Interview: George Marsden

December 5, 2003

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week714/exclusive.html

On the 300th anniversary of his birth, the great American theologian and preacher Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) is being remembered as “the spiritual godfather of our nation,” “America’s Augustine,” and “our greatest expert on the American soul.” Read excerpts from an interview about Edwards with University of Notre Dame history professor George M. Marsden, author of JONATHAN EDWARDS: A LIFE (Yale University Press):

Jonathan Edwards might be a helpful corrective to what American culture is like today, or a balance to some of the tendencies in the culture. He is interesting just in order to understand some of its religious dimensions. A lot of people are simply puzzled by the persistence of religion, so to add Edwards to the Founding Fathers — he’s at least a spiritual founder — is a good balance to all the interest in people like Benjamin Franklin and John Adams and those kinds of founders. We need a little more on the religious side.

Our history and self-image are so upbeat that we have a tendency to say we can do anything. It seems to me there’s something to be said for having histories that have at least a minor key in them. Edwards is one of those people who say that humans are limited … that we can’t do everything we want to do. I saw last summer a church sign that said, “The last four letters in ‘American’ are ‘I can.'” That struck me as a good example of how Benjamin Franklin’s optimism has won, even in the churches — that with the right technique, we can make anything happen. Practicality has prevailed. Edwards would emphasize that humans are limited creatures and need to be dependent on God. That seems to me to be a worthwhile balance.

Edwards had a sense of the tenuousness of life. He talks about how we’re “walking on rotten canvas.” In the 18th century that was easier to understand; lots of people lost most of their children. Cotton Mather, who lived just before Edwards, had 15 children, only two of whom lived to adulthood, and he went through three wives. When there was always that possibility that you or anybody else you knew might die at any time, there was a much greater sense of the need to depend on something else. Post-9/11 America has gained a little bit of that sense — that things aren’t necessarily just upward and onward; that lots of things can go very wrong. Edwards’s kind of theology is addressing the dimension of the human condition that consumer culture tends to ignore — that most people don’t succeed, and things do go wrong.

The only exception to the prevailing view that people can do anything they want is, I think, in the arts. Artists and literary people and filmmakers, like Martin Scorsese or Paul Schrader, have a sense of human limits. If you’re writing an interesting novel, you have to have things that go wrong and people who do evil things. There’s a host of films that deal with the darker side of the human condition. In films, we find that understandable. But we don’t get a lot of sense of that in our public culture, where we’re always affirming everything. There’s a good side to that, but it also tends to be a bit unrealistic as far as our actual state of affairs. When we do political analysis of the American situation, there’s a kind of constraint. You have to say everybody is basically good and work from there.

That seems to me to be a limited way to look at things. Edwards would argue with that. People have observed long before me that the one traditional Christian doctrine that’s best illustrated and most empirically verified in the 20th century is the doctrine of the total depravity of humans — that everyone is corrupted. With all the terrible things that went on in the 20th century, which was supposed to be the culmination of the progress growing out of the Enlightenment, it makes one think there is another side to the story.

Edwards was a promoter of the revival. One of the very significant things in understanding America is the persistence of evangelical religion. American religion wasn’t dependent on the state, coming from the top down; it came from the bottom up. It had to be popular religion. Edwards was one of the first proponents of that. His whole view of history was one in which revival was at the center of what God is doing in the world. The evangelical movement, in a way, is an outgrowth of that outlook. That was also expressed by Edwards’s contemporaries, like George Whitefield or John Wesley, who was also born in 1703. That’s very important just for understanding evangelicalism.

Also, Edwards has something to say to American evangelicals. They would benefit by having him among their spiritual founders. For one thing, it would be good to have more emphasis on a founder who was a profound thinker. There is a tendency toward anti-intellectualism in American popular religion. In some ways, that’s its strength, because it’s very easily shared and spread. But that also leads to some shallowness. Edwards has a very deep theological expression to propose to people. I think there would be a good basis for recovering some more depth in evangelical theology — particularly a tendency within evangelicalism (to which I am essentially sympathetic) to make one’s own religious experience the center of what the religion is about. It loses sight of God as the real center.

The most striking thing about Edwards’s theology is its God-centeredness. He is always starting everything with reference to “What is God doing?” and then trying to understand us in that light. He has a very dynamic view of how God works in the world — that God is essentially love, which means that God is essentially an active being who is relating to creatures. The whole purpose of creation is to express God’s love to creatures. Creation isn’t simply something that went on long ago — that God wound up the universe and then it runs on abstract laws. Creation is an ongoing process. Edwards could go out in the fields and get a sense of the beauty of God’s love in the beauties of nature; they are pointing toward the love of God, the redemptive work of God and Christ. He’s constantly emphasizing that the essence of religious life is true affections directed toward God. Even in the Awakenings that he was dealing with in the 18th century, he was criticizing people who were celebrating their own experience too much, in a way that religion could get them to talking about themselves or what they get out of it. He was always referring them back to the centrality of God in all that they talk[ed] about.

Evangelicalism is a catch-all term for about a hundred different strands in American Christianity. Some of them are fairly close to Edwards theologically, although today they are not very well known. There are some preachers today who are explicitly Edwardsian and who have been quite successful — John Piper, who has a very large church in Minneapolis and has also written quite a few books on Edwards that have sold very well. He has a lay audience of people who find this kind of theology exhilarating; Edwards can be palatable to people. There’s another pastor in New York City, Tim Keller, who has had great success preaching Edwards’s kind of doctrine. This substantial theology appeals to some people who are looking for a little more depth than they’re getting in the churches that are just a community church or church-growth kinds of places.

Edwards sees human nature as very complex; it has a dark side. He would warn against the folly of being so concerned about material things when life is very transitory. To say he’s an expert in the American soul is to say he sees some of the dangers in the American condition.

It was a profound insight from Reinhold Niebuhr that our strengths are also our weaknesses. We are very good at “how-to” culture, material things, and the like. But those can become idols. What we see as evidence of our virtue, because we’re so rich and powerful, people in the rest of the world see as evidence of our vice. Edwards makes us take a second look at ourselves and say, “Don’t assume that these material achievements are the greatest thing you can do, or that they’re going to last, because they won’t.”

Edwards had a fair number of flaws that he, being a good Calvinist, was very aware of. There’s a kind of Catch-22 in Calvinism. If you do good, then you become worried about your pride in doing good. Edwards actually had quite a bit of pride. He talked about that; he was aware of it. He was involved in church controversies a lot and he tended not to back down on things. If someone criticized his views, he would drop everything and write a 200-page treatise to refute it. He could never let an argument rest. He was a very serious person. He knew he wasn’t good at small talk, and he didn’t do a lot of it. He didn’t joke. He didn’t think that it was appropriate to joke, because you would usually belittle people in some way or other. There have been other people in the Christian tradition who had a better balance of seeing humor in things as a way of dealing with human foibles.

Edwards tended to be a brittle sort of person, very intense. He was greatly loved by his family. He had 11 children and a very loving wife. Their family became somewhat legendary. He grew up the only boy with 10 sisters. He had very close personal relationships, but he wasn’t particularly good at dealing with the public except in a public role, in the role of the pastor. He could do that, but he wasn’t so good just at getting along with people or having much sense of how to deal with people who differed with him. He’s like lots of people in those respects.

What was it like to live in the 1700s in North America, when the American Revolution was not on the horizon at all? The most striking thing in trying to understand Edwards in that light is to think about him at the intersection of British culture, French culture, and the Indians. They were all contending for more or less the same territory. Edwards’s whole life was shaped by this rather intense struggle that’s often breaking out into warfare among these groups. The precariousness of life in that era is also shaped by living in that kind of situation. Edwards’s house was often fortified. He became a missionary to the Indians. He was in Stockbridge, Massachusetts on the frontier during the French and Indian wars. He was in a very dangerous situation with his whole family there. It was a very different era.

The biggest revelation about Edwards was to understand him particularly in relationship to the Indians — the Indian wars, on the one hand, and the Indian mission, on the other. That’s a side of him that people hadn’t really brought out, but it seems to me a very poignant part of his life and the development of New England. These people came with ambition to convert the Indians, to live in friendship with them; in fact, they were at war with them often and displacing them, not converting them. That was an agonizing sort of thing.

Edwards was trying to respond to that with his own missionary work. He wrote a biography of David Maynard, a great missionary to the Indians. I think it was his best-selling book. It inspired lots of 19th-century missions. Maynard was very much of a loner who went out in the wilderness. I don’t think he was especially skilled as a missionary, just very dedicated. He finally did have some success. People admired his dedication. It was very hard work in those days.

Edwards died at age 54, and he started writing very substantial theological treatises, or outlining them, when he was already in his twenties. Actually, there’s an amazing continuity in Edwards’s thought, but he did change his thinking about church membership. That led to a disaster with his congregation. He had these amazing revivals in Northampton, Massachusetts, which was a town of maybe 1,200 or 1,500 people. Everybody was in the church, and almost everybody, he thought, was either converted or seeking conversion for a while. But then, after two major Awakenings, Edwards became discontented with the policy that had been set up by his very revered grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, that church membership would be based basically (as it is in lots of churches today) on profession of faith and being a good person. Edwards wanted a little more. He wanted people to be able to give some account of heartfelt dedication to God — something like a conversion; not an overnight kind of thing, but rather to talk about the heartfelt quality of their religion. Trying to change the basis of church membership — that offended a lot of people who felt they had a right to be in the church, and particularly had a right, for instance, to have their children or their grandchildren baptized. If church membership suddenly becomes very strict, then what happens if people aren’t getting baptized? So Edwards’s church severed their connection with him. He didn’t back down at all. He knew he was going down with the ship and was going to take his family with him, but when he saw a principle, he would simply stick with it no matter what.

In his 18th-century language Edwards tends to speak with great precision in formulating his ideas, even in most of his sermons. Sometimes he has very vivid imagery — as in the famous sermon that said sinners are in the hands of an angry God. Someone said that Puritan sermons are like speaking something that’s printed. It’s a print culture; it’s not an oral tradition, essentially, but it’s a culture very much oriented toward the book. The preachers are speaking to people who are used to that kind of rhetoric. They can apparently follow rather elaborate sorts of arguments. John Piper has republished one of Edwards’s more abstract theological works, a treatise on why God created the universe. That’s sold very well among laypeople who are looking for some substantial theology. It’s not a hard language to get into; it’s just not catchy and easy, the way a lot of religious writing today is.

There are lots of practical things to retrieve from Edwards, because he’s talking about the practical Christian life as well as more high-powered theological principles. Like a lot of 18th-century people, he’s an expert on everything. His desk has all these little compartments for all the different topics that he was working on. A lot of 18th-century people tried to know everything, so it’s a comprehensive system of knowledge. Edwards was writing everything from a popular missionary biography to an abstract treatise on freedom of the will; he was answering the Enlightenment. For theologians, the treatises are interesting, but there’s enough that’s practical to be found in the sermons. There’s a book of Edwards’s collected sermons that can be very edifying. There’s a sermon series called “Charity and its Fruits” on I Corinthians 13: “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels…”. That’s a very engaging set of sermons for the serious Christian.

Edwards tends to emphasize the wrathful side of God more than perhaps I would. It was a great mystery. The key to understanding Edwards is this high Protestant tradition that emphasizes the Bible alone as authority, and there in the Bible are these dimensions of God, and Edwards is saying, “How can we avoid this?” I don’t think he is happy about it, but he’s saying that given our premises, this is what we have to believe. It’s a great mystery why God would permit evil. If the whole purpose of the universe is to express the love of God, why would God be wrathful and why would there be a hell? But Edwards sees this in Scripture.

Edwards believed that the millennium, the golden age, would come. He actually thought it would probably begin around the year 2000. After that time, just about everybody in the world would be converted, and the millennium would happen before Jesus returned. There would be a golden age in which the gospel would triumph, and everyone would see the truth. Then Edwards calculated that the world population was expanding in geometric proportion, so if you take that into account, in the last thousand years of history — in which there is a huge population — it would turn out that something like 98 percent of people who ever lived would be converted. Even though he has this very harsh doctrine that some people are going to be punished eternally and some people are chosen for heaven, as it turns out, the percentage of people who will be saved is far higher than normally would be taught in this kind of doctrine. It suggests to me that Edwards was extremely optimistic. He was also very uncomfortable with the implication that only a few people would be saved and most people would be lost. He’s worried about the wrathful side of God, but he doesn’t know how to get around it. Evil is present, and it’s there both in experience and in Scripture, so what do you do?

In the 18th-century sensibility, the sense that everybody might die at any moment is extraordinarily strong. Edwards, with his strong theology, is constantly emphasizing to people: you have to be prepared. Don’t get absorbed with these transitory things that aren’t going to last, because you have to face eternity. Even in writing letters to his children, he will say: “We miss you, and we worry that you could die any moment. Think about the state of your soul.”

There’s one case where his son, Jonathan Edwards Jr., who is 10 years old, is off with a missionary to the Indians in northern Pennsylvania during the war. Edwards is writing to him and saying: “You might die; care for your soul.” He’s thinking of eternity all the time. There’s this emphasis on being ready to die. Within about a one-year span, his son-in-law Aaron Burr Sr. dies. Then Edwards dies. Then his daughter, Esther Burr, dies. Then his wife Sarah dies. A lot of the major characters, within a 12-month period, all die. We tend to live with the illusion that we’re going to live forever. Of course, we do live longer than people then did, but we don’t face the reality that life is limited. I think you can learn from 18th-century people. With the precariousness of the world today, things can go very wrong. It’s good to be reminded that we’re not here forever, and one ought to face that.

Edwards didn’t like elaborate, expensive funerals. There’s no order of service from his own funeral. I imagine it was quite simple. Funeral sermons were a common thing, but I don’t even know who preached his.

I wouldn’t think Edwards is more than ordinarily fearful, but his theology emphasizes that life is profoundly important and that you’re playing for high stakes — that eternity is at stake. That does invite some fearfulness, but it is also the occasion for great emphasis on God’s mercy. You need to be brought to an extreme situation to see that you can’t depend simply on yourself; you do need God. That whole psychological experience is one that does intensify the meaning of life. It was something that made life, even for very ordinary people, part of a larger drama. This is PILGRIM’S PROGRESS, and we might get off the road and be destroyed, or never get out of Vanity Fair, or the like. That life is a great drama, I think, is one of the appeals of the whole Puritan-Calvinist way of thinking.