s native majesty, purity, ef¤cacy, wisdom, perfection, and power, and the harmony or consent of its parts. See Owen, The Reason of Faith, pp. 59, 20, and Of the Divine Original of the Scriptures, pp. 307, 315, in The Works of John Owen, vols. 4 and 16, respectively (Edinburgh, 1862). See also François Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology (1679– 1685), ed. James T. Dennison Jr. and trans. George M. Giger (Phillipsburg, N.J., 1992). See vol. 1, Topic 2, Question 6, pp. 89–91, and Topic 2, Question 4, pp. 68–69.

49.

Edwards, Misc. No. 654 (c. 1737–1738), The “Miscellanies” 501–832, ed. Ava Chamberlain, vol. 18 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, 2000), pp. 195–196.

50.

Edwards, Misc. No. 333 (1728), in “Miscellanies” (Works 13), pp. 410–411. Such a view helps to explain in part why Edwards could adopt a seemingly paradoxical approach in his theological method, asserting that even though they were historical or testimonial in nature, the statements of Scripture could still serve as the axiomatic foundations of philosophical and theological re®ection, because they functioned as self-evident principia.

51.

On this problem in Edwards’s theory, see Michael J. McClymond, Encounters with God, pp. 9–13.

52.

See Benjamin Bennet, The Truth, Inspiration, and Usefulness of the Scripture Asserted and Proved (London, 1730), pp. 7–11. Bennet’s work is cited frequently by Edwards on matters of critical interpretation, including inspiration.

53.


54.

Edwards, “A Divine and Supernatural Light,” in Sermons and Discourses 1730–1733, p. 420.

55.

Edwards, Misc. No. 410 (1729), in “Miscellanies” in (Works 13), pp. 470–471. This entry is the basis for his development of the argument in a sermon eight years later, one of his most systematic and important public pronouncements on these issues. See his “Divine Revelation Is a Light,” 2 Peter 1.19 (August 1737), pp. 3–4.

56.

Edwards, Misc. No. aa, in “Miscellanies” in (Works 13), p. 178.

57.

Edwards, Misc. No. 141 (1724), ibid., pp. 297–298.

58.

Edwards, “Miscellaneous Remarks: Concerning Faith,” in The Works of


219

President Edwards, vol.8 (Leeds,1811), p. 543 (in manuscript form it is entitled “Miscellaneous Observations on Faith”; begun c. 1728 and continued over the course of his career). 59.

Edwards, Misc. No. 126 (1724), in “Miscellanies” (Works 13), pp. 298, 290, 291.

60.

It is also an important element in one of his earliest sermons on this subject. See “A Spiritual Understanding of Divine Things Denied to the Unregenerate” (1723), in Sermons and Discourses 1723–1729, pp. 70–96.

61.

Edwards, “A Divine and Supernatural Light,” in Sermons and Discourses 1730–1733, pp. 409, 416–417.

62.

Ibid., p. 412.

63.

Ibid., pp. 413–415.

64.

Ibid., pp. 421–422.

65.

Ibid., p. 416.

66.

Ibid., pp. 421–422.

67.

Ibid.

68.

Ibid., p. 422. One can ¤nd contemporary unpublished instances where Edwards softens his rhetoric on this fundamental distinction and explores the role that even ratiocination may play in the economy of salvation. He offers, for example, that “that belief of the truth may be saving that doth most directly depend on rational arguments [that demonstrate the being and attributes of God]. Believing the truth of divine doctrines is one of those suitable exercises of grace that God insists that there should be opportunity for in order to his bestowing grace.” Edwards, Misc. No. 630 (1733– 1736), in “Miscellanies” 501–832 (Works 18), p. 158; see Misc. Nos. 628 and 629 to the same effect.

69.

Edwards, A Divine and Supernatural Light: Sermons and Discourses 1730–1733, pp. 416–417.

70.

Ibid., p. 420.

71.

Ibid.

72.

Ibid., pp. 414–415.

73.

Ibid., pp. 420–421.

74.

See Stein, “Quest for the Spiritual Sense,” pp. 102–103.

75.

Edwards’s concerns for enthusiasm are revealed in a letter to John Erskine (1752), in which he requests a history on the movement, one that “judiciously and clearly” distinguished it from true religion. Three years later Erskine made good on his request, sending him Archibald Campbell’s The Apostles Were No Enthusiasts (1730), a work aimed at the criticisms of Matthew Tindal and Thomas Woolston equating the two. See Edwards, Letters and Personal Writings, pp. 490, 661.

76.

These appear, in heavily edited form, as “Christian Knowledge; or, The Importance and Advantage of a Thorough Knowledge of Divine Truth” (November 1739), in The Works of President Edwards, vol. 5 (Leeds, 1809), pp. 405–425.

77.

Ibid., pp. 405, 407, 409, 410.

220


78.

Ibid., pp. 410–411.

79.

Edwards, “A Faithful Narrative,” in The Great Awakening, ed. C. C. Goen, vol. 4 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, 1972), pp. 178, 181, 184. In his Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God (1741) Edwards had to defend against the claim that narrating or appealing to the religious conversions or the examples of others abrogated the fact that God’s Word was the principal means of grace in true revival. His response was to claim that, as with all secondary means, including the sacraments, such examples become effectual only when they are viewed through a previously established scriptural framework. For “all that is visible to the eye is unintelligible and vain, without the Word of God to instruct and guide the mind.” Seen through such a framework, however, recounted religious experiences function, like the sacraments, as a means of the republication of doctrine—“’tis the Word of God that is indeed held forth and applied by example.” In addition to which, this practice had scriptural precedent (see the Fifth Negative Sign, pp. 238–241). The Third Positive Sign indicates that these revivals were in fact a work of the Spirit of God. As he had previously observed, “that spirit that operates in such a manner, as to cause in men a greater regard to the Holy Scriptures, and establishes them more in their truth and divinity” (p. 253). See as well Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion (1742), p. 327.

80.

Edwards, The Religious Affections, ed. John E. Smith, vol. 2 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, 1959), pp. 266, 268, 272.

81.

Ibid., pp. 274, 280, 281, 285. His use of the term “spiritual understanding of Scripture” here seems consistent with the traditional Protestant pursuit of the literal-historical meaning (sensus literalis). For Edwards it is precisely the literal meaning—that which was always “contained in it, ever since it was written”—which is in view of the spiritual sense. However, it is the true bearing or signi¤cance that this meaning has for the soul—its “wonderful spiritual excellency” or glory—that is recaptured by a spiritual understanding of it. See also Edwards, Misc. No. 397 (1729), in “Miscellanies” (Works 13), pp. 462–463.

82.

Edwards, Misc. No. 754 (c. 1738), in “Miscellanies” 501–832 (Works 18), p. 403.

83.

John Owen, Reason of Faith, p. 91. Some of the sharpest criticism of the latitudinarian position in the seventeenth century issued from within the ranks of Reformed orthodoxy. Owen, for example, objected to this view because he believed that as an epistemological strategy, probability offered an insuf¤cient degree of certainty. Latitudinarians argued that the rational motives for belief in the trustworthiness of the scriptural accounts are so credible that it is unreasonable (psychologically impossible) not to assent; thus moral certainty is suf¤cient to convince any objective observer. But Owen rejected this as a mere “human and fallible faith,” subject to the vicissitudes of an individual’s inadequate level of knowledge, incapable of any lasting certainty, and remiss in its failure to recognize the Spirit’s principal role in convincing readers of the truthfulness of Scripture. Ibid., pp. 45–54.

84.

For a treatment of the soteriological implications of these issues, see John Piper, “Jonathan Edwards on the Problem of Faith and History,” Scottish Journal of History 31 (1977): 217–228.


221

85.

Edwards, Religious Affections, pp. 291–292.

86.

Edwards expresses this view earlier, in his “Miscellaneous Observations on Faith.” In these he draws the analogy of common (natural) faith to intellectual assent, or “a belief of any history.” Edwards, The Works of President Edwards, vol. 7 (Leeds, 1810), pp. 564–572.

87.

Edwards, Religious Affections, p. 295.

88.

Ibid., pp. 303–304. He also brie®y touches on the issue of moral certainty in A Divine and Supernatural Light (1734).

89.

Ibid., pp. 304, 305, 307; here Edwards incorporates the entirety of Misc. No. 754 cited above.

90.

Owen, Divine Original, pp. 315, 328.

91.

Edwards, Religious Affections, p. 307. Edwards’s characterization of the moral certainty argument is in fact fairly one-sided. While the distinction was recognized by both sides as a real difference, it was perhaps more one of emphasis rather than of kind. Latitudinarians retained a fundamental role for spiritual illumination and the internal marks in their religious epistemology. Edward Stilling®eet, for example, acknowledged the need for illumination and rational argument; see his Origines sacrae (book 2, ch. 8, pp. 154– 158, and book 3, ch. 6, pp. 374–386). Latitudinarians saw their task as an exercise in apologetics, attempting to answer their critics on grounds the latter accepted. Thus Charles Wolseley states that “the Testimony given by the Holy Ghost in the Minds and Consciences of Men, to the Truth of the Scriptures (though it be the most convincing Evidence that can be given to them . . . ) ’tis not to be urged in proof of the Scriptures, against its professed Adversaries. [It is] not a common demonstrable Principle amongst Mankind; [such evidence] can never go beyond his own Breast . . . because such Evidence is no way Communicable to another but in an ordinary way.” Charles Wolseley, The Reasonableness of Scripture Belief (London, 1672), pp. 79–80. On Stilling®eet’s views, see Robert Carroll, The Common-Sense Philosophy of Religion of Bishop Edward Stilling®eet 1635–1699 (The Hague, 1975), pp. 80– 82; on the Anglican view of the Spirit’s operation, see Reedy, Bible and Reason, pp. 57–59.

3. Sacred History and the Common Sense 1.

Edward Stilling®eet, Origines sacrae; or, A Rational Account of the Grounds of Natural and Revealed Religion (1662), 8th ed. (London, 1709), p. 69.

2.

Timothy Dwight, referring to his grandfather Jonathan Edwards, in Travels in New England and New York (1821–1822), from John R. Fitzmier, New England’s Moral Legislator: Timothy Dwight, 1752–1817 (Bloomington, Ind., 1998), p. 92.

3.

See Mark A. Noll, Princeton and the Republic, 1768–1822 (Princeton, 1989), pp. 16ff., 36–47; Varnum L. Collins, President Witherspoon: A Biography, vol. 1 (Princeton, 1925), pp. 114ff., 136ff.; and Thomas J. Wertenbaker, Princeton 1746–1896 (Princeton, 1946), pp. 98ff.

4.

See John Witherspoon, “Lectures on Moral Philosophy,” in The Selected Writings of John Witherspoon, ed. Thomas Miller (Carbondale, 1990), pp. 152–230.

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5.

Varnum L. Collins, President Witherspoon, p. 114.

6.

On the broader success and demise of common sense philosophy in America, see Theodore Dwight Bozeman, Protestants in an Age of Science: The Baconian Ideal and Antebellum American Religious Thought (Chapel Hill, 1977), and Herbert Hovenkamp, Science and Religion in America, 1800–1860 (Philadelphia, 1978).

7.

Edwards, Misc. No. 583 (c. 1731–1733), in “Miscellanies” 501–832 (Works 18), pp. 118–119 (quotation marks mine). Edwards shows an appreciation for the fact that the particular dif¤culties connected with the external evidences of the narratives posed special problems for traditionary religious knowledge prior to the appearance of Tindal’s treatise, even though he does not develop fallibilist solutions to them. For example (and in a manner somewhat reminiscent of Origen’s well-known pronouncement), he attributes the existence of such dif¤culties to the express purposes of God, rather than to the nature of historical processes or non-evident forms of knowledge. See, for example, Misc. No. 139 (1724) and Misc. No. 351 (1729), in “Miscellanies” (Works 13), pp. 296 and 426, respectively.

8.

Characteristic of what is known of much of Edwards’s personal reading, the full extent of his direct exposure to the literature of deism is not altogether clear. He possessed and cites John Leland’s lengthy View of the Principal Deistical Writers (1757), which provides fairly extensive albeit selected excerpts of all of the important authors. One ¤nds scattered references to works, some of which he appears to have read, and others that according to his “Catalogue” he pursued (e.g., William Wollaston’s Religion of Nature Delineated, 1722). His earliest dated citation of Tindal’s magnum opus is February of 1757, though it would be hard not to conclude that he would have possessed a copy well before this time. In general, however, it is probably safe to conclude that with the exception of Tindal, the most important source of his understanding of deism was the secondary (anti-deist) literature at his disposal.

9.

Edwards, Misc. No. 382 (1729), in “Miscellanies” (Work, 13), p. 451. For examples of his frequent appeals to extrinsic evidences, see Misc. Nos. 1307, 1308, 1310–11, 1319, 1321, and 1323 (c. 1753–1757).

10.

Turretin and other continental Reformed theologians maintained close associations with many English divines, such as John Tillotson, and they increasingly mirrored their appeal to common sense arguments, incorporating historical probability to establish the certainty of sacred history as well as appealing to external evidences such as miracles and prophecy. On this transition in Reformed thought, see Michael Heyd, “Un rôle nouveau pour la science: Jean-Alphonse Turrettini et les débuts de la théologie naturelle à Genève,” Revue de theologie et de philosophie 112 (1980): 32–38; Maria Pitassi, “L’apologétique raisonnable de Jean-Alphonse Turretini,” in Apologétique 1680–1740, ed. Maria Pitassi (Genève, 1991), pp. 99–118; Richard Muller, PostReformation Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2 (Grand Rapids, 1993), pp. 128–145; and Martin Klauber, “Jean-Alphonse Turretini (1671–1737) on Natural Theology: The Triumph of Reason Over Revelation at the Academy of Geneva,” Scottish Journal of Theology 47.3 (1994): 301–325.

11.

Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2, pp. 141–142, 144–145.


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Muller notes that Johann Friedrich Stapfer exhibits this shift in thinking. Edwards resorted to Stapfer’s Institutiones theologiae polemicae (1743–1747) often in his attempts to answer the infallibilist critique (see, for example, Misc. Nos. 1300ff.). Stapfer’s Institutes show a preoccupation with what he termed “theological naturalism” (naturalismus theologicus)—the claim that religious knowledge can and should be restricted to universally evident (and therefore non-revelatory and non-traditionary) forms of knowledge. Stapfer made heavy use of latitudinarian sources in developing his justi¤cations of the adequacy of an approximate, morally certain religious understanding. See particularly vol. 2 of his Institutes, where Stapfer devotes a chapter of some 300 pages (one-half of the entire volume) to the arguments of Tindal and Anthony Collins (both of whom he also excerpts and critiques copiously). His divinity is one of the most important sources for the development of Edwards’s own polemical theology. 12.

See Martin Grif¤n, Latitudinarianism in the Seventeenth-Century Church of England, ed. Lila Freedman (Leiden, 1992), pp. 38ff., 66ff.; W. M. Spellman, Latitudinarians and the Church of England, 1660–1700 (Athens, Ga., 1993), pp. 72–89. For a discussion of the programmatic rejection of a priori approaches to scienti¤c explanations by the Royal Society and the role of its practitioners as a phalanx against religious skepticism, see Michael Hunter, Science and the Shape of Orthodoxy: Intellectual Change in Late SeventeenthCentury Britain (Suffolk, 1995), pp. 102–106, 169–173, 225–244.

13.

Nearly all of the signi¤cant epistemological critics of the Bible were likewise critics of the Royal Society. This is no coincidence, and it is no coincidence that Anglican apologists saw the defense of experimental science and religion as part of a uni¤ed effort. On their resistance to scienti¤c experimentalism, see Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, pp. 65–79, 99–115, 283–331; James R. Jacob, “The Ideological Origins of Robert Boyle’s Natural Philosophy,” Journal of European Studies 2 (1972): 1–21, and Robert Boyle and the English Revolution (New York, 1977), pp. 96–132; Douglas Jesseph, “Hobbes and the Method of Natural Science,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes, ed. Tom Sorrel (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 86–107.

14.

On the Anglican-Catholic dimensions of the issue, see van Leeuwen, Problem of Certainty, pp. 17–32; Popkin, History of Scepticism, pp. 146–150; Shapiro, Probability and Certainty, pp. 74–101; Grif¤n, Latitudinarianism, pp. 54–83.

15.

See Richard Baxter, The Unreasonableness of In¤delity (London, 1655), pp. 20ff., 59–70, and The Reasons of the Christian Religion (London, 1667), pp. 308ff. The appeal to the argument from moral certainty is also earlier and broader than mid-century concerns. Hugo Grotius employed it extensively in his De veritate religionis christianae (1624), a work that is ostensibly for the proselytizing efforts of Dutch sailors but that is taken up with the epistemological and historical-critical problems of the Bible. See Grotius, De veritate, bk. 2, sec. 3 (London, 1632), p. 148. This treatise, a great favorite among latitudinarians, is a work that Edwards cites frequently.

16.

Sarah Hutton, “Reason and Revelation in the Cambridge Platonists,” Wolfenbüttler Studien Zur Auf klärung 12 (1984): 183–192. Similar criticisms of the geometricians, as well as the use of a type of “constructive skepticism,” can

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also be found in French intellectual circles, perhaps most notably in Blaise Pascal’s L’esprit geometrique and De l’art de persuader (1659). On Pascal see Richard H. Popkin, “Scepticism, Theology, and the Scienti¤c Revolution in the Seventeenth Century,” in Problems in the Philosophy of Science, ed. Imre Lakatos (Amsterdam, 1968), pp. 15–16. Though known more as a religious skeptic and critic of the Bible, Pierre Bayle appears to have advocated similar views. He may have been in®uenced by Boyle; as the editor of the Nouvelles de la republique des lettres in the 1680s, Bayle corresponded with him and reviewed his works favorably. He also defended the experimentalist scienti¤c epistemology of the Royal Society in the Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697). For varying evaluations of Bayle’s relation to the experimentalist epistemology, see Leo P. Courtines, Bayle’s Relations with England and the English (New York, 1938), pp. 84–100; Richard Popkin, “Pierre Bayle’s Place in 17th-Century Scepticism,” in Pierre Bayle, ed. Paul Dinon (Amsterdam, 1959), pp. 4, 16; E. D. James, “Scepticism and Fideism in Bayle’s Dictionnaire,” French Studies 16.4 (1962): 308–314; Harry Bracken, “Bayle Not a Sceptic?” Journal of the History of Ideas 25.2 (1964): 173–180; E. D. James, “Pierre Bayle on Belief and ‘Evidence,’ ” French Studies 27.4 (1973): 395–404; Sean O’Cathasaigh, “Skepticism and Belief in Pierre Bayle’s Nouvelles lettres critiques,” Journal of the History of Ideas 45.3 (1984): 424–432. 17.

See, for example, Wolseley’s Reasonableness of Scripture-Belief (1672); Francis Gastrell’s Certainty of the Christian Revelation (1699) and his Principles of Deism (1708). Similar views are expressed in a number of John Tillotson’s sermons; on Tillotson’s signi¤cance here, see van Leeuwen, Problem of Certainty, pp. 34–42.

18.

Among his most important works in this regard are his Origines sacrae; or, A Rational Account of the Grounds of Natural and Revealed Religion (1662), written against Cartesians in general and Hobbes and Fisher in particular; A Letter to a Deist (1677), written in answer to Spinoza; and a revision of Origines sacrae (1697), left un¤nished at his death. See especially bk. 2, ch. 8, secs. 2–12 (pp. 144–154) of Origines sacrae on his general argument for moral certainty, and its incorporation of experimentalist epistemology. One of Stilling®eet’s most vehement opponents was the English Catholic John Sergeant. His Sure-Footing in Christianity (1665) attacked the claims of the “Probability Men” on the grounds that a rule of faith must be clear and distinct, self-evident, and incapable of error, since religious conviction requires an infallible certainty (such as that possessed by papal authority). Stilling®eet’s reply to Sergeant is found in his Discourse Concerning the Nature and Grounds of the Certainty of Faith (1688). Not coincidentally, Sergeant also rejected the experimentalist epistemology of the Royal Society, arguing instead (in Aristotelian fashion) that natural philosophy must be based on an a priori deductive method (The Method to Science, 1696), since matters of fact are incapable of demonstrating causes with certainty. See Dorothea Krook, John Sergeant and His Circle (Leiden, 1993), pp. 84–95, 114–125.

19.

Boyle’s experimentalism in natural philosophy was not readily received by signi¤cant elements of the scienti¤c and religious establishment, who viewed it as philosophically de¤cient: the idea of recognizing an obscure and merely tentative body of learning as “knowledge” seemed like a philosophical oxy-

Notes to page 63

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moron. Boyle’s views were met with vociferous dissent, for example, from Spinoza. Through the intermediary efforts of Henry Oldenburg, the secretary of the Royal Society (1661–1663), Spinoza raised objections to Boyle’s method in a debate over the composition of saltpeter on the grounds that his method could not produce certainty about its conclusions. On Spinoza’s exchange with Boyle, see A. Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall, “Philosophy and Natural Philosophy: Boyle and Spinoza,” Histoire de la Pensée 13 (1964): 241–256; on his reservations toward experimentalism in general, see Nancy Maull, “Spinoza in the Century of Science,” Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 91 (1986): 3–13. 20.

On the conceptual and historical links between constructive skepticism, scienti¤c experimentalism, and latitudinarian religious epistemology, see van Leeuwen, Problem of Certainty, pp. 93–105; Margaret Osler, “The Intellectual Sources of Robert Boyle’s Philosophy of Nature: Gassendi’s Voluntarism and Boyle’s Physico-Theological Project,” in Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England 1640–1700, ed. Richard Kroll, Richard Ashcraft, and Perez Zagorin (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 187–191; Rogers B. Miles, Science, Religion, and Belief: The Clerical Virtuosi of the Royal Society of London, 1663–1687 (New York, 1992), pp. 99–109, 127–156; Shapiro, Probability and Certainty, pp. 75–95; and Jan Wojcik, Robert Boyle and the Limits of Reason (Cambridge, 1997).

21.

Shapiro, Probability and Certainty, p. 4.

22.

This can be seen in the lectures established by Boyle’s estate. Though perhaps known more for the development of arguments demonstrating the rationality of the design argument, they were almost equally devoted to establishing the epistemological certi¤cate of historical religious knowledge along the lines of thought developed by Boyle and Edward Stilling®eet. See, for example, John Williams’s entire 1695 Boyle Lectures, but especially The Certainty of Divine Revelation and The Characters of Divine Revelation (second and third lectures); John J. Dahm, “Science and Apologetics in the Early Boyle Lectures,” Church History 39.2 (1970): 175, 177–178. One can of course ¤nd occasional and interesting exceptions to this epistemological method among Anglican apologists, such as John Craig’s attempt to develop a more geometrico for historiography in his Theologiae christianae principia mathematica (1699). John Craig, “Craig’s Rules of Historical Evidence,” in History and Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History, Beiheft 4 (The Hague, 1964), pp. 1–31.

23.

These include John Tillotson’s Works (1696), Robert Jenkin’s Reasonableness and Certainty of the Christian Religion (1698), Thomas Halyburton’s Natural Religion Insuf¤cient (1714), Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopedia (1728), George Berkeley’s Alciphron (1732), Patrick Delaney’s Revelation Examined with Candour (1732), Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), Isaac Watts’s Logick (1724) and Orthodoxy and Charity United (1745), the Chevalier de Ramsay’s Philosophical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion (1748), Philip Skelton’s Ophiomaches, or Deism Revealed (1749), William Warburton’s Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion (1753–1754), sundry volumes of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and Locke’s Essay.

24.

Tindal, Christianity as Old as Creation, p. 185. For Tindal’s argument in general, see pp. 1–10, 58–68, 179–190, 230–250, 320–340.

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25.

Ibid., pp. 182–184.

26.

Ibid., pp. 179, 189; for Tindal’s analysis of the epistemological inadequacies of historical tradition, see especially chs. 12 and 13.

27.

These appear in his unpublished notes, and are of varying length, ranging from short paragraphs to several pages. See for example Misc. No. 652 (c. 1733–1736), Edwards’s oft-cited illustration of “the boy and the cube” (discussed below); Misc. Nos. 636 (1733–1736), 708, 765, and 770 (c. 1737–1739); Misc. Nos. 839 and 964 (c. 1740–1745).

28.

Edwards, Misc. No. 1340, p. 1; and his “Book of Controversies,” p. 190. Misc. No. 1340 probably dates from the latter part of the years 1753–1757; the “Book of Controversies” dates from approximately 1748–1757. These two treatises are cross-referenced with each other, likely indicating that the “Controversies” entry (p. 190ff.) was also written in the last year or two before he left for Princeton. The fact that Edwards had just received a copy of Tindal’s treatise from Joseph Bellamy in early 1757 may help provide a more secure dating for both of these manuscripts.

29.

Edwards, Misc. No. 1340, p. 6.

30.

Ibid., p. 1.

31.

Ibid., pp. 3, 4.

32.

Ibid.

33.

Ibid.

34.

Ibid., p. 1.

35.

See Edwards, Misc. No. 1100 (c. 1751–1753).

36.

Edwards, “Book of Controversies,” p. 267.

37.

Ibid., pp. 191, 192 (emphasis mine).

38.

Ibid.

39.

Edwards, “Ordination Sermon of Edward Billing,” pp. 8–9. This sermon, preached in May of 1740 in Cold Spring, Massachusetts, signals the maturation of his response to the critique of traditionary religious knowledge, and also indicates his strong concerns about its popularity. An address to the clerical establishment as well as Billing’s new parishioners, this thirty-sevenpage sermon lays out nearly all of the essential theses of his later treatment of the problem of rationality and religious knowledge (it was a sermon he returned to preach on at least one other occasion). While to a certain degree it may represent an effort to counteract the general trend toward rather amorphous notions of “rational religion” waxing in New England at midcentury, it is more speci¤cally a detailed response to the kinds of problems raised in Tindal’s treatise. For the background and an analysis of this sermon, see Helen Petter Westra, “Jonathan Edwards and ‘What Reason Teaches,’ ” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 34.4 (1991): 495–503.

40.

Edwards, “Book of Controversies,” pp. 194–197. The extent to which he seems to have been prepared to defend the validity and rationality of experiential though merely probable forms of knowledge may also be indicated in his observation that historical reports of the events of the life of Christ functioned as a means of grace in the ministry of Jesus and the apostles:


227

“Saving [faith] may be built upon rational arguments, or rational arguments may savingly convince the soul of the truth of the things of religion. . . . Thomas believed by reasoning from what he had perceived with his external senses. . . . How often did [the apostles] use that argument especially of the resurrection.” Edwards, Misc. No. 636 (c. 1733–1736), in “Miscellanies” 501– 832 (Works 18), pp. 162–163. 41.

Edwards, “Book of Controversies,” p. 190 (quotation marks mine).

42.

Ibid., p. 191 (quotation marks mine).

43.

Ibid. Edwards’s argument here is more fully elaborated in Misc. No. 770 (c. 1737–1739), and is perhaps drawn from it (see “Miscellanies” 501–832 [Works 18], pp. 418–419).

44.

Edwards, “Book of Controversies,” pp. 191–192. The use of such scienti¤c metaphors (in particular, the microscope and telescope) to illustrate the experiential nature of religious knowledge is nearly ubiquitous in latitudinarian literature. Edwards also employs a second analogy to illustrate the confusion of opinion with reason, one also common in latitudinarian literature: without his willingness to accept testimony, the man born blind would have dif¤culty apprehending the properties of the world that differ in sight from the other senses (e.g., the perception of extension); see Misc. No. 1340, pp. 15–17. While in themselves they do not show that he was committed to a form of mitigated skepticism in full, such illustrations do indicate the degree to which such thought had penetrated his own analysis. On the context and presence of various analogies of vision in Edwards’s thought, see Ron Loewinsohn, “Jonathan Edwards’ Opticks: Images and Metaphors of Light in Some of His Major Works,” Early American Literature 8.1 (1973): 21–32.

45.

See Boyle, “The Christian Virtuoso,” in The Works of Robert Boyle (London, 1772), pp. 526–529. In “The Style of Holy Scriptures” (ibid.) Boyle explains the causes of the kinds of problems encountered in the scriptural accounts and attempts to solve them by relying largely on traditional humanist methods of historical study. See also excerpts from his unpublished “Essay on the Holy Scriptures,” in Rose-Marie Sargent, The Dif¤dent Naturalist: Robert Boyle and the Philosophy of Experiment (Chicago, 1995), pp. 118–120.

46.

Boyle, “Christian Virtuoso,” p. 525.

47.

See Boyle, “Advices in Judging,” in Works, p. 450. Nearly all of his theological treatises after 1670 address in some manner the epistemological problems raised by Spinoza. See, for example, “The Excellency of Theology Compared with Natural Philosophy” (1674); “Some Considerations about the Reconcileableness of Reason and Religion” (1675); “A Discourse of Things of above Reason” and “Advices in Judging Things Said to Transcend Reason” (1681); “Christian Virtuoso” and “Re®ections upon a Theological Distinction” (1690).

48.

On Boyle’s dialectical theory of interpretation, and his resistance to Hobbes’s demand for a rhetoric of “Perspicuous Words,” see Robert Markley, “Robert Boyle on Language: Some Considerations Touching the Style of the Holy Scriptures,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 14 (1985): 159–171. On his interpretive approach to nature and his progressive theory of knowledge accumulation, see Sargent, Dif¤dent Naturalist, pp. 109–115; Mitchell Fisher, Robert

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Boyle, Devout Naturalist: A Study in Science and Religion in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia, 1945), pp. 65–74; and Jan Wojcik, Boyle and the Limits of Reason, pp. 95–113, 151–188. 49.

The image of the pearl diver is one frequently used by Boyle; it may derive from his interest in oceanography, as evidenced in his “Relations about the Bottom of the Sea” (1672). Along with other analogies, such as the telescope and microscope, it illustrates how important the use of representational language was for Boyle in the explanation of both natural philosophy and religion. See Lotte Mulligan, “Robert Boyle, ‘Right Reason,’ and the Meaning of Metaphor,” Journal of the History of Ideas 55.2 (1994): 235–257.

50.

Edwards, Misc. No. 1340, pp. 23–24.

51.


52.

Ibid., p. 6; Edwards goes on to list a number of examples of paradoxical knowledge that are standard in latitudinarian literature: the existence of a sensible world; the duality of mind and matter; the nature of human thought, passion, and affection; being and non-being in time; the problem of theodicy, and the rational origin of the dictates of the moral sense. Boyle similarly augmented his defense of experimentalism and religion by arguing that rationalism itself encountered certain instances of paradox or incomprehensibility, such as the in¤nite divisibility of ¤nite quantities, the idea of myriagons, and Zeno’s denial of local motion. Furthermore, Boyle argued that the rationalistic approach to knowledge often resulted in a composed body of authoritative opinions, its so-called evident principles of nature no more than entrenched conclusions based on (unrecognized) observations of experience. See Boyle, A Discourse of Things above Reason (London, 1681), pp. 40–48, 64–82; “The Usefulness of Natural Philosophy,” in Works, pp. 46– 47; “Christian Virtuoso,” in Works, pp. 513–523, 526–528; and “Considerations Touching Experimental Essays” (n.d.), in Works, pp. 299–318.

53.


54.

See Edwards, Misc. No. 583 (c. 1731–1733) and Misc. No. 1169 (c. 1751–1753).

55.

Edwards, Misc. No. 1340, p. 25. He evidently includes the teleological dimension of nature in his consideration of the progressive character of its comprehension. Teleology was a prominent consideration in the thought of the new natural philosophy, beginning with Robert Boyle. Its presence is quite important for Edwards’s larger argument, because in making their case for the super®uous character of traditionary religion, deists were insistent that divine providence, as a component of natural religion, was rationally evident in the works of nature. Edwards’s counter-claim, like that of Butler in his Analogy of Religion, is that the teleological functions of nature are, like its scienti¤c discovery, obscure in character and thus only progressively understood. Thus it is no defect if traditionary religious knowledge shares this feature with the notion of providence (see Misc. No. 1340, p. 27).

56.


57.

Edwards, Misc. No. 1340, pp. 24–25; see Misc. No. 765 (c. 1737–1739) on the eschatological culmination of this process. His beliefs about the progressive nature of religious epistemology offer to shed light on certain aspects of his millennialism as well. There can be no doubt that Edwards portrayed the


229

millennium as a time marked by the explosion of both secular and spiritual knowledge, and one of the most important contributing factors to this view was his epistemology. He believed that the understanding of Scripture, like the study of nature, was a gradual historical process, and that the eschaton would not commence until the obscurities of Scripture had been cleared up, a process accelerated during the millennium. For a summary and critique of previous interpretations of Edwards’s millennialism, see Gerald R. McDermott, One Holy and Happy Society: The Public Theology of Jonathan Edwards (University Park, Pa., 1992), pp. 37–40, 63–66, 71–72. 58.

For Miller’s thesis, see his Jonathan Edwards, pp. 52–62, and “Jonathan Edwards on the Sense of the Heart,” pp. 121–145.

59.

The hypothesis of this sort of tension between Locke’s empiricism and Edwards’s theory of religious knowledge is proposed by Claude Smith, “Jonathan Edwards and ‘The Way of Ideas,’ ” pp. 153–173, and reiterated in Laurence, “Jonathan Edwards, John Locke, and the Canon of Experience,” pp. 107–122. It subsequently reappears in a modi¤ed form in James Hoopes, “Jonathan Edwards’s Religious Psychology,” Journal of American History 69.4 (1983): 849–865, and Michael McClymond, “Spiritual Perception in Jonathan Edwards,” Journal of Religion 77 (1997): 195–216.

60.

On Locke’s association with and intellectual similarities to latitudinarianism, see van Leeuwen, Problem of Certainty, p. 123ff.; Richard Ashcraft “Faith and Knowledge in Locke’s Philosophy,” in John Locke: Problems and Perspectives, ed. John Yolton (Cambridge, 1969), pp. 194–223; John Marshall, “John Locke and Latitudinarianism,” in Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England 1640–1700, ed. Richard Kroll, Richard Ashcraft, and Perez Zagorin (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 253–274; G. A. J. Rogers, “Boyle, Locke, and Reason,” Journal of the History of Ideas 27.2 (1966): 205–216; and Margaret Osler, “John Locke and the Changing Ideal of Scienti¤c Knowledge,” Journal of the History of Ideas 31.1 (1970): 3–16. For some modest quali¤cations of this view of Locke, see M. Jamie Ferreira, “Locke’s ‘Constructive Skepticism’: A Reappraisal,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 24.2 (1986): 211–222.

61.

Richard Popkin, “The Philosophy of Bishop Stilling®eet,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 9.3 (1971): 302–319; and John C. Biddle, “Locke’s Critique of Innate Principles and Toland’s Deism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 37.2 (1976): 411–422.

62.

Samuel C. Pearson, “The Religion of John Locke and the Character of His Thought,” Journal of Religion 58 (1978): 244–262; and G. A. J. Rogers, “John Locke: Conservative Radical,” in The Margins of Orthodoxy: Heterodox Writing and Cultural Response, 1660–1750, ed. Roger Lund (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 100–103. It is instructive that Locke was read in contrary ways by thinkers from both the infallibilist and the fallibilist perspectives. Stilling®eet, for example, attacked Locke for his apparent exclusion of claims based on historical tradition from the realm of knowledge. Toland and other deists read the Essay in the same manner, appealing to it in order to bolster their own critique of historical religious knowledge. But Stilling®eet’s theological confederate Francis Gastrell used Locke’s epistemology to vindicate the probabilistic approach to religious knowledge. And the Catholic John Sergeant issued a sustained attack on Locke (Solid Philosophy Asserted, 1697) precisely be-

230


cause Locke failed to utilize a method and the criteria of rational infallibility for religious ideas. See John Yolton, John Locke and the Way of Ideas (Oxford, 1956), pp. 76–85, 122–124, 175–190. 63.

His basic distinctions between knowledge and faith and his conclusions about their respective prerogatives may compare with medieval and later scholastic (Protestant) treatments. David Snyder, for example, sees parallels in Locke’s approach with that of Aquinas; Snyder, “Faith and Reason in Locke’s Essay,” Journal of the History of Ideas 47.2 (1986) 197–213.

64.

John Locke, An Essay on Human Understanding, ed. Peter Nidditch, 4th ed. (Oxford, 1975), pp. 525, 530–534, 536–539; see Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Locke’s Philosophy of Religion,” in The Cambridge Companion to Locke, ed. Vere Chapell (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 175–177, 190–191. This refusal to blur the line between knowledge and belief contributed to the animosity between Stilling®eet and Locke in spite of the basic similarities of their respective views. Stilling®eet attacked Locke in part for so radically separating faith from knowledge that he put belief in testimony in a doubtful state. He claimed that as a result Locke’s epistemology could not counter the skepticism of critics like Spinoza (Popkin, “Philosophy of Stilling®eet,” pp. 311, 315; Ashcraft “Faith and Knowledge in Locke’s Philosophy,” p. 202). In his reply (1697) to Stilling®eet Locke rejected this conclusion, countering that the issue separating them was essentially a terminological one: “For it is only about my de¤nition of knowledge, that all this stir, concerning certainty, is made. For with me, to know and be certain, is the same thing; what I know, that I am certain of; and what I am certain of, that I know. What reaches to knowledge, I think may be called certainty; and what comes short of certainty, I think cannot be called knowledge.” Locke, “Letter to Edward Stilling®eet,” in The Works of John Locke, vol. 4, 11th ed. (London, 1812), pp. 145ff.; Paul Helm, “Locke on Faith and Knowledge,” Philosophical Quarterly 23.90 (1973): 60ff.

65.

Locke, Essay, pp. 661–663.

66.

Ibid., p. 667. On the interpretive dif¤culties involved in this assent, see J. T. Moore, “Locke’s Analysis of Language and the Assent to Scripture,” Journal of the History of Ideas 37.4 (1976): 707–714.

67.


68.

Ibid., p. 655.

69.

Ibid., pp. 45–46, 538–540.

70.

Ibid., p. 662.

71.

Ibid., pp. 692–694. Locke is simply observing here the psychological impossibility of believing something either that is known to be false or for which compelling evidence is lacking. Merely calling something “revelation” cannot under such conditions “move our Assent,” since “we cannot tell how to conceive that to come from God . . . which if received for true, must overturn all the Principles and Foundations of Knowledge.” To assert the prerogative of faith in the face of contrary evidence is unintelligible, if not disingenuous, since belief cannot be induced “where we have the clear and evident Sentence of Reason . . . under a Pretence that it is a Matter of Faith” (ibid., emphasis mine).


231

72.

Ibid., pp. 691–693.

73.

Ibid., p. 664.

74.

Ibid., pp. 654–655, 667–668; see Paul Helm, “Locke on Faith and Knowledge,” pp. 52–57.

75.

The restriction of “knowledge” to the rationally demonstrable led to an increasing tendency to associate “reason” only with such knowledge. Boyle attempted to rescue these philosophical terms by asserting a basic distinction: that which was obscure (and thus technically not knowledge) could be distinguished from that which was irrational, or repugnant to reason. See his Discourse of Things above Reason and Re®ections upon a Theological Distinction.

76.


77.

Ibid., pp. 687–695.

78.

Biddle, “Locke’s Critique,” pp. 415–419. Further con¤rmation of Locke’s view of the essential rationality of revealed religion appears in his Reasonableness of Christianity. Here Locke takes the (some would say radical) position that all religious knowledge comes by the aid of revelation, and not by the act of uninformed ratiocination. See Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity according to the Scriptures (London, 1823), pp. 5, 105, 139–145. See also Ashcraft, “Faith and Knowledge,” pp. 218–223; Pearson, “Locke and the Character of His Thought,” pp. 253ff.; Yolton, Locke and the Way of Ideas, pp. 173ff.

79.

Locke, Essay, p. 668.

80.

Ibid., pp. 669, 682–685.

81.

Ashcraft, “Faith and Knowledge,” p. 215; Stephen N. Williams “John Locke on the Status of Faith,” Scottish Journal of Theology 40 (1987): 595–600.

82.

Smith, “Jonathan Edwards and ‘The Way of Ideas,’ ” pp. 154–155, 157ff.

83.

Laurence, “Jonathan Edwards, John Locke, and the Canon of Experience,” pp. 108–109, 119.

84.

For example, one of Edwards’s most extensive and systematic critiques of the application of Lockean ideas to religious problems, Misc. No. 1337, is listed in his “Table” to the Miscellanies as “Tindal, answer to his arguing.” See Edwards, “Miscellanies” (Works 13), p. 147. Furthermore, Edwards explicitly identi¤es Locke’s Essay as providing counter-arguments to Tindal on the issue of mysteries; see “Book of Controversies,” p. 197.

85.

For examples of Edwards’s use of Locke’s biblical commentary, see his “Blank Bible” entries on the Pauline epistles. He cites Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity on the interpretation of Matt. 24; ibid., p. 688.

86.

Edwards did have his criticisms of Locke’s account of Christianity, of course, chie®y his complaint in the “Book of Controversies” against the kind of doctrinal minimalism—present in Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity—that reduced Christian faith to the belief that “Jesus is the Messiah.”

87.

Locke, Essay, pp. 705, 704.

88.

See Edwards, Misc. Nos. aa, 6, 201, 204, 333, in “Miscellanies” (Works 13), pp. 177, 202, 338, 339, 410, respectively. In fact, Edwards evidently did not per-

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ceive Locke’s empiricism as a challenge to the notion of a divinely illuminated revelation, but rather as providing an important counter-argument to critics of the epistemological coherence and suf¤ciency of concepts like illumination and revelation. He found in Locke’s account an epistemological justi¤cation of the intuitive and thus infallibly certain nature of sense perceptions: that they in fact quali¤ed as “knowledge.” In like manner he argued that spiritual sense perceptions (including those induced by revelation) were both intuitive and infallibly certain, and therefore known. Thus it was not simply the possibility of an empiricist description of spiritual perceptions that attracted him to Locke, but the intuitive and infallible epistemological status of those spiritual perceptions. See Misc. aa (1722), Misc. No. 201 (1726), Misc. No. 256 (1727), in “Miscellanies” (Works 13), pp. 177–178, 338, 365–266 respectively; and entry Nos. 19 and 20 (c. 1724) of “The Mind,” in Scienti¤c and Philosophical Writings, p. 346. 89.

Tindal, Christianity as Old as Creation, p. 189.

90.

Ibid., p. 330; see Peter Byrne, Natural Religion and the Nature of Religion: The Legacy of Deism (London, 1989), pp. 70–78.

91.

Edwards, “The Mind,” entry No. 5, in Scienti¤c and Philosophical Writings, 387–388 (see entry No. 2, regarding prejudice, as well). This entry provides additional evidence of the in®uence that the debate over traditionary religious knowledge had upon Edwards’s overall philosophy, and may indicate ways in which it reshaped his intentions for major treatises such as “The Mind.” It may be more than coincidental that in the 1730s Edwards had begun to shift other elements of his general epistemological theory (e.g., perception) away from his initially strong emphasis on “knowledge as the immediate apprehension of self-evident truths” toward the notion that knowledge is a habitual and approximating process of accumulated experience, such that “the certainty or fallibility of perceptual judgments depends upon the constancy of our experience and our opportunities for trial and experiment in cases similar to the one being judged.” See Anderson, “Introduction,” in Edwards, Scienti¤c and Philosophical Writings, pp. 122–128. It is worth noting that Edwards uses his illustration of “the boy and the cube” in entry No. 5, one borrowed from an earlier entry in the “Miscellanies,” No. 652 (c. 1733–1736). This well-known analogy was intended to illustrate the fact that even the notions of evidence and clarity have an experiential or psychological dimension to them, such that they are relative to the subjective circumstances of the subject. Even the most evident forms of knowledge can possess the quality of obscurity, more seeming “contradiction in it, that ever there did in any mystery of religion to a Socinian or Deist.” Edwards, “Miscellanies” 501–832 (Works 18), pp. 192–193. It is an illustration used as well in the Billing ordination sermon; see Westra, “Jonathan Edwards and ‘What Reason Teaches,’ ” p. 499.

92.

Edwards, Misc. No. 1100 (c. 1751–1753).

93.

Howard, “The Mind” of Jonathan Edwards, pp. 121–135. It is in this vein that James Hoopes attributes Edwards’s criticism of Locke’s de¤nition to his rejection of the latter’s empiricism; see Hoopes, “Edwards’s Religious Psychology,” p. 855.


233

94.

Anderson, “Introduction,” in Edwards, Scienti¤c and Philosophical Writings, pp. 316–331. The ¤nal placement of entry No. 71 at the head of “The Mind” may in fact indicate a reorientation of this treatise toward the kinds of problems at issue in this essay, if indeed the rearrangement by Edwards in 1747 re®ects anything more than a desire for topical coherence.

95.

Edwards, “The Mind,” in Scienti¤c and Philosophical Writings, p. 385.

96.

Ibid.

97.

See Tindal, Christianity as Old as Creation, p. 181.

98.

Edwards, “Book of Controversies,” p. 190.

99.

Ibid.

4. Plain Obvious Sensible Facts 1.

Lord Henry St. John Bolingbroke, “Letters on the Study and Use of History” (1752), in Bolingbroke, Historical Writings, ed. Isaac Kramnick (Chicago, 1972), p. 37.

2.

Edwards did take particular notice of them at that time, however. He notes in the “Catalogue” (p. 37) that John Leland’s Authority of the Old and New Testament was being advertised in periodicals as a response to Bolingbroke’s essays. See also the note on Exod. 17.6 in the “Blank Bible” (p. 65), where Edwards cites a Monthly Review (1752) article on Robert Clayton’s Vindication of the Histories of the Old and New Testament “in answer to Lord Bolingbroke.” Leland’s View of the Principal Deistical Writers (1755), which Edwards possessed, devotes more attention to Bolingbroke (Letters 22–34) than any other author; Patrick Delaney’s Revelation Examined with Candour, another work used by Edwards, also contains a section on Bolingbroke (ch. 9). And when he came to revise his treatise on the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, Edwards observed that “Lord Bolingbroke himself owns that the Jews had a genuine history of their affairs . . . tho he pretends that the ages before were fabulous ages among them.” See Edwards, “Notebook on the Pentateuch,” p. 33.

3.

See Isaac Kramnick’s introduction to Bolingbroke, Letters, xiff.; Walter Merrill, From Statesman to Philosopher: A Study in Bolingbroke’s Deism (New York, 1949), pp. 12–13, 221ff.

4.

See Miller, Jonathan Edwards, pp. 307–330, and Peter Gay, A Loss of Mastery: Puritan Historians in Colonial America (Berkeley, 1966), pp. 88–117. Even more sympathetic treatments of Edwards’s historical thought have concluded as to his pre-critical mindset. See Stephen Stein, “Introduction,” in Edwards, Notes on Scripture, pp. 4–6; John F. Wilson, “Jonathan Edwards as Historian,” Church History 46.1 (1977): 5–18; and Karl P¤sterer, The Prism of Scripture: Studies on History and Historicity in the Work of Jonathan Edwards (Frankfurt/M, 1975), pp. 121–164.

5.

See Chambers, “Criticism,” in Cyclopedia. This notion of criticism is also present in another encyclopedia that Edwards cites, Jeremy Collier’s translation of Louis Moreri’s Great Historical Dictionary. Jean Le Clerc (Parrhasiana) and Giambattista Vico (Scienza Nuova) also operated under such a

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notion; it can be found as well in Bayle’s comments on the subject in the Historical and Critical Dictionary. See Patrick Lambe, “Critics and Skeptics in the Seventeenth-Century Republic of Letters,” Harvard Theological Review 81.3 (1988): 285–286. 6.

Richard Simon, Histoire Critique du Texte du Nouveau Testament (Rotterdam, 1689), preface.

7.

It is this form of criticism that Voltaire had in mind when writing the Philosophical Dictionary, in which he expresses a level of contempt for “that criticism of the Scholiasts . . . which disentangles whatever it can of ancient history and philosophy,” preferring instead that criticism “whose real aim is satire.” See François Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, pp. 221–229.

8.

See Lambe, “Critics and Skeptics,” pp. 271–296; see also Bertram E. Schwarzbach, Voltaire’s Old Testament Criticism (Genève, 1971), pp. 5–20; and William Baird, History of New Testament Research, chs. 2, 6.

9.

Edwards, “Miscellanies” (Works 13), p. 114.

10.

Others headings include: “Canon: of the New Testament, of the Scripture; Coming of Christ, its being spoken of as nigh by the apostles; Greek of the New Testament, see Warburton’s Sermons; Job, that book of Scripture, why inserted into the canon of the Scripture and why so constituted; Septuagint, the writers of the New Testament seldom cite the Old from thence; World: not older than the Scripture account.” Ibid., pp. 125–150. The “Table” was ¤rst begun in 1728, and supplemented over the course of his career up to 1756–1757.

11.

Edwards, “Catalogue,” p. 41.

12.

Jacob Elsner, Observationes sacrae in Novi Foederis libros (1720–1728); Elsner also authored a Commentarius critico-philologicus in Euangelium Matthei (1767). See Edwards, “Catalogue of Reading,” p. 23 (c. 1750). So also: “Mr. Erskine . . . says ‘One of the most judicious criticks and accurate reasoners this age has produced [is] Mr. Warburton in his Divine Legation of Moses.” And again: “Ramsay in the Preface to the 2nd vol. of his Principles . . . commended Cudworth and says ‘among all those modern criticks there is none we have made more use of than the learned Dr. Cudworth . . . [and] speaks of Calmet as one of the Ablest and most learned Criticks of the Age.’ ” Ibid., p. 16 (c. 1747), p. 36 (c. 1754). See as well his comments in letters to John Erskine, Letters and Personal Writings, pp. 375, 489–490, and his comments on 2 Tim. 2.19 in his “Blank Bible,” p. 863.

13.

Isaac de Beausobre, Histoire critique de Manichée (1734).

14.

Edwards, “Account Book.” Humphrey Prideaux, The Old and New Testament Connected in the History of the Jews and Neighbouring Nations (1716); Nathaniel Lardner, The Credibility of the Gospel History (1727–1757).

15.

These include, in addition to Bengel’s work on New Testament criticism, works by Grotius, Jean Le Clerc’s commentaries on the Old and New Testament, several works by Jean Alphonse Turretin, William Warburton’s Divine Legation, the chronological treatments of Isaac Newton and William Whiston, the gospel treatments of Whiston and Nathaniel Lardner, Jeremiah


235

Jones’s canonical study, Locke’s commentary on the Pauline epistles, the erudite geographies of Samuel Bochart, Edward Wells, and Thomas Salmon, as well as Bayle’s dictionary (entered on three separate occasions in the “Catalogue”) and a number of other encyclopedic works, including Calmet’s Bible dictionary. 16.

Edwards, “Catalogue,” p. 38 (c. 1755), p. 30 (c. 1752), p. 36. Like Richard Simon, Houbigant (d. 1784) was an Oratorian priest; he sought to render the Hebrew text free from mistaken readings introduced by the Masoretic vowel points.

17.

In fact he makes a speci¤c reference in these notes to just this sort of program: “In reading the Old Testament observe its harmony with the New.” See Edwards, “Subjects of Enquiry” (Notebook 5) (c. late 1740s or early 1750s), p. 16.

18.

Show how parallel in many instances historical evidence of a past age by the testimony handed down to us is to the evidence we have of what is present. . . . Of the existence and estate of a distant country or nation that we have never seen and consider what may be agreed from what then we see ourselves. To what degree truth is maintained in narration of things past in our age and so may argue how it could be through many such ages; for the ages are all another and so all are interlaced as it were. We agree in the same manner as [past authors] concerning the truth of narrations concerning distant places. So far as we travel we have opportunity to see with our own eyes how far truth is kept in its carriage through such a distance, etc. Ibid., pp. 24, 26.

19.

Ibid., p. 21.

20.

Ibid., p. 17.

21.

Ibid., p. 22. Other notes include: “Observe the agreement of style and manner of writing between the Epistle to the Hebrews and the Apostle Paul’s other epistles” (p. 14); “In reading the epistles observe references to the history of and facts [reported] by the Evangelists” (p. 16); “In reading the Evangelists to observe the circumstances of the miracles, the number of spectatours, etc., shewing them to be true miracles” (p. 17); “Compute the number of Christ’s miracles” (p. 22); “Observe the passages in the NT that argue that the Epistles of the Apostles were soon made very publick in the Christian church” (p. 24); “Observe passages in the epistles con¤rming the Acts of the Apostles; this should be read with Dr. Doddridge’s table to traditions of the heathens concerning divine matters” (p. 24).

22.

Edwards, “Ef¤cacious Grace,” from Kenneth P. Minkema, “The Other Un¤nished ‘Great Work’: Jonathan Edwards, Messianic Prophecy, and ‘The Harmony of the Old and New Testament,’ ” in Jonathan Edwards’s Writings: Text, Context, Interpretation, ed. Stephen J. Stein (Bloomington, Ind., 1996), p. 57.

23.

Gay, Loss of Mastery, pp. 92–94.

24.

Ibid., pp. 89, 91, 93, 94.

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25.

See Leonard Krieger, “The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Historians,” Church History 47 (1978): 279–297; and Sheridan Gilley, “Christianity and Enlightenment: An Historical Survey,” History of European Ideas 1.2 (1981) 103–121.

26.


27.

Ibid., pp. 25–26.

28.

Richard Simon, for example, was without question the ablest biblical scholar during the intellectual era that de¤ned Edwards’s career. Nonetheless, his criticism touched only limited details of the texts and their overarching narrative. It also included theological argumentation as a matter of course. Jean Astruc’s Conjectures sur les memoirs (1753), most often credited for the genius of the documentary hypothesis, was written as a defense of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch against the more radical conclusions of Spinoza. It was not until the late eighteenth century that Johann Eichorn developed Astruc’s ideas into a post-Mosaic theory of the origin of the Pentateuch.

29.

It is, furthermore, a mistake to identify critical thinkers by the relative success of their particular historical judgments or by the judgments’ agreement with those of modern scholarship; arriving upon the right answer is not necessarily an indication of critical judgment or methodology. It may be the case, for example, that Isaac La Peyrére was correct to conclude that the biblical accounts were local history and that Adam was not the oldest human being in the empirical historical record. But his reasons for doing so were almost wholly theological in nature, and not due to any commitment on his part to a rigorous historical methodology. On the theological and millenarian motives informing La Peyrére’s pre-Adamite theory—interestingly enough, a theory also adopted by English radical sects—see Richard M. Popkin, “The Marrano Theology of Isaac La Peyrére” Studi internazionali di ¤loso¤a 5 (1973): 97–126, and Isaac La Peyrére (1596–1676): His Life, Work, and In®uence (Leiden, 1987).

30.

This symbiotic relationship between skeptics and traditionalists is strikingly illustrated in Voltaire’s relationship with Augustin Calmet, the great French Catholic biblical apologist. In 1707 Calmet began publishing his critically informed if more popularized 120-volume biblical commentary; in 1710 he followed this with his immensely successful Historical and Critical Dictionary of the Bible. As a result he became synonymous with French biblical scholarship, and a convenient target for Voltaire and his colleagues. But in 1748 the two began a correspondence, which resulted in Voltaire making an extended visit to Calmet and his library in 1754. In Voltaire’s subsequent published writings on the Bible (e.g., Philosophical Dictionary, The Bible Finally Explained) he ridicules the kind of interpretation represented in the work of Calmet. At the same time, however, it is clear that his education about critical issues was aided by his interactions with Calmet, and that in fact the latter is a major source of his own biblical commentary. See Arnold Ages, “Voltaire, Calmet, and the Old Testament,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 41 (1966): 87–187.

31.

Edwards’s critical biblical reading re®ects this fact; it includes the works of


237

progressive latitudinarians, Arians, Arminians, Dissenters, Catholics, irenic Reformed theologians, and even crypto-deists at times, from Holland, France, Germany, and England. 32.

Bruce Metzger, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration (Oxford, 1968), pp. 107–108; Baird, History of New Testament Research, p. 28.

33.

Tindal, Christianity as Old as Creation, p. 288. See also Anthony Collins, Discourse of Freethinking (London, 1713), and John Toland, Nazerenus; or, Jewish, Gentile, and Mahometan Christianity (London, 1718), p. 11.

34.

Edwards, “Catalogue,” p. 24 (c. 1750).

35.

See, for example, Matthew Tindal’s rehearsal of them in Christianity as Old as Creation, pp. 250–290.

36.

John Edwards, A Discourse Concerning the Authority, Stile, and Perfection of the Books of the Old and New Testament (London, 1693), pp. 65–66. Other more moderate thinkers, such as John Dryden and Edward Stilling®eet, also voiced the opinion that such variations implied a lack of divine providence in the transmission of the text; see Reedy, Bible and Reason, pp. 111–112.

37.

A passage from the “Miscellanies” may be of some use here. In Misc. No. 535 (c. 1732) he comments on the relative utility of the patristic writers for interpreting Scripture. Their subordinate value is due in part to the lack of providence in maintaining their transmission; thus Edwards clearly expects that the biblical texts have been preserved in a heightened state of integrity.

38.

See Edwards, “Christian Safety,” in Sermons and Discourses 1720–1723, ed. Wilson H. Kimnach, vol. 10 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, 1992), p. 458; Notes on Scripture, No. 220, p. 155. As an example of his textcritical concerns, see his treatment of 1 John 2.23 as potential interpolation, a conclusion he borrows from Mill through Philip Doddridge.

39.

See, for example, Edwards, “Blank Bible,” Josh. 15.32, Judg. 20.15, and 2 Sam. 8.4 (pp. 183, 208, 244 et passim); Neh. 7.7–9, Matt. 1 (pp. 371, 637 et passim); Luke 18.35, Acts 13.20 (pp. 729, 776). See also Notes on Scripture, No. 215, pp. 146–147.

40.

Edwards, “Blank Bible,” John 5, p. 740. This would be an unusually original insight on his part; it may be derived from Philip Doddridge, whom he cites extensively in this section of the “Blank Bible.” This passage is also crossreferenced to No. 449 of the “Notes on Scripture,” an entry that cites Henry Maundrel’s Travels, a geography of the Holy Land.

41.

Edwards, Letters and Personal Writings, pp. 134–142, 236–240.

42.

Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 278–279.

43.

Richard Simon, A Critical History of the Text of the New Testament (London, 1689), pp. 59–61.

44.

Jean Le Clerc, Five Letters Concerning the Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures (London, 1690), p. 104; see pp. 50–68. See also Samuel Golden, Jean Le Clerc (New York, 1972), pp. 133ff.

45.

Edwards, “The Mind,” in Scienti¤c and Philosophical Writings, p. 346.

238


46.

See as well Misc. No. 1144 (c. 1752), in which he compares the prophetic selfknowledge as a kind of personal familiarity, “as it were to know his voice.”

47.

Edwards, “Charity and Its Fruits,” in Ethical Writings, ed. Paul Ramsey, vol. 8 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, 1989), pp. 152–154.

48.

Edwards, Misc. No. 1162 (c. 1752). Edwards also raises this possibility in his revision of the “History of the Work of Redemption”; see Notebook 1, p. 4.

49.

Edwards, A History of the Work of Redemption, ed. John F. Wilson, vol. 9 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, 1989), p. 284.

50.

Edwards, Misc. Nos. 358–359 (1729), in “Miscellanies” (Works 13), pp. 430–433. He extended this analysis in Misc. No. 810 (c. 1740) with similar arguments on the vexing problem of the authority of Job.

51.

Edwards, Misc. No. 303 (1727), ibid., pp. 389–390. See as well Misc. No. 252 of the same year. Even John Edwards similarly conceded the role of personality in the inspired texts, though he held to a strict dictation theory of inspiration; see his Discourse, pp. 32–33.

52.

See Edwards, Notes on Scripture, Nos. 115, 145, 434, 440, 506, pp. 83, 91, 518, 522, 609, respectively.

53.

Edwards, “Rough Notes” (c. 1737), p. 1.

54.

See, for example, Anthony Collins, A Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion (London, 1724), pp. 1–38.

55.

Edwards, “Rough Notes,” pp. 1–3; see also “Blank Bible,” 2 Peter 3.16, p. 879. Another of the most vexing problems regarding the inspiration of the Old and New Testaments was whether individual authors recognized the full import of their message, as in the future or double sense of some prophecies or in the prophets’ own apparent expectations about their literal ful¤llment. As previously noted, this became a part of the of¤cial ministerial discussions in the Hampshire Association. Edwards also devoted extensive labor to resolving this issue in his private notes. See, for example, Misc. Nos. 160, 195, 229, 842, 1287, 1318, and 1321; Nos. 35, 53, 56, 118, 188, 197, and 414 in the Notes on Scripture.

56.

Bennet, Truth, Inspiration, and Usefulness, pp. 8–9. Edwards seems have come into possession of this work around 1735 or 1736, when it appears in his “Catalogue” (p. 4). The “Rough Notes” (begun shortly thereafter) cite Bennet on the ¤rst page. He also possessed the work of another apologist making similar allowances for the historical portions of Scripture, Robert Jenkin’s Reasonableness and Certainty of the Christian Religion (London, 1698); see Book 2, pp. 35–45.

57.

Edwards, Notebook 1 (c. 1754), “History of the Work of Redemption,” pp. 4, 7.

58.

On the history of these developments, see Bruce Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Signi¤cance (Oxford, 1987); Baird, History of New Testament Research, pp. 116–154; Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft, pp. 99–132; Reedy, Bible and Reason, pp. 90–118; William J. Abraham, Canon and Criterion in Christian Theology: From the Fathers to Feminism (Oxford, 1998), chs. 5–9; and Samuel Davidson, The Canon of the Bible: Its Formation, History, and Fluctuations (London, 1878), pp. 245–275.


239

59.

John Toland, Amyntor or, a Defence of Milton’s Life (London, 1699), pp. 20–60.

60.

Toland, Nazarenus, pp. 5–55. This gospel is probably a Renaissance-era forgery, perhaps based on an older gnostic text, with subsequent Islamic interpolations; see Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft, pp. 124–126. For Matthew Tindal’s recapitulation of many of Toland’s arguments, see his Christainity as Old as Creation, pp. 305–324.

61.

Slightly more orthodox thinkers like William Whiston (Primitive Christianity Revived, 1711) also advocated reopening the canon, arguing that primitive works such as the Apostolic Constitutions and the third epistle to the Corinthians were apostolic in origin; see Metzger, Canon of the New Testament, p. 14. Jean Le Clerc also expressed doubts about individual books in the Old and New Testaments, and about the inspired nature of the canonical process; see his Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, pp. 39ff., 85ff.

62.

Both, for example, introduced for the ¤rst time into English many of the apocryphal texts cited by Toland. See Baird, History of New Testament Research, pp. 116–133; Metzger, Canon of the New Testament, pp. 14–15. Samuel Davidson, writing in the late nineteenth century, still found it necessary to engage Jones’s work as a formidable participant in the discussion on the canon; see his Canon of the Bible, pp. 273ff.

63.

Lardner’s treatise was serialized over a long period; Edwards notes in his “Catalogue” after 1736 (p. 11) that there are “some other volumes than those that I have seen,” so it is reasonable to suppose his acquaintance with Lardner was relatively early. Jeremiah Jones is cited in the “Notes on Scripture” circa 1740 (No. 402), so it would not be surprising to discover a similar familiarity. Through them Edwards gained access to the canonical theories of Mill, Le Clerc, Simon, Grotius, Locke, and Jean Alphonse Turretin. Besides Lardner and Jones, he exhibits a heavy reliance on Philip Doddridge’s Family Expositor (1739–1756) for his views on canonical criticism, as well as the divinity of Johann Stapfer and the commentaries of Moses Lowman, Matthew Henry, and Matthew Poole. He lists John Cosin’s Scholastical History of the Canon of Holy Scripture (1657) in the “Catalogue” (p. 17, c. 1748), though there is no evidence that he obtained it.

64.

There are three headings on canonicity in his index to the “Miscellanies,” relating to the books of Job, Daniel, and the New Testament.

65.

He borrows the substance of this theory from Arthur Bedford’s Scripture Chronology. See Edwards, Notes on Scripture, No. 402 (c. 1730), pp. 122–126. He treats other aspects of the problem of Job’s canonicity in No. 145 (1729), the “Blank Bible” (Job, p. 385; 1 Cor. 3.19, p. 823; both post-1740), and Misc. Nos. 810 (c. 1740) and 878 (c. 1743). Misc. No. 810 details his theological argument for its canonicity, namely its typological applicability to the af®icted church. The Song of Solomon was problematic because it appears to be about physical love, a subject seemingly inappropriate in a sacred canon. Edwards, citing Matthew Henry, argues that its subject matter was interpreted spiritually, and that this was the “ancient, constant, and committed testimony” of both Jews and the early Christians; see Notes on Scripture, Nos. 147 (1729) and 231 (c. 1735), pp. 92, 181. On Ecclesiastes, see the entries in the “Blank Bible,” pp. 328, 477, 480.

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66.

On Daniel, see Misc. No. 1309 (c. 1755); on the problems with Revelation, see Notes on Scripture, No. 291 (1737), pp. 249–251, and the “Blank Bible,” pp. 882, 885–886 (c. 1740). On Jude, see the “Blank Bible,” p. 883 (c. 1740). Edwards also addresses the problems associated with the gospel of John and its divergence from the synoptic gospels in Notes on Scripture, No. 447 (c. 1747), pp. 529–530, and John, “Blank Bible,” p. 736 (post-1747).

67.


68.

A work now believed to be from the late second century. Jeremiah Jones notes objections to the early dating of the Syriac NT by Louis Ellies Du Pin (Canon of the New Testament, 1699) and Hugo Grotius; Edwards does not record these.

69.


70.

Ibid., pp. 3, 43.

71.

Ibid., pp. 20, 41.

72.

See Edwards, “Charity and Its Fruits,” in Ethical Writings, pp. 149–166, 351– 360. Entry No. 305 in the “Notes on Scripture,” also written in 1738, is crossreferenced to the fourteenth sermon, and is similarly focused on the closing of the canon.

73.

Edwards, “The Extraordinary In®uences of the Spirit of God” (May 1748), p. 32; this sermon is composed of three preaching units totaling 138 pages. This statement is a somewhat curious piece of hyperbole. While obviously telling as a rhetorical element, few if any of his historical sources on the canon would have made such a claim. Indeed, his reading of Jones clearly acknowledges that the process of canonization was hardly “settled” at the end of the ¤rst century, though the extant books all may have been written by that time.

74.

Edwards, Notebook 2 (c. 1755), “History of the Work of Redemption,” p. 29.

75.

Metzger, Canon of the New Testament, p. 18.

76.

See George Huppert, The Idea of Perfect History: Historical Erudition and Historical Philosophy in Renaissance France (Urbana, Ill., 1970), pp. 1–21; Donald R. Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law, and History in the French Renaissance (New York, 1970), p. 22; Leonard Krieger, Time’s Reasons: Philosophies of History Old and New (Chicago, 1981), pp. 11–26; and Joseph M. Levine, Humanism and History: Origins of Modern English Historiography (Ithaca, N.Y., 1987), pp. 19–20.

77.

Jean Bodin, A Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, trans. Beatrice Reynolds (New York, 1945), pp. 15, 51. Bodin’s Method was a part of the Dummer gift to Yale. While there is no evidence that Edwards studied it, Bodin’s treatise did exercise a decided in®uence on English historiographical thought in the seventeenth century, which no doubt helps to explain why it was part of Dummer’s collection. See Leonard F. Dean, “Bodin’s Methodus in England before 1625,” Studies in Philology 39.1 (1942): 160–166; and F. Smith Fussner, The Historical Revolution: English Historical Writing and Thought 1580–1640 (New York, 1962), pp. 165ff.

78.

Le Clerc, Parrhasiana, pp. 97–141. See too the Catholic author Lenglet du


241

Fresnoy’s New Method of Studying History, trans. Richard Rawlinson (London, 1728), a work that appears in Edwards’s “Catalogue.” 79.

Henry Winder, A Critical and Chronological History of Knowledge, 2nd ed. (London, 1756), p. 8.

80.

Chambers, “History,” in Cyclopedia. This de¤nition of history also appears in Bayle’s Dictionary, and does so in the context of the problems associated with historical knowledge. Bayle defends a “history of facts” as being as epistemologically certain as the geometric method of Descartes. On the importance of the encyclopedic genre in disseminating a common terminological and conceptual vocabulary, see Frank A. Kaf ker, ed., “Notable Encyclopedias of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Nine Predecessors of the Encyclopedié,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 194 (1981): 13– 52, 83–100, 107–121, 123–137.

81.

Levine, Humanism and History, p. 20.

82.

Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship, pp. 22–27.

83.

Huppert, Idea of Perfect History, p. 21.

84.

See, for example, Joseph H. Preston, “English Ecclesiastical Historians and the Problem of Bias, 1559–1742,” Journal of the History of Ideas 32.2 (1971): 203–220.

85.

Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern (Chicago, 1983), pp. 190–203; Barbara Shapiro, “History and Natural History in Sixteenthand Seventeenth-Century England: An Essay on the Relationship between Humanism and Science,” in English Scienti¤c Virtuosi in the 16th and 17th Centuries, ed. Barbara Shapiro and Robert G. Frank Jr. (Los Angeles, 1979), pp. 3–55.

86.

Zachary S. Schiffman, “An Anatomy of the Historical Revolution in Renaissance France,” Renaissance Quarterly 42.3 (1989): 507–533. On the development of the new critical history and its pervasively factual concerns, see Peter G. Bietenholz, Historia and Fabula: Myths and Legends in Historical Thought from Antiquity to the Modern Age (Leiden, 1994), pp. 1–20; Denys Hay, Annalists and Historians: Western Historiography from the Eighth to the Eighteenth Centuries (London, 1977), pp. 133–185; Donald R. Kelley, “Historia Integra: François Baudouin and His Conception of History,” Journal of the History of Ideas 25 (1964): 35–57, and Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship, pp. 27–136; Huppert, Idea of Perfect History, pp. 21–95; Shapiro, Probability and Certainty, pp. 119–156; Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft, pp. 25–52; Fussner, Historical Revolution, pp. 253ff.; D. R. Woolf, The Idea of History in Early Stuart England: Erudition, Ideology, and “The Light of Truth” from the Accession of James I to the Civil War (Toronto, 1990); Alan Richardson, History Sacred and Profane (Philadelphia, 1964), pp. 17–53; Harcourt Brown, “History and the Learned Journal,” Journal of the History of Ideas 33.3 (1972): 365–378; and Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1995).

87.

Chambers, “Fable,” “Romance,” in Cyclopedia. See Le Clerc, Parrhasiana, pp. 1–2, and Mathias Prideaux, Easy and Compendious Introduction for Reading All Sorts of Histories (Oxford, 1672), p. 348. Edwards himself was not averse to romantic forms of literature, as his “Catalogue” and other materials at-

242


test. He had an avid interest, for example, in Samuel Richardson’s popular novel Pamela (1740): “Monthly Review Decem. 1752 . . . speaks of Pamela as an ‘interesting original’ worthy to be ‘spoken of in terms of high respect which has afforded entertainment to readers of all ranks.’ ” And indeed, visitors to the Edwards home in Northampton reported encountering a copy of Pamela for their enjoyment. See Edwards, “Catalogue,” p. 31; and Winslow, Jonathan Edwards, p. 287. 88.

Negotiating the boundaries of fact and ¤ction was a pervasive problem in literary culture, playing an important part, for example, in the dif¤culties associated with the emergence of the novel. Lennard Davis makes the interesting case that novelists made formalistic denials of the ¤ctional nature of their prose, associating it instead with the factual form of history, in order to enhance its legitimacy in the eyes of the public. See Lennard J. Davis, “A Social History of Fact and Fiction: Authorial Disavowal in the Early English Novel,” in Literature and Society, ed. Edward W. Said (Baltimore, 1978), pp. 120–148.

89.

Francis Gastrell, The Principles of Deism (1708) (London, 1724), p. 13.

90.

Frei, Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, p. 2.

91.

See, for example, Giovanni Gentile, “Eighteenth-Century Historical Methodology: De Soria’s Institutiones,” History and Theory 4.3 (1965): 315–327, as well as any number of works either that Edwards possessed or that were intellectual stock for the age, including Bodin, A Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, pp. 42ff., 85ff.; du Fresnoy, ANew Method of Studying History, chs. 17–20; Winder, A Critical and Chronological History of Knowledge, pp. 8ff.; Bennet, The Truth, Inspiration, and Usefulness of the Scripture Asserted and Proved, pp. 55ff.; Le Clerc, Parrhasiana, pp. 98ff., 113–125; and Bolingbroke, Historical Writings, pp. 35–48.

92.

Samuel Willard, A Compleat Body of Divinity (Boston, 1726), p. 25.

93.

Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason (Secaucus, N.J., 1998), p. 114.

94.

See also Schwarzbach, Voltaire’s Old Testament Criticism, p. 64.

95.

Edwards had at least two examples of early-seventeenth-century works that address this issue, Hugo Grotius’s De veritate religionis christianae and Francis Roberts’s Key of the Bible (Clavis Bibliorum).

96.

Spinoza argues that the entire Old Testament history down through the books of Chronicles was composed in this way, as one continuous narrative intended to explain Jewish national destruction.

97.

Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise, p. 135. He postulates that Ezra was prevented from ¤nishing this task on his own, perhaps by his death.

98.

For Spinoza’s treatment in its entirety, see pp. 120–156. Hobbes’s interpretation is very similar, accepting that the legal codes are Mosaic but the present form of the Pentateuch and other historical books are either post-Davidic or post-exilic. See Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 260–268.

99.

Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise, p. 154.

100.

Richard Simon, A Critical History of the Old Testament (London, 1682), preface and pp. 36–60. On the substantive similarities between the two, see John D. Woodbridge, “Richard Simon’s Reaction to Spinoza’s ‘Tractatus Theologico-


243

Politicus,’ ” Wolfenbuttler Studien zur Auf klärung 12 (1984): 201–226. Isaac Newton also apparently adopted the essential thrust of Spinoza’s argument; see Richard H. Popkin, “Newton as a Bible Scholar,” in Essays on the Context, Nature, and In®uence of Isaac Newton’s Theology, ed. James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin (Dordrecht, 1900), pp. 103–118. Jean Astruc’s documentary hypothesis (1753), which he derived from H. B. Witter’s Jura Israelitarum in Palestinam (1711), was also originally intended to refute Spinoza, though it too appealed to the notion that the Pentateuch gives ample evidence of Mosaic documents imbedded in a non-Mosaic narrative. Even critics like Voltaire had dif¤culties with aspects of Spinoza’s fragmentary or compilation theory, at least as it was adapted by Astruc. See Emil G. Kraeling, The Old Testament since the Reformation (New York, 1955), p. 55; and Schwarzbach, Voltaire’s Old Testament Criticism, pp. 59–87. 101.

On the development of these issues, see Kraeling, Old Testament since the Reformation, pp. 39–55; John D. Woodbridge, “German Responses to the Biblical Critic Richard Simon: From Leibniz to J. S. Semler,” in Historische Kritik und biblischer Kanon in der deutschen Auf klärung, ed. Henning Graf Reventlow, Walter Sparn, and John Woodbridge (Wiesbaden, 1988), pp. 65– 88; John Drury, ed., Critics of the Bible 1724–1873 (Cambridge, 1989); Bietenholz, Historia and Fabula, pp. 220–269, 314–324; and Patrick J. Lambe, “Biblical Criticism and Censorship in Ancien Régime France: The Case of Richard Simon,” Harvard Theological Review 78.1–2 (1985): 149–177.

102.

There is another piece of material in Edwards’s manuscripts that may date from around this period, and so may shed light on the genesis of No. 416. On the cover of a letter written to Eleazar Wheelock Edwards sketched out some ideas concerning the problem of Mosaic authorship; the cover is addressed to Wheelock “now at Northampton.” This does not accord with any of the ¤ve known letters from Edwards to Wheelock, which originated either from Northampton (two in 1740, one each in 1741 and 1744) or from New Haven (1748), and all of which are addressed to Wheelock at his home parish in Lebanon, Connecticut. See Edwards, Letters and Personal Writings, p. 84, 85, 89, 145, 250. The letter cover would, however, ¤t well with Edwards’s itinerancy in 1742 (Wheelock was one his fellow maligned itinerants; he later went on to found Dartmouth College). If the notes date from this period they may well record the initial ideas that led to No. 416. However, Edwards’s expressed intent to “inhance this argument for the BOOKS OF MOSES thus” would seem to indicate that he had already done substantial work on the problem, and so these notes may have been a part of his plans for revision and elaboration. This would ¤t with the origin of the later notebook, a time when Edwards was conscripting every available scrap of paper he could get his hands on. See Edwards, “Letter Cover to Eleazar Wheelock [Notes on the Mosaic History].” I am grateful to Ken Minkema of the Works of Jonathan Edwards for his helpful suggestions about the origin of the letter cover.

103.

Stephen Stein dates Nos. 400–412 before May of 1743, suggesting an approximate time for No. 416 as well. However, as Thomas Schafer has shown, the entries in these notebooks were frequently made out of their ¤nal sequential order; therefore it is possible that Edwards wrote No. 416 slightly earlier or

244

Notes to page 117

somewhat later than this date. See Stein, “Introduction,” in Notes on Scripture, pp. 36–46. 104.

Other material can be found in his “Rough Notes” and “Subjects of Enquiry” (Notebook 5). The “Rough Notes” may date from the late 1730s, although if it can be assumed that Edwards’s reference to “No. 864 at the end” on the ¤rst page is Misc. No. 864 (c. 1741–1742), this would place these notes closer to the time frame of No. 416. On page one he notes: “Books of the Old Testament Not Forged. . . . The nature of the laws of Moses makes it impossible that they should be palmed upon the people. . . . ” The “Subjects of Enquiry” (Notebook 5) dates from the late 1740s or early 1750s, paralleling the dating of the revision notebook. On pages 14 and 18 Edwards notes his intention “to show largely what evidences there are that the facts of the Mosaic History never could be forged,” and “in reading the Old Testament to observe what con¤rmations there are of the truth of the Mosaic history.” These are both subjects that are developed extensively in the Pentateuch notebook.

105.

Edwards, Notes on Scripture, No. 416, p. 423.

106.

Edwards generally does express the opinion that Moses introduced literacy to human culture, though he is not emphatic about it, and seems open to the idea that writing may have preceded him. Voltaire, on the other hand, while conceding that Moses was literate, argued that since his “literacy” consisted of Egyptian hieroglyphics, he could not possibly have composed written documents in a desert setting.

107.

In fact, he takes a notorious passage frequently used against the originality of Moses’ religion and learning, that he “was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians” (Acts 7.22), as evidence that he was a trained historian. This “wisdom” consisted in the “traditional knowledge of antient history before writing was known,” for “much of the learning of the world must consist in traditional history.” “Greater care was needful then to keep up the knowledge of antient facts and to deliver ’em down from one generation to another.” Thus his education might have prepared him “for writing the history of the world from the beginning.” Edwards, “Blank Bible,” Acts 7.22, p. 771.

108.

Edwards, Notes on Scripture, No. 416, pp. 423–424.

109.

Ibid., p. 456. Edwards borrows this observation from Arthur Bedford’s Scripture Chronology (1730). His citation also includes Bedford’s claim that the contemporary Phoenician historian Sanchuniathon avers that his own accounts of world history were derived from a certain priest of the god Jao, presumably Moses. Corroboration by external histories, particularly those of antagonists, was a conceptually powerful standard of measure for critical historians. As Europeans increasingly were exposed to other cultural traditions, it was an almost re®exive move to press these traditions for con¤rmation of biblical history and religion. Edwards adopted this practice wholesale; it became an important part of his attempts to fortify the authenticity of the Old Testament, and explains to a great degree his avid interest in comparative religions.

110.

Ibid., p. 440. Edwards had already used these very metaphors—the tree and


245

the stream—to describe the course of providential history in his redemption sermons of just a few years before (1739), a fact that can hardly be coincidental and that may point to a closer relation between his critical historical work and that theological treatise. 111.

Ibid., pp. 430–436.

112.

Ibid., pp. 436–439.

113.

Ibid., p. 441. Edwards did allow, however, that the Pentateuch involved editorial work, namely distillations of those sources of national history mentioned in it: “The Book of the Word of the Lord,” “The Book of Jasher,” and a collection of wilderness poems or psalms. See “Blank Bible,” Num. 21.14, p. 126.

114.

Edwards, Notes on Scripture, No. 416, p. 442.

115.

Ibid., pp. 443–456.

116.

Ibid., pp. 453–454.

117.

Ibid., pp. 457–466. Edwards appears to derive the example of the Samaritan Pentateuch from Humphrey Prideaux’s Old and New Testament Connected in the History of the Jews and Neighbouring Nations (1729). In the passage immediately preceding this one he cites Prideaux for evidence that the contemporaneous (exilic) Babylonian work, the Zand-Avesta, derived material from the Pentateuch. This may be true; the text, however, is a Zoroastrian commentary that originated in the ninth century c.e.

118.

Ibid., pp. 466–469. Here Edwards relies on the work of Herman Witsius (Miscellaneorum Sacrorum, 1695), as well as Louis Ellies Du Pin’s New History of Ecclesiastical Writers (1693) and Matthew Poole’s Synopsis criticorum (1669).

119.

Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft, p. 34.

120.

Champion observes that debates about religion carried forth on critical historical grounds had a decided effect upon the form in which histories were written; speci¤cally, that the emphasis on factuality produced an increasingly precise apparatus to demonstrate it, through citations, footnotes, and appendices. There was considerable discussion about the appropriateness of these devices, since they interfered with the eloquence of the narrative, a quality that was still valued in many circles. The trend toward source acknowledgment prevailed, however, because the perception about the nature of historical writing had changed. Jean Le Clerc provides a good example of this sort of reasoning. He argued that authors must cite their sources, since the failure to cite them is an indication of ¤ctionality: “If a Man avoids to quote his Vouchers, the reason of it is, because he wou’d not have any one to examine the History, as he relates it, by comparing the Narration with that of other Historians who writ before him.” Furthermore, not to cite them requires the reader to rely upon the good faith of the historian. But, in Le Clerc’s words, the republic of letters is a country of reason, not of authority and implicit faith, and “’tis easie for a Man to sham a Romance upon the World without fear of discovery” without such an apparatus. Signi¤cantly, Edwards too planned to develop this sort of critical notation in his revision

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of the “History of the Work of Redemption.” See Le Clerc, Parrhasiana, pp. 107–109, and Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft, p. 30. 121.

Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft, pp. 26–41. As Champion rightly points out, and as any survey of the literature bears out, the question of the moral or exemplary purposes of historical discourse continued to play a vital role in eighteenth-century historiography. Though contemporary historians have been inclined to see the distinction of “modern” history in the disjunction between the factual and the hortatory functions of the genre, many of the important historical thinkers of the era continued to assign an important and even primary moral function to historical narrative, and decried factual accumulation as mere antiquarianism. This view pervaded discussions of biblical history as well. Bolingbroke’s very objection to the fabulous or inventive quality of all ancient histories, including those of the Old Testament, was rooted in his insistence that history was meant to provide moral instruction. Such instruction was impossible to derive from fraudulent works. Much of the more popular skepticism aimed at the biblical narratives was rooted in the moral failures of its leading characters, their violence and sexual licentiousness; this is particularly true of Voltaire’s critique. Edwards’s view that sacred history should have an exemplary function is thus hardly at odds with the critical sentiments of the age. See Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft, pp. 25–33; Philip Hicks, Neoclassical History and English Culture: From Clarendon to Hume (New York, 1996), pp. 4–5; Joel C. Weinsheimer, EighteenthCentury Hermeneutics: Philosophy of Interpretation in England from Locke to Burke (New Haven, 1993), pp. 72–102; Schwarzbach, Voltaire’s Old Testament Criticism, pp. 5–12; and Howard Robinson, “Bayle’s Profanation of Sacred History,” in Essays in Intellectual History (no ed.) (New York, 1929), pp. 147–162.

122.

Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft, pp. 12–20, 133–168, 173–179. See also Reventlow, Authority of the Bible, pp. 302–374.

123.

John Wilson, however, argues that even though the Redemption notebook could have been started as early as 1752, Edwards’s health and schedule probably did not allow him to begin a sustained writing effort on that series until 1755. Thus, the same considerations may also apply to the Pentateuch materials. If so, Edwards’s productivity over these two years is even more impressive, especially considering he was also at work on the Redemption series revision. See Edwards, A History of the Work of Redemption, pp. 546–554.

124.

Edwards, “Notebook on the Pentateuch,” p. 1. The title given it by an unnamed editor is “Defense of the authenticity of the Pentateuch as a work of Moses and the historicity of the Old Testament narratives.”

125.

Ibid., p. 43.

126.

Ibid., pp. 122–123. Other signi¤cant subheadings include: “Ezra did not forge the Jewish SS after the Captivity (Part 1)”; “Forge the Old Testament”; and “Ezra did not forge the old testament.” See pp. 124, 126, 130.

127.

Ibid., p. 2; see also pp. 47–54. This argument also appears in his entry on Acts 7.52 in the “Blank Bible,” p. 771, and on the ¤rst page of the “Rough Notes”: “The Jews never would in books that they forged read themselves such a perverse, wicked people as they are recorded in those books.”


247

128.

A second argument is derived from the comparison of the Mosaic history with heathen mythology. No matter how wonderful the biblical accounts may appear, they are factually restrained, while pagan myths are obviously fabulous by contrast. Edwards, “Notebook on the Pentateuch,” p. 34.

129.

See, for example, his continued discussions of the interlineated nature of the historical and legal materials (pp. 2, 10, 61–67), as well as the consistency between later Old Testament recapitulations of the Mosaic history and that of the Pentateuch (pp. 2, 12–14).

130.

Ibid., p. 5.

131.

Ibid., p. 2. On the Mosaic history as a record of monuments, see pp. 2–5, 9– 11, 19–27, 33–38, 43–45, 82.

132.

One can ¤nd instances of Edwards’s appeals to the public nature of biblical history as early as 1728; see his sermon “True Nobleness of Mind,” in Sermons and Discourses 1723–1729, p. 233.

133.

Edwards, “Notebook on the Pentateuch,” p. 7.

134.

Ibid., p. 4. For Edwards’s appeal to the public and recorded nature of the Mosaic history and religion, see pp. 1–9, 16–19, 28–30, and 45–52.

135.

Ibid., p. 4; see also pp. 7, 9, 32–43, 57, 70.

136.

See, for example, Misc. Nos. 131, 159, 190, 202, 203, 277; and Nos. 215, 220, 222, 223, and 233 in the “Notes on Scripture.”

137.


138.

Ibid., pp. 66, 101, 109, 118–131.

139.

Jean Le Clerc, Twelve Dissertations out of Monsieur Le Clerk’s Genesis, trans. Mr. Brown (London, 1696), pp. 108–129.

5. Sacred History and the “History” of Religions 1.

John Dryden, Religio laici, in The Works of John Dryden, vol. 2, ed. H. T. Swedenberg Jr. (Berkeley, 1972), p. 111.

2.

Jonathan Edwards, Misc. No. 332 (1728), in “Miscellanies” (Works 13), p. 410.

3.

At the time he anticipated that his scienti¤c investigations and metaphysical speculations would be rather sensational if offered to the republic of letters, but that at a future date they would almost certainly be published in London. See the “Cover-Leaf Memoranda” (c. 1724) to his notes on “Natural Philosophy,” in Scienti¤c and Philosophical Writings, pp. 193–194.

4.

See Fiering, Edwards’s Moral Thought, pp. 49–50.

5.

Miller, Jonathan Edwards, pp. 266–267.

6.

See Ibid., pp. 52–56, 74–82, 165–195; Douglas Elwood, The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards (New York, 1960), pp. 16–22, 99–112; Delattre, Beauty and Sensibility in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards, pp. 165–166; Mason Lowance, The Language of Canaan (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), pp. 249–276; and Stephen Daniel, The Philosophy of Jonathan Edwards: A Study in Divine Semiotics (Bloomington, Ind., 1994), pp. 22–34, 41–64. See also R. C. De Prospo, Theism in the Discourse of Jonathan Edwards (Newark, 1985), pp. 60–96; Conrad Cherry, Nature and Religious Imagination from Edwards

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to Bushnell (Philadelphia, 1980), pp. 29–30; Clyde A. Holbrook, Jonathan Edwards, The Valley and Nature: An Interpretive Essay (Lewisberg, 1987), pp. 74ff.; and Paula M. Cooey, Jonathan Edwards on Nature and Destiny: A Systematic Analysis (Lewiston, 1985), pp. 57–63, 117–128. 7.

David Pailin identi¤es no less than eleven ways in which the term “natural religion” was used during this period. Two of these de¤nitions are of particular relevance here: natural religion as “what is universally acknowledged by reason,” and natural religion as “that which is the result of Adamic revelation.” The debate between traditionalists and deists turned on which of these two de¤nitions best described what was observed of actual religious behavior and belief owing to “nature.” See Pailin, “The Confused and Confusing Story of Natural Religion,” Religion 24 (1994): 199–204.

8.

Byrne, Natural Religion and the Nature of Religion, pp. 70–78; see also Roger Emerson, “Latitudinarianism and the English Deists,” in Deism, Masonry, and the Enlightenment, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay (Newark, N.J., 1987), p. 26.

9.

Tindal, Christianity as Old as Creation, p. 234.

10.

Ibid., pp. 330, 247.

11.

Ibid., pp. 180–181, 182.

12.

Ibid., p. 243.

13.

Ibid., p. 64.

14.

Pailin identi¤es seven different interpretations of the relationship of natural and revealed religion in eighteenth-century literature. I am concerned here only with two general views, broadly conceived as those that characterize revealed religion as a historical manifestation of natural religion and those that maintain that natural religion is derivative of a received tradition. See Pailin, “Some Eighteenth-Century Attitudes to ‘Other Religions,’ ” Religion 1.2 (1971): 85.

15.


16.

For a recent treatment of these issues in Edwards’s thought, see McDermott, Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods, pp. 55–70.

17.

Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, pp. 68, 67. Even in Calvin, however, there is a degree of ambiguity suf¤cient to produce controversy among his interpreters. As Edward Dowey has observed, Calvin makes a fairly substantial appeal in the Institutes to elements of the classical design argument (bk. 1, ch. 5). This knowledge, while serving only to render the soul without excuse, is nevertheless available by ratiocination and observation of the cause, design, and order of nature. This rational knowledge is in need of scriptural revelation to correct it rather than to supply it (bk. 1, ch. 6); Calvin uses the analogy of “reading spectacles” to describe the “clarifying” effect of scripture upon natural religion. See Edward Dowey, The Knowledge of God in Calvin’s Theology (New York, 1952), pp. 73–86, 131–147. On Calvin’s use of reason, see also Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 1, pp. 185–190; and John Platt, Reformed Thought and Scholasticism: The Arguments for the Existence of God in Dutch Theology, 1575–1650 (Leiden, 1982), pp. 3–9.

18.

Thus in Reformed systems the knowledge of God is three-fold: the natural


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knowledge of the unregenerate, the natural knowledge of the regenerate, and the supernatural theology derived from Scripture. On Reformed views of natural theology, see Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 1, pp. 167–193. Confusion can arise from the varying ways in which the concepts of natural and revealed religion are used in the religious literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Technically, the traditional Reformed scheme considers all theology to be revealed theology. Natural theology is nevertheless the product of a natural human rational capacity, unaided by any infusion of grace or historical information (as it does not encompass the salvi¤c revelations of sacred history, nor does it originate in them); see Muller, ibid., p. 168; and idem, vol. 2, pp. 156–182. By the eighteenth century, however, these two concepts were more rigidly distinguished: natural religion was typically taken to refer to a strictly rational phenomenon without reference to any “revelation,” written or otherwise. The term “revealed religion” came to have a more restricted meaning as well, connoting the knowledge of the conditions of salvation, contained exclusively in the sacred revelation or text. It is in these later senses that Edwards and his interlocutors use these terms. 19.

G. E. Aylmer, “Unbelief in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Puritans and Revolutionaries, ed. Donald Pennington and Keith Thomas (Oxford, 1978), pp. 22–46; and Spurr, “ ‘Rational Religion’ in Restoration England,” pp. 571ff.

20.

Scholder, Modern Critical Theology, pp. 32–33.

21.

Turretin, Institutes, vol. 1 (First Topic, Third Question, Parts 2, 4), p. 6. Turretin’s proofs of God’s existence, for example, can be found in vol. 1, Third Topic, First Question; van Mastricht’s in bk. 2, ch. 2 of his Theoreticopractica theologia. While this may appear to be an instance of the theological version of eating one’s cake and having it too, Platt observes that the orthodox uniformly omitted the proofs from the de cognitione dei and de theologia topics, employing them only in the de deo locus. He maintains that this was traditionally the more philosophical segment of Reformed dogmatics, and theorizes that once having denied the soteriological function of unregenerate natural theology, Reformed theologians thought it proper to reintroduce such philosophical arguments as a part of the true or regenerate natural theology informed by revelation. See Platt, Reformed Thought and Scholasticism, pp. 119–176, 182–225, and 239–241.

22.

Ames, for example, who like Calvin viewed the knowledge of God primarily in terms of piety, devotes only a few lines to the consideration of natural theology; see William Ames, The Marrow of Theology (1629), ed. John Eusden (Boston, 1968), pp. 77–80, 83–110.

23.

On the fundamental shift indicated by Wolff ’s system, see Muller, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 1, pp. 190–193; on Reformed rationalism see also Heyd, “Un rôle nouveau pour la science,” pp. 25–42.

24.

Edwards, Misc. No. 254 (1727), in “Miscellanies” (Works 13), pp. 364–365.

25.

Edwards, “Concerning the End for Which God Made the World,” in Ethical Writings, p. 422.

26.

Edwards, “True Nobleness of Mind” (1728), in Sermons and Discourses 1723–

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1729, pp. 231–232. This language appears later as well; see his lecture-sermon of August 1737, “Divine Revelation Is a Light,” pp. 4–6, 11–19; Misc. Nos. 268– 269 (1727), Misc. No. 837 (c. 1740–1745), and Misc. No. 1304 (c. 1753–1757). 27.

See, for example, the following: Misc. Nos. 128, 132, and 140 (all dating from 1724); Misc. Nos. 358–359 (1729); Misc. No. 752 (c. 1738–1739); Misc. No. 837 (c. 1740–1745); Misc. No. 1156 (c. 1751–1753); and Misc. Nos. 1206, 1230, 1239, 1304 (c. 1753–1757). See also his November 1739 sermon “Christian Knowledge,” in Works of President Edwards, vol. 6, p. 268.

28.


29.

Edwards, Misc. No. 1297 (c. 1754), p. 7.

30.

Edwards possessed and cites a number of popular critiques of deism that advanced a traditionary view of natural religion, including Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity; Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion; John Tillotson’s Works (1696); Robert Jenkin’s Reasonableness and Certainty of Christianity (1698); Thomas Halyburton’s Natural Religion Insuf¤cient (1714); the Chevalier de Ramsay’s Travels of Cyrus (1727) and Philosophical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion (1748); Samuel Shuckford’s Sacred and Profane History of the World Connected (1728); Patrick Delaney’s Revelation Examined with Candour (1732); Johann Stapfer’s Institutiones theologiae polemicae (1743– 1747); Philip Skelton’s Ophiomaches, or Deism Revealed (1749); William Warburton’s Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion (1753–1754); and John Leland’s A View of the Principal Deistical Writers (1754–1755).

31.

Edwards, “The Pure in Heart Blessed” (1730), in Sermons and Discourses 1730– 1733, p. 74.

32.

Both Alfred Owen Aldridge and William Wainwright have commented on the innovative nature of this element in Edwards’s approach to natural theology, and its character as a product of socialization and tradition. Wainwright locates Edwards’s suspicion of reason within his Puritan heritage. He argues that Edwards explained the “problem” of natural theology largely in terms of its incomprehensibility (i.e., paradox or mystery) and the passional biases of human rationality (since “the process of discovery is in general non-rational”) rather than in any rejection of its self-evident rationality per se. See Wainwright, Reason and the Heart: A Prolegomenon to a Critique of Passional Reason (Ithaca, N.Y., 1995), pp. 8–18; and Aldridge, Jonathan Edwards, pp. 150–162.

33.

Edwards, Misc. No. 1337 (c. 1756), pp. 1–2.

34.

William Law, The Case of Reason (1731), in The Works of William Law, vol. 2 (London, 1892), pp. 117–119. Locke makes the same argument in The Reasonableness of Christianity, pp. 139–145.

35.

Edwards, Misc. No. 1337, pp. 1–2, 4–5; Misc. No. 350, in “Miscellanies” (Works 13), p. 425 (see also Misc. No. 1338, pp. 4–5).

36.

Edwards, Misc. No. 350 (1729), in “Miscellanies” (Works 13), pp. 421, 424. One can see hints of this view as early as 1724 (Misc. No. 140); it recurs throughout his career (e.g., Misc. No. 598 [1733]), including the late Stockbridge period (Misc. Nos. 1206, 1230, 1304, and especially Misc. Nos. 1337, 1338, 1340, and 1350).


251

37.

In addition, he argued that Tindal’s rationalism would, upon continued use, eventually turn in on itself. Even the principles of natural religion cherished by the deists could not sustain themselves: “To reject everything, but what we can ¤rst see to be agreeable to our reason, tends by degrees to bring every thing relating not only to revealed religion, but even natural religion, into doubt; to make all its doctrines appear with dim evidence, like a shadow or the ideas of a dream, till they are all neglected as worthy of no regard.” Edwards, “Book of Controversies,” p. 190.

38.

In fact, Edwards was quite willing to press this line of argument, insisting that not only were the constituent elements of natural religion owing to a revelatory tradition, but that all knowledge, religious and secular, owed its success to such traditions. He was not so naive as to argue that the Bible contained all such knowledge; in fact he explicitly rejects this notion. But he was assured in his conviction that both the content and the salutary effects of revealed knowledge were responsible for the progress of all branches of knowledge. See Misc. No. 350 (c. 1729), in “Miscellanies” (Works 13), pp. 424– 425; see also Misc. No. 1170 (c. 1752) and Misc. No. 1326 (c. 1755). He incorporates this argument into the Religious Affections (Fifth Sign, pp. 307–308).

39.

This diversi¤cation of the conventional explanations of natural religion in orthodox thought is perhaps one of the more remarkable consequences of the epistemological debates surrounding historical religion in the eighteenth century. While Pailin offers that the adherents to such a sociological view of natural religion were few in number, their members did include some of the most notable theological ¤gures of the age. In addition to Locke, this view appears in Samuel Clarke’s Boyle lectures, The Evidences of Natural and Revealed Religion (1706); George Berkeley’s Alciphron (1710); Peter Browne’s The Procedure, Extent, and Limits of Human Understanding (1728); William Law’s The Case of Reason (1731); and Joseph Butler’s The Analogy of Religion (1736).

40.

Elements of this development in Anglican thought can be found as far back as Dryden’s Religio laici, as well as in Stilling®eet and Boyle. By the turn of the century it is fully developed, as in Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) and Robert Jenkin’s Reasonableness and Certainty of Christianity (1698), both of which Edwards owned. See Pailin, “British Views on Religion and Religions in the Age of William and Mary,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 6.4 (1994): 352–353.

41.

Edwards, Misc. No. 350, in “Miscellanies” (Works 13), pp. 423–424.

42.

Edwards, Lecture-sermon of August 1737/February 1758 (2 Peter 1.19), p. 11; see pp. 10–23 as well; see also “Man’s Natural Blindness in Religion” (February 1739/40), in The Works of President Edwards, vol. 7 (New York, 1830), p. 23. This view reappears frequently: Misc. No. 519 (c. 1731–1733), Misc. Nos. 977, 979, and 986 (c. 1740–1741), and Misc. No. 1338 (c. 1756). It was during this time that the “Notes on Scripture” as well as the “Miscellanies” were particularly taken up with the comparative study of non-biblical religions. His interest in them was underwritten by the belief that they, like natural religion, must be derived from an Adamic tradition; these two concerns frequently coincide.

252


43.

See Edwards, Misc. Nos. 1206, 1230, 1239, 1297–1299, 1301–1302, 1313–1314, 1326, 1337–1338, 1340, and 1350.

44.

It should be noted that the issues addressed here were also signi¤cant for his treatment of original sin. There he raises the dismal progress of religion among the heathen (citing Henry Winder’s History of Knowledge to this end), and rests much of his argument on the empirical record of human religious behavior as outlined in the history of the Old Testament. See Edwards, Original Sin, ed. Clyde A. Holbrook, vol. 3 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, 1970), pp. 150, 158–188.

45.

Edwards, “The End for Which God Created the World” (c. 1753–1754), in Ethical Writings, p. 536.

46.

Ibid., pp. 419–420.

47.

Ibid., pp. 432–433. Not surprisingly, this view of nature as the communication of God was worked out in his earliest theological re®ections; see Misc. Nos. gg, kk, 3, and 92 (1722–1723).

48.

Edwards, “The End for Which God Created the World,” in Ethical Writings, pp. 526–536.

49.

Ibid., p. 419; see also pp. 470ff.

50.

Ibid., pp. 470–489.

51.

Delattre, Beauty and Sensibility in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards, pp. 168– 184; see also Sang Hyun Lee, The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Princeton, 1988), pp. 170–210.

52.

See Edwards, Misc. Nos. 204, 544, 1298, 1304, and 1338.

53.

As was so often the case with his treatment of Edwards, Miller saw in “The Images or Shadows of Divine Things” another example of Edwards’s anticipation of a more modern appreciation of the dif¤culties that Newtonian science and Lockean psychology posed for, and the pressures they exerted upon, traditional theology. This resulted in an “exaltation of nature to a level of authority co-equal with revelation—nature as seen by the regenerate eye, but still nature, the nature of the Principia.” See his introduction to Jonathan Edwards, Images or Shadows of Divine Things, ed. Perry Miller (New Haven, 1948), pp. 1–41. On Edwards’s typology, see Mason Lowance, “ ‘Images or Shadows of Divine Things’ in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards,” in Typology and Early American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Amherst, Mass., 1972), pp. 209–248; and Lowance, “Jonathan Edwards and the Knowledge of God,” in Language of Canaan, pp. 249–253, 260–261, 274– 276); Conrad Cherry, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards, and “Symbols of Spiritual Truth: Jonathan Edwards as Biblical Interpreter,” Interpretation 39 (1985): 263–271; William Wainwright, “Jonathan Edwards and the Language of God,” American Academy of Religion Journal 48.5 (1980): 519–530; Stephen Yarbrough, “Jonathan Edwards on Rhetorical Authority,” Journal of the History of Ideas 47.3 (1986): 395–408; Stephen J. Stein, “Spirit and the Word,” p. 125; and Diana Butler, “God’s Visible Glory: The Beauty of Nature in the Thought of John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards,” Westminster Theological Journal 52 (1990): 13–26.


253

54.

For a survey of this discussion, see Janice Knight, “Learning the Language of God: Jonathan Edwards and the Typology of Nature,” William and Mary Quarterly 48 (1991): 534–536.

55.

Ibid., pp. 536–537.

56.

Edwards, “Types” (c. 1745), in Typological Writings, ed. Wallace E. Anderson, vol. 11 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, 1993), pp. 150, 146, 152. See also Misc. No. 1139 (1751) on the need for the liberalization of types.

57.

Edwards, “Types,” in Typological Writings, p. 152; on the contemporary context of Edwards’s typology, see Anderson’s introduction, pp. 11–33.

58.

See Paul J. Korshin, Typologies in England 1650–1820 (Princeton, 1982), pp. 5ff., 39–79. Korshin notes that from the mid-seventeenth century typology was generally undergoing a process of liberalization, and being used as a code to decipher all sorts of ancient texts, including Jewish Kabbalah and Egyptian hieroglyphics. This can be seen in the citations Edwards makes of Ramsay’s Philosophical Principles in his typological writings in Image 206 (pp. 126–127); Edwards cites Stapfer (Image 207) to the same effect.

59.

Edwards, “Images of Divine Things,” in Typological Writings, p. 53 (No. 7, 1728); see also Nos. 13, 22, 26, 55, 57, 70, 130, 132, and 134. See also Misc. No. 119 (1724).

60.

Edwards, “Images of Divine Things,” in Typological Writings, p. 53 (No. 8, 1728); see also Nos. 19, 45, and 86. This view appears in Misc. Nos. 42 and 108 (c. 1723–1724) as well.

61.

His motive no doubt stems in part from his metaphysics (creation as divine idea) as well as his theism; see Anderson, “Introduction,” in Scienti¤c and Philosophical Writings, pp. 9–11. Knight, interestingly, locates an essential motive for Edwards’s uni¤cation of ontological and historical typology in his understanding of God’s nature as a self-communicating being, whose fullness emanates ad extra as a matter of course. This divine effulgence understandably ¤nds expression in ontological as well as historical venues; all of God’s works are a form of speech, and bear the marks of his person and excellence; see Knight, “Learning the Language of God,” pp. 543–550.

62.

For a discussion of this problem in terms of his theistic ontology, see Sang Hyun Lee, “Edwards on God and Nature: Resources for Contemporary Theology,” in Edwards in Our Time: Jonathan Edwards and the Shaping of American Religion, ed. Sang Hyun Lee and Allen C. Guelzo (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1999), pp. 15–44. See also McDermott, Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods, pp. 110–129.

63.

Edwards, “Types,” in Typological Writings, p. 106.

64.

Edwards, “Images of Divine Things,” in Typological Writings, No. 156, p. 106.

65.

Edwards, “Types,” in Typological Writings, pp. 150–151, 148.

66.

This was especially true of the Cambridge Platonists, whom Edwards would come to use extensively in his study of other religions. On this view of the Kabbalah, see Jacques Basnage, The History of the Jews, from Jesus Christ to the Present Time (London, 1708), pp. vi–vii, 276–279.

67.

Edwards shows a decided interest in the mystery of hieroglyphics; the belief

254


that they were a symbolic, pre-literate form of divine communication was a constant source of preoccupation for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers, in®uencing everything from the development of the emblematic genre (e.g., Francis Quarle’s Emblems, 1644) to alchemical speculation. They were ¤nally deciphered only in 1824, twenty-¤ve years after the discovery of the Rosetta stone. Erik Iversen, The Myth of Egypt and Its Hieroglyphs in European Tradition (Copenhagen, 1961), pp. 60–130. 68.

On early modern approaches to comparative religion, see Frank E. Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (New York, 1967); Peter Harrison, “Religion” and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 99–129; Eric J. Sharpe, Comparative Religion: A History (London, 1972); Margaret T. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia, 1964); J. Samuel Preus, Explaining Religion: Criticism and Theory from Bodin to Freud (New Haven, 1987); Scholder, Birth of Modern Critical Theology, pp. 65–85; and Joan-Pau Rubíes, “Hugo Grotius’s Dissertation on the Origin of the American Peoples and the Use of Comparative Methods,” Journal of the History of Ideas 52.2 (1991): 221–244.

69.

Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft, pp. 100, 133.

70.

David A. Pailin, Attitudes to Other Religions: Comparative Religion in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain (Manchester, 1984), p. 6. See also Sharpe, Comparative Religion, p. 17.

71.

My design here is not to duplicate Gerald McDermott’s documentation and excellent treatment of Edwards’s analysis of other religions, but rather to relate that analysis to his critical historical concerns. Readers who are interested in a fuller exposition of Edwards’s interpretation of other religions as well as its effect on his soteriological considerations should direct themselves to McDermott’s Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods.

72.

Edwards had obtained Defoe’s work, probably the new edition, by 1724, as he cites it in Misc. No. 100.

73.

Edwards, “Catalogue,” pp. 7, 8.

74.

Ibid., p. 22. This work is one of several English translations of Lettres edi¤antes et curieuses (begun in 1702), a long-running serialization of Jesuit missionaries’ activities based initially on Louis Daniel Lecomte’s Nouveaux memoires sur l’etat présent de la Chine (1696). See Jessie R. Lucke, “The Cancels in Lockman’s Travels of the Jesuits, 1743,” Studies in Bibliography (1949– 1950): 205–207.

75.

See his 1754 note on Ramsay to this effect in the “Catalogue,” p. 36.

76.

See, for example, his entries in the “Catalogue” (pp. 7, 36).

77.

One of the most notable and most in®uential efforts in this vein was Samuel Bochart’s Geographia sacra (1646), which proposed that the sea-faring Phoenicians were responsible for disseminating this body of sacred revelation and history to other major civilizations.

78.

In addition to the works already cited, see Daniel P. Walker, The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Ithaca, N.Y., 1972); Truesdell S. Brown, “Euhemerus and the Histo-


255

rians,” Harvard Theological Review 39.1 (1946): 259–274; Stephen Gaukroger, ed., The Uses of Antiquity: The Scienti¤c Revolution and the Classical Tradition (Dordrecht, 1991); and Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft, pp. 133–169. 79.

Edwards, “Miscellanies” (Works 13), pp. 125–150.

80.

The ¤rst expresses the belief that Job’s temporal proximity to the Deluge ensured he had Adamic traditions that “came out of the ark”; the second af¤rms the traditionary sources of natural religion among the heathen. The earliest instance of his views on these matters may be the 1722 sermon “The Importance of a Future State,” in which he asserts that “Jews, Mahometans, and heathens” and even “the barbarously ignorant Indians here in America” believe in the notion of an eternal afterlife. The universality of this belief was one of the most disputed in the contest over the nature of other religions. See Edwards, Sermons and Discourses 1720–1723, p. 360.

81.

Edwards, Notes on Scripture, No. 387 (c. 1740), pp. 369–372; also No. 415 (c. 1743), and Misc. Nos. g (c. 1722), 815 (c. 1740), 962 (c. 1744), and 1012 (c. 1745). Edwards naturally had signi¤cant contact with Native American culture and an interest in indigenous religion, which he incorporated into his interpretive reconstruction. This was a completely typical approach, as evidenced by the work on Canadian religion of his Jesuit contemporary, the priest Joseph La¤tau’s Customs of the American Savages Compared to the Customs of the First Ages (1724). For a fuller treatment of Edwards’s views on indigenous American religions, see McDermott, Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods, pp. 194–206.

82.

Edwards, Notes on Scripture, Nos. 259, 409, 424, 429, 454, 455 (c. 1736, 1742– 1747), pp. 206, 416, 503–504, 508–509, 534–537; “Blank Bible,” Genesis 6–10, pp. 11–13.

83.

Edwards, Notes on Scripture, No. 419 (c. 1743), pp. 471–499.

84.

Edwards, ibid., Nos. 239 (1736), 402 and 411 (c. 1742), pp. 189–190, 405–411, 417; “Blank Bible,” Josh. 10, p. 178.

85.

Edwards, Misc. Nos. 983, 1015, 1020 (c. 1745); Notes on Scripture, No. 406 (c. 1742), p. 414; “Blank Bible,” Gen. 19, Ps. 77, Dan. 2, pp. 20, 431, 615, respectively.

86.

Edwards, Notes on Scripture, Nos. 404 (c. 1742), 432 (c. 1746), pp. 511–514; “Blank Bible,” Ex. 15.23, Num. 21.6, Ps. 77, pp. 60, 128, 431, respectively.

87.

Edwards, Notes on Scripture, Nos. 400, 405 (c. 1742), pp. 399–400; “Blank Bible,” Gen. 8–10, Ex. 25, pp. 13, 67. Noah might also be the Chaldean Xisuthrus and Fohi, the cultural founder of China, speculations Edwards derived from Samuel Shuckford; Notes on Scripture, Nos. 454–455 (c. 1747), pp. 534–537.

88.

Edwards, Notes on Scripture, Nos. 401, 407, 408 (c. 1742), pp. 400–405, 415–416.

89.

Edwards, ibid., No. 427 (c. 1745), pp. 505–506; Misc. No. 1012 (c. 1745); “Blank Bible,” Gen. 1.3, Gen. 1.2, Gen. 1.27, Gen. 8–10, Gen. 3.6, pp. 1, 3–4, 8–9, 13, 17, respectively. Adam could also be confused with Saturn, as could Abraham; see “Blank Bible,” Gen. 2.8–9, pp. 5–6.

90.

Edwards, Misc. Nos. 953, 954, 956, 959, 962, 969, 973, 975, 981 (c. 1744), 1017, 1073 (c. 1745–1747), 1162, 1181, 1200, 1236, 1244, 1255, 1269 (c. 1752–1754).

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91.

Edwards, Notes on Scripture, No. 251 (c. 1737), p. 202. This last piece of intelligence comes from William Nicholl’s Conference with a Theist (1696) by way of Thomas Stackhouse’s Complete Body of Divinity (1729), and to them from Philip Melanchthon, probably by way of Maimonides.

92.

Edwards, Notes on Scripture, Nos. 412 (c. 1742), 457 (c. 1747), pp. 418, 538.

93.

John Toland, Letters to Serena (London, 1704), p. 20. So too Voltaire in the Philosophical Dictionary, p. 61: “It is a strange example of human stupidity that we should have so long regarded the Jews as a nation which taught everything to others, while their historian Josephus himself admits the contrary.”

94.

Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft, pp. 154ff. Spencer borrowed the gist of this idea from Maimonides’s Guide to the Perplexed. He had previously published the Dissertatio de urim et thummin (1669), in which he argued that Jewish methods of prophecy derived from Egyptian augury. John Marsham’s work on chronology, the Chronicus canon Aegypticus, Ebraicus, et Graecus (1672), was also signi¤cant in the development of this theory.

95.

On the history of the Egyptian theory, see John Gascoigne, “ ‘The Wisdom of the Egyptians and the Secularisation of History in the Age of Newton,” in The Uses of Antiquity: The Scienti¤c Revolution and the Classical Tradition, ed. Stephen Gaukroger (Dordrecht, 1991), pp. 171–212; Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), pp. 55–100; Richard H. Popkin, “The Deist Challenge,” in From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England, ed. O. Peter Grell, Jonathan Israel, and Nicholas Tyacke (Oxford, 1991), pp. 195–215.

96.

See as well Toland’s Letters to Serena (1704), pp. 34–40; on Toland’s work, see Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft, pp. 129ff. Tindal advocates Marsham’s theory of Egyptian priority in Christianity as Old as Creation, pp. 88ff.; he also employs some of Bernard de Fontenelle’s views from The History of Oracles (1686), pp. 128ff.

97.

See Voltaire, “Abraham,” in Philosophical Dictionary, pp. 58–62.

98.

He takes up Spencer’s interpretation of the urim and thummin, for example, in Misc. No. 240 (1727); see No. 143 (1729) in the “Notes on Scripture.” Interestingly, he also attempts to explain Moses’ failure to impress Pharaoh and his magicians by the fact that Moses actually had been trained in all their arts, and so was perceived as only one of many among them. See the “Blank Bible,” p. 53.

99.

Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, pp. 284–297.

100.

Toland, Letters to Serena, pp. 71ff.; Voltaire, “Important Study by Lord Bolingbroke” (1767), in Voltaire on Religion: Selected Writings, trans. Kenneth W. Applegate (New York, 1974).

101.

Manuel, Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods, pp. 85–125. On Newton’s euhemerism, for example, see Manuel, Isaac Newton, Historian (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), pp. 39ff.; Richard Westfall, “Isaac Newton’s Theologiae gentilis origines philosophicae,” in The Secular Mind: Transformations of Faith in Modern Europe, ed. W. Warren Wagner (New York, 1982), pp. 15–34.


257

102.

Albert J. Kuhn, “English Deism and the Development of Romantic Mythological Syncretism,” Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 71.5 (1956): 1094–1116.

103.

Friedrich Creuzer, Symbolism and Mythology of Ancient Peoples (1810); Karl Otfried Müller, Introduction to a Scienti¤c System of Mythology (1825); Friedrich Max Müller, Comparative Mythology (1856) and Introduction to the Science of Religion (1873).

104.

The belief in a primitive monotheism would continue to commend itself even to various students of religion in the twentieth century; see Wilhelm Schmidt, The Origin and Growth of Religion (1912), trans. H. J. Rose (New York, 1931), pp. 172–289.

105.

A view previously articulated in Edward Stilling®eet’s Origines sacrae; both were objecting to the views of the Cambridge Platonists, who greatly in®uenced both Edwards and Ramsay. On Basnage’s place in the republic of letters, see Gerald Cerny, Theology, Politics and Letters at the Crossroads of European Civilization: Jacques Basnage and the Baylean Hugenot Refugees in the Dutch Republic (Dordrecht, 1987). See also Sarah Hutton, “Edward Stilling®eet, Henry More, and the Decline of Moses Atticus: A Note on SeventeenthCentury Apologetics,” in Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England 1640– 1700, ed. Richard Kroll, Richard Ashcraft, and Perez Zagorin (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 68–84.

106.

Walker, Ancient Theology, p. 249.

107.

Chevalier de Ramsay, The Travels of Cyrus (London, 1728), p. 143, and The Philosophical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion (1748) (London, 1751), pp. 6–24. Ramsay had made his way in life from Scottish Presbyterianism through deism to the French Catholic mysticism of Francis Fénelon, and it is clear that his views were shaped by all of them. See G. D. Henderson, Chevalier Ramsay (London, 1952).

108.

See Samuel Shuckford, The Sacred and Profane History of the World Connected (1727), ed. J. T. Wheeler (London, 1853), pp. 43ff.

109.

Harrison, “Religion” and the Religions, pp. 99–101, 112–116; Hodgen, Early Anthropology, pp. 276–283.

110.

Edwards, “Subjects of Enquiry,” p. 22.

111.


112.

Edwards, “History of the Work of Redemption,” Notebook 1, pp. 26, 36, 38– 39, 41–45, 59, 91, 122; Notebook 2, p. 4.

6. Theology in the Historical Mode 1.

Edwards, Misc. No. 547 (c. 1731–1733), in “Miscellanies” 501–832 (Works 18), pp. 93–95.

2.

Edwards, A History of the Work of Redemption, p. 284.

3.

On Edwards’s intentions for the “Harmony,” see Minkema, “The Other Un¤nished ‘Great Work,’ ” pp. 52–65.

4.

This book, entitled “The Harmony of the Genius . . . of the Old Testament

258


and the New,” is composed of some 220 pages, a 24-page preface of notes on faith, Messianic prophecies, and such, followed by a 196-page commentary on the Old Testament. The commentary runs from Genesis through the Psalms. 5.

The cover of the notebook is lined with a page from a 1748 edition of the Boston Gazette, suggesting its initial date.

6.

See Edwards, “Letter to the Trustees,” in A Jonathan Edwards Reader, ed. John E. Smith, Harry S. Stout, and Kenneth P. Minkema (New Haven, 1995), pp. 323–324. Kenneth Minkema has suggested that they should be viewed as sequential works, with the “Harmony” addressing issues pertaining to biblical history proper and the “Work of Redemption” addressing ecclesiastical history; see Minkema, “The Other Un¤nished ‘Great Work,’ ” p. 63.

7.

See the initial critique of Edwards’s treatise in the Monthly Review 52 (London, 1775): 117–120. For modern interpretations see H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America (Chicago, 1937), pp. 136–145; Miller, Jonathan Edwards, pp. 307–330; Clarence C. Goen, “Jonathan Edwards: A New Departure in Eschatology,” Church History 28 (1959): 25–40; Peter Gay, “Jonathan Edwards: An American Tragedy,” in Loss of Mastery, pp. 88–117; Ernest Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role (Chicago, 1968), pp. 27–30, 55–57 et passim; William J. Scheick, “The Grand Design: Jonathan Edwards’ History of the Work of Redemption,” Eighteenth Century Studies 8 (1975): 300–314; P¤sterer, Prism of Scripture, pp. 121ff., 225ff.; John F. Wilson, “Jonathan Edwards as Historian,” pp. 5–18, and John F. Wilson, “Introduction,” in Edwards, A History of the Work of Redemption, pp. 86–100; Stephen Clark, “Jonathan Edwards: The History of the Work of Redemption,” Westminster Theological Journal 56 (1994): 45–58; and McClymond, Encounters with God, pp. 65–79.

8.

Edwards conceived this project at the outset of his career. On the lettersheet inserted at the front of his “Catalogue” of reading (c. 1723–1724) he penned various titles and subjects for his “Rational account of Christianity, or the perfect harmony between the Doctrines of the Christian Religion and human Reason.” He makes an early reference to the entire “Miscellanies” as his “Rational Account” (see his short paper, “The Beauty of the World,” c. 1726), indicating the potential scope and diversity of theological concerns he intended this work to encompass. See Edwards, Scienti¤c and Philosophical Writings, p. 306. On Miller’s estimation of this proposed work, see his Jonathan Edwards, pp. 49, 127, 251, 266, and 285.

9.

Edwards might have taken the opportunity to become familiar with the Origines sacrae when he was at Yale, since it was included in Jeremiah Dummer’s gift of books to the school; see Bryant and Patterson, “List of Books Sent by Jeremiah Dummer,” pp. 423–492. In any case, it was the kind of treatise that no doubt served as the model and inspiration for Edwards’s own project. Early entries in his “Catalogue” indicate his interest in a number of “rational accounts,” many of which he came to possess. These include Hugo Grotius’s De veritate religionis christianae (Eng. trans. 1689), John Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity as Delivered in the Scriptures (1695), Robert Jenkin’s Reasonableness and Certainty of the Christian Religion (1698), Francis


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Gastrell’s Certainty of the Christian Revelation (1699), Benjamin Bennet’s Truth, Inspiration and Usefulness of the Scriptures (1730), and Jonathan Dickinson’s Reasonableness of Christianity (1732). 10.

His rough outline of the “Rational Account” most likely dates from around 1730, with additions being made to it over a period of some ¤fteen years; Edwards, Scienti¤c and Philosophical Writings, pp. 394–397.

11.

Ibid., pp. 396–397.

12.

The title of this outline derives from an anonymous modern editor. It was left untitled by Edwards himself, perhaps suggesting that he intended it as a part of the “Rational Account” proper.

13.

Other evidence in the material circumstances of the 1730 outline of Edwards’s “Rational Account” may indicate a connection in his mind between the critical interpretation of the Bible and his intended defense of the rationality of Christian belief. This manuscript was sewn together at an early time with a number of other documents in addition to the “Rough Notes.” These “loose papers,” as Jonathan Edwards Jr. described them, included material on such topics as the Trinity, free will, and ef¤cacious grace. There is some question as to who bound these materials together, and thus as to what signi¤cance can be assigned to their association. Since the description on the cover of the materials is in the hand of the younger Edwards, and since the cover itself is a dark brown paper not usually used by Edwards himself, the assumption has been that it was Edwards’s son who collated them. This is not entirely conclusive, however, since we know from the outline of the “Rational Account” that Edwards intended to handle these very topics (e.g., the Trinity, grace, and free will) in this work. Thus it would be entirely consistent with his stated intentions for this treatise that he would have bound these materials together himself, in anticipation of executing the project at a future date. My thanks to Douglas Sweeney of the Works of Jonathan Edwards at Yale University for his assistance in ascertaining the condition and content of the bound materials.

14.

See Edwards, Misc. No. 832: “PREFACE. To a Rational Account” (c. 1740), in “Miscellanies” 501–832 (Works 18), pp. 546–547.

15.

Edwards, “Outline of the ‘Rational Account,’ ” in Scienti¤c and Philosophical Writings, pp. 396–397.

16.

Ibid.

17.

Edwards, “History of the Work of Redemption,” Notebook 1 (c. 1755), p. 8. On the production of the revision notebooks, see John F. Wilson, “Appendix B,” in Edwards, A History of the Work of Redemption, pp. 543–556.

18.

Edwards, A History of the Work of Redemption, p. 522; see also pp. 283–284, 290, 519–521.

19.

Monthly Review 52 (1775): 117–120.

20.

Edwards, “Letter to the Trustees,” in A Jonathan Edwards Reader, pp. 322–324.

21.

See Miller, Jonathan Edwards, pp. 307–330, and Gay, “Jonathan Edwards: An American Tragedy,” pp. 88–118.

22.

John F. Wilson, ‘Introduction,” in A History of the Work of Redemption, p. 70;

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for a systematic analysis of the Miller-Gay thesis, see John F. Wilson’s “Edwards as Historian,” pp. 5–18. 23.

John F. Wilson, “Introduction,” in A History of the Work of Redemption, pp. 1–2.

24.

Ibid., pp. 28–34. Wilson’s identi¤cation of the theological character of the “Work of Redemption” provides an important corrective to the historiographical interpretations of Miller and Gay, although ironically its close connection to problems of critical biblical interpretation does show that a consideration of critical historical method was important to the genesis of the work.

25.

Ibid., pp. 67, 71.

26.

Wilson does allude to the possibility of a more broadly doctrinal purpose for the “Work of Redemption,” though he describes this as a fairly removed concern; see John F. Wilson, “Edwards as Historian,” p. 14, and “Introduction,” in A History of the Work of Redemption, p. 34. Others have alluded to this possibility as well; see Wilson Kimnach, “Introduction,” in Sermons and Discourses 1720–1723, pp. 255–258; Stephen Stein, “Introduction,” in Notes on Scripture, p. 29; Jenson, America’s Theologian, pp. 43–44; Stephen Clark, “Edwards: The History of the Work of Redemption,” pp. 45–58; and Ava Chamberlain, “Introduction,” in The “Miscellanies” 501–832, pp. 29–34. Interestingly, Chamberlain notes that Edwards effectively discontinued the rubric of the “Rational Account” in the “Miscellanies” after he delivered the 1739 sermon series, which she takes to indicate a shift in rhetoric from rationality to history.

27.


28.

See Edwards, “End for Which God Created the World,” in Ethical Writings, p. 488; see also pp. 435, 441–444, 470–473, 485–489, 533.

29.

It is also consistent with the broad doctrinal scope intimated in the outline of the “Rational Account,” where he proposes to “have done with all the doctrines relating to man’s redemption.” Edwards, “Outline of ‘A Rational Account,’ ” in Scienti¤c and Philosophical Writings, p. 396.

30.

This sermon was delivered in November of 1739; see The Works of President Edwards, vol. 5 (Leeds, 1809), pp. 405–423.

31.

This concern for the vital importance of doctrine persisted in Edwards’s thinking. His “Book of Controversies” notebook (begun in the 1730s, with continued entries in the 1750s) shows that at the close of his career he was preparing a sustained treatment against the deists’ assertion that all doctrine beyond a natural and ethical religion was super®uous. Edwards, “The Importance of Doctrines and of Mysteries in Religion,” in “Book of Controversies,” pp. 190–199, 269–298.

32.

Edwards, “History of the Work of Redemption,” Notebook 1, p. 103.

33.

As to his catechetic instruction in Northampton, and the kinds of Scripturehistory questions he used, see Winslow, Jonathan Edwards, pp. 125–126, 352; on the widespread and enduring use of the Shorter Catechism in the eighteenth century, see Wilberforce Eames, Early New England Catechisms (Worcerster, Mass., 1898), pp. 51ff., 68ff.


261

34.

Jonathan Edwards, “Letter to Sir William Pepperell,” November 28, 1751. Another literary fragment similarly addressing the teaching of Scripture history to children is located at Andover Theological Seminary. The rough draft of the Pepperell letter also includes a “Catalogue of Books” he intended to use for these purposes, a list that includes several works on critical interpretation such as William Warburton’s Divine Legation of Moses and Nathaniel Lardner’s Credibility of the Gospel History. Edwards, “Letter Draft to Sir William Pepperell,” 1751. Edwards gave the same advice to Joseph Bellamy concerning some Native American children who had been sent to him for their education; see Edwards, “Letter to Joseph Bellamy” (June 1756), in Letters and Personal Writings, pp. 688–689.

35.

Edwards, “Letter to Sir William Pepperell.”

36.

Iain Murray, Jonathan Edwards: A New Biography (Edinburgh, 1987), p. 392.

37.

John F. Wilson, “Introduction,” in A History of the Work of Redemption, pp. 61, 3–5.

38.

See, for example, Misc. Nos. 38, 60, 156, 332, 337, 402, 463, 469 (dating from 1723–1731). Edwards continued to make frequent entries on this subject throughout the 1730s and 1740s; see John F. Wilson, “Introduction,” in A History of the Work of Redemption, pp. 14–15.

39.

Wilson argues against the supposition of a controversial context for the Redemption series on the grounds that, while Edwards’s technical theological writing was polemical in nature, his sermons were “on the whole very much less explicitly shaped as polemical exchanges.” Thus “the medium in which A History of the Work of Redemption was cast removed it from the kind of attention that might have led to responses or placed it at the center of controversy” ( John F. Wilson, “Introduction,” p. 81). But it is clear that Edwards did in fact deliver a number of contemporaneous sermons on the necessity and rationality of the biblical revelation that were thoroughly polemical in nature, and that the “Work of Redemption” itself is highly polemical.

40.

Edwards, “Divine Revelation Is a Light,” pp. 22–23.

41.

Edwards, “The Miracles That Christ Wrought” (John 10.37), 1740.

42.

Edwards, “Man’s Natural Blindness in Religion,” in The Works of President Edwards, vol. 7, pp. 3–30.

43.

For the background on this sermon, see Westra, “Edwards and ‘What Reason Teaches,’ ” pp. 495–503. A number of entries in the “Miscellanies” dating from 1737 to 1740 also provide evidence of Edwards’s engagement with biblical criticism, some of which he explicitly connects to the “Work of Redemption”; see, for example, Misc. Nos. 708, 752, 765, 770, 810, 814.

44.

He intimated as much about the revision in his letter to the trustees, stating that the “Work of Redemption” itself (as well as the “Harmony of the Old and New Testament”) was to be polemical in nature, developed after his penchant for addressing “the prevailing errors of the present day.” See Edwards, “Letter to the Trustees,” in A Jonathan Edwards Reader, p. 322.

45.

Edwards, A History of the Work of Redemption, pp. 182–187, 199–210, 232–240, 267–277, 281–285, 368–369, 388–389. In subsequent revisions of the original

262


sermon manuscripts (c. 1739) Edwards speci¤cally directed himself to insert Misc. Nos. 810 and 359 (dealing respectively with the canonical status of Job and the inspiration of the Old Testament) into the body of the “Work of Redemption.” See John F. Wilson, “Introduction,” in A History of the Work of Redemption, p. 16. 46.

Edwards, A History of the Work of Redemption, pp. 282–285, 432.

47.

Ibid., pp. 182–183, 514.

48.

Edwards, “History of the Work of Redemption,” Notebook 2 (c. 1756), p. 19.

49.

Ibid., Notebook 1, p. 59.

50.

He possessed, for example, many able instances of the scholastic topical method among the Protestant orthodox divines he resorted to so frequently. These were theological mentors and contemporaries who were otherwise the objects of his effusive admiration—the works of Peter van Mastricht, for example, as well as John Owen, François Turretin, and Johann Stapfer; on his special esteem for Turretin and van Mastricht, see his letter to Joseph Bellamy (January 15, 1747), in Letters and Personal Writings, pp. 216–218. It is probably safe to conclude, however, that Edwards was too much a student of the new philosophy to adopt a method so immersed in Aristotelian nomenclature, and probably too much an admirer of the style of the literary treatise to adopt such a stilted form of argumentation. As an alternative to the loci method, Edwards might have chosen the Westminster Confession as the structural template for his divinity. This approach was popular from the late seventeenth century onward, and Edwards had at least two examples of this method in his personal library, Samuel Willard’s Compleat Body of Divinity (1726) and Thomas Ridgley’s like-named work (1731). But he declined to use this model as well. What he actually perceived as its de¤ciencies we can only guess, though again, its topical approach may not have been suitable to his purposes. We do know from his catechetic practices that his augmentation of the Confession with the Scripture history as a teaching method was of long tenure.

51.

It is true, of course, as Wilson has pointed out, that in Notebook 1 Edwards mulled over several possible alternatives to “history” for the title of his work, including the terms “progress,” “scheme,” “nature,” and “treatise.” This indicates that his use of the term “history” did not imply that the work was historiography in the technical sense. But it is also evident from his characterizations of the revision that, regardless of the title, Edwards believed that what was signi¤cantly new and important about his theological method was its structural emulation of the sacred narrative. Though not historiography proper, it would still possess the form of a history, that is, a temporal, chronological orientation based upon the architectonic of sacred history from Genesis to Revelation, from creation to consummation. His catechetic practices certainly suggest that his affection for a narratival presentation of doctrine was deeply ingrained; thus it is perhaps not unwarranted to conclude that the alternatives he considered were themselves synonyms for a chronological sense of “history” rather than vice versa. See John F. Wilson, “Introduction,” in A History of the Work of Redemption, pp. 68–70; Edwards, “History of the Work of Redemption,” Notebook 1, pp. 102, 121–122.


263

52.

Edwards, Misc. No. 547 (c. 1731–1733), in “Miscellanies” 501–832 (Works 18), pp. 93–95.

53.

Edwards, Misc. No. 752 (c. 1737–1739), in “Miscellanies” 501–832 (Works 18), pp. 401–402. Misc. No. 702 (1736–37) delivers an especially long (twenty-onepage) dissertation on the subordination of creation to providence (see John F. Wilson, “Introduction,” in A History of the Work of Redemption, p. 15).

54.

Edwards, “Sermon 30,” in A History of the Work of Redemption, p. 519; see also “Sermon 1,” pp. 118–119.

55.

Edwards, A History of the Work of Redemption, p. 399. On Edwards’s argument for the subordination of natural religion, see pp. 118–119, 183, 277, 281– 282, 399–400, 432, 441, 519–522. This concern reappears in the planned revision; see Notebook 1, pp. 4, 38, 41, 48–53, 123.

56.

Edwards, Misc. No. 832 (c. 1740), in “Miscellanies” 501–832 (Works 18), pp. 546–547; a similar trepidation toward naturalistic theories of religion is registered just a few entries later in Misc. No. 837: “Christian Religion. Natural Religion. Revealed Religion.” This same criticism of contemporary divinity appeared in his earlier outline of “A Rational Account” (1730), another indication perhaps of the overlapping concerns of these two treatises. See Edwards, “Outline of ‘A Rational Account,’ ” in Scienti¤c and Philosophical Writings, p. 396.

57.

Edwards, “History of the Work of Redemption,” Notebook 1, p. 38; see also pp. 49–51.

58.

Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2, pp. 313–340.

59.

Edwards, A History of the Work of Redemption, pp. 284, 521–522; see pp. 283– 285, 290, 519.

60.


61.

It still occasionally generates some interest; see, for example, Julie Whitman, “Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards: Philosophy, Science, and Puritan Theology” (Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 1994).

62.

Clarence H. Faust, “Jonathan Edwards as a Scientist,” American Literature 1 (1929–1930): 393–404; Theodore Hornberger, “The Effect of the New Science upon the Thought of Jonathan Edwards,” American Literature 9 (1937): 196– 207; James H. Tufts, “Edwards and Newton,” Philosophical Review 49.6 (1940): 609–622; Henry J. Laskowsky, “Jonathan Edwards: A Puritan Philosopher of Science,” Connecticut Review 4.1 (1970): 33–41; Martin, “Edwards’s Epistemology and the New Science,” pp. 247–255; Loewinsohn, “Jonathan Edwards’ Opticks,” pp. 21–32.

63.

Edwards, “History of the Work of Redemption,” Notebook 1, p. 5. See also pp. 8, 17, 20, 48–53, 88, 89.

64.

This is not to say, of course, that skeptics did not quickly utilize the fruits of the new science in their polemic. Matthew Tindal, for example, was happy to point out the scienti¤c crudeness of the scriptural accounts; see his Christianity as Old as Creation, p. 254ff.

65.

See, for example, Kirsten Birkett and David Oldroyd, “Robert Hooke, Physico-Mythology, Knowledge of the World of the Ancients and Knowledge of the Ancient World,” in The Uses of Antiquity: The Scienti¤c Revolu-

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tion and the Classical Tradition, ed. Stephen Gaukroger (Dordrecht, 1991), pp. 145–170; Scott Mandelbrote, “Isaac Newton and Thomas Burnet: Biblical Criticism and the Crisis of Late Seventeenth-Century England,” in The Books of Nature and Scripture, ed. James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin (Dordrecht, 1994), pp. 149–178. 66.

See Theodore Hornberger, Scienti¤c Thought in the American Colleges 1638– 1800 (Austin, Tex., 1945), pp. 40–45, 81–84; Brooke Hindle, The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America, 1735–1789 (Chapel Hill, 1956), pp. 11–101; Pershing Vartanian, “Cotton Mather and the Puritan Transition into the Enlightenment,” Early American Literature 7.3 (1972): 213–224; Winton U. Solberg, “Science and Religion in Early America: Cotton Mather’s Christian Philosopher,” Church History 56.1 (1987): 73–92; and Jeffrey Jeske, “Cotton Mather: Physico-Theologian,” in The American Enlightenment, ed. Frank Shuf®eton (Rochester, N.Y., 1993), pp. 61–72.

67.

It was reviewed in the Bibliotheque universelle (1687); Morton had only just arrived in New England when it appeared.

68.

All sorts of physical considerations needed to be taken into account in order to sustain his theory. He argues that since birds in ®ight are more remote from the earth, gravity must have less effect on them. No human records are reported of their living anywhere else on earth, so it seems reasonable that they are elsewhere. Eyewitness accounts report that their arrival is sudden, as though dropped from above, and that they tend to make vertical spiral ascents before departing. The moon is calculated to be 179,000 miles distant from the earth, requiring the stork to travel at 125 miles per hour to make the journey manageable. Eating and sleeping are perhaps less of a problem in the ether of space, allowing them to proceed on a kind of automatic ®ight; there may also be rocky “islands” between the earth and the moon for them to rest on. See Charles Morton, “An Enquiry into the Physical and Literal Sense of That Scripture,” reprinted in The Harleian Miscellany 2, ed. William Oldys and Thomas Park (London, 1809), pp. 498–511.

69.

Such works are some of the ¤rst to appear in the “Catalogue.” They include William Whiston’s New Theory of the Earth and his Astronomical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion, John Ray’s Three Physico-Theological Discourses, and John Woodward’s Natural History of the Earth.

70.

Edwards, Notes on Scripture, Nos. 297 (c. 1737) and 346 (c. 1742), pp. 268–272, 328; see also No. 354.

71.

Ibid., pp. 120–121, 142–144; he goes on to consider the problems of the ark’s size and place of construction in Nos. 212 and 259. See also “Blank Bible,” Gen. 6–9, pp. 11–12. On the host of problems associated with the Deluge, see Don Cameron Allen, The Legend of Noah: Renaissance Rationalism in Art, Science, and Letters (Urbana, Ill., 1963), pp. 41–102; and Rhoda Rappaport, “Geology and Orthodoxy: The Case of Noah’s Flood in Eighteenth-Century Thought,” British Journal of the History of Science 11.1 (1978): 1–18.

72.

Edwards, Notes on Scripture, Nos. 167, 207, pp. 98, 129–131.

73.

Edwards, Notes on Scripture, Nos. 117, 208, pp. 83, 131–134; “Blank Bible,” Josh. 10, p. 177. This was an event con¤rmed by pagan history and mythology; “Blank Bible,” p. 179, and Notes on Scripture, No. 209, pp. 134–135. Accommo-


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dations of this passage to natural law were quite common in Edwards’s day; the theories and implications of natural science were fairly plastic, and could be applied in numerous interpretive directions. Spinoza, for example, suggested a meteorological solution. The sun only appeared to remain in the sky longer because of atmospheric snow that refracted its light beyond sunset, and so “lengthened” the day. Jean Le Clerc adapted this theory by appealing to the presence of vapors creating some type of aurora. Edwards was no doubt aware of these kinds of explanations and of the debate over their relative propriety. Samuel Shuckford, for example (whom he cites on Joshua 10), rejected them. Yet Shuckford acknowledged that physically speaking, the author of this passage was mistaken and so must have been writing according to the conceptions of his time. See Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise, p. 34; Shuckford, Sacred and Profane History of the World Connected, pp. 187ff. 74.

On his reservations about using secondary causes to explain divine intervention, see Misc. Nos. 176, 177, 178, 541.

75.

In their order, see Misc. Nos. 880, 984, 1038, 1041, 1336, and “Natural Philosophy,” Long Series No. 38, on the relation of the Mosaic creation to the time of universal creation; Misc. No. 1222 (heaven); “Notes on Scripture,” Nos. 237, 238, and 348 (Flood), and Nos. 240 and 430 (Babel); “Blank Bible,” 2 Kgs. 3.16, p. 287 (optics); “Notes on Scripture,” Nos. 226, 229, and 469 (botany); “Notes on Scripture,” No. 462, and “Blank Bible,” Matt. 12, p. 663 (zoology); “Notes on Scripture,” Nos. 90, 101, 149, 276, 431, 389, 391, and 394 (meteorology in Ecclesiastes, Job, Sodom, and Ezekiel); “Notes on Scripture,” Nos. 65, 203, and “Blank Bible,” 1 Sam. 17, p. 227 (physiology). Many of these issues appear in his earlier notes on “Natural Philosophy” as well.

76.

Edwards, “Blank Bible,” Luke 9, John 19, pp. 753, 757, 763. The physiology and circulation of blood was one of the celebrated medical issues of the day; Edwards discusses it in his “Natural Philosophy” as well (see Scienti¤c and Philosophical Writings, pp. 223, 228–229.

77.

Respectively, The Discovery of a World in the Moone (1638), Democritus Platonissans; or, An Essay upon the In¤nity of Worlds (1646), True Intellectual System (1678), Sacred Theory of the Earth (1681), Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation (1691), Confutation of Atheism (1693), Astro-Theology (1715), and Astronomical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion (1725). See Steven J. Dick, Plurality of Worlds: The Origins of the Extraterrestrial Life Debate from Democritus to Kant (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 61–105; Harrison, “Religion” and the Religions, pp. 128ff.

78.

Edwards, “Natural Philosophy,” in Scienti¤c and Philosophical Writings, pp. 229–230, 237. He cites Huygens in his paper “Of Light Rays,” and may have had access to his ideas through Derham’s Astro-Theology. Ibid., p. 302.

79.

Edwards, Misc. No. 1303 (c. 1755). The Bishop of Clogher Robert Clayton’s Vindication of the Histories of the Old and New Testament (1752), a work Edwards was familiar with, also addresses this problem.

80.

Most of the major geographical works appear there (Edmund Bohun, Hermann Moll, Edward Wells, Thomas Salmon) as well as many travel accounts, such as Henry Maundrel’s Travels.

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81.

See, for example, his 1752 letter to Joseph Paice on the needs of the Indian school: “And I should think it is no matter how soon that a couple of good terrestrial globes, and good maps of places mentioned in the Scriptures, were procured for their use.” His 1756 letter to Joseph Bellamy requests the same: “I wish you would send to [New] York to Mr. [William] Smith, or somebody that understands, and get some plain maps of the land of Canaan, and places adjacent, and if you don’t choose to have ’em for your own use of your children, I will be at the cost of ’em for the use of Mr. [Isaac] Hollis’ school; and show them where the places are they read of in the Bible, or that you tell ’em of, from the Scripture history.” Edwards, Letters and Personal Writings, pp. 445 and 688–689, respectively.

82.

Edwards, “Notes on Scripture,” Nos. 202, 213, 254, 256, 275, 278, 419, and 420; “Blank Bible,” Gen. 24, Matt. 2.17, John 3.23, pp. 26, 659, 738.

83.

Hovenkamp, Science and Religion in American 1800–1860, p. 148. See, for example, Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, pp. 340–341, on the fact that the present arid conditions of Palestine contradict the texts’ verdant descriptions of it as a land ®owing with milk and honey. On the disciplinary advances during Edwards’s era, see Magarita Bowen, Empiricism and Geographical Thought: From Francis Bacon to Alexander Von Humboldt (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 91–120.

84.

Edwards, Misc. No. 202 (1726), in “Miscellanies” (Works 13), pp. 338–339.

85.

On American exploration of the Holy Land, see Jerry Wayne Brown, The Rise of Biblical Criticism in America, 1800–1870: The New England Scholars (Middletown, Conn., 1969), pp. 111–124. For the impact of sacred geography on popular piety and Bible publishing, see Paul C. Gutjahr, An American Bible: A History of the Good Book in the United States, 1777–1880 (Stanford, 1999), pp. 60–69.

86.

Edwards, “Blank Bible,” Luke 2.46, p. 711.

87.

Edwards, “Blank Bible,” 1 Cor. 9.27, p. 814. He uses a number of sources, but Locke’s commentary on the New Testament epistles was especially important in this regard. See Edwards, Notes on Scripture, Nos. 421–423, pp. 500– 503; and multiple entries in the “Blank Bible,” pp. 61, 65, 191, 257, 678, 730, 691, 694, 712, 720, 730, 735, 811–818, 824, 830, 833, 839, 841–843, 854–855, and 863.

88.

On the ethical dimensions of this problem in Edwards’s theology, see Fiering, Edwards’s Moral Thought, pp. 200–260.

89.

Philip C. Almond, Heaven and Hell in Enlightenment England (Cambridge, 1994), p. 111.

90.

In addition to Almond, see Daniel P. Walker, The Decline of Hell: Seventeenth-Century Discussions of Eternal Torment (Chicago, 1964).

91.

See Almond, Heaven and Hell in Enlightenment England, pp. 113–123. These views were given a fuller delineation in the posthumous publication of Burnet’s De statu mortuorum (1720).

92.

In addition to Walker and Almond, on the physics of the con®agration see James E. Force, William Whiston: Honest Newtonian (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 32–63; Stephen Jay Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), pp. 21–59; and


267

Martin J. S. Rudwick, “The Shape and Meaning of Earth History,” in God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science, ed. David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers (Berkeley, 1986), pp. 296–321. 93.

Almond, Heaven and Hell in Enlightenment England, p. 87.

94.

Lightning was, of course, a fascinating phenomenon to eighteenth-century natural philosophers. Edwards speculates frequently on its nature in his notes on “Natural Philosophy.” See also Misc. No. 275 (1727) (as well as Misc. Nos. 280 and 282) on the torments of ¤re and brimstone, which he speculates may be actually lightning, “many degrees hotter than the ¤re of the hottest furnace.” He also theorizes that far from a restored paradise, earth after the con®agration will be the place of the damned; Misc. Nos. 316, 318 (1727–28). On the aptness of ¤ery imagery to express the extremity of suffering and the eternity of hell’s torments, see Misc. Nos. 407, 418, and 425 (1729). Of his early sermons see “The Importance of a Future State” (c. 1722), in Sermons and Discourses 1720–1723, pp. 354–376; “Warnings of Future Punishment Don’t Seem Real to the Wicked” (1727), “The Torments of Hell Are Exceeding Great” (1728), and “The Day of Judgment” (1729), in Sermons and Discourses 1723–1729, pp. 200–212, 301–328, 509–541, respectively.

95.

Edwards, Misc. No. 215 (1726), in “Miscellanies” (Works 13), p. 343; see also his Apocalyptic Writings, p. 142.

96.

Edwards, Apocalyptic Writings, pp. 140–141; see also Misc. No. 133 (1724). He argues against the notion that (like the Greek Hades) the literal location of hell is under the earth. This is but a “metaphor expression” of the state of the dead, the symbolic language of a vision: “when taken for reality, it is childish.” Edwards, Misc. No. 60 (1723), in “Miscellanies” (Works 13), pp. 229– 233. See also Notes on Scripture, No. 274 (1737), pp. 230–231, on Jonah’s description of hell as being in the bowels of the earth, and at the bottom of the sea.

97.

Though he does not mention Whiston’s work in the “Catalogue” until the 1750s (p. 34), the dating of Misc. Nos. 863–952 (c. 1740–1745) probably indicates his early awareness of it, or at least the renewed state of the argument that it provoked. In any case he was no doubt aware of the general argument in the 1720s.

98.

See Misc. Nos. 863, 901, 906, 921, 924, 926, 927, 929, 931, 952 (c. 1740–1745), and Misc. No. 1097 (c. 1748). These sorts of considerations no doubt have implications for understanding the genesis and rhetoric of the En¤eld sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741), which he wrote and delivered at a time when the reality and vivid imagery of hell as it is described in the Bible was being challenged philosophically.

99.

He may well have obtained his views from Whiston: see his notes on “Natural Philosophy,” in Scienti¤c and Philosophical Writings, pp. 230, 294–295.

100.

Edwards, Misc. Nos. 1038, 1041 (c. 1746).

101.

Edwards, Misc. No. 900 (c. 1743). So too Misc. No. 929: “’Tis strange that some divines should be at a loss for ¤re to enkindle the last con®agration when the Scriptures plainly tell us that the visible universe shall all be rolled together.” The fact that the universe is naturally winding down con¤rms the

268


authority and divine origin of the Bible, which speaks of its demise without the advantage of modern scienti¤c knowledge; see Misc. No. 867 (c. 1741). 102.

Edwards, Misc. No. 929.

103.

This view was not uncommon: in 1714 one Tobias Swinden proposed that hell was in the sun (see Almond, Heaven and Hell in Enlightenment England, p. 125).

104.

Edwards, Misc. No. 929. He subsequently supplemented his physical account of eternal torment with extensive historical-grammatical and theological answers to Whiston; see Misc. No. 1348 (c. 1756).

7. Denouement 1.

See Winslow, Jonathan Edwards, pp. 316–318; Murray, Jonathan Edwards, pp. 440–442.


269

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287

Index Acta eruditorum, 16 Addison, Joseph, 9 Alexander, Archibald, 111 Allen, Ethan, 25 American Magazine and Historical Chronicle, 17 American Weekly Museum, 17 Ames, William, 5, 137 Anderson, Wallace, 85 Antiquarianism, 125ff Arnauld, Antoine, 29, 123 Astruc, Jean, 10, 237n28, 244n100 Babel, Tower of, 8 Baird, William, xix Basnage, Jacques, 7, 9, 154, 161 Baudouin, François, 112 Baxter, Richard, 34, 63 Bayle, Pierre, xiii, 6, 7, 16, 24, 225n16, 242n80 Beausobre, Isaac, 93 Bedford, Arthur, 7, 9, 11, 154, 245n109 Bellamy, Joseph, 9, 57 Bengel, Johann, 9, 93, 97, 100, 101 Bennet, Benjamin, 44, 105, 239n56 Bentley, Richard, 187 Berossus, 159 Bible: and the new sense, 45ff realistic reading of, xvi textual integrity, 99–102 Biblical criticism, in America, 6, 25–26 Biblical narrative, eclipse of, xv–xviii Billing, Edward, 12, 227n39 Blair, James, 17 Blasphemy Act, 15 Blount, Charles, 10, 13, 117, 137, 189 Bochart, Samuel, 16, 154 Bodin, Jean, 6, 16, 97, 111, 112, 152, 241n77 Bolingbroke, Lord Henry St. John, 88, 234nn1,2,3 Boston Evening Post, 17 Boston Gazette, 23 Boyle, Robert, xvii, 16, 34–36, 63–64, 65ff, 73ff, 225nn16,19, 226n22, 228nn45,46,47,48, 229n49 Boyle lectures, 226n22 Bozeman, Theodore Dwight, xiii Breck, Robert, 20–21, 101, 109, 210nn76,77

Brett, Thomas, 8 Broughton, Thomas, 153 Bryant, Jacob, 160 Bulkley, Robert, 19 Burnet, Thomas, 7, 16, 158, 187, 189ff, 210n68 Byrd, William, 17 Calmet, Augustin, 7, 9, 237n30 Campanella, Tommaso, 187 Canonicity, 106–110 Cappel, Louis, 91 Chambers, Ephraim, 7, 9, 16, 90, 111, 112 Champion, J. A. I., 15, 123, 246nn119,120, 247nn121,122 Chauncy, Charles, 17, 19, 58, 129 Cherbury, Edward Herbert, 31, 137 Chillingworth, William, 63 Christian literature, ancient, 107ff Clap, Thomas, 21ff, 211n85 Clarke, Samuel, 9, 13, 22 Coccejus, Johannes, 137 Collier, Jeremy, 7, 9, 16 Collins, Anthony, 7, 10, 14, 100, 148, 185 Colman, Benjamin, 19, 210n66 Colonial periodicals, 17 Comets, and eschatology, 189ff Common sense philosophy, 57–59 Comparative (world) religions, 151–162 Constructive (mitigated) skepticism, 52ff, 59–64, 81 Critical literacy, colonial, 5–12 Criticism, xiii–xv, 210nn68,78: in Colonial America, 13ff concept of, xviii, 89–91, 98–99 satirical, 92, 235n7 textual, 100–102 Cudworth, Ralph, 16, 34, 63, 154, 187 Davies, Edward, 160 Davies, Samuel, 57 Defoe, Daniel, 153, 185 Deism, 13–25 Delaney, Patrick, 154 Derham, William, 187 Descartes, René, 32, 215n14

Dickinson, Jonathan, 19 Doddridge, Philip, 92, 238nn38,40 Dryden, John, vii, 206n30, 238n36 du Fresnoy, Lenglet, 7, 8 Du Pin, Louis, 7, 116 Dummer, Jeremiah, 6, 205nn18,20 Dupuis, Charles, 160 Dwight, Sereno, 4–5, 204nn14,15 Echard, Laurence, 16 Edwards, John, 100, 158 Edwards, Jonathan: “Account Book,” 9, 93 “Billing Ordination Sermon,” 12 biography, 2–5, 10–13, 23–26 “Blank Bible,” 8, 12, 23, 101, 108, 114, 177, 187 “Book of Controversies,” 15, 24, 65ff, 85ff “Catalogue,” xiii, 6, 7, 9, 10, 24, 100, 101, 153, 188, 204n17, 259nn8,9 catechisms, 174–175 “Christian Knowledge,” 12, 50, 173, 176 critical method, 92–98 critics on biblical scholarship of, 2–5 and Deism, 15ff, 19–20, 23 Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God, 221n79 Divine and Supernatural Light, 46–49 “Divine Revelation Is a Light,” 12 education, 5–6, 10 End for Which God Created the World, 144ff, 170ff Faithful Narrative, 26, 89 “Harmony of the Old and New Testament,” 24, 93, 106, 110, 164ff, 177 as historian, 94–96 historical consciousness, xiii–viv “History of the Work of Redemption,” 13, 89, 104, 110, 144, 164ff, 167–183 infallibilism, 36–38 library, 8–9 “Man’s Natural Blindness in Religion,” 12, 176 “The Mind,” 28, 39, 103, 131, 138 “Miscellanies,” 10–12, 15, 23, 28, 92, 101, 104, 108, 114, 149, 167 and modernity, xix–xx “Natural Philosophy,” 10, 131 and Nature, 131–132 Nature of True Virtue, 144 “Notebook on the Pentateuch,” 122–127, 177 “Notebooks on the History of the Work of Redemption,” 177ff “Notes on Scripture,” 8, 10–12, 23, 101, 105, 108, 114, 117ff, 123, 149, 177, 187 “Notes on the Apocalypse,” 10–11

290

Index

“Personal Narrative,” 3 and psychology of religion, 45–55 “Rational Account,” 10–13, 28, 164, 166–169 Religious Affections, 51–56, 87 “Rough Notes on the Truth of the Christian Religion,” 12, 28, 105, 167–168 “Subjects of Enquiry,” 23, 93, 177 systematic theology, 166–183, 269n104 Elsner, Jacob, 92 Emanation, of God’s being, 145ff, 254n61 Empiricism, 28, 38, 76ff, 81, 232n88, 233n93 Epistemology, 27–35, 59–87, 181ff Erskine, John, 10, 20, 123, 220n75 Estienne, Charles, 16 Euhemerism, 154ff Excellence, divine, 29–30, 39–45, 46–56, 179ff Experimental philsophy, 73–75, 143, 225nn16,18,19 Ezra, 121ff Faber, George Stanley, 160 Fact, concept of, 111–115 Fallibilism, epistemological, 52ff, 59–64, 77, 79ff, 214nn11,12 Fiering, Norman, 6, 39, 40, 185 Finley, Samuel, 57 Fisher, Samuel, 10, 61, 214nn11,12 Fontenelle, Bernard de, 159, 187 Forgery, authorial, 122ff Frei, Hans, xv–xvii, 113, 201n7 Gale, Theophilus, 9, 154, 158, 161, 185 Galilei, Galileo, 187 Gastrell, Francis, 113 Gay, Ebenezer, 19 Gay, Peter, 88, 94ff, 128, 170 Geddes, Michael, 6 General Magazine and Historical Chronicle, 17 Gibbon, Edward, 95 Gibson, Edmund, 11 Glanvill, Joseph, 189 Gridley, Jeremiah, 17, 18 Grotius, Hugo, 16, 91, 102, 154, 159 Guardian, 7 Hampshire Association of Ministers, 9, 22, 206n26, 211n79, 239n55 Harles, Jonathan, 206n24 Hawley, Gideon, 123 Hawley, Joseph, 18, 209n65 Hell, 189–194 Historical method, 88–99 Historiography, biblical, 95–98 History of the Works of the Learned, 7 Hobbes, Thomas, 10, 16, 31, 63, 102, 115, 215n15

Hooke, Robert, 187 Hopkins, Samuel, 4–5, 57, 93 Horn, Georg, 154 Hotman, François, 112 Howard, Leon, 85 Hume, David, 95 Huygens, Christian, 187 Illumination, of Scripture, 40–45, 61 Independent Re®ector, 17 Infallibilism, epistemological, 30–38, 51, 60, 75, 77ff, 86, 214n12, 217n36 Inspiration, and the Bible, 102–106 Jones, Jeremiah, 9, 23, 101, 107, 109, 210n78 Junius, Franciscus, 137 Kabbalah, xiii, 151, 153, 254nn58,66 Kepler, Johann, 187 Kircher, Athanasius, 154 Knight, Janice, 147ff La Peyrére, Isaac, 115, 237n29 Ladies Library, 7 Lambe, Patrick, 92 Language, nature of, 49 Lardner, Nathaniel, 9, 93, 107 Laurence, David, 81 Law, William, 140 Le Clerc, Jean, 7, 8, 16, 91, 97, 102, 111–112 Learned journals (see Republic of letters) Leland, John, 24, 161, 177 Levine, Joseph, 111 Lightning, 268n94 Linne, Carl von, 16 Livingston, William, 17 Locke, John, 9, 16, 27–29, 37–40, 76–87, 230nn59,60,62, 231nn63,64,71, 232nn78,84,86 Lockman, John, 153 Logan, James, 16 London Magazine, 7 Lowth, Robert, 97, 202n11 Maimonides, Moses, 153, 159, 257nn91,94 Malebranche, Nicolas de, 29 Manetho, 159 Marsham, John, 158 Martin, Benjamin, 153 Maryland Gazette, 17 Mather, Cotton, 18, 19 Mather, Samuel, 147 Maurice, Thomas, 160 Mayhew, Jonathan, 19 McCulloch, William, 102

McDermott, Gerald, 255n71 Michaelis, Johann David, 107 Mill, John, 91, 99–100 Miller, Perry, 28, 76ff, 82, 88, 94ff, 128, 147, 166, 170 Milton, John, 107 Mishnah, 16 Monthly Review, 7, 169 Monuments, historical, 125 Moral certainty, 59–64, 222n91 More geometrico, 31–32, 37, 61, 74, 133, 181 More, Henry, 34, 63, 187 More historico, 179–182 Moreri, Louis, 16 Morgan, Thomas, 10 Morton, Charles, 185, 265nn67,68 Müller, Friedrich Max, 160 Mystery, 65 Natural religion, 129–144, 179ff, 249nn7,14,17: Reformed view of, 135–138, 249–250n18 social origins of, 139ff and the work of redemption, 145–146 Natural science (philosophy): analogous to history, 73–76 and the Bible, 183–194 New (spiritual) sense, 29, 36–40, 45–56, 218n43 Newcastle General Magazine, 7 Newton, Isaac, xvii, 7 New-York Gazette, 17 Noah’s ark, 11, 186 Novels, 243n88 Owen, John, 5, 36, 61, 99–100, 221n83 Paine, Thomas, 25, 115 Parker, James, 17 Pascal, Blaise, xvii Pasquier, Estienne, 112 Pentateuch, authorship of, 115–127 Pepperell, William, 174ff Philo, 153 Physico-theology, 184ff Pierrepont, Sarah, 5 Platt, John, 136 Pluche, Noël Antoine, 154 Plurality of worlds, 187–188 Poole, Matthew, 9 Popkin, Richard, 30 Present State of the Republick of Letters, 7 Prideaux, Humphrey, 7, 9, 154 Prideaux, Mathias, 112 Priestcraft, 123ff Primitivism, xiii, 41–42

Index

291

Prisca theologia, 154ff Public records, Israelite, 126ff Qu’ran, 16, 153 Ramsay, Andrew Michael, 154, 161 Randolph, John, 17 Rational apologetics, xvi–xvii, 166ff Ray, John, 187 Reason: concept of, 30ff, 66–69 and experience, 70–73 and revelation, 76–81 Religious biography, morphology, 17–18 Republic of letters, 6–10 Reventlow, Henning Graf, 1 Royal Society, 31 Salmon, Thomas, 9, 177 Sanchuniathon, 159 Schafer, Thomas, 92 Semler, Johann, 107 Shaftesbury, Earl of, 6, 18 Shapiro, Barbara, 63 Shuckford, Samuel, 7, 9, 154, 158, 161 Simon, Richard, 7, 8, 10, 14, 16, 90–91, 100, 102, 117, 152 Skelton, Philip, 154 Skepticism, 30–32 Smith, Claude, 81 Social clubs, 20 Socinians, 136ff Spencer, John, 158, 257n98 Spinoza, Benedict de, 10, 14, 16, 31–34, 36, 40, 44, 61, 63, 83, 102, 115–117, 215n17, 225–226n19 Sprat, Thomas, 31, 214nn11,12 Stapfer, Johann Friedrich, 92, 177, 223–224n11 Stiles, Ezra, 18, 22 Stilling®eet, Edward, 6, 11, 12, 16, 63–64, 77, 167, 225n18 Stoddard, Solomon, 11 Sturmy, Daniel, 187

292

Index

Talmud, 153 Teleology, in nature, 144ff Testimony of faith, 37–39, 218n43 Thomassin, Louis, 154 Tillotson, John, 13, 64 Tindal, Matthew, 7, 10, 13–15, 41, 59, 60, 64–70, 76ff, 83ff, 100, 133ff, 148, 159 Toland, John, 7, 8, 10, 13, 77, 79, 100, 107, 159 Turner, William, 154 Turretin, François, 5, 91, 100, 136 Turretin, Jean Alphonse, 7, 8, 61, 92 Tylor, E. B., 160 Typology, of nature (ontological), 144–151 Van Leeuwenhoek, Antoni, 187 Van Mastricht, Peter, 5, 137 Vico, Giambattista, 97, 159 Volney, Constantin, 188 Voltaire, François, 17, 35, 95, 117, 159, 237n30 Voss, Gerhard, 154 Vossius, Issac, 7 Vowel points, Hebrew, 17 Walton, Brian, 99 Warburton, William, 7, 154, 161 Wells, Edward, 9 Wesley, John, 17 West, Gilbert, 20 Wheelock, Eleazar, 244n102 Whiston, William, 7–9, 13, 16, 187, 189–194 Whitby, Daniel, 99 Wilkins, John, 187 Willard, Samuel, 19, 114, 173 Wilson, John, 123, 170ff Winder, Henry, 9, 111, 154, 177 Witherspoon, John, 57–59 Wolff, Christian, 138 Wollaston, William, 18 Wolleb, Johannes, 5 Woodward, John, 158 Young Students Library, 7

ROBERT E. BROWN is Visiting Assistant Professor of American Religion at Franklin and Marshall College.

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