Immediate and progressive divine agency: Jonathan Edwards' rhetoric of history

! ! ! IMMEDIATE AND PROGRESSIVE DIVINE AGENCY: JONATHAN EDWARDS’ RHETORIC OF HISTORY by Juan Sánchez Naffziger BA, University of Seville, 2005 MA, University of Seville, 2010 A DISSERTATION Submitted to the faculty in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in English and North American Literature Concentration in American Studies at the University of Seville Seville, Spain April 2015 Acknowledgements The following dissertation would never have been completed without the continued encouragement and invaluable help of professor Ramón Espejo Romero. He has been instrumental (providential, if I may put it in more Edwardsean terms) in bringing about the final result in more ways than the ‘mere’ revision and correction of the text. It was through a scholarship offered by the department he is currently the Director of that I was able to come to the United States, where I have found the time and inspiration to finish my readings and dissertation writing. Had Dr. Espejo not prompted me to go for the ‘American experience’, I probably would never have finished the following study. I certainly would not have been able to include or consult many of the works (recent scholarly studies on Jonathan Edwards, old letters and sermons, etc.) that have been made available to me at UNC Chapel Hill, and which now make up what I believe is a solid bibliography. My most grateful recognition and special thanks, therefore, to this excellent professor of North American literature at the University of Seville, Spain. The love and support of my wife through the last five years, as I locked myself away to read and write during Christmas, Easter and summer holidays, deserve the deepest thanks. Thank you Priscila for being the kind of woman who makes a man feel blessed. While I have endeavored to give birth to this dissertation, she has literally gone through labor and born our beautiful son. Around the time that he began to take a keen interest in ‘wheels’ (one of his first words in English), I was caught up in the analysis of the ‘wheel metaphor’ as used by Jonathan Edwards in the 1739 sermon series. Sammy is simply a great and tangible reminder that God’s Work of Redemption is carried out relentlessly from generation to generation, as the wheels of providence continue to ‘go round and round’. Finally, authors who are not quoted or named in the pages below, like John Piper or J. I. Packer, must be mentioned and acknowledged as responsible for my one decade long interest in the Puritans. They have sought to bring Jonathan Edwards’ works to bear on their lives, their preaching and their pastoral ministry. They are consequently not quoted very often in scholarly writings since their work seems to lie outside the context of academia. However, present-day Edwardsean studies are undoubtedly indebted to them in more ways than we can tell, and such pastors/theologians are probably more deeply immersed in the essence of what Jonathan Edwards wrote and taught than many renowned scholars. Juan Sánchez Naffziger Chapel Hill, North Carolina May 2015 IMMEDIATE AND PROGRESSIVE DIVINE AGENCY: JONATHAN EDWARDS’ RHETORIC OF HISTORY CONTENTS Introduction …………………………………………………………. pp. i-xi • Chapter 1: THE SETTING FOR JONATHAN EDWARDS’ RHETORIC OF HISTORY……………………………………………………….…… pp. 1-41 1. 1. The Great Awakening ………………………………………….. pp. 1-18 1. 1. a. Revival of Old Doctrines; Rise of New Movements … p. 2 1. 1. b. Expectations and Controversy in the Colonies ………. p. 6 1. 1. c. From Theological Controversy to Revolutionary Implications ………………………………………………………… p. 13 1. 2. Jonathan Edwards: Biographical and Contextual Keys ………… pp. 19-30 1. 2. a. Edwards the Thinker …………………………………. p. 20 1. 2. b. Edwards the Convert ……………………………….… p. 24 1. 2. c. Edwards the Minister ……………………………….… p. 26 1. 3. The Northampton Revival ……………………………………… pp. 30-41 1. 3. a. Deep Anxieties Leading to the Height of Revival ……. p. 31 1. 3. b. Decline and the Scene for the Redemption Discourse … p. 36 • Chapter 2: RHETORIC OF HISTORY & DIVINE AGENCY ……... pp. 42-136 2. 1. Edwards vs. Winthrop: Love, Community and History ……………………………………………………………….………. p. 43 2. 2. Edwards vs. Cotton: God’s Kingdom on Earth …...………………………………………………………….………. p. 57 2. 3. Edwards vs. Shepard: The Visibility of God’s Work in the Saints ……………………………………………………………….………. p. 72 2. 4. Edwards vs. Mather : The Operations of Providence in History pp. 91-136 2. 4. a. Providence and Nature ……………………………….. p. 92 2. 4. b. Providence and Sacred History ………………………. p. 108 2. 4. c. Worldly Affairs, Secular History and God’s Absolute Sovereignty ………………………………………………………………… p. 120 • Chapter 3: PROGRESSIVE DIVINE AGENCY: THE RHETORIC OF PIETY …………………………………………………………….. pp. 137-209 3. 1. God’s Building …………………………………………...…. pp. 147-177 3. 1. a. Moral Decay and the Ruins of Satan’s Kingdom …………………………………………………………………… p. 147 3. 1. b. The Solid Structure of Piety …………………………………………………………………… p. 156 3. 2 Modern Science and Mechanics in Nature………………....…pp. 177-209 3. 2. a. Cyclical History and Mechanical Providence. ………….. p. 178 3. 2. b. Nature, Natural Cycles and the Goal of the Universe. ….. p. 194 • Chapter 4: IMMEDIATE DIVINE AGENCY: THE RHETORIC OF REVIVAL …………………………………………………….………… pp. 210-247 4. 1. The ‘Hub’ of Historical Progress: The Purchase of Redemption ….. p. 211 4. 2. Of the Sun’s Dawning and the Spirit’s Outpourings ………..… pp. 216-247 4. 2. a. The Paradigmatic Case of Pentecost …………………….. p. 217 4. 2. b. Ancient, Biblical Revivals ………………………………. p. 222 4. 2. c. Revivals Outside the Scriptures: The Protestant Reformation ………………………………………………………………..….. p. 231 • Chapter 5: CONCLUDING REMARKS & FURTHER PERSPECTIVES: EDWARDS AT THE CROSSROADS OF AMERICAN HISTORY …………………………………………………….………… pp. 248-258 Works Cited ………………………………………………………… pp. 259-268 ! i IMMEDIATE AND PROGRESSIVE DIVINE AGENCY: JONATHAN EDWARDS’ RHETORIC OF HISTORY INTRODUCTION The research leading to this dissertation began as an attempt to understand the ways in which Puritanism had a long-term influence on colonial American culture. Since Jonathan Edwards came across as a critical and pivotal figure in American thought and history in several major works by intellectual and literary historians like Perry Miller or Sacvan Bercovitch, I read through Edwards’ major treatises in search of the reasons why he might have been, as it were, singled out by such notable authors. His skill as a rhetorician and logician was clear from the very beginning although it was not until I carefully read some of his homiletic works (other than the famous revival sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”) that I started to view this New England theologian as first a pastor-preacher, and only secondarily a philosopher or thinker. In gauging the oratorical value of Edwards’ extant sermons one is drawn to analyze his use of metaphorical language, logical argumentation and other stylistic traits that may have contributed to the impact his pulpit delivery had during the revivals. My specific inquiry into Edwards’ historical thought and discourse is not unconnected to the consideration that he was, first and foremost, an orator. What later became an influential book among evangelicals in the United States and abroad, A History of the Work of Redemption, had first been conceived as a sermon series that the Northampton minister preached to his congregation little before the Great Awakening. This series, delivered in 1739, was not published in its original form until 1989, when it came out as volume nine of Yale’s 26- volume edition of The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, 1957-2008). ! ii A few years before this authoritative edition of Edwards’ writings was completed, professor Avihu Zakai published Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of History: The Reenchantment of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (Princeton, 2003). His comprehensive analysis of the colonial minister’s philosophy of history goes beyond the 1739 series although Zakai does emphasize the importance of the 1730s in Edwards’ intellectual development, especially as regards his “redemptive mode of historical thought”. One point the author makes, which definitively determined the trajectory of this study, is that Edwards developed a “singular rhetoric of history” during the years of revival in New England (275). This dissertation, therefore, owes much to Zakai’s work (and not just this one book) and, more specifically, to the insights he provides regarding the colonial author’s vision and understanding of the historical process. But since his book focuses mainly on thought, not discursive modes, and covers a wide range of writings, not just those delivered in the sermonic form, the issue of Edwards’ “singular rhetoric of history” is by no means exhausted. It remains to be determined how his rhetorical originality and historical imagination were fleshed out from the Northampton pulpit in the oratorical endeavor of 1739. What characterized Edwardsean revivalistic homiletics during the six months devoted to the exposition of salvation history in particular, and during the 1730s in general? In order to establish what the distinguishing features of Edwards’ discursive modes and rhetoric exactly were when he expounded the history of the Work of Redemption, I first needed to have a grasp of colonial American historical discourse in my author’s literary and ideological setting. The immediate context for his construction of a singular rhetoric of history was the Great Awakening and his apocalyptic belief that ! iii God’s kingdom had to be manifestly set up in the world before the final conflagration. Since these latter elements had been present in colonial Puritan theology and discourse for more than three generations, I chose to compare Edwards’ concept of divine agency and his ideas about how God specifically intervened in history with the same tenets in the writings of other relevant colonial American authors (chapter two). To carry out the intended study, some primary texts from the canon of pre-Revolutionary American literature were looked into in a preliminary survey. Such were the local histories of colonial Puritans like Cotton Mather, William Bradford or John Winthrop. Likewise, and since sermonic literature and oratory were to be my main focus, a wide range of homiletic texts had to be surveyed as well. John Winthrop’s famous “A Model of Christian Charity” preached on board the Arbella in 1630 was an obvious sermon to start with (2. 1. below), and the texts of other New England clerical orators such as John Cotton, Thomas Shepard and, again, Cotton Mather fell naturally into place as I became familiar with their writings and understood their relevance and their relation to Edwards’ ideological context and literary activity. The sermons of some of Jonathan Edwards’ own contemporaries, like George Whitefield, John Wesley or Gilbert Tennent, were also studied and taken into account, especially to set the wider scene of revivals in the American colonies and Europe. As to the bibliographical starting point for secondary sources, the perusal of certain ‘milestones’ in connection with Puritanism (both European and colonial) and its cultural legacy was crucial. Such were The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Perry Miller), The Rise of Puritanism (William Haller) or more recent works like The Language of Canaan (Mason Lowance) and The Rites of Assent (Sacvan Bercovitch). Other less well-known but equally valuable works that provided me ! iv with the necessary background in Puritan pulpit oratory, eschatology and symbolism were Harry Stout’s The New England Soul, Richard Bauckham’s Tudor Apocalypse and Avihu Zakai’s Exile and Kingdom. The general aims of my doctoral research were thus articulated and the method of inquiry, partly triggered and informed by the foundational readings named above, was established along the following lines. The immediate religious and social context of the Great Awakening had to be examined closely and Edwards’ own life and preaching activity explained within the revival setting. Thus, his most authoritative biography, George Marsden’s Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven, 2003), and the most recent and comprehensive study of the years where Edwards’ sermon series is framed, Thomas Kidd’s The Great Awakening (New Haven, 2007), constituted the backbone of the first chapter of this dissertation. At the theological and ideological levels, the same could be said about Mark Noll’s America’s God (Oxford, 2002). But as someone who was already familiar with Edwards’ sermonic artistry and with his 1739 series in particular, I set out to distinctly identify the reasons for Jonathan Edwards’ effective and compelling articulation of divine agency in history not just in the context of colonial revivals but against the backdrop of the Enlightenment. By analyzing the thirty sermons that made up Edwards’ redemptive-historical exposition with literary criteria and in search of discursive modes and figurative patterns, his theology of the deity’s very essence as well as his philosophy of history emerge in what is a cohesive hermeneutic of the scriptural God and a symbolic understanding of reality that, while challenging modern modes of thought and slightly deviating from traditional ones, shrewdly draws on both of them. 2 ! society, as New England was, and the consequences and wider implications it had for the generation of colonial Americans that witnessed the birth of the United States. Both of these aspects may be summed up in Hugh Brogan’s words when he says that the Great Awakening not only “saved souls, but it split churches; indeed, its emphasis on the importance of individual experience may be said to have democratized American Religion” (91). In a similar vein, Carroll and Noble assert that “a pluralistic approach to matters of religion became possible” as a consequence of the “major intellectual war” which followed the awakening (68). 1. 1. a. Revival of Old Doctrines; Rise of New Movements. As the terms ‘awakening’ and ‘revival’ are often used interchangeably, it may reasonably be asked what it was that was being revived during the Great Awakening. This religious movement was not the result of the introduction of any foreign doctrine or new fashion but, rather, it drew heavily on Puritan and Reformation heritage. Whether Anglican, Presbyterian or Congregational, revivalist preachers (Jonathan Edwards among them) emphasized “the importance of a personally felt conversion experience –a tenet that had been central to the seventeenth-century church in New England” (Marcus & Sollors, 82). The awakening was thoroughly Calvinistic, particularly in New England, as it was marked by “the old Puritan concern” with sin, the new birth and “the necessity of conversion” (Brogan, 91). While some historians will go no further than to say that “[i]n some respects the Great Awakening was a return to the old belief in salvation through faith and God’s saving grace” (Middleton, 263), others reckon that the period of colonial revivals from 1735 to 1745 was “similar to the situation under the Puritans” (Noll, America’s God, 75). 3 ! A fairly solid piece of evidence in favor of the opinion that this was essentially a rediscovery of seventeenth-century Puritan doctrine and that revival preachers were not misinterpreting their forefathers’ teaching, or presenting it in a biased or inaccurate manner, is the fact that the demand for religious writings, particularly Puritan classics, rose significantly during this period. One example will suffice to illustrate this. Following the departure of Gilbert Tennent (an influential Presbyterian itinerant preacher from the Middle Colonies), the prominent Boston minister Thomas Prince explained that The people [from the Boston area] seemed to have a renewed taste for those old pious and experimental writers, Mr. Hooker, Shepard, Gurnal, William Guthrie, Joseph Alein, Isaac Ambrose, Dr. Owen, and others […] The evangelical writings of these deceased authors, as well as others alive […] were now read with singular pleasure; some of them reprinted and in great numbers quickly bought and studied. And the more experimental our preaching was, like theirs, the more it was relished. (Gaustad, 34) Thus, we see that the content of those sermons which so many people swarmed to hear was no new doctrine. Nevertheless, the Great Awakening did become closely linked to the emergence of new movements. One of these was Methodism, which emerged within the Church of England as a movement of spiritual renewal. Methodism began to spread during the decade of the 1730s, precisely when the first signs of revival in the colonies became apparent. The term ‘Methodist’ was first applied in Oxford to the Wesley brothers, John and Charles, and to their followers because of their holy, disciplined (‘methodic’) principles and lifestyle (“Methodism”). In the present study, however, the figure we are most concerned with is George Whitefield. Like the Wesleys, Whitefield experienced a radical conversion during his years at Pembroke College (Oxford) and placed great 4 ! emphasis on holy living2 (Dallimore, I, 70-77). Unlike the Wesleys, though, he came to strictly Calvinist convictions. This would be a key factor for Whitefield to play such a prominent role in the revival of the colonies, since the established churches of New England and the Middle Colonies still held fast to Calvinism and saw Arminianism,3 with its denial of God’s absolute sovereignty, as a threat. Whether it is historically accurate to call George Whitefield “The Founder of Methodism” or not, it is undeniable that he became the leading figure of the movement in colonial America and, most significantly, he introduced the practice of open-air itinerant preaching, later followed by John Wesley (Dallimore, II, 531). More will be said on the relevance of the itinerant preaching style below. Returning to the issue of ‘old doctrine’ and the novelty or alleged innovations of the Great Awakening, it might be claimed (as some historians have) that since there was “no serious declension in religious belief” in churches in the colonies during the years preceding the revival, only the introduction of new elements or forces can account for such social turmoil and for the shaking of the religious establishment, especially in New England. The other side of the story, however, is that there was an increasingly complacent and relaxed membership in these churches who were “adopting a more rational approach” to Christian faith and principles, which undermined the essence of belief in a supernatural rebirth of the soul. As for the clergy’s role in the decline of !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 2 Apart from an emphasis on conversion and the study and meditation of the Bible, they promoted the doing of good to orphans, slaves and other distinct groups within communities. Likewise, “an intense devotion to hymnody” was developed in Methodism (Noll, Rise, 64). 3 Arminian doctrine was a reaction against the deterministic implications of a Calvinistic understanding of predestination and it affirmed the key role of free will in the process of salvation. It was named after the Dutch Reformed theologian Jacobus Arminius, whose doctrinal legacy was set forth one year after his death in the ‘Remonstrance’ of 1610 (“Arminianism”). 5 ! experiential (or ‘heart’) religion, their sermons had lately become “more theoretical and philosophical in content” (Middleton, 262, 263). Furthermore, there had taken place a “taming” of the sovereign God “as two generations of Puritan ministers had tried to evade the classic Calvinist dilemmas of enforcing moral behavior when it could not earn salvation and saving men from despair when there was no earthly certainty of being among the elect”. The development of the so-called ‘federal theology’4 had come to convey the idea “that God would elect those who behaved as though they were saints” within the community. This tendency in New England religious thought had found a source and a doctrinal sanction in the tradition of the ‘preparationist’ model of conversion which could be traced back to the Pilgrim Fathers.5 This vein of colonial Puritanism established a number of ‘steps’ which were deemed essential for reaching the status of true convert and saint. It emphasized the “use of means” (the practice of moral duties) “such as prayer, ordinances [and] sincere moral reform” so as to imply “that God would reward those who prepared” (Tracy, 25, 204 n. 19). Thus, the way was paved for a moralistic religious formalism that departed essentially from the experiential concept of Christian living. This concept emphasized the genuineness of motivations and the role of the affections in conversion as well as the need to lead a pious and religious life. There was likewise an international front where pure Reformed and Puritan ideals of religious experience were quickly losing ground in the first half of the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 4 Regarding this theological development in New England and the above mentioned implication, see Miller, Errand, 89-98. 5 Thomas Hooker is the major first-generation colonial figure which represents the beginning of this “departure from the experiential tradition” of Puritanism (Goen, 4: 12). An interesting study comparing his doctrine of spiritual ‘preparation’ to that of John Cotton is found in Habegger, “Preparing the Soul for Christ: The Contrasting Sermon Forms of John Cotton and Thomas Hooker” (1969). 6 ! eighteenth century. Colonial clergy looked to their European brethren for guidance and new inspiration, and in doing so they found (to name one significant example) Irish and Scottish Presbyterians being “influenced by the spread of Enlightenment opinions that undercut the force of traditional Calvinism” (Noll, Rise, 45). For the revivalists of the Great Awakening, the abandonment or the distortion of sound doctrine were as deadly for ‘true religion’ as indifference toward or coldness in spiritual matters. Genuine conversion should not simply be a heartfelt experience, but had to proceed from a rightly informed mind. Without the backbone of theology, churchgoers’ piety would not flow from a godly motivation and religion could only be expected to degenerate into hypocrisy and formalism. Thus, the main grievance brought forth by evangelical6 preachers was not in principle against the ecclesiastical establishment itself or what it represented but, rather, they viewed themselves as fighting a “battle against deadness and formality in the churches”, whether on the clergy’s or the laity’s part (Dallimore, I, 433). 1. 1. b. Expectations and Controversy in the Colonies. The momentous arrival in America of the English Methodist preacher George Whitefield at the end of the year 1739 may be said to have marked the beginning of the Great Awakening. Although there were some preachers from the colonies, like Gilbert Tennent or Jonathan Edwards himself, who would play no small role in firing up the flames of revival, Whitefield was undoubtedly “the most important figure in fomenting !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 6 The way the term ‘evangelical’ will be used in the present study basically coincides with the definition of “evangelicalism” provided by Noll: “The form of modern Protestantism characterized by a stress on conversion, the Bible as supreme authority, activism manifest especially in efforts to spread the Christian message, and a focus on the cross as the defining reality of Christian faith” (America’s God, 564-565).! 7 ! the massive awakenings of the 1740s” (Kidd, 40). Tens of thousands gathered around the charismatic preacher and there was hardly any place in the colonies where the winds of revival did not blow. His thundering voice, which, according to the testimony of Benjamin Franklin, could reach an assembly of no less than 30,000 people out in the open air (Dallimore, I, 439),7 announced the urgent need for the new birth and exhorted everyone to flee from religious formalism as well as from wrath to come. The idea of and the longing for a general ‘revival of true religion’ had been passed down by some key New England figures of the previous generation, like Solomon Stoddard or Cotton Mather (Kidd, 8). Although Whitefield, ordained in the Church of England and beginning his preaching ministry there, might seem an “unlikely vessel” for the advancement of this expected revival, Jonathan Edwards and a great part of New England were willing to look through the corruption that the Anglican Church was normally associated with, to see in this ‘Grand Itinerant’8 a divine instrument which had been raised up “to revive the mysterious, spiritual, despised, and exploded doctrines of the gospel” and was “full of a spirit of zeal for the promotion of real vital piety” (Marsden, A Life, 204). Expectations at Whitefield’s arrival were probably lower but also existed in other parts of colonial America like New Jersey (where the Presbyterian Church, and therefore Calvinism, was well established), South Carolina or Georgia (Kidd, 75). Apart from this preacher’s undoubted charisma and the direct impact of his sermons (which were read by many even before they had seen or heard him), a great part of his tours’ !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 7 Arnold Dallimore refers to a personal account where Franklin explained that hearing Whitefield preach live in the open air and carrying out some estimates of the radius within which he might be heard, “reconciled [him] to the newspaper accounts of his having preached to twenty-five thousand people in the fields” (I, 439). 8 George Whitefield was commonly known by this name (Marcus & Sollors, 81). 8 ! success and attraction in the colonies was due to newspaper publicity and the publication of his own journals (Kidd, 45, 47). Benjamin Franklin, having no evangelical convictions himself but seeing the great potential in the figure of the Grand Itinerant and having felt the power of his oratory, became his admirer and one of his most cooperative publishers. He published a considerable number of Whitefield’s writings from his printing firm in Philadelphia and established a long-term personal, as well as financial, relationship with him (Noll, Rise, 106). Whitefield was, like Edwards, thoroughly Calvinistic in his theology and they both helped to revive “the old Puritan concern with the conviction of sin, the necessity of conversion, and the certainty of salvation”. It is no exaggeration to say that “[s]pectacular results were achieved” (Brogan, 91). The old message, nevertheless, acquired new force when preached “extemporaneously” (using no sermon notes) and in highly emotional dramatizations like those of Whitefield. His sermons were not just oral but visual spectacles (Marcus & Sollors, 80). Harry Stout quotes an instance of a memorable preaching moment as Whitefield’s early biographer, John Gillies, described it: “See here!” said he, pointing to the lightning [a thunder storm was passing nearby], which played on the corner of the pulpit─ “’Tis a glance from the angry eye of Jehovah! Hark!” continued he, raising his finger in a listening attitude, as the distant thunder grew louder and louder, and broke in one tremendous crash over the building. “It was the voice of the Almighty as he passed by in his anger!” As the sound died away he covered his face with his hands, and knelt beside his pulpit […] Rising and pointing to the beautiful object, he exclaimed, “Look upon the rainbow…” Whitefield’s preaching method, especially his improvisation without notes, “had never been practiced by Congregational ministers or taught at the colleges” (Stout, Soul, 190- 9 ! 192). The impact and influence of the new homiletic method may be summed up in Mark Noll’s words: Forthright preaching of repentance, the redemptive work of Christ, the necessity of faith and the privileges of holy living were Whitefield’s sermonic stock in trade. But because he usually dispensed with a written-out sermon text, because he preached intentionally for emotional as well as intellectual effect, and because he called on individuals to respond as individuals to his message, these traits also became characteristic of evangelical preaching in general. (Rise, 132; author’s italics) It was impossible for anyone in a society so religious as New England’s to remain neutral before such powerful and compelling preaching. Although controversy would completely take over towards the end of the Great Awakening, there was an overwhelming majority who welcomed the fresh message delivered by itinerant preachers and numerous local ministers favored the movement. The content of what was preached from New England pulpits and the longings of congregations were pervasively affected by the arrival of Whitefield before bitter disputes began to tear the Congregational establishment apart. Under the influence of Whitefield, “weekday lectures and sabbath sermons were given over entirely to the subject of the new birth”. Even in Boston, where religious formalism might be expected to have taken deeper root, there was a demand for “affective preaching” (Stout, Soul, 195, 196). While some have assumed that revivalist preachers were “particularly effective in reaching people in vulnerable places” (Carroll & Noble, 67), Edwin Gaustad seems to have provided enough evidence to prove that at least in New England the awakening “knew no boundaries, social or geographical, that it was both urban and 10 ! rural, and that it reached both lower and upper classes” (42).9 Furthermore, there was a considerable increase in the number of communicants in churches throughout the land, young people being the most heavily represented group (Stout, Soul, 197). Whether the religious movement be considered as a “pouring out of the Spirit of God” or a phenomenon where “multitudes were seriously, soberly and solemnly out of their wits” (Gaustad, 135), the Great Awakening had an astounding influence on colonial spiritual life at least during the early 1740s. The level of expectation and the general welcome to news and symptoms of revival on the part of ministers and congregations favored this early success. Those ministers who were in favor of revival and against the dry intellectualism of Harvard and Yale began to be labeled “New Lights”.10 The traditionalist Congregational clergy of New England, who (in principle) were also Calvinists, came to be called “Old Lights” in opposition to the incipient doctrinal school, and advocated for a more rationalistic interpretation of the Scriptures. The latter caricatured the former as “enthusiasts” and were, in turn, accused of being spiritually dead and “unconverted” (Stout, Soul, 194, 199). The following generation of Americans would witness both the “shattering of the Congregational establishment in New England” (Goen, Revivalism, ix) as many churches turned Unitarian or Arminian and the number and size of congregations waned notably in relative terms, and the dramatic expansion of those denominations which were imbued with the theology of the revivalist, New Divinity !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 9 For a detailed survey of the revival’s extent, see the whole chapter entitled “The Flood, 1741-1742” (Gaustad, 42- 60). Richard Middleton (264, 265) provides a bibliographical note (n. 6) on the various perspectives which have existed regarding the possible socio-economic causes behind the revival’s success and opposition. 10 For a brief explanation of the movement and its link to Edwards and to revivalism in general, see Marsden, “Biography”, 27-28 and Sweeney, “Evangelical Tradition in America”, 218-220. 11 ! school.11 This movement would become associated with resistance to British rule during the revolutionary age as religious sentiment and ideals permeated the politics of independents and patriots (Stout, Soul, 263, 286).12 But the seed of a theology “of, by and for the people” (Noll, America’s God, 145), and therefore the idea of a God who was closer to individuals than to institutions or structures, had been sown during the awakening of the 1740s. The issue of how and where the preaching of the Word was to take place, and (most importantly) who had the authority to perform it, soon became a cause of division among pro-revival clergy. Old lights used the fact that “lay exhorters” were being encouraged to preach by some revivalists to attack the movement as a whole and lay forward accusations of both social and ecclesiastical “great disorder” (Stout, Soul, 204). Since many settled ministers who looked favorably upon the awakening thought that having lay Christians preach the gospel authoritatively was a threat to their position and role in society, the unity of the pro-revivalist party started to break down (Stout, Soul, 198). Jonathan Edwards was one of those moderates who, while essentially supporting the revival, could not approve of untrained laity being sent out to minister the Word to multitudes or even to small ‘societies’.13 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 11 Figures showing the relative decline of the Congregational Church and the notable growth of evangelical churches are found in Noll, America´s God, 162-169. 12 For further analysis of the different ways in which the New Divinity movement and patriotism during the Revolution were linked in New England, see Weber, Rhetoric and History. A more general but equally valuable discussion is found in Bercovitch, Jeremiad, 93-131. 13 Edwards, nevertheless, had been one of the first ministers in New England to encourage religious meetings apart from the established Sabbath services and weekday lectures, especially among the youth. Yet, it probably seemed right to Edwards that such meetings of “social religion” should take place only because it had been him who “proposed it to the young people”. Under the minister’s supervision and sanctioned by him, it was “accordingly 18 ! deliverance from both human and spiritual slavery) reflected on the “Impartial Saviour” she had heard the Methodist itinerant preach about in and out of season. If God’s Word was true, this savior would make “sons and kings, and Priests to God” (51) out of Africanas well as Anglo-Americans. It was only natural that Wheatley’s republican odes, composed during the Revolution, should be brimming with commonplace evangelical doctrines, like Christ’s atonement on the cross or eternal punishment, as well as with the themes of freedom and liberty (Noll, America’s God, 147). Thus, personal and collective religious experience during the revival of the 1740s and New Light (revivalist) theology became a significant contribution to change through the manifold social and ideological ramifications of the Great Awakening. The role and place of the Great Awakening in the history of American thought also deserves a brief comment at this point. Mark Noll considers Jonathan Edwards and the Anglican minister Samuel Johnson to be “America’s two most important Christian thinkers at midcentury” (America’s God, 102). Edwards, therefore, stands as the foremost representative of the eventual intellectual and philosophical developments associated with the revival, which Noll’s words succinctly describe: A great social transformation lay behind the shift in ethical axioms. That shift began in the religious and domestic circumstances of the 1730s and 1740s before it took political shape a generation later. The colonial revivalists, who were conservative in doctrine, nonetheless helped create the social conditions in which a new intellectual perspective could flourish. The revival compromised the traditional importance of inherited structures by placing more emphasis on the individual’s reception of God’s grace than on the individual’s place in an inherited ecclesiastical order. Its ideal of the pure church hastened a sectarian fragmentation of the traditionally inclusive state churches. Its 19 ! fervent millennialism encouraged a negative opinion of the theological past. (America’s God, 106) The latter aspect (i.e., revivalist millennialism) will be given special attention in due course and is particularly relevant to this study as it is closely linked to the issue of ‘history’ in Edwards’ thought and sermons. But the main conclusion is that (paradoxical though it may seem) revivalism, which was essentially a renewal of the Reformation and Puritanism (Noll, America’s God, 95), paved the way for a kind of republican and modern thought which, in turn, was wedded to Enlightenment moral philosophy. Edwards probably would not have approved of the way evangelicalism and republicanism became mutually adapted19 but, ironically, his prominent role in and his relentless defense of the revival in the colonies played a crucial part in that development. 1. 2. Jonathan Edwards: Biographical and Contextual Factors Since my purpose in this introduction is to eventually arrive at the scene that constituted Edwards’ stage for action as a revivalist preacher and orator (namely, the Northampton pulpit from the mid 1730s to the early 1740s), this second section will not yet deal with the local awakening of 1734-35 but will simply attempt to sketch out a biographical portrait, focusing on some key factors. A detailed description of the Northampton revival will be provided in the third (1. 3) and closing section of the present introductory chapter. The most comprehensive biography of Edwards to date is George Marsden’s Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven, 2003), upon which the following account largely depends. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 19 See Noll, America’s God, 82-87 for a description of this ‘mutual adaptation’. 20 ! 1. 2. a. Edwards the Thinker. One key to the rhetoric and art of any orator or literary author surely lies in the intellect behind the ideas expressed. Therefore, it seems appropriate to begin with some details about Jonathan Edwards’ education and intellectual life. Being the only male child of the Edwards household, his schooling was given high priority by his father, Timothy, who was a minister in East Windsor, Connecticut. Edwards and his sisters received a solid education from their parents at home and were sent to Boston to finish school (Marsden, A Life, 17-19). In the fall of 1716, having just turned thirteen, he left home for Wethersfield, near Hartford, to begin college at Connecticut’s Collegiate School. There were at this time three competing branches of the college, one of which was located in New Haven. Through the mediation of Cotton Mather, the newly born institution had received a substantial donation from an English merchant called Elihu Yale, which the college trustees employed to build a fine building in New Haven. Eventually, this branch of the college prevailed and all students, the young Edwards among them, had to move to the new premises. However, the coming together of all three branches of the college only became possible after the controversy over the unorthodox beliefs of a tutor had been settled. The tutor was the Arminian theologian Samuel Johnson, who, after being removed from Yale College, would “defect to the great Puritan nemesis, Anglicanism” (Marsden, A Life, 35). Thus, by 1719, the fledgling academic institution already seemed to show its determination to be the guardian of orthodoxy in New England. The new college was considered necessary by many in New England since Harvard College had, from the early eighteenth century, “begun to adopt more liberal attitudes in religious matters, reflecting the growth of Arminian views” (Middleton, 21 ! 270). Modern thought had already found its way into the college’s curriculum during the second half of the seventeenth century, as is shown by the fact that its graduates were familiar with, and to some degree influenced by, the thought of key contemporary philosophers like Descartes (Miller, Mind, 121, 512 n. 15). Solomon Stoddard (Edwards’ maternal grandfather), for instance, owned a copy of Descartes’ works as early as the 1660s, when he was still a student at Harvard College. Although some medieval assumptions about education were still made at Harvard in the eighteenth century, the new trends of “natural philosophy” (i.e., natural science) became increasingly influential and were eventually introduced as part of the curriculum (Marsden, A Life, 61). It is clear that in the early 1700s Yale was “far behind Harvard in the assimilation of modern learning” (Fiering, 29). During Edwards’ student years, the college of New Haven still stood for orthodoxy. However, by 1760 there was no substantial difference between the two colleges (Middleton, 270). Despite belonging to a class and social circle that in some respects resisted modern thought and new theological notions, the young student was clearly affected by the prevailing concern “with staying current” that existed among New England clergy. His “exhilarating reading of Locke, Newton, and a host of other modern thinkers convinced him that he stood at a pivotal point in New England’s history”. As Edwards’ notebooks from this period show, he was well aware of his intellectual abilities and was quite determined to become an international figure. Though his ambition included the advancement of the heavenly cause in the souls of men through the preaching of the gospel, he also hoped to “play a role in promoting God’s earthly kingdom at a crucial moment in the history of redemption” by partaking in the spread of Christian knowledge through “plain reason and demonstration, deduced from the Word of God” (Marsden, A Life, 60- 63; my italics). 22 ! In its struggle to fit the mould of the Enlightenment and modernity, American society received a considerable impulse from the Calvinism which permeated the Great Awakening and which Edwards so loyally defended. However, in general terms and internationally speaking, “the spread of Enlightenment opinions undercut the force of traditional Calvinism” (Noll, Rise, 45). Edwards played a significant role in his day due to his arduous intellectual efforts to commend a declining set of Reformed doctrines. He may be said to have been “both the last of the Puritans and the first of the evangelicals” in a modern sense (America’s God, 258).20 The Northampton pastor was not, as he has sometimes been made out to be, a provincial or archaic thinker. As Norman Fiering has shown, there may not have been any substantial difference between the quality of the education he received at Yale and that imparted in Harvard during the same period (28- 31). Edwards was familiar with the latest influential philosophers and was eager to enter into dialogue with contemporary thought. He had the ability to use the ideas and language of Enlightenment philosophy as a means to advance his own arguments and cause: Edwards in a sense reversed the ongoing process [of the secularization of thought] by assimilating the moral philosophy of his time and converting it back into the language of religious thought and experience […] [H]is progressivism must be seen not so much as a vision of a radically different future for society, but as a remarkable receptivity to the philosophical speculation of his own era insofar as it bore on the well-being of religion (Fiering, 60). !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 20 See n. 6 above for a definition of the term ‘evangelical’. 23 ! Although after his conversion Edwards adopted an essentially ‘heavenly’ and ‘otherworldly’ mindset,21 this did not mean that the intellectual disciplines of study and keeping in touch with contemporary culture and thought were neglected. Edwards’ quality and stature as a philosopher has generally been measured by the depth and skill he displayed as logician and polemicist in his late treatises on Original Sin, Freedom of the Will, The Nature of True Virtue and God’s End in Creation. These were written during the Stockbridge period (1751-1758), after being dismissed from Northampton, when pastoral cares were not so intense and less time and energy were devoted to sermon making. Avihu Zakai, however, has significantly noted that between 1735 and 1739 Edwards “immersed himself in his private notes in the effort to incorporate the New England awakening in the context of providential history”. His painstaking effort to “define God’s end in creation and to grasp the relationship between divine activity and history”, together with “the development of his apocalyptic interpretation” of both secular and sacred historical events, render this period crucial and pivotal in Edwards’ intellectual trajectory (Zakai, History, 211, 212). It was precisely after preaching his Redemption Discourse22 sermon series in 1739 that he changed his mind as to the “method” he should follow in writing what he intended to be an all-encompassing masterwork where he would “vindicate the faith against its detractors” (Marsden, A Life, 482). One last moment in Edwards’ intellectual life must be highlighted in order to grasp the relevance of these latter considerations regarding his view of divine activity in history and his greatest literary ambition. Not without much reluctance, in 1758 Edwards had finally accepted the call from the trustees of the College at Princeton to !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 21 As he himself expressed it in his Personal Narrative (16: 793-795).! 22 See n. 1 above. 24 ! become president of the young institution. In 1757 he had replied to the trustees’ offer by listing his personal and scholarly disqualifications. After explaining these, he wrote: “Beside these, I have had on my mind and heart, (which I long ago began, not with any view to publication) a great work, which I call a History of the Work of Redemption, a body of divinity in an entire new method, being thrown into the form of a history” (Miller, Edwards, 307). Jonathan Edwards was not able to complete this ambitious work as he died after being inoculated and contracting smallpox the same year he went to take his position as president of Princeton College. We know, however, that the seminal work for the “great” project he envisioned at the time of his death had been conceived, written and preached in the context of arduous study and in the pastor’s homiletic zenith of the late 1730s (Kimnach, 10: 91). 1. 2. b. Edwards the Convert. The moments and aspects which have been highlighted above as relevant and decisive for the shaping of Edwards’ thought would undoubtedly be considered by him to be lacking the most important of all, namely, his conversion. What could be more critical for his worldview than receiving the “sense of divine things” that would lead to the transformation of the “appearance of everything”? (16: 793; my italics) Edwards grew up in a religious culture where children from an early age “learned that in their natural state they deserved the flames of hell”. Edwards’ father, Timothy, who no doubt exerted great influence on his view of spirituality, emphasized one step of conversion in particular: “Potential converts not only had to recognize their guilt deserving eternal flames, but be ‘truly humbled’ by a total sense of their unworthiness” (Marsden, A Life, 27, 28). Some of his son’s earliest memories of 25 ! religious experiences were linked to Timothy Edwards’ ministry in East Windsor, as he first became concerned about spiritual matters some years before I went to college, at a time of remarkable awakening in my father’s congregation. I was then very much affected for many months, and concerned about the things of religion, and my soul’s salvation; and was abundant in duties. I used to pray five times a day in secret, and to spend much time in religious talk with other boys; and used to meet with them to pray together. I experienced I know not what kind of delight in religion. My mind was much engaged in it, and had much self-righteous pleasure […] But in process of time, my convictions and affections wore off; and I entirely lost all those affections and delights, and left off secret prayer […] and went on in ways of sin. (16: 790, 791) Later, during his college years, there was another moment of spiritual awareness when “it pleased God […] to seize me with a pleurisy; in which he brought me nigh to the grave, and shook me over the pit of hell”. However, Edwards tells us, “I fell again into my old ways of sin” (16: 791). The third and definitive instance of personal awakening Edwards recalls in his Personal Narrative came when he was eighteen, during his final period at Yale, and was also linked to the figure of his father. While staying at home for vacation in the spring of 1721, Edwards talked to his father about a recent breakthrough that was accompanied by an “overwhelming spiritual manifestation” (Marsden, A Life, 41, 42): Not long after I first began to experience these things, I gave an account to my father, of some things that had passed in my mind. I was pretty much affected by the discourse we had together. And when the discourse was ended, I walked abroad alone, in a solitary place in my father's pasture, for contemplation. And as I was walking there, and looked up on the sky and clouds; there came into my mind, a sweet sense of the glorious majesty and grace of God, that I know not how to express […] After this my sense of 26 ! divine things gradually increased, and became more and more lively, and had more of that inward sweetness. The appearance of everything was altered: there seemed to be, as it were, a calm, sweet cast, or appearance of divine glory, in almost everything. (16: 793) We must assume that the self-righteousness of his youth had been replaced by a duly humbled spiritual disposition. Edwards’ experience of conversion, however, is expressed in strikingly positive terms and enveloped in the language of glory rather than in Thomas Hooker’s language of humiliation.23 Perhaps for this reason the young candidate for the ministry, being imbued with the New England Puritan tradition, had not thought at first “that there was anything spiritual, or of a saving nature in this” (16: 793). 1. 2. c. Edwards the Minister. Whereas the figure of his father is almost pervasive in the tracing of Edwards’ journey towards a consolidated conversion, his first steps in the pastoral and preaching ministry took place far away from parental oversight. In August 1722, the young Yale M. A. graduate set off to New York as an unordained assistant, or “supply”, pastor at a Presbyterian church (Marsden, A Life, 46). There, the intensity of his personal awakening did not wane as he continued with his “eager pursuit after more holiness”. His keenness and intent on making the most of the time lying ahead was fueled by “reflections on my past life, considering how late it was, before I began to be truly religious”. On the 12th of January 1723, Edwards writes, “I made a solemn dedication of myself to God […] giving up myself, and all that I had to God; to be for the future in no respect my own” (16: 795, 796). The young minister combined an essentially !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 23 Avihu Zakai makes this same observation about the “morphology of Edwards’s conversion”, quoting Yarbrough and Adams (7): “What is absent from Edwards’s conversion is ‘the experience of “legal fear,”’, or terror, which constituted ‘a key element in most [Puritan] morphologies’ (History, 66, 69, 70). The same issue is dealt with in Marsden’s biography (A Life, 57, 58). 27 ! contemplative and ‘otherworldly’ mindset, matching his rather melancholy character, with a keen interest in “anything that happened in any part of the world”. He was “earnest to read public newsletters […] to see if I could not find some news favorable to the interest of religion in the world”, and at the same time “frequently used to retire into a solitary place, on the banks of Hudson’s River, at some distance from the city, for contemplation on divine things, and secret converse with God”. When he found the time to socialize with Mr. John Smith, with whom he lived, their “conversation used much to turn on the advancement of Christ’s kingdom in the world, and the glorious things that God would accomplish for his church in the latter days” (16: 797). It is crucial to understand, before dealing with Edwards’ homiletics in the Redemption Discourse of 1739, that in his eschatological scheme the course of universal history was closely tied to God’s action in and through “his church”. What went on at the pulpit and the pew was as decisive as governments’ policies, military strategies or overseas commercial developments. His apocalyptic interpretation of sacred and secular history, together with his sermonic and exegetical strategies, constituted, according to Sacvan Bercovitch, one of his major contributions to furthering colonial Puritan nationalistic thought (Jeremiad, 98, 99). The inevitable conclusion resulting from Edwards’ premises was that revivals and ministers of the Word (and hence himself) were at the centre of historical climax and prophetic fulfillment (Stout, Soul, 204). Whether one considers this view of the importance of the preaching office a delirious exaggeration or not, the moment was drawing near when Edwards would take up an objectively relevant position in the social and religious scene of New England. In coming years, he would be called to take the place of his reputable grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, as leader of the Connecticut River Valley congregation at Northampton. 34 ! many more people in their mid and late twenties living with their parents than in previous generations. At the geopolitical level, there were recurrent Indian hostilities in settlements near the border, which would certainly have caused social unrest (Marsden, A Life, 150-152). Jonathan Edwards would make the most of every earthly anxiety for the advancement of God’s kingdom. Nevertheless, this anxiety was not an end in itself but the means for realizing one’s absolute dependence on God and, ultimately, for experiencing the new birth. As George Marsden has expressed it: “The travail of the new birth might be excruciating, but that was God’s way of working” (A Life, 164, 165). The direct social impact on the town’s life was considerable even if their pastor tended to magnify some aspects when he wrote about the revival retrospectively. His own life and relationships with his relatively new flock were certainly affected as his parishioners, Marsden explains, daily “filled his home, waiting to see him for counseling”. Under his influence, “the spiritual fervor of the town seems to have gone beyond what anyone had previously seen” and the people seemed to follow their “worldly business” only as an inevitable part of their duty, for they infinitely preferred to be occupied in the “immediate exercise of religion” than in pursuing worldly gain. Prayer meetings, bimonthly communion services where dozens of new converts were received, private meetings (or ‘societies’) where hymns were sung for the first time;28 all these communal experiences made up the atmosphere that attracted numerous visitors to Northampton and caused much controversy over “enthusiasm” in New England. Whether sympathetic or skeptical, there seemed to be no question among observers about the fact that the town was undergoing an “extraordinary transformation” (Marsden, A Life, 156-161). !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 28 In most Calvinist churches since the Reformation only psalms were sung in meetings, and almost exclusively during formal public worship. 35 ! Many of the traits of the Northampton awakening (religious ‘societies’ in particular)29 became a model for other towns in the Connecticut River Valley where revivals had begun around the same time. The latter was obviously interpreted as providential by many who looked on the movement with a friendly eye. It must not be forgotten, however, that while Jonathan Edwards was a revivalist and a great advocate of preaching to move the affections, he also “deplored the hysteria” and represented the moderate position in the controversies that followed the Great Awakening (Tracy, 137, 138). Probably due to his first-hand experience before the prevalent, intercolonial revival of the 1740s, he was wary of excesses and fanaticism. For Edwards, as soon as the work of God’s Spirit began in the lives of a people, Satan should be expected to be working against it and imitating the genuine fruits of revival. Spiritual visions or ecstatic experiences were precisely the sort of work that Satan could easily imitate and, therefore, these should never be considered definitive signs or ‘marks’ of a true conversion or genuine awakening. The most important fruit of true piety and revival was “communal holiness” (Tracy, 123). For this reason Edwards’ preaching shifted from the intense and urgent call to repentance and faith (at the height of the revival), to an emphasis on growth in holiness during the second half of the decade (Murray, New Biography, 150, 151). The picture of the ‘hellfire preacher’ making superstitious people terrified that has so often been handed down in history is clearly unwarranted. Of course, the severity and emphases of revivalist preachers now seem to belong to another era. But Edwards, while being keen on exploiting people’s anxieties (as I have argued above), was well aware that some of his hearers “often suffered many needless distresses of thought, in which Satan probably [had] a great hand, to entangle them and block up their way” to !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 29 See n. 13 above. 36 ! conversion and spiritual comfort (4: 162). Such was the case of Edwards’ own uncle, Joseph Hawley, who was a successful merchant and a congregant at Northampton’s church. At the height of the awakening he had become “despairing and unable to sleep” due to a deep concern over “the state of his soul”. A depression and his unwillingness to “listen to reason or take advice” finally led him to commit suicide by slitting his own throat on the Sabbath morning of 1 June 1735 (Marsden, A Life, 163, 164). Although this event has often been taken to mark the beginning of the awakening’s decline, Edwards observed that by “the latter part of May, it began to be very sensible that the Spirit of God was gradually withdrawing from us, and after this time Satan seemed to be more let loose, and raged in a dreadful manner. The first instance wherein it appeared was a person's putting an end to his own life, by cutting his throat” (4: 206). And so the events seemed to be providentially in sync with the beginning of decline just as they had accompanied the hopeful early stages of the revival. 1. 3. b. Decline and the Scene for the Redemption Discourse. Since the present study must gradually move on from the biographical to more rhetorical and literary considerations, this last point of the introductory section will focus particularly on what different scholars have gathered from their careful analysis of Edwards’ homiletics and preaching ministry during the second half of the 1730s. Nevertheless, some observations have already been made previously regarding the intellectual significance of these years (p. 22 above) and a couple of contextual details will still be pointed out. In his introduction to volume 19 of the Yale edition of Edwards’ works, M. X. Lesser observes that among the sermons from the period going from 1734 to 1738 the theme which stands out is “conversion and declension” (19: 4). From the pulpit, 37 ! Edwards had sought to reverse “dullness” and immorality in “degenerate times” and he relentlessly fought against what he perceived as an Arminian tide threatening New England (Lesser, 19: 9-13). When the fruits of revival began to be felt, Edwards combined “technical mastery [of the sermon] with great optimism concerning what could be accomplished through pastoral preaching” (Lesser, 19: xii).30 He was not, however, so naïve as to think that the intensity and level of emotion experienced during the winter and spring of 1734-35 could be maintained indefinitely. As Harry Stout observes regarding the late 1730s, “in each mark of vitality he saw signs of decay and approaching judgment” (22: 3). Though Edwards is sure to have been disappointed after the general decline of religious zeal (Marsden, A Life, 159), he conveniently developed a view whereby “decline” was, together with “revival”, incorporated into the “historical structure and pattern of the redemptive process”. Edwards was thus able to combine a rhetoric of urgency, insinuating potentially imminent changes, with a vision of God’s action in history as “gradual” (Zakai, History, 250) and, consequently, he could call his congregation (and himself) to persevere patiently. Again, the overarching doctrine of divine sovereignty provided assurance and the comfort that the “sudden surge and fall” of Northampton’s “little revival” did not escape God’s purpose of bringing glory to himself (Zakai, History, 211). The waxing and waning of the Spirit’s presence, as perceived and felt by men, were both part of the unfolding of God’s predetermined plan for the church and the world. Even if the waning of the town’s spiritual fervor had to some extent been a humbling experience for their leader, the years 1736 to 1739 would see the publication !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 30 These words are actually from the general editor of the ‘Sermons and Discourses’ volumes, Wilson Kimnach, in his ‘Note to the Reader’. 38 ! and wide circulation of the Faithful Narrative31 and the first and only sermon compilation published during Edwards’ lifetime, Discourses on Various Important Subjects (Boston, 1738). In the wider scene, his leadership was being strengthened despite temporal appearances of defeat. While many local concerns kept him busy in his demanding pastoral office, at the individual and personal level Jonathan Edwards may have been quite satisfied and hopeful, as it was during this time that he “won international attention as a preacher” (Kimnach, 10: 91). It was precisely the English editors of the Faithful Narrative, Isaac Watts and John Guyse, who were first in integrating the Northampton awakening within the universal framework of salvation history (Zakai, History, 208, 209). In reply to the Boston minister Benjamin Colman, who had sent them a draft of the account of conversions, Isaac Watts wrote: “We are of [the] opinion that so strange and surprising work of God that we have not heard anything like it since the Reformation, nor perhaps since the days of the apostles, should be published…” (Goen, 4: 36). The allusion to the “days of the apostles” evinces the level of excitement and expectations after receiving the news of revival in the American colonies. Edwards himself had not minimized the matter and had “constructed the revival as an intercolonial event” (Kidd, 18). During the late 1730s, the Northampton minister tried to make sense of something as real, tangible, and with so many pastoral implications as the recent revival, while at the same time he began to show “a more speculative preoccupation with history”, both historiographical and mythic (Stout, 22: 4, 9). Envisioning the grand-scale implications of the recent past and pondering the potential of the present, Edwards “found breathing room for big thoughts and substantial reading” while he went on with the duties of weekly sermon making (Stout, 22: 10). !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 31 See n. 26 above. 39 ! General editor of Edwards’ ‘Sermons and Discourses’32 Wilson Kimnach points out that in the sermons produced and preached during this decade there was a growing complexity that finally made the “sermon series” the only suitable form for setting forth his thoughts and reflections: [A] most notable development in this period is the inevitable breaking up of long and complex sermons into true series. Thus, there is the series of three sermons on John 16:8 (1730), the series of five sermons on 2 Corinthians 13:5 (1735), the series of sixteen sermons (1738) later published as Charity and its Fruits, the series of thirty sermons (1739) later published as A History of the Work of Redemption, the series of six sermons on the parable of the sower […] Indeed, it seems obvious that, at least from 1735, there is an increased tendency to preach treatises from the pulpit. Study of the “History of Redemption” sermon series manuscripts reveals that much of the series was written in the manner of a treatise. (10: 105) Sermon series were part of the homiletic tradition handed down from Puritanism but what made the Redemption Discourse a “different kind of project” was the fact that Edwards was basing thirty sermons on a single verse of Scripture (Wilson, 9: 5). Apart from the religious ‘pulse’ of Jonathan Edwards’ congregation and his intellectual and homiletic developments, some details concerning the state of Northampton have to be mentioned at this stage. Although Edwards had by now secured his position as the successor of Solomon Stoddard, the social and economic evolution of the town after 1735 made the people grow “away from the ability or the desire to participate” in what had become their pastor’s “ideal vision of community life” (Tracy, 122). The series he preached on love (or ‘charity’) during 1738 was aimed at establishing and strengthening the bonds of the community, and it was not unconnected !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 32 The Yale edition has a total of seven volumes (out of twenty-six) consisting of sermons only. 40 ! to the following year’s dissertation on history, since Edwards had found, Marsden argues, that “Christ’s redemptive love was the key to all history” (A Life, 193). The Puritan ideal for a Christian commonwealth continued to be the one that John Winthrop had spelled out in “A Model of Christian Charity” a century earlier but, as we shall see in chapter 2, Edwards had significant and innovative contributions to make. Northamptonites had lately busied themselves with practical concerns such as the building of a new meetinghouse and a “town house for secular meetings”. The former was finished in 1737 and the latter in 1739 (Tracy, 130). For the first time in the town’s history, “ecclesiastical and governmental functions” were physically separated. Taken symbolically, this “segregation” was a threat to the New England tradition of clerical authority and Edwards, who may have perceived it as such, was hence all the more keen to “assert the importance of religion”. The new and larger church building was a suitable “stage” for the ingenious theologian’s expository and apologetic enterprise of the Redemption Discourse (Wilson, 9: 3, 4). If “the minister’s proper sphere was [now] clearly separate from the business of everyday life” (Tracy, 130), he would make it his business to endow Sabbath and lecture days33 with solemn importance. While Jonathan Edwards’ loss of empathy or his being out of touch with his people during these years may be harder to trace34, the loss of power, or the struggle to maintain it, as the town’s minister is manifestly seen in at least two facts. First, he was significantly left out of the committee (of which his grandfather Stoddard had always been a member) that was to decide over the assignment of seats in the new !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 33 The Redemption Discourse was preached (at least partly) on Thursday evenings, which were the appointed days for lectures in Northampton and elsewhere. 34 Obviously, by the mid and late 1740s we can find clear signs of the distance there was between Edwards and his people in general, which finally resulted in his dismissal from the Northampton pastorate in 1750. 41 ! meetinghouse. These decisions were highly controversial in the town during the two years preceding Edwards’ delivery of the history of redemption series (Tracy, 125, 126). The second fact showing tensions between pastor and church members were the ongoing quarrels over his salary. In the year 1744, Edwards agreed to have an amount fixed permanently because he was weary of “the annual struggle for an adequate salary” (Claghorn, 16: 149). We may assume that this struggle35 had been going on for several years, including 1739. In March 1739, therefore, Edwards set out to share his reflections on the history of redemption with the church of Northampton from a position of growing prestige throughout the colonies and abroad but a less flattering one at the local level. It was also a time of high expectations in the colonies as George Whitefield’s first tour was to start toward the end of that same year. And although Edwards partook in the enthusiasm caused by the latter event, his most immediate pastoral worries were those concerning the establishing of his people in the truth and the consolidation of a congregation who had experienced revival recently enough to still be mindful of spiritual matters, but too long ago to not be taking a new step in spiritual growth and to not be considering the deeper implications of their conversion, which was “not an end in itself” in their pastor’s view (Murray, New Biography, 151). !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 35 Edwards did not hesitate to address the issue of ministers’ salaries from the pulpit as far back as 1741, in the middle of the Great Awakening. See his sermon “Pastor and People Must Look to God” in The Salvation of Souls (145, 146). 42 2. RHETORIC OF HISTORY AND DIVINE AGENCY In the present chapter I set out to search for the main keys in Jonathan Edwards’ rhetoric of history and in his concept of divine agency. Before I actually analyze the Redemption Discourse closely (chapters 3 and 4), it is essential to know where Edwards was simply following a traditional approach to history and where and how he was departing from New England and Puritan legacy. In order to make a comprehensive approach to his historical discourse, the scope of this section will go from the most particular observations about his vision of history to the most general, seeking to understand and analyze how each aspect relates to the different strands of Edwardsean rhetoric. A ‘particular’ observation could be, for instance, the mere finding that in his historiography, as opposed to all other English and American Puritan historians, Edwards did not exalt any political figure since he refused “to accord earthly rulers a role in providential history” (Zakai, History, 251). More general observations (again, regarding historical discourse) will need to be made and explained, as, for example, the acknowledged fact that Jonathan Edwards envisioned history as progressive, in contrast with the Augustinian concept of unresolved and ongoing conflict between the heavenly and earthly cities (Augustine, The City of God, passim.; cf. Lee, Theology, 214, 215; Marsden, A Life, 197). The method I have chosen to help me spell out these ‘keys’ in Edwards’ rhetoric of history is to compare his concept of divine agency in history (whether past, present or future), in relation to several theological tenets of the Protestant faith, with that developed by preceding representative colonial figures. Four New English authors will serve this purpose, three belonging to the first generation of American Puritans (John Winthrop, John Cotton and Thomas Shepard) and one to the third (Cotton Mather). The latter will be particularly helpful in setting the New England philosophical/theological 43 scene at the turn of the century. Furthermore, since Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana was deliberately written as a historical work, it will serve to close up on some of the most relevant aspects to this dissertation, such as the use of historical narrative in colonial oratory, the role of historical considerations in sermons,1 or ‘providence’ as a key to God’s intervention in history. By sketching out the evolution of these Puritans’ theological notions, how they relate to colonial historical thought, and American society’s simultaneous transition from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century, it will become much clearer why and how Jonathan Edwards developed “a singular rhetoric of history” (Zakai, History, 275). It must also be pointed out that while at this stage I am still drawing most of the material for analysis from sermons and works other than the Redemption Discourse, special attention is paid to the chronology of all sources due to the relevance of their connection with the events, already laid out in chapter 1, preceding and following the 1739 sermon series. 2. 1. Edwards vs. Winthrop: Love, Community and History John Winthrop’s2 vision of the church, individual Christians and God’s means of ruling over a people or community must be framed in the context of the “theocratic universe” of seventeenth century Puritanism. Moreover, in the context of the migration and the setting up of the New England colonies, the background for “A Model of 1 Several sermons, most by Mather himself, are inserted throughout his eclectic work. 2 Before immigrating to and establishing the colony of Massachusetts, where he was to be governor, John Winthrop was justice of peace in the English town of Groton. A Cambridge graduate, like most Puritans, Winthrop’s motivation for migrating during the reign of Charles I seems to have been mostly religious since, humanly and financially speaking, he “still had so much to lose at Groton” when he left (Middleton, 73-75). He has been accorded a place in colonial American literature due to the preaching of “A Model of Christian Charity” on board the Arbella (Heimert & Delbanco, 81ff). 50 predicting divine judgment as a consequence of the excessively individualistic spirit that was driving some within the community (Heimert & Delbanco, 98, 99). The very congregation that was addressed on board the Arbella in 1630 may have been seen as a potential prey of the same spiritual malady that ruling Puritans perceived in the entrepreneurial tendencies of migrants. In contrast with this perspective, for Edwards “the true mark of sacred, ecclesiastical history was not the social and political event but the religious revival, whereby the Spirit transformed the human condition”. Though his “historiography” includes “earthly occurrences” (natural phenomena, political or military conflicts, etc.), the “history of God’s work of redemption concerns primarily the saving acts of God in time and does not depend on worldly affairs” (Zakai, History, 180, 181). In colonial Puritan or ‘covenantal’9 thought, the individual’s spiritual experience was not distinctly incorporated into their vision of God’s intervention within the historical process (especially when viewing events taking place in their own immediate context) but, rather, divine agency was mainly considered within the dimension of a community’s relation to a somewhat distant but predictable deity. Perry Miller discovered some key factors in his comprehensive study of the ‘New England mind’ which are pertinent for this present study. He found that in firstgeneration, orthodox Puritanism the divine “activities” of “everyday providence” and “grace” were kept “on separate planes” (Mind, 33). The divine activities of grace (which concerned only the elect) included coming to faith, achieving certainty of one’s new birth, or experiencing fellowship with God through prayer, reading or listening to the 9 ‘Covenant thought’ is used here to refer to the view of God and society which derived from ‘federal theology’, and it alludes to national, church or other collective covenants (see chap. 1, p. 5, n. 4 above). Although it has been argued that Edwards’ theological framework was in no way different from this inherited one in this respect (Stout, “The Puritans and Edwards”), it seems to me, as I explain, that there were fundamental ways in which his philosophy of history led him to modify the way he conceived of God’s relationship with individuals and communities. 51 Word. These things, which were demonstrations of divine initiative and His faithfulness to the “Covenant of Grace”, and their application to the individual belonged to the inscrutable dimension of God’s sovereign decrees, while the collective covenant had “articles” which “were to be fulfilled in time” and its rewards and punishments “were to be tangible and immediate”.10 God’s dealings with a people or nation implied his potential presence “here and now” whereas individual fellowship with the Spirit remained within the sphere of the invisible. By conferring such significance on the substance of church and other collective social covenants, which (considered on the spiritual scale) should have been second to the covenant of grace, New England society eventually lost sight of the transcendence of the latter, taking it for granted and mixing it with the social covenant derived from ‘federal theology’ (see n. 8 above): By 1700 the ministers were speaking familiarly of the Covenant of Grace, by which they meant the secret transaction of the individual and God, of the covenant of baptism, which pledged the children of saints to the church on the assumption that they were included in the Covenant of Grace, of the church covenant, of the social and political covenant, and lastly of this national covenant. At one level New England had developed the idea that they were an exceptional case, as the Jewish nation in Old Testament times, and therefore “lifted out of the flux of nature” and made to be “an exception to the cycles of history”. Consequently, God’s “special presence” and the potential for immediate divine intervention remained (in theory) unpredictable. Nevertheless, the theological and social tendency of this colonial covenantal thought was generally11 to “put restraints upon the absolute sovereignty of Jehovah” at both the collective and individual levels. A “good covenanted society” 10 See chap. 1 p. 13 for how the ‘covenant of grace’ took precedence over collective covenants during colonial revivals. 11 Cf. chap. 1 above, pp. 4, 5. 52 would prosper in this world and “a bad one” would get what it deserved; thus, the potential for a ‘mechanistic’ or cyclical vision of history was in the very fabric of New England thought (Miller, Mind, 478-484). As we saw in the preceding chapter12 regarding Edwards’ conversion, he can be said to have departed substantially from New England’s ‘preparationist’ tradition, whereby certain steps (including a high degree, and a prolonged process, of contrition) were to be undergone by any would-be convert. The mechanistic potential of this imposed pattern of conversion was radically different from the conviction Edwards came to through his own experience and theological discoveries. He saw his immediately and sovereignly bestowed ‘sense’13 (as opposed to one received gradually through preparation for grace) as crucial in being made fit to perceive glory and discern God’s creative and redemptive activity. By claiming that the “appearance of everything was altered” as a result of conversion, Edwards was conferring an objective value on a highly subjective experience since his newly acquired “sweet sense of the glorious majesty and grace of God” (16: 793) enabled him to perceive ultimate reality and not just secondary causes behind it (Lee, Theology, 82).14 Nothing was more glorious than God’s immediate presence with humans or creation, and hence it would seem inconceivable to find Edwards saying what Winthrop affirms in the opening lines of “A Model of Christian Charity”: 12 See pp. 24-26 above, especially n. 23. 13 See pp. 32, 33 above. 14 Lee points out that this idea of a God-given ‘sense’ does not imply that such “perfecting of vision” is to be achieved “through a spiritual ascent that totally transcends the earthly ideas of sensation but rather by setting those very ideas side by side—ultimately, side by side with the meaning of the whole reality as manifested in God’s history of redemption. Any mysticism that would abrogate the essential place of time and history in cognition is fundamentally incompatible with Edwards’ conception of the imagination” (Theology, 131). 53 God Almighty in his most holy and wise providence hath so disposed of the condition of mankind […] to hold conformity with the rest of his works, being delighted to show forth the glory of his wisdom in the variety and difference of the creatures; and the glory of his power, in ordering all these differences for the preservation and good of the whole; and the glory of his greatness, that as it is the glory of princes to have many officers, so this great king will have many stewards, counting himself more honored in dispensing his gifts to man by man, than if he did it by his own immediate hands. (83, my italics) Not that Edwards did not delight to see and explain the divine wisdom shown in setting up the world in such a way that secondary ‘means’ were appointed to order and bring about events; on the contrary, much of his vision of history analyzed in this dissertation is particularly concerned with this very dynamics in redemptive history (Schweitzer, 115, 116). But Edwards considered God to be glorified first and foremost in man’s utter and direct dependence on him,15 whether considered individually or collectively. Insofar as Winthrop’s text quoted above is referring to the created order or ‘common grace’,16 and not to the dispensation of saving grace or the Spirit, it may be thought that Edwards could have expressed himself in a similar way. Nevertheless, in his more sophisticated and mature thought (see n. 5 above), the concepts of contingency and divine agency were developed in a way that makes it difficult to establish different 15 See his early sermon God Glorified in Man’s Dependence (17: 200-212), the full title of which was “God Glorified in the Work of Redemption, by the Greatness of Man’s Dependence upon Him in the Whole of It” (Works, II, 2). Regarding the significance of Edwards’ view of conversion as articulated in this sermon, and its relation to his historical thought, see Zakai, History, 64, 198, 199. 16 ‘Common grace’ is the Calvinistic doctrine which serves to distinguish between the grace which Christians are exclusively the objects of and that which society at large benefits from, as, for example, through the restraint of gross sin by means of government and rules of decency, or through the achievements of art and science (“Common Grace”). 54 ‘degrees’ of immediacy or directness in God’s involvement in history and creation’s dependence on his constant activity: “The Puritans, of course, commonly believed the universe to be dependent upon God for its existence. But as Edwards makes plain, though he assumes this he intends to go beyond it; he is not thinking of God just ‘upholding’ the world, but constantly recreating it” (Moody, 101).17 As Miller’s conclusions have shown, New England covenant thought unwittingly led to, as it were, the taming of the sovereign God, and the categories of ‘providence’ in the general sense and divine ‘decrees’ became muddled, thus losing the potential for subjecting both collective and individual experiences to the “hidden God” that was originally the essence of Puritanism (Errand, 94; Mind, 21). Edwards’ rejection of this inherited theological development and his innovative idea that God is, as it were, constantly recreating the cosmos and regenerate souls in particular (6: 204; 3: 385, 401) made it possible to restore John Calvin’s doctrine of divine sovereignty to its preeminent role of encompassing all spiritual experience (Miller, Errand, 98). This is why the opening lines of Winthrop’s famous sermon (“A Model”, 82, 83) seem once again markedly applicable only to a collective whole, and there is no compelling argument for his 17 See Sang Hyun Lee, Theology, 70-72 for a detailed explanation of how Edwards maintained the “integrity” of the created order and natural laws while actually holding a radical view of God’s “immediate involvement in the cosmos” (72). The individual’s status as a relatively independent agent in Edwardsean ontology was nevertheless quite effectively and coherently articulated within this scheme of unquestionable divine sovereignty. The singularity of “perceiving beings” (i.e., individuals) was accounted for in that Edwards viewed “the position of human beings as both continuous with and also transcending nature. Intelligent beings as well as matter are all governed by similar principles─namely, laws […] As God creates, sustains, and works through the laws that govern human beings, he is acting without making use of certain other laws (i. e., the laws of material existence). God’s involvement in the existence and operation of intelligent creatures, then, is more immediate and direct than his relationship with the material realm” (73-75). Confer the same author’s discussion in his “Editor’s Introduction” to Yale’s edition of the works of Jonathan Edwards (Lee, 21: 53ff). 55 listeners to interpret what is being said as establishing an essential nexus between their own regeneration and the subsistence of the community whose foundations are allegedly being laid. Winthrop’s address, historic and momentous in many ways, does not bring together effectively the vital matters of the individual’s fellowship with God and fellowship with the community although these issues are, in fact, addressed in his text. In New England’s covenant tradition God appeared as an enemy or friend of the community with little or no reference to the individual’s ability to deal directly with or perceive that deity. A convert’s rebirth or his continued fellowship with God (to name just two instances of what was supposed to be an effect of immediate divine activity) were left out of what was considered tangible spiritual experience and consigned to the realm of inscrutable divine decrees. Visible worldly events or natural phenomena were given, by contrast, a spiritual status and were easily and consistently interpreted, in colonial literature at large, as major manifestations of the divine purpose in the community’s history. Edwards, on the other hand, was able to address the broadest subjects from the pulpit, like ‘universal history’ in the Redemption Discourse, without leaving out the individual’s experience, thus showing “his aim to bring the transcendent into the immanent” (Moody, 23).18 In an explanatory note on how he presented his congregation with God’s inescapable “objectivity” or transcendence and his immediate presence, Josh Moody writes: Edwards builds on his metaphysical understanding of the presence of God to preach the presence of God to both sinners and saints. Sinners should be awakened by the “amazing Consideration to think that they live and move in God who is angry with them 18 So much so, that William Scheick believes Edwards “treats history as an allegory of the conversion experience” (178). 56 every moment he is not an enemy at a distance from them nor is he only near to them he is in them and they in him …,” and also, “it should be of Great Comfort to saints that he that is their friend and father is alwaies present with them and In them...” (117, n. 137)19 Jonathan Edwards built his thought on New England’s heritage, and yet departed from its rhetorical and theological tradition in more than one respect. Apart from the general aspect of ‘collective’ or ‘communal’ culture enshrined in John Winthrop’s sermon that I have briefly touched on, there is still another point regarding Edwards’ vision of his congregation and of communal (ecclesiastical) life that is more concretely linked to the issue of God’s presence and agency in time and space: the administration of the sacrament of communion (or the Lord’s Supper) and the ordinance of the Word. The former had been, for a whole century before the time of the Great Awakening, an essential element of “heart religion” in European Reformed circles as well as in the American colonies. In fact, some of the revivalist preachers of Edwards’ own time considered “communion seasons” to be “a critical means to revival” (Kidd, 30-31, 35; Noll, Rise, 14, 15). As for the preaching of God’s Word, it was obviously considered by colonial Puritans (and evangelical churches at large) the main means by which the divine made itself present through the Spirit’s conviction of sinners, leading them to repent and be converted, and through its agency in instructing and edifying the saints. Although Winthrop implicitly refers to communion and preaching when he mentions “ordinances” (“A Model”, 89), it will be much more helpful for our purposes to analyze the issue of church government through, and the presence of God in, ordinances by comparing Edwards with the figure and thought of John Cotton. 19 Moody is quoting from an unpublished sermon manuscript; hence the lack of punctuation and the odd capitalization. 57 2. 2. Edwards vs. Cotton: God’s Kingdom on Earth H. R. Niebuhr insightfully noted that the revivalism of the 18th century did not identify divine rule with the prosperity and stability of the ecclesiastical or the “institutional”. The ‘kingdom of God’, therefore, was not to be seen as progressing primarily through the well-being and advancement of the “visible church”20 but, rather, “the reign of Christ was above all a rule of knowledge in the minds of men” (104, 105). At the time of, and during the run-up to, the Great Awakening in America, the idea of God’s presence among His people and the issues of church government (membership, ordinances, etc.) were becoming increasingly dissociated in converts’ and, more significantly, in some ministers’ minds. The general weakening of the New England ecclesiastical establishment during these years caused many to question the traditional role of clergymen as the only heralds of God’s message. Due to the popularity of lay and itinerant preaching and of religious societies, which constituted an alternative to one’s parish church, a lot of people (especially the youth) left their original congregations. The traditional criteria for regulating church membership or participation in communion simply became impracticable and doctrinal diversity grew rapidly due to the burgeoning of churches outside the tax-supported Congregational church (see pp. 9- 15 above). Thus, not only professing Christians but some of the most zealous ones in 20 The distinction between the visible and invisible church has existed at least since Saint Augustine but aquired particular importance during the English Reformation and later in Puritanism. It basically points to the impossibility of a pure church on earth and, therefore, to the assumption that there is a body of people (local congregations or organized denominations at the national, regional levels) who make up a professing Christian church but who are not literally the Church, or the body of true believers. For a succint explanation of these ideas and their relevance in early colonial America, see the first chapter of Edmund Morgan’s Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (1-32). 58 the land had no doubt of God being at work in and around them while they no longer considered traditional ordinances to be essential for their communion with the divine. Jonathan Edwards’ and John Cotton’s views on communion and church membership evolved in somewhat opposite directions. A notably skilled orator and a natural leader, Cotton’s early ministry in Old Boston, England, had been marked by controversy over the “treatment of the sacraments” and the exclusion “from full church membership” of some people in his congregation since he “maintained the highest standards of admission” to communion and membership (Heimert & Delbanco, 27-28, 93). However, during the 1640s, more than a decade after his migration to the colonies, the Boston senior minister’s stance during the controversy with Roger Williams21 showed an evolution towards a more moderate (or lax) position regarding the issue of who should be welcome to join or remain in the ecclesiastical establishment (see pp. 60- 63 below). As for Edwards, his increasingly strict opinion on admission to the Lord’s Table and church membership was precisely the reason why he was confronted by his congregation in the late 1740s and finally dismissed from Northampton church in 1750.22 After the Great Awakening had died out, Edwards began to consider that his grandfather’s practice of keeping communion open to any who merely professed the 21 Having been trained for the ministry in England, Roger Williams arrived in Massachusetts in 1631. His concern for Christian purity and his ideas about the need to separate church and state led him to hold separatist views which were most unwelcome in Massachusetts. He lived for two years in Plymouth and William Bradford himself said that he was “godly and zealous ... but very unsettled in judgement”. After a few but intense years of controversy and of denying the authority of the general court in spiritual matters, Williams was banished in 1635 and he settled in Rhode Island (Middleton, 79, 80). Controversy with John Cotton, however, continued during the 1640s through an exchange of letters and essays refuting each other’s views on civil and ecclesiastical government (Heimert & Delbanco, 196- 199). 22 For a detailed account of this episode, see Marsden, A Life, 345-365. 59 Christian faith and did not lead a scandalous life was not biblical. He unsuccessfully tried to convince Northamptonites that his predecessor had been wrong in considering the Lord’s Supper a means of conversion and he held that any candidate for communicant member of the church should, from then on, provide (orally or in writing) a heartfelt and convincing narrative of his or her conversion. Although the exact moment of Edwards’ change of mind is not easy to trace, it seems clear that it was not until the decline of the Great Awakening that he began to seriously question the church policy he had inherited from his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard (Hall, 12: 53-62). The way John Cotton’s view of church and society evolved, which eventually determined the model passed down to eighteenth century New England, is closely linked to his view of divine agency through the establishment of Christ’s kingdom on earth and in history. Likewise, the fact that Edwards could see no flaw in the inherited socio-ecclesiastical model by the end of the 1730s is linked to what his expectations were concerning revival, which he viewed as the concrete form of divine intervention in the order of time. John Cotton conceived of the Puritan ‘errand’ in the American colonies as a climactic, apocalyptic23 event, and he gradually came to endow his own way (the ‘congregational way’) of church government with historical significance: “Rejoicing at the Wilderness-Exile state of the Church in New England, where Puritans could fashion their congregational way, Cotton was more than confident that here the way was open not only for the realization of the Kingdom of Christ but even for the imminent coming of the New Jerusalem as foretold in the Apocalypse”. His model, according to which the 23 Avihu Zakai explains in Exile, 184-190 how John Cotton’s vision of the eventual consummation of history was “based upon the course and progress of Congregationalism in sacred history”. The key work in this intellectual development was a “revolutionary exposition” of chapter 13 of the book of Revelation (188, 189). 66 and church life, always related to revival, was not essentially dependent on ordinances, social order or any other external aspects. The limited influence of John Cotton’s works and social theory on Edwards (Miller, “Sociology”, 50) may account for the striking detachment there is between the essence of spirituality and church ordinances for the Northampton revivalist. In one of his sermon series preached during the particularly significant inter-revival period (Minkema, Neele & McCarthy, ix), just over a year before beginning the Redemption Discourse, Edwards observed that the reason why “false professors” of Christianity abounded in the church was that “[t]hose that are indeed members of the mystical body of Christ, they can’t look into others’ hearts, and certainly determine who are of their society and who are not, so as to refuse to admit or receive any to be of their company, or to partake with them in their external privileges”. Regarding an individual’s reception into the visible church, “officers and rulers of the church, they are none of them searchers of men’s hearts. And though some of them may be well-skilled in experimental religion and soul concerns, yet Christ has not seen fit to make their private judgment of the state of men’s souls, their rule in admission of members into the church” (Parables, I, 69). External ordinances and appearances are not just secondary in the spiritual order; they are so unconnected to the real essence of God’s presence28 with a people that the unregenerate may “abound” in the visible church without disturbing church order or conditioning the administration of the sacraments. However, the implications of this observation take the argument (in a typically Edwardsean fashion) one step further: if an apparently healthy façade does not necessarily determine that ‘all 28 Edwards’ view would be different by the end of the 1740s regarding the reality of God’s presence with his people in communion (Marsden, A Life, 353, 354), but in the present study I am examining the views and rhetoric of the revivalist during the second half of the 1730s and early 1740s. 67 is well’ in a congregation, neither does a declining, apparently dead, stage in the Church’s journey through history automatically rule out the reality of God’s hand and presence upon it. Edwards wanted his hearers to envision divine activity in their own hearts and in history as one and the same; as proceeding from the transcendent God who had made himself so manifest in their recent local revival (providentially synchronized with other colonial awakenings),29 and whose unremitting love could be immanently experienced by the elect despite the appearance of present circumstances. In order to drive home the message of the parable of the ten virgins in Matthew 25, Edwards identified the moment when the ten virgins “began to grow drowsy and fall asleep” as a period which may represent the times that commonly follow remarkable outpourings of the Spirit of God, viz., times of deadness in religion, and the prevailing of sin. Christ, in this part of this parable, doubtless means to teach us the same things as he teaches the disciples in the foregoing chapter, at the 12th verse: “and because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold.” Christ is there speaking how it would be amongst his professing people before his coming, and so it is in this parable. When iniquity abounds, and it is a time of general decay of religion, the love of many waxes cold, i.e., totally ceases. Though they seemed to have their affections much warmed for a while, and when they heard the Word, even with joy received it; yet their goodness proves as the “morning cloud, and the early dew that passeth away” [Hos. 13:3]. And the love of true Christians in a sense waxes cold; as it ceases, its liveliness and the exercises of it do greatly fail, though it don’t totally cease in their hearts. (Parables, I, 93) In the Edwardsean scheme, the principle of love (as we observed when comparing it with Winthrop’s ‘charity’ in 2. 1.) is an active, dynamic force which communicates 29 See chap. 1 p. 38 above. 68 God’s immediate presence at conversion and is bound to continue gradually working in any person or community that has received it.30 This progressive aspect of God’s activity does not exclude a measure of divine agency in redemptive history through the very pattern of rise and fall of love, zeal or revival. There is, on the one hand, the assurance that divine love “don’t totally cease” in the elect’s hearts, so that there is a relentless progressive aspect to God’s intervention. On the other hand, an awakening or the Spirit’s outpouring “in an exceptional way [would happen] only when the welfare of his church was gravely threatened, or when a desperate state of sin and degeneration prevailed among his chosen, or during a sad decline of interest in religion in the world as a whole” (Zakai, History, 250, 256). The issue of the intrinsic inefficiency of external ordinances is not wholly absent from the cited passage, as in Edwards’ interpretation of the parable some people “heard the Word” but finally proved to be out of touch with the divine. Being under the ordinance of the Word, even under the teaching of sound doctrine, was not seen ultimately by Edwards as a guarantee that a people were the object of positive divine activity, nor did it mean that those ministers preaching were being used as ‘means’ in the advancement of God’s work. 30 It is significant that in a time of growing individualism like the 18th century Edwards should define the individual as an essentially ‘relational’ being: “The regenerate person is nothing less than a dynamic force that would seek out and know and love an unending number of beings in an unending number of circumstances [...] The regenerate minds and hearts participate in God’s never-ending activity of self-communication” (Lee, Theology, 113). Though this principle was eternal in its essence and therefore transcended history, it was nevertheless inserted and had its fruition within the historical process and the immediate social context. For Edwards, then, the certainty of having partaken in a genuine revival (where a number of people are known to have been born again at a given time) is cause enough to be confident that there are outward effects to be expected, not only from each individual who is assured of his salvation and seeks to bear fruits in keeping with his profession, but in relationships which inevitably follow the undergoing of “a renewed experience of the presence of God” (Moody, 21). 69 Before moving onto another representative, and comparatively more important, text regarding Edwards’ view of ordinances, and of the Word in particular, it is interesting to note that just after a conventionally structured and delivered passage like the one above,31 we find a clear example of an effort on the preacher’s part to “forge” in his people “a new historical consciousness”32 apart from exhorting them to piety and self-examination in the ‘application’ of the text (Parables, I, 96-101), as was the custom. He tells Northamptonites that the “insensibility that there [is] in sleep, does consist in forgetting what is past, and in being insensible of what is present, and inconsiderate of what is to come”. Edwards then breaks each of these temporal considerations into three different heads, backing each one of them with Old Testament verses. The underlying hortatory tone of this section, and especially of the verse from Deuteronomy used to reinforce the point that some are “unmindful of what is future”, is somewhat striking as the sermon has not yet reached the moment for application (93, 94; see Deut. 32:29). This evinces, it would seem, a keen interest on the preacher’s part to have his hearers apply themselves to a historically-oriented meditation and due reflection on the doctrine. To illustrate how clearly revival had become, in Edwards’ framework and rhetoric of history, the ‘concrete agent’ of divine agency, as opposed to John Cotton’s 31 Edwards is simply carrying out an exegesis of the Matt. 25 passage. He predictably takes the immediate context into account in his reference to “the 12th verse” of the “foregoing chapter”, and establishes connections with Old Testament prophecy (prophet Hosea) which, regarding the eschatological nature of the Matthean text, would be expected by his audience. 32 Zakai, History, 275. Avihu Zakai and Harry Stout (22: 9, 14) both make the same observation, namely, that Edwards’ own growing interest in various historical issues and their relation to the work of redemption conditioned not just his own thought but the way he addressed his congregation during the years of revival, especially the late 1730s and early 1740s (cf. 1. 3. b. above, especially pp. 36 and 37). 70 apocalyptic vision (and that of his successors) whereby the realization of the Kingdom of God and his direct rule over a people was achieved through the establishment of Congregationalist church-government (Zakai, Exile, 196-198), a close look at his most important text on the Great Awakening will suffice. In Some Thoughts Concerning the Revival (Boston, 1743), where revivalism is moderately defended against religious formalism and the detractors of the movement, we find Edwards solemnly claiming that God’s awakening in the colonies is no less than the “day of his power” and will prove to be the day of his “wrath” for those who oppose the work. When he writes that ministers must “acquaint themselves with things pertaining to the Kingdom of God”, he clearly means not just supporting but carrying out revival. To be sure, the gospel ministry consists in the “administration of God’s word and ordinances”, as these are the “principal means” appointed to work “on the souls of men”. So far, Edwards seems to be in line with standard New England ecclesiastical legacy. However, he makes his mind known to his readers by asserting that if “ministers preach never so good doctrine, and are never so painful and laborious in their work, yet if at such a day as this, they show to their people that they are not well affected to this work […] they will be very likely to do their people a great deal more hurt than good” (4: 371, 374, 375). There is no doubt that for Edwards no considerations of church order or ministerial prerogatives, like preaching or the administering of ordinances, could be placed higher on the spiritual scale than the work of revival, which was at this time so manifest across the land. However, it may be argued from one of the above-quoted assertions that the “principal means” in the internal and lasting work of the Spirit “on the souls of men” was still found in church “ordinances” for Edwards (4: 374), as it had been for New England Puritans. And surely this internal action in the heart was more ultimate than 71 any apparent, external signs of ‘religious affections’, however genuine. So it has been argued in this very section. But though Edwards’ own logic might seem to support this objection, his use of the phrase “principal means” in yet another passage from Some Thoughts betrays his intention of maintaining revival as the most immediate and definite form of divine government and intervention in the order of time. Among the many revival practices denounced by Old Lights as contravening the rules of church order, there was that of keeping persons together that have been under great affections, which have appeared in such extraordinary outward manifestations. Many think this promotes confusion […] and that when any in a congregation are [so] strongly seized that they can't forbear outward manifestations of it, they should be removed […] But I can't but think that those that thus object go upon quite wrong notions of things: for though persons ought to take heed that they don't make an ado without necessity, for this will be the way, in time, to have such appearances lose all their effect; yet the unavoidable manifestations of strong religious affections tend to an happy influence on the minds of bystanders, and are found by experience to have an excellent and durable effect; and so to contrive and order things, that others may have opportunity and advantage to observe them, has been found to be blessed as a great means to promote the work of God; and to prevent their being in the way of observation, is to prevent the effect of that which God makes use of as a principal means of carrying on his work at such an extraordinary time, viz. example. (4: 400; my italics) Whereas Winthrop, Cotton and other representative New England Puritans developed a philosophy of history which eventually led colonial Americans to view “sacred space” (i.e., their own colony) as that which made them an exceptional people in God’s eyes (Zakai, Exile, 120-155), for Edwards it is the event (not a place) of revival which calls for exceptional considerations. The overturning of social and ecclesiastical order was 72 justifiable in terms of the “extraordinary time” the colonies were facing and undergoing. The administration of traditional ordinances and instituted church practices made it possible to observe only the “visible church”, providing no tangible evidence of what God was doing in the hearts of individuals; however, “outward” or external manifestations, insofar as they were the “effect” of “strong religious affections”, must not be hidden from the public eye since they were the immediate effect of divine intervention. What was little less than repulsive for Old Lights was for Jonathan Edwards “blessed as a great means” or, rather, “principal means” in the cause-effect chain wherein the unfolding of God’s providential plan could be discerned. There is still more to be said on the visibility of the effects of God’s gracious work in a people, and the role this played in both New England thought and Jonathan Edwards’ philosophy, and consequently his rhetoric, of history. Was it possible to establish some ‘marks’ whereby the real members of Christ’s invisible and mystical body might be distinguished from the rest, thus enabling the keenest observer to discern God’s gracious activity more accurately? This point, however, will be dealt with in the next section as we compare Edwards to Thomas Shepard. The latter, as opposed to John Cotton, received ample consideration from and greatly influenced the Northampton pastor. 2. 3. Edwards vs. Shepard: The Visibility of God’s Work in The Saints Thomas Shepard, together with John Cotton and others, belonged to that first generation of colonial Puritans whose eschatology established that the advancement of the “Kingdom and Government of Christ in his Churches” largely depended on 73 successfully implementing and enforcing the congregational way (Zakai, Exile, 191).33 Shepard’s persistent use of the word “Churches” in the plural form betrays the idea that the establishing of particular congregations according to this rule was in a way tantamount to making Christ’s Kingdom concrete and, in a way, visible. Even before the migration took place, the concern for holiness in the saints’ lives meant for Shepard and other English Puritans that those who would “keep their covenant with God” must “withdraw into godly covenanted societies” as a way of making the true Church visible in this world. If God’s work was to be discerned in a moment of historical climax, like the one migrating Puritans felt they were living in, it must be done by distinguishing between those who were the real subjects of God’s work and those who were not. The ecclesiastical means for implementing this ideal was to exclude the ungodly from communion (Zakai, Exile, 214, 215). A further means for separating the wheat from the tares, a rhetorical one, would be pursued by Thomas Shepard after settling as pastor in Cambridge, Massachusetts: the preaching of a sermon series where he set out to establish what the marks of a true believer were. This sermon series, which unfolds and applies the parable of the ten virgins (Matthew 25), deserves particular attention from anyone who wishes to understand Jonathan Edwards’ thought with regard to this issue of the true Christian’s marks or fruits. In his major treatise on Religious Affections (Boston, 1746), he quoted “more from Shepard than from any other writer, depending chiefly upon The Parable of the Ten Virgins” (Smith, 2: 54). Edwards’ own expository effort on the same biblical passage,34 though much shorter, shows a similar approach and concern to that of Shepard, namely, “the distinction between true and false Christians” (Minkema, Neele 33 Zakai is quoting from the preface in Allin & Shepard, 28-32. 34 Already referred to above (pp. 66-69). 74 & McCarthy, 33). Recognizing divine agency within and God’s government over history was for both preachers linked to the issue of the new birth and, in Edwards’ case, to the doctrine of assurance.35 Moreover, the historical transcendence of the matter for him lay in the notion that in perceiving the direct result of real conversions (or even just one conversion), a Christian could be said to be witnessing, whether in himself or in others, an event “more glorious […] than the creation of the whole material universe”. Indeed, [i]t is spoken of in Scripture as that which shews the exceeding greatness of God's power, and the glory and riches of divine grace, and wherein Christ has the most glorious triumph over his enemies, and wherein God is mightily exalted: and it is a work above all others glorious, as it concerns the happiness of mankind; more happiness, and a greater benefit to man, is the fruit of each single drop of such a shower, than all the temporal good of the most happy revolution in a land or nation amounts to, or all that a people could gain by the conquest of the world. (4: 344, 345) Such an elevated view of God’s work of redemption explains Edwards’ long-lasting concern about the ‘marks’ of true Christianity, his increasingly strict and exhaustive ‘tests’ of assurance and the appeal of Shepard’s Parable. Before continuing with the consideration of Shepard’s influence on Edwards’ view of the importance of the ‘visibility’ of the saints, it is worth noting that in the Redemption Discourse the idea of God’s work being beheld by men, or its appearing before the eyes of heavenly and earthly creatures, becomes crucial for the preacher’s rhetoric of history. The visibility of divine intervention in history may not be, as one might suspect, proportional to how sudden it is and how quickly its effects appear or spread. Edwards provides one historical example (that of the Roman empire being set 35 ‘Assurance’ is the “question of whether certainty of ultimate salvation is possible in this life” (“Assurance”). 75 up after the Greek) which for him showed that an “overturning of the world” being brought about “gradually” in no way meant that it was less radical or impressive; on the contrary, such providential changes could far exceed others in greatness and have more lasting, if temporary, effects (9: 276). Such logic provided a rationale for what I am calling ‘progressive’ divine agency in this dissertation. Edwards envisioned God as acting immediately first and foremost in revival and conversion (see p. 31 above and chap. 4 below). At the same time, providential divine activity could be expected to be progressive, as events were directed and chained in sequences to bring about Godappointed ends. Though providence and the internal saving work of the Spirit had traditionally been considered as eminently secret and inscrutable, Edwards seemed particularly interested in unveiling not just the motives or ends in specific historical instances of the advancement of God’s kingdom, but the divine dynamics implicit in all ‘providences’, whether in the dispensation of saving grace or in the accomplishment of ‘temporal’ purposes (e.g. the downfall of an empire, a defeat or victory in a battle, etc.). Having laid out what he understood to be the biblical doctrine of the fall or “destruction of Antichrist” (which, following the Reformed tradition, primarily meant the loss of power and influence by the Roman Catholic Church),36 Edwards reflected on how tangible and manifest divine agency was in history: I must also briefly answer to an inquiry, viz. why the setting up of Christ’s kingdom after his humiliation should be so gradual, by so many steps that are so long in accomplishment, when God could easily have finished it at once. Though it would be presumption in us to pretend to declare all God’s ends in this, yet doubtless much of the wisdom of God may be seen in it by us […] In this way the glory of God’s wisdom in 36 Though Edwards held this view in broad terms, ‘revival’ came to replace the struggle between Protestantism and the Roman Catholic Church as the central eschatological event (Zakai, History, 181). 82 hypocrite under heaven has” (219). But since religious enthusiasm and an excessive show of affections was a definite sign of hypocrisy (234), the internal work which had to be identified in order to attain assurance was more like a quiet “revealing” of the Spirit or an inwardly confirmed “word of promise” (213, 215).40 All in all, there was little ‘tangibility’ in this internal mark of the true believer. If genuine divine activity was to be thus discerned and measured, how could Edwards, who did not ascribe to conformity to ordinances the transcendence that his Puritan forefathers did, be satisfied in his keen observation of spiritual phenomena around him? In Edwards’ scheme, revival and the contemplation of God and his work of redemption stayed at the centre of assurance, keeping him optimistic about the genuineness of God’s work in and around him throughout the inter-revival period which mainly concerns this study. Though it is known that he eventually rejected any ‘methods’ whereby Christians might be led to rely on “momentary experience for assurance”, we must not assume that by the late 1730s he had already elaborated the doctrine in such a way that the believer was exclusively, or even mainly, encouraged to “find his hopes of heaven in the evidence of his holy life”. This was the method of selfexamination, enshrined in Religious Affections, which Edwards developed after many personal and collective experiences, disappointment not being the least of them. However, there is one trait of his mature thought regarding assurance which can be seen in the post-revival41 years preceding the preaching of the Redemption Discourse, 40 Similarly, Stoddard considered it sufficient to find or remember one “act of saving grace” in the soul in order to be assured of one’s salvation (Puritan Pulpit, 148ff). Cf. Eugene White’s contrast between Edwards’ and his grandfather’s revival preaching in Puritan Rhetoric, 36-48. 41 That is to say, the years after the Northampton revival of 1734-35 (see 1. 3 above). 83 namely, that in exercising the ‘sense of the heart’42 granted to every true convert one “did not think about his own salvation” (Breitenbach, 184). There was a prevailing tendency in the message delivered from the Northampton pulpit to encourage hearers to look away from themselves and exert themselves in something other than self-centered introspection. In this respect, Jonathan Edwards at this stage of his ministry may have contributed to the rediscovery of Calvin’s focus on the doctrine of assurance, which colonial Puritanism in particular had departed from, whereby the key to one’s certainty of salvation “is taken off the worthiness of the subject and his acts and placed upon the worthiness of the object and his work” (Parker, 58). Some of the reasons why Shepard’s Parable would have appealed to Edwards so much, despite the divergent thinking of both theologians briefly stated above, are not hard to grasp. To begin with, Edwards shared to a considerable extent (especially at times of revival declension) Thomas Shepard’s skepticism about enthusiasm: “And another device of Satan to hurt the credit of this work […] has been to lead away and deceive some particular professors by enthusiastical impressions and imaginations; which they have conceited were divine revelations, such as were wont to be given to the prophets of old” (19: 550). Also implicit in this quote is the issue of spiritual pride, which always kept Edwards alert during his oversight of Northampton’s church as it did Shepard during his years of ministry at Cambridge. Yet, it would be misleading to equate Edwards’ skepticism about expressions of affections with that of the 17th century Puritan. In addition to the example from Some Thoughts (pp. 69-72 above), where we observed that “extraordinary outward manifestations” (4: 400) which were clearly the result of a genuine revival were to be encouraged and seen by others as a means to promote the Great Awakening, there is sermonic and rhetorical evidence to show that in 42 See chap. 1 above, pp. 24-26. 84 the years immediately preceding the Redemption Discourse Edwards ascribed more importance to subjective (if God-centered) experiences than would appear by reading his 1740s and 1750s perspective back into the period here dealt with. Take, for instance, a sermon from July 1736 which is concerned (relevantly for my present purpose) with making “a professing people or society as a city set on an hill” in order to be “greatly observed and taken notice of”. In other words, Edwards intends to stir up his congregation to display and make visible what is the direct result of what he still confidently called a “very remarkable and distinguishing” season or “occasion”, in reference to their local awakening the preceding year, expressed in the metaphorical terms of the gospel image: “As a city set on an hill stands on distinguished ground, above the level of the common surface of the earth, the place is eminent and lifted up; and this sets it forth to view […] It can’t be hid, and no other can be expected than that all should observe it”. Given that the main thrust of the sermon, according to its stated ‘doctrine’, is to call “any professing society” to “honor religion in their practice”, one might expect Edwards to have devoted some ink and delivery time to emphasizing the role of good works or ‘Christian practice’ in attaining assurance of salvation as well as their importance for the church’s witness in the world. Or, to apply it collectively (since most of the sermon focuses on Northampton church as a whole), their conduct might have been presented as a potential witness to the genuineness or counterfeitness of their recent experience during the Spirit’s outpouring. On the contrary, what Edwards does is to confidently assume “that greater numbers of [his congregants] are holy” compared to other communities, and assert that he hopes “many of [them] are the children of God” (19: 540-42, 558; my italics). His certainty as to the divine origin of their collective and individual recent experiences permeates the whole sermon. 85 In an apparently more hypothetical statement from “A City on a Hill”, not directly applied (in principle) to his audience, Edwards explains that when Christians make a profession of having greater degrees of the presence of God with them, of God having done more for them, and of greater mercies that God has bestowed upon them than on other people; when there is a far greater number among them that do make profession of special experiences, and of extraordinary light, that they have had; when they make profession of greater acquaintance with God, and more communion with him, and of greater hopes of what God will do for them hereafter […] [Such] a people are set forth to the notice of others. Such a people will be much observed. (19: 542; my italics) It is worth noting that the preacher does not hide the fact that he considers this hypothetical community of believers to be better instructed than most as regards historical, especially future, redemptive events: they claim to have “greater hopes of what God will do for them hereafter”.43 Soon, in the second point of the ‘application’, Edwards makes it clear that in the above description he alluded to his own people: I come now particularly, to apply this doctrine to the case of this town. This town is in a remarkable degree such a society, as is spoken of in the text and doctrine. It has been so in a considerable degree formerly. It has in time past been a town of an higher profession, and more noted, for the works which God had wrought in it than most towns, if not than any town in the land. But it is become more remarkably so of late, by means of the late wonderful pouring out of the Spirit of God upon us. (19: 548, 549; my italics) God’s work of redemption is, for Edwards, materialized and brought to concrete, historical realization in and through revivals. Revival is the concrete agent of divine intervention in the order of time. Edwards strove to set forth before his church a vision 43 This may be a veiled reference to the millennium. For other examples which evince latent millennial expectations in Edwards’ pulpit oratory during the 1730s, see Sanchez, “Divine Communications” 26, 23 n. 19. 86 of history which could encompass their personal rebirth experiences, the recent local awakening, the history of Northampton’s previous generations and the ultimate revival which would usher in the millennium (see 4. 2. c., p. 245 below). Thomas Shepard’s doctrine of assurance was essentially applied, as we have already seen, through the exercise of introspection and was basically dissociated from his eschatology and vision of history. Although historical references are present throughout his exposition of the Matthean parable, most of them served to focus on New England as a providentially privileged space where pure religion could be practiced in freedom. This dissociation of one’s assurance of salvation and concrete prophetic fulfillment, in turn, caused Shepard and the colonial Puritan tradition after him to consign the immediate, verifiable actings of God’s Spirit to the intangible and secret realm of the soul, while the various strains of eschatology44 developed by New England’s first three generations pointed to, and dealt with, affairs and observable events taking place around them or bound to happen in history. These, when they came to pass, would constitute definite and tangible examples of divine intervention in time and space that could be corroborated. This division between historical thought and the application of the doctrine of assurance did not happen in Jonathan Edwards’ homiletics during the late 1730s. When, a year and a half after preaching “A City on a Hill”, Northampton heard the parable of the ten virgins being applied to them in a “Use of Examination”, the commended way to gauge their right standing before God was to consider whether they were not “more influenced by the Spirit of God by far [during the awakening] than you are now”. While they are required to examine wherein they are “guilty of declining and backsliding”, their verdict is not to be inferred by running a test 44 For a brief but accurate summary of the premillennialist, amillennialist and postmillennialist positions on the Second Coming of Christ developed in English and colonial Puritanism, see Lovelace 69, 70. 87 of self-examination in their own souls. The issue is not so much that they must find an inwrought sign or mark of true grace lest they should turn out to be reprobates; rather, they are to consider the outcome of their experience insofar as it has affected the way revival is seen by them and by others: “Christianity, when its virtues are truly excited and its rules truly practiced, is lovely in the eyes of the world” (Parables, I, 96, 97, 99). There is undoubtedly greater optimism in, and greater concessions are made by, this Edwards than the one we find in other stages of his preaching career. Why is this so? Whereas Shepard used the image of the ten virgins being asleep basically to provide a descriptive frame where the church could be envisioned, Edwards used it to encourage his hearers and himself: “Use II. Let us rouse out of sleep. Let every one wherein, on examination, he finds himself [asleep, awake]. Let natural men [rouse themselves]”.45 Or, in the “Use of Exhortation” of another sermon in the same expository series: “Labor as it were to realize the midnight cry to yourself…” (Parables, I, 100, 136, 137; my italics). This is a surprisingly optimistic mode of Puritan rhetoric, which had usually been pervasively suspicious of and pessimistic about human nature and efforts in both regenerate and unregenerate listeners. The Calvinist theological heritage, which the Northampton pastor fully embraced, was receiving a fresh and new impulse from the positive and innovative Edwardsean conception of “the regenerate person” as a “dynamic force that would seek out and know and love an unending number of beings in an unending number of circumstances” (Lee, Theology, 113). Said more plainly: in every Christian there is a force that is unstoppable due to the source from which it draws its life; although this dynamic force is not immediately from him but from God, it is reasonable and necessary to call the faithful to action, even ‘self-awakening’ action. Or, as Edwards himself expressed it more than halfway 45 Editor’s additions. 88 through the same exposition of the parable of Matthew 25: “[I]t is from the Spirit infusing a new and divine principle. ’Tis not only a natural principle, stirred up and set to work by God’s Spirit, as men’s natural conscience is stirred up […] but ’tis from the creative power of the Spirit of God, giving a new heart, infusing a new principle”. And what was the dynamics of this principle working in the believer? Precisely the same as the dynamics of God’s activity in history that was briefly touched on at the start of this section (pp. 74, 75 above). Edwards had not ruled out, as Shepard had, the potential genuineness and value of a ‘sudden’46 work of God, whether in some earthly matter or in the salvation of souls. Divine agency ought to be recognized when operating in both its immediate and progressive modes: “[This principle] is continually from the Spirit of God, dwelling as a spring of life in the soul. It is at first immediately from the Spirit of God, and ’tis always immediately from the Spirit” (Parables, I, 147; my italics). The continual or progressive operation must not be taken for a weaker sort of divine activity due to its gradual and hidden appearance to the inexperienced eyes of some. On the contrary, God may choose to work thus in history, in an individual soul or in a community of believers precisely because his power appears greater in doing so. Therefore, the way Edwards conveyed assurance of the divine nature of the work his congregation had been the subject of was through an underlying optimism both in his expository and hortatory modes of discourse (corresponding roughly to the sections of ‘doctrine’ and ‘application’ in sermons respectively). This optimism was rooted in the firm belief that what had been bestowed on the Northampton community by the recent spiritual outpouring of 1734-35 was not “inactive and motionless” (Parables, I, 148). Edwards was not yet saying that “assurance is not to be obtained so much by self- 46 Shepard, Parable, 346. Edwards would, as late as 1743, continue to partly sanction the work of revival on the basis of the “suddenness of conversions”, though the change produced had to prove to be “manifestly durable” (4: 346). 89 examination, as by action”47 (with all the potential for moralism that focus had) as he would in the mid 1740s, and his ‘method’ for attaining certainty of a right standing before God definitely had more to do with coming out of oneself than with looking inside oneself for evidences of grace: Don’t rest in any sort of affection, without a real and deep conviction of the reality and divine excellency of spiritual things. […] ’Tis one thing to be affected with that, that God has been very good to us and has set his love on us; and another thing to be inwardly convinced, and to see that God is superlatively lovely in himself and worthy to be loved, whether he has loved us or no. (Parables, I, 166) The powerful nature of the source of revivals guaranteed the visibility of its fruits to the spiritual naked eye. There was not only a need for Christians to long for more of God’s presence in their midst, although, following Edwards’ eschatological scheme, Northamptonites had enough reasons to expect further revivals at the threshold of and throughout the millennium. Above all, there ought to be a community of self-forgetful and faithful converts who, on being exhorted and admonished, could release themselves from remaining corruption and rest on God alone for the soul’s eternal wellbeing, and an unshakable faith that could observe divine activity in all its forms. Despite the evolution of certain aspects of Edwards’ practical theology, such as the ultimate source of assurance or the biblical way of administering communion, his idea of divine agency through revival in its immediate and progressive modes would remain unaltered. Even after being through experiences of personal disappointment and what he saw as spiritual decline in the town, Edwards retrospectively evaluated the effects of the awakenings with the lens of his particular mode of historical thought. Writing in two different letters during the second half of 1743, he could speak about a 47 As he would put it in Religious Affections (2: 195; italics in original). 90 “great and abiding alteration” in Northampton since their local awakening, and also about a “visible alteration” at George Whitefield’s coming to preach to his church in 1740 (16: 110, 116). Thus, seeing through the pattern of “degeneration and awakening” that was intrinsic to revival as orchestrated by the Spirit (Zakai, History, 250), he construed his town’s recent history of salvation as having advanced unremittingly: first, by recognizing the “abiding” fruits that resulted from the first revival experience, and second, by recalling one instance of remarkable, immediate divine visitation through the itinerant preacher that had been God’s main human instrument during the Great Awakening. The issue of the visibility of God’s work throughout history brings me to the consideration of the last key to understanding Edwardsean and colonial historical thought: divine providence. This basic doctrine of Calvinistic theology had a bearing not just on observable events that came to pass in Christendom but on everything that came to pass in humanity’s existence and in nature. Thus, it ought to function as an allencompassing reality and dialectic tool for any Puritan attempting to write a history that would go beyond mere Church history. The wider implications of the doctrine of providence for human history were kept in mind by Cotton Mather as he compiled and wrote a history of the seventeenth century in New England. Though Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana was not as ambitious in its scope as Edwards’ Redemption Discourse, setting these two giant intellects of colonial America (arguably the two greatest Puritan thinkers) side by side will serve the comparative purpose of this chapter. How does the issue of divine sovereignty or providence determine their rhetoric and their respective attempts to write historical accounts at the outset of the Enlightenment era? 91 2. 4. Edwards vs. Mather: The Operations of Providence in History The figure of Cotton Mather will be particularly helpful in synthesizing some of the points already discussed in this chapter, as well as analyzing divine providence, for at least three reasons. Firstly, his views on issues like church ordinances or the visible and invisible church in history are not hard to trace due to the scope of his numerous writings. As a minister of Boston’s Second Church, his work consisted mainly in overseeing ecclesiastical affairs. Secondly, he was the son of Increase Mather, who was virtually as much a statesman as he was a clergyman.48 He therefore had well-informed (if debatable) insights into politics, civil government matters and relevant episodes affecting early colonial history. As the grandson of John Cotton, he also had, through his family connections, access to first-hand testimonies from people in authority belonging to the first and second generations of Puritans. Finally, the extent to which he keeps providence in mind throughout his historical writing is quite remarkable, even for a Puritan.49 Cotton Mather does not simply attempt to justify and prove God’s sovereignty over all events, which would be expected from any orthodox Calvinist, but goes to great lengths in expounding divine providence in New England’s recent past with all the intricacies that are derived from a due consideration of the material and spiritual dimensions of history. 48 Lovelace explains how, in one of his many trips across the Atlantic, Increase Mather was involved in “seeking unsuccessfully to interest King James in restoring the vacated charter and securing Puritan theocracy in New England”. His “diplomatic skill […] gained him respect in London” as he took part in obtaining a new charter, adopted in 1691, and “he was permitted to name the chief officers who were to put [the new] government into operation” (14, 15). Lovelace’s biographical inquiry in the introductory chapter of The American Pietism of Cotton Mather (1-31) is the main source consulted for contextual details of Cotton Mather’s life and work in this section. 49 The sixth book of the Magnalia (there are seven in total) consists of approximately 130 pages and is exclusively devoted to instances of providential divine interventions in history. 98 providential operations (whether lightning striking or a raging sea) is escaped from by the saints and serves God to punish his enemies or turn them to himself through the fear and awe produced in them. With the exception of one instance, in which a crew of starving seamen who are lost receive direct supply from the sea when “there leap’d a mighty fish into their boat” (II, 297), the role of natural elements in providential operations is essentially negative. Although a comprehensive discussion on the issue of nature and Puritanism would require a longer inquiry than the present one can afford to be, I want to bring some of the conclusions of experts on colonial literature to bear on this brief comparison between Mather and Edwards. First, Sacvan Bercovitch avers that “[c]ontrary to general opinion, the Puritans neither hated nor feared their environment” but, rather, believed that “the land belonged to them before they belonged to the land, and they took possession [...] imposing their own image upon it” (Jeremiad, 162; Rites, 35). However, the “image” Puritans saw in the natural environment of America before a proper settlement was established would have been hateful in some measure since the continent was considered to be “under the dark dominion of the devil” (Zakai, History, 263). The latter view was, according to professor Zakai, common to both Edwards and Mather. It can, I believe, be argued that the general opinion Bercovitch gainsays is true at least to some extent, and that, though Zakai may be right in general terms about Edwards having adopted Mather’s view of the American continent as being under Satan, the Edwardsean view of nature itself was more positive than that of earlier colonial Puritans. Perry Miller may have gone too far (as he himself conceded) in establishing a link between Emerson’s and Edwards’ interpretation of their “impressions” from nature, but he was certainly accurate when he described our author as passionately in love with nature (Errand, 184, 185). Cotton Mather evinces an 99 unfavorable perception of nature by consistently assigning a negative role to it in providential operations, and he shows the same prejudice by his use of certain allusions (analyzed below) when dealing with preternatural phenomena. Jonathan Edwards, on the other hand, found great delight in retiring to solitary places, like his “father’s pasture” or the banks of the Hudson River far from the city (see pp. 25, 26 above), to meditate in a natural environment. The essential reason for his appreciation of nature was that he saw an analogy between the “works of creation and providence” (18: 192; 11: 53).56 Up to this point of the chapter, immediate divine agency has been mainly linked to the consideration of the Holy Spirit’s activity in history toward particular groups or individuals (sections 2. 1, 2. 2, and 2. 3). This has also been referred to as the ‘order of grace’, as opposed to the ‘order of nature’ in which God operates indirectly according to established laws or other secondary causes. The assumption in the ‘negative examples’ of spiritual agency in space and time that follow in this brief study of the Magnalia is that, for both Edwards and Mather, neither satanic agents (demons or ‘devils’) nor Satan himself could have intervened to disrupt or affect human affairs without explicit permission from God. Therefore, though the term divine agency is not wholly inappropriate, it is not the deity’s direct but indirect influence or involvement in history 56 Based on this conception of creation, Edwards also “argued that Scripture endorses a system of types in nature”. In his effort to understand and elaborate this system of types and images, he “departed in style if not in substance from the Puritan typological tradition” (McClymond & McDermott, 120). Since the use of images from nature is an instrumental rhetorical device throughout the Redemption Discourse (Wilson, 9: 57), it will be analyzed and discussed fully in chapters 3 and 4 (p. 194ff). At this stage, it is enough to note that, due to his concept of creation as being subordinated to history and ultimately to providence (Zakai, History, 39), Edwards “reasoned from the end or purpose of creation to the character of the natural world” (McClymond & McDermott, 121). 100 that the authors would have envisioned when gauging and examining this kind of supernatural and spiritual occurrences. In one of his many displays of biblical and etymological erudition, Mather opens the chapter that deals with “the wonders of the invisible world”, or the sphere of ‘Heaven’, by establishing a connection between the ritual whereby a goat carried the sins of ancient Israel to the desert on the day of expiation (Leviticus 16: 9, 10) and deserts themselves as the place “the Devil and his angels” were believed to inhabit in the “days of Moses” (II, 388, 389). A New Testament confirmation of this doctrine is the fact that those goats, which through the Levitical ritual became an atonement for Israel’s sins, are a prefiguration of Christ, as he was met and tempted by the Devil in the wilderness at the start of his ministry according to the gospel (Matthew 4: 1-11). Based on this exposition, the way Cotton Mather construes a frame for New Englanders’ experience of the demonic in their own wilderness is to contend that regions, like the land of Israel, where the true God is continually pray’d unto, and where the word of God is continually sounding, are filled with such things as are very uneasie unto the devils: The devils often recede much from thence into the wilderness [...] [T]he christians who were driven into the American desart, which is now call’d New-England, have to their sorrow seen [Satan] dwelling and raging there in very tragical instances. The devils have doubtless felt a more than extraordinary vexation, from the arrival of those christians with their sacred exercises of christianity in this wilderness... (II, 389) The parallelism with Israel is commonplace in Puritan literature and quite clear in this particular case. Though New England as a whole is referred to as “this wilderness”, the word “there” (my emphases) indicates that for Mather there is a distance between the places where God’s people abound (towns like, say, Boston) and the wilderness or countryside where demons flee due to their horror at the faithful’s holiness. There are 101 several examples to show that the Bostonian minister consistently associates the wild, natural surroundings of New English settlements with exposure to demonic influences. The first instance Mather narrates for his readers is that of Ann Cole, “a person of serious piety” who felt she was being haunted. The woman who was examined by the magistrates on account of her being suspicious of the witchcraft behind Ann’s torments “declar’d that her devil appear’d unto her first in the shape of deer; skipping about her, and at last proceeded so far as in that shape to talk with her: and that the devil had frequently carnal knowledge of her”. This woman’s execution after her confession brought about the deliverance of Ann Cole from her former “extraordinary troubles” (II, 389, 390). The point is that the reader is able to recognize the same connections in the narratives of the occult in the Magnalia as in the frame Mather has established for them, justified in terms of biblical exegesis and sacred history (II, 389). Through several details in these stories, a nexus between the wilderness (or the ‘wild’ and ‘animal’ instincts aroused by it) and satanic influences is clearly hinted at. Other allusions are more subtle but equally significant as regards the way nature comes across in a careful reading of these accounts. In the case of a married couple whose house “near the Salmon-falls” was being haunted, the evil spirit made itself visible while “going over the river in a canoo”. Up to this moment, they had only heard noises and voices while they were at home and had objects inexplicably thrown against them (“by an invisible hand”, Mather intimates). But only when they were rowing “over the river”, on their way to and back from a certain place, did the gruesome apparition of a man’s head magically joined to a cat’s tail manifest the demonic presence scarcely three feet from their canoe (II, 394). A third example of allusion to an element from nature carrying connotations of a devilish influence or presence is found in the story of Philip Smith. A “deacon of a church” in rural and agricultural Hadley, Massachusetts, one of the jobs 102 the man had was as “a justice in the [sic] countrey Court”. The setting is, for a start, one of closeness to the wilderness. The strange allusion, involving ‘deer’ once again, comes when we are told Mr. Smith saw an apparition of the woman who was using witchcraft against him in revenge for some unsatisfactory services received in the past: “In his distresses he exclaim’d much upon the woman aforesaid [...] as being seen by him in the room; and there was divers times both in that room, and over the whole house, a strong smell of something like musk” (II, 394, 395). Since ‘musk’ is a secretion produced beneath the skin of the abdomen of the male musk deer, the same association of ideas is triggered when reading this story as in the previous two short narratives. Although these tales may have been passed down to Cotton Mather almost exactly as he narrates them, he consciously selected the ones he would include in this short history of the preternatural in New England (II, 389). These three include such elements as I searched for in my survey of the fourteen stories, and they confirm the view that there is a consistent representation of the occult or satanic as connected to nature in the American wilderness. The other eleven stories contain no such references, but two more general observations may be pertinently inserted here. Firstly, Mather is clearly trying to present these supernatural episodes in a way that would make providence consistent with the observable dynamics of nature and acceptable from the point of view of Enlightenment science. His insistence on the presence of an “invisible hand” or “invisible spirit” behind most of the extraordinary events narrated (II, 391, 392, 393, 394, 398; my italics) evinces the self-consciousness of someone writing during the age of empirical science, which demanded a method of observation in order to ascertain facts. Indeed, Miller is probably accurate when he says “Cotton Mather was venturing beyond the limits of Puritan prudence when he actually did see an angel; the more normal attitude was that by close observance of some merely natural occurrence, 103 the presence of angels or of God Himself could be detected” (Mind, 229). The presence of doctors in some of the stories, reaching a common diagnosis with the clergy, also points in the same direction. Mather would have his readers know that in several cases of demonic possession the seizures of the victims were “pronounced extraordinary and preternatural” by “the most experienc’d physicians” (II, 396, 397). Thus, even in the part of New England’s history that is hardly explainable in scientific terms, Mather’s narrative is cloaked with the plausibility bestowed by the sanction of scientists. The other aspect that should not go unnoticed is that, since many of the accounts are concerned with cases of witchcraft, the role of magistrates and executions is crucial in putting a stop to the spiritual evil that affects the different towns and people. Thus, the Christian establishment, represented by the authorities carrying out their office, defends itself against the satanic onslaught. The antithesis of this godly establishment, prevailing outside the settlements and sometimes present within, is associated also with the presence of Native-Americans, that is to say, the natural inhabitants of the wilderness. In the fourteenth and last story, there appears an “Indian woman” who is responsible for the torment of many in “Salem-Village” during 1691 and 1692 (II, 409). Bercovitch’s contention that colonial Puritans’ view of their natural surroundings was not negative inasmuch as the wilderness was there for the settlers to impose “their own image upon it” (Jeremiad, 162) is supported by my present argument. The Christian commonwealth’s depiction in the Magnalia as providentially advancing or resisting in terms of its ability to stand against a spiritually and naturally wild and hostile environment implies that the world beyond the settlers’ frontier awaits its subjection to the kingdom of God (Jeremiad, 163, 164). A comparison between Mather’s and Edwards’ use of metaphorical language to refer to what they viewed as the historical event of the fall of Antichrist will show that their different perceptions of nature 104 determined their respective use of figurative language taken from the natural realm in their rhetoric of history. In a sermon series preached towards the end of his life,57 Mather used an “accessible rhetoric” to “restate the old preparationist hope that man, with the help of a stern but loving ministry, can render himself fit for the ravishing experience of grace” (Heimert & Delbanco, 330, 331). To describe the progress of grace or of God’s kingdom in the human soul, the preacher reminds his hearers that “the word of God, accompanied by the influences58 of the Holy Spirit, is the plow with which this work of God is carried on”. Taking his metaphor from Jeremiah 4: 3 (“Break up your fallow ground”), Mather describes man’s soul and heart as “earth” that needs to be “broken by the plow”, to signify that it must be “broken with the sorrow of repentance” (Agricola, 331). Even though the imagery is from nature, the explicit metaphor employed to represent God’s gracious activity is from agriculture (a man-made “plow”) and points to the idea that the natural element itself (the lump of “earth”) is dignified, or made fit for contact with the divine, by the external human action of subduing nature. Interestingly for the present study (and moving on to the example that was anticipated), in a later sermon from the same series there is a somewhat similar depiction of the “ruin of Antichrist”. This is of particular importance to this dissertation because of the broad sense in which ‘history’ is being considered and analyzed, namely, as encompassing 57 Circa 1725 (Heimert & Delbanco, 330). 58 Note that Mather’s language in dealing with the work of repentance leading to conversion seems to be in line with the Old Light theology that held there was no direct illumination of the soul by the Spirit but, rather, an “influence” cooperating with the truth presented to the potential convert. However, since Mather’s life does not overlap with the Great Awakening (he died in 1727), there is no certainty that he would have opposed the revival as other conservative ministers from Boston did (see p. 94 above). In fact, some authors have gone so far as to argue that his hopes for the renewal of the churches in New England and in the world, based on a premillennial eschatology, were not unlike those of revivalists like Edwards himself or Gilbert Tennent (Lovelace, 240-250, 274). 105 future fulfillment of biblical prophecy as well as past historical events. Moreover, the relevance of this particular eschatological reference in Mather’s Agricola is twofold: first, it draws on the imagery of nature, and, second, Edwards in the Redemption Discourse expounds the issue of the downfall of Antichrist comprehensively since it is a critical event in his scheme of redemptive history. Mather’s exposition of Psalm 37:2 starts: Desector. The Grass before the Mower Psalms 37:2. They shall soon be cut down as the grass Of whom speaks the psalmist this? Those whom the spirit of God calls evil-doers and workers of iniquity [...] We find here foretold the ruin of Antichrist, in a tremendous conflagration, wherein the enemies of God shall be consumed [...] When the wicked are cut down as the grass, ’tis that they may be cast into the oven and thrown into the devouring fire. (Agricola, 333) Cotton Mather chooses, once again, an image in which nature (metonymically referred to in “the grass”) suffers the onset of human agricultural activity (the “Mower” cutting it down), the latter signifying, as in the previous example, the advancement of God’s kingdom.59 Edwards’ departure from the colonial literary strain that consistently (if subtly, in many cases) represented nature in a negative light can be clearly discerned in one passage from his manuscripts on the history of redemption. The text under consideration was written by Edwards in his notebooks to expand a section on the gradual rise of Antichrist from the twenty-second sermon of the 1739 series (9: 413 n. 8). To be more precise, he was reflecting on the fact that the Roman 59 The kingdom of Satan or Antichrist for the Puritans, as explained earlier (pp. 74, 75), means in principle any influence or vestige of the Roman Catholic church in the world. Nevertheless, the ‘kingdom’ in a broader sense (i.e., the gospel) was seen as progressing or advancing whenever a soul was truly converted as well as when a Roman- Catholic stronghold fell or yielded. Mather, in this case, is simply alluding to Antichrist and does not develop on the topic further due to the devotional character of this particular sermon series. 106 church had been corrupted “gradually” until apostasy culminated when “at length [the bishop of Rome], as Christ’s vicar on earth, claimed the very same power that Christ would have if he was presently on earth” and came to be called “God on earth” (9: 412). On revising his sermon manuscript, then, he developed on the idea that the antithesis of this anti-Christian kingdom would likewise advance gradually in the providentially appointed time. God had his “elect times and seasons” of spiritual enlightenment for the present and future just as He had them during Old Testament times. In the divine redemptive pattern, “one remarkable dispensation and another” bring increasing knowledge of God and He “shows great favor to his church accomplishing great things”. The ultimate dispensation or millennium, those glorious times[,] how they will gradually come on the church of God on earth, will gradually ripen for that greatest glory when all things are settled in clearest brightness and greatest peace and purity, as the times are gradually prepared for their flourishing state in summer by the gradual increase of heat from the depth of the winter. Sometimes a very warm and pleasant season and then cold returns again to give a check to the sap. Otherwise the too sudden growth of the trees would issue in their death. (9: 413) In the last two sentences it is clear that the gradual triumph of God’s kingdom does not rule out for Edwards a dynamics of cyclical rise and fall working as part of the same pattern (see pp. 67, 68 above). But what concerns our comparison with Mather’s use of imagery in reference to the end of Antichrist’s reign is that, whereas the latter envisioned the withdrawal of Satan’s forces as “grass” being “cut down” and thrown into an “oven” (again, a man-made device is the preferred metaphor to represent the triumph of righteousness; Agricola, 333), the Northampton pastor picked his images from nature to paint his picture rather differently. There is indeed a scorching heat to signify the arrival of God’s mighty kingdom and His righteousness, but, instead of coming from an “oven”, it is like the “gradual increase of heat” in the summer that is 107 accompanied with the “ripen[ing]” of fruit and “flourishing” as well as “brightness”. The darkness and the “winter” of anti-Christian rule yield not at the hands of man, his instruments of husbandry or at the appointed seasons for harvesting, but they withdraw gradually as the naturally established cycles bring “a very warm and pleasant season and then cold returns again to give a check to the sap”. It is “trees” that are growing on the field of Edwards’ depiction of God’s advancing kingdom, not any crop or produce from the plowed fallow ground of Cotton Mather. The wise, God-appointed, natural cycles “give a check” to the progress of redemption, not the skill of the husbandman whose tools (whether a mower or a plow) enforce the divine commandment of subduing the earth. The issues of revival and the advancement of God’s kingdom hinted at in this last passage from Edwards bring us to the next subsection in this last point of chapter 2. For the Puritans, providence encompassed, as has been argued, absolutely everything in nature and in history. Late Puritanism had unwittingly dissociated divine sovereignty from nature and, by thus obscuring the idea of God’s immanence, it had gradually come to develop an essentially negative, or at least not a glorious, vision of the natural that clashes with what we find in Edwards. Though colonial thought had also subtly rendered the workings of grace man-dependent, as opposed to the traditional humanityhumbling ‘sovereign grace’, there is still in Mather’s Magnalia a high view of the Church, the community of saints, as providentially guided and sustained throughout sacred history. Sacred history comprehends the biblical narrative, church history from Christ’s time to the present and the unfolding of all events that confirm prophecy until Judgment Day. These stages and elements structured and enhanced the thinking and historical writings of Mather as much as Edwards’. Bercovitch refers to Mather’s 114 2. 1. above. Taking this text and the previous one from the chapter on conversions in book VI, it would seem that the real answer, for Mather and all Puritans who followed his rationale, to the question “But how?”, is ultimately: “Through the covenant”, rather than mysteriously and sovereignly. God is bound by this covenant, openly equated here with the “covenant of grace”, and must ‘dispense’ His grace to everyone in the “visible Church”. It is a “ministerial dispensation”, indicating that the presence and role of ministers (primarily in the ordinances of the Word and the sacraments) is instrumental in materializing this grace. Edwards’ premises and conclusions in his preaching during the years of the local awakening and the late 1730s clash with Mather’s thought and framework just described above. In a sermon which emphasized the helplessness and vileness of men apart from God’s grace, Edwards warned his listeners that “he is not the covenant God of those who are in an unconverted state [...] They are without God in all their affairs, in all the business they undertake, in their family affairs, and in their personal affairs, in their outward concerns, and in the concerns of their souls” (Works, II, 819). The last two remarks seem to have been made with regard to a potential confidence in some congregants who might soothe themselves with the thought that they belonged to the visible church. In the application of the sermon it becomes clear what kind of parishioner Edwards has in mind: “You may possibly flatter yourself that your condition is not so doleful, because you have always walked orderly, you have been moral and religious. Here also you deceive yourself. For notwithstanding your moral and religious behaviour, and all your sobriety, you never did the least thing from a gracious respect to God” (II, 827). Conformity to external or outward religious propriety is worthless for Edwards and has no essential connection with the dispensation of God’s grace to His invisible church. For the Edwards of the 1730s, the 115 “external privileges”, or ordinances, which everyone in the visible church was entitled to (Parables, I, 69), were not the channel or means through which the Spirit necessarily, or even primarily, worked within time and space; revival was. Before finishing with a few observations on revival and our authors’ eschatology, it is interesting to note that for Cotton Mather signs of God’s displeasure also bore a relation to church ordinances. Two accounts of divine judgment narrated in a sermon from 1697, inserted in the sixth book of the Magnalia, clearly establish a link between neglecting or contravening church ordinances and being an object of divine wrath. First, there are some people who have dared to pursue a settlement in “the eastern parts of this province” without any regard to “the ordinances of the gospel”. An ecclesiastical establishment “not [being] settled among them”, the “jealousie of the neglected Lord Jesus Christ, has broke forth like an unquenchable fire upon those plantations; the fiery wrath of heaven has brought a swift destruction upon them”. But Mather is speaking in figurative terms, for it was a “barbarous enemy” (presumably Indians) who “has once and again broke in upon those towns, like an irresistible torrent, carrying all before it, until they come to those towns, where the ordinances of the gospel are more upheld” (II, 336, 337). The second example may have been more of a warning for Mather’s listeners at this lecture (325), as it concerned a member of a church in “a certain town in Connecticut” who, on the absence of their “godly minister”, dared to disobey the pastor’s orders regarding the ordinance of the Word. Instead of reading the sermon appointed for the Sunday service, this church member (who was “reputed a pious man”) preached one of his own. Not only that, but “he betook himself to bewail the envy of the clergy in the land, in that they did not wish all the Lord’s people to be prophets, and call forth private brethren publickly to prophesie”. While preaching this very message “God smote him with horrible madness; he was taken ravingly distracted: 116 The people were forc’d with violent hands to carry him home”. From that day on, when anyone “began a discourse of any thing in religion with him, he would ever fly out into a fit of madness” (337). So it is obvious that in Mather’s historical scheme divine providence operated within the parameters of the covenant, and was therefore more patently observable wherever an establishment of God’s ordinances was present, or where its absence led to an outpouring of wrath instead of blessing. But this cherished establishment, these highly-valued ordinances, had after three generations brought about precisely the kind of formalism denounced by the preaching of Edwards and other revivalists (Murray, New Biography, 125-128, 202, 209, 215). As I have already argued, it was a formalism that affected colonial thought as well as morals, often leading to an unconscious intellectual compromise when faced with the increasingly influential and secularizing Enlightenment philosophy. In the Redemption Discourse, Edwards challenged the “new modes of historical thought” which placed an “increasing importance” on “historia humana” and “accorded to human agency” a determining role in the historical process (Zakai, History, 224). By considering human actions merely a “by-product of the divine agency”, he was not just confronting secular assumptions about the historical process but also shaking off the Puritan heritage of historians who had always (from John Foxe, through John Milton and right down to Cotton Mather) sought to ascribe a greater role to human authorities and rulers64 in bringing about God’s purposes than, for instance, to ordinary men. Edwards did not let such hierarchical, political considerations undermine the absolute theocentricity of his vision of history (Zakai, History, 233, 225). And if God was the main actor in the 64 The respective exaltations of Queen Elisabeth I, Oliver Cromwell and John Winthrop by the authors named above are some examples (Zakai, History, 251). 117 theater of history, revival was to be particularly instrumental during the last act of the sacred play, namely, in the millennium. According to Edwards’ postmillennial eschatology, there were many things that would be unprecedented during the millennium, such as the power and clarity of gospel preaching (9: 460) or the amount of “arbitrary” or “miraculous” events taking place (Fiering, 101). However, his language in the Redemption Discourse points to anything but a sudden or stark arrival of the expected ‘glorious times of the Church’. This stage of sacred history would, rather, be ushered in “swiftly, yet gradually”, by “means” like the preaching of the Word (9: 459). This ambiguity (“swiftly” vs. “gradually”) prevails in Edwards’ oratory throughout the revival years. Stephen Stein, in his introduction to Apocalyptic Writings, argues that the Northampton pastor was too cautious to suggest from the pulpit that their local revival had been “a beginning or even a type of the millennium”, and that only in his private reflections did he define awakenings as “preparatory” and “leading to the future glorious state of the church on earth” (Stein, 5: 20). But in one of the last sermons of the Redemption Discourse the opposite seems to be the case. After explaining that the “Spirit shall be gloriously poured out for the wonderful revival and propagation of religion”, he stretches his use of language enough to suggest the millennium may have begun: “We know not where this pouring out of the Spirit shall begin, or whether at many places at once, or whether what has already been ben’t some forerunner and beginning of it” (9: 460; my italics). Only a few months later, in December 1739, preaching at a private meeting, Edwards emphasized the fact that awakenings had happened in many colonies and across the Atlantic, and called for serious consideration regarding the historic moment they were living in: “Let it be considered that we know not what these things [the recent revivals] may be forerunners of. It is generally supposed by divines that most or all those things that have been 118 foretold before God begins to accomplish those glorious things, that shall usher in the glorious time of the church, are already fulfilled” (22: 109). Despite his reference to “divines”, one thing Edwards was not doing was looking for the realization of the millennium in the same way that other New England theologians, Cotton Mather among them, had done it before him.65 The basic idea that sacred history would culminate with a glorious period for the saints on earth was commonplace, not just in colonial writings, but in all Puritan literature throughout the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, Mather’s premillennialist stance on the issue led him eventually to hold slightly pessimistic views regarding the possibility of a general revival prior to the Second Coming. Professor Lovelace argues that Mather pursued an implicitly optimistic form of international ecumenism among Protestants, but he concedes that [t]he positive amillennial and postmillennial strains were driven toward an Edwardsian concept of revival because their understanding of the church’s perseverance in the future had to depend not on the bodily return of Christ but on his spiritual rule through the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. It might be assumed that literal chiliasts [i.e., premillennialists like Cotton Mather] would lack this dynamic and would be indifferent to the cause of reformation. (70; my italics) Although the latter has been true in some periods and branches of Protestant Christianity, Mather, as Lovelace proves in his book, did take an interest in the progress and state of the wider Protestant church. Nonetheless, the expectations of Christ’s imminent and visible coming could hardly be kept high indefinitely by someone who, like the Boston minister, firmly believed he would personally witness Christ’s Second Coming and lived to be more than sixty. So, roughly in the last two decades of his life, 65 McClymond and McDermott, in fact, argue that the eschatology of the Redemption Discourse is its main innovative aspect (225). 119 there is a traceable decline of motivation based on eschatology, and Mather finally “surrendered this instrument of awakening the church’s sense of mission” (71, 72). One of the keys to the contrast there is between this pessimism and Edwards’ optimistic eschatological outlook lies in the idea of “spiritual rule” attached to the revival or revivals he expected would introduce human history into its last chapter. One crucial aspect that distinguishes Mather’s and Edwards’ concept of divine agency or presence during the millennial era has to do with their discrepancy over the role of civil or secular government in providential history. This issue will be explored in the next subsection. However, my survey of ‘sacred history’ in both authors’ historical schemes has logically and inevitably66 brought the present discussion to deal with their different eschatological views, so I shall conclude with some observations about the distinct way in which Edwards envisioned immediate or direct divine government during the millennium. Avihu Zakai’s synthesis is helpful for my present purpose: Edwards’s concept of the millennium thus differed radically from those of previous Protestant and Puritan exegetes. He deemphasized Christ’s millennial rule. He did not look for the personal return of Christ in his majesty to inaugurate the millennium, as the New England divine John Cotton did,67 nor did he envision any millennial reign of Christ and his saints upon earth. Further, in contrast to the overt millennial expectations among Protestants and Puritans in England and New England during the seventeenth century, he refused to identify the millennium with any violent social and political transformation that would usher in the transformation of the world into the kingdom of God [...] He dwelt more on the power of the Spirit than on millenarian expectations of earthly dominium. (History, 270) 66 Since future prophetic fulfillment is encompassed by sacred history, the millennium had to be included in this subsection. 67 Or both Increase and Cotton Mather, among others (Lovelace, 70). 120 Moving away from the theocratically driven perspective of preceding generations, Edwards articulated a historical vision which did not search for the tangibility of the kingdom in the inherited Puritan establishment (ecclesiastical or governmental) or any other institutional structure. This, however, was not done at the expense of the notion that God’s plan would ultimately be imposed by an irresistible rule or force. Quite on the contrary, God’s authority would ultimately prevail. But it would not triumph through earthly governments and means but over them. This fresh emphasis on absolute divine sovereignty made it a logical necessity to relativize the importance of the secondary means God used to enforce His agenda, like human rulers or governments. 2. 4. c. Worldly Affairs, Secular History and God’s Absolute Sovereignty. There is a contextual similarity between Mather’s and Edwards’ position as the ministers of notable and renowned congregations that may shed light on the different aspects which concern this last point in chapter 2 of the present study. As was pointed out in chapter 1 (p. 40), Edwards could observe around him the signs of growing secularization, which was made visible by the fact that, for the first time in Northampton’s history, a building other than the meetinghouse was erected to host the town’s political meetings. His Redemption Discourse was preached precisely during the first months of this symbolic and definitive physical separation of the secular and the ecclesiastical. Similarly, Mather wrote his history of New England in a time when the “authority of ministers was greatly reduced [and] the state no longer acted as the protective arm of the churches” (Arch, 144). In Bercovitch’s rather stark terms, third generation Puritans witnessed the “demise of the church-state”, although for Mather “the vanished theocracy [still] enshrined the true meaning of the country” and its errand. (Rites, 88, 94). His inability to come to terms with this new social and ecclesiastical 121 reality probably explains the pervasively hortatory tone of the Magnalia and other writings from the last decade before the turn of the century (Lovelace, 239). He was assuming the role of prophet as well as historian in an attempt to convince a generation to join him in his “allegiance to the past” (Bercovitch, Rites, 94). The above quote from Avihu Zakai has served to point out that the Edwardsean attitude towards secular institutions and the part they played in history (particularly in the millennium) was significantly different from that of previous colonial Puritans. However, Edwards and Mather showed a keen interest in secular events (present, past and future) that needs to be accounted for, as both theologians assigned to them a more or less direct role in the bringing about of God’s purposes in history. Colonial Puritans (or “Bay theocrats”, as Bercovitch puts it) who still held on to the theocratic ideal of New England at the threshold of the eighteenth century, like those of the two previous generations, “had joined secular to sacred history” (Rites, 156).68 Just as the advance and success of Congregational church polity was tantamount to the progress of Christ’s Kingdom on earth, the continuance of an operative theocratic civil establishment was essential for the materialization of God’s plans before the millennium. In broad terms, Mather’s “interest in worldly affairs” during the mid-1690s was linked to his firm belief in the “imminent” return of Christ, which was the closing act of sacred history. His hopes and prayers for revival throughout the nations were not unconnected to what he viewed (following whatever news he received from Europe) as “revolutions” in places like France or Turkey, even if the developments in those countries were not directly connected to religion (Lovelace, 20, 245). Mather also 68 Cf. Richard Bauckham’s Tudor Apocalypse on the English origins of this Puritan strand of historical thought. After the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, optimism grew over the role of temporal (i.e., governmental, civil) powers in advancing the cause of the gospel (173, 174). 122 looked around him and associated any setbacks suffered by secular institutions (especially those set up according to God’s will) with divine displeasure or wrath. Thus, he considered it was only logical that the “loss of Protestant territory” at an international level as well as some instances of worldwide Popish persecution should be accompanied by a general spiritual decline (240). Such was Cotton Mather’s outlook not only when considering the present and the millennial future, but when he looked back at New England’s past. Some examples from the Magnalia may serve to show how the progress of piety or the community’s experience of the divine presence are envisioned by the author as intertwined with, and at times dependent on, the secular government’s action. When Mather asserted it was a “matter of every body’s observation” that the “divine dispensations towards this country” changed as a consequence of decline in religion (II, 270), he had in mind a divine providence that operated at the political level as well as the natural and ecclesiastical ones (sections 2. 4. a. and 2. 4 .b. above). In book V of the Magnalia, there is a recapitulation of the 1662 synod’s69 decisions and conclusions. Mather inserts references to events of New England’s recent history (maybe recalled by the synod’s participants themselves) where his view of the place and role of civil and governmental institutions in providential dispensations becomes apparent: Truly, if New-England had not abounded with the like offences, it may be supposed, such calamities [some natural/accidental disasters previously alluded to] had not befallen it. It intimated a more than ordinary displeasure of God for some offences, when he proceeded so far, as to put over his poor people into the hands of tawny and bloody salvages: and the whole army had cause to enquire into their own rebellions, when they saw the Lord of Hosts, with a dreadful decimation, taking off so many of our 69 See chapter 1, p. 28 above. 123 brethren by the worst of executioners […] The serious people throughout the country, were awakened by these intimations of divine displeasure, to enquire into the causes and matters of the controversie. (II, 270, 271) Now although the sinners in the army who needed to examine themselves are distinguished from more pious Christians (the “serious people” of the land), the emphasis of the passage is on the whole community’s dealing with divine anger. The Indians are the instrument of punishment through the “lamentable wars” New England suffers (270). Then, the people, having noticed that this is clearly a “more than ordinary displeasure of God”, turn corporately to Him: And besides the self-reforming effects of these calamities on the hearts and lives of many particular Christians, who were hereby brought unto an exacter walk with God, particular churches exerted their power of self-reformation, especially in the time of the Indian war […] Moreover, the general courts enacted what laws were judged proper for the extinction of those provoking evils, which might expose the land unto the anger of heaven. (271) The definitive part played by the general courts in this episode is quite telling. Civil government is here and elsewhere in the Magnalia (I, 90, 91, for instance) assigned the duty, not only of allowing or even preserving piety, but actively promoting and enforcing it. Military success and the survival of the community depend on this instrument of “reformation” being put to its right use, and not simply on a spiritual exercise of contrition, fasting or prayer. Later on, in the same account of the fifth book, Mather continues to define what the “reformation of the land” meant according to the 1662 synod. It is “outward conformity” to the ideals of both church and social order that is to be sought. This, together with the renewal of covenants, shall “divert temporal judgements” and bring back the “presence of God” to the land. In these covenants, New Englanders are asked 130 transcendence made immanent: “The novel element in Edwards is his conception of God’s ad extra not only as God’s relation to the world but as God’s external repetition of his own being” (Lee, Theology, 204; italics in original). God’s involvement, then, in creation and in human affairs alike was originated in the divine disposition to communicate and exert himself, and the “external” fruits and vitality mirrored by creatures and the historical process itself made God’s presence manifest and his character known. The word “external” as it is used by Lee in his definition of these philosophical intricacies in the Edwardsean conception of the divine must not be understood as when the pastor, during the mid-1730s awakening, reproved his congregation for flattering themselves on account of the ‘outward’ or ‘external’ religion they practiced and the earthly, temporal prosperity they might enjoy (p. 114 above). Though this was Edwards’ use of the term at times in his preaching of the 1739 series (9: 231, 287, 322), there is one sermon, delivered barely six months after finishing the Redemption Discourse, where “external things” refers to the necessary action in order to revive the flame, which the pastor assumes has not been extinguished (nor can it be), that was sparked by the Spirit five years before the current decline: “And of all the external things that we can do to have the Spirit of God continued amongst [us], I believe the most likely thing to be successful to that end, of any one thing whatsoever, is abounding in deeds of love and charity. The abounding in deeds of love is the likeliest way to have the God of love and peace always dwelling with us”. First, it should not go unnoticed that the use of the phrase “love and peace” in this context of the outworkings of the Spirit amidst a society is very much like the one encountered when Edwards described the millennial future of ruling classes (p. 128 above). Secondly, though (a few lines on) the people are exhorted to promote “any design that tends to encourage [the] duty [of giving to the needy]”, the 131 main rhetorical function of this part of the sermon’s application is not so much to call congregants to some form of organized activism as to define what is the logical consequence of having the “Spirit of God continued amongst [them]” (22: 260). Niebuhr’s words seem at this stage a good synthesis of the point I have been trying to clarify and expound, namely, the way revivalists (“Edwards above all”) sought to, first, spread God’s knowledge and, only then, express compellingly that “[s]uch knowledge require[d] action”: In preaching the kingdom of Christ as the kingdom of love they did not commit the mistake their successors [i.e., 19th century evangelicals] often made, that of defining love of neighbor as the essence of Christianity, as though men could practice this love without reference to other elements in the Christian life, without apprehension of the divine sovereignty or without revolutionary change from natural to divine affection. Neither did they fall into the other error of confusing love with amiable sentiment. Sentiment which does not press to practice is like knowledge which does not issue in action; if the latter is the abhorred speculative knowledge, that is, spectator knowledge, the former is counterfeit affection, satisfied with itself and not based on knowledge of reality. Practice is the test of genuine love. (112, 113) The observation made about the doctrine of divine sovereignty in the abovequoted fragment from Niebuhr’s The Kingdom of God in America is particularly pertinent as I come to the close of this section on providence. Much has been said throughout this second chapter about how Edwards left behind Mather’s theocratically driven vision of divine agency in history, how he did not attribute the same intrinsic spiritual value to church ordinances as John Cotton and Thomas Shepard did, or how his modern outlook on the individual’s participation in communion with God contrasts with Winthrop’s communal ideal, enshrined in his ‘Model of Christian Charity’. But, though 132 it is understandable that Jonathan Edwards should often be viewed as a transitional figure, due to the pivotal moment at which he stands in the history of colonial thought, it is easy to overstate (if unwittingly) the innovative character of his theology and rhetoric. Nineteenth century evangelicals, as Niebuhr remarks, inherited the activism that revivalism fostered but they would obviate the revivalists’ emphasis on God’s absolute sovereignty. Edwards in no way compromised this doctrine but, rather, defended it with the same (if not greater) vehemence as his forefathers. In this respect, he may more accurately be called “the last of the Puritans” than “the first of the evangelicals” (Noll, America’s God, 258). As many scholars have noted when analyzing the Puritan tradition and the different cultural developments that ran parallel to it, the “high Calvinistic doctrine of divine sovereignty”, more often than not, constituted an “impulse” (Goen, 4: 3).72 Predestination, being one of the most controversial ideas directly associated with this emphasis on God’s sovereignty, rather than leading men to desperation or some form of static fatalism, was often at the centre of believers’ motivation to lead industrious and practical lives in every sphere. But, since the concern of this chapter is to discover how this tenet, like others, of Edwards’ theology determined the way he articulated and presented God’s intervention in history, let us consider one example connected to the issue of knowledge. It has been stated that knowledge of God was in the Edwardsean scheme a means whereby the same deity exercised authority over the minds of people in and through revivals, and that, in a very specific manner, knowledge would serve to bring about an irresistible divine reign over humankind (even over the most powerful men) during the last act of human history. How did Edwards manage to remain 72 Cf. Perry Miller in The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century p. 37 and William Haller in The Rise of Puritanism p. 192, to name just two of the most widely recognized scholars who have expressed this view. 133 optimistic about the proximity of the millennium when Enlightenment philosophy was taking over theological institutions like Harvard, and its implications undermined the core of Christianity? Indeed, significantly for this dissertation, Enlightenment historical thought was increasingly leading to a “detachment” of “divine agency from temporal events” (Zakai, History, 229). The key to resisting the onset of worldly wisdom was precisely a reaffirmation of God’s absolute control over everything that came to pass. God would turn the very ignorance and pride (as Edwards perceived it) that prevailed in secular philosophy into a means to make his presence and truth known. And He could do so immediately; that is, acting both directly and soon. Cotton Mather had understandably looked back at God’s preparation for the Reformation, and later for New England’s colonization, and recognized in what he called the “resurrection of literature” (Magnalia, I, 41) an agent or force behind the success of Protestantism. He was viewing the apogee of the humanities during the Renaissance and the instrumentality of the printing press as providential developments which God made use of in the gradual advancement of His kingdom. Edwards would have essentially agreed with Mather’s survey of the past. He himself had had the tendency to think that the increase of human learning was destined to be subservient to the cause of faith. However, during his own times, “the advance of learning […] proved to be an obstacle to the growth of Christian faith and knowledge”. His assumption that the progress of divine revelation would go hand-in-hand with burgeoning secular and scientific knowledge proved to be wrong, at least at present (Zakai, History, 264). Considering the role of human learning during the millennium, Edwards held the same basic idea as Mather when he analyzed the Reformation: “God will improve this great increase of learning as a handmaid to religion, a means of a glorious advancement of the kingdom of his Son” (9: 441; my italics). The age of “midnight darkness” the church 134 was living in did not change the fact that divine purposes were progressing (9: 440). The very same knowledge and erudition which for a time keeps men in their pride (“this great increase of learning”) can be used by God to humble them when they become better informed. ‘Progressive’ divine agency is always operative at a multiplicity of levels despite the apparently cyclical pattern of ‘rise and decline’ of the religious cause (p. 68 above). In fact, things are just being prepared to fit divine purposes more strictly, as revival must eventually break in to manifest ‘immediate’ divine presence or agency. God was reserving Enlightenment learning for a time when He had “sufficiently shown men the insufficiency of ‹human wisdom›, when the time comes for that glorious outpouring of God’s Spirit, when he will himself by his own immediate influence enlighten men’s minds”. Human efforts and progress are futile per se though God will use such secular things as the invention of the printing press to bring about his millennial reign (9: 441; my italics). It is interesting that Edwards seems to be suggesting two alternative ways for mankind to come to the true knowledge of God: They may come to a point when it has “sufficiently” (for them) been shown that their wisdom, useful as it is in many ways, will not bring them to spiritual self-fulfillment or intellectual satisfaction, and they will therefore be gradually brought to the right disposition for the acceptance of all the corollaries of the gospel (the total depravity of man, Christ being wisdom itself and the author of faith, etc.). Alternatively, God may consider that He has “sufficiently” proved to men the futility of their scientific and philosophical endeavors, though they may refuse to accept the truth. In the latter case, God’s “immediate influence” will dazzle men by contrast; that is to say, when the truth of the gospel is irresistibly and clearly presented before their eyes, they will acknowledge their downright folly. In the former instance, the change having been wrought gradually (to a certain extent only, for the 135 coming of the Spirit through revival would decisively inform people’s minds and change their hearts) would not make it less admirable or manifest (cf. pp. 75, 76 above). The hope of awakening and the millennium served the last of the Puritans in times of difficulty and intellectual opposition like the Enlightenment. Belief in absolute divine sovereignty over the historical process meant that, though one had to concede that the cause of a certain event or situation might after all remain hidden, it was never inappropriate to search for a logic behind any (or all) providential outcomes because there was in fact a divinely appointed end in everything that came to pass, whether ‘sacred’ or ‘secular’, ‘natural’ or ‘supernatural’. Jonathan Edwards grappled with the questions raised by apparently contradictory methods in God’s disposition of events, and he put all his acumen, his imagination and rhetorical resources at the service of orthodox Christianity. Divine sovereignty and some of its corollaries (like mankind’s utter dependence on God for true and ultimate knowledge, let alone for salvation) were the premises that led Edwards through his meditations on history and his attempts to make sense of all of God’s past, present and future acts. His concept of revival as a sovereign work of God did not differ from Cotton Mather’s or even from that of Puritans and some evangelicals before and after their own generations respectively (Murray, Revivalism, 374). But revival in Edwardsean rhetoric and philosophy of history virtually paralleled eschatology or prophecy in importance. The latter two, in fact, were materialized in the form of awakenings, which for Edwards encompassed anything from Northampton’s local experience in 1734-35 or the Protestant Reformation, to the zeal of Joshua’s generation of Israelites or the piety of Job. Edwards’ compelling articulation of revival as the concrete agent of divine intervention 136 in history derived its freshness from his “unique combination of tradition and innovation in theological reasoning” (McClymond & McDermott, 207). ! 137 3. PROGRESSIVE DIVINE AGENCY: THE RHETORIC OF PIETY Some crucial quotations from the sermon series that mainly concerns this study have already been analyzed in the context of chapter 2, where outlining divine agency in Edwards’ rhetoric of history and searching for the keys to his historical framework were the primary aims. I shall, in the present and next chapters, continue to bring the distinction between immediate and progressive divine agency to bear on the literary analysis of the Redemption Discourse, focusing first on the latter and on how the preacher’s deeply theological thought was effectively fleshed out in the historiographical and homiletic endeavor of this sermon series. Oratorical strategies, therefore, are the main focus in the following pages and also how (or whether) they brought about the response on the part of Northamptonites that their pastor intended. Enough biographical background has already been outlined throughout the foregoing chapters although some key events and circumstances will be described again where relevant and for clarity’s sake. However, my purpose is to look at Edwards’ rhetoric throughout the thirty sermons and to analyze it in its own terms, taking the text’s internal coherence at all levels for granted. This task depends to a great extent on some elements that have already been unpacked in chapter 2, such as the Edwardsean view of nature (pp. 92-108 above) and, hence, how imagery from the realm of nature is imbued with a transcendence that was rare in other colonial Puritans;1 or the importance of contemplating God at work in history (pp. 72-90), both local and universal, the role this had in making spiritual experience tangible, as it were, and the assurance and encouragement, both collective and individual, that were to be derived from such contemplation. This latter aspect bears on !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 See Mason Lowance’s conclusions in this regard (273-276). ! 138 my rhetorical analysis, for instance, as I explore what are some of Edwards’ most subtle uses of allusion and of parallelism between his own congregation and other faithful communities in biblical and historical narratives. Although it is probably not necessary by now, I think it necessary to define the scope and qualify the complexity of the task that I have set for the present and next chapters in terms of scholarship. Some remarks from two different editors of the Yale collection of Jonathan Edwards’ works may be quoted to this end. John F. Wilson makes the following comment in his editorial introduction to the Redemption Discourse: To move into a systematic analysis of Edwards' literary strategies necessarily misrepresents them, because it treats as separate elements that are fused in his text. But it ought to be evident that, already in the thirty sermons preached in 1739, he had moved far toward the conception of a treatise or sustained essay on the fundamentals of the Christian religion, which he would organize in terms of the objective side of the redemptive process, namely, God's Work of Redemption. The sermons stand without the ambitious development he intended for them. But they stand also as a literary achievement in their own right, without the revision, refinement, and extension he would have given them. (9: 34) There is a rudimentary character to Edwards’ work that does not lessen its literary value. At the same time, and despite the lack of “ambitious development” or elaboration in the sermon series as it appears in volume 9 of the Yale edition, there is a structural complexity and sophistication wherein Edwards innovates and breaks away from Puritan sermonic tradition. The evolution from sermon to treatise during the 1730s and early 40s, or what Wilson Kimnach (Yale general editor of the sermons) calls the “tendency to ! 139 preach treatises from the pulpit” (10: 105), probably with future elaboration in mind,2 must not lead the reader of Edwards’ homiletic works to forget they are first oratory and then literature (Kimnach, 10:115). In fact, the art of oratory in its classical sense has everything to do with apologetics and persuasion, which is precisely what Edwards had in mind as he sought to systematize “the fundamentals of the Christian religion” for a future comprehensive publication. The ‘History of the Work of Redemption’ was to be an (if not the most) important piece in Edwards’ defense of orthodox Christianity (Marsden, 482) and that places this sermon series not just at the center of his thought but of his heart. For this pastor-preacher, informing the mind of his hearers about anything concerning the faith had to go hand-in-hand with a response of the will. So he mustered all his oratorical skill and resources to paint the grand historical picture, which was meant to not merely lead listeners to accurate propositional truths, or ‘doctrine’, but to become a driving force for their individual and communal piety in an ‘application’ of history’s past examples and future promises. Although the present and following chapters of my dissertation will not stick to a linear analysis of the sermons, but shall encompass the whole series and follow an order based on specific imagery and other literary resources, it seems appropriate to begin with some observations about sermon one. Despite its relative shortness, there are a number of elements contained in it that begin to set the tone for the whole Redemption Discourse, establish a framework for the series and define the dynamics of divine activity in history. The latter definition Edwards provides explicitly as well as through the use of biblical illustrations and other allusion. He seems compelled, after having established his doctrine !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 2 This was almost certainly the case when he conceived and preached the Redemption Discourse. See pp. 23-24 above. ! 242 Despite this prevalently negative view of his own times and nation (indeed, people “wander in the dark” and “fall in matters of religion as in midnight darkness” [440]), Edwards moves on to consider what had improved since the Protestant Reformation. The three points which make up this final section of sermon twenty-four are very telling if viewed in relation to the above-mentioned hierarchy, as it were, whereby Edwards holds the spiritual outpouring of God’s immediate presence to be the greatest means to advance His Work of Redemption, as opposed to other secondary means like military or political power. He begins: “The Pope is much diminished in power and influence”. Thus, the importance that Edwards has attributed to revivals up to this point in the sermon does not imply that developments of a political nature are not also orchestrated by God to favor the progress of His kingdom in the world. Likewise, persecution, though still present in “some parts of the Protestant church”, is “now in no measure as it has been heretofore”. These human factors and their bearing on the state of religion were not to be minimized when considering what the divine designs might be through them. However, they were not positively decisive (as revivals were) since the absence of persecution, for example, meant that “the enemies of Christ” now found “another channel” of “opposition against his cause” through downright mockery (9: 439). The third and last respect in which things had improved since the sixteenth century was the “great increase of learning”. Interestingly, Edwards devotes twice as much space and ink to this point than to the two preceding put together. Also, there seems to be a real basis for optimism according to what he makes of the issue of contemporary scientific knowledge, its origin in God’s own intervention at the Reformation and how God will use it in the millennium to glorify Himself and abase human pride. ! 243 The period from the Reformation to the present day is depicted, in this consideration of “learning” or “knowledge”,13 as one abounding in ‘light’. This is done without actually using the term but by indirect allusion through contrasts, imagery and certain expressions that are suggestive of the sun being “raised to a vastly greater height” than ever before (9: 440). In this regard, the end of the twenty-fourth sermon works with the same notion of ‘dawn’, or light that has hitherto increased gradually but suddenly advances by a remarkable divine intervention, as did the sermons dealing with other ‘outpourings’ like those of the days of Enos, Joshua’s generation or Pentecost. That “light” should be rhetorically replaced by “knowledge” is not surprising since Pauline discourse of conversion referred to “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God” shining through His Son (2 Corinthians 4:6). And although the ‘sun’ is not literally present in the last three pages of the text under consideration, Edwards’ use of certain expressions subtly evokes its zenith. First, there is the obvious contrast between the coming of the sixteenth century’s outpouring of the Spirit and the preceding “dark times of popery”. Also, there is the fact that scientific as well as religious “[l]earning began to revive with the Reformation”. Providence assisted this increase and spread of knowledge with the human invention of “the art of printing” just at the right time, and caused “learning” to be “increased more and more, and at this day is undoubtedly raised higher than ever it was before” (9: 439, 440). Here there is a clear parallel between the course of apparently natural or human intellectual advance and the point reached by supernatural light that has Christ, the Son/sun, as its source. Edwards goes as far as to suggest a parallelism between the current situation and the time of Christ’s First Coming into the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 13 These words are repeated throughout 9: 439-441. ! 244 world. Basing his inference on Daniel’s prophecies concerning the increase of knowledge that was to precede the Messiah’s advent, it is suggested that “God in his providence now seems to be acting over again the same part which he did a little before Christ came” (my italics). These prophetic and, for Edwards, historical correspondences between the first appearing of the Son of Man and the millennium imply that the coming of the latter cannot be far off. His interpretation (two sermons later) of the gospel saying “Nevertheless when the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on earth [?]”, in fact, places that “coming” announced by Jesus himself at the time of his “set[ting] up his kingdom in the world”, not at Judgment Day (457). So, how are prevailing unbelief and great human pride in their scientific breakthroughs turned into an “excellent handmaid to divinity”? Men now “seem to wander in the dark, are miserably deluded, stumble and fall in matters of religion as in midnight darkness. Trusting to their learning, they grope in the daytime as in the night” (440, 441; my italics). At this point it is clear that Edwards pictures the sun, as it were, shining in its zenith but light is prevented from entering humankind’s understanding only due to their unconverted state. The present historical period is objectively one of spiritual light in the same way that secular advances (technological, scientific, etc.) are undeniably great. Despite all the pointers to a predictably imminent divine intervention, the “appointed time” for the millennium, or “for that glorious outpouring of God’s Spirit”, remains unknown and is viewed by Edwards as depending entirely on an arbitrary and immediate act of God. Indeed, He “will himself by his own immediate influence enlighten men’s minds; then may we hope that God will improve this great increase of knowledge as an handmaid to religion” (9: 441; my italics). So there is, after all, an ! 245 optimistic outlook implicit in the Edwardsean vision of history (McClymond & McDermott, 237) despite the preacher’s jeremiad-like insistence, until the very last sermon, on “the present dark circumstances” for the church and the interests of religion (9: 526). What makes this third point of improvement since the Reformation (i.e., the increase of knowledge) significant in comparison with the previous two which were connected to political or more human considerations (the Pope’s power and physical and material persecution) is that the understanding or intellect, for Edwards, had a particular role to play in perceiving and immediately experiencing the divine presence within time and space. Though God’s “ordering of events” and the “details of providence, which very much include human instrumentation” are important to understand “secondary causation” in Edwardsean theology of history (Schweitzer, 115, 116), God’s immediate presence and glory is “manifested to [creatures’] understandings”. Divine self-communication was possible to intelligent creatures by means of the “divine supernatural light”14 and their subsequent ability to perceive glory in all of God’s works (supremely in the Work of Redemption) resulted in an appropriate response of the heart (26, 27). Edwards firmly believed this and with this confidence he expounded the Bible, which he considered to be instrumental in revival and in the subsequent increase of knowledge to be expected, as in Ezra’s days or the Reformation. Likewise, there was the paradigm of Pentecost, typified also by Ezra’s completion of the Old Testament canon, which established great revelation to be a corollary or accompaniment of the revival experience. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 14 See Schweitzer, 116, 117, and pp. 32ff above. ! 246 After sermon twenty-four, the use of terms pertaining to the ‘rhetoric of revival’ serve merely to point forward to the millennium, and that only in one single instance (9: 460-462). Otherwise, the account of the Reformation in relation to the awakenings of Edwards’ own day is the last context for his compelling deployment of oratorical strategies designed to elicit a response from Northamptonites. These have been shown to be, mainly, the identification of 16th to 18th century reform and revival movements with biblical ones by means of numerous connections (typological or more direct allusions) through the use of the revivalist idiom both in biblical exegesis and in the construal of post-apostolic history. Parallelisms or “historical comparison” would, in fact, continue to be one of Edwards’ main tools in making an apology of the Great Awakening during its aftermath, especially comparing the situation in the colonies with the days of the apostles (Zakai, History, 278; cf. p. 38 above). But extra-biblical revival, as has been shown, was also instrumental to enable congregants in 1739 to measure their own experience against something less remote and easier to identify with. Likewise, due to the essential connections between the Protestant Reformation begun two hundred years before and Reformed/evangelical identity in the colonies, the construal of the third “spiritual resurrection” in period three of human history as beginning in the sixteenth century but stretching to the present placed their own local, first-hand spiritual experience in a “sacred historical moment” and a transnational context. By doing this Edwards intended to elicit people’s response (Zakai, History, 286). Revivals were the “immediate effect” of the pouring out of God’s Spirit (235) and, therefore, there was nothing to be found within human time and space that more directly signaled the presence of divine agency. The eschatological dimension of revivals went beyond the millennial hope that was implicit in ! 247 them, since the very eternal “destiny of human beings is inextricable from the course of salvation history” (282). That is to say, what will be revealed at Judgment Day (the ultimate eschatological event) has already been decisively materialized in the unfolding of the Work of Redemption, during which individuals or multitudes (depending on the kind of ‘season’ one lived in) were converted by the Spirit. In the same way, it could be said that every conversion and revival is, in the Edwardsean scheme, “inextricable” from the purchase of redemption at Calvary. The latter was an event very much prepared for by providential developments and followed by repeated and manifold manifestations of its success; however, in itself, it constituted the apex and axis of redemptive history and transcended time and space, as was shown in Fig. 4 above. (p. 215). ! ! 248 5. CONCLUDING REMARKS AND FURTHER PERSPECTIVES: EDWARDS AT THE CROSSROADS OF AMERICAN HISTORY Although this dissertation began with, and has returned to, plenty of references to what was essentially a local or, at the most, colonial context of religious revival (1. 3. and chap. 4), I hope it has become increasingly clear that Jonathan Edwards was a visionary with broader horizons than may appear at a first or superficial glance. The circumstances of the years following the writing and preaching of the Redemption Discourse would afford this New English orator a notable position from which he was able to influence more than just a few hundred congregants. As the main representative of a moderate stance on the Great Awakening he would, from pulpits and in print, seek to win colonial Americans over to the revivalist cause, thus contributing decisively to what became, in time, the collapse of New England’s Congregationalist establishment (1. 1. above). Though he may accurately be labeled both a conservative and a rationalist, Edwards would be opposed precisely from some Congregational quarters where ministers advocated for a rationalistic interpretation of Scripture and stood for ecclesiastical conservatism. They lacked the Edwardsean framework that provided a practical balance between Word and Spirit (pp. 232, 233 above) while acknowledging divine sovereignty to the point of letting God himself conduct human history, even if this meant a temporary suspension of ecclesiastical order or the shaking of social structures (pp. 70-72 above). The good old ‘New England Way’ (cherished by figures like Cotton Mather), with its love for social order and its blurring of the line between civil and spiritual categories, was by the middle of the eighteenth century totally outdated. Movements of religious renewal ! 249 with a fresh outlook on the future were necessary but orthodox Christianity, by definition, could not have an identity that was not deeply rooted in its historical past. Jonathan Edwards’ main contributions in this regard were his construal of salvation history in terms of continuous and teleological progress (which stretched into both an earthly and a heavenly future) and the radical Christocentricity of his philosophical understanding of reality. Revivals, which were inextricable from Christ’s ‘purchase of redemption’, constituted mighty acts of an unpredictable God and were the best proof that immediate divine agency had always been, and was still, operative in the world. However, this deity’s redemptive activity towards humankind was not just ‘immediate’ but also ‘progressive’, as Edwards’ rhetoric of piety made evident (chapter 3 above). Though an emphasis on God’s remarkable irruptions throughout history was crucial in order to maintain the traditional sense of divine transcendence in historical discourse, the Spirit’s outpourings in the Edwardsean scheme always resulted in the creation (or, to use the Pauline idiom, the new creation) of pious dispositions and communal holiness in human objects of divine mercy. These people, God’s elect, were called to experience the divine presence immanently through mutual edification and by continual perseverance in the basic duties of the Christian life. It was with respect to these two necessary effects of revival that Edwards’ handling of imagery from building or construction became instrumental (being directly linked to the idea of ‘edification’; 3. 1. above) and that an Edwardsean understanding of the new birth remained fundamental in order to see the essential connection between individual conversion and the pious life that should follow it. “The creative power of the Spirit” gave the believer “a new heart, infusing a new principle”. This principle was “continually from the Spirit of God, ! 250 dwelling as a spring of life in the soul. It is at first immediately from the Spirit of God, and ’tis always immediately from the Spirit” (Parables, I, 147; my italics). This ontological necessity was not simply explained to Northampton congregants so they might go home and figure out how to lead a life that would mirror such inwrought principle. Approximately one year after the words above were preached, they would be summoned by their minister to accompany him through a six-month-long sermon series for the sober contemplation and comprehensive analysis of the Work of Redemption. If they were able to recognize beauty as well as acknowledge God’s absolute sovereignty during this prolonged consideration of salvation history, the glory of the Son, Edwards hoped, would supernaturally influence and nurture the spiritual lives that had begun at each Northamptonite’s conversion. Compelling elements in Edwards’ rhetoric of piety and revival included not only imagery (from ‘building’, ‘light’, etc.) and typology (Christ as the Sun/Son, revivals themselves as echoes or fulfillments of biblical episodes and prophecies, etc.) but the preacher’s shrewdness as a logician and creative exegete. As I suggested above, the Northampton theologian might be termed a rationalist insofar as he believed that reason and logical argumentation could play an important role in the believer’s growth in the knowledge of God’s will. Edwards’ historical discourse reflected this confidence in the power of reason as he endeavored to articulate divine agency in terms of reasonable and orderly providential activity. His depiction of cyclical and strictly symmetrical patterns within the historical process (3. 2. and 4. 1. above) conveyed the idea of a God who acts in no irrational or arbitrary way but who, on the contrary, implements His eternal plan and designs according to the highest ideal of reason. By employing logic (following the ! 251 principle of “reasoning after revelation” [Moody, 123]) in his very defense of divine reasonableness in the Work of Redemption, Edwards tried to appeal to colonial contemporaries who had neutralized, to say the least, the vitality of true Christianity with their formalism and who claimed to defend a purely rationalistic interpretation of the Bible (chapter 1, pp. 4-6, 10 above). Despite this colonial American context, which undoubtedly conditioned Edwards’ choice of rhetorical strategies, there was also the wider philosophical scene of the Enlightenment, whose shifting paradigms threatened traditional approaches to history in particular and the Christian interpretation of the cosmos in general. In light of this international context, the Redemption Discourse also seems quite ambitious, especially as Edwards subtly engaged the empiricist mode of thought whereby the material universe was seen as operating and being sustained by mere mechanical laws. By using language that is highly suggestive in terms of sensorial perception (especially ‘seeing’; pp. 190, 201, 202 above) when considering how the historical process is revealed and clarified by Scripture’s own account and prophetic predictions, Edwards seems to intimate that the Bible itself can withstand a test conducted according to the empirical method, that is, based on the observation of evidence. Moreover, in conducting such a test, one may distinctly identify patterns that resemble natural processes themselves or human inventions, which are set in motion by some contrived mechanism and the interaction of different forces. The discovery of this apparent ‘mechanics’ within the very tissue of temporal and material reality as revealed in the Scriptures, far from pointing in the direction of a self-sustaining universe, should confirm the existence of an immanent, as well as transcendent, deity. But Edwards does not intend his hearers to consider these ! 258 As much as his postmillennialist outlook on the future may have led to various intellectual and social developments in America during and after his own lifetime, the ultimate goal of history, i.e. God and heaven, would no doubt be considered by him the best legacy to be passed down “from generation to generation”. Lying outside human time, but not beyond human reach due to Christ’s Incarnation and ‘purchase of redemption’, the transcendent, “immutable” God had “built heaven” for a “happy society”, His invisible Church, to enjoy after every word in the book of Revelation was fulfilled (9: 525, 526, 528). 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