Douglas Sweeney's Edwards the Exegete offers the first comprehensive attempt to account for the substance of Edwards's biblical interpretation. While some of this work has been done in limited scope (e.g. David Barshinger's Jonathan Edwards and the Psalms [Oxford University Press, 2014]) or with a more specialized focus (e.g. the career writings of Stephen Stein, as well as my own monograph, Jonathan Edwards and the Bible [Indiana University Press, 2002]), this is the first work to address the subject in such a thoroughgoing and systematic way. Sweeney has structured the work as an interplay between theory and application, pairing chapters treating an aspect of Edwards's principles of interpretation with particular examples of the method in action. Thus we find his canonical approach to scripture paired with his treatment of Melchizedek, a figure who appears in narrative, poetic (psalms), and epistolary genres in the Bible. Edwards's Christological method is paired with a consideration of his interpretation of the Song of Songs. Edwards's understanding of the Bible as providing a framework for understanding world history as the work of redemption is paired with his interpretation of the book of Revelation as the final chapter for both. Finally, Sweeney considers Edwards's commitment to a doctrinal focus in his preaching, with a specific look at how he drew out the doctrine of justification by faith from scripture in his sermons.

The first two chapters, however, pair two different subjects, each contextualizing Edwards's interpretive framework. The first chapter locates Edwards's writings in a larger history of biblical interpretation. Sweeney deftly weaves Edwards's interpretive method into the fabric of patristic, medieval, Protestant, and rabbinic traditions, as well as the rising early modern (critical) work that he so avidly studied, showing how Edwards was in conversation with all of these influences—where he adopted them, and where he struck out on his own to some degree. Not surprisingly, Edwards turns out to have been particularly influenced by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English circles of interpretation, which put him into indirect contact with important Continental voices such as Jean Le Clerc, Richard Simon, and Benedict Spinoza. If Sweeney's study shows Edwards to have been less original in his biblical interpretation, this is in keeping with recent reassessments of other areas of Edwards's thought (e.g. philosophy and ethics). What makes Edwards's work on the Bible of keen interest nonetheless is the manner in which he digested his sources and fashioned them into an organic whole. Beyond the first chapter, Sweeney continues to locate Edwards's approach within the aforementioned traditions in each of the subsequent chapters (with an eye also toward contemporary discussions of interpretive method), a simply invaluable aid to understanding the development of his thought.

The second chapter provides an insightful window into the cognitive processes that Edwards and his parishioners underwent when they encountered the Bible, or at least what Edwards hoped they ideally would experience. As such, this chapter gives us some notion of what it may have been like to encounter a text as a direct divine word, a theological psychology of reading and hearing, as it were. Edwards describes this kind of experience as in every way a numinous one, full of aesthetic wonder. The voice of scripture becomes the locus of the unveiling of the glory of God, or at least a moment in which the separation between heaven and earth grows particularly thin.

The chapters on Edwards's canonical, Christological, and providential reading of the Bible demonstrate just how completely committed he was to a theological method of interpretation, at the expense of what modern critical method would insist upon as the delimiting nature of historical study upon interpretation. And yet it is precisely these elements of his method that opened up for Edwards almost limitless (if at times highly subjective) opportunities for theological exploration: God is everywhere in scripture, and everywhere revealing the deeper truths of the spiritual world to those with the interpretive keys to uncover them.

The final two chapters bring us to the more practical side of Edwards's biblical interpretation. Edwards was first and foremost, as Sweeney points out, a pastor, and as such had a vital interest in the power of scripture to transform the lives of his parishioners, a subject of far more interest to him than speculative arguments about the historical provenances of the biblical texts. True to the pietistic elements of his heritage, Edwards insisted that the experiential knowledge of biblical truths far outweighed its rational comprehension. Perhaps nowhere was this of more concern to Edwards the revivalist than in his attempts to articulate the central doctrine of justification to his audiences. If the book can be faulted for omitting anything, it is perhaps here in Sweeney's consideration of the practical or social components of exegesis. That is, just how the Bible was read and heard in the complex dynamics of colonial social, political, and cultural life would be of significant interest in trying to understand Edwards's interpretive practices. How did he address the contemporary anxieties of his parishioners about the world they inhabited? How did issues such as slavery, class conflict, intercultural negotiations with Native Americans, or economic uncertainty shape his reading out of the Bible? If we look more closely, can we find these concerns written between the lines of his theological language, his spiritualized interpretation?

This book is a welcome addition to the field. One certainly hopes it will stimulate additional investigation of the contours of early American interpretation of the Bible, a subject that is still woefully understudied, particularly with regard to its social and cultural matrix. Sweeney's work will be of particular interest to intellectual historians, Edwards scholars, and those who study the history of biblical interpretation. For the latter, Edwards's biblical interpretation (along with that of Cotton Mather) helps to fill an important omission in the history of European and early modern interpretation, in its American dress. This book will also have significant appeal, I believe, to those who are theological admirers of Edwards, who might also wish to follow his example in developing a theological framework for approaching biblical interpretation. And, in spite of Edwards's obvious interpretive departures from contemporary hermeneutical assumptions, one wonders whether his approach might also have appeal in a post-modern context, for those who have grown tired of the somewhat artificial dichotomy between criticism and more holistic, narrative-driven methods of biblical exegesis.