Abstract
Michael McClenahan,
Jonathan Edwards and Justification by Faith
, Ashgate: Farnham, 2012; 240 pp.: 9781409441786, £55.00/$99.95 (hbk), 9781409483694, £55.00/$99.95 (ebook)
Michael McClenahan has brought forth an excellent, scholarly, accurate, creative and compelling account of Jonathan Edwards’s essential orthodoxy with relation to the doctrine of justification by faith. McClenahan establishes that the older view that Edwards was reacting against an incipient Arminianism present in New England covenant theology and preparationism is inaccurate. Because of this mistaken trajectory some scholars have painted Edwards as crypto-Roman Catholic in his view of justification, a sincere ‘anachronism’. Instead, Edwards is to be viewed as arguing against the Arminianism of the emerging Church of England mission to New England through the Society of the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), a mission that was at the time time heavily influenced by the Arminian and Latitudinarian theology of Tillotson. As Cotton Mather put it at the time the SPG ‘serve the Empire of Satan under the Banner of our Saviour’ (p. 42). In the background to this is a sophisticated and helpful understanding of the influences and development of Anglican theology at the time, stemming from the influences of Cambridge Platonism, and the long debate between Sherlock and John Owen. Against the form of Tillotson-influenced Arminian Anglicanism, Edwards ‘emerged to do battle with the Anglican foe’ (p. 50). McClenahan traces the influence of this opponent through Edwards’s Justification by Faith treatise. When the contemporaneous context is correctly understood, one can readily see that Edwards ‘fulfilled his promise to defend the “old Protestant doctrine” against novel Arminian interpretations’ (p. 157). This book will be enjoyed by anyone who has an interest in Edwards’s theology, in the doctrine of justification, in reformed theology specifically, and in academic historical scholarship generally.