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Gettysburg College

History of Christianity

Jonathan Edwards

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After Edwards: Original Sin And Freedom Of The Will, Allen C. Guelzo Aug 2012

After Edwards: Original Sin And Freedom Of The Will, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

Book Summary: Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) is widely regarded as one of the major thinkers in the Christian tradition and an important and influential figure in American theology. After Jonathan Edwards is a collection of specially commissioned essays that track his intellectual legacies from the work of his immediate disciples that formed the New Divinity movement in colonial New England, to his impact upon European traditions and modern Asia. It is a unique interdisciplinary contribution to the reception of Edwardsian ideas, with scholars of Edwards being brought together with scholars of New England theology and early American history to produce a …


Edwards On The Will: A Century Of American Theological Debate, Allen C. Guelzo Mar 2008

Edwards On The Will: A Century Of American Theological Debate, Allen C. Guelzo

Gettysburg College Faculty Books

Jonathan Edwards towered over his contemporaries--a man over six feet tall and a figure of theological stature--but the reasons for his power have been a matter of dispute. Edwards on the Will offers a persuasive explanation. In 1753, after seven years of personal trials, which included dismissal from his Northampton church, Edwards submitted a treatise, Freedom of the Will, to Boston publishers. Its impact on Puritan society was profound. He had refused to be trapped either by a new Arminian scheme that seemed to make God impotent or by a Hobbesian natural determinism that made morality an illusion. He …


God's Designs: The Literature Of The Colonial Revival Of Religion, 1735-1760, Allen C. Guelzo Jan 1998

God's Designs: The Literature Of The Colonial Revival Of Religion, 1735-1760, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

In December of 1990, after the completion of a section on Jonathan Edwards at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in New York City, a dozen or so of mostly younger scholars of Jonathan Edwards swept around the corner from the convention hotel and settled themselves down to a staggering repast at a posh north Italian restaurant. In the midst of some very un-Edwardsean consumption, I offered a question to everyone around the table: What is the most important book which you've ever read on the Great Awakening? With only one exception, the Young Edwardseans gave the palm …


Oberlin Perfectionism And Its Edwardsean Origins, Allen C. Guelzo Jan 1996

Oberlin Perfectionism And Its Edwardsean Origins, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

An impression has very generally prevailed," wrote James Harris Fairchild toward the end of his twenty-three-year presidency of Oberlin College, "that the theological views unleashed at Oberlin College by the late Rev. Charles Grandison Finney & his Associates involves a considerable departure from the accepted orthodox faith." It was an impression that Fairchild believed to be inaccurate, and he would probably be horrified to discover a century later that the prevailing impression the "Oberlin Theology" has made on historians of the nineteenth-century United States continues to be one in which Oberlin stands for almost all the progressive and enthusiastic unorthodoxies …