JONATHAN EDWARDS AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT
Knowing the Presence of God
By Josh Moody
University Press of America, 2005
vii + 203 pages. £20.00/$29.95
ISBN 0 761830 55 3
In four short chapters Dr. Josh Moody, pastor of Trinity Baptist Church in New Haven (USA), offers an interesting and informed introduction to four important themes in the thought of Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758): True Salvation; True Experience; True Reality; and, True Light. Dr. Moody’s gift for communication, a lamentably rare commodity in the academy, makes this volume an enjoyable read.
The book is slightly oddly arranged with only 96 pages of text and 750 endnotes. The advantage of this arrangement is that the uninitiated reader need not follow the myriad debates in the secondary literature but can enjoy instead a relatively unbroken exposition of what Edwards taught. The strength of the book is the author’s ability to use both the published works of Edwards and the many unpublished manuscripts available at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Readers of this volume may ponder the fact that much of this material was last conveyed to Edwards’s own congregation in the first half of the 18th century.
