Jonathan Edwards towered over his contemporaries-a man over six
feet tall and a figure of theological stature-but the reasons for
his power have been a matter of dispute. Edwards on the Will offers
a persuasive explanation. In 1753, after seven years of personal
trials, which included dismissal from his Northampton church,
Edwards submitted a treatise, Freedom of the Will, to Boston
publishers. Its impact on Puritan society was profound. He had
refused to be trapped either by a new Arminian scheme that seemed
to make God impotent or by a Hobbesian natural determinism that
made morality an illusion. He both reasserted the primacy of God's
will and sought to reconcile freedom with necessity. In the process
he shifted the focus from the community of duty to the freedom of
the individual. Edwards died of smallpox in 1758 soon after
becoming president of Princeton; as one obituary said, he was a
most rational . . . and exemplary Christian. Thereafter, for a
century or more, all discussion of free will and on the church as
an enclave of the pure in an impure society had to begin with
Edwards. His disciples, the New Divinity men-principally Samuel
Hopkins of Great Barrington and Joseph Bellamy of Bethlehem,
Connecticut-set out to defend his thought. Ezra Stiles, president
of Yale, tried to keep his influence off the Yale Corporation, but
Edwards's ideas spread beyond New Haven and sparked the religious
revivals of the next decades. In the end, old Calvinism returned to
Yale in the form of Nathaniel William Taylor, the Boston Unitarians
captures Harvard, and Edwards's troublesome ghost was laid to rest.
The debate on human freedom versus necessity continued, but
theologians no longercontrolled it. In Edwards on the Will, Guelzo
presents with clarity and force the story of these fascinating
maneuverings for the soul of New England and of the emerging
nation. Allen Guelzo writes with grace, charm, and even wit about a
weighty subject that others have found forbidding. His scholarship
is broad and his expositions lucid.-Daniel Walker Howe, University
of California at Los Angeles Edwards on the Will is an important
contribution to the study of Jonathan Edwards's thought. Where
earlier scholars have been largely preoccupied with Edwards's
'modernity' or with measuring the social effect of Edwards in the
context of the American Revolution, Allen Guelzo demonstrates his
intellectual 'legacy' not only to the generation of the Revolution
but also beyond. This work will stand as the definitive treatment
of the legacy of Edwards's classic treatise on Freedom of the
Will.-Harry Stout, Yale University This book elevates the study of
eighteenth-century New England theology to a new level of
sophistication and insight. With a precise, fresh, and lively
literary style, Guelzo makes old controversies come alive for a
twentieth-century reader. This is intellectual history at its
best-learned, animated, and compelling. It is one of the finest
studies of theology in America ever written.-E. Brooks Holifield,
Emory University By tracing the development of one central point of
Edwards's doctrine, Guelzo allows us to see the unfolding of the
entire history of the Edwardsean school, and, by implication, of
American theology, in the period between 1750-1830. This book is a
major work of scholarship-thorough, enlightening, intellectually
uncompromising.-Philip F. Gura, University ofNorth Carolina, Chapel
Hill
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