Jonathan Edwards

The mark of the wounds

Tony Reinke Cross of Christ, Cross-centered life, Jonathan Edwards, Puritans

From the end of a letter written by Jonathan Edwards to Deborah Hatheway (June 3, 1741):

“Don’t talk of things
of religion
and matters of experience
with an air of lightness and laughter,
which is too much the manner in many places.
In all your course,
walk with God
and follow Christ
as a little,
poor,
helpless child,
taking hold of Christ’s hand,
keeping your eye
on the mark of the wounds
on his hands
and side,
whence came the blood
that cleanses you from sin
and hides
your nakedness
under the skirt of the white shining robe
of his righteousness.”

Mini-Marsden on Jonathan Edwards

Tony Reinke BR > Eerdmans, Jonathan Edwards

George Marsden, author of the brilliant biography Jonathan Edwards: A Life (Yale, 2003) is back with a new biography—A Short Life of Jonathan Edwards (Eerdmans, 2008). The books is now available and costs about $11.00. In the preface of the new title, Marsden explains the origin and purpose of this new biography.

“In 2003 I published Jonathan Edwards: A Life with Yale University Press on the occasion of the three-hundredth anniversary of Edwards’s birth. Prior to being asked to write that major biography, I had already told my friends at Eerdmans that some day I would write a life of Edwards for them. So with the cooperation of both publishers, I agreed that after I wrote the more definitive biography for Yale, I would write something shorter for Eerdmans. The happy outcome is that, having already published a much longer, closely documented work, this book could be kept brief without any scholarly apparatus. With the exception of a few items noted in the acknowledgments, documentation for whatever is said here can be found in the larger work. Nevertheless, I need to emphasize that this book is not an abridgement of Jonathan Edwards: A Life. Rather it is a fresh retelling in which I have tried to include just what is most essential and most engaging. A few things, especially the recurrent theme of Edwards and Franklin, are new. My hope is that the result will appeal not only to the general reader but also to church study groups and to students in college courses in American history or American religious history. In the retelling, I have tried to keep the interests of each of these audiences in mind.”

Works of Jonathan Edwards online

Tony Reinke Jonathan Edwards

October 5, 2008 is the birthday of Jonathan Edwards (happy 305th!). And on this date the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale will launch WJE Online 2.0, a new 73-volume(!) digital works of Edwards, which will include the full electronic versions of the printed Yale Works (25 volumes) and another 47 volumes of unpublished, digitized sermons and other material.

Wow!

Currently you can search and browse the electronic version of the 25-volume Yale works for free (though I’m not sure it will be that way forever).

Here is the complete index of 2.0 works …

Volume 1: Freedom of the Will
Volume 2: Religious Affections
Volume 3: Original Sin
Volume 4: The Great Awakening
Volume 5: Apocalyptic Writings
Volume 6: Scientific and Philosophical Writings
Volume 7: The Life of David Brainerd
Volume 8: Ethical Writings
Volume 9: A History of the Work of Redemption … Continue reading →

The Cross in the Preaching of Jonathan Edwards

Tony Reinke BR > Banner of Truth, Cross of Christ, Cross-centered life, Jonathan Edwards, Preaching

“The great eighteenth-century New England preacher was no preacher of moralism—he was no peddler of ethics without the gospel. He was a preacher of the gospel of Christ; and it is his powerful and undeniably beautiful Christocentricity that both establishes his evangelical orthodoxy and distinguishes him from the moralists of Rome and (more significantly still) from the moralists of the eighteenth century.

It is, therefore, very important to note that the New England preacher, whose reputation rests so powerfully on the minatory, also excelled in the consolatory. It is, moreover, precisely because of the recalcitrant issue of the general perception of Edwards as a preacher of judgment, and even of terror, that it is so important to note the sweetness and the beauty of his descriptions of Christ. It was clearly a fundamental part of his homiletical philosophy that he should not only provide what might be described as ‘the element of attack’, but that he should also administer the healing ‘balm of Gilead’ to the soul. Indeed, his sermons, considered in toto, reveal what might be described as a kind of homiletical pincer movement. ‘For by the law is the knowledge of sin, insists the Apostle; and Edwards’ great concern in preaching the law of God was that men should ‘flee from the wrath to come’ into the open arms of Christ. Thus, if in his sermons there is often great emphasis upon the terrors of Mount Sinai, there is also great emphasis upon the wonder and the glory of Calvary’s hill. This balance may not always be evident in the same sermon; it is, however, evident in his preaching ministry as a whole. The sweetness of his preaching at this point is, of course, no saccharine sentimentalism about the universal fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood of man. The New England preacher never says, ‘Peace, peace, when there is no peace’; he never ‘heals the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly’.

The encouragement, the consolation, and the peace that Edwards offers in his preaching are always on the basis of the gospel of Christ. It is important to note that he has no encouragement or consolation to offer apart from Christ; he has, therefore, no hope to offer to those who persist in remaining outside of Christ. The encouragement and the consolation that he repeatedly holds forth in his sermons are rooted and grounded in ‘Jesus Christ and him crucified’.

Moreover, it is this rare ability to depict the beauty and the glory of Christ that many have found to be so attractive and so winsome in Edwards’ preaching. In 1825, on the morning of his sudden death, John Williams, the first pastor of the Oliver Street Baptist Church in New York City, made this observation to a friend: ‘I love President Edwards; he always speaks so sweetly of Christ.’”

–John Carrick, The Preaching of Jonathan Edwards (Banner of Truth, 2008) pp. 111-112.

Related: Edwards, Cross-Centeredness, and Application (7/16/08)
Related: Was Jonathan Edwards Cross-Centered? (7/11/08)
Related: A Sense of Christ’s Sufficiency (7/9/08)

Was Jonathan Edwards Cross-Centered?

Tony Reinke Cross of Christ, Cross-centered life, Jonathan Edwards

I’ll be the first to admit that the 17-18th century Puritans were not the most cross-centered bunch. They most certainly understood the gospel, preached on the gospel, and called sinners to embrace the gospel. But too frequently the gospel was pushed out to a remote and peripheral place in the Christian life. For example, one can read many pages from Richard Baxter’s gigantic Christian Directory on virtually all areas of the Christian life, and not see any connection made between the daily pursuit of holiness and the cross.

So I think a fair and healthy question to ask is this: How cross-centered was American Puritan Jonathan Edwards?

In 1756 Samuel Hopkins published The Life and character of the Late Reverend Mr. Jonathan Edwards, and as part of the biography Hopkins included a reprinting of a “Letter to the Trustees of the College of New Jersey, Oct. 19, 1757.” The letter was Edwards’s response to the trustee request to consider becoming the new college president (of what we now know as Princeton). In the response to the opportunity, Edwards pens several objections to the appointment trying to convince the trustees that they could find a better suited, more broadly educated, and a healthier presidential appointee.

As part of his argument against his own appointment Edwards wrote in this letter that he hoped to write several books and a move to lead the college would—by Edwards’s estimation—limit his freedom to write theology. In the letter Edwards reveals one particular project he hoped to write.

“… a Body of Divinity in an entire new method, being thrown in the form of a history, considering the affair of Christian theology, as the whole of it, in each part, stands in reference to the great work of redemption by Jesus Christ; which I suppose is to be the grand design, of all God’s designs, and the summum and ultimum of all the divine operations and degrees; particularly considering all parts of the grand scheme in their historical order.”

Five months after writing these words to the trustees at Princeton, Edwards would be dead from a smallpox inoculation gone bad. And in a field to the north of Princeton, the hope of Edwards’s book on the centrality of the gospel was buried, too. Had he lived, Edwards would have embraced the full demands of leading the college. Whether in life or death the book was unlikely.

The short excerpt from this letter gives us a glimpse into Edwards’s priorities in theology and reveals to us a man who understood the centrality of the cross in the full scope of God’s plans and purposes.

A Sense of Christ’s Sufficiency

Tony Reinke Cross of Christ, Cross-centered life, Faith, Jonathan Edwards, spurgeon

The glorious sufficiency of Christ’s sacrifice is a golden theme woven by God throughout the New Testament. The list of passages rejoicing in this sufficiency—and warning us not to forget it—is a lengthy list. A small sampling of my favorite passages would include Gal. 1:6-9, 2:16, 21, 5:2-4, 6:14, 1 Cor. 2:1-2, Col. 2:5-19, 3:1-4, Heb. 7:11, 10:1-14, Rev. 5:1-14.

Rather than some optional, ornate fixture hung on Christianity, understanding of the sufficiency of Christ’s work is very central to saving faith. At the most fundamental level “there is salvation in no one else” (Acts 4:12). Not Abraham, not angels, not the Mosaic Law, not the blood of bulls and goats, not the merits of Mary, nowhere but in Christ do we find hope of justification before our holy Father and freedom from the clutches of death.

On the flip side of this cross-sufficiency, the Scriptural warnings are also very clear. If we misunderstand the sufficiency of the cross we misunderstand the very heart of saving faith. Paul told the Galatians—a church lured by a ‘gospel’ of Christ + self-righteousness—that to believe Christ’s death was insufficient to secure eternal salvation was comparable to “deserting” God himself, to completely chucking the true gospel, a tragic “falling away from grace” (1:6, 5:4). Had Christ’s death been deemed insufficient—or if there was another means to salvation outside of Christ—then he died in vain (2:21). Given the high priority of Christ’s sufficiency, Paul persuades the Church to pronounce “condemnation” on teachers, angels, and apostles who teach anything to the contrary (1:8-9).

By accumulating the force of these biblical passages we begin to see that the sufficiency of Christ’s atoning work on the cross is no fringe truth but pulls back the soil to reveal the root of saving faith. To believe—to really believe—requires a resignation of the soul to the complete, all-satisfying work of Christ.

As a 24-year old writing in the early months of 1727, Jonathan Edwards penned a few words in a notebook as he contemplated the links between the pleasure of the Father in the sacrifice of the Son, the sufficiency of Christ’s work, and the nature of genuine saving faith. That God would ordain that the redeemed would keep their eyes focused on the sufficient work of Christ is not only biblical (Rev. 5:1-14) but quite rational, too. Edwards explains why:

“If any person that was greatly obliged to me, that was dependent on me and that I loved, should exceedingly abuse me, and should go on in an obstinate course of it from one year to another, notwithstanding all I could say to him, and all new obligations continually repeated; though at length he should leave it off, I should not forgive him (except upon gospel considerations). But if any person that was a much dearer friend to me, and one that had always been true to me and constant to the utmost, and that was a very near friend of him that offended me, should intercede for him, and out of the entire love he had to him should put himself to very hard labors and difficulties, and undergo great pains and miseries to procure him satisfaction; and the person that had offended should with a changed mind fly to this mediator and should seek favor in his name, with a sense in his own mind how much his meditor had done and suffered for him, I should be satisfied, and feel myself inclined without any difficulty to receive him into my entire friendship again. But not without the last mentioned condition, that he should have a sense how much his mediator had done and suffered. For if he was ignorant of most of it, and thought he had done only some small matter, I should not be easy nor satisfied. So a sense of Christ’s sufficiency seems necessary in faith.”

-Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards: The “Miscellanies” a-500 (Yale, 1994), pp. 359-360.