2. Reading Edwards’s Stockbridge Sermons

[Rob Boss]

How did studying Puritan primers, catechisms, and confessions reshape the way you read his Stockbridge sermons?


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[John Inman]

I think it shaped my view of his colonial preaching, and then by extension his approach to preaching among Native Americans. The quote I have of Edwards towards the end of my second chapter, where Edwards describes the colonial view of the Bible as “insipid” or “despised” manna was something that certainly shaped how I saw Edwards’s view of his task in preaching the Word to colonials, it was to make it come alive to them once again and to spark an awakening to its beautiful Gospel truth.

In looking at it from a perspective of how he relates their use at Stockbridge among Native Americans, I mention at the beginning of my introduction (in greater detail in the dissertation which was edited into the published book) was a technique Edwards had for teaching not only memorization, but comprehension of ideas beyond just the words themselves. This was an idea that has been picked up and expounded on well by John Van Wyck in his dissertation (and published book) To Understand Things as Well as Words: An Examination of Jonathan Edwards as an Educator and His Pedagogical Methodology. In my work, I apply this further in showing how Edwards wanted his preaching audience to not only understand the Bible, but to be affected by it in his preaching. For those at Stockbridge, this would mean helping them to understand the Bible first in his exposition, before going for their affections.