The miscellanies

"Throughout his ministerial career, Jonathan Edwards filled a series of private notebooks on a wide variety of theological topics, numbering his entries - nearly 1,400 of them - in sequence. With the publication of this, the fourth and final volume of miscellanies, readers have access for the first time to the most comprehensive printed edition of Edwards' "Miscellanies," the most controversial and commonly cited of his sets of private notebooks and his most sustained, serious effort to rough out his theological reflections. Edwards began the nine-book series in 1722, while still in his late teens, and added to it throughout his last thirty-five prolific years." "The entries in this volume cover the years from 1751 to 1758, a period during which Edwards faced a variety of difficult challenges. In these entries Edwards grapples with modern naturalism, critiques "generous doctrines," and attempts to bolster Reformed thought in the face of the Enlightenment."--BOOK JACKET.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Spiritual, Philosophy. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.