Excerpt from analysis at the Yale center.
The Stockbridge Mission
During this period of transition, the call to Stockbridge and the Indian mission became the most likely (or likable) of Edwards' options. He preached at Stockbridge in
mission was doubtless problematic, perhaps to himself as much as to others. He had talked at length with David Brainerd about the challenges of Indian missions, and he knew that he was not even able to speak the Indians' language. On the other hand, perhaps his heroic image of Brainerd was a source of inspiration to Edwards, or perhaps he felt that Indians would pose no more difficulties for him than Englishmen had. Edwards had never been celebrated for his pastoral touch. Whatever the balance of positive and negative considerations he entertained, Edwards made a lonely winter journey to Stockbridge in
During his first days in Stockbridge, Edwards thus responded to the task of preaching to the Indians with characteristic seriousness and vigor. He returned to his homiletical roots, at least technically, for he made octavo booklets such as he had made when he first preached as a youth of eighteen, except that he now wrote consecutively on each separate bi-fold of paper and left the bookets unstitched. Apparently he did not care whether the Indians saw him reading from a paper: that would be the least of his problems during simultaneous translation. Otherwise, he wrote out these first Indian sermons fully and in single columns. He also sensed, or was told, that Indians would not have much need for the conventional sermon format of numbered heads divided into Text, Doctrine, and Application, all of which was predicated upon the auditory's taking written notes. However, for his own aid if nothing else, he made divisions in the manuscript with double horizontal lines corresponding to the three main divisions of Text, Doctrine, and Application.
In his first sermon to the Indians, The Things That Belong to True Religion (1751), Edwards begins the first division, the Text, in his usual fashion with a biblical text citation. In this case, the text tells of Peter's conversion of Cornelius, the first non-Jewish convert to Christianity, and thus in Edwards' vocabulary a "heathen"—just like the Indians. In contrast
to his virtually universal past practice, however, Edwards does not analyze the text for theological implications but rehearses it as a story, a biblical narrative, telling of the conversion of one whom Edwards identifies as a "warrior." He clearly assumed that a good story (or a powerful picture) would be more memorable and persuasive to the Indians than any traditional exegesis, and he was to continue this practice in his Indian sermons. He next gives a brief history of the spread of Christianity through the world to England, and then announces, "Now I am come to preach the true religion to you…. [M]ind what I say." Edwards' immediate concern is to differentiate "true religion" from French religion; but he soon introduces specifically Edwardsean terminology: "excellency," "sweetness," "heart," and references to the loveliness of Christ. The practical emphasis in the conclusion of the sermon is upon the Indians' learning to read so that they can read the Scripture and then instruct their children.
As if wholly focused on the Indian mission, Edwards rapidly composed other sermons in the next week or two in the same format. Heaven's Dragnet (1751) is, like many of his Indian sermons, based upon earlier Northampton sermons, in this case an eight-sermon series preached in 1746 on the parable of the net (Matthew 13:47–50 [nos. 820–22, 825–27, 829–30]). The brief Indian sermon is based upon a slightly different reading of the parable and makes more use of the central image of the net. Equating the Christian church with a net, Edwards observes that a net inevitably takes up bad as well as good, and that even the English have more bad people than good in the earthly church. But Edwards assures the Indians that God will soon sort out the "fish," trampling underfoot the bad and saving the good; thus, they must get new hearts if they want to be among the saved. Although the sermon is brief and the message compressed, Edwards manages to work in the subtle but important point that a new heart is revealed only in good works.
Still within the month of January, Edwards began to retrench a little on the development of his material, as is evident in Death and Judgment (1751), an awakening sermon to the Mohawk contingent.8 Although keeping the octavo booklet—as he would for his entire Indian ministry—Edwards shifted the text into double columns. Despite this further compression,
Edwards' argument does not shrink from the complications
of Calvinist soteriology. Edwards points out that since God clearly does not punish sinful men in this life, there must be another life in which he does punish them or he would not be a just God. In that new life, those who have heard the gospel preached will be held to their awareness, and thus they must repent and come to Christ or be condemned, even by their own hearts. But Edwards also devotes much of the sermon to the joys of heaven and the absence there of sickness, pain, sorrow, and the contentions of this world.
People there will never die, never age, and never need food or sleep. Edwards goes on to assure the Mohawks that despite their inherent sins as human beings, and their peculiar sins as Indians, they are in a very hopeful situation at the mission. In such awakening sermons for the Indians, Edwards deftly balances the fear of punishment and the hope of reward.
In addition to his sermons evangelizing the Indians, Edwards was also apparently asked to officiate at communion services during his trial residency, both for Indians and for the small English congregation. The sacrament sermon he preached for the Indians, Christ Is to the Heart Like a River to a Tree Planted by It (1751), recycles earlier Northampton sermon material using vivid imagery that should have appealed to the Indians and certainly appealed to Edwards: the tree and river were two of his favorite "shadows of divine things" from his childhood by the Connecticut River. The sacrament sermon for the English congregation—written on octavo paper in a single column like the first Indian sermons—provides an interesting contrast in argument. Sacramental Union in Christ (1751) shows that Edwards had no intention of easing away from his Northampton preoccupations concerning the sacrament, at least when preaching to an English congregation. Edwards may even have felt that a frontier church might be more receptive to the idea of the purity of the true church. The text (1 Corinthians 10:17) is particularly suggestive in that it calls attention to the issue of regulating church ritual in a pagan context. Edwards argues that a union of hearts is an essential foundation for a Christian society, since all who are truly united to Christ love one another. The sacrament is a seal of this union, and thus all who are not truly converted should stay away from the sacrament lest they perjure themselves. Edwards' sacrament sermon to the Indians is a welcoming of all who might be inclined to participate, whereas that preached almost simultaneously to the English reiterates Edwards' Northampton position of strict admission.9
The
popular pastor among the English farmers of the Stockbridge church during his seven-year tenure, his early days at the mission were blighted by continual struggles with Col. Ephraim Williams, Mrs. Abigail Williams Sergeant Dwight and her second husband, Brig. Joseph Dwight, and their family supporters and hangers-on. That most were either relatives or old friends of Edwards from Northampton made the struggle over management of the mission funds even more bitter. In the end, Edwards would win over the Commissioners and the chief funder of the mission to his side, but only after the Indians had become disenchanted with the mission and most had left Stockbridge altogether.3
What this means in connection with the literature of Edwards' Indian mission is that much of the story is best represented by documents other than sermons. The survival of his mission hinged much more crucially on Edwards' epistolary skills than on his homiletical skills, and his efforts to save Indian souls are more amply documented by his multifaceted epistolary campaign on behalf of his mission than in the file of sermons to the Indians.4 Between Edwards' de facto arrival in the fall of 1751 and
the departure of most of his mission subjects in the spring of 1754, his mission struggled on seriously for just two and a half years. The sermons Edwards preached through his interpreters (John Wauwaumpequun-naunt for the Mahicans and Rebecca Ashley for the Mohawks) become increasingly outlinish as time passes, though he continued to minister to the remaining Indians until his departure for the College of New Jersey in 1758.5
An Indian sermon representing the meridian of Edwards' missionary effort is God Is Infinitely Strong, preached in
A later phase of Edwards' Indian preaching is represented by Warring with the Devil (1754). In keeping with the times, the sermon has a military motif, depicting the sinner defending himself from the devil as one would defend his home from an enemy. The sinner is of course helpless to defend against an adversary who uses the sinner's own lusts as weapons, at least until he turns to Christ for help. But it is in the Application that Edwards engages in some hand-to-hand combat of his own as a preacher and pastor, for there his analysis of Indian failings not only
condemns the Indian vices of drink and worldliness but indicts the very civilization of the Indians: their hunter/gatherer, migratory culture and their traditional gender roles. Although he does not say so explicitly, his position is the same as that of Cotton Mather in his life of John Eliot, apostle to the Indians, in the Magnalia Christi Americana, where Mather insists that the Indians must be civilized before they can be Christianized.6
Whether analyzing the nature of religious experience, the flight of spiders, or long-term trends in New England theology, Edwards demonstrated penetration and intellectual clarity. Although he often did not like what he saw, he did not blink at it but engaged the issue directly and fully. His commitment to the frontier of evangelism was genuine; he even sent his son into Indian country to learn the language, and he did not give up the Stockbridge mission until drafted by Nassau Hall. However, as he points out in Warring with the Devil, sermons have little effect when the hearts of the auditory are not receptive. He never gave in to such doubts during his last days in Northampton, but the sermon manuscripts composed for the Indians at Stockbridge reveal Edwards to have become generally more perfunctory as the years passed, Edwards certainly continued to compose sermons for the Indians, but whether he found that they could not absorb all he at first gave them, or whether in his personal economy of energy he found other things more worthy of effort, the Indian outlines became ever more brief, two-leaf sermons becoming common after 1754, until an entire late sermon is contained on one leaf.
The Stockbridge pastorate is known as the period of some of Edwards' greatest philosophical and polemic writing. In 1752 he published Misrepresentations Corrected and Truth Vindicated, his final word in the Northampton qualifications controversy, and began drafting his Careful and Strict Enquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions of That Freedom of Will, Which Is Supposed to Be Essential to Moral Agency, Virtue and Vice, Reward and Punishment, Praise and Blame. His anti-Arminian treatise was of course the culmination of much past thought and writing, and he also turned to past writing when his new son-in-law, President Aaron Burr of the College of New Jersey, apparently arranged for his invitation to address the Presbyterian Synod of New York on
True Grace, Distinguished from the Experience of Devils (1753) is one of Edwards'
more thorough analyses of the concept of grace, certainly in sermon form. It is a summary of the standards that he fought to defend in his critiques of religious experience during the Great Awakening and, later, during the controversy over qualifications for communion. His delivery of the sermon before the New York Synod can be seen as an effort to clarify his position on faith and grace before an influential audience, especially one that might not yet have taken sides on his New England controversies.
Back in Stockbridge, Edwards continued preaching, not only to the Indians but to the English church, occasionally composing sermons when events required a direct acknowledgment. Although not labeled as a fast sermon or otherwise identified with specific hardships, God's Use of Affliction appears to address some specific communal distress. As a sermon, it makes an interesting contrast with God Is Infinitely Strong, since both sermons derive from the book of Job. The sermons differ, however, not only in that the Indian sermon is composed in an octavo booklet and the English sermon in a duodecimo, but because there is a substantive contrast in Edwards' treatment of his scriptural material, emphasizing biblical narrative in the Indian sermon and analysis of doctrinal implications in the English. The doctrinal implications in this case are that, when God afflicts a people, the only recourse for them is to attempt to appreciate the afflictions: all hinges on the people's ability to make a proper improvement of their affliction. In three propositions, Edwards outlines a spectrum of probable reasons for a just and righteous God to afflict a people: to rebuke, to humble, and to warn. The result of such afflictions is to change hearts and behavior, and then the benefits will appear to outweigh the affliction. However, Edwards insists that appreciation of the affliction is necessary for any good to come of it; otherwise, the result may be damning despair.
http://edwards.yale.edu/archive?path=aHR0cDovL2Vkd2FyZHMueWFsZS5lZHUvY2dpLWJpbi9uZXdwaGlsby9nZXRvYmplY3QucGw/Yy4yNDozLndqZW8uODk2NDguODk2NTMuODk2NTg=
