The Jonathan Edwards Renaissance is fully underway, with an increased emphasis on Edwards as an exegete and interpreter of Scripture. In this work, Brian Borgman explores Edwards’s exegetical, hermeneutical, and theological treatment of the book of Genesis. This study gives special attention to Edwards’s hermeneutics and exegesis of Genesis, his pastoral methods for preaching it, and his theological development of the meaning of “the image of God.” The result is a fruitful study on Edwards’s interaction with the first book of the Bible.

Jonathan Edwards represents one of the most popular figures in church history. The father of the First Great Awakening and the wellspring of American Puritan theology, Edwards’'s corpus has provoked immense scholarly study. Nevertheless, scholarship has only recently been directed to that subject that most captivated Edwards, his exegesis of Scripture. Jonathan Edwards’ Exegetical Reflections on Genesis seeks to remedy this paucity of research by exhaustively studying Edwards’'s utilization of Scripture in Genesis. Given scholarly debate concerning Edwards’s adherence to the Protestant literal sense, the author, Doug Landrum, measures Edwards’s use of typology, prophecy, metaphor, and natural language against a Puritan hermeneutic. This method grants the reader a comprehensive understanding of Edwards’'s hermeneutic of historical literature in Genesis and his placement within Puritan exegetical tradition.

For too long, scholars have published new research on Edwards without paying due attention to the work he took most seriously: biblical exegesis. Edwards is recognized as an innovative theologian who wielded tremendous influence on revivalism, evangelicalism, and New England theology. What is often missed is how much time he devoted to studying and understanding the Bible. He kept voluminous notebooks on Scripture and died with unrealized plans for major treatises on the Bible. More and more experts now recognize the importance of this aspect of his life; this book brings together the insights of leading Edwards scholars on this topic. The essays in Jonathan Edwards and Scripture set Edwards' engagement with Scripture in the context of seventeenth-century Protestant exegesis and eighteenth-century colonial interpretation. They provide case studies of Edwards' exegesis in varying genres of the Bible and probe his use of Scripture to develop theology. The authors also set his biblical interpretation in perspective by comparing it with that of other exegetes. This book advances our understanding of the nature and significance of Edwards' work with Scripture and opens new lines of inquiry for students of early modern Western history.

Explore the Bible through the mind of one of the greatest theological minds of the eighteenth century, Jonathan Edwards. During his career, Dr. Edwards recorded in writing his thoughts on biblical passages in the form of sermons. This text includes his commentaries from the Bible that refer to passages from the Old Testament books of Genesis through Psalms.

This is the first complete edition of the private biblical notebook that Jonathan Edwards compiled over a period of nearly thirty-five years. Edwards' "Notes on Scripture" confirms the centrality of the Bible in his thought and provides more balance to earlier depictions of his writings that emphasized the scientific and philosophical while overlooking the biblical dimension. In this critical edition the entries appear in the order in which Edwards wrote them, beginning with a short commentary on Genesis 2:10-14 that he penned in 1724, and ending with his last entry, Number 507 on the Book of Solomon's Song, written two years before his death. This volume provides direct access to one of America's most influential religious thinkers. Edwards' entries range across the entire scriptural canon and reveal his creativity in the interpretation of particular biblical texts and his fascination with typology. The notebook also documents Edwards' engagement with the intellectual currents of his day, in particular his response to the challenge associated with the Enlightenment critique of biblical revelation. Stephen J. Stein's introduction situates Edwards as an exegete in the larger tradition of biblical commentary and in the intellectual world of eighteenth-century Western thought.