Forgiveness: From the puritans to Jonathan Edwards

In 1740, the Reverend Jonathan Edwards fretted about the state of affairs in his town, Northampton, Massachusetts. The son and grandson of New England ministers, he had recently led many townspeople into a period of spiritual awakening and would later achieve fame as a defender of Calvinist revivals. Yet he worried that such religious fervor had not engendered, as he had hoped, a society of love and concord. In a particularly biting sermon from that year, he accused many of his parishioners of being "content to put on a religious face in the meeting house or at private religious meetings" while continuing to "enjoy their covetousness and their pride, and their malice and envy, and their revenge" in public "behavior." Such hypocrisy was troubling, he continued, because it appeared to legitimate the enemies of godliness. Critics of evangelical Protestantism, from liberal clergy in Boston to freethinking rationalists in Glasgow, demeaned it as emotion without moral substance, sensuality and superstition masked as devotion. To promote revival, Edwards declared, people should care less about their reputation for attending worship and more about their conduct "among men." They should in fact "excel other people in a just and righteous, humble, meek, peaceable, quiet loving conversation one among another." They should be "far from all revenge and ill will, all living in love, studying to promote one another's good," and "apt to forbear with one another, apt to forgive one another." Edwards repeated this last admonition: his people should be "forgiving one another, retaining no grudge against any." If they showed forgiveness, they would "make" doubters "believe that there is indeed something in our profession. It will have a greater tendency to convince the world about us⋯ ten times [more] than all our private religious meetings, and it will stop the mouths of them that ben't convinced."¹ Edwards's exhortations point to a transformation in the conception and practice of forgiveness in New England's churches in the eighteenth century. He followed the standard lexicon of Christian virtues when he urged forgiveness, but his sense that he needed to argue its necessity, and the way in which he explained its operation, distinguished him from the previous generation of pastors. Edwards's concern for order and concord in his town bespoke a customary-and what we might label puritan-idea of forgiveness as a means to solidarity in the local community. In this setting, forgiveness denoted a specific behavior ("quiet conversation," in the above sermon) defined by the pastor and regulated through corporate moral supervision. Yet Edwards overlaid such social rules with a rhetoric of interior dispositions or moral states ("far from ill will" and "living in love"). This alerts us to a second strand in Edwards's preaching, which we might call evangelical. Employing the language of the critics of experimental Calvinism ("them that ben't convinced") he parsed forgiveness as a benevolent inclination that, contrary to what the detractors said, derived from evangelical conviction. This conception pointed toward the union of individuals in a widespread moral community. Edwards came to envision a practice of forgiveness that transcended the local community-that even crossed national and ethnic boundaries. Edwards never made a complete transition from Puritan to evangelical conceptions of forgiveness. He often wove together Puritan and evangelical themes, stressing one or the other at different times, often maintaining both at the same time. He continued to aspire to local control over his parishioners' behavior even as he reoriented his ideas around internal moral states and cosmopolitan ideas of social solidarity. How should we understand Edwards's ambiguity? He modified the Puritan practice of forgiveness as he encountered social schism and religious disputes in his town, new social sensibilities attending a vigorous commercial and legal culture, religious skeptics who disparaged Calvinism as morally offensive, a growing international network of evangelicals, and conflict between English and Indian residents of New England. Such encounters propelled Edwards into what Pierre Bourdieu has identified as "the whole field of practices subjected to traditional precepts and customary recommendations" yet freed for "improvisations." In this in-between space, a realm defined by neither pure regulation and customary (Puritan) teaching nor pure innovation and (evangelical) interiority, Edwards reoriented his understanding of forgiveness without producing an entirely new conception of it.² Edwards's story shows how the modern history of the Christian practice of forgiveness turns on the complex interaction between customary regulation and the innovations called for by specific social and cultural realities. Indeed, our contemporary discussions about religion, forgiveness, and social conflict-energetic and profuse as they are-must deal with a similar set of negotiations, albeit in quite different social circumstances. They face the same sort of competing claims that Edwards confronted in early modern New England: the relationships of public acts to interior affection, local loyalty to universal compassion, particular religious convictions to public encounters between different peoples.