Some fifty years ago, in a biography still infamous today, Perry Miller presented a heroic picture of the Reverend Jonathan Edwards as "a prefigurement of the artist in America." The late Puritan minister was, for Miller, a solitary colonial type for whom existential novelists and neo-orthodox theologians provided the antitype. At one point, Miller expressly credited Edwards with anticipating Søren Kierkegärd and at another offered up a long epigraph from Franz Kafka in which Edwards's theology is associated with existentialist alienation and terror. Such claims drew on the views of mid-twentieth century theologians, such as H. Richard Niebuhr and Joseph Haroutunian, who had managed to join Edwards to neo-orthodoxy's reassessment of liberal Protestantism, its (supposedly) feminized sentimentality, naïve optimism, and humanitarian progressivism.

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With artistic and theological appreciation of Edwards rising, Miller led a successful effort to persuade Yale University Press to launch a monumental scholarly edition of the works of Jonathan Edwards in the 1950s. Thus at its advent the new critical edition of Edwards, which would ultimately bring together leading historians of two-plus generations, was allied with a distinct public vision highlighting American liberalism's intellectual flaccidity and innocence. To recover both its vigor and its realism, the liberal mind required a stiff draught of human depravity and divine wrath that Edwards stood ready to provide. 1

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