Jonathan Edwards' Conception of the Church

1955 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas A. Schafer
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Conversion Experience ◽  
American Protestantism ◽  
The Church

As the pioneer of the New England Awakening and its literary defender, Edwards has long been associated with revivalism and sectarianism in American Protestantism. Several writers have noted that his Faithful Narrative (1737) of the 1734 Northampton revival, with its many translations and reprints, not only stimulated the Great Awakening of 1740 and later revivals but helped set the pattern of conversion experience in its more “enthusiastic” features. Attention has been called to his involvement in the “hell-fire” preaching of the revival, its emotional excesses, its distorted conception of childhood religion, and its pietistic individualism.

Jonathan Edwards, Enthusiast? Radical Revivalism and the Great Awakening in the Connecticut Valley

2005 ◽  
Vol 74 (4) ◽  
pp. 683-739 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas L. Winiarski
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Private House ◽  
Connecticut Valley ◽  
Colonial New England ◽  
The Church

It is difficult to imagine Jonathan Edwards countenancing the “Confus'd, but very Affecting Noise” that erupted in Suffield, Massachusetts, on July 6, 1741. Yet there he stood, his loud voice rising in prayer above the din that emanated from an assembly of more than two hundred boisterous men and women who had gathered to listen to his exhortations in the “two large Rooms” of a private house. On the previous day, the visiting Northampton, Massachusetts, revivalist had administered the sacrament to nearly five hundred Suffield communicants, ninety-seven of whom had joined the church that very day. It was an extraordinary event—quite possibly the largest oneday church admission ritual ever observed in colonial New England.

Puritans and the Great Awakening in America (1630–1790)

2020 ◽  
pp. 356-377
Author(s):  
David W. Kling
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
The Awakening ◽  
Conversion Experience ◽  
The World ◽  
Evangelical Culture ◽  
Extended Discussion

This chapter examines the necessity and nature of conversion from the earliest Puritan communities in New England through the colonies-wide Great Awakening. It begins with the conversionary views of Thomas Shepard, examines briefly the phenomenon of the Great Awakening, and ends with an extended discussion of the centrality of conversion in the life and writings of Jonathan Edwards. Despite the awakening’s many variations, the unifying theme that transcended denominational boundaries was its attention to “heart-centered,” conversion-oriented religion. Indeed, the legacy of the awakening—what makes it truly “great”—was the formation of a distinctively American evangelical culture whose touchstone was the conversion experience and whose influence has stretched into our own time and expanded around the world.

Jonathan Edwards and the Closing of the Table: Must the Eucharist be Open to All?

Ecclesiology ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-68
Author(s):  
Oliver Crisp
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Sacramental Theology ◽  
Doctrine Of The Church ◽  
The Church

AbstractThe New England Puritan theologian, Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) famously changed his mind on the question of the qualifications for communion in his church, a matter that led to his dismissal from the pastorate at Northampton. This paper sets Edwards' contribution to the Communion Controversy in New England into the broader context of his thought, especially his doctrine of the Church. I argue that, although there are objections to Edwards' position, his sacramental theology makes a constructive contribution to ecclesiology.

scholarly journals Jonathan Edwards' Emphasis on Religious Affections As Via Media To Extreme Responses of Revival

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-121
Author(s):  
Heruarto Salim
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Reformed Theology ◽  
Middle Ground ◽  
Great Work ◽  
The One ◽  
Time Critical ◽  
Extreme Responses ◽  
Assurance Of Salvation

God?s great work to reform His churches on earth many times preceded by great revival sent by Him. Apparently many revival like the one in the Great Awakening of New England colony in the eighteenth century produced two opposing responses: either fanaticism or denial. The Great Awakening became a battle to answer a key question: whether the Great Awakening was a genuine work of the Spirit? What is a true revival, then according to Reformed theology? The figure most fit to answer this question is none other than Jonathan Edwards. In the midst of the controversy, Jonathan Edwards stood in the middle ground trying to justify that the Great Awakening was truly a work of God while at the same time critical towards the excesses. Edwards Treatise of Religious Affections will be related to his discussion on the centrality of affections in religion, the nature of experience and the assurance of salvation.

The Women of the ABCFM Oregon Mission and the Conflicted Language of Calvinism

1995 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Genevieve McCoy
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New England ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Second Great Awakening ◽  
Foreign Missions ◽  
Internal Conflicts ◽  
New Divinity ◽  
Conversion Experience ◽  
Free Grace

Among the books Oregon missionaries Elkanah and Mary Walker kept in their mission home at Tshimakain was a Bible in which was written a quotation attributed to Martin Luther: “Men are never more unfit for the sacrament, than when they think themselves most fit—and never more fit and prepared for duty than when most humbld ‘sic’ and ashamed in a sense of their own unfitness.” Fitness founded in unfitness, ability based on inability, and autonomy grounded in dependence were qualities that the Walker' sponsor, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), encouraged in its emissaries. The country's first foreign missionary program was established in 1810 by a small group of New Divinity ministers. Dominating the rural pulpits in New England and New York during the Second Great Awakening, New Divinity preachers aimed to legitimate their conception of revival and conversion by appealing to the earlier revival theology of Jonathan Edwards. In the process, they insisted that predestination and free grace did not violate human free will and moral responsibility. Based on these convictions antebellum ABCFM missionaries, including the Oregon group, learned to assess their own spiritual condition and calling. However, the internal conflicts prompted by New Divinity understandings of the conversion experience alternatively produced debilitating and vitalizing effects that continued to trouble these women and men throughout their missionary careers. In effect, the vocation of the missionaries of the Whitman-Spalding mission proceeded from an uncommonly heroic effort to achieve a salvation that could not be guaranteed by their own theology. Moreover, contemporary clashing views regarding the nature and social role of women became intertwined with this disabling discourse. This, in turn, limited the Oregon women's conception of themselves and their capacities as missionaries.

Poems, Propositions, and Dogma: The Controversy over Religious Language and the Demise of Theology in American Learning

1988 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 310-321
Author(s):  
D. G. Hart
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Religious Language ◽  
American Protestantism ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Trinity

One of the ironies in the annals of nineteenth-century American Protestantism is the impact that Horace Bushnell's famed address “Dogma and Spirit” had upon the theological scene. In his remarks before the Porter Rhetorical Society at Andover Seminary in September 1848, the Congregationalist minister from Hartford established his reputation as one of the more controversial, if not gifted, theologians in New England. Bushnell offered a vision of Christianity that he hoped would eliminate the theological bickering that, as he saw it, had plagued the church throughout its history. To be sure, many in Andover's audience would not have been surprised if Bushnell's quirky views on the Trinity and the Atonement drew fire from New England Calvinists. But few would have predicted that this reconciliatory address would provoke one of the era's more noteworthy debates, a lengthy one-and-a-half-year, 250-page quarrel between America's two most prominent Calvinist theologians, Princeton Seminary's Charles Hodge and Andover's Edwards A. Park.

The ‘True Remedy’: Jonathan Edwards' Soteriological Perspective as Observed in his Revival Treatises

1995 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-210 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Jinkins
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Doctrine Of God ◽  
Conversion Experience

The revival treatises represent one of the most fruitful and provocative portions of the Jonathan Edwards corpus. The purpose of the treatises, considered as a whole, was (1) to provide a cogent account of the revivals which cropped up in New England in 1734–35 and agin in 1740–1743; (2) to defend the revivals to those, like Charles Chauncy, who objected to their emotional excesses or were skeptical of their validity; and (3) to encourage to moderation and humility those who were taking part in the revivals. In the course of accomplishing these objectives Edwards presents a morphology of the conversion experience, provides a basic description of his anthropology/psychology and gives an indication of the pneumatological side of his doctrine of God. We will consider each of these streams of thought briefly in terms of how they relate to Edwards' soteriology.

Jonathan Edwards on the Sense of the Heart

1948 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Perry Miller
Keyword(s):  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
American Mind ◽  
Freedom Of The Will ◽  
The World ◽  
Real Work ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Mind

The reputation of Jonathan Edwards, impressive though it is, rests upon only a fragmentary representation of the range or profundity of his thinking. Harassed by events and controversies, he was forced repeatedly to put aside his real work and to expend his energies in turning out sermons, defenses of the Great Awakening, or theological polemics. Only two of his published books (and those the shortest), The Nature of True Virtue and The End for which God Created the World, were not ad hoc productions. Even The Freedom of the Will is primarily a dispute, aimed at silencing the enemy rather than expounding a philosophy. He died with his Summa still a mass of notes in a bundle of home-made folios, the handwriting barely legible. The conventional estimate that Edwards was America's greatest metaphysical genius is a tribute to his youthful Notes on the Mind — which were a crude forecast of the system at which he labored for the rest of his days — and to a few incidental flashes that illumine his forensic argumentations. The American mind is immeasurably the poorer that he was not permitted to bring into order his accumulated meditations.

scholarly journals Re-Thinking Atonement in Jonathan Edwards and New England Theology

Perichoresis ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-99
Author(s):  
S. Mark Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Substitution Model ◽  
Divine Justice ◽  
Penal Substitution

Abstract Jonathan Edwards′ New England theology has a great deal more to say that is of contemporary doctrinal interest than it is often credited with, particularly as it relates to the doctrine of atonement. This article explores several anomalous claims made be this 18th and 19th century tradition, and in this way, challenges the recent and growing consensus that Edwards espoused the penal substitution model and his successors a moral government model. I argue that of all that is yet to be considered about their doctrine of atonement, we ought to begin with those claims made about the nature and demands of divine justice.

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