Jonathan Edwards and America’s Hebraic Spirit

In their seminal essay, “America’s Hebraic Awakening,” Eric Cohen and Jonathan Silver argue that the rediscovery of the Hebrew Bible and its role in shaping the American founding is necessary for national renewal. Here they draw on the work of such scholars as the political theorist Joshua Mitchell, who has written convincingly of the “Hebraic Christianity” that lay behind our nation’s founding. Wilfred McClay and Stuart Halpern have likewise shown how American liberties were grounded in the Founders’ use of Jewish antecedents. In her response to Cohen and Silver, Luma Simms suggests that it was Protestant recognition of the “social dimensions of sin” and the need for political restraints that turned the Founders to biblical Israel for instruction. In passing, she dismisses Jonathan Edwards’s (1703–58) teachings as too “extreme” for furthering that instruction.