JE 2007

The Jonathan Edwards Soci­ety held its 2007 Con­fer­ence on “Jonathan Edwards and the Envi­ron­ment,” Octo­ber 5–7 at the First Churches of Northamp­ton, Mass­a­chu­setts. The papers explored the rel­e­vance of the thought of Jonathan Edwards to our cur­rent envi­ron­men­tal and eco­log­i­cal concerns.

Edwards was a keen observer of nature, and filled his volu­mi­nous note­books with exact and some­times poetic descrip­tions of a wide vari­ety of nat­ural phe­nom­ena. He con­ceived of the world Neo-​​Platonically as an ema­na­tion of God’s exter­nal glory. He inter­preted nature as a book of types or sym­bols, coor­di­nate with Scrip­ture, which shad­owed forth moral and spir­i­tual lessons. He highly val­ued nat­ural beauty since for him it was an image of divine beauty or love. His ethics of benev­o­lence or “con­sent to being in gen­eral” morally enfran­chises not only human but all other sen­tient beings.

Clearly, then, Edwards has much to say to those work­ing in the gen­eral fields of ecol­ogy, envi­ron­men­tal phi­los­o­phy and the­ol­ogy, and in the more spe­cific fields of envi­ron­men­tal ethics and aesthetics.

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