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There are a number of ways to deal with this "disjunction." One way would be to ignore the "subsequent canonization" and treat Edwards strictly as an 18th-century American figure, in a strictly historical manner. The results of this are likely to be limited. Biographies of Congregational pastors may have local or professional interest, or they may be cast (in the manner of Carlo Ginzberg or Robert Darnton) as cultural microhistory, but such ventures rarely result in canonization, and in Edwards' case, that retrospective reassessment cannot be easily ignored as a factor in why a biography is being written at all. Gura has opted to leap directly at the issue of canonization and "present Edwards as someone whose conceptions of man and the universe continue to challenge and enlighten us because of their universality." If Edwards seems to have made only a very modest impact on his own contemporaries, that is because he was speaking over their heads to ours.
To bring this off, however, Gura has to deal with the uncomfortable reality that "Edwards couched his vision in language that many today would find offensive, or at least unpalatable." Indeed he did, and not just by "many today." As the favorite son of a pastor's family, Edwards grew up never knowing what it was to duck an argument. He chided himself to behave with more "modesty" and to try "not only to silence but to gain readers." But there was an element of the prig in Edwards, a self-confidence in his own intellectual rectitude and virtuosity, which was the seedbed for most of the woes he endured in life. He was, said another Yale president, "of a strong brain and thoughtful," but "Narrow and odd in his sentiments." He painted a bull's-eye on himself early in his pastorate by entering a regional controversy over the appointment of an "Arminian," Robert Breck, to the church in Springfield, Massachusetts. From that point on, he swung away at the critics of the Great Awakening, at his own congregation over the terms of church membership, at the most prominent of Northampton's families over the behavior of their adolescents, at the sponsors of the Stockbridge Indian mission, and finally, in his last published works, at Isaac Watts, Thomas Chubb, Daniel Whitby, John Taylor, and Samuel Clarke
In almost every case, what Edwards was arguing for was the past, and especially the Puritan past of Massachusetts' first generation (restoring the strict membership criteria of the churches of the 1630s was the principal issue that caused his disastrous break with the Northampton church). "He was not a man of the moderate, rational, English Enlightenment of his day," Henry May once remarked, "Indeed, he was the most powerful enemy of that way of thought."2
This means that Gura's Edwards must not only speak over the heads of his own era. His "unpalatable" words must become a code that modern hearers can decipher and discover to be a relevant and friendly message for modern sensibilities. This is what goes into a great deal of modern scholarship on Edwards, whose authors hope devoutly that their recalcitrant subject can be made to yield neo-orthodoxy, postmodernism, semiotics, and other modern intellectual dividends. In Gura's case, the dividend he believes the modern reading of Edwards will yield is "a generous acknowledgment of our common humanity," a vision of "all souls as irreducibly equal" and capable of transformation "into benevolent beings." This means reading Edwards' relentless insistence on human depravity in The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin (1758) as a device for demonstrating "an equality that made no one any better than another, man or women, master or slave, European or Native American." It also means that the "new simple idea" of grace which Edwards borrowed from John Locke to explain the core of the conversion experience becomes a model of generic "personal transformation," which can occur "as one reads a book, is in the midst of a battle, volunteers in the Peace Corps, or climbs Mount Ranier."
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