On July 1, 1750, the Rev. Jonathan Edwards preached his farewell sermon to the congregational church in Northampton, Massachusetts, which he had served for twenty-three years, almost all of his adult life. It was barely ten days after a bitter church meeting elected by one vote to dismiss him, ignoring his offer to resign. Edwards had already alienated the congregation when he proposed to discipline the children of some prominent families for circulating a “bad book,” a midwives’ manual. The final die was cast when he insisted that congregants demonstrate a saving work of God in their own souls in order to partake of the Lord’s Supper, a practice long since abandoned by the previous minister, Edwards’s own grandfather. Forgotten in the dispute were the repeated seasons of religious awakening that had graced the church under Edwards’s pastorate.

At forty-six, Jonathan Edwards would never have another congregation. Instead, the man who would one day be viewed as the greatest American religious thinker— and one of the foremost American philosophers—found himself stranded with a wife and seven dependent children. After almost a year of soldiering on in Northampton, rescue came in the form of a call to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, a tiny frontier outpost where the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England and the Bay Colony’s Board of Commissioners for Indian Affairs maintained a struggling mission to the Housatonics.

And yet, the ensuing eight years of exile were productive ones. In between running a boarding school for Indian boys, preaching to his Housatonic charges through an interpreter, dodging the hostilities of the French and Indian War, and facing the opposition of a land-speculating relative who had already settled in Stockbridge, Edwards published the works familiarly known as Freedom of the Will (1754) and The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended (1758). He also prepared the manuscript of The Nature of True Virtue (1755, first published 1765) and began his epic narrative, A History of the Work of Redemption. This extraordinary outpouring ended only with an offer to assume the presidency of the College of New Jersey (predecessor of Princeton University), where Edwards died after less than two months in office.

Born into the first ranks of the New England clerical elite, Jonathan Edwards (1703– 1758) was raised in East Windsor, Connecticut, in the shadow of his father’s church, and attended Yale College, then the most evangelically-inclined school in the colonies. Following a brief pastorate in New York and an appointment as academic tutor at Yale, Edwards was ordained associate pastor of his eighty-four-year-old grandfather’s Northampton church in 1727. Two years later, on his grandfather’s death, Edwards became pastor, acceding to one of the most prestigious pulpits in New England at the ripe age of twenty-four. Within a few years, in the mid-1730s, he led a series of revivals in Northampton and the other towns of the Connecticut River Valley that was the precursor of a wider colonial religious movement known as the “Great Awakening.” But, by 1743, the religious fervor had waned, leaving Edwards to analyze the awakening in A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746)—and to develop the scruples that would ultimately end his ministry.

Despite this outwardly conventional career, Edwards was nothing if not a complex figure. A strict Calvinist whose theological works found favor with those strictest of Calvinists, the Scottish Presbyterians, Edwards waxed rhapsodic about the inward sweetness of his religious experience. A successful revival preacher, he is traditionally known for delivering closely-reasoned sermons in a deadly monotone. A man who spent his time scanning the newspapers for signs of the imminent apocalypse, he died from a botched smallpox vaccination, when vaccination was still an experimental medical procedure.

It is the thesis of Joseph A. Conforti’s stimulating revisionist study of the Edwardsian tradition that there is more complexity still: the heroic Jonathan Edwards is a creation, not of his own day, but, rather, of the “Second Great Awakening,” a religious revival that began almost fifty years after Edwards’s death and persisted until about 1840. What is more, following the lead of current revisionist scholarship, Professor Conforti minimizes the importance of the colonial awakening itself, contending that it was neither great, nor general, nor much of an awakening.

Instead, Professor Conforti, director of the American and New England studies program at the University of Southern Maine, argues that the clerical leadership of the second revival “reinvented” Edwards— and the colonial revival—turning him into the founder of Protestant America’s emerging evangelical culture of revivalism, sentimental piety, and social reform. In doing so, his successors shaped Edwards to meet their needs. They pointed to Edwards’s restraint as a counterweight to the unbridled excesses of the religious awakening on the western frontier. More important, they downplayed Edwards’s ardent Calvinism, including his emphasis on the absolute sovereignty of God and his belief in the freedom of the will under the determining moral constraint of original sin. Instead, they focused on his works of practical divinity and personal piety, works in which Edwards placed the wellspring of true religion in the lively inclinations that determine the heart and its outward expression in disinterested benevolence.

Professor Conforti further describes a vital and persistent Edwardsian theological tradition which traced its roots both literally and figuratively to the Edwards parsonage and remained active through the Civil War. Among the laity, the tradition was exemplified by the hothouse religious atmosphere fostered by Mary Lyon (1797–1841) at Mount Holyoke College, where, according to Conforti, the school’s culture revolved around an obsessive version of the Edwardsian doctrine of disinterested benevolence. Among the clergy, Professor Conforti finds the most powerful interpreter of this tradition in Edwards Amasa Park (1808–1900), Abbot Professor of Divinity (1847–1881) at Andover Theological Seminary. (And yes, not only was Park named after Edwards, but he married Edwards’s great-granddaughter and eventually acquired the Edwards papers from family sources.) Park transformed the works of the first generation of Edwards’s followers—the so-called “New Divinity” men, including Samuel Hopkins and Joseph Bellamy, both of whom had studied with Edwards—into the New England Theology by claiming a direct “genetic” descent from Edwards himself. At the same time, Parks personally attempted to synthesize a Consistent Calvinism that would reconcile divine sovereignty with freedom of the will, while freeing old-style Calvinism of its “wens.”

Professor Conforti finds yet another renovation of the Edwards image in the late nineteenth century with the “colonial revival”: the general resurgence of interest in the nation’s founders in reaction to the pressures of immigration and industrialization. New England antiquarians turned Edwards into a figure of stern Anglo-Saxon Puritan virtue, while concurrently, in the academy, his mystical accounts of the beauty of religious experience transformed him into the direct ancestor of the New England renaissance in American literature. Edwards monuments began to dot the landscape and clutter the bookshelf.

The most controversial—and, consequently, the most interesting—aspect of the book is Professor Conforti’s claim that Edwards’s reputation is an artifact of the nineteenth century. As evidence for Edwards’s narrow successes in his own day, Conforti points to a remarkable, and rarely remarked upon fact: Edwards’s writings enjoyed very limited publication until the nineteenth century and many of his works were first printed abroad and enjoyed greater circulation there than in America. For example, although Edwards died in 1757, there was no complete American edition of his works until 1808, more than fifty years later. In 1765, Samuel Hopkins was forced to abandon his plans for such a collection due to lack of public interest. When Edwards died, his son, Jonathan Edwards, Jr., could not find an American publisher for A History of the Work of Redemption; rather, he had to turn to Scotland, where the book was first published in 1774.

By contrast, in the 1830s, students and faculty withdrew Edwards’s Works from the Yale library at almost twice the rate of the next most frequently circulated volume. Simplified versions of Edwards’s works were among the most popular books in the American Tract Society’s catalogue of religious writings. The previously ignored History of the Work of Redemption was a virtual best seller after 1838, when it became part of the Tract Society’s Evangelical Family Library. And, Edwards’s hagiographic Life of David Brainerd (1749), the tale of a hapless young man who died in the course of a hopelessly unsuccessful career as a missionary to the Indians, went through repeated editions. It remained on the Tract Society list until 1892, and spawned a cult of pilgrimage to Brainerd’s grave.

Now, in its broad outlines, Conforti’s is a most interesting and thought-provoking thesis. As with so many other things, however, the devil is in the details. It is, for example, rather difficult to square Conforti’s description of a man whose death was noted by “only a few obituaries” that suggested “no great outpouring of grief” with the Edwards who was called from “frontier exile” to the presidency of Princeton and who had, in palmier days, been the commencement speaker at Yale. Indeed, both the very fact that Edwards was among the few American intellectuals whose works were widely circulated abroad during the eighteenth century and the persistence of an Edwardsian theology undercut Conforti’s argument.

What is more, the claim that Edwards was a less than dominant figure during his own lifetime is unnecessary to Conforti’s other claim—that the Second Great Awakening rediscovered him. It is equally—if not more—plausible that the eclipse of popular interest in Edwards after his death is attributable to the wider secularization of culture in the decade preceding the Revolution and during the early national period, a secularization that was countered only by the Second Great Awakening. Professor Conforti’s observations serve to underscore the profound cultural volte face at the turn of the century.

For that matter, revisionism is all well and good, but it is important not to mistake the baby for the bathwater. To those of us raised on the Great Awakening—including the triumphant tours of George Whitefield, the Billy Graham of his day, from Georgia to New England—Conforti’s suggestion that the colonial revival was ginned up by nineteenth-century evangelical historians seems a bit much. Previous accounts may have overstated the importance of the colonial awakening, hoping to find in it the seeds of a national consciousness that would eventually lead to the Revolution. I think it is fair to say, though, that something deeply significant of a religious nature happened in the colonies between 1734 and 1743 and that Jonathan Edwards was prominently involved in whatever that was.

But even Professor Conforti’s account of a continuing and vital Edwardsian tradition during the antebellum period raises some questions. First of all, it tends to overlook other major contributors to the antebellum cultural mix, particularly those associated with Yale and the increasingly liberal, revival-oriented theology of Nathaniel William Taylor, Lyman Beecher, and Timothy Dwight, president of Yale and Edwards’s grandson. But, even on its own terms, the account remains less than fully convincing.

The received interpretation, strongly influenced by twentieth-century neo-orthodoxy, is that the New Divinity represented a decline from the tragic vision inherent in Edwards’s strict Calvinism to a watered-down moralism that verged on obscurantism in its attempt to preserve the Edwards legacy while purging it of doctrines, such as imputation, that were becoming increasingly unpalatable. In reaction, recent scholars have argued that the New Divinity theologians remained true Calvinists and loyal Edwardsians despite their modification of key doctrines. Professor Conforti presents a third path, choosing to revise the revisionists: he emphasizes the doctrinal innovations of the New England Theology even while claiming that the Edwardsian tradition remained vital throughout the antebellum period. This, of course, brings us to the nub: when does Edwardsianism become so diluted that it no longer has anything to do with Edwards?

Conforti attempts to strengthen his claim for the continuity of the Edwardsian tradition by remaking Edwards into the nineteenth century’s image of him. Thus, in his discussion of Mary Lyon’s lay revivalism, Conforti seems to give Edwards credit for being a nineteenth-century evangelist, given to such “new measures” as the “anxious bench” and protracted prayer meetings in order to bring about conversion experiences among the hopeful. Although Puritans had a long tradition of making use of the means of grace—prayer, self-examination, reading the scripture, and church attendance—it was not until the advent of Charles Grandison Finney, the greatest evangelist of the antebellum period, that revivalism became an institutionalized science and not a “suprising work of God.”

Although this book is likely to engage the specialist even while generating objections, it may have a more limited appeal to the ordinary reader—after all, in order to appreciate revisionism, you have to know what is being revised. At times, in fact, the enterprise does put one in mind of the old saw about scholars taking in one another’s washing. As a more general matter, the book bears the marks of being an expanded set of monographs, most of which first appeared in specialized journals. Thus, on the one hand, it assumes a fair amount of what a lay reader might—with some justification —consider rather obscure knowledge regarding the New Divinity and, on the other, it is repetitive to the point of distraction. Buzz words such as “cultural icon” and “reify” appear with grating regularity, substituting for deeper analysis.

Part of the difficulty, I think, is that the author cannot decide whether he is in sympathy with Edwards or not. This leads him to focus on the weakened reflection of Edwards in the thought of others and to avoid the question of why Edwards has retained so much symbolic power for our culture. Perhaps it is the genuine grandeur of Edwards’s vision that filters through, becoming all things to all men that he might by all means save some.