Oliver CRISP & Kyle STROBEL. Jonathan Edwards: An Introduction to His Thought. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2018. Pp. 232. $28 pb. ISBN 978-0-8028-7269-2. Reviewed by Ann SWANER, Barry University, Miami Shores, FL 33161.

Jonathan Edwards is a key figure in the history of American Christianity. This book, written by two prominent Jonathan Edwards scholars, Oliver Crisp and Kyle Strobel, is a very clear and interesting introduction both to Edwards’s own thought and to the current state of Edwards scholarship since Perry Miller sparked a revival of interest in the “Northampton Sage” after the Second World War. The first seven chapters focus on careful exposition of Edwards’s theology with minimal critical evaluation. The final chapter engages in a “theology of retrieval” for the sake of allowing Edwards to continue to participate in constructive theology today. The book contains extensive footnotes, an index, and an annotated guide to further reading on the literature by and about Jonathan Edwards.

The first chapter considers the context in which Edwards wrote. It stresses the effect that working on the “periphery of the civilized world” (Colonial New England) had on his thought. The authors argue that Edwards was not an “American theologian” except in a strictly geographical sense, but was rather a British theologian, but his relative isolation and lack of intellectual peers affected his thinking and his personality. The chapter also discusses the influence of his family, his education, and his religion on his intellectual development. Edwards is described as “a minister in a Puritan ecclesiastical polity, a student of traditional Reformed theology, a reader of early modern philosophy, and an adept of the emerging natural science.” (p. 37)

Chapters two through four explicate Edwards’s creative theological and philosophical ideas beginning with his novel doctrine of the Trinity, the heart of his intellectual project. His understanding of personhood and his development of the nature of the triune persons is the basis for his soteriology. The authors also explore Edwards’s philosophical idealism, the belief that the world is composed only of minds and their ideas, and his understanding of divine dispositions, panentheism, continuous creation, occasionalism, perfect being theology, and determinism.

Chapters five through seven turn from metaphysics to constructive theology examining Edwards’s understanding of the atonement, salvation, justification, theological anthropology, and the moral life of true virtue. Throughout these chapters the authors give attention to the differences in the two major strands of contemporary Edwardsian scholarship, the “American School” which holds that Edwards’s ontology is dispositional – “the idea that the world is a nexus of dispositions and habits that God actualizes at each moment, bringing them from potentiality to actuality,” (p. 5) and the “British School,” which holds that his ontology is more traditionally essentialist, holding that “things that exist consist of properties or predicates and the substances that exemplify them,” (p. 69) and not dispositional. The authors are on the side of the British School. They see Edwards as a traditional theologian trying to rethink classical Reformed theology in light of early Enlightenment thought. They also, in the course of their very careful exposition of Edward’s ideas, compare and contrast them to the ideas of the medieval scholastic traditions and the great theologians in the Reformed tradition, Calvin, Schleiermacher and Barth.

The final chapter intends “to read Edwards as a theologian of the church and not simply a former theologian of the church.” (p. 198) To retrieve Edwards’s thought for today’s theology requires critical and constructive engagement to extract some of his helpful insights from his more radical notions in a way that does justice to his thought without its negative features. Specifically it is Edwards’s notion of the God-world relation that the authors see as negatively and unnecessarily radicalized by Edwards’s panentheism, occasionalism, continuous creationism, and idealism. This radicalization results in the underdevelopment of human freedom and the glorification of evil. But they find the resources to go around Edwards’s own conclusions in Edwards’s non-contrastive view of the God-world relation: “By advancing an account of God’s glory that includes the creature, Edwards is not contrasting the divine glory with human glory, as if one must choose between them.” (p. 205) This non-contrastive view creates space for creaturely freedom without compromising the transcendence of God. This retrieval, the authors conclude “is not somehow foreign to Edwards’s theology but is an extension of insights fundamental to his thought that push beyond his own conclusions.” (p. 216)

Edwards is presented as a theologian focused on God’s love and human participation in the life of God rather than the traditional stereotype of Edwards as focused on sinners in the hands of an angry God. In fact one might be left wondering where the angry-handed God even fits into this picture.

The book is well-written and presents complex ideas in an accessible way.