Edwards Amasa Park

1808-1900. Congregational theologian. Professor of Christian theology at Andover Theological Seminary (1847-81), where he helped to found and edit Bibliotheca Sacra, Park was preeminent among those who tried to reconcile the thinking of Jonathan Edwards and Jacksonian America. To Lyman Abbott, he was the last of those striving “to relieve Calvinism of the objections apparent in the dawn of the more ethical and humanistic spirit of our times.” Unlike Charles Hodge, who fused Edwards to Scottish philosophy, Park allied divine sovereignty to “theology of the heart.” His former student, Frank Hugh Foster, described him as an eclectic who by 1881 had become an anachronism. Gallant in defeat, ironically he has encouraged the rise of modern liberalism by humanizing the deity.