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Title: Jonathan%20Edwards%201703-1758


1
Jonathan Edwards1703-1758
  • American Literature I
  • 10 /18/2004
  • Cecilia H. C. Liu

2
Historical Background (1)
  • During last decades of the 17th century, many
    Puritans felt that society had betrayed the first
    settlers' hopes of building the New Jerusalem in
    America.
  • The 1660 Restoration of Charles II to the English
    throne was the first of many blows. The church
    had also undergone key changes. For example, in
    1662 a synod of Boston theologians met and
    adopted the "Halfway Covenant," which extended
    the sacrament of baptism to the children of those
    who had not experienced religious conversion.

3
Historical Background (2)
  • The real purpose of this compromise to solve the
    problem of declining church membership. New
    England society also underwent enormous changes
    after 1660.
  • The success of Boston as a commercial hub brought
    great changes new richness in habits of dress,
    entertainment, and the adornment of homes and
    public buildings as well as boom-times for
    tavern-keepers, brothel operators, and the owners
    of horse-tracks.

4
New England Politics
  • Politics in New England was permanently altered
    in 1691 when the crown acted to revoke the 1630
    charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company, put the
    colony under royal governorship, united the
    formerly distinct Plymouth colony with the Bay
    Company, and entitled all Christians (except
    Catholics) to vote. In a trice, Massachusetts had
    been changed from a theocracy into a secular (and
    proto-democratic) colony. Meantime, from Europe
    came news of new, rationalistic philosophical
    thinking--in names like Rene Descartes
    (1596-1650), Isaac Newton (1643-1727) and John
    Locke (1632-1704)--which posed strong challenges
    to Puritan doctrines of predestination and
    election.

5
Salem Witchcraft Trials
  • The 1692 witchcraft trials in Salem,
    Massachusetts, may be seen as an outgrowth of
    these anxious times. Many historians see them as
    a last-ditch attempt of churchmen to assert their
    authority over an increasingly secular society.
    As a chronicler of those events, Cotton Mather
    revealed the backwards-looking side of his
    character.

6
Cotton Mather
  • As the title of his Wonders of the Invisible
    World implies, Mather believed there was a realm
    of supernatural beings, claimed to have
    experienced a visit from an angel when he was
    thirty, and wrote of confronting devils as well,
    saying on one occasion that he had physically
    prevented a devil from wrapping invisible
    manacles around a girl.
  • The forwards-looking side of Mather's character
    is revealed in other writings, perhaps best of
    all his 1710 book Bonifacius, which was popularly
    known under the title of Essays to Do Good, and
    an enormous influence on the young Benjamin
    Franklin.

7
Cotton Mathers Arguments
  • In these writings, Mather argued for the
    pragmatic benefits of religion, and put to use
    the humanistic ideas of early Enlightenment
    thinkers. Mather's writings on geology, astronomy
    and botany won him a wide reputation and with
    Boston physician Zabdiel Boylston he brought to
    America the practice of inoculating people
    against smallpox.

8
Edwards Beliefs (1)
  • Broadly educated, having read extensively in the
    philosophy of Descartes, Locke and others
  • Edwards absorbed much from rationalist science,
    in particular the idea of Man as a natural
    organism conditioned by its environment.
  • Edwards also realized that Locke's ideas of a
    human psyche based on physical sensation, in a
    cosmos ruled by mechanistic laws, had rendered
    obsolete much of conventional theology--especially
    its ideas of a separate spiritual realm,
    Mather's "invisible world."

9
Edwards Beliefs (2)
  • Edwards himself was to be the instrument of New
    England's reformation in the 1730s and '40s.
  • He insisted there would be times of conflict,
    remissions and lulls between the sovereign
    outpourings of the Spirit.

10
Edwards Writings
  • The challenge Edwards faced was to sustain basic
    tenets of Puritan belief--original sin,
    predestination, and providence--against this
    increasingly secular climate.
  • His writing in Images and Shadows of Divine
    Things illustrates the attempt to blend a
    rationalist observation of nature with his
    Puritanism.
  • His "Personal Narrative"--a spiritual
    autobiography in the tradition of
    Bradstreet's--reveals a man struggling with the
    rationalist challenge to religious belief.

11
Edwards and the "Great Awakening
  • Edwards is best remembered for his contributions
    to the "Great Awakening" of the 1740's, when much
    of New England was swept by a revivalist fervor.
    Edwards's sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an
    Angry God," is a classic instance of the
    hell-fire and brimstone preaching which
    apparently typified the Great Awakening. It
    stands, moreover, as a final, classic statement
    of Puritan belief in a colonial society becoming
    increasingly rationalistic, economically and
    politically independent, and conscious of itself
    as American--the society, in short, of Franklin,
    Jefferson, Paine and Crevecoeur.

12
Questions for Discussion
  • Edwards' 1741 sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an
    Angry God," seems to be based upon a scriptural
    text from Deuteronomy ("Their foot shall slide in
    due time"). In fact, however, Edwards' text
    really proceeds through an act of paraphrase or
    interpretation, as he restates the scripture for
    his own use. What is his restatement of it, and
    how does he then use that restatement?
  • According to Edwards, what are the main features
    of God's punishment against sinners?

13
Salem Witchcraft Trials (1)
  • Although the accusations of witchcraft at Salem
    described by Cotton Mather in The Wonders of the
    Invisible World have become the most notorious
    example of the hysteria about witches.
  • According Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum's
    account, the outbreak at Salem began in the
    winter of 1691 when the girls of the village,
    aided by Tituba and John Indian, a West Indian
    slave couple, attempted to tell their futures by
    using a makeshift crystal ball.
  • On February 29, 1692, warrants were issued for
    three women Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and
    Tituba, the former two proclaiming their
    innocence while the latter confessed.

14
Salem Witchcraft Trials (2)
  • It has been suggested Boyer and Nissenbaum that
    what happened at Salem was the outgrowth of
    conflicts between the rising mercantile class and
    the people who were tied to the wealth and power
    of the merchants.
  • In addition to sexual and doctrinal threat posed
    by independent women, those with property and no
    male heirs constituted a threat to an economic
    system based on the "orderly transfer of property
    from father to son."

15
Map of Salem Village
16
Cotton Mathers Beliefs
  • Cotton Mather remains one of the most famous
    religious figures from the early New England
    Puritan society.
  • Cotton Mather was a true believer in witchcraft.
    In 1688, he had investigated the strange behavior
    of four children of a Boston mason named John
    Goodwin.
  • His sermons and written works fanned the flames
    of the witchcraft hysteria. He declared that the
    Devil was at work in Salem, and that witches
    should face the harshest punishment. He became a
    major influence during the Salem witch trials,
    during which many people, were hanged.
  • Later on, when confessed witches began denying
    their testimony, Mather may have begun to have
    doubts about at least some of the trials. He
    revised his own position on the use of spectral
    evidence and tried to minimize his own large role
    in its consideration in the Salem trials.

17
References
  • Great Awakening
  • http//home.earthlink.net/gfeldmeth/lec.ga.html
  • http//www.wfu.edu/matthetl/perspectives/four.htm
    l
  • http//www.nhc.rtp.nc.us/tserve/eighteen/ekeyinfo/
    grawaken.htm
  • http//www.u-s-history.com/pages/h620.html
  • http//library.sebts.edu/sprescott/Church20Histor
    y_files/Great20Awakening.htm
  • Models for Reformation Jonathan Edwards, The
    First Great Awakening
  • Salem Witchcraft
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