The Theology of Jonathan Edwards, by Michael J. McClymond and Gerald R. McDermott

Like many people, when I first started reading Jonathan Edwards, I was dazzled, but I found much of his theology nearly unfathomable. Texts like Freedom of the Will and Original Sin, explicating the difference between moral and natural necessity and justifying our culpability for Adam’s sin, left me gasping in Edwards’s rarefied intellectual air. By contrast, his writings on piety and revival, such as the “Resolutions” and A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God, were both inspiring and comprehensible. As I studied American religious history at the doctoral level, Edwards’s sophisticated theology grew somewhat clearer to me. But still, when students or church friends asked me where to start with Edwards, I normally referred them to his writings on revival.

Study of Edwards has seen a renaissance in the past 30 years, keyed by Yale University Press’s The Works of Jonathan Edwards, which recently published its 26th and final volume. Biographical studies of Edwards have also flourished; George Marsden’s Jonathan Edwards: A Life (2003) is definitive. Now comes Michael McClymond and Gerald McDermott’s remarkable The Theology of Jonathan Edwards, which will undoubtedly become the standard scholarly introduction to his theology.

Of course, legions of scholarly volumes and articles have been devoted to Edwards’s theology, and two recent companions to Edwards published by the university presses of Cambridge and Princeton have offered excellent overviews of his thought. But McClymond and McDermott introduce Edwards’s beliefs with unparalleled cohesion and clarity.