George Marsden attempted to give an accurate portrayal of the life, times, and effects of Jonathan Edwards in Jonathan Edwards: A Life. He had identified several misappropriations that other scholars had utilized in their portrayal of Edwards. Marsden thought that many of these mischaracterizations stemmed from am importing of outside ideas onto Edwards and his time. To counter these flawed portraits, Marsden tried to give an account of Edwards through the same lens from which Edwards saw the world. Inter-spliced throughout Edward’s personal story are descriptions and explanations of the Edward’s historical backdrop. This serves to further immerse the reader into Edward’s life and worldview. With this aim in mind, Marsden is remarkably effective.

In light of the ease of which one can find an inaccurate view of Edwards, Marsden does a commendable job sorting out the issues. Much care and detail was given in explaining the ins and outs of the religious controversies of New England in the 1700’s. Similar care was given in relating these issues to the larger whole, the movements and currents in public and religious thought of the Western world as it impacted New England. The exposition of the relationship between the Old and New Lights and how they related to Whitefield’s ministry and those that came after him were especially helpful. This helped to further ground Edward’s actions and predispositions in their proper context.

The largest obstacle that this approach encounters is that sometimes the narrative is confusing to the modern reader. This is especially the case if the reader is not a white male protestant. The narrative is written so closely to the point of view of Edwards that the effect is that his sensibilities, such as the equivocating of the Catholic Church with the Antichrist of the book of Revelation. While careful and through examination will exonerate Marsden from this charge, there are times in which the casual reader could be lead to believe that Marsden held these views in line with Edwards.

Another issue that came up in the work was, at times, the apparent undue sympathy that Marsden gave Edwards. His character flaws are minimalized or explained away while those of his adversaries are enlarged or painted in a selfish light. Examples of this are the conflict with the town of Northampton and the conflict over the Stockbridge. The reader is given in depth explanations of how Edwards was operating off the best of intentions and was impaired by personal flaws, such as the inability to communicate or the grafting of his moral perfectionism onto the townspeople of Northampton. The reader is given diary accounts, personal testimony among other sources to strike home this point. No such in depth explanation is offered of the opposing parties’ motivations. Again, the reply to this criticism could be that Marsden was trying to get the reader to see the world from Edward’s perspective, to see how he viewed the matter and how Edward’s attempted to live out his ideals in the swamp of his personal foibles.

These minor criticisms set aside, Jonathan Edwards, A Life accomplishes something much more than a mere biography of Jonathan Edward’s life. It paints an astonishingly detailed portrait the later stages of the Puritan movement. For instance, through descriptions of Edward’s view of millennial history and God’s relation to humanity, gives insights as to how the Puritans viewed the progression of God’s plan in history. It also showed how the Puritan canopy cracked as was Noll posited in America’s God. It illuminates what Noll meant when he gave the advice to “read Edwards” if one wanted to understand pre-Revolutionary War colonial America.