Reviving Jonathan Edwards: Perry Miller's Mid-Century Mission

The untold story of how an unlikely Harvard atheist helped resurrect one of America’s greatest Puritans

Jonathan Edwards is widely regarded as one of America’s most important and original thinkers. Prior to the mid-twentieth century, however, he was largely unknown to the learned community, except, perhaps, as a preacher of terror due to his well-known sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” In 1948 and 1949, Harvard professor of English Perry Miller published four pieces on him, including the acclaimed biography, Jonathan Edwards, and only a few years later he became the general editor of Edwards’s collected works. Miller’s efforts helped to resurrect Edwards as America’s greatest Puritan and to solidify him as central to the American experience, and their names have been closely intertwined ever since.

Miller, an iconoclastic scholar widely considered to be the founder of American studies, was known for his brilliant scholarship, devoted teaching, and hard living. Dying prematurely in 1963, he remains an enigmatic and controversial figure, with no biography available. In Reviving Jonathan Edwards, Stephen D. Crocco explores why this Harvard atheist, with an eerie sense that his time was short, delayed work on his planned magnum opus—a sweeping intellectual history of early America—to edit the works of the greatest of all American Puritans.

In a riveting history that combines biographical insight with a detailed look into mid-century academia, Crocco draws on a large body of unpublished correspondence to offer an intricate detective tale of a decades-long publishing endeavor. He provides fresh portraits of Miller and the editorial committee he assembled, which included Sydney Ahlstrom, Roland Bainton, H. Richard Niebuhr, Norman Holmes Pearson, Paul Ramsey, and John E. Smith, and follows the story long after Miller’s death, tracing the repeated, sometimes seemingly intractable challenges that publishing the many volumes on Edwards’s work faced. He concludes by tracing Edwards studies up to 2003, the 300th anniversary of his birth, when the quiet revival of this colonial minister had evolved into a full scholarly renaissance.

Illustrations

Preface

Acknowledgments

1. Perry Miller and the "Recovery" of Edwards

2. Yale Ought to Publish Mr. Edwards

3. Something Fine for American Religion and Scholarship

4. A Clear and Fair Exhibition of Edwards's Thought

5. Agitation on Behalf of Edwards

6. Restarting the Edwards Edition

7. Major Changes on the Way

8. From a Filing Cabinet to Edwards Renaissance

Note on Titles and Abbreviations

The Yale University Press Edition of The Works of Jonathan Edwards

Notes

Index

“With his mastery of published sources as well as unpublished correspondences, Crocco makes an essential contribution to understanding how and why interest in Jonathan Edwards has burgeoned around the world. This landmark study will become essential reading for those interested in Edwards, Perry Miller, and (even more) the evolution of American scholarly publishing after World War II.” - Mark Noll, author of America’s Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization, 1794-1911

“Reviving Jonathan Edwards compellingly details 20th-century American academic culture, religious philanthropy, the rise of the computer age and its effects on publishing, and the study of religion and of a particularly important yet galvanizing religious figure during the Cold War and the rise of the Christian Right. The ups and downs of Miller and his reputation, and of Edwards and his reputation, reflect the currents of American society during a period of more than half a century. A ripping good yarn with a curious cast of characters.” - Kenneth P. Minkema, editor of The Works of Jonathan Edwards and Director of the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University