furnishes much other valuable information on the project.
∑Ω∏ Notes to Pages 481–87
instance, God's command to sacrifice Isaac was intended to illustrate the substitutionary atonement, since the ram that was sacrificed in Isaac's place was a type of Christ.
For a general account and interpretation of the crisis concerning Scriputre history during this era, see Hans Frei, The Eclipse of the Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenthand Nineteenth-Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 1–85. Edwards' views that the texts should be taken at face value as history and his assumption regarding their overall unity centered typologically on Christ were unremarkable in the post-Reformation tradition, except that he proposed to explore the unities of Scripture more comprehensively than other interpreters had done. Brown, Edwards and the Bible, shows that, although his conclusions were consistent with the precritical views of earlier Reformed interpreters, Edwards himself was hardly precritical since he was so deeply involved in answering the critics of his era.
19. Miscellany no. 248, Works, 13: 361. See also Brown, Edwards and the Bible, who uses this quotation (p. 44) in developing this theme and also points out in a related note (p. 219) that Reformed theology typically divided evidences for Scripture into internal and external evidences.
20. Religious A√ections, Works, 2: 303–4. Cf. p. 304: '' 'tis unreasonable to suppose, that God has provided for his people, no more than probable evidences of the truth of the gospel.''
21. Edwards to Trustees of the College of New Jersey, October 19, 1757, Works, 16: 727– 28. 22. It was to begin with a section on ''The being and nature of God,'' a second ''Of created minds, free will etc.,'' and a third ''Of excellency, Trinity, etc.'' That would be followed by ''Creation: the ends of it.'' Then would come doctrines such as faith and justification. The preface, he noted, would ''shew how all the arts and sciences, the more they are perfected, the more they issue in divinity'' and would also (anticipating the Two Dissertations) ''shew how absurd for Christians to write treatises on ethics distinctly from divinity as revealed in the Gospel.'' One can see here the essence of all Edwards' later arguments regarding God's method of governing the universe through the dispositions of moral agents as well as the centrality of the redemptive end for which God created the world. ''A Rational Account of the Main Doctrines of the Christian Religion Attempted,'' Works, 6: 396–97.
23. These descriptions follow closely that of John F. Wilson, Works, 9: 546–47, who furnishes much other valuable information on the project.
24. Edwards had already written, in the 1740s, a discourse on the Trinity. This was later published as An Unpublished Essay of Edwards on the Trinity, ed. George P. Fisher (New York: Scribner's, 1903).
25. All the above quotations are from the ''History of Redemption,'' Notebook A, Works of Edwards transcription. Cf. Wilson's very helpful analysis, Works, 9: 61–72.
26. See Gerald R. McDermott, Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods: Christian Theology, Enlightenment Religion, and Non-Christian Faiths (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), for a full discussion of these topics. On Islam, see ibid., 166–75. See also Edwards' views from Miscellany no. 1334, republished in in nineteenth-century editions of his Works, such as Works of Jonathan Edwards, ed. Hickman, 2: 491–93.
27. Cf. Peter Gay, A Loss of Mastery: Puritan Historians in Colonial America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 88–117. Gay's astute observations are marred by his