Mark A. Noll in his book, America’s God, explains that most of theological developments in early 18th and late 19th century are based on three specific contextual historical forces; (1) evangelical protestant religion (evangelicalism), (2) republican political ideology (republicanism), and (3) common sense moral reasoning (common sense realism). These forces are dynamically shaping Western intellectual history with two distinctive accounts: human reason (the Enlightenment) and human sensibility (the Romanticism). He then tries to synthesize all these historical variants with the central influence of Scottish common-sense realism on evangelicalism and republicanism in the Enlightenment movement. At this point, Noll successfully suggests the right way of historical study, as George Marsden quoted from Haskell’s book Objectivity Is Not Neutrality, “the best way to deal with these universal phenomena is to acknowledge one’s point of view rather than posing a neutral observer.”
In terms of Noll’s theses, Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) may be, on the one hand, evaluated as a multisided person and thinker in that he is one of the most difficult characters to be objectively and universally defined because of his immense works, possessing great philosophical and theological depth of insight influenced by the vortex of the Enlightenment and the Evangelical movement in his age. On the other hand, Edwards can be characterized as the most puritan, Calvinistic evangelical of colonial America, who mediated between those two distinctive movements by answering how an exclusive faith should relate to a pluralistic modern American movement. His philosophical, theological, and practical endeavors to come up with sound orthodox doctrine in various contextual accounts can be understood as the monumental apologetic work against the troubled age.
Hence, this paper was undertaken to reinforce the investigation on the aspect of the Reformed apologist: Jonathan Edwards with his primary works. Thus, the historical context (with the view point of Noll’s thesis in synthesis) will first be surveyed, and some primary works by Edwards will then be analyzed in their own theological approach, and finally the Reformed apologetics components within the works will be evaluated in order to evaluate Jonathan Edwards as the most puritan and Calvinistic apologist.