JONATHAN EDWARDS AND THE PSALMS
A Redemptive-Historical Vision of Scripture
By David P. Barshinger
Oxford University Press. 470 pages. £47.99
ISBN 978 0 199 396 757
Taken together, the title and subtitle are liable to be misleading.
This is not Jonathan Edwards’s demonstration from the Book of Psalms that the message of Scripture unfolds progressively through the sweep of redemptive history. Nor is it, except for a small fraction of the book, Edwards’s doctrine of Scripture as derived from data in the Psalms. Rather, it is a church historian’s attempt to put the record straight on the kind of theologian Edwards was. Author David Barshinger is persuaded that scholars have placed excessive emphasis on Edwards the philosopher, Edwards the systematic theologian and Edwards the revivalist. Setting out to change the ‘distorted portrait of Edwards [that] remains the reigning image in scholarship today’ (p.3), Barshinger highlights the credit that should be given to ‘America’s theologian’ for his proficiency as an exegete. To this end, he turns to Edwards’s handling of the Psalms, since this is the Bible book that Edwards cited more than any other and (Matthew’s Gospel aside) preached on more than any other (108 extant sermons).
Redemptive history
What the author demonstrates and documents extensively – and what he means by ‘redemptive-historical vision of Scripture’ – is that Edwards’s interpretation of the Psalms was Christ-/gospel-centred, being undergirded by a belief in the unity of the two Testaments, and that he mined the Psalter for material relating to the range of systematic-theological categories (as Barshinger arranges them, these are: doctrines of God, Scripture, humanity, sin, Christ, Spirit, gospel, Christian piety, church, eternity). To those of us who are not Edwards scholars, this might seem ‘remarkably unremarkable’.
Doctrinal slant
Yet there is much here to edify, and this volume has greater appeal than its academic orientation and length might suggest. Although Edwards’s exegesis often drifts into allegorisation (Barshinger uses the term ‘typology’ to cover this) and is concerned more with doctrine than with the kind of inductive, bottom-up exposition that will be familiar to many en readers, this giant oozed a love of Scripture and of Christ that emerges from these pages and that we do well to emulate. There are benefits to be reaped here for those who have a particular love of Christian doctrine and the historical curiosity to probe Edwards’s interpretation of the Psalms in the context of his day. Those who are thus motivated but baulk at the price of the book can be encouraged to access Edwards’s sermons on line.
