Introduction to Yale edition

 GENERAL EDITOR'S NOTE

WITH PAUL RAMSEY'S edition of A Careful and Strict Enquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions of... Freedom of Will the Editorial Committee for the Works of Jonathan Edwards presents the first volume of the Yale University Press edition. The project, undertaken with the generous support of the Bollingen Foundation, has been launched with the purpose not only of republishing all of the printed works of Edwards but also of publishing the massive manuscript materials in which much of Edwards' most profound thinking and finest prose have been concealed.

It is appropriate that Freedom of the Will should appear as Volume 1, for although it is not the first in the Edwards chronology, it is the work through which his fame has been most widely spread abroad, even to the multitudes who have known the book only by hearsay.

At the outset we hope it will be understood that while we approach this towering edifice with veneration, we do not expect to find among all students a unanimity of interpretation, or uncritical endorsement of Edwards' views. He is too majestic a figure to yield to every observer a single, simple meaning, and was too rigorous a critic himself to demand servile adherence. Hence it is the policy of the Committee to put each volume into the hands of a different editor, for him to expound and evaluate in his own terms. If out of these several treatments various and sometimes contradictory interpretations emerge, we shall greet that result as a documented attestation to the range and complexity of Edwards' mind.

We therefore seek uniformity only in editorial integrity: our aim is meticulous faithfulness to the words of the original text, whether printed or manuscript, within the limits of a format acceptable to modern eyes. Only a few general editing conventions have been established. Apart from these, each editor will cope with special problems as seems best to him according to the demands of his own text.

The very existence of the project is itself testimony to the deepening appreciation in the mid-twentieth century of the importance of Edwards to the intellectual as well as the religious history of America. 

A generation or so ago, outside a restricted circle of professional theologians, he was popularly known only as one who had preached a distasteful and happily outmoded brand of hell-fire and brimstone. There was, in fact, a general disposition to pass him over as an anachronism, as retrograde. 

Recent events in world history have no doubt stimulated drastic re-examination of such complacent assumptions. 

Whether because of that prodding or because of the logic of intellectual development, we find today a new urgency to confront and reinterpret the historic philosophical and theological cruxes with which Edwards grappled so courageously.

This is not to imply that today the precise doctrines that Edwards maintained, in the language in which he cast them, have been or should be extensively revived; indeed it is quite beside the purpose of this edition to promulgate them. But as Professor Ramsey's account of the provenience of the Inquiry and of the immense issues involved in it helps us to comprehend, Edwards—the greatest philosopher-theologian yet to grace the American scene—deserves to be heard. He has waited long for the monument we propose to erect to him, the only one he would have been at all interested in: a clear and fair exhibition of his thought.

Perry Miller

http://edwards.yale.edu/archive?path=aHR0cDovL2Vkd2FyZHMueWFsZS5lZHUvY2dpLWJpbi9uZXdwaGlsby9nZXRvYmplY3QucGw/Yy4wOjEud2plby40NTAyLjQ1MDcuNDUxMQ==