Logos 6 is a powerful ebook reader and search engine. A passage you remember reading but can’t quite remember where you read it is now much more easily and quickly found. What might have taken hours or days in the past to locate now occurs at the snap of the fingers. Many new books are published in the Logos format but it was quite a pleasant surprise to learn that the Yale University Press edition of The Works of Jonathan Edwards would be available in the convenient Logos format. Now the critical text of Edwards’ Works could be summoned at will on my desktop, notebook, tablet, and phone. Edwards would be ubiquitous. You just never know when the exact citation of an Edwards treatise or sermon or miscellany will prove useful to successfully untie a theological Gordian knot.
The Yale edition of The Works of Jonathan Edwards began publication in the late 1950s under the leadership of Perry Miller with Paul Ramsey’s edition of Freedom of the Will and continued release until a few years ago when the last and 26th volume was issued which contained Edwards’ reading catalog. Each volume contained a critically prepared version of the text being published along with substantial introductions by the successive volume editors. I especially enjoyed the fact that I did not have to go blind reading Edwards and did not have to suffer the psychological oppression of never getting off the page! Logos does contain an electronic form of the Hickman edition of Edwards’ Works (the two volume edition published by Banner of Truth and Hendricksen) so we can now adjust the size of the font and we can easily compare the Yale and Hickman editions of various texts in Edwards’ voluminous corpus. I know that you are just dying to do some textual criticism of an Edwards treatise. What is that I hear you saying? Oh, you are happy to leave that task to the disciples of Thomas Schafer? I understand completely.
I cannot sing enough the praises of Logos and Yale University Press for bringing us this fine new format of Edwards’ Works. I do not want to leave you before sharing with you one of the finer features of this version of the Works. When you cut and paste into your word processor Logos automatically provides a footnote with the appropriate page numbers from the letterpress edition. One of my headaches from earlier ebooks is that if you wanted to cite from a CD or DVD the page numbers from the print edition were often not included. Thus I was reduced to smoldering embers citing “somewhere on the CD.” That was not very scholarly or very precise. We have come a long way from those days baby!
Logos has done the church a great service in bringing the Yale edition of the Northampton pastor theologian’s Works to life again.
