Category Archives: Edwards, Jonathan

Edwards, revival, and suicidal thoughts

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Christopher Hays, in The Widening of God’s Mercy (co-authored with his father, Richard Hays), judges that Jonathan Edwards seems to have paid little attention to God’s love for humankind.  He portrays God, rather, as resplendent in glory, having no need of us, his unworthy subjects.

Not surprising, then, that Edwards, in his (in)famous sermon on ‘Sinners in the hands of an angry God’, writes threateningly of impending doom for unrepentant sinners:

‘The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.

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Masters and slaves in Christ

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In the course of a discussion about Jonathan Edwards and slavery, John Piper notes:

I believe that the New Testament ordered human relationships in Christ in such a way as to transform the master-slave relationship into something so different from “owner” and “property” that what remained was no longer recognizable as slavery in the traditional sense. To say it another way, when the New Testament instructions to masters and slaves were obeyed, what was left of the master-slave relationship was not a relationship of owner and property.…

Jonathan Edwards on communion with God

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If George Whitefield was the great evangelist of the Great Awakening in its North American phase, then Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) was the great thinker.  But he was by no means a detached analyst.  This is clear from his account- especially in his Personal Narrative – of his own spiritual experience.

Like the psalmists of old, Edwards delighted in God’s handiwork in creation:

‘I often used to sit and view the moon, for a long time; and so in the daytime, spent much time in viewing the clouds and sky, to behold the sweet glory of God in these things: in the meantime, singing forth with a low voice, my contemplations of the Creator and Redeemer.

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Jonathan Edwards on the atonement

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Andy Naselli draws attention to a passage in Michael J. McClymond and Gerald R. McDermott, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards, in which the authors show that Edwards felt the need to explain the rationality of the atonement against the following charges of the deists:-

  1. that justice could be satisfied by earnest human efforts,
  2. that God was not obligated to fulfill his threats, and
  3. that the merits of one person could not be imputed to another.

Against the second of these – the presumption that God does not have to fulfill his threat to Adam and his descendants that they “would surely die” (Gen.…