After Jonathan Edwards: The Courses of the New England Theology . Edited by Oliver D. Crisp and Douglas A. Sweeney. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. xviii + 348 pp. $99.00 cloth; $35.00 paper.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)After Jonathan Edwards: The Courses of the New England Theology . Edited by Oliver D. Crisp and Douglas A. Sweeney . New York : Oxford University Press , 2012. xviii + 348 pp. $99.00 cloth; $35.00 paper.Book Reviews and NotesThis collection of seventeen essays is presented as a corrective to a position first articulated almost a century ago by Joseph Haroutunian in Piety Versus Moralism: The Passing of the New England Theology (New York: Henry Holt, 1932), a classic text that contributed in large part to the twentieth-century resurgence of interest in the academic study of Jonathan Edwards. Taking my copy of this text from the shelf, where it had most likely rested unopened since graduate school, I was surprised to discover on the flyleaf the strong signature of the influential Presbyterian theologian himself. I also easily located in its introduction a strong statement of the view the essays in After Jonathan Edwards aim to counter: "As seen from the perspective of the theology of Edwards," writes Haroutunian, "the history of the New England Theology is the history of a degradation" (xxii).Coined in the nineteenth century, the term "New England Theology" refers to a theological tradition whose diverse members promoted a style of evangelical Calvinism that, although doctrinally distinctive, claimed allegiance to the thought of Jonathan Edwards. Following Haroutunian, the growth of this theological tradition has commonly been framed not as development, but as decline. As the collection's editors, Oliver D. Crisp and Douglas A. Sweeney, observe, "the New England theology is a tale of ever more arid and abstruse metaphysical theorizing on the basis of an original, and intellectually dynamic, Edwardsian deposit" (5). Contrary to this declension narrative, they assert this tradition is "the most significant and enduring Christian theological school of thought to have originated in the United States" (4). The essays in this volume support this contention by considering not only the development and importance of New England Theology in nineteenth-century America but also the international reach of its theological vision.The collection is divided into three sections. The first places intellectual and theological concerns of Edwards's immediate successors, called the New Divinity, in a larger context. The essays written by Mark Valeri and James P. Byrd draw interesting connections between this theological school and issues of broader historical concern. Valeri shifts attention from doctrine to method by arguing that a distinguishing feature of Edwardsian thought was its promotion of "the culture of gentility that defined the rules of Anglo-American social discourse during the second half of the eighteenth century" (18). Byrd explores the theological roots of Edwardsian anti-slavery activism, which at times placed the New Divinity in conflict with genteel New England society. Crisp's essay, by contrast, stands out for directly challenging a central element of the declension thesis, the development of a governmental doctrine of the atonement, which Haroutunian considered symptomatic of the "degraded" moralism of New England theology. To undermine this claim Crisp argues that "the seeds of the New England governmental view of the atonement were sown by Edwards himself," and that precedents exist for this view in earlier Reform thought (78).The essays in the volume's second section are each devoted to prominent representatives of the New England Theology, from Samuel Hopkins to Edwards Amasa Park. …