Today was the first day of the week-long class, “Jonathan Edwards and his World,” led by the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University’s Ken Minkema and Adriaan Neele. The class has nine participants, the perfect size for this sort of thing, and is quite diverse in age and vocation, though all are men.

Today was mainly about orientating, both to the class and our immediate surroundings as well as to Jonathan Edwards himself and the world he lived in. After registration and introductions, which included fascinating brief explanations on the participants’ familiarity or not with Edwards, we were invited to the offices of the JEC at Yale to hear more about what they are doing, especially with the online project. It’s been mentioned before, but the JEC has graciously put up, for free, electronic versions of all twenty-six printed volumes in the Yale Works of Jonathan Edwards series, as well as nearly fifty additional “volumes” that contain mostly unfinished works and unpublished sermons. The amount of Edwards primary source material at that website is simply astounding. What a blessing to those who are interested in Edwards, whether cursorily or vocationally.

One of the coolest things we heard about in our tour of the JEC is a program that they are working on called First Source. First Source will eventually develop into an online repository of entire corpora of noted theologians including John Calvin, Philip Melanchthon, George Whitefield, John Wesley, etc. These collections will function much like the Edwards collection currently does, except, and here’s the really cool part, they will all be cross-searchable. So one would be able to construct a search query that only searches the Edwards texts, or that includes the Edwards and Whitefield text, or any other combination. So, for example, if someone was interested in how this disparate array of men used a particular biblical text, they would simply search the biblical reference and include whomever’s work they pleased in the search. This could have a profound impact on the way we study the exegetical methods, historical methods, etc. as they developed and passed through the centuries. Very exciting!

After the tour the class officially began and we heard about the world that Edwards was born into, largely influenced by the English Puritan milieu, but also greatly impacted by theology and philosophy from the broader European context, particularly Continental Reformed theology and the early inklings of Enlightenment philosophy. From there launched brief discussions of several of JE’s writings, including “On Being,” “The Mind,” and the famous “Spider Letter” which he wrote as a young man. Tomorrow the class discusses Edwards the theologian with readings from several of the more major works. Lots of reading for this class, but it’s all good!

Stay tuned for more from New Haven and you can also follow updates through aDaSL’s twitter. Til then…

Filed under:
JEahW June 2009, jec at yale, wje online