Encounters with God An Approach to the Theology of Jonathan Edwards [Hardcover]

This book offers a broad-based study of Jonathan Edwards as a religious thinker. Much attention has been given to Edwards in relation to his Puritan and Calvinist forebears. McClymond, however, examines Edwards in relation to his eighteenth-century intellectual context. In each of six chapters, he contextualizes and interprets some text or issue in Edwards within the emergent post-Lockean, post-Newtonian culture of the English-speaking world of the 1700s. Among the topics considered are spiritual perception, metaphysics, contemplation, ethics and morality, and apologetics.

Winner of the Brewer Prize of the American Society of Church History, this fresh approach to the theology of Jonathan Edwards avoids the narrow specialization of recent studies, yielding a sense of the whole rather than a glimpse of fragments....Recommended for a wide readership, from undergraduates to research specialists. --Choice

Clearly and cleverly written....Recommended for courses in American religious thought. --Religious Studies Review

Straightforward and accessible... The excellent tandem of McClymond and McDermott has produced a standard and indispensible reading... I finish writing this review with the sweet and happy music still ringing in my ears. --Evangelical Studies Bulletin

...an interesting and stimulating treatment of Edwards and the uniqueness of his theocentric vision. --Theological Studies