In this excellent and intricately argued study, Gilsun Ryu adds to recent scholarship showing Jonathan Edwards was a dogmatic Biblicist. Edwards is still a psychological, philosophical, and theological genius worthy of deep interdisciplinary study, but for too long, as Douglas Sweeney points out in the “forward” of this book, scholars have tended to ignore the assumptions and methods of biblical exegesis at the foundation of Edwards's thinking. Ryu adds to new studies, such as Douglas Sweeney's Edwards the Exegete: Biblical Interpretation and Anglo Protestant Culture on the Edge of the Enlightenment (New York: Oxford, 2015) and David P. Barshinger's, Jonathan Edwards and the Psalms: A Redemptive-Historical Vision of Scripture (New York: Oxford, 2014), by focusing on the way in which Edwards innovatively supported the Federal Theology of the Reformed Scholastic tradition.

The history and definitions of Federal or Covenant Theology are bigger topics than this book can handle, and Ryu is wise to focus on Edwards and his direct predecessors in Europe. Essentially the theology as Ryu deals with it is a scheme that identifies a covenant of works in the Garden of Eden followed by a six-part covenant of grace extending from Adam's fall to Noah, Noah to Abraham, Abraham to Moses, Moses to David, David to the Babylonian captivity, and finally from the captivity to the incarnation of the second Adam, God in Jesus. A third covenant of redemption, that Edwards plays an important role in encouraging, extends from the resurrection of Jesus to the second coming, including judgment.

Federal or Covenant Theology is especially tricky for dogmatic Biblicists because it entails affirming divinely ordained time frames and chronologically backward-looking entanglements between the Old and New Testaments that are not plainly stated in the Bible. Ryu makes clear Edwards's reliance on a rule for interpreting scripture found in the Westminster Confession (1647) that allows for affirming a doctrine that “by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture” (202). Ryu also makes it clear that Edwards must rely on the medieval tradition of fourfold interpretation: literal, allegorical, tropological, and anagogical. All this gives room for Edwards to be innovative even as he is being traditional. Ryu shows ways in which Edwards was “more multidimensional” than his predecessors and innovatively created a “wider interpretive framework” (314).

As for his predecessors, Ryu focuses on four and analyzes each in the first chapter: Johannes Cocceius (1603–1669), Herman Witsius (1636–1708), Petrus van Mastricht (1630–1706), and Francis Turretin (1623–1687). In general, Edwards is in agreement with all four; however, Ryu teases out the differences between each and shines a light on innovations by Edwards. The most important of these innovations is a Trinitarian emphasis on the Holy Spirit that gives “driving force” to Edwards's more forward-looking, more progressive, sense of the history of salvation (310–311).

Two unfinished books by Edwards are at the core of Ryu's analysis: A History of the Work of Redemption and The Harmony of the Old and New Testaments. As much as Federal Theology tends to dissect, these two books insist on one purpose, one end goal, one great work evident in Bible. For Edwards, exegesis requires circular methods. The Bible teaches the unity of its history and prophesy; therefore, that unity is a good tool for interpreting the Bible. Harmony is the default reading of the whole of the Bible. Ryu points out that this “doctrinal harmony of the Bible” is “a central principal through which Edwards understands the church” (280). Federal Theology, more so for Edwards than for his predecessors, especially Witsius, who thought of salvation too much in individualistic terms (44), is foundational for the church. For Edwards, Christ's blood is at work in history long before the cross, unifying both the Old and the New Testaments, moving “the process of salvation history forward, intensifying the light of the gospel toward the final state of the church” (164).

Ryu's book exemplifies the liveliness of international Edwardsian studies. Ryu offers gloriously fulsome bibliographical footnotes throughout the book, situating his own work within the thought of others. Ryu's footnotes and bibliography are worth the price of the book. Evident in the bibliography is a transition from using Jonathan Edwards to help us understand the genius of America to using Jonathan Edwards as a guiding figure in the long history of American-influenced international evangelicalism. As we move into the third decade of the twenty-first century, what began in the spirit of Perry Miller's biography of Edwards published in 1949 in the “American Men of Letters Series” and publication of the first volume of The Works of Jonathan Edwards in 1957 has led to, at last count, ten different Jonathan Edwards Centers around the world. Jan Stievermann, professor of the History of Christianity in the United States at Heidelberg University, director of Heidelberg's Jonathan Edwards Center, and author of Prophecy, Piety, and the Problem of Historicity: Interpreting the Hebrew Scriptures in Cotton Mather's Biblia Americana (Tubingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 2016), writes, similar to Ryu, about conservative evangelical engagement in America with the European enlightenment that continues on into our modern and postmodern intellectual life. Federal Theology is alive and well, as are the assumptions and methods of exegesis used by Edwards. Ryu, who at the time of publication was an adjunct professor at Kukje Theological University and Seminary in Seoul, South Korea, presents the thought of Jonathan Edward, not merely for historical interest, but as “one of the most intriguing” of federal theologians in the cause of the long tradition of Reformed orthodoxy (1).