This 45-chapter volume is the most comprehensive survey of Jonathan Edwards’s theology yet produced. It is also the first book that makes full use of the recently completed, 73-volume online edition of The Works of Jonathan Edwards(Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University), while it also draws deeply from the extensive secondary literature on Edwards. Its opening chapters set out Edwards’s historical and personal theological contexts. The next thirty chapters connect Edwards’s major themes in the temporally ordered way in which he conceptualized the theological enterprise—beginning with the ... More

This 45-chapter volume is the most comprehensive survey of Jonathan Edwards’s theology yet produced. It is also the first book that makes full use of the recently completed, 73-volume online edition of The Works of Jonathan Edwards(Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University), while it also draws deeply from the extensive secondary literature on Edwards. Its opening chapters set out Edwards’s historical and personal theological contexts. The next thirty chapters connect Edwards’s major themes in the temporally ordered way in which he conceptualized the theological enterprise—beginning with the triune God in eternity with his angels to the history of redemption as an expression of God’s inner reality ad extra, and then back to God in eschatological glory. The authors treat Edwards’s approach to aesthetics, metaphysics, typology, the history of redemption, revival, and true virtue. They take up such rarely explored topics as Edwards’s missiology, sacramentology, public theology, and views of other religions. Running throughout the volume are what they identity as Edwards’s five basic theological constituents: Trinitarian communication, creaturely participation, necessitarian dispositionalism, divine priority, and harmonious constitutionalism. The last section of the book traces Edwards’s influence on and connections with the later culture, philosophy, and theology of North America and Western Europe. The result is a multilayered analysis that treats Edwards as a theologian for the global Christian community, whose thought provides bridges between the Christian West and East, Protestantism and Catholicism, conservatism and liberalism, and charismatic and non-charismatic Christianity.