300th birthday osbervance spotlights new appreciation of Edwards' impact on American colonial life, politics and faith

Saturday, October 18, 2003

By Ann Rodgers-Melnick, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Jonathan Edwards, the brilliant but misunderstood 18 th century theologian whose preaching ignited the Great Awakening, will be the subject of lectures by one of America's pre-eminent church historians next week at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in East Liberty.

This year marks the 300th birthday of Edwards, whose work has undergone a major reappraisal. Edwards was a towering intellectual whose philosophical writings are thought to have influenced the Declaration of Independence. He served as both a missionary to Mohican Indians and president of what is now Princeton University. But he is best known to high school history students as the preacher of the fire and brimstone classic "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," which describes people as spiders dangling above the flames of hell.

The excerpts of that sermon in high school textbooks are taken out of context, said the Rev. James Davison, director of continuing education at the seminary.

"That sermon was intended to speak about God's grace," Davison said. "It is not about God enjoying wrath.

"Edwards is saying that God doesn't want to exercise his wrath and is hoping people will return to him. The idea is that, while only a thread holds the spider from falling, God's grace is that thread."

The lectures by Mark Noll, professor of Christian thought and church history at Wheaton College in Illinois, will focus on Edwards as a pastoral theologian -- examining both his successes and failures, Davison said.

Between 1724 and 1735, his sermons in Northampton, Mass., were the focal point of a revival of evangelical Christian faith in New England. Some of his writings during that revival examine the difference between true religious experience and emotionalism.

Fifteen years after the Great Awakening, Edwards' congregation fired him because of his efforts to restrict the reception of communion. He became a missionary to Mohican Indians while continuing to write influential books on philosophy and theology. One of Edwards' projects was to introduce and interpret the philosopher John Locke to Americans, and it was Locke's ideas that the framers of the Declaration of Independence drew on years later.

He died from an experimental smallpox vaccination in 1758, a few months after becoming president of Princeton.

This year, his image is on a U.S. postage stamp, and he was the subject of a major conference this month at the Library of Congress. Interest in his work has been furthered by Noll's book, "America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln." Noll is the leading historian of evangelical Christianity in America, and among the nation's most influential church historians.

On Monday at 7:30 p.m. Noll will speak in the Hicks Chapel Auditorium on "What Edwards got right -- the enduring legacy of Jonathan Edwards as pastor-theologian." On Tuesday at 2 p.m. he will address "What did Edwards get wrong? -- Learning from Edwards' trials in Northampton." The lectures are free.

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