Beeson Podcast, Episode #526 Doug Sweeney Dec. 8, 2020 >>Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University. Now your hosts, Doug Sweeney and Kristen Padilla. >>Kristen Padilla: Welcome to this special episode of the Beeson Podcast in which my co-host, Doug Sweeney, is not hosting today but rather serving as today’s guest. This episode is also special because we have invited a guest to co-host with me in Doug’s place. His name is Samuel [Hagos 00:00:48]. Samuel is an MDiv student from Dallas, Texas. He works for both me and Dr. Sweeney, assisting me with marketing and communications and assisting Dr. Sweeney with his new book, “The Oxford Handbook of Jonathan Edwards,” which is the subject of our conversation today. Before we jump into our conversation, Samuel, why don’t you give our listeners a fuller introduction of yourself and your role in this Jonathan Edwards project. >>Samuel: Yeah, thank you for having me on. My name is Samuel. I am a second year MDiv student here at Beeson, originally from Dallas, as Kristen has mentioned. I have the distinct privilege of being a research assistant for Dr. Sweeney and so I actually helped do the index for this project along with Colby Brandt. So, he and I tag teamed this index project and was able to work alongside Dr. Sweeney reading through the book and compiling terms. I’m eager to hear more about the project from Dr. Sweeney and thank you, Dean Sweeney and Kristen for the kind invitation to co-host this episode with you all. >>Kristen Padilla: Samuel, I’m so glad that you agreed to helping me today with this interview. Dr. Sweeney, we are glad to have you as our guest. Listeners, you may or may not know that Dr. Sweeney is one of the leading Jonathan Edwards scholars in the world. He has co-edited with Jan Stievermann “The Oxford Handbook of Jonathan Edwards,” which will be available this February. So, Doug, you’ve invested almost all your academic career in Jonathan Edwards’ studies. We’re interested in knowing how did you get interested in Jonathan Edwards? What drew you to him? >>Doug Sweeney: Thanks, Kristen, great to be with you and Samuel on the other side of the table today. Of course I’ve written a ton about lots of other things as well. So, I don’t care only about Jonathan Edwards, but I have spent a lot of time working on Edwards, written several books about him. Honestly I kind of fell into my work on Edwards. In the middle of college I switched from being an economics major to a history major, largely because I was taking a class from a man who became my mentor. A man named Mark Noll. In the history of Christianity that God used in an unprecedented way to deepen my faith and enhance my walk with him. I wanted to keep studying those things. Mark Noll was somebody who loved Jonathan Edwards. I didn’t take a class from him on Edwards, but I just picked up his passion for Edwards in other classes I took with him and through my seminary years I had other professors who liked him. I went to grad school at Vanderbilt. Did a PhD there. That was the first place where I took a seminar on Edwards. And thought about writing a dissertation on Edwards. But my advisor there told me not to do that “because everybody talked about Jonathan Edwards and if you write a dissertation on Edwards, Doug, yours will get lost in the crowd.” He said, “Why don’t you write on something that comes a little bit later in church history and maybe has a connection to Edwards, but doesn’t get you right on Edwards himself. So, I did. That became my first book on a man named Nathaniel William Taylor. He was the founding theology professor at Yale Divinity School in 1822 and a Congregational minister as well. He fancied himself a 19th century Edwardsian but he was very controversial in the way he appropriated and used Edwards in his day. But to get to a direct answer to your question, by the time I was done writing that dissertation and looking for jobs, one of the job offers was from Yale University to work on the Edwards project. I’d done a bunch of manuscript work there already. Some of which was on Edwards in support of my doctoral dissertation. But by the time I went and took that job I was spending every single day of my life working on Jonathan Edwards. I was transcribing Edwards’ manuscripts. We were publishing the modern critical edition of the works of Jonathan Edwards. I was writing articles on Edwards. We were hosting visiting scholars, convening conferences, and after two years of spending pretty much every day of your life working on someone I guess you become something of an expert in him. >>Samuel: That’s great, Dean Sweeney. You spent so much time with Jonathan Edwards. Could you go on to talk to us about who is Jonathan Edwards? What makes him such an important person for the Church? In other words, why should people care about Jonathan Edwards and read him? >>Doug Sweeney: Well, there’s lots of reasons why. He was a theological founding father. I would argue the most significant theological founding father of the modern evangelical movement. Lots of people say he’s one of the greatest minds and the greatest theologian America has ever produced. That’s of course controversial. And I would say these days when I was young and teaching I used to say things like, “Edwards is probably the most influential theologian in American history.” I think now probably Martin Luther King Jr. is the most influential theologian in American history. But Edwards may be ranked second. He’s right up there in terms of big influencers on lots of people. He was a pioneer of the modern missions movement. Significant for persuading lots of Calvinists in the English speaking world to get excited about cross cultural evangelism. He’s more helpful than anybody else in the history of the Church in my opinion in helping us distinguish the genuine work of the Holy Spirit in our lives, our churches, our communities. He wrote several books at the height of the Great Awakening on that topic that I find especially helpful. And maybe if I could say one more thing about his importance it would be that Edwards maintained very powerfully what I call, in the classroom, an eschatological perspective on daily life. He was somebody who believed, deep down in his bones, that the things of God were the most real, the most true, the most beautiful, the most blessed things that one could ever experience. His way of talking about that with the kind of passion that he brought to that conversation is just contagious and exciting. I think honestly that’s probably the main reason why most people get attracted to him. >>Kristen Padilla: As I’ve already said, you’re one of the main editors of this forthcoming Oxford Handbook on Jonathan Edwards, which I would imagine is no small feat. What is the purpose of this project? And what makes it unique? Perhaps you could say a word about just these Oxford Handbooks and the purpose of them. >>Doug Sweeney: Yeah, for a long time now Oxford University Press has published this Oxford Handbook series on all kinds of subjects. The goal of the volumes in the series is to provide a state of the art summary of the scholarly study of the subjects of these volumes. So, the task of editing the Oxford Handbook of Jonathan Edwards was putting together a massive volume of essays. There are 37 chapters in this. Written by the leaders in the field of Edwards’ studies who do two main things in each of the chapters. First thing, they give interested readers a summary of the state of the conversation on the subtopic they’re responsible for in Edwards studies. And then they offer a contribution of their own to the study of that subject. And/or some suggestions about what we need to do as we continue working on that subject. It’s been almost 20 years since a volume like that was done. Edwards was born in 1703. So, in the year 2003 and leading up to the year 2003 there were a bunch of different books and articles and a couple of compendia published about Edwards. And not since that time has anybody really tried to bring us up to speed on where we are in the study of Edwards today. So, that’s the main goal of the volume. This is also the biggest collection of essays, just in terms of length, that’s ever been put together on Edwards. Maybe we can talk more about this later in the interview, but probably the distinguishing feature of it, beyond just the state of the art kind of summaries it provides is that it gives people a feel for Edwards’ global reception. That’s been one of the things that people have worked on more in the last couple of decades than ever before in history. Where around the world has Edwards been studied, has Edwards been talked about in churches, and how have different kinds of people in different parts of the world made use of him? >>Samuel: That’s wonderful, Dr. Sweeney. I think one of the most enjoyable parts when I was going through the book, actually, was that final part which you were referencing to about Edwards’ global reception, how he was received. Really on almost every continent he’s lauded as America’s greatest theologian. Sometimes you forget that he also has a very global reach and reception. I want to tailor a question that could be a potential controversial question in the study of Jonathan Edwards. Some have a hard time reconciling Edwards as America’s greatest theologian, but also someone who supported such a thing like [inaudible 00:10:34] slavery. Could you maybe speak to that conflict and the contradiction people see in that? >>Doug Sweeney: Yeah. Samuel, I get that all the time when I teach Edwards or speak about Edwards. And there’s a number of things I guess I’d want to say about it. I’ll keep this short so we can talk about other things, too. But the first thing I want to say about it is just very clearly Edwards did own slaves. And that was a horrible thing. We shouldn’t try to defend it. I’m going to get around it contextualizing that a little bit. But there’s a big difference between contextualizing something and defending it. I think Edwards is with the Lord now. I think he was a holier man than I am. But this was obviously a major flaw in his life. I’m confident that he’s praying for us to do better on issues of race relations and racial justice than he did in his day. Having said that, Edwards lived in a day when scholars estimate that nearly 80% of the people in the world, when Edwards was alive, were bonded in some way. They were either enslaved, or they worked as serfs, or they were indentured servants. So, slavery was not unusual at all in Edwards’ day. Christians didn’t take for granted then, like we do now, that all forms of slavery were sinful and evil. In fact, there were very few people in Edwards’ world who were making distinctively Christian anti slavery arguments. So, Edwards wasn’t unusual. In fact, in so far as Edwards was unusual it’s because he wound up opposing what he called man stealing. So, he didn’t think it was sinful for himself to own a slave, but he did think it was sinful to take people out of their countries and enslave them and ship them across the world for sale in other places. Edwards’ followers very quickly became some of the most influential Christian clergymen who actually did oppose slavery altogether. So, one of the ironies of the study of Edwards, with respect to slavery, is that even though he didn’t get all the way to a clear opposition of slavery generally, he was unique in his day for trying with the limitations that people dealt with in his own context at making things better with respect to slavery. >>Kristen Padilla: You wrote the final chapter in his handbook on Edwards studies today. And you mentioned that this is a state of the art book on current Edwards studies. I just wonder what is your assessment of the current and future state of Edwards studies? >>Doug Sweeney: They’re thriving. Every year there are dozens and books and articles written on Jonathan Edwards from people from all walks of life, all kinds of academic disciplines, really every part of the world. Probably the thing that is special these days about Edwards studies is that they’re getting more theological than they used to be. What we call the Edwards Renaissance that took place in the middle decades of the 20th century that led to this modern critical edition of the works of Jonathan Edwards by Yale University Press, it was founded by an atheistic Jewish man at Harvard who drank himself to death, basically, in the early 1960s. A man named Perry Miller, who was the most influential American intellectual historian of the 20th century and was fascinated by Edwards and the Puritans but tended to write about and influence others to write about Edwards in a way that made him interesting to secular folks and non Christians as much as to Christians. So, in the early years of the resurgence of Edwards studies in the 20th century people didn’t know a whole lot about Edwards theology. They knew a lot about Edwards as a literary artist, Edwards as a natural philosopher, Edwards as a minister, of course, and a leader of the Great Awakening, but in recent years lots of theologians have weighed in and made good use of Edwards. That’s one of the special things that have been going on recently in Edwards studies. Then, as we’ve touched on already, there really has been a powerful internationalization of the study of Jonathan Edwards. The critical, we call it the letter press edition of the works of Edwards, the volumes, the books in the Yale publication, the works of Jonathan Edwards – those were finished in the year 2008. 26 volumes had been published between 1957 and 2008. And from 2008 to the present the main things going on among Edwards scholars have been the digitization of the works of Edwards. We now have 73 digital volumes of Edwards writings. And then the globalization of the use of all those materials by scholars on every continent of the world. We have Jonathan Edwards centers now, believe it or not, on every continent of the world except Antarctica. We have a Jonathan Edwards center in South Africa. We have a Jonathan Edwards center in Brazil. We have Jonathan Edwards centers in places like Australia and Japan, as well as in more familiar places like England, various parts of Europe, and North America. So, the really exciting thing that’s happening these days is we have people in all these parts of the world who are native speakers and can read the work on Edwards that other people in their own context have been doing a lot better than Westerners can. Then some of them are pretty good with English and they can translate some of these things for the rest of us. Yeah, so that’s where we are today. I see a great lot of promise for the further globalization of Edwards studies moving forward. >>Samuel: Dr. Sweeney, over the years of your research and study of Jonathan Edwards what are the most important things that you have learned from him? >>Doug Sweeney: Wow. I’ve learned a lot of things from him. I would say, if I had to pick one most important thing I’ve learned from him, it’s what he called “the reality and the beauty of diving things.” A few minutes ago I talked about Edwards’ eschatological perspective on daily life. I think that’s been the thing the most compelling for me. I’m not a Calvinist myself. I don’t feel a big need to defend every little thing Jonathan Edwards ever did or said. Although I like a lot of what he did and said. So, the thing that really draws me to him is in this day and age, in modern Western Christianity, I’d argue modern global Christianity as well, when for so many churches platform performance is the thing that is most important and is seen as that’s what is going to draw people to the Lord and to the gospel and to the Christian discipleship and so on. People like me are drawn to Edwards because though not a great platform performer he so clearly preached and wrote from this deep well of knowledge of and love of God and from a deep commitment that God is real, God is present in our world, God is present and working in my life, and people could just feel that when he preached. You get a sense of that even today when you read his sermons or you read his theological treatises. He’s just so convinced of the reality of what he called “diving things” and their beauty and their importance. He’s a very edifying man to spend time with. >>Kristen Padilla: For our listeners who have never read anything by Jonathan Edwards, what would be a good starting place for them? >>Doug Sweeney: I get this question a lot, too. For me the answer always depends on the person I’m talking to. If it’s somebody who really wants to chew on something meaty and theological I think the best place to start is with Edwards’ Treatise on the Religious Affections. That’s just so powerful and helpful spiritually for us. For people who are interested in Edwards but don’t want to dive quite so deep into profound theological waters, I’d suggest honestly reading Edwards’ sermons. One of the volumes that I have done on Edwards for Yale University Press is just a book of Edwards’ greatest sermonic hits. That’s not the title. It’s called, “The Sermons of Jonathan Edwards: A Reader.” And in there, there are some marvelous, wonderful, edifying things to read. My favorites would be sermons like “A Divine and Supernatural Light.” Which is available on the web as well. You don’t have to go buy that reader to read it. Another one of my favorite sermons by Edwards would be one that’s called, “The Excellency of Christ,” on Revelation Chapter 5. Some of those things can be read without a great lot of investment of time. They’re pretty clearly written, because they were written to be delivered as Sermons in the Church, and yet they’re also very rich spiritually and theologically. >>Samuel: Dr. Sweeney, what is God teaching you these days? >>Doug Sweeney: Well, he’s teaching me a lot of things, Samuel. And I would say probably during this COVID season and this season of social and political turmoil in American society, he’s teaching me that we can trust in his providential care for us wholeheartedly, even when times are tough. That he’s faithful to see us through difficulties. That he asks us simply to wake up each day and be faithful and trust in his presence and his guidance and his care for us and those around him. And then relatedly I’ve been learning more and more in recent years that people around us need encouragement to believe this and to live as though it really is true. I say sometimes to my wife, Wilma, “We need more Barnabases in the Christian world.” We need more sons and daughters of encouragement. People who come alongside those who are sick or fearful or angry and help them to recognize God’s presence in their lives, God’s activity in their lives, God’s gifting in their lives. And try to cultivate that through godly friendship and relationship with them. The older I get, the more of a providentialist I become. And as I become more certain of God’s presence and guidance and provision for me and for those around me I get excited about trying to share that with other people, trying to do what I can to be a little Barnabas to my neighbor and help others to believe those same things. >>Kristen Padilla: Well, thank you Dr. Sweeney for being a guest on the podcast and for this reminder and encouragement to trust in God’s providence, his care, his presence for us at this time, and thank you for sharing about Jonathan Edwards, getting us hopefully more excited about reading Jonathan Edwards. I know I would like to read more about Jonathan Edwards after this conversation. Thank you, once again, and thank you listeners for tuning into another week on the Beeson Podcast. We hope after this conversation you will pick up a book that Dr. Sweeney mentioned or read one of Jonathan Edwards’ sermons, or you can also find more about the Oxford Handbook on Jonathan Edwards online at the Oxford University Press’s website. We are praying for you. We thank you for praying for us. We will meet you here again next week. Goodbye for now. >>Kristen Padilla: You’ve been listening to the Beeson podcast. Our theme music is written and performed by Advent Birmingham of the Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham, Alabama. Our engineer is Rob Willis. Our announcer is Mike Pasquarello. Our co-hosts are Doug Sweeney and, myself, Kristen Padilla. Please subscribe to the Beeson podcast at www.BeesonDivinity.com/podcast or on iTunes.