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Evangelical Enlightenment
Sarah Rivett, Assistant Professor of English, Washington University
April 17, 2008

Jonathan Edwards’s use of Enlightenment philosophy is well-known.  His History of the Work of Redemption (1739) seeks to address the lament that concludes Newton’s Principia.  A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746) codifies a theological response to the limits that John Locke imposed on human understandings of the infinite.  Freedom of the Will (1754) makes a language of transcendence integral to moral philosophy.   Critics persistently characterize Edwards through his engagement with the formally distinct registers of an emergent philosophical modernity and a retroactive Puritan theology.  This paper, however, argues for an intrinsic epistemological relationship, not simply between theology and philosophy, but rather between Edwards’s far-reaching transformations of religious practice and his contributions to Enlightenment thought.  What invisible knowledge did Edwards perceive in four-year-old Phoebe Bartlett’s closet devotions?  How did Edwards integrate his wife Sarah’s exclamatory conversion into his response to Locke?  How did Edwards discover, through David Brainerd’s observations, “true religion” as displayed on the souls of Native American converts?  Reading such scenes of revivalist performance, I show that Edwards not only integrated European philosophy within American theology but also looked to lay converts to supply answers to one of the most vexing philosophical dilemmas of the Enlightenment.  As defined by Calvin, Bacon, and Newton alike, this dilemma consisted of a desire for forbidden knowledge of God.  In his attempted resolution, Edwards inaugurates what I am calling an evangelical Enlightenment, a concept that I use to suggest epistemological continuity across these seemingly disparate domains of eighteenth-century culture.