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The Supreme Harmony of All The Supreme Harmony of All: The Trinitarian Theology of Jonathan Edwards by Amy Plantinga Pauw Eerdmans, 2002 196 pp.; $22, paper Jonathan Edwards: A Life Jonathan Edwards: A Life by George M. Marsden Yale Univ. Press, 2003 615 pp.; $35

Perhaps the most permanent monument to Edwards' tercentennial year is the stack of publications—piled like bibliographical stones of remembrance—released in honor of the occasion. They are too many to note even in passing, roughly a dozen books and scores of essays in sundry periodicals. Scholarly quarterlies and more popular magazines have feted Edwards.3 Christian publishers like Baker and Presbyterian & Reformed have issued paperbacks for lay readers.4 And academic presses, as well, have published major scholarly tomes.5 Many thousands of pages on Edwards appeared in 2003 alone.

One book that stands out from the crowd is Jonathan Edwards and the Bible, Robert Brown's study of Edwards' engagement with biblical higher criticism. Ignored for decades by secular scholars, Edwards' vast biblical writings are finally receiving due attention. And scholars like Brown (and Stephen J. Stein of Indiana University) are leading the way.

Brown's book reveals that higher criticism emerged in North America long before the second half of the 19th century (where scholars usually place it). In fact, he contends that "the problem of the relationship of critical thought to the Bible is almost as old as the American experience itself." Brown demonstrates that Edwards tackled this problem head-on. Indeed, Brown argues, "the problem of biblical criticism is a ubiquitous feature of Edwards's work, an aspect absent of which the nature and genesis of his entire theological career cannot be adequately understood, or can hardly be made intelligible at all." He uses Edwards to devalue misnomers like "pre-" and "post-critical" that have pervaded the modern study of the history of biblical scholarship. And he transcends the false dichotomy in stock questions about whether Edwards was a "medieval" or "modern" thinker.

In Brown's account, Edwards was a "modestly critical" theological conservative whose thorough engagement with biblical criticism opened the door to more radical views. As an apologist for historic Protestant claims about the Bible, its formation and authority, Edwards answered more skeptical critics along evidentiary lines. He defended the historicity of biblical narratives, supported traditional views of the provenance of disputed biblical books and, according to Brown, responded diligently to the "infallibilist critique" (the argument that historical/traditionary forms of religious knowledge are incapable of yielding infallible certainty). Such argumentation involved him inevitably in a "program of modernization … that carried within it inherent tensions and a momentum toward increasingly naturalistic and untraditional interpretations of the sacred texts." Despite his conservatism, then, Edwards' work, according to Brown, "is the product of, and not an exception to, the forces producing the eclipse of biblical narrative in western culture." Specialists will wrangle over the finer points of Brown's interpretation. But most will agree that he has written a masterful treatment of his subject.

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