Rhys S. Bezzant – författare

Among his many accomplishments, Jonathan Edwards was an effective mentor who trained many leaders for the church in colonial America, but his pastoral work is often overlooked. Rhys S. Bezzant investigates the background, method, theological rationale, and legacy of his mentoring ministry. Edwards did what mentors normally do--he met with individuals to discuss ideas and grow in skills. But Bezzant shows that Edwards undertook these activities in a distinctly modern or affective key. His correspondence is written in an informal style; his understanding of friendship and conversation takes up the conventions of the great metropolitan cities of Europe. His pedagogical commitments are surprisingly progressive and his aspirations for those he mentored are bold and subversive. When he explains his mentoring practice theologically, he expounds the theme of seeing God face to face, summarized in the concept of the beatific vision, which recognizes that human beings learn through the example of friends as well as through the exposition of propositions. In this book the practice of mentoring is presented as an exchange between authority and agency, in which the more experienced person empowers the other, whose own character and competencies are thus nurtured. More broadly, the book is a case study in cultural engagement, for Edwards deliberately takes up certain features of the modern world in his mentoring and yet resists other pressures that the Enlightenment generated. If his world witnessed the philosophical evacuation of God from the created order, then Edwards's mentoring is designed to draw God back into an intimate connection with human experience.

This book seeks to shed new light on the development of the ecclesiology of Jonathan Edwards from the writings of his youth until his Stockbridge treatises, setting this within the context of Reformation and Puritan debates, and his experience of the revivals during his Northampton ministry. Bezzant contends that Edwards repristinated an ossified New England ecclesiology by acknowledging the church's dynamic relationship with the created order, history and the nations, and by advocating renewal in ecclesial life through revivals, itinerancy, Concerts of Prayer, missionary initiatives outside of the local congregation, and doctrinal clarification. Bezzant shows that Edwards accommodated the Christendom model of ecclesiology to the new philosophical, political and social realities of the mid-eighteenth-century British Atlantic world. His ecclesiology can be aptly summarized as prophetic, in as far as the church makes identification with its social context, while yet providing an alternative millennial vision for human flourishing. Edwards's Gospel is preached within a larger vision of transformed society and the glory of God, for whom the church is an orderly but not ordinary instrument to promote visible union between believers and Christ.