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

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

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

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

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

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

Discerning the Spirit: ambivalent assurance in the soteriology of Jonathan Edwards and Barthian correctives

2010 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 437-455
Author(s):  
W. Ross Hastings
Keyword(s):  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Human Subjectivity ◽  
The Social ◽  
In Christ ◽  
Theological Controversy ◽  
High Level ◽  
Assurance Of Salvation ◽  
The Trinity

AbstractAssurance of salvation is a matter of perennial pastoral concern and theological controversy. After the Great Awakening, Jonathan Edwards developed a doctrine of assurance based largely on discerning the work of the Spirit in the affections and actions of the professed believer. One might have expected from this theocentric, trinitarian and surprisingly participational theologian a robust doctrine of assurance and a joyful, other-centred spirituality. Ironically, however, profound ambiguities persisted within it which will be shown to arise from the predominantly pneumatic nature of his version oftheosis, a blurring of the distinction between justification and sanctification, and the power of his predominantly psychological analogy of the Trinity. This article will therefore first present the main features of Jonathan Edwards’ doctrine of the assurance of salvation. The second section will evaluate it by outlining factors in Edwards’ theology which might have been expected to produce a high level of certainty concerning assurance, and then those which might militate against this certainty. Whilst Edwards did at times espouse the social analogy of the Trinity, histheosisis constructed predominantly within the psychological analogy. Innovatively modified though it was, because Edwards works within this framework, he overemphasises the pneumatological union of the saints with God, at the expense of the incarnational union of God with and for humanity in Christ. This results correspondingly in an inordinate reliance for assurance on the Spirit's work within the realm of human subjectivity, over against objective christological realities. In short, Edwards’ theology of assurance is, in the end, individualistic and anthropocentric.

Jonathan Edwards' Conception of the Church

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

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

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

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

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

Bastard Feudalism and the Framing of Thirteenth-Century England

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Coss
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Great Work ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship

In the introduction to his great work of 2005, Framing the Early Middle Ages, Chris Wickham urged not only the necessity of carefully framing our studies at the outset but also the importance of closely defining the words and concepts that we employ, the avoidance ‘cultural sollipsism’ wherever possible and the need to pay particular attention to continuities and discontinuities. Chris has, of course, followed these precepts on a vast scale. My aim in this chapter is a modest one. I aim to review the framing of thirteenth-century England in terms of two only of Chris’s themes: the aristocracy and the state—and even then primarily in terms of the relationship between the two. By the thirteenth century I mean a long thirteenth century stretching from the period of the Angevin reforms of the later twelfth century on the one hand to the early to mid-fourteenth on the other; the reasons for taking this span will, I hope, become clearer during the course of the chapter, but few would doubt that it has a validity.

Presbyterians and Ethics

2019 ◽  
pp. 525-537
Author(s):  
Mark Douglas
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Reformed Theology ◽  
Second Great Awakening ◽  
World War ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
History Of Ethics ◽  
Presbyterian Church ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of

The history of ethics in the Presbyterian Church has been shaped by the theological commitments of Reformed theology, the church’s ecumenical and interreligious encounters, its interactions with the wider cultures in which it functions, and its global scope. Consequently, Presbyterian ethics have become increasingly diverse, culturally diffused, ecumenically directed, and frequently divisive. That said, its history can helpfully be divided into three lengthy periods. In the first (roughly from the church’s origins in 1559 to the Second Great Awakening in the early nineteenth century), theology, ethics, and politics are so interwound that distinguishing one from the others is difficult. In the second (roughly from the Second Great Awakening to the end of World War II), moral concerns emerge as forces that drive the church’s theology and polity. And in the third (for which proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 might be a heuristically helpful starting point), ethics increasingly functions in ways that are only loosely tethered to either Reformed theology or polity. The strength of the church’s social witness, the consistency of its global engagements, and the failings of its internecine strife are all evident during its five-hundred-year history.

The Metaphysics of Jonathan Edwards’s “Personal Narrative”: Continuous Creation, Personal Identity, and Spiritual Development

2019 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 184-206
Author(s):  
Christopher Woznicki
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Spiritual Development ◽  
Personal Narrative ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Textual Evidence ◽  
Continuous Creation ◽  
Historical Figures ◽  
The One

Summary Central to evangelical piety is the theme of “conversionism”. Among historical figures who embody this characteristic of evangelical piety one finds that Jonathan Edwards plays an important role, in part, because of his 1740 “Personal Narrative”. In this essay I examine the metaphysics underlying Edwards’s view of conversion in his “Personal Narrative”. Special attention is given to Edwards’s doctrine of continuous creation and to a feature that underlies his understanding of spiritual development, namely the One-Subject Criterion. I weigh two options for how Edwards may coherently hold to continuous creation and the One-Subject Criterion: Mark Hamilton’s relative realism/endurance account and Edwardsean Anti-Criterialism. I conclude that given the textual evidence Edwardsean Anti-Criterialism is to be preferred over Hamilton’s view.

The Contributions of Oscar Halecki to American Historical Scholarship

1976 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 89-97
Author(s):  
Thaddeus V. Gromada
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
New England ◽  
The United States ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Oil Refineries ◽  
Middle Atlantic ◽  
Steel Mills ◽  
Social Opportunities ◽  
The One

Most of the one and one-half million Poles who immigrated to the United States before World War II were people of rural, Catholic, Slavic stock in search of greater economic and social opportunities. They settled in urban centers primarily in the middle Atlantic, mid-Western, and New England states where they formed communities (Polonias) around the steel mills, coal and iron mines, slaughter houses and meat packing plants, oil refineries, shoe and textile factories, granaries and milling plants. Their labor was an important element in the industrialization of America. They were among the millions of unknown persons from eastern and southern Europe, as Michael Novak put it, “who have strengthened family and neighborhood life in America, and from 1930's to the present have made possible the longest strides in the nation's history in economic matters and civil rights.” Very few scholars and intellectuals, however, could be found among these Polish immigrants. When Polish scholars, intellectuals, or artists emigrated from partitioned Poland, usually after unsuccessful revolutions, they settled in France or some other European country.

Jonathan Edwards on the Sense of the Heart

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

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

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