That Asbury University’s chapel has become a “hot spot of sacramentality” {James K.A. Smith] would not surprise the founders of Christian higher education in America. The integration of revival and moral philosophy in the college chapel helped lead to what Mark. A. Noll calls “the great age of Christian higher education.”
By linking the choice of new birth with his audience’s choice of a new American identity, British evangelist George Whitefield provided a common American experience that unified diverse colonists who lacked a common identity
More than a century before the New Deal, Public Education, or the Civil Rights movements, the Second Great Awakening fostered a nation-wide “benevolent empire” of care for the poor, freedom for the oppressed and education for all.
Before we can learn anything from Jonathan Edwards, we first need to humble ourselves as he did on that fateful day in 1734, when he finally admitted that “business as usual” was failing his students.
Edwards is widely recognized as one of the most important American thinkers and religious figures and as a major figure in the history of Christian thought. The release of Edwards’ work comes at a moment of renewed interest in the preacher, especially among conservative evangelicals.
A Pulitzer prize-winning novelist writing of her intellectual debt to Jonathan Edwards in a major intellectual journal it is definitely worth a read:
“I have heard it said a thousand times that people seek out religion in order to escape complexity and uncertainty. I was moved and instructed precisely by the vast theater Edwards’s vision proposes for complexity and uncertainty…”-Marilynne Robinson