Kenneth Minkema: great awakenings to sacred history

Ray Waddle

Kenneth Minkema was 10 years old when he wrote the New York Historical Society to find out what historians do. He loved reading about the past. He wondered if he could be a historian when he grew up. A fateful answer soon arrived in the mail.

“A very patient, understanding, and obviously bemused staffer wrote me back in detail to tell me what’s involved in a Ph.D. program and what sort of work historians do in a classroom, museum, and other places,” says Minkema, director of the Jonathan Edwards Center, based at YDS.

“I never forgot that. I still have the letter.”

Minkema has turned those early glimmerings into a vocation spanning three decades, with a professional focus on colonial American church history and early modern European religion.

A global awakening

Today he works at the heart of an expanding global fascination with American theologian Jonathan Edwards – and Yale’s leadership in curating his writings. Edwards (1703-58), a Yale College grad and author of the famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” is finding a world of new readers who see his 21st century relevance, with Minkema monitoring the interest. 

“Edwards keeps attracting all kinds of people because he’s an authority in so many areas – church growth, revival, conversion psychology, the practice of piety, the Enlightenment, missions, ethics, aesthetics, eco-theology.”

Minkema’s title is executive editor of the Works of Jonathan Edwards and of the Jonathan Edwards Center & Online Archive at Yale University. The center oversees an ambitious contemporary print edition of Edwards’ selected writings. In recent years it has created an online archive, vastly expanding availability of Edwards’ work.

That digital archive – practically all his published writings, manuscripts and letters, as well as 1,200 sermons – attracts 50,000 registered online users from 100 countries. Some 500,000 unique visits are made annually, a steadily increasing number. Through online inquiries and analytics, Minkema and the center nurture relationships with pastors, scholars, students, YDS alums, and others who share an abiding interest in Edwards as preacher and thinker.

Ten Yale-affiliated Jonathan Edwards Centers have been established in eight countries. Organizers in Ghana and South Korea are planning to start centers there.

An antidote to naïve optimism

Edwards’ involvement in the First Great Awakening in colonial Protestant America is a matter of keen interest to many who perceive signs of spiritual renewal occurring in contemporary times.

“Especially in the global south, there are lots of pastors and churches focused on church growth and renewal,” says Minkema, who has been associated the Edwards initiative and YDS for 25 years.

“Is a new awakening underway? If not, there are people who are certainly seeking that, and they’re looking for someone like Edwards to help them think about it – what an awakening looks like, what the signs are, what the counterfeit signs are.”

Edwards’ reputation has ebbed and flowed over the centuries, reaching a low point in the early 20th century. By the 1940s, however, intellectual Perry Miller started a wave of reappraisals that hasn’t slowed since, Minkema says. Edwards’ rigorous intellectual style, coupled with his sense that sin lurked at the center of human nature, was taken as a more plausible theological response to the bloody cataclysms of the 20th century than naïve optimism was.

“After two world wars and the Holocaust, Edwards was an antidote to stale optimism and progressivism,” Minkema says.

Minkema keeps an array of far-flung contacts around the work of Jonathan Edwards. He is a dissertation reader for a couple of dozen Ph.D. students worldwide. He is a visiting professor at Trinity Evangelical Theological Divinity School in Deerfield, IL. He goes there every other January to lead a weeklong course on Christianity in the colonized Americas. When a snowstorm prevented him from making the trip this year, he conducted the course online with Trinity students.

Born in New Jersey, Minkema has history degrees from Calvin College (B.A., 1980), Bowling Green State University (M.A., 1983) and 
University of Connecticut (Ph.D., 1988), where he studied with historian Harry Stout before Stout joined the YDS faculty.

Minkema edited volume 14 (Sermons and Discourses: 1723-1729) in The Works of Jonathan Edwards series (Yale, 1997). He co-edited A Jonathan Edwards Reader (Yale, 2003), The Sermons of Jonathan Edwards: A Reader (Yale, 1999), Jonathan Edwards at 300: Essays on the Tercentennial of His Birth (University Press of America, 2005), and Jonathan Edwards’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”: A Casebook (Yale, 2010). He also co-edited The Sermon Notebook of Samuel Parris, 1689-1694 (Virginia, 1994), dealing with the Salem Witchcraft crisis.

Between reason and revelation

The Salem episode continues to be one of Minkema’s teaching interests. At YDS, besides courses in Edwards and the Great Awakening, he offers a class in “Witchcraft and Witch-hunting in Early Modern Europe and America.” In 1692-93 in Massachusetts, 20 people were tried and executed for witchcraft in an atmosphere of mass hysteria. Historians are still sorting out the causes and ramifications of this notorious period.

Minkema says each new era tends to put its own stamp of interpretation on the Salem episode.

“The witch-hunts are a laboratory for new methods. In the 1970s, with the prevalence of the drug culture, the argument was made that the Salem hysteria was caused by an inadvertent ingestion of hallucinogens. In the 1990s, we saw a period of interest in recovered memories, especially of children who recall abuses. So the idea of recovered memory was applied to the accusers in Salem.”

More recently, he says, Salem research has focused on themes of war and violence. A colonial climate of trauma and disruption – tension between colonists and Native Americans, conflict between the English and French – might have created the fear and paranoia that defined the witchcraft accusations and trials.

The Salem case is but an extreme example of tensions found throughout religious history – the interplay of rationality and emotion, militancy and moderation, reason and revelation. The life and thought of Jonathan Edwards during the First Great Awakening, decades after Salem, is another, Minkema says – the attempt by a major thinker to find a middle ground between the claims of the works of God and human standards of reason and evidence.

As Ken Minkema discovered long ago, the forces at play in the human drama are enough to preoccupy any conscientious historian for a lifetime.

“Edwards thought a lot about the reasonableness of Christianity. But he also thought we are fallen: We need revelation to complete the full picture. He saw history working in sacred time, the unfolding of God’s eternal purpose.”

August 12, 2014