Kathryn Reklis’ fine book joins other efforts, including those by Michael McClymond, Avihu Zakai and Josh Moody, to interpret Jonathan Edwards’ theology within the context of intellectual developments in early modern Europe. Edwards tends to be portrayed as a sort of intellectual hero in these accounts, opposing or repurposing Enlightenment ideals and assumptions for his own theological ends. Charles Chauncy, the rationalist critic of the American colonial revivals, is the predictable local villain. To some degree Reklis sticks to this script. Yet Reklis’ Edwards is a fascinatingly ambiguous hero.
Two features stand out in Reklis’ analysis. First, she widens her purview beyond Europe to include the circum-Atlantic world, which she describes as an ‘increasingly interconnected oceanic interculture’, connected by patterns of trade, consumption and colonisation (p. 24). In particular, the emerging slave trade sets the backdrop for her consideration of contrasting accounts of human subjectivity. Quoting Paul Gilroy, Reklis notes that early modern appeals to universal benevolence were ‘cheerfully complicit’ in the radical inequality and domination of the growing profit in human flesh. While Edwards had his own theological reasons for challenging these appeals to universal benevolence, Reklis is right to insist that ‘Edwards's project cannot be innocently disentangled from the practices of brutality and trade in human flesh that made his social location possible’ (p. 107). A full reckoning with this entanglement still awaits, but Reklis is to be commended for raising the issue. Second, Reklis directs attention to what she calls ‘kinesthetic imagination’, the complex ways in which cultural memory is transmitted and recreated in bodily performance. The flailing, groaning bodies of those swept up in the waves of colonial revival defied the disembodied reason and individualised subjectivities prized by early modernism. The ecstatic bodily gestures of those caught up in revivalist passions are, for Reklis, the most concrete expressions of Edwards’ alternative account of subjectivity: the subject defined by surrender to God's sovereignty. By these bodily means, ordinary people came to know what it meant to be swallowed up in God and transmitted that theological truth to others. Yet Edwards’ own philosophical and theological framework had only grudging room for bodily ecstasy. It was for him a ‘negative sign’, neither proving nor disproving the presence and work of the Holy Spirit.
The heart of reality for Edwards was the beauty of the triune God and the beautiful consent of creaturely beings to God's being. Following a broad Augustinian tradition, Edwards argued that it is our affections, rather than our reason, which drive all our acting and knowing. Edwards's social imaginary was of Christians ‘so swallowed up in God – so enraptured by the beauty of the world's interrelatedness in the divine being – that beautiful, harmonious, joyful, benevolent social relations would flow naturally’ (p. 106). As the terror unleashed during the revivals demonstrated, this consummate experience of divine sovereignty had its inverse expression: being swallowed up in God's wrath. Just as the universal benevolence of Enlightenment thinkers excluded enslaved human beings, so Edwards’ millennial vision of ‘one holy and happy society’ excluded the non-elect. Reklis might have wrestled more with how Edwards’ radical particularism compromised his ‘scenario of universality’.
Barton Stone's account of the Cane Ridge revivals shows that the kinesthetic imagination Reklis describes was not altogether lost in later American Reformed traditions. But she is right to note a connection with contemporary Pentecostalism. The renewalist impulses of global Christianity are testimony to ‘the power of God in the disenfranchised and even enslaved body’ (p. 115). This ground-breaking book deserves a wide readership.
