Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections, and the Puritan Analysis of True Piety, Spiritual Sensation and Heart Religion

This study focuses on Jonathan Edwards’s “Treatise concerning religious Affections” and shows that rather than discontinuity, Edwards’s reliigon of the heart reflects a conservative extension of traditional Puritan thought into the time of the Great Awakening. It opposes the main stream scholarly views of Edwards, argue that, however unique as a fully synthesized and exhaustive work, the “Religious Affections” is constructed almost entirely from elements deriving from 16th and 17th century Puritanism.