Edwards on the Will (Jonathan Edwards Classic Studies)


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About The Book

Jonathan Edwards towered over his contemporaries--a man over six feet tall and a figure of theological stature--but the reasons for his power have been a matter of dispute. Edwards on the Will offers a persuasive explanation. In 1753 after seven years of personal trials which included dismissal from his Northampton church Edwards submitted a treatise Freedom of the Will to Boston publishers. Its impact on Puritan society was profound. He had refused to be trapped either by a new Arminian scheme that seemed to make God impotent or by a Hobbesian natural determinism that made morality an illusion. He both reasserted the primacy of Gods will and sought to reconcile freedom with necessity. In the process he shifted the focus from the community of duty to the freedom of the individual. Edwards died of smallpox in 1758 soon after becoming president of Princeton; as one obituary said he was a most rational . . . and exemplary Christian. Thereafter for a century or more all discussion of free will and on the church as an enclave of the pure in an impure society had to begin with Edwards. His disciples the New Divinity men--principally Samuel Hopkins of Great Barrington and Joseph Bellamy of Bethlehem Connecticut--set out to defend his thought. Ezra Stiles president of Yale tried to keep his influence off the Yale Corporation but Edwardss ideas spread beyond New Haven and sparked the religious revivals of the next decades. In the end old Calvinism returned to Yale in the form of Nathaniel William Taylor the Boston Unitarians captured Harvard and Edwardss troublesome ghost was laid to rest. The debate on human freedom versus necessity continued but theologians no longer controlled it. In Edwards on the Will Guelzo presents with clarity and force the story of these fascinating maneuverings for the soul of New England and of the emerging nation. Allen Guelzo writes with grace charm and even wit about a weighty subject that others have found forbidding. His scholarship is broad and his expositions lucid. --Daniel Walker Howe University of California at Los Angeles Emeritus Edwards on the Will is an important contribution to the study of Jonathan Edwardss thought. Where earlier scholars have been largely preoccupied with Edwardss modernity or with measuring the social effect of Edwards in the context of the American Revolution Allen Guelzo demonstrates his intellectual legacy not only to the generation of the Revolution but also beyond. This work will stand as the definitive treatment of the legacy of Edwardss classic treatise on Freedom of the Will. --Harry Stout Yale University This book elevates the study of eighteenth-century New England theology to a new level of sophistication and insight. With a precise fresh and lively literary style Guelzo makes old controversies come alive for a twentieth-century reader. This is intellectual history at its best--learned animated and compelling. It is one of the finest studies of theology in America ever written. --E. Brooks Holifield Emory University By tracing the development of one central point of Edwardss doctrine Guelzo allows us to see the unfolding of the entire history of the Edwardsean school and by implication of American theology in the period between 1750-1830. This book is a major work of scholarship--thorough enlightening intellectually uncompromising. --Philip F. Gura University of North Caroline Chapel Hill Allen C. Guelzo is Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and Professor of History at Gettysburg College. He is formerly Dean of the Templeton Honors College and the Grace F. Kea Professor of American History at Eastern University. He holds an MA and a PhD in history from the University of Pennsylvania an MDiv from Philadelphia Theological Seminary and an honorary doctorate in history from Lincoln College in Illinois.
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