Jonathan Edwards on the Beauty and Wrath of God: A Brief
Overview (Update)
J.
I. Packer refers to Jonathan Edwards (1703-58) as “colonial America’s greatest
theologian and philosopher;” one might argue that Edwards was the greatest
theologian whoever graced the many pages of American religious history. Packer further notes that “as a bible-lover,
a Calvinist, a teacher of heart-religion, a gospel preacher of unction and
power, and above all, a man who loved Christ, hated sin, and feared God,
Edwards was a pure Puritan; indeed, one of the greatest and purest of all the
Puritans.” Packer rightly notes that
this Puritan was “born out of due time.”
As with Lincoln, so with Edwards: in Lincoln’s case, in revitalizing the
democratic legacy of 1776, in Edwards’ case, in reawakening the Puritan
religious vision for a new generation that came to a crescendo in the breakout
of the First Great Awakening, which continued to characterize his ministry and
writings until his death in the late 1850s.
The
Puritan impulse emerged as a reform initiative within the Church of
England. It transmuted into an
independent religious movement in the embrace of the fundamentals of the
Protestant Reformation: the sovereignty
of God, justification of faith, and the centrality of the personal
interpretation of the Bible through the power and light of the Holy
Spirit. Puritans also believed “that man existed for the glory of God,
that their first concern in life was to do God's will and so to receive future
happiness. They believed that Jesus Christ was the center of public and
personal affairs, and was to be exalted above all other names” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puritans. Edwards stressed all of these themes.
The
English Puritan movement of the late 16th and early 17th
centuries brought great vitality to the Christian faith through the writings of
Richard Baxter, John Bunyan, John Owen and other luminaries; writers whose work
on faith, theology, and the power of the written and spoken biblical word
deserve close study among contemporary evangelicals. The Puritan movement was brought
to New England in the early 17th century with Boston serving as the
epicenter—“the city on a hill”—with high hopes that through its “errand into
the wilderness,” New England would become transformed into the New Israel where
the Protestant Reformation would reach its pristine goal that would ultimately
lead world conversion. This vision of ultimate global conversion was central in
Edwards’ world view.
New England Puritanism reached its high water mark
in the first two generations, particularly the first, say by 1660, but gradually
declined through the first decades of the 18th century in a
transition that one historian captured in his book titled From Puritan to Yankee: Character and Social Order in Connecticut,
1690-1765. It is in this milieu that
Jonathan Edwards burst on the scene in North Hampton, MA, as the key theologian
of the First Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s, a conversion-based
revitalization movement that brought radical faith once again to the center of
cultural and religious focus throughout New England and the northern
colonies. It is in this setting that
Edwards preached his classic sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” where
he stressed the fear of God in the classic sense. In this sermon he offered the following dire
warning to those who have backslid or never accepted the faith once for all
delivered to the saints:
It would be
dreadful to suffer this fierceness and wrath of Almighty God one moment; but
you must suffer it to all eternity. There will be no end to this exquisite
horrible misery. When you look forward, you shall see a long for ever, a
boundless duration before you, which will swallow up your thoughts, and amaze
your soul; and you will absolutely despair of ever having any deliverance, any
end, any mitigation, any rest at all. You will know certainly that you must
wear out long ages, millions of millions of ages, in wrestling and conflicting
with this almighty merciless vengeance; and then when you have so done, when so
many ages have actually been spent by you in this manner, you will know that
all is but a point to what remains. So that your punishment will indeed be
infinite. Oh, who can express what the state of a soul in such circumstances
is! All that we can possibly say about
it, gives but a very feeble, faint representation of it; it is inexpressible
and inconceivable: For “who knows the power of God's anger?”
As
important as is this sermon in the Edwards canon, it captures only one
essential aspect of his religious vision, the righteousness of God expressed
through his heightened wrath and the need strive toward a life of radical
holiness, without which one is in the most acute danger of being utterly lost
in terms of enjoying a right relationship to the living God.
There
is also an aesthetic sense underlying Edward’s religious vision in its focus on
God’s beauty that is captured in another of his sermons, “A Divine and
Supernatural Light, Immediately Parted to the Soul by the Spirit of God, Shown
to be Both a Scriptural and Rational Doctrine.”
As Edwards presents the vision:
There is a divine and superlative glory in these
things [the revelation of the living presence of God to the individual
conscience]; an excellency that is of a vastly higher kind, and more sublime
nature than in other things; a glory greatly distinguishing them from all that
is earthly and temporal. He that is spiritually enlightened truly apprehends
and sees it, or has a sense of it. He does not merely rationally believe that
God is glorious, but he has a sense of the gloriousness of God in his heart.
There is not only a rational belief that God is holy, and that holiness is a
good thing, but there is a sense of the loveliness of God's holiness. There is
not only a speculatively judging that God is gracious, but a sense how amiable
God is upon that account, or a sense of the beauty of this divine attribute.
There
is a great deal packed in here which goes to the essence of Edwards’ religious
vision, in which his love, exhibiting itself as true beauty, infuses the world
at its most fundamental essence, a beauty that is marred, even disfigured, but
not destroyed by sin, in which it is not possible for “those whose minds are full of spiritual pollution, and
under the power of filthy lusts [to] have any relish or sense of divine beauty
or excellency; or that their minds should be susceptive of that light that is
in its own nature so pure and heavenly.”
It
is the tension between these dynamics (the unsurpassable beauty of God and the
gross destruction of sin) that underlies all of his major texts, notably Treatise on Religious Affections, Freedom
and the Will, The Great Doctrine of
Original Sin Defended, The End for
Which God Created the World, and The
Nature of True Virtue.
Packer’s
summary statement is worth noting: “Edwards
has been described as God-centered, God-focused, God intoxicated, and
God-entranced, and so indeed he was. There is no
overstatement here. Every day, from morning till night, he sought to live in
conscious communion with God, whether walking, riding, studying on his own, or
relaxing in the bosom of his large and, it seems, happy and often extended
family. He was not a mystic in the sense of seeking Goddrenched states of soul
that leave rationality behind; on the contrary, it was precisely through deep
and clear thoughts that God warmed and thrilled his heart.”
For
Edwards, the beauty and awesome fear of God were mutually entwined in a way
that lent an intensity of passion to the revelation of God in Christ in the
very midst of reconciling the world. When
taken as a whole, his theological reflections and devotional commitments were
grounded in his aspirational vision to realize the kingdom of God in this life
as an ever present and most fundamental reality, notwithstanding the ever
present gap between the reach and the attainment in this life.
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