The heart specialist: the American mind owes a lot to Jonathan Edwards

Sixty in a place undergo the works at once ... Sadness and horror seize them, and hold them some days, and then they feel an 'inward joy' that often first shows itself 'in laughing at the Meeting.' Others are 'sad for want of experiencing this work,' which 'takes up for the present the thoughts and talk of that Country.' Everywhere 'the canting question trumped about is, are you gone through? i.e. Conversion.'"

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For Americans who shudder at the thought of open-air revivals and worry about "unprecedented" insertions of religion into the public square, it bears remembering how much the nation's culture is saturated in Christian revivalism and the hope of personal conversion. The excerpt above, from Philip Gura's new biography of Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), quotes a firsthand account of the revivals that America's most famous Calvinist minister facilitated. In what posterity dubbed "The Great Awakening," Edwards and sympathetic colleagues presided over revivals and Christian conversions throughout the country in the 1730s and '40s. New England, and especially the Connecticut River valley where Edwards ministered, was the wellspring of this outpouring.

Renewed interest in Edwards has helped dispel the narrow notion of him as the forbidding preacher of "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." Gura's study further broadens our view of the man, insightfully placing him in the context of the Connecticut River valley's powerful and learned network of Calvinist ministers. He also helpfully explains the conflicts between strictly orthodox Calvinists like Edwards, and more lenient, Arminian (so-called after the 16th-century Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius) thinkers around Boston. But more than anything else, Gura seeks to explain how the minister's conception of revival and conversion has made him such an iconic figure in American culture. What, Gura asks, makes Edwards America's evangelical?

All Christians are concerned with salvation. A good Calvinist like Edwards believed that God elected to save men independent of their merit, since men are innately corrupt. For Edwards, the grace that brought this salvation caused a deeply emotional experience, a conversion by which God graciously changed hearts. If the abiding question of a Christian concerns his salvation, Edwards put this question into emotional terms: "Has God changed my heart, and how do I know?"

For Americans accustomed to talk of Jesus changing men's hearts, such may seem like standard Christian fare. But this only reflects the extent of Edwards's influence. All Christians believe in conversion and a subsequent spiritual rebirth, but for Catholics and mainline Protestants, conversion itself happens at baptism. And although American Calvinists before Edwards rejected the sacraments as dispensers of grace, and accepted a conversion experience as the only sign of salvation, they did not locate that experience so emphatically in the heart.

Edwards spent a career encouraging examination of the heart, and eagerly hungering for its conversion. The revivals for which he was famous were merely dramatic public testimonies of the inner spiritual experience that urged the unrepentant to give themselves to God. When the nineteenth century rediscovered Edwards after the Revolutionary era, it was his evangelical faith in a change of heart that it admired. Edwards's insistence on "the necessity for individual experience of conversion [and] emotion as a central component to this experience and thus to the religious life" was very appealing to the antebellum American personality and, Gura argues, to our own. Certainly Edwards's "religion of the heart" seems to reinforce our own affirmation of personal sentimentalism.

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But betraying his admiration for Edwards, Gura envisions a larger role for Edwards's psychology of conversion: The energy of the "new birth," which came from conversion, "engendered human agency in people who had hitherto not known it." Gura sees these "liberated and awakened souls" in the patriots of 1776, the abolitionists of the 1850s, and the soldiers of the Civil War, people "exhilarated at what the power of God within them allowed them to dream and accomplish." One might think also of a political version of the "new birth" preached at Gettysburg. For Gura, then, Edwards's evangelicalism is at the heart of America's sense of individualism, search for personal renovation, and belief in the possibility of revolutionary and moral change.

Of course, Gura does not associate these heroic moments exclusively with Jonathan Edwards. Doubtless he means only to illuminate some of the hidden cultural byways of history. But his apologetic tone ignores a more nuanced result of Edwards's evangelicalism. The reader can find it in Gura's book, although the author does not acknowledge it.

Even as his revivals generated eagerness among his audience to lead a Christian life, and persuaded many that they had experienced changes of heart, the question nagged Edwards: "How do I retain the energy?" He never answered it, and, after two periods of "awakening," his own flock in Northampton, Massachusetts, slid back into its old, selfish ways and eventually dismissed him as its minister.

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If Edwards's revivalism sparked spiritual revolution in the community, its aftermath became a permanent anxiety about how to routinize that revolution. The dilemma is analogous to that faced by new regimes after the fires of political revolution cool. As his revivals died down, Edwards looked continually, even desperately, for new opportunities to fan the flames, at one point heralding the collapse of a church balcony (in which no one was hurt) as a gracious act of God.

This anxiety over the genuineness of religious conversion, so evident in Edwards's life and career, seems to affect American cultural life as much as the empowerment of the "new birth." To seek life-altering spiritual rebirth is to face constant disappointment at the things that remain unchanged in this life. American rest-lessness and energy may be driven in part by this psychological dynamic, which reflects the image, from the Jews in the desert to Christians on pilgrimage, of God's as a sojourning people in this world.

Edwards was uniquely attuned to the psychology of conversion, and his endless revolution against spiritual complacency, with its anxiety as well as its hope, still agitates the American psyche.

Jonathan Edwards

America's Evangelical

by Philip F. Gura

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 284 pp., $24

Daniel Sullivan is a writer living in New Jersey.

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