Jonathan Edwards: Notes and Catalogues (5 vols.)
Overview
This collection contains Jonathan Edwards’ theological notebooks called the “Miscellanies” and his “Catalogue.”
The “Miscellanies” were written over the course of Jonathan Edwards’ ministerial career. He filled a series of private notebooks with writings on a wide variety of theological topics, numbering his entries—some 1,400 of them—in sequence. Edwards used the “Miscellanies” as a repository for ideas that he intended to develop in future sermons and treatises, and these entries contain the seeds of such contemporaneous works as Justification by Faith Alone and The History of the Work of Redemption. In these volumes you’ll see into Edwards’ thoughts on a broad range of topics and how they developed throughout his ministry.
The “Catalogue” is a notebook he kept of books of interest, especially titles he hoped to acquire, and entries from his “Account Book,” a ledger in which he noted books loaned to family, parishioners, and fellow clergy. These two records, along with several shorter documents presented in the volume, illuminate Edwards’ own mental universe while also providing a remarkable window into the wider intellectual and print cultures of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic. An extensive critical introduction places Edwards’ book lists in the contexts that shaped his reading agenda, and the result is the most comprehensive treatment yet of his reading and of the fascinating peculiarities of his time and place.
Product Details
- Title: Notes and Catalogues
- Author: Jonathan Edwards
- Publisher: Yale University Press
- Volumes: 5
- Pages: 3,003
- Christian Group: Reformed
Partially includedAbout Jonathan Edwards
Jonathan Edwards was born in 1703 in East Windsor, Connecticut to Timothy and Esther Edwards. He began his formal education at Yale College in 1716, where he encountered the Calvinism that had influenced his own Puritan upbringing. In 1727, he was ordained as minister of the church in Northampton, Massachusetts. The First Great Awakening began in Edwards’ church three years later, which prompted Edwards to study conversion and revival within the context of Calvinism. During the revival, Edwards preached his most famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” and penned many of his most popular works, including The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, and The Life of David Brainerd. When the revival subsided, the church of Northampton became increasingly suspect of Edwards’ strict requirements for participation in the sacraments. Edwards left Northampton in 1750 to become a minister at a missions church in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. In 1757, Edwards reluctantly became president of the College of New Jersey (Princeton University), where he hoped to complete two major works—one that expanded his treatise on the history of redemption, and the other on the harmony of the Old and New Testaments. His writing ambitions were interrupted by his death in 1758, when he died of complications stemming from a smallpox inoculation.