Selected Sermons of Jonathan Edwards. Edwards Jonathan
of His divine and sovereign attributes.
This, in general, is the scheme which Edwards stands for, he most conspicuously of all men of modern times. His speculative genius gave to this scheme a metaphysical background, his logical acumen elaboration and defence. He modified it in some respects, e.g., in his doctrine of the will. What is more important, he gave a prominence to the inward state of man – the dispositions and affections of his mind and heart – which appreciably affected the relative values of the scheme, and which has, in fact, changed the entire complexion of the religious thought of New England. But as to the general scheme itself, the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of life it expresses, there is nothing in that which is essentially original with Edwards. In standing for these doctrines he but champions the great orthodox tradition.
But however little original may be the content of his thought, there is nothing that is not in the highest degree original in his manner of thinking. The significant thing about Edwards is the way he enters into the tradition, infuses it with his personality and makes it live. The vitality of his thought gives to its product the value of a unique creation. Two qualities in him especially contribute to this result, large constructive imagination and a marvellously acute power of abstract reasoning. With the vision of the seer he looks steadily upon his world, which is the world of all time and space and existence, and sees it as a whole; God and souls are in it the great realities, and the transactions between them the great business in which all its movement is concerned; and this movement has in it nothing haphazard, it is eternally determined with reference to a supreme and glorious end, the manifestation of the excellency of God, the highest excellency of being. All the dark and tragic aspects of the vision, which for him is intensely real, take their place along with the other aspects, in a system, a system wherein every part derives meaning and worth from its relation to the whole. People have wondered how Edwards, the gentlest of men, could contemplate, as he said he did, with sweetness and delight, the awful doctrine of the divine sovereignty interpreted, as he interpreted it, as implying the everlasting misery of a large part of the human race. The reason is no revolting indifference, callous and inhuman, to suffering; the reason is rather the personal detachment, the disinterested interest, the freedom from the “pathetic fallacy” of the great poet, the great constructive thinker. It is this large quality in Edwards’s imagination which is one source of his power. Another is the thoroughness and ability with which he intellectually elaborates the details of his scheme. He wrote, indeed, no system of divinity; yet he is the very opposite of a fragmentary thinker, and few minds have been less episodic than was his. His intellectual constructions are large and solid. Of the doctrines with which he deals, he leaves nothing undeveloped; with infinite patience he pushes his inquiries into every minute detail and remote consequence, putting his adversaries to confusion by the unremitting attack, the overwhelming massiveness of the argument. Rarely indeed can one escape his conclusions who accepts his premises. Moreover, by the thoroughness, acuteness and sincerity of his reasoning he powerfully stimulates the intellectual faculties. Even in his most terrific sermons he never appeals to mere hope and fear, nor to mere authority; in them, as in his theological treatises, he is bent on demonstrating, within the limits prescribed by the underlying assumptions, the reasonableness of his doctrine, its agreement with the facts of life and the constitution of things, as well as with the inspired teachings of the Word.
Now these qualities appear, as in his other writings, so also, and perhaps most conspicuously, in his sermons. Edwards’s chief public work and his chief reputation in his lifetime was as a preacher; the fame of his theological treatises is largely, indeed, posthumous. He was a great preacher. In the case of many of the older divines, it is difficult for us now to understand how they could ever have been considered great preachers: to us their sermons seem dry and insipid. But it is not so with Edwards. Even in print, after more than a hundred and fifty years, and notwithstanding the gulf which separates our age from his, his sermons are still deeply interesting. They are interesting because, among other things, they reveal a great and interesting personality. They are instinct with the energy of his intellect, they are vital with the vital touch of his genius. He preached his theology; some of his sermons – for instance, the sermon, or rather combination of sermons, on Justification by Faith – seem to be less sermons than highly elaborate theological disquisitions, adapted to the use of professional students. And there is doubtless no sermon of his which does not reflect, to some extent, his theological system. Edwards was certainly impressed with The Importance and Advantage of a Thorough Knowledge of Divine Truth – the theme and title of one of his ablest discourses. He held that God had revealed Himself not only to the heart, but to the mind of man, and that an intelligent apprehension of the revelation was indispensable, in some measure, alike to saving faith and to the development of Christian character. But it would be a mistake to think of Edwards as preaching the dry bones of his theology. He was far, indeed, from supposing, as some now seem to suppose, that a Christian society can be the more perfectly organized in proportion as all definiteness of theological, that is, distinctively religious, conceptions is eliminated. He had too profound a respect for the intellect to exclude it from matters of the deepest speculative as well as practical moment, and he had too lofty an idea of religion to identify it either with vague, transcendental emotion or with merely personal, social, or political morality. His sermons, however, are by no means all of one type. On the contrary, they are of a great variety of types. They are “doctrinal,” “practical,” “experimental,” and – taking into account the unpublished manuscripts – there is an unusually large number of “occasional” sermons.10 And there are a good many varieties within the types. But even when the sermons are most “doctrinal,” the practical interest of a living conviction of the truth is never absent. The abstract antithesis of thought and life, of theory and practice, as though thinking were not itself a doing or as though an attitude toward truth were not itself practical or capable of determining other practical attitudes, is an error from which Edwards is wholesomely free.
To say this is not necessarily to approve the content of his doctrinal preaching. The thought of the churches with which Edwards was associated has moved away from his thought. He contended stoutly for his scheme of things, but he fought, it would seem, a losing fight. It is not that he has been refuted by abstract logic; the argument by which he has been set aside, so far as he has been set aside, is the logic of events. The change has been brought about no doubt by many influences. Some of them seem purely sentimental. But there are two things at least of fundamental divergence in the character of our time – the development in us of a critically disciplined historical sense and the dominating influence in our modern science and philosophy of the idea of evolution. These have broken down those hard and fast distinctions between nature and the supernatural, nature and grace, human reason and divine revelation in which Edwards delighted, at least in the form in which he habitually preached them. With the establishment, on the lines of historical criticism, of new canons of exegesis in the interpretation of Scripture and with the gradual disappearance of the idea of the Bible as an external authority, Protestant Christianity is at present confronting the question, whether the entire claim of Christianity to be a supernatural revelation, in the sense in which the term “supernatural” is used by orthodox theologians, has not been misplaced. This is a question which Edwards never raises and which he does not help us directly to solve. He has the mind of a speculative philosopher, has a very profound thought of God, grasps firmly the eternal spiritual significance of things; but he is deficient in the historical sense – his History of Redemption is a wholly uncritical, dogmatic construction, and he is not speculative enough to find, or at least he works under conditions which prevent him from showing, the mediating principles by which the antitheses and contradictions of experience and theory can be reconciled and annulled.
But to return to the sermons. Edwards’s sermons are constructed, in general, on a definite model. We have, first, the Exposition of the text. We have, secondly, a clearly formulated statement of the Doctrine, which is then developed under its appropriate and preannounced divisions. Finally, we have what is variously called the Improvement, Use, or Application, similarly developed. The “Doctrine” is not usually an abstract theological dogma: it is simply the theme of the discourse stated in propositional form. Thus an unpublished sermon on John i. 41, 42 has this for its statement of doctrine: “When persons have truly come to Christ themselves, they naturally desire to bring others also to him.” Another unpublished
See F. B. Dexter,