Author(s): M. X. Lesser
Publisher: Eerdmans
Price: $4.99       (Ends Oct 31)

This comprehensive compilation of reader response to Jonathan Edwards, spanning 276 years, includes a reprint of two earlier works — Jonathan Edwards: A Reference Guide (1981) and Jonathan Edwards: An Annotated Bibliography (1994) — and the publication of a third, a gathering of commentary from 1994 to 2005. Nearly 140 essays have been added to the first and second works, while the third part — prominent in it the celebration of the tercentenary of Edwards’s birth — adds another 700 to the whole.

The text preserves the pattern of arranging items alphabetically within a given year and of recording cross-references. Essays in a collection are annotated serially rather than alphabetically. Each of the three sections is self-contained with an introduction and annotated bibliography of its own.

Adding to the immense value of this work to Edwards scholars are the chronology of Edwards’s works, listed by date and by short and long title, and the three comprehensive indexes — of authors and titles, of subjects, and of additions to the previous volumes.

“Some things about Edwards do not change, or change ever so slightly. A troublesome, and largely unresolved, duality haunted Edwards from the start — mystic and rationalist, philosopher and theologian, poet of the divine and scourger of the wicked — and hangs on even now, though in our less dramatic age, there appears little need to color him tragic. The habit of reading the American experience as a quarrel between Edwards on one side and Franklin on the other, first noted sometime in the nineteenth century, becomes for twentieth-century cultural critics (and popularizers) a recurrent, if not wholly rewarding, theme. There is a list of his inadvertences — his antinomianism, his liberalism, his pantheism, his republicanism — to reckon with from the eighteenth century on. And there is, for Americans, the abiding question of his importance to their history, their religion, their society, their thought.”
— from the introduction to Part I