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.