Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Nossaman, Lucas

Titel

Approaching Jonathan Edwards: The Evolution of a Persona by Carol Ball (review)

Ist Teil von

• Christianity & Literature, 2019, Vol.68 (4), p.694-697

Ort / Verlag

Malibu: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2019

Quelle

ProQuest_Literature Online_英美文学在线

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• [...]Ball’s insistence on his commitment to divine sovereignty means she hardly touches on the memorable details of this narrative. [...]Approaching Jonathan Edwards reads more like an overview of Edwards’s life and writings, for Ball mostly opts out of close discussion of texts that might have new interest for us today, texts such as Two Dissertations that illuminate his theology of glory and moral virtue in a trinitarian context. Ball contends that these threats represent specific turning points in the evolution of Edwards’s persona as he progresses into the writing theologian who takes his stand for divine sovereignty and, implicitly, for the Protestant principle of justification by faith. Often in an early American context, it would seem that a theologian had to be a revivalist or a political leader of sorts, but this book challenges that simplistic understanding by emphasizing the importance of the “man of letters” theologian. [...]what makes Edwards particularly significant, in my view, is not merely the fact of his attention to composition or to one single doctrine, but his sophisticated adherence to Christian teachings about creation, Scripture, and the Trinity in the midst of a religious culture that was beginning to let the first—understood as nature—triumph over the other two.