LAUSR

Edwards’s legacy is well known and highly regarded, it has not always been appreciated that he was more than a lone genius whose theology profoundly influenced the colonies and nascent evangelicalism. Bezzant’s work shows that Edwards’s impact was driven by a training network governed, ultimately, by a kind of intimate mentoring given direction by Edwards himself and carried on by his mentees. In the third chapter, Bezzant takes a turn away from narrating Edwards’s practice to a more theoretical register. Here we discover how Edwards’s theology, in particular his understanding of anthropology, the visual reality of knowing Christ, and the beatific vision, ordered his understanding of what mentoring relationships entail. Bezzant navigates well the temptation to focus solely on either Edwards’s practices or simply to exposit theoretical material, showing that either path would be a reductive approach to the topic. Having focused on the practical, he then turns to the theoretical, locating Edwards’s practice in his rich theology of personhood, participation, and vision under the framework of “the Mimetic Way.” The focus on personhood, participation, and vision to reconstruct Edwards’s notion of mimesis is a brilliant synthesizing move, being both original, as far as I can tell in Edwards studies, while also grasping several of the most fundamental strands of Edwards’s theology. What this helps unveil is a Reformed instinct of recent interest; the formation of a person is a decisively relational endeavor, and in Edwards one sees the real practical import of this theology on friendship, mentoring, and, through those endeavors, the development of institutions. Bezzant concludes with a reflection on how Edwards’s mentees advanced the cause of the New Divinity, briefly tracing the life of Edwards’s son, Jonathan Jr., showing how Edwards’s mentees mentored him. This chapter shows the fruit and trajectory of Edwards’s mentoring as it spread throughout New England and helped establish the DNA of what is known now as American evangelicalism. It is this movement that would help construct and advance new training models and institutions in the early years of evangelicalism. It would be impossible to fully articulate the impact of this movement on the American consciousness, institutions, and social thought, but there is no doubt that it was substantive. Bezzant’s volume gives a glimpse into the innerworkings and logic of this movement—not of its ideals but of the relational features that held it together. This volume is profoundly interesting, original, and, perhaps, prophetic in timing, as American evangelicalism is confronted with questions about the training of pastors in an age of revolution.