For many mainline and evangelical Protestants, Jonathan Edwards remains a distinguished but distant figure whom one knows one should know more about. Douglas Sweeney's book seeks to redress that problem by presenting Edwards's life and thought in an accessible manner for “fellow Christians” who wish to reflect on Edwards as a model for the Christian life (16). Sweeney comes to his task as an expert on Edwards and American Puritanism, and as an insightful guide to practical spiritual concerns. To this end, Sweeney deftly weaves considerations of Edwards's spiritual development, his study and preaching of Scripture, and his intellectual efforts into an elegant telling of Edwards's life.

The first two chapters focus on Edwards's upbringing, education, and marriage, and the beginning of his ministry in Northampton, as Sweeney invites the reader to inhabit colonial New England. Born into one of the more influential clerical families of the Connecticut River valley, Edwards was a devout child who was expected to follow his father into ministry. He was educated in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew and entered Yale to study a curriculum of theology, grammar, and science. After wrestling with the Calvinist doctrines of predestination and election during his teen years, Edwards experienced a conversion that led to a peaceful certitude concerning his salvation and Calvinism as a belief-system. Sweeney ties this event to Edwards's renewed dedication to lifelong study, especially scriptural study, and service in the church.

Edwards settled into sustained ministry after assuming the pastorate in Northampton and marrying Sarah Pierpont. The Edwards household teemed with children, visiting friends, and regular visitors from town and church. Edwards's devotion to writing and study did not prevent him from maintaining an active social life; his position as pastor required it. As for the dour and imposing figure that looms in the American imagination, Sweeney argues that it is largely an exaggeration. Edwards cultivated a public modesty that hid the personal warmth attested to by many friends. His weeping with congregations during the Great Awakening and his charitable giving to the poor demonstrate public spirit and a concern for social justice.

There is no doubt that Edwards's charity extended to the Northampton poor and later in his life to mission work with the Mahican and Mohawk Indians. There is also no doubt that Edwards found owning slaves an acceptable practice for Christians. In direct and certain terms Sweeney condemns Edwards for owning the slaves without whom the Edwards household could not have successfully operated. Slave-owning is Edwards's most tremendous moral failure, and Sweeney uses this failure to encourage the reader to practice self-examination and humility as trustworthy foundations for spiritual discipline. Sweeney also points the reader to the small but growing secondary literature that addresses slavery in Edwards's legacy.

In chapter three Sweeney turns to Edwards's relationship to the Bible. As Sweeney notes, Edwards's exegetical reputation is often described as “precritical” or “premodern,” which implies that Edwards was unaware of the burgeoning historical and textual criticism happening across the Atlantic (95). This is not the case. Edwards read widely in historical criticism and respected it as a hermeneutic, but he loved the figurative sense of Scripture. Edwards stressed typology in his exegetical work and his sermons. He had a masterful way of connecting types from the natural world to biblical types to create an emblematic view of reality dependent upon a communicative triune God. Sweeney suggests that attentiveness to typological interpretation may allow pastors and laypeople to see the world again with a renewed sense of God's activity in history.

The next two chapters deal with Edwards's theology as it relates to the Great Awakening and Enlightenment thought. The revivals that swept through the colonies in the 1740s led Edwards to reflect on the Holy Spirit's supernatural role in conversion and a life of holiness. Pneumatology, the doctrinal exploration of the Holy Spirit, became a consistent feature of Edwards's theological project. Edwards advocated “spiritual discernment,” the practice of assessing one's spiritual state through an analysis of one's desires, actions, and view of Scripture and the world. Even as revival waned in the mid-1740s, Edwards was convinced that affective religion, the “sense of the heart,” was the key to Christian discipleship and maturation.

Edwards's dismissal from the Northampton pulpit in 1750 allowed him to devote his last years to completing his influential work on the freedom of the will, Original Sin, the purpose of created reality, and human virtue. For Sweeney, these intellectual endeavors highlight Edwards's involvement with an Enlightenment culture that contested Christian orthodoxy. Instead of retreating into unreflective dogma, Edwards attempted to explain and defend traditional theological positions with novel approaches and arguments. The exercise of the mind, for Edwards, consists not only in contemplating divine things but also in engaging the learning and cultural conversation of one's own time.

Sweeney ends with a chapter that encourages the reader to consider his or her own Christian life according to theses gleaned from Edwards's example. These theses encourage self-reflection in ordinary social interaction, sensing God in everyday experience, risking humiliation and real poverty for spiritual growth, a willingness to die to self in service to others, building ecclesial community, and a life immersed in the Bible. Edwards's Christian eudaemonism, or living a flourishing life in response to God's grace, challenges the reader to avoid spiritual complacency.

Sweeney set for himself a difficult question in the composition of this book: how to recommend a legendary eighteenth-century Puritan divine to twenty-first-century readers without sliding into hagiography? Sweeney answers this question by giving us Edwards with all of his flaws as well as his many virtues. On that note, Sweeney's aim to present Edwards as a model for a Christian life necessitates a gentle warning. For the reader who is not Christian the author's use of “we” throughout the text will be disconcerting and perhaps off putting. But this book will not disappoint the non-Christian or Christian reader who wants an authoritative and spiritually oriented reflection on an enduring figure in American religious history.