Students of Jonathan Edwards now look back to the tercentenary celebrations of his birth in 2003 as the culmination of nearly fifty years of effort to prepare a critical edition of his works. The publication of several volumes in the Yale Edition and conferences in Washington, D.C., Princeton, and elsewhere that year heralded Edwards's many contributions and his ongoing significance. For some, the publication of George M. Marsden's Jonathan Edwards: A Life was the high point. Finally, there was a usable, modern biography of a colonial figure who shaped his own era and continues to shape America and the world nearly 250 years after his death.

Marsden's book made the cover of the New York Times Book Review.1 Edwards had arrived! Those who know the history of Edwards's reception know he did not always occupy such a prominent place in the national psyche. Generations of scholars have learned a common account of Edwards's legacy that goes something like this. Edwards's theological legacy died out by the end of the nineteenth century. He began the twentieth century with few friends and plenty of critics. His greatness was admired from a distance, if at all. In the 1920s, he was called an anachronism for his failure to imbibe the budding democratic spirit of his own age. Edwards was pitied for being a theologian when he could have turned his prodigious mental abilities to philosophy, science, or belles lettres. He was scorned for degrading God and human beings by his insistence on the essential truths of Calvinism. Yet for the most part, he was ignored.