1654, 2 vols. (Northampton, Mass., 1898, 1902), 1: 559 and passim. This account is heavily
∑∞∂ Notes to Pages 1–11
Introduction
1. On Edwards' Life of Brainerd, see Joseph A. Conforti, Jonathan Edwards, Religious Tradition, and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 62–86. On recent scholarly and popular interest in Edwards, see Leigh E. Schmidt, ''The Edwards Revival: Or, The Public Consequences of Exceedingly Careful Scholarship,'' review essay, William and Mary Quarterly 58, no. 2 (April 2001): 480–86. Schmidt refers to the work of a Baptist pastor, John Piper, God's Passion for His Glory: Living the Vision of Jonathan Edwards (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books, 1998), as a ''Wheaton bestseller.'' God's Passion for His Glory includes the entire text of Edwards' formidable The End for Which God Created the World. In February 2002, Amazon.com listed God's Passion for His Glory as its bestselling book by or about Edwards, followed by another book by Piper and Life of Brainerd.
2. Gordon S. Wood provides a wonderful sense of the implications of the hierarchism of pre-Revolutionary eighteenth-century America in The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1992), 11–92. This paragraph is mostly a summary of some of his points. Jon Butler, Becoming America: The Revolution before 1776 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), argues to the contrary that colonial America was already modern.
3. Edwards occasionally used ''Calvinistic'' as a description of his theology, but he seldom cited or mentioned John Calvin by name. Edwards' theology was refracted mostly through Reformed, or Calvinistic, writers of the seventeenth or early eighteenth centuries, especially Puritan and Scottish Presbyterian writers from Great Britain and Reformed theologians from the continent. The entire movement is frequently referred to as ''Reformed,'' and I often use that term because it more clearly suggests that the movement had evolved beyond direct dependence on Calvin himself and was diverse and changing in many ways, even while it had various creeds that defined widely used standards of Reformed ''orthodoxy.''
4. Edwards, like his Reformed and Puritan predecessors was ''biblicist'' in the sense of rigorously attempting to follow the Reformation principle of ''the Bible alone'' as an authority, particularly in matters pertaining to theology and the church. Many of their beliefs and practices were determined because, according to their scholarship, such were taught in Scripture. At the same time, every biblicist interprets the Bible through a tradition of interpretation, and Edwards' biblicism was refracted through the scholarship of his Calvinistic heritage. When I refer to his views as being ''biblical'' or being ''refracted through the lens of Scripture,'' etc., I am, of course, taking into account that his understandings were shaped largely by traditions of Reformed interpretations.
5. Thomas J. Haskell, Objectivity Is Not Neutrality: Explanatory Schemes in History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).
6. Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Minister's Wooing (1859). Cf. her Oldtown Folks (1869) for similar themes.
7. See Barbara B. Oberg and Harry S. Stout, eds., Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards, and the Representation of American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
chapter 1. A Time to Be Born
1. James R. Trumbull, History of Northampton, Massachusetts, from Its Settlement in 1654, 2 vols. (Northampton, Mass., 1898, 1902), 1: 559 and passim. This account is heavily