A Reader’s Guide to Jonathan Edwards

Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. 2 TIMOTHY 2:15

Edwards is easier to obtain than almost any other major theologian and harder than most to read. Everything he wrote is out of copyright, and the complete Yale edition — twenty-six printed volumes, with a great deal more unpublished material — is available without charge from the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University. There is no financial barrier to reading him at all. The barrier is his prose. He wrote long, carefully qualified sentences for readers with more patience than we have. The remedy is to begin with the sermons, which were written to be heard, and to leave the treatises until the voice is familiar.

Begin here

A Divine and Supernatural Light (1734). Short, and the key to everything else. If you read one thing, read this. The Excellency of Christ. On the Lion and the Lamb. The most beautiful of his sermons and the most immediately accessible. Heaven is a World of Love, the closing sermon of Charity and Its Fruits (1738). The best correction to his reputation. Personal Narrative and the Resolutions. Brief autobiographical pieces, invaluable for seeing the man behind the arguments.

The central work

A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746). His masterpiece and the basis of chapters eleven to fourteen of this book. It is long and demanding. Several reliable abridgements exist and there is no shame whatever in starting with one; the twelve signs in Part III are the heart of it and can be read on their own.

The major treatises

Freedom of the Will (1754). The most philosophically formidable thing he wrote, and hard going. Read a summary first. The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended (1758). The End for Which God Created the World and The Nature of True Virtue, published together after his death as Two Dissertations (1765).

Short, dense, and the foundation of chapters one and fifteen.

On revival

A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (1737). His account of the Northampton awakening; the book that made him internationally known. The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God (1741). Brief and immediately useful for anyone assessing a movement today. Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival (1742). An Humble Attempt (1747). On united prayer. Skip the chronological speculation and keep the argument.

Also worth knowing

The Life of David Brainerd (1749). Edwards’s edition of the journals of the young missionary who died in his house. It became one of the most influential missionary books ever published, read by Carey, Martyn and Hudson Taylor. Read it aware that Brainerd’s relentless self-examination has harmed some readers as much as it has inspired others. A History of the Work of Redemption. Sermons tracing God’s single redemptive purpose through all of history.

About Edwards

George Marsden’s Jonathan Edwards: A Life (2003) is the standard modern biography and is outstanding — thorough, sympathetic and candid about the failures. Iain Murray’s Jonathan Edwards: A New Biography (1987) is warmer and more devotional, and less searching on the difficult matters. On slavery, the essential scholarship is by Kenneth Minkema, whose work brought the documentary evidence to light. Read more than one. No single account of him is disinterested.

Three counsels for reading him

Read him with the Bible open. His authority is entirely borrowed, and he would have been the first to insist that anything of his which cannot be sustained from Scripture should be discarded. Read him for the burden rather than the system. Where he presses a framework beyond what Scripture states — and in Freedom of the Will, in the mechanism of original sin, in the prophetic timetables, he does — take the pastoral concern and leave the scaffolding. Read him slowly, and aloud if the sentences resist. These are not books to be finished. A page a day, prayed over, will do more than a volume a week admired.

Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. 1 THESSALONIANS 5:21