In celebration of the tercentenary of Jonathan Edwards's birth in 1703, religious scholars, theologians and intellectual historians gathered for a seemingly endless succession of conferences, offered a flurry of essays, published long-awaited synthetic studies and, as a final gesture, produced several anthologies dedicated to the eighteenth-century New England Calvinist and evangelical divine. The vast project to publish Edwards's collected works (The works of Jonathan Edwards, twenty-five volumes to date [Yale University Press]), now housed at the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale, came almost to completion during the same period, providing scholars with an abundance of new texts from the Sage of Northampton. The Princeton companion is just one of the products of this sustained attention to Edwards.

This anthology of nineteen essays, written by many of the most respected interpreters of Edwards, may be distinguished from other publications by its focus on Edwards's theology. That may sound unsurprising – how else would one interpret a pastor and famous divine? – yet it highlights the distinct contribution of this volume. Modern Reformed systematic theologians in Europe (e.g. Barth) typically sped past Edwards as a mere signpost between seventeenth-century scholasticism and nineteenth-century liberalism. American liberal theologians (from H. R. Niebuhr to James Gufstason) used Edwards for their purposes (with sometimes stunning misreadings), but attended to a small number of select ideas such as religious affections and moral virtue. Twentieth-century readings by historians, in contrast, often focused on Edwards as a literary figure, cultural and philosophic critic, devotional writer, evangelist and local pastor. All of these functions had theological implications, but they minimised his technical theological accomplishments. This volume, which originated at a conference at Princeton Theological Seminary and is edited by a philosophical theologian, attempts to recover technical theological themes and set Edwards in the context of the history of Christian thought.

It does so by offering summary essays on Edwards's major concerns. Some of these essays present solid yet unsurprising reviews of signal themes: Richard R. Niebuhr on the idea of being; John E. Smith on religious affections and virtue; Allen Guelzo on the problem of free will; Sang Hyun Lee on God and the world; Janice Knight on typology; and Douglas A. Sweeney on the Church. Others offer striking explorations of Edwards that suggest his engagement in a theological conversation ranging from Augustine to Aquinas and Luther, and, by anticipation, to modern theological problems: Amy Plantiga Pauw on the Trinity; Robert W. Jenson on Christology; Sang Lee on justification by faith; John F. Wilson on history; and Stephen J. Stein on eschatology. Yet a third sort of essay in this volume sets standard themes in eighteenth-century historical context, yielding surprising readings of Edwards as much more engaged in the culture of the Enlightenment than we might have suspected: Peter J. Thuesen on the broad intellectual background; Robert E. Brown on biblical criticism; Wilson H. Kimnach on sermon writing; Gerald R. McDermott on missions and American Indians. Two other essays survey Edwards and his relationship to his past and appropriation by his American successors: Harry S. Stout on the Puritans and Edwards; and Mark Noll on Scottish and American receptions of Edwards.

The net effect is a sense that Edwards preached and wrote with traditional theological questions in mind. He was not, to put in the negative, a precursor to American Protestant theological liberalism. Nor was he merely an evangelical Calvinist, refashioning Puritan pieties to an emotional critique of New England religion gone bad, which is to say, gone Arminian. None of these essays, to be sure, presents Edwards as a modern systematician. He cannot be read as propounding a set of doctrines according to classical modern loci. Even the word ‘Calvinist’, used by Edwards's conservative admirers as a recommendation, appears infrequently in this volume. These essays do suggest none the less that Edwards's writings cannot be adequately understood apart from formal and broadly western Christian theological categories. In this sense, the Princeton companion bears some comparison to the Cambridge companion to Jonathan Edwards (edited by Stephen J. Stein and published in New York by Cambridge University Press in 2007). Stein's volume resets Edwards in his particular historical context: Anglo-American evangelicalism and the theological traditions peculiar to that tradition.

Which companion, we might wonder, would Edwards have found more amiable and familiar? My suspicion is that many of the essays in Sang Lee's Princeton companion present an Edwards who was somewhat more abstract and technical than he might have found to his purposes. Yet this volume none the less illuminates important questions, and serves well as an introduction to the possibility that Edwards should be taken as a serious theologian in modern Protestant history.