Jonathan Edwards's religious psychology.
Jonathan Edwards scholarship, thriving since the late 1940s when Perry Miller wrote his influential book on the great thinker, has flourished even more than usual in recent years with significant new books by Wallace E. Anderson, Norman Fiering, Terrence Erdt, and Patricia J. Tracy. 1 Though much of this recent work surpasses Miller, one is grateful for the 1981 reprinting of his Jonathan Edwards (1949), which, as it fades from influence among colonial historians, remains an interesting document of twentieth-century culture because of Miller's use of Edwards to attack modern American liberals. To so use Edwards, Miller had to render him palatable to modern readers and rescue him from the liberals' image of an inhuman preacher of fiery hell. His strategy was both to put Edwards at odds with his contemporaries and to bring him closer to us by arguing that his preaching "was America's sudden leap into modernity." A courageous man of existential angst, Miller's Edwards accepted the loneliness of human beings in a cold, inhuman universe. The source of Edwards's modern sensibility was his youthful reading"the central and decisive event in his intellectual life '-of John Locke's An Essay concerning Human Understanding. Miller, accepting Sereno Dwight's mistaken dating, believed that at age fourteen Edwards realized that the English empiricist was "the master-spirit of the age" and promptly wrote his brilliant notes on "The Mind," which firmly followed Locke's sensational psychology. It was only to be expected that the backwoods prodigy later described religious experience according to a strictly empirical model, reducing even divine grace, Miller thought, to the status of a sense perception. In Edwards's outwardly tragic life Miller found a nice morality play of the tough-minded thinker out of step with his prosperous and complacent society; voted out of the Northampton pulpit,