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On the Massachusetts frontier in April 1753, a famous preacher, known for his belief in an angry and highly selective God, sat in his Stockbridge study, writing a letter. In it, he described his neighbors, a group of unconverted Indians, as excelling "in religion and virtue."

Surprising? This doesn't fit the stereotype of the preacher, Jonathan Edwards. But during this period, Edwards was assembling a "Catalogue" of hundreds of notebook pages filled with evidence that pagans had received knowledge about God the Redeemer both from the Jews and from traditions going back to Noah's sons.

Whence this open-mindedness toward those who had not heard the name of Christ? The explanation starts with the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century explorers of the East and the New World, who had discovered not just spices and trade routes but also "heathen" who exhibited better morals than most European Christ-ians.

Seventeenth-century geographers estimated that only one-sixth of the planet had heard the gospel, so, according to hyper-Calvinists of the day, at least five-sixths of the world's population was doomed to hell.

Beginning with Lord Herbert of Cherbury, the deists, those self-appointed guardians of a reasonable religion, suggested that the Calvinist god responsible for this scenario was a monster. These deists succeeded at popularizing the disjunction between the heathen who were damned but morally good and the Christians who were saved but morally bad.

Edwards, disturbed by deist use of non-Christian religions to attack God's goodness and justice, worked hard to learn about these religions. He sought out and read travelogues, dictionaries, and encyclopedias of religion available in his time. The books cited in his "Catalogue" include George Sale's translation of the Qur'an, reports of the Jesuits in China, an analysis of the Qabbalah, comparative mythology, and a wide range of reference works—from skeptic Peter Bayle's Historical and Critical Dictionary to Daniel Defoe's Dictionary of All Religions Ancient and Modern.

Edwards developed three strategies to defend Reformed orthodoxy against deist charges.

First, he used the idea of a prisca theologia (ancient theology) to try to prove that vestiges of true religion were taught by the Greeks and other non-Christian traditions. Therefore, he concluded, five-sixths of the world had not been deprived of the basic truths of the gospel.

Second, he developed an elaborate typological system to show that God is constantly communicating Reformed truths wherever the eye can see and the ear can hear—in nature, history, and even the history of religions.

Finally, Edwards taught that an inner "disposition" is better evidence of regeneration than precision in belief. He described the necessary disposition as "a sense of the dangerousness of sin, and of the dreadfulness of God's anger … [such a conviction of] their wickedness, that they trusted to nothing but the mere mercy of God, and then bitterly lamented and mourned for their sins."

Therefore, some people can be regenerated before explicit conversion to Christ: elect infants, Old Testament saints, and New Testament saints (such as Cornelius before he heard the gospel from Peter, Nathaniel, "probably" John's two disciples, and several others who were "good men before [they met Christ]"). In all these cases, "conversion may still be by divine constitution necessary to salvation in some respect even after [a person] is really a saint."

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