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Jonathan Edwards, Solomon Stoddard, and the Preparationist Model of Conversion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2011

David Laurence
David Laurence
Affiliation:
SUNY—Stony Brook, Stony Brook, NY 11794
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Extract

As a youth of nineteen, Jonathan Edwards was full of questions and anxiety about his conversion. Like many another Puritan seeker, Edwards was eager to obtain the reward of faith but found it impossible not to doubt the genuineness of his religious pretensions. Doubt and self-distrust were hardly unusual in the religious life of a New England Puritan. Indeed, as Edmund Morgan has observed, they were an expected, even prescribed, part of the Christian pilgrim's journey toward God. “This was the constant message of the Puritan preachers: in order to be sure [of one's standing before God] one must be unsure. … [T]he surest earthly sign of a saint was his uncertainty….” Edwards' reflections upon his experience, however, brought to light another, more interesting reason for hesitation—and one that was anything but conventional. He observed a marked discrepancy between what he had experienced and what the theorists of conversion—among them his esteemed grandfather Solomon Stoddard—said he ought to experience. Furthermore, far from glossing over this discrepancy between theory and experience, Edwards brought it to the very center of his attention. He did not seek to evade his difficulty but determined instead to make this aporia the basis for an inquiry that eventually led him to reject the step-by-step model of conversion that had provided the framework for New England's discussion of the knotty problem, never satisfactorily resolved, of how to formulate a reliable procedure for determining who were the visible saints. Even those skeptical about the possibility of arriving at such a procedure, like Solomon Stoddard, phrased their objections within that framework. Stoddard never doubted the truth of the preparationist, step-by-step description of conversion; he did doubt that any reliable procedure for distinguishing true faith from its imitations could be constructed on the basis of that description. Edwards' eventual rejection of his grandfather's open communion practice was a consequence of a critical reevaluation of the step-by-step model upon which New England thought and practice had been based.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 72 , Issue 3-4 , October 1979 , pp. 267 - 283
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1979

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References

1 Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1963) 70.Google Scholar

2 In Dwight, Sereno E., The Life of President Edwards (New York: Carvill, 1830) 93.Google Scholar

3 In Levin, David, ed., Jonathan Edwards: A Profile (New York: Hill and Wang, 1969) 25.Google Scholar

4 “Preface,” A Guide to Christ (Boston, 1714) 5. Stoddard's italics. The “Preface” and text are paginated independently. References to the “Preface” will be cited as such. Those to the text will have the book's title alone as the provenience.

5 Guide, “Preface,” 2.

6 The Soules Preparation (London, 1632) 57–58.

7 Hooker, The Soules Humiliation (London, 1638) 145.

8 See Baird, L. Tipson's excellent study, “The Development of a Puritan Understanding of Conversion” (Diss. Yale, 1972).Google Scholar

9 Workes (3 vols.; London, 1608–31) II. 13.

10 Workes, I. 364.

11 Levin, Jonathan Edwards: A Profile, 25.

12 Ibid.

13 Guide, 88. Stoddard's italics; Stoddard's brackets.

14 Ibid., 25.

15 Edwards, , “A Divine and Supernatural Light …,” The Works of President Edwards (4 vols.; New York: Leavitt & Allen, 1843) IV. 441.Google Scholar

16 “Theological Miscellanies,” No. 393. MS, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Quoted by permission.

17 “Theological Miscellanies,” No. 317.

18 Ibid., No. 393.

19 A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, ed. Smith, John (New Haven: Yale University, 1959) 161.Google Scholar

20 Ibid., 334.

21 The Soules Preparation, 171.

22 A Treatise Concerning Conversion (Boston, 1719) Sig. A 2 recto. The copy of the Treatise I used was dog-eared through most of its length. Where page numbers were obliterated, citation will be by signature.

23 Ibid., Sig. B 2 verso-[B 3 recto], B 5 recto. See also Sig. A 2 recto-[A 3 recto]: “This change is made at once in the Soul; it is wrought in the twinkleing of an eye. There is wont ordinarily to be a great deal of Preparation for this change: In order to this change there is wont to be a work of Contrition and Humiliation, and tho' in primitive times we read of men passing thro' the work in very little time, yet ordinarily we find that much time is consumed in the work of Preparation … commonly some months are spent, and sometimes some years, before they get through the work of Preparation; yet conversion it self is wrought at once, in the hearing of one passage in a Sermon, by the remembering of one Scripture. As it will be in the Resurrection, I Cor. 15:52. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye at the last trump; for the trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed: So it is in this first resurrection: Joh. 5:25. The hour is coming and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and they that hear shall live.”

24 Ibid., [B 8 verso].

25 “A Divine and Supernatural Light,” Works (1843) IV. 442.Google Scholar

26 I claim no originality here. See Schafer, Thomas, “Solomon Stoddard and the Theology of Revival,” in Henry, S. C., A Miscellany of American Christianity (Durham: Duke University, 1963) 357.Google Scholar

27 See Morgan, Visible Saints; Pettit, Norman, The Heart Prepared: Grace and Conversion in Puritan Spiritual Life (New Haven: Yale University, 1966)Google Scholar; and Miller, Perry, “‘Preparation For Salvation’ in Seventeenth Century New England,” Nature's Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1967) 50–77.Google Scholar

28 Guide, “Preface,” 6–7.

29 Guide, 25.

30 Conversion, [Sig. B 9 recto].

31 Ibid., 85–86.

32 Stoddard, “The Way to Know Sincerity and Hypocrisy Cleared Up,” Conversion, 119. I have deleted Stoddard's italics.

33 See, for example, The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God, in C. C., Goen, ed., The Great Awakening (New Haven: Yale University, 1972) 283ff.Google Scholar

34 A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, 223.

35 Ibid.

36 The Distinguishing Marks, in C. C. Goen, ed., The Great Awakening, 240.

37 A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, 162.