Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of St Andrews, August 2008.

This thesis is believed to be the first full-scale study of Jonathan Edwards’ theology of revelation. The interrelated questions addressed in this work are ‘what was Edwards’ understanding of divine revelation,’ and ‘how did this understanding function in his larger theological project?’ The first question is answered by showing how Edwards’ theology of revelation flowed from a doctrine of the Trinity that featured the divine attribute of communicativeness, and from a doctrine of creation that theorised God created in order to communicate himself to intelligent beings noetically, affectionally and beatifically. Edwards’ theology of revelation was thus distinctively tri-dimensional in that Trinitarian communication contained noetic, affectional and beatific elements. This revelation encompassed the media of Scripture, nature and redemptive history, and Edwards’ understandings of each of these three media are explored in depth. The concept of harmony is shown to be key to Edwards’ use of all of these media. Edwards’ radical opposition to Deistic thinking, in which the media of revelation are alleged to be discordant, grounds the discussion in its eighteenth century context. The second of the questions posed above is answered by presenting a theory explaining Edwards’ great project as the pursuit of one objective: to interpret all reality as the harmonious self-revelation of the Triune God, so that human beings might better fulfil their purpose to apprehend and re-emanate this revelation. We believe that this is a plausible and useful way to understand Edwards’ entire corpus.

Thesis advisor: Dennis Hale / Thesis advisor: Gerald Easter / Intellectuals' different self-understandings contribute to their development of different views on the people in society. And such different attitudes remarkably affect their ways of engaging their people in the specific cultural contexts. In the process of interactions, people's characters were established in their specific environments. Admittedly, intellectuals acted as intermediary between the core values/beliefs and the people. Fundamentally and ultimately it is our conceptions of God and our thinking of messages from Heaven that determines not only intellectual's self-awareness and their views on the people, but also people's actual self-understanding. I am trying to demonstrate that those lacking of sense of self-understanding were so tough to develop public awareness and take initiatives in civic participation, just like people in traditional Confucian society in ancient China. People of colonial New England were directed to cultivate their personal relationships with God and so also their sense of the self, which is compact with their active civic society. / Thesis (MA) — Boston College, 2013. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Political Science.

Jonathan Edwards, an eighteenth-century theologian and preacher, is often most recognized for his teachings on hell and damnation. This stereotypical understanding prevents a proper understanding of the complexities and depth of subjects that Edwards did in fact address. Edwards preached and wrote extensively on other aspects of theology forming one of the most voluminous collections of written works in early America. Many have written analyzing Edwards theology and have traced his commentary on social, political, and economic ideas. There is however, a gap of scholarly research as to how Edwards's understanding of poor relief directly and indirectly shaped and influenced his social, political, and economic beliefs. Thus, this study has been devoted to making that connection. It specifically focuses on Edwards's understanding of the Christian's responsibility to aid the poor. It examines the works that Edwards's himself produced in order to find the basis for how Edwards's belief in aiding the poor affected his teachings on the market economy. In addition, it analyzes how Edwards utilized the language of the market in his critique of it. It is primarily focused on the works in which Edwards used economic language and ideas, and seeks to understand the source of such viewpoints.

The primary aim of this dissertation is to demonstrate that Jonathan Edwards's "sense of the heart" as a principle of a new kind of perception or spiritual sensation given by the Spirit of God in regeneration, in which a believer tastes or sees God's beauty, can provide expository preaching with a meaningful direction for the restoration of religious experience. Chapter 1 focuses on the disappearance of religious experience in contemporary expository preaching and introduces, by illustrating the debate between the Old and the New Light in the First Great Awakening, an uncomfortable phenomenon in expository preaching that polarizes affectionate religious experience and cognitive-propositional truth. It argues that expository preaching should aim at affectional application because application is possible only when the listeners' fundamental affections are reoriented. Chapter 2 examines Jonathan Edwards's spiritual epistemology by analyzing Edwards's concept of the sense of the heart, through which the saints can experience God's beauty. The sense of the heart enables the saints to obtain a new habit or the heart that brings about new affections. The chapter contends that experiencing God's beauty through the sense of the heart is central to all genuine religious experiences. Chapter 3 defines the nature of Edwardsean religious experience as a spiritual-linguistic approach in the sense that the Spirit is the producer of genuine religious experience and the word of God illuminated by the Holy Spirit enables people to experience God's beauty and glory. It argues that expository preaching should create an experience for the listener, in Edwardsean sense, assuming that the conviction of the authority of the word of God and the encouragement of religious experience are completely compatible. Chapter 4 presents a homiletical analysis of Edwards's affective preaching. The chapter offers a comprehensive analysis of two of Edwards's sermons, as prime examples of his rhetorical strategies, to demonstrate how vivid and dramatic images are used in his sermons. The chapter suggests that expository sermons should pay more attention to language, just as Edwards recognized that the power in the sermon lies in the masterful use of language. Chapter 5 provides helpful implications for contemporary expository preaching. First, the chapter proposes preaching as a persuasion by illustrating Paul's use of rhetoric. Second, it indicates Edwards's power of imagination and suggests that expository preachers should pursue affective preaching by the use of their imagination and imaginative language. Third, it examines the implication of Edwardsean piety for expository preaching. Fourth, it offers preaching as a means of experiencing God's beauty. Chapter 6 summarizes the overall arguments established in the previous chapters. The goal of our preaching should be to touch the affections of our listener's hearts to bring them beyond a merely theoretical knowledge of spiritual realities.

Thesis (M.A.)--Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 2006. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 142-144).

Thesis (M.A.)--Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 2006. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 142-144).

This thesis examines the doctrine of happiness within the Jonathan Edwards corpus and seeks to understand its function and significance as it relates to Edwards's broader theological project. A close examination of both the internal development and the Early Modern intellectual context of Edwards's thought reveals that spiritual happiness is of central importance to Edwards's 'end of creation' project. Scholars commonly assume that the burden of Edwards's teleological writings is a theocentric defense and promotion of the glory of God in the face of an increasingly anthropocentric Enlightenment. However, this study demonstrates that, notwithstanding Edwards's adherence to the Reformed tradition's high view of God's glory, the early and enduring concern of Edwards's teleological project is the proof and defense of spiritual happiness as ultimate telos from a Reformed perspective. Edwards's purpose to defend the teleological status of happiness is primarily exposed by the development of Edwards's teleology in his Miscellanies notebook and related theological treatises such as Discourse on the Trinity and End of Creation, especially as Edwards engages rival teleological visions that tend to subordinate happiness. While Edwards's teleological conviction regarding happiness is inspired by his own Puritan and Reformed heritage and his early profound religious experience, he subsequently pursues the proof and defense of his Reformed teleology of happiness in response to the increasing tendency of Reformed and non-Calvinist Enlightenment thinkers to subordinate the teleological status of happiness. During the Early Modern period, Reformed theologians frequently subordinate happiness relative to godliness, and especially the glory of God, and Enlightenment thinkers increasingly make practical virtue and usefulness toward the common good the ultimate telos of human existence at the expense of spiritual happiness, which intellectual trends Edwards engages for the sake of defending his Reformed teleology of happiness. The first stage of the development of Edwards's teleology of happiness is marked by his conversion and subsequent profound experiences of spiritual happiness, and by his efforts that follow during the early 1720s to prove happiness as ultimate telos, primarily on the basis of Edwards's doctrine of divine goodness. During the second stage of development, Edwards works to defend happiness as ultimate telos from a comprehensively biblical and Reformed perspective. Edwards spends the rest of his career developing his doctrines of God and the Trinity, the work of redemption, and the glory of God primarily for the sake of defending his Reformed teleology of happiness, which I suggest, significantly influences and shapes Edwards's theology.

Departing from humanist models of American intellectual history, this dissertation proposes an alternative posthumanist approach to the thought of Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Charles Sanders Peirce. Beginning with Perry Miller’s influential scholarship, American thought is often cast as a search for “face to face” encounters with the unaccountable God of Calvinism, a figure that eventually evolves to encompass Romantic notions of the aesthetic, imagination, or, most predominately, individual human feeling. This narrative typically culminates in the pragmatism of William James, a philosophy in which human feeling attains priority at the expense of impersonal metaphysical systems. However, alongside and against these trends runs a tradition that derives from the Calvinist distinction between a fallen material world and a transcendent God possessed of absolute sovereignty, a tradition that also anticipates posthumanist theory, particularly the self-referential distinction between system and environment that occupies the central position in Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory. After systems theory, the possibility for “face to face” encounters is replaced with the necessary self-reference of communication and observation, an attribute expressed in Edwards, Emerson, and Peirce through, respectively, the figures of “true virtue,” an absent and inexpressible grief and, in its most abstract form, Peirce’s concept of a sign. In conclusion, Edwards, Emerson, and Peirce represent an alternative posthumanist genealogy of pragmatism that displaces human consciousness as the foundational ground of meaning, communication, or semiosis.

A number of basic themes suggest themselves as focal points for a study of the thought of Jonathan Edwards. The dissertation is an attempt to argue that experience is one of them, and that an attentive eye to the doctrine of experience will reveal it as the unifying theme of his philosophy. Specifically, at the center of Edwards' aesthetic and religious vision there lies a rich and profound sense of experience, and of the relation of all things to some form of perception. The evidence is to be found in Edwards' extensive published and unpublished writings. Among the several editions of his collected works, the 1808 Worcester edition and the 1829 Dwight edition are the most complete and most reliable. Another especially valuable source is the "Miscellaneous Observations," a notebook of random thoughts Edwards kept throughout his life. Parts of this journal are published, but a great deal remains unpublished in the Yale University Library, and contains a wealth of insights into the mind of Edwards. It is important to note the doctrinal influences of covenant theology. There had always been a disposition among the Puritans to emphasize real assent in religious matters. Their gradual acceptance of experience as a guide to doctrine can be attributed to the influence of medieval Neo-Platonism as well as to their own historical situation. Three elements form the center of Edwards' doctrine of experience. They are the idea of beauty, the sense of the heart, and the theological concept of grace. An explanation of each of these components in themselves and in their interrelations reveals the full meaning of experience. A sense of beauty suffused his own personal experiences and allowed him to see the world in relation to the universal consciousness of God. Man perceives the presence of divine consciousness throughout reality with a sense of the heart. The seat of man's cognitive life is his heart, which includes the understanding as well as the will. By defining grace as a "new simple idea," Edwards proposes that it is a new principle of nature within man, and that it is a taste for moral excellency which is specifically designated as love. As a metaphysical principle, the consent to being is an attempt to rethink the category of substance in terms of relation. The truly significant fact of the doctrine resides in an implicit theory of value-response—that value is objectively rooted in God, and that everything gives consent to it through man. Edwards' theology is an effort to place Newtonian physics into a wider frame of reference. He adapts the concepts of atoms, space, and gravity to an organic metaphysics of consent. Divine creation is a diffusive process of communication, and natural objects and events are called "images or shadows" because they bear an intrinsic relation to God's communicative nature. The specific agency of creation is to be found in the Incarnation, which is the capstone of his whole system of thought. Experience has held a position of preeminence among the major themes of American philosophy. The conclusion of this paper is that Edwards' philosophy can be viewed as the systematic explication of his doctrine of experience, and that it is possible to consider him an early exponent of the American tradition which gives experience a position of primacy in relation to thought.