Introduction

For with thee is the fountain of life: in thy light shall we see light. PSALM 36:9

Most people who know the name Jonathan Edwards know one thing about him, and the one thing is misleading. They know that he preached a sermon about sinners dangling like spiders over a fire. It appears in school anthologies as a specimen of Puritan severity, and it has fixed his reputation for two centuries as a grim man who frightened people for a living. The sermon is real. He did preach it, at Enfield in July 1741, and we shall come to it. But it is one sermon out of roughly twelve hundred that survive, and it is thoroughly unrepresentative of the rest. The man who preached it also wrote that heaven is a world of love, that God’s purpose in creating anything at all was the overflow of His own fullness, and that the difference between a true Christian and a false one is finally a matter of what the soul finds beautiful. He was, in the plainest terms, a theologian of joy who happened once to write something unforgettable about hell.

Why he still matters

Edwards has a strange standing. He is widely agreed to be the most powerful mind the American church has produced, and he is very little read. His treatises are difficult; his sentences are long; his categories belong to the eighteenth century. Most believers who admire him have got him at second hand. That is a pity, because his central concern is not eighteenth-century at all. He spent his life on a single question, and it is the question the church in every age is least able to answer honestly: how do you tell the difference between a person who has been changed by God and a person who has merely been stirred? He asked it because he had to. He stood at the centre of two great awakenings, watched thousands profess conversion, watched a proportion of them fall away, and refused to draw either of the easy conclusions — that the whole thing was delusion, or that every emotional response was the Spirit of God. He insisted on a third possibility that requires far more work: that God was genuinely at work, that counterfeit was genuinely present, and that the two could be distinguished.

Any church that has ever run a crusade, counted decisions, or wondered what became of last year’s converts is standing where Edwards stood.

How this book is arranged

Eighteen short chapters set out the teaching for which Edwards is chiefly remembered, beginning where he began — with God — and moving outward through sin, salvation, the affections, revival, love, and finally prayer and the hope of what God intends to do in history. Each chapter ends in the same two places: a set of application points and a prayer. This is deliberate, and Edwards would have approved. He held with great firmness that knowledge which never reaches practice is not saving knowledge at all. The last and longest sign in his Religious Affections is Christian practice — how a man actually lives — and he ranked it above every inward experience a person might report. A chapter of this book that is read and admired but not obeyed has, by its own argument, failed. Read one chapter a day, or one a week. Stop at the application points. Pray the prayer, or better, pray your own. Throughout, his own sermons and treatises are named, so the reader may follow any thread back to its source. A short guide to his works is provided at the end. Edwards’s writings are out of copyright and widely available at no cost, which means that unlike most great theologians he can be read entire by anyone with an internet connection and some patience.

One more thing must be said at the outset, and it is better said plainly. This is not a book of hero-worship. Jonathan Edwards owned slaves. He purchased a girl named Venus in Newport in 1731, when she was about fourteen. Over the following years his household included others — Leah, Titus, Joseph, Sue, Rose. He opposed the Atlantic slave trade and wrote against it, he baptised black believers and received them into full membership of his church when other ministers would not, and he recorded in his notebooks that master and servant have one Maker who made them alike with the same nature. And he defended the institution itself in a draft letter, and he died without freeing anyone. There is no way to soften this, and it should not be softened. It was not a blind spot of an age that knew no better; men in his own colony were arguing against slavery in his lifetime, and he answered them. The people who worked in his house made possible the study that produced the books we still read. That fact belongs in any honest account of him. Why then read him at all? For the same reason we read David, who arranged a murder, and Peter, who denied his Lord, and Paul, who held the coats. The Scriptures themselves record the failures of the men God used, and they do it without embarrassment and without excusing anything. God has never had any material to work with but sinners, and He has never pretended otherwise. There is also a grim irony that Edwards himself would have understood. Within a generation, his own son and his closest theological heir, Samuel Hopkins, became leading opponents of slavery — and they argued their case directly from his theology, insisting they were only carrying his own principles where he had failed to carry them. His doctrine of true virtue, of benevolence extended to all being, turned out to contain the refutation of his own practice. That is precisely what he taught us to expect. No teaching was more central to him than that the human heart is deceitful beyond our capacity to detect, that we are most blind where we most benefit, and that even a converted man may harbour what he has never examined. A book presenting Edwards as a spotless saint would be contradicting the very doctrine it was written to commend. So the counsel of this book is the counsel of Scripture: Prove all things; hold fast that which is good (1 Thessalonians 5:21). Weigh every chapter against the Word of God. Where Edwards is faithful to Scripture — and on the glory of God, the necessity of the new birth, the testing of religious experience and the beauty of holiness, he is faithful indeed — receive it gladly and act upon it. Where he was wrong, and he was, learn from that too. It is one of the more useful lessons he has to teach.

A final word about the reader this book assumes. Edwards wrote for an English-speaking colonial congregation of farmers and tradesmen in a river valley in Massachusetts. He is now read across the world — in Korea, in Brazil, in Nigeria, in China — by Christians whose circumstances share nothing with his. The reason is not that his setting travels well. It plainly does not. It is that he dealt almost entirely with what does not vary: what God is like, what the human heart is like, and how a person may know whether the grace of God has actually touched him. Those questions are already waiting wherever this book is opened, in whatever language it is carried.