Jonathan EDWARDS. Selected Writings. Selected and introduced by Kyle C. Strobel, Adriaan C. Neele, and Kenneth P. Minkema. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York/Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2019. Hardcover, pp. 440. $49.95. ISBN 978-0-8091-0634-9. Reviewed by Richard B. STEELE, Seattle Pacific University, Seattle, WA 98119.

Of the making of many anthologies of the writings of Jonathan Edwards there is apparently no end, and much study of the same half-dozen excerpts can indeed be a weariness of the flesh. Thankfully, Strobel, Neele, and Minkema have here given us a wide sampling of less familiar works by the great Puritan—along with a few well-known but nevertheless indispensable ones. As the publisher’s advertisement of the book correctly observes, scholarly and popular interest in Edwards has been growing of late, and several other anthologies of his work have recently been published, but scant attention has been paid—until now—to his “spiritual writings.” Those wanting a more balanced understanding of Edwards’s life and thought and of his crucial place in the history of American evangelical piety will therefore welcome this book.

The book is organized thematically. Its five parts are titled: "The General Contours of Edwards’s Spirituality," "Affections," "Beauty," "Means of Grace," and "The Internal and External Work of Grace." The composition or publication dates of the various selections are given (whenever ascertainable), but the sequence in which the selections in each part appear is not chronological. This may annoy readers interested in the development of Edwards’s thought across his career. The editors have addressed this issue to some extent in their introductions to the five parts, but readers will benefit from already possessing a general knowledge of Edwards’s life and theology—or a reliable biography ready to hand.

As noted above, some of the works selected to exemplify the five themes are well-known and often anthologized, such as the “Resolutions” and the “Apostrophe to Sarah Edwards.” But many others are far less familiar, and some appear here in print for the first time, courtesy of the Jonathan Edwards Center’s Global Sermon Editing Project, of which Minkema is executive editor. And many of the works of both sorts hail from the first two decades of Edwards’s ministry, that is, from his stint as a supply preacher in New York (1722–23) until the waning years of the Great Awakening (early 1740s). This makes perfect sense, as this was the period in which Edwards was busy trying to “revive” actual audiences, whereas his later works tend to be defenses or analyses of the extraordinary religious upheavals that had swept the American Colonies under his leadership. (That said, the distinction between academic theology and popular spirituality—always a dubious one—is often meaningless in Edwards’s case. Many of his great later treatises, for all their exhaustive detail and technical precision, began life as sermon series and retained much of their original homiletical razzle-dazzle.)

The book’s scholarly apparatus is generally quite adequate. First, Neele’s “prelude” situates Edwards’s spirituality in its immediate setting within Reformed and Puritan piety, and in the broader context of Medieval, Reformation, and Pietist spirituality. Second, Strobel’s volume introduction offers a splendid exposition of Edwards’s “practical divinity,” and brings out several crucial points that are often overlooked in treatments of Edwardsean thought (and of Puritan/Calvinist thought more generally), namely the stress laid on the delight felt by the “saints” in the beauty and glory of God, and on the importance of the “means of grace” (sacraments, prayer, preaching, scripture study, self-examination, public professions of faith, and the performance of good works) for individual spiritual formation and congregational spiritual revival. Finally, the endnotes are useful in elucidating Edwards’s sometimes mystifying habits of speech and prose composition, in explaining the publication history of the selected texts, and in referencing noteworthy secondary sources. But more attention might have been given to the details of Edwards’s broader intellectual culture and to his habit of recycling his ideas and illustrations. For example, in one early sermon, Edwards tells a story about “one of the emperors of Rome” (p. 218). The editors correctly identify the emperor in question as Domitian but neglect to mention that Edwards got the story from Suetonius. In another early sermon, Edwards observes that someone hearing a second-hand descriptionof the taste of honey “would never get so lively an apprehension of it as he had that had tasted [it]” (p. 326). Over twenty years later, Edwards used this same image inhis Treatise Concerning Religious Affections­. But the editors make no mention of its recurrence in the later work, despite the important role it plays there for Edwards’s mature religious epistemology.

All in all, this book is a welcome addition to the shelfful of Edwards’s publications—anthologies and all—and an important contribution to our understanding of American evangelical piety.