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JONATHAN EDWARDS' RHETORIC of HISTORY by Juan Sánchez IMMEDIATE AND PROGRESSIVE DIVINE AGENCY: JONATHAN EDWARDS’ RHETORIC OF HISTORY by Juan Sánchez Naffziger BA, University of Seville, 2005 MA, University of Seville, 2010 A DISSERTATION Submitted to the faculty in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in English and North American Literature Concentration in American Studies at the University of Seville Seville, Spain April 2015 Acknowledgements The following dissertation would never have been completed without the continued encouragement and invaluable help of professor Ramón Espejo Romero. He has been instrumental (providential, if I may put it in more Edwardsean terms) in bringing about the final result in more ways than the ‘mere’ revision and correction of the text. It was through a scholarship offered by the department he is currently the Director of that I was able to come to the United States, where I have found the time and inspiration to finish my readings and dissertation writing. Had Dr. Espejo not prompted me to go for the ‘American experience’, I probably would never have finished the following study. I certainly would not have been able to include or consult many of the works (recent scholarly studies on Jonathan Edwards, old letters and sermons, etc.) that have been made available to me at UNC Chapel Hill, and which now make up what I believe is a solid bibliography. My most grateful recognition and special thanks, therefore, to this excellent professor of North American literature at the University of Seville, Spain. The love and support of my wife through the last five years, as I locked myself away to read and write during Christmas, Easter and summer holidays, deserve the deepest thanks. Thank you Priscila for being the kind of woman who makes a man feel blessed. While I have endeavored to give birth to this dissertation, she has literally gone through labor and born our beautiful son. Around the time that he began to take a keen interest in ‘wheels’ (one of his first words in English), I was caught up in the analysis of the ‘wheel metaphor’ as used by Jonathan Edwards in the 1739 sermon series. Sammy is simply a great and tangible reminder that God’s Work of Redemption is carried out relentlessly from generation to generation, as the wheels of providence continue to ‘go round and round’. Finally, authors who are not quoted or named in the pages below, like John Piper or J. I. Packer, must be mentioned and acknowledged as responsible for my one decade long interest in the Puritans. They have sought to bring Jonathan Edwards’ works to bear on their lives, their preaching and their pastoral ministry. They are consequently not quoted very often in scholarly writings since their work seems to lie outside the context of academia. However, present-day Edwardsean studies are undoubtedly indebted to them in more ways than we can tell, and such pastors/theologians are probably more deeply immersed in the essence of what Jonathan Edwards wrote and taught than many renowned scholars. Juan Sánchez Naffziger Chapel Hill, North Carolina May 2015 IMMEDIATE AND PROGRESSIVE DIVINE AGENCY: JONATHAN EDWARDS’ RHETORIC OF HISTORY CONTENTS Introduction …………………………………………………………. pp. i-xi • Chapter 1: THE SETTING FOR JONATHAN EDWARDS’ RHETORIC OF HISTORY……………………………………………………….…… pp. 1-41 1. 1. The Great Awakening ………………………………………….. pp. 1-18 1. 1. a. Revival of Old Doctrines; Rise of New Movements … p. 2 1. 1. b. Expectations and Controversy in the Colonies ………. p. 6 1. 1. c. From Theological Controversy to Revolutionary Implications ………………………………………………………… p. 13 1. 2. Jonathan Edwards: Biographical and Contextual Keys ………… pp. 19-30 1. 2. a. Edwards the Thinker …………………………………. p. 20 1. 2. b. Edwards the Convert ……………………………….… p. 24 1. 2. c. Edwards the Minister ……………………………….… p. 26 1. 3. The Northampton Revival ……………………………………… pp. 30-41 1. 3. a. Deep Anxieties Leading to the Height of Revival ……. p. 31 1. 3. b. Decline and the Scene for the Redemption Discourse … p. 36 • Chapter 2: RHETORIC OF HISTORY & DIVINE AGENCY ……... pp. 42-136 2. 1. Edwards vs. Winthrop: Love, Community and History ……………………………………………………………….………. p. 43 2. 2. Edwards vs. Cotton: God’s Kingdom on Earth …...………………………………………………………….………. p. 57 2. 3. Edwards vs. Shepard: The Visibility of God’s Work in the Saints ……………………………………………………………….………. p. 72 2. 4. Edwards vs. Mather : The Operations of Providence in History pp. 91-136 2. 4. a. Providence and Nature ……………………………….. p. 92 2. 4. b. Providence and Sacred History ………………………. p. 108 2. 4. c. Worldly Affairs, Secular History and God’s Absolute Sovereignty ………………………………………………………………… p. 120 • Chapter 3: PROGRESSIVE DIVINE AGENCY: THE RHETORIC OF PIETY …………………………………………………………….. pp. 137-209 3. 1. God’s Building …………………………………………...…. pp. 147-177 3. 1. a. Moral Decay and the Ruins of Satan’s Kingdom …………………………………………………………………… p. 147 3. 1. b. The Solid Structure of Piety …………………………………………………………………… p. 156 3. 2 Modern Science and Mechanics in Nature………………....…pp. 177-209 3. 2. a. Cyclical History and Mechanical Providence. ………….. p. 178 3. 2. b. Nature, Natural Cycles and the Goal of the Universe. ….. p. 194 • Chapter 4: IMMEDIATE DIVINE AGENCY: THE RHETORIC OF REVIVAL …………………………………………………….………… pp. 210-247 4. 1. The ‘Hub’ of Historical Progress: The Purchase of Redemption ….. p. 211 4. 2. Of the Sun’s Dawning and the Spirit’s Outpourings ………..… pp. 216-247 4. 2. a. The Paradigmatic Case of Pentecost …………………….. p. 217 4. 2. b. Ancient, Biblical Revivals ………………………………. p. 222 4. 2. c. Revivals Outside the Scriptures: The Protestant Reformation ………………………………………………………………..….. p. 231 • Chapter 5: CONCLUDING REMARKS & FURTHER PERSPECTIVES: EDWARDS AT THE CROSSROADS OF AMERICAN HISTORY …………………………………………………….………… pp. 248-258 Works Cited ………………………………………………………… pp. 259-268 IMMEDIATE AND PROGRESSIVE DIVINE AGENCY: JONATHAN EDWARDS’ RHETORIC OF HISTORY INTRODUCTION The research leading to this dissertation began as an attempt to understand the ways in which Puritanism had a long-term influence on colonial American culture. Since Jonathan Edwards came across as a critical and pivotal figure in American thought and history in several major works by intellectual and literary historians like Perry Miller or Sacvan Bercovitch, I read through Edwards’ major treatises in search of the reasons why he might have been, as it were, singled out by such notable authors. His skill as a rhetorician and logician was clear from the very beginning although it was not until I carefully read some of his homiletic works (other than the famous revival sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”) that I started to view this New England theologian as first a pastor-preacher, and only secondarily a philosopher or thinker. In gauging the oratorical value of Edwards’ extant sermons one is drawn to analyze his use of metaphorical language, logical argumentation and other stylistic traits that may have contributed to the impact his pulpit delivery had during the revivals. My specific inquiry into Edwards’ historical thought and discourse is not unconnected to the consideration that he was, first and foremost, an orator. What later became an influential book among evangelicals in the United States and abroad, A History of the Work of Redemption, had first been conceived as a sermon series that the Northampton minister preached to his congregation little before the Great Awakening. This series, delivered in 1739, was not published in its original form until 1989, when it came out as volume nine of Yale’s 26- volume edition of The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, 1957-2008). i A few years before this authoritative edition of Edwards’ writings was completed, professor Avihu Zakai published Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of History: The Reenchantment of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (Princeton, 2003). His comprehensive analysis of the colonial minister’s philosophy of history goes beyond the 1739 series although Zakai does emphasize the importance of the 1730s in Edwards’ intellectual development, especially as regards his “redemptive mode of historical thought”. One point the author makes, which definitively determined the trajectory of this study, is that Edwards developed a “singular rhetoric of history” during the years of revival in New England (275). This dissertation, therefore, owes much to Zakai’s work (and not just this one book) and, more specifically, to the insights he provides regarding the colonial author’s vision and understanding of the historical process. But since his book focuses mainly on thought, not discursive modes, and covers a wide range of writings, not just those delivered in the sermonic form, the issue of Edwards’ “singular rhetoric of history” is by no means exhausted. It remains to be determined how his rhetorical originality and historical imagination were fleshed out from the Northampton pulpit in the oratorical endeavor of 1739. What characterized Edwardsean revivalistic homiletics during the six months devoted to the exposition of salvation history in particular, and during the 1730s in general? In order to establish what the distinguishing features of Edwards’ discursive modes and rhetoric exactly were when he expounded the history of the Work of Redemption, I first needed to have a grasp of colonial American historical discourse in my author’s literary and ideological setting. The immediate context for his construction of a singular rhetoric of history was the Great Awakening and his apocalyptic belief that ii God’s kingdom had to be manifestly set up in the world before the final conflagration. Since these latter elements had been present in colonial Puritan theology and discourse for more than three generations, I chose to compare Edwards’ concept of divine agency and his ideas about how God specifically intervened in history with the same tenets in the writings of other relevant colonial American authors (chapter two). To carry out the intended study, some primary texts from the canon of pre-Revolutionary American literature were looked into in a preliminary survey. Such were the local histories of colonial Puritans like Cotton Mather, William Bradford or John Winthrop.
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