The Affective Turn

This chapter describes and evaluates the actual practices adopted by Edwards in his mentoring ministry. First, shifts in understanding authority in the eighteenth century are expounded, followed by an investigation of the nature of friendship and conversation in Edwards’s world. His dynamic conception of individuals in social contexts provides a base from which to explore mentoring. His own pedagogical assumptions as a modern thinker are outlined, which find their expression in the ways that Edwards conducted his personal correspondence in a familiar manner. Edwards’s ordination sermons of the late 1740s are evidence of his aspirations for mentees and of his frustration that the revivals had not been as effective as he had hoped.

The Traditioned Self

Edwards did not invent the practice of mentoring. In the premodern world, identity was received rather than created, and mentoring served this traditional means of personal formation. This chapter investigates the significance of the cultivation of virtue for a flourishing life, and the ways in which discipline functioned as a strategy for virtue formation in the post-Reformation world. The examples of Richard Baxter and Cotton Mather are presented as significant landmarks in that story. Edwards’s own upbringing in New England, with its Puritan expectations of life and ministry, is unpacked as a way of understanding the innovation Edwards would ultimately pursue in a ministry of mentoring.

Coda

This brief coda positions Edwards’s insights into mentoring as valuable contributions to the pursuit of integrative learning in a postmodern and fragmented world. Given the value of the medium and message being mutually reinforcing, a Christian educational agenda should no less conform to this pedagogical assumption. This is supported theologically by appeal to Christ’s incarnation and to the expectation of meeting him face-to-face in the coming age, and calls us to resist pragmatic pressures which prize efficiency over embodiment. The long-term pursuit of wisdom, best acquired through direct encounter, personal negotiation, and contextually driven decision-making, becomes more pressing than ever in an age which encourages rage and unreflective reaction through social media.

The Revolutionary Lens

Part of the intriguing power of Edwards’s mentoring is the legacy he creates during and after the American Revolution. He trains his mentees to be not mere mimics but rather leaders who can reason from first principles and adapt their proclamation to the particular social context of their ministry. Edwards spawns a school of ministry known subsequently as the New Divinity, which institutionalizes Edwards’s revivalist impulses in founding Andover Seminary in Newton, Massachusetts, in 1808. Their successes in New England in local church settings and their influence on debates of the early republic are dramatic, evidenced in federalist political philosophy as well as the cause of abolition. Edwards takes traditional mentoring practices and retools them to operate in a modern and democratic world.

Introduction

Taking up correspondence between Edwards’s closest associates, Samuel Hopkins and Joseph Bellamy, we begin our investigation of the concept of mentoring in Edwards’s ministry. This chapter highlights the challenges involved in writing on the mentoring of an historical figure, for example the difficulty of exploring a ministry, which is often private and without documentation, as well as the method adopted to capture the pastoral and theological insights that animate Edwards’s practice. Feminist historians have provided a lead in this kind of method. The content of the book is outlined as a case study in cultural engagement, and the potential readership among academics and pastor-theologians is acknowledged.

The Mimetic Way

Edwards’s chief theological justification for mentoring arises from the doctrine of the beatific vision, or the significance for our present life, ministry, and spirituality of meeting Christ face to face at the end of the age. Visual imagery is a constant feature of Edwards’s teaching, which is here combined with his approach to the image of God in human beings, the Christological nature of imitation, and the pressure points of modernity. The first things, near things, and last things are signposts to Edwards’s understanding of the power of mentoring in human experience. We see how integrative the mentoring project is for him, in as far as it obviates the fragmenting narrative of the Enlightenment. Edwards’s theological and cultural reflex is both to resist and appropriate modern categories of thought.