Edwards, Germany, and Transatlantic Contexts [1 ed.] 9783666554612, 9783525554616

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Vol. 3

In this edited volume, scholars from around the world demonstrate that Jonathan Edwards was part of a global network of thinkers and practitioners who impacted his understanding of the nature of vital piety in the modern world. He in turn shed light on piety, philosophy, and missiology through the prism of the German church and contributed to theological reflection amongst Lutheran, Reformed, and Free Church traditions in Europe.

ISBN 978-3-525-55461-6

9 783525 554616

JES 3

The Editor Rhys Bezzant teaches as a Senior Lecturer in the field of Christianity in History at Ridley College, in Melbourne, A ­ ustralia. He is a priest in the Anglican Diocese of Melbourne, a Visiting Fellow at the Yale Divinity School and President of the Evangelical History Association of Australia. His most recent publication is Edwards the Mentor with Oxford University Press.

Rhys Bezzant (ed.)

Bezzant (ed.)  Edwards, Germany, and Transatlantic Contexts

NEW DIRECTIONS IN JONATHAN EDWARDS STUDIES

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Edwards, Germany, and Transatlantic Contexts

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New Directions in Jonathan Edwards Studies Edited by Harry S. Stout, Kenneth P. Minkema and Adriaan C. Neele

Volume 3

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht

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Rhys Bezzant (ed.)

Edwards, Germany, and Transatlantic Contexts

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht

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With 6 figures Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek: The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data available online: https://dnb.de. © 2022 by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Theaterstraße 13, 37073 Göttingen, Germany, an imprint of the Brill-Group (Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands; Brill USA Inc., Boston MA, USA; Brill Asia Pte Ltd, Singapore; Brill Deutschland GmbH, Paderborn, Germany; Brill Österreich GmbH, Vienna, Austria) Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau, Verlag Antike and V&R unipress. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher.

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Table of Contents

Introduction .........................................................................................

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Rhys Bezzant Telling the Story from Luther’s Break of Dawn to Edwards’s Glorious Gospel Light ............................................................................ 11 Kenneth P. Minkema “The Late Germanic Turn of Jonathan Edwards” ........................................ 31 Ryan P. Hoselton Jonathan Edwards, Halle Pietism, and Benevolent Activism in Early Awakened Protestantism......................................................................... 51 Willem van Vlastuin Jonathan Edwards and the Dutch Great Awakening.................................... 69 Katharina Krause Jonathan Edwards’ Images. Eine Lektüre im Kontext von Praktiken der Sakralisierung des Alltags protestantischer Frömmigkeitskulturen dies- und jenseits des Atlantiks ............................... 85 Philip Fisk Jonathan Edwards and Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten. Aesthetic Theology and the Art of Beautiful Thinking .............................................. 113 Walter J. Schultz Edwards and Kant on God’s End in Creation ............................................. 135 Thorsten Dietz Edwards and Schleiermacher................................................................... 151 Jan Stievermann Jonathan Edwards, American Evangelicalism, and the Prussian Erweckungsbewegung, ca. 1815–1850 ........................................................ 169

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Authors ................................................................................................ 191 Index ................................................................................................... 193

Introduction

Like moths to the flame, students of modern evangelicalism are easily drawn to Anglo-American scholarship. Those of us who work in nations of the British Commonwealth have almost intuitively assumed that our sense of self as Protestant Christians can be attributed to our historical place in the British Empire. Those readers who seek in Jonathan Edwards the “American Augustine” have frequently come to lionise his writing because he has contributed so profoundly to the development of later US theological – perhaps national – history. Even those scholars of evangelical history outside the English-speaking world often turn to Edwards as a way of understanding the impact of the American church, or American missions, on their native land, whether that be Brazil or Japan, Korea or Australia. In Europe, it might be that Edwards can help explain why the American experience of revivalism seems so foreign to their own Christian identity. The size and influence of North American scholarship and publishing nurtures its own gravitational pull, and it easily blinds us to other contributions to the study, impact, and contexts of evangelical history. It is for these reasons (and more besides) that a book like this is so important. For as much as studies of Jonathan Edwards need to be understood in his British North American context, with an eye to the Anglo-American world of his immediate followers, it is his trans-Atlantic context, both during and after the eighteenth century, that is of critical importance in understanding his world as his world understood itself. The Atlantic was not just an ocean to cross but had also become an identity to embrace. The wealth of the growing British Empire had in the eighteenth century been built on the triangular trade of slaves from West Africa to the British colonies, sugar from the Caribbean to sweeten the tea of the homeland, as well as manufactured goods from Britain being sold in Africa as well as North America. Further, the largest cities of the American colonies, like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, or Charleston, were still nothing compared to the size of London or Glasgow, reinforcing the notion that the colonies were dependent for their prosperity and influence on the life of the metropolis. The trans-Atlantic Republic of Letters consisting of a multidirectional coterie of thinkers, set Edwards and his New World colleagues within the bigger frame of reference of European thinkers, which also funded an openness to, and appreciation of, Enlightenment categories with hopes for a brighter future. Indeed, as Caroline Winterer has pointed out: “Enlightenment was a phenomenon of the age of empires.” Correspondence between America and Europe was the result of Empire as well as a factor in allowing thinkers to “venture new ideas, ponder strange possibilities, and juggle uncertainties more freely than

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in publications”.1 As Britain developed its global Empire, so its proxy wars with France in North America (and elsewhere) gave the British colonies there a sense of occupying a strategic role in the Empire’s worldwide significance, until at least the British Crown asked for some measure of recompense for its defence later in the later eighteenth century. Edwards, as a slave-owner, voracious reader of books, connoisseur of hot chocolate, energetic correspondent, and frontiersman experiencing conflict between the English, the French and the native Americans, was profoundly shaped by his trans-Atlantic context, even when his debt to this world was muted. This book, however, does more than set Edwards within the Anglosphere, as powerful as it was to shape identity. In this volume, we want to engage with a sphere of theological and philosophical exchange which is less frequently commented upon in Edwards scholarship, namely the ways in which Edwards can be positioned or understood in relation to the Teutosphere, another significant element in the transatlantic context. His correspondence, reading, situation in a theological tradition, and ultimately sense of self were enriched by his interactions with continental systematic writing and church revivals, not least in the German-speaking lands. Indeed, learning about revivals in Germany confirmed Edwards’s sense that his own experiences were part of something “great”.2 Focus has been given to his engagement with Scotland in a publication ten years ago.3 But there have been no other collections of essays investigating another cultural context, though the publication this year of The Oxford Handbook of Jonathan Edwards includes several chapters exploring the reception of his work in each of the continents of the world.4 A focussed national study like this one draws concentrated attention to themes, gives an opportunity to eavesdrop debates which otherwise are overlooked, and makes available to an English-speaking readership scholarship from the perspective of continental European authors. As Stievermann has written elsewhere, “Due to the prevalent monolingualism of the discipline and the long ascendancy of exceptionalist models in American studies based on ‘Puritan origins’ theories, the rich

1 C. Winterer, American Enlightenments: Pursuing Happiness in the Age of Reason (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 12, 11. 2 A. Zakai, “Jonathan Edwards, the Enlightenment, and the Formation of Protestant Tradition in America”, in E. Mancke/C. Shammas (ed.), The Creation of the British Atlantic World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 206. 3 See for example K.P. Minkema/A.C. Neele/K. van Andel (ed.), Jonathan Edwards and Scotland (Edinburgh: Dunedin Academic Press, 2011). 4 D.A. Sweeney/J. Stievermann (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Jonathan Edwards (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.)

Introduction

archives of German-language literatures written in or in exchange with colonial America are almost as neglected as the sources of material culture …”5 . In this book can be found, for example, essays by Ryan Hoselton and Ken Minkema, which draw attention to Edwards’s interest in eminent writers and ministerial practitioners of German-speaking Europe whose work provided immediate impetus to Edwards’s own output, whether addressing the Halle Pietists and their commitment to works of love, or authors like Lampe, Pfaff, Wolff or Stapfer, his theological contemporaries. Remarkably, even when later philosophers and thinkers of Germany were not aware of Edwards’s oeuvre, there can be traced common systematic insights or understandings of how to parse ultimate reality, given that Edwards’s capacity to think and to write were of the highest order and engaged with thinkers, whom later Germans would also read. He may have lived on the perimeter of Empire, but Edwards’s passions and pursuits were interwoven with the bigger debates of the metropolitan centres of Europe, which were themselves representative of the greater Western Christian tradition. His writings on ontology, for example, prove to be productive conversation partners for scholars whose interests span continental and American philosophy, so authors in this book, like Walter Schultz on Kant, Philip Fisk on Baumgarten, or Thorsten Dietz on Schleiermacher, demonstrate how comparing Edwards with noted philosophers and theologians can sharpen our approach to both. Katharina Krause addresses issues in practical theology and material history, drawing on the sense of sight and the purpose of meditation for her investigation, which were so central to Edwards’s concerns. Still others in this book set themselves the task of placing Edwards is his wider European historical context, for instance Rhys Bezzant on the historiography of Luther and later secularisation, Willem van Vlastuin on the Dutch Awakening, and Jan Stievermann on Edwards’s legacy in the Prussian Awakening of the early nineteenth century. Though there will yet be many avenues in Edwards’s relationship with Germans and Germany to explore, this book is a taster in how Edwards through his networks negotiated a much larger theological world, how he can be understood against that world, and how his own ministry in preaching and writing have impacted the world beyond Massachusetts. These may have been contexts beyond his immediate ken, but not beyond his capacity to shape. How appropriate then that this book has been brought to the world by a German publishing house! I want to thank Izaak de Hulster and the editorial team at Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht for their help in such a busy time for their company, and to acknowledge the fine labours of the scholars of three continents who have

5 J. Stievermann, “Introduction”, in J. Stievermann/O. Scheiding (ed.), A Peculiar Mixture: GermanLanguage Cultures and Identities in Eighteenth-Century North America (University Park PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), 14.

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Introduction

contributed to the volume despite the uncertainties and challenges of research under covid conditions. It is worth noting that contributors to this volume also represent the value of the network of Jonathan Edwards Centers around the world, drawing together here reflections on Edwards in the context of German ministry and scholarship, written in Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Australia and the US. I trust that this book might encourage the life of the church wherever it is read, most of all Germany. Rhys Bezzant on the Feast of Bede, historian of the church

Rhys Bezzant

Telling the Story from Luther’s Break of Dawn to Edwards’s Glorious Gospel Light

As Luther lay on his deathbed, there was certainly no doubt about his ongoing belief in the Gospel he preached: he refused any sacramental assistance and affirmed the desperate state of humans in need of salvation: “we are all beggars – this is true”.1 However, beyond that room in Eisleben, there was significant doubt about the immediate future of the cause, given the precarious political situation both within Electoral Saxony and beyond in the Empire. In this fragile environment, memorials to Luther were soon being constructed and his story narrated, even by Melanchthon at his funeral. Other reformers would subsequently take up the baton, some of whom he had previously resented as rival champions in the field. But through these carriers of tradition, the Protestant story would be retold and often thereby remade to capture the complexity of reality or to shape it. In some later narratives Luther would even be blamed reductionistically for the problems of modernity, whether fairly or not. Luther’s part in the historiography of modernity is an important if not always easy story to tell, for good history-writing acknowledges nuanced interrelationships, diffuse webs of causation, the honesty to note correlations where causation is too ambitious, and of course (where relevant) the overlay of theological considerations. We need historical reflection because patterns of influence or dependence cannot be reduced to ideas alone. Serving as a case study in history-writing, we can investigate Jonathan Edwards, a North American Protestant serving in Luther’s Augustinian wake, who based his identity not on local contingencies alone but saw himself on a world stage incorporating broader historical streams into his identity. As Carol Ball avers, “Even more important to Edwards than … social and cultural associations … was the burgeoning sense of the authority of his own personal piety and special insight into

1 Some parts of this chapter appeared in Rhys S. Bezzant, “Semper Reformanda: The Revivalists and the Reformers”, in Mark D. Thompson, Colin Bale, and Edward Loane (ed.), Celebrating the Reformation: Its Legacy and Continuing Relevance (London: Apollos, 2017), and are used with permission. I thank Justin Hawkins for reading an earlier draft and providing as ever helpfully pertinent feedback. This chapter is dedicated to the memory of my late father, John William Bezzant, who died peacefully in the Lord during its composition, and whose enthusiasm for my thinking about Luther and Edwards was always a surprise and a delight. Volker Leppin, Luther: A Late Medieval Life (trans. Rhys S. Bezzant and Karen Roe; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2017), 132, 133.

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God’s presence and activity in the world”.2 In fact, his part in a longer theological story is the chief way we get to know how he understood his ministry, for he was reticent to share many insights concerning his own soul. It was not of course that he disengaged from the world immediately around him, but it was visions of God’s grand design that captivated his mind and motivated his actions, even when frustrations in Northampton occupied his attention. The primary goal of this chapter, then, is to recount how Edwards saw his place in Protestant history with Luther as the chief point of reference, offering a deeper dive into his theological identity than is normally offered when his dependence on writers from the seventeenth century alone is highlighted.3 Secondly, I want to situate the relationship between Edwards and Luther in a broader conversation about the merits of the so-called secularisation thesis, a sociological analysis of the development of the modern world, which is sometimes used to describe generically the decline of the practice of religion or a “decrease in organised public religiosity”,4 or on other occasions the failure of religious concepts to offer a sufficiently coherent interpretation of the world. For yet others it refers not to practice or theory but to the place of religion in the centre or on the margins of social life, irrespective of the number of religious adherents or the consistency of its teachings.5 Though one among many theorists,6 Charles Taylor is approached as a leading philosopher in the field, and takes a position which highlights the development of pluralism in order to understand secularisation, which “consists, among other things, of a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace”.7 He recognises that, though

2 Carol Ball, Approaching Jonathan Edwards: The Evolution of a Persona (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 161. 3 We do acknowledge however that seventeenth century continental dogmaticians were leading conversation partners for him, as he sought out allies wherever he could: “His theological formation was in the Puritan and continental post-Reformation traditions … He was a kind of intellectual magpie, gathering up useful material wherever he found it.” See Oliver D. Crisp, Jonathan Edwards among the Theologians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015), 3–4. 4 Kenneth G. Appold, “Luther’s Abiding Significance for World Protestantism”, in Robert Kolb, Irene Dingel, and L’Ubomír Batka (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Martin Luther’s Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 604. See further J.C.D. Clark, “Secularization and Modernization: The Failure of a ‘Grand Narrative’”, The Historical Journal 55 (2012) 161–94. 5 See an outline of the application of these theories in David Hempton, Methodism: Empire of the Spirit (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), ch. 8. 6 See for example Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), Robert R. Reilly, America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2020), or Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007). 7 Taylor, Secular Age, 3.

Telling the Story from Luther’s Break of Dawn to Edwards’s Glorious Gospel Light

problematised in modernity, belief in and commitment to divine engagement with mundane reality has not been eradicated from our contemporary world and retains some philosophical saliency, though as a theological commitment it remains outside the methods of sociology to critique. In presenting the historiographical relationship between Luther and Edwards, I want to relativise theories of the process of secularisation against which backdrop Edwards might be located, putting his reactionary finger in the leaking metaphysical dyke of Protestantism. In Edwards’s estimation, Luther’s ideas did not contribute to the disenchantment of the world, which Edwards then by his own ministerial labours would feel duty-bound to reverse. Edwards certainly took his part in the epistemological revolution of modernity, but saw himself indebted to Luther for his own understanding of the enchantment of the world and did not interpret their relationship by means of a narrative of declension. Edwards was an optimist about God’s ongoing engagement in the world. Rather than speak of decline, Edwards gloried in the expectation of an increase of divine light.

1.

“After the Dismal Night of Darkness”: An Apocalyptic Account

Edwards and Luther were not worlds apart, despite geographical and chronological distance. Edwards was cut from the same theological cloth as Martin Luther, though it would be too much to say that they sang from the same hymn book – Edwards resisted for the longest time using any hymns at all! Like Luther, Edwards’s daily energies were spent not just in abstract theological disputation, but in promoting the cause of the Gospel in local church settings. We must not let Luther’s formal status as professor distract us from his parochial commitments, chiefly at St Mary’s Wittenberg. They upheld similar views of volition, sin, and salvation (even if their historical context predisposed them to view freedom in slightly different ways).8 In soteriology and ecclesiology, Edwards inherited Luther’s opposition towards Roman Catholicism, and in eschatology he absorbed Luther’s anti-papalism, for having used the language of Antichrist in his fight with the papacy Luther had reintroduced apocalyptic thinking into the mainstream of the western Christian tradition and placed his Protestantism on a war footing. Set within a cosmic frame of reference, both Luther and Edwards made spiritual renewal their great cause.9

8 See Obbie Todd Tyler, ‘Luther v. Edwards: The Human Will,’ https://edwardsianblog.word press.com/2016/08/28/luther-v-edwards-the-human-will/?fbclid=IwAR3iu4QGw1BlxkOvv7ZDO eURCp1–KRBH_z2UvJjkSeUrbwkxWu8A5c_ywcU. Accessed February 5, 2021. 9 See C. Scott Hendrix, “Martin Luther’s Reformation of Spirituality”, in Timothy J. Wengert (ed.), Harvesting Martin Luther’s Reflections on Theology, Ethics, and the Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 244, and D.A. Sweeney, “‘The Most Important Thing in the World’: Jonathan Edwards on Rebirth

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Though Edwards was not of the mind that it would be achieved in his own lifetime, he wanted to bring the Reformation to its consummation, to play his part like Puritans and Pietists before him in such an exalted project.10 He recognised the needs of the church of his own day but did not thereby despair, for the expectation of better days ahead was an expected pattern with the coming of the Kingdom of God: So again, before the glorious times of the church commence, the church’s wine runs very low, and is almost out; what they alouted with is water—human learning, sapless speculations and dispensations, and dead morality. Formerly the Christian church had wine, as in the times of the primitive church, and in the times of the Reformation, but now their wine is just gone. But after the beginning of those glorious times, their water shall be turned into wine, and much better wine than ever they had before.11

Not surprisingly, Edwards listed Luther in his Catalogue of Reading and lent a copy of Luther’s sermons to his mentee, Samuel Hopkins, for his edification.12 Most important of all, beyond the details of generic Protestant systematic commitments, Edwards saw his identity in apocalyptic terms, occupying the very same stage in salvation history as Luther, which provided the foundation for his confidence. With an historicist approach to reading the book of Revelation, believing that each chapter in the book tracked with a subsequent stage of history after Christ, Edwards placed the two witnesses of Revelation 11 as pre-Reformation figures: 33. CHAPTER 11:3. “And I will give power to my two witnesses.” By it may partly be intended those two nations, that were all along witnesses to Christianity, viz. the Waldenses and Albigenses. 45. CHAPTER 11:3 … Hereby it is with me undoubted, that respect is had to Moses and Elias. For these witnesses are two prophets … But yet, I believe respect is also had

and Its Implications for Christian Life and Thought”, in C. Chun/K.C. Strobel (ed.), Regeneration, Revival, and Creation: Religious Experience and the Purposes of God in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards (Eugene: Pickwick, 2020) 27–52. 10 Richard F. Lovelace, The American Pietism of Cotton Mather: Origins of American Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Christian University Press, 1979), 241. 11 Jonathan Edwards, Notes on Scripture (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 15; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 359. 12 Jonathan Edwards, “‘Catalogue’ of Reading”, in Peter J. Thuesen (ed.), Catalogues of Books (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 26; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 126, and Edwards, “Account Book”, WJE 26:338.

Telling the Story from Luther’s Break of Dawn to Edwards’s Glorious Gospel Light

to Zerubbabel and Joshua … who were God’s instruments for the rebuilding and reestablishing of the church after the Babylonish captivity …13

This enabled him to insert himself into the same phase of salvation history as Luther, between the fifth and sixth vials (or bowls in modern parlance) of Revelation 16: If these things that have been spoken of, are intended in the prophecy of the sixth vial, it affords, as I conceive, great reason to hope that the beginning of that glorious work of God’s Spirit, which in the progress and issue of it, will overthrow Antichrist, and introduce the glory of latter days, is not very far off. Mr. Lowman has, I think, put it beyond all reasonable doubt, that the 5th vial was poured out in the time of the Reformation. It also appears satisfyingly, by his late exposition, that take one vial with another, it has not been 200 years from the beginning of one vial to the beginning of another, but about 180 years. But it is now about 220 years since the 5th vial began to be poured; and it is a long time since the main effects of it have been finished. And therefore if the 6th vial han’t already begun to be poured, it may well be speedily expected.14

As much as we might commit the “syllabus error” and identify the Reformation and the Great Awakening as two distinct and divided phases of history, most importantly Edwards was not of this mind. Indeed, the “errand into the wilderness” in north America as flight from the Antichrist was commonly held to be a way of bringing the Reformation to its true end,15 thereby situating Edwards within the Reformation “moment” not just by virtue of an apocalyptic timetable, but closer to home as he participated geographically in that very errand. America was a new canvas, even if God continued to paint the same story: And ’tis worthy to be noted that America was discovered about the time of the Reformation, or but little before: which Reformation was the first thing that God did towards the glorious renovation of the world, after it had sunk into the depths of darkness and ruin under the great antichristian apostasy. So that as soon as this new world is (as it were) created, and stands forth in view, God presently goes about doing some great thing to make way for

13 Jonathan Edwards, “Notes on the Apocalypse”, in Stephen J. Stein (ed.), Apocalyptic Writings (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 5; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 137, 144. 14 Edwards, “An Humble Attempt to Promote Explicit Agreement and Visible Union of God’s People in Extraordinary Prayer for the Revival of Religion and the Advancement of Christ’s Kingdom on Earth, Pursuant to Scripture-Promises and Prophecies Concerning the Last Time”, WJE 5:421. 15 Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), 11.

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the introduction of the church’s latter-day glory, that is to have its first seat in, and is to take its rise from that new world.16

Such an apocalyptic frame of reference was further fuelled by more recent historical events. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 reprised earlier anti-Catholic sentiment in England, at the same time that anti-French sentiment was growing in North America. To maintain the United Kingdom’s Protestant identity, the British Crown after 1714 was granted to the German Protestant House of Hanover, provoking ongoing Roman Catholic opposition which supported the Stuart line and the Jacobite rebellion of Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1745. Edwards in his own writings affirmed British victories over the forces of the Antichrist, for example the defeat of the French at Louisbourg in 1745, or on the spiritual plane lionised victories over the Antichrist during times of refreshment and revival in Northampton in 1734–35, or 1740–41. His international perspective on the work of God in history empowered him to see his own work related to the trajectory of the Reformation, which was for him accomplished in several steps yet was prophesied as a unitary concept: And if I may be allowed humbly to offer what appears to me to be the truth with relation to the rise and fall of Antichrist; it is this. As the power of Antichrist, and the corruption of the apostate church, rose not at once, but by several notable steps and degrees; so it will in the like manner fall: and that divers steps and seasons of destruction to the spiritual Babylon, and revival and advancement of the true church, are prophesied of under one. Though it be true, that there is some particular event, that prevails above all others in the intention of the prophecy, some one remarkable season of the destruction of the Church of Rome and papal power and corruption, and advancement of true religion, that the prophecies have a principal respect to.17

Indeed, when Edwards surveyed the history of the work of redemption and divided it into three periods (from creation to Christ, Christ’s earthly ministry, then from Christ’s exaltation to his return), he further subdivided the last period in order to give due attention to the story of the progress of the church in history. The Reformation of the sixteenth century was significant in itself, but was not a turning point without relationship to the more important progress of the defeat of the Antichrist in its chronological development:

16 Jonathan Edwards, “Some Thoughts Concerning the Revival”, in Clarence C. Goen (ed.), The Great Awakening (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 4; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 355–356. 17 Edwards, “Humble Attempt“, WJE 5:407–408.

Telling the Story from Luther’s Break of Dawn to Edwards’s Glorious Gospel Light

This [the Reformation] was begun about 220 years ago, first in Saxony in Germany by the preaching of Martin Luther, who being stirred in his spirit to see the horrid practices of the popish clergy, and having set himself diligently to inquire after truth by the study of the holy Scriptures and the writings of the ancient fathers of the church, very openly and boldly decried the corruptions and usurpations of the Romish church in his preachings and writings … it went on by the labors of Luther and Melanchthon in Germany, and Zwingli in Switzerland … and particularly Calvin who appeared something after the beginning of the Reformation … Thus God began gloriously to revive his church again and advance the kingdom of his Son after such a dismal night of darkness as had been before from the rise of Antichrist to that time.18

In using the language of light, Edwards is doing nothing here that Luther had not already done. In typically broad-brush strokes, Luther had set his opposition to medieval scholasticism in terms of darkness and light: “the whole Aristotle is to theology as darkness is to light.”19 Neither Luther nor Edwards want to hide their scriptural light under a philosophical bushel, and are inclined to see its removal in apocalyptic terms. For Edwards, God’s victory was not outside history but within it, and the progressive stages of the victory were powered by effusions of God’s Spirit. Doctrinal recalibration was certainly a gift of the sixteenth century Reformers to the church, but Edwards when treating Luther appears to draw more critical intelligence from the bigger story than from particular theological notions that Luther may have defended. As Zakai explains: Edwards’s philosophy of history shows that he was true heir of sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury Protestant and Puritan historiography, which was founded upon an apocalyptic interpretation of history, although he radically transformed some of its basic assumptions. Edwards inherited the quest to establish the closest possible link between prophecy and history … Yet, in contrast to the Protestant assumption that the historical process is based ultimately on social, political, and ecclesiastical changes, such as the struggle against the Church of Rome, Edwards held that the principal source governing the historical process is God’s redemptive plan.20

18 Jonathan Edwards, A History of the Work of Redemption (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 9; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 421–422. Emphasis mine. 19 Martin Luther, “A Disputation against Scholastic Theology”, in J. Pelikan/H.C. Oswald/H.T. Lehmann (ed.), Career of the Reformer (Luther’s Works 31; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1999), 12. 20 Avihu Zakai, Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of History: The Reenchantment of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 161–162.

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In making common cause with Luther’s broad eschatological framework, Edwards was provided with an escape clause to look beyond his local identity and its origins in particular English ecclesiastical debates to understand himself in more generically Protestant terms. Edwards’s apocalyptic providentialism sought to critique the blindness of the modern world to the presence of divine power, rather than oppose all social or political developments since the Reformation. With his acceptance of the growing power of imperial Britain, and of the waves of philosophical modernity couched in the language of light, Edwards took refuge in a new kind of internationalist Protestant identity as the best strategic path to defend the doctrines of grace, with Luther as his cover. This “Protestant interest” was “ecumenically Protestant” and offered a broad canopy, under which many could gather to agitate against Roman Catholic resurgence, leading to an openness to new patterns of Protestant unity and a more cosmopolitan identity in New England.21

2.

“This Spiritual and Divine Illumination”: The Centre of their Story

Edwards believed that he occupied the same eschatological time as Luther, and Luther believed that he was himself a harbinger of light, even if he grew increasingly frustrated that his prophetic ministry was going unheeded.22 If there was not consistent systematic convergence between them, there was at least ecumenical camaraderie. Indeed, underlying their eschatology was a deeply shared commitment to divine grace, understood experientially as well as intellectually. Though they breathed different epistemological air, both shared the conviction that the blessing of Christian discipleship was an experience of the closeness of the Lord, with common theological ground between eighteenth-century evangelicals and sixteenth-century Reformers mapped in the new birth, “a vital truth of Christianity, and indeed of Luther’s Reformation doctrine”.23 Both Luther and Edwards upheld as central the belief that God would communicate powerfully and directly to the soul. Luther encouraged preachers to “take pains to be simple and direct”,24 and Edwards made “spiritual regeneration … the sine qua non of true religion in the world”.25 Indeed,

21 Thomas S. Kidd, The Protestant Interest: New England after Puritanism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 52, 70, 72. 22 Despite feeling disappointed that history had not rolled out as he earlier expected, Luther nevertheless maintained in later life his apocalyptic views, summarised in the Schmalkaldic Articles (1537) and outlined in the introduction to his translation of the book of Daniel. See Leppin, Luther, 113, 119. 23 Paul R. Hinlicky, Luther for Evangelicals: A Reintroduction (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018), 104. 24 Martin Luther, Table Talk (Luther’s Works 54; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967), 236. 25 Sweeney, “‘The Most Important Thing’”, 52.

Telling the Story from Luther’s Break of Dawn to Edwards’s Glorious Gospel Light

with vernacular communication as a reinforcing strategy, Leppin has argued that Luther insisted on “interpreting the text [of the Bible] as a direct address to the believer,”26 and Brad Gregory argues that “Luther’s pioneering approach of appealing directly to the laity about religious matters is in some ways the most astonishing aspect of the movement”.27 Joshua Mitchell has argued that Luther’s profound reconception of human equality under God, refuting the “spiritual superiority of the priest over the layman,” has shaped both the nature of Christian discipleship, and the significance of more democratic expressions of human association, for “[h]ierarchy, where it exists, is conventional, not fixed in the order of things”.28 For Luther, grace nurtured the sense of individual agency and reasserted the spiritual dignity of every believer, which evangelicals like Edwards in the Puritan tradition came to share.29 In resisting “the rise of mechanical philosophy,” Edwards made natural philosophy “inseparable from his new sense of the immediate presence of God”.30 Though Luther wrote on many topics, he was no systematician in modern terms, yet his protest was extraordinarily focused, centred on a radical re-conception of the nature of grace and its application to human lives captured in the doctrine of justification by faith. If grace in the late medieval world had been commodified, with the church as the clearing-house of exchange overseen by the mediating power of the priesthood and exemplified in penance as preparation for the mass, then spiritual renewal would only be possible when sermons taught, theology defended, and sacraments instantiated, an experience of grace as direct encounter with the living Lord.31 Of course, Luther’s insights did not come overnight, even though Protestant hagiographical accounts of his breakthrough might intimate this. His insights were hard won, arrived at in haltering fashion, and only gradually were formed together into some kind of coherent shape. But their object was to give to every believer a confidence in God’s nearness and therefore accessibility. Divine initiative to come close subverted the human psychological inclination to force

26 Leppin, Luther, 21. 27 Brad S. Gregory, Rebel in the Ranks: Martin Luther, the Reformation, and the Conflicts That Continue to Shape Our World (New York: HarperCollins, 2017), 105. 28 Carl R. Trueman, “Reformers, Puritans and Evangelicals: The Lay Connection”, in D.W. Lovegrove (ed.), The Rise of the Laity in Evangelical Protestantism (London: Routledge, 2002), 18, 19; Joshua Mitchell, “The Equality of the All under the One in Luther and Rousseau: Thoughts on Christianity and Political Theory”, Journal of Religion 72 (1992) 351–65, on p.356. 29 Lovelace, American Pietism, 94. 30 Bruce Hindmarsh, The Spirit of Early Evangelicalism: True Religion in a Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 130. 31 Lyndal Roper, Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet (London: The Bodley Head, 2016), 84, 117, 167.

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God’s hand in order to grasp power through superstitious mechanisms.32 Luther reacted against a mechanistic and impersonal understanding of grace and replaced it with an organic one. His agenda was not to demolish the medieval church but instead to renovate it on firmer foundations. Of course, Luther did contribute to the process of “demystification,” which promoted the “duty of the Church … to proclaim grace, not to mediate purification”.33 He also uphold a kind of declericalisation.34 But this process did not result in “discarding a sacred view of the universe” often termed secularisation or disenchantment.35 Indeed, among others like Scribner or Collinson, Hendrix has argued that the Reformers were evangelising the peoples of Europe through catechesis and homiletics perhaps for the first time, after their prior nominal “Christianisation”.36 Luther’s adjustments to sacramental theology were not so much a sign of his program to reject God’s closeness, but rather his attempt to protect a worldview, in which believers could meet the Lord directly in his sacramental word: The displacement of the holy from the physical to the personal was not a removal of the sacred from the world but a different way of giving the faithful access to the sacred … reformers did not think of themselves as slowing down a process of secularization but of combating, to different degrees, the improper sacralization of Christendom, namely, those practices that reformers considered remnants of paganism or superstitious accretions.37

He was not merely reforming the external structure of the church but radically reassessing its animating principle: “Let this then stand fast: The church can give no promise of grace: that is the work of God alone.”38 Or in the words of Joshua Mitchell: The great paradox in Luther … is that the world is not disenchanted … Luther’s pronouncements of the stark disjunction between the two worlds must be juxtaposed with his view that this world is not emancipated from the other … This world however does not become disenchanted as a consequence of separating religious and worldly affairs …

32 Scott H. Hendrix, Recultivating the Vineyard: The Reformation Agendas of Christianization (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 11. 33 Euan Cameron, Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason, and Religion, 1250–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 157, 158. 34 Hendrix, Recultivating the Vineyard, 184n30. 35 Hendrix, Recultivating the Vineyard, 154. 36 Hendrix, Recultivating the Vineyard, 35, 42 37 Hendrix, Recultivating the Vineyard, 154, 155. 38 Martin Luther, “The Babylonian Captivity of the Church”, in H.T. Lehmann (ed.), Three Treatises (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970), 239.

Telling the Story from Luther’s Break of Dawn to Edwards’s Glorious Gospel Light

It is my contention … that Protestant thought does not disenchant the Roman Churchdominated world but, rather, enchants the world in a different manner than does the Roman Church.39

Luther stood against the disenchanting possibilities of late medieval Christian experience. For Luther, this type of experiential Christianity was itself built on renewed Christology. To reject the pope as focus of the life of the church was to require a new theological centre, which Christ filled, thereby judging other doctrinal positions and pastoral postures.40 There would now be just two sacraments, baptism and the Lord’s Supper, because these two alone had been authorised by the Lord. In hermeneutics, Luther argued that the Scriptures consisted of law and Gospel, whereby the law that condemned would drive believers to Christ who in turn forgave. As monk and friar, Luther’s exasperation with the scholastic syllabus led in 1518 to his infamous outburst against the “theologians of glory,” whose rationalistic methods smoothed out any existential ardour which had both birthed his breakthrough and characterised his preaching. He represented the “theology of the cross,” the “theologia crucis,” which focused on the veiled vision of Christ’s existential nearness. In each of these instances, Luther’s Christological agenda is prominent. Neither mysticism nor scholasticism gave security: only a renewed understanding of transcendence centred on Christ could protect the possibility of divine immanence.41 Luther believed that renewal came as a result of God’s gracious intervention to draw near, not as a result of cultivating habit or unlocking mathematical secrets or suppressing the physical, which entail a more dramatic separation of the material from the spiritual.42 It has been assumed that Luther’s understanding of human passivity in justification represents “a philosophical and metaphysical position on the relationship between divine and human causality” – a kind of univocalism that does not allow for a coordinated approach to the divine/human encounter – but 39 Joshua Mitchell, “Protestant Thought and Republican Spirit: How Luther Enchanted the World”, American Political Science Review 86 (1992) 688–95, on p. 689. Emphasis original. Further see J. Mitchell, Not by Reason Alone: Religion, History and Identity in Early Modern Political Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), which recognises the inadequacy of Charles Taylor’s thesis of disenchantment as applied to the Reformation. 40 Paul D. L. Avis, The Church in the Theology of the Reformers (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1981), 3, 13. 41 William C. Placher, The Domestication of Transcendence: How Modern Thinking About God Went Wrong (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 138. 42 For a more detailed discussion of late medieval science, see G.B. Deason, “Reformation Theology and the Mechanistic Conception of Nature”, in D.C. Lindberg/R.L. Numbers (ed.), God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 178.

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this has come under serious review, for as Simeon Zahl argues it leaves out the core driver, namely Luther’s existential angst, which may obscure his otherwise keen philosophical mind or alternatively help his commentators to locate him historically.43 Luther’s soteriology is not the last word on his metaphysics. In fact, Luther’s approach to understanding the “inner man” – as distinct from the “outer man” – in his tract of 1520 On Christian Freedom, or in On Secular Authority of 1523 should perhaps be understood in less contrastive terms, for “the Platonic tradition with its rationalistic optimism misinterpreted Paul’s teaching on the conflict between the Spirit and the flesh” which “cast the human moral conflict repressively – that is, as a battle of the mind for supremacy over wayward bodily desires”.44 Lutheran scholar Paul Hinlicky explains: Surely one of Luther’s greatest achievements as a student of Paul was to discover that distinctions such as the inner and the outer person, or akin to it, spirit and flesh, are not anthropological dualisms at all. Rather, these oppositions signal the invasion of God’s new creation coming to redeem the fallen world They are reflections of the battle between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of the devil, the city of God and the earthly city, humanity in Christ and humanity in Adam.45

Further, Luther’s immersion in Platonic thinking, which shaped him so profoundly through the writings of Augustine, encouraged a worldview that enabled a textured, participatory and anagogical ontology. Placher notes that the “Aristotelian tradition thought of God as an external cause producing motion in the things of the world”, whereas “neo-Platonism considered God as the ultimate form in which all finite things participate, and who is thus internal to them”.46 On this spectrum, Luther “was very critical” of the “syntheses of ‘Aristotelian’ philosophy and Christian thought”,47 and upheld those theological postures that sought out the relationships between, rather than the distinctions within, the created order, not least in regards to the integrity of the human person. This kind of graded reality promoted hierarchy, appreciated the enchantment of the world around him, and assumed the analogia entis, the ontological commitment to categories of this world truthfully communicating the divine nature. Christ could be near because created matter

43 Simeon Zahl, “Non-Competitive Agency and Luther’s Experiential Argument against Virtue”, Modern Theology 35 (2019) 199–222, on p.219. 44 Hinlicky, Luther for Evangelicals, 57. 45 Hinlicky, Luther for Evangelicals, 65. 46 Placher, Domestication of Transcendence, 113. 47 Theodor Dieter, “Martin Luther”, in G. Oppy/N. Trakakis (ed.), The History of Western Philosophy: Early Modern Philosophy of Religion (vol 3; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 44.

Telling the Story from Luther’s Break of Dawn to Edwards’s Glorious Gospel Light

could mediate his presence, as Luther illustrated: “In red-hot iron, for instance, the two substances, fire and iron are so mingled that every part is both fire and iron.”48 Edwards espoused a spirituality which, like Luther, resisted mechanism and promoted personalism. For example, Edwards wanted the church to understand how God’s power in and through nature, described in his conversion account “The Personal Narrative”, attests first God’s communicative ability then God’s gracious approach to the soul. Indeed, this Narrative provides a model of spirituality, in which God animates the affections and prompts our delight in his presence not just our duty to his commandments. Without any official representative of the church present during this experience in the fields, Edwards contemplated the deep theological unities which hold all things together and his place in God’s grand design. In fact, in the “Images of Divine Things,” he said, “The things of the world are ordered [and] designed to shadow forth spiritual things”.49 Unlike Luther’s Christological focus, Edwards, resisting modern anthropocentric categories, took up a text from 1 Timothy 1, in which using more traditional theocentric terminology God’s transcendence was stressed.50 Edwards celebrated divine design, which communicated divine presence through typology and analogy. What happened in Edwards’s soul – the reintegration of his energies – is then projected onto the historical plane. In Edwards’s context, in which the Enlightenment’s empowerment of individual autonomy was celebrated, Edwards’s agenda was to renew the church through traditional affirmation of the Lord’s initiative to come close, paying particular attention to promote the Spirit’s agency and personhood. He first of all used the language of sense perception with attending philosophical categories to prosecute this belief: Edwards valorised the visual tropes of the Enlightenment, for “grace is of the nature of light”.51 In highlighting its Scriptural warrant, Edwards wrote: “This plainly shows, that there is such a thing as a discovery of the divine superlative glory and excellency of God and Christ; and also that ‘tis as immediately from God, as light from the sun … ‘tis a kind of emanation of God’s beauty, and is related to God as the light is to the sun”. This “spiritual and divine illumination”52 promoted God’s

48 Luther, “Babylonian Captivity”, 148. 49 Jonathan Edwards, “Images of Divine Things”, in W.E. Anderson (ed.), Typological Writings (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 11; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 53. 50 Michael A. G. Haykin, Jonathan Edwards: The Holy Spirit in Revival: The Lasting Influence of the Holy Spirit in the Heart of Man (Darlington: Evangelical Press, 2005), 166, in which Haykin affirms both Michael McClymond and Hans Frei on their understanding of the anthropocentric turn of modernity. 51 Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 2; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 235. 52 Jonathan Edwards, “A Divine and Supernatural Light”, in M. Valeri (ed.), Sermons and Discourses, 1730–1733 (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 17; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 418, 422, 426.

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freedom to engage with humans powerfully and directly and placed Edwards within the longer Protestant tradition outlined in this chapter. However, in Edwards’s writing the divine initiative to come close was also set within an occasionalist philosophical framework, in which – this time in contrast with Luther – all things created “including human creatures, are merely the ‘occasions’ of God’s action”, denying all human agency.53 Where deism grew in influence, so divine closeness needed renewed theological and philosophical defence. Jan Stievermann takes up this case when he appeals to the philosophical Edwards and his occasionalism to assert that Edwards “in the strongest possible terms denied that history progresses through human agency … as a reaction to the perceived danger of a secularism that he feared”.54 Like Luther, Edwards can be viewed as denigrating the role of human beings in God’s plans to highlight instead divine power. However, it is frequently the case that the pastoral Edwards does affirm the role of human agency in the divine design, and elsewhere draws on the notion of the image of God or the gift of the Spirit to dignify our responsibilities in time and space. He calls on the clergy to expend effort in promoting teleological concerns: “‘Tis God’s design to make use of ministers thus: to correct the mistakes of his people and gradually introduce an increase of light. God will make use of means and instruments [to achieve his ends].”55 In the “Redemption Discourse”, Edwards frequently affirms the ministry of “eminent Christians” to demonstrate their human agency in a narrative in which God is the primary actor. In preaching, Edwards addressed the very particular demographic groupings present in the congregation, and through exhortation urged them to conform to divine expectations for their discipleship. If human participation in the Lord (using the language of 2 Peter 1:4) assumes neither identity between them nor incommunicability, Edwards encouraged his hearers towards real moral responsibility before God: They [the redeemed] have spiritual excellency and joy by a kind of participation of God. They are made excellent by a communication of God’s excellency: God puts his own beauty, i.e. his beautiful likeness, upon their souls. They are made ‘partakers of the divine nature’, or moral image of God … as the moon and planets are bright by the sun’s light.56

53 Oliver D. Crisp, “Occasionalism”, in H.S. Stout/K.P. Minkema/A.C. Neele (ed.), The Jonathan Edwards Encyclopedia (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017), 415. 54 Jan Stievermann, “History, Providence, and Eschatology”, in D.A. Sweeney/J. Stievermann (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Jonathan Edwards (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 231–32. See also Rhys S. Bezzant, Edwards the Mentor (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 90–91. 55 Jonathan Edwards, “One End in God’s Appointing the Ministry”, in W.H. Kimnach (ed.), Sermons and Discourses, 1743–1758 (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 25; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 446. 56 Edwards, “God Glorified in Man’s Dependence”, WJE 17:208.

Telling the Story from Luther’s Break of Dawn to Edwards’s Glorious Gospel Light

Indeed, Edwards expanded the possibilities for lay leadership. He believed divine light would be attainable “by persons of mean capacities, and advantages, as well as those that are of the greatest parts and learning”.57 He collaborated with evangelical friends in Scotland to launch the program of Concerts of Prayer, which involved laity and clergy together coordinating prayer meetings outside of the normal hours of Sunday services. Further, emotional expression could be understood as enabling a sense of agency, and this was not always uncoupled from physical sensations, like shrieking or barking. Bodies as conduits of responsiveness to divine closeness was one more way to promote his project of reintegrating the person and affirming the enchantment of the world.58 Ultimately Edwards championed a new way of understanding the Lord’s Supper, where individuals could only partake with confidence if they had known the Spirit’s regenerating work: Edwards displaced the received language of covenant to celebrate divine propinquity in the language of communion.59 Although this was in the end his undoing in Northampton, it placed an expectation on the individual to look for and work towards an experience of grace in their own heart. No spectators here. Meeting the Lord may have been adapted to modern conditions, but it fundamentally promoted Edwards’s premodern assumptions which aligned with those of Luther, channelling “the monastic tradition that was more directed to experiential or affective faith”.60 Even if Edwards’s pastoral reflexes need further philosophical integration, or are ultimately inconsistent with his anti-realist ontology, Edwards was conscious that human beings must be intentional in setting themselves within the history of redemption, for God had not left the field and would raise up champions for his cause. Edwards’s resistance to deism incorporated both divine and human strategies.

3.

“Covered with Glorious Gospel Light”: A Protestant Narrative

Both Luther and Edwards, in different contexts, propounded a narrative not of God’s disengagement from the world, but of divine transcendence making possible divine propinquity and human responsibility. Luther’s apocalyptic response to corruption in the church and his desire not to reduce God’s ways to what was logically demonstrable was a spoke in the wheel of late medieval scholastic theology

57 Edwards, “Divine and Supernatural Light”, WJE 17:423. 58 See Kathryn Reklis, Theology and the Kinesthetic Imagination: Jonathan Edwards and the Making of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 3. 59 William J. Danaher, “By Sensible Signs Represented: Jonathan Edwards’ Sermons on the Lord’s Supper”, Pro Ecclesia 7 (1998) 261–87, on p. 269. 60 Adriaan C. Neele, “Prelude: Locating Jonathan Edwards’s Spirituality”, in K.C. Strobel/A.C. Neele/K.P. Minkema (ed.), Jonathan Edwards: Spiritual Writings (New York: Paulist Press, 2019) 5.

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and spirituality. Luther was not entirely consistent about what he expected of God in the short to medium term, and he certainly did not present a millennial vision of the future of the people of God on earth, but he did set the scene for a more popularist, demotic, understanding of God’s apocalyptic inbreaking. Building on Luther’s resistance to the domestication of God, Edwards’s assertion of divine transcendence did incorporate millennial thinking, by means of which he argued that creation, providence and the work of redemption would ultimately fulfil the divine design in time and space, that is, that this world is not merely a useful backdrop to God’s plans but is essential to them and serves as a coordinating category asserting the harmonious relationship between the Lord and his people. The millennium offers a vantage point from which to interpret history from outside of history.61 In fact, the narrative linking the ministries of Luther and Edwards is one in which the image of light functions as a stabilising metaphor, which tracks positive progress towards the millennial reign of Christ. Rather than Edwards lamenting spiritual declension, in as far as many in his day promoted divine disengagement from history, the narrative he valorised was the opposite. The new day had dawned in the period of the earliest Reformation, and was now about to shine brightly on new lands with millennial hope: the sun of righteousness shall then arise, with his glorious light shining on those many vast regions of the earth that have been covered with heathenish darkness for many thousand years … Then shall this vast continent of America, that now in so great part of it is covered with barbarous ignorance and cruelty, be everywhere covered with glorious Gospel light and Christian love.62

Recognising the gradualness of the progress of divine light, Edwards was honest enough to acknowledge that progress would not always be smooth. He could see that “the church of God was greatly reformed in Luther’s time,” yet he also averred that “Luther remained under some great errors, [such as his concept of] consubstantiation [and his] denial of the doctrine of God’s decrees”.63 Even if not smooth, progress was sure: “There from the very beginning has been a gradual increase of light in the church of God … In these later ages, in the times of the reformers, more clear explanations of the Scriptures in many respects [were given, and] errors corrected … it is often foretold that there will be hereafter, in order to that more glorious state of the church, a much greater increase of light than ever has

61 John F. Wilson, “History”, in Sang Hyun Lee (ed.), The Princeton Companion to Jonathan Edwards (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 221. 62 Edwards, History of the Work of Redemption, WJE 9:471, 472. Emphasis mine. 63 Edwards, “One End”, WJE 25:444–445.

Telling the Story from Luther’s Break of Dawn to Edwards’s Glorious Gospel Light

yet been”.64 In other words, the arc of history may bend towards justice, but surely therefore bends towards light. The labours of the sixteenth century Reformers were necessary but not sufficient for complete illumination. But this narrative of gradual intensification of light stands in contrast with a declension narrative, which for some historians frames the period between Luther and Edwards. According to just such a narrative of modernity, Luther and Edwards may well speak of positive progress, but they were nonetheless blinded to a true apprehension of events. On this reading, they were not able to see their unwitting part in the process of secularisation. As Miller so ingloriously suggests, “From the point of view of the social historian and still more from that of the sociologist, [the Great Awakening] was a phenomenon of mass behavior, of which poor Mr. Edwards was the deluded victim”.65 The narrative commonly focuses on Luther, who sets the nature of authority (with sola scriptura the guiding motto) adrift from its institutional mooring, eating away at the fabric of an enchanted world, and creating the preconditions for fragmented modernity. Luther’s personal resistance to the Emperor’s demands and to the pope’s threats caricatures him as archetypally modern, and his proto-democratic agitation for the priesthood of all believers renders him a leader who detaches the church from the Great Tradition, such that each under their own vine and fig tree pontificates as to the meaning of Scripture without accountability or appeals. The ills of modernity are to be brought home to the Reformer’s fracturing of the medieval synthesis, typically by writers for whom Thomist thought is an abidingly attractive systematic edifice. But the notion that Luther in particular, or the Protestant tradition more generally, is responsible for such tumultuous dismantling of the medieval world is to discount other contributing factors which predate them. For example, the teaching of Duns Scotus (1264–1308) on nominalism (the focus on particulars over universals) and its contested relationship with his univocalism (the use of language to highlight how the same word can be applied to God or to humans) would potentially undercut transcendence and fuel a much earlier beginning to the secularising project, with humans and God in a competitive (or non-analogous) relationship, fracturing an integrated worldview. Subsequently, William of Ockham (1132–44) influentially recast the philosophy of Scotus. Indeed, Larry Siedentop claims that “the Franciscans Duns Scotus and Ockham put into place the basic building blocks

64 Edwards, “One End”, WJE 25:445. 65 Miller, Errand, 155. Rather than trapped in his circumstances, Davidson mounts the case that Edwards, in investigating prophetic views of history, could understand his own moment better “by getting outside it … from the perspective of God’s history of redemption”. See James West Davidson, The Logic of Millennial Thought: Eighteenth-Century New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 36.

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of modern secularism”,66 though Brad Gregory sees their rarefied notions as barely impacting their own world (and names Luther as a more significant protagonist).67 The challenges of social dislocation and cultural dissolution caused by the Black Death (1347–1351), ecclesiastical division and loss of corporate confidence during the Great Schism (1378–1417), which witnessed two (sometimes three) rival popes, and economic developments expedited by the invention of the printing press (1440) (triggering the death-knell of feudal face-to-face economic relationships to be replaced by the impersonalism of early market economies), all made the dawning of the sixteenth century ripe for serious attempts at reform. Apocalyptic aspirations were also in the air: Joachim of Fiore (1132–1202) had outlined his thinking about the New Age of the Holy Spirit in Italy, reforms in Bohemia under the hand of soon to be executed Jan Hus (1369–1415) had ignited millennial flames, Constantinople had fallen to the Turks in 1453, and Columbus had arrived in the New World at the same time that Muslims and Jews were expelled from Spain (1492). Further, new kinds of mystical spiritual devotion, to which Luther appealed, took root in the Netherlands in the fifteenth century, encouraging the practice of imitation of Christ. Even the scientific revolution as harbinger of modernity might at best be correlated to Protestant insights but not attributed to the Reformation’s causation: “Recent studies of Protestantism and science … have not located the origins of science in Luther’s revolt.”68 If in some circumstances, Luther might be linked causally to a “long-term dynamic of differentiation,” referring to spheres of discourse, these must be held against his “vision for church and society clearly aimed at a more integrative model,”69 which is reinforced by a panoply of factors contributing to the conditions of modernity: economic, political, philosophical as well as theological. In critiquing Brad Gregory, Vanhoozer reminds us that correlation is not causation. We must beware the aphorism: post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this). From the Reformation emerged not just the principle of Scripture alone, but other solas, which mitigated the dangers of hyper-individualised patterns of interpretation without recourse to traditional epistemological anchors.70 Edwards did not blame Luther for the challenges he faced, but rather saw him as an ally in their cobelligerent cause.

66 Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (London: Penguin, 2014), 296. 67 Gregory, Unintended Reformation, 37, 41, though Gregory does not arraign Edwards in order that he might answer to secularising charges. 68 Deason, “Reformation Theology”, 172. 69 Appold, “Luther’s Abiding Significance”, 608. 70 Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Biblical Authority after Babel: Retrieving the Solas in the Spirit of Mere Protestant Christianity (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2016), 10–12, 47, 61, 110.

Telling the Story from Luther’s Break of Dawn to Edwards’s Glorious Gospel Light

Though modest, this chapter is a contribution to a bigger historiographical project. If, as Landes opines, “the history of millennialism in the Reformation, or rather the millennial history of the Reformation, still awaits composition”, to outline the relationship between Luther and Edwards offers a first move in analysis.71 Indeed, their relationship expounded in both theological and historical terms is a natural place to investigate millennial concerns of the Reformation period, given that the American experience is frequently assumed to belong to a millennial narrative.72 Looking beyond the frequent end-point of Reformation story-telling with the confessionalisation of European states, we might then learn to appreciate Luther’s internationalist and pan-denominational contribution to an eschatological narrative, with Edwards himself a player in just such a “Protestant international”,73 self-consciously taking his place in Luther’s millennial legacy. A grand sociological narrative of decline may not be sufficiently inclusive to allow for the universalising and integrating narrative which the Luther-Edwards axis presents, a historical narrative which contributes theological and spiritual complexity to commonly held positions. Surely telling stories within a longer timeframe, acknowledging several moving parts, will produce fruit in an age when certain streams of evangelicalism have lost both historical moorings and epistemological modesty – often with disastrous consequences.

71 Richard Landes, “Millenarians and Millennialism”, in H.J. Hillerbrand (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Protestantism (vol. 3; New York: Routledge, 2004), 1239. 72 Jan Stievermann, “The Discursive Construction of American Identity in Millennialist Tracts During the War of 1812”, in B. Engler/J.O. Fichte/O. Scheiding (ed.), Millennial Thought in America: Historical and Intellectual Contexts, 1630–1860 (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2002), 305. 73 Appold, “Luther’s Abiding Significance”, 609; Caroline Winterer, American Enlightenments: Pursuing Happiness in the Age of Reason (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 23.

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Kenneth P. Minkema

“The Late Germanic Turn of Jonathan Edwards”

Recent scholarship has revealed new ways and extents to which German Protestantism, particularly Pietism, defined or influenced the early colonizers, English and otherwise, of North America.1 The renown of Pietist pioneers such as Johann Arndt and Philipp Spener among these groups has been well established. Stalwarts of New England religious culture, such as Cotton Mather, were fully conversant and sympathetic with the Pietist agenda, and Mather even corresponded with one of its key figures, August Hermann Francke.2 This relationship continued among later New England figures in the Reformed tradition, including Jonathan Edwards. In his “Catalogue”, or list of books he read or wanted to read, he included Arndt’s True Christianity among his earliest reading, and he cited a Boston edition of Francke’s account of his conversion, as well as a preaching manual by him.3 In his correspondence, Edwards inquired about Francke’s complex at Halle as a model and epicenter of evangelisation.4 In addition, Edwards was acquainted with the devotional works of German expatriate Anton Wilhelm Böhm (1673–1722), or Anthony William Boehm; indeed, he used Boehm’s English translation of Arndt’s classic work, and also cited Boehm’s trea-

1 See, for example, W.R. Ward, Early Evangelicalism: A Global Intellectual History, 1670–1789 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); J. Strom/H. Lehmann/J. Van Horn Melton (ed.), Pietism in Germany and North America 1680–1820 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009); and D.H. Shantz, An Introduction to German Pietism: Protestant Renewal at the Dawn of Modern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). An earlier but still-valuable work is F.E. Stoeffler, German Pietism during the Eighteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 1973). The author gratefully acknowledges Layne Hancock’s work, when he was still a student at Yale Divinity School, in constructing an initial list of Stapfer references in Edwards’s writings and for providing secondary references. He, Adriaan C. Neele, and Jan Stievermann provided comments on a draft of this essay. Paul Eberwine translated Stapfer’s Latin into English that Edwards excerpted in the “Controversies” notebook. 2 O. Scheiding, “World as Parish: Cotton Mather, August Hermann Francke, and Transatlantic Religious Networks,” in R. Smolinski/J. Stievermann (ed.), Cotton Mather and Biblia Americana, America’s First Bible Commentary: Essays in Reappraisal (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 131–66. 3 Jonathan Edwards, “Catalogue” of Reading, no. [436], citing a “discourse Concerning the most usefull way of Preaching”, in P.J. Thuesen (ed.), Catalogues of Books (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 26; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 222. (Hereafter, following initial citation, volumes in this series will be referred to as “WJE” plus the volume and page numbers). 4 Jonathan Edwards, “Letter to Josiah Willard, June 1, 1740”, in G.S. Claghorn (ed.), Letters and Personal Writings (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 16; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 83.

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tise on original sin and his sermons.5 The attention was reciprocated, as Pietists and Moravians took notice of and translated Edwards’s revivalist works, such as A Faithful Narrative. 6 During the period leading up to his bitter dismissal from Northampton in 1750, Edwards even appealed, albeit indirectly, to the “Palatine” or Heidelberg Catechism to defend his revised views on the qualifications for church membership.7 So far forth, Edwards’s knowledge of German theologians was fairly standard. But late in his life – really, beginning only two or three years before his death in 1758 – he exhibited a marked interest in the work not only of Pietist writers but even more of German and Swiss Reformed and Lutheran theologians, exegetes and philosophers, who evinced a markedly rationalist bent, or were trying to reconcile rationalism and pietism. Edwards certainly maintained his curiosity about writers in other countries and traditions – as evidenced in his later notebooks by voluminous copying from the likes of Chevalier Ramsay, George Turnbull, and Ralph Cudworth, or his citations of works by French Protestants such as Jacques Basnage and Dutch scholars such as Hugo de Groot. But in the midst of this, it is legitimate to speak of a “Germanic turn” by Edwards, particularly as he gathered material for his “great work,” A History of the Work of Redemption. This “turn” consisted in large part of Edwards’s consultation of and extensive excerpting from the Institutiones Theologiae Polemicae of Johann Friedrich Stapfer, whom Edwards described as “an eminent divine”. Through Stapfer’s work, Edwards became acquainted, or in some cases further acquainted, with names such as Christian Wolff, Christoph Matthäus Pfaff, Friedrich Adolph Lampe, Johann Lorentz Mosheim, and Israel Gottlieb Canz, none of whom one typically encounters in studies of Edwards. By examining Edwards’s reading, notebooks, and published works, this essay seeks to discover the origins and unfolding of his Germanic turn,

5 See Edwards, “Catalogue” no. [7], Johann Arndt, Of True Christianity, transl. Boehm, 2 vols. (London, 1712–13); no. [76], “Boehm’s Doc of Original sin,” or The doctrine of original sin, set forth in a sermon preach’d at St. James’, in the chappel of His late Royal Highness Prince George of Denmark (London, 1711); and no. [434] cites a reference in George Whitefield’s Journal to “Boehms sermons”, possibly Several discourses and tracts from promoting the common interest of true Christianity (London, 1717), WJE 26:118, 134, 220–22. 6 J. Stievermann, “Faithful Translations: New Discoveries on the German Pietist Reception of Jonathan Edwards,” Church History 83 (2014) 324–66. 7 K.P. Minkema, “‘Our Confused Way of Church Government’: Jonathan Edwards, the New England Way, and the Heidelberg Catechism”, in C. Strohm/J. Stievermann (ed.), Profil und Wirkung des Heidelberger Katechismus: Neue Forschungsbeiträge anlässlich des 450jährigen Jubiläums (The Heidelberg Catechism, Origins, Characteristics, and Influences: Essays in Reappraisal on the Occasion of its 450th Anniversary) (Schriften des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte, Bd 215; Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2015), 330–42.

“The Late Germanic Turn of Jonathan Edwards”

and to show, at least in a preliminary way, how and to what extent he was resourcing these authors. We start with central European scholars of earlier generations than Edwards, born in the seventeenth century. The first person we will consider suggests that Edwards remained drawn to Pietist authors, while the following brace of authors provided him an entrée into the vanguard of continental Enlightenment philosophy. We end with a contemporary of Edwards and by far the most copiously studied by him, who was another important figure in the development of a rationalist approach to Calvinism.

1.

Friedrich Adolph Lampe (1683–1729)

A German Pietist theologian, pastor, catechist, and hymn-writer, Lampe gained a position as professor of dogmatics at the University of Utrecht. A disciple of Dutch preacher and author Johannes d’Outrein (1662–1722), Lampe was an exponent of the covenantal approach of Dutch theologian and Hebraist Johannes Cocceius (1603–1669). In Lampe, too, the Dutch Nadere Reformatie and German Pietism converged, and Edwards was a recipient of these two post-Reformation Reformed church movements. Edwards came to know of Lampe’s works through his reading and correspondence. In a note on Acts 13:20 in the Family Expositor of Philip Doddridge, an English Dissenting teacher and exegete, he read of “Mr. Lampe’s Compendium of ecclesiastical History,” or Synopsis historiae sacrae et ecclesiasticae, published in 1721. After Matthew Henry and Matthew Poole, Doddridge was the biblical commentator to whom Edwards most resorted, and during late 1750 he committed Doddridge’s recommendation of this book into entry no. [565] of his “Catalogue”.8 It was about five years later, when Edwards apparently borrowed Stapfer’s Institutiones, that he found the author’s praise for “Lampes dissertation concerning the Eternity of Punishment”. In no. [706], Edwards digested Stapfer’s commendation of the work “as fully proving the doctrine establishing the Argument against Evasions of the Adversaries & Answering all their Objections fully & clearly”. But he went on to note that Stapfer “cites some passages in dutch or German,” so “‘tis uncertain whether the Book is to be had in Latin”.9 Edwards need not have worried; the dissertation, Disputationis theologicae de poenarum aeternitate (Bremen, 1728), was indeed in Latin, which for the time being continued to be the prevailing language of academics.

8 Edwards, Catalogues of Books, WJE 26:262. 9 Edwards, Catalogues of Books, WJE 26:312.

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Another vital inlet of information about relevant works, new and old, was Edwards’s correspondence with the broadly connected John Erskine, pastor of Kirkintilloch, Scotland. The two had started writing to each other in 1747, and many a pamphlet and bound volume made their way into Edwards’s library in oilclothwrapped bundles that were sent across the Atlantic. In addition, Erskine described books he thought his New England associate would like. In one letter alone, dated May 13, 1752, Erskine referred to the biblical commentaries of at least two scholars, Campegius Vitringa’s on the Book of Isaiah and Lampe’s on the Gospel of John, the latter a three-volume Commentarius published in Amsterdam from 1724–26. Edwards copied out Erskine’s accolade – “There are few Books more accurate and evangelical” – into entry no. [609], as an incentive to seek out Lampe’s commentary.10

2.

Christoph Matthäus Pfaff (1686–1760)

Pfaff was a German Lutheran theologian, a faculty member at Tübingen University, and active in the Protestant church union movement. In 1756, he had to leave his Tübingen position and moved to Gießen, where he served as professor and chancellor. 11 His chief work, and the one to which Edwards referred a number of times, was Institutiones theologiae dogmaticae et moralis, published in 1719. Pfaff was an independent thinker who positioned himself between moderate, ecumenically minded Pietism and Enlightenment rationalism. His Institutiones is reputed to be one of the first German theological works employing the new rationalistic method of the Enlightenment, so Edwards’s interest in it is telling, as is his timing: he seems to have come to the knowledge or possession of this treatise during the late 1750s. In the “Catalogue,” Edwards first made use of the treatise by copying out a number of recommendations by Pfaff, indicating that he had the work. In six entries between nos. [698] and [717], Edwards appeared to be leafing through Pfaff to see whom he held in esteem, twice noting Pfaff ’s commendation of French Catholic scholar Pierre-Daniel Huet, once of Swiss Reformed theologian Jean-Alphonse Turretin, and twice again of Dutch Reformed theologian Hermann Witsius.12 As with the stream of “Miscellanies” and “Controversies” entries composed, as we shall see,

10 Edwards, Catalogues of Books, WJE 26:277. 11 W. Raupp, “Pfaff, Christoph Matthäus”, in H.F. Klemme/M. Kuehn (ed.), The Dictionary of EighteenthCentury German Philosophers (vol. 2; London/New York: Continuum, 2010), 885; W.-F. Schäufele, “Pfaff, Christoph Matthäus”, in Neue Deutsche Biographie (vol. 20; Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2001), 290. Jan Stievermann kindly supplied these references. 12 Edwards, Catalogues of Books, WJE 26:310–17.

“The Late Germanic Turn of Jonathan Edwards”

entirely or in part of excerpts from Stapfer, so Edwards’s references to Pfaff began in earnest only after 1755. Actual citations of or quotes from Pfaff ’s Institutiones were sprinkled by Edwards across a range of notebooks beginning in 1756 or ‘57. In “Miscellanies” no. 1336, Edwards brought Pfaff to bear against theories of a pre-Adamite creation, instead asserting the one and only Mosaic account, or a monogenetic origin of the human race.13 In the second of three booklets in which Edwards was collecting materials for A History of the Work of Redemption, he reminded himself to consult Pfaff “Concerning the Time of the Confirmation of the Angels”.14 The fact that Edwards merely gave the page number in Pfaff ’s Institutiones, and instead cited the “place marked,” demonstrates that he had a copy of the work by this time, into which he had drawn marginal notations–a practice he employed only in his most-consulted tomes. And in the “Controversies” notebook, in the midst of a slew of entries “Concerning Importance of Doctrines,” Edwards sufficed with reminders to consult a passage in Pfaff, as well as an essay by another of his Scottish correspondents, John MacLaurin.15

3.

Christian Wolff (1679–1754)

Wolff was a German philosopher and scientist known for his efforts to reconcile Reformed orthodoxy and rationalism, and considered one of the most important

13 Commentators such as Isaac La Peyrère (1596–1676), in his Prae-Adamitae (1655), argued for polygenism, that is, that inferior races of human existed before Adam, an argument used to support racist ideologies. Later exegetes such as Cotton Mather (and Edwards) renounced this in favour of monogenism, the origin and unity of all the human race in Adam. See, for example, Mather, Biblia Americana: Volume 1, Genesis, Reiner Smolinski (ed.) (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 501. 14 For a discussion of this and other aspects of Edwards’s angelology, see M.J. McClymond/G.R. McDermott, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 273–94; K.P. Minkema, “Angels: From John Calvin to Jonathan Edwards (Via John Milton),” in B. Gordon/C.R. Trueman (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Calvin and Calvinism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 15 For these references to Christoph Matthäus Pfaff, Institutiones dogmaticae et moralis (Tübingen, 1719), see Jonathan Edwards, “‘Misc.’ no 1336”, in D.A. Sweeney (ed.), The “Miscellanies” (Entry Nos. 1153–1360) (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 23; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 342; “History of Redemption,” 23, Bk. II, MS, The Works of Jonathan Edwards Online 31 (hereafter, WJEO); and “Controversies”, 133, MS, WJEO 27, sec. on “Importance of Doctrines, and Mysteries in Religion”. Pfaff’s name appears several other times in the “Controversies”, but in the context of quotes from Stapfer. See also the “Table” to the “Miscellanies”, entry on “Consequences from Scripture”, in which Edwards cited Pfaff specifically on the role of reason in deducing doctrines from Scripture that were not expressly revealed: T.A. Schafer, The “Miscellanies” (Entry Nos. a-z, aa-zz, 1–500) (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 13; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 129.

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figures of the Religious Enlightenment between Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Immanuel Kant.16 As a religious enlightener who prioritised the intellect over the will and downplayed the role of revelation, Wolff, when he was appointed to the faculty at Halle, ran up against the Pietists, such as Francke and Joachim Lange (1670–1744). This friction came to a head when Wolff ’s 1721 lecture as outgoing rector at Halle argued that Confucius, without the benefit of divine revelation, was an eminently virtuous person. This soon led to his expulsion from the Pietist center by an edict from Friedrich Wilhelm I. Wolff went on to teach and produce voluminously at the University of Marburg until restored at Halle by Friedrich the Great. Scholars often mention “the Leibniz-Wolff method”. Although frequently paired with and compared to Leibniz, Wolff differed in many regards. Wolff ’s “method” was “scientific,” by which he meant “demonstrable” or practically provable; he prioritised philosophy as the most fundamental science but recognised the relation of all knowledge; he applied reason without appeal to authority, but also joined experience to reason. For him, Christianity was based on principles of reason, but he also held that rational arguments had to be martialled to disprove religion’s critics.17 It is possible that Edwards was interested in Wolff because of his long practice of knowing, and adapting ideas from, his opponents. But if Wolff ’s method was anything like the “entire new method” that Edwards sought to formulate in A History of the Work of Redemption, then the attraction becomes less that of opposites. Also, the irenic spirit that Wolff and his followers displayed may have appealed to Edwards, who was coming out of the cauldron of the divisive revivals and internecine ecclesiastical disputes (including his own bitter dismissal from Northampton). Too, Edwards’s critique of the (to him) inadequate ways in which “reason” was used by some professed rationalists – was it a method? a faculty? – might have led him to ascertain whether Wolff was more substantial than the run-of-the-mill English Arminians and deists he usually encountered. Finally, Wolff ’s infamous tribute to Confucius and to other non-Christian moralists may have jibed nicely with Edwards’s exploration in his late “Miscellanies” of world religions, including

16 I adopt the terminology of David J. Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008) 20: “In a variety of philosophical idioms – Cartesian, Lockean, or Wolffian – religious enlighteners championed ideas of reasonableness and natural religion, toleration and natural law that aimed to inform, and in some cases reform, established religion. Religious enlighteners were theologians, clergy, and religious thinkers who were fully committed partisans and reformers of their own tradition.” 17 M. Hettche/C. Dyck, “Christian Wolff ”, in E.N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2019 Edition). See plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2019/entries/wolff-christian. Accessed 2021 Jan. 15.

“The Late Germanic Turn of Jonathan Edwards”

Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, and, coincidentally, Confucianism. Thus, in “Catalogue” no. [702] we find a twinned reference to both Pfaff and to “Wolfius concerning natural Religion,” meaning his Theologia naturalis methodo scientifica (Natural scientific method in theology), a two-volume set printed in Frankfurt and Leipzig in 1736–37.18 Two things about the entry are significant: first, Edwards struck through the phrase referring to Wolff, which was his usual (though not categorical) way of indicating that he had obtained the work; and second, the testimonial to these two works was culled from Stapfer’s Institutiones Theologiae Polemicae.

4.

Johann Friedrich Stapfer (1708–1775)

Now we come to the major figure in Edwards’s Germanic turn. Although Stapfer was born and worked most of his career as a Reformed pastor in Switzerland, he was trained at Marburg and wrote in German, was a disciple of Wolff, and grew to become a contributing and highly influential member of the Germanspeaking philosophical community.19 He went on late in life to write a massive dogmatics on which Kant drew,20 but the work that engaged Edwards was his earlier Institutiones Theologiae Polemicae universae ordine scientifico dispositae, published in five volumes from 1743 to 1747. Edwards had access to the first edition, as confirmed by his describing the work in Original Sin, completed in 1757, as having been published “fourteen years ago”. Institutiones Theologiae Polemicae was a systematic defense of Reformed theology – known as the last of its kind – that utilised the method of Wolff, though it also purportedly revealed the influence of the Saumur school, which if true, complicates assumptions about the controversial nature of Amyraldianism.21 Here is not the place to attempt a summary of the work’s purpose and content, not least because we currently lack a detailed study of it.22 Our focus must be restricted to Edwards’s

18 Edwards, Catalogues of Books, WJE 26:311. On continuities between the Leibniz-Wolff school and High Orthodoxy, see C. Leduc, “Sources of Wolff ’s Philosophy: Scholastics/Leibniz”, in R. Theis/ A. Aichele (ed.), Handbuch Christian Wolff (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2018), 35–53; G. Tutor, Die wissenschaftliche Methode bei Christian Wolff (New York: G. Olms, 2004). 19 U. Lehner, “Stapfer, Johann Friedrich (1708–1775)”, in H. Klemme/M. Kuehn (ed.) Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century German Philosophers (London: Continuum, 2010), 1114–15. 20 See the chapter on Stapfer and Kant in U.L. Lehner, Kants Vorsehungskonzept auf dem Hintergrund der deutschen Schulphilosophie und -theologie (Leiden: Brill, 2007); and S.R. Palmquist, Comprehensive Commentary on Kant’s Religion Within the Bounds of Bare Reason (Wiley Blackwell, 2015). 21 See J. Powell McNutt, Calvin Meets Voltaire: The Clergy of Geneva in the Age of Enlightenment, 1685–1798 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014). 22 An important step is C. Blaauw, “Johann Friedrich Stapfer (1708–1775): Reformed Orthodoxy and Theological Rationalism”, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Groningen, forthcoming.

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use of Stapfer. His selections may tell us more about his own priorities, how he read Stapfer, and how he used Stapfer to learn of other authors, than the details of what Stapfer actually believed. However, highlighting Edwards’s engagement with Stapfer can hopefully help to establish a pregnant point of contact within the transatlantic pan-Protestant community, and one that anticipated later developments. Stapfer’s Institutiones was not listed in the Yale College library inventories for 1743 and 1755, and we have no evidence whence Edwards procured his copy–perhaps from Thomas Prince, who had one of the largest libraries in the British North American colonies, or from Anglican missionary, educator and bibliophile Samuel Johnson, with whom Edwards maintained contact.23 That this was likely a borrowed item was reflected in the swaths of text that Edwards copied into his late notebooks, similar to what he would do with other lent items, for example, Ramsay’s Travels of Cyrus and Cudworth’s True Intellectual System of the Universe. Beginning in no. [702], which at its earliest dates from 1756, up through no. [716], Edwards, clearly building his bibliography, cited Stapfer in six entries as “highly” or “greatly” commending in turn Wolff’s treatise on natural theology (as we have seen); a systematic theology by German Lutheran jurist and historian Tobias Pfanner (1641–1716); a philosophical-theological work in the Leibnizian and Wolffian mode by Tübingenbased scholar Israel Gottlieb Canz (1690–1753); an ecclesiastical history by German Lutheran church historian Johann Lorentz Mosheim (c. 1694–1755); Lampe’s dissertation on eternal punishment (again, as we have seen); and a further dissertation on the reasonableness of religion by Dutch Reformed theologian Hermann Alexander Röell (1653–1718).24

23 Stapfer, Pfaff, and Wolff (and Leibniz for that matter) were not listed in the early library inventories of Harvard or Yale colleges, which suggests that Edwards was anticipating in some ways the move by Anglo-American intellectuals into German theology. See W.H. Bond/H. Amory (ed.), Printed Catalogues of the Harvard College Library, 1723–1790 (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1996), and J.E. Mooney (ed.), Eighteenth-Century Catalogues of the Yale College Library (New Haven: Yale University, Beinecke Library, 2001). 24 Although the first mention of Stapfer in the “Catalogue” came in no. [252], this was a later, inserted reference (Edwards, Catalogue of Books, WJE 26:168–69). The main entries, and works referred to in them are found here, Edwards, Catalogue of Books, WJE 26:311–15, namely:   [702]. Wolff, Theologia naturalis methodo scientifica pertractacta (2 vols., Frankfurt & Leipzig, 1736–37). [703]. Pfanner, Systema theologiae gentilis purioris (Basil, 1679). [706]. Canz, Philosophiae Leibnitianae et Wolffianae usus in theologia, per praecipua fidei capita (2 vols., Frankfurt & Leipzig, 1728–32). [709]. Mosheim, Institutiones historiae christianae antiquioris (2 vols., Helmstadt, 1737–41). [711]. Lampe, Disputationis theologicae de poenarum aeternitate (Bremen, 1728). [713]. Röell, Dissertatio de religione rationali (2nd ed., Franeker, 1689).

“The Late Germanic Turn of Jonathan Edwards”

Almost immediately upon procuring the Institutiones Theologiae Polemicae, Edwards put it to work for him in Original Sin, which he began writing in the summer of 1756 and completed in May 1757, though the work was not published until more than a year later, six months after his death. Clyde Holbrook remarks that Edwards found in Stapfer material “to support the thesis that the Old Testament rabbis and other commentators . . . believed in the sinfulness of man”.25 Part four of the treatise fielded “Objections”. In the concluding chapter of this part, considering a range of questions, Edwards drew on Stapfer to provide support for the argument that the “more ancient of the Jewish rabbis,” as well as early Christian Hebraists, “received this doctrine of original sin … from their forefathers”.26 But there was more to Edwards’s use of Stapfer in Original Sin than Holbrook detected. As mentioned, Stapfer was reportedly a disciple of Moise Amyraut (1596–1664) of the University of Saumur.27 In the name of a purer brand of Calvinism, Amyraut sought to formulate a more inclusive doctrine of atonement by arguing for its universalism prior to Christ’s sacrifice, which effected election. Along with his colleague, Josué de la Place (c. 1596–1665), Amyraut also advocated a mediate form of imputation of sin, in which original sin was inherent in and not immediately imputed by God to each person.28 In chapter three of part four, Edwards addressed “That great objection against the imputation of Adam’s sin to his posterity”. Here Edwards, at least in the published version, had three lengthy footnotes quoting Stapfer approvingly, first on the constitutional identity of humanity, and then on the validity of the imputation of Adam’s sin to his posterity.29 While Amyraldianism was not viewed universally by other

  25 Jonathan Edwards, Original Sin, C. Holbrook (ed.) (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 3; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 83. 26 Edwards, Original Sin, WJE 3:429n. See also Edwards, “Miscellanies” no. 1325, in D.A. Sweeney (ed.) The “Miscellenies” (Entry Nos. 1153–1360) (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 23; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 299–301, entitled “Original Sin Agreeable to the Doctrine Anciently Maintained by the Jews,” which quotes Stapfer, Institutiones 3:36–38, 132–33, and cites rabbinic sources, Sebastian Munster, and Anthony Hornbeck. 27 E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 117. 28 C.R. Trueman, John Owen (Farnham: Ashgate, 2007), 29–31; B. Armstrong, Calvinism and the Amyraut Heresy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). Edwards cited Amyraut only once, on the resurrection, in “Miscellanies” no. 956, “Traditions Among the Heathen Concerning the Conflagration”, but even there the citation was at second-hand, because the entry consisted of excerpts from Theophilus Gale’s Court of the Gentiles. See Jonathan Edwards, The “Miscellanies” (Entry nos. 833–1152), A. Plantinga Pauw (ed.) (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 20; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 230. 29 Edwards, Original Sin, WJE 3:191–93.

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Reformed as heretical, the particular passages that Edwards chose seemed to steer clear, consciously or not, of explicit indications of Stapfer’s suspected sympathies with that school. Stapfer’s construction of his Institutiones consisted of many and large quotes from friend and foe alike, so it would have been easy unwittingly to have lifted items out of context.30 Without being certain that Edwards was even aware of Stapfer’s Saumur connection – and if so, if that would have concerned him–we can only speculate whether the references here, and elsewhere in Edwards’s unpublished corpus, may open up some unexplored aspects of Edwards’s views on the divine decrees and theodicy.31 Incidentally, we can with some confidence reconstruct the process by which Edwards layered in these annotations, because we have fragments of the printer’s copy of the manuscript of Original Sin that went to the printer. For example, between pages 197 and 198 of the folio-sized manuscript is a smaller-sized leaf whose content is cued, via an asterisk, to the place where it is to be inserted on page 198. The tipped-in leaf contains an excerpt from Stapfer in which he is quoting Socinius – known for his opposition to original sin – to the effect that “men are born with corrupt Inclinations”.32 From this, we can deduce that Edwards, as a result of his diving into Stapfer, added these references to the already-completed version, with the intention of bolstering his arguments with those of his newly found continental systematician who combined orthodoxy and rationalism. Besides this short-term purposing of Stapfer, Edwards lifted from his work for longer-ranged projects. While many of Edwards’s citations from Stapfer seemed to be with an eye to the History of the Work of Redemption project, he also brought the Institutiones Theologiae Polemicae to bear on his other “great work,” A Harmony of the Old Testament and the New, composed during the mid-1740s. This treatise was to collate the prophecies of the Messiah, the fulfilment of those prophecies, the types of the Messiah, and the harmony of the testaments “as to doctrine and precept”.33 By means of later additions and even of a “Supplement,” Edwards particularly imported Stapfer into the manuscript, “Prophecies of the Messiah,” which consisted of an avalanche of Scripture texts broken out into 101 sections. 30 By contrast, P.J. Fisk, Jonathan Edwards’s Turn from the Classic-Reformed Tradition of Freedom of the Will (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016), 256–59, argues that Edwards, in drawing from Stapfer, deliberately omitted aspects of the Reformed tradition regarding free will. 31 In Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods: Christian Theology, Enlightenment Religion, and NonChristian Faiths (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), Gerald R. McDermott controversially proposed that Edwards was experimenting with expanding the limits of atonement to those who did not have explicit knowledge of the gospel. 32 “Original Sin,” Fragment II, MS p. 198a, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Jonathan Edwards Collection, Gen. Mss. 151, f. 1242. 33 See Edwards’s description in his letter to the Trustees of the College of New Jersey, Oct. 1757, in WJE 16:728.

“The Late Germanic Turn of Jonathan Edwards”

The “Prophecies” considered the nature of the person, times, and kingdom of the Messiah, as reflected in various Old Testament passages. Edwards grafted relevant quotes from Stapfer into more than a dozen entries,34 providing supporting information regarding Jewish targumic and Talmudic interpretation over millennia. So, for instance, in section 2, on Genesis 49:10, Edwards added a passage from the Institutiones Theologiae Polemicae on rabbinic scholarship to show that the prophecy, “The scepter shall not depart from Judah,” pertained to the Messiah.35 Other sections sought to demonstrate that texts ranging from Psalms to Isaiah to Haggai to Malachi, invoking a royal person, a king, a prince, the Branch, the Sun of righteousness, and so forth, all related to the same person, the Christ or Anointed of Daniel 9. The Harmony project was also to incorporate at least some of Edwards’s typological ruminations, and here again Stapfer figured. For in the German-speaking Swiss Lutheran pastor, Edwards may have found someone who shared his typological sensibilities. “Images” no. 207, not written before late 1756, consisted entirely of an excerpt from the Institutiones Theologiae Polemicae discussing “the foundations of

34 The specific section numbers in “Prophecies,” and the biblical texts treated, are:   2 Gen 49:10. 12 Hag 2:4–10. 14 Mal 4:1. 15 Mic 5, 3:53–54. 16 Verses from Ezek 30, 34, 37, Hos 3, and Isa 55. 31 Isa 53. 36[b]  Isa 2, Mic 4 and 7. 39 Ps 72. 46 Ps 45. 52 Ps 2. 62 Verses in Isa 8 and 9. 91 Dan 9:24–27. 97[a]     Ps 40:6–10.   For all of these, Edwards drew on volume 3 of Stapfer, Institutiones. Near the end of “Subjects of Inquiry”, a notebook begun in the late 1740s detailing intellectual projects, Edwards reminded himself to “Look through the Old Testament and observe and remark particularly what Prophecies are there which must have been uttered before the event, and whose agreement with the event plainly shows a spirit of prophecy, and that the prediction must be by the direction of an omniscient Spirit. Here see Stapferus, vol. 2, p. 1071, etc.” (Jonathan Edwards Collection, Gen. Mss. 151, f. 1251, MS pp. [22]–[23], WJEO 28). Given the lateness of this entry in Edwards’s life, it may have represented a further stage of labour beyond that of “Prophecies of the Messiah”. Edwards did not copy out his reference to Stapfer, which suggests that he owned the set by this time, or had easy access to it. 35 Stapfer, Institutiones 3:46–47.

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emblematic theology,” which taught that divine wisdom “established such wonderful harmony and conformity between the visible world and that other, the spiritual world”.36 In “Types of the Messiah,” Edwards explored this archetypical model, writing, “The system of created beings may be divided into two parts, the typical world and the antitypical world. The inferior and carnal, i.e., the more external and transitory part of the universe, that part of it which is inchoative, imperfect and subservient, is typical of the superior, more spiritual, perfect and durable part of it, which is the end and as it were the substance and consummation of the other”. Like Stapfer, Edwards went on to call the superior world “the city of God”. To this passage Edwards later added a reference to “Miscellanies” no. 1307, where he copied passages from the Institutiones Theologiae Polemicae arguing that earthly, historical events were typical of the heavenly events of the church.37 Before we proceed, let us circle back for a moment to one of the most important German figures in early modern philosophy, Leibniz, who was conspicuously absent from Edwards’s late turn. Scholars have noted the similarities of Edwards’s thought to that of Leibniz on causation, sufficient reason, and moral necessity, and on the identity of indiscernibles, among other topics. Norman Fiering has insisted that “that even though Edwards probably never read a single word of Leibniz and had probably not read much about him,” yet a knowledge of the German polymath is more helpful to understanding Edwards than any other writer of the time, including Locke.38 That said, there is no direct proof that Edwards read Leibniz, partly because he did not have much access to Leibniz’s thought, since only the Theodicy and his correspondence with Samuel Clarke were published during his lifetime.39 It is in “Images” no. 207 that we encounter one of only a small handful of mentions of Leibniz in Edwards’s writings, all late, but only because they were all embedded in quotes from Stapfer. The other two are found in other parts of Edwards’s corpus that we will turn to next: first, in “Miscellanies” no. 1358 on the “Divinity of Christ”; and second, in the “Controversies” notebook,

36 Jonathan Edwards, Typological Writings, W.E. Anderson/M.I. Lowance (ed.) (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 11; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 128, citing Institutiones 1:181–82. 37 Edwards, Typological Writings, WJE 11:429, citing Institutiones 2:1087–88. 38 Edwards, Original Sin, WJE 3:35, 114; Jonathan Edwards, Scientific and Philosophical Writings, W.E. Anderson (ed.) (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 6; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 86; Norman Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and Its British Context (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 47. Paul Ramsey took Fiering to task for this statement in Ethical Writings (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 8; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 692n. For another work that traces “affinities” between Edwards and Leibniz, see Leon Chai, Jonathan Edwards and the Limits of Enlightenment Philosophy (New York: New York University Press, 1998). 39 Leibniz, Theodicy (1710) and A Collection of Papers Which Passed between the Late Learned Mr. Leibniz and Dr. Clarke, in the years 1715 and 1716 (1717).

“The Late Germanic Turn of Jonathan Edwards”

specifically in the subsection on “Predestination” regarding “the dispute between the Supralapsarians and Infralapsarians”. Swaths from Stapfer also appeared in some thirty of Edwards’s “Miscellanies,” in their most concentrated form beginning with entry no. 1300, the date of which, 1756, closely coincided with his likely first encounter with the Institutiones Theologiae Polemicae.40 No less than nineteen of these entries have “Christian Religion” as their main title, a prominent rubric in Edwards’s projected magnum opus, from its youthful conception as a “Rational Account” to the History of a Work of Redemption.41 Under this general topic, however, each entry explored some particular

40 A quote from Stapfer (2:1172), excerpting Alphonse Turretin, appears in the latter part of “Miscellanies” no. 1156, “Observations on the Agreeable of the Christian Religion to Reason”, which is dated to late 1750, but the ink and handwriting of the Stapfer reference appear to be match that of the later ‘50s. That the previous paragraph ends with a reference to “History of Redemption”, Bk. I, which was begun in the winter of 1755, lends further weight to these being among a string of later additions. By the same token, we should not rule out that Edwards had had an opportunity to view the Institutiones at an earlier date, which may have whetted his appetite for it. See Edwards, “‘Misc.’ no. 1156”, WJE 23:69. 41 Here is a list of “Miscellanies” (WJE 23:249–633) with integral references to Stapfer (parenthetical references after entry titles give citations in the Institutiones by volume and page numbers):   1300.    “Christian Religion” (2:696–700). 1301 “Christian Religion, Necessity of Revelation” (2:828–29, 826). 1302 “Christian Religion, Necessity of Revelation” (1:258–59). 1305 “Christian Religion” (continuation of no. 1300) (2:1074–75). 1307 “Of Prophecies Respecting Different Events” (2:1087–88). 1308 “Prophecies of Scripture, Why It Is Not Proper Their Meaning Should Be Perfectly Plain” (2:1088). 1309 “Christian Religion. Divine Authority of the Book of Daniel” (2:1080–81). 1310 “Christ’s Miracles” (2:115–16). 1311 “Miracles Wrought in Christ’s and the Apostles’ Days” (2:1103–4). 1312 “Christian Religion. The Unreasonableness of Infidelity” (1:512). 1313 “Christian Religion. Necessity of Revelation. The Knowledge of Deists from Revelation” (1:503–4). 1314 “Christian Religion, How It Excels the Heathen Morality” (1:508–11). 1315 “Christian Religion. The History of the New Testament Early Written. Christ’s Prophecies of the Destruction of Jerusalem, Etc., Written Before the Accomplishment” (2:1127–28). 1317 “Christian Religion, Christ No Impostor” (2:1132–36). 1318 “Christian Religion, The Apostles Not Enthusiasts” (2:1146–40). 1319 “Christ’s Miracles, Not Performed by Human Art and Sleight of Hand” (2:1141–42). 1321 “Christian Religion, The Apostles No Impostors” (2:1143–47). 1322 “Christian Religion. The Truth of the History of the New Testament” (2:1148–51). 1323 “Christian Religion. Evidences of Christ’s Resurrection” (2:1157–63). 1324 “Christian Religion. One Evidence of the Truth of the Facts That Were the Ground of the Christian Faith Is That Christianity Was Propagated So Far, In All Parts So Early” (2:1168–69).

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aspect, including the “Necessity of Revelation” (nos. 1301, 1302, 1313); the divine inspiration of the biblical writers (1300, 1309); miracles (1310, 1311, 1319); prophecies (1307, 1315, 1332b); proofs that Christ and his disciples were no “impostors” (1317, 1318, 1321, 1332a); and evidences of the truth of Christianity (1322, 1323, 1324). Edwards also cited Stapfer in contemporary single, though lengthy, entries on “The Propagation of Mahometanism” (1334), “Christ’s Satisfaction or Atonement” (1352), “Extracts from Ramsay’s Philosophical Principles” ([1355]), and, as mentioned, the “Divinity of Christ” ([1358]). From this list we can deduce that Edwards was generally searching, not only in Stapfer but in other authors, for arguments that would support or extend his own regarding the need for revelation beyond the light of nature, the authentic nature of both the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, and other issues. Furthermore, Edwards did indeed seem to rely on Stapfer, among others, for expertise on Jewish commentators. Another sourcebook in which Stapfer is amply represented is the “Controversies”. This manuscript is a gathering of sheaves of notes and partial essays on many subjects dealing with current “hot” theological topics that Edwards must have somehow felt were related. Although the title was given by his son Jonathan Jr, Jonathan Sr himself assembled this collection of disparate notes, dating from the 1730s to the end of his life, and put them into one volume, as indicated by his own cross references within the volume. Edwards cited Stapfer at least fourteen times in the “Controversies,” focusing the entries under three of a dozen topics: “Universal and Particular Redemption,” “Predestination,” and “Importance of Doctrines and Mysteries”. For the first topic, Edwards sufficed with one long quote regarding the sameness of God’s will through-

1325 “Original Sin Agreeable to the Doctrine Anciently Maintained by the Jews” (3:36–38, 132–33). 1326 “Christian Religion, The Greatest Means of Knowledge” (3:67). 1328 “Christian Religion. The Messiah Is Already Come” (3:155–63). 1330 “Christian Religion. Christ’s Resurrection, Concerning That Supposition That the Disciples Stole Away the Body of Jesus” (3:240–43, 245–48, 250). 1332a.     “Christian Religion. Christ No Impostor” (2:1120–23). 1332b.     “Christ Had the Spirit of Prophecy” (continuation of no. 972) (2:1126–28). 1334 “In What Respects the Propagation of Mahometanism Is Far from Being Worthy to be Looked Upon as Parallel with the Propagation of Christianity” (3:292–340). 1352    “Christ’s Satisfaction or Atonement, Etc.” (3:553–57). [1355] Extracts from Ramsay’s Philosophical Principles, subsection on “METHOD. In a treatise of future punishment, to show when will be the season of it, and here prove particularly that it will begin at death” (5:397–403). [1358] Divinity of Christ, subsection on Deity of the Son (3:488–93).  

“The Late Germanic Turn of Jonathan Edwards”

out all time, in which Stapfer concluded, “God from eternity established Decrees on the eternal Fates of individual Men”.42 For his notes on “Election and Predestination,” Edwards turned to Stapfer on the nature of divine decrees. In a group of entries on “Election of Collective Bodies: To show particularly in what respect God has regard to conditions in his decree,” Edwards quoted Stapfer on reconciling divine foreknowledge and human free choice: “It must be held here that the divine understanding, seen in itself, or with respect to the Will, is the root of the pure possibility of things”. In the excerpt discussed above that mentioned Leibniz, concerning the dispute between supralapsarians and infralapsarians, Stapfer asserted that the debate could be “cut off ” by establishing that “the decrees of God exist simultaneously, not only in Time, about which No one doubts, but even in the sign [signo] of Reason, or the Order of Nature”.43 This actually commenced a pastiche of excerpts, one on how “a divine Decree with Regard to Sins is not elective but only Permissive,” and another on “whether God would have willed for Faith and Constancy in it to be increased in those who are damned If They Had Only Correctly Used the Means of Grace”. These excerpts related to the issue of divine foreknowledge, as instanced in the following item from Stapfer, quoting Pfaff, which seemed to have caught Edwards’s eye as a missionary to Native Americans: “Why did [God] make the Doctrine of salvation announced more quickly to one People, and more slowly to another? Since most of the American People, many in hidden parts of Africa, and Asia, labor in unconquerable Ignorance of the Gospel, what is the Reason why these are damned?” By far, Edwards called on Stapfer the most in the section on “Importance of Doctrines and Mysteries”. While both Edwards and Stapfer held that religious mysteries were ultimately reasonable, they could be nonetheless incomprehensible to fallen human intellect, beyond the light of nature. “[A] Mystery,” Stapfer wrote, was “such a dogma as must be revealed by immediate divine Revelation, and cannot be grasped and demonstrated by Principles of Reason, but is above Reason”. Further, he criticized “modern fashionable divines” – the same disparaging term Edwards used – for looking on “doctrines of revealed religion” as being “of little Importance”.44 Edwards also drew on Stapfer for his position on the “fundamental” articles of religion (in Stapfer’s case, referring in all likelihood to the Helvetic Consensus). Carl Trueman has written that “The Reformed Orthodox wrestled long and hard with exactly which items of the Christian creed were necessary to be believed for credible Christian profession and which found expression in the various lists of

42 Stapfer, Institutiones Theologiae Polemicae 5:216–17. 43 Stapfer, Institutiones 5:185–87, 208–9. 44 Stapfer, Institutiones 2:858, 3:560.

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fundamental articles which exist”.45 “When primary truths are given in Religion,” Edwards copied from Stapfer, “other more remote truths are then also deduced through Reason”.46 Edwards even committed to his notes Stapfer’s tribute to Johann Christian Kirchmayer (1674–1743), Reformed professor of theology at the universities of Heidelberg and of Marburg, whose treatise “on the fundamental Articles” demonstrated their pliability. In a series of excerpts on this topic, Edwards quoted Stapfer to the effect that “the fundamental Articles are not the same in number for all, but are different on account of varying levels of Revelation, diversity of Resources, men’s varying natural talents, manner of living, and even individual circumstances”.47 Edwards’s collection of views on the articles of religion, though admittedly small, suggests a developing pietistic irenicism towards conceiving of a unified pan-Protestantism, what would later be called “ecumenism”. Cotton Mather had provided an earlier model for this spirit in his call for Protestant Christians to unite under basic “maxims of piety”, but Edwards’s late Germanic turn apparently reinforced or redirected this imperative. Edwards had evinced a growing concern for religious practice over profession following the Connecticut Valley Revival of the 1730s, which found its most notable statement in A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. And Edwards certainly had longstanding issues with “professions of experiences”. Accompanying this skepticism was a downplaying of confessions. For example, when John Erskine had inquired of Edwards if he could subscribe to the Westminster Confession as a prerequisite for being offered a church in Scotland following his dismissal from Northampton, Edwards merely said “there would be no difficulty” – hardly a ringing endorsement. In short, he did not appear to be so committed to any one confessional statement as to make it his final guide.48 Finally, on the subject of “Mysteries,” commencing with a short quote from Stapfer on the “absurdity” of men, Edwards declared: “There are two things especially that make modern fashionable divines, look on doctrines of revealed religion of little Importance: one is their mistake about the condition of salvation, another is their mistake about the nature of true virtue.” Under this heading, Edwards even copied out a passage from Stapfer in which he quoted Quaker apologist Robert Barclay: “There could therefore be limbs of this Universal Church among Gentiles,

45 Trueman, John Owen, 31. 46 Stapfer, Institutiones 1:524–25. 47 Stapfer, Institutiones 1:527–28, 531. Edwards committed further entries in the “Controversies” on the “articles” from Stapfer, Institutiones 1:532–33, 553, 554. 48 J. Stievermann, “A ‘Syncretism of Piety’: Imagining Global Protestantism in Early Eighteenth-Century Boston, Tranquebar, and Halle”, Church History 89 (2020) 829–56; J. Edwards, “Letter to John Erskine, July 5, 1750”, in G.S. Claghorn (ed.), Letters and Personal Writings (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 16; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 355.

“The Late Germanic Turn of Jonathan Edwards”

and Turks, and Jews, and from all sects of Christians, namely Men of good Integrity, and simplicity of heart, even though among certain men they are blinded in their understanding, and perhaps weighed down by the superstitions and rites of their sects, in which they are enveloped.”49 It is difficult to ascertain whether Stapfer was citing Barclay sympathetically. As for Edwards, who previously had been consistently critical of Quakers, it is important to note that he placed this quote under the statement, “[W]hy many Enthusiasts seem to esteem it of little consequence, what doctrine men profess”. Even so, he seemed, along with Stapfer, to entertain the possibility that even Friends were “limbs” of the church universal. If there is any doubt that Edwards was using Stapfer in the “Miscellanies” and in the “Controversies” to heap up treasure for A History of the Work of Redemption, then we need look no further than the neglected series of notebooks he constructed specifically for the project, and in particular Book II (the same in which we found materials from Pfaff). Edwards here committed entries relating to a discrete range of topics, including the fall, confirmation, and election of the angels; Old Testament themes such as the deaths of Abel and of Moses, Ezra and the writing of Chronicles, the Jews’ preservation as a distinct nation, and the dating of the Talmud; and the miracles, discourse, sufferings, death, and resurrection of Christ. About midway through the notebook are two consecutive entries, one on the dating of the Talmud, and the other on “Why the Jews Did Not Receive Christ,” drawn from volume 3 of the Institutiones Theologiae Polemicae, the first translated into English by Edwards, the second transcribed in Latin. The next is a brief entry, recording the year of the prophet Muhammed’s birth as 571 CE. And a further entry contributed to widespread anti-Catholic themes in these notebooks, this one considering “When the Pope came first to be adult as to stature and strength” – “adult” here meaning “matured”.50 In his sometimes virulent condemnation of popery, too, Edwards seems to have found a kindred spirit in Stapfer.

49 Stapfer, Institutiones, 4:20–21, quoting Robert Barclay, Theologiae Vere Christianae Apologia (Amsterdam, 1676), translated into English as An apology for the true Christian divinity (London, 1678), 182. 50 “History of Redemption”, Bk. II, MS pp. [13]–[14] (WJEO 31), citing Stapfer, Institutiones 3:12–13; “History of Redemption”, Bk. II, MS p. [19], citing 3:290; and “History of Redemption”, Bk. II, MS p. [21], citing 3:76. Stapfer, with Edwards quoting agreeingly, located this point on May 10, 1073 CE, during the tenure of Gregory VII, who declared “the Roman Pope only is to be universal”. Edwards would go on to devote the entirety of “History of Redemption,” Bk. III, to entries drawn from Archibald Bower’s The History of the Popes, from the Foundation of the See of Rome, to the Present Time (7 vols., London, 1748–66), presenting items in church history, mostly from the second to the eighth centuries CE, about the development of corrupt practices in the early Catholic church.

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5.

Conclusion

So was Edwards’s late Germanic turn a turn toward rationalism? There can be no doubt that he remained committed to the necessity of revelation, the authority, reliability and unity of Scripture, the reality of supernatural regeneration, and the cogency of prophecy. Although he had substantial objections to certain Enlightenment modes of thought,51 he was also part of a community of late Reformed orthodox thinkers who subscribed to the reasonableness of religion–the religious enlighteners–and maintained that religious truths could be deduced from other sources outside of Scripture through the use of reason. As Stephen J. Stein has written of the period, “New knowledge about the nature of the universe, the geography of the earth, and the possibilities of scientific inquiry was combined with a commitment to the supremacy of reason to produce a series of questions that undermined standard assumptions based on the biblical cosmogony”.52 This was the intellectual ocean that Edwards was navigating, and it was showing him broader horizons by which to appreciate what he considered “true” religion. Prominent Edwards interpreters Michael McClymond and Gerald McDermott have depicted Edwards’s life as a series of “turns,” the last identifying the period we have been considering here, which they dub his “Cultural-Historical Turn”. “Toward the end of his life,” they write, “Edwards was in the process of reconceptualizing the history of redemption as a history of religions,” looking at other cultures outside of his own, and at secular features of Western civilisation, for proof of God’s revelatory and redemptive work.53 We have focused here on an aspect of that changing focus – a turn within a turn – that gives some credence to this characterisation of Edwards’s journey. We may chuckle at nineteenth-century historian Leslie Stephen’s assessment of Edwards as “a German professor … accidentally dropped into the American forests”.54 Nonetheless, it is suggestive that Edwards’s attention to the likes of Lampe, Wolff, Pfaff and especially Stapfer grew in his last years, strengthening John F. Wilson’s observation that Edwards was “preparing to return to exposition of strictly biblical themes but in a more rationalistic manner than had characterized his earlier

51 On Edwards’s participation in and criticism of certain aspects of the Enlightenment, see, for example, Avihu Zakai, Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of History: The Reenchantment of the World in an Age of Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 52 Jonathan Edwards, Notes on Scripture, S.J. Stein (ed.) (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 15; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 12. 53 McClymond/McDermott, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards, 87. 54 L. Stephen, Hours in a Library, 3 vols. (London, 1876), 1:343.

“The Late Germanic Turn of Jonathan Edwards”

sermon-based work. Had the project been completed, it seems likely that it would have synthesized types of Edwardsean interests frequently viewed as antithetical”.55 Edwards had told the trustees of the College of New Jersey that his History of the Work of Redemption was to be in an “entire new method”. Given these potential “turns” and “returns,” instead of dismissing Edwards’s method as a retread of the work of earlier continental scholastics, perhaps we need to come to a deeper understanding of what he was attempting. Perhaps we need to take him at his word about his “entire new method”. Ascertaining the role of these Germanic religious enlighteners in this project may help us do that.

55 Jonathan Edwards A History of the Work of Redemption, J.F. Wilson (ed.) (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 9; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 554.

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Jonathan Edwards, Halle Pietism, and Benevolent Activism in Early Awakened Protestantism

“In Germany, God did not only pour out his Spirit for a little while”, Jonathan Edwards told his congregation, “but has continued it, as I said before, for above thirty years”. In particular, he recounted the “remarkable reviving of religion” that had “begun by the labors of a certain divine in Saxony named [August] Hermann Francke”. Given the sermon’s date − early 1741, amidst the fervour of evangelical awakenings − one might assume that Edwards employed this example of revival to garnish a stirring message on the new birth or spiritual experience. In fact, the sermon was an exposition of Acts 10:4−6 about almsgiving, titled “Much in Deeds of Charity”.1 Why would Edwards spotlight a revival of religion in Germany in a sermon on Christian charity? The mere five sentences Edwards devoted to the work of revival under Francke in this sermon reveal a great deal about his understanding of true religious awakening. Even before Edwards published his analyses of the revivals, such as The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God (1741) and Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New England (1743), he instructed his own congregation to abound in Christian charity if they wished to attain authentic and lasting spiritual renewal. As he preached for the main doctrine of his sermon, “To be much in deeds of charity is the way to have spiritual discoveries”, he pointed to the Halle Pietists to illustrate his point.2 Edwards rejoiced in the spiritual awakenings in New England, but he warned that emotional stirrings alone could not sustain lasting reform. His investment in shepherding the awakened to authentic fruit-bearing religion buttressed his grand aspirations for the revival fires to spread throughout all the world, hoping that the Spirit’s outpourings in America signalled the dawn of the final stages in the history of redemption before Christ’s Second Coming.3 However, these designs would woefully miscarry without the divine blessings that accompanied charitable deeds, as at Halle. The renewal of religion in Germany under Francke “began with setting on foot a charitable design for the relief of poor orphans”, Edwards explained, “and was carried on in that way in the building of an

1 J. Edwards, “Much in Deeds of Charity”, in W.H. Kimnach/K.P. Minkema/D.A. Sweeney (ed.), The Sermons of Jonathan Edwards: A Reader (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 210. 2 Edwards, “Much in Deeds of Charity”, 198. 3 Edwards, Some Thoughts Concerning the Revival, WJE 4:353−4.

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orphan house by deeds of charity, where many hundreds of orphans have been for many years supported and instructed by the charity of others. God has wonderfully [smiled upon it]”. Building on a foundation of Christian charity, the work “has now been wonderfully carried on for above thirty years, and has spread in the happy influences of it into many parts of the world”. The way Edwards saw it, charity was key to the conception, vitality, longevity, and global influence of religious renewal in Germany, and Christians in America would do well to follow suit, for “there would be no more likely way for us to have the outpouring of the Spirit of God continued here”.4 Edwards’s own relationship with the Halle Pietists was minimal and indirect, and he seemed to have only a superficial knowledge of the movement. Nonetheless, the link deserves further exploration. For one, the German connection opens up new vistas for viewing Edwards’s revivalism and ethics as part of a wider transatlantic context that expanded beyond the Anglophone world.5 Scholars have primarily examined Edwards’s thinking on charity from the perspectives of philosophical theology and American social history, yet more work is needed to contextualize it in the broader transatlantic Protestant reform movements of the late seventeenth and early-mid eighteenth centuries.6 Furthermore, Edwards’s statements about Francke and Halle underline the multifaceted significance of Christian charity in the development of his theology of revivalism. As Ava Chamberlain and others have shown, Edwards increasingly emphasized the importance of good works in the years after his first revival treatise, A Faithful Narrative (1737), having promoted Christian practice to the chief sign of spiritual conversion by his 1746 work on Religious Affections.7 His comments on Halle in the years between these writings (particularly 1739 to 1743) shed light on this development. Edwards’s turn to stressing Christian practice was not merely in reaction to the dangers of backsliding, hypocrisy, self-deception, division, and enthusiasm arising from the misguided experientialism that increasingly undermined the credibility and momentum of the awakenings. Rather, beginning in the late 1730s, he also pursued a constructive agenda to promote Christian charity as both an essential mark and a vital wellspring of true and lasting spiritual revival, and he looked above all to the example of

4 Edwards, “Much in Deeds of Charity”, 210. 5 See W.R. Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 6 For his thinking on charity and social concern, see G.R. McDermott, One Holy and Happy Society: The Public Theology of Jonathan Edwards (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 93−116; and R. Story, Jonathan Edwards and the Gospel of Love (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), 51−74. 7 A. Chamberlain, “Self-Deception as a Theological Problem in Jonathan Edwards’s ‘Treatise Concerning Religious Affections’”, Church History 63 (1994), 541−56.

Jonathan Edwards, Halle Pietism, and Benevolent Activism in Early Awakened Protestantism

Halle’s auspicious combination of experiential religion and charitable activism for inspiration.

1.

Halle, Charity, and Transatlantic Protestant Reform

Unlike the Bostonian minister Cotton Mather (1663−1728) and the English revivalist John Wesley (1703−1791),8 Edwards had no record of correspondence or collaboration with German Pietists − not even with Pietist immigrants in British North America such as Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg (1711−1787) in Pennsylvania or the Salzburgers in Ebenezer, Georgia.9 He was familiar with some works by Anton Wilhelm Böhme (1673−1722), the Halle-trained chaplain to Prince George of Denmark in London, including his Doctrine of Original Sin (1711), various published sermons, and his English translation of Johann Arndt’s Of True Christianity (1712−1714).10 He also read Francke’s “Letter Concerning the Most Useful Way of Preaching”, which had been translated into English and published with John Jennings’s tract on Christocentric and experimental preaching entitled Two Discourses (fourth edition published in Boston in 1740).11 Other sources exposed Edwards to various aspects of Pietism second hand. For instance, Edwards likely read quotes from Francke’s exegetical work Manuductio ad lectionem Scripturae Sacrae (1693; published in London 1706) in Cotton Mather’s Manuductio ad Ministerium (1726), a source Edwards often mined for book recommendations. Alas, had Mather properly cited Francke, perhaps Edwards would have tracked down Francke’s exegetical publications directly and discovered valuable resources to supplement his own Christocentric and experiential-oriented hermeneutic.12 Aside from a few entries in Edwards’s Catalogues of Books notebook, he referred to the German Pietists only a handful of times and he restricted his comments to Francke and Halle − never using the label “Pietist”, nor did he mention any other major figures of the movement such as Philipp Jakob Spener (1635−1705) or Johann Albrecht Bengel (1687−1752). Edwards also came across Moravians − a separatist Pietist group 8 For more on the connections between Pietists and Anglophone church leaders, see J. Stievermann, “A ‘Syncretism of Piety’: Imagining Global Protestantism in Early Eighteenth-Century Boston, Tranquebar, and Halle”, Church History 89 (2020), 829−56; and the essays in R.P. Hoselton/J. Stievermann/ D.A. Sweeney/M.A.G. Haykin (ed.), The Bible in Early Transatlantic Pietism and Evangelicalism. (University Park PA: Penn State University Press, forthcoming). 9 For Edwards’s connections to German Pietism, see J. Stievermann, “German Pietism”, in H.S. Stout/ K.P. Minkema/A.C. Neele (ed.), The Jonathan Edwards Encyclopedia (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017), 247−51. 10 Edwards, Catalogues of Books, WJE 26:67, 134, 221, 414. 11 Edwards, Catalogues of Books, WJE 26:220−1. 12 See C. Mather, Manuductio ad Ministerium (Boston: Hancock, 1726), 80−2.

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descended from the Unitas Fratrum that experienced renewal under the leadership of the Halle-trained Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf (1700−1760) − as they intersected directly and indirectly with his missionary interests and labours among the Mohicans and Mohawks in the 1750s. It appears, however, that Edwards did not associate the Moravians in any way with Halle Pietism. His comments about them were brief and critical, lumping their “absurdities” with the same “counterfeits of vital experimental religion” as the radical enthusiasts who undermined the colonial revivals.13 In fact, the Pietists paid more attention to Edwards than he did to them. Contrary to what some scholars have claimed, Jan Stievermann has shown that German Pietists took great interest in Edwards and actively translated and promoted his works. Johann Adam Steinmetz (1689−1762) kept German readers abreast of the awakenings in America through his periodical Sammlung Auserlesener Materien zum Bau des Reichs Gottes, providing translated excerpts of Edwards’s revival tract, Some Thoughts, in a 1745 special edition. He also facilitated the translation and publication of Edwards’s Faithful Narrative into German in 1738 under the title, Glaubwürdige Nachricht von dem herrlichen Werck Gottes. While the Lutheran Steinmetz moderated some of Edwards’s Reformed theology in his translations, German Reformed Pietists in the Lower Rhine region retained Edwards’s original emphases on predestination and human inability in their own edition of the Faithful Narrative titled Erweckliche Nachricht auß Nordhampton in Neu-England. Pietists of various stripes especially admired Edwards’s Life of David Brainerd as a model for self-sacrificial devotion to missions, which saw multiple German editions up until the mid 1800s.14 The main point of contact between Halle Pietists and America came initially through Cotton Mather. The mutual interest in Christian charity nurtured the relationship from the beginning. Around 1709, Cotton Mather began a sustained correspondence with Halle Pietists such as Francke, Böhme, and the Tranquebar missionaries Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg (1682−1719) and Johann Ernst Gründler (1677−1720).15 He found kindred spirits in his German counterparts, pronouncing 13 Edwards, “To the Reverend John Erskine”, WJE 16:348. 14 See J. Stievermann, “German Pietism”, 247−51; “Faithful Translations: New Discoveries on the German Pietist Reception of Jonathan Edwards”, Church History 83 (2014), 324−66; “Halle Pietism and its Perception of the American Great Awakening: The Example of Johann Adam Steinmetz”, in H. Wellenreuther/T. Müller-Bahlke/A.G. Roeber (ed.), The Transatlantic World of Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg in the Eighteenth Century (Halle: Franckeschen Stiftungen, 2013), 213−46; and “The German Lives of David Brainerd: The Beginnings of Pietist Interest in an American Evangelical Icon”, in T.K. Kuhn/V. Albrecht-Birkner (ed.), Zwischen Aufklärung und Moderne: Erweckungsbewegungen als historiographische Herausforderung (Münster: LIT, 2017), 119−39. 15 See K. Silverman (ed.), Selected Letters of Cotton Mather (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1971), 92, 215, 260−1; and C. Mather, The Diary of Cotton Mather, W.C. Ford (ed.) (New York:

Jonathan Edwards, Halle Pietism, and Benevolent Activism in Early Awakened Protestantism

his own agenda for religious renewal an “American Pietism” akin to that of Arndt and Francke.16 Above all, he admired their promotion of experiential piety and charitable activism as the means to revive the church and advance the heavenly Kingdom. As he wrote to Böhme, “it is vital Piety embracing the Maxims of the everlasting Gospel, (and your Arndtian and Franckian Charity,) which must unite the People of God”.17 Mather’s “Maxims” of true Christianity consisted of three fundamental commitments: “Homage to the Infinite GOD, Reliance upon our Saviour, and Charity towards our Neighbour”.18 A genuine love for Christ bore fruits of charity, and thus it was an essential marker of true Christianity regardless of one’s credal tradition. If awakened Protestants across denominational and geographical boundaries could unite on these “Maxims”, he told Böhme, the “Papal Empire will fall” and “the Kingdome of God will come on”.19 Böhme along with Henry Newman − Mather’s fellow Harvard graduate who moved to London in 1703 and became secretary of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) − supplied Mather with Pietist literature. Mather especially took inspiration from the Pietas Hallensis, Böhme’s 1705 English translation of Francke’s Segensvolle Fußstapfen (1701), which recounted the charitable initiatives in Halle to establish an orphanage and schools for the poor. Like many English readers, Mather marvelled at Francke’s reports of God’s provision for the orphans and the poor through benevolent donors, his emphasis on true justification bearing fruits in sanctification and charity, and his pedagogical prioritisations to inculcate godliness over learnedness.20 In 1711, Mather published his own essay on orphan care, Orphanotrophium, which he sent to Halle along with a generous donation of

16 17 18

19 20

F. Ungar Publishing, 1957), 2:23, 332−3, 406−7, 411−13, 563; India Christiana (Boston: B. Greene, 1721), 62−87. C. Mather, The Heavenly Conversation (Boston, 1710), unpaginated preface. Mather, Diary, 2:406. C. Mather, “An Essay, for a further Commentary on the Sacred Scriptures”, unpaginated. See J. Stievermann (ed.), Biblia Americana. Vol. 10, Hebrews–Revelation (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, forthcoming). Mather, Diary, 2:406−7. See A.H. Francke, Pietas Hallensis, trans. with preface by A.W. Böhme (London: J. Downing, 1705). The orphanage and charity schools were not in fact in Halle but in the small neighbouring town of Glaucha. For more on Francke, Halle Pietism, and the charity schools and orphanage, see M. Brecht, “August Hermann Francke und der Hallische Pietismus”, in M. Brecht (ed.), Geschichte des Pietismus: Band 1 Der Pietismus vom siebzehnten bis zum frühen achtzehnten Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993), 439−539; U. Sträter, “Das Waisenhaus zu Glaucha vor Halle”, in C. Veltmann/J. Birkenmeier (ed.), Kinder, Krätze, Karitas: Waisenhäuser in der Frühen Neuzeit (Halle: Franckeschen Stiftungen, 2009), 77−87; D.H. Shantz, An Introduction to German Pietism: Protestant Renewal at the Dawn of Modern Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 117−43.

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gold for the orphanage.21 An active promoter of voluntary religious societies − as outlined in his widely-read ethical treatise Bonifacius (1710)22 − Mather continued giving financially to the Halle orphanage, he facilitated and supported charity schools for poor children, orphans, and Blacks in New England, and he even took orphans into his own home for extended periods.23 In 1715, he published an adulatory synopsis of the work in Halle for New England readers called Nuncia Bona e Terra Longinqua, applauding the Pietists for inspiring religious renewal and works of charity around the globe: “Very many Charity-Schools have been set up here and there thro’ the World, upon the Excitation of what our Franckius had Exhibited.”24 In a demonstration of the mutual admiration, Böhme printed an almost complete translation of Francke’s cordial letter to Mather from December 1714 in the third instalment of Pietas Hallensis (1716).25 Carrying on the connection, Cotton’s son, Samuel (1706−1785), maintained correspondence with August Hermann’s son, Gotthilf August Francke (1696−1769), and he published a hagiography of the elder Francke in Latin in 1733.26 The influence of the orphanage and charitable schools in Halle spread throughout Germany and beyond to Denmark, India, Estonia, Siberia, Hungary, and other countries. Leaders from Halle actively participated in the coinciding charity school movement in Britain and cooperated with the SPCK to advance similar charitable enterprises in the American colonies.27 For instance, after reading the Pietas Hallensis, the Anabaptist Moses Bartlett travelled to London with the hope of recruiting a few Halle Pietists living there to open charitable schools in Rhode Island.28 Renate Wilson identifies three major projects in North America that deliberately sought to replicate the Halle orphanage: the Ebenezer orphanage established by the Salzburger

21 C. Mather, Orphanotrophium. Or, Orphans Well Provided For… (Boston: B. Green, 1711); Mather, Diary, 2:73−4, 150. 22 C. Mather, Bonifacius: An Essay Upon the Good, David Levin (ed.), (Cambridge: Belknap, 1966), 133−7. 23 R. Lovelace, The American Pietism of Cotton Mather: Origins of American Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Christian University Press, 1979), 227. 24 Cotton Mather, Nuncia Bona et Terra Longinqua (Boston: B. Greene, 1715). 25 A.H. Francke, Pietas Hallensis…Part III, To which is prefix’d, A Letter of the Author to a Reverend Divine in New-England (London: J. Downing, 1716), 1−60. 26 S. Mather, Vita B. August Hermann Francke (Boston, 1733). 27 See D.L. Brunner: Halle Pietists in England: Anthony William Boehm and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993), 71−99; R. Wilson, “Replication Reconsidered: Imitations, Models, and the Seeds of Modern Philanthropy”, in U. Sträter/J.N. Neumann (ed.), Waisenhäuser in der Frühen Neuzeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2003), 197−217; J. Birkenmeier, “Die weltweite Ausstrahlung des Halleschen Waisenhauses”, in Kinder, Krätze, Karitas, 101−12; Shantz, German Pietism, 140−3. 28 Brunner, Pietists in England, 87.

Jonathan Edwards, Halle Pietism, and Benevolent Activism in Early Awakened Protestantism

immigrants in Georgia, George Whitefield’s (1714−1770) Bethesda Orphanage in Georgia, and the “Economic Orphanage” in Pennsylvania (which never came to fruition).29 In 1733, under the leadership of Gotthilf August Francke, Halle collaborated with the SPCK to facilitate the immigration of Protestant exiles from Salzburg to the new American colony of Georgia. Led by two former Halle teachers, Johann Martin Boltzius (1703−1765) and Israel Christian Gronau (1714−1745), the community established an orphanage in 1737 based largely on the Halle model. The English revivalist George Whitefield visited Ebenezer in 1738, and he left inspired and determined to collect money in order to found another orphanage in cooperation with Georgian officials. While Whitefield’s orphanage did not receive direct support from Halle, the Pietists followed and commended his efforts. Whitefield himself aspired to “imitate Professor Frank” in every respect, wishing that the Bethesda Orphanage “be rightly stiled Pietas Georgiensis, and such as the Pietas Hallensis, or Professor Frank’s Orphan-house at Glaucha near Hall, become the Joy of the whole Earth”.30 Whitefield made fund-raising for the orphanage a key part of his revival tours, and he regularly reported about its progress in his writings. He named the orphanage Bethesda (which means “house of mercy” in Hebrew), hoping “it would be a House of Mercy to many Souls”. In a report from 1745, he likened the providential provisions for Bethesda and the “Fruits of the Spirit” produced from it to the history of the Halle orphanage, “Were all the particular Providences that have attended this Work recorded, perhaps they would be found not inferior to those mentioned by Professor Frank, in his Pietas Hallensis, whose Memory is very precious to me, and whose Example has a Thousand Times been blessed to strengthen and encourage me in the carrying on this Enterprize”. Whitefield continued to commend Francke’s model and writings until his death and maintained active correspondence with Francke’s son, Gotthilf August, and with Böhme’s successor in London, Friedrich Michael Ziegenhagen (1694−1776).31 While the charitable foundations at Halle yielded concrete influences on institutions abroad, they also acquired a symbolic significance in the historical imagination of Anglophone evangelicals. In 1744, Thomas Prince (1687−1758), a close friend of Edwards, published substantial portions of Böhme’s 1705 “Preface” to the Pietas Hallensis in his Christian History. The New England based periodical printed reports of evangelical awakenings with the aim of presenting them as a unified work

29 Wilson, “Replication Reconsidered”, 203. 30 G. Whitefield, An account of money received and disbursed for the orphan-house in Georgia … (London: W. Strahan, 1741), 1, 9. 31 G. Whitefield, A further account of God’s dealings with the Reverend Mr. George Whitefield … (Philadelphia, 1746), 57−8. On Whitefield’s regrettable use of slave labour for the orphanage, see P.Y. Choi, George Whitefield: Evangelist for God and Empire (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018), ch. 4.

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of the Spirit, and it republished texts from classic Puritan and Dissenting authors to underscore the continuities between the old religion and the new.32 By incorporating the preface to Pietas Hallensis − in which Böhme placed the founding of the Halle orphanage in the wider historical context of Pietist reform − Prince memorialized the Pietists’ spiritual and charitable labours as part of the same international movement of religious renewal.33 The Halle orphanage and schools also gained a reputation among Anglophone evangelicals as a model for Christian education that united learning with piety and charity, and they hoped that their own institutions would receive the same divine blessing by following in Halle’s footsteps. A report from the Edinburgh-based Presbyterian Scottish Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge praised Eleazar Wheelock’s (1711−1779) founding of Moor’s Charity School in Connecticut − which trained Native American missionaries − for carrying on “the same spirit with which the late Reverend and eminent Professor Frank founded the present famous orphanhouse at Hall in Germany, so it hath been blessed with many suchlike remarkable smiles from Heaven”.34 In another instance from November 1757, the Presbyterian revivalist Gilbert Tennent (1703−1764) wrote to the English evangelical minister John Guyse (1680−1761) to inform him that Jonathan Edwards would succeed the deceased Aaron Burr (Edwards’s son-in-law) as president of the newly founded College of New Jersey (later Princeton). He compared the budding institution to “that of Hall in Saxony, began by Pious Dr. Frank in respect of their rise, progress, & influence, especialy in respect of vital Piety”, and he felt confident that “it will be in respect of continuance” under Edwards’s leadership, whom he lauded for his “superior acumen, orthodoxy, Learning, Piety, & courage in the cause of God”.35 One wonders if Edwards also viewed Francke’s Halle as a model of learning and piety as he contemplated his leadership objectives for the new college. Kenneth Minkema infers from Edwards’s sermons, letters, and activities during his years as a missionary in Stockbridge (1751−1757) that Halle may have inspired part of his vision as overseer of the mission school there.36 Clear parallels in educational philosophies existed. Echoing a key point from Spener’s Pietist reform manifesto 32 See T.E.W. Gloege, “The Trouble with ‘Christian History’: Thomas Prince’s ‘Great Awakening’”, Church History 82 (2013), 132. 33 Böhme, “Preface” from Pietas Hallensis (1705), xvi−xl, reproduced in T. Prince, Christian History, Containing Accounts of the Revival & Propagation of Religion in Great Britain, America, &c (Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1743−1745), Oct. 13, 20, 27, and Nov. 3, 1744, 2:262−4. 34 The Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge, Recommendation By The Society … (Edinburgh: s.n., 1767), 2. 35 G. Tennent, “C139. G. Tennent to J. Guyse, November 15, 1757” in Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards Online 32 (Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University, accessed 2020). 36 K.P. Minkema, “Francke, August Hermann (1663−1727)”, in The Jonathan Edwards Encyclopedia, 233.

Jonathan Edwards, Halle Pietism, and Benevolent Activism in Early Awakened Protestantism

Pia Desideria (1675), which greatly influenced Francke’s agenda at Halle, Edwards wrote in 1743 that the colleges training ministers must not simply provide scholarly formation but also be “nurseries of piety”.37 This philosophy grounded his labours in Stockbridge as well. Whatever ambitions he had for Princeton, his death shortly after his arrival in March, 1758 laid them to rest.

2.

Halle’s Model and Edwards’s Quest for True Revival

While Edwards himself may not have had a direct relationship with the Halle Pietists or made frequent reference to them, many in his closest social circles did. He likely read, talked, and thought about them more than his published writings suggest. Altogether, the literature, networks, and legacies of the Halle Pietists loomed large in the eighteenth-century transatlantic context of Protestant reform movements in which Edwards came of age and actively participated. Given the wide circulation and interest in the Pietas Hallensis in British North America, it is possible Edwards may have read it or at least gained second-hand knowledge of Halle’s reform efforts early in his life. But it was not until mid 1739 when Edwards began to commend Halle in his sermons and writings as an exemplary model of true revival and charity. A look at Halle’s role in Edwards’s thinking during these critical years of awakening will illuminate the significance of charity in his developing theology of revivalism. Edwards’s advocacy of Christian charity predated his comments about Halle. In his list of “Resolutions” which he wrote as a young man in 1722–3, he made it a goal for his spiritual growth “to be endeavoring to find out fit objects of charity and liberality”.38 According to his early biographer and former pupil, Samuel Hopkins (1721−1803), Edwards continued to manifest an “uncommon regard” for “Liberality, and Charity to the Poor and Distressed” throughout his life, and he “was much in recommending this, both in his publick Discourses and private Conversation”.39 This concern permeated his pastoral ministry in Northampton, as illustrated in his 1733 sermon The Duty of Charity to the Poor. As shifting social conditions gave rise to starker class division and poverty in the town, Edwards addressed the elite’s increasing conspicuous consumerism by emphasizing the Christian duty of almsgiving to the poor. Edwards accepted the hierarchical social systems of his day as ordained by God, but like his Puritan tradition he insisted that the stewardship and

37 Edwards, Some Thoughts, WJE 4:510. 38 Edwards, “Resolutions”, WJE 16:754. 39 S. Hopkins, The Life and Character of the Late Reverend Mr. Jonathan Edwards … (Boston: Kneeland, 1765), 45. Regrettably, however, as a slaveholder himself, Edwards failed to apply his principles of Christian charity to aid the enslaved.

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pursuit of wealth must serve the greater welfare of the community.40 Furthermore, he advanced an evangelical egalitarianism in declaring that charitable duties applied not only to the rich but also every individual Christian. A few years later, in his report of the revival in Northampton, A Faithful Narrative (1737), he highlighted the fruit of Christian charity as an evidence the Spirit’s gracious workings. He found the four-year-old convert Phebe Bartlet’s discovery of an “uncommon degree of a spirit of charity” especially noteworthy, recounting her “compassion for the poor” when she begged her father to give a poor man a cow and let his family live with them.41 After the revival waned, Edwards laboured to rekindle the fires while simultaneously cultivating true Christian practice in his congregants. To this end, in 1738, he preached on the virtues of the Spirit from 1 Cor 13 in a fifteen-part sermon series called Charity and Its Fruits. Here he defined true charity as a Spirit-given disposition of love to God and neighbour that inclined the redeemed to repudiate a “narrow, private spirit” and become more “merciful”, “liberal”, “public spirited” and “greatly concerned for the good of the public community to which he belongs”. The “most proper evidence” of a sincere “Christian spirit”, he exhorted, is a “love of benevolence” or “that disposition which a man has who desires or delights in the good of another” and in “doing good to another”.42 In 1739, Edwards embarked on another major sermon series titled A History of the Work of Redemption. Wishing to show his congregants that the revival in Northampton was part of God’s grander plan of salvation history, he presented it alongside other recent phenomena signalling that the dawn before the church’s glorious age was upon them. Despite Satan’s counterattacks, there were promising signs that the Spirit’s workings of spiritual renewal were underway in fulfilment of redemptive history and in preparation for the millennial Kingdom. One sign was the “very considerable propagation of the Christian religion among the heathens ... in a country in the East Indies called Malabar”, carried out “by the labors of certain missionaries sent there to instruct them by the king of Denmark, who brought over many heathens to the Christian faith, and set up schools among them, and a printing press to print Bibles and other books for their instruction in their own language, with great success”.43 Edwards was referring here to King Frederick IV of Denmark, who in 1705 commissioned Halle-trained German missionaries, Ziegenbalg and Heinrich Plütschau (1676−1747), to establish a mission in the Danish colony of Tranquebar. Protestants from Copenhagen, Halle, London, and Boston united to support the work. However, Edwards did not explicitly associate the mission with

40 41 42 43

Edwards, “The Duty of Charity to the Poor”, WJE 17:369−404. Edwards, Faithful Narrative, WJE 4:203−4. Edwards, Charity and Its Fruits, WJE 8:129, 260, 212−13. Edwards, “History of the Work of Redemption”, WJE 9:435.

Jonathan Edwards, Halle Pietism, and Benevolent Activism in Early Awakened Protestantism

Halle and even referred to them incorrectly in a letter to Josiah Willard as “Danish missionaries”.44 Alongside the progress of Christian missions, Edwards furnished two notable examples of “revivals of the power and practice of religion” within the Protestant world as further manifestations of redemptive history’s progress. One instance was the mid-1730s revival in Northampton. The other was Halle: There has not long since been a remarkable revival of the power and practice of religion in Saxony in Germany. With the endeavors of an eminent divine there whose name was August Herman Frank, professor of divinity at Halle in Saxony, who being a person of eminent charity, the great work that God wrought by him began with his setting on foot a charitable design. It began only with his placing an alms box at his study door into which some poor mites were thrown, whereby books were bought for the instruction of the poor. And God was pleased so wonderfully to smile on his design and to pour out a spirit of charity on people there on that occasion, that with their charity he was enabled in a little time to erect public schools for the instruction of poor children, and an orphan house for the supply and instruction of the poor, so that at last it came to this, that near five hundred children were maintained and instructed, and about two thousand children under this instruction in such colleges or schools, in learning and piety by the charity of others. And the number continued increasing more and more for many years, and till the last account I have seen this was accompanied with a wonderful reformation and revival of religion, and a spirit of piety in the city and university of Halle. And thus it continued, which also had great influence in many other places in Germany. Their example seemed remarkably to stir up multitudes to their imitation.45

It appears Edwards derived his main information on Halle from The History of the Propagation of Christianity and the Overthrow of Paganism by the Church of Scotland clergyman Robert Millar (1672−1752).46 As Darren Schmidt has shown, Edwards relied on this work throughout his History of Redemption sermons, which contain “nearly identical sentences” and numerous “parallels in terminology or points of detail” with Millar.47 It seems Edwards also condensed, modified, and

44 Edwards, “To Sec. Josiah Willard”, WJE 16:83. 45 Edwards, “History of the Work of Redemption”, WJE 9:436. 46 R. Millar, The History of the Propagation of Christianity and the Overthrow of Paganism (3rd edn; London, 1731), 370−6; Edwards, Catalogue of Books, WJE 26:185. 47 D. Schmidt, “‘Different Streams…into the Same Great Ocean’: Jonathan Edwards, Robert Millar, and Transatlantic Influence on A History of the Work of Redemption”, Jonathan Edwards Studies 5 (2015), 25−6.

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reproduced Millar’s account of Halle.48 Edwards followed the same order of details, used near identical language in his description of Francke using an “alms box”, reproduced similar numbers of children in the orphanage and schools, and like Millar he concluded by emphasising Halle’s growth and influence. Furthermore, it seems Edwards followed Millar’s mistaken notion that “Danish Missionaries” established the mission in Malabar (they were in fact Halle-trained Germans).49 In any case, what Edwards found so noteworthy about Halle was that it embodied a revival in “power and practice”. The two components had to coincide; spiritual fervour absent of good works entailed no true work of the Spirit at all. In Charity and Its Fruits, Edwards utilised exhortation and instruction to urge his awakened congregation to excel in benevolence and love of neighbour. In sermon twenty-four of History of Redemption, he utilized an example. Edwards had broadcast in his Faithful Narrative a stirring instance of spiritual revival from Northampton that inspired admiration and imitation throughout the Protestant world. Now, after the excitement had cooled in his own congregation, he was possibly looking for inspiration from abroad to rekindle the flame and thereby restore Northampton’s credibility and influence as a specimen of true revival. Halle provided an attractive case. The work began with deeds of charity, which God blessed “with a wonderful reformation and revival of religion”, and its influence held widespread sway for many years − something Edwards had hoped dearly for Northampton. Inspiration from abroad arrived later that year in another form. In November 1739, Edwards received a letter from George Whitefield enclosed with a publication of his journal detailing his recent revival tours. Whitefield promised it will “shew you what the Lord is about to do in Europe”.50 In December, Edwards shared the exciting news of religious renewal abroad with his congregation in a talk titled “God’s Grace Carried On in Other Places”, hoping to rouse them “to seek the same blessing among themselves”. He reported about the work of “the New Methodists” in England and Wales such as John Wesley, Howell Harris, and above all Whitefield, who was sparking renewal in the backslidden Church of England by boldly preaching “Christ and the New Birth”. He especially highlighted Whitefield’s “charitable design” in

48 Millar says his sources were the Pietas Hallensis, Mather’s Nuncia Bona, and letters written by Francke in November 1719 to the “Secretary of the Society at London for promoting Christian Knowledge”. Millar, Propagation, 371, 373. 49 Edwards, “To Sec. Josiah Willard”, WJE 16:83; Millar, Propagation, 373, 322−42. 50 See the letter of November 16, 1739 in G. Whitefield, The Works of the Reverend George Whitefield, M.A … With a select collection of letters, written to his most intimate friends, and persons of distinction … (vol. 1; London, 1771), 121. From the journal, Edwards took note of Whitefield’s recommendation of “Boehms Sermons” (referring to Anton Wilhelm Böhme) in his Catalogue of Books, WJE 26:220−1; Whitefield, A continuation of the Reverend Mr. Whitefield’s Journal, during the time he was detained in England by the embargo (London, 1739), 3, 9.

Jonathan Edwards, Halle Pietism, and Benevolent Activism in Early Awakened Protestantism

England and Georgia and his ability to “stir up the people to charity”. Perhaps Edwards extemporaneously talked about Whitefield’s initiatives with the Bethesda orphanage. He concluded by venturing his own attempt to inspire his congregants to charity: Let what we hear of this work of God, that I have now informed you of, stir us up to seek that the like good spirit [may be found among us]. By what we hear, those persons that God has raised up as the instruments are remarkable for a charitable spirit. Remarkable works of God’s Spirit do commonly so begin. God’s Spirit is a Spirit of love. Let us seek a lively faith that appears in good works.51

Building upon his comments about Halle in History of Redemption, Edwards here furnished further examples and exhortations elucidating how spiritual revival followed deeds of charity. Whitefield’s journal did not satiate Edwards’s appetite for news of global revivals, however. In a letter to Secretary Josiah Willard from July 1, 1740, Edwards explained that Whitefield’s journals told him much about “the hopeful state of reviving religion in England”, but he wished for “more information concerning some things ... in other parts of the world”. He was especially interested in the latest news concerning the Halle Pietists. He explained: I have some time since heard something of a revival of religion in the King of Prussia’s dominions; ... and also what are the latest accounts of the progress of that affair at Halle in Saxony, begun by the famous Dr. Francke. I have seen nothing since the account we had of Dr. Francke’s life, published by Mr. Samuel Mather in Boston. I exceedingly want to know how things have been since Mr. Millar in his History of the Propagation of Christianity gives an account of a glorious beginning made in the East Indies by some Danish missionaries; but I have heard nothing since that book was published, which was about nine years ago. He also mentions some things that appeared very hopeful in Moscovy.52

The burgeoning awakenings in the English-speaking world stirred Edwards’s hopes that a global movement of the Spirit was blossoming, and he wondered how far it extended. He needed to know how events in Prussia, Halle, Malabar, Muscovy and elsewhere in the world fit into this picture and what it all might reveal about the progress of redemptive history, but his sources were outdated. It does not appear that Edwards’s request for this information was fully satisfied either. In the meantime, the progress of Whitefield’s orphanage sufficed as a

51 Edwards, “God’s Grace Carried On in Other Places”, WJE 22:106−10. 52 Edwards, “To Sec. Josiah Willard”, WJE 16:83.

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supplemental illustration of his point that spiritual blessings followed charitable undertakings. Edwards had read Whitefield’s reports on Bethesda’s development in his published journals, and they may have spoken about it in person along with other related matters during Whitefield’s visit to Northampton in October 1740.53 By that time, Edwards’s congregation had been regaining some of its former fervour as it partook in a now much wider phenomenon of transatlantic religious awakening. Wishing to fan and nurture this momentum, Edwards preached “Much in Deeds of Charity” in early 1741. As noted above, the sermon was based on Acts 10:4−6, in which an angel tells the Gentile Cornelius, “Thy prayers and thine alms are come up for a memorial before God”. Edwards deduced that God had blessed Cornelius with an angelic visitation that led to his “saving discovery of Christ” in large part “as a consequence of his giving much alms to the people”. Thus, if others wished to obtain such “spiritual discoveries”, Edwards preached, they would do well to imitate Cornelius and the poor widow in Mark 12:42−43 in being “liberal and bountiful” in “deeds of charity”. Edwards provided three instances of how a “remarkable outpouring of the Spirit of God and an abounding” in charitable deeds “have been wont to accompany one another”. The first example was the early apostolic church’s communal-oriented benevolence in Jerusalem as recorded in Acts 2:45. The second, as discussed above, was the revival in Germany sparked by the charitable initiatives in Halle under Francke. As he recounted the case, he remarked, “I have heretofore told you of it”, and “as I said before”, referring most likely to his History of Redemption sermon, but perhaps there were other unrecorded instances. The third example was the “charitable designs” of Whitefield “and his followers in England”, who “took pattern” from Halle. “You see how God ... smiled upon the charitable spirit when the Rev. Mr. Whitefield was here”, he reminded his parishioners. “Let us go on and God will go on. God won’t be behind hand with us if we give him our carnal things. He will continue with a liberal hand to bestow spiritual things”, he proclaimed.54 Yet as the revivals flowered over the next few years, controversies multiplied too. From one direction, radicals empowered by experience fomented disarray and division, and from the other, traditionalists and rationalists challenged the authenticity of the awakenings altogether. Edwards tried desperately to defend the revivals as a work of the Spirit while simultaneously labouring to cultivate the awakened in lasting, fruit-bearing religion through a devotion to charity. In his revival treatise, Some Thoughts Concerning the Revival (1743), he urged the critics not to judge the revivals “a priori” but rather “a posteriori”, or by their effects and their agreement with Scripture. Edwards thus set forth evidence of genuine fruits − such as the example of enlivened piety in an unnamed woman (it was actually

53 See G.M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 201−13. 54 Edwards, “Much in Deeds of Charity”, 197−8, 210−11.

Jonathan Edwards, Halle Pietism, and Benevolent Activism in Early Awakened Protestantism

his wife, Sarah) who, among other things, felt “a great sense often expressed, of the importance of the duty of charity to the poor”. However, he also shared the critics’ concerns about enthusiastic extremes and wished to counteract them. He thus wrote that true “inward religion” manifested itself in two ways: “outward acts of worship” and outward acts of love and obedience to God’s “moral commands”. He worried that the latter was particularly lacking, and he pleaded for a greater devotion to charity as the remedy: “God’s people at such a time as this ought especially to abound in deeds of charity, or almsgiving” for “nothing would have a greater tendency to bring the God of love down from heaven to the earth”.55 One suggestion for benevolent action he offered − reminiscent of Francke’s stated pedagogical agenda in Pietas Hallensis − was for the wealthy to fund “schools in poor towns and villages, which might be done on such a foundation as not only to bring up children in common learning, but also might very much tend to their conviction and conversion, and being trained up in vital piety”.56 Such deeds of charity have proven time and again to engender spiritual renewal. To substantiate his claim, he referred to the revival in Germany one final time: I don’t remember ever to have read of any remarkable outpouring of the Spirit that continued any long time, but what was attended with an abounding in this duty. So we know it was with that great effusion of the Spirit that began at Jerusalem in the apostles’ days: and so in the late remarkable revival of religion in Saxony, which began by the labors of the famous Professor Francke, and has now been carried on for above thirty years, and has spread its happy influences into many parts of the world; it was begun, and has been carried on, by a wonderful practice of this duty. And the remarkable blessing that God has given Mr. Whitefield, and the great success with which he has crowned him, may well be thought to be very much owing to his laying out himself so abundantly in charitable designs.57

Edwards had used examples of individuals − such as Phebe Bartlet, Abigail Hutchinson, and his wife − to illustrate a true work of the Spirit in an individual’s life. But as he hoped for Northampton, all New England, and the world to be transformed by the Spirit in more structural ways in preparation for the millennial kingdom, he also needed an example of a whole community that had enjoyed lasting transformation and influence. He thus looked to Halle, believing the secret to its fruitfulness lay in its devotion to charity. When he was unable to obtain current news on Halle to

55 Edwards, Some Thoughts, WJE 4:293, 339, 524, 527. 56 Edwards, Some Thoughts, WJE 4:515. Perhaps Edwards drew inspiration for this point from Millar, Propagation, 371−2. 57 Edwards, Some Thoughts, WJE 4:527−8.

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milk more spiritual lessons from its example, he emphasized the influence it had on Whitefield’s recent deeds of charity and how God has “crowned him” with success and spiritual blessing. In late 1742, when Edwards penned Some Thoughts, he knew it was a decisive moment for the course of the revivals. True renewal would only flourish if Christians abounded in love and charity. In his final revival treatise, Religious Affections (published in 1746 but preached in 1743), he emphasised again that those who “pretend a love to men’s souls, that are not compassionate and charitable towards their bodies” have not experienced the gracious work of “the Spirit of God”. Rather, “a true Christian love to our brethren, extends both to their souls and bodies. And herein is like the love and compassion of Jesus Christ”.58 As Mark Valeri observes, in the early 1740s Edwards had been pushing “his church beyond private acts of virtue to institutionalized benevolence”, as he increasingly “emphasized the importance of the visible church as a reforming society” in the world. To this end, he successfully led his congregants to commit to more just and charitable practices in a renewed church covenant in 1742, and he established a regular church offering for the poor in 1743. His efforts to set before them the example of charity at Halle contributed to these aims. However, in the mid-to-late 1740s as the revivals abated, controversies erupted, and his congregation slid back into sinful quarrels, he lost confidence that the awakened churches could transform society. He began laying greater weight on the Christian’s responsibility to influence governments and magistrates as the main agents of enforcing economic equity and moral cohesion,59 a turn that was, seemingly unbeknown to him, not entirely unlike Francke’s own growing reliance on the Prussian noble powers to enact reform.60

3.

Conclusion

There is no trace of Edwards mentioning the Halle Pietists after his comments in Some Thoughts. Perhaps the Halle model became less relevant to him as his hopes of seeing Northampton become a Halle-like centre of reform had dwindled in the mid-to-late 1740s. And perhaps his longing for a connection with Protestants beyond England and New England was satisfied by his growing correspondence with Scottish ministers in the 1740s, with whom he collaborated to unify international Protestants in “concerts of prayer” for the advancement of the gospel in the world. In his tract that grew out of this undertaking, An Humble Attempt (1747), he 58 Edwards, Religious Affections, WJE 2:369. 59 M. Valeri, “The Economic Thought of Jonathan Edwards”, Church History 60 (1991), 46, 43, 47−54. 60 See B. Marschke, “Pietism and Politics in Prussia and Beyond”, in D.H. Shantz (ed.), A Companion to German Pietism (1600−1800) (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 472−526.

Jonathan Edwards, Halle Pietism, and Benevolent Activism in Early Awakened Protestantism

curiously omitted any mention of Halle when speaking about “late remarkable religious awakenings”. Drawing from a work by the Scottish minister John Willison (1680−1750), Edwards reported the conversion of “above twenty thousand” to Protestantism in Salzburg in the early 1730s. Halle Pietists were instrumental in aiding these Protestants when the Catholic Salzburg authorities banished them as refugees, but it is unclear whether Edwards knew that.61 In any case, the role Halle played in Edwards’s thinking during the climactic years of awakening (1739−1743) manifests a key development in his theology of revivalism as he increasingly advocated charitable deeds as both an essential mark and stimulus of authentic spiritual renewal. It also sheds light on a wider pattern in early transatlantic evangelicalism to make benevolent activism a core feature of true, international, pan-Protestant Christianity. Like the Halle Pietists, Whitefield, and other early evangelicals, Edwards did not see charity as an end in itself. Even as they adopted aspects of the rising humanitarian movement’s “language of benevolence”, as Catherine Brekus has observed, they resisted its optimistic anthropology and its program to reform society without Christ’s redemption, the Spirit’s power, and the teleological commitment to glorify God. Their promotion of charity went hand in hand with their pursuit of true Christianity as they laboured to reform and renew the Protestant world in preparation for Christ’s Second Coming. For Francke, charity was an essential mark of true justification by faith; for Edwards, it was an essential mark of the Spirit’s gracious outpourings. For both, it distinguished true believers from the deceived. They would have heartily agreed with Whitefield’s declaration, “If you have no Compassion, no Value of the bodies of Men”, then “you are not, indeed, my dear Brethren, Christians, nor true Disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ”.62 Moreover, they viewed Christian charity not only as a sign but also as an instrument of spiritual and social renewal − a principle that would galvanise generations of evangelicals in their religious and social activism. As Brekus writes, “When the humanitarian command to ‘do good’ collided with the Christian imperative to ‘preach the gospel,’ the result was an explosion of missionary zeal”.63 Yet, as this examination of Halle’s role in Edwards’s thinking has demonstrated, the inspiration to “do good” in early evangelicalism was no mere carry-over from Enlightenment humanitarianism but also had roots in traditions of early modern Protestant reform and renewal. Wishing to advance Christ’s Kingdom of righteousness on earth, evangelicals like Edwards drew inspiration from the

61 Edwards, Humble Attempt, WJE 5:363. John Willison, A Fair and Impartial Testimony (Edinburgh: T. Lumisden, 1744), 99−100. Willison detailed the revival among the Moravians in Germany and abroad after the section on Salzburg − a part Edwards tellingly excluded in Humble Attempt. 62 G. Whitefield, The Great Duty of Charity Recommended (London: C. Whitefield, 1740), 3. 63 C.A. Brekus, Sarah Osborn’s World: The Rise of Evangelical Christianity in Early America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 218−19.

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Halle Pietists to apply the transforming love of the Spirit via charitable deeds to reform church and society alike. In this way, Edwards and other early evangelicals functioned as a bridge between early eighteenth-century Protestant reform and the vast proliferation of voluntary activism that fuelled the “benevolent empire” and transatlantic religious societies of the nineteenth century − the architects of which conscientiously harnessed Edwards’s theology of disinterested benevolence for their agendas.

Willem van Vlastuin

Jonathan Edwards and the Dutch Great Awakening

1.

Introduction

Jonathan Edwards has been interpreted as “The Global Edwards”.1 A description which prompts one to ask: How is Edwards’s work and theology received in other parts of the world? In this chapter, the relationship between the “Great Awakening” in Nijkerk (a village in the province Gelderland in the centre of Holland) and the theology of Jonathan Edwards is examined. The fact that Johan Steinmetz’s translation of A Faithful Narrative into German was the basis for its translation into Dutch shows the link between Germany and the Netherlands. In this chapter I investigate the broader revival context in the Netherlands, the events concerning “Nijkerk”, Edwards’s consciousness of religion in the Netherlands and his assessment of “Nijkerk”. I will close with some conclusions and considerations.

2.

Pietist context

Reformed Pietists in the Netherlands accepted the doctrines of the Reformation but, at the same time, they sought a spiritual deepening.2 This implied that personal regeneration had become central in Christian life. Christians were expected to renounce the sins of their personal life, family life and public life, while focussing more on reading the Bible, meditation, singing and family worship, developing a more ascetic lifestyle and celebrating the Sabbath in the strictest sense. On the one hand this pietism was focused on the individual spiritual life, but on the other, meeting each other was an important characteristic of this movement. The positive attention given to Israel was remarkable in this movement and, on lots of occasions, was related to the positive millennialist expectations for the church. The Nadere Reformatie found its home in the movement of reformed pietism in the Netherlands.3 The name of this movement goes back to Willem Teellinck’s (1579–1629) remarks about “de naerder reformatie der dinghen, die onder ons

1 This reference relates to R.S. Bezzant, The Global Edwards: Papers from the Jonathan Edwards Congress held in Melbourne, August 2015 (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2017). 2 For this general introduction, see http://www.ssnr.nl (accessed November 5, 2020). 3 See http://www.ssnr.nl (accessed November 5, 2020).

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ontstelt zijn” (the further reformation of the things that have gone wrong among us). The focus of this “further reformation” was the inner experience of sin and grace which became concrete in the need for self–examination, in determining the distinction between real and false faith and in its focus on the path of conversion. Besides Teellinck, Gisbertus Voetius (1589–1676), Jodocus van Lodenstein (1620–1677), Jacobus Koelman (1631–1695), Wilhelmus à Brakel (1635–1711), Theodorus van der Groe (1705–1784) and Alexander Comrie (1706–1774) were also representatives of this movement.

3.

Revival context

The Nadere Reformatie can be termed a revival movement because its representatives sought the revival of spiritual life.4 This implies that the existing level of spiritual life was critically evaluated as low. When reading the sermons and songs, and the books and pamphlets of the Nadere Reformatie, it is clear that the authors intended to address the problem of spiritual declension by emphasising the need to fear the Lord, forsake sin, trust Jesus, praise the Lord and walk with the Lord. A book published in 1711 including the sermons of Jodocus van Lodensteyn had the title: Decaying Christianity awakened from its carefree sleep and encouraged towards Holy Living (Het vervalle christendom uyt hare sorgeloose doodslaap opgewekt en aangespoort tot een heyligen wandel) is telling in this regard. The expectation of the conversion of Israel, and a new flowering season for the church, is not the only explanation as to why this movement persisted, despite all the disappointments. It also offered a positive framework for these awakening-calls to take place in. Within this context, several local, regional and national awakenings happened in which spiritual life was intensified, and many people experienced a spiritual conversion.5 Because of the deep emotions involved in these revivals, people spoke of “turmoil” (beroering).

4 Compare W. van Vlastuin, “Opwekking”, in W.J. op ’t Hof, Encyclopedie Nadere Reformatie (Utrecht: Kokboekencentrum, 2021), forthcoming. For the broader international context of awakening, see W.R. Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 5 For a broader overview of these awakenings, see F.A. van Lieburg, “De Libanon blijft ruisen. Opwekkingen in Nederland in de gereformeerde traditie”, in J. Spaans (ed.), Een golf van beroering. De omstreden religieuze opwekking in Nederland in het midden van de achttiende eeuw (Hilversum: Verloren, 2001) 15–38; “Interpreting the Dutch Great Awakening (1749–1755)”, in Church History 77 (2008) 1–19; “Gute Nachricht aus den Niederlanden: Pietismus und Erweckungsbewegung als Medienkonstruktionen”, in C. Soboth/P. Schmid (ed.), “Schrift soll leserlich seyn”: Der Pietismus und die Medien: Beiträge zum IV. Internationalen Kongress für Pietismusforschung 2013 (Halle: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen, 2016) 639–49.

Jonathan Edwards and the Dutch Great Awakening

Around 1620 Willem Teellinck was happy that many “lovers of the reformed religion” in the second phase of the Eighty Years War with Spain (1568–1648) came to a conscious choice to become members of the reformed church. The increase in the congregation of Elkerzee (a village in the province Zeeland in the southwest of Holland) in 1651 from 40 to 140 members was interpreted as a breakthrough of the Holy Spirit, and between 1610 and 1640, the church of Zierikzee (a village in the province Zeeland) actually grew from 500 to 3000 confessing members. The church of Utrecht (an important city in the centre of Holland) also grew impressively. In fact, under the warm pietistic preaching of Voetius, Van Lodensteyn, Johannes Teellinck (ca. 1614–1674) and others, the number of confessing members increased by 500 a year from 1650 until it had around 7000 members in 1660. It is remarkable that Van Lodensteyn complained about the spiritual level of the congregation, a complaint that reflected his own high spiritual standards. In the 1670s, there was also a spirit of revival. Jean de Labadie (1610–1674), who wanted to purify the church, participated in this movement spurred on by his belief that one had to judge the spiritual position of anyone who wanted to enter the church. His insights touched many representatives of the Nadere Ref ormatie deeply, which was evidenced by their tendency to separate themselves from the Reformed Church of the Netherlands. Notwithstanding many were attracted to him, the Nadere Reformatie rejected this appeal. One of the pastors who initially intended to separate from the Reformed Church was Jacobus Koelman. Although he opposed De Labadie’s approach, a revival took place in his church in Sluis in 1671 and 1672 under his earnest and evangelical, puritan-pietistic ministry. This revival began before 1672, the “disaster year” (“rampjaar”), which saw great political and economic disasters in the Netherlands and may have been a catalyst for the intensification of the spiritual revival. In the first few decades of the eighteenth century, a pietistic revival occurred in the northern part of the Netherlands. The names of Sicco Tjaden (1693–1726), Johan Verschuir (1680–1737) and Wilhelmus Schortinghuis (1700–1750) are connected with these awakenings which also reached parts of Germany. Schortinghuis’s book about inner Christianity represents this type of piety and its influence on others,6 characterised by “five nots”: I will not, I cannot, I do not know, I do not have and I am not good. In the same time period a spiritual revival took place in the Alblasserwaard (a region in the province South-Holland in west of Holland), with Petrus van de Velde (1656–1723), Henricus Eyssonius (1620–1690) and Gerardus van Schuylenburg (1681–1770) as leading names. Van Schuylenburg wrote

6 W. Schortinghuis, Het innige christendom tot overtuiginge van onbegenadigde, bestieringe en opwekkinge van begenadigde zielen, in desselfs allerinnigste en wesentlikste deelen gestaltelik en bevindelik voorgestelt in t’zamenspraken (Groningen: Jurjen Spandaw, 1740).

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an introduction to the translation into Dutch (1756) of David Brainerd’s diary, first edited by Jonathan Edwards, in which he referred positively to the labours of Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen (1691–1747), a predecessor of the Great Awakening in America. Besides these revivals, the revival in 1718 in Woubrugge (a village in the province of South-Holland) should also be mentioned as the conversion of the local pastor, Carolus Blom (1671–1734), had a spiritual effect upon the congregation. In 1746 there was also an awakening under the ministry of Johannes Groenewegen (1709–1764) in Werkendam (a village in the province Noord-Brabant, in the south of Holland). Six years later, there was an awakening through the actions of his brother, Jacob Groenewegen (1710–1755), that was much more emotional. The report of this awakening was entitled: A Faithful Narrative and a Defence (Een opregt verhaal en eene verdediging). There were more revivals in the Netherlands, but those mentioned here are sufficient to show that the Netherlands had a revival tradition, even before the American Great Awakening. It is also important to note that there may have been some spiritual and theological influence from the Netherlands on the new world, as one can identify adherents of Jacobus Koelman in the new world who tried (and failed) to bring him to America.7 We see this influence from the Netherlands in the latter leader of the First Great Awakening, Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen. He was a reformed pietist in line with Koelman and originated from the Dutch-German border area. Sicco Tjaden suggested to the Amsterdam classis to call this preacher to New Jersey where his theological and spiritual influence became one of the foundations of the Great Awakening.8 An interesting historical detail is that Gerardus van Schuylenburg gave shelter to John Frelinghuysen, the son of Theodorus Jacobus, during his theological study in the Netherlands. He married Dina van den Bergh, who is still remembered in the reformed churches in America.9

7 A. Eekhof, “Jacobus Koelman, zijn verblijf te Amsterdam en zijn beroep naar Noord-Amerika”, Nederlandsch archief voor kerkgeschiedenis 10 (1913) 289–327 and 11 (1914) 13–14. 8 See J.R. Tanis, Dutch Calvinistic Pietism in the Middle Colonies: A Study in the Life and Theology of Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen (’s Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhof, 1967), and “Reformed Pietism in Colonial America”, in F.E. Stoeffler (ed.), Continental Pietism and Early American Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976). 9 See J.H. van de Bank (ed.), De leiding van des Heeren liefde met Dina van den Bergh: Aantekeningen, dagboek en brieven (Houten: Den Hertog, 1994).

Jonathan Edwards and the Dutch Great Awakening

4.

‘The Nijkerk Turmoil’ (‘De Nijkerkse beroering’)

This broader context of the pietistic revival reveals that the Great Awakening in the Netherlands was not unique, but was part of a broader movement. So, what happened in Nijkerk?10 Gerardus Kuypers (1722–1798) was ordained in 1749 in Nijkerk beside Johannes Jacobus Roldanus (1714–1791) who preached earnestly about sin, hell and the necessity of conversion, but did not prompt a renewal. Even the cattle plague and trade blockades did not change the spiritual climate and only a small circle of god-fearing people prayed for a revival of religion. But Kuypers had a new pastoral approach. He organised public catechesis and meetings in which the sermons were discussed and applied to personal lives. In his sermons he used a tone which was very different from that of his colleague because, according to his view, it was not only necessary to wound people, but also to heal them. During one of Roldanus’s sermons, an old lady started crying about her sins. Some days later, in Kuyper’s services on November 16th and 17th of 1749, many people expressed religious emotions and some people were bodily overwhelmed while he preached on Psalm 72:16, a text which promises that a handful of corn on the top of the mountain would be so fruitful that the fruit would shake like Lebanon. Kuypers was engaged in guiding the processes of regeneration in his congregation. He talked personally to the people and visited mass-meetings in taverns that had closed down because the people were only interested in the message of the Bible. The letters to his parents about these events were pivotal in history because they were published in the spring of 1750 and raised much attention in the country. Many people visited Nijkerk, including several lay preachers who helped in the spiritual guidance of the awakened sinners. The Bible was studied, Psalms were sung and many people gave testimony about the work of the Holy Spirit. Several visitors ignited the fire of revival in their own neighbourhoods or wrote pamphlets to spread the flame. At the same time, others criticised the awakening, which resulted in a real pamphlet-war.11 Unfortunately, Kuypers’s professor at the university, Joan van den Honert (1693–1758), was one of his greatest opponents. Kuypers himself also defended the awakening, publishing Faithful Narrative and Apology (Getrouw

10 J. Fekkes, Nieuwkerk, een lichtbaken op de Veluwe: Een historische beschrijving van de Nijkerkse opwekking in 1749 (Heerenveen: Groen, 1999); C. Huisman, Geloof in beweging: Gerardus Kuypers; patriot tussen vroomheid en Verlichting (Zoetermeer: Boekencentrum, 1996). 11 See A.M. Roest, “Chronologische catalogus van de polemische geschriften rond de Nijkerkse beweging”, Documentatieblad werkgroep achttiende eeuw 17 (1985) 211–45.

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Verhaal en Apologie) in 1750.12 Another well-known defender of the revival was Hugh Kennedy, pastor of the Scottish church in Rotterdam.13 In the autumn of 1750 Kuypers wrote a public letter to all the Dutch pastors, prompted by his sense of responsibility for these events.14 He distanced himself from the extremes, but defended the legitimacy of emotional responses. According to him, the saving work of the Spirit could be distinguished from any false imitations. He also pleaded for clearer rules concerning the conventicles. Meanwhile the awakenings continued in the Netherlands, stopping quite abruptly in 1752.

5.

Relationship between Nijkerk and Northampton

Given the fact that the awakening in Nijkerk was part of an international pietistic revival and that there was some Dutch pietistic influence in the New World, can something be said about the specific relationship between the awakening in Nijkerk and the awakening in Edwards’s Northampton?15 First, the influence of Edwards in the Netherlands should be mentioned. Edwards wrote a report about the local and regional revival in 1734– 5 under the title A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God. This work was a catalyst for other revivals and also served as a model for other revival-reports; the translation of A Faithful Narrative into German in 1738 by Johan Adam Steinmetz (1689–1762) is a good example. Interestingly it was this translation that formed the basis for the Dutch translation in 1740 by Isaac Le Long (1683–1762). It is remarkable that Kuypers’s Getrouw verhaal and Een opregt verhaal f rom Werkendam have a similar title as Edwards’s Faithful Narrative. However, the Dutch reports also have the word verdediging (defence) in the title, revealing that the Dutch awakenings needed a defence; this was not something that Edwards’s initial report required. At first glance this could indicate that the revivals in the Netherlands happened in a more critical context. But, in light of the fact that Edwards also had to explain his position on the revivals at a later date, this explanation does not completely satisfy. Perhaps we could conclude that the original awakening

12 G. Kuypers, Getrouw Verhaal en Apologie of Verdeediging der zaaken voorgevallen te Nieuwkerk op de Veluwe (Amsterdam: Borstius, 1750). 13 H. Kennedy, Nederige Verdediging van het Werk des Heilige Geestes … eenige jaren geleden in Schotland, en nu onlangs in Nieuwkerk … (2nd ed.; Rotterdam: Hendrik van Pelt & Adrianus Douci, 1751). 14 G. Kuypers, Briev van Gerardus Kuypers predikant te Niewkerk op de Veluwe aan de Leeraaren onzer Kerk (Leiden: Johannes Hasebroek, 1751). 15 See W. van Vlastuin, “Nijkerk en Northampton”, in J. Spaans (ed.), Een golf van beroering: De omstreden religieuze opwekking in Nederland in het midden van de achttiende eeuw (Hilversum: Verloren, 2001) 59–78.

Jonathan Edwards and the Dutch Great Awakening

in Northampton happened in a less critical context than that of Nijkerk which indicates that the international criticism of the awakenings increased in that period. Several other works of Edwards were translated into Dutch, for example, The Life of Brainerd, A History of the Work of Redemption, Religious Affections, Freedom of the Will, Original Sin, The End for Which God Created the World, and several sermons.16 This positive reception of Edwards’s works did not mean that there was an uncritical attitude in the Netherlands. Jacob Groenewegen, for example, opposed the Dutch translation of An Account of the Life of the Late Reverend Mr. David Brainerd in 1756 with the argument that the author had omitted Christ’s priestly office and the forgiveness of sins in justification. He also complained that melancholy and spirituality were not distinguished clearly enough. Several ecclesiastical meetings accepted this critique. Also certain phrases in Edwards’s Religious Affections raised debate because the essence of faith was missing from them. Cornelis Brem’s translation of The End for Which God Created the World raised two important issues: was creation necessary or a free act of God’s sovereignty, and could moral agency and metaphysical necessity be compatible? Second, there was also the reverse movement from the Netherlands to America. In this context it is noteworthy that Edwards was sensitive to, and interested in, the state of religion in the Netherlands. In 1739, in The History of Redemption, he wrote about the special place that the Netherlands had in Protestant history.17 Together with Britain, Holland was a stronghold of reformed religion; a position that was related to the fight for independence from Spain (WJE 9:428).18 This sensitivity to the state of religion in the Netherlands can also be seen in his extended letter of

16 For an extended overview of the reception of Edwards’s works, see A.C. Neele, “The Dutch Reception History of Jonathan Edwards”, forthcoming. For a general introduction to the translations of Edwards’s works, see J. Yeager, Jonathan Edwards and Transatlantic Print Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 141–42. See also W. van Vlastuin, “Jonathan Edwards in Amsterdam”, forthcoming. 17 Jonathan Edwards, The History of the Work of Redemption (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 9; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 426, 428. Holland is interesting because of the Synod of Dort (WJE 9:431), the Heidelberg Catechism, noted in Jonathan Edwards, “An Humble Inquiry”, in Ecclesiastical Writings, D.D. Hall (ed.) (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 12; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 329, and the Synopsis Purioris Theologiæ in Edwards, “Humble Inquiry”, WJE 12:342. 18 We can also identify this interest in Dutch politics in Jonathan Edwards, Apocalyptic Writings, S.J. Stein (ed.) (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 5; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 424, with further geographical, historical, economic, military and apocalyptic interests in WJE 5:131, 192–93, 262, 268–69. We also see interest in the Netherlands in other places, as is noted in W.H. Kimnach, “General Introduction”, in Sermons and Discourses 1720–1723 (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 10; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 47; in Jonathan Edwards, Notes on Scripture, S.J. Stein (ed.) (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 15; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 498, and Jonathan Edwards, Letters and Personal Writings, G.S. Claghorn (ed.) (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 16; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 350.

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November 20th, 1745 to John McLaurin in Glasgow.19 In this letter he observed that religion in Scotland was decaying, but was making a real impact in the Netherlands, and in closing, he asked McLaurin to spread the word about the religious situation in Holland. On April 6th, 1748 Edwards got a letter from John Erskine in Scotland,20 saying that there was a concert of extraordinary prayer among the Dutch people and that “the wonderful interposition of divine providence” had answered these prayers in the stadholdership of the pious Prince of Orange. It appears that Erskine had been given this information by Hugh Kennedy in Rotterdam. It is fair to say that Edwards looked for any information about new religious revivals in the Netherlands and was not disappointed. James Davenport wrote a letter to him, dated April 26th, 1751, repeating what John Frelinghuysen had told him about the revival in the Netherlands.21 Davenport told him about the “success” of the gospel in the Jerseys and, in that context, he referred to the ministry of Frelinghuysen and his second son John who came over from Holland where he was ordained and married. Davenport wrote: “Pious ministers among the Dutch our way, I think, increased faster of late than among other people.” In this context Edwards remarked: The Dutch people in the provinces of New York and New Jersey have been famed for being generally exceeding ignorant, stupid, and profane, little better than the savages of our American deserts. But ‘tis remarkable that things should now begin to appear more hopeful among them, about the same time that religion is reviving among the Dutch in their mother country. And certainly, the revival of religion which has very lately appeared, especially that among the Dutch in Europe, do verify God’s holy Word, which gives such great encouragement to his people to pray for such mercies.22

Edwards understood these revivals as an answer to prayer. In 1743 Edwards was involved in a “Concert for United Prayer” which he later explained in his An Humble Attempt to Promote Explicit Agreement and Visible Union of God’s People 19 Edwards, “Edwards’ Letter to a Correspondent in Scotland”, WJE 5:444–60, on p. 447. 20 See Edwards, “Notes on the Apocalypse”, WJE 5:289. 21 Edwards, “Letter to the Reverend John Erskine”, WJE 16:375–80. The first reference to revivals in the Netherlands in Edwards’s writings appears 1748: “There has also been something remarkable of the same kind, in some places in the United Netherlands”, Edwards, “Humble Attempt”, WJE 5:363. This cannot be related to Nijkerk which happened in 1749, so Edwards must be referring to preceding revivals in the Netherlands, while we see that there were no reprints before 1789, in Stein, “Editor’s Introduction”, WJE 5:83–6. Edwards also refers to politics in the Netherlands in “Notes on the Apocalypse”, WJE 5:131, and refers to a letter from John Erskine, dated April 6, 1748, in which the piety of the Prince of Orange is mentioned in the same document, WJE 5:289. 22 Edwards, “Letter to the Reverend John Erskine”, WJE 16:379. During a visit to Boston on May 4, 1715 Edwards also heard about the revival in Holland, “Notes on the Apocalypse”, WJE 5:294.

Jonathan Edwards and the Dutch Great Awakening

in Extraordinary Prayer for the Revival of Religion and the Advancement of Christ’s Kingdom on Earth pursuant to Scripture Promises and Prophecies concerning the Last Time. This agreement implied that Christians from all over the (Western) world would pray for the extension of God’s Kingdom and the coming of the millennium, an arrangement which lasted seven years from 1744. Every Saturday evening, every Sunday morning and the first Tuesday of every quarter Christians were united in this prayer. About thirty prayer meetings existed in Edinburgh, while Glasgow counted forty-five. Already in 1745, in his first letter about the concert of prayer, Edwards referred to the participation of Dutch representatives: I am persuaded that such an agreement of the people of God in different parts, to unite together, to pray for the Holy Spirit is lovely in the eyes of Jesus Christ the glorious head of the church … Who knows but that by degrees, it may spread all over the British dominions, both in Europe and America, and also into Holland, Zeeland, and other Protestant countries, and all over the visible church of Christ, yea, far beyond the present limits of the visible church?23

In his other letter to McLaurin, written in 1745, Edwards had suggested that Dutch ministers could join this concert of prayer. The revivals among the Dutch in America, and in the Netherlands, confirmed Edwards’s conviction to invite ministers in the Netherlands to join these extraordinary prayers for revival: What if you, dear Sir, and other ministers in Scotland who have been engaged in this affair, should now take occasion to inform ministers in the Netherlands of it, and move them to come into it; and join with us in our united and extraordinary prayers for a universal revival or religion?24

Edwards wrote this in a letter to John Erskine in Scotland, dated June 28th, 1751.25 In the same letter he referred to Frelinghuysen, William Tennent, MacLaurin, John Gillies, James Robe, James Davenport and others. These references indicate the international nature of the pietistic network in the eighteenth century, because MacLaurin, Gillies and Robe were Scots. He also corresponded with William McCulloch in Cambuslang and Thomas Gillespie in Carnock, and with people in New Jersey about Dutch ministers. In the correspondence in this network, Nijkerk was an issue, which was made clear in Edwards’s letter to John Erskine, written from Stockbridge:

23 Edwards, “To a Correspondent in Scotland”, WJE 16:179–197. 24 Edwards, “Edwards’ Letter to a Correspondent in Scotland”, WJE 5:447. 25 Edwards, “To the Reverend John Erskine”, WJE 16:375–80, on p. 379.

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The letters I have received from my other correspondents make mention of a great revival of religion in Gelderland; and Mr. MacLaurin has sent me printed accounts of it, published, as I understand, by Mr. [John] Gillies, his son-in-law, being extracts of letters from Holland.26

In the same letter to John Erskine, Edwards also remarked that “the accounts Mr. Davenport gives from him are not as specific as those that are published by Mr Gillies”. But which accounts did he mean? This question leads us to another aspect of the pietistic network, namely the magazines in which messages about revivals were shared. Among these magazines were Christian Monthly History edited by James Robe, Christian History edited by Thomas Prince, the London Weekly History and the Glasgow Weekly History.27 Thomas Prince in Boston published two letters written by pastors in the Netherlands about the Nijkerk revival in his Christian History under the title “Good News from the Netherlands. Extracts of Letters from Two Ministers of Holland Confirming and Giving Accounts of the Revival of Religion in Guelderland”.28 John Gillies also published these letters, dated Oct 2nd, 1750 and January 15th, 1751, in his Historical Collections Relating to Remarkable Periods of the Success of the Gospel, and Eminent Instrument Employed in Promoting it.29 Perhaps Gerardus Kuypers was involved in this network, given the fact that he corresponded with John Gillies. On July 10th in 1754 Kuypers wrote a letter to Gillies about the situation in Nijkerk before the awakening, during the awakening and after the awakening.30 It is noteworthy that five years after the awakening, Kuypers still interpreted the awakening as a work of God’s Spirit. He ends his letter by wishing for a new outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Although we are not sure whether Kuypers wrote about Nijkerk before 1754, we do know that he also received an account of the revival in the Netherlands from John Erskine, dated May 13th, 1752.31 Hugh Kennedy had his own place in this

26 See also John Gillies, Good News from the Netherlands: Extracts of Letters from Two Ministers of Holland Confirming and Giving Accounts of the Revival of Religion in Guelderland (Reprinted Boston, 1751), according to M.J. Crawford, Seasons of Grace: Colonial New England’s Revival Tradition in Its British Context (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 230. 27 See M.J. Crawford, Seasons of Grace, 173, 224, 231. 28 M.J. Crawford, Seasons of Grace, 230. 29 This work was originally published in Glasgow 1754. Horatius Bonar revised this edition in 1845. This revised edition is published as Historical Collections of Accounts of Revival (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth, 1981). The two letters can be found on pp. 490–92. 30 For this letter, see J. Gillies, Historical Collections, 499–501. W.R. Ward also refers to this letter, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening, 239. 31 Edwards, “Notes on the Apocalypse”, WJE 5:295. This letter has been lost. Edwards refers extensively to this letter in his letter to John Erskine dated November 23, 1752.

Jonathan Edwards and the Dutch Great Awakening

greater pietistic network, with his contribution to international awareness of the Great Awakening in the Netherlands, not only writing in Dutch to defend Nijkerk against its critics, but also sending several letters to his friends in Scotland and London to make the Great Awakening in the Netherlands known to an international public in his Short Account of the Rise and Continuing Progress of a Remarkable Work of Grace in the United Netherlands.32

6.

Jonathan Edwards’s assessment of Nijkerk

Given the fact that Edwards knew about Nijkerk, how did he assess this awakening? To answer this question, we compare three remarks that Edwards made. On the 28th of June 1751 Edwards wrote: At the same time that we rejoice in this glorious work and praise God for it, it concerns us earnestly to pray that God’s ministers and people there may be directed in such a state of things, wherein wisdom and great discretion is so exceedingly needed, and great care and skill to distinguish between true and false religion; or those inward experiences which are from the saving influence of the Spirit of God and those that are from Satan transforming himself into an angel of light. Without this, it may be expected that the great deceiver will gradually insinuate himself; acting under disguise, he will pretend to be a zealous assistant in building the temple, yea, the chief architect, when his real design will be to bring all to the ground, and to build Babel instead of the temple of God, finally to the great reproach, and grief of all true friends of religion, and the haughty triumph of its adversaries. If I may be allowed my conjecture in this affair, there lies the greatest danger of the people in Gelderland who are concerned in this work. I wish they had all the benefit of the late experience of this part of the church of God here in America.33

Reflecting upon Edwards’s comment, it is noteworthy that he accepts the account of the revival as an account of a real revival. At the same time, it is remarkable how briefly he refers to the blessings in Nijkerk and how concerned he is about the situation. He worries more about the deceptions of the false spirit than being happy with the work of the Holy Spirit. It seems that Edwards fears that the ministers in the Netherlands are inadequately equipped to deal with these spiritual deceptions. Edwards is also anxious that theologians in the Netherlands may be unacquainted with Satan’s strategy of working under the pretence of spiritual zeal, and hopes

32 H. Kennedy, Short Account of the Rise and Continuing Progress of a Remarkable Work of Grace in the United Netherlands (London: John Lewis, 1752). 33 Edwards, “Letter to the Reverend John Erskine”, WJE 16:377.

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that difficult lessons learnt in America about the strategies of the devil would be helpful in Holland. More than a year later, on July 7th, 1752, Jonathan Edwards wrote again to John Erskine in Scotland. In this letter his worries about the revival in the Netherlands seem to have increased: I am sorry to hear that there is so much reason to fear that the revival of religion in the Netherlands will be hindered and brought under a cloud through the prevailing of imprudences. It is what I was afraid I should hear. I should be glad to see the pastoral letter you mention against fanaticism, though written by one disaffected to the revival. I wish I could see a history of enthusiasm, through all ages, written by some good hand, a hearty friend of vital religion, a person of accurate judgment and large acquaintance with ecclesiastical history. Such a history, well–written, might doubtless be exceeding useful and instructive, and of great benefit to the church of God; especially if there be united with it a proper account and history of true religion. I should, therefore, choose that the work should be a history of true, vital, and experimental religion and enthusiasm; bringing down the history from age to age; judiciously and clearly making the distinction between one and the other; observing the difference of source, progress, and issue; properly pointing out the limits; and doing justice to each, in every age, and at each remarkable period. I don’t know that there is any such thing extant, or anything that would in any good measure answer to the same purposes. If there be, I should be glad to hear of it.34

The reflections made in this letter compared to the preceding letter reveal that Edwards’s worries were confirmed. It is these fears of bad developments which inform his interpretations of the awakening in Holland. Edwards’s letter, moreover, revealed very clearly that his concern was mainly related to enthusiasm, which Edwards understood to be a tool used by the devil to deceive. The devil opposes a spiritual movement by demonstrating opposition or extreme enthusiasm. For this reason, Edwards dedicated the greatest part of his revival-analysis in Some Thoughts to the dangers caused by extreme proponents of revival, who, he believed, could do more harm to the spiritual revival than those who opposed the work of the Spirit.35 Relating this interpretation to his theology of Word and Spirit, we can say that Edwards understood the one-sided emphasis on the subjective Spirit as a greater danger than the one-sided emphasis on the objective Word, for with this emphasis truth as such remains, but with the onesided appeal to the Spirit, subjective feelings prevail over the objective truth. He

34 Edwards, “Letter to the Reverend John Erskine”, WJE 16:489–93, on p. 490. 35 See W. van Vlastuin, “Faith and Feeling in the Theology of Jonathan Edwards”, in R.S. Bezzant, The Global Edwards: Papers from the Jonathan Edwards Congress held in Melbourne, August 2015 (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2017) 203–22, on p. 210.

Jonathan Edwards and the Dutch Great Awakening

would argue that human subjects need the correction of the Word and without this correction, are liable to make every error. We can hear a certain distrust of subjective human feelings in Edwards’s approach and the need for correction by the infallible rule of God’s Word. This distrust of human feelings is remarkable in Edwards’s theology and spirituality, because he was a defender of affective faith.36 The great message of his Religious Affections is that saving faith consisted for the main part in affections, because Edwards was convinced that faith could not be reduced to the intellect. At the same time, this affective dimension of faith apparently did not imply that an intellectual understanding of the doctrinal content of Christian faith was denied or rejected. In his sermon Christian Knowledge37 , for example, he defended the fundamental importance of Christian doctrine and its understanding. Another of Edwards’s worries concerned the importance of church history. It seems that Edwards expected a lot from a good historical description of the Christian religion that distinguished between the healthy experience of faith, on the one hand, and the derailments of extreme views and experiences on the other. Does that mean that Edwards expected to learn more from the insights of history than from the lessons of Scripture? Given the fact that, in his Religious Affections, Edwards distinguished between false and true religion on the basis of text and stories in the Bible, it seems that he is interested in the history of experiential religion as an extra confirmation of Scripture and as a communion with saints of all times to interpret Scripture in a catholic way. We now come to a third reflection that Edwards made about the revival in the Netherlands. In a letter dated November 23rd, 1752 he again refers to this awakening. This letter starts with the reference to a book Against Fanaticism, which indicates that Edwards is really involved in these issues. Immediately he continued with his view of the events in the Netherlands: I am very glad to see what you write concerning the state of religion in the Netherlands. But I believe there is more of a mixture of what is bad with the good that appears in the land than Mr. Kennedy, and many other ministers there, are aware of; and that they will find that the consequence of their not carefully and critically distinguishing between the good and the bad, and guarding with the utmost caution and diligence against the latter, will prove worse than they now conceive of (…) The cry was, “O, there is no danger, if we are but lively in religion and full of God’s Spirit and live by faith, of being misled! If we do but follow God, there is no danger of being led wrong! ’Tis the cold, carnal, and

36 See W. van Vlastuin, “Faith and Feeling in the Theology of Jonathan Edwards”, 215–16. 37 Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections, J.E. Smith (ed.) (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 2; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 157–163.

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lifeless that are most likely to be blind and walk in darkness. Let us press forward and not stay and hinder the good work, by standing and spending time in these criticisms and carnal reasonings!” etc., etc. This was the language of many, till they ran on deep into the wilderness and were taught by the briars and thorns of the wilderness. However, ‘tis no wonder that divines in Europe will not lay very much weight on the admonitions they receive from so obscure a part of the world. Other parts of the church of God must be taught as we have been; and when they see and feel them, they will believe. Not that I apprehend there is in any measure so much enthusiasm and disorder mixed with the work in Holland, as was in many parts of America, in the time of the late revival of religion here. But yet I believe the work must be more pure, and the people more thoroughly guarded from his wiles, who beguiled Eve through his subtlety and corrupts the minds of zealous people from the simplicity that is in Christ, before the work goes on to a general conquest and is maintained in its power and glory for a great length of time.38

This long citation again underlines the necessity of distinguishing between good and bad. First, Edwards thinks that Hugh Kennedy has the same naïve attitude as the ministers in America, a category that he most probably included himself in. In his own development, we see Edwards becoming more sensitive to the unspiritual and hyperspiritual tendencies in the awakening. Second, the critical attitude to Kennedy, and the other ministers in Holland, is caused by John Erskine’s way of referring to Kennedy. In Erskine’s description of the attitude in the Netherlands, it seems that the Dutch theologians had a certain carelessness to test the spirits. If the Spirit works, its movement is too deep and mysterious to be analysed. In third place, it is remarkable that Edwards judged the level of spiritual disorder to be less in Nijkerk than it was in America. We can – in fourth place – conclude that Edwards was convinced that the purity of the spiritual awakening was what was most important. In this conviction we can see how sensitive Edwards was to the great intelligence of the devil whose strategy it is to weaken spiritual movements by hyperspiritual meanings, attitudes and developments. An important question remains: was Erskine’s assessment of Kennedy and the Dutch theologians correct? The answer is no. Like Edwards, Gerardus Kuypers was sensitive to the danger of fanaticism and hyperspirituality39 and did not encourage the emotional or physical effects of the awakening. Neither did he isolate the Spirit from the Word. We find the same attitude in Kennedy.40 Like Edwards, he recognised the danger that the devil brings to extreme spirituality.41

38 39 40 41

Edwards, “Letter to the Reverend John Erskine”, WJE 16:538. G. Kuypers, Getrouw verhaal, 37–8, 82–6, 94–7. H. Kennedy, Nederige verdediging, 72–73, 81, 113, 131. H. Kennedy, Nederige verdediging, 144–46.

Jonathan Edwards and the Dutch Great Awakening

7.

Considerations and conclusions

We can conclude that the nature of the revival was not unique to the New World, but that it belonged to the heart of the pietistic movement and, within this movement, to the Nadere Reformatie. There are grounds for arguing that the First Great Awakening in America had its roots in the piety of Dutch preachers in New Jersey which was coloured by the spirituality of Koelman, Frelinghuysen and Schortinghuis. This makes it understandable that the features of the Great Awakening in Nijkerk and America were comparable and that Edwards recognised that. But his assessment was overly based on the view espoused by John Erskine and he underestimated the critical and analytical attitude of the Dutch theologians. Given these corresponding phenomena it is remarkable that we do not know about such explicit and international concerts of prayer in the Netherlands. There was prayer before the spiritual awakening in Nijkerk, but we do not know about a national or international movement of prayer and prayer meetings. This fact remains one of the distinguishable features of the Dutch “Great Awakening” and of Dutch spirituality through the centuries. It is a subject which demands more research.

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Jonathan Edwards’ Images Eine Lektüre im Kontext von Praktiken der Sakralisierung des Alltags protestantischer Frömmigkeitskulturen dies- und jenseits des Atlantiks

Abstract Supplementing prevalent intellectualistic interpretations of Edwards, this chapter locates his Images of Divine Things in the context of widespread religious practices. Occasional meditation, popular in Puritan and Pietistic milieus alike, forms the background against which Images of Divine Things can be discussed as an expression of a Protestant mode of seeing that is cultivated in ordinary and everyday situations. The visual order which is then constructed is comprehensive and integrative: mentality and practice – ‘saying’, ’doing’, and ‘feeling’. Applying the methodology of visual culture studies to Images and to similar texts from manuals of devotion of British and German origin, we supplement texts with material culture and pictures to enrich our analysis. Examples drawn from sources dating from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century suggest that this visual construction of pious realities was attractive not only in its time but continues to resonate to this day, whether in genuine imitation or parody.

1.

Einleitung

Edwards’ Images of Divine Things blicken auf eine wechselvolle Auslegungsgeschichte zurück. Während anfangs primär nach bibelhermeneutischen Voraussetzungen gefragt wurde, vor deren Hintergrund sich ihr Innovationspotential diskutieren ließ, hat man die Images bald auch als Zeugnis einer chiliastischen Geisteshaltung gelesen, die die Welt der Erscheinungen fortwährend auf Gottes Heilsplan hin durchsichtig zu machen versucht.1 Grundlage dafür sei ein endzeitli-

1 U. Brumm, Die religiöse Typologie im Amerikanischen Denken. Ihre Bedeutung für die Amerikanische Literatur- und Geistesgeschichte (Leiden: Brill 1963); M.L. Lowance, The Language of Canaan: Metaphor and Symbol in New England from the Puritans to the Transcendentialists (Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 1980); J. Knight, “Learning the Language of God: Jonathan Edwards and the Typology of Nature”, The William and Mary Quarterly 48 (1991) 531–551; ähnlich neuerdings G.

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cher “habit of mind”,2 in dessen Lichte sich die Images als Produkte einer spezifisch religiösen Mentalität ausnehmen. Diese Deutung, die ich auf Grund ihrer großen Nähe zu professioneller Buchgelehrsamkeit die kognitivistische nennen möchte, hat sich als die wirkmächtigste erwiesen. Der ihr eingeschriebene mentalistischelitäre Zug zeigt sich auch in der neueren Diskussion, etwa wenn die Images vor dem Hintergrund des Edwardschen Idealismus gedeutet werden.3 Demgegenüber möchte ich, indem ich den Text im Kontext zeitgenössischer praxis pietatis diesund jenseits des Atlantiks zu verorten versuche, für eine ergänzende Sichtweise werben. In der Optik der visual culture studies liegt es nahe, die Images auch einmal auf eine darin implizit enthaltene Praxis des Sehens hin zu befragen.4 In solcher Perspektivierung allerdings haben wir es nicht nur mit einem rein intellektuellen Verfahren religiöser Welterkenntnis zu tun. Die Images zeigen sich vielmehr als Niederschlag einer visuellen Ordnung, die im umfassenden Sinne neben einer Mentalität zugleich auch ein Lebensgefühl befestigt, das seine Verankerung im Alltag ganz unterschiedlicher Schichten finden kann. Aufgabe wird also sein, eine Sehpraxis zu rekonstruieren, die als “socially and historically constructed religious practice”5 in die Breite der Religionskultur frommer Milieus vordrang. Attraktiv ist dieser Zugang auch deshalb, weil er das Vorurteil einer angeblichen Vorordnung des Hörens vor dem Sehen im Protestantismus ein wenig zu relativieren vermag.

2.

Gelegenheitsmeditation

Gegenstand im Folgenden sind also vor allem kulturell geformte Wahrnehmungsweisen, die sich aus konkreten Praktiken, materieller Kultur und dadurch geformten Subjekten zusammensetzen und ein Lebensgefühl hervorbringen, in dem Weltsicht und Lebensform aufs Engste miteinander vermittelt sind. Ein guter Ansatzpunkt dafür ist die Gelegenheitsmeditation bzw. occasional meditation. Im England des

2

3 4

5

Black, “Spectator of Shadows. The Human Being in Jonathan Edwards’s Images of Divine Things”, Jonathan Edwards Studies 8 (2018) 82–94, on p. 94. M.L. Lowance, “Images or Shadows of Divine Things in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards”, in S. Bercovitch (ed.), Typology and Early American Literature (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1972) 209–244, on p. 244; wieder aufgenommen in Lowance, Language, 1. A. Světlíková, “Edwards’ Natural Typology and the Problem of Subjectivity”, Jonathan Edwards Studies 3 (2013) 27–42. Zur Methodologie vgl. S. Prinz, Die Praxis des Sehens. Über das Zusammenspiel von Körpern, Artefakten und visueller Ordnung (Bielefeld: transcript, 2014), sowie D. Morgan, Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images (2nd ed.; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Morgan, Visual Piety, 15.

Jonathan Edwards’ Images

17. und 18. Jahrhunderts vielfach propagiert,6 fiel sie durch Vermittlung schweizerischer Theologen auch in deutschsprachigen Landen auf fruchtbaren Boden.7 Schon bald ist der europäische Buchmarkt überschwemmt von Erbauungsschriften, die zu persönlicher Frömmigkeitspflege anleiten. Zahllose Handbücher enthalten Materialien für ein Laienpublikum, die in die Grundlagen kontemplativer Praxis einführen, was Baier dazu veranlasst, von einem regelrechten Meditationsboom in sämtlichen europäischen Konfessionen zu sprechen, der sich vor allem als literarisches Ereignis greifen lässt.8 Die Images lassen sich vor diesem Hintergrund unschwer als Niederschlag einer praxis pietatis einordnen, die dies- und jenseits des Atlantiks propagiert wurde. Bevor wir uns um deren lebensweltliche Kontextualisierung bemühen, sei jedoch in gebotener Kürze an bibelhermeneutische Grundlagen erinnert, die dafür einschlägig wurden. Andernorts breit dargestellt,9 können wir uns auf den Hinweis beschränken, dass die Vorsicht, die die Reformatoren der Typologie gegenüber walten ließen, protestantische Frömmigkeitsbewegungen des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts nicht davon abhielt, den charakteristischen Analogieschluss auch im Hinblick auf außerbiblische Materien zu vollziehen. Der Typos konnte seinen Antitypos auch jenseits der Schrift finden. Exemplarisch sei auf Edwards’ Blank Bible verwiesen. Alttestamentliche Erzähltradition wird häufig noch ganz konventionell auf Christus und die mit ihm angebrochenen Zeitenwende hin gedeutet. Weil Edwards dabei aber den Etappen von Schöpfung, Abfall, versöhnter Neuschöpfung und Vollendung folgt – Ereignisse, die teilweise noch ausstehen – muss er auch die Ausweitung zur halbbiblischen Typologie wagen. Legitimiert sieht sich das Verfahren durch die endzeitlichen Verheißungen der Johannesoffenbarung. Diese weisen ebenso über die Grenzen jener Geschichte hinaus, die zwischen den beiden Buchdeckeln enthalten ist, was nahelegt, die Schrift insgesamt als einen Spender von Typologien künftiger heilsgeschichtlich relevanter Ereignisse zu begreifen. Darüber hinaus fordert sie vielfach dazu auf, Gott auch in seiner Schöpfung zu suchen.10 Die pa-

6 M.-L. Coolahan, “Redeeming Parcels of Time. Aesthetics and Practice of Occasional Meditation”, The Seventeenth Century 22 (2013) 124–143; C. Weiss Smith, Empiricist Devotions: Science, Religion, and Poetry in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016), 33–68. 7 U. Sträter, Sonthom, Bayly, Dyke und Hall. Studien zur Rezeption der englischen Erbauungsliteratur in Deutschland im 17. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: Mohr, 1987). 8 K. Baier, Meditation und Moderne. Zur Genese eines Kernbereichs moderner Spiritualität in der Wechselwirkung zwischen Westeuropa, Nordamerika und Asien (Würzburg: Echter, 2009), 1:123–130. 9 F. Ohly, Ausgewählte und neue Schriften zur Literaturgeschichte und Bedeutungsforschung (Stuttgart/ Leipzig: Hirzel, 1995); W. Anderson, “Editor’s Introduction to ‘Images of Divine Things’ and ‘Types’”, in Typological Writings, W. Anderson (ed.) (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 11; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 3–33; sowie die in Anm. 2 und 3 genannte Literatur. 10 Edwards, Typological Writings, WJE 11:62, 66f, 74, 106, 108, 144.

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tristische Lehre von der Doppeloffenbarung im liber scripturae und liber naturae, welche einander wechselseitig auslegen, kann so wiederaufleben. Damit wird einer kontemplativen Praxis der Boden bereitet, die sämtliche der Erfahrung zugängliche Erscheinungen spiritualisiert und damit den Alltag gewissermaßen zu sakralisieren vermag. Occasional meditation bzw. zufällige Andacht, ihr Pendant im deutschsprachigen Kontext, sieht in allen Dingen ein auf eine geistlich-immaterielle Wirklichkeit verweisendes und diese vergegenwärtigendes Symbol. Grundlage solcher Bezugnahme ist der Analogieschluss vom Leichten auf das Schwere – vom Diesseitigen zum Jenseitigen, vom Irdischen aufs Himmlische. Solchermaßen transzendierend wird jegliches Sein hintergründig. Alles ist potenziell bedeutungsschwanger, der Kosmos birgt einen allumfassenden, jedes noch so abseitige Phänomen integrierenden Hintersinn. Schrift und Natur erhalten die Anweisung, diesen zu entschlüsseln und eröffnen so die Möglichkeit, sich in einer Welt geborgen zu fühlen, die anderen längst undurchsichtig und kontingent geworden ist. Denn noch spricht Gott. Aus allen Dingen lässt sich seine Stimme vernehmen. Voraussetzung ist, und das ist wohl der springende Punkt, ein entsprechender Resonanzboden, der uns gestattet, seiner gewahr zu werden. Der Gedanke, dass es letztlich auch einer gewissen Haltung bedarf, um Gottes Stimme überhaupt vernehmen zu können, findet sich schon bei Johann Arndt (1555–1621) ausgeführt, dessen Vier Bücher vom wahren Christentum11 auch in der Neue Welt rezipiert wurden.12 Edwards’ Schwester Jerusha etwa besitzt ein Exemplar der von Anton Wilhelm Böhm besorgten englischen Ausgabe, das sie an Familienmitglieder und über Timothy Edwards auch an dessen Amtskollegen verleiht.13 Der mit Liber Naturae überschriebene vierte Band enthält ein spiritualistischtheosophisches Programm, das Arndt anhand einzelner Schöpfungswerke entfaltet. Entsprechend können diese im Vorwort auch als “Handleiter und Botten Gottes” eingeführt werden, “so uns Christlicher Erklärung nach, zu Gott und Christo führen”.14

11 1605 begonnen, wuchs die Schrift bis 1610 zunächst auf vier Bände an, die in der von J.A. Steiger besorgten Edition J. Arndt, Vier Bücher vom wahren Christentumb. Die erste Gesamtausgabe (1610) (Hildesheim u. a.: Olms 2007) zugänglich sind. Weitere Bände folgten, die bis weit ins 20. Jh. hinein wieder aufgelegt werden und zusammen mit Übersetzungen durch mindestens 160 unterschiedliche Editionen gingen, vgl. D. Peil, Zur ‘angewandten Emblematik’ in protestantischen Erbauungsbüchern: Dilherr, Arndt, Francisci, Scriver (Heidelberg: Winter, 1978); H. Geyer, Verborgene Weisheit: Johann Arndts ‘Vier Bücher vom Wahren Christentum’ als Programm einer spiritualistisch-hermetischen Theologie (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2001). 12 D. Peil, “The Emblem in the German-Speaking Regions”, in P.M. Daly (ed.), Companion to Emblem Studies (New York: AMS Press, 2008) 187–221, 200f. 13 Jonathan Edwards, Catalogue of Books (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 26; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 118, 414. 14 Arndt/Steiger, Vier Bücher, IV:5.

Jonathan Edwards’ Images

Versucht man, der konkreten Umsetzung der Gelegenheitsmeditation anhand der Vier Bücher auf die Spur zu kommen, wird man allerdings enttäuscht. Die Suche in der zeitgleich entstandene Arte of Divine Meditation Joseph Halls (1574–1656) führt ebenso wenig weiter. Zwar wird dort zwischen set und occasional meditation unterschieden,15 eine methodische Anleitung zu letzterer sucht man vergeblich. Beiläufig handelt Hall sie auf zwei Seiten ab, um sich sodann ausführlich der gerichteten Meditation zu widmen. Auch die Occasional Meditations16 geben kaum Aufschluss. Und doch sehen sich interessierte Leser zu fleißiger Übung ermahnt: The creatures are half lost if we only employ them, not learn something from them. God is wronged if His creatures be unregarded; ourselves most of all if we read this great volume of the creatures and take out no lesson for our instruction.17

Die Grundlagen der Gelegenheitsmeditation vermitteln sich Edwards auch nicht über Joseph Hall, sondern über Richard Baxter (1615–1691) sowie vor allem John Flavel (1628–1691).18 Explizit rekurriert Edwards in Image 164 auf Flavels Husbandry Spiritualized.19 In der Zuschrift des Buches an Robert und William Savery of Slade findet sich auch der für unsere Zwecke relevante quellensprachliche Beleg, wonach sich die Gelegenheitsmeditation als ein “spiritualizing”20 charakterisieren lässt, das zugleich auf den Seh- wie den Hörsinn abstellt:

15 F.L. Huntley, Bishop Joseph Hall and Protestant Meditation in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study with the Texts of The Art of Divine Meditation (1607) and Occasional Meditations (1633) (Bingham/ New York: Bloomington, 1981), 73–75. 16 Huntley, Bishop Joseph Hall, 119–198. 17 Huntley, Bishop Joseph Hall, 74. 18 Edwards, Catalogue of Books, WJE 26:130, 385, 393. Baxter unterscheidet im Anschluss an Hall in The Saints Everlasting Rest (1650) ebenfalls zwischen gerichteter Meditation, der er sich ausführlich widmet, und Gelegenheitsmeditation, vgl. R. Baxter, The Saint’s Everlasting Rest. Or a Treatise of the Blessed State of the Saints in their Enjoyment of God in Glory (London: Thomas Tegg, 1839), 553, ohne jedoch der Gelegenheitsmeditation weitere Aufmerksamkeit zu schenken. 19 J. Flavel, Husbandry Spiritualized. Or the Heavenly Use of Earthly Things. To which was Appended Occasional Meditations upon Birds, Beasts, Trees, Flowers, Rivers, and other Objects etc. (London, 1669). 20 D. Wallace (ed.), The Spirituality of the Later English Puritans. An Anthology (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1987), 120–135, 122. Quellensprachlich greifbar wird die Begrifflichkeit der Spiritualisierung auch bei Edmund Calamy (1600–1666), vgl. E. Calamy, The Art of Divine Meditation, or a Discourse of the Nature, Necessity, and Excellency Thereof etc. (London, 1667), 15. “Spiritualizing” bzw. “Heavenlizing” werden als frommer Habitus im Gegenüber zur beständigen Neigung des “wicked man” in Stellung gebracht, “who doth carnalize and naturalize” sämtliche Dinge – selbst so heilige wie das Sakrament.

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It hath been long since observ’d, that the world below is a Glass to discover the World above; Seculum est sepculum. […Y]et this I know, That the irrational and inanimate, as well as rational creatures, have a Language; and though not by Articulate speech, yet, in a Metaphorical sense, they preach unto man the wisdom, Power, and goodness of God, Rom. 1:20.21

Visuelles und Auditives liegen ineinander, ohne dass einem von beiden ein Vorrang eingeräumt würde. Edwards schließt daran an, wenn er die Schöpfungswerke als “voice or language of God, to instruct intelligent beings in things pertaining to himself ”22 profiliert, um die Praxis ihrer Spiritualisierung zu rechtfertigen. In solch didaktischer Zuspitzung legt sich der Eindruck nahe, Gelegenheitsmeditation sei primär eine gedankliche Übung, ein – wenn auch mit einem gewissen Lustgewinn verbundenes – Gedankenspiel. Seh- und Hörsinn sind menschliche Fernsinne, die den Gegenstand distanzieren und so der reflexiven Auseinandersetzung zugänglich machen. Entsprechend hat die Forschung die Gelegenheitsmeditation auch als einen “mode” bzw. “way of thinking” eingeführt, der im Wesentlichen in einem “metaphorical reasoning” bestünde.23 Dabei wird aber ausgeblendet, dass wir es mit einer Praktik zu tun haben, die zunächst einmal ganz unmittelbar an eine leiblich-sinnliche Erfahrung anschließt, weshalb regelmäßig auch Eindrücke, die sich durch die Nahsinne wie das Riechen, Schmecken oder Fühlen erschließen, spiritualisiert werden. Vor allem aber verbindet sich die Gelegenheitsmeditation auch mit praktischen Handlungsvollzügen, die per Analogieschluss in einen vom Alltag unterschiedenen Sinnhorizont versetzt werden, um damit zugleich wiederum beide aufs Engste miteinander zu verbinden. Ergebnis ist eine Wahrnehmung, worin die Diesseitigkeit des Alltags gänzlich von einem Weltjenseitigen durchdrungen ist. Anders als Weiss-Smith postuliert, muss der Meditationsgegenstand im Falle der occasional meditation also nicht erst für die Anschauung zugerichtet werden durch quasi-wissenschaftliche Operationen wie das “magnifying, pulverizing, repeating and correlating”,24 die den Gegenstand zunächst auf Distanz bringen. Denn wer sich in Gelegenheitsmeditation übt, ist immer schon in die Vollzüge eingebunden, die sie zum Thema hat. Der gerichteten Meditation demgegenüber geht es vor allem um Anverwandlung eines zunächst Abständigen. Topoi christlicher Lehre müssen durch ein komplexes, stufenförmiges Verfahren allererst anverwandelt werden. Gelegenheitsmeditation hingegen greift auf das zurück, was sowieso in der Nähe

21 22 23 24

Wallace, The Spirituality, 120. Edwards, Typological Writings, WJE 11:67; ähnlich WJE 11:152. Coolahan, “Redeeming Parcels of Time”, 124, sowie Weiss-Smith, Empiricist Devotions, 37. Weiss-Smith, Empiricist Devotions, 47.

Jonathan Edwards’ Images

liegt, es mit einer spirituellen Rahmung zu versehen, die auch künftig routiniert abgerufen werden kann. Dieser These werden wir uns ausführlich im dritten Abschnitt zuwenden und damit zugleich an konkreten Alltagspraktiken und materieller Kultur erhärten, dass Bücher mit Gelegenheitsmeditationen nicht nur verkauft, sondern auch tatsächlich gebraucht wurden. Davor sei jedoch die Frage aufgeworfen, wie es zu dieser kognitivistischen Einschätzung der Gelegenheitsmeditation sowie ihres literarischen Niederschlags in Texten wie den Types kommen konnte. Tatsächlich scheint das Bild der gerichteten Meditation die wissenschaftliche Rezeption zu bestimmen. Deren Charakteristikum besteht ja bekanntlich darin, primär im Modus des Diskursiven auf Willen und Affekte Einfluss zu nehmen oder, wie Baxter treffend formuliert,“[to] fire your hearts by the help of your heads“.25 Dies geschieht mittels Verfahren, die sich an kontemplative Techniken mittelalterlicher Mystiker anlehnen. Gelegenheitsmeditation demgegenüber scheint – zumindest zeitgenössischen Autoren zufolge – intuitiv umsetzbar zu sein, weshalb sie oft nur beiläufig abgehandelt ist.26 Dass sich die Gelegenheitsmeditation sozusagen von selbst verstand, scheint auch ihre breite Nachahmerschaft nahezulegen. In Deutschland etwa inspirieren Joseph Halls Occasional Meditations Christian Scriver (1629–1693) zu einer Sammlung von 400 Gelegenheitsmeditationen, die schon 1666 unter dem Titel Gottholds Zufällige Andachten27 verlegt werden. Im pietistischen Württemberg wird dieses Buch bald zum Kassenschlager,28 dicht gefolgt von Gottliebs Zufälligen Andachten. Deren Autor, der schwäbische Pfarrer und direkte Zeitgenosse Edwards’ Andreas Hartmann (1677–1729) gibt sie sechs Jahre vor seinem Tod mit dem Hinweis im Vorwort heraus, Scrivers Buch hätte ihm dazu “Anlaß, Trieb und Lust gegeben”.29 Auch die Zufälligen Andachten verzichten auf methodische Einführung. Auf das Verfahren kann jedoch aus dem Aufbau der Meditationen selbst geschlossen werden. Vergleichen wir Flavel mit Scriver, zeigen sich, wo das Schema konsequent durchgehalten ist, große Übereinstimmungen in der Durchführung. Nach der Benennung einer Wahrnehmung – Gotthold beobachtet, hört, fühlt, schmeckt oder 25 Baxter, Saint’s Everlasting Rest, 570. 26 Exemplarisch sei auf Hall und Baxter verwiesen. Eine Ausnahme stellt Calamy dar. 27 C. Scriver, Gottholds Zufälliger Andachten Vier Hundert: bey Betrachtung mancherley Dinge der Kunst und Natur, in unterschiedenen Veranlassungen zur Ehre Gottes, Besserung des Gemüths und Übung der Gottseligkeit geschöpffet/aufgefasset und entworffen (Leipzig: Süstermann, 1706). 28 Vgl. die Buchstatistik bei H. Medik, Weben und Überleben in Laichingen 1550 – 1900. Lokalgeschichte als Allgemeingeschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996), 534 – 540 auf Grundlage einer Auswertung von Besitzinventaren zwischen 1748 und 1820. 29 A. Hartmann, Gottliebs zufälliger Andachten Zwey Hundert/Bey An- und Einschauung Mancherley Him[m]elischer und irdischen Dinge in zerschiedenen Veranlassungen und Begebenheiten etc. (Stuttgart: Metzler und Ehrhardt, 1723).

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verspürt etwas – schließt sich eine umfängliche Schilderung damit verbundener sinnlicher Reize an. Der Meditationsgegenstand wird möglichst breit erfasst, woraufhin der Analogieschluss auf spirituelle Materien erfolgt. Als stream of consciousness des meditierenden Ich wird er oft gleich in mehrfacher Hinsicht vollzogen. So mag beispielsweise das Einpfropfen von Schösslingen einerseits zum Sinnbild der glaubenden Vereinigung mit Christus geraten; deren Teilmomente hingegen lassen sich wiederum in den einzelnen Handgriffen des Züchters wiederfinden. Im entlegensten Detail nach Zusammenhängen suchend, wird so ein Hintersinn konstruiert, worauf bei Flavel ein mit ‘Reflections’ überschriebener Teil folgt, in dem die miteinander ins Verhältnis gebrachten Materien mittels affektiver Sprache emotional aufgeladen werden. Die im Diesseitigen erfasste geistliche Realität wird, wo solcher emotion talk eingeübt ist, mit der Evidenz persönlicher Erfahrung ausgestattet. Die von Interjektionen und Emotiven durchtränkte Selbstanrede mündet schließlich in ein Gebet, in dem das Verhandelte in konkrete Absichten überführt wird, die womöglich abschließend mittels eines Merkverses im Gedächtnis verankert werden. Dass die Emotionalisierung religiöser Materien vor allem im Medium der Sprache vor sich geht, mag die kognitivistische Deutung der Gelegenheitsmeditation befördert haben, zumal mit ‘Reflections’ überschriebene Abschnitte oder auf Memorieren abzielende Merkverse selbst nahezulegen scheinen, dass wir es primär mit gedanklichen Operationen zu tun haben. Tatsächlich aber lässt sich die Gelegenheitsmeditation besser als eine Praktik beschrieben, in der sich ‘doings’ und ‘sayings’30 miteinander im Dienste einer Kultivierung von Emotionen verbinden.31 Letztlich nämlich stellen sich die fraglichen Gefühle erst ein, indem die Akteure auf sie zu sprechen kommen. ‘Feelings’32 werden hervorgerufen, indem sie aufgespürt, identifiziert, intensiviert und im Gebet vor Gott gebracht werden. Der mittels Analogie konstruierte Hintersinn wird infolgedessen in einen anderen Aggregatzustand überführt: Von einer Vorstellung, die sich doch kritisch hinterfragen lässt, zur persönlichen Erfahrung, deren Evidenz sich im persönlich Erlebten erschließt. Konstruktionen religiöser Wirklichkeit, wie sie sich also in den Images und vergleichbaren Literaturen finden, werden so zum Erfahrungswissen, das sich

30 Zur praxistheoretischen Einordnung vgl. T. Schatzki, The Site of the Social: A Philosophical Account of the Constitution of Social Life and Change (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002). 31 Damit schließe ich an M. Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (And Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion”, History and Theory 51 (2012) 193–220 an, wie in K. Krause, Bekehrungsfrömmigkeit. Historische und kultursoziologische Perspektiven auf eine Gestalt gelebter Religion (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018), 145, ausführlich dargelegt. 32 Gewissermaßen als Weiterführung des Schatzkischen Ansatzes von ‘doings’ und ‘sayings’.

Jonathan Edwards’ Images

nur schwer abweisen lässt. Das Gefühl, sich inmitten einer verzauberten Welt zu befinden, in der alles von göttlicher Absicht durchdrungen ist, gewinnt dadurch die Evidenz der Erfahrung. Bestreiten lässt es sich allenfalls durch ein alternatives Lebensgefühl was, wie in Abschnitt 3.1 darzulegen ist, oft genug auch geschah. Zur Absicherung der Gewissheit, die mittels Gelegenheitsmeditation geschaffen wird, bedarf es dann weiterer Bemühungen. Weltsicht und Lebensgefühl sind erst stabil, wenn sie die gleichsam unhintergehbare Selbstverständlichkeit des Habituellen gewonnen haben; sich gewissermaßen dem Leib eingeschrieben haben und ihn von innen heraus zu steuern beginnen. Die Wahrnehmung einer verzauberten Welt muss also in Fleisch und Blut übergehen. Wo dies gelingt, eignet ihr die Evidenz des Faktischen, wie in Abschnitt 3.2 an konkreten Beispielen zu illustrieren ist.

Zwischenbilanz Zuvor jedoch sei das bislang Verhandelte noch einmal bilanziert: Begreift man die Images und verwandte Texte als textlichen Niederschlag einer umfassenden historischen visual culture, stößt man unvermeidlich auf die Praktik der Gelegenheitsmeditation. Diese wiederum erweist sich als eine Form religiöser Konstruktion von Wirklichkeit. Konstruiert wird eine allumfassende Zusammenschau von Natur, Mensch, Geschichte und Kultur in einem Kosmos, der gänzlich von Gottes Vorsehung durchdrungen ist. In der erfahrbaren Welt gibt es demnach nichts Zufälliges mehr. Alles ist wohlgefügt und verweist auf seinen göttlichen Ursprung. Diese Sicht der Dinge geht mit einem Lebensgefühl einher, das sich umso stärker Evidenz verschafft, je routinierter die Gelegenheitsmeditation praktiziert wird. Folge davon ist die Kultivierung einer Wahrnehmung, in deren Horizont ganz alltägliche Vollzüge transzendiert werden, um sich ihnen auch künftig unter diesen Vorzeichen widmen zu können. Religiöse Vorstellungen, auf die sich der leibliche Vollzug bezogen sieht, gewinnen in solchem Erleben die Evidenz der Erfahrung. Empfindungen indes sind von kurzer Dauer und werden fraglich, wo ein alternatives Lebensgefühl sich Raum zu verschaffen beginnt. Unplausibel wird die Wahrnehmung, sich in einer von Sinnbezügen durchwalteten Welt geborgen zu wissen, aber auch, wo deren Konstruktivität sichtbar wird, d. h. die postulierten Sinnbezüge unter Verdacht geraten, den Dingen von den Menschen selbst unterlegt worden zu sein. Je pluraler die Weltanschauungen und Lebensformen, desto größer die Wahrscheinlichkeit, dass dies geschieht. Dann bedarf es weiterer Konstruktionen zur Absicherung der fraglichen Konstruktionen – ein Umstand, der sich, wie im Folgenden zu zeigen ist, auch in den Images deutlich niederschlägt.

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3.

Transgression aufs Himmlische als Konstruktion einer verzauberten Welt

Strategien zur Absicherung der Konstruktion einer verzauberten Welt setzen in der Regel an zwei Stellen an: Diskursiv, auf der Ebene theologischer Argumentation (3.1.) oder aber – mit wohl größerer Nachhaltigkeit – auf dem breiten Feld der Alltagspraxis (3.2). Sich mit letzterem zu befassen, ist aussichtsreich, weil die Frage nach körperlich-materiellen Implikationen der Gelegenheitsmeditation meines Wissens nach bislang kaum aufgeworfen wurde. Der Blick auf die Alltagskultur eröffnet aber auch Möglichkeiten, mehr zur tatsächlichen Verbreitung dieser Praktik in Erfahrung zu bringen. Auch wird die Attraktivität der Gelegenheitsmeditation, die mancherorts bis ins frühe 20. Jahrhundert hinein greifbar ist, vor diesem Hintergrund eher verständlich. 3.1

Diskursive Konstruktionen zur Absicherung der verzauberten Welt

Auf die kritische Rückfrage, ob Entsprechungen, wie sie in den Images vorgenommen werden, nicht vielleicht doch bloß Ergebnis wilder Spekulation seien,33 kann zunächst mit dem Hinweis auf Autoritäten begegnet werden. Bezugnahmen auf biblische Personen, vor allem aber auf Christus und bisweilen auch Gott selbst,34 finden sich zuhauf neben Verweisen auf Gestalten der Kirchengeschichte.35 Weitaus interessanter jedoch sind Verwahrungsstrategien, die einer Logik der Einverleibung folgen. Was zu entzaubern droht, wird schlicht wiederverzaubert. Bisweilen wird die Praktik auch insofern gerechtfertigt, als die damit einhergehende visual culture selbst Gegenstand einer Spiritualisierung wird, um sie als gottgewollt zu legitimieren. Im Einzelnen handelt es sich also um den Versuch, alternative Weltsichten, die zu einer schleichenden Entzauberung der Lebenswelt führen könnten, samt den dazugehörigen Praktiken und Artefakten in den Horizont der verzauberten Welt

33 Eine Frage, mit der sich Zeitgenossen auch selbstkritisch konfrontieren konnten, vgl. Edwards, Typological Writings, WJE 11:152; Coolahan, “Redeeming Parcels of Time “, sowie Weiss-Smith, Empiricist Devotions. 34 Vgl. exemplarisch Calamy, The Art of Divine Meditation, 9f.; Scriver, Gottholds zufällige Andachten, Vorrede o.P., Edwards, Typological Writings, WJE 11:62. Genannt werden u. a. Abraham, David, Salomo, kurioserweise auch Bileams Eselin, sowie Paulus, vor allem aber der in Gleichnissen predigende Jesus und nicht zuletzt Gott selbst, indem er Noah den Regenbogen vor Augen stellt. 35 Augustin, Chrysostomus, Hieronymus oder Martin von Tours, aber auch Größen der kontemplativen Tradition von Bernhard von Clairvaux über Luther bis zu Baxter, Henshaw oder Harsdörffer zählen nebst einem namentlich nicht benannten Konstanzer Bauer zu den Gewährsleuten, die bei Hall, Flavel, Calamy oder Scriver erwähnt werden.

Jonathan Edwards’ Images

wieder einzuspeisen, um die damit verbundenen konkurrierenden Wissenskulturen gewissermaßen zu entschärfen. Während im Gewitter über Neuengland die einen noch eine machtvolle Epiphanie Gottes gewärtigen, der mit Donnerstimme zur Buße ruft und sein Volk mit Unwetter, Krieg und Seuchen züchtigt,36 experimentieren andere schon mit Blitzableitern und Pockenimpfung.37 Physikalische Gesetzmäßigkeiten beginnen, die Regel zu formulieren, nach der sich die Welt selbst im Innersten zusammenhält. Elektrische Energien durchziehen Himmel und Erde und die bedrohliche Dynamik des Blitzes, der Türme oder Bäume zu Fall bringt – für Edwards ein Bild göttlichen Zorns, der die Stolzen erniedrigt38 – kann durch Menschenhand eingedämmt werden. Fromme Zeitgenossen indes können solche Entwicklungen noch mit enthusiastischer Neugierde mitverfolgen, um die neuen Erkenntnisse samt der Instrumente, durch die sie zutage gefördert wurden, sogleich zu spiritualisieren. Damit wird, was die Konstruktion einer verzauberten Welt prinzipiell in Frage stellen könnte, eben jenem Sinnhorizont wieder einverleibt. Beispiele dafür sind Edwards’ Überlegungen zu Gravitation und Hydraulik39 oder zu Apparaturen mit Zahnrädern.40 Solche Strategien indes müssen sich, je länger, je mehr, als heikel erweisen, bedienen sie sich doch eben jenes Organons, dem durch konkurrierende Epistemologien der Boden entzogen zu werden beginnt. Und so wird diese Strategie auch für die spiritualisierende Wahrnehmung selbst in Anschlag gebracht. Das zu Grunde liegende Argument lautet dann: Es gibt in der Welt der Erscheinungen Phänomene, die diesen Modus der Betrachtung wiederum selbst nahelegen. Edwards verfährt so, wenn er die Plausibilität seiner Images und der sie hervorbringenden Praxis mit naturgesetzlichen Argumenten41 zu begründen sucht. Anderen wiederum werden konkrete Erscheinungen aus Natur und Kultur zum Emblem einer die Welt der Erscheinungen spiritualisierenden Sichtweise. Klassischer Topos etwa ist die Biene, die anders als die in ihrem Netz

36 Edwards, Typological Writings, WJE 11:91; Jonathan Edwards, Letters and Personal Writings (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 16; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 793f.; Jonathan Edwards, The Great Awakening (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 16; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 195; Jonathan Edwards, The Life of David Brainerd (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 7, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 140. 37 Cf I.B. Cohen, Benjamin Franklin’s Science (2nd edn.; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003). Zur Impfkontroverse im Neuengland der 1720er vgl. exemplarisch J.D. Burton, “‘The Awful Judgements of God upon the Land’: Smallpox in Colonial Cambridge, Massachusetts”, The New England Quarterly 74 (2001), 495–506. 38 Edwards, Typological Writings, WJE 11:75.97. 39 Edwards, Typological Writings, WJE 11:81.107. 40 Edwards, Typological Writings, WJE 11:118.125. 41 Edwards, Typological Writings, WJE 11:69, als Beispiel für die Regel sowie Edwards, Typological Writings, WJE 11:61 als Ausnahme, die die Regel bestätigt.

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abwartende Spinne rastlos umherfliegt, um aus allem, was sich ihr darbietet, Nektar zu saugen.42 Ähnliches will mit dem Bezug auf einen Destillierkolben ausgesagt werden: Occasional meditation is an act by which the soul spiritualiseth every object about which it is conversant. A gracious heart is like an alembic; it can distil useful thoughts out of all things that it meeteth with. Look, as it seeth all things in God, so it seeth God in all things.43

Auch Calamy greift darauf zurück, wenn er betont, “A godly Christian is like a Heavenly Alchymist, that can draw Heaven out of a spider as it were, draw something of God out of a Toad”.44 Weitaus verbreiteter noch, weil in Literatur und Volkskultur breit verankert, scheint der Rekurs auf optische Apparaturen gewesen zu sein, die ohne Umwege auf Visualität abheben. Beispiele dafür etwa finden sich bei Hervey: I think, we should always view the visible system with an evangelical telescope (if I may be allowed the expression), and with an evangelical microscope, regarding Jesus Christ as the great projector and architect, who planned and executed the amazing scheme. Whatever is magnificent or valuable, tremendous or amiable, should ever be ascribed to the Redeemer. This is the Christian’s Natural Philosophy.45

Ob Edwards auf Hervey zurückgreift,46 wenn er selbst das Teleskop – eigentlich ein Entzauberungsgerät par excellence – zum Sinnbild endzeitlich unbeschränkter Gotterkenntnis erhebt,47 muss dahingestellt bleiben. Jedenfalls scheint dieser Topos weitaus konventioneller, als oft geglaubt, wie unter anderem auch ein Emblem an der

42 Coolahan, “Redeeming Parcels of Time”, 132. Ähnlich Scriver, Gottholds zufällige Andachten, Vorwort o.P.: “Es gehet mir offt als einem Hu[h]n, welches auf einem Misthauffen ein Körnlein findet.” 43 T. Manton, “Several Sermons Upon the CXIX Psalm”, The Works of Thomas Manton D.D. (4 vol., London: 1872), 151–160, 153f. 44 Calamy, The Art of Divine Meditation, 15. 45 J. Hervey, Meditations and Contemplations. In Two Volumes. Containing Vol. I.: Meditations among the Tombs. Reflections on a Flower Garden; And a Descant on Creation. Vol. II. Contemplations on the Night. Contemplations on the Starry Heavens; And a Winter Piece (3rd edn.; London: 1748), 185f. 46 Auf Empfehlung eines seiner schottischen Korrespondenten schafft er das Buch schließlich an, vgl. Edwards, Catalogue of Books, WJE 26:244, 333. Seine Tochter Esther Edwards-Burr wiederum tauscht sich darüber mit ihrer Freundin Sarah Prince aus, vgl. C.F. Karlsen/L. Crumpacker, The Journal of Esther Edwards Burr 1754–1757 (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1984), 114. 47 Edwards, Typological Writings, WJE 11:101.

Jonathan Edwards’ Images

Abb. 01 Emblem auf der Emporenbrüstung der Kirche zu Freudental (bei Besigheim).

Emporenbrüstung der Kirche zu Freudental nahelegt (Abb. 1).48 Kirchgänger, die ihren Blick nach oben schweifen lassen, finden dort drei Knaben, die konzentriert ihre Fernrohre in eine von einer Gloriole durchleuchteten Öffnung im Himmel richten. Die Bildunterschrift dazu lautet: „Hier kannst du haben einen Schein, wie groß wird dort die Freude sein!“ Zu den konventionalisierten Topoi zählt aber auch die Brille. Schon Hall bedient sich ihrer,49 um die Spezifika der Offenbarung Gottes in Schrift, Natur und Heilsgeschichte zum Ausdruck zu bringen. Als ein Sinnbild spiritualisierender Betrachtung von Natur und Kultur wird die Brille wiederum auch auf einem Emblem inszeniert, das Johann Arndts Bücher vom wahren Christentum beigegeben ist.50 Der Zusammenhang zwischen Abbildung und Mottovers wird in einer Prosaerklärung verdeutlicht:

48 Das Fernrohrmotiv findet sich auch in der Stettener Schlosskapelle, vgl. H. Westphal, Sehnsucht nach dem himmlischen Jerusalem. Das Emblemprogramm der Stettener Schlosskapelle (1682) (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2017), 138f. 49 Huntley, Bishop Joseph Hall, 180. 50 Embleme wie diese finden seit der sogenannten Rigaer Ausgabe, die erstmals 1678/79 verlegt wird, Eingang in die deutschsprachige Religionskultur, cf. Peil, “The Emblem”, 199f. Die wohl erste deutsch-amerikanische Arndt-Ausgabe mit Emblemen erscheint 1751 in Philadelphia, cf. D. Peil, “Zur Illustrationsgeschichte von Johann Arndts ‘Vom wahren Christentum’. Mit einer Bibliographie”, Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens 18 (1977), 963–1066, col. 1016.

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Abb. 02 Detail eines Kupferstichs mit vier Emblemen aus J. Arndt, Sechs Bücher vom wahren Christentum (Altdorff: E.F. Zobel, 1735), eingebunden zwischen Seite 542 und 543.

Hier ist eine Brille, durch welche man auf etwas anders siehet, und es deutlicher erkennen kann: Also sollen die Kreaturen unsere geistliche Brille sein, durch welche wir sollen auf ihren Schöpfer sehen, und denselben desto mehr lieben.51

Die optische Apparatur jedoch gerät, so es darum geht, die Praxis der Spiritualisierung argumentativ abzusichern, auch an ihre Grenzen. Brille und Fernrohr können letztlich doch nur schon vorhandene Sehkraft verstärken. Das Sehvermögen selbst ist vorausgesetzt. Entsprechend vermag sich der hintersinnige Blick, der beständig in der Welt der Erscheinungen Gottes Wirklichkeit gewahrt, nur dem Auge des Glaubens zu eröffnen. Oder anders gesagt: Es bedarf eines geformten Blicks, der durch die Sehschule der Gelegenheitsmeditation gegangen ist. Auch Edwards argumentiert so, wenngleich er sich dabei in einem anderen Sprachspiel, nämlich im Rahmen eines soteriologischen Deutungsschema bewegt.52 Das Vermögen, Gott in allen Dingen zu wähnen, seine Stimme aus Natur und Geschichte zu vernehmen und sämtliche Erscheinungen der Erfahrungswelt auf einen

51 J. Arndt, Sechs Bücher vom wahren Christentum (Altdorff: E.F. Zobel, 1735), 543. 52 Zum Folgenden vgl. ausführlich Lowance, “Images or Shadows of Divine”, 270–274 sowie Knight, “Learning the Language of God”, 550.

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Heilsplan hin zu dechiffrieren, wird als Gabe des göttlichen Geistes konzipiert. Diese wiederum teilt sich nur in der alles umstürzenden Buß- und Umkehrerfahrung mit, ist also ausschließlich jenen gewährt, die erwählt sind. Bekehrte, und nur Bekehrte, so Edwards, verfügen über den new sense of the heart – jenen siebten Sinn, der überall Abschattungen des göttlichen Heilswillens zu erblicken vermag. Das Vermögen dazu kann deshalb auch als ein Zeichen der Gnade bzw. des Wachsens in ihr gewertet werden.53 Nicht zuletzt wird wohl auch darum beständig zur fleißigen Übung der Gelegenheitsmeditation angehalten. Flankiert wird diese Argumentation von einer schöpfungstheologischen Reflexion, die darauf abhebt, dass die Beziehungen zwischen den Dingen und jenem immateriell Geistlichen, auf das sie verweisen, von Anbeginn der Schöpfung gesetzt sind.54 In der Welt der Erscheinungen materialisiert sich die kommunikative Disposition Gottes. Die fraglichen Sinnbezüge sind infolgedessen in die jeweiligen Referenten gelegte, und ihnen darum inhärente Qualitäten. Entsprechungen werden also nicht erfunden, sondern aufgefunden! Gott hat sie in die Kreatur gelegt, um sich entdecken zu lassen. Weil Kritiker aber mangels göttlicher Befähigung keinen Resonanzboden dafür haben, können sie gar nicht anders, als das Argument der Selbstreferenzialität aufzubringen. Sie sind, um es mit Scriver einmal klar auf den Punkt zu bringen, schlicht verstockt.55 Einem solchen Exklusivismus, der in einer Konstruktion besteht, die sich dagegen verwahrt, ihre eigene Konstruktivität anzuerkennen, lässt sich eigentlich nur mit Amüsement und Persiflage begegnen. Auch dafür finden sich Beispiele, worauf noch einzugehen sein wird. Auf Dauer bleibt diese Selbstimmunisierungsstrategie nämlich unplausibel. Haltbar ist sie nur, wenn die Absicherungsarbeit auch auf anderer Ebene als der des Arguments ansetzt. Die Konstruktion einer von Sinnbeziehungen durchwalteten Welt muss samt der damit einhergehenden Wahrnehmung zur unhinterfragten Selbstverständlichkeit werden. Dies gelingt umso besser, je alltäglicher sie wird, d. h. je intuitiver sie sich einstellt und je weniger über sie nachgedacht wird, weil sie gleichsam natürlich in die umgebenden Alltagsarrangements eingebaut ist.

53 Zur Untermauerung dieses soteriologischen Arguments kann Edwards daher auch für sämtliche Teilmomente des ordo salutis Entsprechungen finden, vgl. für den Stand in der Sünde, Edwards, Typological Writings, WJE 11:54, 92, 94, 96; für das Wirken des Gesetzes im Stande der preparatio Edwards, Typological Writings, WJE 11:60, 62; für die alles entscheidende Erfahrung der humilatio Edwards, Typological Writings, WJE 11:58; für die glaubende unio mit Christus Edwards, Typological Writings, WJE 11:52–54, 67; für Belastungen und Prüfungen im Stand der Heiligung Edwards, Typological Writings, WJE 11:61, 106–108. Die gesamte Morphologie der Bekehrung wird darin als unhinterfragbare göttliche Setzung legitimiert. 54 So argumentiert schon Flavel, Husbandry Spiritualized, 120. 55 Ähnlich argumentiert Scriver, Gottholds zufällige Andachten, Vorrede o.P.: “Mich aber düncket, daß täglich und stündlich auch die unvernunfftige und stumme Geschöpfe mit uns reden, wenn wir nur Ohren hätten, ihre Sprache zu hören, und Hertzen, dieselbe zu verstehen.”

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Konstruktionsarbeit wird dann gewissermaßen automatisiert und entschwindet dem Bewusstsein. Zur Erhellung dieses Zusammenhangs hat sich das Konzept des impliziten, verkörperten oder stummen Wissens bewährt.56 Wie der Bourdieusche Habitus, der scheinbar von selbst aus dem Körper heraus agiert, wo er einmal sozialisiert wurde, kommt auch dieses Wissen routiniert zur Anwendung. Einmal in Fleisch und Blut übergegangen, kann es nur noch unter erheblichem Aufwand diskursiv verfügbar gemacht werden. Mehr ein Können, das sich von selbst versteht, als ein Wissen, ist es kritischer Reflexion kaum mehr zugänglich. Einst ein knowing that, das in ein knowing how transformiert wurde und sich in fraglosem doing Ausdruck verschafft, hat es sich in Körper und materielle Kultur einschrieben. Damit ist eine Evidenz des Faktischen generiert, die es nahelegt, Praktiken der Spiritualisierung auch unter Aspekten ihrer Körperlichkeit und Materialität zu betrachten und die Gewissheiten in den Blick zu nehmen, die dadurch geschaffen werden.57 Es gilt darum abschließend, den Blick auch auf Bestände verkörperten Wissens zu richten, um vor diesem Hintergrund ein vertiefteres Verständnis für das Subjekte und das ihre Sehpraxis formende Potential der Gelegenheitsmeditation zu gewinnen. 3.2

Formungen eines auf das Himmlische transgredierenden Habitus

Als hilfreich erweist sich dabei das Konzept von einem auf das Himmlische transgredierenden Habitus, das ich in Anlehnung an Scharfe58 als Ergänzung zur These eines ‘habit of mind’ ins Gespräch bringen möchte. Denn die Begrifflichkeit der Transgression vermag die Zusammenhänge weitaus umfänglicher zu erfassen als es die Rede von einer chiliastischen Mentalität oder Geisteshaltung vermag. Vor allem aber findet sie eine quellensprachliche Fundierung in einer Pastoraltheologie aus dem 18. Jahrhundert. Unter dem Abschnitt “Von erbaulicher General-Auffsicht” heißt es da: Wenn ein Prediger bey seinen Zuhörern einen Eingang im Umgang mit ihnen bekommen will, muß er nicht gleich ex abrupto Himmelische Dinge mit ihnen reden; eines theils darum, daß solche ihnen nicht vilesciren; anderntheils darum, daß sie nicht scheu werden mit dem Prediger umzugehen, sondern von […] ihren Oeconomicis &c. Gelegenheit nehmen aufs Himmlische die Transgression und Application zu machen nach Christi, deß Meisters, mit der gelehrten Zunge Exempel […]. Es sey dann Sache, daß sie ihm

56 R. Keller/M. Meuser, Körperwissen (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2011). 57 Zum Ansatz vgl. Krause, Bekehrungsfrömmigkeit, 192. 58 M. Scharfe, Die Religion des Volkes. Kleine Kultur- und Sozialgeschichte des Pietismus (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1980), 97–102.

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selbst (welches freylich am besten ist,) Anlaß geben, und à Coelistibus anfangen. Auch ist bey Gesprächen von Himmelischen Dingen nöthig, daß der Prediger immer, so viel es Gelegenheit gibt, Applicationem ad Cor Auditoris mache.59

Transgression auf das Himmlische geht darin eindeutig über eine bloß gedankliche Operation hinaus. Hartmann pocht auf Kultivierung einer Haltung, die darin besteht, die “Hertzen allgemach von der Erde gen Himmel […] auf[zu]schwingen”.60 Entsprechend wird Amtsbrüdern auch dazu geraten, Transgression auf das Himmlische auch im Rahmen einer Seelsorge bei Gelegenheit zu praktizieren. Gemeindeglieder, so Hartmann nicht ohne einen gewissen geistlichen Stolz, hätten ihm dies vielfach zu danken gewusst: Unser Herrgott im Himmel vergelte dem Herrn Pfarrer tausendfältig, daß er uns Bauern gelehrt hat, wie wir natürliche und zeitliche Dinge aufs Geistliche und Himmlische ziehen sollen.61

Anleitung erhält das Kirchenvolk im persönlichen Gespräch,62 aber auch durch Standesliteratur, deren Vorbilder im englischen Puritanismus zu suchen sind. John Flavels Husbandry Spiritualized etwa inspiriert neben Navigation Spiritualized zu unzähligen Nachahmungen, die Vollzüge alltäglicher Berufsarbeit einer spiritualisierten Betrachtung zugänglich zu machen. 63 Bauern, Seefahrer und Kaufleute finden sich darin ebenso zur Transgression ermutigt wie Weingärtner und Leinenweber. Im württembergischen Pietismus ist derlei Literatur noch im frühen 20. Jahrhundert in Gebrauch.64

59 A. Hartmann, Unvorgreifflich-Einfältig- und wohlgemeynter Entwurff/Wie ein Dorff-Pfarrer seiner anvertrauten Gemeinde erbaulich vorstehen möge etc. (Ulm: Georg Wilhelm Kühnen, 1710), 157. 60 Hartmann, Unvorgreifflich-Einfältig- und wohlgemeynter Entwurff, 159. 61 A. Hartmann, Anweisung, wie die Landleute ihre Feld- und Haus-Geschäfte zur Ehre Gottes und Erbauung ihrer Seelen einrichten können (Ulm: 1709), 240. 62 Beispiele seiner fast schon zudringlichen Art, Gemeindeglieder bei der Arbeit dazu anzuhalten, finden sich in der Anweisung zuhauf. 63 Vgl. dazu sowie zum Folgenden exemplarisch Titel wie C. Mathers Agricola, or the Religious Husbandman, W. Bagshaws Trading Spiritualized oder J. Collinges Weaver‘s Pocket Book, or, Weaving Spiritualised. 64 Vgl. für den Weinbau im Stuttgarter Raum den bei Scharfe, Religion des Volkes, 98f. abgedruckten Bilderbogen ‘Gebet eines Weingärtners’, der um 1900 in Bad-Cannstatt gedruckt wurde, sowie das bei Medik, Weben und Überleben, 557 überlieferte Weber-Lied der Hahnischen Gemeinschaft in Laichingen, das Erinnerungen der Gesprächspartner zufolge noch lange nach der Jahrhundertwende in der Stunde gesungen wurde.

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Abb. 03 The Beardsley Limner: Mrs. Hezekiah Beardsley, geb. Elizabeth Davis aus New Haven (1788–1790), Öl auf Leinwand, Yale University Art Gallery.

Während Männer und bisweilen auch Kinder ausführlich Anleitung erhalten,65 werden Tätigkeiten, die Frauen zugeschrieben werden, in der Andachtsliteratur nur selten thematisiert. Eine Ausnahme, die sich an ein gehobenes Damenpublikum richtet, sind James Herveys Naturmeditationen.66 In entsprechenden Kreisen werden sie auch in Neuengland gelesen, wie nicht zuletzt das Portrait der Mrs. Hezekiah Beardsley, geborene Elizabeth Davis aus New Haven nahelegt, das zwischen 1788 und 1790 entstanden ist. Sorgfältig auf der Höhe des Zeitgeschmacks gekleidet sitzt sie auf einem Windsor Stuhl ihres Salons, dessen Fenster den Blick auf einen direkt am Hause gelegenen Garten freigibt. Der Maler lässt Elizabeth, als würde der das Zimmer betretende Betrachter sie beim Lesen unterbrechen, überrascht aus dem Bild heraus-, ihren Besucher an- und zugleich eigentümlich über ihn hinwegblicken. Das in Strähnen herabfallende Haar der Leserin weist wie das Band um ihren Hals auf Herveys Meditations and Contemplations, dessen aufgeschlagene rechte Seite sie mit einem Eselsohr zu markieren scheint. In ihrer rechten Hand liegen eine offene und eine noch zur Knospe verschlossene Blüte, möglicherweise gepflückt aus den Rabatten vor dem Fenster. Indem der Maler den Gartenweg, Elisabeths Arm und die das Buch haltende Hand auf einer Linie arrangiert, lenkt er unseren Blick noch weiter hinauf in einen zart bewölkten, durch einen Volant größtenteils verhüllten Himmel. Die Konstruktion einer Simultaneität von sichtbarer und unsichtbarer Welt wird darin selbst wiederum ins Bild gesetzt. Elisabeth, die aus der kultivierten Distanz ihres

65 J. Bunyan, Divine Emblems, or Temporal Things Spiritualized. Fitted for the Use of Boys and Girls. Adorn’d with Cuts Suitable to Every Subject (London, 1724). 66 Hervey, Meditations and Contemplations, 1:107ff.

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Salons auf ihren Garten blickt, wird dadurch im Zwischenraum eines alltäglichen und doch zugleich verzauberten Universums positioniert. Deutlich bodenständiger nehmen sich demgegenüber die Transgressionen anlässlich der “Hauß-Geschäfft einer Hausmutter” aus, zu denen der Ulmer Pfarrer Bonifacius Stölzlin (1603–1677) die bis zu den Ellenbogen in Waschtrog und Brotteig versinkende Hausfrau anhält.67 Die Böden der schwäbischen Alb sind so karg, dass Bauersfamilien auf Einkünfte aus dem Nebenerwerb angewiesen sind. Viele haben sich deshalb auf die Herstellung von Leinen spezialisiert. Handwebstühle standen oft in dem dunklen ‘Dunk’, einem engen Kellergelass unterhalb der Wohnstube, dessen anhaltende Feuchte dem Leinen, nicht aber der Gesundheit der dort wirkenden bzw. webenden Frauen und Männer zuträglich war,68 die einander, wie wir Stölzlin entnehmen können, dabei offenbar zuarbeiteten. Das Meditieren über Eigenschaften des Leinens und die Arbeitsschritte zu dessen Herstellung setzt schon beim Spinnen an, einer dezidiert Frauen zugewiesenen Tätigkeit. Dies kann auch singend vor sich gehen, wie das “Geistliche Spinn- oder Gunkel-Liedlein” nahelegt, das sämtliche Vollzüge vom Herauslösen der Flachsfasern über das Anknüpfen abgerissener Fäden bis zum Haspeln zum Anlass nimmt, über die Vergänglichkeit des Lebens zu sinnieren. Vor allem aber werden auch die Abläufe beim Kochen, Brotbacken und Waschen Gegenstand spiritualisierender Betrachtung. Wie bei Edwards ist auch bei Stölzlin das Bearbeiten von Lebensmittel durch Mahlen, Kochen und Rösten Sinnbild für Christi stellvertretendes Leiden.69 Stölzlin sieht darüber hinaus in diesen Vorgängen auch die praeparatio präfiguriert: Wie das Kochen die Nahrungsmittel mürbe macht, “[a]lso sind wir von Natur roh, sicher und frech […]. Aber durch das Feur des Creutzes macht uns Gott mürb und geschlacht, daß wir […] weich werden, uns für Gott demütigen, ihn suchen, und zu ihm ruffen“.70 Spürbar vorweggenommen wird das Gesetz aber auch, wenn der Kochtopf zu brodeln beginnt und der heiße Dampf der Hausfrau, ähnlich wie beim Brühen der Wäsche übrigens auch, unbarmherzig ins Gesicht schlägt.71 Ein geschlechter-, schichten- und generationenübergreifender Anlass, sich im Transgredieren auf das Himmlische zu üben, ist demgegenüber das Zubettgehen.

67 B. Stölzlin, Geistlicher Hauß-, Feld-, Garten-, Tisch- und Hochzeitsprediger etc. (Ulm, 1655), 62–110. 68 Tuberkulose war G. Mayer, “Leinenindustrie und Landwirtschaft in Laichingen” (Heidelberg: Univ., Diss. 1939), 53 zufolge eine Berufskrankheit der Leinenweber. Jahraus, jahrein in diesen schlecht belüfteten Räumen tätig, wurden sie oft auch mit dem wenig schmeichelhaften Titel “Dunkenstenker” belegt. 69 Stölzlin, Geistlicher Haußprediger, 70 sowie Edwards, Typological Writings, WJE 11:122. 70 Stölzlin, Geistlicher Haußprediger, 69. 71 Stölzlin, Geistlicher Haußprediger, 89–97.

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Routinen der Bereitung zur Nacht72 sind wie das morgendliche Aufstehen so alltäglich, dass sich die These einer Schaffung von Gewissheiten, die sich im Leib als Körperwissen verankern, gut daran illustrieren lässt. Auch lässt sich anhand von Zeugnissen materieller Kultur im deutschsprachigen Raum73 plausibilisieren, dass solch geistliches Reframing von Alltagsroutinen auch tatsächlich vorgenommen wurde, um auf diesem Wege Evidenzen des Faktischen zu generieren. Insofern rekurriert Edwards, wenn er beiläufig in dem seiner Sammlung titelgebenden Image auf Schlafen und Aufwachen als Vorwegnahmen von Tod und Auferstehen zu sprechen kommt,74 auf einen geprägten Topos. Schon in Lewis Baylys (1575–1631) Practice of Piety wird er unter der Überschrift “Things to be meditated upon as thou art putting off thy Cloaths”75 aufgerufen, um diesen Vollzug sodann auch en detail auszuführen: “Let therefore thy bed-cloaths represent unto thee the mold of the earth that shall cover thee; thy sheets thy winding-sheet, thy sleep thy death, thy waking thy resurrection.” Autoren wie Hall und Calamy greifen den Topos ebenso wie Scriver und Hartmann in gesonderten Meditationen über das Bett und seine Ausstattung auf.76 Dass die Nacht als eine besonders günstige Zeit für geistliche Übungen gilt, belegt neben entsprechenden der Tagzeit gewidmeten Erbauungsschriften77 auch die Gattung des Morgen- und Abendsegens, die Gesangbüchern häufig beigegeben ist.78

72 Mehr zum Hintergrund findet sich bei K. Krause, “Bereitung zur Nacht. Spuren einer sich wandelnden Praktik in den Lieddichtungen des evangelischen Gesangbuchs”, Liturgie und Kultur 3 (2019) 75–96. 73 Christliche Motive auf der materiellen Alltagskultur sind mir im angloamerikanischen Kontext trotz umfänglicher Recherchen so gut wie kaum begegnet. Literatur, die sich mit dieser Thematik im Umfeld des Puritanismus des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts befasst, beschränkt sich auf Großbritannien, vgl. T. Hamling, Decorating the Godly Household: Religious Art in Post-Reformation Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). Dort finden sich allerdings keine Zeugnisse materieller Kultur besprochen, die auf eine Spiritualisierung abendlicher Einschlafroutinen hinweisen. 74 Edwards, Typological Writings, WJE 11:95. 75 L. Bayly, The Practice of Piety. Directing a Chistian how to walke that he may please God etc. (London, 1672 [1613]), 150. 76 Huntley, Bishop Joseph Hall, 137; Calamy, The Art of Divine Meditation, 18; Scriver, Gottholds Zufälliger Andachten, 84f., 360f.; Hartmann, Gottliebs Zufälliger Andachten, 539–544 (Bett), 544–548 (Schlaf-Küssen). 77 Vgl. exemplarisch die Contemplations on the Night bei J. Hervey, Meditations and Contemplations, 169ff. oder die von einem anonymen Autor herausgegebenen Heilige Nacht-Gedancken Zu munterer Wachsamkeit wider den Sünden-Schlaf und freudiger Seelen-Ruhe etc. (Leipzig: Johann Ludwig Gleditsch, 1710). 78 Weit verbreitet und z.T. noch im frühen 20. Jh. in Gebrauch waren J.F. Starck, Tägliches Handbuch in guten und bösen Tagen, für Gesunde, Betrübte, Kranke und Sterbende (Stuttgart: Steinkopf, 1848 [1727]) oder M.E.G. Tietz, Geistliche Wasserquelle, woraus zu schöpfen tägliche Morgen- und Abendsegen mit Reim-Gebetlein etc. (Magdeburg: Carl Friedrich Faber, 1775 [1765]).

Jonathan Edwards’ Images

Abb. 04 Titelkupfer zu Heilige NachtGedancken Zu munterer Wachsamkeit wider den Sünden-Schlaf und freudiger Seelen-Ruhe etc. (Leipzig: Johann Ludwig Gleditsch, 1710).

Bisweilen wirkt solchermaßen spiritualisierendes Liedgut, wie Paul Gerhards (1607–1676) Nun ruhen alle Wälder bis heute fort. 1647 in der Praxis Pietatis Melica veröffentlicht,79 begleitet dieses Abendlied die leiblich-körperlichen Vollzüge beim Zubettgehen über mehrere Strophen hinweg, um sie dabei stets auch mit einer spiritualisierenden Rahmung zu versehen. Das Abstreifen von Kleidern und Schuhen wird zum Sinnbild für das Ablegen des sterblichen Leibs, beim Hineinsteigen ins Bett wird singend die eigene Grablegung vorweggenommen. Indem schließlich Haupt und Glieder in den Schlaf finden, kommt auch die Sünde zur Ruhe. Die matte Seele kann sich getrost der Bewusstlosigkeit überlassen. Indem die leiblichen Vollzüge so Schritt für Schritt begleitet werden, wird der Körper gewissermaßen sakralisiert. Deutlich zeigt sich diese Tendenz in Benjamin Schmolcks (1672–1737) Gottgeheiligte Andachten, einer Sammlung von Abend- und Morgengebete für alle Wochentage, denen stets auch ein Lied beigegeben ist.80 Tag

79 A. Beutel, “Lutherischer Lebenstrost. Einsichten in Paul Gerhardts Abendlied ‘Nun ruhen alle Wälder’”, Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 105 (2008) 217–241. 80 B. Schmolck, Herrn Benjamin Schmolckens Past. Prim. und Inspect. der Evangelischen Kirchen und Schulen vor Schweidnitz, Gott-geheiligte Morgen- und Abend-Andachten etc. (Leipzig/Frankfurt, 1752).

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für Tag wird aufs Neue der Nexus zwischen Schlafen und Sterben, Aufwachen und Auferstehen enaktiert. Die Nacht gerät so zur Todeszone, weshalb das Hineingleiten in diese prekäre Schwellenphase besonderer Sorgfalt bedarf. Schmolck nimmt sich des Übergangs an, indem er die Abendroutinen begleitet, bis die Seele schließlich in Jesu Wunden zur Ruhe kommt. Im Einzelnen hat man sich solches Ruhen in Jesu Wunden vorzustellen, wie im Abendlied am Freitag besungen.81 Das Kissen wird zum Dornkranz, der Schlafrock zu Jesu Spottmantel, der Schlaftrunk zum Blut Christi. Das Motiv der Ruhe in Jesu Wunden findet sich auch im Starckschen Gebetbuch, einem weiteren Bestseller im deutschsprachigen Protestantismus des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts. Dessen Abendgebet am Sonntag schließt mit den Worten: So gehe dann hin, mein Lieb, in deine Kammer, zur Ruhe, du aber meine Seele, in die Wunden Jesu. Laß mich, Herr! von dir nicht wanken, in dir schlaf ich sanft und wohl; gieb mir heilige Gedanken, und bin ich gleich Schlafes voll: so laß doch den Geist in mir, zu dir wachen für und für, bis die Morgenröth angehet, und man von dem Bett aufstehet, Amen.82

Im darauffolgenden Lied Ich lege mich in Jesu Wunden wird dieses Motiv wieder aufgenommen. Gesungen auf die eindrucksvolle Melodie Georg Neumarks zu Wer nur den lieben Gott lässt walten, hat es eine enorme Breitenwirkung erfahren, sodass sogar auf einem Bett aus dem Emmental, das derzeit im Depot des Freilichtmuseums in Ballenberg eingelagert ist, darauf Bezug genommen wurde. Eine Inschrift im Kopfteil übernimmt direkt die letzte Liedzeile der ersten Strophe: “Fürchte nicht die finstre Nacht / wenn jesus im [sic] dein Bette wacht / ulrich Moismann 1847”. Ob der Spruch im Sinne eines Mottos angebracht wurde, das allabendlich daran erinnert, das Zubettgehen als geistliche Disziplin zu betreiben, muss dahingestellt bleiben. Zu wenig wissen wir über den Besitzer des Bettes und die Schläfer, die nach ihm darin gelegen haben. Ganz explizit hingegen wird das Motiv der Ruhe in Jesu Wunden auf zwei Himmelbetten, die sich im Besitz der Volkskundlichen Kommission für Westfalen in Münster befinden. Die Inschrift auf dem Kopfteil des Bettes aus Abb. 5 lautet “Johannes Herman Heinrich Nolting 1845”, das Motto darüber, auf zwei Kassetten verteilt, “Ora et labora”. Auf der Außenseite des Betthimmels verläuft ein Fries, das näheren Aufschluss darüber gibt, wie diese Maxime im Ravensberger Land umgesetzt werden sollte:

81 Schmolck, Gott-geheiligte Morgen- und Abend-Andachten, 90. 82 Starck, Tägliches Handbuch, 29.

Jonathan Edwards’ Images

Abb. 05 Himmelbett Johannes Hermann Heinrich Noltings aus dem Jahr 1845 mit Haltestrick (sog. Helpup) aus Bünde, Kreis Herford.

Abb. 06 Aussteuerbett der Christine Luise Engel Poppensieker, verheiratete Kämper aus dem Jahr 1862 mit Haltestrick (sog. Helpup) aus Löhne, Kreis Herford.

Dis ist ein schones Schlafgemach wo auf der Leib sich ruhen / mach von den Berufsgshaften und eh ihr euch zu Ruh / begeht so furt die Sele Jesu zu das sie in seinen W.D.N.R.

Beim Auftragen der Inschrift muss wohl der Platz ausgegangen sein, weshalb der Handwerker sich gezwungen sah, die letzten Worte abzukürzen. Vergleicht man diese rätselhaften Initialen mit einer Inschrift auf dem Aussteuerbett der Christine Luise Engel Poppensieker, verheiratete Kämper aus dem Jahr 1862 (Abb. 6), lichtet sich das Geheimnis – freilich nicht ohne ein gewisses Amüsement hervorzurufen: Das ist ein schönes Schlafgemach wo auf der Leib sich ruhen mach von den / Berufsgeschäften und eh ihr euch zur Ruhe begebt so furt die/ Sehle Jesu zu das sie in seinen heiligen Munden ruhet.

Platzprobleme gab es diesmal keine, wohl aber einen Verschreiber. Dieser lässt, wie auch die übrigen orthographischen Varianten vermuten, dass Handwerker über Musterbücher verfügten, in denen sich Vorlagen zur Auszier von Möbeln fanden.

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Neben Motiven wie Blumenranken, Vögel und Gestirnen könnte es darin auch eine Sammlung von Sprüchen gegeben haben, was wiederum wahrscheinlich machen würde, dass es auch andernorts Betten gegeben haben könnte, die mit religiösem Spruchgut ausgestattet waren.83 Auch wenn uns solch ein Blut- und Wundenkult heute abständig vorkommt – das Motiv und die damit verbundene Praxis all-abendlicher Gelegenheitsmeditation fand offenbar auch über das Liedgut Eingang in die protestantische Volkskultur und hat sich mancherorts bis weit ins 19. Jahrhundert hinein erhalten. Dass wir den Begriff der Transgression auf das Himmlische zu Recht auch für allabendliche Spiritualisierungen von Routinen und Artefakten rund um das Bett in Anspruch nehmen, lässt sich mit Schmolcks Abendlied am Mittwoch begründen. Das Schlafen im Bett – bislang ein Bild für das Grab – gerät dort zur lustvollen Vorwegnahme himmlischer Herrlichkeit: Ich suche dich in meinem Bette holdseligster Immanuel; o dass ich dich gefunden hätte! so freuet sich mein Leib und Seel. Komm, kehre willig bey mir ein; Mein Hertz soll deine Kammer seyn. […] Wohlan! du treuer Freund der Seelen, ich habe dich, ich halte dich: schlaf ich in deiner Wunden Höhlen, so ist mir gar nichts hinderlich. Ich weiß, dass, wo du Jesus bist, mein Bette gar der Himmel ist.84

Manch ein Bett erleichtert einem die Transgression auf das Himmlische auch dadurch, dass im Betthimmel Gestirne aufgetragen sind, an denen sich der schlafumwölkte Blick festmachen kann.85 In katholischen Regionen ist dieser des Öfteren mit Christusmonogrammen ausgeziert. Im evangelischen Raum wird auf solch explizite Verweisung verzichtet, was in Gelegenheitsmeditation Geübte nicht daran hindern muss, im Sternensymbol ihren Herrn zu vergegenwärtigen. Bisweilen finden sich auch deutlichere Hinweise darauf, wie die Auszier gemeint ist – etwa wenn Sonne, Mond, Wolken und Sterne gleichzeitig am Betthimmel stehen.86 Auch

83 Betten, zumal sperrige Himmelbetten wurden, wie im Bildarchiv der Kommission Alltagskulturforschung für Westfalen schön nachzuvollziehen, selten aufbewahrt, nachdem sie aus der Mode kamen. Verzierte Kopfteile haben sich bisweilen erhalten, weil sie zu Anrichten oder Garderoben umgearbeitet wurden. In der Regel aber hat man sich von diesen Möbeln getrennt, weshalb sich kaum mehr materielle Kultur findet, anhand derer sich die These eines Vorlagen- bzw. Musterbuches auch wirklich zweifelsfrei erhärten ließe. 84 Schmolck, Gott-geheiligte Morgen- und Abend-Andachten, 68. 85 Abbildungen von entsprechenden Schrank- und Himmelbetten finden sich bei K. Dröge, Das ländliche Bett. Zur Geschichte des Schlafmöbels in Westfalen (Detmold: Westfälisches Freilichtmuseum, 1999), 37, 82, 86. 86 Dröge, Das ländliche Bett, 86.

Jonathan Edwards’ Images

wenn diese Konstellation zu bestimmten Jahreszeiten möglich erscheint, ist eine solche Simultaneität schließlich vielleicht doch eher als ein Hinweis darauf zu lesen, die Gestirne im Sinne Arndts als Handleiter und Boten Gottes, zu gebrauchen, die zu Christus und Gott selbst führen.87 Der Betthimmel wird damit zu einer Öffnung auf das Überirdische hin – einer Stelle, an der sich Himmel und Erde berühren. Wo Zweifel an dieser These bestehen, sei an Schlafstätten erinnert, in deren Himmel eine Taube angebracht ist.88 Im Schalldeckel der Kanzel eine vielverbreitete Erinnerung, dass die Wirkung der Worte des Predigers dem Heiligen Geist anheimgestellt bleiben, versinnbildlicht die Taube darüber hinaus auch die Vorstellung göttlicher Inspiration. Welch andere Funktion sollte sie nun aber in einem Betthimmel haben, wenn nicht jene, die schlaftrunkene Seele zu beflügeln und zu kontemplativer Übung zu ermuntern? Zumal dann, wenn sie in ihren Klauen einen Strick trägt – im schwäbischen Raum ‘Hilf ’, in Norddeutschland ‘Helpup’ genannt –, an dem sich der erdenschwere Leib gen Himmel zu ziehen vermag.89

4.

Nachwirkungen

Transgressionen auf das Himmlische, wie sie sich in Edwards’ Images, aber auch andernorts in der Andachtsliteratur protestantischer Glaubenskulturen des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts finden, sind, so die These im Vorangegangenen, auf eine konkrete praxis pietatis zurückzuführen, mittels derer letztlich nicht bloß eine Weltsicht generiert, sondern auch ein Lebensgefühl samt dem im Körper verankerten Habitus kultiviert wird. Spiritualisierung in diesem Sinne erweist sich als eine Praxis, die Subjekte im vollumfänglichen Sinne zu formen mag. Fromme Heldengeschichtsschreibung kommt darum nicht umhin, den auf das Himmlische transgredierenden Habitus als Indikator zu stilisieren, an dem sich der rettende Glaube des wahren Christenmenschen ausweist. Beispiele finden sich zuhauf in Selbstzeugnissen, aber auch in geistlichen Biografien oder Leichenpredigten, die Frauen und Männer gehobenerer Schichten gewidmet sind. Ähnliches gilt für die Frömmigkeitskultur einfacher Leute, wie sie bis ins 20. Jahrhundert hinein in geistlichen Lebensbildern greifbar werden, die in Württembergs Hahnschen Gemeinschaften zirkulieren: So lebte er ganz in Jesu und aus ihm; was ihm vorkam, bezog er aufs Himmlische. Sah er z. B. etwas von der Herrlichkeit der Großen dieser Welt, so wandte er es folglich auf die

87 Arndt/Steiger, Vier Bücher, 4:5. 88 Weitere Abbildungen finden sich bei Dröge, Das ländliche Bett, 70, 73, 87. 89 Vgl. Dröge, Das ländliche Bett, 87.

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Herrlichkeit im Reich Jesu an, und so wurde es ihm zum Leben, daß er ganz himmlisch davon belebt wurde.90

Gepaart ist solche Idealisierung mit einem entsprechenden Jargon. Im Nachruf auf denselben Stundenbruder etwa heißt es, der Verstorbene sei durch fleißige praxis pietatis allmählich so “durchsüsset”91 worden, dass es sich auch in seine Physiognomie eingegraben habe. So sei “sein Angesicht so edel und hell gewesen”, “dass schon sein Anblick erbaulich war“.92 Kritik an einer solch durchgehenden Spiritualisierung des Alltags kann sich darum auch in Parodie kleiden – erinnert sei an Jonathan Swifts Meditation über einen Besenstiel93 oder Carl Julius Webers Karikatur frommer Dienstboten94 – deutlich aggressiver aber in unverhohlener Pathologisierung äußern: Du sagst zu einem Pietisten: es regnet, ich will einen Schirm nehmen, und er antwortet: gut, aber der wahre Schirm ist Gott. Du sagst: ich trage gern einen Stock, und er versetzt: gut, aber der Herr allein ist der wahre Stecken und Stab. Du sagst: dieß Licht brennt hell oder dunkel, und er bemerkt: gut, aber die Religion ist das wahre Licht u.s.w. Mit einem Pietisten ist daher schlechterdings nicht fortzukommen, zu sprechen, zu leben, er nimmt nichts, wie es ist, er sieht alles gebrochen wie im Wasser, er ist absolut geschmacklos, aberwitzig, pervers, er ist wahnsinnig.95

Spätestens im nachindustriellen Zeitalter scheint sich die Praxis und mit ihr auch der Habitus endgültig zu verlieren. Bäuerliche Alltagskultur wandert in die Museen, Arbeitsroutinen ändern sich und damit auch die allabendlichen Gepflogenheiten, deren materielle Kultur sich zunehmend verliert. Und doch finden sich immer

90 Lebenslauf des Bruders Jakob Haller, genannt Küferjakob, Trossingen, 20 (maschinengeschriebenes Exemplar mit Widmung aus dem Jahr 1941 im Besitz der Autorin). 91 Lebenslauf des Bruders Jakob Haller, 33f. 92 Lebenslauf des Bruders Jakob Haller, 10. 93 Weiss-Smith, Empiricist Devotions, 65. 94 C.J. Weber, Demokritos oder hinterlassene Papiere eines lachenden Philosophen (11 vol.; Stuttgart: Hallbergsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1840), 180. 95 F.T. Vischer, Kritische Gänge (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1861) 1:XXIII, vgl. Scharfe, Die Religion des Volkes, 101.

Jonathan Edwards’ Images

wieder Reminiszenzen in Schrift96 und Bild97 , die nahelegen, dass Zeitgenossen auch heute noch ansprechbar sind auf jene Wahrnehmungskultur, die sich die Welt verzaubert, und sei es im Gestus ironischer Brechung. Als das Ashmolean Museum in Oxford im Mai 2020 dazu aufrief, sich die pandemiebedingte Langeweile damit zu vertreiben, Kunstwerke der Sammlung mit zu Hause verfügbaren Mitteln nachzustellen, wurde auf Instagram auch eine Anspielung auf C.A. Collins Convent Thoughts (1850) hochgeladen.98 Schon von Zeitgenossen durch den Kakao gezogen99 wurden die Convent Thoughts nun in die Niederungen des Alltags verlegt. Anstelle der Nonne im Habit, die sich am Teich eines Klostergartens stehend in eine Passionsblume versenkt, sehen wir eine in Schürze und Pantoffeln gekleidete Hausfrau, deren Leib schwer gegen die Unterschränke einer Einbauküche gelehnt ist. Konzentriert blickt sie unter dem mit einem Geschirrtuch improvisierten Schleier hervor auf ein Ei. Das aufgeschlagene Kochbuch in ihrer Linken legt nahe, dass es gleich in die Teigschüssel wandert, um zu Pastete oder Kuchen verarbeitet zu werden. Davor allerdings wird es noch einmal eingehender Betrachtung unterworfen. Die Szenerie wirkt umso skurriler, als sich die Protagonistin von Mikrowelle, Wasserkocher und Backofen umgeben sieht. Doch selbst der Putzeimer mit aufgestelltem Schrubber erinnert an das Wasser des Teichs im hortus conclusus. Was, so fragt sich die an religiöser Gegenwartskultur interessierte Praktische Theologin, macht Transgression auf das Himmlische so attraktiv, dass auch heute noch darauf erfolgreich angespielt werden kann? Vielleicht liegt ihr Potential darin, dass sie Möglichkeiten eröffnet, Gewissheiten in unsicheren Zeiten zu schaffen. Sich auf Schritt und Tritt in Spiritualisierung übend versetzen sich die Akteure in eine Welt der sinngebenden Verweisung. Darauf beharrend, dass das Netz an Sinnbezügen, das sie über ihren Alltag spannen, ein von Uranfang in die Schöpfung gelegtes, mithin faktisch gegebenes und darum bloß aufzudeckendes ist, vermögen sie Transzendenz und Immanenz so nah zueinander ins Verhältnis zu bringen, dass Irdisches und Himmlisches ineinander diffundieren. Alles, was uns umgibt, steckt voller Sinn. Nichts ist zufällig. Belebtes wie Unbelebtes ist, auch wenn andere ihren Platz in der Welt vergeblich suchen, der Kontingenz enthoben. Ähnliches gilt für 96 Das in Deutschland weit über fromme Kreise hinaus erfolgreiche Buch von M. Schleske, Der Klang. Vom unerhörten Sinn des Lebens (München: Kösel, 2010), spiritualisiert ganz in der Tradition oben beschriebener berufsständischer Literatur das Geschäft eines Geigenbauers. Im Duo mit dem Erfurter Soziologen Hartmut Rosa hat er in den letzten Jahren durch Lesekonzerte bzw. Vorträge auf Kirchentagen, Seelsorgefortbildungen, Lehrerkongressen ein breites Publikum gewonnen. 97 Verwiesen sei auf die Visualisierung des Habitus der Transgression auf das Himmlische in dem Gemälde God’s Two Books (1968) von Harry Anderson, dessen religiöse Gebrauchsimagerie v.a. in adventistischen Kontexten große Verbreitung findet. 98 https://twitter.com/AshmoleanMuseum/status/1256616708917338113 (abgerufen am 9.7.2020). 99 Vgl. eine entsprechende Karikatur in der Ausgabe des Punch vom 17 May 1851, 219, auf der die Protagonistin ratlos auf die Passionsblume in ihrer Rechten blickt.

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unser Tun. Was auch immer geschieht – es ist eminent sinnhaft. Beruhigt kann ich meiner Arbeit nachgehen, ohne an deren Sinnhaftigkeit zweifeln zu müssen. So in einen Kokon gesponnener Bedeutungen eingewoben, lässt sich allerlei Unbill bestehen, weshalb sich Transgression auf das Himmlische durchaus auch als eine Form von Lebenshilfe begreifen lässt, die modernen Achtsamkeitskonzepten in vielem sicherlich auch nahekommt. Und doch erschöpft sich ihr Potential nicht in der Diesseitigkeit. Letztlich geht es damit ja vor allem auch um die Arbeit an Gewissheiten in Bezug auf jene Dinge, die das Vorfindliche transzendieren. Selbst das Vertrauen darauf, dass es eine Sphäre gibt, wo Gott und Mensch nicht mehr voneinander getrennt sind, und die wir Himmel nennen, kann sich infolge kontinuierlicher Übung einstellen. Vermittelt über Evidenzen der Erfahrung wie des Faktischen lässt sich Gottes Nähe vorwegnehmen, während er anderen, sofern sie überhaupt noch nach ihm fragen, fern und unnahbar geworden ist. Getragen von solcher Gewissheit lässt sich getrost sterben – und erwartungsvoll leben.

Bildnachweise Abb. 1 Emblem auf der Emporenbrüstung der Kirche zu Freudental (bei Besigheim), abgedruckt mit freundlicher Genehmigung der evangelische Kirchengemeinde LöchgauFreudental. Abb. 2 Detail eines Kupferstichs mit vier Emblemen aus J. Arndt, Sechs Bücher vom wahren Christentum (Altdorff: E.F. Zobel, 1735), eingebunden zwischen Seite 542 und 543. Abb. 3 The Beardsley Limner: Mrs. Hezekiah Beardsley, geb. Elizabeth Davis aus New Haven (1788–1790), Öl auf Leinwand, Yale University Art Gallery (Inv. Nr. 1952.46.2); abgedruckt mit freundlicher Genehmigung der Yale University Art Gallery. Abb. 4 Titelkupfer zu Heilige Nacht-Gedancken Zu munterer Wachsamkeit wider den Sünden-Schlaf und freudiger Seelen-Ruhe etc. (Leipzig: Johann Ludwig Gleditsch, 1710). Abb. 5 Himmelbett Johannes Hermann Heinrich Noltings aus dem Jahr 1845 mit Haltestrick (sog. Helpup) aus Bünde, Kreis Herford (Inv.-Nr. 0000.72473), abgedruckt mit freundlicher Genehmigung der Kommission Alltagskulturforschung für Westfalen. Abb. 6 Aussteuerbett der Christine Luise Engel Poppensieker, verheiratete Kämper aus dem Jahr 1862 mit Haltestrick (sog. Helpup) aus Löhne, Kreis Herford (Inv.-Nr. 0000.72484), abgedruckt mit freundlicher Genehmigung der Kommission Alltagskulturforschung für Westfalen.

Philip Fisk

Jonathan Edwards and Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten Aesthetic Theology and the Art of Beautiful Thinking

1.

Introduction1

The classical Western tradition of early modern Christianity since Plato, with the exception of nominalist strains, assumes that the inherent meaning of the words of a proposition make a truth claim about the actual world, and refer to a transcendent reality beyond language itself, and beyond the human mind. In this worldview, both poets and Christian theologians suppose that there is an extralinguistic and extramental reality. Critical literary theory and theology share a common core of first principles – though widely divergent in their appropriation and use – such as archetypes and ectypes, ideas in the mind of God (not in some Platonic corner of the universe), God as the transcendental signified, representation and reality, aesthetics and beauty.2

1 All translations into English from Mirbach’s German edition, Ästhetik, as well as from the Harvard and Yale Latin commencement broadside theses and quaestiones, are my own, unless otherwise indicated. I wish to express my thanks to Evan E. Boyd, Library Director and Archivist, at the United Lutheran Seminary, Philadelphia Campus for his assistance in accessing the 1757 4th edition of Baumgarten’s Metaphysica. 2 Hudson notes that the premises of the representation of an extramental world of ideas was challenged in the nominalism of William of Ockham, and in the seventeenth century with John Locke, who arguably “inaugurated” the Enlightenment version of “the linguistic turn”, in N. Hudson, “John Locke and the Tradition of Nominalism”, in H. Keiper/C. Bode/R.J. Utz (ed.), Nominalism and Literary Discourse, New Perspectives (Critical Studies 10; Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997) 283–99. In the same volume, Fendler notes the historically situated loss, in the tradition of Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, of the conventional, allegorical meaning of beauty, which signified virtue and ultimately its transcendental referent, namely God’s beauty. See S. Fendler, “The Emancipation of the Sign: The Changing Significance of Beauty in Some English Renaissance Romances”, in H. Keiper/C. Bode/R.J. Utz; Nominalism and Literary Discourse: New Perspectives (Critical Studies 10; Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997) 269–82. For a defence of critical realism and extralinguistic reality, see M.G. Murphey, Truth and History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), 1–22; J.P. O’Callaghan, Thomas Realism and the Linguistic Turn: Toward a More Perfect Form of Existence (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003); C.B. McCullagh, The Truth of History (New York: Routledge, 1998); D.A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1996), 13–137; N.T. Wright, Christian Origins and the Question of God 1: The New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 29–144. On ways different kinds of “truth” correspond to divine reality in discussions in modern philosophy and theology, see A. Thiselton,

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Contrarily, while examining the “epistemic foundations” of “postmodern sophistics”, McComiskey describes “the most naïve understanding of representation views”, which are those that “view language as transparent, a pure medium through which reality may be described and understood without distortion”.3 His critique generally would apply to the Western metaphysics tradition within which Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762) and Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) find themselves. This chapter attempts to show that Baumgarten and Edwards resist this trend in modernity by holding the scientific clarity of rational thought together with the sensate cognition of the heart. For Edwards and Baumgarten, God himself is the final transcendental signified.4 They espouse the view that signifiers, types, tropes, and metaphors of bounded and unbounded discourse can signify and point to perennial truths beyond themselves, that images of divine things embody transcendent truths. Baumgarten observes that humans have “a faculty of joining signs together in a representation with the signified”.5 However, in a departure from the Platonic tradition’s downplaying of

“Truth”, in C. Brown (ed), The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology (3 vols; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1979) 3.874–902, on pp. 3.894–902. Methodologically, in defence of transcendent meaning, significance, and perennial ideas, see J.P. Diggins, “The Oyster and the Pearl: The Problem of Contextualism in Intellectual History”, History and Theory 23 (1984), 151–169; Diggins, “Arthur O. Lovejoy and the Challenge of Intellectual History”, Journal of the History of Ideas 67 (2006) 181–208; J.E. Toews, “Review: Intellectual History After the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreducibility of Experience”, The American Historical Review 92 (1987) 879–907. 3 B. McComiskey, Gorgias and the New Sophistic Rhetoric (Rhetorical Philosophy and Theory; Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002), 77–89. Similarly, see S.H. Daniel, The Philosophy of Jonathan Edwards: A Study in Divine Semiotics (The Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion; Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 38–39, 41–65. 4 “Logocentric-minded aestheticians consider the best art to be that which most fully realizes this logos and believe that such works of art, because they express and incarnate truths that are eternal, can transcend their time and place to exist on a plane of perpetual meaning. Logocentrists not only believe that there is a real and essential link between the signifiers of poetry and the signifieds to which they point, but generally posit a transcendental signified (or centre) to which all signifiers can be ultimately referred”, in L. Markos, From Plato to Post-Modernism: Understanding the Essence of Literature and the Role of the Author. Course Guidebook (Chantilly VA: The Teaching Company, 1999), 153, 165. E. Chambers, whose Cyclopaedia was in Edwards’s library, defines “transcendent or transcendental” as “particularly applied to the object of metaphysics, which concerns being in general, or transcendental beings, as God and angels, and truths consisting in pure speculation”. Transcendental terms have universal signification. “They pass through all the categories, and agree to all kinds of things: such are the terms ens, unum, verum, bonum, res”. See “transcendental” in E. Chambers, Cyclopaedia: Or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (2 vols; London: D. Midwinter, 1741–43). 5 A. Baumgarten, Metaphysics: A Critical Translation with Kant’s Elucidations, Selected Notes, and Related Materials (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), (§619) 226; Cf.(§347) 163: “A sign is the means of knowing the existence of another thing and the end of the sign is the signified”; (§822) 284: “The greatest transcendental truth belongs to God.” Compare Edwards who writes, “When the subject and

Jonathan Edwards and Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten

the senses, as seen in the rational metaphysics of Christian Wolff (1679–1754), according to Gregory Moore, Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803) “was one of the few contemporaries who seemed to grasp the revolutionary implications of Baumgarten’s enterprise”, namely the elevation of “the science of sensuous cognition” in his “philosophy of art”.6 Likewise, Edwards’s theory of aesthetics embodies both reason and the heart, the rational and the affective dimensions, elevating the sensate cognition of beauty. Indeed, aesthetics is the science of sensate knowledge that concerns signs and their re-presentation. The belief of Baumgarten and Edwards that the clear, distinct, and emblematic propositions of science were not incompatible with classical, medieval, and renaissance re-presentation theory of language was disputed by the “New Philosophy of nature” (as Avihu Zakai calls it) of Bacon (1561–1626), Galileo (1564–1642), Kepler (1571–1630), and Descartes (1596–1650).7 Dante (1265–1321) speaks of the principle of “polysemous” meaning in a letter to Can Grande della Scala (1291–1329).8 Galileo, however, ridicules the “multilayered, polysemous” character of the language of nature. He says, “nature takes no delight in poetry”, thereby “reversing the ‘emblematic world view’”.9 By acknowledging the ambiguity, irony, paradox, and metaphor of language, especially in poetry, Baumgarten, as well as Edwards, broadened the Enlightenment idea of a one-to-one correspondence between word and idea, between Old Testament type and New Testament antitype, to include a polysemous (multiple, but not endless, possible senses) understanding of signifiers and what they signify.10 But this slippery nature of language in no way implies

predicate of the proposition, which affirms the existence of anything, either substance, quality, act or circumstance, have a full and certain connection, then the existence or being of that thing is said to be necessary in a metaphysical sense”, in J. Edwards, Freedom of the Will, P. Ramsey (ed.) (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 1; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 152–3, 265. 6 G. Moore, “Introduction”, in J.G. Herder/G. Moore (ed.), Selected Writings on Aesthetics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 3. 7 A. Zakai, Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of Nature: The Re-Enchantment of the World in the Age of Scientific Reasoning (London: T & T Clark, 2010), 17–22. 8 N. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957; 2000), 72; U. Eco, The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 160. 9 J.J. Bono, The Word of God and the Languages of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and Medicine (Science and Literature 1; University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 196, as quoted in Zakai, Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of Nature, 24. 10 “Edwards’ approach, as preserved most fully in “Images of Divine Things” and the notebook on “Types”, represented an important innovation in Christian typology and philosophy. Edwards attempted to free typology from the narrow correspondences of the two testaments without reverting to exaggerated medieval allegory. In the process, he transcended philosophical dualism, linking the natural and the supernatural in a compelling and dynamic unity in God,” in W.E. Anderson, “Editor’s Introduction to ‘Images of Divine Things’ and ‘Types’”, in J. Edwards, Typological Writings, W.E. Anderson/M.I. Lowance/D.H. Watters (ed.) (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 11; New Haven:

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slipping into endless, meaningless aporia. Nietzsche (1844–1900) would later break with the classical tradition, asking, “What therefore is truth? A mobile army of metaphors”.11 For Baumgarten and Edwards, the classical Christian worldview of God’s eternal presence and God as the transcendental signified grounds and supports their aesthetics as well as the polysemous nature of language, in poetry, typology, and in Baumgarten’s case, a theory of literature in general.12 Some forms of the Enlightenment privileged reason over sense perception, logic over intuition, content over form, history over myth, science over poetry, external over internal, fact over fiction. One might ask, what has the Cartesian principle of clear and distinct ideas, as shared by Baumgarten and Edwards, to do with their equally firm stance on sensate cognition and sense of the heart? Both Baumgarten and Edwards elevated the cognitive status of the so-called lower faculty. To be clear, contrary to the Enlightenment philosophy of an alleged dichotomy of upper and lower faculties, they espoused the view that though reason and sense cognition be distinct, they are inseparable. As Avihu Zakai writes, like Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) and John Donne (1572–1631), Edwards believed in the re-enchantment of the philosophy of nature and the elevation of the metaphysical status of language, typology, and poetic history.13 Baumgarten’s Meditationes philosophicae (1735), which are “Reflections on Poetry”, Metaphysics (1739), and Aesthetics (1750, 1758), and Edwards’s diverse works, such as, A History of the Work of Redemption (1739), Typological Writings (1744)—“Images of Divine Things”, or, “The Book of Nature and Common Providence” (1737), “Types of the Messiah” (1744–1749) – Freedom of the Will (1754), and End of Creation (1765), show that their use of clear thinking is not necessarily incompatible with a “typological and emblematic view” of the language of nature and of poetry, nor with the “re-enchantment” of the philosophy of history and nature. On the one hand, Zakai can call Edwards’s A History

Yale University Press, 1993), 33. On the distinction, which Edwards recognized, between allegory and the vertical dimension of type/antitype, see E. Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Realty in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 73,74. 11 F. Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense”, in V. Leitch (ed.), Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010), 759–74, on p.768. For a sketch of “The Death of Language”, see L. Markos, Lewis Agonistes: How C. S. Lewis Can Train Us to Wrestle with the Modern and Postmodern World (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2003), 112–131. 12 “Until the mid 18th century, semiotics was based on the rationalist paradigm of representation; its theories uncoupled the relation of sign and meaning from all relations of similarity and described signification as a psychological process of representation,” in F. Berndt, Facing Poetry: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Theory of Literature (Paradigms 12; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2020), 49. 13 Edwards, Typological Writings, WJE 11:9, 19, 34–35, 157; Zakai, Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of Nature, 17–27.

Jonathan Edwards and Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten

of the Work of Redemption “a model of Christian poetics of history”.14 On the other, Edwards’s Freedom of the Will uses “scholastic distinctions, and abstruse metaphysical subtleties” and “the science of metaphysics”.15 But as Aschenbrenner and Holther conclude in their Introduction to Baumgarten’s Meditationes, there is “no conceivable conflict” (as “romantic critics” suppose) between the rationalists’ “clear and distinct idea” of a circle according to “analytic geometry” on the one hand and “the unique shape the eye beholds” on the other. “Baumgarten pursues the ideal of scientific clarity about art.” There is only an “apparent paradox of rationalism” wherein Baumgarten seeks to put forth a con-fusion of “extensively clear representations” that characterize “all perfected sensate discourse”, such as a poem does.16 Views such as appear in Baumgarten’s Meditationes, Metaphysica, Aesthetica can further be highlighted through a brief introduction to the education of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten. He was born on June 17, 1714 in Berlin. His father, Jacob, was a Protestant evangelical pastor. Alexander’s two eldest brothers attended a preparatory school, the Paedagogium, whose principal was the Pietist, August Hermann Francke (1663–1727). Francke became a formal member of the theological faculty at Halle in 1698, making Halle a center of Pietism and a sender of missionaries. Christian Wolff ’s lectures in rational philosophy at Halle represented a break with Lutheran orthodoxy and Pietism. His Pietist colleagues urged King Friedrich Wilhelm I (1713–1740) to dismiss him, resulting in a royal sentence for him to leave within forty-eight hours in 1723. Friedrich the Great of Prussia (1740–1786), however, restored Wolff to Halle in 1740.17 The sources of tension within the Lutheran tradition were the Pietists, confessionalists, and rationalists. It was in the midst of this tension, especially between Wolffian rational philosophy and Pietism, that Alexander was educated. Alexander’s eldest brother, Siegmund Jacob (1706–1757), was largely responsible for Alexander’s studies and encouraged him to read Wolff. Alexander read theology “under Johann Justus Breithaupt and Gotthilf August Francke (August Hermann’s son)”.18 In his introduction to Meditationes, Alexander writes about how from his “earliest boyhood” the study of poetry attracted him. He went to the home of Francke in

14 A. Zakai, Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of History: The Re-Enchantment of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 155–57. 15 Edwards, Typological Writings, WJE 1:423. 16 A. Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Meditationes Philosophicae de Nonnullis Ad Poema Pertinentibus, translated, with the Original Text, an Introduction, and Notes by K. Aschenbrenner and W.B. Holther. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1954), 26, 32. 17 Fugate/Hymers, “Historical Sketch”, in Baumgarten, Metaphysics, 5, 6. 18 Fugate/Hymers, “Introduction”, in Baumgarten, Metaphysics, 6.

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Halle in 1727, took courses at Francke’s Waisenhaus, and began his studies at the University of Halle in 1730: “With dazzled eyes, I was drawn into the light of the Fridericiana.” Having been educated as a boy in the arts and sciences, fine art, Hebrew, and Latin poetry in Berlin by Martin Christgau (1697–1776), Alexander later tutored young men at Halle “in poetics, along with so-called Rational Philosophy”.19 I hope to demonstrate that Baumgarten overcomes what some scholars may perceive as the untenable tension between his upbringing with Wolff ’s rational metaphysical thought, on the one hand, and his espousal of the beauty of poetic truth, on the other. In the first half of the eighteenth century, Baumgarten and Edwards found themselves challenging the boundary markers of their traditions, comfortably thinking and writing within not only what conventional nomenclature calls the Augustan Age (1700–1745) of Pope, Addison, and Swift, and more broadly, the Neoclassical Period (1660–1785), but also the Enlightenment, the Age of Scientific Reasoning, or the Philosophical Century. In other words, the characteristics and conventions of the two traditions are not mutually exclusive for Baumgarten and Edwards. Arguably, in Baumgarten and Edwards one finds reciprocal yet asymptotic lines of approach to aesthetics, perception, transcendental truth, and the art of beautiful thinking. The way forward in this chapter which compares and contrasts Baumgarten’s and Edwards’s aesthetics is to introduce the topic by giving a brief and select overview of relevant literature and commentary in part two. Having assumed that Baumgarten was the lesser known of the two, I limited my introductory remarks on Edwards’s background and gave more space to Baumgarten. Then in part three, which is the heart of the chapter, I will bring both thinkers’ understanding of aesthetic theology and the art of beautiful thinking into sharper relief, by expounding both

19 Baumgarten, Meditationes, 35; Fugate/Hymer, “Historical Sketch”, in Baumgarten, Metaphysics, 5. Of relevance to the discussion of their metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics, the catalogues of books for both Baumgarten and Edwards show that they share many sources in common: W. Ames, De Conscientia et Eius Iure, Vel Casibus, Libri Quinque (Amsterdam, 1631); the Leiden professors, F. Burgersdijck, Institutionum Logicarum (Leiden: A. Commelinum, 1626), and A. Heereboord, Meletemata Philosophica (Leiden: Franciscus Moyard, 1659); the Cambridge Platonists, H. More, Opera Philosophica (London: J. Macock, 1679) and R. Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe: The First Part; Wherein, All the Reason and Philosophy of Atheism is Confuted; and Its Impossibilty Demonstrated. (London: Richard Royston, 1678); the French philosopher, N. Malebranche, La Recherche de la Vérité (Paris: André Pralard, 1675); the Halle philosopher, C. Wolff, Elementa Matheos Universae (Halle: Prostat in Officina Libraria Rengeriana, 1713–15), Theologia Naturalis (Frankfurt: Prostat in Officina Libraria Rengeriana, 1736–37), and Methodo Scientifica Pertractata (Verona: Dionysius Ramanzini, 1736–37). See A.G. Baumgarten, Catalogus Librorum a Viro Excellentissimo Amplissimo Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (Frankfurt: Joannis Christiani Winteri, 1762), 109.

Jonathan Edwards and Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten

theologians’ primary sources where they develop the art of beautiful thinking, both in its epistemic and transcendental dimensions. Finally, in part four, I will offer what I consider to be compelling reasons for revisiting these two independent thinkers’ art of beautiful thinking.

2.

Overview of Relevant Literature

Umberto Eco (1932–2016) wrote that the conventional view, at least in Italy until 1954, was that “aesthetics had been born with Baumgarten, that before him aesthetics had been a morass of infantile chatter”. Eco writes, Baumgarten described aesthetics by means of such expressions as ‘the science of sense knowledge, the theory of the liberal arts, the epistemology of the lower level of knowledge, the rules of thinking aesthetically, the rules of reasoning by analogy.’ If aesthetics is conceived of in these ways, then indeed the medievals, with perhaps a few notable exceptions, did not have an aesthetics theory. But if, instead, aesthetics refers to a whole range of issues connected with beauty—its definition, its function, the ways of creating and of enjoying it—then the medievals did have aesthetic theories.20

Karl Aschenbrenner and William B. Holther’s introductory essay in 1954 to Baumgarten’s University of Halle Magisterarbeit of 1735, Meditationes philosophicae, offers insight into his “lasting achievement” in advancing “modern philosophical aesthetics”. It not only reports the well-known fact that Baumgarten was the first to coin the Latin term aestheticae from the Greek term perception (aisthesis) in Meditationes philosophicae—with a full essay Aesthetica in 1750 (Part One) and 1758 (Part Two)—but also explains what they understand to be his intent in using the term aesthetics.21 His aim was to give “a cognitive theory of the art” its rightful place alongside logic in a total scientific scheme, arguing that “beauty is not only perceptual, but is perception perfected”.22 Rather than understanding Baumgarten’s Meditations of Philosophy as “Reflections on Poetry”, as Aschenbrenner and Holther do, Frauke Berndt argues that Baumgarten set out a “theory of literature”. She argues that Baumgarten’s theory of literature “remains undiscovered”. This “oversight is based on a simple misunderstanding of the role literature plays in his philosophical project”. His is an “embodied

20 Eco, Aesthetics of Aquinas, xi, 2. 21 Baumgarten, Meditationes, 3–4. New editions of Meditationes and Aesthetica were published by Tommaso Fiore and Alessandro Casati at the beginning of the 20th century. 22 Baumgarten, Meditationes, 4,7, 8.

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philosophy”. Without intending to relate literature to philosophy, Berndt argues that while “working on his philosophical writing and lectures, he ended up analyzing, synthesizing, and contextualizing literature. It thereby became clear to him that aesthetics demands a sensate realization … an epistemic object”.23 In “A Monument to Baumgarten”, Johann Gottfried von Herder says that Baumgarten was a “Wolffian philosopher and a Christgauian poet conjoined in a single person”. For Baumgarten, “taste and philosophical contemplation” were not inimical to one another. His Meditationes, or “Reflections on Poetry”, were “an attempt to transplant Wolffian philosophy into the soil so dear to our Baumgarten, the soil of his childhood sweetheart, poetic art”, writes Herder. Baumgarten’s analysis by way of oratio, sensitiva, perfecta “affords the best view over the entire philosophy of the beautiful and therefore enables poetry to be united with its sisters, the fine arts”.24 Baumgarten writes Meditationes and Metaphysica in a scientific style, a strict exposition ruled by definition, by which he assigns meaning to terms, often with words in capitals. His axioms are propositions without prior premises. From axioms and/or previous propositions he deduces theorems. With each successively numbered paragraph, he builds upon previous propositions, whose numbers are often cited. His method builds up a series of systematic-geometrical, philosophical “proofs”. His approach is that of syllogistic division of paragraph.25 Both Baumgarten and Edwards share the longer history of the Western theory of art, beauty, and aesthetics since Plato. Broadly speaking, the European-modeled educational background at Harvard and Yale specific to Edwards’s context reflects this tradition. Although Baumgarten is the first to coin the term aesthetica as a definition, over a century earlier William Ames (1576–1633) used the Greek term aisthesis to mean “sense perception”. For Ames, “All things are either in themselves or by reason of their effects ‘appearances’ (φαινόμενα) or ‘perceptibles’ (αἰσθητὰ)”.26 Ames attempted to subsume the theory of art, technê, under one architectonic system known as Technometry, which “circumscribes the boundaries and ends of all the arts and of every individual art”.27 As Lee W. Gibbs states, Anyone who approaches the writings of William Ames on technometry from the relatively recent aesthetic point of view will find it difficult, if not impossible, to understand or empathize with the theory of art and the arts that he sets forth. An examination of Ames’s

23 24 25 26 27

Berndt, Facing Poetry, 2. Herder, Selected Writings on Aesthetics, 41–43. Baumgarten, Meditationes, 12. W. Ames, Technometry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1979), 104. Ames, Technometry, 93.

Jonathan Edwards and Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten

conception of art reveals that technometry is richly grounded in Greek and Roman classics, medieval pedagogy and Scholasticism, and Renaissance humanism.28

Arguably, Ames desires to develop a total philosophical framework for what he calls the arts. For Ames, art is a model (exemplar), which he grounds in the mind of God. “Art” stands at the head of Ames’s Ramist chart of Technometry.29 In the university curriculum while Edwards was a student at Yale, art served the purpose of organizing human learning, understanding, science, and wisdom. While Ames places his universal approach under Technometry, Baumgarten, unlike Ames, has a similar objective, but aims to achieve it under metaphysics. Although Edwards does not expressly write an aesthetic theory of literature per se, as Baumgarten does, many of the same elements of a theory, such as sensate cognition, aesthetic beauty as an “embodied philosophy” and the “transcendental status of beauty” are present in Edwards’s writings.30 When Edwards expresses the aesthetic virtue of loving God, he formulates it as such in “The Nature of True Virtue” (1778, drafted 1753–54): True virtue most essentially consists in benevolence to Being in general. Or perhaps to speak more accurately, it is that consent, propensity and union of heart to Being in general, that is immediately exercised in a general good will.31

Emily Stipes Watts draws a line between Edwards’s “True Virtue” and the Cambridge Platonist Henry More (1614–1687). She argues that Edwards’s turn of phrase, 28 29 30 31

Ames, Technometry, 18. Ames, Technometry, 34, 35. Berndt, Facing Poetry, 2. J. Edwards, “Nature of True Virtue”, in P. Ramsey (ed.), Ethical Writings (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 8; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 540. On the use of the phrase “being in general”, in the same year as the publication of Baumgarten’s Metaphysica, the Harvard 1739 thesis defining ontology, subsumed under theses technologicae, and presided over by Edward Holyoke, reads, “Ontology treats being in general together with its various affections and distinctions”, in “Commencement Theses, Quaestiones, and Orders of Exercises, 1642–1818”, HUC 6642, Harvard University Archives 1739, original, Box 3, Folder 2. Curiously, the date of one of the few Harvard or Yale Quaestiones through the years on the topic of “pure benevolence” coincides with the dates assigned to the draft version of Edwards’s “True Virtue”, namely 1753–54. The Yale 1753 Quaestio, presided over by Thomas Clap, asks “Whether there is any pure benevolence that does not look for one’s own advantage? Affirmed by Samuel Reynolds”, in “Yale College Theses and Quaestiones”, RU 146, Yale University Archives 1753. Reynolds would have argued for a kind of disinterested love to being. Relatedly, the Harvard 1786 Ethica Thesis 7 (for debate), presided over by Joseph Willard, reads, “Virtue does not consist in benevolence alone”, in “Commencement Theses, Quaestiones, and Orders of Exercises, 1642–1818”, HUC 6642, Harvard University Archives 1786, original, Box 6, Folder 10.

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“consent to being” or “perceiving being” are likely his direct translation of “Axiom I” in Henry More’s Latin Enchiridion Ethicum (1666), rather than from the English translation of 1690. Notably, Watts says that “consent,” according to the underlying Latin, has the richer sense of “dearness,” with the implication of “love”. In sum, More and Edwards, she concludes, reverse the traditional order and place love to God first, from which is derived love to fellow beings.32 Edwards’s intuited emblematic-aesthetic vision sees that, God is God, and distinguished from all other beings, and exalted above ‘em, chiefly by his divine beauty, which is infinitely diverse from all other beauty. They therefore that see the stamp of this glory in divine things, they see divinity in them, they see God in them … the mind ascends to the truth of the gospel but by one step, and that is its divine glory.33

Sang Hyun Lee writes that there is a “relational conception of being as beauty” by which Edwards intuits that, “One alone, without any reference to any more, cannot be excellent; for in such case there can be no manner of relation no way, and therefore, no such thing as consent”.34 Roland A. Delattre finds that Edwards grants the highest ontological status to the concept of beauty as excellence in his vision of aesthetics.35 Clyde A. Holbrook, within a framework of theological objectivism, finds that Edwards casts his theory of true virtue in Neoplatonic terms such that the beauty of virtue resides in the cordial consent of being to Being in general.36 Norman Fiering points to the need to research the historical background of Edwards’s medieval and seventeenth-century Protestant scholastic heritage in addition to Platonism, as well as “British and Continental moral philosophy”, in

32 E.S. Watts, “The Neoplatonic Basis of Jonathan Edwards’ ‘True Virtue’’”, Early American Literature 10 (1975), 179–89. Kristeller draws a line from the Florentine Platonists to the Cambridge Platonists, such as Henry More, in P.O. Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and the Arts: Collected Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 100. See D.W. Howe, “The Cambridge Platonists of Old England and the Cambridge Platonists of New England”, Church History 57 (1988) 470–85. 33 J. Edwards, Religious Affections, J.E. Smith (ed.) (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 2; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 298–99. 34 J. Edwards, “The Mind”, in W.E. Anderson (ed.), Scientific and Philosophical Writings (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 6; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 337; S.H. Lee, “Editor’s Introduction”, in J. Edwards, Writings on the Trinity, Grace, and Faith (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 21; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 10. 35 R.A. Delattre, Beauty and Sensibility in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards: An Essay in Aesthetics and Theological Ethics (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2006), 1, 2, 28, 52–53, 107. 36 C.A. Holbrook, The Ethics of Jonathan Edwards: Morality and Aesthetics (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1973), 98–100, 105.

Jonathan Edwards and Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten

order to better understand the development of the “ontological theories” underlying, for instance, the aesthetics of “True Virtue”.37 Robert W. Jenson identifies two “conventional” motifs in Edwards’s metaphysical vision of piety, (1) the beauty of nature and (2) the world that images God’s beauty, the archetype of God’s beauty imaged in the ectype of the human soul. Edwards thus reflects on the emblematic nature of beauty: I believe the whole universe . . . the divine constitution and history of the holy Scriptures to be full of images of divine things, as full as a language is of words and are but a very small part of what is really intended to be signified and typified by these things: but that there is room for persons to be learning more and more of this language and seeing more of that which is declared in it to the end of the world without discovering all.38

The two “unconventional” motifs, writes Jenson, are (1) the Trinity as the “supreme aesthetic object” of a “christological-trinitarian apprehension”, and (2) the “art of singing” as a “metaphor” of “aesthetic description”. The vision Edwards intuits is “sheerly aesthetic ecstasy”.39 William Wainwright explores Edwards’s reason for holding that “our apprehension of beauty is a kind of sensation or perception”, which as we shall see sounds similar to Baumgarten. For Edwards, writes Wainwright, reason alone may lack an “affective dimension” but “the cognition of true beauty has an affective dimension … spiritual cognition must therefore be some kind of sensation or perception”.40 Lee argues that foundational to Edwards’s metaphysical notion of the aesthetic sense is consent to the interconnected beauty of all things, that is, love to Being in general. The habit of mind and heart functions together as an “aesthetics of sense”, which is essential “in the mind’s sensation of beauty”. However,

37 N. Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and Its British Context (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2006), 12, 325–6. Fiering calls into question what he thinks to be Delattre’s ahistorical methodology and the “structure of his thought as a unit over a thirty-five year period,” in N. Fiering, “Review of Beauty and Sensibility in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards: An Essay in Aesthetics and Theological Ethics, by R.A. Delattre”, William and Mary Quarterly 28 (1971) 655–61. In reply to Fiering, Holbrook finds that he goes too far in separating “Edwards’s critical from his synthetic ethics” and in doing so evades “entanglement” with Edwards’s “more strictly theological views in spite of the difficulty”, in C.A. Holbrook, “Review of Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and Its British Context by N. Fiering”, William and Mary Quarterly 39 (1982) 689–93. 38 Edwards, “Types”, WJE 11:152. 39 R.W. Jenson, America’s Theologian, A Recommendation of Jonathan Edwards (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 16–19. 40 W. Wainwright, Reason and the Heart: A Prolegomenon to a Critique of Passional Reason (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 19, 28.

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the mind’s perception of beauty is not discursive, nor a result of argumentation, but immediate.41 Whereas Ames defines theology as “living well” and “living to God”, Peter van Mastricht (1630–1706) as the art of “living for God through Christ”, and Henry More describes ethics as “the art of living well and happily”, Baumgarten defines “aesthetics” as “the science of sensate cognition” and “the art of beautiful thinking”, and Edwards, similarly, as “the propensity and benevolent affections of the heart” for the beauty of the greatest being, God, who commands the greatest universal consent.42

3.

Aesthetic Theology

3.1

Alexander Baumgarten and the Art of Beautiful Thinking

Meditationes philosophicae 1735

Beauty hinges on the notion of perfection. Translators Aschenbrenner and Holther of Baumgarten’s Meditationes philosophicae note that: “Aesthetics is to be the science which will investigate perception for the purpose of describing the kind of perfection which is proper to it. It will have its counterpart in the science of logic which will perform the same office for thought”.43 Baumgarten dares to demonstrate that aesthetics is the science of beautiful thinking, comprised of a lower part (perception) and a higher part (thought). His starting point is the classical distinction between “things perceived (aesthetica) and things known (noetic)”.44 Intuition belongs to the “higher cognitive faculty” and the quality or greater clarity of marks renders the beauty of the nature of an object “essentially or intensively clear”. The marks or

41 S.H. Lee, The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards (rev. edn; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 141, 150–53; Lee, “Edwards and Beauty,” in Gerald R. McDermott (ed.), Understanding Jonathan Edwards: An Introduction to America’s Theologian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 117. 42 W. Ames, The Marrow of Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1968), 77, 78; P. van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, Volume 1: Prolegomena, J. Beeke (ed.) (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2018), 167; H. More, Enchiridion Ethicum, The English Translation of 1690 (New York: The Facsimile Text Society, 1930), 1; A.G. Baumgarten, Ästhetik: Zwei Bände. Band 1: §§ 1–613 / Band 2: §§ 614–904, Einführung, Glossar (Philosophische Bibliothek 572; Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2009), 10 (§1) “Aesthetica (theoria liberalium artium, gnoseologia inferior, ars pulcre cogitandi, ars analogi rationis) est scientia cognitionis sensitivae”; Edwards, Ethical Writings, WJE 8:550. 43 Baumgarten, Meditationes, 4. 44 Baumgarten, Meditationes, 4–5.

Jonathan Edwards and Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten

characteristics of poetic representations, indeed of literature in general, belong to the “lower cognitive faculty”, to sensate cognition. The more abundant the marks, the more “extensive” the “clarity”. Poetry offers, thus, a sui generis type of clarity.45 The sensate experience of objects of beauty presented to the mind corresponds to rhetoric, and the aesthetic experience of objects of beauty corresponds to poetry.46 Baumgarten argues that by intuitive cognition the happy aestheticus can fuse different marks and characteristics of con-fused representations and thus engage the faculty of wonder, as a poet would. To be clear, by con-fused he does not mean confusion in today’s derogatory vernacular, but rather that the marks of sensate representations are fused together.47 If a poem is “perfect sensate discourse”, then “[p]hilosophical poetics is the science” of the literary object presented to the mind and senses. The science of sensate discourse is, for Baumgarten, the perfection not only of “speaking those representations which we communicate” but also of literature itself. This science assumes in the poet “a lower cognitive faculty”.48 Berndt notes a “quantitative” difference between “sensate discourse” and “perfect sensate discourse” giving perfect the meaning of “complete”, since the greater the number of marks or characteristics, the greater the quickening of sensate representation.49 Beauty, thus, depends on phenomenality. Beauty is an observable perfection. In the Metaphysica, to which I now turn, Baumgarten gives a philosophical perspective of perfection, showing how there is a harmony of connections presented to the mind. Metaphysica 1757

In the opening paragraphs, we cited Baumgarten’s descriptions of aesthetics as “the philosophy of graces and muses, inferior gnoseology, the art of thinking beau-

45 46 47 48 49

Baumgarten, Meditationes, 21. Berndt, Facing Poetry, 58. Baumgarten, Meditationes (§§15, 44) 42, 53. Baumgarten, Meditationes, (§9, §115), 39–40, 77–78. Berndt, Facing Poetry, 56. See “notion” in E. Chambers, Cyclopaedia. Chambers’s Cyclopaedia was well known to Edwards and listed in his reading. Chambers defines “a confused notion” as “that wherein you are not able to assign the very marks or characters whereby you recollect the object; though it be resolvable into them. Such is the notion of red colour”. Edwards uses the technical sense of “confused”, when speaking of the word “man” and whether one actually understands what it signifies, namely, mankind. Edwards says, “In order to this he must have an actual idea of man. I don’t mean only a confused idea of an outward appearance, like that of man, for if that was all, that was not an idea of man properly, but only a sign made use of instead of an idea”, “Miscellany” no. 782, in A. Chamberlain (ed.), “The Miscellanies” (Entry Nos. 501–832) (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 18; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 453.

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tifully, the art of the analogue of reason”.50 The art of thinking beautifully is to be complemented by “the art of the analogue of reason”, which is to say that the inferior faculty of sensate cognition runs analogous to reason and cultivates the art of discerning connections, interconnections, patterns of images, and other representations presented to the mind. Crucially, the beauty and harmony of these connections commands the assent of the mind. Truth along with unity and perfection are the transcendental predicates of being. The transcendental unity of a being consists in the inseparability of all its determinations, that is, purposes or ordinations. Baumgarten writes: §89 METAPHYSICAL (real, objective, material) TRUTH is the order of many in one. TRANSCENDENTAL TRUTH is the order in a being’s essential determinations and attributes.51

God possesses the greatest transcendental truth, the most supreme order of perfections. He is the best, most perfect possible being: “It is so far from the case that all plurality in God is impossible that, rather, it is absolutely necessary that some plurality be posited in and through his very essence (§812, 816)”.52 Baumgarten implies that the Trinity is the perfection of transcendental truth and beauty. Signs and the things they signify have a transcendental dimension and have to do with the science of the “aesthetics of characterization”: §347 A sign is the means of knowing the existence of another thing and the end of the sign is the signified. Hence, the sign is the principle of knowing the signified (§311), and the nexus between the sign and the signified is the nexus of signification, which is called meaning (power, potency) when attributed to the sign.53

The mind perceives the different features of a sign and joins it to what it signifies, called a representation. When the mind can only combine the features of a sign in

50 Baumgarten, Metaphysics (§533), 205. This translation is based on the 4th edition of 1757 (1st edn 1739; 2nd edn 1743; 3rd edn 1750; 4th edn 1757). See C.D. Fugate, “Alexander Baumgarten on the Principle of Sufficient Reason”, Philosophica 44 (2014) 127–47; A. Baumgarten, Metaphysica (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 2011); C. Schwaiger, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten–Ein Intellektuelles Porträt: Studien Zur Metaphysik und Ethik von Kants Leitautor (Forschungen und Materialien zur Deutschen Aufklärung Abteilung II: Monographien zur Philosophie der Deutschen Aufklärung Series 24; Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 2011). 51 Baumgarten, Metaphysics, (§89) 115, 116. 52 Baumgarten, Metaphysics, (§§817–822) 283–284. Compare Edwards’s “one alone cannot be excellent” remark in “The Mind”, WJE 6:337. 53 Baumgarten, Metaphysics, (§347) 163–164.

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an inadequate way, it is symbolic knowledge. When the mind immediately intuits the idea signified by the sign, that is, when it puts together all the features of a perceived object at once, it is called intuitive cognition. Aesthetica 1750, 1758

Analogous to metaphysical truth is “aestheticological truth”, a term which Baumgarten coined in Aesthetica (§427) in order to distinguish the complementary relationship of logical truth and aesthetic truth when the so-called upper and lower faculties of the mind recognise the beauty of an object.54 Mirbach notes that the analogy of logic and aesthetics is possible thanks to the “structural equality” of the faculties themselves, which are assigned to the sensate and intellectual cognitions.55 Indeed, Berndt notes that in eighteenth-century faculty psychology, the “epistemological basis” of aesthetics supports its aim of the “autonomy from logic”.56 Moreover, in §14 the end of aesthetics is the perfection of the cognition of perception.57 “The aesthetic end is the perfection of sensuous cognition, as such; this is beauty.”58 But there is no perfection without order.59 For Baumgarten, perfection is a predicate of being. Whatever lacks perfection is not beautiful. He grounds his understanding of a “general beauty of sensate cognition” in the concept of perfection, a perfection which demands assent.60 Nor is what is presented to the mind and what the mind recognises two different processes. In other words, to move from object to subject (mind) and from subject to object is to meet in a kind of fusion of the two horizons.61 Baumgarten summarizes a three-fold conformity of the beauty of sensate knowledge as a “beauty of things and thoughts, a beauty of order, and a beauty of signs”. The beauty of thoughts are considered as distinct from their “order and signs”. Nevertheless, they are not perceived as signifieds without signs. There is an accompanying unity in line with the conformity of thought, order, and signs when we think beautifully.62 This threefold conformity corresponds to what Baumgarten calls “heuristics, methodology and semiotics”, which in turn correspond to the

54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

Baumgarten, Ästhetik, Bd 1:l. Baumgarten, Ästhetik, Bd 1:xxix. Berndt, Facing Poetry, 28. Baumgarten, Ästhetik, (§1) Bd 1:11. Baumgarten, Ästhetik, (§14) Bd1:20. Baumgarten, Ästhetik, (§14) Bd 1:20. Baumgarten, Ästhetik, (§§ 18–20) Bd 1:22. Baumgarten, Ästhetik, Bd 1:lviii. Baumgarten, Ästhetik, (§§18–20) Bd 1:22.

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essential bond of beauty and phenomena.63 Beauty, thus, is the pleasant agreement we sense among things, like art and the melody of a song. Baumgarten juxtaposes “formal perfection” and “material perfection” of aesthetic truth in his aesthetics of art theory. On the formal level of representation, the aesthetic sense recognizes the form of an object from a marble block, for instance, whereas on the material level, it recognizes the actual beauty of the representation.64 The mind strives to see the aesthetico-logical truth and beauty on the formal-ontological level. He also distinguishes between the aesthetic greatness of the subject, on the one hand, and the aesthetic greatness of the object, on the other. In other words, there is an objective aesthetic dignity of the thing itself, and the thing represented in the subject “by a beautiful mind and a beautiful heart”, the latter of which is thus the greatness and dignity of the person himself or herself.65 Mirbach says that “Baumgarten’s aesthetics is not a theory of sensory knowledge”, but rather “an epistemology in which beauty is proven to be an appearance of the transcendental perfection of an object in sensual cognition and in its representation”. Inasmuch as it is “art theory”, it explains “the art of beautiful thinking” of a “happy aesthete” (felix aestheticus) which makes “artistic activity and the production of beautiful art possible”. Inasmuch as it is a theory of the art of beautiful thinking, it describes “the appearance of transcendental perfection”.66 Baumgarten understands signs in three ways. First, as things which in this world have in themselves “an emblematic connection”. Second, as having marks or characteristics of a word on a page which signifies something such that the sensate faculty can interpret the marks. This is the “power of the soul to visualize the representations of the world”.67 Third, as speech. The beauty of the phenomenon is based on consent and the emblematic nature of the things themselves.68 Since “innate beauty is essentially a disposition”, the disposition of beautiful thinking and rational thinking are not mutually exclusive.69 The perfection of phenomena is dependent on the object. And the sensate perfection of the subject recognizes the object: “The two are reconciled when one understands that the first, phenomenal perfection, serves in the background to Baumgarten’s metaphysically grounded theory of truth”. The first has to do with transcendental truth and perfection. Here we encounter the consensus of many to the universal. It is from the status as a transcendental that beauty achieves its ontological dignity. On the other hand the subjective-human

63 64 65 66 67 68 69

Baumgarten, Ästhetik, Bd1.lvi. Baumgarten, Ästhetik, Bd1:lix. Baumgarten, Ästhetik, Bd 1:lxix. Baumgarten, Ästhetik, Bd 1:lviii–lix. Baumgarten, Ästhetik, Bd1:lvi. Baumgarten, Ästhetik, Bd 1:lvi. Baumgarten, Ästhetik, Bd 1:lvi.

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side of beauty is seen only as metaphysical perfection. Phenomena and beauty each serve in a mediating capacity. For Baumgarten, the perfection of beauty is the metaphysical key that commands an “ontologically dignified status”.70 Beauty, thus, is a phenomenon of perfection and perfection of sensate cognition.71 3.2

Jonathan Edwards and the Art of Beautiful Thinking

In the year 1720 when Edwards took his BA from Yale, the commencement broadside “Logic” thesis §23 read “Intellectual cognition is more certain than knowledge by the senses”.72 In 1728, “Logic” thesis §6 read, “Intuitive cognition does not differ from true perception”.73 There appears to be a clear distinction between intellectual cognition and intuitive cognition. This distinction corresponds to the difference between the ratio, as regards the former, superior faculty, and the affective dimensions of the will, its affections, and sense perception, as regards the latter, inferior faculty. The implication of this distinction is that aesthetics, if indeed it is the art of beautiful thinking, is to be relegated to the lower inferior dimension within faculty psychology. It shall be argued, however, that Edwards overcomes the apparent implication of this distinction by elevating the dignity and certainty of the art of beautiful thinking, much as Baumgarten does. The affective dimension of the heart and mind thus rises to a higher rational level. The art of beautiful thinking immediately intuits the aesthetic appeal of beauty. That is, there is no need for “argumentation”. The immediate sense of beauty is as “tasting the sweetness of honey, or perceiving the harmony of a tune”. The mind is framed in such a way as to recognize what is beautiful and respond accordingly.74 Indeed, in search of the moral foundation of human nature, the Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) used the term “moral sense of beauty” in a 1726 publication.75 Timothy Dwight answered in the affirmative the question of the 1747 Yale Master’s Quaestio §4, presided over

70 Baumgarten, Ästhetik, Bd1:lviii–liv, and (§14) Bd 1:20. Likewise, Eco who says that if beauty is a transcendental then beauty acquires “concreteness and a quality of necessity, an objectivity and dignity”, in Eco, Aesthetics of Aquinas, 22, 59. 71 Baumgarten, Ästhetik, Bd1:liii. 72 G. Saltonstall, Yale College Commencement Broadside (New London: Timothy Green, 1720). 73 J. Tallcott, Yale College Commencement Broadside (New London: Timothy Green, 1728). 74 Edwards, “True Virtue”, WJE 8:619. 75 F. Hutcheson, An Inquiry Into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue in Two Treatises: I. Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, and Design. II. Concerning Moral Good and Evil (London: J. Darby, A. Bettesworth, F. Fayram, 1726), xv, 16. Hutcheson says that references to the “moral sense” of beauty offended the moralist Lord Shaftesbury.

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by Thomas Clap, “Whether the moral sense of beauty occasions a sufficient rule and obligation in the good actions of human beings to live well?”76 True Virtue 1778

In Edwards’s account of “True Virtue”, God’s goodness and benevolence are logically “prior to the beauty” as well as the existence of objects ad extra that he wills to create. It is God’s goodness that moves him to give his works ad extra their very being and existence. God’s “benevolence” is the pleasure of his “good-will”. God is thus disposed to will intelligent beings into existence and to give them “beauty and happiness”.77 The beauty of God’s created works ad extra, however, is not and cannot be the ground of God’s benevolence since in a first logical plot line God’s goodness moves the pleasure of his good-willing to will objects of beauty into existence. Then, in a second logical plot line God is inclined to the beauty he himself brought into existence. This is the “love of benevolence” that Edwards describes. On the other hand, the “love of complacence”, of which Edwards speaks, “presupposes” the beauty of God’s works ad extra, and thus logically follows the love of benevolence.78 This gives rise to the question that Augustine asked, “Whether things are beautiful because they give pleasure, or give pleasure because they are beautiful?” The first position reflects a relative subjectivity. The second reflects an essential objectivity. Eco suggests that Augustine takes the second position.79 For human beings, according to Edwards, the reverse is true. The beauty of objects that God has created is normally the epistemic ground of the propensity and human benevolence toward beauty, although not always. Humans, thus, first delight in beauty and then are benevolent toward those objects.80 Edwards sees an inconsistency and circular reasoning in supposing that a virtuous person with “beauty of mind” instills, as it were, beauty in the object in which a person delights, on the one hand, and that the beauty of an object moves a person to love it, rendering

76 T. Clap, “Yale College Theses and Quaestiones”, RU 146, Yale University Archives 1747. See Fiering’s remark that whereas Edwards as “a typologist“ begins with transcendent “spiritual reality”, Hutcheson as “a naturalist” begins with “material reality”, in Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought, 118. 77 Edwards, “True Virtue”, WJE 8:542. 78 Edwards, “True Virtue”, WJE 8:543. See Edwards use of “God’s sovereign pleasure” juxtaposed with the “objects of complacence” in “Miscellanies” no. 1245, in J. Edwards, The “Miscellanies” (Entry Nos. 1153–1360), D.A. Sweeney (ed.) (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 23; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 80–81. 79 The question then arises, “Is beauty one of the transcendentals?” Eco reminds us that “the medievals were persistently unsettled on the issue of beauty as a transcendental, in Eco, Aesthetics of Aquinas, 49. 80 Edwards, “True Virtue”, WJE 8:542.

Jonathan Edwards and Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten

him or her, as it were, virtuous, on the other.81 Thus, like Augustine’s question, it seems that Edwards would agree with Augustine that one cannot have it both ways. Thus, things are delighted in and give pleasure because they are beautiful. Edwards distinguishes between the “sensation of primary”, that is, “spiritual beauty”, and “secondary beauty”. In secondary beauty, someone may “be pleased with the harmony of the notes in a tune” without understanding the proportional distribution of the notes, “the ground of the melody” itself. In primary beauty, the mind immediately perceives the quintessence of beauty and that is what is “pleasing to the virtuous mind”. There is a God-given “law” of “mutual natural agreement” that appears “beautiful or grateful to men”.82 In this case, singing beautifully is thinking beautifully.83 Edwards’s maxim in Freedom of the Will that “the will is as the greatest apparent good is” shows that the nature of immutable truth is based in cordial consent. Here Edwards finds himself in the tradition of Plato’s foundational epistemology. The law of beauty is an immutable law and thus the beauty of the apparent good is a determinative power irresistibly exercised upon the will.84 Virtue, however, is not the love of virtue in infinitum.85 The essence of virtue is neither the love of benevolence, nor of complacence. True virtue is love of being for who he is in himself. It is “propensity and union of heart to being simply considered; exciting absolute benevolence”.86 Edwards concludes that the greater the being, and the greater the existence, the greater should be “the propensity and benevolent affections of the heart”. The greatest being, God, commands the greatest consent, namely, “pure benevolence”. “Spiritual beauty”, then, is the “primary and most essential beauty”. It is the “primary” ground of complacence, but the “secondary ground” of benevolence. “True virtue must chiefly consist in love to God; the Being of beings, infinitely the greatest and best of beings.”87 The first objective ground of love is Being. The second objective ground of love is beauty. God is infinitely

81 Edwards, “True Virtue”, WJE 8:544. 82 Edwards, “True Virtue”, WJE 8:566. 83 “Singing is amiable, because of the proportion that is perceived in it; singing in divine worship is beautiful and useful, because it expresses and promotes the harmonious exercise of the mind. There will doubtless, in the future world, be that which, as it will be an expression of an immensely greater and more excellent harmony of the mind, so will be a far more lively expression of this harmony; and shall itself be vastly more harmonious, yea, than our air or ears, by any modulation, is capable of. Which expressions, and the harmony thereof, shall be sensible, and shall far more lively strike our perception than sound,” in “Miscellanies” no. 153 in J. Edwards, The “Miscellanies” (Entry Nos. a-z, aa-zz, 1–500), T.A. Schafer (ed.) (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 13; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 303. 84 Delattre, Beauty and Sensibility, 191, 198–99. 85 Edwards, “True Virtue”, WJE 8:543. 86 Edwards, “True Virtue”, WJE 8:544. 87 Edwards, “True Virtue”, WJE 8:550.

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the most beautiful Being. Edwards has demonstrated that there is an extra-mental reality by pointing to the divinely dependent sense of things outside our minds. The idea of a spiritual or divine sense is “true knowledge of God” and a “representation” of things outside the mind, a representation which images “the moral perfection and excellency of the Divine Being”.88

4.

Conclusion

A significant challenge to this and other approaches to Edwards comes from Stephen H. Daniel, who sets the “modernist assumptions” of clear and distinct ideas and the aesthetics of Western metaphysics in general in opposition to what he calls Edwards’s “Stoic-Ramist-Renaissance” semiotics. Daniel finds that a structuralist/ poststructuralist application of semiotics – Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), Michel Foucault (1926–1984), Julia Kristeva (b. 1941) – helps reveal the rationale behind Edwards’s doctrine of cordial consent to Being and beauty. In cordial consent, there is a perceiver and a perceived. This consent is “not only part of the epistemology of beauty; it also describes the parameters for delineating the mind and its objects”. Crucially, to speak of cordial consent implies with it a relation to another, that is, “a relation of identity (e.g., A is A)”. The mind is not distinct from the object it loves with cordial consent. Both mind and the object loved are in a dialectic relation one to another. Accordingly, for Edwards, Daniel says, “The apprehension of the union or identity of mind with its objects is the experience of spiritual beauty”. In this sense, Daniel says Edwards’s regenerate sense of the heart poses a “radical” challenge to “the classical-modern theory of knowledge”.89 The consequences of Daniel’s poststructuralist reading of Edwards is that there is no independent, extra-mental reality. The images from the book of nature, for instance, do not have an independent ontological status. There is no transcendental reality, no Truth, no “originary event” or “presence” to serve as the basis for the book of nature, the Scriptures, or poetry. There is rather a linguistic turn such that a stable transcendent reality is displaced by a metareality, a metadiscourse.90 It is, thus, questionable whether Edwards’s use of “discourse” can mean what “discourse” means to poststructuralists, and the meaning with which Daniel thinks Edwards infuses it. Insofar as Daniel aims to overcome modernist assumptions, I too have aimed to show that Baumgarten and Edwards are not to be cast in a modernist Enlightenment

88 Edwards, “True Virtue”, WJE 8:622. 89 Daniel, The Philosophy of Jonathan Edwards, vii–viii, 2, 178, 179, 183, 185, 186, 187. 90 McComiskey, Gorgias and the New Sophistic Rhetoric,77–89.

Jonathan Edwards and Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten

mould. Baumgarten and Edwards transform the notion of beauty into an art of beautiful thinking. Both thinkers communicate distinct ideas with scientific clarity, but disavow the reductionist approach to the language of propositions in the new philosophy of the Enlightenment. Both share in a common rational aesthetics that is not incompatible with the elevation of the status of sensate cognition and a regenerate sense of the heart. Nor is their shared semiotic belief in the real and essential bond between a sign of beauty and truth and the transcendental signified, namely, God as the ultimate referent, incompatible with their rational aesthetics. By the term “transcendental signified”, I mean a signified that exists positively and independently of the sign. One ought not therefore attribute to Baumgarten and Edwards the modernist Cartesian cogito subject as transcendental signified. Nor ought one confuse the term transcendental with Kant’s later redefinition of the term. Indeed, Baumgarten and Edwards stand as two of the last defenders of the classical-transcendental dimension of the art of beautiful thinking before the Kantian turn.

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Edwards and Kant on God’s End in Creation

1.

Introduction

Both Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) hold that God is absolutely self-sufficient, that God has an end in creation, and that these are directly connected to the content of morality and to the incentives a creature has to fulfill its ideals. Edwards addresses these issues in his dissertation, Concerning the End for Which God Created the World (completed in 1755; published posthumously in 1765).1 Kant addresses the same issues in his Lectures on Philosophical Theology (given 1783–84; published 1817).2 This chapter presents and compares their views and offers an assessment of the extent to which they succeeded in achieving their stated aims. Edwards uses the phrase “absolute self-sufficiency” three times, explicating it as follows: “God is infinitely, eternally, unchangeably, and independently glorious and happy.”3 Kant writes that God “is self-sufficient and has a complete self-contentment in his independent existence. God needs no thing external to him, and nothing outside him could increase his blessedness”.4 With regard to God’s having an end in creation Edwards writes that, what God had respect to as an ultimate end of his creating the world, to communicate of his own infinite fullness of good; or rather it was his last end, that there might be a

1 Jonathan Edwards, “Concerning the End for which God Created” in Paul Ramsey (ed.), Ethical Writings (Works of Jonathan Edwards 8; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). Henceforth, I will refer to this work as End of Creation. 2 Immanuel Kant, ‘Lectures on the Philosophical Doctrine of Religion,’ in A.W. Wood/G. Di Giovanni (ed.), Religion and Rational Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). While Kant’s Lectures are a commentary on the Vorbereitung zur natürlichen Theologie by Johann August Eberhard and the Metaphysica by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, according to Wood and Giovanni, they are the “principal source about his view on the concepts of God”, 338. The section of Kant’s lectures which this chapter addressed was devoted to a section of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Metaphysica (1739). Edwards may have been aware of some of the notions Kant mentions because of his awareness of the metaphysical views of Christian Wolff (1679–1754) through the works of Johann Friedrich Stapfer (1708–1775). Baumgarten was responding to Wolff. 3 Edwards, End of Creation, WJE 8:445, 450, 462, and 420. 4 Kant, Lectures, 400.

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glorious and abundant emanation of his infinite fullness of Good ad extra, or without himself.5

For Edwards, this infinite fullness of good is God’s Holy Spirit. In other words, God’s ultimate end in creation is God himself indwelling a society of beings who are upheld in existence moment-by-moment ex nihilo. Kant writes that “God willed the attainment of certain aims by his production of the world”.6 Kant continues this idea writing that “It is possible to think of a double end for it, first an objective end, consisting in the perfection which made the world an object of God’s will, and then a subjective end”.7 God’s objective end in creation is its physical and moral perfection. Creation’s physical perfection is the happiness of rational creatures who “overflow with pleasure and good fortune”.8 As he put it earlier, “God’s aim is the happiness of creatures”.9 Both Edwards and Kant recognized that for a theist of any kind, a view of how we should live will depend on a view of the nature of God and God’s purposes. The central concern of their works under consideration was how these assumptions are related to morality. Edwards’s primary goal in writing was to provide the conceptual ground for ethics – what he called “True Virtue”. A secondary goal was to undermine the influence of a contrary view of religious experience by refuting the views of God’s end and motivation it presupposed and promoted. As Samuel Hopkins wrote in the Preface to End of Creation, The notions that some men entertain concerning God’s end in creating the world, and concerning true virtue, in our late author’s opinion, have a natural tendency to corrupt Christianity, and to destroy the gospel of our Divine Redeemer.10

In his 1757 letter to Thomas Foxcroft, Edwards writes, I have also written two other discourses, one on God’s End in Creating the World; the other concerning The Nature of True Virtue. As it appeared to me, the modern opinions which

5 6 7 8 9 10

Edwards, End of Creation, WJE 8:433. Edwards, End of Creation, WJE 8:422. Edwards, End of Creation, WJE 8:428. Edwards, End of Creation, WJE 8:429. Edwards, End of Creation, WJE 8:413. Edwards, End of Creation, WJE 8:402.

Edwards and Kant on God’s End in Creation

prevail concerning these two things, stand very much as foundations of the fashionable scheme of divinity, which seems to have become almost universal.11

He echoes what Thomas Clap discussed two years earlier in 1755 at the meeting of the General Association of the Colony of Connecticut. Clap, who at the time served as the President of Yale College, defended New England’s Puritan tradition against these “fashionable schemes”. According to Clap, the scheme holds that the “only End and Design in Creation is the Happiness of the Creature”, and the way the scheme construes God’s purpose as creature happiness “naturally leads to most, if not all the rest”, of its ideas about moral duty, freedom of the will, and sin.12 In other words, both Edwards and Clap observe that the currently “fashionable scheme” of religious belief and practice is a logical consequence of modern views of God’s end in creation and of moral virtue. Neither Clap nor Edwards denied that God’s end in creation included creature happiness. Rather, they differed radically from their opponents regarding its source, nature, and means of achieving it. Grounding morality was Kant’s stated concern both in the Critique of Pure Reason and in the Lectures. Kant asserts that the moral perfection of creation is God’s ultimate end. He says that “Creation’s moral perfection is every human person’s using their reason and their freedom “according to which the moral law is fulfilled,” thereby sustaining a “system of all ends” and “making themselves worthy to be happy”.13 Notice that it looks as though what Kant was promulgating was exactly what Clap and Edwards opposed. For Edwards, true virtue is a work of God; for Kant moral perfection was solely a work of creatures. Each of them argues their case deductively from the same assumptions!

2.

The Role of Reason and its Limits

Both Kant and Edwards invoke the capacity of reason to ascertain God’s ultimate end and motivation in creation. Edwards says that he wants to “to discover what the voice of reason is, so far as it can go”.14 His aim is to “see what light reason will give us respecting the particular end or ends God had ultimately in view in the

11 Jonathan Edwards, “Letter to the Reverend Thomas Foxcroft”, in G.S. Claghorn (ed.), Letters and Personal Writings (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 16; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 696. 12 Thomas Clap, A brief history and vindication of the doctrines received and established in the churches of New England, with a specimen of the new scheme of religion beginning to prevail (Boston: Kneeland, 1757), 17, 22. 13 Kant, Lectures, 430. 14 Edwards, End of Creation, WJE 8:463.

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creation of the world”.15 Even though in the second chapter of his work he exposits what Scripture teaches regarding these things, he adopts the rationalist rhetorical method in the first chapter in order to refute what has been claimed. As he puts it, those objections, have chiefly been made use of against what I think the scriptures have truly revealed, have been made from the pretended dictates of reason, – I would in the first place soberly consider in a few things, what seems rational to be supposed concerning this affair; – and then proceed to consider what light divine revelation gives us in it.16

Edwards deductively demonstrates that, contrary to the assertions of the rationalists, what follows is actually what Scripture teaches. Kant says that his aim is to “see how far our reason can go in attaining cognition of God”.17 Indeed, “one of the most worthwhile considerations” with which reason can be engaged is to attempt as much.18 His method is “transcendental”. It is not a matter of the exegesis of Scripture, but rather a matter seeking “cognition of God from pure concepts”.19 Throughout his corpus, Kant held that this theoretical (purely conceptual) knowledge of God differs from faith. He is famous for attempting to ascertain the limits of theoretical reason “in order to make room for faith”.20 It is not as though Kant is saying that faith is unwarranted. Rather, as Lawrence and Fugate put it, Such a faith has its source in the needs of pure practical reason, and it is through these needs that Kant maintains that we can extend our cognition for practical purposes, allowing us to form a warranted conception of God and the afterlife in the service of the highest good.21

In sum, while their respective positions regarding the limits of a role for reason in achieving knowledge of God appear to be similar – “how far” versus “so far” – they are not. Edwards holds that reason has limits regarding the knowledge of God, but

15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Edwards, End of Creation, WJE 8:428. Edwards, End of Creation, WJE 8:419 (emphasis given). Kant, Lectures, 343. Kant, Lectures, 343. Kant, Lectures, 347. Immanuel Kant. Critique of Pure Reason, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), 29. L. Pasternack/C. Fugate, “Kant’s Philosophy of Religion”, in E.N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2020 Edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2020/entries/kantreligion/. Accessed April 23, 2021.

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the knowledge of God is more that propositional knowledge.22 Kant, by contrast, holds that reason will discover the “boundaries completely” of “possible cognition of God”.23 He holds that reason sets limits regarding the knowledge of God. Given their divergent views of the role of reason, the next question is what concept of the knowledge of God did each have in mind.

3.

The Creature’s Knowledge of God in Relation to God’s End and Morality

For both Edwards and Kant the nature and point of creature’s knowledge of God was crucial to morality. For Edwards, the nature of the creature’s knowledge of God is both rational and spiritual. Spiritual knowledge of God is of two sorts. The first is propositional knowledge illuminated by the Holy Spirit. It is a true sense of the significance of what is believed. More important is the second sort of knowledge of God: in virtue of the indwelling Holy Spirit – what Edwards calls an “emanation” – spiritual knowledge of God is “God’s own knowledge, holiness, and joy”.24 For Edwards, the moral behaviour related to the knowledge of God was primarily a work of God in redeemed creatures. It was a matter of the Holy Spirit indwelling creatures, giving then experiential knowledge of God. The indwelling Holy Spirit is like a fountain, flowing into people, so that God’s own knowledge, love (holiness), and joy (happiness) exists in them, affecting every aspect of their lives. This is “true virtue”.25 For Kant, a creature’s knowledge of God, according to Kant, is purely conceptual or a priori, because God cannot be an object of experience. By holding that God cannot be an object of experience, Kant not only denies the reports of empirical experience of God in Scripture, but thereby treats Scripture as a defective source of conceptual knowledge of God. For Kant, the point of conceptual knowledge of God is to motivate morality. He says, “our morality has need of the idea of God to give it emphasis”. In other words, what is needed for morality (the behavioural aspect of religion) is a coherent concept of God sufficient to motivate such behaviour. That is, the concept of God and creation must “not contradict the laws of the

22 Edwards discusses this at length, noting the difference between propositional knowledge–what Edwards calls “notional” knowledge–and spiritual knowledge. See Jonathan Edwards, “Divine and Supernatural Light,” in M. Valeri (ed.), Sermons and Discourses, 1730–1733 (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 17; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999) 405–27. 23 Kant, Lectures, 343. 24 Edwards, End of Creation, WJE 8:433. 25 Edwards, End of Creation, WJE 8:442.

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understanding”.26 In sum, for Edwards, a creature’s knowledge of God is both a condition and a crucial aspect of God’s ultimate end. For Kant, knowledge of God is only propositional and, as such, a condition of God’s achieving his objective end.

4.

A Conceptual Problem and Conditions for overcoming it

The issue of how God’s end in creation is related to morality was an important issue for many philosophers and theologians in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as it was for many Jewish and Christian thinkers before them. Holding both notions is famously difficult. The problem is that the very concept of acting to achieve an objective end entails that the agent values the state to be achieved more than the initial state. By definition, prior to taking the first step in a course of action to achieve it and as it is being pursued, the accomplishment of an ultimate end is appraised by the agent as having some objective value. (This is a cognitive attitude.) In addition, it is also treasured, cherished, loved, or esteemed accordingly. (This is an affective attitude). Both attitudes are involved in an agent’s pursuing an end. It would appear then that God’s end in creation involves something of value, something real that he otherwise lacked. It follows that God must not have been fulfilled in his initial state without creation. If this is so, then God is not self-sufficient and must have acted out of necessity to satisfy a deficiency. In other words, God could not have created freely. This conceptual problem is seldom appreciated for the precise difficulties it raises for developing a coherent theology. The primary task for anyone’s theorising about God and creation is to explain how God can have an end in creation without God’s gaining something he previously lacked. The first thing to take into consideration is that the concept of gain presupposes some notion of value. Given the observed conceptual parameters of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thought, there are three concepts of value in accordance with which God might be thought to gain by acting: (1) ontological, (2) qualitative, and (3) psychological. A thing’s ontological value is its objective or real existence. A thing’s qualitative value is its objective or real excellence. Finally, a thing’s psychological value is the pleasure (felicity, joy, fulfillment) it provides. From a summary of their own words, both Edwards and Kant understand God’s being absolutely self-sufficient to entail that (1) God alone comprises all possible existence and excellence, dwelling in a state of all possible felicity and fulfilment and, therefore, that (2) that no existing or possibly existing future created entity or set of conditions could be necessary for the maintenance of God’s existence, excellence, or felicity or could be sufficient for the reduction or increase of any of

26 Kant, Lectures, 343, 346.

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them to any extent. The concept of a total state of affairs comprising all possible existence precludes the creation of additional real existence. The same holds for God’s excellence and felicity. In other words, Edwards and Kant – indeed every theologian or philosopher who holds these assumptions – must explain how and in what senses (ontological, qualitative, and psychological) God’s ultimate or objective end in creation (and what it presupposes) is valuable and valued by God both cognitively (as an appraisal of its value) and affectively (as esteem, giving him pleasure) both before creation and as it is being achieved, but not more valuable or more valued as it is being achieved. For Edwards, seven truths about God are central to his position and, in various combination, address this issue. Let us refer to these truths as “factors”. – (F1) God comprises all possible existence and excellence, appraises his value accordingly, having infinite self-regard.27 – (F2) The attitudes, emotions, and behaviour of redeemed people in this universe and in the coming new universe are – and always will be – due to the life of God himself in them, which is the indwelling Holy Spirit producing such “fruit”.28 – (F3) The qualitative value of any of the effects of the exercise of God’s attributes derives solely from the value of God, whose characteristics they manifest.29 – (F4) God has eternally perfect ideas of all that he is able to achieve ad extra.30 – (F5) God’s pleasure and joy in his ability ad extra and in every one of the effects of its exercise are eternally perfect.31

27 Edwards asserts that “the Creator is infinite, and has all possible existence, perfection, and excellence, so he must have all possible regard”. Edwards, End of Creation, WJE 8:424. 28 Edwards writes that “Fehler! Nur HauptdokumentThere is included in this [the glory of God as God’s end in creation], the manifestation of his internal glory to created understandings. The communication of the infinite fulness of God to the creature. The creature’s high esteem of God, love to God, and complacence and joy in God; and the proper exercises and expressions of these”. Edwards, End of Creation, WJE 8:527. 29 Edwards writes that “Fehler! Nur HauptdokumentAs God’s perfections are things in themselves excellent, so the expression of them in their proper acts and fruits is excellent; and the knowledge of these excellent perfections, and of these glorious expressions of them, is an excellent thing, the existence of which is in itself valuable and desirable”. Edwards, End of Creation, WJE 8:431. 30 As he puts it, “God as perfectly knew himself and his perfections, had as perfect an idea of the exercises and effects they were sufficient for, antecedently to any such actual operations of them, as since,” Edwards, End of Creation, WJE 8:432. 31 Edwards writes, “For though these communications of God, these exercises, operations, and expressions of his glorious perfections, which God rejoices in, are in time; yet his joy in them is without beginning or change … He ever beheld and enjoyed them perfectly in his own independent and immutable power and will”. Edwards, End of Creation, WJE 8:448.

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– (F6) The being of the universe before being achieved is only a plan for a universe. As such it is a complex representation, whose structure is a logically ordered sequence of component representations.32 – (F7) Creation is ex nihilo.33 In what follows, the requirements for coherently holding both that God is absolutely self-sufficient and that God has an end in creation are made more precise by expressing them as questions to be answered. 4.1

What is it that makes God’s end in creation qualitatively valuable as it is being achieved and explains God’s appraising and esteeming it as such so that it satisfies the definition of being an ultimate end?

For Edwards, what makes God’s end in creation qualitatively valuable is that God’s end (in one sense) is God himself, who is eternally, infinitely qualitatively valuable, comprising all possible excellence (F1). The particular sense in which God’s end is God himself is in its being God’s Holy Spirit indwelling creatures who are ex nihilo. In another sense, God’s end in creation is a work of God. This also has two aspects. The physical existence of redeemed creatures and the creation itself are works of God and the moral life of redeemed creatures is a work of God (F2).34 This is God “glorifying” himself. It is God’s sharing or extending his “internal glory” into ex nihilo creatures. What makes this work qualitatively valuable? As Edwards puts it, It seems a thing in itself fit, proper and desirable that the glorious attributes of God, which consist in a sufficiency to certain acts and effects, should be exerted in the production of

32 This follows the assumption that God has an ultimate end in creation and Edwards’s analysis of the notion of an ultimate end as it appears in his Introduction. God’s having an ultimate end involves a system of subordinate and both consequential and “mixed” ultimate ends. This system is God’s plan. 33 Edwards expresses it as follows, “Fehler! Nur HauptdokumentThe notion of God’s creating the world in order to receive any thing properly from the creature, is not only contrary to the nature of God, but inconsistent with the notion of creation; which implies a being’s receiving its existence, & all that belongs to its being, out of nothing. And this implies the most perfect, absolute and universal derivation and dependence”. Edwards, End of Creation, WJE 8:420. 34 This raises the issue of the nature of creature freedom at least insofar as it might seem to be a necessary condition of a creature’s being willing to be a work of God. It would appear from his work on the freedom of the will that Edwards would categorically deny the idea. Contrary to this is the idea that without some level of independent freedom the creature cannot stand in a personal relationship to God. It appears that Edwards must explain how God’s working in a creature “to will” produces a genuine experience of conscious will. Those who oppose him must explain how a being who is ontologically dependent in every sense could ever be functionally independent in any sense. This important issue cannot be further pursued in this chapter.

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such effects as might manifest the infinite power, wisdom, righteousness, goodness, etc., which are in God.35

In other words, what makes any work of God qualitatively valuable is its manifesting what God is like (F3). Therefore – to extend the previous thought – God also “glorifies himself ” in revealing what he is like in and through his works of sustaining creation, his works of providence, and his work of redemption. The qualitative value of God’s characteristics (or attributes) is a matter of the qualitative value of God himself. What about this explains God’s appraising and esteeming it as such are God’s eternally perfect ideas and eternally perfect joy in his power expressed by factors (F4) and (F5) above. Kant asserts that a system of ends is of “preeminent value”.36 Indeed, it is “the best world of all possible worlds”.37 In short, God’s objective end has qualitative value and is the best of all alternatives. Kant adds that “God created a world because he was most well-pleased with its highest perfection, where every rational creature would participate in happiness to the measure in which he had made himself worthy of it”.38 Here Kant asserts that God both appraises it as having the highest qualitative value and esteems it as such accordingly. Kant, however, does not explain what makes God’s objective end in creation qualitatively valuable. 4.2

What makes God’s end in creation and what it presupposes qualitatively valuable before being achieved so that God appraises and esteems them as such and what explains why they are not more valuable as they are being achieved, showing that it is consistent with God’s being absolutely self-sufficient?

Edwards holds that, since God’s ideas of what he can create and his joy in his ability and its effects are eternally perfect, God’s end in creation and what it presupposes cannot be more valuable as it is being achieved than what it is before being achieved. God’s original ultimate end in creation is God himself, who is eternally of all value. It presupposes God’s works of sustaining creation and his works of providence. What makes the achievement of what is presupposed by God’s original ultimate end in creation – all being works of God – qualitatively valuable before being achieved is because they manifest what God is like (F3) and God’s ideas regarding what he

35 36 37 38

Edwards, End of Creation, WJE 8:428. Kant, Lectures, 429. Kant, Lectures, 426–27. Kant, Lectures, 430.

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can create and pleasure in them are eternally perfect (F4) (F5). There can be no change or increase. Kant asserts that God’s “objective end” in creation is its physical and moral perfection.39 The dynamic and continuing “perfection of creation” is God’s “production of the greatest possible sum of all good”.40 Again, Kant claims, but does not provide an explicit account or even a statement regarding what makes God’s end in creation qualitatively valuable and explains God’s appraising and esteeming creation’s qualitative value. 4.3

In what sense does God’s end in creation have ontological value (i.e., existence) as it is being achieved thereby satisfying the definition of being an ultimate end?

For Edwards, God’s end in creation has “being” (has ontological value) as it is being achieved because it is God’s “internal glory” indwelling creatures. God’s “internal glory” is God who “as it were comprehends all. His existence, being infinite, must be equivalent to universal existence”.41 Since Kant holds that God’s objective end in creation is the physical and moral perfection of creation and that creation is ex nihilo, depending for existence on God’s willing its existence, God’s end in creation has “being” (having ontological value) as it is being achieved. The being of whatever God wills to exist is the being of God’s willing its existence. 4.4

Why are God’s end in creation and what it presupposes not more ontologically valuable as they are being achieved thereby satisfying the definition of God’s being absolutely self-sufficient, containing within himself all value?

Edwards holds that God’s end in creation has “being” (has ontological value) as it is being achieved because God’s end is God’s “internal glory” indwelling creatures. God’s “internal glory” is God himself, an eternal, inexhaustible fullness of being. No additional ontological value could have been added by the achieving of God’s end in creation because God’s end is his eternal Holy Spirit dwelling in creatures. Secondly, no additional ontological value could have been added by the existence of the universe, because before being achieved it is a plan in God’s mind (F6) and as it is being achieved, it is created ex nihilo (F7)

39 Kant, Lectures, 429–30. 40 Kant, Lectures, 401. 41 Edwards, End of Creation, WJE 8:455.

Edwards and Kant on God’s End in Creation

This explanation warrants elaboration. An object in relation to a person can be either ideal or real. This is a matter of its ontological status with respect to a person S’s cognition (i.e., S’s perceiving, conceiving, willing that it exists, or imagining). Object x is real with respect to S if it exists independently of S’s cognition. Its ontological status, in this case, is objective with respect to S’s cognition. On the other hand, object x is ideal with respect to S if its existence depends on S’s cognition. Its ontological status is subjective with respect to S’s cognition. Applying this to God, since absolute self-sufficiency is incommunicable, no creature can ever be an ontologically independent result of God’s creative action. The created universe is never real with respect to God’s “mind”. Before creation, a physical object is a real possibility, being an element of God’s representational awareness of his ability ad extra and being situated in God’s plan. As it is being created, a physical object is the simultaneous and coextensive result of God’s existence-conferring action. In other words, a physical object is ex nihilo – nothing more than God’s willing its existence according to plan. Before creation, an object is divinely “intended” as a representation of what God can create. As it is being created, a physical object is divinely “intended” as nothing more that an act of willing its existence. There is a change in the intentionality of the idea, but nothing real in relation to God is added by his existence conferring actions.42 As Edwards put it, “Now, if the creature receives its all from God entirely and perfectly, how is it possible that it should have any thing to add to God, to make him in any respect more than he was before”.43 The underlying concepts of Kant’s answer to this are nearly identical to those upon which his answer to the fourth requirement is based. In other words, since God’s objective end is the physical and moral perfection of creation and since creation is ex nihilo, the being of creation (i.e., its ontological “value”) is only the result of God’s willing its existence. No ontological value is added by the creative act, because the “result” can never be more than an idea in God’s mind. This is essentially identical to Edwards’s view. 4.5

On what grounds does God “experience” pleasure in God’s end in creation as it is being achieved thereby satisfying the definition of being an ultimate end?

Edwards holds that God “experiences” pleasure in God’s end in creation as it is being achieved for two reasons. The first is that God’s end is God himself indwelling redeemed creatures. God’s being absolutely self-sufficient entails that God is com-

42 Creation’s being ideal with respect to God does not entail that it is ideal with respect to creatures. For Edwards, creation is real in relation to human minds. 43 Edwards, End of Creation, WJE 8:420.

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pletely satisfied, being completely “fulfilled” in being God. As Edwards puts it, “God is infinitely, eternally, unchangeably, and independently glorious and happy”.44 The second is that God’s end is itself also work of God which manifests what God is like (F3). Kant holds that God’s end in creation is its physical and moral perfection, the production of the greatest possible sum of all good. Kant adds that God “was most well-pleased with its highest perfection, where every rational creature would participate in happiness to the measure in which he had made himself worthy of it”.45 Kant does not state the grounds of God’s being most well-pleased. This omission is a shortcoming but does not appear to create incoherence in Kant’s position – not yet, at least. 4.6

In what sense does God “experience” pleasure in God’s end in creation and what it presupposes before it is being achieved and why is it that God’s pleasure is not increased as they are being achieved?

Edwards posits two reasons to hold that God’s felicity could not have been increased by creating. The first is that (F1) God comprises all being and is of all possible value. God appraises his value as such and esteems himself accordingly, which is “infinitely”. Second, God’s felicity could not have been increased by creating, because as (F7) and (F2) indicate, God’s works of sustaining creation and working redemption manifest God’s eternal and unchanging supreme self-regard. In other words, as Edwards puts it, “the church of Christ [is that] toward whom, and in whom are the emanations of his glory and communication of his fullness”.46 Thus, “God in seeking his glory, therein seeks the good of his creatures”.47 The good that is in God is their good and “God in seeking their glory and happiness, seeks himself ”.48 Kant writes that “[God] has no pleasure and no interest; for his is self-sufficient and has a complete contentment in his independent existence; he needs no thing external to him, and nothing outside him could increase his blessedness”.49 Yet Kant also asserts that God is “most well pleased” as God’s objective end in creation is being achieved.50 Charity in interpretation compels us to infer that, since “nothing outside him could increase his blessedness” God’s being pleased is simply a continuation of the pleasure he had in his perfect idea of creation before creating. This apparent

44 45 46 47 48 49 50

Edwards, End of Creation, WJE 8:402. Kant, Lectures, 430. Edwards, End of Creation, WJE 8:439. Edwards, End of Creation, WJE 8:459. Edwards, End of Creation, WJE 8:459. Kant, Lectures, 400. Kant, Lectures, 430.

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tension is resolved by Kant – like Edwards – holding that God has eternally perfect ideas, among them being the eternally perfect idea of creation’s perfection, with which God is eternally “most well pleased”. 4.7

If no qualitative, ontological, or psychological value is added by God’s achieving his end in creation, what is God’s motivation that satisfies the definition of having an end in creation?

Edwards realises that, given the assumptions of rational (or philosophical) theology, while God’s motivation to create did not spring from the prospect of gaining anything for any reason, it is at least conceptually possible that God was motivated to create (1) by a duty to comply with the demands of moral norms existing externally, (2) by what God’s holiness and wisdom determine is the “best”, or (3) by God’s moral goodness understood in terms of the Dionysian Principle of Goodness, which is that goodness is essentially self-diffusive. In other words, the nature of goodness is to give of itself and to refrain is contrary. Edwards argues that none of the three accounts of God’s motivation apply. Regarding the first, Edwards argues that there simply is no moral realm external to and morally constraining God’s actions. Regarding the second, God’s achieving his original ultimate end and its system of subordinate ends – which include all God’s works of sustaining creation per se in every respect, all works of providence, works of redemption, and works of self-revelation, both in creation and through creation, providence, and redemption – all of this compared to God’s eternally refraining are of equal objective value. There can be no best. Nevertheless, God did create, which leaves the third and final alternative explanation. To characterise a person as having an ultimate end is to attribute to that person a complex dispositional property. To put it another way, the concept of acting to achieve an ultimate end entails a concept of being dispositional in several senses: cognitively in appraising that end as actually being valuable, affectively in esteeming and treasuring that end, intentionally in planning how to achieve it, and behaviourally in taking action to achieve that end. But Edwards’s view is not an instance of the Dionysian Principle. For Edwards, God’s disposition to create is itself grounded only in his supreme self-regard and felicity. God’s motivation is, therefore, a matter of two dispositions: God’s infinite self-regard (an eternally manifesting disposition) grounds God’s being “inclined” to extend and share God’s intra-trinitarian life, of which the existence of a creation is a necessary condition. According to Edwards, each are aspects of the complex notion of God’s goodness: (1) God’s infinite selfregard is “God’s holiness”, (2) God’s inclination to create in order to share what is most valuable is “God’s love in a larger sense”, and (3) God’s disposition to do good

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to creatures is “God’s love in a stricter sense”.51 Edwards argues that the latter cannot be what motivated God to create because it presupposes creation. Edwards summarizes his argument from reason as follows: “a disposition in God, as an original property of his nature, to an emanation of his own infinite fullness, was what excited him to create the world; and so that the emanation itself was aimed at by him as a last end of the creation”.52 Neither Scripture nor reasoning from Scripture indicates what initiated the manifestation of this inclination. While we cannot have an exhaustive account of God’s motivation in creation, we have a coherent account in Edward’s two-tiered dispositional understanding that satisfies the ordinary concept of an agent’s acting for an end. In short, Edwards provides an account of God’s motivation and, even though it is ultimately inscrutable, the account is sufficient to overcome the conceptual problem posed by holding both that God is absolutely self-sufficient and that God’s has an ultimate end in creation. Kant asserts that “God created a world because he was most well-pleased with its highest perfection, where every rational creature would participate in happiness to the measure in which he had made himself worthy of it”.53 Here we have it that God’s motivation is his being “most well-pleased” with its ongoing existence. Yet, Kant also asserts that God “does not need to be motivated, and in his case there are no particular incentives; indeed no subjective relations are possible for him at all, because he is already all-sufficient in himself and has the highest blessedness”.54 Kant resolves this by asserting that God, being cognitively and morally perfect, always does what is the best. Such a motivation is not a matter of acting from need.

5.

Assessment

Edwards claims that “[There is] no way left to answer but that which has been taken above”.55 Every other way of combining God’s having an end in creation with God’s being absolutely self-sufficient is incoherent. Is Edwards correct? Kant’s position appears to meet all the requirements for a coherent answer. If so, how could both seem to arrive at contrary views of their position’s bearing on morality? Wherein lies the issue that makes the difference?

51 Edwards, End of Creation, WJE 8:439–40. 52 Edwards, End of Creation, WJE 8:433. Emphasis given. Edwards uses the words “emanation” to refer to God’s Holy Spirit indwelling the redeemed. He is not using it in a neo-platonic sense. See W.J. Schultz, “Is Jonathan Edwards a Neo-Platonist? The Concept of Emanation in End of Creation”, Jonathan Edwards Studies 8 (2018) 17–36. 53 Kant, Lectures, 430. 54 Kant, Lectures, 401. 55 Edwards, End of Creation, WJE 8:449.

Edwards and Kant on God’s End in Creation

The issue lies in Kant’s overlooking one crucial necessary condition in the common meaning of an agent’s having an end as applied to God, which is that the ends for which agents act are appraised and esteemed as being inherently valuable. Granted, as Kant describes it, God’s objective end in creation has value. It is not sufficient, however, that it merely have qualitative value, even if it is the “best of all possible worlds”. Anything God creates will have qualitative value, given that their value lies only in their being manifestations of what God is like. Merely having qualitative value – even being the best – does not satisfy the requirement that God’s end in creation be inherently qualitatively valuable. Kant, however, neither shows nor even claims that God’s end in creation is inherently valuable. One might protest, arguing that the requirement is satisfied by the nature of the value of Kant’s “system of ends”. It is a morality in which no person sees others as a means to an end. The nature of its value lies in its comprising persons who are treated as being intrinsically valuable, treated as “ends in themselves”. Moreover, this is how God treats persons and views his objective end: neither individuals nor the entire dynamic system is a means to meet any of God’s ends. By definition, if an agent does not treat the end for which they act as a means to something else (do not treat it as being instrumentally valuable), they treat it as being intrinsically valuable (as an end in itself). By analysis, if an agent treats the end for which they act as an end in itself, they appraise and esteem it as being inherently valuable. Hence, we should presume that Kant considered God’s end in creation to be inherently valuable. The objection involves helpful distinctions: being valued intrinsically differs from being valued inherently and from being inherently valuable. While in ordinary speech the words may be used synonymously, analytically speaking they denote different things. Being valued intrinsically has practical import, being the opposite of being valued instrumentally, that is, as a means. Being valued inherently does not essentially involve a practical dimension. Its value, rather, is simply non-derivative. Of course, they both apply in many situations involving a person’s purposeful action: the person believes that the value of what is sought does not depend on anything else and the person does not treat the thing sought as a means to something further. Even so, this objection fails because the position it correctly attributes to Kant turns out to be the core error in Kant’s position. God’s end in creation must be inherently valuable before creation. One might protest that the idea is contrary to the notion of an end, which is something inherently valuable only in prospect. While the objection is sound when applied to humans, it is not when applied to God. If only as it is being achieved God’s end in creation is appraised as being inherently valuable without it also being absolutely inherently valuable before creation, God’s end in creation is something God lacks before creation, which entails that God is not absolutely self-sufficient.

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Edwards realises that only God is absolutely inherently valuable before creation. He also realises that no created thing can be non-derivatively inherently valuable before it is created. Granted, God has eternally perfect ideas and perfect understanding and joy in what he can create, each having the value it has in revealing a characteristic of God. But their inherent value can never be non-derivative, that is, absolute. The only thing that can be inherently valuable before creation – the only thing that can be the ontological and axiological ground of all derivatively valuable achievements – is God. Edwards shows how God’s end in creation is God himself. Edwards also realises that his position requires a rigorous account of God’s motivation. As he puts it, It was this value for himself that caused him to value and seek that his internal glory should flow forth from himself. It was from his value for his glorious perfections of wisdom and righteousness, etc. – that he valued the proper exercise and effect of these perfections, in wise and righteous acts and effects.56

As noted above, Kant claims but does not provide an explicit account, or even a statement, regarding what makes God’s end in creation qualitatively valuable. Without this we have no account of how God’s end even might be inherently valuable. But this is just the issue: Kant cannot provide this. Kant’s notion of God’s objective end in creation is a state of the creation itself – it is persons “making themselves worthy to be happy” – but no created thing can be non-derivatively inherently valuable before it is created. Kant’s position is incoherent. Ironically, given Kant’s assertion that what is required for morality – indeed, all that is required for morality – is that “I see that my concept of God is possible and that it does not contradict the laws of the understanding”, Kant’s project fails the canons of reason.57 Kant’s explicit position on God’s end and motivation in creation differs from Edwards’s on several counts. The most crucial is that it is constructed upon a fatal error in deductive reasoning from a concept available to pure reason, namely, the cause, author, and ruler of this world having an end in creation.

56 Kant, Lectures, 532. 57 Kant, Lectures, 346. It should be noted that this conclusion supports Adolph Schlatter’s “Edwardsean” position regarding the relation of the biblical doctrine of God to social ethics against Kant’s project to ground ethics in an a priori concept of God. See A. Schlatter, “Metaphysik,” in Werner Neuer (ed.), Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche (Beiheft 7; Tübingen: Mohr, 1987), 1–15.

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Edwards and Schleiermacher

1.

Introduction

Jonathan Edwards and Friedrich Schleiermacher are outstanding examples of American and German theology in the eighteenth century. Given this, it is surprising that Edwards remains relatively unknown in the context of German theology.1 It is astonishing that there have been hardly any comparisons between the two theologians. For at first glance, there are some important parallels. Both are theological classics in their country. Both share at least the same basic constellation of theological debate: the strong influence of revivalist Christianity combined with an intensive engagement with the Enlightenment. Finally, both have developed an overall theological approach, in which the understanding of religion or piety is inseparably linked to a concept of affection or feeling. Both have fundamental significance for the respective theological histories in their home countries, and far beyond. It is therefore surprising that there have been few attempts to compare the two theologians.2 At the same time, the differences are considerable: here the self-evident presupposition of a theocentric metaphysics, there the departure from Kant’s principled critique of metaphysics; here the community pastor and Indian missionary, there employment as faculty and founding member of Berlin University; differences

1 There have been some German studies in recent years: See C. Schröder, Glaubenswahrnehmung und Selbsterkenntnis: Jonathan Edwards’ Theologia experimentalis. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998); F. Kelleter, Amerikanische Aufklärung: Sprachen der Rationalität im Zeitalter der Revolution. (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2002); A.U. Sommer, “Weltgeschichte und Heilslogik: Jonathan Edwards’ History of the Work of Redemption“, ZRG 53 (2001) 115–144; H. Deuser, “American Philosophy”, Gottesinstinkt. Semiotische Religionstheorie und Pragmatismus (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2004), 1–18; K. Huxel, “A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections” (Jonathan Edwards)”, in M. Eckert/E. Herms/ B.J. Hilberath/E.Jüngel (ed.), Lexikon der theologischen Werke (Stuttgart: Kröner, 2004) 754–755; M. Zeindler, “Jonathan Edwards: Calvin in der Neuen Welt”, in M. Hofheinz/W. Lienemann/M. Sallmann (ed.), Calvins Erbe. Beiträge zur Wirkungsgeschichte Johannes Calvins (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2011) 280–307; and K. Krause, “Jonathan Edwards’ Beitrag zum Freiheitsdiskurs”, ThZ 68 (2012) 139–162. 2 See for example M. McClymond, Encounters with God. An Approach to the Theology of Jonathan Edwards. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 22–24. Within German theology, see H. Deuser, Religionsphilosophie (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2009), 247–258 (on Edwards) and 282–290 (on Schleiermacher).

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that lead to such a different way of thinking that any rash comparison threatens to become anachronistic. Therefore, this essay focuses on a topic that was highly significant for both of them: the importance of feelings for religion.3 Both are regarded as classics in the discussion of religious feelings.4

2.

Edwards: Religious Affections and experimental religion

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) has long been considered the most important theologian in American history. In this sketch, I focus on the relationship between religion and emotion. 2.1

The Importance of religious experience

In his great biography of Jonathan Edwards,5 George Marsden shows that the question of right conversion was the overriding issue facing Edwards. The question of true faith was exacerbated by the phenomenon of large-scale revivals. It was not the phenomenon of revival that was new. His grandfather had already experienced five major awakenings in his congregation. But this phenomenon had taken on new dimensions with respect to their internationality, their approaches to postdenominational community building, and the increasing voluntaristic nature of church membership which resulted. At the same time, Edwards was sensitive to intellectual challenges of his time, which could be bundled under the vaguely used term of deism.

3 “In trying to understand the religious affections, we can obviously do no better than to consult Jonathan Edwards.” A. Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 294. Cf. P. Järveläinen, A Study of Religious Emotions (Helsinki: Luther-Agricola Society, 2000), 52–55; 59; 69 (on Schleiermacher), and 104–112, 114–116 (on Edwards). Also M. Wynn, Emotional Experience and Religious Understanding: Integrating Perception, Conception und Feeling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 65–70 (on Schleiermacher) and 128–132, 179–182 (on Edwards). 4 See R.C. Roberts, Spiritual Emotions. A Psychology of Christian Virtues (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), vii: “More than a century ago Friedrich Schleiermacher, Rudolf Otto, and William James gave religious emotions treatments of very different kinds from that of the present work, and even earlier Jonathan Edwards offered a theological account of Christian emotions that still stands as a classic.” Cf. M. McClymond, “Jonathan Edwards”, in J. Corrigan (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) 404–417; R.S. Bezzant, “From Sad and Mad to Glad: the Pilgrim’s Passions”, in M.P. Jensen (ed.), True Feelings: Perspectives on Emotions in Christian Life and Ministry (Nottingham: Apollos, 2012) 185–205; and T. Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 75. 5 G.M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards. A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 25.

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“True religion, in great part, consists in holy affections.”6 This statement is the key thesis of his treatise on Religious Affections (1746). What is striking is the fundamental intensification: affects are at the centre of piety and at the same time allow the distinction between true and false piety. The emphasis on the affective is by no means new. Puritanism has a long tradition of emphasising doctrine, but also piety as a piety of the heart, of experience. The theologians Perkins (1558–602) and Ames (1576–1633), who were particularly influential in New England, emphasised as a matter of course an understanding of faith characterised by heartfelt piety. It was not the strong emphasis on affects that was new, but that they were given central importance in new contexts. They no longer only stood for individual reassurance about one’s own state of grace; they were then also used to negotiate membership in religious communities, and the plausibility of the cognitive claims to validity of the Christian proclamation. In a time of intellectual uncertainty and simultaneous destabilisation of traditional social embeddedness, they become the decisive point of reference for religious reassurance. 2.2

Spiritual sense of the heart

According to Jonathan Edwards, many contemporaries made a philosophical view of man the basis of their theology, instead of the Bible: “In their philosophy, the affections of the soul are something diverse from the will, and not appertaining to the noblest part of the soul.”7 But this anthropological dualism is “false philosophy” and “false divinity”.8 Edwards’s theory of the spiritual sense of the heart has a foundational character for his theology. Edwards thus developed a theory of religious experience. His conception of the sense of the heart is a biblically founded and anthropologically verifiable theory concerning the legitimacy and form of emotional experience. Edwards links the basic dogmatic convictions of God’s sovereignty and the soteriological powerlessness of man with the tradition of a voluntaristic theological anthropology. In short, this theory states that spiritual realities are made accessible to human beings by means of a spiritual sense of the heart, in which cognitive, aesthetic and affective moments always already interact.

6 J. Edwards, Religious Affections, J.E. Smith (ed.) (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 2; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 95. 7 J. Edwards, “Some Thoughts concerning the Revival”, in C.C. Goen (ed.), The Great Awakening (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 4; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009) 281–530, on p. 296. 8 Edwards, “Some Thoughts”, WJE 4:297.

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2.2.1 Cognitive content and certainty of experience

First, religious experiences have a cognitive dimension. This involves the communicatively mediated cognitive content of the experience. Religious experiences refer to God, his grace, holiness or perfection, as communicated in the Scriptures, in individual hymns, sermons or other religious communication. Edwards developed his conception in an apologetic context, especially in the confrontation with deism. Enlightenment philosophy brought with it an epistemological crisis of religious certainties. Now, research has moved away from understanding Edwards one-sidedly as an exact imprint of John Locke, for classical theological and rationalist traditions also had considerable influence on Edwards. At the same time, it remains unmistakable that Edwards worked significantly on John Locke’s epistemological questions and their consequential problems.9 For Locke, all knowledge is based on immediate sensory certainty or theoretical processing of sensory experiences. This approach fitted in perfectly with the new wave of scientific insights. However, it posed a problem for the historical tradition of Christianity. Locke considered his starting point to be compatible with biblical Christianity. But his more radical disciples, the deists, played Locke’s empiricist epistemology against the possibility of religious knowledge. For them, it was unthinkable to build a religious faith upon historical accounts to which they themselves had only mediated access. From the outset, their concept of a rational religion only considered one’s own direct sensory experience or its reflection as a prerequisite for possible certainty of truth. However, there can be no such certainty with regard to classical dogmatic contents of a historical or metaphysical nature such as the incarnation or resurrection of Jesus. That is why deists refused to accept such contents as part of religious faith at all. They demanded a natural religion that adheres to the world of experience accessible to all people. Now, from the point of view of many, this was the whole dilemma of a Lockean epistemology: the facts of the biblical tradition are not directly verifiable by the senses. Can there only be a derived certainty with regard to religious content? What is the starting point of the immediate certainty of faith in religious experience? Must this experience be dismissed as enthusiasm or at least relativised? Edwards fundamentally embraced the empiricist stance. At the same time, Edwards refused to accept the consequences that had largely been drawn in the tradition of deism. On the other hand, he claimed that the key moment of the divine, the holiness of God or his moral excellence, can be immediately understood by man as a “simple idea”10 (to use Locke’s expression), as a given that can be grasped

9 Marsden, Edwards, 60–64. 10 Edwards, Religious Affections, WJE 2:205.

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in immediate sensory evidence.11 In Locke’s tradition, the given of every content through a sensual efficacy is the epistemological axiom of all knowledge of truth. Edwards’s thesis, however, obviously goes beyond the limits of Locke’s framework, which did not allow for any conceptions other than those that owed their existence to sensual perception or rational reflection. This extension of the conception of experience was in need of clarification. At this point, Edwards supplements the sensualist language with a terminology of aesthetic experience. 2.2.2 Religious experience and aesthetic perception

Since his earliest sermons, Edwards had spoken of a “sense of divine beauty”.12 The perception of God within religious experience is not related to a contested object in the world, but to a particular aspect within the horizon of all perception. In the midst of natural sense perception, it is about seeing the beauty and excellence of God. Aesthetic experiences have the peculiarity of always being built up through the moment of discovery; in this alone they are comparable to the experience of a religious conversion. The use of this aesthetic language is by no means new. Edwards’s account of this aesthetic dimension of faith is found in the Bible (Ps 34:9; Eph 1:18), and the tradition of spiritual senses is found in Origen, Bonaventure as well as in the spiritual literature of Puritanism.13 What is new, however, is Edward’s systematic application of this language to the epistemological challenges of his time. Edwards makes the language of pietist theology fruitful for an epistemological critique of a narrow Lockean empiricism. Edwards’s thinking shows both a connection to Locke and a contradiction of his sensualism. Cognition owes itself to perception, but perception cannot be limited to the circle of empirical sensory experience. Faith is a perception of a superior nature, namely of an intellectual kind. The analogy of the perception of beauty allows a number of transfers to the religious field. It is about an immediate knowledge of God that does not have to be rationally deduced or reflexively produced. This does not mean an absolute immediacy that is probably unattainable. For it is clear that knowledge of God is always mediated through the Word of God or Christian proclamation. In this respect alone, it can only be a matter of a mediated immediacy, as is also inherent in aesthetic experience. This already results from the fact that the rational capacities of word and sense apprehension are involved in this event. The term “immediacy” emphasises three things: cognition is not based on a process of 11 Cf. Edwards, Religious Affections, WJE 2:260. 12 J. Edwards, “A Divine and Supernatural Light”, in M. Valeri (ed.), Sermons and Discourses, 1730–1733 (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 17; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999) 405–426, on p. 421. 13 Cf. P. Gavrilyuk/S. Coakley, The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

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deliberation or a movement of searching reflection. Rather, its development has the character of an involuntary discovery and is therein not simply graspable. The second aspect Edwards emphasises is that of certainty. This is precisely what the use of a language of sensuality achieves, because it is associated with the highest degree of evidence. But even here, Edwards qualifies the idea that sensuality is always a matter of provisional and changing experience. Finally, the use of the terminology of seeing is justified because the mental view has a high degree of concreteness; it is clear and vivid as otherwise a sensual affliction. Edwards thus has a language at his disposal that formulates the genuine experiential certainty of faith in the horizon of empiricist aporias. What can be described as aesthetic discovery can be understood theocentrically as the self-communication of the triune God in the Holy Spirit by means of sensual signs and types. 2.2.3 The affective dimension of religious experience

The concept of the sense of the heart only becomes complete by adding its affective dimension. There are purely intellectual insights, such as those encountered in mathematics. Genuine religious insight, however, is distinguished by a special holistic character: the “seeing” cannot be separated from the “feeling”. Its content (moral excellence) concerns the whole person. Religious insights therefore touch the heart, the centre of the person, as Edwards emphasises, borrowing biblical as well as classical devotional language. Contrary to the critics of the revival, Edwards was not concerned with feelings overriding rational insight. Edwards was concerned with a holism of cognitive and affective-voluntary moments without establishing a clear hierarchy of the soul’s faculties. The spiritual perception of God is connected with “joy, and spiritual delight and pleasure”.14 Hearing or seeing beauty is not conceivable without joy, just as tasting sweetness is not conceivable without pleasure. In this sense, joy is a key emotion without which there can be no religious affection. Emotional experiences always have a hedonistic valency. At the same time, faith is never without transformational effects on the life of the believer. “True grace is not an inactive thing”.15 Just as love constitutes the essence of God, so it becomes the defining life force of the Christian. Creation, like redemption, aims at God’s self-communication and communication to his creatures. Therefore, love becomes the basic orientation of the new person and the centre of all true sanctification and renewal. Love is the decisive sign of genuine spiritual experience, as are compassion and mercy.16

14 Edwards, Religious Affections, WJE 2:249. 15 Edwards, Religious Affections, WJE 2:398. 16 Edwards, Religious Affections, WJE 2:369.

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2.3

Conclusion

For Edwards’s concept of religion, human emotional involvement is not something secondary. Nor is this human involvement a mere epiphenomenon of cognitive insights. Rather, the holistic involvement of the human being is of fundamental importance. This is where the metaphor of the heart comes into play. When Edwards refers to the totality of understanding and will, he is talking about the soul. He speaks of the heart when it comes to the unified ground of this connection. The new spiritual sense of the heart thus stands for the fundamental determination of all human capacities. Edwards’s talk of the sense of the heart is not a postulate for a new faculty in the sense of a sixth sense, but a new basic orientation of the entire soul structure. The charm of such an approach lies in the following: no arbitrary hypostasis of a further faculty of the soul (“sixth sense”) is necessary. Rather, it is about a sign-like and biographically incisive process of reorientation of personal sense and value orientation. With this conception, the newness of the conversion experience can be explained by means of its foundation in an anthropological structure. At the same time, strong religious experiences are made more plausible for apologetic debates. The intense experiences of religious ecstasy are in principle legitimate expressions of spiritual emotion and need not be placed under general suspicion. Conversely, these experiences are in themselves no guarantee of true religion. They are only legitimate in connection with a holistic perception of divine excellence and holiness. Alongside the possible justification of an intensive experiential religion, there is at the same time a restriction of its pathos of immediacy. Religion cannot be authenticated without the experience of religious feeling; at the same time, religious experience must be protected from the absolutisation of its forms of experience. The communicative character of feelings always carries the danger of the effects of imitation, which produce pseudo-results. Edwards draws boundaries in both directions: there is no religious certainty without the moment of affective involvement. And at the same time, the certainty of emotional experience always remains an approximate certainty.

3.

Schleiermacher: Theory of Religion and feeling

Friedrich Schleiermacher’s renewal of theology has had a great impact on the German-speaking world. It is particularly worthwhile to understand it with respect to his interpretation of religious feelings. For biographical reasons alone, Schleiermacher was equipped to adapt to the diverse spiritual currents of his time. After his father had turned to the Moravian Brethren, young Schleiermacher grew up in the sphere of influence of this pietistic faith. Schleiermacher’s speeches on religion

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are a condensation of his previous debates and insights and at the same time the starting point of his scholarly work.17 3.1

Key elements of the theory of religion

3.1.1 The anthropological justification of religion

The first speech, “Apology”, describes Schleiermacher’s starting point as indicated in the subtitle “Speeches to the educated among their despisers”. Schleiermacher addresses from the outset those listeners who have given up on Christianity or are sceptical about it. He wants to present them with an “apology”. He refrains from any defence of religion which disparages modern education or the Enlightenment as a whole. Instead, the humane fruit and cultural progress of the Enlightenment era are unreservedly appreciated and constitute the starting point of modern religious thought. Schleiermacher resolutely rejects all attempts to prove the necessity of religion on ethical or political grounds.18 Also, a traditional derivation of religion from the revelatory claims of its founding documents is no longer an option. In general, the starting point is human existence itself: “Als Mensch rede ich zu Euch von den heiligen Mysterien der Menschheit”.19 In this, the approach of the speeches is obviously a continuation of the Enlightenment theory of religion.20 3.1.2 Faculty Psychology

Schleiermacher places religion among the “Anlagen der Menschheit”.21 It is a “Richtung des Gemüths auf das Ewige”22 or finally, with the most famous metaphor, an “eigne Provinz im Gemüthe”.23 Schleiermacher develops a wealth of attempts to

17 C. Albrecht, Schleiermachers Theorie der Frömmigkeit. Ihr wissenschaftlicher Ort und ihr systematischer Gehalt in den Reden, in der Glaubenslehre und in der Dialektik (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 1994). 18 F. Schleiermacher, Über die Religion. Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern, G. Meckenstock (ed.) (de Gruyter Texte; Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2001), 58. 19 Schleiermacher, Reden, 58. 20 A summary of this principle can be found in Schleiermacher’s Kurze Darstellung of 1830: “Wenn fromme Gemeinschaften nicht als Verirrungen angesehen werden sollen, so muß das Bestehen solcher Vereine als ein für die Entwicklung des menschlichen Geistes notwendiges Element nachgewiesen werden können.” F. Schleiermacher, Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums zum Behuf einleitender Vorlesungen, D. Schmid (ed.) (de Gruyter Texte; Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2002), 334. 21 Schleiermacher, Reden, 65. 22 Schleiermacher, Reden, 70. 23 Schleiermacher, Reden, 72.

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understand religion in the sense of a property-psychological location, as an inherent human disposition. Schleiermacher most frequently uses the concept of “meaning” for this purpose. Thus he can conceive of religion as “Sinn und Geschmack für das Unendliche”24 or as “religiösen Sinn”25 and “Sinn für Religion”.26 If religion has been proven to be a human faculty, then attention to religion cannot be denied, if only for reasons of a comprehensive educational ideal. Religion can then be affirmed as another independent endowment of human nature, like morality and aesthetics. The modern disdain for religion is then regrettable, for such an attitude fails to recognise that religion represents something that is essentially part of the human being. Schleiermacher explicitly recognises the autonomy of modern spheres of life: religion can and should no longer regulate life, thought and action. On the other hand, it should itself be taken seriously as a further, autonomous, irreducible sphere of human life. As such, religion is a necessary moment of human self-development. 3.1.3 Functional distinction between religion, metaphysics and morality

Proof of the functional independence of religion in relation to morality and metaphysics is strongly emphasised. In view of the debates of the time, this distinction is anything but self-evident. The manifold mixing or confusion of these areas is, of course, understandable. From a functional perspective, all three forms of consciousness are united by their reference to the same subject area. Metaphysics and morality have “beide mit der Religion denselben Gegenstand […], nemlich das Universum und das Verhältnis des Menschen zu ihm”.27 Schleiermacher is not thinking chiefly of scientific disciplines, but of “primäre Lebensakte“ (“primary actions of life”) or “Lebenseinstellungen“ (“dispositions of life”),28 which can only be understood in a secondary way in scientific sub-disciplines. Beyond this common pull towards the whole, the determination of the relationship of these ways of orientation needs to be discussed in more detail. Obviously, it is not possible to explain the attribution through a coherent relationship of dependence or with a conclusive form of subordination or superordination. The central aim of the speeches is to justify the functional differentiation of these areas in

24 25 26 27 28

Schleiermacher, Reden, 80. Schleiermacher, Reden, 93. Schleiermacher, Reden, 110. Schleiermacher, Reden, 75. G. Meckenstock, Deterministische Ethik und kritische Theologie. Die Auseinandersetzung des frühen Schleiermacher mit Kant und Spinoza 1789–1794 (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter 1988), 224. See too P. Grove, Deutungen des Subjekts. Schleiermachers Philosophie der Religion (Berlin/New York: Walter De Gruyter, 2004), 266.

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the sense of an independence of religion from metaphysics or morality. But then the task arises of describing the inner constitution of religion, as transcendental philosophy and morality have exemplified in various respects. Not least in relation to the moral claims of revivalist piety, Schleiermacher emphasises a restriction of religion’s exaggerated assertions of validity.29 The recognition of the autonomy of human morality is self-evident to him, alongside the representatives of a Kantian or Fichtean conception of ethics. The opposite attempt to justify religion through its moral or social usefulness fails to recognise its principled difference from any orientation to action. Against Kant, but also against not insignificant parts of Enlightenment theology, the independence of religion from morality must also be justified. The attempt to make “aus der Religion nur einen unbedeutenden Anhang der Moral”30 distorts both in the long run. 3.2

The definition of the essence of religion in intuition and feeling

3.2.1 Religious consciousness between concern and interpretive activity

In addition to the assertion of property-theoretical independence and functional location alongside morality and metaphysics, the analysis of the inner constitution of religious consciousness is now decisive. This, however, is the focus of the second speech, in which the essence of religion is to be elaborated. Essential for the understanding of religion is the distinction between intuition and feeling. In this presentation, we will first discuss the special form of consciousness (contemplation and feeling) of religion and then its reference to the object (universe). The distinction between intuition and feeling has a purely analytical meaning in this discussion. In every empirical appearance, the two stand in a correlative relationship of mutual interpenetration. For the discussion of the structure of religious consciousness, it is first important to observe that Schleiermacher opens up religious consciousness from general basic principles of consciousness. Starting from the definition of religion as intuition and feeling, the presentation unfolds their meaning in two further concentric circles.31 In this context, the passive, purely receptive side of the event is emphasised. But then it also becomes clear that religious intuition, with its reference to the universe or the infinite, is precisely not a sensory perception. Religious intuition is explicitly distinguished from sensual perception.32 In contrast to sensual perception 29 Cf. U. Glatz, Religion und Frömmigkeit bei Friedrich Schleiermacher. Theorie der Glaubenskonstitution (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer Verlag, 2010), 168. 30 Schleiermacher, Reden, 104: “of religion only a meaningless extension to morality”. 31 Schleiermacher, Reden, 79–89. 32 Schleiermacher, Reden, 124.

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or experience in the Kantian sense, for Schleiermacher it is a matter of spiritual intuition, of a spiritual realisation of a given that is analogous to sensual experience in its immediate evidence.33 If we have so far emphasised the side of being affected, of passivity, of being gripped or being affected, this must by no means be set as absolute. Receptivity presupposes the passive moment of unavailable affectivity, but at the same time it cannot be thought to exist without moments of self-activity, an active side of receptivity. This becomes clearest with the concept of intuition. In addition to its receptive side, the emphasis on the act of intuition makes it clear that there is an undeniable moment of activity here:34 “Alles Anschauen gehet aus von einem Einfluß des Angeschaueten auf den Anschauenden, von einem ursprünglichen und unabhängigen Handeln des ersteren, welches dann von dem letzteren seiner Natur gemäß aufgenommen, zusammengefaßt und begriffen wird.”35 Intuition presupposes being affected from the outside, but is by no means completely passively exposed to it: rather, it is unavoidable that this moment of being gripped is, as it were, actively participated in and comprehended from the inside. This active processing has increasingly been described by recent research as a conscious activity of interpretation.36 The concept of interpretation describes a reactive practice of interpretation that works on something, that refers back to something given, which at the same time it does not possess independently of its reference. 3.2.2 Religion and the universe

The two concepts of intuition and feeling do not stand eo ipso for religion. They can obviously also be used in other contexts. For this reason alone, a purely propertytheoretical consideration is insufficient. Only in a very specific respect can intuition and feeling be considered religiously formatted. For this specification, the second speech uses two concepts. One key concept is that of the universe. The concept ensures independence from classical metaphysics with its reference to God. At the same time, it is also clear that the concept of God is not completely dispensed with. The first edition of the speeches also offers a wealth of mentions of the deity and their

33 See Grove, Deutungen, 296. 34 See D. Korsch, Religionsbegriff und Gottesglaube. Dialektische Theologie als Hermeneutik der Religion (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 64: “[in intuition are] “passiv-rezeptive und aktiv-wahrnehmende Momente ineinander geschoben”. Cf. Glatz, Religion, 188. 35 Schleiermacher, Reden, 81. 36 J. Stolzenberg, “Weltinterpretationen um 1800”, in U. von Barth/C.-D. Osthövener (ed.), 200 Jahre Reden über die Religion (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2000) 59–78, on p. 70. See too Grove, Deutungen, 293.

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acting and speaking,37 which obviously cannot completely replace the concept of the universe, but only interpret it. The legacy of Spinoza is unmistakably taken up here,38 but in such a way that Kant’s epistemological insights remain affirmed throughout. The opposition of immanence and transcendence is replaced by a correlation of the infinite and the finite. The ontological dualism of transcendence and immanence is overcome by the insight that the one can only be thought of in relation to the other. The concept of the universe first stands for a totality that cannot be transcended any further, which is neither reducible to an ultimate unity nor an ultimate plurality, but appears as “Einheit in der Vielheit”.39 Rather, it remains a borderline concept that respects the cognitive restrictions of Kantian metaphysical criticism and, in the sense of its totality dimension, can at the same time be imagined as acting, and acting in a certain way. Fundamental to this is the structure of mediated intuition, in which the individual is conceived as a representation of the universe. Following Spinoza’s conception of infinity, Schleiermacher developed such a new conception of the Absolute, which did not objectify it in opposition to the finite but described it as the horizon in which everything finite is included. Religious consciousness does not become religious by being oriented towards religious things; rather, all occurrences are basically eligible as intentional objects of religious consciousness. What is decisive is the nature of the reference. Consciousness is religious in that it intuits something in “Beziehung auf ein unendliches Ganzes”, that is, in an unconditional horizon of meaning or in a “universalen Sinn- und Ordnungszusammenhang”.40 Only by linking the anthropological structure of receptivity as intuition and feeling on the one hand, and the horizon of unconditionality described in this way on the other, can the theory of religion of the speeches be properly described. 3.3

Individuality, and authenticity of religion

We have already observed in the remarks on the constitutive constitution of religion how discussions in principle always had to refer to empirical phenomena. An essential point of the speeches is fundamentally to relate these two levels to each other. For that we need to discuss the general location of the empirical appearance of religion as described in the third, fourth and fifth speeches. Here, the individual, social and historical conditions of the emergence of historical religions are interrelated in such a way that religions are grounded in the authenticity of experience, and the concreteness of their symbolisation.

37 38 39 40

Schleiermacher, Reden, 81, 114. Schleiermacher, Reden, 81. Schleiermacher, Reden, 113. Cf. Korsch, Religionsbegriff, 65. Stolzenberg, “Weltinterpretation”, 71.

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3.3.1 Authenticity of Religion

In the third and fourth speeches, the speaker explains the individual and social conditions for the development of religion. In the third speech, Schleiermacher unfolds a brief theory of religious education. Religion is a natural disposition, whose nature is to come to fruition only under cultural circumstances. Areligiosity is a possible phenomenon, and Schleiermacher gives space to the spread of such, and to the criticism of religion in his diagnosis of the times. Religion is a phenomenon that does not just arise naturally but comes into being in educational processes. However, Schleiermacher limits here the scope of religious education. Religion cannot be taught through instruction. In the final analysis, religious education can only provide stimuli by mediating contact with living piety. Religion must freely arise and develop in every human being on its own. The emphasis on the individual is anything but solipsistic. This educational process is at the same time dependent on social stimulation and introduction. One can only have religious experiences oneself, but they cannot be produced if one is not stimulated by others. The fourth speech, with its setting of sociability as the condition of the possibility of religion, develops this aspect in detail. Just as religion is always already a disposition of the individual, it is also always already a social fact, a phenomenon in historical space. The enlightened endeavour to privatise religion to a certain extent and render it harmless does not do justice to human nature or the essence of religion in equal measure. Religion will always organise itself publicly in one form or another.41 Religions are communities of feeling in which individual experience and common expression of feeling interact. On the one hand, religion necessarily leads to community building; on the other hand, the emergence of religious consciousness presupposes involvement in human community. Religion is always already involved in communication, in various forms of representation and conversation. This communication begins with the immediate expressions of feeling in bodily expression and extends to their explicit reflection and symbolisation in the classical terms of theology. But feelings are also communicated directly. In this respect, the individuality of one’s own religion cannot be separated from such conditions of origin, which are connected from the beginning with a certain self-activity of the receiving subject. This is the authenticity of religion: all stimuli only reach their goal where they are appropriated in one’s own self-development. In this respect, the individuality of religion is always bound to the inalienability of a first-person perspective in which such self-interpretation is

41 M. Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and is that what makes them have a History)? A Bourdieuan Approach to Understanding Emotion”, History and Theory 51 (2012) 193–220.

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carried out. The emphasis on the authenticity of feelings also stands for the speaker’s claim to be able to make the distinction for oneself and for others. 3.3.2 Concreteness

Now we have to ask how this historical-social individuation of religion relates to the characteristics of personal religiosity described so far. Is the assertion of historical positivity once again a heteronomic concept that stands in tension with the authentic individualisation of religious consciousness? This possible misunderstanding cannot be dismissed out of hand, but it can be shown to be a misinterpretation. It is not a question of positive religion restricting religious individuality by normatively prescribing “eine bestimmte Summe von religiösen Anschauungen und Gefühlen”.42 There are certainly such attempts to define a religion through the definiteness of its intuitions or the standardisation of its emotional processes. An “ascetic” variant of such an attempt, for example, is to insist on a “System und eine bestimmte Succeßion von Gefühlen”.43 Such a process of standardisation, however, contradicts the essence of religion. These points of reference are the horizon of religion, but religion is concretised historically; the same principle of individuation applies to religion as to the individual. This individuation takes place through a process of concentrated perspectivisation: an intuition becomes the central point of the whole religion: “Centralpunkt der ganzen Religion”.44 Such centring does not suppress the diversity of different intuitions and feelings but provides them with a communal link. Centring opens up a diversity of intuitions and feelings; it connects this diversity through a common point of reference. Such a centring moment is a condition for the possibility of real religion at all. This is why the basic religious intuition does not contradict the religion of the individual but makes a parallel act possible on the part of the individual for the individual, a respective historical “Fundamental-Anschauung, in Beziehung auf welche er Alles ansehen wird”.45 Religion becomes part of a concrete biography and already individualises itself through this. Therein lies its individual-historical nature; at the same time, it cannot be derived from biographical circumstances, but remains an original setting. Fundamental to this is the function of mediation or a mediator. In the concept of the mediator, the social dimension of religion is connected with the historically developed symbolism in view of the mediation of humanity and the infinite. The mediation of religion through personal instances plays an important

42 43 44 45

Schleiermacher, Reden, 168. Schleiermacher, Reden, 169. Schleiermacher, Reden, 171. Schleiermacher, Reden, 173.

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role in all five speeches.46 This relationship is exemplified by Christianity: both in the specifically Christian intuition of the reconciliation of the finite with the infinite, and in the feeling of melancholy that accompanies this intuition. Both are shown not least in the mediator of Christianity, in whose person the basic intuition as self-intuition is realised, just as much as the mood that is decisive for it. What is the advantage of such a historically concrete example, in which religious consciousness not only appears in the horizon of the world and humanity by means of individual religious intuitions, but is itself, as it were, historically consolidated? I would like to express this added value in terms of concreteness. The positive religions are distinguished by the fact that in them “alles wirklich, kräftig und bestimmt erscheint”.47 But this obviously happens because religious consciousness does not just leave itself to the coincidence of momentary afflictions, but rather stabilises itself through an act of inner commitment and determination. This happens through a permanent perspectivism in which a certain intuition (and the feeling associated with it) becomes dominant. For the religious person, “eine Anschauung muß in seiner Religion die herrschende sein, sonst ist sie so gut als Nichts”.48 This concreteness of real religion shows itself in contrast to the natural religion of the Enlightenment. Religious intuitions and feelings are always faced with the alternative of remaining dark and indeterminate, or of achieving clarity. Such an increase in clarity, such a gain in concreteness, is obviously connected with the act of concentrating: “Alles wird fixiert was vorher vieldeutig und unbestimmt war.”49 What are the characteristics of this process? First, it is a matter of stabilisation. A certain link between intuition and feeling becomes dominant and permanent. Religion also experiences an increase in inner reflexivity. Religious consciousness remains determined by intuition and feeling, but in such a way that through the centring of perspective, one formation becomes the interpretive horizon of all others. In positivistic religions, unlike in the natural religion of Enlightenment philosophy, as in individual consciousness, it is crucial that everything is related to a centre. The interpretative moment of religious consciousness is even more evident than in the definition of the essence of religion, because here not only do views appear as implicit interpretative achievements, but they are interpreted again as such, in the sense of their need to be determined by the intuition that prevails in the individual. The points of view developed here, the individual disposition and

46 C.-D. Osthövener, “Die Christologie der ‘Reden’”, in N.F.M. Schreurs (ed.), “‘Welche unendliche Fülle offenbart sich da ... ’. Die Wirkungsgeschichte von Schleiermachers ‘Reden über die Religion’” (Assen: van Gorcum, 2003), 61–78. 47 Schleiermacher, Reden, 179. 48 Schleiermacher, Reden, 172. 49 Schleiermacher, Reden, 171.

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origin, the empirical development in the social sphere and finally the historical concretisation of religion under the influence of Christianity, are the rubrics under which empirical religious feelings can now find their representation.

4.

Comparison of Edwards and Schleiermacher

Even if there was no or almost no mutual influence between Jonathan Edwards and Friedrich Schleiermacher in their history of influence, they are nevertheless connected by a common horizon of problems. Both stand for a comparable path of Christian faith through the challenges of modern times: both affirm (in the context of their generation’s state of development) the impulses associated with the Enlightenment for the critical-rational discussion of traditional claims to validity, the functional differentiation of various spheres of truth, and the practical-social orientation of the conduct of life. Both were intensively influenced by various forms of revivalist Christianity. Both were inspired by aspects of the Enlightenment, which sought to complement the often dominant trend of rationalising the world of life with a similar enlightenment of feeling, the discourses of “Empfindsamkeit” and/ or early Romanticism. Both stand (with different emphases) for an expression of Christian faith rooted in tradition and open to modernity. By appealing to feelings and affections they both do not want to reduce religion to subjectivity and thus immunise it from the critique of religion.50 Rather, their thinking about God shows that theological reflection cannot detach itself from the metaphysical and religiousphilosophical debates of their time. In this respect, religious consciousness cannot emancipate itself from ultimate questions. Edwards is still thought of today as the forerunner of an empirical psychology of religion.51 Edwards assumes a consensus of the early Enlightenment regarding the fundamental rationality of Western metaphysics. With his attempts to mediate between neo-Platonic and empiricist forms of thought, he participates in the intellectual debates about their transformation and crisis. Schleiermacher’s starting

50 Cf. W. Proudfoot, Religious Experience (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1985), 1–40; W. Proudfoot, “Intuition and Fantasy in On Religion”, in D. Korsch/A. Griffoen (ed.), Interpreting Religion (RPT 57; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 87–98, on p. 92. 51 Cf. H. Joas, “Schleiermacher and the Turn to Experience in the Study of Religion”, in D. Korsch/A. Griffoen (ed.), Interpreting Religion (RPT 57; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 147–161, on p. 151: “I would, therefore, underline the fact that James’ pioneering work took its main inspiration for the emphasis on experience not from Schleiermacher, but from strictly American religious traditions and American theology and philosophy. Jonathan Edwards’s Treatise of Religious Affections from the eighteenth century (1746) comes to mind here, and there are indeed many references to Edwards in James’ work.”

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point is always the Kantian critique of classical metaphysics and the destruction of all its supposed claims to knowledge. Where Edwards seeks to coordinate religious, ethical and metaphysical questions appealing to a hierarchical approach to order, Schleiermacher always already assumes their functional differentiation and the autonomy of their areas of validity. Nevertheless, it is difficult to do justice to Schleiermacher’s Christian combination of a Kantian transcendental philosophy and a Platonic concept of God by distinguishing between realistic and anti-realistic, or by differentiating between subjectivist and objectivist approaches. Even Schleiermacher’s theology of religion cannot dispense with metaphysical implications under post-Kantian conditions. Conversely, Edwards’s intellectual development shows the insight that the metaphysical consensus of old European theology cannot escape questions of its rational and empirical validity. Edwards, too, is obviously aware of the signs of this crisis of transformation, so that he feels compelled to write to the Trustees of the College of New Jersey about his plan to write a “body of divinity in an entire new method”.52 For both, the biblical texts and the ecclesiastical confessions of the Christian tradition based on them are the fundamental framework of their Christian theology. For both, salvation through Christ is the centre of their mature designs. The location of religion in feelings or “affections” does not stand against an orientation towards the classical symbolic stock of Christian tradition, but rather for the necessity of a reciprocal development of symbolic expression and the individual appropriation of faith. In Edwards and Schleiermacher, reflective figures of Christianity are encountered, both of whom maintain the connection with the history of Christian thought and at the same time prove to be part of a reshaping of faith in the modern era. The linking of modern forms of experience with the contents of classical symbolism and dogmatic descriptions of the essence of the Christian faith is a challenge that can be studied at an authoritative level in both classics.

52 J. Edwards, “Letter to the Trustees of the College of New Jersey”, in G.S. Claghorn (ed.), Letters and Personal Writings (The Works of Jonathan Edwards 16; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 727.

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Jonathan Edwards, American Evangelicalism, and the Prussian Erweckungsbewegung, ca. 1815–1850

In 1842, Hermann Ferdinand Uhden (1812–1888), a Lutheran pastor and author from Hamburg working in Prussian ecclesial services, published a history of New England Congregationalism from its first establishment to the revivals of the 1740s. The volume came with a preface by Uhden’s teacher, the Berlin church historian and awakened theologian August Neander (1789–1850). Uhden’s portrayal of the “Great Awakening” begins with an extensive and enthusiastic account of the Northampton revival that he characterises as a forerunner, catalyst, and practical model for the subsequent religious renewal movement. It took place, Uhden tells his readers, under the direction of “one of the most excellent theologians in North America, Jonathan Edwards,” who was widely regarded by earnest Christians in the modern US as their spiritus rector.1 Uhden based his retelling of the Northampton events and their aftermath on Edwards’s revival treatises, in particular the Faithful Narrative, of which a German translation had been prepared under Prussian-Pietist auspices as early as 1738.2 Edwards was known to awakened German Protestants of Uhden’s time not only as the leader and chronicler of eighteenth-century revivals but also as a theologian of note. At the academic centers of the Prussian Erweckunsgbewegung (“awakening movement”) in Berlin and Halle, Edwards even had a few veritable admirers, including the famous August Tholuck (1799–1877). Writing a rather mixed review of Moses Stuart’s Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (1832) for his learned journal Litterarischer Anzeiger in April 1834, Tholuck found occasion to comment on the different understandings of original sin among New England’s Reformed

1 Geschichte der Congregationalisten in Neu-England bis zu den Erweckungen um das Jahr 1740: Ein Beitrag zur Kirchengeschichie Nordamerikas (Leipzig: Bösenberg, 1842), 214. The book had a second edition which was translated into English by H.C. Conant as The New England Theocracy: A History of the Congregationalists in New England to the Revivals of 1740 (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1858). For reasons of space, citations from German sources are not provided in the original but only in my translation. 2 On the eighteenth-century translations and reception of Edwards, see Jan Stievermann, “Faithful Translations: New Discoveries on the German Pietist Reception of Jonathan Edwards”, Church History 83 (2014) 323–66. Uhden seems to have used this edition: Edwards on Revivals: Containing A Faithful Narrative …. Also, Thoughts on the Revival of Religion in New England …. (New York: Dunning & Spalding, 1832).

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theologians. The thinker who first established the long-dominant view (from which Stuart regrettably now departed) and “whom all Americans regard as foremost among their ranks, [was] President Edwards (d. 1758) – a man which we too venerate as an astute and profound Christian thinker, after having become acquainted with his writings”.3 How can one explain this remarkable knowledge and appreciation of Edwards by Uhden and Tholuck, given the assumption that the German reception of “America’s theologian”, after a brief flurry of interest in the mid-eighteenth century really only began around the turn of the twentieth century?4 As this essay will argue, Uhden’s and Tholuck’s fascination with Edwards and his religious tradition was not a coincidence. Rather, it reflects the influence of hitherto largely overlooked networks that evolved in the post-Napoleonic era between American evangelicals and German awakened Protestants. The largest group of these neo-Pietists hailed from Prussian territories – particularly Berlin, Halle, and the Rhineland provinces. The majority of American evangelicals involved belonged to Congregationalist and Presbyterian churches in the northeastern seaboard states, with a significant constituency of theologians associated with the New England tradition.5 It was these self-identified heirs of Edwards who made him known among their contacts in Berlin and Halle as the focal point of the broader German interest in the American revivalist tradition. Inversely, Edwardseans (in the broadest sense of the term) such as Edward Robinson (1794–1863), Bela Bates Edwards (1802–1852), Calvin Stowe (1802–1886), and Edwards Amasa Park (1808–1900), served as principal mediators of Prussian neo-Pietism and Erweckungstheologie to the US.

3 Litterarischer Anzeiger für Christliche Theologie und Wissenschaft überhaupt 21, 22, 23 (April 2, 7 and 11, 1832) 169–176, on pp. 173. 4 This is the conclusion reached by David Bebbington in “The Reputation of Edwards Abroad”, in Stephen J. Stein (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 239–61; and “Remembered Around are the World: The International Scope of Edwards’s Legacy”, in David W. Kling (ed.), Jonathan Edwards at Home and Abroad: Historical Memories, Cultural Movements, Global Horizons (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 177–200. Similarly Michael McClymond’s essay has argued that there was virtually no German interest in Edwards the revivalist from the mid-1700s to the early 20th century. See his “A German Professor Dropped into the American Forest: British, French, and German Views of Jonathan Edwards, 1758–1957”, in Oliver D. Crisp/Douglas A. Sweeney (ed.), After Jonathan Edwards: The Courses of New England Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 208–224, on p. 218. 5 The “New England Tradition,” just like “New Divinity”, is a notoriously fuzzy concept, the precise boundaries of which have always been contested among interpreters. In any version it contains a rather heterogenous group of theologians, all of which, however, in some way laid claim to the legacy of Edwards. For a broad representation of primary sources and helpful introduction, see D.A. Sweeney/A.C. Guelzo (ed.), The New England Theology: From Jonathan Edwards to Edwards Amasa Park (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006).

Jonathan Edwards, American Evangelicalism, and the Prussian Erweckungsbewegung

The essay will first outline the institutional co-operation that developed between religious societies in Prussia and the US – often triangulated through sister organisations in Great Britain – during the first half of the nineteenth century, as well as the academic contacts and exchanges between theologians from both sides. It will then examine how American evangelicals and Prussian Pietists perceived, interpreted, and influenced each other. What theological views and practical goals did they share? To what extent did they imagine and share a communal identity? What were the misunderstandings, contested issues, and differences? As will be shown, Edwards was a recurring point of reference in these German-American exchanges about awakenings, missions, reform, but also church-state relations. These exchanges peaked in the middle decades of the nineteenth century but became complicated and partly disrupted after Prussia’s reaction against the 1848 Revolution.

1.

Networks, Collaborations, and Exchanges

The Age of Revolutions and the Napoleonic Wars had much diminished immigration to the New World, and they severely disrupted long standing transatlantic trade relations and communication between Protestants in England, German-speaking lands and British North America. After 1814, New England evangelicals once again started working closely with their brethren in Britain, who were spearheading a new age of mission and reform and promoting innovative models of voluntary religious societies. Renewed collaborations between British and German Protestants had begun with the creation of the Deutsche Christentumsgesellschaft in 1780, founded after the example of the English Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. The “Christianity Society” quickly spawned numerous local chapters, including one in Berlin (1784), which would then also be instrumental in organizing a host of new German religious societies patterned after British models in the early nineteenth century. With the support of British resources, tract and Bible societies as well as missionary organisations and seminaries rapidly spread across the territories of the Deutsche Bund (“German Confederation”) and Switzerland in the context of local but interlocking revival movements. In Brandenburg-Prussia (the increasingly dominant power in the Confederation), the awakened “started as a group of outsiders,” organized in conventicles and extra-ecclesial associations, before they “then moved to the center of political and cultural life” between the 1830s and 1850s, especially after Friedrich Wilhelm IV came to the throne in 1840.6 The

6 David L. Ellis, Politics and Piety: The Protestant Awakening in Prussia, 1816–1856 (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 35.

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capital Berlin was a leading center of Pietist activities and home to a whole cluster of societies, which soon spawned numerous auxiliaries in the Prussian provinces of the east and on the Rhine.7 Following independence from Britain, American evangelical Protestants, too, created their own national religious societies, often building on earlier local organisations. In many cases the principal movers behind these activities were New England Edwardseans, such as Samuel John Mills (1783–1818) who was one of the founders of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (1810). New Divinity men also pioneered numerous state-based and denominational mission organisations as well as tract and Bible societies, for which the American Bible Societies (1816) and American Tract Society (1825) served as umbrella organisations.8 The British religious societies and their American and Continental counterparts spun a veritable web of co-operative endeavours across the Atlantic world. British and American societies provided funds, Bibles, and other religious literature to their European sister organisations. With this web grew new channels of communication, through personal encounters and correspondences between agents, and, more importantly, through the voluminous print exchanges among the circles of awakened Protestants. All the principal actors discussed in this essay were members of one or usually several religious societies in their home country, which connected them to fellow reformers in the respective sister organisations abroad. On both sides of the ocean, countless new journals promulgated the activities not only of national and local societies but also of affiliate and parallel societies overseas. Translations and shared news created a distinct public sphere of the pious, from which emerged a sense of shared purpose and world-wide community. One strand in this web that grew particularly active was that between Prussia and the newly founded United States. Starting in the mid-1820s, there developed a good deal of mutual interest and interaction. Not a few of the journals associated with the Prussian Erweckungsbewegung closely followed the work of the original British societies and their American sister organisations. For their reporting they drew from a variety of evangelical media sources as well as personal correspondences. For instance, the Neueste Nachrichten aus dem Reiche Gottes (“Latest News from the Kingdom of God”), published between 1817 and 1856 by the Prussian Central Bible

7 On the Prussian religious societies, see Andrew Kloes, The German Awakening: Protestant Renewal after the Enlightenment, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 147–86. On the transatlantic connections, see Wayne Detzler’s unpublished dissertation, “British and American Contributions to the Erweckung in Germany, 1815–1848” (2 vol.; University of Manchester, 1974). 8 The literature on the Benevolent Empire is vast. For a good recent introduction with an annotated bibliography, see Steven Mintz, Moralists and Modernizers: America’s Pre-Civil War Reformers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).

Jonathan Edwards, American Evangelicalism, and the Prussian Erweckungsbewegung

Society, devoted considerable attention to North America. A typical issue had several shorter pieces on the US among its mission news and updates on the activities of the various American religious societies. The journal, as Kloes puts it, “portrayed the Awakening in Germany as but one national instance of a larger transnational religious movement”,9 in which Great Britain and the US played a leading role. Even the new flagship journal of Prussian neo-Pietism Evangelische Kirchenzeitung (EKZ), founded in 1827 by Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg (1802–1869), regularly featured “Nachrichten” or “Missions-Nachrichten” from North America during the first two decades of its publication history.10 It is worth noting that during this early phase, the EKZ applauded not only the reform activism and managerial skills of the Americans, but also the nondenominational character of US religious societies comprising Protestants of all stripes. While Hengstenberg would later become the leader of a highly conservative, neo-confessional Lutheran Pietism, he and his circle initially appear much more ecumenically-minded.11 Germans such as Hengstenberg marveled at how a young country of such geographical proportions as the US, lacking any central government, could muster the resources, human and financial, to develop this kind of reformist energy. They openly admired the achievements of American organisations and the power of voluntarism in the US. Of course, there was always a strategic element to these praises as well. Through “shaming by comparison”, they were meant to galvanize German readers into action. If awakened Protestants in the US of the early nineteenth-century appeared as exemplary for how they combined theologically orthodox views with remarkable activism and modernising tendencies in the field of social organisation, German Pietists were also very interested in the history of American missions. This was one context in which they encountered and learned to appreciate Edwards and the New Divinity tradition. The first partial German translation of Edwards’s The Life of David Brainerd as well as of Brainerd’s Mirabilia Dei had appeared in Pietist journals as early as the mid-eighteenth century.12 Between 1830 and 1863, at least seven stand-alone biographies of Brainerd were published, some of which went through several editions. Typically, these biographies were adaptations that made use of both Edwards’s text as well as the Mirabilia. Still, the model saint and missionary they painted for their German audience was, for the most part, Edwards’s original

9 Kloes, German Awakening, 158. 10 See, for instance, EKZ 1 (1827), 94–95, 301–02. 11 This is reflected, for example, in an editorial comment by Hengstenberg on the mission of the journal to promote an awareness of the unity of all genuine Christians in EKZ 6/7 (1830), 425. 12 See Jan Stievermann, “The German Lives of David Brainerd: The Beginnings of Pietist Interest in an American Evangelical Icon”, in T. Kuhn/V. Albrecht Birkner (ed.), Zwischen Aufklärung und Moderne: Erweckungsbewegung als historiographische Herausforderung (Münster: LIT, 2017), 119–40.

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creation. One of most successful of these nineteenth-century German lives of David Brainerd came out of the Prussian Erweckungsbewegung. It appeared in a very popular series, the Evangelische Missionsgeschichte in Biographien (“History of Protestant Missions in Biographies,” 1850–61) produced by Reinhold Vormbaum (d. 1880), a pastor from Kaiserswerth near Düsseldorf, a center of Prussian neoPietism on the Rhine. Vormbaum had started his series with a life of John Eliot, while the second volume was on Brainerd.13 Moreover, the missionary activities of the New England Puritans and later the Edwardsean evangelicals were celebrated in some of the period’s popular global histories of mission.14 Thus, these American figures became something like forerunners of contemporary German missionary endeavors. These works were meant to serve as a timely admonition and inspiration for earnest German Christians to become engaged not only in organising revivals at home but also in the rising foreign missionary movement. Moreover, they functioned as an important medium for reflecting on ideals and practices of evangelisation and for constructing a world history of Protestant mission. Wayne Detzler’s research suggests that Edwards’s writings on missions, directly or indirectly, influenced the training of missionaries with the Berlin Mission Society (1824) and The Rhenish Missionary Society. Organized in 1828, the Rheinische Missionsgesellschaft pooled three older evangelical mission societies (Elberfeld, Barmen, Köln) of the Prussian provinces on the Rhine and became one of the largest organisations of this kind in Germany. According to Detzler, Johann Christian Wallman (1811–1865), leader of the Rhenish and the Berlin mission, read and was inspired by Edwards.15 The American evangelical interest in and perception of Prussia, on the one hand, reflected a more general and widespread American admiration for German culture and academic learning. Especially among the New England elites, the 1820s and

13 Reinhold Vormbaum, David Brainerd, der Apostel der Indianer in Pennsylvanien und New-Jersey (Düsseldorf: Verlag der Schaub’schen Buchhandlung, 1850). Also Nachrichten über das Leben und die Arbeiten des sel. Missionars David Brainerd (Calw: Calwer Missiongesellschaft, 1830). See also Johann Hartwig Brauer, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Heidenbekehrung (4 vol.; Altona: Hammerich, 1835–41), vol. 1. The fifth installation (edited by Carl Christian Gottlieb Schmidt) of Kurzgefasste Lebensbeschreibungen der merkwürdigsten evangelischen Missionare (Leipzig: Hinrichsche Buchhandlung, 1841); Christoph Friedrich Eppler, Das Leben des Indianermissionars David Brainerd: Ein Bild aus der älteren Mission dem heutigen Christenvolke vorgestellt (Zurich: Hanke, 1851; 2nd edn, 1856); and Das Leben von David Brainerd, Missionar unter den Indianern: Nach dem, von Edwards herausgegbenen Tagebuche Brainerds beschrieben (New York: Amerikanische Traktat Gesellschaft, 1860). 14 See for instance, Julius Wiggers’s (1811–1901) popular two-volume Geschichte der Evangelischen Mission (Hamburg: Perthes, 1845–46), 1:358–62. 15 Wayne A. Detzler, “Seeds of Missiology in the German Erweckung (1815–1848)”, Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 38 (1995) 231–39.

Jonathan Edwards, American Evangelicalism, and the Prussian Erweckungsbewegung

30s saw a rising tide of enthusiasm for German scholarship, literature, and art, which was also reflected in the growing number of students flocking to German universities.16 On the other hand, American evangelicals at that time imagined postNapoleonic Germany as a sort of religious wasteland with few genuine Christians. Rationalism was thought to dominate among the elites and in the universities. A magnet for America’s liberal Protestants, notably Unitarian students from Harvard, Göttingen, the stronghold of German “Higher Criticism,” had a particularly bad reputation among American evangelicals. Like other parts of Continental Europe, German-speaking lands were perceived to be in dire need of re-Christianisation. Then, in the early 1820s, American evangelical papers started to pick up news stories from affiliated British magazines about fresh religious stirrings in different parts of Germany, especially Prussia. Per the reports of periodicals like the Portland-based Christian Mirror, there was a growing sense among American evangelicals by the mid 1820s that “evangelical religion has begun to revive, and has already made considerable progress” not just in Berlin, Halle, or in the Rhine provinces but in “Germany in general”.17 They kept close track of their progress and initiatives and even became co-operation partners with some of the new societies, such as the Central Association for Devotional Literature in the Prussian States and the Wuppertal Tract Society in the Rhine province. Detzler estimates that with the help of the English and American Tract Societies maybe eleven million tracts were distributed across German-speaking countries between 1815 and 1850.18 One of them was a German translation of the Brainerd biography produced by the American Tract Society in 1854.19 Another significant instance of direct involvement by a US-organisation in Prussia is that of the American Temperance Society (1826). In 1835 the Presbyterian minister, reformer, and church historian Robert Baird (1798–1863) came to Europe as an emissary of the American Temperance Society and the Foreign Evangelical Society. He helped to inspire the organisation of numerous chapters in France and across Northern Europe, and he cultivated relations with aristocratic donors and monarchs such as Friedrich Wilhelm IV, the pietistically-oriented crown prince and later king 16 Moreover, American evangelicals looked to Prussia for inspiration in their efforts to reform public schools in the US. See, David Komline, The Common School Awakening: Religion and the Transatlantic Roots of American Public Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). 17 “Religion in Prussia”, Christian Mirror (September 8, 1826), 1. For an even earlier report, see the Boston Recorder (December 18, 1824). 18 Detzler, “British and American Contributions”, 2:546. 19 Das Leben von David Brainerd, Missionar unter den Indianern: Nach dem, von Edwards herausgegbenen Tagebuche Brainerds beschrieben (Neu-York and Philadelphia: Schäfer & Koradi, 1854; 2nd edn, 1860). See Vierteljahrs-Katalog aller neuen Erscheinungen im Felde der Literatur in Deutschland: nach den Wissenschaften geordnet; mit alphabetischem Register, neunter Jahrgang (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1854), 12.

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of Prussia, who in 1837 ordered the establishment of temperance societies for all Prussian provinces. Baird helped to bind together American and Prussian reformers for a common goal and served as an important mediator of New England theology.

2.

Changing Perceptions and Interpretations

Starting in the mid 1820s, American as well as Prussian newspapers and journals began to broadcast the “great awakenings” on the other side of the ocean and connected them to events at home. Already the first issue of the EKZ in 1827 included spectacular accounts of the waves of revivals in several regions of the US that confirmed earlier such reports printed in the Missions-Freund. Never since the founding of the colonies had there occurred such massive revivals as during the preceding year. And they were happening all over the country, throughout the South, New England, and the northwestern frontier. Probably most unusual and exciting for the German audience was the fact that these were not just individual conversions but community revivals, in which entire villages or parts of urban communities became affected. A follow-up appeared in the EKZ in 1830 that already noted the widespread fascination with the American revivals. Apparently the journal had received many letters from earnest Christians seeking to learn more about these events. These good people, Hengstenberg reflected, longed for a similar great awakening in the “darkened churches of Germany”.20 Why, Hengstenberg’s readers asked, were such community revivals happening in America but not in England or the Continent? To answer this pressing question, the EKZ offered some reflections taken from an essay by a Dr Griffin – probably Edward Dorr Griffin (1770–1837), then President of Williams College – that had appeared in the New York Observer. Griffin underscored several providential developments in America that were conducive to awakenings such as the renewed influence of and appreciation for Puritan piety and culture, the revival tradition, and the postRevolution strain of republican virtue and pragmatism. While Hengstenberg did not approve of everything said, especially the political points, he did not challenge Griffin’s argument about the New England revivalist tradition. This reflects a broader tendency among Prussian Pietists who mostly seem to have accepted the interpretation of current religious events in the US that their evangelical interlocutors offered them. Religious leaders and laypeople associated with the New England theology represented American church history as a progressive series of religious renewals followed by periods of relative decline. A direct line was drawn from Puritan origins through the colonial Great Awakening to

20 EKZ 6/7 (1830), 70–72, on p. 70.

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the current revivals. In this narrative Jonathan Edwards constituted both a critical historical juncture and a universal model. This narrative is most famously enshrined in Joseph Tracy’s The Great Awakening (1842), which, to my knowledge, did not see a German translation. But it was also communicated to a German audience in Uhden’s 1842 Geschichte der Congregationalisten in Neu-England, and especially the German edition of Robert Baird’s Religion in America (first edn, Edinburgh, 1843) that appeared the following year with a prefatory endorsement by August Neander. Baird’s Kirchengeschichte explained to a European audience the different American denominations, advocated the power of voluntarism in religion, and described in great detail the work of the countless religious and benevolent societies in the US, all of which were self-organised and self-funded, and relied on the involvement of ordinary lay-people. Moreover, it highlighted the tradition of theology and practical piety that, according to Baird, was behind America’s successful history of evangelical revivalism. In so doing, he gave pride of place to Edwards and the Northampton revival, treated at length in book five, chapter seven. While Northampton offered an exemplar for vital but orderly awakening that carried the legacy of Puritan piety into a new era, Edwards was the consummate preacher of the new birth. And he had provided American revivalism with an effective theology whose basic distinction between natural and moral (in-)ability was still foundational for the various schools of divinity.21 As Baird presented it to his German audience, the era of modern revivals, which had started around the turn of the century with the village and college revivals in New England, and then shifted to the southwestern frontier and upstate New York, was basically an extension of the Edwardsean tradition. Such a view of the current American revivals was also popularized in various reports ran by Prussian Pietist journals. As early as 1831, the EKZ adopted an article from Lyman Beecher’s Spirit of the Pilgrim that traced the cycles of revivals and spiritual decline in New England history from the beginnings to the new Great Awakening to his own period that was blessed by another outpouring of the Holy Spirit. America might well find itself at a turning point in the history of redemption as it moved toward the millennial age. Instead of chiding this as enthusiasm, as one might have expected, Hengstenberg used it to prod ministers in Germany who were more likely to deliver moral homilies than to preach the new birth: “German Christians and especially preachers of the gospel,” he exclaimed in an editorial note, “as you are comparing the dead and miserable state of our desolate church to this [i.e. the reports from America], are you not desiring to see similar fruits of your

21 See especially Baird, Kirchengeschichte, kirchliche Statitsik und religiöses Leben der Vereinigten Staaten von Nordamerika (2 vol.; Berlin: Reimer, 1844), 2:534–35.

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preaching?”22 This sort of highly positive revival news from America, strategically employed as a vehicle to criticise “nominal Christians” and rationalists at home, featured in the EKZ, the Missions-Freund and the Neueste Nachrichten into the late 1830s, with an occasional article mixed in between about New England Unitarians and how they compared to German Rationalists. However, already in this “honeymoon period”, one can detect at least one major sore point in the romance between Prussian Pietists and American evangelicals: the issue of church-state relations. The way in which their American interlocutors constantly touted disestablishment and religious freedom bothered Prussian conservatives such as Hengstenberg. Very revealing in this regard is the EKZ’s response to a long report on his German experience that the Andover theologian Edward Robinson had written for the first issue of his new journal Biblical Repository (1831).23 The piece gave an extensive account of the university scene in Germany, including not only the state of theological education and biblical criticism but also the stifling influence of the state. Hengstenberg penned an editorial comment entitled “North-American Judgments on the state of the church in Germany”, in which he readily accepted Robinson’s criticism of the largely un-Christian student life at many German universities, of the still wide-spread rationalism, of indifferent pastors, low church attendance, and the lack of small group religion. But Robinson had also taken a swing at the state-church system in the German Confederation and criticized how in Prussia specifically “the church itself is but the slave of the civil power, and must do all its bidding. … The government mixes itself in everything, prescribes everything, will know everything, and prohibits everything, which does not strictly coincide with its own interests and will”.24 Hengstenberg could not let this charge go unanswered. It was an exaggeration distorting the facts (including the fact that many “sects” were tolerated under Prussian law), and it showed that an American or Englishman was, by principle, incapable of a sympathetic interpretation of the ecclesial system in Germany. Indeed, after Friedrich Wilhelm IV came to power, toleration was broadened for Old Lutherans and dissenters registered as Religionsgesellschaften, putting the liberality of Prussia’s relgious politics on a level comparable to Britain. However, a radical disestablishment akin to what the US had implemented on the national level was out of the question for the awakened. As excited as Prussian Pietists were about American revivals in the early decades of the nineteenth century, when it came to church-state relations, communication became difficult and insurmountable cultural differences were invoked.25 These tensions

22 23 24 25

EKZ 8/9 (1831), 766–68, on p. 768. Edward Robinson, “Theological Education in Germany”, Biblical Repository 1 (1831), 1–51. Robinson, “Theological Education in Germany”, 42–43. EKZ 8/9 (1831), 804–05.

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would only deepen in the context of the 1848 Revolution, when most Pietists rallied around the monarchy and the established churches. On the American side, I found several reports in religious journals during the mid-1820s that reported on the resurgence of evangelical religion and the decline of theological Rationalism in Germany more generally. Prussia was presented as the centre of this happy change. The above-cited piece from the Christian Mirror, for example, presented a summary of a speech that August Tholuck (also frequently mentioned in evangelical journals as leading figure in the Berlin Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews) had given before the Continental Society in London, in May 1825. In it, Tholuck had portrayed Prussia as a new beacon of faith shining in darkness of “Socinianism and Infidelity [that] have been almost universally prevalent”. In no small part thanks to Prussian influences, Tholuck promised, Germany will soon “not only be evangelical herself, but she will be a powerful agent in promoting the work of converting the world, and of securing to Jesus her dishonored Savior, the worship due to him as Lord and God”. American evangelicals would certainly have been excited to hear this.26 It is hard to gauge how American readers responded to one particular part of the “Prussia story” that was already introduced at this point and frequently repeated in reports thereafter. According to Tholuck, the Prussian revivals had a top-down dynamic. One essential reason why they were happening was that the “[t]he kingdom of Prussia is more highly favored than some other parts of Germany” by having a new pious monarch who succeeded his infidel predecessors: “the influence of the king is felt, and upholds true Christianity”. Also, members of the Prussian high nobility, like the Baron Hans Ernst von Kottwitz (1757–1843), were the driving force behind the religious renewal but also behind new charitable enterprises. It is remarkable, the summary of Tholuck’s speech emphasised, “that as at first infidelity came down from the higher ranks to the lower, so now true religion is beginning with the nobility, and influencing the poor”.27 This contradicted the deeply ingrained American evangelical belief in not only the natural congruence between true Protestantism and democracy, but also lay-based religious voluntarism, which forced religious organisations to rely mostly on their own resources gathered from free contributions. I found no evidence, however, that American evangelicals felt seriously challenged by this, at least not during these early years. In the late 1820s, more stories appeared that confirmed and fleshed out this basic narrative about the awakening in Prussia, including reports by American visitors. Some of these portrayed prominent members of the faculties of theology at

26 “Religion in Prussia”, Christian Mirror (September 8, 1826), 1. The same piece was also run by the New Hampshire Observer, among others. 27 “Religion in Prussia”, Christian Mirror (September 8, 1826), 1.

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the Prussian universities of Berlin and Halle as leading the counter-attack against rationalism and Hegelianism.28 The names of Neander, Tholuck, Hengstenberg, but also of August Detlev Christian Twesten (1789–1876), Karl Immanuel Nitzsch (1787–1868), and later Friedrich Willhelm Krummacher (1796–1868) began to acquire a positive ring. Significantly, all of these German theologians were active in various religious societies connected to England and the US. The new image of Prussia and the universities of Berlin and Halle soon attracted pious American students in search of theologically orthodox teachers. The most prominent examples here would be Charles Hodge (1797–1878), Edward Robinson, and Edwards Amasa Park, often dubbed the last great “Edwardsean”.29 But there were many more. American Congregationalist and Presbyterian clergymen travelling in Europe, such as Calvin Stowe or William Buell Sprague, now frequently made a point of visiting professors at Halle or Berlin and attended their lectures. In some cases, correspondence ensued and friendships developed. This was the case with Hodge and Robinson who maintained friendly relations with Tholuck. The Halle professor attracted a great number of British and American students from various denominations, including many Methodists. Such connections, of course, did much to promote the works of German Erweckungstheologen in the US, when their American correspondents wrote about their works in journals, used them in the classroom, or even translated them into English. It is my impression that at around 1830, the narrative of the “evangelical revival in Prussia” was firmly established for American evangelical readers. The fullest and most detailed expression of this narrative I could find is a long essay that appeared on February 1, 1830, in Spirit of the Pilgrims, a journal founded to counter Unitarian tendencies in New England. Published anonymously in the Spirit and reprinted that way in other journals, the piece was written by the missionary William Gottlieb Schauffler (1798–1883), a graduate of Andover (1830) and a friend of Edwards Amasa Park. For his account of the remarkable Erweckung in Prussia, Schauffler put existing arguments and ideas into one overarching explanation that pointed

28 However, American evangelical journals were not oblivious to the deep divisions between Erweckungstheologen and Rationalists (or Neologists) and the many groups in-between at the faculties of Berlin and Halle. The so-called Rationalismusstreit of 1830 at Halle, for instance, received considerable coverage. On this episode, see Kloes, The German Awakening, 103–10. 29 On Hodge’s German connections, see Paul C. Gutjahr, Charles Hodge: The Guardian of American Orthodoxy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 108–119; Andrew Z. Hansen, “NineteenthCentury Transatlantic Protestantism: Charles Hodge and the Prussian Erweckungsbewegung”, Pietismus und Neuzeit 37 (2011), 192–212; and chapters six and seven of Annette Aubert, The German Roots of Nineteenth-Century American Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). Hodge gave a survey of German theology and the university scene in his “Introductory Lecture Delivered in the Theological Seminary, Princeton, New Jersey, November 7, 1828”, i Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review, i (new series) (1829), 73–98.

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to the humiliations under Napoleon, the hardships and unexpected victory in the Wars of Liberation, the inspiration of the Reformation anniversary in 1817, the new Romantic spirit, and most importantly the work of the new religious societies. “From that time until 1824,” Schauffler claimed, “Protestant Europe enjoyed more revivals than it ever did before,” with Prussia in the lead. Yet, the final part of his narrative warned that victory was far from complete: “It is like the day-break just before the rising sun. But the sun is not yet risen.” Surveying the present scene, Schauffler expressed significant ambiguity, “Revivals of religion have comparatively ceased in Germany. Light is therefore spreading but slowly, and not as could be wished, or, as was expected a few years ago”.30 Nevertheless, the reports that American evangelicals would receive about Germany and Prussia over the next decade or so continued to be mostly positive. Some observers, however, came to the conclusion that the German revivals, while real, did not have the same scale, intensity, and effect as those in the English-speaking world. In the “Introduction” to their Selections from German Literature (1839) the Andover theologians Bela Bates Edwards and Edwards Amasa Park noted matter-of-factly that “the modern revival of Christianity and the awakened spirit of missionary enterprise … pervaded England and the United States far more than they have Germany”.31 They ascribed that disparity to the lack of political freedom and participatory rights, which were so congenial to religious voluntarism and social activism in the US. At the same time, Selections from German Literature illustrates the widespread American reception of major Erweckungstheologen and devotional writers from Prussia that had set in. The volume contained, among other things, translations of generous excerpts from Tholuck’s works.32 Several of Tholuck’s exegetical and theological works also appeared in complete American

30 [Schauffler], “The Decline, Revival, and Present State of Evangelical Religion in Germany”, Spirit of the Pilgrims (February 1830), 57–71, on p. 69. 31 B.B. Edwards/E.A. Park (ed.), Selections from German Literature (Andover: Gould, Newman and Saxton, 1839), 6. 32 The volume includes translations by Park of a lecture on Paul by Tholuck under the title The Life, Character and Style of the Apostle Paul, along with translations of six of his sermons and a highly positive sketch of Tholuck’s life and character, also written by Park. In 1844 the Andover journal Bibliotheca Sacra and Theological Review (edited by E.A. Park) serialised a survey lecture series on systematic theology by Tholuck, “Translated from the unpublished lectures [“manuscripts”] of Prof. Tholuck of Halle, by Edwards Amasa Park”. See, vol. 1.1–4 (February, May, August, and November, 1844), 178–217, 332–67, 552–78, and 726–35. In 1847 the Bibliotheca Sacra (now edited by Bela Bates Edwards) presented its readers with an abridged English version of Tholuck’s Gespräche über die vornehmsten Glaubens-Fragen der Zeit (1846), translated by J.B. Lyman under the title “Religion in Germany”. See vol. 4.14 (1847), 236–47.

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editions.33 As Annette Aubert has demonstrated, New England theologians were especially attracted to Tholuck’s Pietist version of Vermittlungstheologie (“mediating theology”), which sought to reconcile an openness to modern culture, knowledge, and Wissenschaftlichkeit with a biblicist, doctrinally-conservative, and conversionoriented faith.34 If Tholuck was arguably the most celebrated German theologian among learned American evangelicals associated with the various branches of New England theology, they were also very fond of the Pietist church historian August Neander. Especially during the 1840s, the works of the famous Berlin professor received very favorable portrayals in American journals. In 1847, the five volumes that Neander completed of his great church history, Allgemeine Geschichte der christlichen Religion und Kirche (1826–42), were translated into English by Joseph Torrey, a professor at Vermont University as General History of the Christian Religion and Church. At Neander’s death in 1850, several obituaries and sketches of his life and character appeared, including a long essay by Bela Bates Edwards in the Bibliotheca Sacra.35 Although Edwards criticized Neander’s less than absolute commitment to the supernatural authority of Scripture, he had nothing but praise for his Christian character and his general approach to church history as a living record and evidence of the divine power of Christianity. Ironically, the Prussian Erweckungstheologe who would come to exert the greatest influence among the rank and file of New England’s divinity students was the much lesser known Georg Christian Knapp (1753–1825). A co-director of the Francke Foundation and the first president of the Halle Bible and missionary societies, Knapp was also professor of theology at Halle University. While his published lectures were modestly successful in Germany, they enjoyed very widespread reception in the US, after the later president of Bowdoin College Leonard Woods (1807–1878), son of the eponymous co-founder of the American Tract Society, Temperance Society, and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, produced a translation in 1831. Knapp’s lectures went through no less than twenty American editions in the next forty-one years. In 1880, then president of Andover, Edwards Amasa Park, noted how Knapp’s Lectures on Christian Theology had become one of the most widely used systematic theological textbooks in American

33 See Tholuck, A Commentary on the Gospel of Saint John (New York: Sexton & Miles, 1842); Exposition of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans: With Extracts from the Exegetical Works of the Fathers and Reformers (Philadelphia: Sorin & Ball, 1844); A Translation and Commentary of the Book of Psalms for the Use of the Ministry and Laity of the Christian Church (Philadelphia: William S. & Alfred Martien, 1858). 34 See A. Aubert, “Transatlantic Nineteenth-Century Protestantism: Academic Religious Networks”, in T. Kuhn/V. Albrecht Birkner (ed.), Zwischen Aufklärung und Moderne (Münster: LIT, 2017), 103–118. 35 “Life and Character of Neander,” Bibliotheca Sacra & American Biblical Repository 2 (1851), 361–88.

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seminaries.36 Woods kept adding annotations to these successive editions pointing students to relevant literature on the different topics, which included many titles by German Erweckungstheologen and exegetes, notably Tholuck, but also contemporary American scholars such as Moses Stuart. Interestingly, Woods also added several references to Jonathan Edwards, specifically his great posthumous work on Original Sin, which, Woods thought, “deserves mention among the most celebrated works of European theologians on this subject”. To affirm this point, Woods argued that Edwards’s understanding of the matter was vindicated by Schleiermacher and Tholuck, among others. Thus, as a result of these new transatlantic connections of the awakened, Edwards was put into conversation with nineteenth-century German-Pietist Vermittlungstheologie.37 Other Prussian Pietist theologians also made an appearance in American evangelical journals during this period. Bibliotheca Sacra offered sample translations of Twesten, Nitzsch, and of the Halle theologian Julius Müller,38 while the Biblical Repository and Princeton Review introduced its audience to the works of Hengstenberg and the EKZ.39 Undoubtedly, there was a group of scholarly readers who would have been genuinely interested in engaging with the ideas and arguments of these conservative representatives of German mediation theology. For many other readers, it would have been more important to receive assurance that it was possible to reconcile a profound knowledge of history, Higher Criticism, and modern philosophy with a traditional evangelical piety. In this way, the reception of Tholuck, Neander, and others served a kind of “signal function”. Whatever else American evangelical readers found in these works, it indicated to them that German thought and scientific learning was not the exclusive domain of liberal Protestants and Harvard Unitarians. Contemporary sermon collections and devotional writings, including several from members of the Prussian awakening, were much more popular among ordinary American evangelicals than these learned theological works. The English translation of the enormously popular emblem book Das Herz des Menschen (1812), a book collecting emblems or allegorical illustrations with accompanying explanatory texts, by the Berlin evangelist Johannes Evangelista Goßner (1773–1858), appeared in at least thirteen American editions between 1822–1860 under the title The Heart of Man: Either a Temple of God, or a Habitation of Satan. Tholuck’s widely read Stunden christlicher Andacht (1839; 8th edn, 1870) had at least one full

36 Kloes, The German Awakening, 137. 37 Knapp, Lectures on Christian Theology (Philadelphia: T. Wardle, 1845), 287; other such references to Edwards can be found at 284, 287, and 292. 38 Bibliotheca Sacra 4.13 (1847), 25–68; 4.14 (1847), 217–36. 39 Biblical Repository and Princeton Review 18.4 (1846), 514–46.

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American edition, but was often partially reprinted in journals.40 Most popular of all, however, was Friedrich Wilhelm Krummacher’s Elias der Tishbiter (1828–1833), which went through multiple American editions. Already in 1837 the American Tract Society published Elisha the Tishbite, and there were at least eight more print runs up to 1850. Many more of Krummacher’s devotional works also appeared in translation. This strand of German-American reception history remains virtually unstudied. At the same time, publications by American evangelicals were read and discussed by German awakened Protestants, either in the original or in (partial) translation. Among them were some works of theology, biblical criticism, and historical scholarship – almost without exception by authors associated with the New England tradition. Most highly regarded was perhaps Edward Robinson. Among other works, his monumental Biblical Researches in Palestine, Mount Sinai, and Arabia Petraea (1841) was fully translated into German and published in Halle.41 However, Pietists at the time would have known, or at least heard of, only one American systematician of international stature and lasting significance: Jonathan Edwards. To be sure, the popular interest in Edwards among German Pietists was very much focused on his role in the history of missions and revivals. These were the contexts in which Edwards was most frequently mentioned in journal articles as well as church and mission histories. Of Edwards’s writings only The Life of David Brainerd was adopted into German, while an older translation of the Faithful Narrative was reprinted only once more in 1860.42 None of Edwards’s theological treatises found their way into translation. This does not mean that no one read them, however. There is some evidence that members of the learned and internationally-oriented elite among Prussia’s awakened owned Edwards’s major works and read them in the English original. In a letter to Moses Stuart, Edward Robinson remarked, for example, that one of his instructors at Halle, Hübner, personally owned and had studied all the works of Edwards and also Timothy Dwight.43 Tholuck, too, was quite familiar with

40 Hours of Devotion (Boston: Lathrop, 1833). Tholuck’s conversion novel Guido und Julius: Lehre von der Sünde und vom Versöhner, oder: Die wahre Weihe des Zweiflers (1823) also had one American edition (an English translation had been published in London in 1836): Guido and Julius, or, Sin and the Propitiator: Exhibited in the True Consecration of the Sceptic (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1854). In addition, there were two editions of Select Discourses by Adolphe Monod, Krummacher, Tholuck, and Julius Müller (New York: Sheldon & Co, 1858/1860). 41 Palästina und die südlich angrenzenden Länder (3 vols.; Halle: Verlag des Waisenhauses, 1841–42). 42 Nachrichten von dem herrlichen Werk Gottes der Bekehrung vieler hundert Seelen zu Northampton und an anderen Orten in Neu-England … (Basel: Marriott, 1860). 43 See the letter from Oschatz in Saxony, May 3, 1827, in H.W. Williams (ed.), Letters from Edward Robinson to Moses Stuart, 1826–1830 (Bloomington: iUniverse, 2003), 55. I want to thank David Komline for kindly pointing me to this and the following two references.

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Edwards’s Original Sin and Freedom of the Will. He repeatedly conversed with his American interlocutors about these works. In his travel journal, Charles Hodge wrote on March 20, 1827, that he had walked with the professor at Halle talking about “the possibility of a Christian’s falling from grace” and “the doctrine of the freedom of the will”. As Hodge reports, “Tholuck said he agreed entirely with the doctrine of Edwards in that subject. He told me that Schleiermacher who belongs to the reformed church was strenuous in his defense of some of its peculiar doctrines – maintaining that they alone were consistent”.44 And in September 1836, to cite another example, Calvin Stowe wrote to his wife Harriet that Tholuck “has just been reading Presid’t Edwards on original Sin & on the Will, and admires the depths of acuteness so manifested in these works”. Tholuck, Stowe reported, found Edwards “much deeper than Stuart and such writers”, whose writings he had just reviewed.45 Obviously, Tholuck here alluded to his review of Stuart’s Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, mentioned in the introduction, which appeared in connection with discussions of other recent works on Romans. In that review, Tholuck noted the popularity and influence of Stuart’s work in America and praised the many accomplishments of “the founder of exegetical scholarship in the New World”. But he also found him lacking on certain crucial points in overall theological perspective and the ability to consistently develop his ideas.46 More specifically, Tholuck mentioned Stuart’s unfortunate departure in his annotations on Romans 5 from Edwards’s federal understanding of original sin, “according to which the whole of humanity fell in Adam, insofar as all individuals constitute a whole with him, so that each individual incurs the guilt and punishment, insofar as they fell in Adam”. Tholuck was well aware of the fact that debates on the doctrine of original sin deeply divided New England theology, pitting not just Unitarians against a Reformed orthodoxy, but Edwardseans against old Calvinists as well as several camps of innovators. Tholuck discussed the quasi-Zwinglian position of Andover’s Leonard Woods and Moses Stuart’s embrace of the New Haven theology or Taylorism, before clearly positioning himself in the discussion: “Of all the English works on this subject, Edwards’s treatment of it in the third chapter of the third part of his The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin defended appeared to him by far the most astute and deepest.” Indeed, Tholuck mused, “the

44 “Hodge’s Journal of European Travels” (March 22, 1827), Charles Hodge Manuscript Collection, Box 16, Folder 4, Princeton Theological Seminary Library, Library Special Collections. 45 “Calvin Stowe to Harriet Beecher Stowe, Halle, Germany. September 11 and 13, 1836,” ALS, 4 pp. Harriet Beecher Stowe Center Library, Acquisition Collection. 46 Litterarischer Anzeiger für Christliche Theologie und Wissenschaft überhaupt 21, 22, 23 (April 2,7, 11, 1832) 168–176, on p. 168.

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whole work deserved a translation into German”. Even though “Germans would not agree with many things, we could still learn much from it”.47 Nevertheless, even among the educated Pietists any special interest in America’s theologian was clearly outweighed by a more general interest in America’s significance in the history of the church, both as a vast new field of evangelisation and as a bold experiment in religious freedom. The latter aspect assumed growing importance, as the debates over church reform in Prussia became more heated during the late 1830s and early 1840s. At the time, awakeners, in the words of David L. Ellis, had “managed to maneuver the movement from semi-oppositional status to being a movement welcomed by many of the highest figures in the bureaucratic, political, and social circles which had previously opposed it”. They were far from united, however. Not a few, at least initially, sympathised with more independence of the church from the control of the state, an idea that even the new king Friedrich Wilhelm IV supported for a time. Much more controversial were liberal demands “for greater lay leadership in the church, a written constitution, and a measure of democratisation through creating a greater role for the laity”.48 In this situation, accounts of the American system became a medium for Pietists to reflect on and debate the right relation of state and church as well as lay participation in ecclesial government. Catering most successfully to this interest was probably Robert Baird. Already in 1837, he had published a tract in French and German on state-church relations that he also had occasion to discuss with the then crown prince Friedrich Wilhelm IV.49 Then in 1844 his Kirchengeschichte was published, which presented Americanstyle denominationalism and voluntarism in an overall positive light, as did Philip Schaff ’s Amerika (1854), which was dedicated to Krummacher. Tellingly, Schaff noted in his preface that the lectures before the Berlin Society for Domestic Mission on which the book was based had caused some members of the audience (that apparently included, among others, Nitzsch, Hengstenberg, Tholuck, Müller, and the Baron von Stahl) to complain that they were too favorable to the US.50 Already in 1842 Uhden’s Geschichte der Congregationalisten in Neu-England had appeared, and its preface by Neander reveals where the fault lines ran among the Prussian Pietists. The American disestablishment, Neander argued, was a reaction to the theocracy of the first New England settlers, in which the state had been an

47 48 49 50

Litterarischer Anzeiger, 172–73. Ellis, Politics and Piety, 39, 44. Henry Martin Baird, The Life of the Rev. Robert Baird (New York: Randloph, 1866), 155–56. Schaff, Amerika: Die politischen, socialen und kirchlich-religiösen Zustände der Vereinigten Staaten von Nordamerika (Berlin: Wiegandt und Grieben, 1854), v. Schaff characterizes Edwards as a “mighty preacher” and pioneering revivalist (75), and, together with Park, Stowe, Hodge and Nevin as the country’s most significant theologian (51).

Jonathan Edwards, American Evangelicalism, and the Prussian Erweckungsbewegung

instrument of the church. Today Germans were suffering “from ills arising from a state of affairs completely opposite to that in the US: a mixing of the ecclesial with the political sphere”. The friends of a “true Christian Liberalism”, Neander said, “were desiring an emancipation of the church from the state – an emancipation, however, which need not necessarily follow the American model of a complete separation of state and church”. And yet, for them the history of New England Congregationalism was of the highest interest.51 Neander’s comments suggest that even the more liberal Prussian Pietists overwhelmingly rejected a disestablishment akin to America’s. Among awakened Protestants, support for such a model was confined to the very small German Baptist or Methodist circles. However, Neander’s comments also indicate that some circles within the established churches continued to support more lay participation through a Presbyterian-synodal model of church polity, but they increasingly formed the minority. In the years preceding the 1848 Revolution, the Vormärz, the mainstream of the Prussian Pietist elite, was moving in the opposite direction. It was becoming more conservative on political and ecclesial matters and more confessional in its theological outlook. Leading this development was Hengstenberg’s EKZ, which began to wage a veritable war against both political and religious liberalism, condemning the “rationalism of both, believing that it would lead to the destruction of the aristocratic sociopolitical order ordained by God and to the evisceration of Christianity’s spiritual message”.52 At the same time, the German missionary societies grew increasingly independent of Anglo-American organisations and more nationalist in orientation. The growing anti-liberalism and renewed confessionalism of course dampened the previous enthusiasm for America with its denominational system and culture of popular revivalism. It would also complicate the Prussian involvement in the Evangelical Alliance, which in many ways arose as the culmination of the era of transatlantic cooperation among the awakened treated in this essay. Founded in 1846, the Alliance was the first attempt to create an ecumenical and international organisation that would bring together committed Protestants across denominational and national lines to foster religious renewal, missions, and various reform efforts. For the first meeting in London, representatives from more than fifty evangelical groups from Britain, Europe, and the US gathered. Among the delegates from Prussia were Krummacher, Neander, and Tholuck, who had the opportunity to greet some of their long-time American associates, including Robert Baird and Edward Robinson. Conspicuously absent were Hengstenberg as well as the Pietist aristocrats who were closest to the king.53 51 Neander, “Vorrede”, in Uhde, Geschichte, vii–viii. 52 Ellis, Piety and Politics, 44. 53 The best history of the Alliance is Gerhard Lindemann, Für Frömmigkeit in Freiheit: die Geschichte der Evangelischen Allianz im Zeitalter des Liberalismus, 1846–1879 (Münster: LIT, 2011). See also

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Thus, the Evangelical Alliance brought into view the internal divisions of Prussian Pietism that also affected transatlantic relations. By the mid-1840s, hardly any positive news about America appeared in the EKZ anymore. Another factor that helps to explain this was German mass migration to the US, which reached new heights during this period. Immigrants to the Western territories often found themselves without German pastoral supervision or any kind of established ecclesial infrastructure and surrounded by “sectarians” – hardships often highlighted now in the EKZ. By contrast, the new journals associated with the Evangelical Alliance, Die Kirche des Herrn (1852–57) and Neue Evangelische Kirchenzeitung (1859–79) continued to run positive reports on American religious societies, missions, and revivals, even as the vexing slavery question drew increasing attention. Over the course of the 1840s, the American view of Prussia was also becoming more ambiguous. Even as its Pietist theologians and devotional writers were gaining in popularity, the news relayed to American evangelicals about Prussia (and Germany more generally) were getting more mixed and confusing. American evangelicals experienced great difficulties in making sense of dissident religious movements that arose in Germany during the Vormärz, combining religious and socio-political agendas. A case in point are the “German Catholics” and the radical Protestant “Lichtfreunde” who eventually combined to form the “free religious movement”. Informed by their mostly conservative Protestant sources, American evangelicals, condemned the rationalist, anti-ecclesiastical, and revolutionary thrust of these movements. Being Americans, they, however, were also sympathetic to the demand for freedom of religion and opinion. And American evangelicals were well aware that the Prussian government, while acting as nurturing mother to the party of conservative religion, was also a force of political oppression. These interpretive difficulties extended to the revolution of 1848 itself, which was covered by the evangelical press in almost contradictory terms. On the one hand, American evangelicals often simply repeated from their mostly conservative sources the very negative reading of the uprisings in Prussia and other German territories, highlighting the allegedly anti-Christian forces behind them. On the other hand, they expressed support for the demands that the revolutionaries made for constitutionalism and an American-style constitutional guarantee of freedom of religion, which was then also realised in Section VI of the March Constitution passed by the Paulskirchen-Parlament in Frankfurt. In this spirit, American evangelicals would have been sympathetic as well to the plans for a new liberal church constitution that the reform cabinet of 1848/49 was planning in Prussia.

Philip D. Jordan, The Evangelical Alliance for the United States of America, 1847–1900 (New York: E. Mellen Press, 1982), and Nicholas Railton, No North Sea: The Anglo-German Evangelical Network in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 1999).

Jonathan Edwards, American Evangelicalism, and the Prussian Erweckungsbewegung

Ironically, most of their awakened allies not only condemned the revolution but supported its military suppression. Pietist aristocrats, such as Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach, Friedrich Julius Stahl, and Moritz August von Bethmann-Hollweg, also dominated the camarilla, the coterie of conservative, extra-parliamentary advisors that guided the king in his anti-liberal reaction to the revolutionary demands. The failure of the revolution and the subsequent restoration, therefore, put American evangelicals in a peculiar position. From their conservative interlocutors, they heard about the threat to religion posed by the radical left wing of the revolution and about the negative effects that the uprisings had on church life in Germany. In that sense, they were glad to hear that the monarchical government had prevailed and peace returned. At the same time, they saw the failure of the revolution as a missed opportunity for democratisation and more religious freedom, which they, after all, understood to be conducive to the cause of true Protestantism. They had to learn that most of their Pietist allies, especially those of the neo-confessional wing, were among the fiercest defenders of the monarchical principle and the Christian state. Although a friend of the king, Freiherr Christian Karl Josias Bunsen (1791–1860) was now a lone voice in the wilderness crying for a new presbyterian church polity. Some Pietists, such as Tholuck and Neander, still favored more ecclesial independence and supported ecumenical cooperation, not least through the Evangelical Alliance. But this clearly was a minority report. Overall, American evangelicals saw their friends in Prussia on the wrong side of history. After all, many of the Pietists were even critical of the new Prussian constitution that Friedrich Wilhelm IV conceded in 1849, which guaranteed a free exercise of religion as well as the independence of incorporated churches from the control of the state, even while it continued to privilege the Evangelical Church of Prussia. In 1850 American evangelicals thus were forced into a state of “cognitive dissonance”, as it were, with a view to the religious and political attitudes of Prussian Pietists: while they continued to feel very close with regard to their general commitment to biblicism and an experimental piety, on matters of church and state their German-speaking brethren were indeed worlds apart. On the Prussian side, 1848, together with a growing confessionalisation and nationalisation of religious societies, contributed to notable decline in the earlier enthusiasm for America. However, in this process of partial alienation, Edwards was not entirely forgotten among the German awakened. His fame as a pioneer of American missions and revivalism lived on. And his still modest reputation as a major theologian was consolidated. One pointer is the essay on “Jonathan Edwards” and the Edwardsean tradition which Calvin Stowe was commissioned to write in 1855 for the massive and very prestigious Realenzyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche (22 vol., Gotha: Rudolf Besser, 1854–68). Significantly, it was the only such entry on American theology for this project, which perhaps like no other

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reflects the ambitions of German academic theology in the nineteenth century.54 For his German audience, Stowe portrayed Edwards as “one of the most serious Christians and influential thinkers that America has produced”; a kind of original theological genius in the wilderness who was at once a profound systematic thinker in the Reformed tradition and an experiential mystic, “penetrating into the darkest secrets of theology”. Further, “he belonged to a class of men, which distinguished New England in its earliest period” of wilderness deprivation and unconditional devotion to God, and “among these he stood out as the Calvin and Fenelon of his kind”. Stowe’s article offers a very hagiographic biography that emphasizes Edwards’s conversionist piety and that amply quotes the Personal Narrative. He then gives a list and description of Edwards’s main works and available editions. Most importantly, he succinctly characterises some of the main modifications and additions that Edwards and Edwardseanism made to the Reformed tradition, and he competently introduces German readers to key points of Edwards’s mature theology, including his attempt to reconcile predestination and free will through the distinction between “natural ability” and moral inability”. The essay concludes with a survey of the theological school of Edwards (“Die theologische Schule Edwards”) in which Stowe includes Samuel Hopkins, Jonathan Edwards Jr., Joseph Bellamy, Nathaniel Emmons and Timothy Dwight, Leonard Woods, and Lyman Beecher, who are all characterised in brief sketches. “To this theological school,” German readers learned, “New England is much beholden for the preservation of its characteristic intellectual vigor and for the spirit of charity and organisational improvement in matters of practical religion for which it is renowned”. Thus German awakened Protestants were confirmed in their view – which they had already acquired from American sources during the preceding decades – that Edwards was one of the tap-roots of the kind of revivalist, reform-oriented, enterprising evangelicalism they, a generation earlier, had come to admire so much in their co-religionists across the Atlantic. The nineteenth-century German understanding of Edwards the theologian, however, was very much filtered through the interpretative lens of his various New England heirs. Just how much these Edwardseans diverged in their interpretation of various facets of Edwards’s thought would have been only vaguely perceptible to their German correspondents. So too, they would have missed the irony that Edwards’s own view of church, state, and a monarchical Christendom were in many ways closer to their own than to that of his American disciples.

54 See vol. 3, 652–57. The second edition of the Realenzyklopädie was translated into English and published as the Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge.

Authors

Rhys S. Bezzant is Senior Lecturer in Christian Thought at Ridley College, in Melbourne, Australia, within the Australian College of Theology, and Director of the Jonathan Edwards Center Australia. Kenneth P. Minkema is the Editor of The Works of Jonathan Edwards at Yale University and a member of the Research Faculty at Yale Divinity School. Ryan P. Hoselton is Instructor and Research Associate in the Faculty of Theology and the Heidelberg Center for American Studies at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg. His publications and postdoctoral research focus on transatlantic and global histories of evangelicalism. Willem van Vlastuin is professor of Theology and Spirituality of Reformed Protestantism at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, Dean of the seminary of the Hersteld Hervormde Kerk, and research associate at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein. Walter J. Schultz is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Northwestern – Saint Paul, Minnesota. Philip John Fisk is Senior Researcher and Lecturer in Historical Theology at the Jonathan Edwards Center Benelux, headquartered at the Evangelische Theologische Faculteit Leuven, Belgium. Katharina Krause is on the research staff in the department of Practical Theology at the Protestant Faculty of Theology, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Germany, where she focuses on Protestant spirituality, Christian worship and liturgy, dementia, and religion. Thorsten Dietz teaches at the Evangelische Hochschule Tabor in Marburg, Germany, and is Privatdozent in Protestant Theology at the Philipps-Universität Marburg. Jan Stievermann is Professor of the History of Christianity in the U.S. at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, and Director of the Jonathan Edwards Center Germany.

Index

A Aesthetics 113, 115–129, 132, 133, 153, 155, 156, 159 Affections 23, 124, 129, 131, 153, 166, 167 American Temperance Society 175 American Tract Society 172, 175, 182, 184 Ames, William 120, 121, 124, 153 Amyraldianism 37, 39 Amyraut, Moise 39 Arndt, Johann 31, 53, 55, 88, 97, 109, 112 Art 111, 115, 117–121, 123–126, 128, 129, 133, 175 Atonement 39, 40, 44 Awakening Movement s. Erweckungsbewegung

British Empire 7 – British colonies 8 – colonies 7 British North America 7, 38, 53, 59, 171

B Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb 114–121, 123–129, 132, 133, 135 Baxter, Richard 89, 91, 94 Beauty 23, 24, 113, 115, 118–133, 155, 156 Bekehrung s. Conversion Benevolent Activism 51–55, 59, 60, 63–68, 173 Berlin 117, 118, 169–172, 174, 175, 180, 182, 183 – Berlin Mission Society 174 – Berlin Society for Domestic Mission 186 – Berlin Society for Promoting Christianity 179 – Berlin University 151 Böhme, Anton Wilhelm 31, 53–58, 88 Bonaparte, Napoleon 171, 181 Boston 7, 31, 53, 60, 63, 76, 78 Brainerd, David 173–175

D Deism 24, 25, 36, 152, 154 Denmark 53, 56, 60 Divine decrees 26, 40, 45 Doctrine of revelation 88 Dutch pastors s. Netherlands

C Cognition 114–116, 121, 123, 125–127, 129, 133, 138, 139, 145, 155 College of New Jersey 49, 58, 59, 167 Concerts of Prayer 66 Congregationalism 170, 177, 180, 186 Conversion 23, 31, 52, 65, 67, 70, 72, 73, 99, 152, 155, 157, 176, 182, 190 Creation 16, 26, 35, 75, 135–137, 139–150, 156

E Edwards, Jonathan – A Harmony of the Old Testament and the New 40 – ”Catalogue of Reading” 14, 31, 34, 37 – Catalogues of Books 53 – Charity and its Fruits 60, 62 – ”Controversies” 34, 35, 42, 44, 47 – Distinguishing Marks 51 – ”Duty of Charity to the Poor” 59 – End for Which God Created the World 75, 116, 135, 136

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Index

– End for which God Created the World 75 – Faithful Narrative 32, 52, 54, 60, 62, 69, 74, 169, 184 – Freedom of the Will 75, 116, 117, 131, 185 – German professor 48 – Germanic turn 32, 37, 46, 48 – History of the Work of Redemption 16, 24, 32, 35, 36, 40, 43, 47, 49, 60–64, 75, 116, 117 – Humble Attempt 66, 76 – ”Images of Divine Things” 23, 85–87, 92–95, 116 – ”Letters” 58, 61, 63, 75, 77, 78, 80, 81, 136 – Life of Brainerd 54, 72, 75, 173, 174, 184 – ”Miscellanies” 34–36, 42, 43, 47 – Native Americans 54 – Original Sin 37, 39, 40, 75, 183, 185 – ”Personal Narrative” 23, 190 – Religious Affections 46, 52, 66, 75, 81, 152, 153 – ”Resolutions” 59 – Some Thoughts 51, 54, 64, 66, 80 – True Virtue 121, 123, 130, 136 – ”Types of the Messiah” 42, 116 – Typology 40 – ”Letters” 78 Edwards, Sarah 65 Emotions 70, 73–75, 81, 82, 92, 141, 152 Empiricism 139, 154–156, 160, 162, 166, 167 Enchantment 13, 20–22, 25, 27, 93–96, 103, 111, 116 England 16, 62–64, 66, 86, 176, 180, 181 Enlightenment 7, 23, 33, 34, 36, 48, 67, 115, 116, 118, 132, 133, 151, 154, 158, 160, 165, 166 Erskine, John 34, 46, 76–78, 80, 82, 83

Erweckungsbewegung 170, 172, 174, 180 Evangelical Alliance 187–189 evangelical history 7 Evangelicalism 7, 29, 57, 58, 67, 190 F Faculty (anthropological) 36, 116, 124–129, 157–159 France 8, 175 Francke, August Hermann 31, 36, 51–59, 62–67, 117, 118, 182 Francke, Gotthilf August 56, 57, 117 Frelinghuysen, Theodorus Jacobus 72, 76, 77, 83 G Germany 9, 10, 17, 31, 51, 52, 54, 56, 61, 69, 174, 175, 177–179, 181, 182, 186–189 – German Awakened Protestants 169, 170, 189, 190 – German Awakening 173 – German Baptists 187 – German Catholics 188 – German Confederation 171, 178 – German culture 174, 181 – German Erweckungstheologen 180, 183 – German Higher Criticism 175, 183 – German historians 38 – German House of Hanover 16 – German immigrants to the US 188 – German language 9, 33, 37, 189 – German Lutheranism 34, 38 – German manuals of devotion 85 – German Methodists 187 – German migration to the US 188 – German missionaries 60, 62 – German missionary societies 174, 187 – German missions 174 – German orphanages 58

Index

– German philosophers 35, 42 – German Pietism 31, 33, 53, 54, 173, 183, 184 – German Protestantism 31 – German Protestants 171 – German readership 54, 173, 175–177, 184, 190 – German reception 170, 190 – German Reformed Pietism 54 – German Reformed tradition 32 – German religious societies 171 – German revivals 8, 51, 61, 64, 65, 71, 175, 176, 181 – German scholarship 10, 174, 175, 178, 183 – German territories 188 – German theologians 32, 180, 182 – German theology 38, 151, 180, 183, 190 – German translations 54, 69, 74, 169, 173–175, 177, 184, 186 – German universities 178 – German-American exchange 170, 171, 184 – German-speaking lands 8, 9, 41, 157, 171, 175 Glasgow 7, 76–78 Grace 18–20, 25, 45, 62, 70, 79, 125, 153, 154, 156, 185 Great Awakening 15, 27, 72, 169, 176, 177 Gregory, Brad 12, 28

H Halle 31, 36, 51–67, 117–119, 169, 170, 175, 180, 182–185 – Halle orphanage 56–58 – Halle Pietism 54 – Halle Pietists 9, 51, 52, 54–59, 63, 65–68 Harvard 38, 55, 113, 120, 175, 183

Heidelberg 46 – Catechism 32, 75 Hengstenberg, Ernst Wilhelm 173, 176–178, 180, 183, 186, 187 Hermeneutics 85, 87 Hinlicky, Paul 22 Holy Spirit 28, 51, 52, 60, 63–65, 67, 71, 73, 74, 77–82, 99, 106, 109, 136, 139, 141, 142, 144, 148, 156, 177 I Idealism 86 Intuition 116, 124, 160–162, 164, 165 K Kant, Immanuel 36, 37, 133, 135–141, 143–151, 160–162, 167 – Critique of Pure Reason 137 L Lampe, Friedrich Adolph 9, 32–34, 38, 48 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 36, 38, 42, 45 Locke, John 42, 154, 155 London 7, 53, 55–57, 60, 78, 79, 179, 187 Love 9, 26, 55, 60, 62, 65, 66, 68, 122, 123, 130–132, 139, 147, 156 Luther, Martin 11–15, 17–29, 94 – Aristotle 22 – Demystification 20 – Doctrine 18, 19, 21–23, 26 – Eschatology 18 – Gregory, Brad 19 – Hermeneutics 19, 21 – Justification 21 – Laity 19 – Lutheran historians 38 – Lutheran orthodoxy 117 – Lutheran pastors 41, 169 – Lutheran Pietism 117, 173 – Lutheran theologians 32, 34 – Mysticism 28 – Old Lutherans 178

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– – – – –

Plato 22 Preaching 18 Sacraments 20, 23 Scholasticism 21 Science 28

M Material culture 85, 86, 91, 100, 104, 108, 110 Mather, Cotton 31, 35, 46, 53–56 – Bonifacius 56 – Manuductio ad Ministerium 53 – Orphanotrophium 55 McLaurin, John 76, 77 Meditation 69, 85–94, 96, 98–100, 102, 104, 108, 110, 116, 117, 119, 120, 124 Metaphysics 13, 21, 22, 75, 114–118, 120, 121, 123, 125–129, 132, 135, 151, 154, 159–162, 166, 167 Millennialism 60, 65, 69, 77, 85, 177 Missions – Native American 58 missions 7, 54, 61, 171, 173, 174, 176, 178, 184, 187–189 – American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions 172, 182 Moravians 32, 53, 54, 157

N Napoleonic era 170, 175 Native Americans 8, 45 Natural theology 38 Neander, August 169, 177, 180, 182, 183, 186, 187, 189 Netherlands 10, 28, 69, 71, 72, 74–78, 81, 82 – Dutch Concert of Prayer 76, 77, 83 – Dutch Great Awakening 9, 73, 74, 79, 81, 83 – Dutch in New York 76

– Dutch influence in North America 72, 75, 83 – Dutch language 79 – Dutch Nadere Reformatie 33, 69, 71 – Dutch pastors 76–79 – Dutch Pietism 74 – Dutch politics 76 – Dutch preachers 33 – Dutch Reformed Pietism 69 – Dutch revivals 69, 71, 72, 74, 76–78, 80 – Dutch scholarship 32 – Dutch theologians 33, 34, 38, 79, 82, 83 – Dutch translations 69, 72, 74, 75 – Reformed Church 71 New Divinity 170, 172, 173 New England 18, 34, 51, 54, 56, 65, 66, 95, 102, 153, 171, 174, 177, 186, 190 – Divinity students 182 – Edwardseans 172 – New England awakenings 51 – New England Congregationalism 169, 187 – New England missionary societies 174 – New England periodicals 57 – New England revivals 176, 177 – New England theologians 182 – New England theology 176, 182, 185 – New England tradition 31, 137, 170, 184 – New England Unitarians 178, 180 – Reformed tradition 31, 169 New York 7, 76, 176, 177 Northampton 12, 16, 25, 32, 36, 46, 59–62, 64–66, 74, 75, 169, 177

Index

P Perfection 124–129, 132, 136, 137, 143–148, 150, 154 Pfaff, Christoph Matthäus 9, 32, 34, 35, 37, 45, 47, 48 Pietism 32–34, 36, 46, 53–56, 58, 69, 71, 72, 77–79, 83, 85, 91, 101, 110, 117, 155, 157, 170, 172, 173, 175, 179, 182, 184, 186, 188, 189 Piety 11, 46, 55, 58, 59, 61, 64, 65, 71, 83, 87, 109, 123, 151, 153, 160, 163, 176, 177, 183, 189, 190 Plato 22, 113, 114, 120–122, 131, 148, 166, 167 Practice of piety 86–88, 90, 91, 93–95, 98, 100, 104, 105, 108–110 Predestination 43–45, 54, 190 Presbyterianism 58, 170, 175, 180, 187, 189 Prince, Thomas 38, 57, 78 Providence 26, 76, 143, 147 Prussia 63, 66, 117, 169–172, 174–176, 178–181, 186–189 – Evangelical Church of Prussia 189 – Prussian Awakening 9, 169, 170, 172, 174, 179, 182–184 – Prussian Pietism 171, 173, 174, 176–178, 183, 186–189 – Prussian religious societies 172 Puritanism 8, 14, 17, 19, 58, 59, 85, 101, 137, 153, 155, 174, 176, 177 Q Quakers 46, 47 – Friends 47 R Rationalism 21, 22, 32–36, 40, 48, 64, 117, 138, 154, 166, 175, 178–180, 187, 188 Reformation 14–18, 21, 26, 28, 29, 33, 69, 181

Regeneration 18, 48, 69, 73, 132, 133 – New birth 18, 51, 62, 177 Republic of Letters 7 Revelation, doctrine of 36, 44–46, 48, 97, 138, 147 revivalism 7, 52, 59, 67, 177, 187, 189 Romanticism 166, 181 S Salzburg 67 – Salzburgers in Georgia 53, 56, 57 Saxony 11, 17, 51, 58, 61, 63, 65, 184 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 151, 157–163, 166, 167, 183, 185 Schöpfung s. Creation Scotland 8, 25, 34, 35, 46, 58, 61, 66, 67, 74, 76, 77, 79, 80, 129 Scriptures 17, 21, 26–28, 40, 44, 48, 64, 73, 77, 81, 88, 97, 123, 132, 138, 139, 148, 154, 182 secularisation 9, 12, 13, 20, 27 Sehpraxis/Sehsinn s. Visuality Semiotics 127, 132 Sense of the heart 99, 116, 132, 133, 153, 156, 157 slavery 7, 8, 59, 188 Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge 55–57, 171 Spener, Philipp Jakob 31, 53, 58 Stapfer, Johann Friedrich 9, 32, 33, 35, 37–48, 135 Steinmetz, Johann Adam 54, 69, 74 Stockbridge 58, 59, 77 T Tennent, Gilbert 58 Tennent, William 77 Tholuck, August 169, 170, 179–187, 189 Transatlantic community 7, 8, 34, 38, 52, 53, 59, 64, 67, 68, 86, 171, 172, 183, 187, 188, 190

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198

Index

Trinity 123, 126 Typology 23, 41, 87, 91, 114–116, 130, 156 U Uhden, Hermann Ferdinand 169, 170, 177, 186 Universalism 39, 44 V Verzauberung s. Enchantment Virtue 60, 66, 113, 122, 131, 137, 176 Visuality 23, 85, 86, 89, 90, 93, 96, 98, 100, 111, 156

W Wesley, John 53, 62 Westminster Confession 46 Whitefield, George 57, 62–67 – Orphanage 57, 63, 64 Wolff, Christian 9, 32, 35–38, 48, 115, 117, 118, 120, 135 Y Yale College

38, 113, 120, 121, 129, 137

Z Zinzendorf, Nikolaus von

54