12 - The reputation of Edwards abroad

Summary

Jonathan Edwards was not just an American. Though living in “the American plantations, ” the theologian was conscious of being an inhabitant of “the British dominions. ” He was a Briton who delighted in the discomfiture of the French and longed for news of “the notions that prevail in our nation. ” Yet he was also a Christian whose sympathies extended beyond British territories “into Holland, Zeeland, and other Protestant countries, and all the visible church of Christ. Edwards had a cosmopolitan dimension, fostered by his grand apocalyptic vision of the future spread of the gospel. So it is not surprising that others saw in him more than an American. For Isaac Taylor, a commentator on his works writing in 1831, there was no doubt that Edwards shared his own English identity. “We claim Edwards as an Englishman, ” asserted Taylor: “he was such in every respect but the accident of birth in a distant province of the empire. ” But Samuel Hopkins, Edwards's first biographer, recognized the complementary truth that Edwards won fame not only in America and Britain but also in the Netherlands and Germany.5 Although Edwards appealed particularly to his compatriots in England, Scotland, and Wales, he enjoyed a European reputation even during his lifetime and eventually gained a measure of celebrity in specific circles elsewhere. Jonathan Edwards was a figure who contributed to intellectual life far beyond New England.