This wide-ranging volume covers the final fifteen of the thirty-three years that Jonathan Edwards preached and includes some of his greatest sermons--including his Farewell Sermons to his Northampton congregation. The period is defined by Edwards' inventive strategies to improvise during the delivery of his sermons. Considering dependence on the written text in the pulpit to be a serious failing, he devised a double-columned, outlined format for his sermon manuscripts and continued to use it for the rest of his life. Sermons from this period also include those preached to Mahican and Mohawk Indians at the mission post of Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Edwards' various writings of 1743-58 map the complex terrain of his spiritual, intellectual, and professional life after the Great Awakening. He deals with topics ranging from the spiritual role of youth in the community to the struggles over communion in his Northampton congregation to the war with the French and their Indian allies.

The field of Jonathan Edwards studies is only beginning to wrestle with his vast corpus of writings on the Bible, and David Barshinger addresses this gap by providing a close study of his engagement with the book of Psalms. Barshinger explores materials that have received little attention to date, including Edwards's notebooks on the Bible and dozens of handwritten sermon manuscripts. Barshinger shows that Edwards approached the Psalms not merely from a typological or Christological viewpoint, but that the history of redemption provided the theological framework within which he interpreted, preached, and sang the Psalms. At a time of increasing attacks on the Bible, Edwards appropriated the book of Psalms as a divinely inspired anchor to proclaim the gospel. In his reading of the Psalms Edwards treated various theological themes, including God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, revelation, humanity, sin, the gospel, Christian piety, the church corporate, and the eternal dwellings of all people, connecting all of these themes through the redemptive-historical framework that guided his vision of the Bible.

Though Edwards spent most of his life working in local churches, and saw himself primarily as a pastor, his own views on the theology of the church have never been explored in depth. This book presents Edwards's views on ecclesiology by tracking the development of his convictions during the course of his tumultuous career. Drawing on Reformation foundations and the Puritan background of his ministry, Edwards refreshes our understanding of the church by connecting it to a nuanced interpretation of revival, allowing a dynamic view of the place of church in history and new thinking about its institutional structure. Indeed in Edwards's writing the church has an exalted status as the bride of Christ, joined to him forever. Building on the recent completion of the works of Jonathan Edwards, and material newly published online, this book, the first ever on Edwards's ecclesiology, demonstrates his commitment to corporate Christian experience shaped by theological convictions and his aspirations towards the visibility and unity of the Christian church. In a final section, Bezzant discusses topics relating to ecclesiology (such as hymnody, discipline, and polity), that occupied Edwards throughout his ministry. Edwards preached a Gospel concerned with God's purposes for the world, so it is the growth of the church, not merely the conversion of individuals, that is the necessary fruit of his preaching. The church in the West is rediscovering the importance of ecclesiology as it emerges from its Christendom constraints. Edwards's struggle to understand the church and its place within God's cosmic design is a case study that helps us to appreciate the church in the modern world.

This volume provides an interpretative key to Jonathan Edwards's theology developed from within his own doctrinal constructs. Strobel offers a dogmatic exposition of Edwards's theology by unveiling the trinitarian architecture of his thought. Building upon this analysis, Strobel applies his construct to reinterpret three key areas of redemption debated widely in the secondary literature: spiritual knowledge, regeneration, and religious affection. In order to achieve this purpose, Strobel's approach is theological rather than philosophical, employing Edwards's self-confession as a Reformed theologian to guide his analysis. In advancing a theological reading of Edwards, Strobel focuses on the systematic nature of Edward's theology, ordering it according to his doctrinal affirmations. This necessitates, as many Edwards scholars now affirm, a primary focus on Edwards's trinitarian theology, where the Trinity serves as the key ontological principle which orders the whole of his doctrinal construction. By grounding the interpretive key in Edwards's understanding of the Trinity, Strobel's idiosyncratic exposition of his doctrine of the Trinity serves to recast Edwards's theology in a new light.

Over the past half century, there has been a proliferation of scholarship on the great American theologian Jonathan Edwards. However, the vast majority of this output confines itself to the details of his work. With some welcome exceptions, the forest has often been missed for the trees. In this ground breaking study William Schweitzer presents a new reading of Edwards: He starts with the question what is distinctive in Edwards' theology? The answer comes in Edwards' insight into Trinitarian life. God is eternally communicative of his knowledge, love, and joy among the Three Persons of the Trinity, and this divine communicativeness was for Edwards the explanation for why God created the universe. More specifically, however, Edwards believed that God's communication carries with it the Trinitarian hallmark of “harmony.” This hallmark is not always east to discern, even for the regenerate. Edwards' lifelong project-as demonstrated by the common purpose of all three unfinished “Great Works”-was to interpret the harmony found in and among the several media of revelation.