America's theologian : a recommendation of Jonathan Edwards

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America's theologian : a recommendation of Jonathan Edwards

Robert W. Jenson

Oxford University Press, 1988

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Note

Bibliography: p. 197-218

Includes index

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Description

The author argues that Jonathan Edwards was very much a figure of the Enlightenment, having thoroughly absorbed the thought of Newton and Locke. Unlike most other Americans, however, Edwards was also a discerning critic of the Enlightenment. He was able, therefore, to use Enlightenment thought in his theology without yielding to its mechanistic and individualistic tendencies. Jenson sees Edwards's understanding as a radical corrective to what commitment to the Enlightenment later wrought in American life, religious and otherwise. He argues that weaknesses in the common American faiths (a trivial evangelicalism or a deistical secularism) can be remedied by a recovery of Edwards's vision, and that weaknesses in American public moral discourse could likewise be remedied by a reaffirmation of Edwards's God as the source and goal of all human existence.

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