The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Why America’s First Pastoral Philosopher Still Holds the Foundation for Law and Order

These are my favorite kind of days. The best days. No matter how tough it is out there, no matter how rough the problems of life get, sometimes you just have a good day, and this is one of them. I had the grandkids all day. We have been running back and forth at Kings Island, parched in the heat, and we are going to finish the evening at the waterpark. In the middle of all that, a box arrived. I took a minute to sit down with it. I opened it the way I open every book that matters to me. I smelled the pages.

One of my greatest pleasures in life is the wisdom and context of history sitting in my hand. I love the Bible for that reason. I love having so much history in one place. I love study Bibles because they explore the thing you can actually build a civilization on. I have carried one of those Bibles everywhere for years. I will not retire it. I will still read large portions of it every day. But I was ready to add to it, and I was ready to give the old one a rest. The first few pages of the worn one have a crease I cannot get out. That crease has bothered me. The new one does not have wrinkled pages. It just came out of the box.

I saw the Jonathan Edwards Study Bible advertised in Biblical Archaeology Review in the late-summer, early-fall edition. I fell in love with the idea immediately. When I hear the name Jonathan Edwards, I think of the father of the founding fathers. Thomas Nelson released the edition on August 18, 2026, after years of work under general editor Dr. Matthew Everhard. I picked the brown Leathersoft with thumb indexes. I was close to the black genuine leather. I wanted brown. I wanted the indexes. I am a sucker for thumb indexes. That had been my only real gripe with the Bible I have carried for years. They made this one with them. Brilliant.

A Good Day Is Not an Accident

I have said it before and I will say it again: a good day is not the absence of problems. A good day is the presence of a standard that can survive the problems. The world is full of people pinballing off each other. They do not share a common point of reference. They argue government, law, family, and history as if those things were invented last Tuesday. They were not. The argument over what kind of government we are supposed to have was largely settled in the long runway from the 1740s through the 1770s. The First Great Awakening was not a side show. It was a Christian surge into the New World that formed the conscience of a people who would soon have to decide whether they were subjects or citizens.

I wanted something that would push my mind into the right frame for the complicated issues in front of us. Two years into President Trump’s second term, the question is no longer whether the old order can be broken. The question is what we build with the pieces. Biblical scholarship is a very good place to start. Not as decoration. As infrastructure.

Who Jonathan Edwards Actually Was

Jonathan Edwards was born October 5, 1703, and died March 22, 1758. He was a Congregationalist pastor, philosopher, and theologian, widely regarded as America’s most original philosophical theologian. He oversaw early revivals in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1733–35. He preached “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” at Enfield, Connecticut, on July 8, 1741. That sermon is the one everybody remembers. It is not the whole man.

Edwards was not a mascot for rage. He was a man obsessed with joy in God. “The enjoyment of [God] is…the only happiness with which our souls can be satisfied.” That line sits on the new study Bible for a reason. His Religious Affections, his Resolutions, his Miscellanies, and his massive unpublished notebooks were an attempt to think with total seriousness about Scripture, beauty, virtue, and the public order. He became the third president of the College of New Jersey—Princeton—after the death of his son-in-law, Aaron Burr Sr. He served only weeks. He died after a smallpox inoculation. Short tenure. Long shadow.

Princeton was a child of the Great Awakening. When Harvard and Yale resisted the revivals, New Lights built new colleges. The first presidents of Princeton stood in that stream. John Witherspoon, later president of the same college, signed the Declaration of Independence. The line from Edwards to Witherspoon to the Revolutionary generation is not a slogan. It is institutional history.

Calvin Coolidge, speaking on the sesquicentennial of the Declaration, put it as plainly as any American president ever has: “No one can escape the conclusion that in the great outline of its principles the Declaration was the result of the religious teachings of the preceding period. The profound philosophy which Jonathan Edwards applied to theology… had aroused the thought and prepared the colonists for this great event.”  I consider Calvin Coolidge to be one of America’s greatest presidents.  

I call Edwards a founding father because America would not have the moral vocabulary it used to become America without men like him. Ben Franklin admired George Whitefield, the great itinerant of the same awakening. Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and John Adams inherited a public that had already been trained to take sin, covenant, virtue, and judgment seriously. You do not get a Bill of Rights out of thin air. You get it from a people who already believed that law has a source above the king.

The Great Awakening Was a Political Event

People treat revival as private emotion. That is a modern mistake. The Awakening taught ordinary men and women that a regenerated beggar stood before God on the same ground as an unholy prince. In a hierarchical empire, that idea is dynamite. It does not automatically produce 1776. It does produce a population that can hear “all men are created equal” without laughing.

The Awakening also split churches, founded colleges, and trained a habit of examining authority rather than merely inheriting it. That habit can go wrong. It can become mere rebellion. Edwards himself was no enthusiast for unfettered liberty as an end in itself. He wanted ordered affections under God. That is exactly why he is useful now. A country that has spent years dissolving every standard needs the man who refused to separate joy from holiness and holiness from public life.

I have been telling people that the squabbles of the present require a basic foundation. Study of that foundation got settled, in outline, by the 1750s and was tested in the 1770s. If we will not return to it, we will keep inventing new religions of the self and calling them law.

What This Study Bible Actually Contains

The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible is an NKJV edition from Thomas Nelson: Comfort Print, red letter, center-column references, concordance, maps, translator notes, two-color printing. The distinctive load is Edwards himself. Study notes drawn from his work. Articles on doctrinal topics. Full-page essays on his theology, his life, his spiritual practices, and the First Great Awakening. His Resolutions. An introduction to his Miscellanies note-taking system, with space to build your own. The Yale Jonathan Edwards Center remains the great online companion. If you are doing real scholarship, you can move from the page in your hand to the archive.

I like that. I like any book that tries to achieve superior intellect. The Bible, at its most basic essence, is the attempt to put the human mind in contact with the source of order. A study Bible is not a substitute for the text. It is scaffolding. Edwards is unusually good scaffolding because he will not let you treat Scripture as therapy. God, in Edwards, is not a life coach. God is holy. God is beautiful. God is uncompromising. If we follow in those footsteps, the same seriousness can look ruthless to a soft age. That is not a reason to flatten God into niceness. That is a reason to think.

I looked at the maps, the color, the paper, the print, the way the notes sit on the page. I judge Bibles the way I judge tools. Binding, glue, opacity, ribbon, indexes, whether the thing will survive being carried. Thomas Nelson still backs many of these editions with a lifetime guarantee against manufacturing defects. Companies that talk that way are running a different business model than the disposable world. I respect that.

I almost bought the black leather. I bought the brown because I like brown and because this one has the thumb indexes. I will likely still read the old study Bible. I will not carry the creased one everywhere anymore. This one takes that job.

The Smell of a New Book Is Not Trivial

I take publishers seriously when they do their job. The best smell in the book world is still new-Bible smell: paper, ink, glue, cloth, leather. I told my wife, half joking and half not, that if she wants me to keep loving her forever she should find a perfume that smells like a new book. The grandkids laugh at me because I keep putting my face in the pages. Fine. Let them laugh. There are very few things in life better than a well-made book that is trying to make you smarter than you were yesterday.

My old Bible still smells good to me. It has been everywhere. Full-color pages, notes from good scholars, a companion through work I am proud of. It also has the wounds of use. That is honorable. It is also honest to say when a tool has earned a rest. I can straighten pages and put it on the shelf without pretending I have outgrown it. I have not. I have added a second pillar.

Law and Order Begins With a Book on the Desk

People have told me they like that I keep a Bible on the desk in my office. Everybody walking by can see it. I did the same thing when I served as foreman of a grand jury in Butler County. I was not trying to be ostentatious. I was stating the premise. We were there for order. We were swearing to tell the truth. The values that created this civilization are not shameful. You do not apologize for them. You do not mumble that every tradition is equal so that no tradition can judge anything.

I put the Bible on the desk and I swore people in. That book represented a common standard. We can disagree about a thousand things after that. We cannot pretend there is no standard.

When I look back on a long life—good family, good kids, good grandchildren, good work in business—I still say that those weeks as grand jury foreman were among the most rewarding things I have ever done. I wish I could do that job every day. They paid something like twenty-four dollars a day. The whole stint put maybe four hundred dollars in my pocket. I spent every dime of it on Ohio law books, the kind of volumes lawyers keep on their shelves. I needed to explain the law to the other people in the room. Twelve other citizens. Evidence. A vote. Whether a person goes further into the machine of the state. That is serious work. I loved it. For a few weeks I was, in a manner of speaking, the top cop in Butler County, and I treated the job that way.

I have been thinking about cases that break your heart and then break your confidence in a jury’s ability to follow the law. A mother walks away from the death of her own children and the process cannot arrive at the destination the facts required. I will not relitigate a verdict in this space. I will say what the experience taught me. Law is not a mood. Law is a discipline. If the people in the room do not share a moral language, the statutes become a maze. The Bible is not a statute book. It is the source of the moral language that made statute books possible in the West.

Jonathan Edwards belongs on that desk because he is part of the formula that formed the legal society of the early republic. The attempt in our time has been to undermine that formation completely. Our job is to keep the undermining from succeeding. One way to do that is to return to the starting point and read it again, slowly, with notes from a man who actually thought.

God Is Not a Conflict-Resolution Seminar

I need to be clear about something I said in the moment and will not sand down. God is not a slogan for “can’t we all just get along.” God, as Scripture presents Him, is often ruthless and uncompromising. If we claim to follow, we do not get to edit that into suburban kindness and call it discipleship. The intellectual task is to understand what holiness requires in public life without turning the church into a mob and without turning the state into a church.

Edwards is helpful there. He is a pastoral philosopher. He will not let affection float free of doctrine, and he will not let doctrine float free of the glory of God. That combination is what a movement needs after it wins elections. Winning is not the same as governing. Governing requires a metaphysics. If your metaphysics is “the self is sovereign,” you will get the last twenty years on repeat. If your metaphysics is that there is a law above the ruler and a Judge above the law, you have a chance.

I have been saying that we need a common point of reference. This Bible can be that for people who are even half willing. You do not have to become a professional Edwards scholar. You have to read, mark, compare, and refuse the cheap alternatives.

The Politics of Heaven in the Age of Disclosure

We are living in what I have been calling the age of disclosure. Hidden things are coming up. Political things, institutional things, spiritual things. If you do not understand the politics of heaven, you will misread the politics of earth. Heaven is not a fog of niceness. Heaven is a court. There is a throne. There is law. There is judgment. There is mercy that costs something. Edwards never forgot that. A great deal of modern religion did.

The founding generation argued about church and state. They did not argue that the state could invent morality out of committee. They assumed a created order. They assumed sin. They assumed that republics die when character dies. That is not nostalgia. That is the operating system.

I want my grandchildren to see a Bible on the desk and know what it means when I walk into a room. It means I stand for law and order, and that law and order have a foundation that did not begin in a press release. I am not closing my life. I am opening a new chapter with a better tool for the same fight.

Why I Am Telling You to Get This One

If you need a first serious study Bible, this is a strong candidate. If you already have one you love, as I do, this is the right second. The scholarship is serious. The production is handsome. The price is not insane. The leather edition runs more. I paid for the version I would actually use—the one I will thumb through in the car, on the desk, and at the table.

I would like to shut the rest of life off and only read it. I will read a lot of it. It will become the Bible I carry. There is plenty here to work with. I think it is a key to launching a new stretch of work in my own life, and I think it can serve the same purpose for anyone who is tired of arguing with no floor under the argument.

Go get it. Put it where people can see it. Swear to the truth. Then go do the hard parts—family, work, citizenship, the long patience of building a civilization instead of commenting on its collapse.

I took the kids back to the waterpark and we had a great day.  While I waited on them I sat in a chair and read through this new Bible and it turned out to be one of the best days I have had in a while. I am going to smell the pages again many more times. There are very few things in life better than that. If you want the longer map of how I think about work, conflict, and Western order, read The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. If you want the foundation under that map, start with Scripture and a guide who already walked the ground we keep pretending is new.

Notes

1.  Thomas Nelson released The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV) on August 18, 2026, with Dr. Matthew Everhard as general editor. Editions include hardcover, brown Leathersoft (including thumb-indexed), and black genuine leather. See publisher listings and trade bibliographic records for ISBNs 9781400339532 (hardcover), 9781400339556 (brown Leathersoft, thumb indexed), and 9781400339600 (black genuine leather).

2.  Edwards’s dates, Northampton revivals, the Enfield sermon of July 8, 1741, and his brief presidency of the College of New Jersey are standard in the biographical literature. See George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (Yale University Press, 2003).

3.  Edwards died after smallpox inoculation in March 1758, weeks into the Princeton presidency. Marsden and the Yale Jonathan Edwards Center treat the episode in detail.

4.  Coolidge’s sesquicentennial remarks on Edwards and the Declaration are printed in Calvin Coolidge, The Price of Freedom: Speeches and Addresses. The quotation is discussed in Gordon Arnold, “Jonathan Edwards: Founding Father of American Political Thought,” The Imaginative Conservative, October 4, 2024.

5.  On Princeton’s revivalist origins and the New Light college movement, see Thomas Breidenthal, “Princeton’s Revivalist Roots,” Princeton Alumni Weekly, June 21, 2019, and George M. Marsden’s work on evangelical higher education.

6.  John Witherspoon, sixth president of the College of New Jersey, signed the Declaration of Independence and served in the Continental Congress. The Edwards–Burr–Witherspoon succession is a matter of college history, not metaphor.

7.  George Whitefield’s relationship with Benjamin Franklin is documented in Franklin’s Autobiography and in the standard Whitefield biographies. Admiration is not the same as conversion; it is evidence of the Awakening’s public weight.

8.  Edwards’s line on the enjoyment of God as the only satisfying happiness is used by Thomas Nelson as the editorial keynote of the 2026 study Bible.

9.  The Yale Jonathan Edwards Center (edwards.yale.edu) hosts the Works of Jonathan Edwards and remains the primary digital archive corresponding to the print notes.

10.  Thomas Nelson’s published lifetime guarantee covers manufacturing defects, not ordinary wear. See Thomas Nelson Bibles customer-service and Premier Collection guarantee pages.

11.  The First Great Awakening’s role in colonial egalitarianism, church conflict, and revolutionary political culture is argued, with different emphases, by Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind (1966); Mark Noll, America’s God (2002); and Michael Novak’s essays on the “two wings” of the American eagle.

12.  Butler County, Ohio, grand juries operate under Ohio law. Compensation for jurors has historically been modest; the figures given here are from my own service and recollection, not a claim about current statutory rates.

13.  Biblical Archaeology Review is the flagship magazine of the Biblical Archaeology Society. I first noticed the Edwards Bible as a paid advertisement in a late-summer / early-fall issue.

14.  Edwards owned enslaved people. That fact belongs in any honest account. It does not erase his intellectual role in American theology; it does forbid hagiography. See Marsden and the Yale Center’s documentary record.

Bibliography for Further Reading

Primary Edwards

•  Edwards, Jonathan. A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God. 1737.

•  Edwards, Jonathan. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” 1741.

•  Edwards, Jonathan. A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. 1746.

•  Edwards, Jonathan. Freedom of the Will. 1754.

•  Edwards, Jonathan. The Life of David Brainerd. 1749.

•  Edwards, Jonathan. Ethical Writings. Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 8. Yale University Press.

•  Edwards, Jonathan. The Miscellanies. Works of Jonathan Edwards, multiple volumes. Yale University Press.

•  Edwards, Jonathan. Resolutions. Various editions; also included in the 2026 study Bible.

•  The Works of Jonathan Edwards. 26 vols. Yale University Press. Digital companion: Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University, https://edwards.yale.edu.

The 2026 Study Bible

•  Everhard, Matthew, gen. ed. The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV). Thomas Nelson, 2026.

Biography and Intellectual History

•  Marsden, George M. Jonathan Edwards: A Life. Yale University Press, 2003.

•  McClymond, Michael J., and Gerald R. McDermott. The Theology of Jonathan Edwards. Oxford University Press, 2012.

•  Murray, Iain H. Jonathan Edwards: A New Biography. Banner of Truth, 1987.

•  Gura, Philip F. Jonathan Edwards: America’s Evangelical. Hill and Wang, 2005.

•  Sweeney, Douglas A. Edwards the Exegete. Oxford University Press, 2016.

•  Nichols, Stephen J. Jonathan Edwards: A Guided Tour of His Life and Thought. P&R, 2001.

Great Awakening, Princeton, and the Revolution

•  Noll, Mark A. America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. Oxford University Press, 2002.

•  Heimert, Alan. Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution. Harvard University Press, 1966.

•  McDermott, Gerald R. One Holy and Happy Society: The Public Theology of Jonathan Edwards. Penn State University Press, 1992.

•  Kidd, Thomas S. The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America. Yale University Press, 2007.

•  Marsden, George M. The Soul of the American University. Oxford University Press, 1994.

•  Stohlman, Martha Lou Lemmon. John Witherspoon: Parson, Politician, Patriot. Westminster, 1976.

•  Coolidge, Calvin. The Price of Freedom: Speeches and Addresses.

•  Arnold, Gordon. “Jonathan Edwards: Founding Father of American Political Thought.” The Imaginative Conservative, October 4, 2024.

•  Breidenthal, Thomas. “Princeton’s Revivalist Roots.” Princeton Alumni Weekly, June 21, 2019.

Scripture, Law, and Western Order

•  Berman, Harold J. Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition. Harvard University Press, 1983.

•  Witte, John, Jr. The Reformation of Rights. Cambridge University Press, 2007.

•  Novak, Michael. On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding. Encounter, 2002.

•  Blackstone, William. Commentaries on the Laws of England.

•  The Declaration of Independence; the Constitution of the United States; the Bill of Rights.

Related Hoffman

•  Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.

•  Hoffman, Rich. The Symposium of Justice.

•  Hoffman, Rich. Tail of the Dragon.

•  Hoffman, Rich. The Overmanwarrior, https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com.

Periodicals and Tools•  Biblical Archaeology Review. Biblical Archaeology 

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com.  If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.