Amid the burgeoning literature on Jonathan Edwards, the sheer scale of his extant writings still cries out for guidance and elucidation.  The nineteen essays in this volume are intended to furnish a “brief and yet instructive and authoritative introduction to the key ideas in Edwards’ theology” (xi).  The listed contributors read like a Who’s Who of current Edwards scholarship, a field which has grown almost continuously since 1949, when Perry Miller published his influential but controversial Jonathan Edwards.   The old New England intellectual tradition with which Miller identified owed much to Edwards and his followers, but recent scholarship has rightly placed it in a much wider context, spiritually and geographically.

These essays impressively place Jonathan Edwards in historical context.  Edwards easily confuses the modern reader, at once embracing the contemporary intellectual currents of the Enlightenment, while looking back to the classical theology of Augustine and the Scholastic thinkers of Medieval Europe.  Miller’s belief that Edwards’s theology transcended the contours of its own time, however, will simply no longer do.  If anything brought Edwards’s writing into a coherent whole, it was his effort “to harmonize scripture with the human knowledge of his day” (xiv).   Unlike the late Stephen Jay Gould, who posited the separate magisteria of religion and science, Edwards embraced both spheres of knowledge interdependently.  As Robert Brown points out, he “was completely enamoured with the modern intellectual enterprise and accepted its claims to produce real knowledge about the world” (96).  This despite the extreme idealism of Edwards’s theology, which conceived the entirety of physical creation as “shadows of divine things” in the mind of God (37).  While Edwards’s tendency to approach theological problems by analogy to “natural philosophy” may appear problematic, it certainly spoke to the intellectual battleground of the day, challenging the discourses of deism and enthusiasm alike.

The Edwards of these essays is a practical conservative, open to intellectual innovation but essentially formed by his Puritan heritage.  Edwards criticized emotional excesses of eighteenth-century revivalism, even questioning the great awakener George Whitefield concerning “spiritual ‘impulses’ and assurance of salvation” (10).  According to Wilson H. Kimnach, Edwards’s notorious sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” was not even a true “hellfire” piece, “consumed as it is with the here and now,” instead of the everlasting hereafter (253).  Harry S. Stout convincingly lays to rest Miller’s claim that Edwards abandoned Puritan “federal theology” in favour of preaching individual salvation.  Edwards was as much a Puritan as his celebrated grandfather Solomon Stoddard had been; the twin concepts of God’s Israel in New England and the covenant of grace rested easily one beside the other.  Edwards’s theology endured through the nineteenth-century, albeit in unexpected corners.  As Mark Noll points out, while Congregational New England went down the path of Unitarian religion, Edwards’s theology continued to inspire the likes of Thomas Chalmers, leader of Scotland’s Free Church reformation (302).

The Princeton Companion to Jonathan Edwards is a solid contribution to a crowded historical field.  While “an authoritative introduction” may be elusive, this book belongs on the shelves of every scholar of the Great Awakening, not to mention historian of colonial America.  An equivalent compendium depicting Jonathan Edwards as pastor remains to be written, however, this book will be an invaluable appendix to Edwards’s Complete Works, soon to be completed by Yale University Press.