Sources of Christian Homiletics

That Edwards assumed a Puritan style of homiletics is questioned in view of the Christian tradition of preaching. The chapter argues that if the homiletic labors of the preacher of Northampton are “statements on the full range of his thought,” one must situate Edwards’s sermons, both in form and structure, in terms of continuity and discontinuity with Christian preaching. The caricatures and commendations of Puritan preaching must be set aside, so that a broader context of long-standing trajectories of Christian homiletics throughout the ages can be discerned and brought into view. Although Edwards resided on the outskirts of the colonial world, his intellectual endeavors in framing his homiletic discourses resonated strongly with the trajectories of Christian homiletics of earlier centuries—though mediated through the early modern period. Edwards’s sermons, then, as literary devices or discourses with their rhetorical particularities, must be situated in the history of preaching.