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What first showed you that Edwards deliberately changed his preaching style based on how well his audience knew the Bible?


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While taking a Jonathan Edwards class during my Master of Divinity degree (with Owen Strachan), the topic of Edwards’s preaching was broached. It was there while debating whether he was a biblical expositor that the idea to think about and look into his audience and their knowledge of the Bible first came to me. Later, while doing a paper for one of my doctoral classes, I began researching this by looking at two sermons of Edwards on Ecclesiastes 7:6 and Mark 10:32. In researching those sermons, I found Edwards to focus on explaining the text to his audience. In another class I delved further in a directed study by looking at Edwards’s sermon series “Charity and Its Fruits” on 1 Cor. 13, and by reading Mark Noll’s In the Beginning Was the Word and Thomas Kidd’s Great Awakening which looked at biblical literacy in colonial America, and the reawakened culture of the Great Awakening, respectively. Through reading those works, and my own studies on Edwards, I concluded the topic, and specifically his time among Native Americans, was worthy of researching for my dissertation.