Conclusion

But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory. 2 CORINTHIANS 3:18

Eighteen chapters can give the impression that Jonathan Edwards taught many things. He taught one thing, and everything else in him is an application of it. The one thing is this: God is infinitely glorious, the human problem is that we cannot see it, and salvation is God giving us eyes. Follow the chain and the whole system appears. God created the world for the display and communication of His glory. Human beings were made to see it, love it and reflect it. In the fall the capacity was lost — not the eyes but the taste, so that we look at what is supremely beautiful and feel nothing. That is why the will is bound: not because we are prevented, but because we do not want. Regeneration is the giving of a new spiritual sense, by which the same truths we always knew become suddenly lovely. From that new perception the affections move, and from the affections the whole life follows. And the end of the process is a world of love, where the seeing is unobstructed for ever. Justification, revival, the affections, true virtue, prayer — each is that one argument applied at a different point.

The danger of this book

If you have read this far, you are in a position of some hazard, and Edwards would have said so first. The peculiar risk of his theology is that it can be received as a system. It is a magnificent system, and a person can become an enthusiast for it — can learn to talk about the sense of the heart, the beauty of holiness, gracious affections — while remaining exactly the man he was, only better read. Edwards anticipated this precisely. It is why the final sign in Religious Affections is not an inward experience but Christian practice, and why he ranked it above everything a person might feel or remember. He knew that theological sophistication is one of the more effective disguises available to an unconverted heart.

But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. JAMES 1:22

So the plainest counsel this book can give is the same as before. Return to the chapter that made you least comfortable — not the one you found most interesting. Take its application points and work through them slowly over months. Then take the next.

What to carry away

Two things, if nothing else. First, ask for light. This is the request Edwards’s whole theology drives towards, and it is the one most of us never make. We ask God for help, for guidance, for provision, for comfort. We rarely ask Him to make us see that He is beautiful — which is the only request that changes anything at the root. You cannot argue yourself into loving God. You can ask.

Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law. PSALM 119:18

Second, watch your loves rather than your opinions. Edwards’s most useful gift to ordinary Christians is the shift of the diagnostic question from what do you believe? to what do you delight in? The second is far harder to answer dishonestly, and it is the truer map.

A last word about the man

We have been honest in these pages about his failures. He owned human beings while writing that virtue must extend beyond every private circle. He speculated about prophetic chronology and was wrong. He handled the crisis at Northampton in ways that cost him his ministry, and not all the fault lay with his congregation. He could be severe, and his severity did damage that his defenders have sometimes been too quick to explain away. None of that has been raised to diminish him. It has been raised because he, more than almost anyone, taught that the heart is deceitful beyond our capacity to detect, and that we are blindest where we most benefit. His life is the demonstration of his own doctrine. It would be a strange tribute to pretend otherwise. And there is this, which is the most hopeful thing in his whole story. The principle he failed to apply was applied by those who came after him, using his own arguments, against his own practice. The truth he taught outlived and overruled the man who taught it. That is what happens to true things. They do not depend on the vessel.

But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us. 2 CORINTHIANS 4:7

Edwards died at fifty-four, five weeks into a job he had not wanted, in a town he barely knew, eight years after being dismissed by the congregation he had served for twenty-three. He was conscious near the end, and what he said to those around the bed was that they should trust in God, and then they need not fear. It is a small sentence for so large a mind. It is also, on his own principles, the only conclusion there was.

A PRAYER

Father, I have read about Your glory and I am not sure I have seen it.

I can describe the beauty of holiness and remain unmoved by it. I can explain the sense of the heart and not possess it. Do not let me settle for a theology of light without the light.

Open my eyes. Change what I love. And let the change show, not in what I can say, but in how I live when no one is watching.

You are glorious. Make me see it, and make me glad. Amen.