The Prism of Scripture: Studies on History and Historicity in the Work of Jonathan Edwards

Throughout seventeenth and eighteenth century England and New England the historical, doctrinal and prophetical parts of the Bible functioned as the paradigm (Thomas S. Kuhn) of a sophisticated tradition. Through an imaginative and skilful use of this paradigm the New England theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) gave coherence to his critical studies of the Great Awakening, showed the limitations of other contemporary historiographical models and formulated his major program of a historical metaphysics as a resolution of the perennial problem of the one and the many in the thought of the West. By contrast, the Earl of Shaftesbury's (1671-1713) reduction of the paradigm diminished his view of history, impoverished his understanding of tradition and limited his view of nature.