Editor Reviews:

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Rating : - Grand, balanced full-length biography
This is a long book; the text alone is a little over 500 pages. In the ample space of those pages, Marsden very fully sets out virtually everything that is known about Jonathan Edwards. First and foremost, this is the story of a life. It is biography on a grand scale, in which Edwards' life is described, from beginning to end, in great detail.

What is really marvelous about this book is how Marsden combines the professional objectivity of a historian with sympathetic understanding of his subject. This is very important, because Edwards is not the kind of person that just anyone could write about in a useful way. The events of Edwards' life are not very dramatic or significant. What makes Edwards important is his thought. He was a theologican and a philosopher, who stood on the point of transition between a world in which God still reigned supreme and the modern world of secular thought and scientiic belief. He was also a defender of Calvinism, in a world which was about to turn against Calvin.

To write usefully about such a man, the writer needs to have a deep interest in theological and philosophic subjects, and Marsden does. I am not entirely sure what his own perspective is, because he keeps his own beliefs off stage, as is proper, but Marsden says that he is, and he plainly is, someone whose personal religious viewpoint is not too far away from that of Edwards. Marsden is someone to whom the issues Edwards wrestled with are still alive. He is thus able to bring alive Edwards' philosophic and theological concerns in a wonderful way.

I, personally, do not yet know enough about Protestant thought to really be able to make sense of all of this. Much of Calvinism seems very odd to me. I am perplexed by such doctrines as the teaching that humans have absolutely no ability to merit grace -- not just faith alone, but the further teaching that what we believe and feel is not relevant either -- combined with the belief that we should exert ourselves greatly to be saved. If nothing we do makes any difference, where is our motive to work hard to accept God? I find all of this very perplexing.

Marsden does not try to explain the larger Calvinist framework of thought to those, like me, who are bascially ignorant of it, so much of this material goes past me. One point that came across very strongly, however, is that Edwards -- in his own, odd Puritan way -- was a passionate mystic, as devoted to God as Saint John of the Cross or Teresa de Avila. I think, quite often, we find the Puritans repugnant, because their stress on God's anger is so foreign to us. While I still find that aspect of Puritan thought hard to sympathize with, I am glad to have someone show me that the Puritans -- in their own way -- were extremely sincere and zealous Christians.