Encounters with God: An Approach to the Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Religion in America Life) [Hardcover]

Michael J. McClymond (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 20, 1998 | ISBN-10: 0195118227 | ISBN-13: 978-0195118223

This book offers a broad-based study of Jonathan Edwards as a religious thinker. Much attention has been given to Edwards in relation to his Puritan and Calvinist forebears. McClymond, however, examines Edwards in relation to his eighteenth-century intellectual context. In each of six chapters, he contextualizes and interprets some text or issue in Edwards within the emergent post-Lockean, post-Newtonian culture of the English-speaking world of the 1700s. Among the topics considered are spiritual perception, metaphysics, contemplation, ethics and morality, and apologetics.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Winner of the Brewer Prize of the American Society of Church History, this fresh approach to the theology of Jonathan Edwards avoids the narrow specialization of recent studies, yielding a sense of the whole rather than a glimpse of fragments....Recommended for a wide readership, from undergraduates to research specialists."--Choice

"Clearly and cleverly written....Recommended for courses in American religious thought."--Religious Studies Review

"...an interesting and stimulating treatment of Edwards and the uniqueness of his theocentric vision."--Theological Studies

About the Author

Michael J. McClymond is at Westmont College.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (August 20, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195118227
• ISBN-13: 978-0195118223
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 6.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,920,413 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Encounters with God encounters a review, December 9, 1999

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Phillip L. Sinitiere - See all my reviews

This review is from: Encounters with God: An Approach to the Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Religion in America Life) (Hardcover)

In Michael J. McClymond's book, Encounters with God: An Approach to the Theology of Jonathan Edwards, he seeks to synthesize all of Edwards' writing around 'spiritual perception' and 'apologetics,' or 'experiential manifestation' and 'integration.' Surveying Edwards's "reasoned" response to the Enlightenment obsession with reason (as opposed to faith), McClymond sees Edwards as "modern yet with a twist." In the Introduction, McClymond introduces a short historiography of Edwardsean scholarship. He also introduces a bit more, the 'spiritual perception' he sees in Edwards. 'Spritual perception' is the particular attention paid to defining and describing the subjective and objective realities of religious experience, for "Edwards contrasted with the later Romantics, who focused exclusively on the inner experience of religion." To this end, McClymond's comparison between Edwards and Schleiermacher provides a fascinating look into the nuances of religious experience perceived by both men. Furthermore, McClymond uses the introduction to stress the "apologetic orientations of Edwards's spiritual perception" and his "perceptually oriented notion of Christian apologetics." In other words, Edwards labored in his writings to 'teach' spiritual perception while all the while maintaining an 'apologetic' tone. As John Gerstner put it, Edwards was indeed a "rational biblical theologian." Chapter 1 is primarily concerned with defining further and offering examples of Edwards's sprirtual perception. McClymond 'exegetes' some of Edwards's writings, such as Religious Affections, and shows that "there is no dichotomy in Edwards between the spiritual sense of divine things and the philosophical, theological, and historical reflection that may be engendered by it" (p. 26). Chapter 2 shows the apologetic tone in Edwards's metaphysics. In contrast to the "anthropocentrism of the Enlightenment, his metaphysics were primarily theocentric in tone." For Edwards, the measuring stick for all reality is God. After discussing the 'theocentric motif' McClymond delves into Edwards's notions of "God and Being," "God and Knowing," and "God, Beauty, and Causality." Chapter 3 highlights Edwards's contemplation as spirituality and spirituality as contemplation. Expositing the Diary and Personal Narrative, McClymond paints Edwards as a contemplative, a Christian thinker. In contrast to the introspective contemplation of the Puritans, Edwards's "theocentric contemplation" provides a departure from the 'subjective' tradition of his forebearers. Chapter 4 is a look at the ethical strain in Edwards's corpus. Looking at End of Creation, McClymond concludes that, "it does not portray the inscrutable God of Calvinism, who eternally elects some merely for his own good pleasure and whose purposes and actions can be known only after the fact" (p. 58). This is the case because Edwards "anthropomorphizes God" by showing the Aristotelian notion of the "superior man" that is "not subject to the whims of popular approval yet does not ignore well-deserved and well-founded praise" (p. 61). In short, "the God of End of Creation resemebles an enlightened despot in the sense that God possesses unlimited power but uses it for the sake of others" (p. 61). Chapter 5, "Drama and Discernment in History of Redemption," looks at Edwards' view of the unfolding character of history and the "comprehensiveness of God's activity in history" (p. 69). Of course God's providential, paramount activity in history was the death of Christ whereby He secured salvation for His people. Additionally, an eschatological element is present within Edwards's view of history. Acting as a sort of 'contemplative prophet,' Edwards wondered if he would witness the Millennium, beginning in America after the Great Awakening, wherein Christ would reign on earth for 1,000 years. The sixth and final chapter looks at Edwards as Christian Apologist. McClymond charts the obfuscation of God that took place in the modern age and shows the "explicit" and "implicit" character of Edwards's apologetics. Before doing this, however, he looks at the apologetics of William Paley, Joseph Butler, and Frederich Schleiermacher. While these three thinkers took three different avenues in the defense of God, Edwards "is more encompassing than any of [them] yet shows affinities with all of them" (p. 84). The explicit nature of Edwards's apologetics rests with his arguing for the "credibility of Christianity, the existance of God, and the historical evidences for Christianity," just to name a few. The implicit nature of Edwards's apologetics is the subtle way in which he attempts to reinterpret the reigning genres and styles of writing in his own day. He attempted to use his critics' style to defeat them, turning it on its head. As McClymond puts it, "he "baptizes" every eighteenth-century idea and intellectual tradition he could lay hands on" (p. 101). In the Conclusion, "The Religious Outlook in Edwards," McClymond does another sort of historiography of Edwards' thought. In surveying Edwards' worldview, he concludes that "Edwards set for himself the prodigious task of rethinking the entire intellectual culture of his day and turning it to the advantage of God" (p. 112). In this sense, then, Edwards is indeed "modern yet with a twist." McClymond demonstrates his intricate knowledge not only of scholarship on Edwards, but the corpus of Edward's own writings. He articulates the main ideas in Edwards's writings and conveys them in a scholarly, yet readable fashion. He continually prompts the reader to turn the page. Encounters with God is a must for all students of not only American religious history, but American history in general. The quiet, yet profound Puritan from the eighteenth century speaks again!

5.0 out of 5 stars American Library Association Review, January 8, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Encounters with God: An Approach to the Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Religion in America Life) (Hardcover)

The following review of _Encounters With God_ appeared in _Choice_ (Jun. 1999), published by the American Library Association. The reviewer was Bruce Stephens of Pennsylvania State University (Delaware County): "Winner of the Brewer Prize of hte American Society of Church History, this fresh approach to the theology of Jonathan Edwards avoids the narrow specialization of recent studies, yielding a sense of the whole rather than a glimpse of fragments. Twin themes of 'spiritual perception' and Edwards as Christian apologist open onto this larger vista. McClymond (St. Louis Univ.) argues that Edwards's genius was his capacity to delve into the fundamental principles of the inherited intellectual tradition of the Enlightenment and, through deft reinterpretation, to put it to work in the service of his own theology. This reworking of the Enlightenment tradition allowed Edwards to link idea and emotion, the cognitive and the affective, theology and spirituality. Setting major Edwards texts within their larger 18th-century context, McClymond reexamines Edwards's metaphysics in _The Mind_, his spirituality in the _Personal Narrative_ and _Diary_, his ethics in _End of Creation_, his view of history in _The History of Redemption_, and his apologetics in the _Miscellanies_. All of this in 112 well-honed pages, plus 46 pages of insightful notes and a judiciously selected bibliography. Recommended for a wide readership, from undergraduates to research specialists."