Jonathan Edwards and America’s Hebraic Spirit

In their seminal essay, “America’s Hebraic Awakening,” Eric Cohen and Jonathan Silver argue that the rediscovery of the Hebrew Bible and its role in shaping the American founding is necessary for national renewal. Here they draw on the work of such scholars as the political theorist Joshua Mitchell, who has written convincingly of the “Hebraic Christianity” that lay behind our nation’s founding. Wilfred McClay and Stuart Halpern have likewise shown how American liberties were grounded in the Founders’ use of Jewish antecedents. In her response to Cohen and Silver, Luma Simms suggests that it was Protestant recognition of the “social dimensions of sin” and the need for political restraints that turned the Founders to biblical Israel for instruction. In passing, she dismisses Jonathan Edwards’s (1703–58) teachings as too “extreme” for furthering that instruction.

But Edwards in fact had considerable influence on the colonies’ Hebraic spirit, and therefore indirectly on the Founding, an influence far too important to ignore.

Most Americans know Edwards as the preacher of the sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” called by some the best and by others the worst sermon in American history. Few Jews or Christians know that this famous sermon on the danger of hell is a meditation on Deuteronomy 32:35 and is illustrated with thirteen texts from the Hebrew Bible and only five from the New Testament. Edwards was indeed a hellfire and damnation preacher—a style whose revival might not be a bad thing in a nation full of churches with little or no fear of God—but far more. Yale University Press completed its 73-volume critical edition of his Works about fifteen years ago, most volumes comprising more than 400 pages. Edwards is widely, and correctly, regarded as America’s greatest pre-Civil War philosopher, the greatest-ever American theologian, and the Christian thinker more fixated on God’s beauty than any other in the last two millennia, outdoing even Saint Augustine and the 20th-century Swiss Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar. In short, Edwards is the American theologian par excellence.