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Oberg and Harry Stout, Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards and the Representation
of American Culture (New York, 1993), 108 111. Kuklick insightfully observes in his com-
parison of Franklin and Edwards:
The wrong thing in Edwards has attracted his champions the sinner. They have
consequently attributed to Edwards the angst-ridden substantial self that has been
very much a part of twentieth-century life. Commentators have not recognized
that it was repellent to Edwards. The soul-searching that some people found
attractive in the modern period is not the Edwardsean ideal but the end to which
the self of a man like Franklin must be driven. The self of the Edwardsean saint,
as B. F. Skinner wrote in another context, was beyond freedom and dignity. (111)
154 Notes to Pages 10 11
4. Robert W. Jenson, America s Theologian: A Recommendation of Jonathan Edwards
(New York, 1988), 54.
5. Ibid., 60.
6. Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind (Cambridge, 1966), 101 113.
7. Allen C. Guelzo, Edwards on the Will: A Century of American Theological Debate
(Middletown, Conn., 1989), 132 135.
8. Gerald McDermott, One Holy and Happy Society: The Public Theology of Jona-
than Edwards (University Park, Pa., 1992), 98 101. McDermott quotes Sang Hyun Lee,
The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Princeton, N.J., 1988), 109: A thing
is only as it is related to other things.
9. Daniel Walker Howe, Franklin, Edwards, and the Problem of Human Nature,
in Oberg and Stout, Franklin, Edwards and American Culture, 87. Alan Heimert argued
that, for Edwards and his disciples, a beatific vision of perfect brotherhood was the
only true basis for relationships among human beings. Equality was, for them, an aes-
thetic imperative. Heimert, Religion and the American Mind, 307 308. Heimert em-
phasized that Edwards s Two Dissertations: I. Concerning the End for Which God Created
the World; II. The Nature of True Virtue (New York, 1985) pointed to the equality of
all nature and art. Yet Howe notes that, in Charity and Its Fruits (New York, 1851),
Edwards maintained that, in a good society, Christians will not desire that all should
be on a level; for they know it is best that some should be above others and should be
honored and submitted to as such. Howe, Franklin, Edwards, and Human Nature,
87. Gerald McDermott comments:
Edwards was a hierarchialist of sorts. He believed that God s original design was
for there to be heads, princes or governors to whom honor, subjection and obe-
dience should be paid. Yet he never elaborated on the gradations among humans
as liberal parsons often did, and waxed eloquent instead on the beauty of equality.
His heavenly hierarchy was based on holiness and fairly inverted New England s
social hierarchy.
McDermott, One Holy and Happy Society, 153. Just as God must be understood as a
holy society, writes Janice Knight of Edwards, so human beings cannot be considered
as unitary; each saint is part of a dynamic community of believers, a society to be
enlarged over time and particularly by seasons of awakening. Knight, Orthodoxies in
Massachusetts: Rereading American Puritanism (Cambridge, 1994), 208.
10. Jonathan Edwards, A Humble Attempt to Promote Explicit Agreement and Visible
Union of God s People in Extraordinary Prayer, quoted in Roland Delattre, Beauty and
Sensibility in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, Conn., 1968), 211.
11. Richard Rabinowitz, The Spiritual Self in Everyday Life (Boston, 1979), 51, 61, 63.
Conrad Cherry asserts that Hopkins transformed Edwards s universe of natural images
into a world of moral facts, his symbolic understanding of faith into discrete acts of
obedience, the dynamism of being in general into the fixed structures of moral govern-
ment. Cherry, Nature and Religious Imagination from Edwards to Bushnell (Philadel-
phia, 1980), 82.
12. Kuklick stresses that the New Divinity saw individuals as real in the nature of
things, a view much different from that expressed by Edwards in Original Sin (Boston,
1758). Kuklick, Churchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey
(New Haven, Conn., 1985), 63.
13. William Breitenbach, Unregenerate Doings: Selfishness and Selflessness in New
Divinity Theology, American Quarterly 34, no. 5 (Winter 1982), 479 502. New Divinity
Notes to Pages 12 14 155
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